The Down Home Zombie Blues (5 page)

“You. Don’t. Understand,” she said through gritted teeth. “No time!”

“Explain,” he demanded, the pistol aimed at her head. A pistol—thanks to her—he knew how to use. She still had her other G-1 but knew she’d be dead if she made a reach for it.

Her scanner emitted one shrill beep. Portal forming. Another zombie honing in on the unit.

She had no choice. Death by zombie, death by laser, or…

She jabbed the transcomm on the side of her utility belt with her right elbow and issued a terse order into her mouth mike in Alarsh. “Emergency transit. Engage PMaT. Two life forms. Now!”

The nil-tech world called Earth blinked from her sight.

3

The first thing Theo realized was that he itched all over. The second was that somehow—in the blink of an eye—he’d gone from a horror movie in his backyard to the middle of a
Star Trek
set. He was on a platform facing a bank of computer screens and a short console. In front of the console were a group people in green-and-black uniforms. Two were clearly not human. One looked a bit like a short, curly-haired Wookiee. No, that was
Star Wars
. Wrong movie. The other was…His vision hazed. His head spun. His body tingled relentlessly. He knew with sickening certainty he was moments from passing out.

Not good.

He locked his knees. Someone grabbed his arm, steadying him as he sucked in a deep breath. Something slid through his fingers. The laptop. He turned, then let it go, because now, in the bright lights of this science-fiction movie set, he couldn’t stop looking at the woman who took the laptop from him.

He saw her—or thought he saw her—in the uneven glare of the porch light over his back door. A teenager in some mismatched slam-jam outfit running toward him, hollering. He thought she was in trouble, needed help. The whole neighborhood knew he was a cop. He intended to grab her, try to calm her down, when suddenly two beams of light burst from her hands.

That’s when he noticed the big green glowing hole in the night sky about twenty feet away.

Seconds later she was braced against him—her lithe, muscular body draped in odd equipment. Some kind of lens covered her right eye. He quickly discarded his initial impressions of teen and slam-jam. She looked like a member of a futuristic SWAT team.

And then he saw the—what had she called it? The zombie.
Cristos!
Worse than any images of the
Kalikantzri
from his childhood Christmases.

He went on autopilot after that. He hazily remembered damning himself for not putting his hip holster and gun back on immediately after changing his coffee-soaked clothes. He somewhat more clearly remembered taking some kind of gun from her. But mostly he focused on that towering abomination with glowing eyes and metal skin covered with crawling, writhing worms.

Understandably, he wasn’t focused on her, or what she looked like. Until now. She was sweaty, grass-stained, dirt-streaked. And she was unequivocally gorgeous. Exotic. Medium height, five foot five or so, and slender but not skinny. Her skin color reminded him of honey. She had muscles. She had curves. Nice curves. His gaze traveled up from her cleavage to a heart-shaped face with dark-lashed eyes. And lips any Hollywood actress would pay big bucks to own. Lips he’d love to—

He blinked, hard.
Slow down, Petrakos. Slow down.

Sounds, voices filtered back into his ears, making him aware he’d been temporarily deafened. A tremor shook his body, subsiding as quickly as it had appeared. He was suffering from disorientation, delusions. Too many nights on call out resulting in lack of sleep, that’s all this was. In a moment it would all disappear and he’d be back in his kitchen, popping the top off a nice cold can of orange soda he’d left standing on the counter. He intended to finish that off before heading back to the department with the sound system and Mr. Crunchy’s laptop.

He drew in a deep breath, then another. The itching sensation on his skin abated to a mild annoyance. But when the scene before him didn’t morph back into the familiar brown and yellow tones of his kitchen, reality began to stealthily creep in.

And it wasn’t a reality he liked. He unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth and tried to speak. “What happened?” His voice sounded rough. Not surprising, given what his body felt like.

She glanced his way. She was a few feet in front of him, talking in a strange language to a woman with curly red hair who was clad in the same kind of shorts and odd one-sleeved shirt but minus all the hardware. A short spate of more unintelligible words, then she handed the laptop to the woman and stepped back up onto the platform.

“Mine.” She reached for the gun he still held in his hand.

His cop senses kicked in. Instinctively, he stepped back, raising it.

A pale-skinned man and that Wookiee-looking one reacted, silver weapons appearing in their hands. Aimed at him. Tension laced the room. Another man and a dark-skinned, yellow-haired woman turned from their consoles, hands on the weapons at their hips.

“Mine,” the woman in front of him repeated.

He was outnumbered. He might be able to take two, three of them out, but his stomach was still doing somersaults. Even if he could somehow convince his legs to run, he doubted he’d make it as far as the door alive. Unless, of course, this was some kind of elaborate practical joke. In which case, if he reacted with deadly force, innocent people could get hurt.

Every good cop knew there was a time to act and a time to wait, gather information. This, clearly, was not a time to act.

Gritting his teeth, he lowered the gun. The woman plucked it from his fingers. The weapons aimed at him disappeared into holsters. The low hum of conversation resumed.

The woman said something he couldn’t understand.

“What?”

“No concerns. You’re safe here.”

Safe? Where
was
here? Hell, he was a detective. He should be able to find out that simple answer. “Where am I?” he asked, putting some firmness in his voice this time. At least, he thought he had. His head still wobbled. He shook it.
Wrong move, Petrakos.
That didn’t help.

“
Sakanah.
Ship,” she said.

He listened for a moment to the other voices around him. Hers was the only one in the room he could understand. “Where?”

“Come.”

Well, hell, why not?
his brain said, as it completed yet another looping circle. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do. Still wobbling, he followed her off the platform, scratching at the prickling sensation on his arm.

