Chapter Two: Dinner Break of the Damned
SARA
Okay. So we were facing a bunch of zombies. Ah, yeah. This was a little odd, to say the least, but it wasn't as if I could really argue with my central nervous system at that point—while my head knew there were no such things, my body was already kicking into reactive response and I figured what the hey, better go with my gut reaction. Yeah. My guts were having a LOT of reaction, to be honest.
I've seen a lot of things on the job, and usually I don't scare easily, but I hadn't really anticipated being ambushed by the walking dead. That's just not one of the emergency scenarios we have to drill for, you know? So I had my weapon drawn, and I was pretty sure I could put a few rounds in the threat heading towards us, but I held back because it didn't seem right to shoot an unarmed stylist, and because Grissom had decided to play Good Samaritan.
I kept forgetting I'm in love with a man who clearly knew next to nothing about zombies.
"Grissom, get back!" I warned him again. He hesitated, and behind me, Greg was breathing hard.
"She's moving—technically that means she's alive," Grissom tried to argue with me. Before I could point out how utterly wrong he was about that, Greg yelled over my shoulder.
"Grissom, I'm telling you boss, she's missing her trachea, which by all biological standards should put her into the non-ambulatory category. Listen to me good--- She. Should. NOT. Be. Walking. But she is, and that makes her a serious threat, so Holy Mother of God, get back here right NOW!"
I laughed. I know I shouldn't have, but it was so funny to see Grissom flinch at Greg's tone and scurry back to us. I handed my flashlight to Greg and steadied my aim. "Nice use of imperative logic, Champ."
"Debate team, and a lot of arguments with my mother," he told me as he tried to keep the light steady. He didn't do a very good job. Grissom was back next to me, quiet and a little shaken up himself.
Good. Glad he'd finally joined the party.
"Ambulatory dead . . . not ghouls or vampires . . . these are zombies, right?" he muttered. From the corner of my eye, I saw Greg make a 'DUH' face at him and those nervous giggles were threatening to well up out of my stomach again. I mean, how totally surrealistic was this, right? We'd shown up to process a murder scene and ended up on the set of Dawn of the Dead—and even if this was somebody's idea of a joke, it was all a little too real to laugh off.
Nobody was yelling "cut!" or announcing we'd been punk't or even laughing behind the scenes. No, it was just Greg breathing hard, me with my pulse pounding in my ears and Grissom desperately dialing on his cell phone.
The light caught sight of something else moving behind Miss Monique and the cop; I swallowed hard when I saw the two other shambling figures out near the far edge of the parking lot. These two had Cone, Cone on the Range shirts on, and those shirts were very . . . bloody.
"We need to get out of here now," I announced in a raspy voice, "Because I've got a limited amount of ammo, guys."
"The hardware store should have some," Grissom pointed out calmly, and his tone relaxed me. I wondered if he was in some sort of fugue state, but when I shot a glance at him, he was focused on the approaching figures, keeping his flashlight beam on them. "If you take them out at the knees that will probably stop them from reaching us quickly."
"You want me to shoot them?" I asked unsteadily. He gave a slow nod.
Wow. I'd just been authorized to use force—that was a rush.
I gritted my teeth and fired one round.
My shot hit Monique in her knee, and she toppled over, going down so fast I jumped. No blood though. The one-armed cop didn't flinch, although he had been almost abreast of her.
Even the arm on the ground didn't slow down.
"Bullets alone don't work on them; come on Sara, we both know that—" Greg whined in my ear. "What we need are serious weapons, like machetes and shovels and pruning shears—"
For a second, we all paused, looked over our shoulders, right into the darkness of Manly Hammers, and back again at the zombies. Monique was starting to crawl towards us, and I noticed the arm was in a little race with her.
Ew.
"Let's go shopping—" Grissom muttered.
GRISSOM
The division between sanity and insanity is a flexible one at best; narrowing down in any given moment of consciousness to infinitesimal thinness. Up until now, I'd always counted myself on the sane side, albeit tenuous when pushed to the limit by Ecklie's grating staff meetings, or days when Hodges drops by for an informal chat.
Be that as it may, my current situation teetered between those two states of mind, and I wasn't sure quite what to believe. Rationality argued that the biological facts remained constant, while an older, more primitive imperative deep within my locus ceruleus was saying otherwise. Added to that was the immediate and urgent responsibility for my two colleagues, both of whom seemed to know much more about . . . zombies . . . than I did.
Zombies.
I dredged up memories from my childhood, but I'd been a bigger fan of Dracula and the Wolfman than lesser horrors like zombies. At best, I could remember White Zombie, with Bela Lugosi as some sort of zombie overseer on a plantation . . .
