The Down Home Zombie Blues

by Linnea Sinclair

  In the structure? No, still in the land vehicle, according to her scanner. Bliss luck! She wouldn’t have to wait for the man to fall asleep and risk waking him as she appropriated the unit. She didn’t want to hurt a defenseless nil. She wasn’t sure what stun setting on her G-1 would be effective with the least amount of soft-tissue damage on this type of humanoid.

  She squatted down, listening to the world’s odd night sounds—shrill chirps and resonant grumps—as she organized the items in the small pods on her utility belt. A standard desensitizer for any security systems the vehicle might have, then a wide-range sonic lockbreaker like Trenat had used to appropriate their vehicle. She didn’t know if she had the young ensign’s delicate touch—she decided she would file a nice report on him when she got back to the ship—but she’d get inside. She always did.

  With one last glance at her scanner, she rose.

  And froze.

  Light stabbed the green expanse before her.

  Biting back curses, she flattened herself on the ground. The rear door of the residence swung open. The man stepped out in the bright glow of a small overhead illuminator. He no longer wore the jacket he had earlier but was clad in a gray short-sleeve shirt and lighter blue pants. A long black box—not the T-MOD—was tucked under one arm, with two small square boxes nestled in the other. His grip on the smaller boxes wasn’t as secure. They jiggled as he plodded toward the vehicle.

  He hesitated at the pilot’s door, then, evidently changing his mind, he moved toward the vehicle’s front end.

  Damn! Damn! If he turned even the slightest bit, he might see her under the shrubbery. Her gaze glued to his movements, she levered herself up mere minmeters on one arm and slowly plucked one of her lasers from its holster. If he spotted her, she’d have to stun him. She had no choice.

  His attention, however, seemed to be on the vehicle’s interior. She had a sinking feeling that she knew what he was looking for. Danjay’s T-MOD. The boxes he carried must be some kind of decoder.

  He put the smaller boxes on the vehicle’s roof, touched something to the side of the door, then a moment later pulled it open. The grinding, creaking noise it made sounded like a barrage of strafer cannons to her ears. The doors on her land vehicle didn’t sound at all like that. Was this some kind of auditory security measure?

  The rear cargo door of the vehicle suddenly flew open. But no weapons turrets protruded, nothing lethal emerged. She slowly let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and watched him transfer the small black boxes to the rear cargo area. The long box went in too. She was considering how to take him from behind when—damn! damn!—he stepped back to the door on the navigator’s side, bent over, and came out with the T-MOD in his grasp.

  There it was. She had to take possession of it now. It shouldn’t be difficult. He was a nil, a civilian. She was an expertly trained military commander with the element of surprise.

  She rose in one smooth, swift, practiced movement.

  And her scanner screeched out an intruder alert.

  Zombie.

  So much for keeping a low profile.

  “Run!” Jorie screamed at him, her heart pounding in her throat as she tabbed the laser in her right hand up to hard-terminate. “Run!”

  She grabbed her other laser and barreled across the lawn. “Drop the T-MOD! Run!” A sickly green glow formed in the night gloom off to her left. She laced the spot with both her lasers, aware that the stupid nil was still standing there, T-MOD in his hands, staring at the expanding portal.

  Just as she reached him, the green cloud erupted into hard form maybe two maxmeters away, about level with the top of the high hedge. Its diameter was small. Bliss luck, she’d done some damage but she hadn’t stopped it. Yet. She fired off three more bursts, then swung around to face the nil, bringing her micro-rifle across her chest as she did. “Drop the unit, damn you!” Her breath came in hard gasps. “That’s a zombie. It’ll kill you!”

  The man stared down at her. And then Jorie remembered: the entire universe did not speak Alarsh.

  But that was the least of her problems. The zombie had arrived.

  She swung back as it slithered like molten green liquid out of the hole in the night sky. The man behind her uttered something guttural. She could feel his breath against her hair, could feel the hard tension of his body against her back.

