by Mark Tufo
“Toss one of those cleaning jugs in the bag. Then make sure you’ve got one in the chamber.” I had my hand on the door and was getting ready to open it. The barrel of Stenzel’s rifle was nearly resting on my forearm. “Remember, we’re going to the right.”
“Would be hard to forget we’re going into the lair,” she said flatly.
“Or into their rear…of them,” I added because any sexual innuendo regarding zombies needs to be squashed immediately. “I’d rather fight through the stragglers than the main body of them. Malingerers never want to fight.”
“These are zombies—not young, recalcitrant soldiers.”
“Reek what?”
“People with authority issues.”
“You could have just said that,” I told her.
“Or you could expand your vocabulary,” she retorted.
“Right now?” I asked.
“Sorry, sir. I’m about done with this mission.”
There was an explosion somewhere far away, maybe the pops of bullets, nothing that would signify we had help coming any time soon.
“I’m going to do something extremely gross…just be prepared.”
“In your suit? Glad I won’t be able to smell anything.”
“Whose recalcitrant now?”
“Not the right usage.”
“And no, I’m not dropping a deuce in my pants. I’m not a friggen’ savage. I just got a flash of brilliance. Okay, if you were BT, this would be where you say something like, ‘No, that was just the final flare of the bulb burning out.’”
“I think you sufficiently covered it,” she replied.
“I’m going to open the door. There will be a zombie. Shoot it with a suppressed round.”
She let her rifle down and grabbed the pistol holstered to her leg. I pushed my finger into the hole, forced the catch, and pulled the door open. The zombie pressed up against it fell in. It would have fallen completely over if it’d had the room. His mouth was dangerously close to my knee—on it, in fact, but I think the surprise of his new orientation, and maybe the fact that he couldn’t smell us, saved me from a bite. There was the solid thunking of Stenzel’s bolt cycling through its action and the zombie stilled and stiffened. I dragged it in as far as I could. I wanted to shut the door, but that didn’t seem like it was going to happen, as more zombies were pressed up in the area. None, as of yet, trying to get to us. Stenzel had her gun up; I shook my head as little as I dared. Hopefully, it was enough to get my point across. We stood there for what seemed the eroding of mountains. I was slightly bent over, holding the zombie up, Stenzel with her unwavering gun, and the zombies sniffing the air; the burnt gunpowder had their attention. Gun powder meant humans as much as pellets of scat meant deer. A zombie bent down and looked right into my faceplate. I was afraid to blink, believing that might trigger a bite response.
“Sir,” Stenzel said so softly it might have been transferred psychically. This time I didn’t shake my head, afraid that the crinkling would set into motion a series of genuinely shitty events. The zombie began to fog up my faceplate, it was so close. I figured when it couldn’t see me any more it would leave. That would have been the preferred route. Nope. It decided licking my faceplate was the way to go. I watched that gray/black slab of meat run up the entirety of my viewing area. If I’d wanted, I’m sure I could have counted its taste buds. When whatever passed for a mind in that thing decided there was nothing of value to be eaten here, it stood. For all their advances, the zombies still had limitations. It seemed that if they could not smell their food, they wanted nothing to do with it. Made sense, as the majority of humans’ taste is tied up in the olfactory. It stood and pushed its way back into the now trickling stream of zombies. I wrenched the one we had farther in, breaking a few of its bones as I did so. I had a bit of a headache; figured that had to do with the initial stages of dehydration. I could feel a sloshing of liquid building up at my feet.
“What are you planning on doing with that?” she asked, although she already knew. She’d heard what BT, Tommy and myself had done to escape the visitor lodge.
“It won’t be as bad.” I told her. “It won’t technically be on us, and we won’t be able to smell it.” Funny thing about the human mind, though. As I plunged my knife into its stomach and ripped open its guts, my eyes sent the images to my brain, which decided it was going to fill in the blanks by giving me phantom whiffs. So even though I couldn’t smell it, I somehow was. I gagged a couple of times and it had nothing to do with the feet of intestines I was yanking free. Stenzel was the smart one; she wasn’t watching.
