Zombies! (Episode 5): Sinners and Saints (3 page)

Marcus told Leron that he thought morons would want to show off their bravado and get into the ring with zombies. It would be kind of like
Fight Club
, everyday blue and white collar nobodies grabbing for a few minutes of glory in vanquishing the undead. And for every guy that wanted to get into the ring, there would be a hundred other guys who would pay just to watch. Ticket sales alone would hold up their enterprise, but the intake from the betting would be more than they'd ever seen before.

Marcus was their chief investor, which spared him from this kind of work. Leron didn't really care. He was more than happy to do the dirty jobs and collect on the profits. Well, he was more than happy to collect on the profits. These dirty jobs was dirtier than most and he was finding that he didn't really have the stomach for it. Literally. Every time he had to go into the pen, he wound up puking afterwards.

This was going to be their third weekend. The first had seemed like a bust. They'd managed to drum up some interest with the gang sect. It was made into an initiation, which didn't make Marcus happy. But the fights were real and as the word spread, more and more guys showed up with money in their hands. That first Friday night had been dead (ha ha). They'd taken a huge loss. But by Saturday night they were getting people who wouldn't normally even watch stories of that neighborhood on the news. Leron took great pleasure in the guilty expressions on the faces of all of the Wall Street white guys. He imagined they had the same looks on their faces while huddled in the corners of their apartments scrolling through page after page of internet porn.

Toby stood by the door to the cage with a prod while Leron went inside. The zombies all looked up as the door squeaked open. That awful low moan came from some of them. It was muffled by the rubber balls but the combined sounds echoed about the place like a sorrowful wind. They were slow to react to Leron's prodding, the cold affecting them badly. That had been an important discovery. Keeping them cold didn't harm them, but it did slow their reactions. It was much safer moving about a roomful of cold zombies than it was a roomful of warm ones. Leron wondered what they would do come spring.

“The pickings are slim,” he said to Toby, as he moved through the pen and inspected the stock. They were going to need more zombies.

As he continued with his work, the dead became more agitated. They were confused by him, this man in motion with a muffled scent. They pulled at their bonds and stuck their noses at him to try and get a better understanding. He pushed them away, sometimes aggressively. To this they had no reaction. The zombie sense of self preservation was nil. When he finally found one good enough for the Saturday night game, he directed it through the throng and pushed it towards Toby.

“How we doing?” Toby asked. He was referring to time. Their time with the zombies was always short. As docile as they were at the moment, just about anything could spark them once the warmth of a body reached their senses. Even bound and gagged, they were dangerous. If they swarmed him and he got scratched, he could become infected.

Leron shrugged. “I gotta get three more. That ought to start us off okay.”

He went back in. Toby set to work checking the bindings on the zombie's hands mouth. All the work was done when they were put into the pen but sometimes guys got careless. Tying up the hands wasn't really much of a problem but you had to do it first. They hated the gag and they'd fight like bobcats if they had their hands. A couple of times, some lazy idiot had done a superficial job with the bonds and just shoved the guy into the pen. This particular zombie seemed well restrained. He was a ganger from last week, a couple of years younger than Toby, maybe fourteen or fifteen. He'd botched the initiation, a zombie fight, and wound up as stock. He was pretty fresh so he was likely to put on a good show.

Leron came out with two more a minute after that. There was a woman in a police outfit, but the uniform wasn't legit. She'd been a stripper who'd taken a bad job. She wasn't even hot, really, an older bitch whose time had come and gone. Now literally. The other one was a white guy, dark suit, trimmed beard, no hair. Leron always picked one of the white guys.

“One more,” he said as he went back in.

“Maybe not,” Toby answered, as he went to work on the stripper. “They're shuffling around pretty good in there.

“I won't be picky.”

Leron moved back inside, determined to keep his promise. The first one was an older guy, maybe sixty or even seventy years old. The elderly seemed to get stronger as zombies. Maybe it's because they weren't so worried about breaking a hip. Still, not so good for the show. An opening act? Nah, not tonight. Not on a Saturday. He pushed that one aside and homed in on a beefy guy with one arm. The one arm wasn't generally a problem if the zombie was big enough. It skewed the bets because people didn't really understand how little of a handicap it was. That was generally good for the house. It was going to be the one armed guy for sure.

As Leron moved in for the grab, he felt something tug on his shoulder from behind. His first instinct was to pull away. He knew that a zombie had come up behind him and was interested now in more than investigation. He also knew that its hands were free. It didn't really concern him because it would still be gagged. At this stage, he could pull away. In a few minutes, they would be all over him. But as he tugged away, he felt something hook under his left elbow and yank his arm back. Spinning, he let out a cry and shoved hard with his right hand. It was the old man, teeth bared.
Damn!
Just two minutes before, this thing had been trussed up like a Christmas pig. Before he could push the old man away, those teeth nicked his gloved hand. It pissed him off more than anything else and he shoved the old guy hard. The hapless zombie stumbled into a middle aged woman and the two of them went to the ground. With a curse, Leron turned back to the one armed zombie, grabbed it by its shirt front and yanked it out of the pen. Toby was there to quickly subdue it.

“What happened?” Toby asked him when the four zombies were lined up.

“Old fucker got free and twisted my arm back. If we weren't so short on stock, I'd bash his brains in.”

“You didn't get bit, did you?”

Leron shoved him and made a show of his clothing. “Through all this? Don't be stupid.” But as they began herding the night's performers toward the preparation area, his finger began to throb.

