Plague Nation (3 page)

“Just pick up a lid, Sid,” I sang quietly to myself. “Give it a whack, Jack.” I smashed the edge of the lid against the zombie’s head, the metal leaving a dent in its skull. I swatted it a few more times for good measure, finding it very therapeutic after dealing with Captain Jerk.

“Do it again. er. Len.”

Finally Zombie Flo crumpled to the ground.

“Until it drops dead.”

So sue me. I’m not a lyricist. But I
am
a kick-ass zombie killer.

“Can I take your orwdah?” I intoned in my best Schwarzenegger.

“Talking to yourself?”

“Shit!”
I yelped. The unexpected sound of Lil’s voice made me jump almost as much as Zombie Flo had. I recovered quickly, though, and pointed to the zombie. “Nope. Talking to her.”

Lil looked down at the twice-dead corpse and gave a quiet little sigh.

“I knew her,” she said. “Mom and I used to go to Spanky’s for lunch, and—” She stopped, swallowing hard. I immediately enfolded her in a hug.

Lil’s mom had been out of town when the whole zombie plague had hit, but she’d evidently made it back before the quarantine had been imposed around Redwood Grove and the surrounding area. Lil and I had found her car outside their apartment building. Not knowing her mom’s fate weighed heavily, and the cracks in Lil’s already fragile emotional state grew a little bigger with every day. The only time she seemed happy was when she was cuddling with her cats, or killing zombies. I understood the cat thing—they were a connection to her old world. But the homicidal tendencies? Those worried me.

Often I joked that she was like a lethal Care Bear in her combat gear, but it was true. All wide green eyes and cuddly curves, Lil turned into a gleeful slaughter machine when faced with the walking dead. Now, however, she was just an eighteen-year-old who missed her mother.

I missed mine, too, but at least I knew both my parents were alive and well up north in Lake County. Lil didn’t even have the comfort of closure.

“Let’s go take care of business before Gabriel comes looking for us,” I suggested. Giving her one last squeeze, I let go and took a step back.

She nodded, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand. I pretended not to notice.

“Yeah... I heard him yelling.” Lil snuck a quick peek at me. “Are you okay?”

It was my turn to nod.

“Yup,” I said, “just pissed off.” And also worried, but I didn’t want to go into that right now, or even think about it. I’d already been caught by surprise once today because of shit with Gabriel. I didn’t intend to let it happen again. I smacked Lil lightly on the shoulder.

“Let’s go hunting.”

That brought a smile to her face. I tried not to worry.

We joined the rest of the gang in front of Licker Up. Gabriel had returned, but I didn’t bother looking at him.

“We doing two teams on this?” Mack asked. Gabriel nodded.

“Mack, Gentry, Lil, you take the office complex across the street,” he said. “Ash, Tony, Kai, check out the stores on this side of the block.”

“What about you?” Oops... almost forgot we were pissed at each other.

He hadn’t. He just ignored my question and walked away. My face burned just like the good old days, when he was just a self-righteous jerk, giving me grief when I showed up late to class. I made a face at his retreating back and Lil giggled, then tried to turn it into a fake cough when Gabriel turned and shot a dark glance our way.

Immature? Yeah, I totally cop to it. But it was better that than throwing a punch at the back of his head— which was my other impulse.

I turned to the rest of my team, unsheathing my tanto. While my modified katana was shorter than the traditional blade, the even shorter tanto was a better choice for close quarters encounters. Less chance of accidentally slicing one of my fellow wild cards if things got hairy. And the M4? We may have been immune to the zombie virus, but a stray round ricocheting off a hard surface could still kill us.

Tony had what I referred to as “Thor’s Wee Hammer,” a small but lethal sledgehammer that was his weapon of choice, while Kai hefted his favorite crowbar.

“Time to
pahty,”
Tony said, adding his own
Ahnold
impersonation to the day.

Kai grinned and the two clanged their respective weapons together. They had bonded early on during training, and were pretty much inseparable. The term “bromance” could have been invented just for them.

Lucky me. I got to be third wheel on today’s date.

We entered Licker Up through the front door, which was ajar. I took point, hitting the light switch as I stepped in. Even with the bright sunshine outside, the interior of the store was gloomy—not enough windows to let any real light in. Tony and Kai followed close on my heels.

