Gold Guns Girls (Cities of the Dead) Read online

it took is one bite to be infected and turned.

  “We’re going to need to pick up a new woman as well,” Vasily said. “These ones are all burnt out.”

  “That’s going to be tougher than getting coke or vodka. Nobody trusts anyone anymore, and promising girls drugs and food and security hasn’t been worked well the last few times. The girls that are left already know how to survive or have men,” Fyodor said. “And we need to find some better food than canned dog and cat food, too.”

  Vasily laughed. “Yeah, Mariya was good for fucking after we gave her coke, but when she found out she had to eat Alpo, our luster wore off pretty damn quick. Here we are, millionaires with sports cars, apartments and access to everything the city had to offer, and now we’re lucky if we can get some farm girl like Mariya. There was a time when Mariya would have been sidewalk trash to us, just some chick to ignore on the way to somewhere, and now she’s the crazy fuck.”

  Fyodor paused for a moment and thought about the time they had rescued Mariya from the farmhouse she had been holed up in. A small group of undead had found a weakness in some plywood covering the front windows of her house and had begun pulling it down when her father, an over-weight middle-aged man wielding a .22 caliber rifle had stepped from a window on the second floor onto the roof over the front porch and begun plunking zombies with rounds when he lost his balance and slid off the roof. He had been quickly torn to pieces.

  Fyodor and Vasily had been watching from a copse of trees across the street, initially amused that the farmer had thought his little varmint eliminator would do much to the undead, and then saddened at his fate – who can predict a loss of balance on a pitched roof? It’s like slipping in the bathtub: it happens, but not so much. Mariya had climbed out onto the roof moments later and begun wailing at the sight of her father being destroyed by zombies and Vasily had broken from the cover of the trees with his shotgun in hand, blasting holes in the pack of undead. In less than a minute the zombies were all dead, and Fyodor had walked across the street, scanning the distance for itinerant zombies drawn by the noise.

  “Vasily, that was stupid,” Fyodor had said. “You might have just drawn a hundred more to our location with all the shooting.”

  Vasily had ignored him and looked up at the girl on the roof of the porch. “Come with us if you want to live.”

  Mariya had been Vasily’s sex slave for the first few weeks, but the gratitude of having been saved and the grief of the loss of her father finally having morphed into the realization she was still trapped, and then she had succumbed to the alcohol and drugs as a way out of her new predicament. Or, perhaps, a way to avoid the fact that they often had to eat food meant for dogs and cats.

  The next morning, Fyodor gave Nikita a 20-gauge shotgun with shells filled with birdshot. He wanted her to be armed, to feel safe and have a weapon that could at least stun a walking dead person at close range, but he didn’t want her with a weapon that could be used to kill either him or Vasily should she have come to the conclusion that her only way out was to kill her velvet jailers. Or herself, which, in that case, the shotgun would do just fine with the birdshot.

  Fyodor had always told the girls they brought back that they could leave at anytime, and he meant it. It was Vasily who would take them aside and reaffirm that commitment, and then point out the decaying skeleton of Irina just the other side of the fence, her bones picked clean by zombies and scavengers, killed by runner-zombies just ninety seconds after saying her tearful good-byes to them, Fyodor locking the gate behind her and wishing her good-luck.

  There were no remains of Tanya to show anyone, and the digital cameras on which images of her were stored had long ceased to power up. That was back when they thought taking pictures would give them something to look back on in the future, when the zombies were gone. Back when they all thought the plague was a reason for a party.

  The trio made their way down the street cautiously, Fyodor in the lead with Nikita in the middle. They were almost three kilometers out from the dacha along the main road, walking alongside a string of curbside shopping centers and taking pains to check through the storefront windows of each as they moved. For whatever reason, the undead could remain immobile for long periods of time, just standing in place, or lying against a wall. Human movement, the steps of the living, would rouse them in a heartbeat, so one had to take precautions in areas where the zombies assumed people might be.

  “This has all been picked clean, Vasily,” Fyodor said as they came to an intersection and scanned the open space for the undead, the store fronts all broken open. “We’re going to have to walk farther if we’re going to find anything.”

