I've Been Deader (9 page)

Damn it.

Outside, the naked corpse stopped walking and turned to face the kitchen window. She stared at Fred. He noticed that the fat one, still sitting, was also looking up at the window.

Weird
.

He poked the power button again and again. Nothing.

Fuck.

He jammed his fist against the control panel and when that didn't work he hit it a little. All he wanted was to hear and smell something familiar - something that wasn't screaming or trying to kill him.

Is that too much to ask for?

Outside the window he saw the pretty corpse still staring at him, opening and closing her mouth.
Yum
.

He looked down at the microwave. Nothing.

He moaned in frustration and smashed his fists against the microwave. The top bowed in and the microwave door snapped off its hinges. When he got like this things tended to go all red and it was much harder to think. When the rage hit, Fred became more like the lesser dead and Keifer Sutherland.

He picked up the oven and threw it so hard it crashed through the sheetrock and remained wedged half-in and half-out of the wall, about five feet off the ground. Having dealt with the object of his frustration he pulled out the kitchen drawers, spilling flatware across the floor. With a final moan he charged into the refrigerator, smashing into it head first. The door buckled in and the ice-maker spewed frozen chips onto the floor. Remarkably, his head was more or less intact.

As he turned around looking for something else to smash, his feet started slipping on the spilled ice. Fred did a George Jetson for a few seconds, and then his feet shot out from under him and he landed flat on his back on the linoleum tile. He stared vacantly at the ceiling. The rage began to recede, and he had just started thinking about Hot Pockets and the toaster oven when his thoughts were interrupted by a soft
thwicking
sound.

He got back on his feet thinking that maybe the microwave was finally working, forgetting for the moment that it was now a piece of modern art suitable for framing. After a minute he was able to place the sound as coming from the backyard.

Outside the window Fred saw the pretty corpse raise her nine iron and bring it down on what was left of the fat one's head. Fred watched the club connect, making that wet 'thwicking' sound over and over; and while he would never forget whatshername, he couldn't help noticing this zombie's breasts jiggling every time she brought the club down.

"Braaiiinnnsss," Fred moaned.

The pretty zombie, her pale face now speckled red, stopped swinging and turned toward him. The club slipped from her hands.

That's interesting
.

The popcorn fiasco forgotten, he wished she'd come closer and treat him to a better look. He especially wanted a better look at the top part of her. Almost as soon as he thought it, the zombie took a few steps toward the house.

That's close enough
, Fred thought.

The zombie stopped.

Go pick up the club
.

The zombie tilted her head as if she heard him speak, turned around and walked back to the fat corpse. The club was lodged in its head, almost perpendicular to the ground. The pretty zombie bent down and worked the club back and forth a bit, until it broke free from Juicy.

Wow
.

From the television in the living room, a talking head was discussing the zombie plague with a Pentagon spokesperson.

"They are disorganized, mindless and slow," the spokesman was saying. "It's just a matter of time, perhaps weeks, before the situation is completely under control. It's just a question of mopping them up one by one."

Back in the kitchen, Fred walked to the back door, opened it and stepped outside.

Chapter 14

Tasks

One long day, no doubt about that.
Fred was exhausted and dead on his feet. He hadn't slept a wink since becoming a zombie; small wonder he shambled everywhere these days.

He sat on an old-fashioned park bench covered in flaking green paint and facing a children's playground, currently empty. Lacking the necessary motor skills to use a Blackberry, he found himself able to enjoy a few moments of peace and quiet and review his mental To-do list.

Fred's To-Do List

1. Raid CVS for an eye patch. Check.

No slave to vanity, Fred nevertheless loved his new eye patch. Covering the hole formerly occupied by his right eye wouldn't allow him to pass as a breather. Hell, the stench alone would give him away if he strayed upwind from anything living. Still, there was no reason to advertise his current status to the armed and curious. He wondered if the eye patch would have improved his chances with Aleta. He mentally sighed.

No use crying over spilled blood. But still ...

2. Find Broadcasters. No check.

His control trick wasn't perfect. For starters, he needed to see the zombie before he could control it. Fortunately, once he issued a command the zombie would execute it or die again trying, whether Fred was around or not. More troubling however, was his inability to read their minds. At first this hadn't bothered him. Reading the average zombie's mind would be as exciting as watching a
Best of C-Span
marathon.

Then he started receiving flashes from a zombie somewhere out west. A picture of a bedroom, some kind of uniform on the floor. Another flash showing an open jail cell, two mutilated bodies on the floor. Flash of some kind of movie cartoon - Nazis running back and forth, shooting at the screen. Not a movie exactly, but he couldn't recall the word he was searching for. The flashes from the unknown corpse weren't very useful. He had never seen the zombie and so couldn't control it. But getting his hands on a local broadcaster would be invaluable. Imagine sending one into a breather camp. Instant recon, an intriguing idea.

3. Floss. No Check.

Try as he might, he couldn't get the last of Aleta out of his mouth. All day his black tongue worried at the last bits stuck behind his molars.
Time to go our separate ways, my dear Aleta. It was fun while it lasted, but we both need closure.

He'd already forgotten exactly what she looked like or even why he loved her. Still, a vague sense of unease tugged at him whenever he thought about her. So he thought about something else.

Like:

4. Find information on Timmy. No Check.

He had a son - big deal. Zombies ate loved ones all the time. Still, Fred couldn't deny having a mindless obsession with finding Timmy. Questions about his son pulled at his thoughts like a lodestone. Was he a breather? Dead? Undead? Was he safe or in danger?
Is he dangerous?