Broken bottles lay scattered on the floor, their contents blending together in a brew that smelled like the afterhours of an especially rowdy frat party, thankfully minus the vomit. Still, it made my eyes water.

“What a waste,” Kai said, kicking a broken bottle of Maker’s Mark.

“Plenty still left, bro.” Tony hefted a still sealed one and tossed it to Kai.

I gave them both a look.

“Later, okay?” Truth to tell, I was tempted to grab one of the many unopened, unbroken bottles of booze myself. And maybe I would, to enjoy it after we were safe back at Patterson Hall. With that thought in my head, I tucked a bottle of a forty-dollar Napa Cabernet into my knapsack. If the owner of the store turned up alive, I’d settle my account later.

Other than the broken bottles, Licker Up looked clear. No gouts of blood, smears of viscera, or random body parts. It was a refreshing change. We went aisle to aisle, wincing at the smell of way-overripe cheese in a cooler that had long since lost its power.

“That is
ripe,
señor,” muttered Tony.

As soon as he spoke, a creaking noise drew our attention to the back of the store.

Holding a finger up to my lips, I made my way as quietly as possible to a small hallway that had three doors off it, each bearing a little plastic sign labeling them restroom, office, and stockroom. The three of us stood quietly, and listened.

All was quiet.

I cracked open the restroom door, reluctantly taking a deep inhalation. I got a whiff of an ammonia-based cleanser that seared my sinuses, but no
Eau de Zombie.
Letting the door close, I turned toward the office and gestured to Tony, who smirked and strolled over to the door, opening it with a casual air that made me want to punch him. A familiar urge, that.

While he checked out the office, I went over to the stockroom door and pressed my ear against it. I didn’t hear anything, but for some reason my Spidey senses were tingling.

Not satisfied, I knocked.

“Hello?”

A moan sounded from behind the door. Suddenly something started scratching and pounding on the other side. Stepping back, I looked at Kai, jerking my chin in the direction of the commotion. I backed further away, giving him room, and he kicked the door inward.

The smell of rotting flesh immediately assaulted my nostrils. Doing my best to ignore it, I slipped inside, and found a male zombie in a red Licker Up vest sprawled on the floor, knocked there by the door’s impact. Even in the gloom I could see that pieces were missing from its face, neck and arms, and the remaining flesh was a greenish-gray with black goop oozing from the wounds.

Before it could get to its feet, I stepped in and thrust the tip of my tanto into its left eye socket. It only stopped when it reached the back of the skull. Then, putting my foot against its shoulder, I shoved hard as I pulled the blade out. A lovely sucking sound accompanied my movement.

Yuck.

“He’s been chewed on pretty good,” Kai observed.

I nodded. “Which means he either got bitten and crawled in here to die, or—”

There was a crash, and three zombies stumbled out from behind the shelves stacked high with cases of hard liquor, beer, and wine—two of them in store uniforms, and a young woman in bloodstained jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming “I’m a Princess,” the words outlined in rhinestones.

No, you’re a zombie,
I thought, giving her a permanent frontal lobotomy. Does it make me a bad person to admit I kind of enjoyed it? I mean, unless you’re Honey Boo-Boo, who the hell would wear something like that?

While I took care of Princess Z, Kai dispatched the other two zombies with several skull-shattering blows to their craniums, using his crowbar with a casual aplomb that spoke of a lot of repetition. Suddenly a wave of self-consciousness swept over me. It brought my own callousness close to home.

“Doesn’t it worry you that we’re getting used to this?” I asked, wiping my blade on the leg of my pants.

Kai shrugged.

“I’d rather get used to it,” he said, “than need a therapy session every time we have to put one of these things down. And maybe if one of these people’d known what to do, they’d still be alive, you know?”

He had a point, but it still bothered me that killing had become so routine. I looked at the floor and shook my head. There was no easy answer to any of this. Maybe normal emotional responses had to be tossed out the window when the dead walked the earth... But it still sucked.

Kai and I checked out the rest of the stockroom, finding puddles of blood and bits of flesh, but no more bodies, ambulatory or otherwise. Tony was waiting for us in the hallway, flipping through an old Licker Up newsletter. Irritated, I smacked it out of his hands.

