Dove: A Zombie Tale (Byron: A Zombie Tale Book 2) (14 page)

“Head straight up Broad, and make a left onto Fairmount. Why?”

I jabbed my thumb over my shoulder and flattened the accelerator pedal to the floor. It did not surprise me that the thing following us kept pace as it approached.

“I should have grabbed a Maserati, or something,” I jibed as the Rover weaved around cars in the middle of the road.

“Byron, what the hell is that thing?”

Esmerelda finally turned around and spun back toward me. “Step on it! What are you waiting for?”

“It’s to the floor,” I shouted back. The needle danced over one hundred miles per hour, but I felt as if the vehicle crawled in spite of the buildings whipping past the windows.

“Is that one of the new things?” Dove’s voice shook with more than a healthy dose of fear.

We don’t know what that is. But we do sense something of Symbiots inside. It is giving off neurotoxins that we can sense and identify. But these are not good toxins. It is looking to paralyze whatever comes into full contact with the toxins. We can only assume this is to make it easier to destroy an enemy. We cannot fight this.

I looked at Dove. “In short?”

She nodded.

“Yes. But it’s nothing they could ever have planned for.”

The creature pursuing us towered over some of the smaller buildings. It reminded me of a massive zombified gargantuan or leviathan. Perhaps this is what Lovecraft’s Cthulhu had been based on. Who in God’s name knew? All I knew was the tremendous fear growing inside me as we sped through Philly streets with the massive creature closing in on us.

“Turn left here,” Esmerelda shouted from the back as the Rover slid onto Broad Street. I mashed the pedal harder, hoping to gain more speed. With any luck, the creature would have missed the turn and passed us by. It tumbled sideways and fell to the ground as we raced forward.

I paid attention to cross streets as we sped away—Morris, Wharton, Washington, South. The motor roared as the shadow of our pursuer gained on us. Skyscrapers towered ahead of us as I bobbed and weaved across the double yellow lines.

The French Second-Empire facade of Philadelphia City Hall rose tall before us. “Which way?”

“Uh,” Dove stammered.

“Left,” Esmerelda shouted. “Turn left. Just go!”

The creature’s shadow loomed over us. It must have stood more than six stories in height and ran with the lumbering gait of a hobbled hunchback.

I jumped the center median and whipped the Rover around the turn lane to the left. The motor screamed as we rocketed forward. “Right!” Esmerelda shouted from the back. Dove pointed to the right as we passed the other side of City Hall.

“You were supposed to turn there,” she shouted.

The beast behind us slammed into one of the office buildings, shattering glass and growing larger as more Goners leapt onto it.

“Oh my God!” My voice cracked. “That thing is a flesh Golem!”

“A what!?!” The question hit me in stereo as both women shouted it.

~ ~ ~

I had never in my life heard a name of something so absurd. “What in the hell is a Flesh Golem?”

Byron stared at me. “Flesh Golems have been mythological creatures since the beginning of time. Haven’t you ever played Dungeons and Dragons? Or watched a horror movie? Or read the Bible?”

“What does the Bible have to do with a thing called a flesh golem?”

“Golems come from Hebrew folklore. They are humongous creatures made from clay or stone in the form of a person. Usually they are guardians or protectors of some kind. In the case of a flesh golem, it is just like any other golem except that it is made of the stolen body parts of dismembered humans. The story of I am Legion in the book of Mark in the Bible concerns a flesh golem. The thing behind us is Legion’s pissed-off, ugly big brother. It is made of hundreds of whole bodies of Goners that have joined together into a single organism. I think one of the Lords must be commanding them like the leader of a colony. This must be what my Symbiots were trying to tell me about.”

“You talk about this like it’s something out of common knowledge. How in the hell would anyone know that?”

He pulled his eyes away from the road thrashing beneath the Rover and gave me a grimace that spoke volumes. In that one expression, I read an entire conversation: Really? Are you kidding me? You’re asking the dead guy driving the truck how he knows some obscure piece of Hebrew lore that has been popularized into games touted by hordes of pimple-faced geeks? You should know the answer to that one—I am a geek!

That face made me snicker in spite of myself.

“Golems? Goners? Lords? Symbiots? I don’t understand any of this! What the hell is going on here?” Aunt E’s voice cracked as she screamed out in the back seat.

“As we are trying to understand this new world we live in, we have been giving names to things.” He looked up in the rear view mirror and his eyes flashed wide. The vehicle’s motor roared and it shot forward, jerking me back in my seat. “Goners are what we are calling these every day zombies. Lords are a different kind of zombie—more powerful and scary as hell. They can mold and change their bodies to suit their hunting needs. They seek fresh human blood.” He stabbed his thumb over his shoulder. “That is a golem. I don’t think we need to revisit that. And symbiots are the creatures responsible for all of this. They are a group of self-aware microorganisms who sought to develop a symbiotic relationship with their hosts. Us. Unfortunately, our body chemistry did something to them and corrupted them. To date, I am the only successful symbiot host we have discovered.”

“This is insane!” Aunt E’s voice rose a few octaves.

“Yes, it is. The world has gone insane. And if you want to survive in it, you need to embrace the insanity and go with the flow.”

The vehicle jerked to one side as a shadow passed over us. Tires screeched. The motor screamed, the needle dancing in the tachometer’s red zone. A compact car crashed to the ground in line with our previous path.

“Where do I turn?” Byron asked in a strained voice. I hear the effort he exerted not to panic. “We’re on Fifteenth, aren’t we supposed to be on Broad?”

I looked at a passing street sign —Wallace. “Almost there, you’re going to make a hard left onto Fairmount. You may want to slow down a little.”

He turned to me with another easy to read expression. The fear in his eyes and pursed lips said it all. There would be no slowing down. We were coming in hot, like it or not.

