The Sunshine Dame of Doom (2 page)

“Three black beers!” Vince screamed to the bartender.

“Black beer?” Hector queried.

“Do you have a better idea, bro?” Vince replied.

“What about getting out of here and take a walk around the neighborhood, clear the ideas, get a grip on reality for a change?”

“What neighborhood? What ideas? What reality?

“This is a three parts question. I’ll answer each and every one of them as soon as we are out of here.”

“Come on, you know what I’m talking about.”

“And I agree with your brother” said Phil across the table, addressing Hector. “There’s nothing out there.”

“There’ll be us when we get out of here.” Hector insisted. “Come on, when did this stop us before?” He said turning to Vince.

“This is different, Hec. There was a world before.”

“There’s still a world out there, a crappy one, but still a world” Hector retorted “One that’s not very different from good old Hell’s Kitchen.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That is back to the streets for the both of us, bro, as in the good old days, remember?” Hector opened a big white smile, causing his nose to get even larger around the rotund face.

“We can’t.” Vince frowned. “You’re talking about a different life.”

“No I’m not! Have you forgotten everything mamma taught us? Let’s start over, build everything again from scratch, be the lords of networking!”

People around turned to them with stony expressions and a peculiar look on their faces.

“Keep your voice down!” Phil whispered, feeling all his vertebras contracting at once. “You can’t talk like this! People have been disappearing lately, folks who talked exactly like you just did, or so they say.”

“Yes, this is yet another thing I’m having real trouble accepting.” Hector spoke.

“Then you’d better get used to. Rumor says troublemakers are kicked out of Downtown, you know, for the lamebrains to feast on them.”

“Hey, you have some respect when you talk about those souls! They are sick human beings for crying out loud!”

“Not again, Hec!” Vince stepped in furiously. “Now, you’re the one failing to get a grip on reality! Those bastards are dead, you hear?! Dead and rotting and dilacerating and eating, Jesus, they’re not human, man! You saw what they do with your own eyes! They’re freaking monsters!”

Hector’s forehead wrinkled in anger and the dark cloud of seriousness that fell upon his face caused fear on the other two. He was about to lift a finger at them when the beers came. The bartender left three tall glasses in front of them and walked away, but not before giving them the evil eye.

“You’re going to get us all killed.” Phil complained.

They took a deep breath.

“Come on bro.” Vince said. “Just one for the road and them we walk, what do you say?”

“I drink to that.” Phil spoke. “Cheers!”

Hector did not answer. He simply took his tall glass of black beer and swallowed it all nearly in a single gulp.       

Lily was driving her modified truck, so modified that the brand and model of such vehicle were long gone. It looked more like a metallic armored, slightly fortified walking peanut.

A sight caught the corner of her eye. In a not so distant prairie, a lonely human being seemed to be surrounded by dead beasts. She took a real harsh turn to the left, leaving a good amount of rubber painting the road.

By getting closer to the strange scene, she got a good picture of what was going on. A young man was trying to keep zombies away with a tennis racquet. Obviously, it wasn’t working. He desperately waved the racquet back and forth very near the zombies’ heads, but they did not seem to care and advanced to him with furious hunger. “Back off! Back off”, he screamed. He didn’t have much time.

“I’d better look into this matter.” Lily thought.

She left the vehicle and drew two small knives from improvised holsters attached to her belt. When she came to the dead creatures, she looked more like an octopus. In a matter of seconds, all attacking zombies were dirtying the floor with perforated heads.

“Are you all right?” She asked the young lad.

“Yeah” He said breathless and sweating a lot. “Thanks.”

“No problem. Two things though. One, this won’t do it.” She pointed at his racquet. “Those are modern racquets made of titanium, too light to inflict damage. You should try to get your hands on those heavy wooden racquets from days of old. They can really smash a head.”

“I can see you know your way around tennis.”

“Nope, but I know my way around material thickness. These days, it’s important to find good stuff to kill dead folks with.”

“Yes, no arguments there.”

“Second, dead people don’t usually respond to verbal commands like
back off
and all. Sometimes, not even the living ones do. Believe me, I know.”

Some snarling and growling sounds were getting louder in the near distance.

“Their friends will be upon us soon.” Lily nodded at the corpses on the ground. “We’d better go. Do you want a ride?”

“If it’s not imposing...”

“Not at all, where you’re heading?”

“Well um… right now, to no particular place.”

“What a coincidence! I’m also going to no particular place. I take you there.”

“Great!” He smiled.

The man grabbed his bag and walked to the right of Lily’s truck.

“Wrong side” she corrected him.

