Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (15 page)

It was entirely to our benefit. We had running water, electricity and phone service (spotty) for about four out of every seven days. That’s a far cry from the riots in Detroit, Chicago, LA, and Miami. Trust me on this one.

Not that we didn’t have our share of riots. Sections of Washington, DC were nearly leveled by riots, looting, and urban conflict between the Haves and the Have-Nots. I’m grateful I wasn’t there when the tanks rolled into South West, or when Pepper Spray residue turned Georgetown pink.

Three weeks passed pretty quickly, and I was enjoying my job to the best of my ability. I had enough skill that the average zombie didn’t stand a chance against me, but once in a while I got tagged by one.

The night the phone call came I was drinking a lot of water and keeping my right leg elevated. A particularly spry revived grandfather had sunk a bayonet into my thigh the day before. It was a shame to drown my humiliation in tap water, sitting there in the bar, but I didn’t want to test the interaction of black market Percocet and booze.

Marvin picked up the phone, grunted, and brought me the receiver.

“Frank here. Ambulatory corpse hunter, at your service.”

“Frank. It’s Scott. The Man Scythe is done, and I need you to come over to get it right now.” He sounded hollow. Not just any “hollow”, mind you, but the sort of bottomless despair that comes at the bottom of a bourbon bottle.

“Scott, I got pinned by an old fucker yesterday. I don’t know if I can ride.”

“I don’t care,” he said. The despair in his tone was giving way to something much more fierce. “Get your ass over here, right now. You owe me, and I’m cashing that IOU. Understand?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“You had better be.”

I put the phone down, stunned beyond telling, picked up the water glass and poured it over my head. Percocet be damned, I needed to go.

The roads were pretty quiet at night then, not as quiet as they are now, but a massive change from the rush hours that never ended in Northern Virginia. I went from Arlington, out Route 66 to Fairfax in less than 15 minutes. It was not a pleasant ride, traffic conditions not withstanding. Every irregularity in the road surface translated into sharp jabs of pain.

Using a motorcycle for transportation... it wasn’t the best of all possible worlds, but it was what I had. I loved that bike, but during that trip I hated it with a passion. It was like having a vibrator glued to bare nerves in my leg. I arrived at Scott’s house in a foul mood and walking with a pronounced limp.

He was sitting on the front stoop with a shotgun across his lap, and a long bundle propped up at his side. You know someone is in bad shape when his color is greener than flesh tone. I didn’t know if it had anything to do with the bloodstains on his clothes and the bandage across his forehead, and my instincts screamed that I didn’t want to know.

“Waiting for me with a shotgun?” I called across his front lawn instead of just approaching him normally, and settled the katana in my belt. His tone on the telephone was nothing like I’d ever heard out of him in all the years we’d been friends and it set me on edge.

“Not for you,” he said. “The Man Scythe’s done. You owe me.”

“What do I owe you? Are you going to take it out of me with that gun?”

Scott Lewis, my old chum, laughed at me, and his long hair flew around like Medusa’s snakes at a rave.

“No. You’re paranoid, Frank.” I saw him shaking his head back and forth, and I could see his eyes when he stopped moving. I froze where I stood. “I called you here to help me out, because there’s something I can’t do and you’re the only person I trust enough to do... it.”

The painkiller had made my brain slow, and I had a sudden feeling of things adding up. He had a gun, was wounded, and had quite a lot of blood all over him... I realized I had not seen Mara, or even the cat. The picture my dark arithmetic painted was an ugly one.

“Where’s Mara, Scott?”

“She’s in the forge with the baby. Duck!”

I didn’t think, I ducked and was rewarded with the thunder of Scott’s shotgun over my head. I rolled into a crouch, facing away from my friend, and saw the reason for the order. There was a zombie on the other side of the street, howling, and clutching the stump of a missing arm with a clawed hand.

He was, to quote classic South Park, “comin’ right for us!” The slug just slowed him down.

I drew my blade as I came up from the crouch and kept moving forward on that momentum. The maimed former-taxpayer howled and tried to rush me, reaching out with those vicious claws. I taught him something by example, I think.

If you stand still in a close-quarters attack, you die. You can’t do anything important, like change direction, if you’re not moving. Because I was moving I had the chance to blend with his motion, to be alongside him, for a split second. It was more than enough time to bring my blade up and then down as I turned. His other arm was falling to the ground as I completed my direction change.

He stopped moving, stunned at the loss of another limb. I didn’t. I used the power of my turn, uninterrupted after disarming him, to kiss the back of his neck with my blade. I didn’t feel anything but a tiny pop of resistance when I severed his head.

Experience took over. Never pay attention to the gore. This is in the same category of combat rules with “Don’t ever stop moving.” I stabilized the head with my foot, slid the point of my sword into the skull through the eye socket and twisted.

When the blade came free, I took a huge breath and looked back towards Scott.

“That’s why I need you Frank. You can do it.”

“What is ‘it’, Man?”

“Mara had a cold the day the baby was born.”

I had a Luke Skywalker on the Bespin catwalk moment. No. No. It can’t be true. My throat tightened down to the diameter of a toothpick.

“No. No, Scott.” I rasped it out, barely able to shake the blood off the sword as I shambled over to him.

“Shhh,” he said to me, and put the gun down. “Meet her before we go any farther.” He picked up the bundle and held it out to me.

I looked at him like he’d sprouted the head of a badly made up drag queen on his shoulders. I couldn’t do much more than look at him, and re-sheath the katana... that was simple muscle memory from years of practice.

The weight of the bundle was about the same as a gallon of milk, and I unwrapped it in the streetlight glow. A long, sinuous, titanium body with a black rubber handle rested in my hands, nestled in the unfolded bath towel. The titanium was milled with vent holes up and down the frame. I stared at it so hard that I almost didn’t notice the blade that was folded so neatly into the body of the Man Scythe.