  Fyodor stroked his beard and looked around. He hated having a beard, but procuring razor blades was one of the things that rarely occurred to him while he was out foraging for supplies. He kept the growth clipped close with scissors, but for some reason he was still drawn to stroke it as if it were some obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  “What are you thinking, Fyodor?” Vasily asked.

  Fyodor shrugged and watched as Nikita slowly walked to the edge of the sidewalk curb, moving her shotgun in small arcs as if she were searching for something at which to shoot. She might have some talent at this, he thought.

  “I’m thinking we need bicycles, Vasily, but I haven’t a clue where any might be.”

  “What for?”

  “So we can cover more ground more quickly without making any noise,” Fyodor said matter-of-factly. “It’s not like there’s any gasoline anymore. Not that you can drive anywhere with all the fucking car wrecks on the roads, but if we’re going to have to keep going farther out each time, we’re going to need to expose ourselves for less time.”

  “Bicycles,” Vasily said, letting the word just hang in the air and sag under its weight, as if such a contraption were an indicator of poverty or powerlessness. He looked around the intersection, paused a moment on Nikita, who had made her way into the center of the roadway, and turned to Fyodor.

  “How long until they nuke us?”

  Fyodor shrugged. “We’re near Moscow. I think that probably still means something to them, even if it’s mostly burnt to the ground. But if somebody doesn’t figure out what’s going on with these things, and how to kill them or cure them or whatever the fuck you have to do to them, well, it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Unless the dead walkers get to them first,” Vasily said with a sniff of a laugh. “Look at that girl. Twenty-one years old, perfect body, tight ass, and I’m tired of fucking her already.”

  Fyodor rolled his eyes. “You fucked her this morning before we came out here.”

  “Only I wasn’t fucking her, not in my mind, anyway. I was with that redhead coat check girl at the club who would never give me the time of day, only a fucking stub for my coat,” Vasily said. “I wonder where she is these days.”

  “You’re not missing anything with Karena,” Fyodor said, focusing on Nikita as she walked across the street, her shotgun held at her waist, ready for use.

  “You didn’t.”

  Fyodor barely shrugged. “I did. A couple of times. She’s a sloppy fuck.”

  “You never told me you banged her.”

  “Yeah, well, it was before you told me you wanted to, so I didn’t want to prejudice you.”

  “Looking out for me?”

  “Not really,” Fyodor said. “You didn’t miss anything. And, anyway, my being first with Nikita didn’t stop you with her.”

  Vasily stood there in silence for a moment and watched as Nikita looked through the broken store front windows on the other side of the street. “How did you get in Karena’s pants? I tried every time I was there.”

  “It was easy, Vasily, I was a little drunk and she was chatting me up about my coat and I asked her if she wore panties with words on them, and she said all panties had words on them and then I said -- before she could explain, because I knew she meant the label -- that I had seen a catalog with a pair of panties in it that said ‘
Wild in Bed’ and I told her I thought she was the kind of girl who would own a pair.”

  “And that worked?” Vasily asked.

  “I nailed her in the coatroom twenty minutes later,” Fyodor said. “I keep telling you that the way into a girl’s pants is through misdirection. If you talk about a girl’s underwear with a girl who will talk about her underwear, both of you are talking about fucking, not underwear. You’ve just got to recognize the indicator of interest in you. All women who are interested in you do this, send you a signal that they’re into you, and if you know what you’re doing, you can figure out what they’re about pretty quickly and then it’s just about negotiating the time frame.”

  Fyodor paused and stared at Nikita as she walked to the other side of the intersection. “Vasily, all women want to fuck, it’s in their DNA just like it’s in ours, they just want to fuck the right guy at the right time, and you have to know how to make them think you’re that guy and that time is now. It’s not foolproof and it’s not 100%, but you get to a point where you know which girls are for real when you know what you’re doing.”

  Suddenly Fyodor noticed Nikita jumping up and down, pointing to a hole in a building on the other corner of the street. She turned and waved at him, urging him and Vasily to come to her.

  “She’s excited about something,” Vasily said,