PART OF US. YOU ARE OUR ZOMBIE."
A week later, the starving Hank stumbled into the local zombie bar and met with a Consortium zombie. "Shall we save you or eat you?" she asked, as he munched down his first sandwich in weeks. "Your human half is far too skinny to provide us much nourishment, and the neighborhood area your colony controls isn't worth much. Tell you what: we'll give you a month to turn things around, then we'll assess your situation again. Until then we'll give you one human meal and two pounds of grain a day for your colony. That is all that we will invest. At the moment you simply aren't worth anything to us. Show us some initiative and success and maybe we'll let you live, zombie and colony."
Initiative? Really? That would be tough. For one thing he had to stay within four city-blocks of the warehouse, or he would be out of colony range, and his heart and other synapse-triggered body functions would stop. The colony steadfastly refused to move or become mobile. For another thing he was a filthy stinking bum. And now he was also a zombie. And he lacked human background things such as a credit rating or relevant education or work history. Such things tended to be somewhat off-putting to most potential employers and their potential customers.
He had never developed the knowledge or skills for a job: he had even dropped out of high school. His IQ had jumped about ten points as a zombie but was still on the wrong side of the bell curve. He was getting odd-jobs and scraps at the restaurant again, but it wasn't enough. Not with winter coming. Winters here weren't as cold as back home in North Dakota, but they got more snow here; typically well over a hundred inches a winter.
He was living now in a tarp-covered carton near the warehouse that would doubtless be crushed by the next heavy snowfall. It irked him that the nearby nice warm warehouse that he had been evicted from wasn't even used very much, as far as he could tell. At first there were sounds of construction and a lot of truck deliveries, but lately he heard almost nothing. It pissed him off. What a waste of nice warm space!
Lately once in a great while an unmarked van or black sedan came to or left the warehouse, and he even caught glimpses of the thugs that had murdered him. Were they mobsters? Probably. What else could they be? They were big, tough looking men, and whatever suicidal human impulses he had for revenge were fortunately suppressed by his jants.
Currently restaurant scraps and Hank's daily visits to the nearby zombie bar kept both the colony and its human alive. But in three days his trial month would be up and the Consortium would probably decide to cut off aid or worse. And then his colony would have to cut him off. The colony, if it wasn't outright invaded and destroyed by the Consortium, would then essentially suspend operations till spring. Maybe they could do better next year. Maybe they would acquire a new, more successful zombie human. On the plus side Hank's body would probably feed the mostly inactive colony until spring. Nice to be useful, Hank figured.
As he sat in his carton staring out at the warehouse his labored thoughts drifted to what the old Indian had said at the zombie bar the night before. What was the dude's name? Sly Snake? The Indian was big, tough looking, and scarred, as though he had fought in a hundred hard-fought battles. Most strange, he was telepathic, and could speak directly to jant colonies. "Look for anything unusual and search for these tastes," he had said, as he passed around a little swatch of cloth for jants at the table to sample with their sensitive antennae. Then the jants scurried to all the zombies in the bar, spreading the tastes to their med-ticks, including even Hank's. "You will be greatly rewarded if you find those we seek: two missing young female humans of the Mohawk Tribe."
The old Mohawk guy lived in Greenpoint only a couple of miles to the south, one of the other rogue zombies told Hank later. "They know jant and Stone-Coat ways and have influence with the Consortium. They can deliver on their vague promise for rewards. Your colony can talk to the Consortium to quickly reach Sly Snake if you find the missing girls."
A Mob guy in the bar then bought everyone drinks and also promised rewards if the missing Mohawk girls were found. Hank felt doubly motivated, at least until the free apple juice was gone.
In the morning Hank watched a dozen vans, a dozen big tractor-trailer trucks, and a black SUV leave the warehouse in haste, and he idly wondered what the Mohawk's phrase 'anything unusual' meant. He had only vague notions of what was 'usual' and what wasn't. But all that warehouse commotion seemed just a bit strange. But now the commotion was long over with and today the warehouse was mostly quiet. He thought that he heard a thunderous banging for a little while but it stopped after only a short time. Then he heard nothing more for hours. Nothing unusual, he decided. He had no reason to contact Sly Snake. So soon he would dead-dead. What will it be like to be dead-dead, he wondered?
Meanwhile not far from where he sat, a tiny near-blind creature wearing a dirty, ragged sort of harness was slowly working its way towards him. The little mole reached snow and despite the paralyzing cold continued to dig upwards through it towards the light, driven by a vague but powerful fear.
****