A Plague on All Houses (3 page)

“Mmmm, baby, you smell so good.”

I giggled as Matt nuzzled against me. He did this thing where he pretended to be a dog and sniffed up and down my neck and shoulders. It tickled and he sounded like a Saint Bernard with asthma. Disgusting and cute at the same time.

Pushing him away, I ignored Matt's pout, pulling my sweater back down and jeans back up, just in case there were any passersby wandering the woods behind campus after dark. Not too likely, especially when the weather was chilly and overcast, plus the grove of redwoods where we'd spread our blanket was pretty much private, but you never know who might be attracted to the light from Matt's battery-powered lantern.

“Pass the champagne, ‘kay?”

Matt sulked a little, but filled one of the little flutes (glass,
not
plastic) he'd brought with some Italian bubbly. “It's Prosecco, not champagne, Ash. It's only champagne—”

“—if it comes from Champagne,” I finished for him. “I know, I know.” It's what I get for dating a wine snob-in-training. I usually don't complain ‘cause it means I get to taste some wicked good stuff when most people my age are still working their way through White Zins of the World.

Matt decided he'd sulked long enough (I swear, he had a timer for his mood swings) and smiled at me. “Like the picnic, Ash?”

I nodded. How could I not? I mean, how many college guys took the time to pack full-on picnics? We're not talking a bucket of KFC and a six-pack. Nope, roast chicken, bread, brie, and bubbly. Bread knife, cutting board,
and
cloth napkins.

Yeah, Matt had ulterior motives—he
was
a college boy, after all—but I'd rather be seduced with sparkling wine than Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I took another sip and used my other hand to hide a delicate little belch that bubbled out of nowhere. Bubbly burp, I thought, and started giggling.

Whoa, tipsy much? I probably should have had more of the chicken and bread before diving straight into the alcohol. I'm a cheap date. So sue me.

Matt didn't mind. “What's so funny?” he asked, not really expecting an answer. Good thing ‘cause I couldn't stop giggling now that I'd started. Matt started nuzzling my neck again, making low growling noises that vibrated pleasantly against the sensitive skin, both tickling me and turning me on. One thing led to another and we were soon happily in Stage One of making out, i.e. hands groping under clothing, bra pushed up but still fastened, no actual disrobing, lots of hip and groin action.

At first I thought it was Matt when I heard a weird, low, moaning sound. I mean, yes, he was moaning things like “Oh, baby, you turn me on,” and “I swear, you make me hard.” But this noise was weird enough to finally break through my lust and alcohol haze.

I stopped in mid-kiss. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Matt continued stroking my hips, insinuating his hand between my thighs, stroking me through the denim. I squirmed with pleasure even as my ears strained to pick up that moaning noise again.

Nothing except the cracking of ancient redwood branches.

Giving a mental shrug, I turned my attention back to Matt, specifically the bulge beneath his jeans. I teased him, rubbing one hand along the outline of his erection while nibbling gently on his neck in a way I knew he liked. His free hand caressed my breasts, first one, then the other, thumb softly flicking against the nipples, a move guaranteed to drive me wild. We were both moaning with desire at this point, all panting eagerness to take things to the next level, when suddenly his hand squeezed my left breast way too hard.

“Ow! That hurt, you jerk!” I smacked him on the shoulder, hard.

“Huh?” Matt lifted his mouth from my earlobe. “What the hell did you do that for?”

The hand squeezed again, nails digging in this time. A rattling moan sounded close to my ear. The ear
not
next to Matt's mouth. I smelled something rank.

“What the fuck? Get off me!” I shoved Matt off of me and rolled away from the moaning. The hand on my breast stayed there, accompanied by a nasty tearing noise, like the sound of a drumstick being ripped off a whole chicken. I looked down and gasped in grossed-out disbelief because the light of the lantern showed a groddy rotted hand clutching my 34C, ragged nails digging into the flesh. Even worse, said hand was attached to an equally gross arm—and nothing else.

“Omigod!”

“Jeez, babe, what is your damage?” Matt sat up, offended.

I didn't have time to soothe his wounded male ego. I was too busy dislodging what looked like a cheap Halloween prop from my boob. It didn't take much effort; the thing seemed to have lost all of its oomph. I lifted the lantern and found out why.

