by J. I. Greco
Without thinking, Rudy clamped his teeth down on her wrist, tight. The zombie howled, let go of the shotgun. In one motion, Rudy let go of her wrist, pointed the shotgun at the hand keeping her on the roof, and fired both barrels.
The hand disintegrated in a puff of blue blood. The zombie let out a scream of pain and protest as she quickly slid from the roof. Rudy watched her bounce off the trunk and away, then slid himself back down through the window.
“Well, that’s all taken care of,” he said, settling back into his seat and putting the shotgun gently up on the dash. Grinning, he swept his eyes over everyone’s faces. They were uniformly wide-eyed, staring back at him. “Hey, don’t everybody thank me at once...”
Bernice raised a trembling finger, pointed at his mouth.
Rudy crunched his brows together in confusion, wiped his fingers over his mouth. He looked at the fingers. Stained with fresh blue zombie blood. “Oh, this?” he asked, wiping the blood off on his t-shirt. “It’s just blood. Had to bite —”
Trip’s hand clamped over the top of Rudy’s head and twisted it around to face the rear-view.
Rudy took a good look at himself. The faintest of blue-glowing spiderwebbing was just creeping out from around his lips. “Aww, crap.”
“Baton!” Trip ordered, holding his hand out over the seat back at Bernice. After a moment’s hesitation, she slapped it into his upraised palm, and he swung it around into Rudy’s armpit, activating it.
Rudy convulsed. And kept convulsing, his eyes rolling to white and his teeth chattering until Trip was convinced the spiderwebbing had fully retreated. Only then did Trip shut the baton off and toss it back to Bernice.
“Get it under control or next time it’s to the balls,” Trip said.
Rudy slumped back in his seat, gasping for breath. “Working on it,” he panted feebly, twisting his nipple through his t-shirt. “Just need to adjust the ol’ factory.”
Trip nodded at him warily, then smirked into the back seat. “Ok, so from here on in, we drive around shoppers.”
“Yeah, excellent idea.” Rudy banged his forehead against the dashboard. Dazed, he sat back, offering Bernice a reassuring grin. “Just giving the chems a head start.”
Bernice didn’t return the grin. “Stop the car.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Trip asked. “We’ve barely put a mile between us and them.”
“Please. Stop. The. Car.”
Trip shook his head at her through the rear-view. “Sorry, need to make more ground. Just hold it.”
“I don’t have to pee...” she said, then clamped her mouth shut and her hands over her mouth. Her cheeks puffed out.
Trip twitched and engaged the brakes.
Before the Wound could fully skip to a stop, Bernice was pushing on the back of Trip’s seat and pushing her way out of the car, running hunched over for the front of the Wound. Trip shut the door behind her, lit a cigarette. He smirked over at Rudy. “Well...”
“What?” Rudy asked.
“What you waiting for? She’s your girlfriend. You clean up after her.”
“Right.” Rudy popped his door open to get out. His head snapped around. “Wait, what? Girlfriend?”
Trip rolled his eyes. “Just go. And make sure she doesn’t get anything on the grill. Zombie guts is one thing, but puke? That’s just disgusting.”
About ten feet out from the front of the Wound, Bernice was hunched over and grabbing a rack packed with red-striped white tube socks for support while her whole body heaved. Rudy approached her cautiously from the side. He waited for her coughing and gagging to die down, then handed her a mostly clean rag from his back pocket as she straightened.
She wiped her mouth with the rag. “Thanks.” She gave him a weak smile. “I’m such a girl, right?”
“Nah. I was thinking about puking myself. You just beat me to it, is all, and now the novelty’s gone.” He took the rag out of her hand, dabbed it at a stray chunk of something on the side of her lips. “Sorry about Trip. He’s... you know... an asshole.”
“Yeah, a big one.” Her legs waivered and she reached out to grab his arm and steady herself. “Can we sit? Just for a minute. I need to catch my breath. Or cry. Or something.”
