Dead Man's Hand (5 page)

“
The same goes for me,
Bascom. Have your girlfriend call the police. There’s a special
squad for undead disturbances, you know.”

“
Things are bad enough
without getting the police involved,” he said. “She’s already had
the Grommets sniffing around her place. For all we know, they’ve
got something to do with this. If we bring in the police…Drea’s
bound to get caught in the crossfire.”

I was only half-listening now, trying to
figure out what the Grommets had to do with all of this. “What did
she say about the Grommets?” I asked.

He hesitated a moment, probably trying to
process the risks versus rewards of telling me any more. The math
must have worked out in my favor, because he took a breath and
said, “She did some work for Neat Pete. Then some of Yancy’s boys
came around asking questions.”

“
What kind of
questions.”

“
Like where she got her
supply, where it shipped to, the chances of re-animating just part
of a corpse.”

“
She tell ‘em
anything?”

“
She says she
didn’t.”

“
And you don’t quite
believe her.”

“
I don’t know what to
believe any more. I just need some help here. I’ll do whatever it
was you wanted…and more. Name your price.”

“
To be determined,” I
said.

During the last exchange, my mind had been
racing. It stuck me as likely that Neat Pete had sold Drea Wexler a
one-handed corpse in the last couple of days. And somehow Yancy
Grommet had gotten wind of it, maybe even wanted to re-animate the
remaining hand to pull the same kind of muscle memory hack that
Pixel was planning. All of that was inconsequential to me. What I
didn’t like was the fact that all of this would end up back on
Pixel. There was a good chance that if things went badly, she’d end
up in the stable of one or the other Grommet.

My smarter side told me to let it go. Pixel
had gotten herself into this, and if the price was heavy, that was
on her. At best, Pixel was just a resource for me, an occasional
partner whom I’d never had reason to mistrust. At worst, she was a
little conniver who’d jumped at a chance to ensnare me into her
little game when she’d seen that werewolf come at me. Either way,
I’d be none the worse leaving her to the Grommets. But then my less
smart side chimed in, and I thought about that plain pine table in
her apartment. Pixel wasn’t a player, not this kind anyway. She’d
just wanted to help her father out of a jam, and inexperience had
put her right in the middle of an even bigger one.

Knowing I’d be hating myself for a long time
after, I said, “Give me Drea’s info.” I blocked out Bascom’s
gushing thanks, consoling myself with the knowledge that I’d have
hated myself a lot more for throwing Pixel to the dogs.

Four

I don’t claim to be an expert on the zombie
trade. All I know for sure is that a zombie factory relies on a
chemical process that includes a cocktail of viruses and toxins all
aimed at getting the corpse up on its feet—presuming it still has
feet to get up on. The result is definitely unpleasant for the
subject, and so docility is achieved through a second cocktail. I’d
seen Bascom use both to re-animate and calm the corpse in his shop
earlier. The contents are trade secrets, of course, and different
practitioners meet with varying degrees of success; hence, their
good or bad reputations, their supply and demand cycles, etc.

The tricky part is the viral component. When
a zombie bites, the virus is transferred, and if the victim dies
from the bite, death isn’t exactly a permanent state. You don’t
always die from it, as far as I know, but surviving the bite is
often such a horrible process that most people wish they were dead
instead. It’s not uncommon for a surviving bite victim to blow his
own head off before his body’s had the chance to let the virus win
or lose.

For the most part, victims of such attacks
are either people working in the zombie factories—victims of
carelessness or shoddy safeguards—or the people purchasing the
zombies for use in myriad operations. In those cases, it’s maker or
buyer beware, and there’s not a lot of public outcry when a normal
human gets Turned in a zombie accident. But when it’s an innocent
victim, you’re looking at a nasty lawsuit at best, criminal
negligence or maybe even second-degree homicide at worst. Those
were the ends of it that I knew well.

I’d never heard of a whole shipment of
zombies going off the radar. And how many were in the shipment in
question I didn’t know yet. But the possibilities were ugly, and I
tried running through all of them on my way to Drea Wexler’s shop.
All the while, I kept trying to work the Grommets and Neat Pete and
Pixel into the different equations, not to mention myself. None of
them worked out in my favor, and I kept telling myself to turn
around, to call Bascom back and get out of our agreement. But city
block after city block kept rolling by as I drove into the heart of
the industrial zone, and before I’d managed to do anything in the
way of self-preservation, I was parked in front of a little
building with a cheap, fading sign that read “Quality
Re-Animation.”

Neither the building nor the sign seemed to
have a sense of its own irony. From the looks of it, the business
had been here a while, and I guessed that Drea had bought the
existing clientele and business name not long ago. Someone else had
started the process of running it into the ground, and it looked
like Drea was doing a good job of finishing it off. Whatever she
and Bascom had going, it hadn’t been strong enough to move Bascom
to share his secret formulas and help his girlfriend move up the
ladder of zombie success. Thinking of this, I reminded myself not
to count on Bascom for any favors when all of this was over.

I parked and went in, not bothering to
knock. The entrance area was bare concrete floor, a small waiting
room with a couple of chairs against the bare walls. A long
waist-high counter took up most of the room, and beyond it was a
single open door. At the far left end, the counter had one of those
piano-hinged sections that could lift for easy entrances and exits.
A dim light shone through the doorway into the rest of the
building, and I could see tanks back there similar to the ones at
Bascom’s.

“
Hello?” I called out and
was rewarded by a feminine yelp from somewhere in the back
room.

