Dead End Job (Book One of the 'Zombino' series)

by Chris Welsh

  Chapter Eleven. 12:50pm

  NICE VIEW.

  It was a foot wide and maybe twice that in length, head to tail-tip. It had impressive but barely-there wings attached to its back - wide and shimmering with beautiful colours like oil on water. So thin I thought it impossible that the thing ever took flight.

  When I opened the door it had been on the wall above the cistern with its wings folded in line with its body. A naked, human skeleton rested on the toilet seat - rested in it, actually, with its hips dipped into the bowl. Hundreds of the smaller bugs swamped every surface, busily zipping from one place to another. Once I saw them, I heard them too, chattering away with mechanical, cricket-like vibrations.

  When I spoke, the big boss bug opened up its wings with a 'thwip'. Then it pounced off the wall, spun in mid-air and smacked me in the face, laying me clean out. I kept my eyes and mouth sewn shut as hundreds of matchstick legs, possibly fur-lined, or maybe feathers, brushing against my skin. It was like an angry massage from an entire petting zoo. I wanted to scream, to let my hysteria escape, but couldn't for fear of what the vicious insect might shove down my throat.

  I grabbed its wings and heard it squeal, a real high-pitched SCREE that seemed to originate in the centre of my head, jolting me with a searing shot of pain. White lines like lightning flashed across the back of my eye lids. The sound brought Stuart bounding in, conquering his fear. I heard his feet pound past the cubicles, then a squeak as he slipped in the mess.

  I cracked my left eye open and saw some of the smaller bugs zooming around on wings of their own, forcing Stuart to bat them away.

  He kicked the attacking thing in its fleshy side, where ribs would be if it had any. Stunned words tumbled from his mouth but made no sense, like they came out in the wrong order.

  I scrambled up and helped Stuart put the boot in, slamming kick after kick into its wriggling body. We aimed at the fleshy undercarriage, keeping it rolled over, unable to rely on its solid, shell-like back for protection.

  "What the bloody fuck is going on?!" Susan yelled from her porcelain throne.

  I slammed my foot on to its squirming stomach, pinning it in the corner underneath an old, wall mounted radiator. "Axe!" I said, causing Stuart to scurry away. The smaller bugs bounced their heads into my face, copying the actions of their giant-sized King or Queen but with nought-point-nought-one percent of the horrific effect.

  The thing had a beak, sort of like a parrot but squashed, like someone had hit a parrot with a shovel. Its eyes were empty holes of black; hollow caverns that led to nowhere, about the diameter of a shot glass. I couldn't tell if its eyeballs had never been there or had been plucked out. It was indeed fur-lined, at odds with its armadillo-like back, and had hundreds - maybe thousands - of legs that stuck out like fat broom bristles. They all scrabbled and attacked my foot, its beak snapped open and closed, emitting abundance of SCREES, right up until Stuart returned and chopped it clean in half a little close to my toes for comfort.

  Thick, yellowish goo seeped out, creating a puddle on the floor like melted vanilla ice cream. The kicking legs slowed to a listless stop. Dozens of bugs, about the size of a thumbnail, crawled blindly out of the carcass and became swamped in the vile liquid; the few that managed to take flight made it mere inches before nosediving like kamikaze pilots. The rancid, maggoty stench of month-old mince infected the air.

  The middle cubicle door creaked open and a very curious face peered out.

  Susan first spotted Stuart with the paste-tipped axe in his hand, then me with my foot crushing some kind of impossible animal.

  A bug bumped into her cheek but she didn't even blink.

  "I'm done," she said.

  We exited the room, closing the door and avoiding the bugs that had ventured into the hallway.

  -

  "As soon as I saw the bugs I knew something bad would happen," said Stuart, neglecting to explain why he hadn't spoken up about his premonition. "It didn't feel right. That's why I went elsewhere to pee."

  "That, and the bugs creeped you out?" I asked.

  "Correct."