***

Marcus showed up a couple of hours later. He went looking first for Leron, but couldn't find him. Instead, he grabbed Toby and asked about the state of their stock.

“We don't have a lot. And they're not good ones.”

“How many did you pull for tonight?”

“Four.”

Marcus rubbed his eyes. “That's it? We've been doubling the crowd every week. We'll go through at least twelve tonight, probably closer to twenty.”

Toby put up his hands. “I know. I know. Leron was gonna help me but he disappeared after we pulled the first four. I ain't goin' in there alone.”

“What do you mean, he disappeared?”

Toby shrugged. “I just ain't seen him is all. He was gonna meet me and didn't.”

“Did something happen?”

Toby shrugged again. “Leron got into it with one of the things, but it wasn't nothin'”

“One got free? Was he bitten?”

“Well...no. At least he said he wasn't. It just twisted his arm.”

“Okay. Okay.” Marcus made sure he looked relieved even if he didn't feel it. “Get, um, is Damon here?”

Toby nodded.

“Get him to help you. And PJ, too. Get in and out of the pen quick, you got it?”

“You okay, Marcus?”

Marcus nodded. “Just a lot of stress is all.”

When Toby left, Marcus went toward the back of the warehouse and up the stairs where he'd made an office for himself. It wasn't neat or clean like his office at work, and it certainly didn't smell as good. It was also cold. He didn't like it.

He needed Leron so he sent him a text message. The notion of him having “gotten into it” with one of the zombies unnerved him. If Leron had been bitten, he would have hidden it. But would he run? It was pointless to dwell on it. Instead, he stared out at the warehouse at what he'd made. In the center of the open floor was a boxing ring. It hadn't been too difficult to acquire. It was old and the turnbuckles had long since been ripped away. That made the corners dangerous but since there weren't any real rules to the fights, he wasn't worried about it. The ropes were still in fair shape, but that didn't matter either. They served no purpose when a man was fighting a zombie or several of them. No, the most important thing was the chain link cage they'd built around the whole ring. There was a door at one end and the zombie or zombies would be thrown inside just before the match. Then the challenger would waltz in while his name, or whatever name he had given, was announced over the roar of the crowd. The crowd sat around the ring, either in folding chairs on the floor or scrunched into a seat on one of the three tiers of bleachers that had been erected. Tonight's event was going to be crowded. Standing room only. Marcus would use the money to buy more seating. Right after he bought more zombies.

Which took his thoughts back to Shawn.

He was playing a dangerous game carrying on with Shawn. It had always been dangerous because of Shawn's age, but his involvement with this cop had made things a lot worse. A couple of years before, he'd had no reason to worry about the cops. But Marcus, in testing the waters of society, had found that he had a taste for operating outside of its boundaries. This venture was by far his boldest and he wasn't even sure there was a law against it. How could there be? People went into the ring voluntarily and zombies didn't have any rights to speak of. At least not yet. If those crackpots at the
Zombie Rights Association
had their way, the governor would have to have the undead at his table during dinner. Marcus wondered what that would be like.

Over the weeks, Shawn had spoken very little about Anthony Heron. Marcus had checked the cop out but there was nothing useful. He was a model, if not exemplary officer. He'd made detective at a fairly young age, partly due to his association with his former partner, Johan Stemmy. Marcus had started checking out Stemmy also until he found out that Stemmy was dead. At any rate, it seemed that Shawn was right and that Heron had gotten him freed because of some personal belief. He must have called in every favor he'd racked up over the years because it was not easy to do what he'd done. In many ways, Marcus was grateful to Heron. He really did love Shawn. At this point, he was convinced that their relationship was the one honest thing left in his life and he wasn't prepared to give it up so easily. But their conversation that morning had him worried. He knew Shawn and he was pretty sure that Shawn was going to call Heron and rat out the hunting party. That was bad on too many levels.

Marcus had been watching Shawn, keeping tabs on how edgy he was. That boy needed to distance himself from zombies, not get involved in some sting operation. The zombie infection wasn't getting any better so Shawn was waiting for the end of the world. It would never happen, if history was any indication. The infection didn't spread quickly enough, even with the zombies helping it along. Within a few months' time, the adjustment of the human race would be complete and the zombie infection would be assimilated into society just as diseases like AIDS and cancer had been. Doctors would score grant money for treatments and the Earth would keep turning. But Shawn was too naive to see it that way.

Then there was Marcus' own involvement. He was, of course, the one footing the bill for the hunt. It had become clear early on that they wouldn't be able to keep up their stock without help. Leron had led a few hunting parties, but you didn't just find zombies walking down the street. Well, not most of the time. You had to follow the rumors of sick people and break into their apartments. There were plenty of them all over the city but the time and effort made the job too much for his handful of men. So he put the word out to the street kids that he would pay good money for good zombies. As he'd told Leron, morons will do just the dumbest things for the right pay. And if a few street kids got bitten in the process, he'd pay their friends to turn them in. Healthy gangers made good zombies in the ring. But not Shawn. He didn't want Shawn involved because he couldn't bear to see Shawn turn into one of those things. He'd kill him first.

This line of thinking kept him occupied for some time. Marcus' goal was always to make money. He wanted to make enough to ease Shawn's worries about being dependent on his parents. Let Shawn be dependent on him. He could put him through college, do the things for Shawn that he had never been able to do for Leron...

There was a knock on the door and Marcus called out for him to enter. "Where've you been?” he asked Leron.

Leron shrugged. “Took a long lunch.”