Zombie Zero (15 page)

“Oh, I get it.” She winked at him. “Cause you smoke green here?”

Doug was not a ‘take a girl by the shoulders’ kind of guy. Nevertheless, he took her by the shoulders, shook her a little.

“Candi,” he said. “This is serious. Did you see that thing or not?”

She shook her head. “What thing?”

“It was kind of human, but not really,” he said. “It had a bunch of sharp teeth and long claws and…”

Doug shuddered. “…and I think it was eating somebody.”

Candi frowned. “That’s not funny.”

“No it’s not,” he agreed. Fishing around in his pocket, Doug pulled a joint out of one and a lighter out of another. He sparked the flame, touched it to the twisted tip.

“Are you kidding?” Candi was lost in a cloud of smoke, except her voice. “You’re going to get high now?”

“If I were to come up with a list of times when it was most fitting to get high,” Doug said, pausing to inhale deeply, “I would put ‘during zombie attack’ at the top of the list.”

“Zombie?” Candi paled visibly.

“That’s what it looked like to me. Not one of the slow mindless moaners from the old movies,” Doug said. “More like the fast predatorial zombies in-”

Candi screamed, cutting off his sentence and putting a real damper on his buzz.

“Hush!” he said tensely. “It will hear you.”

Candi screamed again.

The door burst open, splinters and twisted metal flying in every direction. The monster was there, right in front of them, blood dripping from its fangs and talons to puddle to the floor. Candi kept screaming, until her eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted. Doug tried to catch her, but he had locked eyes with the creature. It was both horrific to gaze upon and impossible to look away. Then it smiled, and Doug felt his face pale as he saw how many rows of sharp teeth it revealed.

“Hey!” the monster spoke. It’s voice was a horrific screeching growl. “You’re Doug Benson!”

Chapter 17

A small houseboat drifted on the high seas. Maria tried to stay calm, to keep her son close, and to ignore the sounds of scraping underfoot. They had food, and water, but there was very little fuel left in the tank. She kept it in reserve, to skirt storms as they drifted. There would be no outrunning any ship that found them; the little floating dwelling would be at the mercy of any motorized craft, and so would they. Maria could only hope that there was someone left to find them, and that they would want to help. The food would run out, eventually. Over the water, and under the ground…

“I don’t want to kill you,” Mallory called out. He hunched behind a desk, throwing his voice as best he could.

“That’s fine,” a shout came back. “We’re still going to kill you.”

A spray of bullets tore through the back of the desk, and two of them ripped through his meaty calf muscle. Mallory grunted as the wounds healed. Before the explosion hit the desk, he was halfway between his attacker and his abandoned hiding spot. Marveling at his own speed, he dodged the miniature missile in flight, and launched himself at the exoskeleton. They hit the floor at the same time as the missile hit the desk, and the explosion slid them several feet across the tiled floor.

Mallory struck the armor in a dozen places before they stopped sliding. His talons were too long to form a proper fist, but his strength was such that a gnarled imprint of his hand was left in the smooth metal everywhere he struck it. He heard the man under the suit moaning as he shoved at Mallory. The suit augmented his strength enough to toss the professor off of him, and Mallory rolled to his feet a dozen feet from his opponent. The man stood slowly, and Mallory let him. He watched for split seams or tears in the metal as the man rose.

The soldier reached over his shoulder and grasped the hilt of the sword at his back. Mallory noted with a touch of amusement that the man was out of rockets, and that his movements were pained and slow. He rushed the man, letting the long modern blade pierce him through the middle. Mallory pressed him against a wall, the sword trapped between them and still lodged in his belly. Raining heavy blows, Mallory watched the suit go flat under his awkwardly bunched fists. Each strike smashed the suit into itself and into the wall. The man was held in place by his own impression in the concrete as Mallory pummeled him mercilessly.

Somewhere in the violent smashing soup of sound, Mallory heard the man try to speak. His voice was a wheezed gasp.

“Activate self-destruct sequence two,” the man whispered.

Mallory’s blows flattened his lungs, his belly, then his heart. The man went limp, although he still hung suspended in the wall. His feet dangled several inches over the floor, twitching. The professor didn’t have time to be impressed that not a drop of blood escaped the flattened exoskeleton, or to step back and admire his hanging art. He could hear the other two coming up behind him, and the quiet electronic voice counting down inside the pancaked armor.

“Nine,” the sexless voice said.

He pulled the suit from the wall and spun in place, holding it in front of him like a shield. A small missile glanced off it, bursting against the floor to his right and exploding in a cloud of concrete dust. Another hit it head on, driving him back across the tiled floor into the damaged wall behind him.

“Eight,” the voice continued calmly.

They were too close to the elevator, and the stairs, and where his daughter waited however many stories down. The end of the hallway was behind the man and woman bent on his demise, far from here. He moved as swiftly as his amazing speed would allow, catching the two of them up in the twisted metal of their fallen comrade as he rushed them. They punched and kicked at him around the armor while his own sprinting momentum drove the sword more deeply into him.

“Seven,” the voice said dispassionately.

