Chapter 11 -- The Cause

"Where the hell are we, anyway?" I said.

"Hm. Where the HELL. Indeed." Lady M smiled and laughed, but it sounded more like she was choking on something. And liking it. She always was weird. "We're in the Vast Wasteland, Lucy."

"Huh. No shit. So who, like, didn't kill all these zombies too good?"

For a minute Lady M didn't answer. She just stared into the fire we'd made out of a pile of twitching corpses. Bombies burned easier, hotter, and brighter than regular zombies. It was the gunpowder solution Selig marinated them in for a week. Lady M just moved her eyes and stared at me, and it was like I just knew who'd done it. I just knew.

Robe Guy.

"Virgil," Lady M said, like she was correcting me for calling him Robe Guy in my mind. "It was Virgil."

"Virgil. Huh. And to think I actually thought he was cute!" I stomped around the fire, naked because my clothes had been burnt to like nothing, kicking my bare feet into charred bombies. Bits and pieces of them kept getting stuck to me, especially between my toes, but after what I'd had stuck in me, I could really give a flying fuck hole about hot bombie crust on my feet.

I could do anything and not really mind how gross it was now. Maybe that was the point of all this. Huh. Sure. Like I didn't know better than that. Looking for meaning in any of this, huh, really, what was wrong with me?

"You're too close to the fire," Lady M said. "For your burns to heal quickly you need to keep back."

"Like I give a fuck about that, really. They don't hurt as much as my SHOULDER, anyway. Bitch."

Lady M smiled and stared into the bombie bonfire again. "Anger is good. Anger will heal you. Anger will give you the drive to proceed."

"Yeah, um, thanks for the motivational speech. So I guess we gotta, like, finish off all these undead before we get out of here, huh? Before they get up and go all animated on us again. Who the FUCK fucked this up so bad?"

"It was--"

"Can it, I know what happened." And I did. She hadn't told me, but I knew. Damn that Robe G -- Virgil. I would get him one way or another.

"Leave that to me," Lady M said.

"Like hell I will. This is personal."

"Nothing you do or go through is personal!" Lady M snapped. She stood up and started walking toward me, in this slow intimidating way like she was stepping real carefully, but she wasn't even looking at the ground. She probably coulda walked through the hot bombie fire and not even flinched, if she even felt it at all. Sometimes I wondered what she was made of. "You do not have the luxury of personal interaction! What was the oath you took? Remember?"

"I remember." Like I could forget. If only I had the power to forget.

"What was it?"

"I REMEMBER!"

"WHAT WAS IT?" I wasn't backing away, so she ended up right in my face. "Repeat the oath to me. Now."

"Fine." I said. As I said the words it was like I was back in her tower, in the center of the sacred pentagram, with the symbols painted all over my naked body in my own blood. "I, Lucy Tisdale-" the name sounded wrong, but I went on. "Sign my body, mind, heart, and soul over to the cause. Each thought I have, each move I make, now serves the cause." I stopped. I ground my teeth. Where the fuck was my gum? Smelling like peppermint wasn't enough. Seriously, I'd just been dead! My mouth tasted worse than the most vastest of wastelands of zombies.

"End it," Lady M said.

"I obliterate myself in the fire. My. Essence. Is. Thine."

Lady M's eyes glowed like a cat's in the light from the bombie fire. Creepy much?

"It's just as valid as the day you swore to it. More so, now you have this-" she grabbed my newly tattooed shoulder and squeezed. Really hard. I cried out. "You answer to powers greater than me now. Powers greater than the cause."

She was really right. Forgetfulness was not a luxury I could claim. I would just have to do my best with remembering. She put her hand on my bleeding shoulder again and forced me to sit on the ground at her feet, while she sat on some part of a bombie charred into a brick. Like she even noticed.

And so I told her everything I'd learned. I told her about the bombie gunpowder marinade. I told her about this like underground zombie pod network thingy Selig was building across the entire continental US that would allow the zombies to pop up anywhere, even in areas you thought you'd de-infested. Really, that was going to be, like, a serious pain in the ass. She was sorry to hear I'd lost his dick. The source of his power. And I'd carried it so safely for so long . . .

"Where is it?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I guess it got burned in the bombie explosion. It's not in me anymore, anyway." I knew we had to have it for the cause, but I was still secretly kinda glad I'd lost it. It was pretty sick.

"It is also pretty essential," Lady Mindreader snapped. "And it did not burn in the explosion. It's flame retardant. We have to find it. Selig will be looking for it, and if he finds it and reattaches it . . . he'll be impossible to stop."

