by Tristan Vick
55
Shade Falleth
Aokigahara Village, Near Mt. Fuji, Japan
Split open like a spider’s nest, hungry undead spilled out of the shipping containers. Each one expelled at least thirty zombies that staggered out and looked around with hungry white eyes as they scanned the faces of the terrified crowd.
“Get everyone inside the safety of the gates!” Saeko ordered, looking back at Daiichi. He answered with a silent salute and did as was asked of him. Turning back around, Saeko held her sword at the ready, her green and blue plaid school girl skirt flapping in the breeze.
She held steadfast as a swarm of zombies bearing down on her, gripped her sword tight, and readied herself for the fight of her life. The last time she faced this many all at once was at Tokyo Stadium that fateful day. The day she lost everything…including her life.
Saeko ducked the first zombie’s swipe. Wielding her blade, she spun around and sliced its head off. Before the monster’s head could hit the ground, she had already moved on to the next one shambling toward her with outstretched arms. After dispatching another, she jogged up to Rachael’s side, who was eradicating zombies like Xena the Warrior Princess, and said, “You seem to be having all the fun!”
“This isn’t a game,” Rachael informed.
Saeko ignored her. She approached a droopy faced waitress and sliced her arms off at the shoulders with two quick swipes of her blade and then kicked her in the chest and sent her on her ass. Toppling over, the armless zombie landed on her back and rolled around but couldn’t manage to get herself back up.
Rachael looked over her shoulder at Saeko and grinned. “How’d you get to be so tough anyway?”
Before she could answer her, a zombified ground crew worker staggered up to Saeko and she quickly split him in half with a vicious downward slice. Following it up, Saeko spun a full 180 and cut through the legs of two other zombies creeping up behind her.
Flipping her blade up and pointing it toward herself she pulled the handle toward her body. The blade passed under her arm, mere centimeters from her ribcage, and slid into the face of the armless women which was inching her way toward Saeko on the ground, like a caterpillar. “You don’t need to worry about me. Tough is the way the world made me.”
“You wanna see tough?” Rachael asked, unsheathing her Claymore. Saeko merely smiled and motioned for her to go ahead and show her up.
Rachael dashed toward the second container and the litter of undead milling around in search of a bite to eat and began her onslaught.
She ignored any tinge of pain, and thanks to an unforeseen side-effect of the Resurrection Virus, her strength was easily doubled and then some. With one punch she sent the first zombie husk flying five feet up into the air and twelve feet back.
She kicked another monster in its sternum and it shot backward with the velocity of a bowling ball, taking out half a dozen others in its wake. The whole group of fellow Biters crumpled into a dog pile of moaning monsters. Spinning gracefully, Rachael sliced through the heads of three other Biters with her massive sword. Their skullcaps lopped off, all three creatures’ bodies tottered and then fell flat onto their faces—their severed brains prominently on display.
Looking back over her shoulder, she saw a snarly haired flight attendant lurching up behind her. With a harsh back-kick, Rachael sent the woman flying into the air. She crash landed on top of two other unsuspecting Biters.
“Impressive,” Saeko said. She couldn’t help but smile as she raised her sword high above her head and scanned a dozen zombies closing in around her. It felt like a friendly competition between her and Rachael; who could kill the most zombies.
“Your turn,” Rachael informed. Planting her sword tip in the ground, she placed her elbow on the end of the pommel and perched on her sword, leaning on it like a walking stick. She watched with amusement as Saeko began a furious display of master swordsmanship.
As Rachael watched zombies fall to the ground left and right, unexpectedly, a hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed her by the shoulder. Spinning around, Rachael gripped the raggedy-looking salary man by his necktie and hoisted him up off the ground as if he weighed little more than a downy pillow, then she tossed him twelve feet through the air. His brittle legs broke underneath him as he crashed down to the ground. Hard. With a disgruntled moan, he started dragging his useless legs behind him, making his way back toward her to try all over again.
SHLUNK!
Saeko pinned the zombie’s head to the ground with her sword then pulled her blade back out of its skull, flicked the blood off it, and looked up at Rachael. “Tough enough for you?”
