I started forward to try to help Bob, but he waved me back frantically with his free hand.
"No! Git the iBook! Type in 'kill 665'!"
I did. The badger froze, still latched onto Bob's forearm. His tee shirt was soaked in blood from the deep slashes in his belly. He awkwardly shook his arm, but the badger wouldn't budge.
"Well that's a helluva system bug," he said weakly. "This little bastard's bit me right down to the bone. Launch FleshGolem, would ya? It's in the Dock."
I spotted a dock icon that looked like Frankenstein's Monster and clicked it. A program opened that looked a lot like the Mac port of the old DOOM first-person shooter game. Instead of a game screen there was a pixellated black-and-white image of Bob's face.
I was seeing through the dead badger's eyes.
"Cool," I whispered.
"Yeah, it's real cool, get this critter offa me! Hit the 'escape' key!"
The badger unclenched its jaws and fell to the floor with a heavy thump. The screen told me the badger was resetting itself. Bob clutched his bleeding arm, wincing. The badger righted itself and sat like a dog, awaiting new commands. The blood on Bob's shoes shone like tar through the eyecam screen.
"Dang, this stings," Bob said. "Where'd I put that medical kit, I gotta—"
The bars hit the pavement outside with a tremendous clanging crash. One zombie was pinned beneath the bars, but the other four poured in through the shattered window.
"Aw, dangit! Can't a man finish a presentation 'round here?"
Bob pulled a shotgun from a shelf beneath the work table and fired it at the rushing zombies. My ears rang from the boom. The blast hit the lead zombie squarely in its chest, but it barely slowed down.
"Git back an' get the badger running," Bob called loudly, apparently a bit deafened. "An' don't forget to initialize NecroNull in 'options', or he ain't gonna be much use."
Clutching the iBook, I ran to the back of the shop and spotted a closetlike restroom. I ran inside, flipped on the light, and locked the door behind me. The lock wouldn't hold for more than a minute or two, but I hoped Bob could keep the zombies busy long enough to figure out what I was doing.
Amid the roars and shotgun blasts, I set the iBook on the sink and moused around, trying to get the badger up and biting.
While the basic controls were indeed fairly simple and DOOMlike, there was menu after menu of advanced controls for a mindboggling array of behaviors. There was even a Karaoke menu so that you could hook up a microphone and attempt to speak through the primitive vocal cords of the creature you'd reanimated.
Pushing aside the mental image of a frat boy drunkenly singing "Louie Louie" through a dead Pomeranian, I found the NecroNull combat option and clicked it on.
The eyecam screen shuddered and turned technicolor. A new menu of fighting commands popped up for regular Kombat mode and IKnowKungFu mode, the latter of which came with a warning that it was only good for five minutes before your golem spontaneously combusted.
My inner 15-year-old giggled: Spontaneous combustion? Fire is cool! Fire fire fire!
I told my teen to buzz off and set to kicking some zombie hiney in Kombat mode.
All I could see was a mass of legs, so I hopped the badger onto a nearby chair for a better view. Bob was leaping from table to table, trying to dodge the five zombies as he reloaded his shotgun. He'd blasted away parts of their limbs, heads, and bodies, but he'd only just slowed them down. Even the one who'd lost both its lower legs and all of one arm was hopping around on stumped thighs, gamely trying to grab Bob's ankles.
Bob turned his head toward the badger. "A little help here?" he called. His voice came through the iBook's speaker a half-second after I heard it through the door.
I leaped the badger onto Runs On Stumps. As the badger bit into the back of its neck, the zombie went rigid, and its skin went white and ashy. The zombie's NecroNulled flesh crumbled like clay beneath the badger's teeth and raking claws.
"Good one!" Bob said. "The others won't go so quick 'cause they ain't hurt so bad."
I attacked the next zombie, which had only a superficial shotgun wound to its shoulder. As the badger's teeth sank into its neck, the zombie roared and punched the badger into a pile of empty computer cases. I heard a dull snap from the speaker, and the badger shuddered.
