Paula Brown, who would one day become Paula Trent, although she hadn’t yet begun dating the former high school football star who would give her that name, placed her mug in the sink. Her Betty Crocker cookbook lay open to the casserole recipe she’d made for dinner—the dinner Kelton spent complaining about his job, just like most of their meals lately.
She closed it. “I’m done. I’m done with this.”
She stepped past him, walking like an old woman to the door. Kelton would always regret not reaching out for her at that moment, not pulling her into his embrace. But he let her go.
She paused to scoop up his doughnut from the table. She used two hands to give it to him. If it had been an engagement ring, he knew she would have handled it the same way. But he now realized the ring he’d emptied his savings account to purchase would go right on occupying his police cruiser’s glove box, before he ever had a chance to present it to her. He wondered if the pawn shop took returns.
“Take the whole box with you.”
Paula went alone to her bedroom.
***
Kneeling beside him, Lucy Grimm drew in a shuddering breath. “Oh, no. Grandpa?”
Kelton followed her gaze to the zombie who’d broken away from the crowd. It had been an old man, bald except for tufts of gray hair over the ears. He couldn’t see the rest of its face because it held a forearm across its mouth, draped in a black cape.
He saw the same pose once in an old black-and-white silent film about vampires. Movie trivia was the one thing he was good at, so it took him only a moment to identify the iconic pose. Bela Lugosi playing Dracula. The poor guy must have been attacked as he handed out Halloween candy.
Except he wasn’t. Lucy Grimm’s late grandfather dropped the cape to reveal purple ligature marks angling up out of his beard and under his ears. The angle of the marks would reveal the tale—suicide or zombie attack?—but he didn’t intend to get close enough to read it.
Lucy sobbed. “Oh, no. He killed himself. Grandpa, why did you give up?”
One of the soldiers—a hulk of a man with goggles hanging around his neck—stepped forward from his comrades. He gestured at the zombies with his submachine gun, like Stonewall Jackson pointing his sword at the enemy. “Stark, Roy, take the drones! Horner, cover fire!”
As the soldiers increased their fire, the big man took off running. Another soldier saw this and yelled, “Cap!”
Kelton followed Cap’s passage and saw he was charging four zombies standing apart from the crowd and aiming guns at the soldiers.
No, those aren’t zombies.
He recognized the Caucasian man as the one who killed Chief Simpson with the ray gun. A twin brother and two identical young women stood with him. One from each pair wielded more of those tree-branch laser rifles.
Aliens.
The big soldier dove to the pavement a second before the aliens opened fire. Balls of blue light missed him by inches and zapped the military team behind him. A soldier’s face disappeared in a splash of blood.
Lucy yanked Kelton’s elbow. “Kelton!”
Her grandfather and the Rooter zombies walked steadily closer. In another second, they would be within grabbing range.
“Shit!” He drew his pistol.
“Kelton, you have a laser gun.”
“I have a laser gun?” He looked down to see the alien weapon gripped in his left hand while his right held his service revolver. Right. The laser gun would be more powerful. He put the revolver away and hefted the tree-branch rifle to his shoulder.
The zombie that used to be Lucy’s grandfather was only a few steps away. Kelton saw a rash of purple skin eruptions around his eyes. He recalled from the other hanging suicide he’d encountered in his career that this was a direct result of strangulation.
Lucy covered her face. “Shoot him. Please, just shoot him.”
Kelton aimed the laser rifle at zombie’s abdomen and pulled the strange insect-leg of a trigger—but Butch Rooter got in the way. A ball of blue light erupted from the barrel and obliterated his right arm as effectively as a shotgun blast. Butch hissed and lowered his head to charge, but Kelton’s next shot hit center mass.
Myra Applewhite and old man Jamie Rooter stood right behind Butch, but Kelton was out of space. He dashed out of the stairwell to lead them away from the women and kept pulling the trigger. He had no idea what the firing rate was on a weapon like this and prayed it didn’t need to recharge.
