Zombies! Episode 3 - Love Bites (3 page)

***

BY
the time she reached the street,
Suzanna was already having second thoughts about her outburst. It
wasn't John's fault that he was a paranoid weenie. And, to be
perfectly honest, part of the reason she'd become so upset was
because in the deepest darkest parts of her own consciousness, that
little head cold scared the hell out of her. She supposed it was
just like anything else. If you read a novel about a plague, you're
likely to get sick while reading it. If you hear about the plague
on the news, well so much the better. She knew she should see a
doctor. Like John said, just to be sure. But Suzanna came from a
long line of people who had gotten screwed by doing the right
thing. Just to be sure. She'd rather go the zombie route than end
up as somebody's lab rat.

But she hadn't had to have taken it out on
John. She didn't mean to be a bitch. She didn't really
want
to be a bitch. It was just part of her aggressive nature. And that
aggressiveness was intentional and necessary, a defense against her
own insecurities. As a young girl, too many people had taken
advantage of sweet little Suzanna. One day, at the age of fourteen,
while she was doing something she was not proud of and did not like
to think about, she opened her eyes and her mind and became a
totally different person. That guy, whose name was blurred by time
and emotional shielding, had been most unfortunate for having
witnessed her transformation.

But the layer of toughness didn't mean she
didn't want what other people wanted and had. Suzanna wanted a good
man and a family. She was young and in no rush, but that didn't
mean she should throw away opportunities when they came along. And
John was an opportunity. He was the kind of guy every girl says she
wants but on which she doesn't bother to take the chance. He was
kind and sensitive. He was patient with her, partly she knew
because she was so attractive. It was something for him to be seen
in public with Suzanna. She elevated him well beyond what would
normally be considered
in his league
. But that was just on
the surface and she knew it. The girl that married John Arrick
would be safe and secure and lucky. But Suzanna was too screwed up
to remember that most of the time.

Part of the problem was that John wasn't very
exciting. Sure, he knew how to spend some money. He took her to all
sorts of places and when she went to his place for dinner, the food
was good, the movie was her choice, and the rest of the night was,
well, satisfying at least. But not exciting. That was where Larry
had come in.

At first, they'd just been workout partners.
But there's something about a workout that gets the juices flowing
and the pheromones flying. Larry was bored. There's nothing like a
man who's spent ten years in a mundane marriage. He's got all this
pent up sexual energy and all of these crazy ideas that he wants to
try out. Suzanna could smell Larry a mile away. He worked out to
alleviate stress and expend some energy. His wife was a corporate
liaison, whatever that meant. She flew from country to country.
She'd barely had enough time for their daughter let alone for him.
So Larry went to the gym and hooked up with Suzanna. Just for
workouts. But as they became more comfortable and familiar, they
stopped being shy about putting their hands on each other. During
the workout. Then one day, when his wife was overseas and his
daughter was in preschool or daycare or college or whatever, he'd
invited himself back to her apartment and she couldn't say no.

Being with Larry was very different from
being with John. John was comfortable and, again, satisfying. Like
a good meal. Larry was that triple chocolate molten lava eruption
you had for dessert. They didn't do it all the time. Not after
every workout. But enough so that it had become regular. And as it
had gone on, Suzanna had become both more addicted to him and more
guilt ridden over her infidelity to John. Not that she and John
were married or even exclusive. But she knew that she was lying by
omission. She wondered how Larry had felt.

Poor dead Larry.

When Abby had told her about Larry, Suzanna
had all but revealed their affair. To her surprise, she'd found
that she was ashamed. Suzanna DeForest ashamed of something. Well,
many things. She was ashamed of carrying on an affair with a
married man. She was ashamed of doing so while involved herself.
She was ashamed because her first thought had been that his death
had solved both of her problems. There was no more Larry to feed
her addiction and no more addiction to cause her guilt.
Unfortunately, his death had also come with an emotional crisis.
What Suzanna had learned from the experience was that she didn't
really like herself. The woman that had grown out of that
downtrodden girl had focused so much on becoming not just strong
but stronger than everyone else that she had forgotten all about
cultivating her heart. And it was that misguided, overblown
strength that forced her to walk on even when she wanted to go
back. It was that strength that whispered in her ear, telling her
that John didn’t even really want her there. But as she descended
into the subway stairwell, feeling cold and miserable surrounded by
the fall night and John's clothing, her strength abandoned her and
she began to cry.

***

CULPH
went in first. Culph was always
elected to go in first. It was the way he wanted it and, frankly,
the way everyone else wanted it also. The call had come in about
eight minutes before. Some time during the night there had been a
struggle. A super had gone missing. Now there were strange noises
from the basement storage rooms. Despite the media slowdown
concerning zombies, the police were still getting a flood of calls.
The calls were so numerous that they could hardly keep up. There
weren't that many men on the team, although Heron was scouting for
new people every day. Fortunately, most every call that came in was
a false alarm. That's not to say that there wasn't real police work
to be done, just not zombie police work. Culph was beginning to
resent it.

Dressed to the nines, Culph felt invincible.
Overheated but invincible. He was covered from head to toe in
kevlar navy blues. There was a mask and goggles over his face and a
hat with ear flaps under a helmet. His belt held twice the
equipment of a patrol officer, including a second set of handcuffs,
a mallet, and extra ammunition for his rifle. The gloves were
bulky, but not so bulky that his fingers weren't nimble on the
trigger. He felt like something out of GI Joe. And for all it was
worth, he'd probably find some doped up teenager with the body of
the missing super.

The radio in his ear buzzed a test and he
responded.

