by Amber Wyatt
“Live delivery? I’ve never seen one of those before,” Michaels remarked as he handed over his clipboard of paperwork to Taylor. Behind him two IDRC staff in full contamination suits were strapping the body bag down tightly with cargo straps.
“I’m not surprised. Unfortunately, they are very rare. We have a continual need for live specimens for our research here. But it is completely understandable of course, that the natural reaction for people who come across the infected is just to kill them.” Taylor flipped through the forms on the clipboard, signing at the bottom of some of them with surprising dexterity despite his thick gloves.
“Your boss going to come down and supervise the live delivery?”
“Dr. Indika?” Taylor looked up from the clipboard in astonishment. “No of course not, he’s far too busy to waste time on administrative tasks like this.”
Behind him Michaels noticed the two researchers had cautiously unzipped the top of the body bag and one of them reached into it with a small bolt gun.
“That’s new.” He recognized it because one of the few things he remembered from high school was a very cool field trip to an abattoir, and the butcher’s assistant had used an identical tool to kill the panicking cows. The high-pressure air gun thumped and Taylor looked around, seeing Michaels’s interest.
“Yes, it’s the very first part of our new entry protocol, a bolt into the skull, just to ensure it really is a dead specimen.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Michaels agreed, thinking that he should probably implement something similar with his staff. Screw poking at a potentially live zombie with the Protectrex aluminum probe. From now on they would just stand off a few feet and put a 9mm bullet into its head. Then he started thinking of legal liability and what would happen if it was a callout to a case of mistaken identity. He could already imagine his bosses and the viewers of the evening news watching security camera footage of his staff executing some drunk guy who had fallen asleep at a bus stop. Fuck it. If that happened, they would just claim it was an infected, deliver it to IDRC and nobody would ever be able to prove any different.
“Oh no!” Taylor exclaimed, looking at the last page of the collection report, interrupting Michaels’s chain of thought. “A yoga teacher!” The fat, little man waddled over to the body bag, unzipped it as far as the constraining straps would allow and peered in at the corpse with dismay. “Wow. She had a fit body too. Such a shame.”
Michaels did not know what to say, this was just too creepy. He waved at his waiting crew instead.
“Come on gang, you know the drill. Let’s get into decon.”
A staff member in a containment suit was waiting to guide them but they already knew the way. Michaels and the M&Ms walked up the little stairs leading to the men’s changing room and Arlene went to the door marked for women. She was acutely aware of Taylor’s piggy eyes riveted on the sway of her hips as she went up the stairs and made sure to lock the door firmly behind her.
Arlene imagined that both changing rooms were identical, with the four-step decontamination drill painted in large, red, military font directly onto the wall in front of them. She stripped naked, and put every item of clothing into a basket on a conveyor belt where it would be taken away for a quick, cleansing blast of gamma radiation. Michaels had warned her on her first collection not to put anything electronic into the basket such as her cell phone, and so far she had not made that mistake.
She stepped into the shower stall, onto the red outlines indicating where her feet should go. Then there was a chime and fine needles of hot water blasted every centimeter of her skin, and 360 degrees of computer monitored cameras scanned her for evidence of any open wounds or bite marks. Arlene did not mind the shower, and some thoughtful IDRC employee had added a subtle and not unpleasant scent of witch-hazel and lemon grass to the blast. Damn this is a fine-ass shower. Better than back in my apartment that’s for sure. She sighed with regret as the hot blast of water ended far too soon, just as she was relaxing into it.
She stepped out of the opposite side of the shower stall into the ‘clean’ room, toweled herself dry and retrieved her clothes from the basket which had also arrived on its belt. The entire process took two minutes and she stepped out of the other side of the decontamination block to wait for the guys to finish. They always took a little longer since there were three of them. She leaned back against the no smoking sign on the wall and lit up a cigarette while she waited. Arlene had no idea what kind of decontamination they applied to the truck, but assumed it was some heavy-duty radiation, since all personnel, even the IDRC staff in their suits, had to leave the parking bay while it was taking place.
