Michael Ford - Z

“Where would a z even hide in one of these?” Charlie asked when they were halfway down the hall and hadn’t found anything.

“Could be a small one,” Josh reminded her. “A kid.”

Charlie looked at him. “Even Clatter wouldn’t do that,” she said. “Would he?”

“I don’t know,” Josh answered. “Until a few hours ago I wouldn’t have believed any of this.”

They reached the end of the first hallway without finding anything, and the second hallway seemed to be a mirror image of the first. By the time they’d checked the fourth room on that side, Josh was getting anxious. Where were all the meatbags? He looked at his watch. Ten minutes had passed. They had five left.

“This is like one of those nightmares where you’re trying to get out of a place and keep coming back to the same door,” Charlie remarked as they approached the next room.

The next second Josh was on the floor and a horribly disfigured face was hovering over his. He recognized it as the woman whose cell he’d looked into in the lab. She gnashed her teeth, flecking him with spit. He noticed that most of her tongue had been chewed off, leaving her with a bloody stump that twitched from side to side as she tried to talk.

Charlie grabbed the woman by the collar and pulled her back. With a ripping sound the woman’s dress tore, and Charlie slipped sideways. Josh could smell the woman’s breath as she bent closer and closer. It was worse than the smell in the sewers, reeking of blood and decay.

Josh heard footsteps, and suddenly the woman was pulled away from him, her bloody fingertips clawing at him as she was lifted up. He heard Firecracker yell, “Stay down!” and then felt heat on his skin as a stream of fire erupted over him. A gurgling scream filled the air, followed by the horrible stench of burning meat.

Josh rolled over and onto his knees. As he stood, he saw something on the floor and picked it up. It was a name tag, the kind that people wore at meetings or parties when they wanted to identify one another. HELLO, it said. MY NAME IS. Below this someone had printed, in perfectly even letters, ALICE.

“What is that?” Charlie asked as she peered over Josh’s shoulder.

“He wants us to know their names,” Josh replied. “He’s reminding us that they’re human.” For reasons he couldn’t understand, he folded the tag in half and tucked into the pocket of his jeans. “First Howard, and now Alice,” he said. “I wonder who’s next.”

“Did you guys find anything?” Charlie asked Scrawl.

“Just our friend Howard,” Scrawl answered. “Is she your only one?”

Josh nodded. “Ten more,” he said.

“And three floors,” added Charlie. “Why do I think most of those ten won’t be on floors three or two?”

“He’s saving them for us,” Josh agreed. “But we still have to check every floor. He’s making sure we don’t have much time when we get to the end.”

Charlie looked around, scanning the hallway for cameras. “Are you having fun?” she yelled. “Are you getting all this, you sick bastards?”

Josh took her arm. “Come on,” he said gently. “Time’s up for this floor.”

They took the stairs to the third floor in single file, with Josh leading. As they descended, the condition of the walls deteriorated. Huge chunks of plaster were missing, exposing the wood beneath. Broken pipes protruded like bones from the splintered ceiling, and only a few bulbs still emitted any light. What little they did was thin and watery. Josh turned on the light on his flamethrower, but nothing happened. He clicked it half a dozen times to make sure. The others did the same, with no better results.

“Great,” Josh said.

As planned, they switched partners, and Firecracker gave Charlie his watch. Josh, now with Firecracker, took the left-hand hallway. Unlike the fourth floor, the third was a mixture of rooms. The first one they came to was an examining room. The floor was cluttered with old instruments, and a tattered eye chart hung on one wall. A discarded hospital gown, stained and torn, lay across the examination table. Other than that, the room was empty.

Another exam room sat next to the first. As Josh swung the door open, a figure turned toward him. It was a man holding something in his hand. The light in the room was burned out, and it was impossible to see exactly what it was, but Josh thought he saw something wet hanging from the end.

He lifted his flamethrower as the zombie shambled toward the door. He waited until he could read the name on the man’s tag—RICHARD—and then aimed at his chest. Just before he hit the trigger, Josh realized what the man was carrying was a hand. Veins and tendons dripped from the wrist where it had been broken from the arm, and on one of the fingers was a ring.

He has both of his hands, Josh thought as he stared at the zombie. That means that one belongs to someone else.

The man dropped the hand, and Josh stared at it. Something about the ring was familiar to him, although he couldn’t place it. It looked like the body of a snake coiled around the finger, its head biting its tail to form a circle.

“Get down!”

Firecracker’s voice startled Josh. He looked up just in time to see the zombie reaching for him. Instinctively falling to his knees, he covered his head with his hands as Firecracker’s flamethrower roared into action. The zombie wheeled back, shrieking.

“Close the door,” Firecracker said. “Roast him.”

Josh started to do that, then saw the hand again. Trying not to think about it, he reached out and grabbed it, flinging it outside the room. Firecracker cried out in disgust. “What are you doing?”

Josh slammed the door and pressed his back against it as the zombie tried to get out by ramming his body again and again into the door. Josh could feel the heat from the flames passing through the metal, and every time the zombie hit the door, he jolted Josh forward. But slowly the hits became less and less forceful, until finally they stopped completely.

After checking to make sure the zombie was really dead, Josh turned back to the hand. He’d been staring at it while holding the zombie back but had come no closer to figuring out why the ring triggered something in his brain. He knelt and reached for the hand.

“Don’t touch it,” Firecracker warned. “It’s got blood all over it. You get that in you and you might as well be that guy,” he added, gesturing at the closed door. Smoke was seeping out from underneath it and filling the hallway. It burned Josh’s eyes.

“I don’t have any cuts on me,” Josh said as he reached out and pulled the ring from the finger. It came off easily, and he wiped it on his jeans. “I’ve seen this ring before,” he said. “I just can’t remember where.”

A muffled scream came from somewhere else in the building, interrupting his thoughts. “Charlie?” Firecracker asked.

Josh shook his head. “No.” He put the ring in his pocket, and he and Firecracker ran down the hall. Josh completely forgot about checking the rooms until they started to turn the corner into the next corridor. He stopped. “We should go back,” he said to Firecracker.

The scream came again, this time louder and more frenzied. Josh looked down the hall just as someone rounded the corner, running straight for them. Whoever it was moved much more quickly than zombies usually did, with a rolling gait that carried the body forward in weird zigzagging steps.

For a moment Josh was afraid it was Charlie, but in the dim light it was impossible to tell. Then two more figures came around the corner. He saw flames flickering at the ends of two torches and knew the figures were Charlie and Scrawl. Which meant that the screaming figure was a z.