A long gray
Star Trek
–looking corridor, a right turn, then another. She said nothing, guiding him with a slight touch on his arm when his feet—still numb and clumsy—stumbled in the wrong direction. Blocks of lettering on the walls looked like HTML code. Or ASCII. Like the lettering on the laptop screen.

For some reason he felt that was significant, though he couldn’t remember why.

She stopped before a recessed doorway, touched a small pad on the right. The door slid open, silently.

And the galaxy opened before him like a vast black sparkling maw.

This time his knees did buckle.

He grabbed for the door frame. She grabbed his elbow, guided him in. “Sit.”

A ready room. That’s what it was always called on the space shows. A conference table ringed by chairs. He dropped into one at the corner of the table as sweat beaded on his brow. The wall in front of him was all window. All black space, sprinkled with stars.

It could be a projection, a movie screen, but somehow he didn’t think so. Damn.

She came to the table with two tall clear glasses and pushed one in front of him. “Drink. It will help settle the body after the PMaT.”

Peemat?
He had no idea what she was talking about but picked up the glass, sniffed it. Smelled like water. He realized he was parched.

She took a long draft of hers, licked her lips. “Water.” Her voice rasped slightly.

Sweet Jesus and Mother Mary help him. She was gorgeous, totally gorgeous in a way that seized him right in the gut and didn’t let go. Not fashion-model gorgeous—her features were too irregular, her mouth too wide, her nose too broad, her chin a bit too narrow. And not movie-star gorgeous. He’d dated women like that. Hell, he’d married Camille. Camille was so beautiful, men would turn in the street and stare when she walked by.

Though he never did. He knew she was beautiful, but he never had that turn-and-stare reaction to her. He liked looking at Camille, but he always was able to stop.

Not like this.

He took a mouthful of water, swallowed. Then another. Some of the fog hovering in his brain started to clear. Maybe it was thinking of Camille that did it. The itching quieted. And reality slammed him hard this time.

Images of her refusing to answer his questions, threatening him with her gun, flooded back to him. Beautiful woman be damned, he was pissed. She’d kidnapped him. She’d stolen evidence in a homicide case and, he suspected, fully intended to withhold that evidence. She was only interested in getting her damned laptop back. Not in stopping the killings by the…

…
Tis Panagias ta matia!
By the eyes of the Holy Virgin! What in hell
was
that thing in his backyard? That overgrown
Kalikantzri
thing she called a zombie?

A shudder radiated through him and he braced himself in the chair. It ended as quickly as it had started. He drew a deep breath, tried to marshal his thoughts. He was a cop, God damn it. A trained police officer. He wasn’t going to jump to conclusions, act on incomplete information. He’d been in situations like this before.

Well, maybe not quite.

Keep a lid on it, Petrakos, until you know what’s going on.

He sucked in a second slow breath. She watched him, head tilted slightly to one side. He studied her. Her eyes were a golden yellow, like a cat’s. Her skin had a honeyed café-au-lait hue. Her hair had to be ten different shades of gold, orange, and brown—punk-streaked, he thought, but not as garish. It was just short of shoulder length, more chin length in front, with bangs that looked like she’d hacked at them with a knife. She wasn’t that gorgeous.

Oh, yeah, she is.
And tough and capable. She’d faced down that towering monster without flinching. He wasn’t used to being protected; he was the one usually doing that job. So when someone else did it, and did it well, he recognized that. Appreciated it, as a cop. As much as he appreciated her face and form, as a man.
But ignore that, you can ignore that. It’s just a case of temporary insanity. You’ll get over it. Think of Camille. She’s probably just like Camille
.

She held his gaze for a long moment, as if she knew he was studying her. Then she brought her fingers to rest in the middle of her chest. “Jorie. Mikkalah.”

It must be identification time. Good. He needed facts. “Theo. Petrakos.” He mimicked her movement.

“Peh-tra-kos.”

“Yes. Ma-
cay
-la?”

“Yes.”

“Where am I?” He turned one hand outward, motioned toward the room, toward the wide dark window. “Where’s this?”

“Ship. Name is
Sakanah.
”

He remembered asking her that before, remembered her answer. Ship.
This is not Carnival Cruise Lines.
“What kind of ship?”

“Kind?”

“Type.”

“Ah.” She nodded. “Red-Star Class Three intergalactic combat-and-recovery vessel.”

At least, that’s what he thought she said. She touched a small wedge-shaped panel set into the top of the table that he hadn’t noticed until now. A semitransparent, green-glowing image sprang to life, hovering over the middle of the table. He flinched back in his chair. She touched another section of the wedge and the image rotated slowly. It looked like a cross between an incarnation of something from the latest episodes of
Battlestar Galactica
and a Klingon Bird of Prey: elliptical yet winged toward the stern.

“Sakanah,”
she repeated, pointing.

Ship. Combat-and-recovery vessel. A military ship. In space. In orbit around Earth, he assumed, though he couldn’t see either Earth or the moon through the wide window. Every bit of common sense he owned told him this was nuts. Then another part of his mind—one that had performed dozens of police interrogations and discounted nothing as impossible, until proven—said:
Maybe. Maybe not. Listen. Learn. Gather facts
.

She moved her hand to an insignia in the center of her shirt. Three stars in a semicircle, one larger, two smaller. “Commander. Jorie. Mikkalah.”

Commander? That would explain the weapons, her skills.

He reached in his back pocket for his wallet, flipped it open to show his Bahia Vista Police Department ID. He laid it on the table. “Sergeant. Theo. Petrakos.”