Battle of the Network Zombies Read online

  Anyone buying into Washington’s blatantly misleading state name (“Evergreen”) hasn’t seen it from eye level. In dense forests, like those surrounding Harcourt, the fir trees only give off their green at the tips. Like a cougar in need of a dye job, the twelve or so feet poking from the roots are dead with graying moss. Beige and unfurling fingers of fern reach from the ground like lazy dead folk—not that we actually do that mind you. The dead don’t just crawl from graves to eat your brains, they have to be infected somehow, silly. I suppose if I had a hose and a big drill, maybe. But why? Seriously?

  The fog didn’t help the mood. It clung to the undergrowth like dust bunnies massing under a couch—no matter how many times you take the vacuum to them there’s always more. Always.

  “It’s kind of spooky, right?” Scott’s smile came with a hint of boyish evil, standard, like reclining bucket seats. I waited for him to go on. It was inevitable. “The mist? The fog? An old creepy mansion? Who knows what horrors wait in the shadows.”

  I yawned. “Um…zombies and werewolves, for two.” I shifted in my seat to face him. “Have you been reading those adolescent vampire romances again?”

  He shrugged.

  “You know how they scare you.”

  A flush broke out on his cheeks like a riot. “Well, it beats those mysteries you pile everywhere. I’ve yet to see you read one. You’re very good at buying and stacking, though.”

  “I read them,” I interjected with a snarl.

  “You’d think you get enough drama, as much trouble as you and those two friends of yours get into.”

  “At least my books are meant for adults.”

  He clicked his tongue.

  The road wound back and forth and descended gently into a glen, where we eventually passed the haggard groundskeeper wrapped up in a damp barn jacket and jeans tucked into rubber boots. He nodded to Scott and hopped over some low ferns into the undergrowth to make way. The brush fell to the sides and the gravel road split a great manicured lawn converted into a parking lot of trailers and tents and beyond that, what had to be Harcourt Manor.

  “Um. Is it just me, or does that look like a mental institution?”

  Scott nodded. “It’s beautiful.” He pointed out the window at the people bustling between the tents and trailers. “This, however, looks like a madhouse.”

  I shrugged.

  The architect who crafted the massive two stories with its heavily dormered mansard roof was not satisfied with simply intimidating visitors, he—who else but a man—made centerpieces of eight equidistant and giant phallic chimneys, which sprung from the roof like a giant circle jerk. In the center of the roof, a window-ringed cupola stood watch over the grounds like Karen Black at the end of Burnt Offerings.

  “It’s creepy.”

  “And awesome.”

  Scott pulled up to a stone stair and hopped out. “Let’s get your shit and make this happen.”

  He pulled my bags from the trunk and set them on the stairs rather than the damp gravel. It’s like he knew I’d have a fit if my Vuitton got wet. Oh, who am I kidding? He did know. I’d bitched at him before about the very same thing. Scott didn’t give a crap about material possessions, but he clearly got tired of my demands.

  He probably needed this break.

  See how I can be positive in the face of adversity? He calls it broken up, I call it a time-out, like when your kid’s called you a bitch and you need to teach them a lesson that won’t get you locked up.

  I swept out of the car and went to kiss him. The kind of kiss he could think about while he jerked off in the shower, or wherever he did it. I clutched at him, ground my hips into his and played with the waist of his jeans, tucking my fingers just past the crimped edge of his boxers. I pulled away a bit to make sure I’d had the desired effect.

  His teeth were clenched, his eyes steely. I guessed that meant angry. Not the desired effect, but still, he’d think about that kiss later.

  Hopefully.

  “Don’t do that again.” He spat the words like a mouthful of vinegar.

  “Sorry.” Over his shoulder, figures gathered in various windows. “I think we’re being watched.”

  His neck craned and a grin replaced his glower. “You think I’ll get to meet your new boss?”

  “He’s not my boss.”

  “Well, whatever he is.”

  I started up the stairs, rubbing my hip a bit as I climbed. It was only slightly sore, but Scott didn’t need to know that.