It didn’t. Myra was first. Kelton took a perverse pleasure at watching her face go slack as she looked down at the fresh crater he tore into her chest. You fuckin’ pigs, I hope your dicks fall off, she’d said as he and Larry took her to jail. He remembered also the telltale signs she’d been abusing her sister: the cigarette burns on Rachel’s dress, the way Rachel had flinched like a woman used to being beaten. If he had time, he would’ve shot Myra a second time.
But he didn’t have time, because a child-sized zombie charged him from the shadows. He had only a second to register that it was twelve-year-old Sarah Rooter. Her bloody blonde hair streamed behind her as she leapt at him. A blue blast from his gun tore her to pieces.
I just saw a vision, that’s all, she said to him that afternoon. They’re coming. Tonight.
A child. And she was gone.
Oh my god. I just shot a child.
He turned to exchange an open-mouthed look with Paula and Lucy. He wanted to say he was sorry, that he didn’t have any choice. Was he a monster? Was he—
“Watch out!” Paula screamed.
He turned in time to see old man Jamie Rooter, face and clothing still blackened from the house fire, with head lowered to tackle him.
Kelton pulled the insect-leg trigger, and Jamie’s head disappeared.
He followed it with a second shot to the torso. They were at point-blank range, so he was able to place the muzzle against Jamie’s chest before he fired.
It had a more spectacular effect than he expected. The laser light enveloped the old man’s upper body, spreading out from his chest in a miniature supernova. It wrapped him in a blinding blue flash.
Kelton shielded his face and staggered backward from the blast of heat. It took him a couple seconds to blink away the blue afterimage. He smelled his own singed hair and Jamie’s charred flesh.
When he could see again, he discovered Jamie Rooter’s legs lying before him on the floor. Nothing else. The body from the stomach up was gone, ending in a burnt-off stump at the waist. It reminded him of the miniature Lego men he played with as a child, and which he sometimes still hauled out after a stressful day. Each Lego man’s legs came as a separate, detachable unit. Whose upper body and head could he hook these up to? Kelton shuddered and pushed the thought from his mind.
He realized he would never again run a domestic assault call to the old man’s house, would never again have to look at those ancient pink eyes and wonder what exactly had transpired between him and his two impressionable granddaughters.
But only if I live through this.
For now, the rest of the zombie horde remained intent on attacking the Army soldiers. The men remained knotted around the parking garage’s support pillars, picking off zombies as they came near like moving cutouts at a target range.
The four aliens had been reduced to one male, firing a laser rifle. As Kelton watched, a blue bolt decapitated a soldier.
The big man, the one the other soldier called Cap, stalked the alien from behind. In another moment, he would reach him.
Kelton ducked down into the stairwell with Paula and Lucy. Maybe it was time to make their escape. “You guys okay?”
Paula opened her mouth to answer him, but her gaze fixed on something above him, over his shoulder. Kelton looked up to see two zombies descending the stairs. The pair each had broken legs, with shards of white bone sticking out of their knees. Their advance was slow-going, even comical.
Paula raised the police revolver she carried. She shot them each through the hearts on the first try.
Kelton looked at her in amazement. Who taught her to shoot? In all that time they dated each other, maybe he didn’t know her that well after all.
Now that the stairs were clear, he would suggest they climb to the second story and hide.
Before he could speak, three more zombies charged them: a female in a pink, strapless dress, and two men, one of whom wore a tuxedo. Maybe they’d been out at a wedding. This time, they weren’t slow-movers like the Rooters and Lucy’s grandfather. They moved as fast as live people.
Kelton stood up and raised the laser rifle to his shoulder. “Stay here,” he said—but he fired simultaneously, so they probably didn’t hear him.
He took the three zombies down in blue flashes.
The laser rifle was amazing. If he ever wanted to have a real-life action hero’s weapon, then this was it. No recharge time, minimal recoil, unlimited ammo, and a very satisfying result.
Except now he smelled ozone. Thin, blue smoke emitted from the gun’s sides from unseen vents. The weapon was hot in his hands, nearly to the point where he’d have to drop it or burn his skin. Not so amazing, after all.
