by JJ Zep
Who are you? What do you want?
She hadn’t spoken, not out loud anyway. She realized where she was. She was deep inside the hive mind, confronting this creature on its own turf. She tried to break free and found she couldn’t. It held her there.
Calling me a creature is not very polite.
Who are you then? What are you?
I already told you what I am, a God of men. My name is Messenger.
What do you want?
Only what belongs rightfully to me, and the blood of those who took her away.
If that blood includes those I love, you’ll die before you spill it.
Messenger unleashed a laugh that sounded like a thunderclap in her ears.
Love? What do you know about love, Ruby? Love is a human emotion.
I am human. And how do you know my name?
I already told you that. God knows everything. Everything in the hive answers to me.
I don’t.
A buzzing rose up around Ruby, a pulse that throbbed out of the darkness, took on form, arranged itself into a version of the road she was standing on. She could see the ambulance, see three figures lying on the ground, see Messenger with the horde behind him.
Messenger strode across the blacktop and looked from Charlie, to her father, to the other man.
How shall they die?
Don’t.
Ruby tried to move but couldn’t. Not a muscle, not a hair.
Quick, like this?
Messenger hovered over the man lying furthest away from Ruby. He reached down and got a hold on the man’s boot, yanked him from the ground and slammed him back into it, lifted him again and crashed him into the pavement. The sound of the man’s skull cracking open was like a piece of fine china smashing on a tiled floor. Messenger tossed the corpse over his shoulder into the horde. He strode across the tarmac towards where Charlie lay.
I made a promise to this one, back in El Centro.
No! Don’t do it!
But why wouldn’t I Ruby? It’s such fun!
Messenger stooped and placed his hands on the front of Charlie’s shirt, then lifted him from the ground as though he weighed no more than a baby.
forty four
Messenger’s fists closed on his shirtfront. Then Charlie was yanked skyward, arms and legs flopping like those of a marionette. For a moment, he felt certain that Messenger was going to slam him back into the tarmac, the way he’d done with Wackjob. But then Messenger was in his face, regarding him with his one suppurating eye, the semblance of a smile forming on lips that had all but rotted away from his teeth. An electrical pulse seemed to emanate from Messenger’s body.
Do you remember the promise I made to you, the last time we met?
Charlie said nothing, wasn’t even sure that he was able to speak. His tongue felt thick in his mouth.
I told you that there were worse things than death, didn’t I?
Messenger wasn’t voicing these words. Somehow, he was transmitting them.
Now I wonder, what would be the worst thing that could happen to a brave Corporation soldier like yourself, someone who has experienced every horror, witnessed such atrocities as would give the rest of us a lifetime of sleepless nights?
He put on the pretense of contemplating the question.
What if I were to show you what the future holds for your ladylove after you’re gone?
“No!” Charlie wanted to scream, tried to scream. What came out was a Neanderthal grunt.
No? You don’t want to know what happens to your beloved Skye? How about I show you anyway? Give you something to take with you to the afterlife.
The electrical current that Charlie had detected seemed to gather in strength. It pulsed out from Messenger, wavering the air on its path. An uncomfortable sensation ran through Charlie’s body, like the jolt you receive from touching a live wire. His mouth tasted as if he’d just slugged a cupful of bile. The I-POD, which had for so long lain dormant in his pocket, jangled into life.
Charlie hardly noticed those things. What he did notice was that he was no longer standing on the darkened stretch of Big Bear Boulevard. He was in a dusty yard surrounded by wood frame buildings, a ranch house, a smaller dwelling, a barn. Charlie had never seen this place before but he knew it from the way Skye had described it to him.
A sound from the house attracted his attention. He focused in on it and realized that it was a baby crying. Charlie started walking, then running, towards the child's cries.
The side door stood ajar and Charlie entered into a large, rustic kitchen. A woman sat at the table. Even with her back to him, he knew who she was.
“Skye,” he said in a voice barely recognizable as his own.
She turned towards him then, turned in a treacle-paced arc that revealed her nightmare features. Skye’s face was sunken, her eyes hollow, the flesh falling away from her bones. A jagged, crescent-shaped scar was visible in the putrid flesh of her throat. A baby suckled at her sagging, blue-veined breast, from which a trickle of black blood spilled. Something squirmed and boiled under Skye’s skin. Now her breast split open and a deluge of fat maggots spilled to the kitchen floor.
Charlie had never run from anything in his life, but he ran now, charged headlong from the house and into the yard. Then his feet caught under him and he was falling, hitting the ground hard enough to send the I-POD skittering from his breast pocket.
forty five
Charlie hit the tarmac hard and tasted the coppery tang of blood in his mouth. For the briefest of moments he was disorientated by the darkness. Then he realized that he’d been released from the nightmare vision Messenger had shown to him and was sprawled on the tarmac of Big Bear Boulevard.
He tried to rise, tried to pull himself along the pavement and succeed only in gaining a few inches. It was then that he spotted the silvery object lying on the ground a couple of feet away and noticed the faint glow from its display.
So what did you think? Did she turn out to be one hot MILF, or what?
Charlie ignored the taunt, clawed at the ground and pulled himself forward. If there was to be a way out of this, he had to reach that I-POD.
From behind he heard Messenger’s footsteps, moving away from him.
*****
Ruby was certain that what she was seeing wasn’t reality but a warped version of it, somehow projected into her mind by Messenger. The road looked as it had before, Z’s surrounding the ambulance, her father and Charlie down, Messenger now crossing the space towards the blonde woman. Something was different though. The faces of the Z’s were blurred, morphing into one unbroken mass. The light, too, was unnatural. And there was no one in the cab of the ambulance, where Ruby was sure she’d seen Kelly and Sam just a moment ago. It was as though Messenger hadn’t put much effort into recreating the details that were unimportant to him.
