The Down Home Zombie Blues

by Linnea Sinclair

  She explored him more boldly as the morning’s soft light intensified, inexplicably pleased by the way her touch made his breath hitch. But when his teeth nipped the soft flesh of her inner thigh and his tongue traced every intimate corner of her body, she was the one twisting the bedsheets between her fingers, coherency once again fleeing.

  “We’re good together,” he whispered huskily, when heartbeats finally slowed and she was cradled in his arms.

  Yes, they were.

  Later, while Theo was in the—wasteful!—freshwater shower, Jorie borrowed his soft blue robe and, scanner in hand, slipped into Tam’s room to take the next set of medical readings. Her lieutenant was sitting up, but her gaze and her concentration wandered if the conversation went on for more than three or four sentences.

  And the only answer Tam could provide about the ship or the crew’s whereabouts was that Commander Rordan was in Theo’s galley, getting a glass of water. Wasn’t he?

  It was as if time had stopped for Tamlynne Herryck.

  Suppressing a shiver, Jorie remembered seeing the half-empty glass on the galley counter when she and Theo had returned.

  When she walked back into the bedroom, Theo was dressed in faded blue pants and a dark-green shirt.

  Being decadent and wanton, she indulged in a wasteful freshwater shower—the water felt so blissfully better than the ship’s recycled synthetic liquid—and once again sorted out problems and priorities in her mind.

  It all came back to one thing: she had to terminate the C-Prime. It wouldn’t stop the Tresh. But it would stop the Tresh from using the zombies to destroy this world’s inhabitants and—ultimately—control the Hatches.

  She didn’t discount that the Tresh could move their entire experiment to another remote nil-tech world. But at least this one—with Theo Petrakos on it—would survive.

  19

  Theo was standing in his living room, taking the first few sips of coffee and flipping through channels to find the news, when he saw the bright purple horror heading at a determined clip straight for his front door.

  “Shit!” He hurriedly put the remote and his cup on the end table, sloshing hot coffee over his hand, then bolted into the bedroom. He prayed Jorie was out of the shower. He had no idea how to work her scanner gizmo, and frying Sophie Goldstein would not win him any brownie points with Aunt Tootie.

  Jorie was standing naked near the end of his bed, small drops of water still beading on her tawny skin. She turned, head tilted, and eyed him quizzically.

  In spite of impending doom, Theo stopped dead in his tracks, his breath hitching as his body heated. Sweet Jesus and Mother Mary. She was…incredible. And unless he’d missed something important in the past few hours, she was his.

  Sweet Jesus. And Merry Christmas.

  “We have company. My neighbor,” he stammered out. “The house shields?”

  She leaned over to retrieve her scanner from the nightstand.

  Nice ass.

  God, he was hopeless.

  “Disengaged,” she told him.

  “Thanks.” He stared at her a few more long, worthy seconds. “You might want to get dressed. Mrs. Goldstein’s”—his doorbell rang—“here.”

  When he opened the front door, Sophie was already shoving a plastic food container past the screen door that was propped against her shoulder. She had on a purple tunic-type blouse with silver embroidery on the round neckline, purple pants, and—Theo noticed with a quick glance down—purple flip-flop sandals.

  “Working during the holidays! Tootie is upset. I told her I’d bring you some butter cookies and fried honey puffs. I’ve been making them since Hanukkah. It was no trouble to do up another batch.”

  He leaned against the doorjamb, blocking any attempts by the purple horror to enter his home. “Thanks—”

  “So you got some kind of big case? You want some latkes or brisket? I can make that too. You can’t fight crime on an empty stomach.”

  It wasn’t quite ten in the morning yet, but Theo’s mouth watered at the mention of Sophie’s brisket. The honey puffs, little bits of fried dough drenched in honey and flavored with orange and cinnamon, were a nice treat too. And potato latkes—no. He had to keep Mrs. Goldstein—he had to keep everybody—away from his house.

  “I really appreciate this. But, yeah, I’m working, and I have no idea if I’ll be home later or not. But thanks. I mean that.” He nodded and smiled down at her.

  She nodded and smiled up at him. And made no move to leave his front porch.

