Battle of the Network Zombies (22 page)

“You met him at a strip club? That’s kind of tacky.” Hellary peeked over her reading glasses.

I sighed. “We’re totally going to edit you out of the show, I hope you know that.”

“Whatever.” Her head rocked from side to side as she sing-sang the word.

“The real clue came when we searched Johnny’s room a second time and only one of the carcasses was present. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but my impression was that the creepy bug-thing had come back to life. Having a bit of experience with that kind of thing myself, you can see how I’d make the jump to that conclusion. So we tore out of there.”

Hairy Sue glared at me venomously.

I slunk toward her.

“I’ve got you. The envelope you delivered was empty, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t even blink.

“It was a couple of days later that I found a photograph of one of those creatures in a book.” I crouched next to the frothy stripper, rage seething behind her gritted teeth. “Sue, would you like to tell the crowd what those little creatures are?”

Her head jerked away and she folded her arms across her chest.

“No? Didn’t think so.” I stood and took a spot in the center of the room.

Wendy and Scott took their places to get the reaction shots. Mouths were already open in anticipation. Tanesha even licked her lips.

“They were wood nymphs.”

Silence. Stares even.

Apparently I’d confused the gathering, but not Hairy Sue who was backing away silently into the shadows.

“You see. I wasn’t aware—and how could I be, really, it’s not like I study woodland creatures, that’d be boring—that when wood nymphs aren’t walking among us in human form, their natural state is this odd-looking twig-like insect. When threatened, they can and do go into a state of paralysis mimicking death. Some of them can even achieve this state through dehydration and exhaustion.”

“Are you saying that—” Tanesha began, but was cut off by a familiar voice.

“She’s saying that I poured out the ashes, transformed myself and slipped myself inside the empty envelope that Sue delivered and then snuck out while you bitches tried to claw each other’s eyes out.”

I twisted toward the voice and came face to face with the barrel of a gun.

Johnny Birch lurched out of the shadows wearing a dinner jacket, an ascot and a smarmy grin.

Wednesday
12:00–1:00
A.M.
Cataclysm Jones

“Terribly mediocre Poirot impersonation, Amanda. Maybe you ought to spend a little more time reading Agatha Christie and a little less time getting your skin to sag like her corpse.”

I offered my coldest stare, jutting both my jaw and hip violently.
⁹³

“Oh girl, I know you ain’t gonna let that twig-dicked motherfucker talk to your ass like that.” Tanesha stood up menacingly…and sat back down once Johnny aimed the gun at her.

“That’s right, love, just sit your pretty butt in that chair and be quiet.” Johnny sidestepped behind Hairy Sue’s wheelchair and laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Everything will be fine, darling.”

“Like hell it will!” Mama Montserrat rolled over and pushed up on her knees, snatching at a pendant around her throat until it released, revealing a thin sliver of bone she wielded like a prison shank.

But before she could cut her way out of the bubble, Spew stood up and shook the entire contraption like a snow globe. Mama slipped around inside and settled on her back, winded and humiliated.

Johnny chuckled, but continued caressing Hairy Sue as he talked. “I’ve gotta say, I’m impressed with your perseverance, Amanda. I wouldn’t have believed you’d take this crazy show idea of yours and run with it.”

“What else could I do? We all need this to work. Well, maybe not the contestants, since I’m guessing prize money is out of the question.”

“What?” The word rose up from four different points in the room, though it wasn’t so much a question as a threat. Tanesha’s jaw shook, Maiko’s hands turned a translucent gray and were stretching across the table, Absinthe’s jaw started cracking and popping (and we all know what that means), while Angie simply glowered.

“I think you better explain yourself. You might be able to take out a couple of them, but it’s doubtful you’ll make it out of here alive after coming between a girl and her money.”

“I’m not explaining shit, rotter.” He stepped forward and pressed the muzzle of the gun to my forehead, much to the delight of Hellary, who clapped her hands excitedly.

Scott growled through shifting vocal cords. I didn’t have to turn to know that the pops and shredding I heard was his shirt coming apart at the seams and buttons bouncing off the walls; likewise, Wendy’s jaw echoed with the ratcheting of bone and sinew, her mouth stretching open for a brutal feeding.

“Saint Francis on a fuckin’ fritter!” Hairy Sue screamed, her eyes wide with fear and warning. “Johnny, watch out!”

Johnny inched backward, glancing sideways and quickly ducking as Hairy Sue’s casts blew out in a massive blast of chalky powder and chunks, her legs thick as tree trunks and clothes dangling in strips off her waist and neck. The wheelchair blasted away behind her, crashing into the wall and busting a table clean in half.

She roared, also, but that was really just overkill.

Scott jumped into her path. He was smaller than the yeti, but only by a hair and lean with muscle rather than the bulbous pouches of fat covering Hairy Sue’s gargantuan frame.

“Now now,” Johnny said, trying to soothe his lover. “We don’t want any trouble, do we, Sue?”