“But you saw! He didn’t smell you, so he didn’t attack.” She was desperately trying to avoid this.
“We need to go unnoticed. We still stick out, and if every one of them decides to test us, we’ll run out of oxygen long before we’re free of this area.”
“I like it better when you’re not right.”
“Grab some stuff, smear it on, don’t be shy.” I juiced a liver on top of my head, doing my best to not let the vile liquid run down my visor. Ten minutes later, we looked a lot like what I would imagine a serial killer’s wet dream does. It wasn’t quite as thick and gooey as the first go-around, but cohesion, or is it adhesion? on the slick suit was an issue. Like word choice mattered at the moment. Either way, it would have to do.
“Ready for this?” I asked as I tracked Stenzel’s eyes on a nugget of something stuck to my chest. “Hey, my eyes are up here.”
“Yup, yup, on it,” she said, finally tearing her gaze away. “Now that we’re trying to blend in, wouldn’t it make sense to follow instead of swim upstream?”
I had to think on that for a moment; she had a point. It was what I heard next that convinced me that might not be for the best. Another explosion. “Don’t want to get in the way of anything Rose has cooked up.”
“Smart,” she said.
“It happens every once in a while.”
“Almost forgot,” she reached back and shoved some Simple Green into the bag. It was the only thing available for decontamination. I doubted it listed Ebola as something it could kill, but it was our only option.
“Stay close to the wall, facing it.” Kept us from seeing any threats, but also kept them from seeing us. I had to think eyesight had been pushed to third in terms of how they used their senses. We’d effectively removed two, scent and taste; no sense in letting them using their fallback. It would be slow going. I didn’t want us moving too fast and set-off the chase response, but we needed to move somewhat quickly because my air was already being depleted quicker than it should have been.
At first I moved slowly, somewhere between tree and turtle slow. The hallway was disgusting, littered with the remnants of the stasis pile, slime, sludge, tattered clothing, maybe swaths of sloughed-off skin, tangles of hair, so, basically a teenaged girls’ dormitory bathroom. “Go with that, Talbot,” I whispered. To my left and going toward the main part of the ship, I could just make out shadows heading away. To my immediate right was a zombie on the ground. I’d mistakenly thought it was dead, maybe crushed under the pile; that would have been preferable. It was lapping at the left behind goo like a thirsty dog a shrinking puddle.
“Stenzel.” She came out quick. I pointed to the reaver wannabe. “Put one in its skull.” I wanted her to use the suppressed .22, much better chance the sound would go unnoticed. For whatever reason, the light was marginally better than it had been; I moved slightly so my sergeant could get by me and have a better angle. With my head down to make sure I didn’t step on anything even grosser, I saw the ripple travel away from Stenzel’s boot. As it broke over the zombie’s tongue, his head snapped up and fixed directly on us. I don’t know what his mother fed him as a tot, but the fucker moved fast. Back in the earlier days of the internet, there was a scary, jolting prank. Didn’t matter what the image was, but usually would say something like, pay close attention to what happens next or can you spot the difference, so then the recipient had their nose pres
sed against their computer monitor and, surprise! A screaming, horrific, witch person would dominate the screen, making the poor bastard viewer lose a few minutes of their life as their heart rate soared and their blood pressure threatened to burst the piping. This zombie was the living dead embodiment of that. Credit to Stenzel—she didn’t flinch as she drilled it neatly between the eyes. My backward step had pressed me up against the door jamb, I was happy for that or I would have fallen over.
“That was unexpected,” she said.
“How’d you do that?”
“Don’t know; my eyes were closed.”
I didn’t feel quite so bad about stumbling backward. “Okay, let’s go.” I pointed toward the machinery room as we walked side by side. “Hold up,” I told her as I poked my head in to get a quick look. My hope was the room would be empty, perfectly legitimate desire, even if it was not fulfilled. There were a half dozen zombies, which, all things considered, wasn’t bad. It was the four reavers, two bulkers, and a greaver in a pear tree that changed the equation. They were spread out unevenly in the room. Maybe they were the younger ones of the group and decided they weren’t going to get up for the march. I could hope that they’d somehow been damaged from the pile and would stay where they were until such time as a dead zombie eradication team cleaned up the mess or, who knew? Maybe they had already succumbed to the virus. That would have been fantastic, if a wee bit out of the credible, given the amount of time that had passed. Still, who could say?