  "Sorry I insisted on going in," Susan said, scratching at her skin, leaving faint white lines in the wake of her trim nails. She spent a minute, after exiting the room, checking every millimetre of clothing to ensure no bugs had clung on for a ride, but found only one nestled in her hair, already dead. Stuart flicked it out and stomped it to nothing regardless.

  "It's okay. My fault for opening the last door. Couldn't stop myself."

  "Ohh, you NEVER open the last door! Have video games taught you nothing?" said Stuart.

  "Evidently not enough, no. There was a skeleton in there too. No clothes or anything. Just a perfectly preserved set of bones in the shape of a person."

  "Blimey. Wonder how long that's been there?"

  "No idea. Looked like forever."

  "You know...what with the, er, the size of the smaller, squirmy bugs and, well, the method and physiology with which you pee, Susan, I sort-of expected something else to happen entirely."

  "What do you mean?" she asked him, narrowing her eyes.

  "I mean...like..."

  Stuart made a hole with his thumb and forefinger, then imitated a wriggling bug with two fingers of his spare hand.

  "Oh," she said. "Oh. I didn't even think about that."

  Her hand gravitated to her skirt and a special brand of queasy horror flushed across her face. "And I won't think about it any longer, if that's okay."

  "One almost hit me on the cock, but it missed and instead died swimming in my urine," I said, diverting the subject away from a buggy invasion of Susan. It worked, sort of, because neither of my companions said another word as we stomped briskly along the corridor. I wiped my reclaimed axe on the threadbare carpet, scraping off the gunk until it shined almost good as new.

  -

  The thin door to the roof was unsurprisingly locked with a latch secured to the wall, but that was no problem to anyone carrying a decent axe.

  Locks are pointless in a world with axes.

  A blast of cold, damp air blew out from the door as Stuart yanked it open, dropping the broken padlock to the floor. It was musty and dark inside, with a score of stone steps leading to the outer door, unlocked but heavy and we had to fight an unhelpful wind to get it open. Finally with our combined strength we won, shoving it until the wind caught it and slammed it back against the wall. The cold chilled my skin but I welcomed it. As a gentleman and a hero I offered my stolen suit jacket to Susan but she declined, too occupied with battling her pile of blustered, untameable hair to bother with cold. Stuart seemed hopeful I'd offer it to him next, perhaps because it was my fault he no longer had his thick Security jacket, but I didn't.

  He'd survive.

  The roof was flat and featureless except for a handful of boxy air-conditioning units and trails of miscellaneous pipes that snaked from one section to another. No other doors. The grey skies of morning had shifted to reveal a pale blue canvas with patches of murky white cloud.

  "There's none of those big chutes you see in films," I said, speaking my thoughts aloud, not to anyone in particular. Stuart took an interest anyway.

  "I don't think they really exist. They're a comedic trope thing, aren't they?"

  "Thieves use them too. In movies, I mean. Don't know about real life. Heists, sneaking about, breaking in, that sort of thing. They're always travelling through air conditioning vent shafts. I imagine they'd get stuck often in real life, or lost, end up dying of dehydration or banging their head and passing out. Ventilation systems would be lousy with corpsed burglars."

  I lost myself and shut up, adopting a quizzical look; my insight on the matter thoroughly drained.

  Stuart left my side with sourness on his face, stepping over pipes as if they might explode at any moment. His last stun gun was in his left hand, his right held down his otherwise flapping tie.

  "You can probably get rid of that," I said, meaning the tie.

  He
shook his head. "I like it. Makes me feel important. Like I'm in charge of something."

  I instantly regretted my lack of tie.

  -

  "Well, this is pretty fucking irritating," I said as I took a look over the edge and saw nothing but flat wall punctured by intermittent windows. The helpful handy fire escape that I hadn't expected to exist did not, in fact, exist at all. Stuart checked another side and shook his head glumly.

  "Nothing useful," he reported when back in shouting distance.