  He grabbed the bags and followed me up to the entryway. The doors swung inward and a robust black woman, no taller than a chest of drawers, with dreadlocked hair tied up in braids, beads and strips of cotton, burst out. She clutched my arms, as I reached the next to the last step, so we seemed to be matched in height, and shook them like I was having a breakdown—the kind of shaking that’s often accompanied by the demand, “snap out of it.” “Amanda Feral, darling!” she barked in a spicy Caribbean accent. “You’re more gorgeous than pictures in the tabloids give you credit for—now give Mama Montserrat some love.”

  I lurched forward as the woman circled me in surprisingly strong arms and squeezed until I was sure my intestines would liquefy and drop out of me in a wholly unattractive way. She smelled of curry powder, Poison (the perfume, not the weapon, though from the creepy house, I can certainly understand your confusion) and, oddly enough, the dense chemical scent of ink. Of course, what I was most interested in was the fact that she reeked of fresh meat. She pushed me back but still held on.

  “And who are your two friends?”

  Two?

  I knew before I turned.

  Wendy peeked from around Scott like a nosy neighbor, head tilted and mouth pursed dramatically. She wore her hair in a chignon, like my own (though not nearly as smooth—she needed a lesson, to be sure), a cheap pinstriped banker’s suit—one of those you can pick up at Penney’s on sale five days out of seven—and carried a small suitcase in one hand and a briefcase in the other.

  “This must be your boyfriend?”

  “No,” Scott grumbled, setting the suitcase at my feet.

  “This is Scott.” I intentionally ignored Wendy as he stepped forward with his hand extended and was pulled into a grappling hug worthy of a wrestling ring. Mama Montserrat was a bull.

  “Nice to meet you,” he mumbled into the tunic that covered her breasts and torso.

  Wendy stomped forward, dropped her suitcase and handed the buoyant woman a business card so fresh you could see the heat rising off it in waves. “I’m Ms. Feral’s agent, Melody Daniels. It’s a pleasure.”

  Where did I know that name?

  Mama Montserrat pinched the card between her index finger and thumb as though she were collecting a dirty diaper. “Her agent? I been told there’s nothin’ left to negotiate and I don’t recall no agent bein’ involved.”

  “Ms. Feral will be needing a large suite with enough room for her bags and a small but comfortable salon for me,” Wendy said, and then quickly added. “To make business calls, of course.”

  “Of course.” Mama Montserrat’s demeanor chilled to sub-zero, the welcoming glow replaced by ashen suspicion.

  Scott snorted a bit, shoved his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and gawked at Wendy, shaking his head in disbelief. “You girls have fun,” he said as he backed down the stairs. Wendy’s eyebrow rose defiantly, daring him to say anything more.

  I shrugged. Wendy could have her fun, but from the scowl on Mama’s face, she had her hands full with that one.

  Scott smiled and nodded to me genially, then bounded down the stairs to the car. The curtness of it hit me hard and I had every intention of calling out to him, until I felt Mama’s stubby hand slip into the crook of my arm.

  “Follow me, Ms. Feral. We got you a beautiful room right at the top of these stairs.” She took the larger of my bags and pulled me inside.

  For all its external grandeur and English manor-ness, or whatever, Harcourt’s interior was, as is so common
in our world, an exercise in overkill. Like the warehouse that housed Skinshu, the mansion was stripped bare and redesigned to resemble some woodland copse. Tree trunks stood in for columns and rose in ashy lengths from a carpet of green moss to a canopy of—you guessed it—leaves. A cobbled path forked to the left and right, dueling staircases arced from a balcony above, clad in stone and patches of loam. A trio of dazzling antler-and-crystal chandeliers dropped from floral medallions in the ceiling; they flooded the space in warmth and a shower of sparkling refractions lit on the foliage like dew.

  Identical twin girls hovered against the far edge of the hall like a couple of hookers on a smoke break.38 They peered silently from around a bust on a pedestal, its head fully sprouted into a tangle of clover—this being the only setting where Chia is an acceptable decorating option. Contestants, no doubt—their pale and stony flesh not unlike a vampire’s, though that seemed too pedestrian a character for the show’s audience. Twins would be the draw, certainly. One guzzled from a bottle of wine, while the other hammered out a text on a little black phone, sneering at us as we entered.

