Battle of the Network Zombies Read online

  Each jarring of the metal shim squealed and echoed, shivering its way up my already-cold frame, mixing with the anger. If I’d been alive the goose flesh would have been visible, even in the shadows.

  Haven’t I had enough tonight, without having to deal with a thief?13

  “Hey!” I tromped up to the man. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  He shifted the cigarette from his lips to his teeth and mumbled through a clenched jaw. “Vance Ventura, repo artist. You got the keys? That’d make my life a whole lot easier, if you had them. I got a thing later on; don’t want to be late. First impressions, and all.”

  “Well, you’re certainly winning me over.” I made no move for my keys, of course, but scanned the parking lot for witnesses.14

  “It’s Vance.” He actually chuckled.

  I clearly didn’t get the joke.

  The “survivors” of the yeti attack huddled around a burn barrel, warming their hands like hobos and no doubt comparing war stories, as though they just fought their way from “the thick of it.” Never mind the fact that they screamed like little girls and blocked up the exit like a toilet in a Mexican jail cell. A couple of cars over, a man sat in his car hotboxing a cigarette, his tortured face blinking red with each inhalation. Another man steadied himself against a wall at the Daisy Chain motel across the highway, one foot on the ground, the other kicking the wall back—the international pose for street hustlers (and I’m not talking about the kind that throw dice).

  Sure.

  I know what you’re thinking. And yes, it is pretty risky going for a public bite, but can you imagine me without a car? Not in a town like Seattle. For Christ’s sake, it rains here. Have you seen what kind of atrocities nature wreaks on high-viscosity rayon?

  He had to die.

  “Could I talk to you over here for a minute?” I motioned to a gap in the trees and an overlook of the Aurora Bridge beyond, sauntered a bit to get his attention—never underestimate the power of a hip swivel—turned and eyed him over my shoulder. He followed.

  I watched a waterfall of ghost suicides plummet from the Aurora Bridge. The reenactments were really quite lyrical, a mid-century oil come to life. A near-constant cascade of amethyst streaked the darkness below the bridge. I suppose it happens during the day, too, but you can’t see them as well as the night shift.

  Vance Ventura’s eyes seemed to focused on the same vista. He cocked his head before speaking, but didn’t look at me. “You’re wasting your time if you think a blowjob is going to keep me from taking your car tonight.”

  Fucker.

  “Wow, you’re pretty astute, Vance. I guess I’ll have to go with plan B, then.”

  “Which is?”

  I shot a glance through the trees and back into the lot. Once certain no one was interested in our little liaison—after all, it didn’t involve butter churns—I unhinged my jaw. The bones cracked against drying muscle, stretching my mouth wide as a lioness’s. I moved for him, twisting quickly to make for his neck, before the shock of the vision subsided and he’d stumble away or scream. But as I pressed him, an arm shot up between us and collided with my breastbone, forcing me backward.

  “Mighty big mouth you got there, Grandma. The better to eat me with, right?”

  I stumbled a bit and glared. What did he say?

  “Seriously? A fairy tale reference?” I noted his fingers as they elongated into claws and his eyes flooded crimson like portholes on a sinking ship. I should have seen it coming. He was watching the ghosts take swan dives, after all. I dismissed my instinct without even thinking.

  I really am off my game.

  Allowing my mouth to shift back into human form, I kneaded at the ache in my jaw and my pride, of course. Figures I’d run into something inedible while so freaking hungry.

  Ventura’s lips curled from his teeth in dry jerky slips, revealing not the fine bone of vampire fangs, but hearty, thick canines swathed in a yellowed ruddy calculus—Vance could use a good hygienist. His jaw punched his face outward, the skin loosening to reveal overlapping layers of what looked like scales, but turned out to unravel like rose petals loosening from a bud. They fluttered revealing a clear muzzle. This was no werewolf. Not a shapeshifter at all. The floral aspect seemed to imply something older.

  What’s with all the woodland creatures? I thought. Three in one night? And so fucking weird, too.

  I hate nature.

  “So what the hell are you?”

