Note to reader:
Since I did not get a chance to give this information in the description, I shall do it here. The actual flash series "Xombie" can be found at www. xombified. com. The creator and his team of geniuses are midway through an effort to make Xombie into a full-length feature film, with better animation, better dialogue, better action scenes, and all around better zombie goodness. But that does not mean the flash chapters are not worth watching. They are also available for viewage on www. newgrounds. com. I encourage all those who like flash, zombies, car chases, or all of the above to visit either one of these websites, especially xombified. com and tell the creator James Farr how much you enjoyed his work and put in a good word for Xombie to the head honchos of ff. net so that maybe Xombie can have its own subcategory!
Disclaimer: All characters except Crescendo and settings are © James Farr. Don't sue me.
She raised her pretty head and scented the air. Nothing, except for the gravelly smell of the dead ground, decayed buildings and abandonment. She sighed, noting the growing heaviness of the foul air as she sucked it into her lungs. Rain was coming. She glanced up at the sky. Same as it always was, dull grey and purple, the color of an old bruise on the skin of a dead man. And she, of all people, knew what that looked like. Seven years working as a police detective in Chicago had taught her that.
Move on, that's what she had to do. Regret and hunger slowed her steps as she marched down the eerily quiet beach. It was as if the ocean shared her despondency and her weakness and had given up trying to turn the tides. Waves lapped weakly at the sand, and the old carcass of a dead seabird languished in the surf as its feathers were bathed again and again by the unheeding back-and-forth of the salt water. She padded on, the bird's remains her only companion so far.
She closed her eyes, not so much to shut out the emptiness all around her, but to take it in as much as she could. It was something she had learned over the years, over all the years she spent wandering from oasis to oasis in the dark, cold desert of the world. She gave the semi-conscious command, and behind her eyes, her mind suddenly leapt out of her and spread out over the land like a blanket of sentiency with her at its center. She saw the shore and the land beyond stretch out around her and she swept her head across the panorama, wishing, hoping for something, anything. But all was quiet. There was nothing here. No warmth, no light, no sign of anything alive, not even the tiny heartbeat of an insect or a squirrel.
Nothing alive.
Bitterness overwhelmed her, and she clamped down tight the lid of her mind. Her pale eyes blinked open and once again were met with the same hopeless beach, the lifeless waves and the apocalyptic quiet, but all of it had been dipped in shadow like a bright red apple dipped in caramel, dripping with twilight. Night this soon? How long had she been out of it?
The disgruntled growl of the sky behind her told her rain was soon to come. Best to find shelter before she got drenched. Nothing like being rained on to make your mood even worse.
She bore left and trotted inland, looking for the remains of a building under which to huddle or an abandoned vehicle in which to sleep for the night. That was one good thing about the way things were. Now that the sun barely shone, she could be out during the day and sleep at night. That was the way she always liked it.
She kept her senses heightened and her ears and eyes opened as she moved. Even though she couldn't find any people, there were other things, far less desirable, that might happen to cross her path.
Speaking of less desirable, she groaned inwardly as she breasted a small hill and a graveyard hove into view directly in front of her. The stink of the dead smacked her square in the face. Crinkling her nose, she did another mental sweep, this time searching not for the living, but for the dead. Their smell was all around, but not a single corpse popped up on her radar. Had they all been dug up? Or... had they dug themselves up?
The cautious, logical part of her mind upon which she had depended in her work warned her, loudly, to turn away and continue her search for shelter. But the newer, bolder voice in her mind smiled and said hey, curiosity can't kill this cat.
"True," she whispered, her voice thin and airless. "If there are zombies here, and they've all left, p'raps they've all gone to look for humans to eat."
The voice smiled, nodded, and promptly finished her thought for her. where there are zombies, there are humans. where there are humans, there is food.
