Hungry for Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance

by Lori Perkins

  “I hope they don’t play Thriller. I hate that song. People keep asking me to do the Claw at parties. It gets old fast,” Michael mumbled into her hair. His good hand caressing her back, she felt his body jerk in time to the music, she wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not.

  In the hot, dark club, two lost souls found each other amid the lonely living.

  Neither was eager for the music to end as they swayed to the movement of the night.

  Anna imagined her heart was beating again and for a brief moment, she felt alive. The other dancers moved away in disgust as the new lovers discovered that beauty was indeed in the eye of the beholder. Which just happened to be in his pocket.

  First Love Never Dies

  by Jan Kozlowski

  Sometimes it sucks working as a cop in the town you grew up in.

  Danielle LaFontaine had been one of the prettiest and smartest girls in my high school class. But after ten years of bad decisions and worse luck, including our little global zombie epidemic last year, she was neither of those things anymore. What was left was only a sanded-down, dried up carapace of a woman. The only apparent life left in her was the feral survivor’s intelligence that glittered in her eyes as she scrabbled to find a way out of this latest disaster.

  “Okay Danielle, the patrolman said you had something you wanted to share with us before they take you to booking.”

  “Ryan Walborn…I remember you from high school.”

  “It’s Detective Walborn, Danielle. And this is my partner, Detective Shana Mason. It’s late and we don’t have a lot of time. If you’ve got information for us, spit it out.”

  “All

  right,

  Detective Walborn. Like I was saying…I remember you from high school. And I also remember you used to spend a lot of time sucking face with that little Lassiter girl.”

  “Thanks for the trip through the high school yearbook, but…”

  “Well, I got something about her old man that might interest you, especially since it involves what really happened to the mayor last week.”

  Shana and I exchanged glances. “You have our attention.”

  “First you got to do something for me.”

  “Danielle, you know even possessing zombie fluids is an automatic fifty years, and dealing it doubles it down.”

  “But it wasn’t like, the real shit. It’s just fake stuff I mix up and sell to the mutants who think shooting it up is their rocket to nirvana.”

  “All the same in the eyes of the law. Sorry, there’s not a lot I can do.”

  “Even if what I’ve got concerns the mayor, Lassiter, and a meat train?”

  “She’s bullshitting us.” Shana said.

  “Maybe not. Let’s hear what she has to say.”

  “You going to help me out?”

  “If the info is good and you’re not playing us…who knows, the evidence might take a little detour on its way to the station, but no guarantees. Deal?”

  “Yeah, I guess it’ll have to be. This is what I know. Lassiter’s always been the go to guy in town for hardcore kink. A real 8mm beserker. Back before the virus, he was famous for his S and M, bondage and kiddie-diddler parties. You name it. If it dripped slime, this guy was up to his dick in it.”

  “So how come we’ve never heard of him before?” Shana asked.

  “How old are you, five?”

  “Danielle…”

  “All right. Sorry. He is unfamiliar to you fine members of the law enforcement community for the usual reasons…friends in high places and lots of cash changing hands, especially around re-election time.

  “Anyway, when the virus hit, for about a minute and a half people stopped caring about getting their rocks off. Then, when they started getting horny again, there was a brand-new wide world of perversion to explore.”

  “Like

  meat

  trains.”

  “Among other things, but trains are the big money makers. As soon as we figured out how to keep the Zoms from killing us, people like Lassiter figured out how to use them as fuck toys. And Lassiter, since he already owned a full-service dungeon complete with cages, restraints, and the kind of equipment they needed to make it work, became the guy to go to if you wanted to ride.”

  “So I take it the mayor was an avid locomotive enthusiast?”

  “Yep, as often as he could shake his security detail. Except for last week, when something went wrong. I heard the Zom he was tailgating was getting a little overripe and when it twisted around to bite at him, the strap sawed straight through its torso and the top half of it sheared right off. When it landed, it grabbed the mayor’s leg and took a big chunk out of it before Lassiter busted in and blew its head off. I heard His Honor still had his dick in its ass when he got bit and they had a helluva time getting him disconnected before they whisked him away.”

  “Well, that explains why he suddenly took off on that family vacation so close to re-election time.”

  “Yeah, I guess any day now we’ll get word that he was a victim of a tragic accident out of state somewhere.” Shana added.

  “I take it what happened to the mayor hasn’t put a damper on Lassiter’s operation?”

  “You know how it is with these pervs,” Danielle said. “If anything, it’s made Lassiter’s services even more popular. They like the danger, the thrill of doing something other people died doing. They’re even asking for more decayed ones now, ones way past their expiration dates. He used to ‘retire’ them after about six months or so, less if they saw a lot of wear and tear, but now, even if they’re almost a puddle of goo on the floor, somebody will pay big to do something nasty to them.”

  “Well, it sounds like you’ve got some solid intel on an active operation. It’s good, but I don’t know if it’s worth possibly losing my career over.”

  “Never figured you for the type to fuck a girl over when she was down, Detective.

  But since we’ve got a history, I’ll throw in one more nugget that might get your dick juicy. Lassiter’s not alone in the house. His wife and daughter still live there. No one’s talked to either one of them since before the infection, but they’ve been seen on the property.”