"Move it or lose it, Grissom!" Greg told me, pushing none too gently against my back. I stood my ground long enough to do a quick sweep of the main entrance of Manly Hammers before turning to the other two.
"The lock for the sliding doors is up there on the top of the sill, to the right."
"Waitaminute, waitaminute, that could lock us inside with more zombies!" Greg announced, but Sara was already backing through the door and reaching up with her free hand for the switch.
"Right now I see four outside, and those are the ones I'm concerned about, Greg."
Sara as always, had an excellent point; the doors had enough pneumatic pressure left to slide closed. I took a moment to pick up a glittering tungsten barbeque fork from the grilling display in the front foyer; the withering look I got from Greg wasn't at all supportive of my choice.
"I don't think poking them is gonna work, Grissom. It will probably just piss them off."
"It's not for them, it's for you if you don't stop talking and listen for movement," I told him, somewhat testily. I don't like being pushed, even if it's for my own safety. Cowed for the moment, Greg took the barbeque tongs and held them out defensively in front of himself as I let the light sweep once more through the dark interior of the store.
Silence, and then . . .
THUMP!!
All of us jumped, but it was merely the one-armed officer crashing into the closed glass of the doors behind us. In the glare of Greg's flashlight, he looked abnormally pale, and I noticed his mouth and chin were covered with old blood. His nametag read 'Krupke'; for one bizarre moment, I flashed back to West Side Story, which Sara and I had just watched on AMC not two nights earlier.
She backed up into me, shuddering slightly, gun still drawn, and I knew Sara had seen the tag when she whispered in a slightly strangled voice, "Mariaaaa, I just ate a girl named Maria---"
"Sara—"Carefully I put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. The door was holding; the dead officer beyond it had his one hand out, smacking the glass ineffectively. "Take a deep breath, and let's get to someplace safe," I told her in as calm a voice as I could manage.
It seemed to help; she relaxed a little and turned, back with me again by the relieved look in her eyes. I shone the flashlight beam towards the interior of the store. "We need to find the Sporting Goods or Garden Shop area—that's where the tools will be."
"Phone?" she asked softly. I shook my head. My attempt at connecting to the Lab hadn't been any more successful than Greg's had been, much to my dismay.
"What about the power?" It was a good question; I'd wondered about it myself, in-between musing over my lack of knowledge about zombies and a worrisome fear that the Mag-lite batteries would give out before we found more.
"After we're armed, we can look for the fuse box, although given that the entire complex is out, I think it may be more than just a tripped switch."
GREG
Things . . . were not looking good. Really. I mean, Sara had her gun and had already taken out the head-hungry hairdresser, but Grissom and I had nothing but two thirds of a Weber Grillmaster barbeque accessory pack, for God's sake.
Tongs aren't a weapon, unless you watch a lot of Three Stooges, and even then, trying to drag a zombie around by clamping on his nose just doesn't cut it for me.
No, give me a nice big hatchet, or machete or even better, a bazooka. Yeah, a shoulder mounted rocket launcher would have come in handy right about then; not that I actually knew how to load or fire one. I was barely certified to carry a gun as it was, and right then and there I made a promise to myself that if we got out of our little predicament I'd put in the time at the range, so help me Bobby.
But for the moment, all I had consisted of a flashlight and tongs, damn it.
Grissom turned his light to the signs hanging from the ceiling, slowly letting it settle on the one pointing to the garden area. We moved in a cautious little clump, Sara slightly in front with Grissom and me flanking her. I felt like we ought to start singing 'Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh My,' but kept my mouth shut, because once I got started on the hysterical stuff I didn't think I'd be able to shut it off.
I'd been here before.
Not inside Manly Hammers—or at least not inside this one—but here, right on the edge of losing my sanity. Back when I had my run-in and, ah, over, with Demetrius James. That encounter had given me a taste of my own mortality in a way I was not all that eager to repeat.
Luckily, I had Sara and Grissom to look out for this time. Sara was with the program, just like I knew she would be. She and I are pretty much pragmatists in moments like this, you know? Leave the explanations for later; just get through what needs to be gotten through. Grissom though—he'd hate to hear me say it, but it was pretty clear he was a virgin when it came to monsters. I was also worried that he'd spend too much time trying to figure out the why of all this, and get careless, maybe get bitten.
Jeez, the idea of Grissom as a zombie was enough to empty anyone's backdoor—with the residual intellect he'd have, he'd probably figure out a way to march through Las Vegas within a week. He'd also be smart enough to target the biggest and tastiest brains, which would mean all the lab techs would be gone in a week, except for—
"—Did you hear something?" Sara whispered, and I stopped with her, right in the middle of the central aisle. Both Grissom and I had our flashlights shining forward on either side of her, like headlights.