Her mouth began to water, and she strode with renewed resolve under the wrought iron arch into the graveyard, bathed in shadow. Sure enough, as she squatted down on her haunches to inspect a newly-opened gravesite, it had been dug out from the inside. The hole was ragged and uneven and the sides were rough-hewn, not cut smooth with the blade of a shovel. There were no piles of dirt around the site and the hole itself was small, just the right size for a person to surface as if he were coming up from a dive in water. Her detective's shrewd eyes roved over the ground, the brows above them knitted together in concentration. Her head cocked slightly to the side when she found a series of marks which nothing in her experience had taught her to recognize, but she knew them right away: a set of five shallow furrows in the loose dirt, made by scraping fingers, digging and clawing their way out of the ground. Five more near them, and another five. They scarred the ground in one place, and, as she crept outward from the grave on all fours, she found a lone set of footprints, left by bare feet, walking unsteadily but quickly down the hill away from the beach.
they were definitely after something, the voice, hushed by awe, mumbled in her. Dozens of other graves laid open, like gaping punctures in the earth, bleeding dirt and worms. All the footprints that her scanning eyes could find led in one direction. that's the way to go, the voice said resolutely. She quickened her pace, picking herself up onto two legs as she went, guided by the fierce growling in her gut and the sour, swampy stink of the zombies in her hypersensitive nostrils.
Well, at least the rain had passed on.
She had followed the zombies' path for the better part of three hours, and all she had turned up were a dead end and a dead hearse. can someone turn down the irony? it's hurting my eyes, the voice spat sarcastically.
The zombies were nowhere to be seen, but their stink saturated the air and the upholstery of the vehicle, its windows broken and its hood all but torn off. She sulked around the car, seeing all the signs of its recent operation, but the people who had driven it had long gone, leaving nothing, not even sweaty palmprints on the steering wheel or stray hairs on the seat. It was as if whoever had driven the hearse had disappeared as completely as the evaporating heat from the mangled engine. The zombies' smell was still all around, and the overpowering reek confounded her senses and made her head swim. Thankful that her stomach was empty, she ambled away from the hearse, swallowing hard.
The zombies could not have gotten to the people driving the hearse first. She would have seen blood and signs of a struggle. They had to have escaped, but there were no signs of that either. Whoever they were, they were swift and silent as ghosts, as detectable as a vampire's reflection in a mirror.
Suddenly, the familiar but nauseating stench of decaying flesh invaded her nostrils with renewed strength. She froze, for accompanying the smell was the raspy, laborious sound of heavy breathing and pounding footsteps.
But it was not just one, her preternatural ears told her. The being, the zombie, that was trying to creep up on her had a companion, a much quieter one, but one that gave off a strange, wild smell.
Weak with hunger though she was, she knew that dispatching two walking dead would not drain her that quickly. She turned, slowly, flexing her stiff, aching muscles and gathering what power she had deeper into herself, readying for the battle.
She faced a man, a zombie, drawn up to his– its full height, easily a foot and a half taller than she. The flesh of his– its face had long since dripped away, leaving only wide, wild eyes set bulbously in an angular, skull face. But as her own pale green eyes traveled down his– its hunched bulk, they widened in surprise. This zombie had muscles. This zombie was ripped. He– it looked like instead of wandering along the side of the road moaning, it did several hundred reps every morning before breakfast. Under its grey-blue decaying flesh, powerful cords of muscle and sinew bunched and coiled, moved like vipers, curled and ready to strike. Biceps, deltoids, pectorals, abdominals, quadriceps and hamstrings all screamed at her, bulging, barely contained by the zombie's thin skin and torn remnants of cargo pants held together with a belt and a prayer. They moved, they flexed, they seemed... alive. This was not right.
Her eyes traveled back up to his– why did she keep referring to it as a him? It was dead, a sexless, inhuman pile of reanimated flesh... but... it kept staring at her. Silent and unmoving, its haunting eyes drew her own toward them. His eyelids long since eaten away, his eyes now gaped at her demonically, focusing all their power on her. For the first time in many, many years, she felt the cold, wet eel of fear slither up her spine.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
did it just...
Talk...
to me?
