by Jeff Abugov
“Shhh,” she said as she gently took his hand. “I have but one question, my darling, and you need not speak your answer. Merely blink once if it be yes, twice if it be no. Do you want to die?”
Harve closed his eyes and opened them while Africa awaited the second blink, but none came, only a single tear that rolled down the dying man’s cheek. This was God’s final test, Harve knew, the devil’s last seduction. Life everlasting in exchange for evil servitude.
Africa was saddened but not surprised. Hadn’t Prague given her the same choice so long ago as she herself had lay dying in a gutter, a once proud Carthaginian noble raped and beaten by the Roman invaders? And hadn’t she too chosen death over becoming what she had believed to be a pagan demon? But Prague hadn’t accepted her answer, and Africa had been grateful ever since. So too will the human.
She sprouted her sharp fangs, then bit hard into his neck. He had no strength left to fight her as she sucked out all but a single ounce of his life. She then bit into her own wrist, gasping in pain as she sliced open her veins. With her red blood dripping from her arm, she placed her open wound a hair’s breadth from his mouth.
“Yet still, I leave the choice with you,” she told him.
It was life, Harve knew, somehow he just knew. His very survival lay in her blood. Immortality less than an inch away, all he had to do was pucker up and take it. No! he shouted in his mind. It’s a test! No!
But his will to survive was too strong. As his brain continued to shout its protests, he could not stop himself from pursing his lips to taste of her sweet nectar. Those first few drops alone gave him the strength to tilt up his head to drink of her further, deeper, which in turn gave him the strength to lift his arms, grab hold of hers, and helplessly, uncontrollably suckle her very essence into his own.
Africa writhed in ecstasy as their souls intertwined. The Kentucky Christian devoured her, growing stronger with each swallow, while the lady vampire panted and cried out in orgasmic delight. The holes in his chest closed, his lung filled with air, his artery healed, and a vitality he had never experienced before coursed through his veins, making his desire to consume the woman all the more insatiable.
And she was more than happy to be consumed.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Zombie-Sanchez was sad. She had yet to stop her instinctive gnawing on the electronic metallic net that bound her under the Prius, and she could hear the sounds of war—her precious “booms”—moving away. She didn’t know it was because the tide of war had turned, that the aliens had been advancing all night and that the humans were fleeing in retreat—she no longer knew what aliens or humans were. All she knew was that the lovely noise was growing fainter with each passing moment. So when the last vehicle in the far rear of the great alien battalion drove past her and away, all the poor zombie could do was howl in wretched sorrow.
Peyton had run out of options. His command staff had been whittled down to his young Lieutenant aide, the Captain-with-the-scar who sat in place of the late Colonel, the handicapped Private, Laurel and Lance—the latter two having no military background—and the vampire Plato who seemed to be there only to watch.
He had put much of his hope on Jean-François’s promise of using the bugs’ own weapon against them, but the Frenchman had been found dead, and the weapon gone. His trained soldiers now numbered less than a thousand, and he had ordered them to fall back—although fall back to where he didn’t know. If this had been a normal war, he would have surrendered in order to spare his soldiers’ lives, but how do you surrender to an enemy whose singular goal was to watch you die?
He had done everything he could, he knew, had strategically outthought his enemy time and again. If this had been a chess game, he’d have taken significantly more of their pieces than they had of his, but he was down to the king and a few pawns while they just kept replenishing their board. How could anyone defeat that?
“Ding-dong! Zombie delivery!” a merry voice crackled over the loudspeaker.
Lance quickly altered the angle on one of the monitors to show Johnny’s low-flying chopper leading close to sixty-five thousand zombies like the Pied Piper.
“Good morning, Mr. President!” the kids shouted in unison.
“Sorry we took so long,” Johnny added. “But you’ll get your next order free.”
And with that, he soared the bird skyward and beyond, letting the roar of battle lure the sixty-five thousand the rest of the way, the children’s package delivered.
