The Zombie Adventures of Sarah Bellum (44 page)

MEDIASTINUM
IMPOSSIBLE

Several things seem to
happen at once. Luke and I both scream, but due to our manacles
attaching us to the walls, go nowhere other than to dangle from our
chains, while the tiled floor rapidly recedes downward. Carvery drops
the chainsaw, favouring to retain the gun in his other hand, and
grabs the edge of the toilet bowl to halt his fall, and the metal
bunk upon which Homer is still unconscious merely tilts a little,
apparently bolted to the tiled surface as well.

"If that's the Well
of Our Souls down there…" Carvery begins.

"Don't remind me,"
I say through gritted teeth, twirling on the end of my one restrained
arm. "What are they up to now?"

I look up. There seems to
be a commotion in the square.

"I don't think that
little incident was our captors' fault," Luke replies. "They're
not happy either…"

To my concern, I see Ace
Bumgang being prodded around sharply with sword-points on the glass
ceiling above our heads. He skips out of the way, and glancing down
at us past his feet, stamps a few times on the glass.

"Look away,"
Carvery says, hitching up the shotgun again. "Time for that
escape attempt…"

I close my eyes just
before he fires, picking up the hint just in time. Chips of glass
spray down onto our heads, and a huge crack shoots widthways in turn.
Ace does a back-flip from a standing jump, and as he lands, feet
together, on the spot above the metal bunk, the great fracture
feathers outward abruptly, and he punches through.

His
Caterpillar
work
boots just miss the zombie Homer's face, scraping his gray ears on
either side, as he lands astride him.

Two unwary bystanders
from the citadel square plummet by, in the centre of the room –
shrieking piteously and scrabbling the air for non-existent
handholds.

They seem to continue
falling for a very long time…

I gulp.

"What now?" I
ask. Other angry city-dwellers are waving their swords at us from the
perimeter of the bottomless room above. "Do we have a plan? Are
we going up or down?"

"I think the only
way we'll be going up is as dog meat paste," Ace remarks, and
Luke yelps as a cutlass-point nicks his knuckles, still clamped in
their restraints. "They think you've got voodoo, Luke. Now would
be a good time for the old hocus-pocus, if you've got any."

"Do I look like
Mister Dynamo
to you?" Luke splutters.

"Well, you are
wearing a hoody," Carvery points out.

"And you played Old
Harry with the security guards at the University campus all right,"
I say, encouragingly. "Do it again."

"That's just a load
of old tricks and nonsense," Luke sighs. "Nothing beats the
use of good old-fashioned force."

Unexpectedly, the
mechanical grinding groan echoes around us again – and Homer's
bunk, still attached to the wall with no floor, crawls inwards once
more.

"What the fuck?"
I cry. "We're STILL getting crushed in this stupid crazy room?"

"Best it'll do now
is scrape us off the walls," Carvery agrees. "Except Luke,
of course. He's facing it, so he's definitely getting squished.
Unless his secret magic wand that he's not telling us about works in
his favour, of course."

"Man, if my magic
wand could stop that wall, my wife would never have kicked me out of
the house forty years ago," Luke grumbles. "I would be
President of Nigeria now, not a taxi-driver for drunk medical
students."

"Oh, God," I
sob. "Where's a Flying Carpet when you need one…?"

Of course!

I try to remember. What
had Justin Time done to summon the flying rickshaw?

"Sarah,"
Carvery warns, as I whistle a few bars experimentally. "This is
no time to play
Name That Tune
."

"I disagree,"
Ace counters. "Let me guess… is it
Don't Fear The
Reaper?
"

As the bunk carrying
Homer and Ace approaches a few more inches inwards, with an unsteady
wobble, all I can do is hope that I was right.

But didn't it take a
while to respond? Like, the distance between two Lounges… with
another lump in my throat, I recall there was another apparently
bottomless fall involved back then as well…

"Where's Crispin?"
I ask Ace. "What have they done with him?"

"I wouldn't worry,"
says Ace, wryly. "From what I could tell, all this was his
idea."

"What?"

"Do you remember
that spy movie? The re-make, with that short celebrity cult guy with
all the sunglasses and teeth. Hanging around in rooms where they
don't have security cameras installed. The opening scene. I think
it's what they call a
Mole Op
. Weeding out the bad guys from
your own team."

"What?!" I
repeat. "He can't think that! Haven't we all been trying to
help…?"

The three guys exchange
looks.

"Well, forgive me
for saying, but Luke's a Nigerian jewel thief compensating for the
fact he can't satisfy a woman long enough to keep a roof over his
head," Ace continues. "And Carvery has been leaving big
dents in anything female crossing our path since we started. Madam
Dingdong didn't need a tip after we went to her
Sauna And Spa
,
put it that way. And I basically humiliated the zombie guy's mother.
Apparently it's rude not to give a four thousand-year-old zombie
queen a seeing-to when she's asked nicely, and I should have spiked
my own drink and taken one for the team instead of the other way
around. Who knew, right?"

I can't believe it. I
must be desensitized from living around all these psychopaths and
abusers.

"All sounds
perfectly normal to me," I grumble at the wall, which I'm
currently facing on the end of my wrist-chain, at the back of the
sink.