“Hey!” he protested.

“Did it ever occur to you we might’ve needed your help in there?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t hear any screams.”

This time I clipped him on the back of his head.

“By the time you hear them, it might be too late.”

Bart’s corpse twitched. At first just a finger or two—all that were left on his mangled hands—before a ripple shuddered through his body as though it had been hit by an invisible electric current.

What was left of his neighbor chewed on a piece of his intestines, causing them to unspool from Bart’s gutted abdomen as he staggered to his feet.

A gust of wind blew the front door open and the sound of children’s voices and laughter drifted inside, catching his attention. The two zombies made their way outside into the chill November morning, Bart’s intestine linking them together like rotting mountain climbers.

Laughter turned to screams in no time at all.

The rear exit led to the end of the alley, with Partyrama’s back entrance right across the way. The alley was clear, and the door unlocked. But I tried not to get optimistic.

Partyrama was a typical tchotchke store, with merchandise divided into sections for holidays, themed parties, and weddings. The first thing we saw was the “Hold Your Own Luau!” aisle, with plastic leis, tiki torches, brightly colored dishware, and tropical themed cutouts. Next to that was a “Princess Party” aisle, sporting everything you needed for precious royalty between the ages of three and thirteen. “Pirate Cove” themed stuff was right next to it.

Kai stooped over and picked something off the floor.

“Eye-patch, anyone?”

Our footsteps crunched on scattered plastic beads from a fallen display. An end cap of frothy net tutus lay toppled to one side.

“Nothing will remain but the bare earth soaked in putrefying flesh!” Tony picked up one of the tutus, then shook his fist skyward.

“Hell of the Living Dead,”
Kai said, sounding bored. “Try again.”

I rolled my eyes. The boys were playing “name that zombie movie” again. We’d watched a slew of them, ostensibly as part of our training.
Hell of the Living Dead
had featured a mercenary doing a soft shoe routine with a green tutu slung over his neck, just before getting ripped to pieces by third-world zombies.

Tony frowned, and thought about it for a moment.

“‘He took a poo and it stank,’” he offered.

“Dead Set,”
Kai responded, without missing a beat. “Pippa.” He shook his head again. “Next you’ll be all ‘ein, zwie, die’ and expect me to be stumped.”

“Can you two please focus on the job at hand?” I snapped. “Like, checking to make sure there aren’t any zombies wandering around?”

Kai delivered a snappy salute in my direction.

“You got it, Ash.” Spinning on his heels, he wandered off down the St. Patrick’s Day aisle, crowbar dangling loosely from one hand.

“Jeez frickin’ Louise,” I muttered to myself.

“Don’t worry, Ash.” Tony patted me condescendingly on the shoulder. “He’ll be fine. You just need to chillax, y’know?”

I smacked his hand.

“No, I
don’t
know. And you can tell me to chill, or you can tell me to relax. Do
not
friggin’ tell me to ‘chillax’!”

Tony pouted. “Hey, we totally kicked ass against the swarm at Big Red. So how can a few stragglers be a problem?”

“Weren’t you listening? Professor Fraser said this shit could be going nationwide. Maybe even global.” He was really starting to piss me off.

Tony shrugged. “We’ll deal with that if and when it happens.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“Let me paraphrase one of your favorite movies, Tony, with words you can hopefully understand. Don’t get cocky.”

As I stalked off down the Pirate Cove aisle, I heard him mutter, “Yeah, whatevs.”

I swear, I was gonna kill him, if a zombie didn’t take care of his cocky ass first. He and Kai could drive a saint to homicide, and I was
far
from sainthood.
Gabriel must hate me,
I decided.
Why else would he stick me alone with both of them at the same time?

Suddenly Kai’s voice broke through the stillness.

“Ash! X-Box! Check this shit out!”

Instantly the urgency in his words had me running down the aisles, pulling my tanto out of its sheath, Tony close on my heels. We found him in “Miscellaneous Party Fun,” hunkered down by a display of—

“Silly String?” I stared at him in disbelief.

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Tony slapped a hand against his forehead. “Now if we only had a wheelbarrow and a holocaust cloak...”