The screen flashed:
WARNING! SPINAL TAP IN PROGRESS!
Kombat mode not possible. Continue via IKnowKungFu? (Y/N)
Fire! Fire! Fire! my inner teen chanted.
I hit the "Y" key, and the screen went red. The badger rose up, up in the air and floated against the ceiling, scanning for targets. The zombie who'd fractured the badger's spine was flaking apart like asbestos, and the remaining three had cornered Bob, whose shotgun had apparently jammed.
Then Bob looked up, saw the badger, mouthed Oh crap and dropped to the floor, covering his head.
The badger screamed down on the zombies, jaws snapping and paws clawing faster than the computer could track. It went clear through one zombie's head like a fuzzy buzzsaw and ripped through the others. I caught a glimpse of Bob crawling desperately for cover at the back of the store. The badger dove in and out, faster and faster, like a small furry dead Superman.
WARNING! OVERLOAD IMMINENT!
I gave the iBook the four-finger salute, but the program was locked. I was just about to hit the power button when the badger exploded.
You know how matter can turn into energy? I found out later that the reason NecroNull is buried in FleshGolem's options is that when IKnowKungFu sparks a spiritual overload, it causes all of the still-living matter in the golem to become energy. A few bacterial cells, usually, or maybe a dying roundworm. Not enough to match the power of a nuclear weapon, but plenty to create one hell of a bang.
Is it a bug, or a feature? I guess it depends on how many zombies you have to kill, and how badly you want them gone.
The boom rocked the entire building, and I was knocked flat. The iBook clattered onto the dirty floor, its keyboard popping free and its screen blacking out.
I got to my feet and cautiously opened the door. Bob lay in an unconscious heap against the back door. The computer shop was a complete wreck. Smoke and zombie blood hung in a thick, rust-red mist. The remaining windows were shattered, and the front door had been blown off its hinges. There was not a single zombie in sight.
Two middle-aged women in pink beautician's smocks stood on the sidewalk outside, squinting into the dark shop. One clutched a Mossberg shotgun. Though their faces and smocks were smudged with soot and blood, their bouffants were immaculate.
"Are you okay in there?" the older of the two women called.
"I'm fine, but Bob needs an ambulance," I replied. "Does the phone in your shop still work?"
"Shore does. I'll go give the boys at 't VFD a holler," she said.
IT TOOK ME THREE DAYS to get back to civilization. I didn't end up killing my editor; when I got back we had what diplomats call "a frank and cordial exchange" and, well, we parted ways. After that, I did what any good American would do: I sued.
But all's well that ends well. I used my settlement proceeds to start up the Critter Karaoke Club, and the college kids can't get enough.
This story originally appeared in Spacesuits and Sixguns magazine, 2007.
Lucy A. Snyder is a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author. She wrote the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, the nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide, the collections While the Black Stars Burn, Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and the humor book Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Asimov's, and Best Horror of the Year. She lives in Columbus, Ohio and is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can le
arn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.
Good Neighbors
Amanda C. Davis
THERE WAS A STONE in Paul's mailbox instead of a newspaper. He took it out gingerly, so it didn't scratch the bottom panel, and hefted it a few times. Down the block, Mrs. Ha was extracting a similar stone from her own mailbox. She scowled at the stone and then at Paul. Paul raised his stone in a resigned salute.
She shook her stone at him. "All I want is the obituaries. You tell them. Let the man write the obituaries. I don't care what else those maniacs get up to. You tell them to leave the obituaries man alone and let him do his job."
"I'll tell them," said Paul, intending no such thing. He stuck the stone in the front compartment of his laptop bag and began walking downtown for work.
He passed the new paperboy, who was riding a tricycle with a wagon attached to the back. The wagon was full of rocks, and the paperboy was six feet tall, with radiant silver-blue skin and hair like onyx all the way down her back, to the seat of the tricycle. Her legs were far too long for the tricycle, but she was pedaling for all she was worth, her face stern with determination.
Paul waved. "Thanks for the paper! I'll leave you a tip!"