One of them got an arm around the shield and started spraying bullets in Mallory’s face. A dozen biting blows spun his head hard, and his body followed. They landed together in an ungainly heap of tangled power.

“Six,” the voice said.

Mallory leapt to his feet, only to be driven back by automatic gunfire. Both of them emptied their clips into him, and Mallory’s body twitched and shook with the impacts. He ducked below the missile that followed, and grabbed the dead man in one hand and the living one in the other. He began running again. The explosion behind him drove him forward and set his back on fire for a painful moment.

“Five,” he heard, under his pounding heart and labored breaths.

More bullets ripped through his body as he ran, the woman he’d left behind still shooting; and the living man in his grasp suddenly had his own sword at the ready. He hacked at Mallory while his feet dragged behind them, aiming for his neck with wild weak blows. Each shallow cut healed before the next opened up, and the holes from the bullets healed even more rapidly.

“Four.”

The final spray of bullets caught him about the ankles, and Mallory lost his footing at dangerously high speeds. He careened off one wall, bending the dead man into an even more unrecognizable shape. The live man struck the other wall first, and was driven into the concrete in the same moment that Mallory was. They went down together once again.

“Three.” Was the voice programmed to sound more mocking as it counted down?

Mallory didn’t have a moment to wonder. He heard another clip clacking into place up the hallway, and a sword was swinging at his head. He caught the arc of the wrist and crushed it to paste in the same movement. The man cried out as he tossed him to the end of the hallway. Immediately behind him was the flattened body, striking him in flight to send them both sliding further away along the smooth tiled floor.

“Two,” Mallory murmured under his breath, although he couldn’t hear the voice anymore. A barrage of gunfire struck his face and chest as he turned to the woman and began to advance on her.

She ran out of bullets as he closed half the gap between them. Brazenly standing her ground, she pressed a button on her wrist; three little red dots appeared on Mallory’s heaving chest. She raised her arm a little, and red light flashed in his rusted eyes.

“One,” he said, and dove at her feet.

Two explosions filled the hallway behind them. They were a rolling mess of fire and heat that tumbled and slid to land against the wall where the first man had left a fatal impression. They fought while they burned, and by the time they landed in a heap together her suit was pounded flat in a half dozen lethal places. Mallory shook his head as she gasped, in disbelief and admiration.

She wheezed, tried to speak. “Activate-“

Mallory pounded her head flat against the floor with three sudden blows. He bent the sheet of metal, bones and brains into an easy handle and dragged her slowly down the hallway once more. His other taloned hand grasped the hilt of the sword still sticking from his belly as he walked, pulled it a third of the way out. His fingers were sliced as they moved along the blade, and as they grasped it to pull once more. He felt the end tickling his insides as he finally pulled the blade free, and he dropped her body on the floor next to the bloody sword at the end of the hall.

He sighed, looking down at his mangled mess of a torso as it came together again. Bending, Mallory retrieved the sword where he had dropped it. Thrusting it downward, he pierced the dead woman’s armor. The blade slid through her torso, through the other side of the exoskeleton, and lodged several inches deep in the concrete floor under her. Blood welled in the opening as he pulled the sword free, and he licked a taste of it from the end of the glistening blade.

“Your own swords are the only thing that can pierce your armor?” he asked the dead woman, and the smoking pile of debris nearby that surely contained some traces of her comrades.

He smiled a ghastly grin.

“That knowledge would have come in handy an hour ago,” he muttered.

Jogging to the door with stairs imprinted on it, two long swords sheathed at his back, Mallory swung it open and dashed inside. He leapt down one flight of stairs, then another, settling each time with a resounding clang on the grated metal landing. As he soared through the air once more, he heard a quiet frightened voice far below.

“Dad?” her voice quavered as his feet pounded metal again. “Dad, is that you? Please tell me that’s you…”

“It’s me, sweetie,” he called out. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” she called back. “Can we get the hell out of here?”

Chapter 18

North of one of the largest cities in the world, Josh and Sarah were working on a new song. Leroy was helping. They had come to Harmony Lodge to write and record their next album. The zombies had spread, and then word of them had, and now they were just grateful to have gotten out of the city. It was hard to sing of love and loss when the only thing they had left was each other, and when no one but them would likely ever hear the album. Such thoughts had driven them into a shared silent melancholy a couple days ago. Then Leroy had done something adorable, and Sarah forgot what state the world was in for a moment. She had grabbed her phone, took a picture and posted it to his Momentgram account. “Hey,” she had said. “The internet is back up.” They set out immediately to record a new album, a final album, and share it with what remained of the rest of the world. In another large city, in the same country…

Somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand mouthfuls of flesh, Allen began to tire of the taste. The intimacy he shared with Maya began to become pain at the intimacy they would never share. Perhaps becoming a zombie had made his own thoughts more plain to him, or covering the world with flesh-eating monsters had given him time to examine them like never before. Either way, Allen had long since faced the fact that he was, and always had been, in love with Maya. It was the reason he had spent so much time with her, the reason he’d tolerated Todd, the reason he had never even asked other girls out. He wasn’t being shy, or picky, or any of the other silly things he always said; he was waiting for Maya.