  Vance retracted his ability, in a quiver of petals (I guessed), and returned to the same sandy-haired good looks and cocky smile. He shrugged off the question, as though it were none of my business. “Can I get those keys now?”

  “You’re a real asshole. You knew what I was going to pull. Why didn’t you just save me the trouble?” I shoved my hand in my purse and dug. “I don’t have another car, you know.”

  He yawned, twisted his wrist around to get a look at the time. “Thank God for that, I’d probably have to repossess that one too.”

  “Bastard.” I launched the keys at him, hoping to peg him hard enough to leave a dent.

  But he snatched them out of the air, denying me even that paltry satisfaction.

  “A pleasure doing business with you, Miss Feral.” He tossed the keys in the air and caught them again.

  “Fuck off.”

  Gravel ground under his soles and the Volvo’s parking lights flashed. He was in and whipping the car from the Hooch and Cooch lot before I even stepped foot onto concrete. I started to dial Marithé, since it was her inability to follow directions that kept me hanging in the Hooch and Cooch in the first place (not really, but it’s nice to have someone to blame in these cases). I didn’t really want to hear her resounding lack of empathy, so I pounded Wendy’s number into my phone.

  “Hold on.” Wendy picked up mid-conversation. “Make sure to pick up every last bead, I nearly busted my ass on a handful the other day and if I had, it would have been back to Nicaragua with a certain jeweler.” She cleared her throat. “Hey girl, what’s up?”

  “Consuela getting uppity?”

  “Her name is Abuelita, like the hot chocolate with peppers or whatever the fuck they put in it.”

  “Whatever. You gotta come pick me up.”

  Wendy had decided to further embrace her “undeadness” through a line of supernatural jewelry called Skids. She hooked up with a glorified bead stringer and Nicaraguan immigrant named Abeulita, apparently, through Deadspace dot com, and the two had turned Wendy’s apartment into a factory of sorts. It wasn’t exactly clear how she paid the little woman, or if she did at all, but I had to hand it to my girl, she was uncharacteristically accommodating, even to the point of gathering down comforters from local thrift stores to make Abuelita comfortable in her special spot next to the oven. And boy, did she need the down. You could see your breath in there since the heat was shut off—well, if you had breath, or if you had breath that wasn’t supposed to be visible to begin with, like moi.

  “Where are you?”

  “Hell.”

  Wendy snickered.

  “I’m only half-joking. I’m at the Hooch and Cooch. Had a meeting that turned into a bloodbath.”

  “Are you sure you’re not doing a little moonlighting for Mommy?”

  Always the smartass. I was in no mood. “Just get over here. It’s too depressing to tell you over the phone. Just get over here.”

  “Sorry. I can’t right now. Abuelita needs me to do a supply run and since I haven’t gotten her a bus pass yet, it’s all up to me.”

  “Well then you won’t get to hear about the TV show I’ll be doing with Johnny Birch.” I poked the end button like an eye and speed-dialed Scott, ignoring the near endless call waiting signals.

  Poor Wendy, she loved nothing more than gossip.

  “I need a ride and I don’t want any questions.” I bit off the last word.

  “Is this some kind of role-playing sex thing?”

  “That is a question, Scott.�
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  “Yeah, but—”

  I shouted the address and tried to press the end button through the back of the phone. What? You act like I don’t have reason to be a raving bitch, when I do.

  I so do.

  Near the motel, a streetlamp pulsed its dying light through clinging mist and the hustler continued trolling for business, bending down as cars slowed and rubbing his thigh for the benefit of leering businessmen. The huddled masses seemed to be tiring of recounting the story to each other and shambled off to spread the story elsewhere. With no reapers to clean up the memories, it was just a fluke that no one had a camera. Of course, it’d just end up on some Discovery Channel exposé a handful of people watch over their uncomfortably silent dinners with the partner they settled with.

  I was more interested in my next meal.

  I glanced back at the hustler, and weighed the sinking pang in my gut—it burrowed there like a fat parasite—against the odds of becoming someone’s hood ornament.15 Hunger won out. I scanned both directions. The major issue was the cement division separating the traffic. Never one for track and field—I avoided activity like the plague in high school—I didn’t think I’d be able to pull off a hurdle, so I needed enough time to stop and crawl over it like the lazy bitch I am.