Rudy helped her down, then sat next to her. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“I don’t see how,” she said, half laughing, half crying. “If you haven’t noticed, everyone I hang with just got turned into a zombie. And my best friend... who knows where she is or what happened to her... “
Rudy tossed the rag aside, used his thumb to clean a tear away from her eye. “You don’t know him, but Trip... unquestionably, he’s an asshole. But he also gets obsessed. Maniacally. And right now he’s obsessed with Roxanne. He won’t give up until he finds her. After that, it’s anybody’s guess how long the obsession will last. Usually until right before a wedding or he spots some new chick, but we’ll be out of here long before that happens.”
“So what if we do find her? She’ll be a zombie. Just like all of them...” Bernice’s voice trailed off with a shiver.
“We don’t know that. And even if she is, they’re just nanochines. They can be turned off.”
“How? Electric shock every five minutes for the rest of her life?”
“Plenty of ways,” Rudy said, grinning. “Permanent ways. Look at me... my chem factory’s already fought off the second wave.”
“She doesn’t have a chem factory.”
“No, but we find her, we can EMP her. One good electro-magnetic pulse should fry her nanochines. Or we get her a blood transfusion. Or I brew her up a cocktail of chems to fight them. Or shit, she’s got a mind-machine interface — maybe Trip could go in and just order them to shut down.”
Bernice’s face went just the tiniest bit optimistic. “Would that really work?”
“If he can get past any security layers they have over their command structure, sure. Probably. Maybe — he’s fifty-fifty on breaking security. Okay, thirty-seventy. But my point is, there are plenty of ways to do it. If we find Roxanne, we can bring her back. And not as a zombie.”
Bernice nodded. “Okay. But how about the rest?”
“The Sisters?”
“Yeah. If we can save Rox, we can save them too, right?”
“If we can find them. At least with Roxanne, we have a general idea where she might be. The others... they could be scattered who knows where by now. Could take weeks... months...” He stopped himself as he saw the effect his words were having on her, that hint of optimism in her eyes fading fast. “If we can... we will. If not now, we’ll come back.”
Bernice just barely smiled, but she smiled. Rudy leaned in to kiss her.
The Wound’s horn went off. Several times in short, impatient bursts. Killed the moment. Bernice scowling, Rudy’s face sagging in disappointment, they both looked back towards the Wound.
Trip’s head poked out through the window, cigarette dangling from his lips. “You done yakking up?”
“Yeah.” Bernice used Rudy’s shoulder to get to her feet. “But now I really do have to pee. All that beer.”
“Well, get pissing,” Trip said. “Bob says were close. And he filled me in on some of what to expect, security-wise.”
Rudy stood, walked up to Trip. “What are we up against?”
“We’re gonna need the goody bag.”
CHAPTER 15: STRATEGY
“Origin.” Bob’s chin rested on the back of the Wound’s front seat as he stared out the windshield between Trip and Rudy. His voice was breathless with longing. “Isn’t it... wonderful?”
Bernice answered his question by shoving the stun baton into his side and chuckling as he convulsed back.
“For a shantytown, yeah, I guess.” Trip lit a cigarette and shrugged.
The Wound idled at the edge of a five mile-wide stretch of barren concrete, at the center of which hulked the massive city of Origin. A mile wide, it was a maze of hovels with walls made out of repurposed shelving racks covered with a m
ishmash of clothing remnants.
“Looks like a fortress designed by Giger and filmed by David Lynch.” Rudy lit his calabash. “You sure she’s in there?” he asked Trip.
“Nope.” Trip glanced into the rear-view. “Bernice, how’s your confidence level? Roxanne in there somewhere?”
She shrugged at him. “How should I know?”
“Woman’s intuition, maybe?”
“It’s on the fritz.”
Trip jogged his head out at Origin. “But that is in the direction they took Roxanne?”
“Maybe,” Bernice said. “I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Leave her alone, dude,” Rudy said.
Trip grunted. “Bob? Any thoughts?”
“If they took her to the Voice, the Voice is there.”
Trip tapped ashes out his window. “Where’s ‘there’? I mean, specifically?”
“The Hub.”