As if this wasn't enough to set her completely out of her frame, the zombie's quieter but more savage companion suddenly made its presence known. Out from behind the zombie's massive tree trunk legs stepped a snarling, slathering dog, an undead dog. Huge and hulking as its human counterpart, the dog stood even with her waist at its shoulder, as full of muscle as its companion, and, judging from the strings of rabid foam drizzling from its black jaws, twice as mean.
"Hey, I asked you a question. What are you doing here?" The human zombie spoke again, in a deep baritone that was as dull and grating as the dirt that had probably been his– its home for decades, at least.
Her mind worked double overtime, flitting through options and situations, all of them unfavorable, the most desirable of which ended with her getting away missing only a leg
and some chunks of flesh. She breathed deep, swallowed her fear as best she could, and drew herself up to her own full height, relying only on the smooth, sensual charm she had inherited from her father and her maker.
"What I'm doing here hardly has bearing in this conversation, my hulking friend," she said, hoping her voice did not betray the cold nervousness that was making her entire body thrum. "The real question is how a lonely, harmless traveler like moi can get past you and Fluffy there without losing a limb and half her hide?"
The zombie chuckled humorlessly, a dry sound like rocks tumbling in a dryer. "I know harmless when I see it, and I haven't seen anything harmless yet." The zombie reached a meaty hand up behind his shoulder and pulled a long-handled shovel out from a holder on his back. The spade gleamed silver in the weak light, viciously sharp despite layers of caked dirt and
gore
on its surface. With a small chink, he brought it down, point first, into the ground and leaned heavily on its friction-taped handle, making it clear just who had the upper hand.
She suddenly became conscious of her entire self, her pale, almost blue-tinted skin, her white-green eyes, her long fingernails, and her hair, honey blonde save for a shock of moon-white at the top of her high widow's peak. Her appearance didn't quite scream 'normal harmless human traveler'. At least he hadn't noticed...
"I really wouldn't prefer for this to come to fisticuffs, now," she put her hands up in a conciliatory 'I've got nothing to hide' display, painfully aware of how her long, spidery fingers were trembling. "All I want is to be on my way. I'm unarmed, as you can see," she opened her arms wide, "and I'm not exactly in the best shape of my life, so I would not even dream of giving you and Fluffy a hard time."
The zombie seemed slightly appeased, though she wasn't sure if it was because of her words or her trembling frame, shaking half from fear and half from hunger. He heaved a grating sigh and straightened up, relaxing his iron grip on the shovel, which she thought with amusement totally out of place, could not have suited him better if he had planned it that way. "It won't come to fisticuffs, and I can guarantee you that. It would come to Cerberus and me gutting you like a trout."
"Oh, certainly, yes. I just said 'fisticuffs' as a slightly... you know... tamer way of putting it." now you're rambling, both voices in her head warned her. "Right. Before I scamper on my way, would you happen to know where I could find the nearest human settlement? I've been wandering for a while, and I'm getting a bit peckish, if you can understand."
Before the zombie had a chance to reply, a movement behind him caught her eye. A small being, a little girl, poked her head around the zombie's knees and gazed up at her with large, liquid eyes.
She swallowed nothing, her throat suddenly feeling coated with sandpaper. She licked cracked lips with a parched tongue as she locked eyes with the little child, the little child with a beating heart.
She felt it, she heard it, within every corner of her, the child's heartbeat rushing through every nerve in her body. Suddenly, she was alive, alive with hunger, burning like a dragon's breath, shooting and curling through her body, lighting up her eyes with cold, mindless fire. She could not stop it, could not stop the rush of animal craving, the desire above all else to sink her teeth into this child's soft, warm, living flesh.
It had been so long since she had fed. It seemed an eternity since she had last tasted that delicious nectar that now flowed so abundantly and so sweetly, just mere feet out of her grasp. Her heart began to race, beating out its own dry tattoo, as her breath came raggedly in her burning throat. Her jaw dropped slack, and her teeth grew long and cruelly pointed, almost with a craving of their own to be buried in the smooth, pink skin of the little girl's neck. On the edges of her consciousness, she heard the little girl speak to her.