“Yes!” Peyton shouted as he waved his fist in triumph.
The Alien Commander’s bug mouth gaped open, and he coughed an involuntary gasp that could best be translated as, “Oh crap.”
Then a bug at the front of the alien lines took a shot at the chopper. Johnny darted right at the last second but not quickly enough. The white beam blasted a hole through the tail rotor, sending bird, pilot and children spiraling out of control.
*****
Not too long before Julius had sucked the life out of her, Mary had begun her initial research into the zombie phenomena. She had carefully dissected the zombie corpse that had been brought to her from their first onslaught, but there is no difference between the brain of a dead zombie and that of a dead human. A chemical analysis of zombie fluids showed blood, urine and saliva to be a highly toxic mix of human and Dweller, slowly infectious to humans while instantly poisonous, instantly deadly to Dwellers. This, of course, was interesting to her as a scientist, but did nothing to help her uncover a method to destroy the creatures outright.
She had assigned her new subordinates the task of skimming through the lore and bringing her a summary, but their quick reports also uncovered nothing of use. The zombie literature was even more conflicting than that of the vampires. There was the Plan 9 from Outer Space variety in which slow-moving zombies were resurrected human corpses; there was the 28 Days Later type in which super-fast-moving zombies had contracted an accidental virus; even The Walking Dead seemed at times inconsistent between its own graphic novel and TV show.
In the end, all she could suggest was that if bashing zombies in the head kills them, then shooting them in the head would, reasonably speaking, do the same.
And she was kind of wrong.
*****
The swarms opened fire, blasting the zombie hordes right through their blank eyes with impeccable precision, yet barely one out of a hundred fell, the rest continuing their relentless stagger forward. How could the bugs have known (even though Rhiannon did) that most of the zombie brain was already dead, and only one tiny part of one tiny lobe was all that kept these undead alive? There was a decent chance that a single shard from a shotgun’s spray would pierce the miniscule target, and a blunt object bashed through their soft skull would shatter the whole brain at once, but a perfectly clean shot of white nothingness through the eyes had no effect at all. Only the bugs’ misses had a chance of hitting the target, and the bugs rarely missed. Say, one out of a hundred times.
But the Alien Commander would not be dissuaded. If hand-to-hand it must be, then hand-to-hand it would be. He had beaten these creatures before, and he would do so again. Even at a ten-to-one loss rate, he had more than enough soldiers to complete the task. And so he coughed the order for his troops to charge!
Meanwhile, the 407 was still spiraling out of control. Patrick and Rhiannon bounced from one wall to the other, from ceiling to floor, as wooden crates of weapons and explosives (which had never been removed) bashed against the walls and splintered open. Johnny, securely belted in the only seat, struggled with the controls, dumping power and pushing over the cyclic as the helicopter spun straight toward the brick wall of a fifteen-story condo unit.
At the last moment, he managed to pull up just enough to get the front of the bird above the top edge of the roof, the forward thrust lurching it over the rest of the way, the skids ramming hard into the brick wall and collapsing under the fuselage. The metal bottom scraped fiery sparks against the roof’s edge as the 407 climbed a few y
ards above the gravel floor, then crashed back down on its side. The blades screamed as they bent and crumpled while the machine slid sideways across the building where it would inevitably fall over the other side to plummet back to the ground fifteen stories below.
“Jump!” Johnny yelled. “Get out! Now!”
The kids didn’t need to be told for their imminent doom was clear. Rhiannon, closest to the door, leapt out fast, landing in a perfect drop-and-roll (which she had learned from television), then sat on the ground panting, watching, and wondering why the other two hadn’t jumped as well.
“I’m stuck!” Patrick shouted, his legs pinned against the wall by one of the wooden crates. “Help me!”