Rudy pointed with his pipe out at the city and a quarter-mile thick tree-like structure at its center, branches rising to the ceiling and intertwined with it. “That central tower?”
“Yes,” Bob said. “It is the heart of the All-Mart.”
“How’re the defenses?”
Bob leaned forward, keeping a wary eye on Bernice. “I’ve never been inside, but any that live within Origin would gladly give their life to protect it.”
“Of course they would,” Rudy said.
“Which brings us to the second item on the agenda.” Trip flicked his cigarette out through the window and reached under his seat. “Strategy time.” He came back up with a battered Monopoly box in his hand. Rudy scooted up against the passenger side door to make room as Trip opened the box and laid out the board between them on the seat. The two halves of the board were held together with duct tape.
The game pieces and faded paper money were all lumped together loose in the box. Trip picked the Cannon out and placed it on Go. “This is us.” He scooped up a handful of houses and hotels and scattered them randomly across the board. “This is everybody else. Except Roxanne.” He picked out the Shoe, put it in the center of the board. “This is Roxanne. We go in guns blazing, shoot everything that isn’t Roxanne. Strategy achieved.”
Pipe clenched thoughtfully in the side of his mouth, Rudy examined the board. “Could use some slight refinement.”
“Okay...” Trip said, whisking the Shoe from the board, “instead of this shoe, Roxanne is now...” He scanned the box until he found the little Scott dog, picking it out from under a hotel and plopping it onto the board. “This Terrier. Done and done.”
Rudy nodded, pursed his lips. “You don’t think maybe — just maybe — a full-frontal shoot’em-up might be a bad move here?”
Trip’s left eyebrow went up. “When is a full-frontal shoot’em-up ever a bad idea?”
“Since about always. Especially now — we don’t know the size and capability of the opposing force. All we do know is, it took how many shots to put down Bob? And it didn’t even kill him.” Rudy glanced back at Bob. “No offense.”
Bob shrugged. “None taken.”
Trip huffed. “We took down plenty of zombies easy with the Wound back there.”
“Sure... Shoppers,” Bob said.
“You have something to add, Bob?” Trip asked.
“Shoppers aren’t as resilient as Associates. They don’t regenerate as fast as we do.”
“It’s mostly gonna be associates in Origin, right?” Rudy asked.
Bob nodded. “Shoppers aren’t allowed. Just the luckiest Associates and Security.”
“The big brutes?” Bernice asked, her voice wavering as she looked at Rudy.
“They’re big,” Bob said, “but they’re not brutes. But they are much tougher than Associates. I wouldn’t want to get on their bad side, especially the one I’m married to.”
Rudy gave Bernice a nod and turned to Trip. “Given all that... maybe we want to just take a slightly less blow-everything-to-hell approach here.”
Trip scowled. “You mean just drive up to the front gate and knock, ask if Roxanne can come out and play?”
“Yeah, why not? It worked for Dorothy.” Rudy put his calabash in the ashtray. “Think about it. We’ve been in here half a day now. Haven’t seen one security guard. Nobody’s been chasing us. Nobody’s tried to intercept us. If they were gonna turn us into zombies, you think they would have made the effort by now.”
Trip shrugged. “Maybe they’re just luring us into a false sense of security.”
“Why would they do that?” Bernice asked.
Trip smirked at her through the rear-view. “It’s funnier that way?”
“We haven’t been attacked,” Rudy said.
Trip sat back. “Trust me, once we start shooting, we’ll be attacked.”
“All I’m asking is, no guns,” Rudy said. “Unless they shoot at us first. Okay? I feel bad enough about having to shoot Granny already.”
Trip sighed. “You’re still worried about karma, aren’t you?”
“We’re — you’re — building up quite a heavy karmic debt-load.”
“Thought you wanted to be around when the universe sent me my bill?”
“Priorities change.” Rudy glanced briefly into the back seat at Bernice before looking at Trip. “Just, no guns, okay?”
“You’ll see... they’ll attack us.” Trip reached for the Monopoly board. He folded it up — counters, houses, hotels and all — and shoved it back into the box. “But if it’ll shut you up for a few precious moments, the strategy is hereby amended. No guns.”