  He ran off to check the remaining sides of the almost-exactly-square building in the hope of a dangling rope ladder or something equally unlikely. Susan rested against an air conditioning unit, looking over the papers we reclaimed and occasionally flinching whenever she thought she saw a white bug on the gravel-strewn floor. She'd lost a stack of pages to the wind but hadn't given up. The unpredictable tornado of hair bashing her skull likely made it difficult to see anything with any great certainty.

  The forest ran off into the distance and there was nothing visible on the horizon. No buildings, no rescue helicopters, no skyscraper-sized mechadinosaurs fighting gargantuan squidbeasts, nothing at all. Just miles and miles of humdrum tree tops pointing at the sky.

  After more unrewarded searching, I suspected we'd have to make our way down the stairs or risk the fidgety lift again, neither of which I fancied much. Especially since we knew the only real exit was flooded with scary bastards and every floor in between stank of death.

  Stuart waved at me, calling me over to his side.

  "Look," he said, marking out a solitary, shuffling corpse minding its own business ten floors beneath us. The only one jaunting loose in the compound, lost like an untethered buoy at sea. He then led me to a pile of miscellaneous debris stacked next to an air-con unit. Rocks and pieces of rubber that'd been brushed up into one place and left.

  "Why is that even here?" I asked as he scooped it all up into his arms.

  "Dunno. Birds probably bring it up to build nests," he said.

  "Birds don't build nests out of stones, Stu. You're thinking of the Three Little Pigs."

  We moved back to the edge, he deposited the collection of stuff at our feet.

  "Whatever. Reckon I can hit it?"

  A competitive glimmer struck his eyes.

  "If you're going to try, hurry up, we should get moving. Also no, you wouldn't hit it with a million bricks in a million years."

  He threw with an 'umph'. The clump of rock sailed down in silence, I laughed when it hit the ground harmlessly a relative mile away from the ex-man.

  "Told you," I smirked. He challenged me to do better.

  "Of course," I said, picking up a palm-sized chunk to prove it.

  The wind gusted as I threw, blowing my projectile hopelessly off target. It landed even further away than Stuart's. Completely unlucky. Mother Bleedin' Nature's boisterous wind stole my victory.

  We snatched up another brick each without uttering a word, the smiles evaporated from our faces. What began as a stupid game of hitting a zombie with a brick from the roof of a ten storey building became the most important contest in the world. I was at the fair, throwing tennis balls at a coconut next to an unhappy man in a clown costume, all because I desperately wanted to win a stuffed unicorn. It was fun, healthy, maybe even critical, to allow my mind a distraction.

  Quickly we reduced to one brick each. Stuart wore a mask of grim determination. I hid how seriously I took the contest behind a curtain of boredom.

  "Right, last go. I'll throw first, then you. Closest wins," I said.

  I threw.

  The piece of mortar arched gracefully through the air, almost beautiful in the way it spun. In my mind it soared as high as the clouds, floating past Mount Olympus to the great admiration of Zeus, before hitting its apex and descending. I couldn't breathe; I wouldn't, in case the hot air from my lungs affected its perfect trajectory. My throat closed with anticipation. Shadows filtered into my peripheral vision as I blocked everything but the missile and the zombie.

  I cheered like a sports fan as my team lifted the cup, celebrating wildly as the rock crashed into its shoulder, causing blood to spurt out as if it'd been hit with a, well, with a brick from ten stories up. It didn't collapse like I assumed. It just stumbled frantically around. I imagined it down there, in its primitive way, getting irate and flustered about 'pesky kids, throwing shit'.

  There was no way Stuart would beat it.

  Also no chance to find out, thanks to a throat-burning scream which spoilt our stupid, childish game and dragged my eyes back across the roof. A bulky figure disappeared around the side of the largest air conditioning unit. Susan had gone. The papers were scattered as if they'd been thrown to the wind.

