Z is for Zombie Read online

  Z IS FOR ZOMBIE

  By Philip Hansen

  Copyright © 2010 by Philip Hansen

  Cover and art copyright © 2010 by Philip Hansen

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead is entirely coincidental. All right reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Philip Hansen.

  July 2010.

  Sqwwwaaaaaawwwrrrrkkkk!

  “…slick. Say again, inbound…”

  Rrrzzzzzawwr!

  “Fuck your mother, El Tee,” Mack growled, “fix that goddamn radio or just hump it into the bush.”

  Bzzzzshhhhhhh!

  “…nine, eight, seven… Copy? Copy? Echo squad? Copy?”

  Rrrzzzzaaassskkkpppp!

  “This place stinks.” Navarette said, looking back over his shoulder.

  “It’s a dead place, don’cha know.” Skinny said, a faux Jamaican accent echoing from his pale cracker throat.

  Mack didn’t smile, he pinched his face up tight, a parody of a grin. He had heard the line a hundred times. It was funny eight weeks ago, now it was just fucking annoying.

  El Tee dropped to one knee in the mud and pulled his radio out of the holder. It whined in protest.

  Bwwwaaaarrrkk!

  “Did they say slick?” El Tee grunted. He racked the radio against his helmet a few times.

  Sqqqwwwaarrrk!

  Skinny rolled his eyes and flipped a small cell phone out of a BDU (Battle Dress Uniform) cargo pocket. Mack gave him a quick look that said, “If you say, ‘Can you hear me now? I’m going to shoot you in the face.’”

  Cheep-cheep! “Dog squad, ten-nine that radio traffic from command.” Cheep-cheep!

  Cheep! “SLICK! SLICK!” Masterson’s voice screamed over the tiny handheld. “Inbound, find cover. Find some FUCKING cover!” Cheep-Cheep!

  Mack looked around. Cover? Echo squad was camped out in a small open-air bunker near a muddy river. Twenty-Five yards away a decrepit fishermen’s shack squatted like a dried snail near a decaying dock. Secured out of sight under the dock was a rubber raft.

  Mack pulled up his binoculars and looked out through the gun slits. Across the river was an old warehouse, most of the windows shattered by time and wayward children. At the top of the hill was what was left of a parking garage and a couple of apartment buildings. The skeleton of a half-constructed high-rise apartment complex sat rusting next to a ten-story construction crane.

  Mack pointed to the apartment buildings. Navarette nodded. They would have to haul ass up the hill, across open ground, to get to the buildings in time, but they were the best source of cover.

  Mack handed the binocs to Skinny. “Roamers?”

  Skinny quickly scanned the surrounding hills with the binoculars, his head bobbing around like a broken Pez dispenser. “All clear, BossMan. Watch the high grass for Decaps.”

  Mack rolled his eyes and grunted. Decaps in the high grass, he thought, Fuck your mother. I would rather run buck-naked across a minefield with a pole shoved up my ass than deal with that hairy voodoo shit.

  “Everyone grab ass your rucks and be ready to roll out. El Tee?”

  El Tee did a little cowboy twirl with his field radio and slid it back into its holster and strapped it down. It screeched in protest like a mouse caught in a trap. Wheeet! Wheeet!

  “Let’s go,” El Tee said. “Everyone move on three.”

  “Three.” Mack said, giving the rusting door to the bunker a solid kick.

  Echo squad barreled out of the open door in a single file line and then spread out when they hit a dusty dirt road. Navarette’s SAW (M249 Squad Automatic Weapon) whipped around left and right like it was sniffing at the murky swamp air. The dirt road leading from the bunker intersected with a cracked paved road. Scrub weeds grew up through the cracks, letting you know that the rest of the world could go screaming straight to hell and the weeds would still be there, happy to take over the planet once again.

  To the right, a rusty metal bridge spanned the slow moving mud river. The road to the left wound around down below the hills and buildings, ending in an abandoned airstrip several miles away. Mack knew this without checking the map. He could see map grids in his head.

  They crossed the cracked blacktop and waded into the tall grass. Mack kept one eye on the abandoned construction site at the top of the hill. There was still no movement, no enemy in sight, but the mp3 player in his mind played back the low moaning he knew would be coming.

