What are Little Zombies Made of? (Cities of the Dead) Read online

“Whatcha gonna do to it?”

  “Drain the blood out.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “I dunno, but there’s only a gallon or so of blood in a man, maybe more in this fatso, so it shouldn’t take long.”

  Trace shoved the needle into the femoral artery and the zombie twitched, but otherwise made no notice of the event. Blood began slowly pumping out into the bucket, a reddish ooze with the faintest of yellow hues. Holly gave Trace a curious look.

  “What’s the yella? I ain’t never seen any yella in blood before.”

  “Beats me. Maybe it’s what makes ‘em zombies.”

  Charles walked over and peered down into the bucket. “That’s a glow, not a tint.”

  Holly and Trace looked at him.

  “The blood in there. It’s glowing yellow, not tinted yellow. You mix yellow and red you get some kind of orange. That’s red with a yellow glow, and I’ve never seen a red that glowed yellow.”

  Trace looked into the bucket and shrugged. “Fucking zombies are just fucking amazing, ain’t they? I wonder if their shit smells like lemons? That’d be a yellow glowing turd, wouldn’t it?”

  Trace looked at the two with a big grin. Holly and Charles both gave him weak smiles and walked out of the garage, Charles telling Trace to let them know how the experiment worked out. Trace closed in on the zombie and stared at it for a long moment.

  “Come to think of it, do you fuckers even take shits?”

  Trace grabbed the recliner lever on the side of the chair and shifted it, straightening out the zombie in the chair and causing it to gurgle against the rubber ball in its mouth. A trickle of blood and mucus slicked over the black ball. Trace looked at the former man and watched as his eyes fluttered and closed. He pulled the wad of tobacco out of his mouth and dropped it into the bucket with the blood, swished spit around his mouth to move the tiny flakes into a ball, and drooled that into the bucket.

  In the backyard by the lake, Trace passed by the cage with the skinny blue-eyed blonde video store clerk in it. She had been in the cage for nearly two months, stripped naked and exposed to the sun from dusk to dawn in an attempt to determine what extreme sunburn did to a zombie. He paused and looked in at her: once upon a time, she’d have been considered pretty, albeit small-chested with pencil-thin legs, but some guys dug that look. Now, she was covered with bodily fluids, her skin the same shade of dull gray it had been when he had locked her in there. He looked in the bottom of the cage and then back up at the undead woman.

  “Come to think on it, you ain’t ate nothin’, so why would you?” He walked away, listening to her shuffle to the front of the cage and bump into the bars.

  The last few months had been strange months for Trace. Strange not in the sense that he’d had to learn to live with zombies, that had taken some time to get used to, but strange in the sense that he had realized he had an overwhelming fascination to see what made them tick. Or, more accurately, die. Initially, he had taken to figuring out how to shoot them to death, quickly concluding that only headshots actually finished them off. Anything else left something that could still move.

  But he and Dag had also realized that ammunition might get difficult to come by, so shooting was limited to actual necessity, and they had taken to capturing the undead and finding other ways to kill them. Zombies could be burned, drowned, and decapitated. Poison didn’t kill them, although it did fundamentally alter the undead’s ability to function, usually by blinding them. Injecting them with various chemicals produced similar results, but only acids seemed to incapacitate them.

  He stopped briefly at the burn pit, a twenty-by-twenty square hole that was ten feet deep. Inside it were the burnt remains of a dozen of the walking dead, maybe a few more, that had been put through some experiment or another by Trace. Several of the undead hadn’t actually been dead-dead when put in the pit, and Trace had found their screams... of pain? ... to be curious and disturbing. Clearly, the undead didn’t want to die, and they felt some sense of pain, at least when lit afire. When you shot them or chopped something off, they seemed to barely notice the wound and just kept coming at you: it was the damnedest thing.

  Trace heard whine of Dag’s 2005 Honda CRF250X dirt bike and turned to watch him ride in over the hill on the other side of the lake. There should have been two whines, as Mike rode a 2004 XR400R, but Trace just watched as Dag rode up to him and killed the engine, slipped off the side and steadied the bike on its stand.

