Dead End Job (Book One of the 'Zombino' series)

by Chris Welsh

  Chapter Thirteen. 02:20pm

  VARMINT.

  The thing hit me in mid-air.

  Not only was I landed on by a grown man, I was slammed into the ground with force. When a dead weight, let's say twelve stone of it, falls six whole floors and lands square on top of you, it feels as if the world has ended. When you aren't aware of it until collision, it feels like the world has SUDDENLY and SURPRISINGLY ended. I thought my body had been entirely broken, a mix of swan-diving zombie and gravity finally killing me off. I've experienced severe car crashes that were less abruptly agonizing.

  It hurt and I hated it.

  I hated it more when I realised, through what some may call luck, that I wasn't fatally wounded or flattened to death. Not even a bit. I didn't die, there and then, amid the liquid waste of others. Instead I had to drag myself out of the sludge, from underneath the busted corpse that struck me down, smelling like the drainage pipes of a hellish abattoir. Another body fell, another splat. I didn't open my eyes.

  A significant part of me wanted to stay on the ground and forget everything. Contentedly lie there and allow the zombies to crash until their remains built up and drowned me in watery guts. I was happy with that – it was easier than getting up and running and surviving. For that split second, I was done. Sick of moving. I wanted to cash my chips, turn in my tokens and find out what I'd won. I rolled on to my back, lying all still like a sadistic screen-psychopath relaxing in a bath of foetid remains, a broth of blended corpses. I might have even smiled. Another body fell. Close enough that I felt the splash, the wave of lukewarm chowder.

  -

  Stuart pulled me out of my funk and back into reality.

  "Move, you fucking idiot!" he screamed as he grabbed my limp arm. "More are falling! Tonnes more!"

  He dragged me out of the grisly pool to a safe distance, laughably easy thanks to the lubricating slime, and offered to wipe my face down with a piece of tissue magically produced from a back pocket. It was clean and folded into a neat, taut square. I looked at him for half a minute before I sat up, took it from his hand, mumbled a quiet but sincere 'Thank You' and scraped former colleagues from my eyes. I covered a nostril and fired a wad of red miscellaneous meat from the other.

  "That's all I've got," Stuart said, of the paper square bequeathed to me. Enough to wipe away the gruel from my eyes, at least. I looked like a miscarriage, or a super-villain daubed in ferocious face paint; 'I am The Bloodman, with the special ability to smell worse than any other conceivable thing'.

  I had so much blood I didn't know what to do with it. I could have established a transfusion service or a special delicatessen for reforming vampires.

  Fifty more zombies crashed down. They fell like cattle herded off a cliff, toppling down from the smashed window as gutsy, fat rain. Then, they ceased. The dark hole in the side of the building was as welcoming as an abyssal cave. The blustering wind forced two green curtains to flap and billow. Red stains dripped down from the gap like a row of fangs.

  "Look," said Stuart. He narrowed his eyes and pointed. I thought I heard a faint squeak flutter on the wind, but I followed his finger and, distracted, gave the sound no thought. My attention diverted to where he pointed.

  A cloud of white dots gushed from the window, pouring into the sky, expanding and dispersing like sugar in tea. There must have been two hundred of them, two hundred winged roaches off to explore the world. Within seconds they were gone, swallowed by the vastness of the outdoors. None flew down to pay us a visit.

  "That isn't good..." I muttered. "At least they're not the giant versions."

  A slew of giant versions appeared before I let go of the last redundant syllable. The first of them smashed head-first through a closed window to the left of the open one, sprinkling shards of glass down, adding another layer of danger to the human paste. Others followed, colliding with each other like bumper cars until they found fresh air and separated, airborne, taking off in every direction. I stared like a gawping kid at an airshow as they cut trails across the sky, their wings barely visible from moving so quickly. They soared over the tree-line, turning into specks, and then disappearing.

  "That definitely, definitely isn't good," said Susan.

  "At least th..."

  "Don't," said Stuart. "Don't say another word about it."

  -

  Yet again the grim remnants of the rotten deceased covered me.

  Competing against the rank stench and the deeply unpleasant sogginess of my clothes, the contender for 'worst bit' was the taste in my mouth. Since climbing out of the trolley I had likely ingested about a forearm's worth of person, either through swallowing accidentally or snorting it up when I hadn't had the foresight to breathe only outwards. A few pounds had probably absorbed through the pores of my skin.

