Z is for Zombie

by Philip Hansen

  “Crap.”

  Skinny fell onto his back, the P90 dropping from his hands and rapping hard against the blacktop. The two Roamers, both of them were dressed in faded gray coveralls like an automotive repairman.

  Or a Janitor, a voice in Skinny’s head said.

  They both had friendly little oval nametags. One of them read “Bob” and the other one “Neal”. If they hadn’t been trying to tear off Skinny’s head and his right arm, he might have laughed.

  Laugh anyway, Skinny boy, the little voice said. It is the last joke you will ever hear.

  Skinny lashed out with his right arm, he found the P90 right where it should be, tethered to his side by twenty-four inches of tactical combat strap. He got a good grip on it and swung it up hard, where it connected with Bob’s head, smashing it in like a rotting pumpkin.

  Neal had Skinny’s left arm pinned to the ground with both hands and was chewing on Skinny’s BDU jacket, tearing off chunks of the green and brown digital camouflage.

  Not missing out on the free lunch, the Doctor jumped onto Skinny’s legs. Something cracked.

  “Fuck!” Skinny screamed. “Mack, Navarette, El Tee!”

  There was no answer, but he could hear the bark and whistle sound of El Tee’s Desert Eagle firing. In slow motion, Skinny could see the bullet leaving little Matrix ripples in the air. It tore into Neal’s arm, severing it at the wrist. Neal fell back onto its ass, holding the severed stump of its arm up in front of its face in disbelief. Its eyes went all wide and it started to bawl little blood red tears like a four year old with a broken toy.

  His arm free, Skinny pulled the P90 up to his chest and charged the rod, putting a live round into the chamber. He flipped the switch from burst to full auto and fired down the length of his body, where the Doctor had Skinny’s bootlaces dangling from its teeth like skinny licorice.

  The bullets tore into the Doctors arm, shoulder and chest, flipping the corpse end over end. Skinny sat up and fired again.

  On full auto, the Belgian P90 can hammer out nine hundred rounds a second from an overhead fifty round clip. Skinny let the Doctor have the full clip. The corpse was twitching and bouncing around. An invisible cat batted at it like a fuzzy ball at the end of a length of string.

  Skinny was screaming when the clip ran dry. He hadn’t heard himself screaming, but there was a sound coming from him. A high-pitched alien sound that came from the deep primal part of him that still feared what it couldn’t see in the darkness. When the alien Grays stood in the tall shadows of an Air Force platoon after the Roswell crash, they had made the same tortured sound.

  His body ran on automatic. He ejected the clip, grabbed another from a front pocket in his ammo vest, rapped it twice against his helmet and then slapped it in place.

  Ka-Chink.

  Skinny had lived to hear the sound again. He charged the rod and took aim.

  A heavy hand fell on his shoulder.

  “Go easy,” Navarette said. The edge of Navarette’s slight accent slipped over the top of Skinny’s howling cry like a bad check going into an envelope. Skinny stopped screaming and pointed his rifle at the ground.

  Mack and El Tee swam into Skinny’s tunnel vision. Mack kicked the Doctor corpse in the leg.

  “Looks dead enough. Let’s go.”

  “What about him?” El Tee waved his flat black Desert Eagle at Neal. It was snuffling a nose full of dead snot and crying big blubbery baby cries.

  “Forget it. The AR-210’s will get it. Make like a tree,” Mack said.

  Navarette looped his free arm around Skinny’s chest and they started hobbling toward the entrance to the abandoned apartment complex. Skinny’s right leg was twisted at an odd angle above his torn boot. Every time his foot hit the ground he got a feeling in his knee like live squirrels were gnawing on him. He bit his lip hard enough to draw blood and let Navarette drag him along, looking like stepbrothers in a three-legged race.

  What is funnier than a rubber crutch? the little voice said as Skinny’s bones ground together.

  “A pay toilet in a diarrhea ward.” Skinny whispered through clenched teeth. Navarette smiled and nodded like he had heard both sides of the joke.

  Mack and El Tee were already at the entrance, hacking away at the boards blocking the entrance with small field hatchets.

  Navarette dropped Skinny on the sidewalk and pulled another shiny chrome hatchet from a second backpack looped around his arm. He had been carrying Skinny, Skinny’s pack, his burly SAW and his own pack. Navarette was three kinds of muscle.

  Skinny grunted a little when he hit the sidewalk.

  Navarette held up the little axe and made chop, chop motions.