Swaggering up to Rachael, Saeko thumbed over her shoulder toward the upside down Toyota 4Runner and added, “Maybe you can teach me that cool trick you did with that truck.”
“Maybe,” Rachael said, smiling at her wryly from beneath dark set eyes that exuded the fiercest sort of determination.
“Come on! You have to tell me how you did that,” Saeko pleaded.
“All in due time. First, let’s finish cleaning up this godforsaken mess,” she said, nodding in the direction of a still squirming undead corpse.
Saeko shrugged then turned back around and looked at the battlefield littered with several dozen bodies of deceased monsters. Of the horde, only one continued to wriggle and writhe. The creature’s bloody maw chomped pointlessly up at the sky; Saeko spotted the woman without arms.
Reaching down to her belt, Saeko pulled out a throwing star. Taking careful aim, she flung the shuriken and watched it spin through the air like a miniature saw blade. In the blink of an eye it planted itself squarely in-between the woman’s eyes and put her down for good.
56
Feast of Flesh
Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay, U.S.A.
Groggy with the lingering haze of sleep, Gordon Longstaff fought to open his eyes. The last thing he remembered was being at the banquet hall and having taken a single bite of his steak dinner after Jennifer Hurley had urged him to eat up. After that all the rest was a blur to him and he suspected that all the food may have been drugged.
As his eyes began to focus he looked around and noted that he was in a large bedroom lit by a hundred or more candles. The walls were lined with claret drapes with deep pleated folds and ornate, gold floral stenciling. A coordinating golden candle chandelier hung directly over the center of the room. A black vanity table with two candelabras provided additional light that was reflected by the large, over-sized mirror that hung on the wall opposite from him and, realizing what it meant, dread filled the pit of his stomach.
Longstaff realized he was just a fly trapped in the black widow’s web. If that wasn’t bad enough, it dawned on him that he wasn’t entirely decent, as every piece of clothing he owned was folded neatly on the floor beside the bed. Raising his head, he looked down at himself and then grumbled, “Balls.”
Longstaff attempted to sit up but couldn’t. Tugging on his wrists and ankles, he found them securely strapped to a luxurious bed by means of heavy duty leather straps that were fastened to the oak bedposts. The bedpost toppers were spiked, rather than rounded, and the straps, the kind you’d find on an execution table for receiving a lethal injection, ran through a steel buckle. The buckle had a latch threaded with a small padlock, ensuring that the straps could not be easily undone, at least not without some ingenuity. And if there was one thing he knew, an escape artist he most certainly was not.
Grunting out of frustration, he put some muscle into it and tugged on his restraints again, testing the amount of resistance, hoping he might be able to loosen something. But the oak was sturdy and the restraints held firm. “Dammit!” he cursed, giving way to his discontentment.
“Relax big-boy,” Jennifer Hurley’s voice said. “Nothing bad will happen as long as you submit to me.”
Suddenly, Gordon’s eyes shot open. Looking around the room, he saw Jen wearing a fluffy white robe. She was currently bent down lighting some addi
tional candles. “What did you do to me?” Longstaff asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Jen laughed. “I drugged you, of course.”
“Just me?”
“Why? Are you worried about your woman?”
“If you harm a single hair on her head I swear to you I’ll—”
“Relax! No need to get all bent out of shape. She’s fine. She’s with the good doctor.”
Jen paused and stared vacantly out at the flickering bouquet of candles. Suddenly her shoulders and head twitched and, in a somewhat higher pitch voice, she said, “You shouldn’t lie. Lying is not very nice.”
Jen turned her head to the wall, where there didn’t seem to be anything of interest, and began talking to it. Gordon couldn’t tell if she was talking to herself, or to the wall itself.
“Oh, you hush. I wasn’t lying. I was just telling a half truth.” Jen stood up, turned, and looked right at him. It looked like she wanted to say something but seemed as though she had lost her train of thought.