He hid again beside the women and scanned for other zombies who might have noticed them. He saw that the Army soldier, Cap, had successfully crept up behind the alien male.
Cap aimed his Uzi at the alien’s back.
“Shoot him,” Lucy whispered. “Then please, God, let this be over.”
The Uzi jammed.
The alien heard the gun’s click. He turned around to face his attacker.
Cap flipped the gun to grab the barrel and use it as a bludgeon. But as he swung, the alien caught his arm.
Except for the laser gun, which the alien now dropped onto the ground so he could grapple, it was hard for Kelton to think of the tall, Caucasian man as a true alien from outer space. He wore a dark suit, open at the collar, and he looked utterly normal.
That is, until the alien opened his mouth to reveal rows of shark’s fangs. He spit out black venom, which missed the soldier’s face by millimeters.
Not so normal.
The alien had a hold of each of the soldier’s wrists, so Cap head-butted him. The fang-toothed man let go of Cap’s wrists and staggered backward.
Cap drew a knife from his belt and stabbed him in the throat. He grabbed the alien by the hair as he jammed it in deeper and began to saw like he was cutting a roast.
In about five seconds, the soldier decapitated him. Still gripping the hair, he held the head aloft as orange blood rained down.
Kelton’s pounding brain grasped at the only thing that could give him comfort at this moment: movie trivia. Perseus holds up Medusa’s severed head. Clash of the Titans, 1981. Remade in 2010 in a shitty film starring Sam Worthington.
The face on the severed head grinned and looked around until it spotted something in the shadows. Kelton followed its gaze to see the twin alien male standing there, gaping in shock. So the others weren’t dead, after all. Could they even be killed?
The other alien ran away.
A shotgun blast rang out, and a zombie holding a submachine gun fell over. It landed on top of the dead soldier at its feet.
Lucy covered her head. “Smarter. Shit, they’re so smart now.”
Kelton made eye contact with Paula. She stared at him with wide, bulbous eyes. Her face was white with shock. He began to ask if she thought they should trust the soldiers when she saved his life for the second time in five minutes: “Behind you!”
This time, he didn’t turn around fast enough. The women screamed as arms bear-hugged him from behind.
He instinctively raised his elbows and ducked down out of the zombie’s grasp. He turned.
It was Inspector Clay.
Kelton aimed and fired. Nothing happened.
He aimed at Clay’s head and pulled the trigger a second time. This time, the gun burped out a small blue energy ball that cleanly passed through Clay’s open mouth and out the back of his head.
The inspector reeled back. Kelton shot him again in the chest to finish him.
He knew it should have bothered him that he just blew away one of his co-workers and friends, but by this point, he was too numb. Instead, he examined his weapon and saw thicker wisps of blue smoke emanating from its sides and barrel.
Lucy watched the action behind him. “What’s he doing?”
The soldier known as Cap had stripped off his fatigues and combat boots. All he had left was the knife he’d used to dismember the alien. Now that he was naked, Kelton saw the huge muscles bunched at the man’s shoulders and arms. Put some tanning oil on him, and he could compete with the Governator at his body-building prime.
The naked man screamed a war cry—“hee-yah!”—and ran off into the darkness. Presumably, he was chasing the fleeing alien, but Kelton couldn’t understand why he would do so naked.
“They’ve stopped firing,” Lucy said, and she was right.
With the muscle-bound man gone, there were only three soldiers left. They stood there, looking stunned, as their comrade ran away.
Between the soldiers and Kelton’s group lay a pile of zombie bodies. All of them were dead—or dead a second time, depending on how you looked at it. The scattered corpses reminded him of photographs of Jews lying in mass graves at Nazi concentration camps. Kelton closed his eyes against the image.
What do we do now?
He had no idea. Part of him hadn’t expected to live long enough to have the luxury of asking such a question. All he knew was that for now, it was over.
One thing was clear, though. They and the soldiers needed each other to survive going forward. There weren’t enough of them to withstand another assault like this on their own.
He pushed away the memory of Officer Coburn’s death at their hands and stood up. “Time to make friends.”
