Read Heist of the Living Dead Online
Authors: Clarence Walker (the late)
Heist of the Living Dead
By Clarence Walker (the late)
translated
from the original Zombish
by
Jared Oliver Adams
This
is a work of fiction. All of the characters, undead or otherwise, are either
fake or used fictitiously. Also, the organizations and events of the story are
fake or used fictitiously. The National Brain Tissue Repository may have
possibly been broken into, but that’s just a coincidence. What reason would I
possibly have to lie to you?
HEIST
OF THE LIVING DEAD
Copyright
© 2014 by Jared Oliver Adams
All
rights reserved. Published by Previously Perished Press, a subsidiary of Pretension
House Publishing Group.
No
part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, except by an authorized retailer, or by express written permission
of the author. So if you downloaded this illegally, and you’re studiously
reading all the front matter of the story, as I’m sure everybody does, now you
know you’re not supposed to be doing what you’re doing. So there.
Cover
designed by Jared Oliver Adams.
For George A. Romero.
We’re more than just shambling hordes.
You, of all people, should know.
Big jerk.
Ned,
the demolitions expert of our undead crew, pumped his wrinkled, greyish fists
in excitement. “Aaaaargh,” he said, which in Zombish means “It’s so crazy it just
might work!”
“Aar
aargh, arga-raar?!” exclaimed Freddy in response. Freddy was always nay-saying.
“But
that’s why it’s perfect, Freddy old boy,” countered Ned, still in Zombish,
“they’ll never expect us to break into something protected by the Pentagon!
It’ll be a heist like no other. Those damned vampires won’t be bragging so hard
about their little blood bank holdups after we’ve knocked off the national brain
tissue depository.”
I
could always count on Ned to defend my schemes. Still, what with all the bad
press going around about our sub-par intelligence, it was important to put Ned
straight.
“
Re
-pository,”
I corrected. “Not
de-
pository.” It was kind of a difficult distinction
to make in moans and groans, but you let these things slide, and you deserve
every bit of prejudice the media heaps on the previously perished.
“What’s
the difference?” asked Ned, who I swear had a bit of gore between his front
teeth.
“One’s
the place we’re going to break into and steal a fortune in frozen brains. The
other’s a dumbass thing to say. And go brush your teeth. We have planning to
do.”
“Blara
Graaaargh?” asked Freddy as Ned shambled off.
“No,
Freddy,” I said. “Your teeth are fine.”
*****
We
crouched in the darkness by the gated entrance and watched Sarah sashay herself
up to the lit guard’s booth. She’d worked hard to sexy up the shambling step
that plagues our kind, and I have to say if I was alive, I’d have found it
downright appealing. She wore a mini skirt and some kind of shiny top. Her wig
looked good too. Covered over every bit of her patchy scalp. And the makeup,
well the girl was just a wonder at makeup. Somehow, she’d even managed to fill
in that hole in her cheek, the one you could see her teeth through.
Well,
up she walked. The guard leaned out his glass window on cue, and she smiled and
batted her mascara at the poor sap.
And
then her arm fell off.
Sarah
looked down at it. The guard looked down at it. The fingers on it twitched.
Sarah jumped into the booth through the window and ate the man’s face.
“Aaaaarrgh,”
said Freddy.
“Yeah,
no kiddin’,” groaned Ned.
I
turned to look at Ned and would you believe it, his freshly stolen black T-shirt
was hanging out of his black skinny jeans, and he already had rips in them both.
We knock off a Gap so we can look professional, and here he is looking like a
bad stereotype! “How does that even happen?” I asked.
“Aaaarg,
Clarrr,” said Freddy in Ned’s defense.
“Nobody’s
that
clumsy,” I told Freddy. “And you,” I said, rounding on Ned. “Have
some self respect. At least keep your shirt tucked in.”
Back
at the guard’s booth, the chain-link gate was sliding aside and Sarah was
looking down at her arm on the ground. Her face was now a smear of blood and
makeup, but you could still see her perplexia. Should I pick it up and take it
with me? Should I leave it? Hide it in the bushes? What?
“Leave
it,” I said as Ned, Freddy, and I walked through the gate. “Give ‘em something
to wonder about.”
“Aaargh,”
Sarah purred seductively.