  “What in hell is that?” she heard him rasp—in passable Vekran—as the zombie snapped into solidification. Its serrated jaws gleamed in the moonlight and its three sunken opticals pulsed red, strafing the darkness in all directions. Four clawed appendages, long and multijointed, clicked. Energyworms undulated and writhed over its tall, angular body.

  “Zombie,” she said, her breath still harsh. She shoved her pistols back into the holsters and whipped her Hazer micro-rifle forward. “Okay, big boy. Now we play rough.”

  She fired as it lunged for them, the rifle’s energy almost blinding as it crashed against the void substance of the energyworms. She squinted her left eye closed, viewed everything through the filtered ocular on her right.

  The zombie howled, slashing at her with its upper claws. But it stopped advancing.

  Swinging the rifle down, she strafed its legs with a blast. The grass around it immediately blackened. The zombie tottered for a moment. She aimed for its topmost eye, but missed as it jerked sideways. “Damn!”

  It lashed out with its lower right arm. She caught the movement almost too late. “Down!” she screamed in Vekran. She dropped to her knees, prayed the man behind her understood and copied her movement.

  The zombie’s long arm snaked out, ripping through the roof of the land vehicle, sending jagged metal hurtling across the lawn. Damn, this one had extenders. She hadn’t seen that mutation in a long time. She’d have to adjust her attack, especially as neither Herryck nor Trenat was there to help create a diversion or watch after the nil.

  The nil. Another worry. The vehicle behind her was still shuddering, clanking from the contact. “You alive, nil?” she shouted over the noise.

  “Yes!”

  “When I say run, you run. Understand?”

  “No, wait!” He spoke quickly.

  She couldn’t follow his strange version of Vekran, couldn’t catch all the words. She fired another blast at the zombie. “I do not understand all you say. Listen to me. I say run, we run.”

  “No. Gun! Give me a gun!”

  “Gun?”

  He slapped at the pistol on her right side. He wanted the G-1. He wanted to help.

  Could he? She popped off two more blasts, quickly cradled the rifle in the crook of her arm, and yanked her pistol out. A G-1 was easy to operate. A nil should be able to do it. She shoved it into his large hand, closed hers around his as best she could, aimed, and pressed his thumb against the activator. A steam of laser fire streaked down the zombie’s side. “Yes?” she asked, praying her quick lesson was sufficient and he didn’t shoot himself in the foot.

  Or her in the back.

  “Yes!” His mouth curled into an oddly attractive, feral grin.

  Damn, she liked that. She grinned back. “Good! Kill!” She lifted her rifle, sighted, and fired, and hoped he mimicked her movements.

  He fired in a line next to her. Good nil!

  “Legs!” She told him, aiming for the same. “Opticals!” She raised her rifle and, this time, took one optical out.

  His laser fell silent. Oh, damn, it was too much for him. She was on her own again. Then all of a sudden shots streaked out, and—pow! pang!—the remaining two opticals exploded.

  She jerked her head around, stared at him in unabashed admiration. “Damn!”

  “Thanks.” His face was sweaty, streaked. But he still had that delicious—there really was no other word for it—grin.

  She swung back, concentrated on the zombie’s arms. Blinded and howling, the zombie thrashed wildly, advancing then retreating. It could still sense the leaking T-MOD but, without opticals, couldn’t hone in on them
for a kill.

  It used its extenders instead. Shrubbery flew, tree branches crashed. She yanked on the man’s arm. “This way.” She pulled him away from the vehicle, away from the T-MOD. Closer to the zombie.

  “Arms!” She fired at the coiling extenders. He did the same. Good. She sprinted away from him, ignoring whatever it was he yelled. She was almost to the zombie. She had to duck three times to avoid its claws, but she finally sighted its white heart, just under its grinding jaws.

  Almost, almost…now! She fired.

  The zombie exploded, silently, in a cloud of bright green gas, then disappeared.

  Jorie stood, shaking, exhausted, bliss running through her body in galactic-size doses. But only for a few sweet seconds. Then reality hit. The leaking T-MOD. More zombies would come.

  She whirled and headed for the gutted vehicle. The man sprinted, catching up with her. He grabbed her arm, frowning. That delicious smile gone. His eyes were dark, intense. She shook him off, then at the last moment remembered he still had her laser. “I need that.” She pointed to the pistol in his hand.

