Weston Ochse: Age of Blood

Emily Withers had been partying a little too hard the last few days. In fact, she could honestly say she’d drunk more tequila than water, which was why she was determined to stay sober for at least the next few hours. Four days in Cabo San Lucas, living the vida loca like the end of the world was around the corner, wasn’t enough for her to forget that she was the daughter of a serving United States senator; there were people who were just dying to get a picture of her they could use to embarrass her father.

It had happened only once before, during her freshman year in college. Her sorority sisters had dropped her and the other pledges on the other side of campus, with the command to run back to the sorority house. Running fast wasn’t a problem. That she and the other pledges had been naked was. As it turned out, there’d been only a blurred image of her naked backside as she rounded the corner of the math and science building. But the papers ran the picture alongside one of her father’s speeches on funding public education. The late-night talk show hosts had a field day. Her father was less than impressed and spoke to her at length about the need to pay attention and how she wasn’t like other girls. She could have ignored it, but she loved and respected her father. She was serious when she told him it would never happen again.

Which was why for at least the next twelve hours she was going to behave like a nun assigned to the Vatican. No booze. No sex. No cavorting. Just clean living.

She’d been sitting on the balcony all night, staring at the deep blue water of the Sea of Cortez. Everyone else was passed out. She’d stopped drinking around ten and instead had spent the evening listening to those around her, watching the lights of the passing ships, and feeling oddly self-aware.

Now, with the vacation resort asleep behind her, she approached the water. She’d left her shoes and shorts in a pile, along with her cell phone and room key, and wore only the two-piece bikini she’d bought especially for this trip. She dipped a toe in the gently lapping water. It was warmer than she’d expected. She’d thought it might be bracing, but protected from the Pacific by the Baja Peninsula and fueled by the Mexican sun, the water was bathtub warm.

She decided to go for a swim and clear her head. She backed up a few feet, then ran into the water, hopping over and through the waves until she was deep enough that she couldn’t feel the bottom. Then she began to swim, her lurching stroke anything but graceful. She carved through the water for a full minute, then stopped, out of breath. She turned as she bobbed up and down in the sea and stared at the many pinpoints of brightness that were Cabo San Lucas. The glittering lights of the Pueblo Bonita Resort and Club Cascadas de Baja across the water became storybook in her tired vision. They looked nothing like the bacchanal palaces they really were. From here they could have made up a princess’s castle. They could have been her castle.

She bobbed gently for a moment.

Who was she kidding? She was too old to be a princess. Hell, she was too old to be trying to relive spring break. She was twenty-seven, had an MBA from Vanderbilt, and was acting like a girl straight off the farm. Somewhere between her fifth shot of the night and the game of beer pong, she’d looked up and realized that she wasn’t having any fun.

A wave beneath her made her rise gently, then fall back.

She was suddenly aware how far out she was. Were there sharks in the Sea of Cortez? After seeing Jaws, she used to think there were sharks everywhere.

Another wave. This time she rose higher.

She began to paddle madly back to shore. She felt the adrenaline rush as fear shot through her muscles. She could see the white line of surf where it met the beach, and farther up, her pile of clothes.

Something touched her foot.

She shrieked and sucked water into her lungs. She couldn’t continue. She hacked and coughed.

Something touched her other foot and caught it, jerking her down. She disappeared below the water for a second, then popped back up, gasping.

She reared her head back to scream, but was suddenly jerked beneath the water again. She felt a tremendous pressure against her legs. She began moving forward at high speed, her mouth open as she swallowed the entire ocean. For one brief moment she was lifted out of the water, the lights of the resort like a beacon of hope. She glanced down to see the scales of a creature reflecting those lights. Then she was down, into the water, deeper, deeper, until she couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything at all.

That’ll Leave A Mark was spray-painted in garish Day-Glo pink across the front of a seventeenth-century headstone. The out-of-the-way and run-down cemetery was the perfect setting for a horror movie. The ambience was complete with Spanish-moss-hung ancient trees, low ground fog, aboveground crypts crouching like intruders, anomalous statues that could be shrines to the elder gods, and the total absence of sound, except for a tinkling of zydeco on the extreme edge of hearing. And the characters, the complement of characters, inclusive of the astonishingly believable voodoo queen, were as terrifying as they were fantastic. So Petty Officer First Class Jack Walker was pretty pleased with himself that he made this observation while perched high in a tree far away from the action and armed with a sniper rifle.

Only this wasn’t a movie. Through his scope, Walker watched as Voodoo Queen Madame Laboy stood imperiously on the raised sarcophagus behind a wall of bulletproof glass, her arms outstretched as if she were the puppeteer for the vast array of undead which were pulling themselves upright from where they lay on the ground. More than a dozen naked zombies clawed their way to their feet, their jerky movements as they tried to operate their dead limbs increasing the creep factor tenfold. Some of them still had Y-incisions from medical-school students’ inexpert autopsies. Others were fresher, their mortal wounds still weeping fluid, their expressions full of surprise as if they’d just figured out they were no longer alive.

Walker swung the long barrel of the Stoner SR-25 sniper rifle back and forth as he continued observing the scene through the Leupold Mark 4 scope. The other four members of SEAL Team 666 huddled in the middle of the cemetery. Holmes, Laws, YaYa, and the new guy, Yank, stood roughly back-to-back. They wore body armor, including Kevlar forearm pads, Kevlar gloves, and Kevlar shin guards. They each held a slender two-foot metal baton in one hand and a Marine Ka-Bar in the other. Their heads were completely covered with metal helmets, depriving them of sight, sound, and smell. If they were to survive, it would be by touch alone.

The zombies were pretty much as Walker expected—shamblers. Like sailors after a forty-eight-hour drinking jag in Balibago, Philippines. Several bumped into crypts and were redirected.

Walker’s gaze was drawn back to Madame Laboy as she started to sing something in low, guttural French. A mishmash of red and purple satin covered her matronly figure. Her graying hair was piled high and infused with copper coils. Enough of her beauty remained that she could still command a room’s attention, not to mention a pantheon of the undead in a Southern gothic cemetery.