  “That’s Janice and Eunice,” Mama said. She leaned in conspiratorially. “Sirens. So don’t let ’em get goin’, or they’ll sing their little song until you either kill yourself or just wish you were dead. And you know I ain’t kiddin’.” She added for Wendy’s benefit. “You go on ahead though. I’m sure they’ll like you.”

  Wendy sneered.

  Voices sprang from an arch in the opposite wall, where shadows danced in firelight and stretched out into the ivy like phantoms. A door opened above us and a tall black woman appeared on the balcony for a moment, waved dramatically and then disappeared down another dark hall.

  It occurred to me I didn’t really know who Mama Montserrat was, other than her name, obviously. “Mama, I’m sorry to ask this but, what is your role on the American Minions show? You seem to know what’s up.”

  “Oh, I definitely know ‘what’s up.’ I’m Johnny Birch’s manager and one of the executive producers for this season. Unfortunately, it’ll probably be the last.” She looked off into the twilight through the open doors. “We kept it going awhile and that’s all you can ask the good spirits for. Ain’t that right?”

  “Or the bad ones, for that matter.” It was my attempt at a joke. Now, normally you know they don’t fall flat, but Mama just crinkled her eyebrows and stared a moment. Wendy broke through the discomfort with her irritating “agent voice.”

  “Is there a chance this show could be cancelled? Because if there is, I’ve got a right to know on my client’s behalf. I don’t want her taking it up the ass on this one.”

  Oh. My. God. Wendy’s lost her damn mind.

  Mama’s mouth twisted into a grimace, but to her credit, she ignored the questions and just kept walking. There was really no need to respond, though I certainly shot Wendy an icy stare.

  As we reached the top of the stairs, she led us through an arch in the wall and down a darkened hallway. As bright and grand as the stair hall was, this little hallway was its opposite. Shadows clung to the wall as though snagged on the jutting faux Tuscan plaster.

  “Listen, little dead girl. Mama Montserrat been around the block long enough to know you’re playin’ somethin’ here. Now, nice Ms. Amanda—”

  She dropped my bag in front of a door and turned on Wendy.

  I stood behind Mama and mouthed her words in echo at Wendy, who stuck her tongue in her cheek and rolled her eyes.

  “Ms. Amanda. She ain’t said different and I respect that, on account of she’s probably a good friend, but if you make another demand of me, girl, you’re gonna find some bad mojo crawlin’ up your ass. You hear me?”

  Wendy literally gulped.

  “I hear.”

  The woman stomped off down the hall, turning as she neared the top of the stairs. “Ms. Amanda. You got some time to wander before we get started. Have a drink or something, but at 10:00, we’re filming the contestants arriving.”

  “But they’re—”

  “They’re already here, yes, sure enough that’s true. But this is entertainment and things don’t always go in the order you expect. You just gotta flow with it. Chill da fuck out.”

  “Chill the fuck out,” I repeated and waved as Mama Montserrat turned to leave.

  “See—” Wendy started, but I slapped her back, before she could finish agitating, and dragged her into the bedroom.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  She pulled her arm away and settled onto a floral matellasse bedspread. “Please. How could I not try to check this out? It’s kind of awesome.”

  I sat down next to her. I wasn’t nearly as thrilled. Being in advertising and monitoring commercial shoots and such takes the excitement out of the process. “I suppose it is. And I am glad to have someone to chat with that’s not completely freakish.”

  “Speaking of. Did you see those two bitches downstairs? What the fuck? Like a couple of skanks from the corner. And to think they’re contestants.”

  “Well, I am already judging them.”

  “Nice skin though. Tender.” She shed her fitted but ill-fitting jacket with a shiver. It fell to the floor and stood on its seams, stiff as cardboard; the horror of poorly constructed synthetic fibers. She dropped back on a bed large enough to hold both of us and our choice of twelve suitors and slipped off the skirt, lounging there a moment in the silken chemise she wore underneath—it would have been sexy were it not for the deep blue veins peeking out just above her thigh-high makeup line. Wendy’s eyes widened like she’d remembered something and she jumped to her feet and rushed over to her attaché. “I just remembered.”

