Beach Blanket Bloodbath (Amanda Feral Book 4) (3 page)

Gathering up her most pleasant demeanor,
Wendy rose to wrap her spidery arms around Grits.

The man grinned sheepishly—just shy
of braying under his massive overbite. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, even as
he wrapped them behind pale lips. Dentistry exists, people. Take advantage of
that shit and don’t tell me you have a phobia. I’ll give you something to be
phobic about.

Oddly enough, both involve teeth.

Wendy and I are not exactly human—we
were…once. But like Hollywood producers or those fuckers that sell ice cream
out of dirty vans we lost our ability to empathize with the rest of the human
race—we’re dead and thus hungry for the flesh of the living.

So…there’s that.

We are, as has been repeatedly alluded
to, zombies. But not the shambling dumb-as-sticks variety, we’ve got this shit
under control. And when we chow down, we’re not leaving any stragglers to start
some ridiculous outbreak.

We were classy like that.

Also different. But we’ll get to that
after Wendy finishes slobbing on this motherfucker’s knob. Metaphorically, of
course.

“Is that the stuff?” Wendy nodded toward
the basket.

Grits rolled his eyes and grinned. “Um
yeah.”

“Sample me.”

I’m not gonna lie, grimy drug deals are
kind of exciting. You expect the participants to exude a rough street-like
demeanor, so you’ll understand my disappointment when instead of producing a switchblade
or a butterfly knife, Grits flashed a pearly white overbite—not a gold
one in the set—and pulled out a regular paring knife of the variety used
to slice granny smith apples into delicious bite-sized chunks for a county fair
pie. He jabbed the brown wrapper delicately and extracted a small Ball jar of
white cream. Twisting open the lid he held the glass container toward Wendy, who
snatched it from his hands, snapped her fingers and looked skyward.

Seconds later, a mirror was cantilevered
out of an open window on the second floor directly above them featuring the bearded
face and bare shoulders of another of Wendy’s accomplices, one I hadn’t
met—and behind him, deeper in the shadows, a vampire in sunglasses and a
red robe. A basket was lowered, dangling precariously from a bent piece of coat
hanger standing in as a hook. Wendy steadied the basket and set the jar inside
it, all the while smiling coyly at Grits.

The jar was whisked away. Wendy set her
phone to a stopwatch app and flicked the start button. The numbers ticked away
as the product was being run through a little quality assurance upstairs. I
tried to avert my eyes as the man rubbed a thick palm-full through his wild
chest hair, but he seemed to be watching me as he did it, licking his lips.

Disgusting.

“This’ll just be a few moments, Grits,”
Wendy said, fixing a lock of hair behind her ear, coquettishly. “Would you like
a drink? Something to help cool you down? A long island ice tea perhaps?”

The man whipped a checkered handkerchief
out of his back pocket and dabbed his forehead and the damp tips of his
handlebar mustache. “No ma’am.” His words stretched out in a country bumpkin
kind of way, lilting and sing-songy. “It’s mighty hot though. How do you manage
to look so spring fresh, Ms. Wendy?”

Wendy giggled, nauseatingly. “You’re so
sweet, Grits.”

“Not as sweet as you.”

I was rapidly approaching regurgitation
when, from above us, a whole new set of moans joined the ones in the distance.
It took everything I had not to look.

“Oh yes!” the vampire cried. “Yes! Hug me
tighter! Tighter! ”

Grits blushed, clearly human. Wendy
smiled and shrugged off the obvious sounds of a male vampire in the throws of a
cloud cuddle.

“Climb on my back and grind! That’s it!
Get me all creamy.”

I cringed, glancing up in horror at the
scene of the hairy man riding on the now nude vampire’s back like a
mayonnaise-covered child at a county fair, and shouted, “Shut the window,
boys!”

I turned to Wendy. “Are you going to be
free for a few days after this deal?”

Wendy lit a smoke and stared back at me
blinking.

“Like to go with me to the coast for that
book thing we talked about.”

She shrugged. “I dunno, sounds like a
huge waste of my time.”