“Sure,”
I said. “The best prosthetic money can buy. One for every day of the week.” Sarah’s
smile was grisly, but warm. I could see her planning outfits to match her new
arm already.
Past
the guard’s booth, the place was dark, with a few floodlights along the roof of
the bunker-like building. A camera was perched beside each one, but I’d already
dealt with that. All it took was a wheelchair, an old army uniform, and an
overly-glossy Repository brochure.
See,
the whole place was built to study how trauma effects the brain, particularly
the type of trauma one encounters while driving armored trucks over improvised
explosive devices. As such, it relied heavily on donations from former
service-people. Not the
monetary
kind of donations, either.
So,
naturally, to entice people to part with their gray matter when they shuffled
off their mortal coils, there were weekly tours of the facility run by a petite
blonde in tight-fitting pinstriped pants and a blouse that was missing a couple
buttons at the top. She walked everyone around the place in her high heels, and
waxed eloquent about “leaving a legacy” and “being a part of protecting the
next generation of patriots.”
And
wouldn’t you know, at the end of the tour there were papers you could sign to have
your brains scooped out by a board-certified organ removal specialist when you
died. Never mind that there were people out there who could use those brains,
people who would rather sit at home and watch HBO over a quiet cerebellum
soufflé, than have to join a hoard and go hunting for their food like someone
out of the Romero era.
No,
just put the brains on a shelf. Run some tests. Let them sit there and pickle
while good zombies are forced to do things that inevitably get them killed by
ragtag, yet resourceful, bands of humans.
While
the blonde’s attention had been on positioning her cleavage so that it hid some
of the more unsavory clauses on the “brain scooping” form, I’d wheeled out of
sight and shambled back to the server room. After that, making the cameras show
a loop of empty parking lot had been easy as dying. Now, several hours later, I
smiled up at those cameras as we strolled over to the main entrance and Freddy
got to work on the lock.
Meanwhile,
Ned limped around to the back of the building where the loading dock was. He’d
be sitting pretty in a recently liberated cold storage truck by the time we got
there with the first load of brain canisters. He wouldn’t bother with locks
like Freddy; he had a duffle bag full of explosives and he wanted to use them.
And
hey, part of being a good leader is letting your people go with their
strengths. The complex was surrounded by woods. Nobody’d hear a couple little
explosions now that we’d taken care of the guard.
“Aaar
Arp,” said Freddy proudly, and pushed open the front door. Inside was a fancy
lobby with framed posters showing soldiers looking wistfully into the distance.
Underneath their faces were slogans like, “The Few, The Proud, The Donors” and
“Died 2012. Still serving our country today.”
I
kind of liked that last one.
This
was where they took prospective donors, and we followed the tour route I’d been
taken on until we came to a hallway with a long observation window. That window
looked down on the repository itself, row after row of stainless steel shelves,
each one filled with brains packaged in individually sealed plastic canisters.
The
jackpot.
“Start
cutting,” I said, but Freddy was already taking the circular glass cutting saw
out of his satchel. All the official entrances into the warehouse below had
arrays of sophisticated alarms. Not so the observation window.
“Who
goes there?” demanded a rent-a-cop as he came around a corner.
I
took out my pistol and shot him in the forehead.
Guns
are the way of the future for zombies, I always say. The guard fell backwards,
and I turned to Sarah and Freddy, who were gaping at me slack-faced like “Night
of the Living Dead” extras. They didn’t approve of me carrying a gun.
Then
again, they were Democrats.
“Sarah,”
I said, pausing to blow dramatically on the barrel of the gun, “radio Ned. Tell
him the guards are dealt with, and he can go ahead wi—”
“That
really stung!” said the guard, pulling himself up to his feet as I swung around
and trained my gun on him again. “You should warn a fellow before you just up
and pop him like that. Common courtesy. I say ‘Who goes there?’ and you say
‘None a’ your business, Copper,’ and
then
we shoot. What’s the
world coming to?” And then he gave us a crooked smile and I could see his canines,
sharp and pearly white and cocky as hell.
“What’s
your kind doing here?” I said, gun still on him, but now a little lower so that
I could empty my clip into a line across his neck. “You’ve obviously got no
need for brains. Isn’t there a high school girl you should be off impregnating right
now?”
