“It’s an elephant,” Cole said, sighing at her ignorance, which was both profound and tragically common. Since the apocalypse, there had been two attempts to restore public schooling and both had been rife with corruption. Money was misspent, misplaced and straight up stolen, and neither attempt lasted more than a few years. The literacy rate hovered around fifteen percent, but even those who could read, rarely did so at more than a high school level.
Cole had been extremely lucky to find his way into one of the few Catholic orphanages that were still operating. Religion in New York had taken a major hit after the world was set ablaze with radiation, and for years, the term hell on earth had a new meaning. During that time, the very concept of charity was all but discarded. People who ate rats in preference to roaches were not likely to have much left over to give.
Somehow Catholicism managed to hang on, but barely. In a city of ten million, there were maybe a hundred thousand “Jesus Freaks.” There were more devil worshipers and cultist nut jobs than there were actual religious people left.
One cult, the Chain of Light, demanded that their followers make flesh offerings every month. It was generally cuts of skin, but some members sliced off ears or toes. How this was legal, Cole didn’t know. Their only saving grace was that they did venerate children. Children were never touched, but they were “groomed” for when they turned eighteen. By then they were too far gone to know right from wrong, and they eagerly joined the ranks of weirdos who pledged their every waking moment to their living god: the Sun.
Still, Cole would rather take Corrina to the cultists before he gave her up to the city as he should have done according to the law. The city didn’t run orphanages. They relegated the chore of raising cast-off children to licensed “Work-Life” sites—in other words, horrible sweatshops where the children were used as slave labor to churn out the crappy odds and ends that New York had become infamous for. There were thousands of factories scattered throughout the city, their towering smokestacks endlessly belching rank, poisonous clouds.
The little slaves were chained together ten in a row. They worked together, ate together, slept together, crapped together and frequently died together. Human life had become devoid of value.
“Bring the book,” Cole told Corrina, and headed for the door. He had already tried hiring tutors and babysitters, but she had resisted all attempts at education. She didn’t like it. Being smart didn’t feel natural. Running the streets was natural. Stealing was natural. Hustling people smaller or stupider than her was natural. Corrina would never have been able to articulate the point, but she was a pure Darwinist.
Survival of the fittest meant fucking over anyone who got in her way. Six months of tagging along after Cole had done nothing to change that and when he would buy a coat for some little slag or when he’d drop some coins for a begging trog, she would scratch her head looking to see what “angle” he was playing.
“But it’s heavy,” she said of the book, worried that he was going to try and ditch her with some dumpy housewife who knew all the vowels—Corrina was convinced that there were definitely more than six. “Besides, it’ll make me look stupid. You don’t see none of the other bounty hunters walking around with a primer. People’ll think I’m a little kiddie. They won’t take me seriously.”
“You are a little kid,” Cole muttered, knowing he was wasting his breath. She could be a stubborn thing. He headed out the door, once more in a black suit with matching trench coat. The only touch of color about him were his hazel eyes and the thin green band around his Fedora. He grunted up at the sky. It was a typical January day in New York: dreary and grey, with a fine cool mist in the air. Just how he liked it.
Corrina grunted in agreement from beneath a porkpie hat that she hadn’t had the day before. There was no sense asking where she’d gotten it from; she’d only lie. “So, where to first?”
“The morgue.”
“What’s that?” she asked, falling in step next to him. He never made allowances for her short stature and she had to take an extra skip with every third stride to keep up.
“It’s where they take dead bodies to be mulched. But before they do that, they do a quick post-mortem to find the cause of death. What we have to do is find the ones that might have been sucked dry.”
They passed a man sitting on a stoop, smoking a cigarette. He was lost in a wool coat, his wrists sticking from the sleeves looked like twigs. Corrina waited until he was behind them before she said in a low tone, “I thought them zombies ate people.”
