Zombie Zero (10 page)

When they were done, they would join another feeding frenzy already in progress, or take down someone wandering the cabin looking for their first bite. The more vulnerable creatures were not like Elayna and her friends had been when they first changed; they were mindless, moaning animals. They were consumed with a hunger that they couldn’t slake, and the lack of live human scent on the plane had them drifting aimlessly about on foot or sitting in their seats awaiting consumption. They had the slow steel grip of death in their hands, but no human to grasp and no flesh to flay with their starter teeth.

The others were horrific. They were not mindless, or slow; they were fast, intelligent, aware, and so much stronger than the others. Most of them were bent over a meal, and it looked like a cabin of bears or giant wildcats that had been skinned alive and were trying to regrow it by eating as much as possible as quickly as possible. They tore limbs from torsos, cracked bones with their teeth, and sucked the blood from stringy veins and dead arteries. Raking at the vulnerable creatures with their claws and rending their flesh with their teeth, the monsters were surprisingly civil toward one another. More than once, as Elayna watched, she saw one creature tear a scrap of flesh in two and hand it to another. She thought it was sweet, in the most disgusting way possible.

It was them she was able to see through. The ones that hadn’t tasted flesh were distant animal cousins to Elayna; the others were a part of the same mind she was, the mind that drove their personalities deep inside the gnawing hunger like the change had driven their innards up behind their rib cages. She could see through their eyes, just as she could see through Todd’s as he watched the gory chaos happily. He had turned the crew, and the door to the cockpit stood open. The pilot and co-pilot chewed on morsels that the flight attendants brought them. Elayna watched through Todd’s eyes as the creatures consumed each other, then switched to another view to watch him and the crew behind him through one of her sister’s eyes.

The thought made Elayna shudder.

Not my sister,
she thought to herself, despite the connection.
Not my family, not my kind. They are delighting in their hunger; I defy mine.

Todd was the most grotesque creature on board. He was even taller than before, his muscled arms leaner and longer. His skull was huge, thick heavy armor that he swung side to side as he watched the feeding. Every few moments, a feasting monster brought him a slab of flesh or a strip of skin, and Todd would chomp merrily on the bloody hunk. Elayna found herself wishing that he had transformed into something she couldn’t recognize; but that was definitely her friend, eating human flesh and staring out through those rusted eyes.

The vision started to fade as the hunger gnawed painfully at her belly. She tried to check in on Allen; all she got was a glimpse of him sitting still as death in an airplane seat. Elayna didn’t notice that the clumps of flesh that had fallen from her face were no longer in her lap. They had dissipated like so much dust, drifting further up and down the enclosed space of the cabin. Tiny particles of who she used to be floated invisibly in every direction to cling to people’s clothes and shoes and tickle their nostrils. Every passenger had a little piece of her attached to them somehow by the time the plane landed a few short hours later.

Chapter 9

On a floating island made of twenty years of technological trial and error, Christina stood at the sanded beach that ran the length of one coastline. The floating structure was her home, her creation, a solid testament to her brilliance and her hope for the future. It moved with the schools of fish that they herded along in huge gossamer nets, always turned in the morning so the sun rose over the sandy shore and always positioned so the sun set on the same beach. The drift was designed to give every dwelling a perfect day of light every day; the placing of the beach had been a clever afterthought. Meanwhile, twenty thousand feet in the air…

Allen felt Elayna’s feeble thought reach out to him. He hadn’t fed either, but he had maintained an almost constant connection with Maya. Their link was sustenance enough for Allen to stay hungry for flesh and suspended in this temporary cocoon. He felt the changes trying to happen within him, wanting to happen within him; he awaited the transformation like his boyhood self had looked forward to manhood. He didn’t feel the angst in Elayna’s thoughts, and he didn’t wonder for long why the contact had felt so hazy and distant. Allen was one with Maya, in a way he never knew he could be, and he watched her awesome presence reach out to encircle the globe from where she lay in the desert. He had no idea that it was possible to be more in love with her than he had been before; but this was even more than love. Allen was awed by her.

He brushed the pieces of flesh that flaked from his face and hands from his lap with deliberate slowness. He knew what effect they would have. Allen watched them hit the floor or the seat and burst into a million unseen floating bits of unborn death. The only reason that he knew how the professor handled his part of the spread was because Maya felt him there with her, and she showed him. She thought it was a great idea, and Allen followed the same easy template when he finally landed.

The gnawing hunger that had been clouding his vision and slurring his speech was not satisfied with a single bite. His sight became clear, and better than ever, at the taste of blood. His thoughts and words were crisp and concise when they came back to him, and Allen used them both.

“Go somewhere with people,” he said, “but not too crowded.”

He sent the driver a forceful mental image to illustrate, and collapsed back in the seat. The blood and flesh from that one bite was working in him, changing him from weak and vulnerable to strong and powerful. Allen felt his bones growing denser, his neck getting thicker as his skull became heavier. It wasn’t enough to armor his ribcage or pull his insides further up inside him, that one little bite; and as he stared at the driver’s bloody shirt, their eyes met in the rearview mirror. The man nodded, as if to coax Allen to bite him again. Allen shook his head.

