Zombie Zero (12 page)

“Are you saying that aliens are real?” The one with the sense of humor seemed to have a healthy curiosity as well.

“No,” Mallory shook his head. “I’m saying that if aliens are real, we can’t go looking for them with guns and presumptions about their possible viciousness. If there are aliens, they come from a living planet as we do. Their planet will no more let them colonize the cosmos with violence than ours will us.”

“So tell the governments that!” The yelling one was getting on his nerves now.

Mallory smiled. “They all know that they are driving the lot of you to catastrophe one way or another. They don’t care to listen. We have to show them.”

“How?” he cried. “How can you show them if they are all dead?”

“Like this.” Mallory moved before any of them could react, and he had a mouthful of the annoying one as he drew back. Chewing the meat shoved it down his throat, and it only took a moment to swallow the bloody warmth. During that moment the young man clutched his bare bleeding bicep, looking at Mallory with horror. Then his eyes went rusted red, his skin went even more pale, and he began reaching for the professor. The other two tried to stop him, befuddled, but he made as if to bite them with his new jagged fangs.

“No,” Mallory said. “They’re mine. You’re mine. It is time for me to feast until I get my fill. Then I must return to Maya.”

The man turned, and stepped into Mallory’s hungry embrace. The other two watched, their eyes wide, as he tore long strips of sinew from his arms and legs. Every time a vein or artery would start spraying or pumping blood, the professor would drink hungrily until the wound closed and the flow subsided. Mallory felt his teeth growing stronger, his armor getting denser, and he realized that he hadn’t quite completely transformed. The three strangely useless flaps of flesh at his throat still did nothing, but the rest of him felt as though he could do anything. He ate the first man and the second without pause, and he was nearly halfway through the third before his thinking mind came back to him.

The man’s thoughts flooded the professor’s mind as surely as his blood flooded his mouth. Mallory stopped drinking. He swallowed and looked up at the man.

“You can fly jets.” It wasn’t a question. The lolling head nodded.

Mallory wiped his face on his sleeve. It didn’t help. His clothes and face were still caked in layered death, and a stubborn piece of one of the other men was lodged between two of his jagged teeth.

“Let’s go get you some dinner, Dillon. I think I’m good.” Mallory smiled. “How would you like to meet the spirit of the Earth?”

Chapter 12

Megan couldn’t believe what an unprofessional sham the cruise ship gig had turned out to be. They were just using her name to fill the boat, and it had worked. Hundreds of thousands of her fans had responded to her social media posts, and the whole month had been booked in a matter of hours. Even when she had read the script and met the other performers, she’d consoled herself with the fact that it was all for charity. Then her manager had contacted her to tell her that the charity had diverted all the funds to an offshore account and disappeared, paying out zero dollars to the ‘Have A Dream’ foundation. She knew it wasn’t the cruise line’s fault, but no one was going to forgive her or them for calling themselves ‘Circus Cruise Lines’, or for running their events like one. Now they were saying that there was an outbreak at the port city, and all ships were being diverted to other destinations. She just wanted this ship and the nightmare experience of that dreadful show to be in her past for good. In the city with the closed port, a few miles away…

Elayna was handcuffed to a table, enough to move her arms about a foot or so in any direction. She had come out of the other side of her hunger to find herself here, alone and unchanged. It was still there, gnawing at her, but for some reason she had control of her mind and her thoughts once more. She sat there, calm and glad for it, until the door opened. The room was suddenly flooded with the scent of flesh and fear, and her guts twisted with need.

“You caused quite a little scene, I hear.”

She looked up at him. It was hard to see him as a person when her whole being was bent on seeing him as a meal. Elayna began to fight the hunger again, mustering everything she had to make sense.

“Hungry…” she moaned. That was not the word she was trying to say at all. Elayna looked at his hands, tried again.

“Flesh…” she gasped hungrily. That still wasn’t it. She frowned her frustration, looked the man in the eye, and tried once more.

“Brains…” she heard the horrific sound that had been her own voice not long ago. Her betrayed hunger was mocking her, speaking for her.

“You say you’re hungry?” The man was trying very hard to smile at her. “I’m Detective Stiles. If I can get you to answer a few questions for me, I’m sure I can find you a bite to eat. What’s your name?”

Elayna glared at him. She tried once more, with everything she had.

“Zombie…” she said. That was it. That was the word.

His eyes went wide, and he smiled a pained smile.

“You said that word in the lobby,” he said. “Why would you say that?”

She let the chains within her slip free. She allowed the hunger to rise in her once more, to find a way to show him what she was trying to say. Her hands went immediately to the ends of their restraints. Flesh and muscle began to fray at her wrists as her strength pulled unrelentingly. Bone crackled, one of her thumbs went a strange new direction, and one of the cuffs slipped over the break. Elayna reached the free hand for him as she tugged at the one still restrained by unyielding metal. Blood dripped to the floor as she grasped at nothing, and an involuntary spasm threw her chin in a dozen directions randomly and rapidly.

When the spasm ended, she met his eyes with her hungered gaze.