"Could be the unfortunate souls we left outside—" Grissom offered grimly. I was tempted to look back, but didn't. A clattering noise sounded off to our right; a bunch of plastic coolers spilling into a side aisle. I turned my light and caught a shambling clerk in the beam.
Long blonde hair, blue eyes, cute little Manly Hammers vest--She would have been pretty, if she'd had a lower jaw.
The fallen coolers got in her way as she staggered towards us, and I was already tugging Sara away when Grissom stepped forward again, fork high.
Ooooh man, I was not ready to see my boss try to shish kabob a minimum wage employee, but before I said anything, Grissom jabbed the fork through her sleeve and into the peg board display on the end of the aisle.
Pinned her there like . . .
. . . A bug on a board.
Whoa.
SARA
I reached out for Grissom's collar and tugged to make him back up. Yes, he'd managed to pin the zombie, and that was good, but she was still more than capable of making a grab for him, especially if he just stood there staring at her, the way he was doing.
"Incredible," I heard him mutter. Frankly, I thought she looked pretty gross, myself, with her lower jaw ripped off like that. The smell of old blood was seriously rank around her too, but before I could say anything, Grissom was looking at Greg.
"Give me your tongs."
I tried to figure out what Grissom was up to—he didn't seem like the sort to torture, although I could tell the scientist in him was definitely fascinated by the whole Undead thing going on around us. I was listening, waiting for other noises, and kept hearing little ones that might or might not be trouble.
Hard to tell in a store this big and full of funky acoustics.
"Griss—" Greg argued, but Grissom spoke up.
"I want to get her keys, Greg. She's got a ring of them in her pocket and they might come in handy."
In a rush, I remembered exactly why I loved this guy. Brains and patience, yep. And a nice ass, but now wasn't really the time to think about that.
I was definitely hearing noises, from one of the far corners of the store. The clerk was rocking, not aware of the fork pinning her and keeping her from coming after us, but at any point the material of her sleeve could tear . . .
"We have to get moving Greg—" I snapped, "I promise we'll get you a better weapon; just give Grissom your tongs, okay?"
He looked reluctant. I didn't blame him, because if he did what I said, I'd be the only one armed again. I shifted, all the better to keep myself between Grissom and the far corner, where the noise was coming from. "Any time now, babe—"
Oooh. Mistake right there—Greg shot me this look, and I could tell he didn't know if I meant him or Grissom. I didn't have the heart to clarify, and if Grissom heard me, he didn't say anything.
The tongs clacked, and I watched Grissom out of the corner of my eye as he went key fishing, trying to avoid the jawless clerk's arm swings. Next to me, I felt Greg shudder.
"Point of fact, but how could she bite us if she doesn't have a working jaw?" he muttered.
I re-steadied my grip and sighed. "I don't want to find out, Greg—maybe she'd just sort of hickey us to death, or suck our brains out through our noses."
"Ew."
"Hey, you asked—"
"And deeply regret it, yeah," he replied with that crooked grin I knew so well. "How many aisles to the Garden Department?"
"Four, but I'm hearing things—" I pointed out. My grip on the handle of my gun was getting sweaty, and the tension in my shoulders was starting to ache. I made the mistake of looking back towards the glass doors at the front of the store, and the shadowy outlines Officer Krupke was there, with Monique and his right arm at his feet, both of them sort of thumping softly on the glass.
Not good. I didn't know how much residual intelligence they had, but glass wouldn't hold anything back for long.
"Got them," Grissom told us, waving a glittering ring on the end of the tongs. The clerk was pulling hard now, making whistling noises instead of moaning, and I had the weirdest feeling that some part of her was simply pissed at Grissom for nabbing her keys.
He held them up in the beam of the flashlight and started to look at them when the noise from the far corner got a LOT louder.
And closer.
Without a word, we began moving up the aisles towards the Garden Department, shuffling faster now, passing dark aisles and trying not to freak out as we left the clerk behind. I don't know about Grissom and Greg, but for me, it felt good to be in the middle.
We made it just under the sign that read "Spring bulbs are Here!" when something jumped out at us from the other side of the aisle, over in Plumbing. I spun, pushed Greg away and fired, bracing for the recoil. In the flash of the shot, I got a brief glimpse of a fat, balding zombie with a caved-in head and lots of customer service pins on his Manly Hammers vest. I bet he had been in charge of a department. I bet I'd just shot Herb, your go-to guy for Moen fixtures and locking washers.
Good old Herb, who'd probably been in toilets his entire career.
Damn it, I needed to keep it together and NOT laugh.