  It was now or never. Scott didn’t have the stomach to involve himself with a feeding, so I couldn’t wait for him to get there and expect him to be thrilled to wait by some tent city while I darted in for a quick nibble. Nor would I ask—I am a polite girlfriend, after all. We hunted together once and when he saw me dig in, he ended up puking and distant for three sexless days and nights.

  That’s a record, at least for us.

  It turned out I didn’t need to make a decision.

  “Hey!” the hustler shouted across the highway. He’d waited for a break in the traffic or his irritating yowl would never have had the opportunity to abrade my sensibilities. Jesus Christ on a cracker, it was like feedback. “You got a light?”

  “A what?” His words had melted together into a whiny unintelligible “yougawhy.”

  “A light!” He snatched a cigarette from behind his ear and held it up.

  I studied him a moment, while digging for my lighter and a cigarette for myself. He cocked his head to one side and spread his arms in a curt “what,” thrust his lower jaw and stared me down like a nemesis. Interesting. I wasn’t aware there were thug whores, especially male ones. It’s pretty sad when the opportunities of gang life get so slim, a perfectly good thug ends up skiddin’ all the way down to prostitution. Surely there was a car he could jack or a ten-year-old to sell crack to.

  Of course, I’d been running on empty myself, so why should this guy be any different.

  I pulled the lighter out and he darted into traffic, slowing to avoid a semi, its air brakes tearing the concrete in stereo. He tossed himself onto the divider like a pommel horse and, glancing briefly, scrambled into the traffic, sidestepping a skidding Honda. The driver laid on the horn and screamed obscenities out the window, but didn’t stop. Then he was in front of me.

  He was about twenty and dark, with skin so coarse it could have borne a Grown in Florida label if it weren’t for the alternating crop of patchy facial hair and shiny achy pustules in desperate need of a depilatory. He wore a grim pair of Adidas with soles worn thin enough, it was possible his socks were touching sidewalk. The white T-shirt he wore hung nearly to his knees, well past the end of his denim jacket, and his pants were at least three sizes too big, which, while seemingly the uniform of every other gangsta, wanksta and wannabe, probably came in handy for the kind of work that required quick and covert access to the nether regions.

  I sparked his smoke.

  He nodded, his face glowing red as he took a drag. “I don’t chomp no box.”

  Charming. I would have choked had I any sensitivity left in my esophagus (that was one of the first places to go). But my bulging eyes and gaping mouth must have spoken volumes. He grinned and turned his head to chuckle, as though that might be more of a crime than his illicit proposition.

  Shaking off the mild shock—really saying something there, as I’m rarely in that particular state—I said, “No? You look the kind that might go in for that.”

  “I don’t do ladies, not normally.” He shrugged, rubbing his fist across his mouth and tugging at his loose jeans. He clucked his tongue. “What you got in mind?”

  I motioned to the side of the now quiet Hooch and Cooch. Gil and Ethel hadn’t left. Gil probably busy heaping unwarranted praises and Mother “debriefing” the girls, or whatever.

  The burn barrel let off a soft glow and a flurry of sparks flew like gnats into the still night air and up the side of the building’s clapboard exterior. Probably a fire hazard, but after the night’s spectacle, I’m not sure I’d even alert Gil if the place caught fire.16

  The kid nodded and shuffled off in the direction I indicated. When not racing like a madman across a moderately busy freeway, he expressed a slight limp, favoring his right leg explicitly. He lugged the left behind him with a spare hop at the end of each step.

  I wish I hadn’t seen it.

  Those kinds of things make me wish I didn’t have to feed the way I do. The thoughts are always fleeting and always my own fault, a hazard of being too observant. Noticing little details of my victims—and they were definitely that, no matter how hard I rationalized—was not helpful. Not. Helpful.

  In those moments, when food becomes human, identifiable, I’m more likely to walk away than any other.

  Occasionally.