"Police," he called into the gloom. Al Henry
came in behind him and flipped on the lights. That was as far as
Henry would go. He wasn't dressed for the op.

The lighting was decent, illuminating a short
set of wooden stairs which led to a dusty floor. Shelves stood in
neat rows throughout the room. They were filled with clearly
labeled boxes of fuses, light bulbs, light switches, pens, pencils,
beef jerky… All of the necessities of a Manhattan apartment
building.

Culph called out a second warning and then
moved deeper into the basement. Whatever strange noises the caller
had heard, they were now silent. Culph waited and listened but
there was nothing. Breathing deeply, calm in spite of himself, he
proceeded forward, checking the shelves and the corners. It was
probably rats.

Then he heard it. It was the sick flow of air
through dead lungs. He'd heard it once before. Two days after the
incident at
Sisters of Charity,
two days after he'd been
made second in command of the zombie task force, two days after his
world and his personality had utterly transformed, he had taken his
first call. He'd been in charge, Heron having been in surgery for
his lung cancer. He'd fielded the call without a plan and without
experience and he'd been damned lucky not to get bitten. But that
sound, the sound of them "breathing"… It was like nothing he'd ever
heard before. It caused them to moan and their larynxes
reverberated with the passage of air. They uttered this mournful
sound that his ears and his brain had found offensive. To Francis
Culph, it sounded as if the zombie was mocking life.

Rose had mouthed off to him that night and
he'd damned sure let her have it.

At this point, he didn't necessarily like
himself. There were aspects of his personality that had always been
understated but were now coming to the fore. Police work, he
believed, was a gift from the devil. He loved the work, craved the
danger, even though there rarely ever was any. Emotionally, though,
it had left him rigid, like a piece of glass that teeters on the
edge of a precipice. He'd needed that fall. He'd needed that break.
And the job given to him by Naughton and Heron had presented him
with that opportunity. But now that he'd shattered himself, he
didn't know where to turn so that he could put all of the pieces
back together. He couldn't wind down and the cost had been high.
What would he one day become?

He saw the zombie before he smelled it. That
was one of the drawbacks of the protective clothing. With his nose
covered, he couldn't really smell anything except from up close. He
should have been able to detect it as soon as he opened the door.
Al should have been able to smell it, too, but was probably too
scared to smell anything past his own sweat. The zombie was pinned
underneath a shelving unit. Most of the boxes had toppled off and
scattered around it and the unit itself didn't look that heavy. It
was one of those industrial steel jobs that you can fasten together
by putting screws into any one of a thousand different holes. They
were light and sturdy. The zombie had its foot hooked into one of
the shelves. The ankle may have been broken but it didn't matter.
It was just enough to keep the thing from wriggling away.

It was not the missing super. This zombie was
a male anywhere from forty five to sixty years old. It wore a gray
suit with an understated striped tie. The shirt and jacket were
stained with blood and there was a gash through one leg of the
pants. Some of its hair had fallen out, literally
fallen
out. There were tufts of it scattered on the floor. The exposed
portions of its scalp were red and blistered. The remaining hair
was almost entirely white but was, or had been, thick and soft. A
black and white mustache, thick with dried gore, was plastered to
its upper lip. The arm it was chewing on had probably belonged to
the super.

"I've got it, Al," Culph said into the mike.
"Call it in and see if Dr. Luco wants it alive."

"Roger," came the reply.

Culph watched it with fascination, his rifle
leveled at its head. It took one jerking motion toward him but was
held fast by the collapsed shelf. It must have somehow understood
that it couldn't get to him because it ignored him after the failed
attempt and went back to gnawing on the severed arm.

"Al?"

"Yeah, Frank?"

"I want to get some video of this thing."

"
What?
"

Culph chuckled into the mike. "Yeah, I think
Dr. Luco might like to observe their behavior."

Al thought that Culph had a little bit of a
crush on Dr. Luco. She was a pathologist. Her interest began and
ended with the bacteria that caused the infection. Zombie behavior
was a different science altogether. There were other doctors that
might be interested, though. So he complied, comfortable in the
knowledge that the zombie had been found and all was safe.

There was a portable video camera on Culph's
belt. Al came up behind him and removed it, flipping open the
digital lens and taking some footage. Culph watched as the thing
continued its gnawing motion. When Al walked up, it tried to free
itself again, just once. Then it went back to its bone. It was as
if the prospect of the new victim changed the state of its own
situation. It didn't make any rational sense but it did allude to a
sort of rationale behind the hunger.

"Is that the super's arm?" Al asked as he
watched the thing through the lense. His voice quavered a bit.
Unlike Culph, Henry was not enamored with his job. He'd been there
at
Sisters of Charity
when the ER there had been invaded by
the undead. At Heron's order, he'd come into the hospital hefting a
giant sledge hammer as if he was going to bash through the walls
with it. When he'd been offered a place on the squad, he'd
initially declined. Later he'd changed his mind. Al Henry had a
very inflated perception of what his duty as a police officer was.
But inside he was a sensitive man without the real guts for this
kind of work.

"I guess," Culph answered, not really caring
too much about the arm.

"Where's the super's body?"

Culph froze, suddenly chilled even through
his gear. He cursed once. Looking over at Al, he realized the kind
of danger that his partner was in. Without saying anything, he
turned him around and began marching him back toward the stairs. Al
must have also realized that there was a missing body and a missing
body meant a missing zombie. He didn't say anything either.

It was perhaps a fifteen second march from
their position to the staircase when moving directly. Culph moved
behind Al, keeping his gun trained forward and his eyes everywhere.
Everywhere, that is, except behind himself. He didn't even think to
look out for himself.