“The surviving Japanese community insists more effort should be made to find a Japanese actor to play the part of Kuniyoshi, who made a heroic last stand to protect his infant son when Tokyo was overrun by the infected.”
Mike noted that the word “zombie” was coming up less and less in the news. It seemed the media, at least, was following along with the government mandate that those who had been infected by the runaway, man-made Addison-Wilkes virus should be referred to either by the clinical term of “infected” or the politically correct “living-impaired.”
Mike had thought no one would pay any attention to such an asinine order, but apparently the media was following the party line on this one. The coffee pot was full; he mentally shrugged as he reached for a mug. The mug was dingy and scuffed up, a promotional item from his old business. The words “Mike McCormick’s Landscaping, Inc, Let us spruce up your yard” circled the mug in faded blue stenciled lettering.
The phone rang—it was his business cell. Mike hit mute on the TV and answered the call as professionally as he could before coffee. “DeadEx. Government licensed removers of the undead. How can I help you?”
He listened to the woman’s frightened babble, calmed her down, got her address, reminded her of the simple, basic precautions that everyone should have known by heart by now, and promised her that he and his crew would be there between 10 A.M. and 2 P.M., and that someone would need to be at the house to meet them when they arrived.
When not even his smoothest talking could calm her down after that, he reluctantly promised he would see what he could do about being there sooner.
He hung up and rolled his eyes. Zombie removal may have been more lucrative than landscaping had been, but at least with the old landscaping business, people were a lot more agreeable to being part of a schedule rather than demanding instant attention. Nowadays everyone expected him to arrive immediately, as if he were the fucking zombie police or something.
Of course, that was the reason he was in business—there weren’t enough people at the precincts, or animal control, or the town, county, state, or federal governments to clean up all the zombies still shambling around.
The Zombie Civil Rights Act was actually passed under the very bland name of Bill Z1-5AG7. The bill established clearly that only those specially licensed by the government were allowed to attack the living-impaired. Punching, bludgeoning, attempted drowning, electrocution, cross bow action, target practice, lynching, pea shooting, fire setting, etc, were now all banned. Destruction, attempting to destroy, or even simply what was legally known as “badgering” of the undead were all outlawed by the Zombie Civil Rights Act.
The brief glory days of free range zombie hunting died with the establishment of Act Z1-5AG7. Only those authorized by the government could hunt down the undead. And the government was more than happy to farm the work out to third parties. The police and the courts were overworked with catching “hidden” murders—a lot of people thought they could get away with killing people during the Z.A. and then claiming, “I thought he was a zombie.”
Also, the probate courts were overloaded, especially after the Supreme Court had ruled 6-3 that zombies were not entitled to the powers of ownership, and given the same legal status as anyone else without a heartbeat. This was despite heavy lobbying from the ACLU who wanted zombies accorded the right-to-life. True, they no longer had heartbeats, but, their supporters argued, there was definite brain activity going on.
That final ruling meant everyone caught holding or harboring a zombie was guilty of the misdemeanor of not reporting a dead body and those filmmakers fulfilling the niche of zombie porn were able to be tried for the felony of necrophilia.
And, with the government stretched thin to begin with by the mortality rate of the virus, licenses for zombie hunting were made available to anyone who filled out the correct paperwork, paid the $50 application fee, and took a two day seminar—The Undead and You—with one day of written tests, one day of field tests.
Everyone on Mike’s crew was certified, and he was thinking of hiring more, get enough so they could make multiple calls at once, maybe step back and focus more on the finance and advertising. He looked down at his coffee mug and reminded himself he needed to order new ones with the new name, in black and yellow to match the new lettering painted on his truck over the old one.
He turned back to the TV, but the news had been replaced by commercials. FOX was doing a special program that night showing a montage of the more famous celebrity funerals held after the Z.A. Clicking off the TV, Mike radioed in his crew and told them where to meet him. He gathered up the checks he had been counting into the cashbox to deposit at the bank later, scowling as he reminded himself how much had to be put aside for taxes.
He went to the garage and, after double checking the vicinity and the supplies, got in the truck and put the woman’s address into his GPS. Turning onto Maple Street, flicking on the signal more out of habit than any real thought of cutting someone off—there wasn’t much traffic these days—he was surprised to have another truck pull up beside his at the red light. He grinned when he saw who it was and rolled down the window.
“Hey, Sam! Where you headed? I know you’re not about to try and poach my current customer. She wants the herd stinking up her lawn decapitated, pronto.”
Sam Gupta gave him a very sour smile. “My customer wants the infected that’s milling around his house carted up and taken in for possible cure,” he answered stiffly.
“Cure, right. I’m sure they’re getting real close, just like a cure for AIDS and cancer,” Mike mocked him.
The light changed and Sam pushed down hard on the gas, taking off down the nearly empty road with more speed than was usually seen in the suburbs. The inside of his truck rattled with currently empty chains and straps flapping around. Sam’s truck was enclosed, unlike Mike’s open truck bed, the white panels on the side reading Sam’s Zombie Control. Sam was Mike’s main competition in town, but not really.
