Constanzo! He had done this. He’d owned Slaughterhouse decades ago, building his career on the blood that solid block of muscled destruction let loose in the ring. That was before Ink had even been born. Since those days, the man had promoted failure after failure, and only maintained a seat in the clubrooms off increasingly aged triumphs and generous contributions to the stadiums. It wasn’t until Dionysus that he regained some glory, and people remembered that this crumpled, crotchety old man had once been the hot young manager with a zombie that wouldn’t quit until his opponent had been eviscerated.
Stuck in traffic on the freeway, Ink skimmed his phone for information on Constanzo. He was currently in Italy, and not due to arrive in California until tomorrow. This would have had to be done with a thug-for-hire, or one of his personal employees. If Ink accused Constanzo of being behind this, only Ink himself was going to be hurt. The bigwigs would shut him out forever. They did not like Constanzo, but he was one of them. Only if Ink had absolute proof could he point his finger. And he had nothing but suspicions.
He put down his phone and gripped the steering wheel as traffic began to move. If it had not been Constanzo, then there was a host of small-time managers who hated Ink for Samson beating their zombies. Ink shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking this was about someone stealing the win. It could have been pure vengeance. Samson had killed Adolfo’s best zombie in a melee eight months ago. Every time Ink passed him at a competition since then, Adolfo cried, hi, Stink! It was childish, but Adolfo was barely older than a child. This could have been a hotheaded decision of an overgrown boy who lost a big investment and blamed Ink.
Ink should have locked the stables. He had just welcomed the person in. Here, have my zombies! On his way home from Venice, he would stop at the hardware store to purchase some security. This could become a trend now, people killing others’ zombies, and Medusa had to be protected. A lock on both doors, a camera positioned above each of them or in the aisles, a motion sensor alarm . . . He would see what he could do that wasn’t too expensive.
There was no parking available near the Venice boardwalk, and he had the trailer, too. People in shorts and tank tops were strolling around everywhere, ejecting from the sidewalks in clumps to get in the way of cars on the roads. At last he retreated several blocks and found a spot in which to park his vehicle. The car in front of him belonged to some happy parent with a license plate holder reading Final Score: 3 Princes and 1 Princess! Ink winced. He winced every time he saw those, and he saw them all the time. Maybe it was cute when a four-year-old girl declared herself a princess and demanded a new doll. It certainly wasn’t cute when a thirty-four-year-old woman declared herself a princess and demanded a new car every Christmas.
He had thought when they married that they would be a team. He had thought wrong.
He walked in the direction of the beach and swaying palm trees, and missed the alley the first time. Vasilov had told him that he would miss it, and he had. It was dark and narrow, caught between a garish shop for tourists and a packed restaurant with rickety tables both inside and out. An employee of the tourist shop had blocked off the alley with three giant carousels of postcards, birthday cards, and maps. Ink slipped between them and into the gloom on the other side.
You will walk, my boy. You will not see them at first. Just keep walking, and they will see you.
The noise from the street vanished so suddenly that he turned around in surprise. But everything was still there behind him, the postcard racks and people going by, a car moving slowly in the road. It had only been a strange pause in the usual commotion. The driver honked his horn at a jaywalker and a man called, “How long is the wait for a table, honey? Did you ask the hostess? Honey?”
Ink walked farther into the alley. Old buildings lifted two stories high on either side of him, casting shadows that the strip of sunlit sky above failed to penetrate. Curtains shielded the windows and all of the doors were closed. After a minute, he began to search for a trashcan, an overstuffed mailbox, a bit of music lilting along in the breeze. Nothing. The place was deserted. He went around a bend and the postcards, the people, the street, all of them vanished. Ink was alone in the peeling paint and silence.
Have you ever found a zombie in this place, Vasilov? The man had been quiet, and Ink fell over his words in apologizing for his overstep. It was none of his concern where Vasilov found his zombies. If they were healthy, if they fought well, their prices, these were Ink’s concerns.