  “Who are you? What was that thing?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. I need that and my agent’s T-MOD. Then I have to get back to my ship.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  She frowned at him, not understanding.

  “You talk crazy,” he said.

  No, her Vekran and his were somewhat different. “No time. No words now.” She kept it as simple as she could. “Mine.” She pointed again to the pistol he’d yet to relinquish. “Mine.” She pointed to the unit.

  He hefted the pistol in one hand, mulling his options, obviously. As if he had any. She sighed, raised her own pistol, and this time pointed it at his head. “Mine.”

  He handed her the pistol.

  “Thank you.” She tucked both back into their holsters, then turned and strode the few steps to the T-MOD. She bent toward it. Hard, muscled arms wrapped around her waist, lifting her up.

  Damn, the nil was strong. She wrenched out of his grasp and stared in surprise at the business end of her laser pistol. The one he’d just returned to her. His other hand was clamped on the T-MOD. And that feral grin was back.

  “You’re going nowhere, lady, until you explain.”

  She didn’t know how he’d managed to get it, but he could keep the G-1, though she’d face the captain’s hell-wrath for losing it. She tried to jerk the unit out of his hand, but he wouldn’t let go.

  “You. Don’t. Understand,” she said through gritted teeth. “No time!”

  “Explain,” he demanded, the pistol aimed at her head. A pistol—thanks to her—he knew how to use. She still had her other G-1 but knew she’d be dead if she made a reach for it.

  Her scanner emitted one shrill beep. Portal forming. Another zombie honing in on the unit.

  She had no choice. Death by zombie, death by laser, or…

  She jabbed the transcomm on the side of her utility belt with her right elbow and issued a terse order into her mouth mike in Alarsh. “Emergency transit. Engage PMaT. Two life forms. Now!”

  The nil-tech world called Earth blinked from her sight.

  3

  The first thing Theo realized was that he itched all over. The second was that somehow—in the blink of an eye—he’d gone from a horror movie in his backyard to the middle of a Star Trek set. He was on a platform facing a bank of computer screens and a short console. In front of the console were a group people in green-and-black uniforms. Two were clearly not human. One looked a bit like a short, curly-haired Wookiee. No, that was Star Wars. Wrong movie. The other was…His vision hazed. His head spun. His body tingled relentlessly. He knew with sickening certainty he was moments from passing out.

  Not good.

  He locked his knees. Someone grabbed his arm, steadying him as he sucked in a deep breath. Something slid through his fingers. The laptop. He turned, then let it go, because now, in the bright lights of this science-fiction movie set, he couldn’t stop looking at the woman who took the laptop from him.

  He saw her—or thought he saw her—in the uneven glare of the porch light over his back door. A teenager in some mismatched slam-jam outfit running toward him, hollering. He thought she was in trouble, needed help. The whole neighborhood knew he was a cop. He intended to grab her, try to calm her down, when suddenly two beams of light burst from her hands.

  That’s when he noticed the big green glowing hole in the night sky about twenty feet away.

  Seconds later she was braced against him—her lithe, muscular body draped in odd equipment. Some kind of lens covered her right eye. He quickly discarded his initial impressions of teen and slam-jam. She looked like a member of a futuristic SWAT team.

  And then he saw the—what had she called it? The zombie. Cristos! Worse than any images of the Kalikantzri from his childhood Christmases.

  He went on autopilot after that. He hazily remembered damning himself for not putting his hip holster and gun back on immediately after changing his coffee-soaked clothes. He somewhat more clearly remembered taking some kind of gun from her. But mostly he focused on that towering abomination with glowing eyes and metal skin covered with crawling, writhing worms.

  Understandably, he wasn’t focused on her, or what she looked like. Until now. She was sweaty, grass-stained, dirt-streaked. And she was unequivocally gorgeous. Exotic. Medium height, five foot five or so, and slender but not skinny. Her skin color reminded him of honey. She had muscles. She had curves. Nice curves. His gaze traveled up from her cleavage to a heart-shaped face with dark-lashed eyes. And lips any Hollywood actress would pay big bucks to own. Lips he’d love to—

  He blinked, hard. Slow down, Petrakos. Slow down.

