Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (54 page)

Bobby moved his hand slowly, very slowly to his coat pocket. “Right here. No problem. Just take it easy, okay?” He reached in and pulled out the baggie, but something was wrong. It shifted in his hands and he felt the contents draining away, and when he looked down he saw the zipper lock had come open and white powder was falling in a soft, slow drift to the tile floor, and in spite of himself even as his gut dropped to his shoes he licked his ruined lips, thinking of the feeling that powder would give him, if only he were able to use it. Such a terrible waste.

Oh, shit.

The package had drawn their attention away from the table, but two things happened at once to change things in a right goddamned hurry: Rocko cocked the gun, which sounded very loud in the sudden quiet of the room; and the naked woman on the table lunged forward with astonishing speed, grabbing Damon’s head with both hands and burying her teeth in his right cheek.

Jesus, she…she bit him…like…just like a dog.

Damon screamed and threw himself backward, pulling the woman off the table and into his arms. They tottered across the floor like two awkward dancers in a lover’s embrace, and the woman grunted and tore at his face with her mouth, then went lower, at his neck.

Something popped in there, and Damon screamed again, beating at her back with both fists. Bright red blood spurted across the woman’s face and hair. She dropped to her knees and pulled Damon’s pants down with one savage yank, exposing his tiny, shriveled penis in its thatch of gray-blond hair. The dead woman grimaced, showing bloody teeth, or perhaps it was a smile.

Then she leaned in and bit down hard.

Damon let out a gurgling scream. The sound of gristle tearing and ripping could be heard clearly across the room as she jerked her head and came away with a morsel of flesh.

A moment later her head came up and she turned on her knees, sniffing the air. She let go of Damon, who fell to the floor, legs kicking, blood still pumping from the gaping wound in his neck, flap of skin dangling from his cheek. His heels drummed on the tile.

The woman sniffed again like a blind dog on a scent. She cocked her head at where Rocko and Bobby stood near the refrigerator door.

Rocko’s gun barked and the woman’s head snapped back. A small, round hole appeared neatly between her eyes. She didn’t seem to care much, just stood up and began to shuffle forward, gaining speed quickly.

If Rocko was surprised by this latest development, he didn’t show it. “Get the fuck in there, now,” he said quietly, motioning at the stainless steel door with the gun. Bobby nodded and swung it open, and the two of them ducked in, slamming the door shut and putting their backs against it a second before the woman hit it with a shuddering thump.

“Did you see that? Did you see it?” Bobby shook with adrenaline, his stomach churning. “Bit him. Jesus Christ.” He still held the now half-empty baggie, and he stuck it back in his pocket, wiping his hand on his jeans. He shuddered.

Then he threw up.

Dear Lord, Bobby thought, retching again, the smell and taste of vomit thick in his throat, I know I’ve been a useless mess most of my life. I know I don’t deserve it. But if you get me out of here I swear I’ll turn it around. I’ll—

“The fuck happened to your face, anyway?” Rocko said. The woman was still throwing herself at the door, thumps and bangs rattling their teeth.

“My…” Bobby wiped puke from his mouth with the back of his hand, and touched his cheek again. “Who cares about my goddamned face? There’s a goddamn zombie in the other room. How about that, huh? How about we hash that one out before I tell you my life story?”

“Just making conversation,” Rocko said. He checked the gun and snapped the clip back into the handle. “Thought it might be relevant, you know, to the situation. Give me an idea on whether you’re going to flip out on me. That bitch may be stupid, but she’s still dangerous. I gotta know who I’m dealing with in here.”

Bobby looked up then, finally focusing on where they were, and what he saw chilled his blood more than the refrigerated air ever could. Three dead bodies lay under white sheets on rolling steel gurneys, and he knew that several more lurked behind the closed doors of the storage units. Latched, thank God for small favors.

The Augusta morgue pulled bodies from no less than eight different small towns in the immediate area. There had been seven deaths during the past two days. An Edward Needleman from White Falls, Marlene Marcus and a John Doe from Augusta, a Jen Seigel from Wiscasset, and the lovely and talented Denise James (currently starring in Lifestyles of the Rich and Dead, right outside your door)—those were the names he remembered. There were others. Maybe more than seven in here, behind those locker doors, waiting patiently for their time on the slab.

Or waiting for something else. For some reason his mind flashed to a scene he’d imagined many times over the past three years, his Emma, the love of his life, dead of an overdose that should have been his, lying silent and still inside a coffin buried six feet underground, her arms crossed on her chest, her body collapsing into itself, lips and eyes slowly melting away to nothing. Waiting.

“It’s…where we store all the corpses,” Bobby said. He hesitated, staring at the nearest bare toes peeking out from under the sheets. Feminine toes, still painted pink. “You don’t think…”

Bobby stuck out his hands, palms up. Rocko unscrewed the flask and poured liquid over them. The smell of high-proof alcohol burned Bobby’s nostrils. Rocko rubbed it into his skin. “Everclear,” he said. “Gets rid of the residue. Where’s the baggie?”

Rocko didn’t look at Bobby, and at first it seemed it might be out of embarrassment, but then Bobby realized he was watching the corpses. “I’m not exactly J.D.’s best friend, you catch my drift. I knew what you guys were doing here. Smuggling blow inside of dead bodies? Fucking genius, I said. But J.D. didn’t like me cutting in. I had to get creative.”