Taylor sat inside the command console of the delivery bay and watched her slender figure leaning up against the wall on one of the security screens. She was a sexy little bitch no doubt about it. He licked his thin lips and mouthed a silent prayer that the petite Latina would get bitten and infected on one of her callouts, and be delivered to him naked, bound and restrained on his laboratory table.
“Ah… Sir?” It was one of the junior techs who had entered the back of his office unnoticed while Taylor was lost in his fantasies.
“Yes?”
“Front gate reports that the live delivery has arrived.” The tech held up a walkie-talkie. “Should they hold them there or send them to us?”
“Tell them to send them straight in, we are done here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Michaels and his crew were driving back out on the access road, past the car park, when the black Ford Raptor growled past them heading towards the delivery bay.
“There goes the live delivery,” Michaels eyeballed the truck in his wing mirror.
“Live delivery?” Arlene asked, craning her head. The Raptor’s windows had been tinted and she had not even been able to see the driver.
“Bounty hunters,” grunted Marco from the back. “Two thousand bucks a pop for every live infected you bring into the IDRC.” Mauro was zoned out, uninterested in the conversation, eyes closed, earbuds in and listening to music on his phone.
“Two thousand bucks!” Arlene repeated in amazement, eyebrows arched. “That’s some good money right there.” Waste management personnel each received a one-hundred-dollar cash bounty for every collection. She had thought that was pretty good until now.
“You’re fucking loca, Arlene,” Marco laughed at her. “It’s like a suicide mission. It’s hard enough killing them. How you think you gonna capture one alive and undamaged?”
“That’s true,” Michaels chimed in, eyes and concentration back on the road as they pulled out past the guardroom. “If you bring in a damaged specimen, like it’s missing eyes, or a leg or an arm or suchlike, they only pay you five-fifty or something like that. I forget what, but they’re worth way less than half when they’re damaged.” Then he looked over at her, one eyebrow raised. “Hey, don’t even think about it. In the last three years that’s the first live delivery I’ve ever seen. But in waste management we’ve collected plenty of dead zombies who used to be guys that tried being zombie bounty hunters.”
“Still,” she said thoughtfully as Michaels accelerated and the truck hurtled down towards the highway, “two grand is two grand, baby. I’d be on that like ugly on your momma.”
“Well you got a half day off now,” said Michaels. “You wanna go looking for a live infected, you’re on your own. As for me, I’ve got an important date with my couch and a fridge of cold beer.”
Back at the delivery bay, Taylor watched the black Raptor park inside the red lines under the decontamination frame. He hoped that Qureshi had brought in an attractive female zombie this time. Taylor was in a good mood after seeing the Waste Management girl wiggle her juicy, round ass around the delivery bay. He was about ninety per cent sure she did it deliberately just to tease him. And he was feeling optimistic, although also a little frustrated, after seeing the dead yoga teacher. Maybe this time the tall bounty hunter had managed to find a similarly sexy infected,
but this one still alive. Well… maybe alive isn’t the right word. Undead? Taylor mused to himself.
Qureshi switched off the engine and sighed as he saw Taylor rushing up to his window before he had even opened the door. The pasty-faced little pervert was always pestering him to seek out and capture attractive, young female zombies. What the fuck did he think was out there? Besides which, Qureshi’s top-secret business model, which nobody could ever know about, ensured that he would only ever be bringing in unattractive male specimens.
He sighed again as he looked out through the tinted windows at the plump, smiling face of the creepy scientist beaming at him through the faceplate of the containment suit. Jesus, the guy is dripping with perspiration. Qureshi could actually see individual globules of sweat popping into existence out of Taylor’s enlarged pores, and running down his face. Thank god the little creep is wearing the suit. At least I won’t be able to smell him.
