Death After Life: A Zombie Apocalypse Thriller (11 page)

Next in line was a bulky African American fellow with a balding head and glasses. He was accompanied by a pretty teenager whom Voskuil presumed was his daughter.
 

At the ticket window, a uniformed staffer stepped in front of the cashier to say, “May I see a recent health certification, sir?”

The fat guy instantly took offense. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m perfectly healthy.”
 

“Federal regulations, sir.”

“You didn’t ask that lady for hers!”

Voskuil rolled his eyes as the debate continued.

“I’m sorry sir, but it’s theater policy to require a physical for patrons who may pose a health risk. If you would just step over to that line over there—”

“No, I will not step over there. You can’t treat me like some invalid because of a few extra pounds—”

Voskuil stepped forward, “Look, buddy, I’m a doctor — it takes five minutes to check your blood pressure and vitals—”

“Oh yeah? Our movie starts in five minutes!”

“So you miss some goddamned previews. Deal with it.”

“Ridiculous,” the man muttered, glowering at Voskuil before stepping into the second line. The girl, clearly mortified, hurried after him. Voskuil assumed their place and addressed the cashier.
 

“One for ‘The Predicament,’ please.”

“Five dollars.”

Voskuil paid up with a smirk. One nice thing about living in America A.V. — “after virus” — was that to get people into a theater, exhibition chains were forced to slash ticket prices. Fewer movies were being made and on smaller budgets, but cinema was once again an egalitarian experience.

As Voskuil approached the concessions counter, he passed the terminus of the second line. Behind a portable curtain, nurses examined overweight, elderly or possibly ill patrons. Stationed nearby were a pair of rent-a-cops. Impassive observers.

Voskuil bought some Junior Mints and a caffeine-free root beer. He didn’t want to be up all night — quite the opposite. This would be his pleasant coast from madness to unconsciousness, for all too few blissful hours.

When the lights dimmed, there were only 20 or 30 people spread throughout a cavernous theater. The place was built in the headiest days of the multiplex, so it sported stadium-style seating and there was no such thing as a bad view.

Voskuil sat alone near the front and ate his Junior Mints.
 

Unbeknownst to him, the three teens whose boisterous eruption startled the ticket line were the closest patrons. They sat six rows back, at the front of an elevated second section.

Once the trailers started, the kid in the middle, his stringy blond hair cut short by an amateur hand, leaned over to his friend and whispered, “Pass that shit, man….”

Manuel shook his head. He hadn’t had his snort yet. Silverfish was eager, of course — they all were — but Manuel always went first. ‘Fish should know that.

Manuel made sure all eyes were on the screen and carefully unfolded a piece of blue construction paper. The white powder stood out nicely even in the projector’s pale light.

Manuel prepared a nice fat line and used a straw to snort it. He felt instant bliss.
 

Good cocaine was so easy to get these days. The market was flooded, so prices were way down. The U.S. government had basically waved the white flag in the war on drugs. Demand was too high (people needed to escape this hell on Earth however they could) and law enforcement resources were spread too thin to halt any remotely devious traffickers.
 

That was where Manuel came in. Sure, he got high on his own supply, but he had a nice business going selling for an L.A. based gang. Customers were still mostly yuppies but, as prices dipped, new markets emerged. Manuel believed that, at these prices, only the homeless had an excuse to smoke crack.

Though his eyes remained closed, Manuel felt Rico taking the coke. He let him, making a mental note to set his lieutenant straight. You didn’t just pull a man’s drugs from his hands. That shit wasn’t right.

As that first, 10-second blaze of purity faded, Manuel scowled at Rico. “Y’all are like my dog, beggin’ and shit….”

A few rows away, Voskuil watched the movie with contented disinterest. Onscreen, an attractive actor overplayed a petulant expression and said, “If I go with you on this road trip of yours, at every comfort stop I’m going to require sexual favors. And a shot of tequila. Deal?”

#

Lena made her way through an anemic crowd to the dance club’s bar, an island of light in a dark expanse.
 

She leaned against the rail. Glancing down, she saw the opaque liquor case was lit with pink bulbs so the bottles inside were only silhouettes.

The bartender, a slender woman with multiple facial piercings, immediately came to take Lena’s order.