Johnny hurriedly unlatched his seat belt and climbed back to the boy. He tossed out the debris that blocked him like yesterday’s garbage—loose weapons, binoculars, walkies. He groaned from the searing pain in his abdomen as he shoved the crate away from the boy. Patrick stood up fast but immediately fell back down.
“My leg!” he cried. “I think it’s broken! I can’t move!”
With the bird only feet, seconds, away from careening over the edge, Johnny lifted the boy into his arms—barking obscenities as two more of his stitches ripped apart—then leapt out the open door to safety just as the helicopter slid off the building, exploding into a giant ball of flame on the ground below.
The three lay on the roof, panting. Johnny clutched his belly as he watched the smoke rise from the crash. “I bet they’re going to make me pay for that,” he said.
*****
It was almost as if the explosion was the cue for battle because that was the precise moment in which the charging aliens came face-to-face with the zombie hordes. The battle was brutally ugly as the swarms bashed their rifle butts through the zombies’ soft skulls, while the brain-dead undead sunk their rotted teeth and gray fingernails into the bugs’ crusty scales. The chaos was more akin to a battle of ancient times, one in which Marc Antony or Achilles may have fought, certainly not one in which a race that has mastered quantum mechanics would be involved.
Under the Toyota, zombie-Sanchez continued to instinctively gnaw on the electronic net that bound her. She didn’t know why she did so, didn’t know that the constant scraping against the metal had made her decayed teeth razor sharp, and she lacked the brain capacity to wonder about either. Nonetheless, her scalpel-like molar at last punctured a small crack in the metal. Purple steam—the net’s energy source—sprayed out like air from a balloon. The net deflated to a flat, thin material that tore apart against the zombie’s weight, and she fell to the ground.
She crawled out from under the car and rose to her feet. She was almost a mile behind the alien rear, which was another mile from the vicious battle, but she could hear the grunts and groans and yells and screams of the dying warriors. She would have smiled if the part of her brain that controlled such things were alive, but instead, the contented zombie merely staggered forward to war.
“Pretty noise,” she’d have said if she had words. “Pretty pretty noise noise.”
Peyton and his motley staff watched the battle on the monitors, and the Commander in Chief was pleased. According to Lance—who seemed to know everything about these creatures—zombies had no secret vulnerability the way vampires did. The only way to end them was an assault to the head, but the bugs already knew that, and they were still losing. Unlike the Alien Commander’s initial estimation, the loss rate was more like twenty-to-one, and the zombies had outnumbered the bugs by a factor of more than six from the start. The fact that no new replacement bugs had yet to arrive was odd, and Peyton could only assume that the Alien Commander was pondering a full retreat as he had against the vampires.
“Mr. President?” Lance began. “What’re we going to do about all the zombies after the bugs are gone?”
“One enemy at a time, son,” Peyton answered. “One enemy at a time.”
But the thought grated on him. What good was saving the world from aliens only to have the planet overrun by zombies?
“How’d they get rid of them in that Brad Pitt movie?” he asked.
“They gave all the people in the world a lethal injection.”
“Well, that doesn’t seem smart,” answered the President.
On the ground, the Alien Commander watched the carnage through his scope. The heavy loss rate his side was suffering didn’t concern him for he knew that he had billions of brave replacements itching to jump into the fray. But where were they? His standing orders had been for the replacements to wormhole to battle with no delay at all, so where the cough were they?!!!
He ordered his Sub-Commander to look into it, only to have the subordinate inform him that the vessel had shut down all communications.
And for the first time, the Alien Commander began to worry.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Africa and Harve held hands like schoolkids as they walked up the stairwell. They had been watching the battle through the hospital lobby window, but with the sun soon to rise they knew that that would not be an option much longer.
Although the windowless old storage room would be a safe place to spend the day, Harve had serious misgivings about popping in on the Commander in Chief without having been summoned. Africa, embracing her new role as mentor, was delighted to point out that Harve was no longer a mere lieutenant in the United States Army but the mate of the acting vampire queen.