She turned away from me, peering into the bombie bonfire again. "Damn you, Virgil," she whispered. "Why?" After a minute she glared at me. "Well? What are you waiting for?"

"Huh?"

"Take care of this!" she flung her arm behind us, like she was talking about the whole fucking Vast Wasteland. "Destroy the undead who are not wholly dead!"

"All of them?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

Don't be ridiculous. OF COURSE I would have to deal with all of them. I didn't know how, though, really, it seemed like a pretty big job, and -

"You can do it," she said.

"Um, HELLO? Lady Malfunction? I don't even know-"

"You may never understand the powers you now serve, Lucy. If you ever do, it will be their doing, not yours. All you can do is trust in them, and serve them."

"Gee, you know, most motivational speakers aren't so cryptic. How do I-"

"Don't think about it. Just do it."

She looked back in the fire, like she was thinking about something and planning. Huh. I'd get no more help from Lady Mental, that was clear. I'd have to do my best. She could really suck sometimes. She smirked, but didn't comment on that thought. I gave her the mental finger.

Then I turned and walked away, feeling the incinerating heat from the bombie bonfire fading on my back. I had to take care of Robe Guy's mess. I pictured those cute hazel eyes. Dig THIS, Virgil! I don't want you anymore!

I didn't think. I just did it. My fresh tattoo burned, and this like swirling white light came down from the sky into me, like an alien abduction beam only it didn't beam me up. Instead, I felt this energy gathering in me, getting tenser and hotter, and then - I just pushed it out! The light shot out of me in all directions in a great white pulse like a strobe light, and it took out every last half-undead bastard in that Vast Wasteland, and a couple bunnies, too.

Poor bunnies.

Ha.

When I got back to the fire, Lady M was still all "voyeur" about the fire, but Billy Ray was holding out a stick of peppermint gum for me.

ZA Chapter 10: Lady M and the Resurrection

Lady M stood in the vast wasteland. The scorching sand, still aflame in some places, seared up through the soles of her flat-heeled black leather boots. She scanned the desert. Hot wind whipped her long blood-red hair tipped with yellow into her pale eyes. Lady M didn’t blink. A scowl creased her freckled forehead. Bodies lay as far as the eye could see, scattered and burning across the desert. Not human bodies, as far as she could tell, although the stench of rotting human was not much different from the decay stink of annihilated zombie.

No. These were the remnants of the already undead.

M scowled again. This was not the work of Cam and the Cleaning Lady. The haphazard manner in which these minions of Selig had been dispatched did not resemble Cam’s slaughter-style in the least. As impulsive and obsessed as Cam could be (that’s all he talked about—zombie heads and the myriad ways they could explode, the directional trajectory of the gore, the satisfied smile a good noggin-pop brought to his lips), he always hit his mark—the head. He was a professional, one of the best Quellers in the sector. And as annoyingly passionate as he was about his job, M appreciated his commando diligence in this war. She trusted him above all other Quellers, whose statistical burn-out rate had increased exponentially since the return of Retsuc and his followers. Yes. Cam was crucial in this fight. And Virgil, with his quiet ways and deep thoughts, was vital. If anything happened to him….

Yet Virgil was the reason she was out here in this goddess-forsaken wasteland in the first place.

Damn you, Virg-- M shook the thought from her head. No use wasting energy.

“Well, Cam’s obviously not the only one out here with a mission,” Lady M breathed, peering out across the zombie littered desert. The thought of having to deal with a rogue zombie killer made her sigh in exhaustion. She had statistics to get to, after all, and hunting down a sloppy Queller wannabe was not on her list of things to do today. Especially one who didn’t have the decency to clean up after himself.

M rolled an organic cigarette, extra fat to help her concentrate, and crouched down to light it off a twitching zombie’s flaming ass. Definitely not the work of Cam and the Cleaning Lady. Cam may occasionally and out of sheer rebellion go for the genitals (what’s left of them) before blasting the head, but he would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, never ever leave behind a wriggling zombie. Or a hundred. All the deciduous fuckers needed was a few minutes to regenerate to the point of function and they’d be back at it. And M had statistics to get to, goddamn it.

She unsheathed a long, heavy skinning blade, put the heel of her dusty black leather boot between the twitching zombie’s bugged eyes and added a little weight. A stream of green-black goo arced into the air out of the top of its head, sending the most god-awful stench into the dry wind. M didn’t flinch. She often found the reek of burning zombies intoxicating, a turn-on even. She'd learned much from her zombie dissections and autopsies of late, information she hoped would better arm them in this much-too-long war with the undead.