Okay, so she was in the hive. And what was it Messenger had said, Everything in the hive answers to me. She couldn’t defeat him in here. But out there, stripped of whatever mental powers the hive gifted him, he was just another undead asshole looking to be put in the ground where he belonged.
The equation was simple. She was going to have to escape.
But how? Messenger controlled everything inside the hive including, right now, her.
Not everything, a voice spoke in her head.
“What?” she responded. “What doesn’t he control?”
Can good come from evil?
“Can good come from…” Ruby started to say, but then the answer came to her.
It was obvious.
*****
Charlie clawed and pulled, clawed and pulled, dragging himself across the tarmac. The I-POD remained frustratingly out of reach, a rectangle of dull metal against the dark surface of the road. He was getting closer though, another lunge would put him within grasping distance.
Claw. Pull.
He reached out his hand, stretching until he felt as though his arm would pop from its shoulder socket. His fingertips
brushed metal just as he heard footsteps behind him, Messenger returning.
Charlie gathered every ounce of his remaining strength and lunged. His fingers closed on the smooth edges of the I-POD and he drew it to him, thumb shifting to the control wheel, searching frantically for a track. MIGRANE was what he wanted but the I-POD didn’t deliver that. The I-POD was dead. Had always been dead. All that he’d seen was a trick of the moonlight.
forty six
Ruby did not yet comprehend the dynamics of the hive mind, but what she did understand was this. It had always existed, not just in Z’s but more than likely in humans too. At some basic level, perhaps the level of pure energy, we are all connected. Hadn’t mystics been saying that since the dawn of civilization? Messenger hadn’t created the hive mind, he’d simply chanced upon it, a product of his warped psychology, the copious amounts of BH-17 he’d consumed.
But Messenger had been wrong when he’d said that everything in the hive answered to him. He didn’t control the good memories that resided there, the positive images that Ruby had seen, spliced between scenes of brutality and violence.
A baby gurgling up at its mother, a couple kissing on a park bench, a crowd cheering in a sports stadium, a father pushing his daughter on a swing, a graduating class throwing their hats into the air...
Ruby honed in on those images then added a few of her own. She was shushing Pearl to sleep, she was hanging out with Ferret on the fire escape in New York, she was laughing at one of Uncle Joe’s silly jokes, Dr. Gish was hugging her, soothing her hair, she was in a dark tunnel, strapped to her father’s back, detecting his heartbeat, synching it with her own…
Ruby felt a dizzying swoop, like watching a movie that jumps a few frames ahead. Her vision wavered for the merest of moments. When it cleared, she saw the door of the ambulance swing open and Kelly jump to the pavement, a pistol in her hand.
*****
Up until the point he’d shown Charlie a glimpse of Skye’s future, Messenger hadn’t been certain what he was going to do with Skye. He knew now. He was going to turn her, make her his zombie bitch for all eternity. And he was going to do it right in front of lover boy’s eyes. Then, what the hell, he was going to turn them all, Charlie, Ruby, the one who was jumping from the cab right now, pointing a gun at him.
Messenger ignored her, dragged Skye behind him towards where Charlie was lay on the blacktop, the dead I-POD clutched in his fist. The kid had balls he had to give him that much, even if he wasn’t too gifted in the brains department. Even if the player had been working, did he really think that a stupid little jingle was going to hurt a god?
He reached Charlie now, crunched down on his fingers and forced him to release the I-POD. A kick sent the device skittering across the pavement.
A bullet whizzed towards Messenger’s head and he deflected it.
Look who I brought to see you, he told Charlie.
Behind him, he heard a whisper, like the faintest of breezes stirring the pine trees at the side of the road.
Look Charlie, its…
A momentary panic rose in Messenger, an emotion he’d never expected to experience again in his life. He released Skye’s hand, half turned and faced the impossibility that was bearing down on him.
Ruby had her sword drawn, held two-handed above her head. The blade was arcing through the air, reflecting a shard of moonlight. Its whisper spoke of death.
No, you can’t, was Messenger’s final thought. I am a…
*****
The blade sliced through the air, connecting with Messenger in the place where his neck met his shoulders, removing his head, spilling it to the pavement like a rotten cantaloupe.
“God,” Ruby said. “I believe the word you were looking for was God.”
epilogue
Ruby Collins stood on an overpass along a stretch of the I-10 between San Bernardino and Palm Springs. Arrayed before her, stretching across the dusty plain into the distance were more Z’s than she’d ever seen, more even than the hundreds of thousands Messenger had brought to Big Bear Lake a month ago.
She’d drawn them here, entering into the hive mind and summoning them from every town and city within a twenty mile radius. At a conservative estimate, there must have been two million of the creatures.
“Do you think this will work?” her brother Charlie said from beside her.
“It will work,” Ruby said.
“Sure wish Jojo was here to see this, and Uncle Joe.”
Ruby wished they were here too. Jojo had argued long and hard to make the short trip, but Doc Whitfield had refused to allow it. As for Uncle Joe, he was still moping around Hooley’s place. Ruby could understand that. He’d lost a good friend in Hooley. They all had.
She turned towards her father, standing with the wolf, Sugar, alert by his side. He gave her a nod.
“We doing this or what?” Charlie said impatiently.
Ruby turned back and regarded the multitude. She entered effortlessly into their shared consciousness and spoke a single word.
“Die.”
Before you go... A Note From JJ Zep
Hey, this is JJ. Thank you for downloading and reading Zombie D.O.A. Series Five.
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JJ Zep
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Zombie D.O.A. Series by J.J. Zep
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