"We're looking for a human settlement too. We're trying to find my family. You can come with us if you want to."
She couldn't have replied if the zombie had held a silver stake to her heart.
But he did not have a silver stake. What he did have he spun deftly in one hand and pointed it at her, squared his massive shoulders and crouched in a ready stance, coiled like a spring, ready to pounce on her. "I dare you to see how far you can get," the zombie growled savagely, gently nudging the girl back behind his hulking body.
he's found you out now, the voice said, trembling and frightened, and yanked her, slobbering and spitting, back from the edges of madness into regretful composure. She swallowed again, this time her throat was coated with thick, foul-tasting saliva, the last reserves of moisture left in her own dead body. She filled her lungs to capacity several times, each lungful of cold, stagnant air helping to bring her, grudgingly, back into the now.
"All right, you got me," she said, taking a step backward for good measure, as she eyed the two undead creatures, growling and spitting for all they were worth, trying to protect the little human girl, the girl that could have been, no, should have been, her first meal in weeks...
stop thinking about that and find a way out of this before you get hacked to bits by Mister Zombified and Rabid Rover...
"I relent," she cooed, and bowed low in submission, a gesture which both the zombie and the dog seemed to understand, but they both remained crouched and ready, knowing that they were all that stood between their little girl and the very teeth of the devil himself. "But in all honesty, methinks it would be in all three of your best interests if you were to relax a tad and listen to what I have to say."
Slowly but surely, her otherworldly charm was returning, giving her strength, calming the fire in her veins and the trembling in her voice. The mere presence of the girl, and the meal that she implied, gave her the illusion of returning strength, and the very real notion of leverage with which to bargain with the zombie.
"It seems to me we are all looking for the same thing: a human city. You're looking for this little girl's parents, and I am looking for a much-needed morsel of sustenance. In that light, our chance meeting seems quite fortuitous. Judging by that map in your pocket, sir," she inclined her head toward the zombie's right hip, where a hastily-folded piece of paper made its home, "you know where this proverbial pot of gold lies at the end of all of our rainbows. And, weak though I am, I do pack quite a punch when provoked, so I could provide an extra measure of protection, if it is needed." She even had the boldness to tip a smile into one corner of her mouth, barely parting her thin, grey lips to expose the pearly white point beneath.
"No, it is not needed," stated the zombie flatly. "We've got that department covered, as a matter of fact. What we don't need is something else to protect her from." The zombie's wide, white eyes locked accusingly on her.
But her smile only widened. "Indeed," she said, her voice like oil over ice. "I concur. Which is why I think you might want to reconsider letting me tag along. If you don't agree to let me join your little traveling circus, not only will you have your usual host of several score bloodthirsty zombies hunting you, but one irritated and very very hungry vampire on your tail. However, if I do get a ticket in, the old adage will once again prove true: 'The closer you are to danger, the further you are from harm.' In addition, I will lend whatever skills that remain with me to the cause of bringing this little girl safely to a human city and back into the loving arms of her parents, which, I will vow right here and now, not to eat."
Her ultimatum dropped, she waited nervously for the zombie to squeeze it all through the creaky laundry press of his mind. He sat motionless, his shovel still gripped in one dirty, decaying hand itching to hurl it at her.
The girl, peeking out from behind the zombie's legs again, switched her deer-eyed gaze from the zombie to her, looking tired, hungry, but remarkably tranquil. The unending drumbeat of her tiny heart stayed calm and slow, which surprised her, the vampire. Usually by now she could all but dance to the frantic beat of her victims' hearts. The girl most likely had seen her share of danger, and merely another breed of undead did not faze her. The vampire could not help but smile. She did not normally grow to like her food, but this girl might be the exception.
"I don't trust you as far as I could throw you," the zombie's croaking voice broke into her thoughts. She blinked and refocused her eyes on the little girl, calling back a bit of the old hunger into them for the zombie to see.