“I’ve got a male infected for you, about five foot eight, two hundred pounds, mid-forties, grade A condition,” he said as he popped the door, pre-empting any of Taylor’s usual questions. “Found him up by the northern suburb next to the docks. Time and place; it’s all here in my report,” he waved a piece of paper casually. “You got my money?” Qureshi could already see the sealed white envelope clipped to the top of the scientist’s clipboard.
Almost immediately Taylor’s face fell and his plump lips puffed up into a petulant pout of disappointment.
“I need to see him first,” he said plaintively. All of Taylor’s good humor had evaporated in a nanosecond. At that one particular moment he hated Qureshi with a passion. How was it possible that this bounty hunter could only find overweight middle-aged men? He must have brought in fifty of them, and not one single woman.
Qureshi saw the look and shook his head. Christ, it’s like dealing with a spoiled child. He walked to the back of the truck and let down the tailgate.
“I know what you’re going to say, Professor, just save it, okay? I catch what I find.”
Both men looked in at the zombie in the back of the truck. It stared back with ravenous, unthinking eyes and started thrashing about as much as it could within its constraints. Qureshi had hogtied it tightly and duct-taped the mouth firmly shut.
“I have asked you before, Qureshi, please don’t use duct tape. Use the bite hoods, restraint kits and body bags that we supplied you with. It’s a real pain in the ass for us to cut your stuff off safely.”
“Hey you want to come out of the lab and hunt these suckers down with me, you’re more than welcome.” Qureshi folded bulging biceps across an impressive chest and looked down at the rotund form of the scientist with disdain.
Taylor sulked even more and thrust the envelope of money at the taller man.
“Please proceed to decontamination,” he snapped. He waved two of his team over and they grabbed a limb each and wrestled the heavy, grunting infected out of the truck and onto the floor. Another researcher, genderless in his or her containment suit, rolled up a cargo trolley for them to load the new specimen on to.
Qureshi shrugged and opened up the envelope to count his money as he walked across to the decontamination chamber. “See you later,” he called over his shoulder. He knew the fat, angry little man would not be there to swap pleasantries with, after he had finished decontamination.
Taylor watched him go with hate filled eyes, his disappointment transformed into pure anger. It simply was not statistically possible that the man was only finding and capturing male specimens. He clenched and unclenched sweaty fists inside his gloves. Qureshi is in a risky profession, Taylor thought to himself. A very risky profession indeed. If there was any justice in the world one day he would end up as just another infected specimen brought in and strapped to a stainless-steel table for Taylor to cut and slice.
Chapter Five
Hot Chocolate
After identifying Paige’s body on the waste ground behind Hana’s house, Hugh and Hana drove back towards town in silence. She seemed lost in her own thoughts. Unnoticed, Hugh glanced over at her once or twice, but did not say anything. Judging from the grim expression on her face, he imagined that she was probably remembering the night where she had been forced to kill her own zombified friends in a desperate fight for survival. He would have been shocked had he known that she was actually thinking about how much she hated her husband, and was wondering if he was experiencing enough suffering and misery in his underground tomb.
Six goddamn months of my life living in a prison with no sunlight, eating those awful rations, scared out of my mind, and every night lying down in bed, spreading my legs and letting that lying piece of shit do whatever he wanted to me. Hana’s jaw gritted and her fingers became claws digging into her legs. Six months!
Even with her face pinched into a thin-lipped scowl, Hugh still thought that she looked gorgeous. At some stage the easy friendship between the two of them had developed into an unlikely yet close connection, but it was abundantly clear to Hugh that she had no romantic interest in him whatsoever. As for Hugh himself, he had no idea when or how it had happened, but he realized that he had probably fallen in love with her years ago. He had always maintained a respectful, platonic distance, yet now it seemed that they were both single, he could not stop thinking if it would be inappropriate to show that he was interested in her.
“Hey, can I buy you lunch?” he asked as they turned into the main road where both their businesses were located. “I was thinking of just getting a couple of gyros from Stavros’s Gyros, you know, the one next door to my place. I could bring it over to your shop?”