“I think she wants trouble.” I peered around Scott and took note of the blood pooling in the corners of the yeti’s eyes. “I’m pretty sure.”

“So do I.” A man I’d never seen before marched into the room with a gun in one hand and nose spray in the other.

Gil gasped and stood up, slamming one fist on the table—he might have managed both, for added effect, had he not been nursing a rather large goblet of the red stuff.
⁹⁴
“Chase. You motherfucker.”

Johnny spun on the newcomer, biting his lip with schoolgirl glee. “Chase.”

“Don’t ‘Chase’ me, I’ve been tracking you for days.” Chase squinted, searching the depths of the bar for the other voice. “Jesus, is that Gil?”

“Uh, yeah.” Gil pursed his lips, reached down and brushed Vance’s (or whatever his name is) face gently with the back of his hand. “And this is my new boyfriend.”

Chase shrugged and rolled his eyes. Gil sneered.

“Zat’s him!” Absinthe pointed at Chase. “Zat’s ze guy I saw come from around ze side of the house.”

Hairy Sue’s head swung from Johnny to Chase, thin ribbons of spittle dangling from her fangs. She shifted from one leg to the other, anxious for violence, ready to pounce—or possibly needing to pee. Either way, I wished I had an Uzi and some training.

I kept my distance, but not my mouth shut.
⁹⁵
“I smell love triangle.”

“Shut up!” Johnny yelled. “You don’t know.”

“She knows,” Chase advanced. “She’s figuring it out, just like everyone else is.”

I wasn’t really, but who’s gonna argue? I mean really, they both have guns and looked pretty edgy, maybe they’d take care of each other.

Hairy Sue stopped growling and cocked her head, eyes narrowing to slits.

Gil stepped out of the shadows. “Are you here to tell Johnny about the venereal disease you gave him, too?”

“Gave
him!
” Chase barked. “Try the other way around.”

Hairy Sue roared and spun on Birch, snatching him up by his throat before he could cast his bluesy magic. His legs kicked out from under him and he hung for a moment, gagging, clawing at Hairy Sue’s enormous fist with one hand as his face turned a nasty shade of Violet Beauregarde blue.
⁹⁶

“Oh shit, someone else besides Mama gots the pejohos in their fapuna!” Tanesha was nothing if not colorful, but if she was trying to turn that into a trendy saying, I was afraid she was facing an uphill battle.

“She means,” I interpreted for the slow. “Someone else received the gift that keeps on giving.”

I’d nearly expected it to be the end of the show. Wendy was already advancing for a close-up when Johnny brought the gun up to the yeti’s head and, without the slightest hesitation or change in his stoic demeanor, fired. The blast plastered both the ceiling and the portrait of Samuel Harcourt with Hairy Sue’s brains and shards of bloody skull—it dripped from the patriarch’s teeth like sloppy summer watermelon.
⁹⁷
Her body slammed to the floor, splintering the hardwood. Cracks radiated through the room.

Chase moved toward Birch, cocking the pistol, even as he snorted nasal spray from his other hand with a great heave.

The wood nymph jerked toward the vampire and flickered, light dancing off his skin like the crackling projection of old film. He threw back his head and spread his arms out wide, releasing some kind of plea to the wood. His song craned to a high pitch at the same time as the stench of dank mildew filled the room—I guessed from his ass. But jokes aside, you know I was moving away.

Vines sprung from every wooden surface, slow curling sprouts giving way to thick tangles that jutted into the room ramrod straight and sharp at the point, knots piercing the room with barked lances.

One of the branches sprang up between Johnny and Chase, knocking the vampire off his feet. He fired the gun ineffectually into the ceiling and when he scrambled to his feet, the bar was a jungle of whipping creepers and deadly spines.

I didn’t notice Johnny disappear and I don’t suspect he did, probably shrinking down to his insect form, but Mama must have known that for sure. She threw herself at the side of the plastic bubble with a shriek. It rolled off the gurney with a muffled thud, crushing a Medusan shrub overrun with snaking vines before she hamster-rolled it toward the last place he was visible.

“He was here! I saw him!”

“Aren’t you going to do something about this?” I asked Hellary, who rolled her magazine up, slipped it under her arm like a dad on the way to his morning constitutional and strode out of the bar, coughing “losers,” from the doorway.

“Real mature, Hellary!” I crouched next to Mama, her eyes wild and hands pounding the floor of the bubble.

“If he under there, he gotta be dead, right?”

She reared back and the bubble lifted off the crushed vines and twigs, revealing a crack in the floor wide enough to lose a heel in. If this show didn’t pan out, I had a feeling an exercise DVD for yeti might just make some money. There was a population that could benefit from some exercise. I glanced at Hairy Sue’s body, expecting it to have returned to human form in her death and not the pile of pocked chicken skin that lay before me. But why would it? The big lumpy thing was its natural state.

“He’s in the basement!” Chase yelled and wove his way through the flora and fauna toward the main hall door.

“Make sure to take some swag on your way out!” I called.