  He chanced a look up, imagining he could already hear low whine of the inbound jet with its deadly payload. In his mind, He was sure he could hear the metal twang of safety straps blowing away as four 60 lb. AR-210 bombs cycled up to active. He had seen them loading the AR’s back at base, the ordinance geeks chalking little sayings like “Bite This!” and “Choke on me!” on the nose cone of each bomb.

  When they hit two hundred yards into the tall grass Skinny started screaming and disappeared. Skinny’s 1911 sidearm barked twice and he popped back up.

  “Son of a…!” Skinny yelled. His eyes had gone white, bulging out under his goggles like a pair of boiled eggs. “Decap motherfucker grabbed my leg. Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck this.”

  Echo squad formed up on Skinny’s fourty-five. At his feet lay a half a rotting corpse, its head all popped jellyfish from the double tap Skinny had given it with the .45 caliber 1911. Thick blue-green ropes of entrails snaked away from the corpse and wound around the tall grass. A Decap, one of the living dead, but only half a corpse. The clever fuckers liked to hide in tall grass.

  Navarette nudged Skinny with the nose of his SAW. “You bit?” the big Indian said. Navarette was all business.

  “Nnnoo…” Skinny said, twisting around to look at the back of his leg. His digital cammo was covered in grime where the corpse had grabbed him. No blood, just caked with dirt.

  Around them came the low moaning cry Mack had been dreading. The quiet howl of the animated dead.

  “Fuck your mother.” Mack whispered.

  There was no wind. Around them the tall grasses began to move.

  “It’s a trap,” El Tee said. He motioned with his hands to the left and to the right. Navarette was already moving, hunched down low and leading off with the deadly barrel of his SAW. Mack and El Tee followed. Skinny, still trying to brush clotted slime off his BDU’s suddenly realized he was getting left behind.

  “Someone mail me a clue,” Skinny said.

  He holstered the 1911 and trotted off in the direction the rest of the squad had gone. He flipped out the little yellow cell phone again.

  Cheep, Cheep. “Masterson. Time.” Cheep, Cheep.

  Cheep, Cheep. “Less than five. Haul ass, I’m going below.” Cheep, Cheep.

  Skinny shaded his goggles with one hand. Nearly a mile away was another tall apartment complex. Masterson stood up from his hiding place on the rooftop, waved and then disappeared into a stairwell.

  With Masterson taking cover from the incoming AR-210’s Echo Squad would have no sniper cover. Richard “GOD” Masterson was no longer watching their backs. Skinny crouched low and humped back up to the others.

  Navarette glanced back at Skinny and grinned. The Indian loved the little white boy. He was stupid and he was trouble, but he was also fast with a gun. Quick draw fast, and steady as polished steel.

  Behind them the grass shuddered and the moaning cry of the dead wailed.

  * * *

  The squad stepped out of the tall grass at the top of the hill, suddenly appearing out in the open like Shoeless Joe Ja
ckson stepping onto the Field of Dreams. Navarette looked behind them. The high grass rustled.

  “Decaps creeping up on us, Mack.” Navarette said.

  Mack pinched up his nose, his face going all straight angles. Hidden under his helmet and with his black lens goggles pulled down over his eyes, only his stubbly jaw showed. Mack looked like Judge Dredd, the stone-faced futuristic Lawman from one of the four-color comic books Skinny was always carting around in his pack. El Tee might be in charge, but when it came to giving out orders in Echo Squad, Mack was The Law.

  “Under the skeleton and into Cabrini Green,” Mack said. He pointed past the construction skeleton of an unfinished apartment building. On the other side was a ten-story tenement style apartment building surrounded by a chain link fence. Even from a hundred yards away they could see a billboard proclaiming, “Coming soon a new Monumental Mart!”

  They started moving in less time than it took Mack to point the way. Navarette was point man, his SAW pulling him forward. Its name was Nicole, named after the nagging Italian princess he had married when he had finished SpecialForcesUnderwaterOperationsSchool. He could still see her black hair blowing in the Key West breeze, the sun turning the ocean spray into flecks of diamond. A postcard moment.