The paperboy's face lit up. She honked the tricycle's rubber horn at Paul as he passed.
Good neighbors waved at the paperboy and left tips. Good neighbors did not ask what had happened to the previous paperboy.
The Subway restaurant was still closed, but old management had resumed, and though the smell lingered and Paul could see strange, luminescent growths on the walls above the booths, the sign in the window said, "REOPENING THIS EVENING. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE." He made a mental note to get a sub that night, but then reminded himself that he could never be sure who would be making the subs by then, and that he should check before he went inside.
The computer center where he worked was across the street from the Subway. Terry at the front desk looked up quickly, her eyes wide, and shook her head very briefly at him—but not fast enough. Paul's boss came storming around the corner, tie flapping. Paul's boss was not his boss.
"JONES!" roared the new boss, to Paul, though his last name wasn't Jones. "GET IN MY OFFICE. NOW."
Paul's old boss was named Jorge. Jorge had two kids and a wife; he coached softball and collected the signatures of pro wrestlers, which he had hung around his office, in the spaces between stacks of old electronic equipment and file cabinets stuffed with user manuals. Now the signatures were gone. The file cabinets had been moved and the clutter around the office, including the stacks of old electronics, had been shoveled out the window. Some of them were still in sight above the sill. Paul stood in front of the new boss's desk, which had been entirely cleared off except for a pad of yellow paper, a purple permanent marker, and a wooden name placard embossed with "MR. JENKINS" in gold, although that wasn't Jorge's name and was almost certainly not the new boss's name either.
Good employees did not ask what had happened to the old boss.
The new boss—"Mr. Jenkins"—stormed behind the desk scowling. He had a high shock of impossibly red hair, and his white collared shirt hung on him like a ship's sails in a calm. The black tie was knotted four times, all incorrectly. "JONES!" bellowed the new boss. He slammed a rock onto the desk between them. "DID YOU READ THE PAPER THIS MORNING?"
Paul took the stone out of his laptop bag. "I haven't had a chance yet, Mr. Jenkins."
"TURN TO PAGE FIVE AND TAKE A GOOSE AT THAT," said Mr. Jenkins.
Paul flipped over the stone. "It doesn't look good," he said, after a moment.
"YOU BET IT'S NOT GOOD," said Mr. Jenkins. "THEY'LL BURY US. BURY US! JONES, I'M COUNTING ON YOU TO FIX THIS."
Paul stood still, holding the stone he had found in his mailbox, waiting for the cold chill to leave his spine. "Yes, Mr. Jenkins," he said. "Of course, I would really value your professional input."
Mr. Jenkins sat heavily. Someone had replaced Jorge's grim metal folding chair with the kind with wheels. Mr. Jenkins spun the chair three or four times. When he came back around, he said, "I TRUST YOU, JONES. YOU HAVE A GOOD NECK ON YOUR SHOULDERS. DON'T LET ME DOWN."
Paul looked down at his stone again. His mouth had gone dry. "Yes, Mr. Jenkins."
"NOW GET OUT OF MY SIGHT."
Jorge's office did not have a door, but Paul pretended to close it anyway. When he left, Mr. Jenkins was spinning in his chair again, poorly-knotted tie flopping against his chest, his astonishing red hair trailing behind him like a silk flag in the fist of a leaping child.
Paul strolled to the front desk. "Terry," he said loudly. "Would you like to come get some coffee with me in the break room?"
"Sure!" she said. Her voice was so bright it almost broke.
Jorge's computer center had no break room. Paul and Terry squeezed into the closet where ten live servers blinked like small creatures in a dark tree. Terry locked the door behind them.
They leaned their foreheads together. "What else did he say?" hissed Paul in her ear. "Who's going to bury us? What's on page five?"
"He was here when I got in," whispered Terry. Her trembling voice was barely audible even directly into Paul's ear. All the better, really. "Already shouting. I think he's playing that the competition unveiled a better product."
"Are you sure?" said Paul. "Are you sure he doesn't mean the company's under investigation by the law?"