“Stay close to the wall.”
We were creeping along, picking up our feet and placing them gently back down to avoid making any waves in the inch-thick goop we found ourselves traipsing through. We were midway through when our luck changed. I was just watching as another bar flickered off on my display when I heard, then saw, a zombie enter in from the far end.
“Stop,” I spoke so softly that the noise did not have a chance to pass by my faceplate. Stenzel lightly bumped into me. We were shoulder to shoulder, both of us staring at the zombie. It looked like an extremely pissed off homeowner coming home to realize his house had been burglarized and the thieves were still inside, and, instead of calling the cops, he was planning on going all vigilante. The zombie came stomping in, its head whipping back and forth. I was wincing as I watched each footfall cause the gel to move and splash against the bodies of those sleeping, especially the giants. I don’t know how it knew we were here, possibly the fallen zombie in the hallway or, more likely, the smell of the burnt gunpowder. One of the bulkers groaned like a disgruntled kid as a parent tries to wake them to get ready for school.
“Can you shoot it?”
It was some forty feet away, moving erratically in the murk, and Stenzel was using a suppressed pistol, which can have some effect on trajectory.
“Closer would be better.” She was thinking along the same obstacles as I was.
“I’m not sure if we have that option.”
She raised her gun. With her left hand, she cupped the bottom of her right to keep as steady as possible. “I’m having a problem.” Before I could ask what it was, she finished the sentence. “My visor is fogged up.”
The zombie homed in, straight on us, we were that one of these things that’s not like the others in a puzzle book—a find and kill Waldo scene.
“Let me have the gun.” She handed it over without objection. My fault for not looking as I grabbed it; put my finger straight on the trigger and sent a round into the far wall.
“Did you get it?” Stenzel asked.
“Almost.” I’d escaped letting her know how much of a dangerous rookie mistake I’d made. If the zombie cared at all that I’d shot, it in no way expressed concern as it came toward us. The muzzle flash let it know without a doubt we played for the other, edible team. I don’t know if the gun still had some special residue of Stenzel’s left behind on it, or maybe she had magical weapons, but I shot twice, though I only needed the first one. If I took the time to measure the wound, I’m sure it would have been equidistant between its eyes. “Got it.” I handed it back, making sure to click the safety. “Do you want to wait until you can see better?”
“There’s not much I want to see in here.”
“Fair enough. Keep your hand on my shoulder.” We were again moving, I crept along like a kid who had been stuck in the corner for being bad but was doing his best to escape his punishment by slinking, dragging my head along that wall. Not the brightest thought, but it was helping to keep me sane in some sort of a strange coping manner. We were getting closer to the exit; this I knew because the sludge was getting thicker. Fuck Ebola. I couldn’t even imagine the super bacteria meandering its way through the thick, almost gelatinous fluid. By the time I made it another ten feet, it was up past my calf and, even though I was running hot due to being encapsulated in plastic, I could feel the heat of the liquid. It was not welcome.
We’d reached the end of the room. Instead of making a diagonal and much quicker exit to the door I could see, we stayed pressed up against the wall, as far from the remaining zombies as possible. We were just about out when I spared a glance at what was still in there with us. This was one of those times I wished I’d kept my fingers tightly interlocked, covering my eyes during the scariest parts of the horror film I was forced to watch. There was a reaver, its head cocked to the side as it looked at us. I turned back as fast as I dared, realizing that the abomination had seen us. Now I had to hope it didn’t alert the bulker and greaver, as well. If I spent the time to dwell on it, it was a good bet that one of the zombies left here was a shrieker, and, probably, the field marshal for this fuck-fest and maybe a new and improved zombie to round out the fun. Of course, they were going to keep the higher priced and rarer assets in the pen until such time as they were needed. I don’t know if anyone truly knew what made the different species of zombies; all we did know was that they were valued pieces on the playing field and they wouldn’t use them as fodder to gauge the strength of the enemy. Why would you when you have four billion garden variety speeders? I stopped moving, tapping Stenzel’s hand to halt her.