“Aunt E, get your seatbelt on now! We—”

The scream of tortured rubber cut me short as the center of gravity on the Rover shifted. Byron tried his best to take the turn wide, but the acute angle of the intersection drove all the momentum of the vehicle over the right wheels. I tried to lean left, but couldn’t fight the centrifugal force shoving me aside.

Loud voices filled the air inside the cabin, blocking out the sound of the tires. I could feel the vehicle tip, its weight rolling to the right, to my side. Glass exploded in toward me as we slid sideways into a car parked along Fairmount Avenue and the vehicle rocked back onto all four wheels. We shot forward, rocketing down the road.

“Everyone okay?” I shouted as I spun in my seat. Byron would be fine, I knew that much. But my Aunt E—

I looked in the back and didn’t see her. A hand reached out from behind my seat and grabbed mine. “I’m okay, I think.”

Tires screeched again as the brakes engaged. I slid forward, still twisted in my seat. The vehicle pivoted right, sliding sideways and shot forward again. I turned my head in time to see the massive gothic-walls of Eastern States looming overhead and its watchful gargoyles staring down at the road behind us.

Metal protested as the truck scraped along the inside of the entrance tunnel. A tremendous bang resounded behind us as a thick iron gate slammed shut. A figure ran behind the vehicle, waving us forward. Byron accelerated, shooting through the entryway like a bullet through a gun. More clangs echoed behind us as we rolled to a stop inside of an inner courtyard. Several set of metal gates stood between us and the monstrosity outside the walls.

The mousy guy, Evan ran toward us screaming something as we leaped from the vehicle. He waved toward the building ahead of us and we ran with Byron hanging back as far as he could.

“Get inside! Go, go!” Evan bolted past us, his legs pumping like a marathon runner on crack. I half dragged Aunt Esmerelda behind me, trying to help her keep up. Byron stood in the doorway and disappeared in the distance behind us as we ran.

~ ~ ~

We did not know such things were possible.

“Are you sure this is the first time your kind have tried to colonize us?”

We are not sure. Perhaps some older strain of our kind came centuries ago. We do not generally have knowledge of many of our past colonies, especially not if they failed.

“So this could have happened before?”

It is possible.

I coughed. “Possible? I think it more probable that this isn’t your first rodeo. I think if scientists start to examine your colonies, we’ll find out that you have been here time and again.”

Perhaps. But we only know about our current attempt at developing symbiotic relationships.

“We’ll get into your lack of knowledge later. Right now I want to know how the hell those lords are able to do that. Can it be undone? How do we fight it? How do we beat it?”

We don’t know. We have been trying to study it while you were driving away, but given the great distance between it and us, we could do little to understand it better.

“Yeah. And I’m not exactly excited about moving much closer to it. There must be over a hundred individual bodies combined in that thing.”

We count one hundred and eleven individual neurotoxin signatures including the primary signature that is controlling it.

“Do you think you could replicate that signature, or maybe its effects?”

We would need to get closer to study the signature.

I let out a deep, heavy sigh. It did nothing to abate the weight of the world resting on my shoulders. Craning my neck, I looked up the massive towers flanking the front entrance.

“If I get close enough, can you learn whatever you need to about this thing?”

We can do what we can do.

“Okay. Thanks. I appreciate the can do attitude.” I don’t think the Symbiots understood the sour tone and sarcastic nature of my response. Staring up at the tall walls and towers before me, I considered my next steps. Perhaps the center tower would be close enough for what my Symbiots needed. If not, then maybe one of the side towers. For certain, they would not find me standing out in the open street in front of that thing.

A ghastly roar like the joined voices of a thousand lost souls erupted from beyond the walls. Staring through the wrought-iron gates blocking the entry tunnel, I wished the place had solid steel doors instead. In a perverted sense of morbid curiosity, I almost wanted to get closer to the thing to get a better glimpse at it. Almost.

“What are you waiting for?” A familiar voice called from behind me.

“I need to find out how to stop this thing, John. And to do that, my Symbiots need to be as close as possible.”

“You’re not going out there, are you?”

I looked up at the towers.

“Ah, I gotcha! You’re going to do some reconnaissance from up above.”

“That’s the plan. I want you to lock this place down, but keep an ear out for me. If I come running, be ready to let me in.” I gave him a wide, devilish grin.

“Hey, just don’t get yourself any deader than you already are, okay?”

“You got it, brother.”

“Since when do you call me brother?” He scrunched his face up.

“It sounded like a thing.”

He shook his head.

“Yeah, not so much, huh?”

He shook his head again and frowned. “That would be a big negative. You can’t deliver those kinds of quips.” He stared a me for a moment. “In fact, how did you ever get into our frat being who you are?”

I tapped him on the shoulder. “Ha. Ha. Ha. Very funny. So funny I nearly split my stitches.”

“Which ones? The ones from your autopsy?”

“Hey, watch it.”

Another bone-chilling scream filled the air around us. John’s face turned pale. He backed toward the entrance to the administration wing. Heavy wooden doors sealed it off from the outside. “You be careful, hear me?”

“I will.” I nodded. By the time I turned around, he had already disappeared through the double doors. I heard a massive bolt slide into place.

The golem’s left foot landed in the center of the tunnel opening. Numerous faces leered out at me, their mouths crying out and their teeth gnashing and biting at the air. The faces no longer held any semblance of the former humanity that once inhabited them. These were bestial things, given over to a deranged microorganism that kept them alive. That they could work in such perfect concert amazed me. It reminded me of one of my biology classes in high school when we watched a movie about zombie ants and how an entire colony would act like a single organism when infected. They seemed to retain some autonomy, but held firm under the control of the alpha creature directing them.