“There,” he pointed. “Pull over to pick her up.”

She was an older woman with dark hair and eyes. She approached the door when the car pulled up to the curb, only to step back as Allen threw the door open. She peered curiously inside.

“Come here,” Allen said.

She brushed back her hair, putting her other hand on the roof of the car as she leaned in. Her hair drifted forward again as her body tilted, and Allen’s hand shot out to grab it. He yanked, stronger than ever, and she piled on top of him in the back seat. She opened her mouth to scream, but the driver clumsily grabbed her from behind. His fingers sunk into her mouth instead of covering it; something about the taste or the invasive contact made her gasp, rather than cry out, in that moment.

It was all Allen needed to bite her, that moment; almost as soon as he did, she stopped struggling. Instead she began pressing herself into him, like a lover desperate for his touch. He shoved her off, too hard; not because he was repulsed but because he was still so hungry. She bounced off the back of the passenger seat, then off the door, and sprawled in the street. Allen saw her raise her head, her eyes shot with blood and stark with hunger; he shouted at her before slamming the door shut.

“Feed!” he cried. He turned to the driver, sent him another mental image. “Go!”

It wasn’t long before he saw another, a man standing alone on an otherwise deserted stretch of lane. “This one’s yours.”

He probably should have been a little more specific. Allen watched in horrified amusement as the car jumped the curb and took the pedestrian’s knees out. The driver barely waited until the vehicle had stopped before he opened the door and went after him. All Allen could see from the back seat were the droplets of red and bits of flesh that began to stick to the windshield and hood. The driver stood up once, covered in blood and baring rows of jagged teeth, and howled with primal abandon. Then he went back to feeding with such frenzy that blood and bits of flesh continued to obscure the already bad view.

After a minute, Allen sighed. He slid across the back seat to the driver’s side and stepped out of the car, moving behind the wheel a moment later. He hadn’t known how to drive a stick, or the layout of the town, until his mind touched the driver’s once more. The mental contact was enough to make his own gnawing hunger twist his belly. He could feel the change taking place in his brother, and the sublime satisfaction of one mouthful after another of hot bloody flesh. It took him a moment to disengage from the ecstasy and engage the clutch. The windshield swiped away blood in stubborn red streaks as his eyes scanned the sidewalk.

He hadn’t driven a mile before he saw a child, skipping down the street and swinging a backpack. It was only one bite, like the others, but it was a big bite. His teeth were sharper, and more numerous, and his mouth opened wide around the little boy’s arm. He felt his teeth scrape against bone in passing, and his heart twisted at the child’s agonized scream; then he was pushing the little boy away as he tried to offer Allen his other arm. His mouth was full of flesh, his face was covered in blood, and he smiled as he leaned over his hungry little creation.

“Go,” he smiled. “Feed.”

The little boy turned and ran off, and Allen heard a scream as he climbed into the cab once more. It had been a dumb stroke of luck, but he recognized the genius in it at once: children would be able to approach adults without alarming their victims until it was too late. Humans may have invented the strategy, but that didn’t mean Allen couldn’t use it as well. It was natural for an adult to let a strange child close, especially if it looked hungry or scared. Allen’s spawn may not have looked scared, but they certainly looked hungry. He filled the city with them, driving around in a yellow car covered in red streaks, stopping every mile or so. When he drove down a street filled with shuffling starving mindlessness and the creatures feasting on them, and then another, Allen found a freeway and headed for the next big city.

Chapter 10

In two feet of fresh frozen powder, with sweat running in rivulets between her shoulder blades, Deanna sawed at the bear’s thick hide. Red stained the pure pretty white of the beast’s coat where she had unzipped it with her knife, and she was layered in it up to her elbows. She couldn’t wipe at the sweat, or the blood, and both flowed unnoticed as she worked. Night would fall soon, and with no one to depend on but herself she had to harvest as much meat as she could before it did. The snow had been deep for some time now; and as more prey succumbed to the cold, more predators turned scavengers. There would be nothing but bones left in the morning, and whatever she had been able to carve from the steaming carcass. Far south of all this…

Elayna had fallen away like her skin, and there was nothing left of her at this point but that alien hunger and her fading resistance to it. She wandered familiar streets until they became unfamiliar, avoiding anywhere she knew how to get to. Staying away from people as much as possible, sticking to the shadows and hiding her face with her hair, Elayna’s pace slowed to a slow stiff shuffle gradually over the first day and night. It was pain to keep moving, pain to resist the hunger, and pain to think of making the pain stop. As the sun rose on the second morning, Elayna knew she would be mad with a gnawing hunger for flesh by sunset.

She tried to order a breakfast burrito from a food truck, but the words wouldn’t come. The man trying to take her order kept asking if she was alright, if she needed help. Elayna finally gave up, shuffling off as quickly as she could. She had snagged a bit of croissant from a deserted table at an outdoor cafe, then been chased off by a shrieking waitress. It had turned her stomach to even put it near her mouth, but she had forced herself to chew and swallow the buttery bite. A few moments later it had all come up, along with blood and bile, and now her shirt was stained in streaks of red and yellow.