  The hunger from earlier dissipated, running for the hills to make way for abject nausea; if I had anything substantial I'd have ejected it all there and then, adding a fresh layer of awful to my fragrant self. The urge to hurl nagged at me and my guts swirled uncomfortably, but nothing came up.

  A chunk of unidentifiable flesh poked out of the breast pocket of the stolen suit jacket, which I picked out and tossed away. It resembled a half chewed mouthful of undercooked steak, the bit so gristly it is often spat out into a napkin or left on the side of a plate.

  The one comfort was that it didn't turn me into a zombie or cause any horrific rashes across my skin. No, it was simply really gross and icky. I felt like I'd taken a clothed swim in the menstrual debris of every woman I had ever met. The Earth didn't have enough water to make me feel clean; I'd have to bathe in caustic bleach or endure a century-long scalding shower before I could consider myself pure again.

  When I took the jacket off the shirt underneath was, surprisingly, mostly untouched. It was clean aside from the front, flecked in blood, flesh nuggets and other human miscellany like a hideous bib. The gunk quickly became best friends with my meagre chest hair, forming a sticky bond, something I knew I'd regret when I tore off the rotten clothes.

  Susan's mouth hung open and her eyes did a fantastic job of displaying abhorrent sadness, milliseconds away from bursting into tears. Her cheeks flushed beneath eyes that sat in the centre of tender, pink rings.

  "I'm so sorry," she said, somehow rearranging the events to make them her fault. Apologising seemed to sate her, softening the self-hatred in her eyes to mere pity. "If I hadn't taken so long..."

  "It wasn't your fault, not at all," I told her. She lifted her arms as if to hug me but understandably changed tack, shifting into a kind of exasperated slump instead. She apologised for the bathroom incident with the bugs, for Stuart hurting himself on the trolley, for everything she thought of. Stuart told her playfully to shut up and stop worrying, making it clear that she'd done nothing wrong.

  We turned and stared in silence at the amassing muck. I watched one zombie struggling against the ledge of the open window, desperate to get out. A hairless creature in a suit with no tie, leaning against the waist-high windowsill and stretching its fingers towards us, perhaps not realising how far away we were. Maybe it thought we were really small. It swiped and waved at us like a mother watching her child go past on a fairground ride. Another approached from behind, giving the first the nudge it needed to tip it over the edge. It fell in silence, still reaching, and then vanished into the gunge. The second zombie repeated the errors of the first.

  Stuart asked me, cautiously, if I noticed who it was who landed on me. I told him no, exclaiming how I'd been busy welcoming my own death to see anything of the body that floored me. Now, there wasn't enough evidence to make an educated guess. The taste in my mouth didn't carry a name-tag.

  "Brian," he said, struggling to spit the word, as if it snagged on his tongue. "It was Brian. He fell with half of his head still missing, from where you stomped it. He was still wearing his security coat."

  Oh.

  "He had no underwear on."

  Oh again. "I swear he was wearing pant
s when I last saw him. Boxer shorts."

  "Crazy act of revenge, that is..." Stuart giggled, shaking. "You stomp his head in and drop his trousers, he dives six storeys with his balls flapping freely in the wind to get back at you."

  He broke into full guffaws, delirious at the astonishing tragicomedy.

  I failed to form a response. There was nothing I could say. It's exactly what happened, even if he was a brainless zombie and couldn't possibly intend any of it. The level of coincidence on display bordered on otherworldly, impossible. I shrugged and hoped he'd let it go; the only response I could dredge up was derogatory towards either his ex-workmate or fate itself, and I had no plans to anger Stuart or whichever deity designed my path through life. He let his manic laughter subside and loosened his tie an inch or two.

  I heard another squeak. Louder this time. Clear and definitive.

  It mutated into a prolonged tirade of rodent outbursts before a splash in the gore-pool snatched my attention. The mouse, once white but now frosted in sticky red, squeaked and pawed hyperactively at its face, cleaning its whiskers in the centre of the mess. With its stringy tail and blood-soaked body, it looked like a used tampon.

  "Did that...did that fall out the window?"

  "Looks like it jumped," Stuart said.