The top half of what was once a young woman squirmed on the mossy ground next to our blanket. Her torso trailed off into strings of intestines and other bits of unidentifiable ickiness. Chunks of flesh were missing from her face and neck. Two spooky, milky-white eyes stared at me above a bloody hole, chewed gristle sticking out where her nose used to be. Her mouth opened and closed hungrily as she used her remaining arm to pull herself onto the blanket towards me.

This was seriously effed up right here. I'd just been felt up by what looked to be a zombie and a female one at that. I choked back a definitely hysterical laugh as I wondered if this counted as a lesbian encounter.

“Holy shit!” Matt got a good look at our visitor as she pulled herself slowly, relentlessly towards us. “Holy shit! What the fuck
is
that?”

I shook my head, holding back my own “holy shits” by a sheer force of willpower. “I don't know. But it's ugly and it felt me up and I think it's trying to eat us.” I fumbled in the picnic basket and grabbed the bread knife.

“What are you doing, Ash?” Matt's voice rose an octave as I turned back to what had to be the grossest picnic-crasher ever. I mean, worse than army ants.

For some reason, I heard Ah-nold's voice in my head, saying ‘Taking out da trash.” I didn't say anything, though. I just brought the knife down as hard as I could into one of Miss Thang's ears, shoving with all of my strength to push the serrated blade deep into whatever was left of her brain—and hoped that the movies didn't lie.

Kill the brain, kill the zombie.

And what do you know? It worked. She—it—stopped wriggling and chomping, like a really gross mechanical doll with the batteries removed.

Matt stared at me as though he'd never seen me before. “What did you just do?”

I shrugged, my body still thrumming with adrenaline. “I think I just killed a zombie.”

“There's no such thing as zombies!”

“Well, what the hell would you call
this?
” I emphasized my words with another shove of the bread knife. Matt winced. He opened his mouth to answer, but I would never know what he was going to say because the night suddenly filled with a moaning chorus of the damned. This could
not
be good. Matt stood up, nostrils flaring like a panicked horse.

Bracing one hand against the zombie's head, I tried to extract the knife, but I'd jammed it in there well and good and it wasn't budging. Eerie moans floated through and above the trees, drifting in with tendrils of fog coming in from the ocean.

More leverage. That's what I needed. Scrambling to my feet, I stood on either side of its neck, grabbed the knife with both hands and pulled. The blade came up slowly, reluctantly, like someone being pulled out of quicksand. A horrible squelching sound and the knife gave way, nearly sending me back on my ass with the suddenness of its release.

“We have to get out of here,” Matt said unnecessarily. He started gathering up the picnic gear. I stared at him in disbelief.

“Are you crazy? Leave this shit behind!”

“This stuff cost me over a hundred bucks!” Matt tossed the champagne flutes into the basket. I heard one of them break as it hit a china plate.

“We'll come back for it later!” I grabbed the lantern and shoved it into his hand. “Now, Matt!” Seizing his arm, I pulled him out of the grove. We used the lantern's light to navigate uphill through the trees as milky fog poured in like a bad special effect. The only thing missing was the blue backlighting.

The moaning grew louder as we neared the top of the hill. The old redwood growth gave way at the summit to a field with a trail leading through blackberry bushes and bracken back to campus. All we had to do was follow the trail and call the cops when we reached Big Red.

We reached the top of the summit and paused to catch our breath. My breath caught, all right, stuck in my throat as the smell hit. A thick, coppery mix of blood, rot, and shit; decayed flesh oozing out stuff meant to stay inside. We looked at the field in what was left of the moonlight. Tendrils of fog drifted across the landscape, but not enough to obscure the sight of at least two dozen, maybe more, ambulatory mutilated corpses staggering through the bushes and on the path, all with their zombie GPS systems evidently set on me and Matt. One saw us and started moaning louder, sounding the dinner bell for the rest of them. This set off a chain reaction and pretty soon the entire crowd moaned in discordant harmony.

“How are they moving?” Matt's nostrils flared in and out, in and out. “They should be dead!”

“I think they are.” I fought the impulse to puke up my Prosecco.

“Then they shouldn't be walking!” Matt's well-ordered worldview had been smashed to hell and back, and he was having serious trouble dealing with it.

“Well, they are, Matt,” I said harshly, “and we need to get out of here! We don't have time to freak out!”