  “Thanks,” he said again. “Uh, happy holidays.”

  “You should really at least try to see Tootie and Stavros. Not that I’m trying to tell you how to run your life, Theophilus. But your uncle always managed to spend some part of Christmas with you and Tootie, even if he had to sit in his patrol car in the driveway.” She pinned him with a hard stare. “They were always there for you, especially after your meshuga mother decided her life’s calling was to be a craps dealer in Vegas.”

  Well, yes. The four months he’d spent living in Sin City were certainly memorable ones for a twelve-year-old boy. Then his father and Uncle Stavros showed up with a court order. And the jingling sounds of slot machines and “Place your bets! Ante up!” were replaced by the familiar cries of the seagulls down at the sponge docks and Aunt Tootie singing Greek hymns very off-key in church every Sunday.

  Life was—if not as interesting—better.

  “I’ll try to cut some time out and see them,” he told Sophie. So what if the fate of his planet teetered on the brink? The zombies were in nap phase again, according to Jorie.

  But the truth was, he didn’t want to leave Jorie alone. Not that she wasn’t capable of kicking serious ass. The last time they left the house, however, the Tresh showed up and Rordan went missing. Two events that Theo wasn’t sure weren’t somehow connected.

  And then there was Tammy. Not rowing with both oars in the water yet. Which only made him wonder even more what Jorie had gone through as a prisoner of war with the Tresh. And made him admire even more her sheer determination to survive.

  “I’ll call Tootie and tell her to expect you.” Sophie Goldstein reached up and patted him on the cheek. “Merry Christmas.”

  There was a little spring in her step as she returned to her house. Sophie Goldstein, Problem Solver and Amateur Ann Landers, had made everything right again.

  If only everything else was so easy.

  Theo locked the front door, then, container of sweets under one arm, stuck his head through his bedroom doorway. No Jorie. He found her dressed in her sleeveless top and funky shorts, sitting on the bed with Tammy, scanner beeping softly as colors swirled over the screen. He pried open the container’s lid and plucked out a sticky honey puff. They were still warm. “Take a bite. You’ll like this.”

  She did. He waited. A rapturous expression crossed her face. He grinned and handed one to Tammy, whose coloring was still too pale. She chewed, then leaned back against her pillows with an appreciative sigh.

  Both women were licking their fingers when Theo’s cell phone trilled. He handed the container to Jorie and dug the phone out of his pocket.

  Zeke. He flipped it open. “Amigo. What’s up?”

  “You home?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I’m five minutes out. Don’t go anywhere. I have to talk to you. Now.”

  Theo watched Zeke roll up around back, nosing his sedan just behind the white SUV. House shields were off. When Theo saw Zeke tuck a manila case folder under one arm as he shut the car door, Theo’s personal shields went up.

  Zeke had found something in FCIC or NCIC on Jorie. Even though he knew, logically, there was no way that was possible, that’s the first thing that jumped into his mind. Jorie was not who she said she was. Their growing closeness, their growing intimacy, was a sham. It was Camille all over again.

  He was cursed, just like his old man.

  Stop it, Petrakos!

  Zeke climbed the short steps to the
porch, his short-sleeved button-down shirt tucked into dark slacks, his detective’s shield and gun clearly visible on his belt. This was no social call. Theo shoved the kitchen door open before Zeke could reach for it.

  “Jorie here?” Zeke asked. No greeting. No perfunctory off-color joke. Not even “Merry Christmas,” and, Christ, it was.

  Fuck. “Yeah.”

  “Go get her.”

  Theo stepped back, then something warred within him. He had to know the truth before he faced her. “Tell me why.”

  Zeke tossed the folder on the kitchen table and flipped it open.

  Hands clenched at his side, Theo stared at the photographs on the table. Relief and fear tumbled through him. Three parchment-wrapped, wet-eyeball mummies stared back. He grabbed the photos. “I’ll get her.”

  Jorie stood at the galley table, Theo’s hand lightly on her shoulder, Zeke Martinez’s flat photographs at her fingertips. She would have preferred holographs, where she could examine the bodies in more detail. But this nil world made that impossible.