He thought back to the day he turned. He'd taken Timmy to the shelter in his son's school basement. It was already overcrowded when they had arrived, as by then the shit had pretty much hit the fan. The air reeked of smoke and panic. Fred was having second thoughts. A room packed with nervous adults might be more dangerous than staying outside. If he hadn't already been bitten, he might have left with his son to take their chances on the road. In the end it was Timmy who decided for them. He hugged Fred tightly around the waist for a few seconds.

"Love you, Dad."

"Love you too, pal. I won't be long. I'll get Mom and then we'll get out of here. Go someplace safe until this all sorts out," he lied.

Timmy gave him a smile that didn't come close to touching his eyes. "Okay."

His son didn't cry. Even then, terrified and wanting his mother in the worst way, he put on a brave face. Timmy hated crying in front of people. Fred remembered a day three or four years ago, right before Christmas, when he had taken his son to a playground much like this one. One of Fred's greatest joys, he remembered, was spending time together in the park in those fantastic hours between after school and before dinner. On that particular day, one of the older boys - a snot-nosed fifth grader named Rob or Roy or some such bullshit - had dared Timmy to go down the 'big boys' slide backward. Timmy took the dare and took a fall. He didn't shed a tear on the playground, on the way to the hospital or when the doctor manhandled his poor arm into the sling. Only back home, alone in bed, had he let himself go. It broke Fred's heart to hear it and the hardest thing he had ever done was to stay out of his son's room that night.

He absently raised a hand to wipe away tears that weren't there; would never be there again.
Like son, like father.

The incessant yapping of a toy Poodle interrupted his thoughts. A few moments later the little monstrosity named Niki ran toward Fred from the other end of the park, followed by Fred's reason for being here.

The silent little girl ran after the dog. Nearly doubled over, arms stretched out before her, she gained on Niki. Fred was surprised at how fast she ran. If Red Bull ever expanded its market to the undead, he had just found their spokesperson.

Fred didn't know why undead children were so much quicker than adult zombies. He had a theory that nature or evolution or whatever provided the talent to compensate for their relative physical weakness. It made sense. It also explained why some zombies had different talents. Some talents would help them survive and some wouldn't. The ones that died took their useless talents with them and the ones that survived passed their talents on. He recalled seeing one zombie with the ability to set fires with its hands. It demonstrated this by scratching its ass and setting itself ablaze.

The girl ran behind Niki, her wild, filthy blonde hair flying behind her. Both continued to run straight at him. Even for an undead child, this one was fast. A few moments later Niki's yaps turned to yelps as the girl, still running, held her struggling catch in her outstretched hands.

Fred transmitted a simple command and she came to an abrupt halt. For a brief second he thought she looked angry, but that was impossible. Niki whined, yelped and peed. In his mind, Fred made a mental picture of 'Paradise Chinese Buffet'.

Go
, he thought. The girl turned and started to run the way she had come.

Wait
. Obedient, she stopped.

Eat first
.

5. Recruit Runners. Check

Chapter 15

Government Work

The text on screen jumped and jittered worse than a liberal at a Rush Limbaugh surprise party.

President Dobbs ignored the teleprompter and shifted into ad-lib mode, making a mental note to declare a national holiday in memory of the day when something went right - should that ever happen.

"I don't need to tell you, my fellow Americans, that we stand at a crossroads, the likes of which recorded history has never seen. Not since the early years of the Obama administration and its relentless pursuit of national health care, has the American way of life been so openly threatened."

He paused to clear his throat, letting the viewers see their leader caught up in the emotion of the moment, and giving him a few seconds to figure out what to say next.

"But I do not fear for this country. I do not. Americans have a proud tradition of gaining strength from adversity. Nobility through sacrifice. Like our fathers and their father's fathers before them, we will prevail. By doing everything that is necessary to ensure victory. No matter how great or how daunting the obstacles placed on the road to victory may seem."

Behind the camera his Chief of Staff and the Vice President exchanged worried looks. It didn't take a genius to guess what they were thinking. Dealing with an army of undead and a bunch of rabid radio talk-show hosts was bad enough. They didn't need an ad-libbing president fucking up the works on National TV.

Dobbs decided to wrap it up before he started channeling George Bush. Better to forget what needed to be said than to say something he would later need the public to forget.

"And so, I make this promise to you, my fellow citizens. We will eradicate this plague during the first term of my administration, and, contrary to what some of the more vocal critics of my administration have repeated time and time again, we will do so without raising taxes on ninety-eight percent of the population."

Out of the corner of his eye, Dobbs saw his Chief of Staff relax. The one unbreakable rule - whether it was subsidizing corn farmers, instituting a new homeland security agency, or eradicating flesh-eating zombies - was always to assure the people that someone else was going to pay for it.

"We will succeed. Our children will return to school again. Our hospitals will reopen. As will your neighborhood food markets. We will stay the course and we will prevail. Good night, and God bless the United States of America."

He stared confidently at the camera for a full ten seconds after the red 'on air' indicator winked out.
Better safe than sorry
. As if on cue, beads of perspiration peppered his forehead. Like all good politicians, Dobbs never broke a sweat in front of the cameras.

"What the FUCK is going on?" Dobbs shouted. "I am the leader of the free world and I can't get through one god damned speech without the teleprompter going bat shit? I mean FUCK."

He'd only been president for eighteen months, but in that short time he had managed to put on about twenty pounds and ten years. Forget zombies. Shit like this was killing him.

One of the studio monitors was tuned in to ZNN, where Newt Rhodes, opposition leader and all-round dick, was already telling the American people why the Dobbs administration was incompetent. Adding a little more piss to his lemonade, ZNN kept the 'Zombie Alert' banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen, informing the people that for the seventy-second day in a row the zombie threat level was red.