by Evans, John
That gave her pause. Lena looked at the camera, her imagination seeing in its blank stare an executioner’s gaze.
CHAPTER FOUR
HOME
QUARLES FOUND ANGIE pacing, upset. There was a slow, not-quite rhythmic thudding against the fence of the Andersons’ property. A body battering itself against the boards. Snuffling growls (a distinctly male sound) and occasional, cringe-inducing raking sounds against the reinforced wood. The unmistakable sound of clawing fingernails. Or by now, the tips of bare phalanges exposed by repeated trauma. Feeders didn’t think, but nor did they feel.
“You know any rent-a-cop could handle this,” Quarles said, less patronizing than mildly ironic. He was just glad Angie was here, whole, alive and in love with him. She wrapped her still firm and supple body around his. There was no lust in this embrace — she was merely frightened and upset — but Quarles felt the familiar stirring down south. The former stripper had a powerful effect on him, even if years of drug and alcohol abuse had given her face a rather hard, slightly mannish quality. She still had a young woman’s hair.
“It’s Barry and Kate,” Angie said, a little whiny. “My God, we just had dinner with them!”
It had been six months since that dinner, but Quarles saw her point. The Andersons were their neighbors and at least on a surface level, their friends. Whatever had happened inside the Andersons’ own little fortress had been tragic and now there was one, probably two, zombies trapped on the other side of the security perimeter.
As a member of the neighborhood watch — it amused Quarles to no end that he was not the president, or even the VP of that august assembly — Quarles had the Andersons’ keys and security codes. He could deal with this sans red tape and just call it in mañana.
“All right babe, pour me a Scotch and soda,” Quarles said, giving Angie a passionate kiss. This seemed to awaken her sex drive and she moaned softly, wrapping her hands around his buttocks. She breathed into his ear in that incredibly sultry way she had. “I’ll do more than that, when you come back.”
Quarles forced himself to disengage, gave her a pat on the butt and walked over to the Andersons’ security door. As he fitted his key into the lock, the dead thing on the other side of the wall stayed where it was. Apparently it hadn’t heard him yet. That was good. He planned to shoot it from six or seven feet away, to avoid blood spatter. There was some small risk of infection — say if it sprayed him in the mouth or eyes — but more importantly, he’d just bought the khakis and polo shirt on Tuesday.
The lock disengaged. Quarles opened the door and smoothly wheeled into the yard. For fun he quickdrew his pistol, just to keep the skills sharp. After all, he’d been riding the desk for more than a year now. His days of front-line combat in the war against the dead had ended before his fifty-first birthday. And before that intense year, he hadn’t been in combat since his final Seal Team Six deployment. How old had he been then? He didn’t remember, except that it was happened in that nebulous zone of the 40s when a man still had days he felt 20 years younger.
Quarles didn’t have days like that anymore, but that didn’t mean it scared him when he saw the feeder charge, closing to six feet in a few short, spasmodic strides. It was Barry. The pudgy executive’s guts were penduluming from the large open cavity in his lower body. He wore nothing but boxer shorts and it looked like rigor had set in below the belt. The guy was surprisingly well endowed.
All this flashed through Quarles’ mind before he smoothly pulled the trigger and put Barry down. The bullet entered at the temple, exactly where Quarles wanted it to go, and obliterated the little cluster of plague re-animating his neighbor’s corpse.
Barry went down bonelessly without so much as a whimper. Quarles had also, in consideration of the neighbors who were still living, screwed on a silencer before even getting out of his car. No need to ruin anyone’s night with gunfire to report and investigate.
Given the clowns on the neighborhood watch, that was a relief on multiple levels. They would only get in his way, endangering themselves, him and others. Quarles was glad his value to society had put him in a house only Microsoft millionaires like Barry had lived in before the virus, but the disadvantage was that those wimps were still around.
Well, one less now.