He passed a doorway and his heart stuttered to see two women standing there. No door had opened and closed, no voices rung out, they stood there as if they had always stood there. One woman was wearing a modified headlamp that shined right into her eyes. She was a zombie, dressed up in a miniskirt and low-cut blouse, her dyed blonde hair teased and her lipstick a garish red. Her long nails were manicured. The second woman was not a zombie. Her clothing was much more modest, an ankle-length skirt and blouse buttoned to the top. She was twenty to thirty years older than the zombie. When she saw Ink, she said in an accented voice, “One hundred dollars, you ride.”
“Excuse me?” Ink asked.
She thrust out her hips lewdly, her eyes moving to the zombie. “One hundred dollars. Nice room. Good time. Must not remove headlamp.”
Ink stared at them and realized the older woman was the zombie’s mother. Selling her body to freaks with fetishes. The zombie woman would be completely unresponsive in bed, which was more or less how Nadia was. Ink shook his head to the pimp mother. His only interest was in fighters. Young male fighters. This zombie didn’t have a muscle on her wasted frame anyway. Medusa would have made hash of her in less than a minute.
“You sure?” the woman called as he began to walk away. She thrust out her hips again and blew him a kiss. He was sure. Wow, was he sure.
Apollo had been rented for sex many times. A zombie man could still get an erection with some fondling. As long as the client didn’t mind being on top, and also doing most of the work, he’d perform like a man would. The vet had treated Apollo twice for STDs he’d picked up in his encounters. Samson had only been rented once for that reason. Ink had hiked up the price for a tumble with him. It weeded out the silly offers, and only one man had matched the amount. Then he’d had to sign the same contract that Ink used for Apollo. Any damage, any damage at all, and the client would pay through the nose for it. Bite marks, new tattoos or piercings, tears, bruises, broken bones, Ink and Jackie went over them afterwards inch by inch to make sure all was well. The STDs had netted him quite a lot. No one had ever offered for Chaos, which was no shock. No one had offered for Medusa either. She wasn’t very pretty. Gorvich had a nice little side business going on in her all-female stables. She made more in prostituting them than she did in wins at the ring. On her property were two cottages expressly for that purpose, and the women were dressed up beautifully when they were requested. But Ink didn’t get the appeal. If he wanted to fuck a lump in a bed, he had a wife for that.
The next zombie he came across in a doorway was old. Beside him, a man called out like a barker to Ink that his uncle could make sandwiches. “You like Delfini’s? Yes, you like Delfini’s! Everybody likes Delfini’s! What do you like, their turkey on pumpernickel, roast beef and rye? Just put him in a kitchen with the fixings laid out and he’ll make them for you! He’s hot-for-hire. Everyone calls when they’ve got an employee out, even at the elementary school.”
“Not interested,” Ink said when the man followed him down the alley. Hot-for-hire that old zombie might be, but here he was in the middle of the day without work.
“You look like a pumpernickel guy to me-” Ink shook him off and kept going. Now they were appearing everywhere, one zombie after another on the stoops of the buildings with someone beside them to sell services. None were potential fighters. Half were women, which instantly discounted them, and of the males, most were either too young or too old. Ink paused at one, a swarthy, scarred little fellow staring into his headlamp as an older woman
rocked on a chair upon the stoop. “How old is he, ma’am?” Ink asked.
“Forty last December,” the woman said between coughs. Her voice was nasal from a cold.
Too old. But he didn’t look forty. Ink checked him over more carefully and said, “He’s got a lot of scars.” That could be good. It made him look like a fighter. Poor men rented zombies to amuse themselves in backyard battles on drunken Saturday nights. So this one could have some experience. But when Ink examined the scars, they were tiny, and not particularly reminiscent of fighting wounds.
“Oh, yes, he’s scarred,” the woman said comfortably after blowing her nose. “They want his blood, his skin, all sorts of things. Where are you working? The hospital over on Memorial? Or are you one of those research fellows?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll tell you what I tell all of them: the charge is eighty dollars for whatever you want. His blood, his piss, his sperm, his hair, his tears, his shit, his spit, his snot, the air he exhales into your beakers. Flat rate. You don’t like it, not my problem. But he doesn’t leave this house, you hear? Whatever you want from him, you take it here on this stoop while I’m watching. Even if you’re going to give him a handjob. He’s mine.” She patted the zombie man affectionately on his rump.