Coming closer to him, Jen held a long, slender candle in one hand. The flicker of its flame caused the amber lights to dance across her face and enhanced the intensity of her gleaming blue eyes.
“What do you intend to do with me?”
“If you must know,” Jen sighed, sounding more vexed than usual. “In order to control the monsters, I need to release a certain amount of my pheromones regularly. If I don’t have an orgasm at least every four hours, I begin to lose control over the creatures. Which means, to keep everyone on this island alive, including your beloved Alyssa Briggs, and yes even lil’ ole me, you will need to fuck me till my legs are shaking so badly that I can’t stand up.”
“So, you basically have made me into your personal sex slave, is that it?”
“Something like that,” Jen replied with a chuckle. Brushing her long blonde hair back, she said, “Let’s just call it an audition, shall we?”
“An audition, huh? A pass or fail sort of thing?”
“Precisely,” Jen answered, setting her candle on the table beside him. Bending down, she reached under the bed and pulled out a small metal lockbox and set it on the edge of the bed. Lifting the metal latches, she opened it and drew out a large, white, medical grade syringe from the dark gray Styrofoam lining. Pulling off the blue cap of the needle with her teeth, she spit the cap onto the floor, tapped the tube of the syringe to dislodge any air bubbles and squirted a sampling of the medicine into the air.
“And what the hell kind of poison is that?” Longstaff asked nervously, as he eyeballed the long needle. He hated needles.
“It’s Caverject,” she said with a rather suggestive smile. Jen already felt herself growing overheated with lust. Anytime she broke in a new stallion, she couldn’t help but become filled with impious cravings that had only one means of being quenched.
Aroused, Jen breathed heavily through her nostrils with excitement and groped her own breasts, moaning lightly. Then, bending over Longstaff who was strapped to the bed, she held up the dripping needle for him to see, and informed, “This will prick, a bit.”
Jen stabbed the needle into his half-limp cock, forcing him to grunt with displeasure, and then, once she’d completed the act, she untied Gordon’s wrists.
Rubbing his wrists, he sat up in the bed and glowered at her. “What’s to prevent me from strangling you right here and now?”
“Oh, don’t tease me, Mr. Longstaff. Just the thought of your hands wrapped tightly around my neck makes me wet. Besides, I thought we’d already been through this. You won’t kill me. After all, even if you were to escape my chambers, get past the guards outside these doors, and make it out of this building alive, your priority would still be to rescue your darling Alyssa. But by the time you reached her, however, I’m afraid it would already be too late.”
Jen rubbed her finger down Gordon’s nose and tapped it once as she spoke in a cutesy baby-voice. “Need I remind you that you’re on Alcatraz? You literally have no place to run. No place to go. And without their dear mommy to care for them and feed them, my little darlings will be so starved that they will tear anything with a heartbeat to shreds. Do you really want to risk it?”
She gazed long and hard into his hazel eyes, and after a few seconds she knew he was all talk. He wouldn’t take such a reckless chance.
Disgruntled, Longstaff fumed and turned his head away in displeasure. “Fine,” he grumbled. “Just get on with it and get it over with.”
“Nice to see you’re a man of reason,” Jen said, pleased that he’d come around to her way of seeing things. She smiled and then, taking a step back, unfastened her white robe and let it slip off her shoulders and fall to the ground.
Baring all, Jennifer Hurley stood before Gordon Longstaff and took pleasure in watching his eyes study the feminine topography of her alluring form, from her well-defined sternum to the pink nipples standing erect upon her bulging breasts.
Gordon’s eyes roamed down Jen’s amazingly fit body to her taught abs, forged from her grueling schedule of fucking at least seven times a day. Gradually, his gaze wandered down to the gentle curve of her mons pubis.
Jen bit her lip and grinned. “You like what you see?” He didn’t respond, but she knew he was interested. His eyes were glued to her bod. Reaching down, she touched herself and found she was already moist. Reaching up, she wiped her heavenly residue on his lips and whispered, “Shall we begin?”
Before partaking in the evening’s festivities, Gordon grabbed Jen by her throat and said, “Don’t think for a single moment that this means anything.”