“We should go back through the woods!”

I shook my head. “It's too big. We don't know how many of those things are in there. At least here we can see them … and it's a straight shot to Big Red.”

Matt nodded, visibly struggling not to freak out. This had to be the first time in our relationship he'd let me make a major decision. I guess everyone has areas outside of their comfort zone. I'm not sure why zombies weren't outside of mine. Matt evidently had the same question ‘cause he looked at me as though I were a stranger and said, “Why aren't
you
freaking out?”

I didn't have a real answer, so I just said, “I'll freak out later when we're safe at school.”

The look Matt gave me this time made me wonder even if we made it safely home whether or not our relationship would survive the night. What a shitty barometer for compatibility. I mean, how often does this kind of shit hit the fan? Hardly ever, right?

I couldn't dwell on it. The zombies lurched closer with every second. Classic Romero ghouls, not the marathon sprinters currently in vogue. Time to run.

Seizing Matt's hand, I yelled, “
Go
!” and hauled ass down the trail for all I was worth, Matt right beside me. Rotting, diseased hands clutched at us from either side, like the gauntlet scene in
Last of the Mohicans
except with zombies instead of Hurons.

We shook off the first of them, barreling through the ones that stepped in front of us with the velocity of a well-thrown bowling ball smashing into ninepins. The blackberry bushes helped us—they grew all around the path and even at their sparsest, the brambles clutched at the encroaching undead much the way they grasped for us.

But they kept coming. For everyone knocked down, two more would stagger out of the brush and blackberry brambles, leaving bits of themselves behind as they pushed through the thorns, oblivious to pain.

I'm not much of a runner; jogging is last on my list of preferred exercise options, so no surprise I got winded pretty quickly. Matt, on the other hand, soon outdistanced me, sprinting down the path with one arm outstretched like a fullback smashing through his opposition. He sent a few zombies flailing back into the blackberries, but several landed on their decomposing asses on the path. Right in front of me.

I leapt over the first one, what was once a skinny woman with chunks of her arms and legs missing. A broken branch stuck out of one milky eyeball, indefinable goo all jellied and gross below it. She wore a robe, thankfully zipped up the front; I
so
did not want to see zombie boobs. I barely eluded her grasping fingers as they skimmed my ankle. I stumbled, recovered, then tripped right over the second fallen zombie, a fat businessman type, suit still surprisingly pristine. I know this because I fell right on top of him.

Ugh. Squishy.

He clutched me with implacable strength before I could move. I looked right into his fish-belly eyes, smelled decomposition wafting out of the gaping maw of his mouth, and saw my death staring me in the face. I shrieked as the zombie brought his gore-drenched teeth towards my neck, and shoved my left arm in between us without thinking. He growled and sunk his teeth into my sweater-clad forearm. I screamed bloody murder and managed to jerk away from him. A chunk of my arm and sweater stayed behind.

Fatty reached for me again, but this time I threw myself back to the ground before he could take another bite out of me. I crab-scuttled away from him as quickly as I could, the bite in my arm on fire. I scuttled right into the woman I'd just vaulted over, now getting to her feet. Clawed fingers seized my hair. I flailed madly with hands and feet, sacrificing a handful of hair to get away, but she got a bite of my shoulder anyway. God, it hurt. I wailed in pain and terror, my screams mixing with the moans of more zombies closing in for a share of the feast.

“Ashley!”

I heard Matt yell my name from what seemed miles away, along with what sounded like footsteps pounding my way. Then, “Get off me, you motherfuckers!” A loud thud as several bodies hit the ground. And then the screams began.

Matt kept screaming for what seemed forever, shrieks of unimaginable pain accompanied by the sound of rending flesh and chomping teeth.
I didn't know guys could scream so high,
I thought vaguely as I struggled to my feet, the world fading out a little around the edges. I knew I was dead, but part of me refused to give up even as multiple pairs of undead hands reached for me again. I backed away into the blackberry bushes, hemmed in by zombies on both sides of the path. No retreat, no way forward. Thorns dug into my back, poking through the fabric of my sweater and jeans. My hair snarled in some branches, trapping me as effectively as a fly in a spider web no matter how hard I tried to pull free. Zombies closed in from all sides, reaching for me with implacable hands and ravenous mouths.