“I'm going to pretend you're on a
gigantic ego trip and are still my friend and ask you again. Can you go?”

Wendy smiled, a bitter rictus that was
sticking more and more. She really was going to have to check into the Reaper
Clinic and get some touch ups soon. She reached across and placed her
cigarette-spiked hand atop mine. “Honey, I'd love to go, but with all this new
product, I'm going to have to pull some all-nighters as it is. You go on ahead.
Abuelita and I will be fine without you.”

I sneered at the other woman, who grinned
broad as a jack-o-lantern.

“Is okay, Missus,” Abuelita said. “You'll
have a good time with all your fans.”

That was all it took to start a cascade
of giggles, first from the aging chola, then Wendy and then even the cuddler on
the second floor seemed to be in on the joke.

Dirty bitches.

I knocked back a slug of the bourbon and
scowled.

The vamp’s moans of pleasure were
certainly fantastic advertisement for the product, but were becoming so loud; I
could barely hear a screaming woman scrambling backward into the intersection,
two men sluggishly wandering toward her.

“What’s this?” I muttered and craned my
neck for a better look around Grits and his bike.

The woman clamped a hand to her throat,
where a crimson stain gushed down her whiter than white business blouse. The
color was mimicked on the men’s faces and it quickly became clear where the
moaning had come from. They were still far enough away that it wouldn’t
interrupt their business, but nonetheless, there they were. A group of
mistakes—what we call the regular dumb-ass feeders you think of as
zombies—stumbled out into the intersection after the woman.

This was the kind of thing that would
probably be noticed. Once the reapers came in to clean up after the mess,
everyone’s afternoon would be ruined. Plus, the little bitches never left their
lair without a list of those that owed them money.

“It’s so slick-k-k.” The vampire stuttered
and groaned upstairs. “Slick-k-k-k.” Followed shortly thereafter by a thud as
the bloodsucking junkie hit the floor.

Wendy listened, tapped the stopwatch app
and nodded, pleased. “That’ll do, Grits. Zero to brain-dead in thirty-six
seconds. Very nice. You can tell your chemists I’m super happy with the
increase in potency.”

Wendy’s crew of professional cuddlers had
lobbied for just such an enhancement. The quicker a vamp went slack, the sooner
the cuddler could wipe up and get paid and move on to the next client or group.
She nodded to me and I rolled my eyes, reaching beneath the table for my
bag—a Birkin, this time, black ostrich—and before you go on about
how I can’t possibly afford that on a writer’s pay, I traded a pair of Ukrainian
twins for it. The manager at Hermes happens to be family (in that colloquial
sense that he’s totally dead, not like Ethel Ellen Frazier pushed him out of
her twat).

More of the undead mistakes crowded into
the intersection, stopping traffic, spreading bloody handprints down the sides
of white cars, scraping their teeth against windshields.

“It’s an outbreak,” I said, standing.

Abuelita pulled her gun and held it out
sideways—clearly something she’d seen in a movie involving drive-bys and
guys in handkerchief headbands drinking beer on porch couches.

Wendy threw up her hands disgustedly. “Really?”
she screamed. “I’m trying to do business here people!”

Moments later the street was flooded.
Strangely costumed undead scrabbled toward them, their blood-caked clothing
scratching against the cars parked on the street, then the sides of nearby buildings
and finally along the rail that separated the patio area at Gloat from the
sidewalk.

Grits crammed the envelope full of cash
into the basket on his bike and backed away in the opposite direction. Wendy
was smart enough to reign in her attack dog, shoveling Abuelita’s gun arm down
and pushing her inside the restaurant. Neither of us would have any dealings
with a crowd of stupid mistakes, unless they got too close and fucked up my
outfit, or God forbid my Birkin—insert a choir of angels here—and then,
well, there’d be hell to pay and a shit ton of dismemberment. If anything would
draw them over the rail, it’d be Abuelita, despite her sour demeanor; the woman
stuffed herself with more spices than a Moroccan Bazaar. Occasionally when I
looked at her, I imagined the aging chola wrapped in a giant tortilla, cilantro
tucked in her hair like an organic fascinator.