“A Humane Solution to an Inhuman Problem,” Sam advertised on his website. He insisted on carting away every single zombie he and his crew caught, head attached, brain intact. Sam went for the niche market of people who wanted the zombies shuffling around their homes taken away, but were still attached to the damned things, either because the undead used to be friends or relatives, or the customer was just a ridiculous bleeding heart liberal who couldn’t stand the thought of killing anything, even the undead.
Private zombie hunters were paid for each afflicted person they brought in to the specially set up government hospitals—$100 for a “live” undead person, $20 for a dead undead head. The price difference was supposed to encourage hunters to bring them in “alive” so to speak, but many found carting a truck bed full of heads was a hell of a lot easier than transporting two or three “living-impaired” people in the special outfitted vans that cost an arm and leg to properly rig with all of the required restraints. Mike thought it was pretty perverted to drive around a van filled with chains and cuffs.
Mike whistled cheerfully as he drove to the latest customer’s house. DeadEx was booming as Mike and his crew cleared out local infestations. Most of his landscaping crew had died during the Z.A, and he’d been forced to hire a nearly all new crew, most of them pimple-faced kids with no experience in the workforce and great expectations of huge wages, just for not being zombies.
Mike privately thought zombies might do better jobs—if you could somehow retrain them to stop eating every living thing in sight. But the kids picked up on the basics pretty quickly—most of them boasting about their video game experience finally paying off. Mike rolled his eyes every time he heard it—that joke had gotten cliché within about the first six hours of the Z.A. But even paying the kids the wages current market forces demanded, he was still raking in the cash, paid twice for every zombie, once by the customers for clearing away zombies, and second by the government for his headcount.
Someone high up in the state departmen
t had tried to put a positive spin on things after the Z.A. by releasing a report that the unemployment rate had dropped significantly. She was pushed out of office after the succeeding outcry, the loudest voices coming from the shocked and appalled Zombie Apocalypse Survivor Support Group, and her statement had only been oil on the fire with the conspiracy theorists—the Z.A. truthers—who were convinced the virus had been deliberately released by the government.
However, the Zombie Apocalypse had, overall, been anti-climactic. It began on a Tuesday and the CDC had things well in hand by the following Monday. Low level office workers, clerks, fast food employees, retail workers, and teenagers in general were seriously bummed out that life went back to normal so quickly. People working in the cities especially missed the brief span of time huddled in the top floors of the high rises, stairways blocked, living off of vending machine food, and dropping various office supplies down onto anything shambling down in the streets below.
Of course, it was taboo to say anything about having fun during the Z.A.—you never know if someone you were talking to or someone passing by had lost a close relative or friend to the virus; it would have been really rude to boast about your head shot count in front of someone who had been forced to tearfully shoot their dear mother in the face.
Miss Manners had written a whole editorial on it in which she had sternly taken to task a letter writer who had whined about causing a young woman who had lost her brother in the Z.A. to burst into tears when he had bragged that he’d spent the whole Z.A. holed up with his buddies in their apartment and using the time to get drunk and watch every zombie movie they could download from Netflix.
There had been over three million posts in the comment section of Miss Manners’s website within six hours, about 50/50 for and against, before the servers fried and the whole thing went down, which was just as well, as the comments were getting pretty nasty, with the new insult “zombie-fucker” being tossed around by both sides.
Mike got to the address, where most of the crew was already parked. The zombies, unprovoked and not smelling the humans safely inside the zombie-proofed house, were milling around the yard and not yet attacking.
A car pulled up. It was Emily, one of his first hires after the Z.A, and what looked like the new kid. Emily, smart girl, followed the rules for exiting from a car to a building. The new kid, however, needed to be pulled roughly back when he almost exited the barred windowed car without his gun out. Mike shook his head as he readied his own gun and prepared to safely exit the truck.
When the whole crew was gathered in the woman’s living room, the old lady herself dithering about getting everyone tea cups despite Mike’s protests that they were fine, he gave orders for everyone to get their weapons loaded and ready for a final inspection.
Mike circled around the inside of the house, making notes on the layout of the yard from the windows, deciding on how best to divide the area into different sections for each crew member to handle, not all that different from when he had once assigned different sections of lawn to his old landscape crew for leaf raking or mulching.
When he was done he went over to his senior assistant, Sven, who was pulling on the metal/nylon weave protective jumpsuit. “You explained the rules to the new guy?”
Sven grunted as he pulled up the pants. “Nah, thought I’d leave that up to you, boss. You really know how to put the fear of God into the new kids with your first day speeches.”
“Thanks.”
Amongst the sound of rapid clicks and cha-chunks as people made sure they had full ammunition for all three weapons each crew member carried in the field, Mike went over to the new guy, busily readying his Winchester 2087.
“Okay, Dominic. That right?”
The new kid nodded.
“Okay, great, Dominic. First rule, under no circumstances do you ever get closer than ten feet to a zombie, understand? Expect the unexpected—just when you think they’re down, they can take a leap at you and rip out your throat.”