“Your son?” Ink asked.
“Do we look related? He’s my zombie. I paid good money for him and I’ll make good money off him. You’re getting a good deal. Other people ask a hundred. So, what do you want?”
Ink moved on. More people offered him zombie men and women for sex. One offered a little girl no older than Scrapper. The man sneered as Ink hid his revulsion without much success. “It’s not like they feel it. You want to get arrested for boning some real kid, that’s your stupidity.”
“Not into kids,” Ink said. Ink wanted those women, those fully human women who followed Cantine around like he was a demigod. Ink didn’t want a zombie woman, or anything to do with kids whether they were zombie or not.
“Everyone wants kids,” the man called after him. “But not everyone will admit it. Come out of the closet, dude.”
That was quite a mental gyration there, turning the world’s population into secret, closeted pedophiles in order to justify oneself being that way. Then it was an act of bravery to be forthright about it. Ink didn’t turn around to discuss the matter further. It made his head hurt.
Pausing at another man in the right age category, he dismissed him when the seller warned that he was very nearsighted. A fist would be in this guy’s face before he ever saw it coming. And God, did the zombie reek of shit and piss and body odor. Ink was breathing through his mouth as he spoke to the seller. A lot of them stank, even the ones being sold for sex. It was cruel to keep them like that. Ink hosed his zombies off twice a week, and washed their hair on Sundays.
Sometimes he really wondered about people, the kind that would just breathe in the stink and get aroused anyway. Apollo and Samson had been sent out clean as whistles when their bodies were the entertainment. The only thing Ink wouldn’t do was pay for a fake tooth to fill the gap in Samson’s mouth. The client had asked for that and got a big fat NO in answer. If the guy wanted a tooth so badly, he could stick it in himself.
Ink came to another bend in the alley and looked down it. At the far end, which wasn’t that far away at all, was another Venice street. So that was the whole of Zombie Walk, and he was disappointed. He waved off another seller with a prostitute. He would have to skip the Games, or just attend as an audience member and pretend he didn’t care.
He cared. How much he cared.
Fewer zombies were being offered the closer he got to the end of the alley. A woman with straggling black hair sat at a tiny table covered in a dark blue sheet with tiny stars sewn upon it. Standing behind her was a zombie gone white with age. Making a grand motion to the second chair at the table, the woman asked if Ink wanted to know his future. Tarot cards appeared from a fold in her skirt and she picked one out at random. She placed it on the table and made another grand gesture over the picture of people falling out of a tower that had been struck by lightning. “Only ten dollars to know what this signifies,” she said in a spooky voice.
Ink knew what the Tower signified, chaos and sudden change, downfall and ruin, hard times and an explosive transformation. Nadia had a deck of Tarot cards herself. This alley psychic was seeing into last night. That wasn’t worth ten dollars. He passed several empty stoops and looked out to the long line where the gloom ended and the sidewalk began. This had all been a waste, a fool’s hope, and fools usually got what was coming to them.
A door opened and a child’s high-pitched voice said, “Come on, Willy! Come on! Bring it this way.” Ink turned at a tap-tap. A young boy was coming out onto a stoop, and feeling around it with a cane for the blind. A zombie stepped out behind him, a chair in his hands. The boy said, “Set it down, Willy! I said, set it down!” The zombie set it down obediently. Feeling along the wall, the boy closed the door. Then he turned and felt the chair. He sat in it as the bare-chested zombie moved to the corner and stared into his headlamp.
Now this one could be a fighter. Ink checked him over as the boy breathed in deeply and in satisfaction, looking for all the world like a little old woman smelling the roses. He tapped his cane against the stoop and smiled into nothingness.
The zombie was in his twenties, mid to late twenties, at Ink’s guess. He had long, snarled brown hair that hung over his face and shoulders. It was oily and lank. The strap of the headlamp wasn’t holding it back properly. That was careless. If the hair blocked his view of the light, he could freak out.