  “Are they alive?” I asked.

  Danielle shrugged. “He won’t let anyone get close enough to see. He keeps them locked down tight, but nobody knows if he’s keeping them in or keeping everyone else out.”

  “You know the guy. If you had to guess, are they alive…or not?”

  “Just a guess, but I’d bet that the old lady’s gone zombie and he keeps her around like drug dealers used to keep pit bulls. Maybe even sets her out to patrol the place at night. The grounds are completely fenced in, electrified, razor-wire, the whole anti-zombie security package.”

  “And

  Mandy?”

  “She’s probably still alive, much to her dismay.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “You dated her all through high school, you mean you don’t know?” Danielle asked.

  “Know

  what?”

  “You’re

  a

  cop. Put it all together, Einstein. Her father is a sex freak. Who do you think was his favorite victim? Who do you think he used for his first kiddie-diddler parties? Who do you think he tried his new toys and furniture and equipment out on?

  “But of course that was before the infection,” she added. “Now, who knows? He could still be using her. He could be saving her for a big Pay-Per-View event. Or maybe he’s not into live flesh anymore and he’s going to auction her off. Lots of possibilities, none of them good, not when it comes to Lassiter.”

  “All right. Enough,” I said. “Danielle, let the officers take you to the station. I’ll take care of everything else. But this is the last time. Find a different profession, retire to a private island, I don’t care, just get the hell out of town.”

  “Until the next reunion, you mean…right, Ry? You know I could never miss our big one-O c
oming up. Hey, we could double date, I bet I could dig up someone…and make sure to ask Mandy when you see her!”

  Her cackling followed us down the hallway, but it was Danielle’s speculations about Mandy’s life that kept banging through my brain as Shana and I walked to the car.

  “Ryan,

  you

  okay?”

  “Nope. Definitely not okay.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I want to do something about it.”

  “You gonna go get her?”

  “Yep, but I’m going to drop you off back at the station first. No sense you getting mucked up in all of this.”

  I expected an argument from her, but all she did was give me a crooked smile and show me two small glass medicine bottles she had hidden in her pocket.

  “Well, considering I’m the one who remembered to grab the evidence against Danielle,” she said, “I’d say I’m already up to my mucking eyeballs in this, so we might as well head over to Lassiter’s house and put an end to all this shit.”

  “Okay.

  Thanks,

  partner.”

  “De nada. How about backup?”

  “Given that we don’t know who Lassiter’s friends are, it wouldn’t be smart to trust anybody at the department,” I said.

  “How about stopping at my place and picking up Alice on our way…and some extra weaponry?”

  “You must really want to do this, letting me borrow your beast and raid your private armory.”

  “What can I say, Mandy’s story struck several nerves,” she said. “Daddy dearest needs to go bye-bye, hopefully in the most painful, time-consuming, and humiliating way possible.”

  I glanced over and noticed her granite-hard expression. “Shit, you too?”

  “No, not me,” she said. “A girl I knew in school. She tried to tell and no one believed her. Her Dad was a doctor. He started drugging her to keep her compliant. She hung herself from the ceiling fan in his waiting room one day when she was fourteen.”

  She paused, then went on. “I was the last one to talk to her. We were working on a social studies project together. She wanted to pass the notebook back to me so I could add her research to the paper. After she left my house, I found she had written me a fourteen-page letter telling me everything her father had done to her all these years. She never mentioned she was going to kill herself. I thought I’d see her the next day at school and we’d talk about it.”

  “Jesus. That’s a lot for a fourteen-year-old to handle. Did you turn the letter over to the police after you…found out?”

  “Yeah. I figured they’d put the guy in jail, there’d be a trial, something…”

  “But it all just went away, right?” I asked.

  “Yep. He never even saw the inside of the police station. The letter disappeared. I was only fourteen and she was gone.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence, lost in our own individual regrets and what-ifs.

  Alice, a large brown and black German shepherd, met us at the door. She was trained as a zombie detection dog, an indispensable specialty that evolved from her original cadaver dog training. Dogs like her could smell decomposing flesh a minute after death a mile away and Alice was the best of the best. She’d already saved our asses a number of times over the past twelve months.

  After giving Alice her required quota of love and adoration, I followed Shana into her gun room. Once it had been a normal, ordinary bedroom, but she had lovingly refurbished in early John Rambo meets any Robert Rodriguez movie. Handguns from tiny, pearl-handled .22’s all the way up through her array of 9mms and .45s adorned one wall, while two other walls featured her collection of long weapons, rifles, shotguns, automatics—culminating in her pride and joy, a hand-held rocket launcher, just like the one Michael Douglas used in the movie Falling Down. The other wall held drawers filled with ammunition, loaders, kits and other accoutrements.

  “What are we taking?” I asked.

  “It’s your party. Take anything you think we can use.”

  It took an hour to collect and load everything into the car. The hardest part was leaving room for Alice, who filled the back seat with her hulking presence. The sun was just coming up as we rolled across town to the Lassiter homestead.