  “Some fucking Army sergeant zombie got Mike while we were poking around Rucker,” Dag said, fishing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lighting one quickly. “Fuckin’ thing came outta nowhere and fucking bit a hole in his head. I heard him scream, turned around, and shot the fucker.”

  Dag brushed the hair out of his eyes and tucked some loose strands behind each ear. “Then I put a round through Mike’s skull and just got the fuck outta there.”

  Dag took furious puffs on his cigarette. “On the way out, I noticed the whole fucking army was hanging out at Cairns field, just moaning and shuffling and whatever. When the hell did they come back?”

  “How many?” Trace asked.

  Dag shrugged. “I dunno, a thousand or two. They were just there, where they haven’t been in weeks.”

  Trace scratched his forehead. “We’re gonna have to see if we can make these things talk.”

  “Talk? You’re lucky if you can listen hard enough to figure out if they’re saying ‘brains,’” Dag said.

  “Yeah. But one of the things I’ve learned is that they know what they’re doing even if I haven’t figure out exactly what it is they’re trying to do. They know to come at us, not dogs nor cattle nor horses nor nothin’ else,” Trace said. “They know we’re what they’re looking for, and we know it ‘cause they’s lookin’ fer us.”

  Dag shrugged, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and spoke a cloud of words. “Trace, I don’t think we’re ever going to find out why there are fucking zombies or what they want. The world’s gone and I don’t think it’s ever coming back.”

  Trace looked down into the burn pit and thought for a moment about the 40ish housewife zombie that he had burned alive just to see what zombies did when on fire. He had doused her in charcoal lighter fluid and then lit her clothes on fire before pushing her into the pit, which he had already lined with dead branches and scraps of wood. The ropes around her hands and ankles had burned off and she had gotten to her feet and thrashed about in the pit as the branches caught fire, but she eventually fell onto her side and burned to ashes as he tossed in more firewood. She had been the first in the pit, and he had wondered what her life had been before she had been turned, what her kids had been like and if she had been happy.

  “Dag, it jes can’t be possible that the entire world is now zombies, that the entire fuckin’ planet is now filled with walking dead people who want to turn the rest of us who are living into zombies. I mean, what the fuck happens when everyone on the planet is a zombie? What do they eat? How do they live? What’s their purpose? Shit, we’re alive and we’re killing them, so you know we’re not the only ones.”

  “Yeah, but there’s now four of us and a couple thousand of them out there at Rucker. It’s probably like that everywhere. There’s not really much we can do.”

  Trace shrugged. They had only known Mark about six months, but still it hurt to lose a friend, and plain old living people were hard to come by anymore.

  “Sooner or later, Dag, we’re gonna to figger out what the pattern with these things is, because there has to be one,” Trace said. “Until then, we keep capturing them and putting them through whatever tests we can think of. Eventually, we’ll find a way to kill them all in one big swoop, jes like how they all got made in one big fashion. We know we can kill them, it’s only a matter of time until we figure out the easiest way to kill them on a large scale.”

  “Trace, we’re just a few guys living in the middle of Alabama. We’re not the government or some huge corporation: we d
on’t have any assets. Even if we figure out that diesel fuel mixed with arsenic kills zombies when they breathe the smoke from it when it’s burning, well, hell, we don’t have diesel fuel or arsenic or any way to get anything we might come up with to spread it on a large scale. We’re fucked, Trace.

  “We’re fucked, and we’re going to have to live in hiding the rest of our lives.”

  “That might be true right now, Dag, but you can’t know what tomorrow holds, because it wasn’t too long ago that the world didn’t have zombies,” Trace said. “If that can change that quickly, you better sure as hell believe it can change again. And I don’t see any reason not to keep killing them before they kill us. I’ll kill a hundred, a thousand, a million, all of them. Or they’ll kill me. But I’m never going to stop killing them or trying to figure how to best kill them.

  “Dag, man, we used to change oil every day and rotate tires. We used to want something meaningful to do with our lives other than go to work, pay bills, and fucking hate on chicks who wouldn’t give us the time of day. Now we don’t have any of that shit. No work. No bills. No fucking chicks thinking they’re too good for us. We’ve got a calling. We’ve got something to live to do. For the first time in our lives, there’s meaning. “

  Dag sucked the last smoke out of his cigarette and dropped it to the