Magic and Decay (2 page)

They had been turned into animals, pure and simple.
They were animals with the driving addiction to consume human flesh.

So in order to make sure they wouldn’t get back up
again, I kind of had to remove their heads from their bodies.

That usually did the trick.

Once in a while I could get a shot of Magic straight
through the skull, and that would also do the trick. But in a group this large,
quantity won over quality every day of the week.

I heard
Kiran
behind me
equally as engaged. His Magic was as strong as mine these days, except he still
hadn’t received the gift of premonition like I had. Not that mine was something
to brag about, but it kept us globetrotting as we followed my intuition to
every place it led us.

Including the gulf coast of Texas.

The weird thing about this mission was all the
Zombies. I couldn’t figure it out, and I honestly had to think back over my
motives and make sure that it really wasn’t Dr. Pepper that had brought us
here.

I worried for more than a minute that my subconscious
had pulled strings with my meta-conscience and tricked me into this particular
area of the world.

It didn’t take long for me to dismiss the idea. I had
been awake when the vision hit and engaged with my babies. It had to be a very
serious mission for me to want to leave them. And this vision had been enough
to make me move.

No, there was something here.

We just had to find it.

I lunged to my right and sent more
Magic
pulsing through my body and exploding out of my hands. Magic fizzled in the air
and ate up the space between where I stood and my enemies’ necks.

Zombies continued to fall with little effort on my
part. Their heads made gory heaps all over the road, and their wretched stench
permeated the air with distracting potency. I used Magic to help me breathe
lest I start puking in between my waves of killing.

There had been a time when I felt sorry for these
guys. I couldn’t separate killing so many of them when I had a hard time
forgetting that they had once been perfectly human and normal.

Maybe even rational.

And for sure, at least not cannibal.

But now I couldn’t say that guilt robbed me of any
sleep. Whatever humanity had been there before was officially gone. They were
no longer animals or savages or charity cases.

They were the enemy. And if we didn’t kill them, then
they would kill us.

A burst of electricity pulsed from my hand and
connected with the drooling Feeder in front of me. His teeth had turned black
and dripped with a gooey substance that looked like a mixture of blood, saliva
and rubber cement. His face drooped from his skull, bloodied and scabbed over.
His hands reached out in stiff claws that batted at the air in front of him,
hoping to catch a piece of me.

My Magic cut like a laser through his neck, hot and
cauterizing. His body dropped to his knees and then to the ground while his
head bounced away in a different direction. His comrades didn’t even pause to
move his body out of the way. They trampled over the remains of their dead
friend without a second thought.

Or any thought.

They seemed devoid of any kind of ability to think or
reason. This disease made them solely focused on finding food by any means
necessary.

My heart squeezed, but I pushed the sentiment away.
One quick glance at my husband reinforced my focus. We were at war with the
undead and if we didn’t do our small part, they would take over everything and
everyone.

I fought for my life, but more so for my family.
For
Kiran
.
For
my children.

“Eden!”
Kiran
called from a
few feet away. “Do you notice anything strange about these Zombies?”

“They smell worse than usual?”

He made a sound of agreement. “I was thinking their
same-
sexedness
.”

“What?” I looked around. He was right. All of the
Zombies surrounding us in carnal hunger or dead on the ground were men.

Not one woman interrupted their uniformity.

Weird.

“Maybe they were an Elks club or something? Masons?
Interrupted in the middle of a meeting?”

“What is an Elks club?”

At least he understood the Masons.

“Like an all men’s club.
Shriners.
The mob.
I don’t know! It’s weird. Where are the
women?”

“Maybe they ate the women.”

I shuddered. Could that be possible?
Men turning on the women and banding together to form some kind of
Zombie army?
Stranger things had happened.

Such as Zombies in the first place.

There were rumors of Zombie armies further south, but
we had not been brave enough to explore those areas.

Like I said earlier, being a Zombie for the rest of eternity
sounded like the opposite of fun.

“We should have brought a team with us,” I lamented.

“I thought this was your idea of romance? I thought
you wanted alone time?”

Now he was just rubbing it in. “Next time you can take
me to the cabin.”

“
Mmm
,”
Kiran
murmured in approval. “I like taking you to the cabin.”

I felt the slow burn in my stomach as if he’d
suggested something deliciously wicked. It quickly fizzled out with the next
Zombie that tried to bite my face off.

“What the hell?”

I whipped my head around, convinced
Kiran
was practicing his American accent again… here… in
the middle of
Zombiefest
.

“Was that you?” I used another punch of Magic to take
out two more Zombies that had gotten dangerously close to dripping their
mucousy
-puss on me.

“No,”
Kiran
answered
immediately. In that one word, I heard his suspicion and alarm. I felt it surge
through our combined Magic and zing through my blood.

I spun around, searching for the voice that had
pierced through the groaning and guttural cries of the multitude of Zombies
around us.

The sound of fifty Zombies clamoring for flesh and
blood would have been deafening to regular ears, but our Immortal senses were
superior in every way to normal humanity.
Which was why we
diligently fought their battle, picked up their mess and gave them a chance to
resurrect a world that didn’t have to fight tooth and nail to survive on a
daily basis.

There was a human nearby now, and as the numbers of
hungry undead grew with alarming speed, I felt the press of purpose to find
him. They wouldn’t survive this many Zombies. There was no way they had enough
ammunition or weaponry to hold off against a horde of this size.

Even I felt staggered by the sheer number of Zombies
that filled this street. They came in waves.
More and more
and more filed around the corner while
Kiran
and I
did our best to keep them contained.
If a human joined our fight now, he
wouldn’t last a minute.