M extracted her heel and put the blade under the thing’s charred chin. The razor edge cut easily through its necrotized flesh. The zombie stopped twitching. M backed up, took a few long strides, and kicked the head as far away as possible. She preferred using her hands in most cases, snapping spines and ripping heads from necks bare-fisted, but she had a nicely rolled cigarette to finish and some healing to attend to and didn’t want to get her fingers all slimed up with zombie goo. Not yet anyway.

Straightening, M took a deep drag and let the wind pull the smoke from her lungs. She whistled and Cyrus and Billy Ray came loping from the stinking morass, leaping to her shoulders and chattering away.

“Where is she, my darlings?”

Cyrus smiled a mischievous capuchin smile and pointed a long finger into the distance. M noticed the tiny bauble ring on her scout’s slender wrist and grabbed the monkey’s hand.

“And where did you get that, young lady?”

Cyrus nodded her head up and down, a deferential smile on her deceptively sweet face.

“Okay, you little thief,” Lady M said in capuchin clicks and growls. “You can keep it. But if the zombie you took it off of comes looking for it, don’t come crying to me.”

Billy Ray screamed with delight, pulling Cyrus’s ear. Cyrus smacked her brother and leapt from Lady M’s shoulder, pausing to make sure she would follow.

M took a final drag from the world’s most perfect cigarette, checked her piglet-skin satchel one last time, sheathed her knife, and followed her trusty scouts out across the desert. It wasn’t long before they found the girl lying in the dusty dryness, nearly burned beyond recognition.

Lady M crouched down and brushed the girl’s blackened hair off her charred face.

“Hello, little one. It’s me, M. I’ve come to bring you back.”

M got to work just as the sun dipped below the horizon, casting shadows across the writhing zombie bodies strewn across the vastness. She would have to hurry. As much as she liked kicking stringy zombie ass, there was more important business at hand. Namely, saving the only person who knew every detail of Selig Retsuc’s diabolical plan for the Zombie Revolution. The girl had done well, using her seemingly innocent and brainless wiles to extract Selig’s secrets during that long, loving embrace. Damn Virgil for making unfounded assumptions about the girl, sacrificing her in favor of that slut Meg! Virgil was due for a serious ass-kicking, and M had special boots just for that purpose. Chains, too. And whips.

M straddled the girl's limp body, rubbing oil of peppermint into her wounds and speaking the ancient incantations she had studied with shamans from all over the world since she was very young.

“Great powers of dark and night, let there be a spark of life light!”

The girl coughed, her body convulsing with the streamers of light that suddenly sailed from the dark skies above. In the glow of it, M saw a crooked, twisted, one-armed body rise from a stinking pile of corpses.

Billy Ray covered his head as Cyrus wrapped her tiny monkey arms around her brother.

Lady M retrieved the tapping stick and ink from her satchel, set the blue-black pigment into the sharp point, and began the inscription on the girl’s left shoulder, much as she had done for Virgil as he teetered between this world and the next years ago. That had been a particularly brutal zombie battle, and M wasn’t sure the inscriptions carved into his embattled body would even take. But they did and Virgil had come back stronger, more capable than ever, though a little more nasal when he spoke now. The same would be true for the girl lying limp in the hot sand (the stronger and more capable part, not the nasally voice part) … if the zombies awakening all around them could be kept at bay long enough.

Damn you, Virgil. Damn you!

Lady M tapped, penetrating the girl's flesh all the way to the bone, the blue-black ink like lifeblood gifted from the gods and goddesses themselves. The girl groaned in pain. Summoning life back into a body was not an easy task, nor was it without consequence. The girl would bear the scars of this process for the rest of her life, scars that marked her as Other and a woman to be feared, for Lady M planned to instill in the girl the insights of the ancients… her legacy.

“Great powers of light and day, let this woman have her say!”

Another stream of bright white light and the young woman convulsed once more, flailing her fists at Lady M’s face.

“Get off me, you stinking rotten zombie bitch!”

Lady M smiled, holding the girl's wrists. “Hello, Lucy. Welcome back.”

ZA Chapter 9: The Truth Behind the Tears

Meg sobbed in Virgil's arms. He held her, stroking her completely uncharred long blonde tresses, cooing sweet murmurs about how she was going to be okay.

Damn straight she was. Very okay, now that the annoying tartlet Lucy had been incinerated. She got what was coming to her for emasculating Selig Retsuc, the little slut.

Meg wasn't crying, she was laughing. But she continued making it look like a good cry, drawing it out. She kinda liked having those long mantis arms wrapped around her, and those spindly fingers patting rhythmically on her back.