“The dumb ones do. If they aren’t on syn-ope, they go animal. They’re easy to find. It’s the ones that know how to play the game that we’re after.” He looked around at the immense city. “They’re here, hiding among us, sometimes in plain sight, right under our noses. Those ones will hide their tracks. They’ll make the deaths look like suicide in a bathtub or a burglary gone wrong.”
He took out a notebook and held it up in front of Corrina’s face. “We look for patterns. Even the clever Dead-eyes aren’t exactly creative geniuses. Once they find something that works, they tend to stick to it. It’s why reading and writing is so important. It’s not enough to see one dead body and shrug and move on. You have to have an idea about what’s going on now and what has been going on in the past three months or more.”
“If writing is all so great, why is this the first time you got that notebook?”
“Because,” he snapped. Angrily, he shoved the notebook away, muttering to himself, “A refresher course, my ass. Other than Oliver out in Hempstead, I’m the most senior man on the roster.”
Corrina had quick ears and had grown used to Cole talking under his breath. “What’s that mean? Senior on the roster?”
“It means people die in this job all too quick.” The city was divided into eight territories and in the five years he’d been on the job, there had been nine deaths and a retirement. The retiree hadn’t been given a gold watch and a party on his last day. He’d been in a clinic wondering how he was going to button his fly with only one hand. He’d had his left arm torn from his body by a not particularly large zombie.
As always, the morgue was unpleasantly warm and damp. The poorly designed layout of the building placed it across the hall from the furnace room, three stories below street level. The smell was outrageous, mainly because the mulcher that turned human bodies into chum for the fisheries was on the same floor. Even Corrina, a hardy veteran of the vilest smelling tunnels beneath the city, went a little green as they walked in.
“Makes you hungry for stew, don’t it?” Cole asked. Corrina had begun to sweat beneath the round porkpie hat. “If you want to be a part of this life, you’re going to have to get used to it.” As if he were breathing in air saturated with the smell of newly cooked bacon, he sucked in a big breath through his nostrils. “Ahhhh. Come on. Let’s see what’s the latest.”
Corrina teetered along in his wake, trying not to look too closely at the ghastly bodies slipping down the conveyor belt. There were so many that they were stacked like cordwood at the first station. Cole took a quick look at each one, starting with a blackened husk of a thing.
“They sometimes try to hide their deeds by using fire,” Cole explained, pushing back the corpse’s head to look at the neck where the flesh was less charred. It was more or less intact. The next corpse had a small hole on one side of its head and a huge one on the other.
“Suicide?” he asked the attendant.
He was a bored looking man in a disgusting lab coat. It had once been white but was now a mishmash of indescribable stains one layered atop the next. “Yeah, maybe.” He didn’t care.
The next body had a caved-in head. There were tire tracks across the remains of its face. Cole barely gave it a glance. The next was a trog that had died of multiple systemic infections. So much of its body had been eaten away by the slag that it was hard to believe it had lasted as long as it had. Even naked, there was no way to tell its sex.
He passed by two
oddly pink bodies and explained to Corrina, “Carbon monoxide poisoning.” This was hardly an explanation since she didn’t know what that was. The next person on the conveyor belt was sickeningly yellow. Corrina kept as far from it as possible. “It’s alright,” Cole told her. “Liver failure does that. Chances were, she drank too much or was constantly spun up on Uptown Ice.”
Corrina didn’t care. She wasn’t going anywhere near it. Corpses were a part of life and she had seen her share, but this was different. Normally a body was a stripped hunk of flesh that you skirted around while averting your eyes. These bodies were not just on display, they were everywhere she turned. Each one of them was revolting, and barely looked real. They were emaciated with swollen tongues and sunken eyes. Most had died with their mouths gaping and looked as if a scream was on the verge of tearing from their throats. Many were contorted in odd positions, their arms sticking out or their legs turned around and facing the wrong way.
They were almost all stiff as well, and when the attendants had to shift their parts, they made gristly cracking sounds.
