Desperate Souls (11 page)

The Caucasian squeezed Jake’s torso harder, forcing the air from his lungs. With his breathing halted, Jake heard his heart hammering that much clearer. Bending his legs at the knees, he raised his feet off the floor, throwing the Caucasian zombie off balance. As the creature teetered forward because of the extra weight in its arms, Jake planted his feet back on the floor and kicked backwards with all his strength. This propelled him and the Caucasian zombie straight back into the Hispanic zombie, and all three of them tumbled down the stairs.

Holding on to both guns for dear life, Jake heard metal clattering down the stairs, but he couldn’t tell which weapons had been dropped. Halfway down, the Caucasian zombie released Jake, who rolled across the lobby floor.

Leaping to his feet in the bright lobby, Jake glanced out the front glass doors as the zombies rolled onto the lobby floor. Reflections in the glass made it impossible to see the Manhattan nightlife outside, so he had no idea if any passersby had witnessed the sudden arrival of him and his attackers.

As the zombies climbed to their feet, he stepped into the alcove leading to the basement door, out of sight of anyone who might be watching. The zombies’ eyes seemed to focus on him at the same time, like identical digital cameras, and they gathered up their weapons and lumbered toward him in unison. Jamming the empty Beretta into his waistband, he raised the Glock in both hands and squeezed off a shot.

The round tore into the dead center of the Caucasian zombie’s forehead, and the creature fell backwards and splayed across the stairs, out of public view except for one foot. The man’s flickering soul rose from the head wound and faded.

Damn good shot,
Jake thought with pride as he trained his Glock on the Hispanic zombie’s head and squeezed the trigger. The barrel locked back in plain sight, the gun out of ammunition.

Shit!

The Hispanic zombie charged at Jake, who seized the thing’s wrists and forced the weapons away from where they could do him harm. The dead thing head butted him, and he saw spots before his eyes as his forehead turned numb. They grappled in the corner; then Jake lunged for the edge of the narrow stairway leading to the basement. Hurling the zombie into the space below, he made sure it didn’t take him along for the ride.

The zombie struck the stairs face-first and flipped heels over head on its way down. As Jake raced after it, he heard metal scraping cement. The zombie hit the floor and rolled, then stood before Jake could reach him. Its face had collapsed into a mostly unrecognizable mass of bone and tissue.

Glimpsing the .45 on the floor ten feet behind its owner and the machete in the dead thing’s right hand, Jake leapt into the air with his legs before him.
I
hope he doesn’t cut my feet off…

The zombie took the impact full in its chest and spiraled backwards, the machete flying from its hand. Ready for action as he landed on the floor, Jake sprang to his feet. The zombie rose, made eye contact with Jake, then looked from left to right, calculating the distance to each weapon.

Go for the machete, Monte. Go for the machete.

It went for the .45.

Panic drove Jake scrambling for the machete. Out of the corner of his left eye, he glimpsed the zombie hunching over for the gun. Jake’s hands closed around the machete’s handle. The zombie turned toward him, swinging the .45 in his direction. Jake had no choice but to leave himself fully exposed as he cocked the machete with both hands, bringing his arms behind his head. It took all his willpower to ignore the gun’s barrel and concentrate on the zombie’s crown as he brought the machete down with all the force he could muster.

An instant later, the machete cleaved the creature’s head, coming to a stop between its eyes. Gray fluid containing chunks of pink spurted out of the wound. Jake waited for the gun to fire, but instead, it slipped from the Hispanic man’s hand, and a moment later, the zombie joined it in a heap on the floor.

With his chest rising and falling, Jake watched the man’s flickering soul rise and fade.

Jake seized the .45 and ran upstairs to the lobby. Concealing the gun from the glass doors behind him, he raced to the black metal door and flung it open. He switched on the overhead light and scanned the storage area for any more of the damned dead things. Satisfied that he was alone, he crossed the cluttered space to a wide metal door in the back. As expected, the locks on the door had been broken. If he had not answered the call from the alarm company, the dispatcher would have called the police, and some unsuspecting uniforms would have been in store for four big surprises.

They wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t,
he reasoned.
They must have followed me from One PP.

This begged the question: how large was this network of dead things? He had seen three of them dealing drugs on Flatbush Avenue, four had chased him over the Brooklyn Bridge, and four more had invaded the little office building. That made eleven that he had encountered in one night.

And I cut that number in half, give or take a head.

On his way up the stairs to the fourth floor, Jake collected the various weapons that his assailants had dropped. He estimated that he had only two hours remaining before sunrise, which left him little time to accomplish what needed to be done. Entering the slop sink room on his floor, he opened the garbage chute and deposited the guns and two of the machetes, which banged and echoed their way down to the basement trash compactor.