“Tom Collins and a virgin Sea Breeze.”

“I have to charge full price for the Sea Breeze.”

“Make it a Diet Pepsi, then.”

“How about Coke?”

“Sure.”

Lena carried the drinks back to a table near the dance floor, where Nic was waiting. A few dancers were doing their thing but while the beat-driven techno was suffused with energy, their movements were stiff and inhibited.
 

The couple’s moods had not been in harmony for long. At their first stop, a quieter hotel bar, Nic put away most of a carafe of wine. She seemed weary and lethargic afterwards. Lena was still feeling celebratory, for reasons she was nervously eager to explain.
 

As Lena approached the table, she saw that over Nic’s shoulder were nebulous color swirls, projected onto a screen. Rather than inspiring the dancers, as they were no doubt intended, their languid circular motions seemed to trace a hypnotic path to nowhere.

“Thank you, baby,” Nic said and took a sip of her drink. To Lena, it looked like a big sip.

Nic’s voice did sound a little slurred as she said, “Guess we came on the wrong night, huh?”
 

Lena tried to stay upbeat, though she rapidly had a sense that the evening was heading south. “Plenty of room on the dance floor, though.”

Nic shook her head. “Not in the mood. I’m mopey drunk, not wild and crazy.”

Lena scanned the vicinity for alternatives. “Want to shoot some pool?”

“Ummm… Not really.”

Though there was only a two-year age difference between them, on occasion Nic slipped into a little girl mode of manipulation. It was rather like a petulant female asking to be pampered by her man. Lena found it a cosmic irony that gay men and women had their gender’s most difficult aspects turned against them. It was a joke on both genders that they must suffer their own uniquely frustrating sides.

Lena abandoned this slightly disturbing train of thought and kept plugging away. “Air hockey?”

Nic responded with a smile and a squeeze of the hand.

“Air hockey it is.”

She was, after all, really an adult, and a loving one at that.

They went over to a recessed area where a few bar games sat unplayed. Lena swiped her credit card to turn on the air hockey machine.
 

They slapped the puck back and forth with practiced flicks of the wrist. Before meeting, neither had been much into the game, but there was something magical in the adversarial flirtation between opposite sides of an air hockey table. Since a memorable duel on their second date, the game had become a nostalgic ritual for them.

As the puck zinged back and forth at high speed, sharing the room was a guy in a trenchcoat playing vintage Ms. Pacman and a drunk who’d decamped to this quiet corner to gather himself. He tried to light a cigarette, forbidden though it was, with matches that didn’t strike no matter what he did.

Nic slammed home the winning goal with a vicious snap of the wrist, the puck shooting on a line past Lena’s guard. The table went dark except for the flashing score: 7-6.

Lena felt elated by the compelling game they’d played, but her competitive spirit was left demanding satisfaction. “Thought I had you this time!”

“You nearly did.”

They met for an embrace. Cigarette Man doggedly tried match after match, striking them on the wall, an arcade game, his shoe… Anything.

Lena looked at her lover’s face. Nic looked worn down, for a moment aged beyond her 28 years.
 

“Call it a night?” Lena asked. She was hoping for another game of air hockey, strangely enough. She was disappointed to see Nic pulling out now. But then Nic’s face changed and she caressed Lena’s cheek.

“No…. No, let’s have fun. You gotta have fun in life, don’t you? Sometimes? Just a little?”

As Lena led her back to their table, again discouraged by the seemingly inevitable course of the evening, Cigarette Man relentlessly scratched a match against the side of a pinball machine emblazoned with the title “The Great Escape.”

#

On the screen, a Volkswagen Bug rocketed off a cliff. It was one of those stubby, precociously cute second-wave Bugs, not the lovably lumpy 1960s version. From within emanated the annoying actor’s singsong, “Oh, SHIIIIIIIT!”
 

Manuel wasn’t paying much attention. He was assessing Silverfish’s condition. The skinny kid’s eyes were too bright, too large and glassy.
 

“You all right, homes?”

His junior foot-soldier didn’t respond. The kid only twitched, lost in the convulsions of an intense drug reaction. It looked like the kid’s heart might be exploding.
Shit.