Quarles turned to tap out the security code so the alarm wouldn’t go off. Most alarms were silent these days — after all, noise attracted the dead — but it would notify a ton of people. Angie had done the right thing in calling him. Better just let a pro take care of this. And he got to go home early.
Everybody wins.
Quarles locked himself in, for the good of the hood, and gave the corpse a cursory inspection. The gut wound was the typical feeder M.O. Tear open the soft belly, feast on the innards… Just like the George Romero movies. This told Quarles that Barry was a casualty and that meant there was another feeder on the premises.
He’d bet dollars-to-donuts that it was Kate. Stats showed that eight out of 10 feeder-on-human murders were of family members and lovers. The national ad campaigns hit that point over and over again when it came to Health Certificates and other prevention measures. If your loved one killed anyone before being put down, odds were the victim was you.
Quarles moved toward the avant-garde architecture Mr. Microsoft had built for himself. It was all windows, so Quarles could begin clearing rooms before he’d even gotten to the front door.
There was a lot of blood on the gravel path linking the gate and the door. Probably just the last of Barry’s seeping out as he wandered out here with his giant wound.
As Quarles closed the distance to the front door, he panned his pistol around, purely out of instinct and professional pride. No target presented itself and as yet he’d heard nothing. Still, he had the distinct sense there was one more feeder here and that one (Kate) would reveal itself soon.
“Here kitty, kitty,” he said loudly, not really thinking about what he was saying. “Come and get your dinner!”
Reaching the patio, he was unsurprised to find the front door was ajar. There was no view from here — the fence was too high — and thus no furniture on the patio. Just a long, quietly burbling fountain wall. Quarles could step right up to the window and see if he’d attracted the attention of anything.
The glass was great protection — it was undoubtedly bulletproof — so he stood beside the window and pounded it a few times with the butt of his gun. Nothing stirred, other than the water sliding over the fountain’s flat surfaces. Where was she?
A little annoyed, Quarles moved into the house. He’d hoped to be eating dinner by now.
“Kate? Sweetheart? Anything to say about yoga? The love languages? Some other New Age horse hockey?”
The house was quiet except for a strange sound. It was hard to identify at first. After listening for more than a minute, Quarles identified it as crackling flames. But he smelled nothing burning.
Letting his gun lead the way, Quarles moved through the open-plan foyer/kitchen. He kicked open a closet door, then the laundry room door.
Something stopped Quarles on the hardwood between the dining room where that dinner happened six months earlier and the rear of the house.
There was an ear on the floor. That was interesting. Wonder how that happened?
Quarles squatted and gave the ear a closer look. It was pierced but there was no earring. Probably hers, then. But you never know. Barry Anderson had been kind of metrosexual, in Quarles’ book. His soaps were scented, not Lava tough, and Quarles might have missed the wound in his inspection of the body.
Moving down a hallway in the direction of the fire sound, Quarles scanned the deep shadows of the den. He casually flicked on the hall light and paused at the threshold.
The crackling came from the TV — one of those fireplace video loops. There was a thong on the carpet. Fire engine red.
Quarles entered and flipped on the overhead light. He actually jumped at the unexpected sight of Kate, handcuffed to the spiral sta
ircase leading up to a bedroom. A necktie was knotted around her neck. It might have been some kind of erotic asphyxiation, auto or otherwise, because she was nude and obviously dead. But not a feeder…
Quarles approached the corpse, mystified. He grabbed her close-cropped hair with his free hand and lifted her face – there was a small knife jammed into her eye, deep enough to do it. Her other eye stared blankly at him, not the probing but humanist gaze of the woman he’d debated politics with. This was a look he’d seen too much of in his life.
She had blood around her mouth and bits of flesh between her teeth. She’d bit someone. Her husband, or someone else?
“What happened to you?” Quarles muttered to himself. Randomly he remembered that Kate had made a vegetable “bolognese” that night he and Angie had come over. Quarles didn’t care for it.
