“We have to make sure that the brains are eaten, the evidence destroyed,” I told him. “Otherwise, hundreds and hundreds of zombies will descend once the aroma hits them. And that we have to make sure doesn’t happen. It’ll tip her off for certain. Plus, the guards have to come back before she realizes they’re missing. And we have to sneak in while they’re gone.”
He nodded. “Right.”
“And what if the brains don’t work? What if they really do need to be fresh?”
“Backup plan?”
I looked his way. “Which is?”
He looked my way. “Beats me. I just barely came up with the one we came up with.” He looked ahead, to the nightclub cast in moonglow, to the guards who were nothing more than ominous shadows now. “In any case, we at least have to try.”
Fifty feet became forty, forty to thirty, frozen zombies on all sides, milling ones at the periphery, perhaps a hundred or so that we could make out in the darkness. Which meant that there was plenty of room for the guards to move in, to dine and to return to their posts, all without anyone being the wiser. It would work. It had to work.
Sensing my worry, Ricky turned and smiled. “Set the jar down, Creature. Then lift the lid and start moving as quickly as you can toward the entrance. And don’t worry. We’ll be inside before you know it.”
I nodded and did as he said. The lid was sealed, but zombies, though restricted in terms of flexibility, still have terrific strength, especially since we don’t feel pain and can keep twisting and pulling to our nonbeating heart’s content. And so, a minute or so later, the lid came undone, the aroma of brains and formaldehyde permeating the night air.
Oh how those zombies groaned then, moaned and groaned and grunted up a veritable storm, the frozen ones fairly trembling, trying to break from my commands, the peripheral zombies heading in, slowly and surely. I pointed dead, as it were, ahead. “Look,” I managed to say.
Ricky clapped. Or at least tried to. “They’re coming this way. The guards. All of them.”
He started moving in their direction, fast as his legs would allow. I did the same, both of us hurtling our bodies toward the building. The guards passed us midway, their moans as loud as the others, all of them streaming toward their first meal in centuries, more than likely.
I turned as we reached the entrance, a crush of zombies now standing where we’d come from, a black mass of them, the moans louder from the epicenter.
“Yum,” I croaked out.
“Ditto,” said he. “Now, inside we go.
And inside we went.
Inside the belly of the beast, that is.
Belly of the Beast
Inside was nothing like outside. That is to say, while the inside was certainly filled with zombies, hundreds and hundreds of them, absolutely nothing else was even remotely similar between the two. Mainly because the club, unlike the streets we’d come from, was brilliantly lit, ancient disco lights turning and churning and swiveling, beaming a rainbow of colors across every square inch of space as they bounced against one of the largest disco balls I’d ever seen. The music blared, Donna Summer’s voice instantly filling my head as a soft moan escaped from between my lips.
“Home,” I instinctively rasped.
“Circa 1978.”
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, reverently. Now, suffice it say, I’d been trapped in a salt factory in Utah for the past few hundred years, so even a swatch of something other than concrete-beige or steely-gray would’ve set my soul on fire, but this, well now, this was truly magical—apart from the milling undead, of course, the sound of them, the stench of them, rising above the music like a layer of fog.
I then gazed around. Everything was solar-powered, it looked like, judging from the skylights you could peek up through. But as to the whereabouts of the queen bee, that still remained to be seen.
“It’s, um, different,” Ricky said, amending my statement.
I turned to him. “Trust me, different is next to near impossible these days. Better revel in it while you can.”
Further inside the belly of the beast we walked. The zombies here were like the zombies outside. That is to say, they were unthinking, unfeeling, simply shuffling to and fro, all of them clearly under Blondella’s spell. This I surmised because none of them paid heed to my commands. Stupid zombies.
“It looks like she’s amassing an army in here, Creature,” Ricky said, just above the din.
I nodded. “But I wonder what’s taken her so long? She could’ve done this ages and ages ago.”
“No, you could’ve done this ages and ages ago. The jury is still out on her,” he retorted.
I moved to the center of the disco floor, the lights drenching us in color, turning our standard shades of gray and muted purple to brilliant orange and red and yellow. I shuffled my feet, dancing(ish) for the first time in centuries. It felt, surprisingly, well, fanfuckingtastic. “You lost me,” I eventually replied, finally taking in what he’d said.
He shuffled next to me. I grinned. After all, I was pretty sure that I’d never danced with a straight guy before, let alone a straight undead one. First time for everything, I supposed. And then he explained, “The order you went in was human, solar flare, dead, undead. The order she went in was human, solar flare, living, dead, undead. So perhaps her talents are not like yours. Perhaps whatever caused her transformation impaired her ability to act. Until now.”