The kid gave him a condescending smirk and Mike suppressed a groan. “Hey, no problem. I survived the Z.A.”
Emily snorted. “Yeah, you and everybody else here, kid,” she said, sounding more like a battle-hardened colonel than a teenager.
Mike went around and gave everyone their assigned area, and then launched into his usual Pre-Kill speech, speaking to everyone, but focusing on Dominic, reminding everyone that, even though the living had won the Z.A., the undead hadn’t given up yet, that the battle raged on, and that using brains meant keeping brains, that thinking ahead was the best way to stay alive, and that to never underestimate the danger, even when armed and prepared.
“Okay, everyone, helmets on and let’s kill some zombies!”
The crew cheered, their exuberance covering up the old lady’s whimper as she walked into the room with a tray of fine bone china cups and a teapot. Ignoring her, they headed out the front door.
For most of the crew, actually getting the kill order was clearly the high point—the rest was all about checking and double checking your supplies and the horizon and underneath vehicles and behind your back, and then double checking weapons and then the area again, so getting to finally take action became pure relief.
Once outside, they fanned out, taking out zombies with precise head shots, everyone staying the prescribed ten feet away.
Half an hour later, when there were no more signs of moving undead, and a lot of dead zombies on the ground, Mike radioed to everyone’s handset: “Perimeter sweep!”
The group fanned out, methodically checking the area for any lingering undead. After a few minutes the crew radioed back from different points.
“All clear.”
“All clear, boss.”
“Finito!”
“Nothing but splatters over here, boss.”
“This herd looks to be cleared out.”
“All clear.”
“Clear!”
“All Z’s blown away in my sector, boss-man.”
“Good work, folks,” Mike radioed back. “Sven and Emily, you’re on decapitation duty. Dominic, Jayden, assist with B ‘n B—that’s beheading and bagging, kid. The rest of you, we’ve got bodies to load.”
As the group set to work on clean up, Mike took off his helmet and surveyed the yard, counting corpses. It was a grand total of 17 zombies, an about average size for the herds still shambling around. He smiled as he tallied the take for this job. Between the amount they would get for the overall service, the price per zombie from the woman who’d called, and the collection they would get from the government for the heads, it had been a good day’s work.
There was a yell behind him and he spun around to see a zombie burst from the bushes, no less than five feet from him. It was coming from the section Dominic had been assigned to clear—clearly he had missed one. Mike went for his sidearm and managed to get three shots off in quick succession, but hitting the torso instead of the head, and the zombie was chomping onto him before he could raise his gun high enough to get a head shot.
That zombie-fucker Sam is gonna steal all my business, was Mike’s last thought before the virus took full hold and his only conscious thought was “braaaaaaiiiiins.”
If he had still been able to think, he might have been impressed with the fact that Dominic took him down with just one shot from a good twenty feet away.
The Return of the Revenge of the Curse
of the Mummy’s Tomb
by Gary Buettner
Jack Tracker stood triumphantly on a collapsed statue of the sun god, Ra, and stared into the desert.
The Egyptian sun baked Cairo like a stone in a kiln, while the bored drift of hot air failed to muster the strength to ruffle the sun-bleached tents in Jack’s camp. There was something in the air, though, some kind of menace that hung above the heads of the assembled explorers.
“It’s hotter than a camel’s balls,” Dewey said, mopping his face with a dirty handkerchief. Rivulets of sweat drained down from his a
viator goggles and receding hairline, and his t-shirt was plastered to his gut.
Jane Harrison, statuesque and blond, made a sound like steam escaping from a faulty boiler to silence him. “Jack looks like he’s going to say something!”
The other explorers turned to look. Dewey sighed. He’d been with Jack since the beginning, when he was more of a grave robber than a globe trotter. The new blood: the archeology students (mostly female), the diggers, and the hired guns, all thought that they could somehow breach Jack’s inner circle. What they didn’t realize was that Jack was Jack’s inner circle, a circle of one. Dewey had no illusions about his importance to this or any other expedition. He was a pilot—an okay pilot, truth be told—that could fly a plane and, nine times out of ten, land it. In life, as in aviation, Dewey found it prudent to fly close to the ground, just in case you had to jump.
Jack turned to the assembled masses, removed his hat, and held it in his hand. “I’m not going to stand up here and make a speech,” he said, which began most of his speeches.
Dewey stared at Jane. If she wasn’t the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, then she was missing one hell of a chance. Jack had been ignoring her, which pretty much guaranteed that she would be chasing his bullwhip by the time this adventure got into full swing.
“I guess what I’m saying,” Jack said, finishing up, “is that we’re all in this together.” He paused for effect and then pointed into the desert. “Adventure is that way, my friends.”
The small crowd cheered and followed him into the desert.
Watching the ground for cobras and scorpions, Dewey followed.
***
The caravan of explorers marched through the desert under the blinding sun and over the searing sand. Dewey brought up the rear, watching the line of adventurers snake through the desert and making sure that none of the halfwits wandered off or got left behind.
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night... Page 20