He yanked down some drapes and hung them over the stair rail to cover Kate’s body. He’d rather liked Kate and knew she would be embarrassed as hell to be found like this. It was ridiculous to protect her modesty now, but he thought she’d appreciate the gesture.
Quarles climbed the stairs to the loft bedroom. There was no way Kate could have ripped open her husband’s midsection and munched on his guts. So why wasn’t the thing that killed Barry wandering around?
Upstairs, a queen-sized bed and walk-in closet yielded no clues. However, he did hear a new sound while he was up there.
A shuffling footstep. Creaking boards. Above him. The attic? Quarles didn’t see a way up there. Not from here, at any rate.
The answer appeared when he went down to the rear of the house and found stairs going up to the roof. The door was locked. He didn’t have a key for it, so he kicked it open.
Stepping out onto the roof, he found an expansive view of the neighborhood. There were a few pieces of furniture, a fake palm tree and a mini-bar. Quarles was slightly insulted Barry and Kate hadn’t invited them up here after dinner.
A low gurgle warned him of the attacker awaiting him before it could burst around the cover of the stairs to grab him from behind. Quarles pivoted smoothly into a crouch, squeezing off two quick shots at the slightly built assailant as it lunged. Bare-chested, no more than 150 pounds, it was previously a young man with his hair dyed pink. His throat had been bitten, deep — undoubtedly by the asphyxiated woman downstairs — and there were remnants of gore running down his chin.
The feeder’s pretty face lost its looks as Quarles’ first shot sheared through his nose. The second one caught him under the chin and he dropped, convulsively clutching for the Virus Control cop’s ankles.
Quarles hopped back, out of danger, and watched with satisfaction as the dead man’s brains leaked out onto the asphalt shingles. The tattoos on his sinewy body pretty much confirmed what he was doing here, at least in Quarles’ mind. Kinky shit. And probably for hire.
Where the feeder had been lurking there were signs of a struggle near a first aid kit and a huge pool of blood. So she died, bit the prosty and he pretty much disemboweled Barry up here? Quarles couldn’t figure if hubby found his dead wife and was waylaid by the boy, or if this was a long-standing, loving threesome arrangement gone terribly wrong. Given Barry’s state of undress when Quarles found him, it was probably the latter.
Quarles had to hand it to him. Barry had managed to crawl off with his guts hanging out and lock the door behind him. Maybe he’d even dispatched his dead wife before succumbing to his injuries. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to get to a gun or otherwise destroy his own brain before slipping off to the great dark void.
Quarles didn’t need the details. It was a sordid scenario and one that could easily have been avoided. He sighed, looking at the Anderson’s roofdeck love nest. There was a telescope. Barry had mentioned his interest in astronomy to Quarles.
“You two shoulda gone to church more,” he said, gazing at the setting sun for a moment before heading out to have dinner with his wife.
#
Though he had no problem supervising four burners at once, stirring a pot with each hand, when Winter looked over he saw that Nic was out of her element.
“When do I put the veggies in the coconut milk?” she asked, nervously eying the pot she was responsible for.
“Not until you see tiny, delicate bubbles. Timing is everything.”
He picked up a knife and started on the eggplant. It took about 10 seconds to produce 10 equal slices.
The kitchenette was cramped but Winter appreciated his proximity to Nic. He was trying to savor every moment of this evening. Quarles said the reassignment order would take a couple of days to process so they’d have another shift, maybe two, but it still felt like this was it.
“You shoulda been a chef,” Nic said, watching him in admiration.
“Not enough action.” He flipped the rice cooker's lid into the air, caught it, checked the rice, and slammed it back down in one fluid movement.
“I don’t know. You could be the Samurai Chef.” She giggled a little. He wished she did that more often. Particularly lately.
They ate their meal out on Winter’s balcony. His apartment was a studio and had few amenities, but the balcony was nice. Looking out at downtown, it was easy to think all was right in this city. He didn’t have a view of Puget Sound, but you could see the Space Needle. It was no longer open to the public but, for some reason, from time to time Winter saw the elevator going up and down. Someone rich calling in favors, or perhaps murky official business.