“Sure, that would be great, thank you,” Hana visibly shook herself free from wherever her thoughts had taken her and accepted with a smile. “Just get me one of whatever you think is good, but no sauce. I don’t like chili or garlic.”
“No problem. Here we are at your place… I’ll see you in a while.” He pulled up his truck outside Takumi Tactical to let her out, and then with a parting smile, he drove off to park at his garage.
Hana unlocked the front door and slipped inside, eyes narrowing in annoyed resignation as the little bell rang, echoing around the deserted aisles. She flipped the sign on the door to ‘Open’ and strode quickly to the office at the rear of the store to switch on the kettle. Thinking about the Greek takeout that Hugh was fetching was making her hungry, and she wanted to have some hot cocoa to wash it down with. The American version of the chocolate drink was far sweeter than what she had been used to in Japan, and ever since arriving in Florida, Hana had been hopelessly addicted to the sickly, sweet taste.
For her, sweet hot chocolate was both an indulgence as well a private act of rebellion against her proper and ordered life. Hana associated bitter hot cocoa with her mother, and through that beautiful, but disciplined woman, with the traditional Japanese view of marriage.
“Hana,” her mother had said to her with serious eyes, as she watched her young daughter playing on the floor. “You know that this is not what is important in marriage.” Hana had been twelve years old, playing with her dolls and her prince was declaring undying love to his princess. “Marriage is like a job. A very serious job. It is important that you work hard at being a good wife. Love and respect will follow.”
“I know, Mama.” Hana’s eyes remained riveted to her dolls bidding each other farewell. The prince got back onto his horse and rode off behind the sofa to fulfil his quest. The princess had climbed to the top of her tower of cushions to watch him longingly until he disappeared from her view.
Fortunately, she was spared the rest of the ‘role of a decent woman’ lecture by the phone ringing and her mother answering it with her usual, cheerful “Mushi mushi?”
Hana had heard far too many times, how a wife gained respect by diligently fulfilling her duties. It was not that the ideal marriage was supposed to be loveless, rather that love was an unrelated factor. Its existence - or absence - was irrelevant to the efficiency of a working partnership, whose sol
e purpose was to provide a stable family base within which to raise the next generation. In fact, many marriages were deemed to be extremely successful despite a complete lack of romantic affection between spouses. There was even a name for it. Kamen fufu, the ‘mask marriage’. As a twelve-year old girl who overdosed on teen romance novels, Hana could never reconcile this dull paradigm with the sweeping passions which drove the heroes and heroines of her daydreams.
For the typical Japanese salary man, absent at his corporate day job for much of the time, all that was required of him to be a good husband, was that he continued to bring home a monthly salary. He might go to a hostess bar after work, to be flattered and have his ego stroked by pretty, young girls, who were most definitely not housewives; but for the wife there was no such flirting or titillation. After marriage, that part of their lives had simply ceased to exist.
This was another injustice that irked the young schoolgirl. No matter how qualified or senior the young woman may have been in her career, it was generally accepted that once she became a mother, she would immediately resign to become a home-maker. Running the household and raising the children were regarded as full-time roles. And no matter how beautiful a woman might have been in her youth, once she had children, she disappeared to be replaced by a different, totally sexless creature: The Mother. She was no longer seen as a desirable or sexual creature, even by herself.
So that same morning Hana had been beside herself with excitement when her mother had come off the telephone, told her to put away her dolls, and quickly rushed them both out of the apartment to go and meet with her Auntie Rika.
Rika-chan was not her real aunt, she was a lifelong schoolfriend of her mother’s, but she had known Hana her whole life and the little girl regarded her as part of the family. Hana especially cherished her regular visits, because Auntie Rika was a jukujo, one of those rare creatures who was an older married woman, but who was still desirable. She was sexy in a classy, not slutty way, and had refused to become a housewife, still keeping her high-powered job at a bank downtown in Shinjuku. Auntie Rika wore glamorous clothes, high heels, perfume and far too much makeup to be respectable. And she turned men’s heads whenever she entered a room.