In truth she was a little sad that Lucy was gone. Lucy was unique, in a gross, creepifying way. Meg had been looking forward to seeing what kind of Zombie Queen she'd grow up to be. Now the dream was in cinders. Literally. Now her only hope of being a stage-mom to the Queen of the Dead lay with Lizzie, Lucy's twin sister who had been kidnapped at birth and raised by wolves.

Done with the sweaty, clingy drama--at least for now--Meg pulled back from Virgil's embrace.

"Now, now, dear. It's going to be okay," she said, wiping his tears of empathy from his angular face.

"But our sweet Lucy! She's gone forever!" he wailed.

Mentally Meg rolled her sparkly blue eyes. Get a backbone in that long skinny back of yours, you angsty, philosophising, melodramatic Zombie killer, she wanted to say. But instead she said, "Oh, Virgil. What will we do without her?"

"I know, I know. I will miss her so," Virgil said. Meg wondered if he even realized he sounded like one of the ridiculous rhyming Romeos on the soap opera Lucy used to like to watch back when there were soap operas, televisions and Lucy.

"We'll all miss dear Lucy. Me most of all," Meg said, with more than a grain of truth in it. Was her dream of the future lost forever? Or would she find Lucy's twin, Lizzie?

"Oh, if only," Virgil said with a sigh. "If only there was someone who could replace Lucy in all the important ways, minus the corpsified severed cock in her 'special place.'" Virgil looked wistful and disgusted at the same time. "Did, by chance, Lucy have a long-lost twin who was kidnapped at birth and raised by wolves, unbeknownst to us all?"

"No, of course not! Why would you even think such a thing?" Meg exclaimed.

Virgil. There was more to the lanky Lothario than met the eye. Damn rhyming Romeo.

Meg inwardly turned her sparkly blue eye on Cam. Perhaps he deserved a little more attention. He'd be extremely unlikely to see through her evil subplot. He'd never cry tears of empathy on her hair thus compromising the flame-retardant hair spray. He'd certainly never rhyme. And his arms were long enough. Yes, Cam was definitley on her radar. No, more than on her radar. He and his Cleaning Lady were in her sights. But first she had a little Virgil to take care of.

"Virgil," she said, running her fingers through his hair. "The fiery death of my ONLY daughter, and my own close call with Selig Retsuc, have left me empty. The only thing I can think of to make me feel better is to properly thank you for saving me from almost-certain zombification. Will you come with me to the abandoned house nextdoor and...let me bake you some homemade chocolate-chip cookies from scratch?"

Virgil raised his eyebrows and, with a knowing look in his hazel eyes, took Meg's hand.

Meg smiled, wondering exactly what Virgil thought he knew.

ZA - Ch 8

Virgil shook off another bizarre hiccup in Space-Time in the moments before he arrived at the Tisdale house. Sadly, Lucy's dementia in the post-apocalyptic period occasionally bled out into mass hallucinations distorting past and future and convincing people momentarily of an alternate reality.

As Virgil arrived at Lucy's house, he noticed that it didn't look quite right. While this might have been due to the fact Meg had recently repainted the ground floor shutters, it was probably more due to the fact the house was engulfed in hellfire. Bombies! Fearing not for his life, Virgil rushed into the inferno. In one room, Meg was crying for help, surrounded by flames. In the other, Lucy was locked in a loving embrace with Selig Retsuc. Virgil rescued Meg. Virgil liked Meg. Then the house exploded. While Selig Retsuc had developed a flame retardant skin, Lucy was unfortunately, irrevocably destroyed. Burned in such a way that she could never, ever, by any stretch of the imagination be revived, her soul freed at last to occupy another, far less bitter and thoroughly less moody character in the story. Perhaps a rockin' blonde Zombie Queller named Lizzie who's from Australia and is not only able to keep up with Cam physically, but also to--every now and then--outstrip Virgil mentally. Lizzie could also like gum. Peppermint. And, for God's sake, she would never ever have ever had sexual contact of any kind with putrified zombie wangs. Please!

Lucy Tisdale - Menthol and Fire

I leaned over the guy in the robes on the floor. Looked like he was knocked out. Who’d’a thought that when Rambo scorched the head zombie guy he’d also scorch the rope holding the cage, and it’d come crashing down on top of the guy in the robes?

Maybe I wouldn’t’a looked twice at this guy if he were at Valley View, but guys who weren’t zombies weren’t too thick on the ground these days. And I had to admit, this guy was pretty cute. Nothing like Bobby, of course, but then, Bobby was dead. And he didn’t have any legs anymore. Ew, don’t think about that.