“Shit,” Rico agreed, though in fact it was a stream of urine trickling from Silverfish’s soaked pantleg that they noticed simultaneously. Either way, it meant, “not good.”

“Let’s blow,” Manuel said to Rico. Silverfish was gazing into space, a pendulum of saliva clinging persistently to his lips. His body spasmed violently in the seat. You wouldn’t think someone could twitch like that without being electrocuted.
 

Manuel and Rico discreetly hiked up the aisle and left the theater. Silverfish never acknowledged their departure.
 

He was already dead.

Voskuil, unawares, absorbed the absurdly inconsequential film with escapist satisfaction. It was nice to lose yourself in a movie that approximated the dream-world they all used to inhabit.
 

Voskuil was dozing pleasantly when Silverfish, motionless for over a minute, suddenly jerked. His body shook with a different impetus than before. This was not a death rattle, but a birth pang.

Silverfish’s fingers, already cold as his body ceased to generate its own heat, flexed open. They gripped the armrest. Squeezed it.

His eyes rolled into animal focus, as if regaining fundamental equilibrium. They tracked across the scene before him, passing over Voskuil and then returning.

Silverfish rose jerkily from his seat, intense gaze locked on the nape of Voskuil’s neck. Though his heart stopped four minutes and eighteen seconds earlier, the virus fed enough of his brain to compel him forward on its dreadful quest.
 

In the virus world, propagation was the key. A virus that couldn’t do that didn’t stick around very long. Like the bird flu, this bug was likely to keep changing.

When the blond teen lurched from his row into the aisle, he attracted little notice from the moviegoers. His course merited more attention when he staggered toward the screen rather than away.

Young Hilary Willingham found it easy to pull her eyes from the banal comedy onscreen and redirect them to the odd, drunken movements of the shape in the aisle.

The gracelessness of this slouching silhouette spoke volumes to her. Hilary felt a dread certainty that this was no drunk, no lunatic.

“Look…. Look! It’s ONE of them….” Hilary hissed to her uncle James, whose idea of entertainment better matched the fare onscreen. He grunted disinterestedly, actually mistaking her urgency for the foolish imagination of a 15-year old.

“Uncle J, check it out! That guy’s a FEEDER!”

Possessed with the eternal certainty of the young, she pointed at the tottering figure.
 

“No it ain’t,” Uncle J. murmured, giving Silverfish the most cursory of glances. “Watch the damn movie.”

Silverfish was mere inches from Voskuil. An inquisitive flailing of his hand brushed the back of Voskuil’s head. He turned to face this apparition in the dark — it loomed over him with one hand pulled back to lash out again. This was the real-life iteration of a frequent nightmare and Voskuil did not doubt for a moment what his eyes told him. He rolled from the theater chair with one hand darting into his coat.

Silverfish pawed at him, snaring his sweater and clamping down on it with clumsy, eager fingers.

Voskuil screamed, firing the snub-nosed .38 before it had pulled free of his camel-hair jacket. The first bullet burned through the coat around his collarbone and buried itself in the ceiling. The second shot, which he got off in the right direction this time, struck Silverfish’s shoulder.

Uncle J. rose from his seat, Smith and Wesson in hand, and took proper care in aiming. As was his luxury, more than 10 feet from the action. He wasn’t going to get any closer, even if it meant a better shot and thus a better chance for the doctor to survive.

The man was, after all, a stranger (a rude one, at that), and Uncle J. had his niece to protect.

He started shooting as Silverfish lunged into Voskuil. The first bullet missed its mark; the combatant it came closest to was Voskuil.
 

The feeder’s wild attack had knocked Voskuil over the next seat and to the gummy cement floor. Silverfish went with him, an awkward but effective pounce. Voskuil tried to press the gun to his assailant’s ashen temple but before he could, gnashing teeth found the exposed skin of his forearm.

The bite was unlike any Voskuil had experienced before. The sensation of blunted human teeth relentlessly digging into his skin was uniquely disturbing. They were not the teeth of a predator, but of someone just like him. And they were burrowing into his flesh no less aggressively than a cobra’s fangs.

Voskuil beat back the chomping jaws with the butt of his gun. When he finally pressed its barrel to the corpse’s head, he felt the nauseating Pyrrhic victory of the mortally wounded.