  The boy’s scent trailed in his wake, dense and meaty.17 There were sweet hints of maple, smoky bacon. The hustler was a breakfast fan. A lot of street people were, cheap meals done quick and from places that usually kept waitresses long after their expiration date, long after they gave a shit about a kid dining and dashing. Either that or hired them so green they didn’t know what to look for.

  A quick refresher—if you’re late getting on and trying to catch up—when a zombie catches the scent of its prey, it’s over. Reason goes out the window, for the most part, and the hunger kicks in like autopilot. When I first turned (after a run-in with a breather and later a misplaced donut box—damn if slick cardboard and concrete don’t equal flat on your back dead in a parking garage, at least for a little bit), I had absolutely no control over the process. I’d catch a scent and the next thing I knew I was spitting out a retainer (not mine and not necessarily a kid’s, either).18

  Anyway.

  He stalled at the far corner of the Hooch and Cooch, settling into a spot on a rickety picnic table, whose purpose seemed to be only to hold up a massive bloom of cigarette butts sticking out of a spent can of Yuban. He jutted his chin forward, again, lips screwed up in a sneer, in that defiant way one does when there’s nothing to lose or live for. He probably figured if he put that tough face on, I’d be attracted—some women apparently go for the thug type.

  He was right. I was definitely into him.

  After a quick glance behind me, I shoved my arm through the handles of the McQueen and shrugged it over my shoulder like a pack (shielding it from the spatter, if you must know).

  “So whaddup? You getting’ on this?” he asked.

  I could barely conceal my glee.

  CHANNEL 04

  Wednesday

  10:30–11:00 P.M.

  Cleaning House

  Humans complain about hauntings, but the undead really have cause to bitch. Follow eight zombie couples as they struggle with the highs and lows of purging their homes of unwanted spectral guests…forever. (Repeat)

  I slammed the door and settled my purse in the floorboard, turning to Scott for what I hoped would be the first pleasant moment of the evening—God knows I could use one—but finding a face smeared with enough ugly judgment to guarantee him a slot in the local PTA.

  “What?” I asked, agog perhaps and definitely in no mood. ’Cause really, could I pile any more bullshit on my plate?


  His disapproving eyes dropped to my cheek. “You’ve got a little gore on you.”

  I patted for it, the reduced sensitivity in my extremities not helping me any. “Here?”

  “No. A little to the left. More.”

  We played out the hunt a few moments and then I dropped my hand in my lap and sighed. “You get it. I’m frickin’ exhausted.”

  Scott shook his head and reached across to the glove compartment, retrieving a travel pack of tissue. He balanced them on my leg and turned his head. “I’m going to leave that up to you.”

  Fucker.

  “You know, what you do is worse.” I dabbed the tissue around my face until it came back red and spotted with gristle.

  “What? How the hell could a few scratches be worse than eating people?”

  “Please.” I rolled my eyes. “Like leaving them maimed, covered in scars and doomed to a life of unmanageable body hair is a prize.” I amped up the mocking. “Do they thank you? I don’t know how I’ve made it this long without juggling dog teeth in my mouth and these extra six nipples. Yeah, you’re a real humanitarian.”

  “Fine. Make fun. It just bothers me a bit.”

  “Whatever, just drive, I’ve had a really bad night.”

  I told him about Birch and his come-ons—he slapped the steering wheel while making threats, which made me smile—the yeti attack and how gross it looked shaved, the weird creatures on the peg boards like junior high biology experiments and the offer to judge on Johnny’s show.

  “So who wants to kill the fucker this week?” He grinned, lost in some violent fantasy.

  I shrugged as we passed the Center, with its mascot the Space Needle towering above us on legs like a modern TV tray. Scott pointed the car toward the high-rise condo district. Streets lined with crappy domestics gave way to Euro-functional Saabs, Volvos and Volkswagens (mostly Passats, the nuevo bugs gone out of favor as quickly as they fluttered back).

  “Could be anyone, really,” I said. “I’d only known him a few seconds before wanting him dead. There must be a daily tally running. Birch has got to be at the top of the supernatural dead pool.”