Inside his office, he set the two remaining machetes on top of his safe for further inspection later and fetched a digital still camera, an ink pad, and several sheets of blank paper. He photographed each of the dead things from several angles, working his way down to the basement. When he attempted to fingerprint them, he made a shocking discovery: the ends of each finger had been surgically removed and sutured.

What the hell?

Inspecting the insides of their mouths, he saw that all their teeth had been removed, reducing their gums to misshapen masses of gray tissue. The zombie that had attempted to bite him had not been an isolated case. With a sickening feeling in his gut, he removed their shoes and peeled off their socks. The ends of their toes had been cut off and sutured with catgut.

No wonder they staggered around like Boris Karloff in elevator shoes. Someone went to pretty extreme lengths to make sure these things can’t be identified.

Their flesh felt like shoe leather, which explained why their faces had been so inexpressive, besides the fact they were dead.

After returning the camera and fingerprint documents to his office, Jake seized the Chinese and black zombies by their wrists and dragged them into the waiting elevator. Possessing no desire to ride in the cramped elevator with two corpses, he thumbed the button for the basement and stepped out just before the door closed. He returned to his office and took a spare blanket from his bedroom closet, then took the stairs.

It was easy enough to cover the Caucasian zombie with the blanket, harder to sling the corpse over his shoulder and carry it to the alcove, where he dumped the thing without ceremony and watched it flop and thud its way to the basement below.

With all the assassins gathered together, he opened the large, curved hatch of the industrial garbage compactor. The weapons he had dropped down the chute rested atop garbage waiting to be crushed. As he understood it, when a certain weight of garbage had accumulated, the compactor automatically went to work. He loaded the corpses into the machine in the order in which he had put them down. They seemed far heavier now, as his muscles had grown fatigued.

With their arms and legs entangled, blank eyes staring at him, he closed the hatch and pressed the red button on the compactor’s side. Issuing a great rumble, the compactor folded, crushed, and packed the human bones and flesh into a dense package that it forced deep into its bowels, ready for pickup.

One hour later, after sweeping and scrubbing the sawdust and liquefied brains from the walls and floors, Jake sat at his desk, with the Afterlife file uploaded again, and keyed a single word into the search engine:
voodoo.

An hour after that, with the sun rising, he grabbed a round container and poured salt across each doorway of his office.

“Grandma! Grandma!”

Carmen Rodriguez awoke with a start, snapping her head up. She caught her breath. “What is it, Victor?”

The boy stood beside her bed. “Someone’s trying to get in!”

Seeing the panic in her young grandson’s eyes, she threw back her bedsheet and climbed out of bed, her nightgown sticking to her body. She snatched the wooden baseball bat from where she left it propped against her bedroom doorframe and rushed past the bathroom and the bedroom that Victor had shared with Louis.

Early morning light shone through the blinds in the kitchen and living room, and as she rounded the corner, her heart jumped in her chest. Through the front door, open six inches but held in place by the chain lock, she saw her other grandson, Louis, standing in the green hallway and staring at her with flat, expressionless eyes.

Dios mio!

She felt Victor clinging to her nightgown, the poor boy. Raising the bat, she said, “Louis, you get out of here, boy. I don’t care if you are blood—you set one foot in this apartment, and I will do you some serious harm.”

Louis kept looking at her with unblinking eyes, which zeroed in on Victor. A terrible moment passed, and then he stepped back from the door.

Carmen took a deep breath and exhaled. Louis wasn’t the first boy who had tried to menace her only to back down. Just the first dead one. Why had he come home? Perhaps it had been a mistake for her to hire that private investigator. She hurried to the door, intending to close it again and throw the locks, but as her fleshy fingers closed around the knob, a long blade seemed to materialize out of nowhere, shearing the chain on the door in a shower of sparks.

“Grandma!”

Carmen heard the terror in Victor’s voice. As she moved away, the door flew open and crashed into the far wall, and Louis stepped inside holding a deadly looking machete. She raised the bat again, and he mimicked her movement with the machete.

The last thing she heard as the long blade whistled down toward her eyes was Victor screaming.

Gary Brown and Frank Beck sat in the front seat of their unmarked car, observing the Shaft bar across 116th Street. The bar had closed at 4:00 a.m., and the Narcotics detectives arrived an hour later. Now streaks of pink outlined the buildings on either side of the street as the sun poised to emerge from the darkness. A homeless man dug through the contents of an orange metal trash can, and a pimp waited for his top girl to return from a “date,” location unknown. The short Guatemalan wore a leather vest over his muscular torso and a beaded choker around his neck.

“Looks like someone’s impatient for his breakfast money,” Frank said as he pulled a plastic bag filled with white powder out of his jacket pocket. He sprinkled cocaine on the passenger-side dashboard.