“God, why didn’t I let you cook for me more often,” Nic said when they finished the meal, pushing back her empty plate with a look of contentment tinged with melancholy.
“Like he said, we can still go bowling. Let’s start a league for ex-partners, whattaya say?”
She nodded, smiling, but her gaze was faraway. “Not looking forward to this. Having you there is like a tether to my sanity, you know?”
“Yeah, there’s even a few laughs, now and then,” Winter said.
“Makes me want to just say, ‘to hell with it.’ Get a desk job. If they’ll let me.”
“You do a lot of good out there.”
“Sure, like that kid today, right?”
The pain behind her sarcasm was obvious.
“You did him a favor.”
She looked away. “My Grandma used to tell me I should get out, before I saw something I couldn’t unsee. Something I couldn’t undo. One of my cousins was a Blood. She said one day there was just nothing in his eyes anymore. Like looking into a pit. He was that way to the day he died. Never talked about what he’d seen. Or what he’d done... But whatever it was, there was no going back from it.”
Winter was on his second beer and felt irrepressibly tender. “I don’t see that when I look in your eyes.”
She shrugged. “Maybe not. But it can happen in an instant.”
It pained Winter to see her so tortured. “Nic... Forget it. You only do what you have to do.”
“That’s just it. It’s easier and easier to forget. That’s what scares me. It’s like just this big old well of bad, and the more you pour in, the more it can hold...” A thought clearly sickened her. “It really is a pit.”
He touched her arm, just trying to provide some awkward comfort. “Maybe it’s better to forget instead of you know... suffer.”
She smiled. “Look at you. Mr. Sensitivity. You know, Quarles is right. Those sentiments wouldn’t keep you from taking a big old bite out of me.”
He laughed and sat back, finishing his beer at a swig. “Who knows? You just might like it.”
Nic giggled again but the moment was spoiled by her ringing phone. She flipped it open, checked the I.D. and smiled apologetically. Winter started gathering up the plates to take inside. Nic accepted the call.
“Hey, darlin’! What’s up?” She listened for a moment, then said, “I’m having dinner at Winter’s... I'm sorry, baby, I thought you worked late on Mondays! ...Okay, sounds good. Love you!”
She closed her phone and followed him inside.
“I best fly. Thanks for dinner, my friend.”
“Always a pleasure,” Winter said, and popped a fresh beer. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be his last of the night.
#
As she drove home from the Center, Lena mulled over the day’s events and listened to classical music. She felt a bout of depression coming on and regretted not grabbing a pick-me-up before she left. A little mood enhancement, nothing she’d take regularly, just something to help her get her emotional bearings straight again.
She irritably escaped some gridlock with a bold move and turned onto her street. The 25-story tower she called home was the largest on the block and only a few streets from the waterfront.
Lena pulled up to the security kiosk and handed her identification through the window. As she waited for the guard to scan it, behind her the garage door closed the ramp to the street. She was cleared for entry and piloted the VW into her parking space.
An elevator lifted her to an entrance hall under 24-hour guard. Recognizing her, a doorman let Lena into a baroquely furnished lobby with mirrored walls, brass fixtures and a multi-tiered chandelier. She carried her Safeway bags past the front desk attendant.
“Evening, Dr. Gladden. Long day?”
She greeted him with a smile. “Hiya, Tommy. They all are.”
Another elevator would take her to her floor. This one was mirrored and appointed like a luxury hotel’s.
Lena’s elderly neighbor, Izhak Carmel, hurried to join her as she entered. She held the elevator for him.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said. He seemed in a sour mood.
“No problem. Haven’t seen Felix lately, is he all right?” Felix was Izhak’s Pomeranian.
“The building bastards made me give him away.”
Lena was shocked. “What? Why?”
Izhak’s voice dripped with contempt. “Security! Some residents passed around a petition. A dog can bite, you know. And they don’t live forever.”