Zombie Apocalypse 2050 - Chapter 5 - Lucy in the Cage with Gum

Earlier

Virgil was the type of guy that could walk into a room and all the girls would go weak in the knees. Funny thing was, Cam didn’t think he was like that before the zombies showed up. Something happened to him between then and now. The fucker was skinny as a rail, and he always talked about the weirdest shit at the weirdest moments, stuff that made people’s eyes go glassy until he stopped talking. But women went crazy for him. So who knew what they were thinking? Cam hated guys like that.

V thought he knew everything about everything. Mix that with the nasal sound of his voice which reminded Cam of a bird he’d once stepped on, and Virgil was just the kind of guy that would usually have made Cam want to put a sharp stick in his ear and whack it with a hammer. So of course it made perfect sense in this fucked-up world that V was about the only guy Cam could stand.

Yeah. V was all right.

Because really, the guy had guts. Most people –even the fucking Quellers of Hell- damn near pissed their pants when they saw a zombie. V didn’t. First time Cam met him, that fucker was fighting two zombies, just winging those mantis arms of his like some spastic puppet. He would have died if Cam hadn’t showed up, but V beat the fuck out of one of them. Knocked the bastards head right off. That was cool.

Besides, V saved Cam’s mom’s cat. ‘Course, the cat got chomped in half two hours later by a zombie that looked a hell of a lot like Cam’s mom, but hell, it was a nice gesture anyway.

So Cam was about as happy as he could be in the company of Dar, Captain and his Quellers of Hell when they busted into the warehouse. Why? Because V was with them. The Quellers peered around every corner with shaking knees, guns pointed in front of them, but V walked in the front with Cam and The Cleaning Lady, and he didn’t even have a gun. He just looked at everything like he was memorizing it, like it was going to show up on some later on some fucking test.

Cam loosened his shoulder muscles, wagged his head back and forth at the smell, and started to grin. Yeah, there were zombies here. Little strips of skin lay on the floor, some on the handrail along the stairway. There was a foot on the landing. He laughed, and the other Quellers looked at him with angry, fearful expressions.

Fuck you. Like the zombies don’t already know we’re here, Cam thought.

Then his smile faded. So where the hell were the zombies? He looked around the cavernous room. There were two weird cages hanging from the high ceiling and something that looked like a podium in the center of the room, but that was it.

“Where are the fucking dickless dead?” Cam said to Virgil.

V looked at the cages with narrowed eyes. “Look,” he said. “In the cages.”

One of the cages moved at Virgil’s squeaky voice, like he’d invoked it. Fucking cool. Weird shit like that happened around V all the time.

A blonde zombie with broken glasses slanted across her face sat up. She blinked and adjusted her glasses as she furiously chomped, perhaps anticipating the fresh meat.

Why the hell was she in a cage?

“She’s alive,” V answered.

V always read his mind like that? It was fuckin’ cool.

“Do you have gum?” the girl said, shifting to her knees. “Mine tastes like zombie.”

Cam reached into the breast pocket of his fatigues and flicked a stick of Dentine at her. It sailed between the bars and hit her in the chest. She snatched it like a monkey, stripped the wrapper and jammed it in her mouth.

“Fank you,” she said, chomping madly once more.

“We need to get her down,” V said.

“Men!” Dar, Captain said. “We’ll form a line at the base of…”

While the Captain droned on, Cam shouldered The Cleaning Lady, ran back up the stairs and along the high catwalk some twenty feet distant from the cage, jumped up on the rail and launched himself at the cage. He hit it like a cannonball, caught the bars and hung there, swinging. The girl screamed, then clapped her hands over her mouth to stop the sound.

Clinging with one hand, Cam pulled a screwdriver from the thigh pocket of his fatigues and jammed it into the lock. He twisted it sideways violently, grimacing. The latch snapped off, and Cam opened the door. The girl looked at him like he was a zombie.

Cam gave her a sour look, then hung from the cage by his fingertips and dropped the twelve feet to the ground. He grunted, looked at the other Quellers neatly deployed by Dar, Captain.

The girl jumped down and was caught by the Capain’s men, and Cam repeated the process again with the other cage, which held another girl, this one laughing in a funny kind of way. Wacked out motherfucker.

As the other Quellers caught the second girl, the itch tormented Cam’s back. The only thing worse than listening to Dar, Captain give orders was coming to a zombie nest and finding no fucking zombies.

“He was here,” V said. Cam looked at him. “Selig was here.”

Again with V’s high school buddy Selig. “So?” Cam said.

“Well it could be his base of operations.”

“So where the fuck is he?”

“A very good question,” a gargling voice said loudly. Cam, V and the Quellers all turned to the source, guns pointing. A grossy fat zombie with entire chunks of his vast stomach missing stood on the opposite catwalk, looking down at them. He wore a really fuckin’ tall hat, like the pope, and green-stained rags that allowed his decaying blubber to show through all over the place.

“Fuck yeah!” Cam said, unshouldering The Cleaning Lady.