  “You want me to cut it off?”

  Skinny gave him a grin like a bear.

  “Thought it might hurt less.” He held up the axe again, turning it slightly so it gleamed in the sun. “Last chance.”

  Skinny squinted at him, pinching up his face in his best “Mack on a bad day.” impression.

  Skinny’s face suddenly went blank. He had caught the shadow of something in the reflection on the mirror surface of the small axe. It was the shadow of the incoming F-18 E/F Super Hornet.

  They had run out of time.

  * * *

  Lance “Penguin” Charlier was flying too low and too fast. He did a quick bank around a skyscraper and leveled out above the rooftops of the city center. Echo squad was down there somewhere, mixed in with the Roamers and Freaks. He rolled his eyes at the thought. Freaks were those little non-military civilian groups that tried to survive in the city of the dead, living in shopping malls and skyscrapers. They didn’t usually last long.

  “Incoming.” He said to himself.

  “Pity the Fool”, the F-18 E/F Super Hornet jet fighter, had lost her COM (Communications) system months ago and there wasn’t anyone left alive to fix it. He flew quiet now. It was he and his poor crippled girl and miles of empty blue sky. She had been shot to hell by a couple of rogue Russian Mig’s at the beginning of the whole mess.

  They wouldn’t be flying the F-18 at all, except she was the only bird they had that could hold the modified AR-210’s.

  Penguin tapped the glass screen controlling the missile guidance system twice. The four AR-210’s were showing “red” for ready. Flashing text in block military letters said, “LASER ACTIVE. FIRE?” “Pity the Fool” couldn’t hear, but she could still see fine. She had homed in on Masterson’s laser targeting pointer.

  “Red for ready. A for Active. F for Fire. Bombs away,” Penguin said. He tapped each of the red AR-120’s on the glass HUD (Heads Up Display) twice. Three of them cycled back to green and then went dark. He could feel the F-18 E/F shudder slightly as three of the AR-210’s dropped down and away into the city center. One of them stayed red.

  “Fuck your mother,” Penguin grunted. He twisted his head around, snapping his black helmet visor into place as he turned to avoid the sun’s glare. The fourth AR-210 was still there, shaking and rattling. It hadn’t let go.

  He double tapped the fourth bomb on the HUD. It went from red to green and then went dark. He twisted around again. It was still there, shaking worse now and causing the whole jet to rattle with it. He saw the red nosecone and the white chalk where the ordinance tech had written, “Headshot!”

  The bomb started thrashing around, banging against the housing and slamming into the wing.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Then it exploded.

  * * *

  Navarette saw Skinny’s face and dropped the axe. He swung his SAW around on its tactical combat strap.

  “Clear,” he growled.

  Mack and El Tee ran out of the way, El Tee turning his face away and holding onto his black SWAT style combat helmet with both hands. Mack squinted under his goggles, his jaw square.

  Navarette unloaded the full 100 round magazine into the boards blocking the apartment complex entrance. Brass rained down around Skinny. Wood chips, sawdust and gunpowder smoke stung his face. When th
e magazine ran dry Navarette turned and grabbed Skinny by the front of his jacket and crashed headlong into what was left of the wood planks.

  It was a scene from The Incredible Hulk. Navarette plowed through the smoke like a big green monster, Skinny thrown over one shoulder in a firemen’s carry.

  The only thing missing, Skinny thought, is the big explosion right behind us.

  Behind them there was a big explosion.

  The apartment complex shook, cheap white plaster raining down on them like an upturned bag of flour.

  “G-g-ground,” Skinny said from over Navarette’s shoulder, “get us off the ground.” Dark shapes moved in the white plaster dust. The lobby was filled with Roamers. Hundreds of them.

  Navarette didn’t stop moving. He plowed across the lobby, heading for the fire stairs. He slammed right into the crowd of Roamers, pushing into them like a New Yorker without a Subway Token.

  Pale hands of rotted flesh turned and reached for Navarette. For a moment the big California Miwok Indian transformed, becoming a huge green Mississippi water snake. Skinny felt the muscles in Navarette’s back moving and the grip of his tattooed body builder arm around his narrow waist, but Skinny’s mind felt what is eyes could not comprehend. Navarette had changed. His breath hissed from his lungs and his legs melted together into a green and black blur. Navarette wasn’t pushing through the pack of growling corpses; he flowed through them serpentine fashion like they were ripples in a quiet pond.

  And like that they were on the other side.