"Yeah, zombies have
morals and ethics, what a bummer that turned out to be." Out of
the corner of my eye, Ace sits sideways across Homer's stomach and
swings his feet over the precipice, evidently unconcerned about about
potential squid hatchlings. "And you – well, you summoned
Atum, so of course they're going to be pissed at that."

"Atum?" I
exclaim, nose still to greasy ceramic tile. "I had nothing to do
with that great mythical monster turning up!"

"They don't see it
that way. What they see is a male-DNA-motivated obsessive female
virgin, who works with dead bodies. According to them, that makes you
a necromancer."

"Necrophiliac,"
Carvery corrects him. "Nothing romantic about it, buddy."

"And Atum –
well, basically, he's… er…"

"The spirit of the
first gamete," Luke interjects, in sombre tones. "I warned
you, Sarah Bellum – be careful what you wish for."

"Great."
Carvery is nodding, as red-faced, I rotate on the end of my chain to
face into the shrinking room once more. "First, I thought it was
bad enough being trapped in a room with a hormone-riddled idiot
necrophiliac. Now it turns out, it's a hormone-riddled, sperm-jacking
idiot necrophiliac, who's haunted by the gigantic vengeful
manifestation of the first ever spermatozoa."

"Yeah," Ace
says, sourly. "That's the last time I knock one out to internet
snuff porn."

"I told, you, Ace –
that stuff'll give you nightmares," Carvery tells him.
"Sometimes while you're awake. Making you do stuff that you'll
want to deny later."

"If you want to know
what denial is, it's a big river that you should be floating down, in
a large padlocked packing-case," I snap at him.

"Oh, I'm just as
pissed off as you are," he remarks. "I'm hanging by one arm
from a toilet in an underground torture-chamber, on the basis of some
speculation by superstitious zombies, and the failure of a
taxi-driver with persistent erectile dysfunction to come up with a
miracle."

"That's what
she
said," Ace and Luke both agree at once.

I heave a sigh.

"Well," I
begin, annoyed that I'm twisting back around again to face the wall,
"we do have what they want. We've got the clockwork hand –
even though it's not doing much other than scratching my ankle at the
moment. We've got a copy of Mr. Dry Senior's diary. Do you think
they'd let us fall to our deaths?"

We all look up at the
threat from above.
Hmmm
. It does appear that most of the
prodding with swords and shouting is for appearances' sake.

Luke tests his chains,
which squeak against their metal rings in the wall.

"Carvery Slaughter,"
he says at last. "How good is your aim, with that shotgun?"

Oh.
Shit
…

CHAPTER
FIFTY-EIGHT
:

GURNEY TO THE
CENTER OF THE EARTH

"
A
ce,"
Carvery says. "See if you can kick one end of that bed away from
the wall, so it swings out into the room. We need something to break
our fall."

"Good thinking,
Batman," Ace grunts, and grabbing the foot-rail of the metal
bunk, kicks it away from the bracket attaching it to the slimy tiles.

With a groan, the bunk
lurches slowly inwards over the bottomless drop. Homer, still
unconscious, doesn't even stir, as Ace tries to keep his weight
balanced across the barely-there mattress at his feet.

"Think you can
reach, Luke?" he asks.

Luke raises his own feet
from the far wall, and tries to stretch forward towards the foot of
the creaking metal bed.

"Now when we
NEED
that wall to bloody move…" he grumbles.

Ace leans out and just
manages to grab his ankles.

"Now?" Carvery
queries.

"Yup, we're good,"
Ace confirms.

I jump out of my skin, as
with his free hand, Carvery fires the shotgun at the wall above
Luke's wrists. The tiles shatter, and the restraining cuffs break
away, pitching Luke upside-down, suspended now by his legs from the
edge of the precarious bunk.

Ace grabs his belt and
hauls him aboard. Rocking the bed back and forth slightly, they grab
Carvery's arm from where he is still hanging from the toilet-bowl,
and soon he is on top of the bed hanging over thin air as well.

"You next, Sarah,"
Ace tells me, as they rock the now dangerously-overloaded bunk
towards the sink, to which I am still attached. "Stick your legs
out. And maybe better cover your face."

With a gulp, I note
Carvery reloading the shotgun, while Luke and Ace each grab hold of
one of my ankles.

"Any last requests?"
Carvery enquires.

"You wouldn't be
able to pronounce it," I snap. "Needless to say it involves
evisceration and disembowelling."

"Don't flatter
yourself," he replies. "As if my tongue could reach from
here anyway."

I just remember to cover
my reddening face as he fires over my head. My arm is freed from the
pipework with a sickening bang, and I lurch backwards over the hole
where the floor used to be. I'm sure they allow me to dangle there
longer than necessary, before pulling me back up.

A commotion is going on
above us in the citadel square overlooking our cell, and together we
look up to see Crispin's disapproving gray face joining the audience
of angry, frustrated onlookers. They had backed off, as Carvery fired
the shots.

"He's not happy,"
Ace observes. "Must be your fault, Sarah."

I'm perfectly aware that
it is. I gulp, but I'm not going to discuss it with them.

"What now?" I
ask instead.

"All the way to the
bottom, I reckon," Carvery remarks. "Don't think we want to
go back up there."

As we watch, something
appears in Crispin's hands, which he starts unravelling slowly.

Oh. My. God.

It's a
noose
.

"I agree," I
say at once. "Get us out of here."