"I don't blame you," she nodded sagely, "but do keep in mind I'm twice as hard to kill as your less sentient brethren and half as patient." She added a sibilant note to her voice, entwining her words like a snake swiftly squeezing the life out of its victim. Her cold lip snapped up almost imperceptibly, and the zombie was visibly set aback. "If it makes you feel any better, you won't have to worry about me turning into a bat or any of that nonsense," she scoffed. "I'm just as stuck in my body as you are in yours, my friend."
Slowly and creakily, the zombie rose from his hunched pose onto two straight, tall legs. The dog raised its head as well, its pointed lupine ears sliding backward, away from their threatening front-pointed position. "Very well, then. Our choices are limited, as always."
She could have leapt for joy. Instead, she allowed a happy grin to split her flawless, cold face in two. "Indeed," she said. "But, given your choices, methinks you made the wise one." She stepped forward cautiously and held her hand out to the zombie. He did not take it, instead, glared at it coldly, and then raised his eyes to hers, distrust and contempt boiling in them like poison. Before she could blink, the zombie spun his shovel around with inhuman swiftness, its vicious point glinting inches from her pale throat.
"Methinks you'd be wise to never do so much as glance her way," the zombie warned, jabbing his head back at the little girl. "As long as you're with us, you go with your mouth and your hands tied. Tightly."
Her jaw dropped. "Hey now, I'm not your prisoner!"
"It's either that or I staple you to the wall and leave you there."
She swallowed hard. His low, dangerous voice and his eyes assured her he was as grave as the ground from which he had escaped.
"It seems I'm not the only one with limited options," he growled, and she felt sure he would have smiled if he could.
A resigned sigh blew out of the corner of her mouth. "All right, a deal's a deal." She stood still and quiet as the zombie sheathed his shovel, plodded toward her and ripped a long strip off the hem of his pants, twisting it into a makeshift rope in his hands.
"Turn around."
She obeyed, and felt her hands being crossed at the wrists and the cloth being wound around them. She gritted her teeth as the zombie roughly tied her bonds, making them dig painfully into her skin. "Hey, the rope's kinda tight, there, Spanky," she spat.
"That's the point... Spanky." He spat back, clamped a filthy, heavy hand on her shoulder, and spun her around. Rrrrrrrrip, went the thick fabric of his other leg, and she watched the zombie's powerful shoulders flex and bulge as he twisted and spun the strip into more rope until it creaked with protest, then snapped it straight very close to her face. "Open your mouth," the zombie rumbled, his rotting mandible making slight squelching noises as it rubbed against the fleshy joint of his skull.
The vampire blinked. "No way am I going to let you put that in my mouth. Who knows how long it's been since you washed— "
The zombie's thick arms shot out, thrusting the rope between her milky-white fangs and over her tongue, choking her. But he did not give her a chance to gag; she felt the rope jerked tight at the back of her head and knotted. She doubled over, coughing and gagging, the rough-hewn fabric cutting the corners of her mouth.
The zombie stepped back and admired his handiwork. "Much better." A raspy chuckle echoed from his dead throat.
She shot him a venomous glare that could have melted cast iron and bared her fangs, her mouth forced half open. As if in an afterthought, the zombie brought his knee up and ripped a third, wider strip off his pants leg and twisted the ends between his thumb and forefinger.
"To complete the look..." He stepped behind her and muzzled her with the improvised bandana, denying her even the remotest chance of using her fangs against his young charge.
Righteous anger now tearing full strength through her, she considered briefly kicking her leg up behind her, catching the zombie between his legs, but she thought better of it. Not only would it make him more angry, but what would have hurt probably hadn't been there in years, if not decades. She settled for hissing at him impotently, feeling helpless, at the mercy of a strangely sentient, very powerful zombie.
"All right, then." He backed away from her toward his two companions, and settled huge fists onto muscular hips. "I think we're ready now, what do you think, Cerberus?" He moved his dead-eyed gaze from her to his massive, slobbering dog, who made a thick woofing sound in the depths of its broad chest. "Let's go." He beckoned her with a single decayed finger and moved off, the girl and the dog close on his heels.
Muttering curses around the disgusting thing in her mouth, she followed him, her head down.