  Time was working against them. Five minutes away (4:55 and counting) their last F-18 E/F Super Hornet was In the Pipe and Five by Five. Her name was “Pity the Fool.” And her pilot was Lance “Penguin” Charlier. They needed to be under cover when the Penguin dropped the four laser-guided AR-210’s. Under some serious mother humping cover.

  Echo Squad moved silently under the rusted steel girders, expecting trouble and finding none. Two-by-two they cleared the area, Navarette and Mack moving first and El Tee and Skinny following. Mack hung on to an old M16A2 rifle with the M203 Grenade launcher. A center hit with the M203 would leave you wondering why your head was lying on the ground seventeen feet from your toes. Skinny had a tiny Belgian P90 assault machine gun (capable of laying down 900 rounds a minute from an overhead 50 round clip) and the El Tee stuck with a pair of flat black Desert Eagle .50 caliber handguns. After the first shot with a Desert Eagle .50, the recoil would twist your arm so far off the mark that a second shot would catch nothing but wind, but whatever you hit with the first shot was already three shades of dead, so it was frosty.

  All of them had backup guns. These days there was no such thing as too many guns.

  Huddled behind the loose planking of construction scaffolding, Mack saw the first Roamers.

  There were six of them in a loose group right on the other side of a man-sized tear in the chain link fence surrounding the condemned apartment building. They were dead. They were, as Skinny was fond of saying, “All messed up.”

  The leader corpse may have been a Doctor. It had on a dirty white lab coat, splashed with copper stains, over a pair of green scrubs. A stethoscope was hanging around its neck with the little silver dongle cleverly tucked into a front pocket. It had lost one shoe and one sock. Mack could see a shiny copper penny in its one loafer.

  Even from fifty yards away, Mack could tell it was long dead. Somehow its neck had broken and the head hung at a 90-degree angle from the body. Broken neck or not, its lips were curled back in a hungry snarl.

  The group of Roamers (“NEVER use the Zed word”, Mack had said once, sure that Skinny would get the joke. Zed for “Z”. “Z” for ZOMBIE. ZOMBIE for “Fucked up dead guy trying to kill you and eat your Skinny ass.”) shuffled around in front of the entrance. They had a shambling shuffle-step walk that said, “I knew how to walk once, but I seem to have forgotten how, Old Chap.”

  They moved in a ploddingly slow, seemingly harmless manner. Except for the eyes. The eyes were still alive, moving around. Looking up and down, left and right, always in motion. Always moving around. Roaming around.

  Mack looked at Navarette. They spoke in fractured sign language.

  Navarette made a little cross with his fingers like he was warding off vampires. Navarette said, “Hospital?”

  Mack checked the little checkerboard map in his head. He made little walking fingers and then held up three fingers. Mack said, “Three blocks away.”

  Navarette nodded. The Doctor corpse may have wandered away from a hospital. That could be what they were looking for… a hospital, a football stadium, a shopping mall. Someplace with thousands of creepy fucked up dead guys. In other words, a hive.

  “No such thing as six Roamers without a hive, Mack.” Navarette said.

  Mack nodded. Roamers were like rabbits, there was no such thing as just one rabbit and there was no such thing as just one zombie. “No time. We go in there or we get puked on by the bad ass Penguin.”

  “Make a sound like a cow.” Skinny said, moving up right behind Navarette.

  Navarette grunted, “Mooo…”

  “I’ve got this, Mack.” Skinny said.

  “You’re on point then.”

  Skinny patted Navarette twice on the back then started moving, stepping out from under the cover of the construction site an onto an overgrown two lane blacktop. The sun shown down on him, all warm and inviting. There was a very slight breeze, enough to make the loose ends of his Army-green dew rag flutter like pale strands of seaweed in an ocean current.

  Skinny had dropped his oversize backpack, leaving it with Mack, Navarette and El Tee while he dealt with the six Roamers. He wore a black multi-pocket ammo vest over the top of forest green digital cammo BDU pants and jacket. The bottom of his BDU pants were bloused, paratrooper style, into the top of his scuffed black Army boots.