The man exited the room as quickly as he could, slamming the door shut behind him. He watched her through the network of metal between the two panes of glass, the window that ordinarily made him feel safe. He wondered how long the other cuff would hold, and how long the glass and grate would keep her in after that. The detective saw her calming down almost immediately, to his relief. She settled back in her seat, and even refitted the handcuff to her wrist. Her thumb was pointed the right way again, somehow. His own pounding heart slowed. The detective turned the handle once more.

“That was rather-“ Stiles stepped into the room. Immediately she launched herself at him, straining at the end of her restraints. He stepped out of the room and locked the door securely behind him. After his heart stopped trying to pound from his chest, he pressed the button on the intercom next to the grilled glass.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “What’s your name?”

She turned her head, relieved. As long as she couldn’t smell him, it wasn’t so bad. Her hunger only consumed most of her thoughts. Like this, Elayna could talk.

“I’m not okay.” She shook her head. “None of us are.”

The detective smiled, and she wanted to scream at his kindness. Her voice was like her gaunt twitching body, nothing but a slim sad shadow of its former self. She sounded like an animal trying to talk, or like a monster. She sounded like a zombie.

“What’s your name?” Stiles was still being kind.

“My name was Elayna Mallory. My father was a university professor.” She sighed. “Now we are both named destruction, now we are both called murder; now we are both the most monstrous of monsters. We are here to kill all of you that we can, you who we used to be.”

The detective’s smile had fallen. “What makes you feel that way?”

“If I bit you, you would know. If I bit you, that’s how you would feel too.” Elayna looked at him, and the detective saw droplets of blood trickle down her fleshless cheeks like tears.

“I get the feeling you don’t really want to bite me, Elayna.” He tried to smile again. “You don’t seem like the creatures we are hearing news reports about. Even in the lobby, it seemed like you were just trying to get someone’s attention. I watched the recordings. I-”

“Detective Stiles. We’ll take it from here.”

The voice was calm and firm and confident; the detective and the monster that used to be Elayna both turned at the sound.

“Wait, what?” Stiles looked at the man and woman in matching black suits. She wore a burgundy scarf where he wore a dark blue tie, but otherwise they were dressed nearly identically. “Who are you?”

“We are with whatever government agency you feel you should release this young woman to.” The man didn’t smile at all.

“The…bureau?”

“Absolutely.” They both reached into pockets, removed identification. “Feel free to check us out. We’ll wait. Not too long, though. This is a global crisis.”

Stiles released the button, and Elayna didn’t hear anything for nearly a minute. She saw the detective take his phone from his pocket and make a call, and she saw that the call didn’t take long. Then she was straining at the chains again as her nose filled with the irresistible smell of their living flesh and their pumping blood. There was no fear, in either scent.

“She’ll try to bite you,” she heard Stiles warning them. “I don’t think she wants to, but she might still try.”

“We’ve got this, detective,” the woman smiled. The expression looked robotic and forced; it fell as quickly as it had appeared. She closed the door behind her. Stiles listened from the other side of the reinforced glass.

“Miss Mallory, we’re not going to hurt you.” The man was approaching her with a syringe. “You’re not going to hurt us either.”

She lunged at him, and he grabbed her arm. Plunging the needle into one of the exposed veins in her forearm, he emptied the contents of the syringe into her. Almost immediately, Elayna relaxed. She dropped her arms to her sides, looked at each of the agents and the detective through the window. Then she collapsed, unconscious.

Chapter 13

On a private stretch of beach, far from the hustle and bustle of the city and the life that went with it, Rolawndo soaked in the sun and savored the quiet. The only sounds were the soothing rhythmic crashing of waves and the constant happy hum of his own thoughts. He had shut off his phone and stowed it in his bag several days ago, and hadn’t turned it on since. It was not the first time he had done so. Each time it got easier to turn it off, and harder to turn it back on. By the end of the first day he had begun to wonder if he would ever turn it on again. He felt free, and happy, and like he could stay here forever. Meanwhile, deep in a great ancient pyramid…

Todd had been the first to return to her. Mallory showed up a few hours later, Allen the next day. He entered the historic site unchallenged. All he had seen since landing were ramblers and howlers. The plane had been full of them. They had taken over the world.

“Where’s Elayna?” he asked, as soon as he entered the chamber.

“She betrayed us,” Todd growled. “They have her.”

Maya put her hand on his arm. “Don’t speak of your sister like that. We are the beginning of the history that will erase history. If our mission is carried out properly, even we will not be remembered. Elayna is still with us. She has done her part.”

“She betrayed you,” Todd growled again, more quietly. “She disobeyed your orders.”

Maya laughed, and it was the most beautiful sound Allen had ever heard. She had been made just as breathtaking by her change as he had by his, but in an entirely different way. Her curves were more pronounced, her skin glowed with an eternal youthfulness, and her eyes were darker and more beautiful than ever when they were not the color of shifting sand or coded screens. Her hair had grown longer, and she did have a new set of short sharp fangs; otherwise she was simply a more magically stunning version of her former startlingly beautiful self.