The soldier took it in with a nod, but he was still having trouble adjusting to his new identity—although he appeared more handsome than he ever had in his life. “Okay, but I’ll tell you right now. I’m not going to kill people.”
“You have killed many people in your time,” she casually responded.
“Enemies,” he countered emphatically. “Bad people.”
“Then bad people it shall be. We shall voyage to the Middle East in which there are villains aplenty on whom you may feast.”
“That’s a thought,” he considered, then he opened the HQ door for his lady. They walked inside and quietly took their seats next to Plato in the back.
“What about that zombie TV show?” Peyton was asking Lance. He knew full well that the billions of aliens hovering above remained a grave threat, but with his eyes glued to monitors showing zombies killing bugs at an alarming pace, he was determined to find a solution for the next challenge he would possibly have to face.
“TV show, sir?” Lance asked. “You mean The Walking Dead?”
“Yeah. How’d they get rid of their zombies?”
“They didn’t,” Lance answered. “It’s a TV series. Zombies every week.”
“Oh yeah. That makes sense.”
*****
The Alien Commander fought back the fear that grew inside him like a parasitic cancer. He had wormholed one of his officers back to the vessel to uncover the root of the communications problem, but the soldier never returned, the communication issue was never fixed, and the Commander’s anxiety mounted. But his unacceptable rising fright only served to heighten his insatiable desire to win, which in turn ignited his colossal brain. All his years of training suddenly kicked in like an explosion, all those years of baffling his drug-induced amnesiac self with confounding impossible challenges of his own design—and then he saw it! In one mad bolt of inspiration, he knew exactly how to destroy the zombies en masse, and the now pesky humans would be sure to follow. It was perfect, and he knew it.
With intense focus, he watched the zombies push his troops back toward him. They were getting too close for comfort, and he deemed it prudent to pull the command vehicle back to the safety of the vessel meadow before initiating his plan. He tapped a series of symbols on his keypad to divert the power source from the vessel’s main brain, and plugged directly into the central core of the quantum generators. But before he could tap the next sequence of commands, a burning pain shot through the human flesh that surrounded his thorax. The two thousand pound behemoth gagged, wretched and dropped dead to the ground, crushing almost al
l of his high command, pinning in place the sole surviving Sub-Commander.
For the alien brass had been so transfixed on the zombie hordes that lay ahead that it never occurred to them that a single zombie could be behind, staggering up onto their vehicle unheard over their Commander’s coughing shouts.
Zombie-Sanchez lay upon the nine-foot monstrosity, joyously feasting upon his flesh. She had no comprehension of the vast contribution to the war effort that she had just made by killing the enemy Commander—she didn’t even know what war was anymore. All she knew was that he was delicious, juicy and fresh, his flabby human meat made even more delectable by the tart green blood that flowed within.
“Yum,” she would have said if she had had words. “Yum, yummer, yummest.”
In the control room, cheers abounded.
On the rooftop, Johnny and the kids watched through their binoculars.
“Well, look at that,” Johnny said with a smile. “Y’know, I almost dated her. First day we met, she vowed that she’d kill that guy some day. So let that be a lesson to you kids. No matter what life may throw at you, never give up on your dreams.”
Then the President’s voice squeaked out from the walkie-talkie on the ground. “How about that other zombie movie? How’d they get rid of their zombies?”
“Which movie, sir?” Lance asked.
“You know. The one with the guy from the Facebook movie, and the other guy from the Cheers reruns.”
“Um . . . Zombieland?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t see it.”
“Oh,” the President answered.
On the ground, zombie-Sanchez continued to gorge on the Commander’s fine flab and sinew. The Sub-Commander finally managed to wriggle out from under his superior’s hulking corpse and then whipped his rifle off his back to ram its butt into the head of the unsuspecting Sanchez when he noticed twenty zombies headed straight at him. So he jumped off the flatbed and ran.