  He ducked into a triangle shaped opening torn into the chain link fence and then dropped to one knee, aiming the short barrel of his P90 right at the six Roamers. They picked up on the movement right away, turning toward Skinny. The shuffle-step living dead walk that they normally used to wander around aimlessly gave way to a more determined step-and-drag. The lead corpse, the Doctor, let out a howl that would have frightened away a hungry mountain lion.

  Skinny took aim and fired a short burst.

  Thrrrbbbbrraaattttt!

  Six rounds hit the Doctor center mass, knocking it to the ground where it started thrashing around like an overturned turtle.

  “Crap.”

  “You missed white boy,” Navarette’s voice echoed into Skinny’s radio headset.

  Two corpses took its place. The first was a woman in a ragged blue EMT outfit. Her intestines had been torn out, leaving a raw maggot-filled hole like a giant mouth. Her face was pale yellow, the flesh desiccated. Clots of long blonde hair clung to her skeletal head. Skinny aimed down the sight and fired another short burst.

  Brrraaatttt!

  The EMT went down, half her head disappearing into a pink mist.

  “Cha-Cha!” Skinny said.

  The second corpse was male, dressed in a flower print one-piece hospital gown. In one hand it gripped the chrome pole of an I.V. stand. The empty saline bag swung back and fourth as it moved, the plastic tubing attached to the corpses arm filled with dried blood. Flower print moved fast, using the I.V. stand like a crutch, his naked feet making a dry crunching sound on the loose gravel. He was almost on top of Skinny.

  “I think he wants you to give blood.” Navarette taunted over the headset.

  Skinny ignored the big Indian.

  “I’m sensing a motif here, Mack.” Skinny reported. “This bunch is all hospital looking and chummy.”

  Thukka-thukka-braaatttt!

  Skinny fired off a long burst. Flower print guy’s kneecaps exploded and his legs crumpled backward, the joints suddenly reversed like the back legs of a dog. It snarled at Skinny. Pain or rage?

  When Flower print guy tried to move again, its legs fell apart, severed at the knees, and it slumped forward pulling the I.V. pole down on top of it. Only a few feet away, it tried to bat at Skinny with the pole like a long silver claw. The metal pole thumped against the ground, drawing sparks from the cement sidewalk. Skinny fired a single round at it point blank.
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  Grrraa-aaattt! The P90 growled. Flower print guy’s forehead caved in like rotted fruit. Blood, hair and brains reached out from the back of its head in small pink chunks like fleeing amoeba.

  I really need a better job, Skinny thought. Three down.

  Skinny looked around. There were two unmoving dead bodies and two more Roamers hanging back near the entrance to the abandoned apartment complex. They were shuffling from foot to foot in anticipation of the meal they would make out of Skinny, but they hung back.

  What are they waiting for? Roamers don’t wait. They eat and stink up the place. What isn’t right here? Two Roamers left, two dead bodies. Two. After one comes two after two comes three…

  “Break. Break. Break,” Skinny shouted into his headset. “Mack, I’ve got problems. I lost one of the Roamers.”

  “On your six,” Mack said back. The flat sound of his voice through the headset was muffled and distorted, like it was coming from under the midnight hood of Death himself.

  Skinny spun around. The Doctor corpse was right behind him, rotted hands almost around his neck. Skinny pulled up the barrel of his P90 and pulled the trigger at point blank range.

  Click.

  “Crap. I’m out.” Skinny dropped to one knee and rolled forward, putting all 155 lbs. of his body slamming against the legs of the Doctor corpse, knocking it over like an olive green bowling ball taking down a fleshy pin. He rolled a second time and came back up on one knee, pulling a second clip from one of the front pockets of his black ammo vest.

  The Doctor corpse moaned and started to push itself up by its arms. It turned its head and looked directly at Skinny, narrowing its phlegmy yellow eyes.

  “Mmm… eee-t-t-t.” it hissed.

  Skinny rapped the new clip against his helmet twice and then ejected the spent clip from the P90. He slapped the new clip into place.

  Ka-Chink.

  Lord that has to be finest sound on the earth. Please let me live to hear it again.

  A rotted smell like the burning of a wet dog wrapped in a black garbage bag assaulted him and four dead hands grabbed his shoulders. The dead hands of the other two Roamers.