  Navarette kicked the metal “Push to Exit” bar on the fire stairs and the door swung open on the empty stairway. He took the stairs three at a time, Skinny bouncing up and down on his back.

  “M-m-mack,” Skinny said. “El-l T-t-tee.”

  “Forget them. They’re gone.”

  Navarette was all business.

  The building shook with a triple thump as the air-to-ground AR-210’s hit their target.

  * * *

  The AR-210 is a modified air-to-ground chemical agent deployment system developed by Iraqi scientists. In the right hands, it is a weapon of singular mass destruction, capable of deploying 210 lbs. of compressed chemical agent in a quarter mile area. Similar to a fuel-air missile, when the AR-210 explodes it sucks up all the oxygen in a quarter mile area - mixing it with its chemical payload - and then exploding it outward in a rapidly moving cloud of poison gas. Once successfully deployed, an AR-210 bomb creates a low-lying fog bank that takes hours to disperse.

  Dubbed “Agent Red”, this powerful neurotoxin is known for its blood red color. Agent Red is deadly to all known life forms. Agent Red also has a side effect. Agent Red dissolves necrotic flesh.

  * * *

  The shockwave almost knocked Mack off his feet. He caught his balance long enough to smash the butt of his M16 against the forehead of a white-faced corpse dressed in a lacy lolita-goth costume. Mack and El Tee were totally surrounded in the small lobby. Mack could see Navarette hauling ass through the dogpile of corpses, but he couldn’t catch a break from the melee to follow. Every time he pushed a drooling Roamer back or knocked one down three more took its place.

  Mack had run out of .223 rounds and was pushing and swinging wildly with his M16A2, using it as a club to keep the clawed hands and moss encrusted teeth of a hundred hungry corpses away from El Tee.

  El Tee’s eyes went blood red and he smiled. A blood vessel somewhere in his brain had burst. He crossed his arms over his chest and started firing the dual .50 cal Desert Eagle’s Wyatt Earp style. Each shot took down a Roamer and they never got back up. Heads exploded and spines broke. Black blood splashed his face and drops of it sizzled as it splattered against his smoking guns.

  “I never liked you,” El Tee screamed.

  Mack crunched the fallen corpse of a small Mexican child under his boot heel. “I know.”

  Blood red tentacles of gas slithered through the smashed lobby doors. A low moan started up from the collected crowd of Roamers. It built into a howl and then rose in pitch until they were screaming. Slowly the Roamers started backing away from Mack and El Tee (who never stopped firing, dropping the ghouls with one bullet-boy precision shot after another).

  “They know,” Mack said.

  “Time to die, Motherfuckers!” El Tee taunted as a swirling rope of red smoke wrapped around his knees. Engulfed in a cloak of red smoke, El Tee died, his eyes blood red and his lungs filled with the Agent Red neurotoxin.

  Mack waited, holding his breath as the cloud of Agent Red washed over him. The Roamers broke ranks and began to run, some of them running into the slow moving bank of poison gas. When they hit the gas, they melted. Gobs of steaming flesh boiled away from their bones, splashing the floor like pools of vomit.

  In less than a minute, the horde of Roamers were dead. Melted like toy soldiers in a microwave. Mack walked outside, stepping over the body of El Tee, whose dead flesh had started to bubble and sizzle like bacon in a hot plate. He looked for the sun. It was there, hidden behind the fog bank of pale red gas, and it looked down on him like a bloodshot eye.

  Staring up at the sun through his black combat goggles, Mack took a deep breath and died.

  * * *

  When they hit the fifth floor landing, Navarette set Skinny down. Five floors below, the bodies of his best friends were melting.

  He reached over and shook Skinny’s black 1911 out of its holster and then he squinted a bit to clear his vision, because somewhere inside him the flood was building and he knew that there would be waterworks. Oh, yes. There would be waterworks and sadness and a deep tunnel sliding down and away and down again into a pit of black-faced despair, but for right now there was still business to take care of.

  He pointed the 1911 at Skinny’s face. “You bit?”

  Skinny did a quick check of his jacket and his leg where the Roamers had torn into his clothing. His hands came away clean.

  “Clean! I’m clean.”

  “Good. I didn’t want to shoot you today,” Navarette said.

  Navarette was all business.

  Philip “Evil Avatar” Hansen’s zombie blog can be found at http://www.evilavatar.com

  Look for the full “Agent Red” novel on the Kindle in the fall of 2010.