Randy and turned on, Jen pushed Gordon back onto the bed, threw her leg over him, straddling his pelvis, and then settled in. “Don’t worry Mr. Longstaff…” she said in an overheated sounding whisper, the lust practically dripping off her tongue. “I’ll enjoy it enough for the both of us.”
Moaning in pleasure as she placed him inside of her, Jen reveled in the fact that he groaned in anger to mask the moans of pleasure he obviously felt. After all, he was only human, and she was going to do her damned best to get him to make her come, or at the very least, break his cock off inside of her trying. Still, it amused her that he was so fixated on maintaining whatever misguided notion of chivalrous loyalty he felt toward his sweet Alyssa. Jen felt it was rather quite cute actually—in a pathetic sort of way.
57
Unfinished Business
Aokigahara Village, Near Mt. Fuji, Japan
Bodies littered the both sides of the village’s bamboo gates. It looked like a war zone, but the only soldiers were two petite women with swords.
Rachael Ramirez used the shirt of a corpse and wiped the blood off her longsword. Turning toward Saeko, she informed, “I’ll take care of any stragglers.”
Satisfied, Saeko nodded then turned and headed up to the school in the heart of the village, where all the town’s people would be gathered for safety. It also acted as an emergency center, since the local clinic wasn’t big enough to hold all the wounded and the closest hospital was forty miles up the road in the thick of undead territory.
As she walked the streets, she looked around at all the shops and homes that used to be such a big part of her life. She hadn’t been to Aokigahara in years, and she wished it would have been under better circumstances. But as much as she dreaded being back, at the same time, she was almost giddy at the thought of being able to see Kevin again. She wondered how he was doing.
“What do you mean he’s gone?” Saeko screamed as she slammed her fists down onto the nurse’s desk.
Daiichi Endo and a group of men laid the admiral down onto a nearby bed which had been made into a makeshift emergency medical table. The small clinic next to the school was already filled to over-capacity with wounded who got torn up in the crossfire of the evening barrage, so they had taken him to the school infirmary instead.
Admiral Sakaguchi, weak with fatigue from being vitally wounded by the gunshot, raised his hand and mumbled something.
; Commander Endo leaned in to listen, but the admiral wanted to sit up to address his daughter. Some of the village women were already attending to his wounds.
One old woman took a scissors and began cutting away the admiral’s blood-soaked uniform while another wiped his wounds clean and applied pressure to the them until the village doctor could arrive to stitch them up.
Endo, who stood diligently by his side, helped the admiral to sit up.
In a weak voice, the admiral informed his daughter that, “Mt. Gongen was the last place we saw him. If anyone knows where he is, it would be Mia, the evil twin, Ijin Gen’s first General. Leader of the Black Dragons.”
“Where can I find this bitch?” Saeko demanded to know.
The admiral looked away from his daughter. “Find Gen and you’ll find all the answers you seek.”
Flying into a rage, Saeko roared, “Don’t tell me cryptic shit like that! You were there! You saw him!”
“I’m sorry,” her father replied, coughing. “That’s all I have to go on.”
“You lie!” Saeko hollered back. Suddenly, Saeko felt a hand on her shoulder. Looking over, she saw Rachael’s face.
“Dead or alive, we’ll find him. I promise.”
Saeko stared at her with a perplexed look for the longest time, then it hit her. “You…you’re going to help me? Why?”
With a look devoid of emotion, Rachael replied, “Haven’t you heard? I’m a monster hunter.” Rachael suddenly grinned, which forced Saeko to grin in return. “I hunt monsters. And, in my estimation, this Ijin Gen asshole is a monster if there ever was one.”
“You’re crazy,” Saeko said.
“Payback is a bitch, wouldn’t you say?”
“Wrong. A couple of bitches,” Saeko corrected, pointing at Rachael then herself.
Saeko turned back toward Daiichi and they exchanged that look they’d given each other so many times before. Daiichi nodded to her and let her know he understood. She had to do what she had to do. She had to face her demons once and for all.