  We drove past the house once slowly and parked one street over. Lassiter’s house was fairly isolated for central New England suburbia, surrounded by woods on three sides and a long gated driveway out front. Danielle had said the whole place was fenced in, electrified, and razor-wired, which weren’t unusual upgrades for those who had survived the initial attacks.

  “I assume you have a plan for storming the castle…”

  “I told you that when Mandy and I used to date, her father wasn’t happy about it,”

  I said. “So we spent a lot of time sneaking her in and out of the house. Even back then he was into heavy security, but like most people, the one thing he always failed to do was look up.”

  “Look

  up?”

  “Yeah,

  up. The house is surrounded by old-growth trees. Great for keeping prying eyes out, but even better for getting up and over fences as well as flying above Daddy’s radar.”

  “That’s all well and good for you, Monkey Man,” Shana said, “but what about Alice and me? I failed rope climbing in gym and Alice left her wings attached to her special-occasion collar.”

  “Give me some credit. I grabbed Alice’s harness, saddlebags, and a blanket we can use for a sling. There’s also rope in the trunk. Mandy and I did the up and over so often, we had a whole series of ropes and ladders permanently set up in the trees.”

  “You think after ten years, they’re still there, and functional?”

  “The ropes I used were top of the line climbing ropes and we hid them pretty well, but we won’t know for sure until we get in there.”

  We grabbed everything we could carry, packing Alice’s saddlebags with some of the smaller stuff, and headed in.

  Unlike most of the world, nothing much had changed in this little stretch of woods in the past ten years. Paths were fainter and a few of the trees had fallen over, but there was little evidence of human presence or interference.

  It didn’t take us long to run up alongside Lassiter’s property lines. The big metal fence rose out of the underbrush, barbed wire glinting in the early-morning sun. We followed it along the perimeter, checking for breaches and doing recon on what was going on inside. From what we could see, all was quiet, but Alice let us know there was definitely decaying meat somewhere close by.

  I found the access tree just about where I remembered it. Mandy hadn’t been much of a climber when we started seeing each other, so by necessity this tree featured a lot of large, low branches that got us about ten feet up before having to switch over to a rope ladder that took us up into the much bigger oak that spanned the fence.

  Following the old Romeo and Juliet route was harder than I remembered. Shana and I had a few scary moments when ropes were too frayed or missing, but we took it slowly and carefully, and eventually all eight of our feet touched down safely inside Lassiter’s compound.

  We tried to stick to the edges and keep obstacles between us and the house’s windows, but there came a point when there was nothing to do but make a flat-out run across a big chunk of open yard in order to reach the back of the house.

  We were halfway across when I heard Alice’s deep warning growl and saw her cut off to the right. Shana saw it too and we peeled off after her. Alice had picked up the Zom’s scent and led us right to them. There were three of them milling around a fenced enclosure about the size of a large dog run. Off to the side, a wire-covered, human-sized chute connected it to the house.

  “What do you think? Is that our way in?” I asked.

  Shana craned her neck to check out the cage’s perimeters. “I don’t see any insulators or battery boxes, so Lassiter didn’t bother to electrify it. I’m going to say, yeah, this is proba
bly our best bet. I’ll get rid of the meat, you get the bolt cutters for the cage.”

  Shana attached the silencer to her piece and popped off three brain buster rounds.

  Her shots were dead center and all three Zoms went down quick and clean. Ten seconds later we were through the fence and checking out the door and the chute for locks and booby traps.

  Sometimes guys like Lassiter fall into the same trap as the drug dealers used to.

  They figure they’ve got these vicious beasts running around protecting the place, so they don’t need to take regular everyday security precautions. They get sloppy about closing and locking doors and windows, figuring nobody’s ever going to get past the guardians, so why bother? Guys like that make my life as a cop a lot easier.

  Lassiter, unfortunately, was not one of those sloppy guys. The door that led from the cage into the chute was easy enough to breach. But the door that led from the chute into the house was solid steel, with no locks, handles, or buttons on this side to allow humans in. Obviously no one was ever meant to use this door as an entrance.

  “Shit, dead end,” I said.

  “No pun intended, I suppose,” Shana said, staring hard at the door as she ran her fingers around the edges. “Hold on a second. I think I’ve got it.”

  Shana pulled a screwdriver out of Alice’s magic saddlebags and went at the hinges on the door, which surprisingly were completely exposed on this side. Zoms don’t use tools so I suppose it never occurred to Lassiter to cover this particular base. Within a couple of minutes we had the pins out and were ready to pull the door away.

  “Ready?”

  “Go.”

  The door came down, our guns came out and we moved quickly into the house.

  Alice wasn’t alerting to any new threats, but she was moving slowly, swinging her huge head from side to side. I had worked with her long enough to know she was searching for something she knew was out there, just beyond her sense range.

  The house still had an early-morning quiet feel to it. Like its residents weren’t accustomed to acknowledging the brighter half of the day. There were four doors on this lower level, besides the one we came through. When Mandy and I were dating, they led to a family room, a half bath, the furnace room, and the garage. We checked them out: three were empty and the family room was padlocked from the outside. Whatever was in there wouldn’t be getting out any time soon, so we agreed to move upstairs.