  We stared at the thing as it surveyed the area, and then zipped across the car park and around the corner of the building. I wanted to follow it, but was too stunned by the mouse strolling away from such a fall that I forgot to move.

  "Wes!" Susan said, from somewhere behind me.

  My mixed emotions reset, wiped clean, the second I turned and saw the impending attack. Whilst I wrestled with my befuddled, failing internal self on all matters mouse-related, the zombie to whom I'd already dealt damage had crept up on me. The theme of the hour was 'unsubstantiated revenge', apparently.

  "Careful," she urged, but the creaking, doomed menace posed no danger or threat. Its left arm hung lower than it should, dangling on a thread of sinewy muscle after becoming a victim of my expert rock-tossing skills. Where there should have been a top lip was nothing but bare gum, skin torn away to half up its cheek, making it bare its teeth like a rabid mutt poised to savage an intruder. Thin wisps of hair poked from its scalp in patches, amid a collection of scabs and discoloured lumps. It resembled a museum mummy in business attire boasting the same glazed, cloudy stare as the others, with googly eyeballs that rolled and refused to focus. It moved roughly like a human, throwing one foot in front of the other, but with no rhythm or skill. Each step was a terrible chore; slow, cumbersome and pretty much not worth it. At the speed it moved, it couldn't have caught up with a blindfolded, crawling infant wearing a weighted vest.

  "Excuse me," Stuart said, exuding calm. "Wes, push it."

  I obliged, moving forward and giving it a two-handed shove to the chest, forcing it to topple over Stuart's outstretched leg. It fell to the loose gravel, kicking its limbs like an upturned turtle. Stuart stomped his heel down on its throat, crushing it, creating a deep gorge between its collarbone and chin.

  Its jaw opened and closed a few times until the head rolled on to its cheek, where it gave up and checked out. Stuart sent it rolling a few yards away with a flick of his boot.

  "Skin like wet newspaper," he said. "Look, it tore from the pressure of me standing on it. It's all flimsy and soft like dough."

  "Kinda diminishes the danger a bit, doesn't it?" I said, pulling the deceased guy's jacket off the torso. "When there's just the one of them, I mean."

  I used the garment to wipe crap off my face, intending to place it gently and somewhat respectfully over the creature's brackish neck-hole.

  I paused, "This one isn't leaking the same stuff as the others. It's, well, dry inside."

  "Oh yeah," Stuart said. "No idea what to make of that, but good observation, I guess."

  I expected some sort of ugly cream to pour from the sizeable wound, like the others we'd attacked or seen injured, but only a puff of floury dust escaped.

  "There's more than one type, I think. We've seen that. There's the type that burst, which we've met loads of, but a few haven't. Tim didn't even bleed, once he turned. His head just rolled off."

  I nodded in agreement, finding nothing inside me to add to the conversation.

  Stuart pointed out the dried splatter on his leg. "His insides were definitely not dry, I got covered in them."

  "But he wasn't full of mush," she said. "He didn't...leak, exactly. Did he? They've all been fragile little flowers, but there might be different brands, models."

  The conversation died when Stuart shrugged and turned his back on the ruin. Susan appeared to make mental notes of the differing species, like a bird watcher scratching out descriptions in a tattered notepad.

  "What do we do then?" Stuart asked.

  "Curl and into a ball forever and have a good cry?" I suggested. "Or make a traditional Black Pudding by squeezing the blood out of my pants. Where are we going to find a frying pan? Do you even need a frying pan to make Black Pudding?"

  Either they didn't know or they ignored the question.

  "We have to keep moving, try to get off the compound. To the shuttle train if it's still there," Susan said. "It doesn't look like there's been any exodus from the building so I doubt anyone got away. There might be survivors trapped inside, people who aren't zombies. We need a way of signalling to them to come outside."

  "Su, the whole building is full of, well, 'them'. The ones who 'survived' are probably the ones in the foyer, aged to way past dead. Anyone alive at this point doesn't have much of a chance."

  'Not even us,' I didn't add.

  Her expression dipped to extra sullen. No shock or fear, only remnants of an unwanted realisation. "I guess," she murmured.

  I then experienced a terrible realisation of my own.

  "Where's my axe?"

  Stuart pointed to the roof.

  "Bastard!"