Clickers vs Zombies (11 page)

One creature jabbed a young boy in the stomach. As the child wailed and screamed in pain, more Clickers scrambled onto shore. They began stuffing bits of boy-meat into their mandibles, ripping flesh off the child’s body with their giant serrated claws even as the boy’s abdomen began to swell and burst open from the highly venomous sting. The child’s mother rushed forward and managed to tear her child free of the creatures and flee up the sand as they turned their carnivorous attentions to other prey. She collapsed behind a dune and clutched her bleeding child tight, moaning and shrieking. When the boy began to twitch and move, she assumed he was still alive.

She was wrong.

Her son sat up and bit into his mother’s cheek, ripping the flesh from her face just as the Clickers had done to him only moments before.

Rota, Spain

A horde of Clickers emerged from the surf during the busiest part of the day. Hundreds of beach goers fled, creating a mad stampede as the creatures scuttled up the beach. Two teenagers who had been making out on a blanket and at first had been oblivious to everything else around them, broke their embrace in time to find one of the creatures looming over them. The boy had time to yell before the monster’s segmented tail lashed forth, stabbing him in the chest with its stinger. The creature’s tail pulsed, pumping venom through the appendage. The boy’s eyes rolled back into his head, showing white. Both the pain and the pressure were incredible. He screamed as his body began to swell. He jittered on the sand as his skin began to sizzle and slough off him.

His girlfriend reached for him in an attempt to pull her lover away, but a second Clicker grabbed her with its claws, waving her back and forth in the air like a flag, before finally cutting her in half. Her innards and blood spilled and splashed against the creature’s shell and then slid off onto the hot sand. The monster dropped her limp form and began to greedily slurp up her sizzling intestines and organs.

Then the girl began to move again. Her upper half crawled across the sand to her boyfriend, who was still alive and shivering from the pain as the venom coursed through his veins. He turned to her and gasped.

“I…love…you…”

“Aw,”
the dead girl cooed.
“How sweet! I love you, too. Especially your eyes.”

And then she gouged his eyeballs from his skull with her fingers and popped them into her mouth like oversized grapes.

“Eww,”
the zombie rasped.
“That venom makes them taste funny.”

The Clickers continued rushing ashore. Their size belied their speed. Each time the surf crashed into the shore, more of them emerged from the waves, scuttling after their prey. The foaming surf turned red, and the waves receded around dead bodies—that then began to move.

One car-sized Clicker found an elderly couple, who were having a hard time getting up amid the mad rush to flee. Two minutes later, the couple was reduced to bits of scattered flesh and gristle as the giant creature dined on their remains. The old man’s severed head, cast aside by a Clicker and resting amidst some trash, opened its eyes and looked around. Frustrated with its lack of mobility, the head silently cursed in an ancient language.

Cardigan, Wales

Along the Welsh shore, a middle-aged balding man named Tim stood on the deserted beach. He’d come to the shore today to think, to ponder his latest career move. He had a cottage perched on a cliff high over the shore. However, he liked to sit on a rock twenty feet from the shore and let his mind wander. His career was in a standstill and he was unsure of what to do. He was so into his thoughts that he almost didn’t see the Clickers come storming out of the ocean. When they did, they swarmed over the man and reduced him to a pile of bubbling flesh from their highly toxic stings, making it easier for them to scoop their bloody congealed meal into their beaked mandibles.

Tim did not reanimate, for there was nothing left of his body to come back.

The sea churned as yet more of the creatures surfaced. The smallest was the size of a sheep. The biggest was nearly three-stories tall. Seawater streamed off its carapace. It clutched the carcass of a marlin in its pincers. The dead fish flapped and struggled, trying to get away.

San Francisco, California

The battle between the living and the dead inside the Black Lodge building raged for just under an hour. Ob and his fellow Siqqusim made quick, violent work of the security detail. Once the initial commandos inside the Remote Viewing room were dead, their bodies were possessed, just as Abigail and the others had been. The difference was that these Siqqusim now had weapons and armor. They poured out into the hallway and cut down a second emergency response team that had just converged on the scene. Adding to their numbers and weaponry, they then made their way through the building, floor by floor, exterminating every living being—from the Black Lodge operatives who fought or fled to the aquarium full of fish they discovered in one office. As each one died, they rose again, a host shell for another Siqqusim.

The slaughter continued. Throats were slashed, cut or torn out. Veins were opened. Limbs were severed, and then used as weapons to beat other humans to death. Using a letter opener, Ob sliced open the belly of a victim and strangled her with her own intestines. Moments later, when the corpse reanimated, it tore the innards free so they wouldn’t hamper its mobility. The zombies killed—and fed. It wasn’t that they
needed
to eat—at least, not while in their spiritual form. But still, they needed energy, and when they took over these empty corpses, that energy was drawn from food. Eating the living served three purposes. First, it was an affront upon the Creator, who had banished them to the Void eons before. Secondly, it allowed them to convert the flesh to energy while in human form, even if their host body no longer had a digestive system, since their kind processed energy by a different method. Finally, it served as yet another way of killing humans, dispatching their souls so that another Siqqusim could take over the bodies.

The Black Lodge operatives fought back with weapons and more esoteric defenses. But while circles of protection and binding spells slowed the zombies down, and while explosive rounds and grenades destroyed their physical forms, the dead ultimately won the battle due to their sheer numbers. Only the destruction of a corpses’ brain would successfully dispatch a Siqqusim, because that was where they resided. Blowing them up didn’t work. Even with no legs or arms, they still proved determined and deadly. They moved and operated with a singular purpose—the extermination of every living soul.