"N—no," said Terry. She drew a breath. "Yes. Yes, I'm sure. He was strolling around swearing about inferior workmanship and, uh, Jon-come-latelies. I don't think you have to talk to the police."
Paul let his forehead rest on hers. "Thank God."
Terry swallowed. Paul could feel the bob of her throat through their skulls. "I'll pretend to hack their servers," she said. "I'll tell him it's part of your plan. But you're going to have to come back with some kind of a story, Paul."
He stood. "I know. That's a good plan. Tell him you're working very hard and that it's very important. Don't be finished until I get back."
"What if he—" She drew a breath. "What if he thinks I'm a corporate spy?"
"Then you were framed by the competition," said Paul, "to weaken our company unity."
"That's good," said Terry. "That's good."
They looked at each other, unwilling to leave the familiar, functional server room for the stage of a workplace outside. The servers flickered and hummed.
"We're going to do fine," said Paul.
Terry closed her eyes. Then she unlocked the door and they strolled out. Both of them pretended to throw away empty cups of coffee as they passed the trash can.
"I'M TAKING LUNCH, VANESSA," roared Mr. Jenkins down the hall. It was 9:15. "HOLD MY CALLS."
"Yes, Mr. Jenkins!" she called back. She crossed her fingers briefly in Paul's direction: Good luck. He gave her a grim smile, hoisted his laptop bag, and headed back into the street.
Outside of the office, out of Mr. Jenkins' sight, Paul's panic began to fade. He could, he thought, play this role well enough to satisfy the new boss. After all, this was a story with an imaginary villain—not like the police, he thought with a shudder, who were very real, and more than half composed of tall, beautiful beings trying on the job as if the uniform and gun were a costume and a toy. Yes. He could out-think an imaginary competitor with an imaginary superior product. He breathed a little easier.
Heading to the Radio Shack, he started working out what kind of product he could convincingly build, to pass off as the product superior to the one Mr. Jenkins' company produced. The computer center (the one Jorge had built, and hired Paul and Terry to work for) was full of whirring, blinking electronics. None of the new neighbors had ever shown the slightest knowledge of electronics, so Paul was confident that something whirring louder and blinking faster would be suitably impressive. He'd cobble it together from stock on the shelves, present it to Mr. Jenkins as the only prototype, tell a rousing story about having stolen it from the competitor, an
d then destroy it before Mr. Jenkins' eyes. No—he would offer it to be destroyed by Mr. Jenkins' hand. The new neighbors were hungry to try new roles, but they were always happiest to see themselves as heroes.
He had not quite reached the Radio Shack when there came the sound of an explosion from not too far away. He froze to the spot, torn between the urge to see, the urge to help, and the certainty that he would regret both those things. A siren began to wail from across town at the fire hall. He could see a thick plume of dark smoke between two buildings.
Go to Radio Shack, he told himself—but he couldn't. He couldn't buy electronics to pretend to save an imaginary company when there might be real people in trouble. Instead he headed toward the plume of smoke.
The smoke was billowing from the two blown-out front windows of what had been Mazelli's Italian restaurant; there were two workers in Mazelli's-branded aprons across the street, and one graceful green woman, also in a Mazelli's apron, standing between the windows, trying to see inside. A few people were gathering to watch, but not many.
"Is everyone out?" said Paul to the two workers.
The girl nodded. She was plump and dark and looked quite young. Her fingernails were bit to nothing, but what remained was painted pink. The man, mustachioed, sucked a cigarette and turned away from the building.
The sirens grew louder, and a fire truck came screaming down the street, weaving feverishly. The people watching the fire moved closer to the buildings. It passed the burning restaurant, made a hard left down the next alley, which was too small for it, and came rocketing around in the other direction. It lurched to a stop two buildings too soon, then, in fits and starts, pulled up to Mazelli's restaurant. The firefighters started leaping out before it had totally stopped. The driver, pale violet with streaming blue hair with the graceful droop of an orchid, leapt out after them. Someone else in the truck's cab hurriedly slid into his space to put the truck in park.
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