“What are you doing?” It was asked quietly even though we now had somewhat of a cushion around us, maybe ten feet. Which, compared to how densely the room had been packed, this was an open field.
“We’ve piqued some interest.” I could hear her suit creak. “Don’t turn around. It’s looking right at us.”
“What’s looking right at us?”
“Reaver.”
“Fuck,” she muttered.
It was now so quiet that my breathing was the loudest thing, until the reaver began to make its way over to us. It wasn’t exactly cautious, but seemed inquisitive, if that can be derived from mere movement. It brushed up against me like a cat might a coffee table. I stiffened, yeah, that’s a good word, I suppose that’s what happens when something is petrified. It began sniffing around by my back. I was wondering if it were possible to still have some human scent on me from when I was being helped into the suit. Between the Simple Green and the zombie innards, that shouldn’t be a possibility, but it stayed there for a good long time. I was thinking about how fast I could react if it placed its jaws against my thigh. Another bar began to blink. Whatever malfunction my suit was having, it appeared that it was done trying to keep it together and was finally ready to call it a day.
I felt a claw, paw tentatively at the back of my leg. It tugged and caught, but not enough to tear through. It was clear that the reaver wanted to get a more in-depth sniff. I wasn’t so inclined to oblige. I had to think as soon as it began to smell my rifle, the burnt gunpowder would bring this entire meeting to the next level. I was moving slowly, turning and bending. I needed to get my knife free. I caught Stenzel’s eyes; she had her pistol at the ready and was wondering what she should do. That I kept moving for my knife was all she had to see to realize I wanted the gun to be a last resort. Even as quiet as it was, the zombies here had been disturbed from the other three shots I made. I knew that one more would be
the final time they pressed snooze on their alarm clocks. Between that noise and the smell, it would spell the end of our impromptu peace. I had my knife in my hand when I finally turned completely around and had my back to the wall. Like I thought, its muzzle went straight for the rifle, its movements a little more determined.
We were headed sideways faster than a skidding car on ice. I slipped, lost my balance momentarily, surfing on what looked like a scalp—the mop of blood-blonde hair was pushed away as I landed hard on my ass, the reaver on top of me. I had one gloved hand wrapped around its throat; with the other, I stabbed it hard in the side of the jaw. When it tried to pull back, I began to crush its windpipe and quickly delivered knife wounds to any part of the head I could sink the blade into. When it stilled, I gently rolled it over and off me, and took Stenzel’s offered hand. I’d won the battle, but it looked like the war was just getting underway. All that movement had disturbed the greaver. By his feet lay an oxygen tank; at some point in the struggle, they’d rolled out of the bag. I was wondering if I asked for a little help, would he give it back.
“Time to run.” We were close to out and heading straight for the door when the greaver got its legs under him. A rapid series of clicks that deadened as they struck our retreating backs let us know we’d been found out. How it knew we were foe and not friend was not going to be something I would stop and ask it. The liquid in the room began to vibrate as the heavy beast lumbered toward us. There was the sickening sound of snapping bones as the greaver either stepped upon a bulker or crushed a speeder, it was a victory of sorts. Nice to know they had the same mentality as the bulkers. Stenzel let out an oomph as she slipped on something. I reached back and grabbed the only part available to me, ended up being the side of her head. I got a decent grip and was able to not only keep her from falling completely over but propel her, sliding toward the door. Felt like I was bowling with sergeants. Instead of a strike, I needed a bullseye for her to clear the door and get out. The greaver was close. I don’t think I had more than five feet on that goring horn. Nothing like getting injected with a thick, Ebola-filled enema. As bad as I would feel for that person, if I read that news story, I would still laugh and call him or her a dumbass. The only reason I couldn’t find humor in the current situation was that it was me that was going to be the subject of that report.