I wasn’t counting my chews anymore. I was too busy liking the gum to count how many times I chewed it. Jeez, why’d the freakin’ zombies have to take my purse? I had two whole packs of gum in there! What the freak do zombies need a purse for anyway, really? Well, at least Rambo seemed to be on toppa things.

More than I could say for Robe Guy here. Out cold. Jeez.

“Kinda cute when he’s sleepin’ ain’t he?” Rambo said. Then he kicked the cute guy in the robes in the side of the head with his big clunky combat boot. “Hey! V! Wakey-wakey!”

“I’ve got some boots like that,” I said to Rambo.
He stared at me with his mouth open. He looked me up and down. “No you don’t.”
“Yeah, I do. They’re in my closet.”
“No, you don’t, sweetheart. Not like THIS. You’ve got Doc Martin’s is what you’ve got. These are Zombie Stompers. You got a pair of Zombie Stompers?”
“No.” I popped my gum.
“Quit that.”
I popped it again.
Rambo stared some more, then kicked Robe Guy in the side of the head again.

Robe Guy’s eyes fluttered open. Nice. Hazel.

“Wha . . . what happened?”
“You got tromped by a cage, V!”
“. . . What?”

Robe Guy stood up real slow, holding his head. He looked at me. Nice eyes, yeah. I smiled and popped my gum. “Hey,” I said. I winked.

He looked confused. “Lucy?”
What the hell? “How’d you know that?”
“I . . . I was dreaming. So . . . none of it was real?”
“None of what?”
“Um . . . nothing. Sometimes I know things. I thought that you and I . . .”
Rambo spoke up. “He he, V, you must’ve been dreamin’ real fuckin’ hard. Ha ha! Get it? Hard?”
“Yes, okay, I get it.”
“But if any part of the dream included a big goddamn zombie apocalypse, then, yeah, that part’s real.”
“Oh. Damn. Where is Selig?”
“Crispy crittered him! But then his undead fuckin’ minions dragged him out. I don’t know how good I got him.”
“Damn!”

The other guy, the one controlling the rest of the guys in uniforms, said, “Okay, we’ll split up! We need to case all four direction, we’ll communicate with the CB in—“

“Fuck that, V’ll track ‘em! V, which way’d they go?”
Robe Guy closed those nice hazel peepers like he was concentrating really hard. After a minute he put out his arm and pointed. Rambo started running that way. “Come on!” Everybody poured after him, Robe Guy included.

I started to run. Ew! It felt really, really weird! No way, no way NO WAY! I stopped and just stood there. Robe Guy noticed I wasn’t running.

“Lucy? Come on! We’ve got to hurry!”
I shifted my weight again. Ew. “Anybody got a spoon?”

Z.A. 2050 - Ch 6

Now, (aka Later)

Ultimately, it was Virgil that Lucy thanked for her rescue from the school. While Cam had done most of the work freeing her from her confinement and then single-handedly torching Selig Retsuc to within a degree of total incineration until the fat zombie overpope was dragged from the scene by a horde of his minions, Virgil had been the one with the presence of mind to slap the gum out of Lucy Tisdale's drooling mouth, thus shocking her out of her post-zombie-rape dementia and encouraging her to dash madly for the nearest ladies room.

When Lucy came back out of the Valley View High bathroom (conveniently stocked with a spit-polished and recently disinfected bidet and twelve sealed and sanitized douches), she clung to Virgil like a twinkle to the smile of a Hollywood heart-throb.

"But Lucy," Virgil said, wary of her intense affections, "Cam's the guy that rescued you. I'm just the one that popped you in the kisser."

"Oooh. I like it rough," Lucy purred. "And by the way, has anyone ever told you, your voice is like music."

"Really?" Virgil asked. "Cam says it's kind of nasal."

"Yes, but Cam spends all his time yelling at zombies over the pyrotechnic blast of the Cleaning Lady. He shouldn't exactly be considered an authority. Now...would you mind escorting me home? I feel safe with you. Also, I might add, I like to hear you discuss the many interesting things you discuss. When you talk, I find that my eyes never once go glassy. Instead, I'm really quite fascinated by everything you have to say."

So began a lovely friendship. After taking Lucy to her mother's house, Virgil had returned to the front with Cam and they had spent many days and nights killing zombies.

Until now...the point at which we are in this god-damned story...the point at which Virgil is on his way to Lucy and Meg's house and Cam is about to walk into a building full of Bombies and Lady M is off messing with statistics and Selig Retsuc is missing his lost wang, dreaming--one day--of revenge...

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.