Drea Wexler came through
the doorway a few seconds later, looking unsettled to the core. She
was one of those people who wear sunglasses indoors, probably as an
affectation aimed at creating mystique, but which was really just
annoying more than anything else. Her hair was long and straight
and dark, and her skin was pale and cold looking. She had no actual
chin to speak of but had managed to cultivate a little round of a
double chin that tried to get the job done. I was immediately
reminded of the sort of thing you’d see on the muddy ground that
had been hidden under a rock you’d just turned over and immediately
wished you hadn’t. Still, there must have been something about her
that had rung Bascom Quibble’s bell, and there probably still was
from the way he’d sounded on the phone. The break-up had been her
doing, and now Bascom carried the torch.
Poor guy
, I thought.

I introduced myself and told her Bascom had
sent me.

“
Thank God,” she said in a
voice choked with tears and fear. She reached out a pale hand, and
I shook it politely. It was as moist and cold as I’d imagined. Then
she said, “Excuse me,” and pulled off the sunglasses to wipe at her
smeared mascara and tears with the back of her hand. “I’ve had a
hard night. I’m so glad someone’s come to help.” She flashed a
feeble smile, then slipped the glasses back on.

“
I don’t know just how
helpful I’ll be, but I’m willing to try,” I said. “Why don’t you
tell me what happened?”

She shrugged. “There’s not much to it. I had
a shipment to go out to a client outside of town. The van carrying
the product never arrived. When I got the call, I checked the van’s
GPS coordinates, and there’s nothing.”

“
How long ago did you get
the call?”

“
About two hours
now.”

“
And when did the van leave
here?”

She looked at her watch. “Maybe three hours,
three and a half?”

“
And how much…product are
we talking about?”

“
Six.”

“
Six zombies?” I asked just
to be sure.

“
Yes.”

“
Do you have any reason to
suspect your driver might have taken a payment to let this shipment
go astray?”

“
Henry?” She gave me an
incredulous chuckle. “Henry’s eighty-three, and all he knows how to
do is drive from point A to point B. That’s all he’s ever done. If
anyone tried to flip him, he’d be so confused they wouldn’t get
anywhere.”

“
All right.” I didn’t have
as much faith in her driver as she did, but I wasn’t going to argue
the point. “Bascom told me you’ve had people from the Grommet
organization asking questions. What did they want?”

“
Well, the first was Neat
Pete, and he wasn’t asking questions. He sold me some
merchandise.”

“
And by merchandise, you
mean of the dead variety.”

Even through the sunglasses, I could see she
was giving me a cold stare. “Yes.”

“
Anything unusual about
it?”

“
Not where Pete’s
concerned.”

“
What does that mean?” I
asked.

“
Pete’s items usually come
in less than whole. It’s sort of a niche market in terms of how I
can handle re-sale.”

“
And in this case, we’d be
talking about a hand?”

She nodded and then sighed uncomfortably
before saying, “Which is what Grommet’s boys came asking me
about.”

“
Clancy or
Yancy?”

“
They don’t exactly leave
business cards, and I didn’t ask. I just knew where they were
from.”

“
And what did they want to
know about the hand?”

“
They wanted to know if one
could be re-animated all by itself, separate from the rest of the
package.”

“
What did you tell
them?”

“
That it could be done in
theory but that I’d never tried anything like that.”

I nodded. “That satisfy them?”

She shrugged. “It was a short conversation.
They left pretty quickly.”

“
They didn’t ask about the
body Pete had sold you?”

She set her jaw firmly, one
of her buttons just having been pushed. “The
merchandise
I got from Pete did not
come up in conversation.”

“
Sorry,” I said without
meaning it. “I was absent the day they went over re-animator
etiquette.”

She ignored the remark. “Why all this
interest in the Grommets? Do you think they took my cargo?”

“
There’s a good
chance.”

“
Why?”

Now it was my turn to ignore her. “Tell me
about your van.”

She gave me the basics—make and model, white
paint, three hubcaps.

“
And the last location you
have on it?” I asked.

“
Here.” She pulled a tablet
out from behind the counter, ran her fingers across its screen and
then tapped it once before turning it to face me. I was looking at
a map of the city, a blue line leading away from our current
location to a spot about five miles away. Once I’d spoken the
coordinates into my phone, it plotted the same route for
me.

“
That’s not so far,” I
said. “You haven’t been inclined to go have a look
yourself?”

“
With those things on the
loose?”

“
Somebody could get
hurt.”

“
It won’t be
me.”

She said it without shame. I gave her a
little nod. Part of me appreciated her coldness. “It’ll come back
to haunt you.”

I meant it in the legal sense, but she took
it otherwise. “I’m haunted already, Mr. Stubble. For the rest of my
life and by things you don’t even want to try imagining. This won’t
make much difference.”

It wasn’t the reply I’d expected, and I
almost felt some sympathy for her. But then I remembered that she
was sending me out to clean up her mess, and I felt glad for
whatever demons she had to wrestle with. I had no plans on getting
myself killed in the next few hours, but if it should work out that
way, I had just decided that I’d join the ranks of whatever else
was tormenting her soul.

“
Well, wish me luck,” I
said, not expecting her to say anything even remotely
optimistic.

“
You’ll need more than
luck,” she said. “Take this.”

From under the counter, she pulled out a
small grey metallic case, about the size of a thick paperback book.
She popped the latch, and the lid sprang up. Inside were an empty
syringe and vial full of an amber liquid.

In response to my questioning look, she
said, “It’s an antidote. In case you survive an attack. Take it
within twenty minutes and you’ll be okay. Take the whole tube, just
straight into muscle.”

I’d never heard of an antidote to the zombie
virus, but then again I didn’t know any of the re-animators’ trade
secrets. “Can’t I just take it now?”

She shook her head. “It’s an antidote, not a
vaccine. It’s a different virus, attacks the one that’ll Turn you.
If you take it now and it doesn’t find anything to attack, it’ll
just go dormant and be useless when you need it.”