“Oh, okay” and he walked to the left side.

Then, like Willie Nelson, they were on the road again.

Behind the wheel, Lily glanced at the man’s bag, which was open due to a broken zipper. She saw some racquets and lots of tennis ball cans inside.

“So, I gather you are a tennis player of some sort.” She observed.

“That’s very correct. I’m a tennis player of some sort. And I was doing pretty well before this whole mess started. I was number 417 in the world rank, but then I got to the second round of this ATP 250 tournament, that’s how we call them, and I jumped to rank 378! Then, I qualified to participate in this ATP 500 championship, more points in this one, with chances to become number 298 of the world if I made it to second round!”

“It sounds like a good climbing. What’s the top ranking in this thing, two-hundred or so?”

“No! The top position in tennis ranking is number one!”

“Oh boy… Suddenly the dune turned into a mountain.”

“Now, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“No offense, but it seems that you made it to the mezzanine of the Empire State, only the flag you were looking for was hanging on the roof, pardon my lengthy analogy.” 

“Ah, come on! It is still a damn good climbing! It’s not easy, you know! Tennis is very competitive! I was kind of half way there!”

“And what happened? Not that I didn’t know.”

“I was already on court, warming up to play the first round of this ATP 500, when all hell broke loose. Suddenly, people started to get sick and turn into those flesh-eating dead fuckers. Even my opponent tried to eat me. I went to my box for help, you know, the place where my coaching team should be, but then I saw my coach and my personal trainer eating my press secretary and my agent, nothing I could do to stop them. I was about to be killed as well. Lucky one of the ball boys had a chef cleaver hidden in his shorts. I don’t know why he was carrying such weapon around, but it was a good thing he did. We cut our way through the dead with the cleaver. That boy pretty much saved my life, a brave little kid. Once outside, we managed to find a bus to take the boy away safely, but it was too crowded for me.”

He lowered his eyes and continued.

“Suddenly, everything was too crowded for me.”

“What about your family?” Lily asked.

“They are in New York. I don’t know if they survived this whole mess, probably not. I got no ways to know now. After that day on the court, I tried to get some help, but everybody was too scared to think of anything else other than their skins. I was let down bad. I got nobody in the end.”

“Hoy! You got me now!”

“And I appreciate it very much!”

He looked at the dismounted hockey stick in her sheath, sitting beside his tennis bag.

“So, I gather you are a hockey player of some sort.” He spoke.

“Actually, I played cricket, but I found out that no other sport gear is more effective in killing walking corpses than a good hockey stick. It chops their heads clean off.”

“So, that’s your main weapon then.”

“Until I find something better, yes.”

“Have you ever considered fire weapons?”

“Nay. They make too much noise and even attract more corpses. And ammunition only goes so far.” 

He was finding rather difficult to make conversation with that girl. He then scanned the interior of the truck with his eyes.

“Nice contraption you got here.” He said.

“It gets the job done when you need it, with just a few gallons of diesel.”

“Um, don’t get me wrong or anything, but do you have some kind of speech disorder or something?”

“None that I know of. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that you talk real funny sometimes.”

“I’m Australian.” She smiled.

“Oh, all right. Sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve been getting that a lot since I got here.”

“I can imagine.”

“So what’s your name, mate?”

“Good guess, Mate’s my name.”

She glanced at him.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope, my name is Mate Clarkson, as in
Kelly Clarkson
.”

“Well, you’d surely make a lot of friends in Australia with a name like that.”

“I guess.”

“Anyway, I’ll call you
Clark
. Sorry, but from my point of view,
mate
is already taken.”

“
Clark
, as in
Clark Gable
, there’s a nice ring to it.”

“Who’s Kelly Clarkson?”

“Oh, she’s one of the coolest rock stars ever! Her song
my life would suck without you
is really great! I can only hope she’s not a zombie now.”

“So, that’s how we are calling them,
zombies
.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“No. I guess any possible denomination would be equally demeaning. Zombies they are.”

“Anyway, do you think this plague, or whatever they call it, is going on worldwide?”

“I know that at least two countries are affected, United States and Australia. But I guess we can extrapolate it to the whole planet from this.”

“Guess you’re right. And do you think all social classes are affected, I mean, celebrities and all?”

“If a virus is doing all this, they don’t care for bank accounts very much. Actually, if there’s one thing, perhaps the only thing that can bring slobs and celebrities closer together is a terrible disease.”

“Yes, the slobs teaming up with the snobs. What about politicians? Do you think they turned into zombies too?”

“Well, they were zombies before.”

“Got a point there”

“Who’s Clark Gable?”