  This nil world also affected her MOD-tech. Zombies had fed and she hadn’t known about it. When Theo brought the photos into the bedroom, she’d immediately run a scan and a backup data grab. There was no trace of any craving spur in her data, which still assured her the zombies were in a negative phase. Napping.

  Obviously they weren’t.

  “Tell me again why you think zombies did this.” Martinez leaned both hands on the back of a chair.

  He still wasn’t convinced that what she and Theo had told him at Suzanne’s med facility was true. She could hear that in his voice, see it clearly in his stance. But he had come here asking for her input. That seemed to matter to Theo.

  She outlined as simply as she could how the zombies used the portals, how, in their now-perverted quest for viral infections, they were drawn to the warm, humid environment, the high rate of electromagnetism, and, under the right stimuli, the life force of soft-fleshed sentients. How his world, his city, provided them the perfect haven, enhanced by the fact that it was so far off the usual spacelanes that no civilized fleet would think to come here. Except the Tresh.

  But whether or not they were civilized was debatable.

  Martinez puffed out his lips and blew a sigh of exasperation. Frustration. Disbelief. Then he shook his head and raked one hand through his dark curly hair.

  “The lieutenant’s going to Baker-Act us both,” he said to Theo.

  A cryptic comment. She’d ask Theo later what the act of making bread had to do with the zombies. She also wanted to ask him what he’d said in those odd, softly lyrical phrases when they were in the heat of passion. But that definitely would have to wait.

  She went back to the photographs. “This happened yesterday. You’re sure?” she asked Martinez.

  “The bodies were discovered yesterday by the SO—the Sheriff’s Office. Two down at the east beach on Fort Hernando. One by the Gandy Bridge.”

  The locales meant nothing to her. “All by water?”

  Martinez nodded. “We won’t know time or date of death until we get the ME’s report.”

  “Medical examiner,” Theo added when she looked over her shoulder at him. “Med-tech who investigates dead bodies.”

  Then it could have occurred the day before, when she’d captured the juvenile in the park. Or it could have been…anytime. It was one of a tracker’s worst nightmares: insufficient data due to tech failure.

  “Let me run the data one more time.” She headed for the bedroom, Theo and Martinez on her heels. She folded herself down on the floor and slipped her headset over her hair. “Voice system activate, confirm ident,” she said, and then stopped, realizing she’d spoken in Vekran. She repeated the command in Alarsh and ignored the impulse to smack herself.

  But there was nothing in the data. She even recalibrated search parameters to double their usual grab rate. Nothing. It had to be the lack of input from the ship’s seeker ’droids that was hampering her. When the Sakanah disappeared, so did the ’droids. It was like working with one eye blinded.

  Maybe that’s why Prow didn’t destroy these units. He knew they were ineffective. He—

  Prow. Prow had been in here with Tamlynne. And she didn’t know for how long and doing what. A chill clamped around her heart like a graknox’s jaws on its luckless prey’s head.

  Theo hunkered down by her side. “What did you find?”

  “It’s what I didn’t find. And what I, stupidly, didn’t even consider. Prow was in this room with my T-MOD.” She initiated a diagnostic but was fully aware that Prow might have assumed she’d do so and taken countermeasures. She would have.

  “Ass-faced demon’s spawn!” She shoved herself to her feet. Theo moved up with her but stepped back as if he knew she had an overwhelming urge to hit something, hard.

  She spun away from him and Martinez and strode into the spare room, which now functioned as Tamlynne’s bedroom. Her lieutenant was sitting in the middle of the foldout bed, rocking back and forth.

  “You work too hard, sir.” Her voice was dreamy.

  Jorie’s anger spiked, then dissipated. Oh, Tamlynne. “Merely the usual problems, Lieutenant. It will be okay,” she told her in Alarsh.

  “Theo likes you.”

  “I know, Tam.” Sometimes a flower grows in hell. It was an old, overused Kedrian saying, but the truth of it hit Jorie as it came into her mind. In this hell, she’d found Theo. The only positive thing in the midst of all this. Even Tam, as disordered as she was by the effects of the Tresh implant, recognized that.