  “Hmm?” I sunk into an overstuffed side chair that wrapped me in downy comfort. “Holy crap, this is cushy.”

  A large console separated the sleeping area from a small receiving room. Atop it were crystal lamps and a bowl of fruit—clearly they didn’t know us at all, or it would have been decent and chilled organ meat—and a stuffed polar bear cub (the toy kind, not taxidermy, that would have been wrong). No hooch to speak of—it’s like they didn’t know me at all.

  “Gil gave me something for you. It’s from your mother.”

  A chill coursed through my less-than-warm bones. “Oh yeah? What is it, a bottle of diet pills? An etiquette quiz? Or did she cut out the middleman and go straight for the vague and blurry pictures of my father with his new wife and children?”

  Wendy withdrew a paper lunch sack and sat it on the nightstand like some important artifact. “I don’t suppose it’s a sandwich?” she asked, backing away.

  “Who knows?” I dug through my purse for some breath spray—you never can tell when you’ll need it and with zombies, a good rule of thumb is every two hours to keep the dank stench of death at bay. Also, it’s minty.

  “Seriously, you’re not interested in what’s in that bag?” Wendy stabbed her finger at the crinkled brown lump. “Seriously?”

  “Not a bit.” Well, okay, a little bit, but I couldn’t let Wendy know that. She’d take it the same way Gil does, as an admission that I wanted some sort of relationship with the leeching hag. And I don’t.

  I so don’t.

  I propped my suitcase atop a heavily carved chest and unzipped it. “Now act like an agent and come help me pick out something fantastic to accessorize my gown for the big entrance.”

  “Can I at least peek?”

  “Could I stop you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, then.”

  Wendy tore open the top of the bag. Her eyes fluttered back in her head, while her mouth lolled open like someone had slipped her a magic vibrator. I caught the scent shortly thereafter. It was an organ.

  Another whiff and I was certain it was a heart.

  Wendy sagged on the bed and pouted. She looked over sheepishly.

  “Jesus Christ on a cracker, feel free.” I gestured for her to eat up.

  Giggling as she withdrew the Ziploc baggy full of gory musculature,
Wendy made quick work of it, snapping it clean in two with her already-recovering jaw line. She offered me the other half with all the daintiness of a longshoreman, spattering the carpet with clotted blood.

  “Try some. It’s delicious.”

  “I don’t want any.” I could only imagine the poor soul Ethel had torn it out of probably had to wipe the vomit off the thing on whatever fabric grungy bums prefer for clothing. Flannel, maybe.

  “Come on.”

  “I said no.”

  “It’s not like I shit on it.”

  “Well, obviously, it would have smelled like chocolate in here.”

  She squeezed the remaining heart into her maw and swallowed it in two bites, clearly frustrated.

  Wendy shrugged and dug in her own suitcase, pulling on a vintage Pucci mini-dress and a wide plastic headband. “Zip me and then we’ll figure out your ensemble.”

  My first appearance on a supernatural-wide broadcast show called for the big guns. Not just my favorite dress, something truly memorable. I opted for a frock by my favorite designer of the moment, Alexander McQueen. He recently wowed a London crowd of bon vivants or fashion victims or the poor or whoever goes to shows in London with a line of avant-garde gowns and separates I simply couldn’t resist selling off a bauble for.

  The one I chose to unload was a gift.

  I’d only known Tom Buchwald—I know, I know, with a name like that, it’s amazing I even considered letting him stick anything near me, let alone in me—for a few days. It was one of those conference hook-ups. San Diego, I think, and focused on marketing alcohol to kids and under-targeted ethnic groups, also tobacco, oh…and weight loss surgery to those merely bordering on overweight.39

  The usual.

  Tom could banter, wasn’t entirely disgusting to look at and as it turned out, knew how to work his hips into a frenzy. He was also good at shoplifting, as a brief jaunt to the local mall proved. But, when the cops stormed the afternoon “What Your Average Ethiopian Doesn’t Know Won’t Hurt Him” seminar, Buchwald must have slipped the tennis bracelet into my briefcase. I didn’t find it until I was back in Seattle.