“There!”
Kiran
pointed to
the beach. Two humans stood side by side at the edge of the ocean. They seemed
to be contemplating their chances with the endless rush of waves and water
against the Zombie horde that battled to get to them.

And that was when I realized the Zombies around
Kiran
and me were not interested in us. Not really. They
snapped and clawed at us, but their focus had honed in on those two people like
they were ambrosia in a land of gods.

“What the hell?”
Kiran
murmured the human’s sentiment. “Do you think they’ve figured out we’re not
exactly human?”

I looked at
Kiran
and then
at the two people standing fifty yards away. A guy and a girl huddled closely
together, dripping with saltwater and looking altogether terrified.

“I have no idea. I don’t remember them ever caring
before that we were more than human.”

“Do you think this is what your vision was about?”

Yes. I did. And I didn’t need to voice that thought
for
Kiran
to understand it. Our shared Magic gave us
direct access to each other’s emotions and general thoughts. While we could
hide some of that from each other when we needed space, I wasn’t interested in
hiding anything right now.

The Zombies shifted their steps to move around us and
charge those two uncertain humans. I had watched hysteria and confusion flash
across their terrified expressions before they started sprinting down the
beach, sand kicking up in gritty sprays with every step.

“Let’s go help them.”
Kiran
sounded exasperatedly resigned and I tried not to smile. Helping people had
really always been my thing.

We used Magic to clear a path in front of us and help
speed us along. Zombies could be ridiculously fast when they had food in their
sights, much faster than me without Magic.

We caught up to the couple a little ways down the
beach. They were shouting unintelligible words at each other and searching
wildly for weapons or a place to hide out.

The girl’s wild red hair hung to her chin and whipped
about her face while the guy pressed a hand to her back and pushed her along.
They were quite a bit younger than us. I thought they might be teenagers, but
they looked even younger dripping wet.

Just as
Kiran
and I
approached, the girl tripped and fell, bringing the boy down with her.

They sprawled in the sand, a panicked heap of tangled
limbs. We stopped just in front of them.
Kiran
spun
around and created a force-field of Magic to keep the ravening Zombies at bay
while I tried to make sense of the couple on the ground.

“Eden, we need to go!”
Kiran
shouted at me.

I looked down at the couple sharing equally horrified looks
while their attention bounced back and forth between the Zombies pounding
against
Kiran’s
force-field and my face.

“Are you two all right?”

The boy looked at the girl next to him, and something
settled over him, something deeper than fear and panic, something I recognized,
but didn’t understand. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

“The Zombies seem to really like the way you two
smell.” I held my hand out to the girl and she took it warily.

“Zombies?” the boy choked.

Wait… how could he not know about Zombies? And where
exactly had they come from? I would have noticed earlier if two humans had been
wandering around town.

“Zombies,” I repeated. “You don’t know about the
Zombies?”

They shared another look and I heard them both gulp
down some additional panic.

“They’re all men,” the girl whispered.

This seemed to alarm the boy even more. He took an
aggressive step forward and steeled some of his wavering nerves. “Damn it,
Ivy,” he growled.

I glanced over my shoulder. “Does that mean something
to you?”

The girl, Ivy, nodded. Her chin trembled and her big
green eyes seemed to widen with some kind of insight into our current
predicament.

“This is going to sound crazy…” she started.

I didn’t have time to drag answers out of her.
“Crazier than Zombies?”

She cleared her throat and took that in stride. “I’m a
Siren,” she explained.
“Of the Greek variety.
I
attract,
er
, men.”

I nearly laughed. “And apparently it doesn’t matter if
they’re living or dead.”

“Apparently not,” the guy grunted.

“You believe me?”

This time I did laugh. “My husband is keeping
Zombies
at bay with a
Magical force-field
. There’s not much I
don’t believe in.”

“Right,” the guy said. “So that makes you…?”

“A witch.”

“Right,” he repeated. “Ryder.”

“Eden. And that’s my husband,
Kiran
.”

“Got any idea how to get out of here, Eden?” Ryder
asked.

“We’ve been using our Magic to chop heads off. That
seems to work great for us.”

“And if we don’t have Magic?”

“Then you should probably run.
Fast.”
 

“To where?”
Ivy wailed.

I looked over her shoulder and saw that the Zombies
had found a way around
Kiran’s
loophole and were now
coming at us from every available angle.

Yikes!

“Okay, stick with us! We’ll get you someplace safe.

“
Kiran
, we have to get these
two out of the open! We need someplace to go.”

He glanced in the direction of the small jet we’d
taken across the ocean, but ruled that out almost instantly. There were too
many Zombies between us and the plane.

We could easily protect ourselves, and we didn’t have
to worry about the bite as much as humans did. I didn’t know how a Greek Siren
would be affected, but the guy with her hadn’t claimed to be anything but
human.

We couldn’t be reckless with these lives.

“Up!”
Kiran
shouted at me over the rising din of Zombies’ screams.

I looked back to the restaurant we had just been
exploring. There were too many ledges and places for a Feeder to get a foothold
and climb to the top. They would overpower us in no time.

I followed
Kiran’s
focus
down the small strip of downtown. Directly next to the restaurant was a perfect
square of a two-story building with smooth stucco siding and no window ledges
until the second story. From here, I could only make out one door and no
windows on the first floor.

It would be perfect.

If we could just get there.

I pointed it out to Ivy and Ryder. “We’re going to run
there. We’ll put up a force-field around us and hopefully keep you from getting
eaten on the journey. These guys are really aggressive though, so we’ll have to
hurry.”