“But you’re still gonna insist on charging straight into the place, aren’t you?” Rudy asked.
Trip slipped the box back under his seat. “I’m not big on knocking at doors. My knuckles get scuffed.”
Rudy shrugged with his eyebrows. “Okay, fine, but if that’s the way we’re gonna do this, can I at least get out and check some stuff first?”
“Vishnu’s summer house,” Trip said. “We come all this way to kick ass and chew gum, and right when we’re about to run out of gum, you want to buy a new pack?”
“Wound’s taken some hits the last couple days. Not to mention doled out a few.”
“She can take it.”
“Sure, but the whole granny zombie’s elbow thing has me spooked. What if there’s another weak point?”
Trip fingered the patch cord connecting him to the car. “The Wound’s telling me she’s fine.”
“I dunno.” Rudy put his hand palm down on the seat between them. “I’ve been feeling a weird vibration through the seat the last ten miles. Felt like the rear left wheel — like a shopper got caught in the axle or something, rattled around, did some damage.”
Trip scowled and blew smoke out the window. “It’s fine.”
“Right,” Rudy said. “How’s your leg feeling?”
Trip’s head snapped around in surprise. “It’s fine,” he said, knocking on his right knee. “Never better.”
“Your left leg.” Rudy pointed with his chin. “Any soreness in the ankle, perchance?”
Trip’s head canted to one side. “Now that you mention it... It’s nothing. I twisted it when we pinned those zombies chasing Bernice.”
Rudy smiled, crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s feedback through the man-machine interface is what it is.”
Trip growled. “I know haptic feedback when I feel it. This isn’t. The Wound’s peachy.”
“Any other aches and pains? Like in your chest — “ Rudy thumbed towards the front of the Wound “ — or your right side, ‘round your pelvis? You know, where the Wound dinged herself up good?”
Trip’s hand unconsciously pressed against his chest. “I live a pretty rough and tumble life.”
“Dude...”
“Fine,” Trip said. “How long?”
“Five minutes.” Rudy reached between his legs and grabbed his toolbox from under the seat. “Just to check some stuff, make sure she’s in fighting shape.”
&n
bsp; “Make it three. They’re gonna notice we’re here sooner or later.” Trip watched Rudy get out of the car, then smirked back at Bob. “Okay, Bob, you too.”
“What?”
“Out.”
“Why?” Bob asked. “I don’t know anything about cars.”
“Too bad, ‘cause then there might be a reason to keep you around.”
Bob nodded. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Go on.” Trip gestured out the open passenger door with his cigarette. “You can walk the rest of the way.”
“But —”
Trip un-holstered his elephant revolver. He popped the revolver’s chamber open, extracting the spent casings with his thumb and fingertip. He let them drop to the floorboard. “You’re lucky I’m not asking you to pitch in for gas.”
Bob pushed the passenger seat up with his chest, hesitantly slipped one leg out of the car. “Aren’t you gonna untie me, at least?”
“What am I, your mother?” Trip fished around in an inside-tux pocket until he found the special .85 caliber bullet he was feeling for, the ceramic one with the blinking tip. He slipped the fancy bullet into the pistol and closed the chamber. “Look, the last thing we need is you reverting into a zombie at the most clichéd second possible ‘cause we forgot to zap you in all the excitement. Scoot.” He twisted around, pointed the revolver at Bob’s nose. “Now.”
Bob grunted, and got out of the car. Getting out from under the Wound, Rudy stood and watched the zombie walking off and mumbling to himself, then got back into the car.
“How’s it looking?” Trip asked.
“Good thing I checked — had to shore up a tie rod. If that had snapped while we were at speed, goodbye Wound.” Rudy noticed Trip’s revolver was out. “Didn’t we just have a conversation about no guns?”
Trip grinned, pointed the revolver out the window and up at the ceiling.
He fired, straight up, then pulled the pistol back in.
Bernice clapped her hands over her ears. “What was that all about?”
Trip holstered the revolver. “It’s for later.”