Some kinds of steel, rare varieties used by very few masters of the craft, can be polished so the metal is almost chatoyant in the right sort of light. The Man Scythe blade is an example of such mastery. It has all the character of a Samurai sword blade, layers of steel and light that looked alive in the piss-poor glow of Scott’s stoop.

I could barely breathe.

I let the towel fall away and opened the blade into position. I felt and heard the lock engage from the opposite side of the frame and was glad of it. The blade was nearly as long as my arm from shoulder to middle fingertip. To ask if it was sharp would have been offensive: I knew in my bones it was.

Reverently, I reached inside the space between the halves of the frame with my thumb and pushed the titanium tongue back down. Moving that metal spring allowed me to fold the blade back down into the safety of the weapon’s body. I exhaled and looked over at my dear friend, the artist who made the drunken ramblings of my brain into lethal reality. I couldn’t even speak to him.

There were tears cutting rivulets down the dirt and dried blood on his face.

“You owe me.” It was a statement of fact, not conjecture.

“Yes.”

“Do I have to tell you what I need from you?” The look in his sunken eyes shredded me down to my soul, and I’m betting there are still gouges left in it, too.

I shook my head because I didn’t want him to speak the words. The karma from even contemplating what I needed to do for him was enough to ensure my afterlife in the form of a chupacabra, or something else low and horrible. Speaking the words would have only made it more terrible.

The two most important people in Scott’s life were probably dead, dying, or nearly so. Very soon those people would both be zombies. They had to be... exterminated, and he couldn’t do it himself. He called me to do it. I owe him, after all.

“Fuck,” I wheezed. “In the forge?”

“Yes. The door is barred shut. I’ll let you in.”

“Close it after me and bar it. Don’t open it unless,” I paused, lifting the newly-made weapon in my hand, “you don’t have another choice. Better still, just set the forge on fire, take my bike and go really far away.”

Scott nodded, and we walked silently into the back yard and up the hill, to stand in front of the barn door.

There were whispers, and I knew Mara was already back from the dead.

“Scotty, we can hear you out there. Don’t you want to get to know your baby girl? She wants to meet her daddy so badly.”

I turned to look at him, and he was biting his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. Tears were washing his face clean, and it was clear he was shaking where he stood.

“How long?” I whispered in his ear, startling him so badly I expected him to run away.

“She was born... dead... two days ago. We couldn’t bring ourselves to bury her.” Scott’s voice cracked and he had to force the rest of the words out between gritted teeth. “Mara went to see the bbbbody yesterday. Didn’t come out. I heard it. I heard it.”

What else could I do, I put my arm around him. I had no words, and I absolutely could not refuse. All I could do was gesture at the inch-thick metal bar that kept the doors closed.

Then the baby started crying.

“Can’t you hear her, Scott? She wants her daddy! Just let me out and I’ll bring her with me! We’re so hungry, and she just won’t nurse. Honey, she wants her daddy. Come on, Scotty. Open the door.”

The crying became a wail.

Scott was frozen at the other end of the bar, quaking and completely broken. Mara and the baby pushed him beyond his ability to hold the pain and he shut down in self-defense. I wished to Hell I could have done the same, but I had a debt to repay.

I shoved the bar aside and opened the door.

Mara was standing just inside the shop, with the wailing baby in her arms. Her dress was in tatters, and she was covered from chin to ankles in dried blood. I could see her left breast, and it looked like she’d tried to convince the baby to nurse. It didn’t look like her nipple survived the attempt.

“Well, hello Frank! Did you come to meet the baby? She’s a little fussy because she’s so hungry.” Mara’s revived corpse smiled at me, and held the baby out for me to see.

I will not describe the... child. You can torture me, and I still won’t give it up. It took too long to forget, and I don’t want to remember with any more clarity than I already have.

It continued to wail, and two little, loose-in-the-socket eyes, tried to track me.

“Isn’t she pretty?! Where’s that pussy-whipped fuck of a husband of mine, Frank?” She started to move towards me, and I took a step back outside. “I really need to talk to him about fulfilling his fatherly duties.”

I opened the blade of the Man Scythe for the first time with intention to do violence.

“No, Mara, you can’t have him. He sent me to take care of you.”

Miss Undead New Mom of the Decade threw the baby across the shop’s interior and came out after me, shrieking. Her fingers were bent into claws, each one ending in 1/4” thick overgrown fingernails. She moved like a greased eel on a hot griddle and I could barely track her with my eyes.

Thank God, or whoever one looks after zombie exterminators, the Man Scythe was between us. I raised it on instinct, like a crucifix, and she hit the side of the frame head-on, tossing me backward onto my ass.

Mara brought her hands up to her face, and looked at me from between her spread fingers.

“You cheap piece of rich boy ass. You broke my nose... My beautiful nose! You want to stand between a woman and her husband? Well, cocksucker, you’re going to regret it.” Her hands dropped away, and a testicle-withering smile spread across her bloodied lips. “Didn’t your Mommy teach you not to hit girls? You’re just another longhaired, post-grunge, privileged, abuser of women. I really just can’t stand that.”

She started to move forward, looking just like a predator stalking prey. I knew I needed to get off my behind or she was going to get the drop on me. The only problem was I couldn’t move and expect her not to adjust her attack unless she was already moving. Then I might have a ghost of a chance.

Shit.

I wanted to curl into a little ball when she started to bob up and down as she moved closer. When she started chanting, “You’ll eat your penis before you die,” over and over again, I knew I’d gone straight to Hell and reincarnation as a chupacabra was out of the question.

My best friend’s wife was going to kill me in her back yard. I didn’t think it could get any worse. I was wrong.