“You killed him,” Bobby said.

“No, I killed his partner, like I told you. That part was true. They were faggots, you know. J.D. drew down on me. I needed leverage.”

A bullet between the eyes might not slow down Denise James, Bobby thought, but he was pretty damn sure it would put a real damper on his future plans.

“Here’s the deal,” Rocko said in a low voice. “That woman’s been dead too long for her to do more than stumble through the dark. Her bulb’s burned out, you catch my drift? And they need a little more of that Gravedigger powder every few minutes to keep walking around. I haven’t heard a noise from the other room in a while now, which makes me wonder if maybe she just fell back down dead again.”

He was right, Bobby realized; the thumping at the door had stopped.

“What do you want from me?” he said.

“I want you to open up that door, real slow, and stick your head out to see what’s going on. You do that, and if it’s cool, I’ll let you leave. You don’t, and I’ll shoot you in the leg first, before I throw you out there. They love the smell of blood. You can play spin the bottle with Denise. Or something else. Maybe she’ll give you one of those special blowjobs, on the house.”

Bobby looked at him. Rocko smiled, but his eyes were still dead. He motioned with the gun. “Get out there, hotshot, before I change my mind.”

* * *

By the time he’d gathered up his courage enough to crack open the door, Bobby had it all pretty much figured out; Rocko was smuggling something way beyond regular old blow, something that might just be goddamned near the holy grail.
Live forever, even if you’re dead.
Where it came from, who the hell knew, but J.D. must have had a pretty good idea of how the stuff worked for him to believe his partner could be resurrected. Whether he was in on all this from the beginning or not didn’t really matter.

The simple fact was, this stuff was worth a lot more than any other shipment that had ever come through here. And that meant it was way too valuable to let little old Bobby live to tell the tale.

So you’re a dead man if you stay in here, and you’re very likely a dead man if you go out there. Pick your poison.

Bobby ached for a little bit of something to calm his nerves. Just a little pinch would make all this go away for the wet parts, or at least not matter as much. But that wouldn’t really help him, now would it? No. So what if it dulled the pain when Denise started ripping out his throat. The end was the same.

Rocko tapped the gun barrel against the back of his head. Bobby took a deep breath and cracked the door.

The room outside appeared empty. He could just see Damon’s shoes, speckled with blood. No movement.

He pushed the door open a little bit wider, heart hammering in his throat, and got a full view of Damon’s bloody corpse lying on the floor. No sign of Denise.

As he peered into the other room, Bobby was aware of a familiar sense of loss. He wasn’t quite sure what the feeling meant, only that it was about himself and who he was and why he’d ended up here, of all places.
Always wondered if I had a death wish. Way I grew up, always into trouble, like I was looking for it every place I went. Drugs, using and dealing, sort of like dying and coming back to life and then dying again. Little deaths. Waiting for the wrong guy to come along and put a bullet in me. Or maybe just waiting for the wrong pills to fry my brain into oblivion, a dog to tear off my face.

Emma had been his lifeline, or so he thought. They would get married, move out of his shitty trailer, he’d take a steady job and they’d have some kids. She was supposed to make it all better. But somehow they’d never gotten there, and now she was dead, just like he would be if he didn’t think of something pretty damn fast.

He swallowed and pushed the door all the way open. He could see the dusting of powder that had spilled from the bag when he took it from his pocket. He could not tell whether it had been disturbed. Had there been an entire pile of it before, or just…

“What’d you call that stuff?” he said. “Gravedigger powder?”

“Keep moving,” Rocko said at his back. Bobby inched out into the room and scanned right and left. The woman was not there. Equipment was scattered across the floor; bone saws and shears, dissection knives, lab pans and trays, exam gloves spilling from an open packet, Mayo stands tipped like drunken soldiers. Blood from Damon’s carotid artery had sprayed like a whipping fire hose across the wall and high window and speckled the storage closet doors, deep sink and centrifuges, making the entire scene look like some kind of surreal modern art exposition in gore.

The door to the hallway was standing wide open. Bobby could just make out what looked like a single faint footprint in blood near the threshold.

“I don’t think she’s here,” he said, legs shaking with relief as he turned back to Rocko. “I think maybe she—”

He heard a sudden scraping noise, and turned to find the naked dead woman exploding out of the storage closet,

(not so stupid after all, now is she)

gray mottled breasts flapping, hitting him low around the waist, like a free safety coming up to stuff the run, and he was flying backward and into Rocko as the gun went off and stitched the ceiling, scattering plaster chips and dust. The impact took him off his feet and drove them both through the door and back into the refrigerator unit, the woman already scrabbling at him as they hit the floor hard and came to rest below the nearest gurney.

Bobby rolled over, then felt his bladder let go with a warm rush as the dead woman’s cool, dry fingers ran over his face and neck. He kicked at her and tried to scramble away. He could smell the chemicals on her, the dead flesh already beginning to rot. She bared her teeth, but her hands kept moving lower, and at the same time he became aware of a strange film in the room, coating his face and softening the light until he could see nothing but haloed shapes.

He blinked to clear his sight, and looked down to see Denise James licking white dust from his jacket with a long, gray tongue, her eyes rolled back to whites as her body shuddered as if in release.