Corrina was just about on the verge of her own scream when one of the corpses sat up on its own. It was the hideous yellow one. It looked like a ghoul from one of Corrina’s nightmares as its body contorted, bending at the hip, its upper body staying perfectly straight. Upon reaching a vertical position, its head creaked around until it was facing the twelve-year-old, at which point it said, “Rrroughmp.”
A cloud of poison blew over her, and as she was just sucking in a breath to scream, the cloud went down her throat. It came up again with what remained of her breakfast in a brown gush. She left a trail of it as she scrambled away on her hands and knees.
“Son of a bitch,” Cole muttered, reaching for her. “Calm down, Corrina. You get used to the…”
“It moved!” she screamed, her little hands clawing at him. “Kill it! Kill it! It’s a zombie.” Her right hand darted in toward his gun with surprising speed and she would’ve drawn it if he hadn’t slammed his large hand down on hers. “No! Look at it.” She wouldn’t and he really didn’t blame her. On one level, he knew that it was going into rigor mortis—the natural stiffening of the joints and muscles of a body a few hours after death—on a more human level, even he was skeeved out by the corpse.
The attendants tittered briefly at her reaction; being surrounded by death in this endless fashion had caused them to lose touch with what passed for humanity in that time. The closest attendant frowned, “You gonna clean that up, right?”
“Do I look like a fucking maid to you?” Cole snapped. “Call one of your slags.” He pried Corrina’s hands away and forced her dead-white face to look up into his. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. That’s what some bodies do. It’s normal.”
Although her face was being held straight, her eyes were raked far over to the right. There had been nothing normal about the yellow body or any of the bodies for that matter. “It moved,” she whispered again, her insides starting to shake.
“Yeah. They all do. Bodies get stiff when they die and when that happens, they move a little. What they don’t do is get up and walk around. It’s not a zombie.” He gave her a little shake as he said this. “Zombies aren’t real, do you understand? There are no zombies in the city.”
“I guess,” she said without taking her eyes from the body as the conveyor slid it on by.
This wasn’t good enough for Cole. He couldn’t afford for his name to be associated with the word “zombie.” The only reason New York hadn’t been nuked out of existence by the other city-states and countries that still existed, was because it kept its zombie problem a closely guarded secret. Cole’s primary job wasn’t to bag and tag Dead-eyes, it was to keep the secret from ever getting out. In truth, he lived and breathed under his own death penalty. If he ever let the secret out, even in a drunken ramble in some gin joint, he would be killed and replaced.
“Maybe you should go get a cup of coffee,” he suggested, digging in his pocket for his wallet. He gave her a dollar. “And maybe some breakfast when you feel better. There’s a little mom and pop diner around the corner.”
He walked her to the door and shooed her out into the hall.
“You probably shouldn’t bring a kid in here,” the attendant closest to the splash of vomit said.
“You should probably shut the fuck up,” Cole snarled. “You think I want to bring a kid here? She’s just…” He broke off when he realized that he was talking to some nobody morgue attendant. “Never mind,” he muttered and, ignoring the vomit, continued down the line of bodies until he came to the last station where the reports were processed.
As always, there was a stack of them three feet high. The lady typing them up gave Cole a nervous glance as he sat down on the floor and began zipping through them. He sorted them first by location. Everybody found outside of Manhattan was tossed to the side. Then he ignored the findings and went right to the photographs of the corpses. For obvious reasons, “death by zombie” was never an actual cause of death on these reports.
After four hours he had read two hundred reports; his eyes throbbed. He could feel their stems when he squeezed them shut. Out of all of it he came away with only three very flimsy leads. They were better than nothing, he lied to himself. For months now he’d been chasing weak leads and it felt like all he was doing was spinning his wheels.
And now, he had a kid to drag along. Except that Corrina wasn’t in the mom and pop when he got there. “I never did seen anyone like that today,” the mom of the operation told Cole after he described Corrina.
He groaned, fearing the worst. “You know anyone around here who sells mule?” Although mule was illegal and they were only a block from police headquarters, Cole knew for a fact there were a dozen dealers within spitting distance.