He stooped a bit in mid-trot and snatched a small gold bag out of the basket at the door. The contents were mostly shit, a few drink tickets to the Well of Souls, VIP status at Convent, that sort of thing. What was most important was the tiny package of earplugs. I couldn’t have been certain that Johnny would show up at the big finale, but I wasn’t planning on taking any chances. And, since I kind of liked some of these people, particularly the most fantastic drag queen I’d ever met, I figured I’d make sure we all had a defense against Johnny’s vocal power.

Tanesha, Maiko and Absinthe darted out after him, Angie sort of floated—well, part of her did—her entrails curling around the branches and propelling her disembodied head forward. Wendy, however, stood at the bar draining a bottle of Tarantula in greedy mouthfuls.

“Really?” I asked, snatching it from her hand and draining it dry.

Scott lurched forward after her, the claws on his hind paws scrabbling on the floor. Gil and Vance were behind him, my friend grumbling the whole way about chewing Chase a new asshole. I guess it was supposed to sound threatening but came off a tad gross considering the context.

Spew coughed and I turned to see him lounging in his booth, hands behind his sizeable head as his toupee slipped back to reveal a high forehead pasty as floured marble.

“Care to get in on this?” I asked.

He shook his head without meeting my gaze. “I’m opposed to violence. Have fun though.”

“Are you ready?” Wendy asked, eyes skittering toward the dark doorway.

I nodded and crept toward it. Wendy tiptoed behind me, so close, had she been able to breathe, I’d have felt it on the back of my neck. She did run into me a few times, blaming the camera for her lack of perspective, or something to that effect.

I checked the full length of the hallway before stepping out into the melee—a girl can never be too careful, plus it’s always advantageous to be the last one at a fight—either it’s been resolved by the time you get there, or the players are so exhausted I can pick them off easily with a few carefully placed bites (and by carefully, I mean making sure to get the head)—but I took too long to get moving as Mama’s bubble rolled over my foot as she barreled past. The bubble bumped and bounced against the walls of the hallway like a pinball, finally slowing to a crawl about halfway to the rear staircase—that it didn’t occur to her to simply cut a hole through the damn thing amazed me. Mama’s prone figure lay curled at the bottom, worn out.

The stairwell, dark even during the day, was veiled in the kind of shadows even childhood monsters fear, black and inky as midnight on skid row and twice as dangerous. I looked at Wendy, hopeful she’d take the lead. She glowered and shook her head with finality. I clung to the railing for support—the last thing I needed was a fall and a new reaper bill.

“Watch yourself, I don’t want you tripping on top of me.”

I could hear shouting and the thuds of furious combat below. At one point, a scream rang out, a woman’s voice, only graveled and husky.

“Absinthe,” Wendy breathed.

I nodded.

At the bottom, a welcome glow calmed me somewhat. The light came from the source of the ruckus, a doorway about halfway down the hall, and spotlit the crumpled figure of the Belgian ghoul, headless and nude, her flesh stitched in black vine like a homemade rag doll. Focused on the atrocity and not my footing, I caught on a tangle of growth, dense and covered in yellow flowers—St. John’s wort, I thought. A fairly common ground cover for the area. Trudging through the stuff was no easy task and the tiny buckles all over my stilettos didn’t help matters any. But about halfway down the corridor, I caught on something heavy and toppled over it and onto my knees with an aching crack.

“Oh shit.” Wendy’s face was white with terror—or whiter, pale being our natural state, and all.

I reached for the object, a mound only slightly higher than the rest of the brush, and retrieved what seemed to be a wet bundle of leaves.

Too heavy for that, I thought, and drew it toward me, realizing I didn’t really want to know and probably would have been better off just trudging on, but couldn’t stop myself. I pulled some of the greenery away and then dropped it.

It was Absinthe’s missing head, threaded with vines, mouth gaping in a silent scream.

Johnny’s hobby was not so cute anymore. Apparently redecorating wasn’t limited to just rooms.

We pressed on, and reaching the open doorway, heard another scream. Wendy nudged me forward and I pointed out a sign on our right. “The Hungry Desert. What do you think that means?”

“No clue. I’m sure it’s something horrendous. That would figure, right about now,” Wendy whispered.

“The challenges were meant to be held down here, but since Johnny died first, I never knew anything about what they were.”

The light emanated from an overhead bulb hanging ominously from a black cord in the ceiling. It cast a triangle of light onto the far wall, decorated with the harsh edges of two words, painted from floor to ceiling: HUNGRY DESERT. The edge of a door was visible just left of the first “R” and obscured that letter as though it were simply a crease in paper.

I, for one, wasn’t looking forward to this. But Johnny’d played his cards and it was time to play mine, if I can use a poker reference. And I can, because, hey, it’s my book. Plus, what’s a reality show without a big finale. A flop, that’s what.

Over my dead body.

Deadish, even.

We pushed into the first room, a vast space filled with sand that rolled out like seaside dunes. The ceiling was higher than feasible and reflected a moving sky of fluffy cumulus and cerulean blue. In the distance a rectangle of black ruined the illusion of nature.