  Sounds, voices filtered back into his ears, making him aware he’d been temporarily deafened. A tremor shook his body, subsiding as quickly as it had appeared. He was suffering from disorientation, delusions. Too many nights on call out resulting in lack of sleep, that’s all this was. In a moment it would all disappear and he’d be back in his kitchen, popping the top off a nice cold can of orange soda he’d left standing on the counter. He intended to finish that off before heading back to the department with the sound system and Mr. Crunchy’s laptop.

  He drew in a deep breath, then another. The itching sensation on his skin abated to a mild annoyance. But when the scene before him didn’t morph back into the familiar brown and yellow tones of his kitchen, reality began to stealthily creep in.

  And it wasn’t a reality he liked. He unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth and tried to speak. “What happened?” His voice sounded rough. Not surprising, given what his body felt like.

  She glanced his way. She was a few feet in front of him, talking in a strange language to a woman with curly red hair who was clad in the same kind of shorts and odd one-sleeved shirt but minus all the hardware. A short spate of more unintelligible words, then she handed the laptop to the woman and stepped back up onto the platform.

  “Mine.” She reached for the gun he still held in his hand.

  His cop senses kicked in. Instinctively, he stepped back, raising it.

  A pale-skinned man and that Wookiee-looking one reacted, silver weapons appearing in their hands. Aimed at him. Tension laced the room. Another man and a dark-skinned, yellow-haired woman turned from their consoles, hands on the weapons at their hips.

  “Mine,” the woman in front of him repeated.

  He was outnumbered. He might be able to take two, three of them out, but his stomach was still doing somersaults. Even if he could somehow convince his legs to run, he doubted he’d make it as far as the door alive. Unless, of course, this was some kind of elaborate practical joke. In which case, if he reacted with deadly force, innocent people could get hurt.

  Every good cop knew there was a time to act and a time to wait, gather information. This, clearly, was not a time to act.

  Gritting his teeth, he lowered the gun. The woman plucked it from his fing
ers. The weapons aimed at him disappeared into holsters. The low hum of conversation resumed.

  The woman said something he couldn’t understand.

  “What?”

  “No concerns. You’re safe here.”

  Safe? Where was here? Hell, he was a detective. He should be able to find out that simple answer. “Where am I?” he asked, putting some firmness in his voice this time. At least, he thought he had. His head still wobbled. He shook it. Wrong move, Petrakos. That didn’t help.

  “Sakanah. Ship,” she said.

  He listened for a moment to the other voices around him. Hers was the only one in the room he could understand. “Where?”

  “Come.”

  Well, hell, why not? his brain said, as it completed yet another looping circle. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do. Still wobbling, he followed her off the platform, scratching at the prickling sensation on his arm.

  A long gray Star Trek–looking corridor, a right turn, then another. She said nothing, guiding him with a slight touch on his arm when his feet—still numb and clumsy—stumbled in the wrong direction. Blocks of lettering on the walls looked like HTML code. Or ASCII. Like the lettering on the laptop screen.

  For some reason he felt that was significant, though he couldn’t remember why.

  She stopped before a recessed doorway, touched a small pad on the right. The door slid open, silently.

  And the galaxy opened before him like a vast black sparkling maw.

  This time his knees did buckle.

  He grabbed for the door frame. She grabbed his elbow, guided him in. “Sit.”

  A ready room. That’s what it was always called on the space shows. A conference table ringed by chairs. He dropped into one at the corner of the table as sweat beaded on his brow. The wall in front of him was all window. All black space, sprinkled with stars.

  It could be a projection, a movie screen, but somehow he didn’t think so. Damn.

  She came to the table with two tall clear glasses and pushed one in front of him. “Drink. It will help settle the body after the PMaT.”

  Peemat? He had no idea what she was talking about but picked up the glass, sniffed it. Smelled like water. He realized he was parched.