The lady frowned so that her thin black mustache caught the light. “This ain’t an information stand. Buy something and maybe we can talk.” He ordered black coffee and a muffin which turned out to be desert-dry. Once she pocketed the coins, she said in a low voice, “You might try Paco behind the dry cleaners two doors down. Make sure you tell him Victoria sent you. That’s me.”
Paco hadn’t seen Corrina either, and it cost Cole eight dollars in bribe money to discover that none of the other neighborhood dealers had either. Cole told himself that was a good thing, and yet he felt a low anxiety as he wasted the remainder of the day hunting down the three morgue leads and coming back home empty-handed.
It was dark and the rain was beginning to pick up when he trudged up 10th Avenue. He almost went straight up to his apartment, but a small orange spark from the alley across the street caught his attention. Cole had been trying to wean Corrina off of cigarettes, but just then he was happy she hadn’t spent his money on mule. After the day he’d had he could use a smoke and was about to ask her for one when he caught the scent of the tobacco.
The smell wasn’t that of the usual cheap, dry Texas leaf. No, he smelled the rich aroma of Charleston Confederates. No one in that neighborhood could afford Confederates, not at a dollar a piece.
Cole put his back to the alley wall and slid out his Forino. He had thirteen shots, twelve in the magazine and one in the pipe. It might not be enough. Anyone who could afford Confederates could afford a lot of muscle. He pictured Eddie the Axe and sure enough, as he crept through the gloom and the piles of trash, he saw the outline of the Rambler sitting dead center in the middle of the alley.
Chapter 4
Both the driver’s door, as well as the door behind it, were canted open; puffs of smoke bloomed out adding to the grey of the night. Cole dropped to one knee and peered low. There were two sets of shoes set solidly on the ground the closer ones were black and the further ones were silver.
Eddie the Axe, Cole thought. He was hiding in an alley across from Cole’s place with one guard. It wasn’t difficult to guess where the rest of his posse of gangsters were; they were in Cole’s place waiting on him to come home so they could jump him. All
to find one guy? Or was this in retaliation for saying no the other night?
There was one good way to find out. Cole backed out of the alley, slunk around the block until he found the other entrance to the alley and slipped up to the Rambler. The two men were still smoking, but now Eddie was cursing as well. “Out fucking all night in the fucking rain. What the ever-loving-fuck did I do to deserve this shit job?”
His muttering and the patter of rain on the hood of the Rambler masked the sound of Cole’s approach. Not that sneaking was really needed. Both men were sipping at a bottle of brown liquor while gazing at another bottle they had finished an hour before. It sat against the wall of the alley surrounded by the pennies they had been trying to flip into its mouth.
“I thought I told you to get the fuckin’ pennies, Mort,” Eddie was muttering just as Cole came up and pushed the Forino into his face. “What the hell?” Eddie had to lean far back to take in all of Cole. With his features hidden by the extra deep shadow of his Fedora, Cole was unrecognizable. “Who are you?” Eddie started to get up. Cole reached out with his left hand, grabbed him by his white tie and pulled him up while at the same time he smashed him in the face with the Forino. Eddie immediately slumped.
The driver of the Rambler was slow to un-wedge himself from the car. He wasn’t exactly drunk, but he had never been quick to begin with. Ever since he was a kid, Mort had gotten by with using his bulk to intimidate people. Very little intimidated Cole, especially when his mind was redlining with anger. He darted around the door so quickly that Mort was only just thrusting his bulk upward. Cole’s booming front kick sent him back into his seat. The next four kicks crushed him down to the floorboard like an old, unwanted duffle-bag.
His fury unabated, Cole went back to Eddie the Axe who was lying across the back seat blinking up at the ceiling and staining the soft cowhide with his blood. With one hand, Cole hauled him out of the car. “How many of your boys you got up there waiting for me?”
Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands Page 3