“Where are the reapers?” Wendy said,
clucking her tongue impatiently. “Any other outbreak they’d be here ruining our
cocktail hour faster than a bait and switch of cheap booze.”

I climbed atop my chair to see if there
were an end to the throngs of undead in sight. “This is a big herd, too.
They’re going to have to call for reinforcements to clean it up.”

But while I was up there, I began to
notice something. Or the lack of something. It wasn’t fear, exactly, or the
creeping dread that violence would sweep me into its nasty embrace and I
wouldn’t be able to afford the fixes necessary to my already tentative anatomy.
These zombies didn’t smell like the dead. They smelled like other things:
greasy hamburgers, sweat, Goodwill clearance bins.

“Damn.” I shook my head. That feeling was
hunger.

“What?”

“I know why there’s no reaper presence. They’re
not real. They’re in costumes. Jesus. Stupid costumes.”

The cuddler jutted from the upstairs
window, pasty with cloud and smoking a post-romp cigarette. “They’re going for
another world record,” he said. “Biggest zombie walk ever. I thought it was
tomorrow.”

“Shut. Up!” Wendy slammed her palm on the
table; the package of jars clinked as it hopped. “They’re pretending to be
zombies?”

It didn’t make any sense to me either.
Sure, pretend to be Wendy or I—preferably me, because damn, so cute,
particularly in the vintage hairstyle I was courting like a sailor on shore
leave—an apt simile as the idea had hit me after a particularly tasty
meal during fleet week—but for god sake don’t mimic the idiotic brain
sucking mistakes.

They are so uncoordinated, and I’m not
just talking about fashion.

It really did just serve as a reminder of
how dumb our food source really was.

The more I watched the more interested I
became in one of the participants in particular, a woman in a floppy garden hat
and a seventies sundress reminiscent of an Ira Levin adaptation. I couldn’t see
her feet but I suspected wedge espadrilles (the macramé belt was a pretty
distinct clue).

One of these zombies is not like the
others. Even a child would know that. The rest had obvious physical complaints,
dragging bum legs, arms listlessly swinging from a loose socket, visible scars.
So many visible scars.

But the Stepford wife—and the one
Paula Prentiss played, in particular, lanky and full of snark—merely walked
breezily down the middle of them, gray and ice-eyed, a web of broken blood
vessels streaking her flesh. Occasionally, she'd glance down at her feet and
step over a train of rubber entrails before sniffing at the air again.

This was no faker.

She wasn't quite our kind. Her clothing
choices nixed her from any shot at the inner circle, but she was definitely
dead and carnivorous and on the tail of something or someone.

More power to her, I thought. If you
could bag some decent meat amongst this bunch of zombie sycophants, then have
at it. I would personally never be caught dead putting anything covered in that
much cheap cosmetics in my mouth, but if you already have questionable taste—seriously,
a floppy hat—then have at it.

"There's another made in that crowd,"
I yelled down at Wendy.

She let go of the door handle keeping
Abuelita trapped amidst the business casual crowd. It swung open and the woman
fell out, barely righting herself before taking the cement on her starched
chinos. "Shit!" she cried out and then, jutting her chin, made a slow
reach for the pistol shoved into the waist of her pants. "You want me to
take care of this, Missus?"

Wendy laid one of her delicate hands on
the woman's wrist and instantly calmed her. "It's just a ruse.
Pretend." She shouted the last word as if Abuelita were going deaf and not
just predominantly Spanish-speaking.

Crowding against the rail, arms began to
reach toward us, stretching as though they'd actually claw us if they could. I
glowered back at them, making it clear with my expression that a single touch
would result in bodily dismemberment. But it was hard to hold them off with my
eyes alone, especially as more and more were packing into the road.

“So many of them,” I muttered. “Don't
they have jobs?"

Wendy wasn't wasting time with questions;
she was busy slipping business cards into their greedy fingers. I watched as
one fluttered to the table, reaching out to snatch it. On one side was a phone
number I'd never seen before and on the other an advertisement for
"Healthy Incomes for the Morally Flexible. Good Skin Care a Must."