And once they had succeeded, they poured out into the streets of the city, and began the slaughter all over again. Their numbers grew.

The scene was repeated slowly around the world. All across the globe, the dead began to rise. Felled by heart attacks or cancer or automobile accidents or murder, death was not the end. One by one, they rose again, and joined in the killing.

FOUR

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

It was easier to call home by stealing some time from the late work day by slipping out of the conference room and making her way to her rental car where she could steal some time in privacy. Jeanette Sycheck cast her gaze out the windshield toward Hempfield Road where she was currently working with a client, listening as Rick’s cell phone rang. He picked up on the fourth ring.

“Hey there!” he said.

“Hi!” Her mood instantly brightened. “So, how are things going?”

“Busy, as usual.” She heard him set something aside in his office cubicle. Rick’s day job office was in a cubicle in a secure room just off the computer room at Free State Insurance. He was one of three mainframe programmers in the Computer Operations department. His direct supervisor, Wally Green, typically worked out of the larger cubicle at the end of the room. Wally was a cool guy, but she knew if she called before lunch, Wally would demand to speak to Jeanette and would waste her time by telling her fart jokes. “How are things going over there?”

“Same old shit,” she said. “I swear to God, the Controller of this company is such a raging idiot. Honestly, I don’t understand how he got this job. Their programmer calls him a bobble-head. Did I tell you that?”

“Yeah, you did.” Rick chuckled on the other end. “A thousand times.”

“Sorry. I’m just tired of this assignment because of these people. They’re complete idiots. And it’s going to be another late night. It’s already after five o’clock here, and I’m still stuck at work.”

“Well it’s only two more days, then you’re coming home for a week.”

“Yeah, that’s true.” Jeanette couldn’t wait to work out of the house next week. After that it was two more weeks of being on site here in Amish country, then she was home with her family—and then they were going on vacation! They were driving up to Sequoia National Park to a resort for the week. All four of them had been looking forward to the getaway for months. “So how’re the kids? And the dog?”

“Doing good. Princess misses you. The kids spent the night at their friends’ last night, but I called them this morning from work. I told them I wanted them home by tomorrow night so we can pick you up at the airport. I thought maybe we could go out to dinner.”

“That would be great!”

“So, have you heard about what’s been going on at our beaches?”

“No, what?”

As Rick told her about the strange lobster-scorpion-crab creatures that attacked the night before in Huntington Beach and how other sightings had been reported from Portland, Oregon to Ensenada, Mexico, Jeanette listened with numbed shock, hardly believing it.
Surely this has to be some weird kind of joke, right? He’s teasing me, pulling some kind of practical joke?
But she knew her husband better than that. Rick’s demeanor and tone were utterly serious.

“I haven’t heard anything about that,” Jeanette said. “Though I’ve got to admit, I didn’t watch much TV last night. Watched the news a little bit, then read a book for the rest of the night.”

“You didn’t take a dip in the pool?”

“No.” Jeanette smiled. Rick knew that she loved to swim every night. She hardly dipped her toe in the water when she was traveling, but she made good use of their backyard pool at home every night the weather was good. “ And came straight to work this morning. So again, not much time to watch the news.”

As they talked, Jeanette opened her laptop, which she’d brought out to the car to kill time with in case Rick hadn’t been home. After connecting to the company’s wireless network, she double-clicked on her internet browser, and then checked the news.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“What?” Rick asked. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just went online to see if I could find the reports.”

“And did you?”

“Yeah, I see something here about it, but that’s not the top story.”

Rick made a clucking noise. “What can possibly top giant lobster-scorpion-crab hybrids?”

“There’s a riot going on in San Francisco. Some kind of mass shooting, but with multiple suspects and spread out across the city.”

“You mean like when those terrorists shot up Mumbai, India a few years ago?”

“I don’t know. The reports are pretty chaotic right now.”

“Okay. Listen, I’m going to let you get back to work, and go watch the coverage for myself. Call me tonight before you go to sleep?”

She glanced toward the building and noted the time on the dashboard. “Yeah, I’ve got to get back. I’ll call you from the hotel.”

“Sounds good,” Rick said. “I’ll be here.”

“Okay. Love you. Tell the kids I love them.”

“I will. Love you, too.”

After saying goodbye, Jeanette pressed the disconnect button and glanced back out the windshield. The late afternoon sun had burned hot, and even though it was dark now, the interior of the car was still roasting. She exited the vehicle, relieved to be out, then started to head back inside. She had to finish this database design, then she was knocking off early and heading back to the Holiday Inn. She’d be grateful to be back in the hotel room, where she could kick off her shoes and lay back on the bed. She felt…unsettled. She wasn’t sure if it was just that she missed her family, or the stress of traveling for work, or the news reports of strange lobster-scorpion creatures back home and the killings in San Francisco. It was all just too weird.

Jeanette went back inside the building and entered the conference room. She said nothing as she sat back at her spot at the table and began resuming her work. Even though she put on the appearance of being the dutiful working bee, she found it hard to concentrate on her work and found herself opening a web browser and hitting refresh on the search terms on the sea creatures to see if anything new popped up.

Within a half hour, there were so many reports that her browser locked up.

An hour later, the internet went down and the lights flickered.

Outside the building, a distant fire siren began to wail. A few minutes later, three police cars raced by, lights blaring.