  "Shit!" I yelled, running to where Susan had been. My axe rested on the floor next to a pool of blood. I reclaimed it, wiping the handle clean against my thigh. Stuart clung on to his final piece of masonry, gripping it so hard his knuckles turned a pearly white, not unlike the bugs.

  Splats of red liquid ran in a line from the axe to the one area of roof we didn't have a clear view of.

  A scream of "HELP!" reached our ears, carried along by the tempestuous wind.

  "Susan!" Stuart called, panicked, as we followed the gross trail of human spillage. I suspected whatever I saw the back of had chased and/or herded her away from us with nefarious intentions.

  A severed arm lay on the floor, chopped off below the shoulder with a small scrap of cheap material soaking up the blood. A tacky gold watch looped around the chubby, freckled wrist.

  We found Susan backing away from a significantly damaged Nelson into a small cul-de-sac of air con units which stood as tall as me. His head tilted awkwardly to the left, exposing a messy, cavernous yaw in his neck; thick blood dyed the terrible, pudgy-torso-hugging tank top black.

  "ZOMBIE NELSON! KILL HIM!" she exploded, pointing accusingly.

  Zombie Nelson croaked something in response, an inhuman rasp containing no words. I am not the type to look a gift horse in the mouth, nor am I the type to pass on injuring an infected enemy during a zombie outbreak. The fact he already had an arm off and looked peaky justified the action enough for me. He was definitely, in my mind, a card-carrying member of the evil undead.

  I decided to silence him forever.

  Such a shame, so sad etc etc...

  Axe Time!

  I hoisted it to shoulder height and charged, planning on lopping the fucker's head clean off. Unfortunately Stuart had a similar notion and thundered in past me. He held his brick aloft, ready to ruin all my fun, to crush my dreams.

  He gave me no time to proclaim unfairness before he slammed the gnarled chunk of granite into Nelson's bloated face. No action movie 'THWACK!' rang out, not even the expected wet splodge we'd heard when hitting the other zombies with various things - only the dull, disquieting thud of something hard smacking into a human skull. It's a unique sound, like a church bell, and it does odd things to a person. It made my skin itch and my jaw drop. Susan screwed up her face then covered it with her hands.

  To Nelson, the sound signalled a disturbing amount of damage, denting his head like a tin can. Stuart visibly jostled with his emotions, unsure whether to strike out again or run until his legs ended in bloody stumps.

  He swung.

  The second blow sent the dazed Zombie Nelson rocking sideways to the perilous edge which he abruptly toppled over. I grabbed Stuart by the belt before his momentum took him over too. Only Susan witnessed Nelson fall the ten floors directly down. She reported, with a shock-affected stoniness, that some ugly shrubbery swallowed his body.

  The end of Nelson.

  "I hope he was actually a zombie..." she muttered, half under her breath, before biting her lip and letting a look of concern creep out beneath the shock.

  "Was he acting like a zombie?" Stuart asked, pointing his arms and gargling with a soulless look on his face.

  "Yes! He had the blood, the shambling gait, clouded, wandering eyes
. He fell out of the door looking unwell, so I went to help and he lashed out. One of the white roaches rode along on his cheek, even smaller than the others though. It looked like it was burrowing into his skin. I hit him twice with the axe. First swing whipped his arm off like couldn't wait to hit the ground, second one kinda lodged into his shoulder and I dropped it..."

  "So he also looked like a zombie?" I asked. "Good enough for me."

  "What happened to him...where's he been hiding...where did he get the bug from?" Stuart asked.

  "Wherever he was," I said, "it was the wrong place. And I'm electing to ignore the bug on morale grounds."

  -

  Heading back to the only exit, a horrible feeling too hold of my knotted stomach and began to play havoc. I couldn't see the metal door from our angle, instead I stared at the rear of the metal hut that held it.

  "It's shut, isn't it? The door I mean, it's going to be shut. I know it. You know it."

  "I didn't notice when we ran past..." said Stuart.

  "Might not. Nelson didn't close it behind him or anything..."

  Susan didn't sound confident.