He was dirty and smelly, unshaven, but well built. Sparse hair grew on his muscular torso. No piercings or tattoos were visible. He was somewhat attractive, or he would be had he not been such a mess. His trousers were stained yellow in front, and Ink would bet that they were stained brown in back. There was a reek of something brown in the air. But good arms, firm-looking legs, and healthy at first glance. Some scars were on him, fighting scars, so he had experience.
The tapping tip of the boy’s cane was brown, too. The zombie had shit in the house and the kid had tracked through it. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Ink said in cheer, “Good afternoon!”
The tapping paused and resumed. “Hello,” the boy said in a friendly tone. “I don’t recognize your voice. Is that you, Denny? Trying to fool me again?” The boy laughed, a merry little tinkle that brightened the gloomy alley. “One day I’m going to know all your voices, and then the only way you can fool me is just by using your own.”
“I’m not Denny,” said Ink.
“And you have told me that before! Let me feel your hand.”
Coming to the stoop and hardly able to tear his eyes away from this zombie that might, just might be workable, Ink extended his hand. It hovered there untouched, the boy smiling in delight over Ink’s shoulder.
Of course. He couldn’t see Ink’s hand. Ink picked up the boy’s hand. Pinching the shit-stained cane between his knees, the boy put both his hands over Ink’s and inspected it carefully with his fingers. “You aren’t Denny!” he cried.
“How do you know?” Ink asked.
“Denny has hair all over his hands, mister! It’s like shaking hands with a gorilla, my mom says.” The hands crawled up to Ink’s arm and sifted through the hair. “He also has a wart right about here.” One index dug in lightly. Then the fingers resumed their search. “So unless you got it removed and shaved off most of your hair, you’re not Denny. I don’t know your hand. Do you live here?”
“No.”
“Are you looking for a worker?”
“Is your mom home?” Ink asked. “Or your dad? I’d like to talk to them.”
“It’s just me and my mom here, but she’s at work. He’s a good worker, my zombie. The construction guys use him when they need an extra pair of hands.”
That was bullshit. Those weren’t construction scars the zombie was sporting. “How often do they use him?”
“Once eve
ry few weeks they come by and pay me fifty big ones to use him for the day.” The kid’s posture changed to a secretive hunch. His mom didn’t know that her darling boy was renting out the family zombie. Construction. Some dopes were taking advantage of the blindness, telling the kid construction and using the zombie in a backyard battle.
“That’s a good deal,” Ink said. “Fifty bucks.”
“Do you got a project you need him for?”
“Yes, I certainly do.”
“But not fighting,” the boy said primly. “I don’t want Willy fighting.”
“Is he your dad?” Ink asked with sympathy.
“Willy?” The boy burst into laughter and scratched at his head. “No, he’s not my dad! He’s not my uncle either. Mom bought him so I would have some company all day long on the weekends and through the summer. She works three jobs. It’s highway robbery, she says, what babysitters cost. And I’m too old for a babysitter. So she got Willy to help me out. Because I’m blind,” he added, like Ink would not have noticed. “But she doesn’t like him. When she’s home, he has to be in my room so she doesn’t have to see him. Once the construction guys forgot to bring him back for two days and she never even noticed he was gone.”
“What kinds of things can he do?” Ink asked.
“He’s good at weights,” the boy said. “You need something heavy moved from here to there, you just let him know. But you have to tell him a couple of times. Not just once. He won’t get that. But he’s smart, real smart for a zombie. The construction guys always tell me how surprised they are at how smart he is. The smartest one they’ve ever seen! He can even hammer a nail. The other zombies they’ve had can’t do that. They just drop the hammer after a few seconds.”
“That’s great.”
“But I remind them every time: never, ever take off his headlamp or move the beam out of his eyes. He’ll go crazy on you! So, what kind of project do you have? What’s your name? I’m Billy. Billy and Willy. It rhymes. I did that on purpose.”
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 48