Undead Freaks (2 page)

Officer Soul stepped over Marvin's dead body
and walked right up to Kelly. He was on the front step, standing in
the one place that wasn't covered in dark blood. He and Kelly were
face to face.

She looked down at his boots. There was mud
caked over shoe shine and black leather. She held her ground and
looked up at him. He smelled rank like sweat in polyester and he
had stubble that he should have taken care of in the morning but
hadn't had time to.

"I have not given you permission to enter my
home," said Kelly.

Officer Soul felt something in him snap. He
saw a rich woman who he'd thought looked pretty in her designer
clothes when he'd pulled her over and even more fuckable now,
wearing only a bathrobe. But this wasn't a social call. He wasn't
going to sport wood now, because there was something a hell of a
lot scarier breathing right down all their necks.

"You want to live," said Frank, "you let me
and Officer Wells into your home right now. Then you do exactly
what we say. Got that?"

Frank didn't know if the fear was coming
through his voice. But he felt it, like a dark, smoking trash pit
in the middle of of a lonely wood. He'd shot Marvin, that fucker
was dead. But he was an easy one. A dumb one. And there were more.
Lots more.

And they were hungry as hell.

3

Kelly let the officers into her house. She
looked down at her wrist to check the time and realized that it was
a stupid gesture. Just a habit, like biting her nails when she was
nervous. She'd taken her watch off before getting in the shower and
forgot to put it back on. And now here she was, standing in the
foyer of her house with two town cops and a dead guy's brains
splattered on her front door.

What could she say to this? The whole
situation? Was there a precedent? Had she seen something like this
on Law and Order? CSI Las Vegas? The way she saw it, this was going
to be like TV. She followed the crime shows, the good ones.
Everyone had a role to play, whether they liked it or not. Some
people were passive -- hell, even she was passive with all her damn
online shopping and long days spent doing jack shit at home -- but
that didn't mean she didn't fancy herself a doer. She'd done stuff
before, she just had a hard time thinking of a recent example, was
all.

She broke the awkward silence. "What the fuck,
Frank?" She knew his first name and she used it on
purpose.

"Do you have any firearms, Kelly?"

"Why do you ask?"

"If you want to live through this, you're
going to answer my questions without dicking me around. Now let me
ask you again -- are there any firearms in the home?"

She felt her fear then. It hit her like a
baseball to the temple. Except instead of blindness now she was
seeing things more clearly. The cops were scared. They weren't
playing by the book. And that did not make her feel at ease. She
said, "I guess -- Terry has some guns. He keeps them upstairs in a
closet. He's a collector. He tells me they're all
legal."

Frank walked past her and went for the stairs.
He turned to Kelly. "You come up and show me where the guns are."
Then he looked past her to his partner. "Todd, you stay down here
and guard the entrance. You see anything coming you tell us. If
it's just one, kill it. If there are more, you whistle and then we
all get the fuck outta dodge. Got it?"

"Got it," said Todd.

Kelly followed Frank upstairs. The master
bedroom was at the end of the hall on the left and the door was
open. Frank went straight for it. He saw a big walk in closet and
opened it. He thought:
what is it with
rich folks and their damn walk-in closets?
Like it
proved something if the place where you parked your shoes and your
underwear was big enough to have its own zip code.

The closet was divided up into a his side and
a hers side. On the hers side there were shoes. On the his side,
guns. Lots of guns. And a few articles of clothing, but those
didn't matter to Frank.

Frank let himself chuckle for a second at the
sight of the guns

(fucking private arsenal,
hallelujah)

before he remembered what they were up
against. It had been a hell of a day. The first calls came in
before sunup, and then the outbreak just spread like a goddam
wildfire in dry tinder. He knew that at least three quarters of the
force was dead or on the other side by now, converted. He'd gotten
some panicked radio transmissions from the school sometime around
ten in the morning, but those got cut off with screams and shouts
and he knew that the school was not a safe place to be a
survivor.

Frank and his partner were on foot. That's how
they ended up at Kelly's place.Their cruiser was fucked. The
flesh-eating fucks had managed to push it down an embankment, and
the only reason he and Todd got away was that he used to mountain
bike all over the damn place and he knew the local trails. He got
Todd to follow him and they ran a couple miles across town on back
trails until the moans got distant and faded into the trees and
brush.

They ended up here at the Brookside
neighborhood. This was the place where you'd find the rich wives
with plastic tits and Land Rovers and Beemers and all the other
shit rich people liked. That was, if all the rest weren't dead by
now. There was no way to know.

Frank told himself that they didn't come here
to save the people in the neighborhood because they were entitled
to better treatment. It was just where he and Todd had ended up. A
matter of survival. This was where the trails dumped out and if
they could get into another vehicle and find some backup, even
civilians, it might get them the hell out of town in one
piece.

Getting Marvin had been a lucky break. They'd
found him when he was walking up to Kelly's door. They were just
going up the road looking for survivors or a car they could borrow.
And nothing funny meant by it, but it was a no brainer to take
Marvin out; they moved in for the kill because they could. Frank
took him. The new kid Todd didn't have the stomach for
it.

That'll change,
thought Frank.

Marvin had looked like an ambler, one of the
ones that didn't have much left for brains. Kinda like what you
imagined from the zombie movies. A dumb dead fuck. What they knew
so far, which was hardly anything but it was better than nothing,
was that these things were walking dead. And they came in
flavors.

Some of them were dumb and slow, like Marvin.
And some of them weren't. Some of them were freakishly fast and
they even looked smart. Frank saw the look from one of them right
before the cruiser went over the embankment. It was looking right
at him like it knew. The fucking thing knew what the swarm was
doing and it was playing with him and the new kid.