  With a sigh, Jorie squatted down and sorted through the broken remains of the MOD-tech. It was time to get creative.

  She brought what she deemed salvageable back to Theo’s bedroom. Theo and Martinez’s voices filtered in from the structure’s main room.

  “I agree with you, Zeke, but I don’t think we have the luxury of time here,” Theo was saying. “The brass will want to set up committees, research teams. They’re not going to just take Jorie’s word for this. I still don’t think you believe her.”

  Jorie tuned them out as she stripped out the components from the secondary T-MOD and inserted the salvaged ones. All house shields were disengaged, except for the roof. PMaT transports were primarily vertical. If the Tresh transported into the backyard and came through the door, rifles flaring, she’d have a battle on her hands.

  But her two MOD units couldn’t maintain the shields, continue to scan, send out a scrambled seeker signal, and continue to interpolate data while she swapped out components. It was as if she were working under battlefield conditions again. Except this was Guardian MOD-tech, not Interplanetary Marines. And, yes, that meant there were crucial differences, including the lack of necessary redundancy and a reliance on a correlative data source—the ship, now unavailable.

  She resealed the units and restarted the tech programs, holding her breath for the ubiquitous program-failure warning screen. The blue screen from hell. When none appeared after five minutes, she relaxed somewhat. First hurdle cleared.

  But it would be another ten minutes for the units to completely synchronize and another ten for the diagnostic to initialize and complete.

  She pushed herself to her feet. She was thirsty. And perhaps a spoonful or more of that glorious peanut butter. And a honey puff if Theo and Martinez hadn’t eaten them all.

  She clipped her scanner to her utility belt. It erupted with a screech, sending her pulse racing. She jerked it up, noted coordinates, then spun and grabbed her Hazer from the bed, damning herself for dropping the shields.

  Theo heard the familiar screech, dropped the plastic container of honey puffs on the kitchen counter, then pulled his gun out of the hip holster under his shirt. Only as he lurched toward the living room did he realize it was his Glock. Not the laser pistol. Too late. Something was already oozing out of the green glow on his living-room wall.

  “What the fuck?” Zeke rasped from behind him.

  Theo knew Jorie had
to be on the way in here, but he couldn’t take a chance. He fired rapidly three times, center mass.

  The zombie screamed, its cry grating on his ears. A juvenile, he realized. Razor-clawed appendages thrashed, neck twisted—damn! His new leather couch!

  He saw the pinpoint of white and fired once more.

  The head jerked back. Four arms flailed outward. The creature slammed against the wall and, with a violent shudder, crumpled to the floor.

  A stream of Alarsh curses reached his ears. He shot a glance to his left. Jorie, double-stack rifle in her hands.

  “Is it…?” he asked her.

  She angled the rifle down, then whipped up her scanner. She nodded. “Dead.” She turned to him, eyes widening. She stared at the Glock in his hand. “You terminated it with…that?”

  He looked down at his gun. “Yeah. But it didn’t disappear.”

  She trotted over to where the zombie lay, serrated jaws agape, some kind of yellow liquid spilling onto the floor. The worms writhing on its surface were slowing, spasming. She squatted down, ran the scanner over the hideous length of the thing, then rose.

  “Hell’s wrath,” she whispered, and raised her gaze as he stepped next to her. “We just might have a chance.”

  A gagging sound behind Theo made him turn. Zeke, hand over his mouth, looking decidedly green. The detective’s eyes were wide as he bolted for the kitchen doorway and then—judging from the sound—proceeded to lose his honey puffs in the sink.

  Theo had never liked the yellow curtains in his spare bedroom, anyway. Camille had picked them out. He yanked them down and handed them to Tammy, who carried them without comment or question to the living room. Jorie was explaining the different functions of the zombie’s appendages to a thoroughly embarrassed Zeke Martinez as they awaited Suzanne’s arrival. If they had to move the zombie—and Theo suspected Suzanne might want to take it back to her clinic—the curtains would come in handy. If they didn’t move it, they would still come in handy. Just because he didn’t puke his guts out like Zeke did when he first saw one didn’t mean he enjoyed looking at that thing on his living-room floor.