The
vampire guard’s face looked confused, and then he burst out laughing. He lifted
his hands and made talking motions with them, back and forth like they were
having a conversation. “Aar aar aargh! Aar aar arr arr!” he said between bouts
of laughter. “You sound like a demented seal or something! Aar aar arr!” The
bullet hole in his head wasn’t bloody at all, just kind of black, and it
appeared to be knitting together already. The rest of his skin was so flawless
it could have been photoshopped.
“Naar
war Daaarnt!” exclaimed Freddy. “Yaaargh MarMar.”
This
just made the vampire laugh harder. I’d decided to pull the trigger when his
hand shot out like a snake, grabbed the gun, and ripped it out of my grasp.
“Look,” he said, now leveling the gun on me, serious, “you guys, and . . . ugh,
is that a girl? . . . Well, you
people
are the bottom of the
barrel. Me, I’m the next stage in human evolution. There’s no competition.”
“For
an übermensch, you sure look like you’re working as a security guard to me.
What do they pay you, twelve bucks an hour?”
“I
am not unkind to the less fortunate,” the vampire continued as if I hadn’t said
anything. “In fact, I’ll make a deal with you. You leave, go into town, and
come back with a couple warmbloods for me to snack on, and I’ll forgive the
whole thing. I get to tell my boss how I valiantly foiled their robbery. You
get to go on with your little barrel-bottom existence for another night. Win-win,
Capiche?”
I
realized now that the vampire possessed the cultural acumen of a drunk spring
breaker streaking through a hotel lobby, and therefore didn’t speak a lick of Zombish,
but I couldn’t help but mutter “Capiche? You get turned while watching
Full
House
reruns, or what?”
Suddenly
an explosion rocked the building. At that moment, several things happened at
once. Sarah shrieked, the guard stumbled, and Freddy shoved past me with his
glass cutter. Before I knew it, the vampire was relieved of his head and
dissolving into a pile of dust on the linoleum floor. Freddy stood over him, the
glass cutter still whirring. “Araaargh Ar,” he said through clenched gums.
“Araargh
Ar,” is a common Zombish idiom of unknown origin. It means, roughly, “Tell me
more about evolution while I go get the dustpan.”
It
seemed apropos.
I
kicked through the dust, pulled out my gun, and patted Freddy on the back.
Never been so proud of somebody in my unlife.
Another
explosion rocked the compound as we cut into the window and lowered ourselves
into the frigid warehouse. I went straight to the computer terminal and
disabled all the alarms. Then we went over to the shelves together to start
gathering our spoils. For a moment we just stared at the bounty before us,
taking in the blue light reflecting off the polished white plastic of thousands
of canisters. We’d done it. Not only that, but we’d gotten to kill a vampire in
the process. Our crew would be legendary after this!
Sarah
reached out and tapped one of the plastic containers. There was a thin,
vertical window in each, and her long purple fingernail made a clicking sound
as it tapped the small strip of glass.
“Umm,”
she said. “This one’s empty.”
I
looked at the one in front of me. It was empty too. And the one beside it. And
the one beside that. And—
“Aaar
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh aar!” shouted Freddy, a little ways over.
“Just
calm down, everybody,” I said. “It’s probably just this row.” All the talk
about calm though, and I ran as fast as I could around to the next section of
shelving. Empty. And the next. And the next.
“Aar
aarda ar?” cried Freddy.
“I
don’t know!” I snapped back. “This whole place was supposed to be full!” I
pried one open to make sure the window wasn’t one of those fake transparent
things, but no, there was just a slushy, half-frozen liquid in there. From the
smell, brains had been soaking in that liquid recently too.
“Uh,
Boss,” came Sarah’s sultry voice from two rows over. “Boss, there’s a, uh,
note.” I rushed over to investigate and found her pointing at a piece of paper
that looked like it’d been torn out of a spiral-bound notebook. The paper was
taped to the side of one of the empty brain canisters, and large jagged letters
were written on it with a Sharpie marker.
“Dear
Zombies,” it read. “Nice try, suckahs! If you want brains, looks like you’ll
have to buy them from us like everyone else. Bidding starts at five hundred
dollars a canister while supplies last. Love, the Westside Werewolf Posse.”
Underneath the signature line was a URL for an eBay auction.