Could the dead even play games? It sure as
fuck looked like it after the rollover. But lucky for them, when
they came up on Marvin at Kelly's place he'd been an easy target.
The thing was trying to break in to Kelly's house through the front
door. Was that what the dumb ones did? Didn't bother going for the
windows? Frank didn't know. All he knew was that yesterday
everything was normal and now it was all fucked. FUBARed to
hell.

Frank took an AR-15 from the closet. He smiled
again because this was some nice hardware for a douchebag car
dealer. He knew this one was illegal by the size of the magazine,
but he wasn't going to give Kelly shit about Terry's gun habits
today. More ammo getting fed to the chamber faster was better. The
gun felt familiar, but that was because he'd had plenty of practice
with the M-16 when he was Army. This AR 15 was close enough to the
real deal.

He checked the mag and saw it was loaded. He
slid it back in and flicked off the safety. Kelly was watching him.
She had a look on her face like she was scared.

"What now?" said Kelly. "What are you going to
do with Terry's gun?"

"Shoot the undead maybe?"

"The what?” Kelly looked like she'd seen a
ghost. Her face went pale. “Are you serious? Are you fucking
serious with me right now? Are you saying that Marvin wasn't alive
when you shot him?"

"You learn fast, grasshopper. Now go get some
clothes on and grab a gun from the closet that you think you might
be able to shoot straight."

Frank looked in the closet and found a couple
boxes of ammo for the rifle. He picked them up and dumped as much
as he could into his pockets. There were two spare mags, too.
Loaded.
Good
, he
thought.

He saw Kelly shuffling in the closet by the
guns and she was having trouble deciding what to take. He reached
in past her and grabbed a pump action 12 gauge Remington. He gave
it to her and she looked like she was holding a live
snake.

"Isn't it too big?" she said.

"It makes a big damn hole. Just point and
squeeze."

"Shouldn't I have something
smaller?"

"Because you're a girl? Hell no. Unless you've
been practicing with something else at the range with your dear old
husband, you keep that 12 gauge close by." He looked her up and
down again. Nice tits, real nice ones. Too bad he couldn't spend
more time looking at them right now. "Go get dressed. Unless you
want to be running around town in a bathrobe."

"Fuck. You're right." She went out of the
closet and opened a dresser by the big king bed. Frank was watching
her as she dropped the robe and started going through the drawers.
She slipped on some panties and he thought:
only on a day like this.

There was a bang from downstairs. Then another
one.

Shots.

Frank ran out of the bedroom to the top of the
stairs. He looked down at the front door. Todd had the door cracked
open and he was kneeling with his service pistol pointed
outside.

"You get it?" said Frank.

"Two of them. A mother and a daughter. The
girl had a big bite in her neck. I know you said run if it was more
than one, but they looked like they were alone. They came from the
woods on the side of the house."

"Fuck it. Nice work. Now let me see how
missy's doing up here." Frank went back and poked his head in the
bedroom and Kelly had jeans and a blue tank top on. She wasn't
wearing a bra. He saw that small detail, but that was because he
also got paid to notice details, not because he thought he was
going to score in the middle of a zombie outbreak. She had the
shotgun in one hand and a little leather purse in the other
one.

Frank said, "What the fuck you planning to do
with that purse? Go to the Maine Mall?"

"It's full of 12 gauge shells, Frank. Thinking
ahead."

"You know that those fucks only stop if you
nail them in the head, right?"

Kelly said, "Like in the movies. I get
it."

Frank didn't think she'd be getting any
headshots, but a 12 gauge had enough kinetic energy at close range
to knock things back and buy you time.

There was another moaning sound from outside.
It was a deep moan that sounded like a whole herd of cows getting
tortured. "Fuck," said Frank. "I think we have more company. You
have a car that runs?"

Kelly cracked a smile. "BMW M3. V8. 400+
horsepower." She knew the car was overkill and Terry didn't like
that she'd gone German but she'd gotten her way on the car
anyhow.

Frank cracked his own smile. He liked chicks
who were into cars. The fact that it was German could be forgiven,
in his book. M3's were sweet. "Then get the keys. Cause we have to
get out of town."

He and Kelly ran down the stairs and met up
with Todd. Todd had shut the front door and he was crouching by a
window. The window was open enough to shoot from without breaking
glass. Todd looked at them and said, “You guys hear that
noise?"

"Fucking straight," said Frank.

"How'd they track us here?"

"I don't know. This place is crawling with em.
But it's looking like we got another lucky break. Miss Kelly here
has an M3 in the garage, and we're taking it for a
spin."

The three of them ran back to the kitchen and
then followed Kelly's lead. She took a key off a hook and opened a
door that went down to the attached garage. Kelly went for the
driver's side but Frank stopped her. "You let me take this one," he
said.

"Just when this was getting exciting,” she
said. She let him take the driver's seat. She pouted.

Frank saw. He said, "Whatever.”

It was a two-door. He opened the driver's door
and slid the seat forward door so Kelly could get in the back with
the Remington. He put the AR into the front seat and Todd got in
and put the rifle in his lap. Frank looked up at the sun visor and
pressed a button on the black garage door opener. The garage door
started to rise up.

He started the car. He thought the garage door
was slow as hell. He was looking straight out at the sliver of
light that was getting wider underneath it. They were sitting ducks
right here in the garage. Frank thought that if they were lucky it
would be clear and they'd be able to outrun whatever was coming at
them from somewhere in the neighborhood.