“What?” Lucy said.
But he was already emerging from their hiding spot.
The three soldiers watched him approach. His police officer training kicked in and automatically logged their appearances: one Caucasian male, perhaps 50 years old. Regal bearing. Semiautomatic handgun. He would be in charge.
Another Caucasian male, aged 20 to 30. Red hair. Camo baseball cap. Dropped a rifle at his feet in favor of another semiauto handgun.
Stocky looking Asian male, also aged 20 to 30. Combat helmet. Muscular. Combat shotgun.
Kelton jogged to within a few feet and stopped. Let them know I’m a cop. I’m a good guy. “It’s all right. You’re all safe!”
The one in charge raised his handgun and pointed it at Kelton’s face.
Chapter 23
PAULA
As if watching that gorilla of a man rip an alien’s head off wasn’t bad enough, now she was about to witness her ex-boyfriend’s final moments.
Paula raised the police revolver she carried. She had two shots left, three soldiers to kill, and thirty feet of ground to cover.
Meanwhile, Kelton pointed his laser rifle back at the older guy aiming the handgun at him. The red-haired soldier pointed his handgun at Kelton.
The Asian soldier in the helmet spoke to the older one. “He helped us, sir.”
“Stark, question me again, and I’ll kill you myself. Now, draw your firearm and cover your position.”
Paula immediately pegged their roles: the older one was the commander. The Asian guy named Stark was his subordinate. Which meant Kelton was screwed. Paula lined up her gun sights with Stark’s chest.
But then Stark raised his shotgun and pointed it at the commander. “I didn’t sign up for this, sir.”
The redhead grimaced. He lowered his weapon but didn’t put it away. Paula readjusted her aim to him, in case he changed his mind.
She doubted any of the men realized she was ready to shoot as well, but it didn’t matter. She was not going to watch Kelton die today.
Beside her, Lucy whispered, “It’s a Mexican standoff.”
Paula nodded but didn’t answer, intent on maintaining her aim.
She wanted to walk closer but was afraid the movement would cause the lead to start flying.
Her new scientist friend was right, though. Kelton used to subject Paula to endless Mexican standoffs in the John Woo and Quentin Tarantino films he brought to date nights. If Lucy already knew the phrase, she and Kelton might get along pretty well once they started dating.
As the seconds ticked off, it surprised Paula to realize she wished those two would date. Kelton deserved someone after tonight. He’d watched his partner and his boss die horrible deaths. He’d managed to keep her sorry butt alive long enough to speak to her husband one final time on the radio. A good wish for her ex was the least she could do. In the meantime, though, she could warn him when zombies were about to attack, and she could protect him with the shooting skills Daddy taught her.
As for herself…
Oh, Jeff. Where are you? Are you already dead?
Paula knew with absolute certainty their conversation on the police band radio was the last one they would ever have. It was like that spring, when Jeff got her pregnant. They weren’t married yet, but that didn’t matter because she was going to be a mother. It was the happiest she’d ever been, but then one morning she woke up, stared at her bedroom ceiling, and knew it was over. “I’m having a miscarriage,” she told Jeff, but he didn’t believe her until an hour later, when the bleeding began.
This was like that. She already knew her life was over. It was only a matter of time for her heart to stop beating.
Kelton cleared his throat. “We’ve been doing this a long time.”
“Stark,” the commander said. “Stand down!”
“I can’t do that, sir.”
“We have a mission, soldier. You are just wasting time.”
“I will not kill innocent people, sir.”
That was when Paula realized a horrible truth about Mexican standoffs, something the movies never discussed. Once someone pulled the trigger, there was no way to stop it. Just because someone pointed a gun at your face—and you pointed one back—was no insurance the second guy who fired would actually make his shot. There wasn’t enough time to react to your opponent’s shot in the time it took for his bullet to plow through your face. Would you convulsively squeeze your own trigger during your death throes and kill him that way? Maybe. That happened sometimes on TV. But she doubted the real world worked that way.
Plan 9- Official Movie Novelization Page 22