Then there was a pop followed by a fizzzzz and a squeal from the seaweed monster.
“Pop, pop, fizz, fizz,” I sang, turning around to face the thing. “Oh, what a relief it is…”
The satchel charge was a mixture of a white phosphorus grenade for trigger, a couple of pounds of thermite, and some plastic film cans filled with jellied kerosene for longer lasting burning. Milo had made it.
The monster was very wet and thus didn’t burn very well. But the nasty charge was so hot it just kind of melted right through its body and burned a hole in the asphalt, sticking the whole thing in place. It wasn’t going anywhere. Just flopping spastically, curling up around the fire and sort of banshee wailing in a weird, high, piping tone.
“Want me to bring over the flamethrower?” Sam yelled.
“Nah,” I said as the thing finally settled down and was good seaweed. “Think that’s got it.”
To answer the professional question: Muldjewangk. Although it was one of a half dozen creatures with the same name. FUCCN was 57862-4 in this case. PUFF, twenty grand.
To answer the obvious question: the young lady was so excited to meet a top-secret Navy SEAL who was also a member of Hoodoo Squad that she quickly forgot her masticated boyfriend. We nearly had a little war over that. Hitting on girls at incidents was my standard way of finding dates. I didn’t need some redneck pinniped sticking his ball-balancing nose in where it didn’t belong. On the other hand, we had a lot of incidents and a lot of girls to chat up. Honestly, picking up girls in New Orleans was sort of like…clubbing baby seals.
When we had time.
* * *
“I understand that we need to get this under control,” Agent Robinson told us. “But we also need you to be discreet. Do you even understand the meaning of the word?”
This time Decay and I had been dispatched to cover a shambler outbreak in Metairie Cemetery. Problem being, the outbreak was daytime, Metairie was right off I-10, which was ground level at that point and since it was the middle of the day, the interstate would be busy. Fortunately, as far as we knew at that time, the outbreak was on the back side of the cemetery and away from the interstate. And Metairie had fences so they shouldn’t get out.
“We’ll do the best we can considering we’re going to be shooting zombies in broad daylight in a very large cemetery. I promise discretion to the point of not using a rocket launcher because it’s generally pointless with shamblers. Do we have a positive location of the outbreak?”
“According to the caretaker it’s over by Iris Avenue.” Lieutenant Hale was another promoted sergeant in SIU. The good part about working SIU was the promotions tended to be fast. The bad part was that it was like getting promoted in World War II, because you were stepping into a dead man’s shoes.
“Perimeter shut down?”
“Sort of,” Hale said.
“Define ‘sort of.’”
Hale frowned. “Ask the G-man.”
“The outbreak is in a remote part of the cemetery,” Robinson declared. “I saw no reason to surround the place with police cars. That just causes more people to notice.”
“Agent, in this town, you try for subtle, it’s going to bite you in the ass. So I’d suggest you put cars on every entrance, put them along the fences, and have some on patrol.”
“Clearly you don’t understand the meaning of discreet. Let me do my job and you do yours, Hunter.”
“I was trying to help,” I said, opening up Honeybear’s door.
“Where are you going?” Robinson demanded.
The MCB agent was really confusing poor Decay. “Into the cemetery?”
“In a car? What part of discreet was unclear?”
“You keep using that word,” Decay said, climbing in the passenger seat. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
“We’re sure as hell not going to walk all over that fucker. It’s huge. And in the car we can break contact among other things. And, you know, not get bit? Also, from the point of view of any witnesses, it’s a lot better to have a car driving in a cemetery, normal, than having two guys rigged up like commandoes walking all over it, Abbie-normal. So let us do our job and you go do yours, Agent!”
* * *
“Finding all of these again is going to take all day,” Decay said as he shot another shambler in the head.
We were right by the Confederate monument circle, out of the car and dealing with a couple zombies that seemed to be headed in the general direction of Pontchartrain Expressway.
“Not our problem as long as we get tissue samples. That asshole Robinson can worry about it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Decay said, walking over to cut off the right ears.
I looked over my shoulder as I heard the blurt of a siren. Hale was driving up, sort of fast for a cemetery, and had hit it to get my attention. Hale pulled up next to me. “We got real problems now.”
“Which are?”
“Some shamblers got out the main east gate.”
“That’s right by the Pontchartrain off-ramp.” I blanched. “Don’t tell me…”
“Trucker just jackknifed when he hit a zombie on the interstate. There’s more wandering around the pileup. Traffic’s backing up to Metairie. And only one side’s backed up so all them tourists is driving right by a bunch of undead wandering around I-10.”
* * *
“There’s a time for discreet and a time to shut this the fuck down.”
The tractor trailer was parked across two lanes, shutting down traffic all by its lonesome. Problem being, the trucker had gotten out to check on the “person” he’d hit and been swarmed.
Zombies aren’t precise. Unless they are being directed by a necromancer, they just do their thing. They search for the living to feed on. They’re mostly attracted by sound, and anything that indicates a living human presence.
Like tourists honking horns at the “people” who had wandered onto the interstate. You can’t always get a good look from a car and while the people in the front, who had come screeching to a stop to avoid the truck wreck could see there was something seriously weird going on, all the other assholes behind them were honking their horns. Some of the zombies were heading up between the stopped cars, towards the honking. Others were trying to break into the cars. People were trying to drive through them and panicking. Just as we arrived a station wagon filled with a family plowed into the tractor trailer.
Most of I-10 was either elevated or lined by a low concrete wall. Opposite the east entrance to Metairie Cemetery there was an off-ramp from I-10 to Pontchartrain Boulevard. It was this off-ramp the zombies had used to get onto the interstate. Another was down on the off-ramp having been hit by a car which, probably driven by a local, had then sped off. Then a following car had stopped to help the “injured” person in the road. And that driver, female, had also been attacked. So that car was blocking the off-ramp. Not to mention the zombies still feasting on her warm corpse.
I rolled Honeybear up to the stopped car. “You got plenty of rounds?” I asked.
“Loaded up,” Decay said.
“Let’s do this.”
I rolled out of my door, hefted my Uzi and went to work. I hit the head of the driver as we passed.
I held my hand up to a car that was rolling forward, covered in zombies who were trying to get to the passengers inside. Again, another tourist family. I made eye contact with the male driver and just held my hand up like a traffic cop for him to stop. Then I pointed at his kids and put my left hand over my eyes. He and his wife got the message and turned around to cover their kids’ eyes.
Then we shot every zombie off that car in a couple of seconds, single taps to the head.
“Hey!” I yelled through the rolled-up window. “I know you want to get your family to safety but I need you to stay right here, blocking traffic! You’ll be okay!”
“You’re nuts!” the guy screamed. “They’re eating people!”
“Just stay here!” I hoped he’d listen. We n
eeded traffic stopped.
Decay had trotted over to the group around the wrecked station wagon. One had gotten through the cracked front window and to at least one of the parents in the front seat. He was clearing the ones around the car when I yanked open the back door and climbed in.
“Hi, folks,” I said, leaning over the front seat and shooting the female zombie in the head. The dad, driver again, was still alive. She’d been ripping at his carotid artery and he didn’t have much time left. The wife and mother, presumably, had climbed into the back seat to escape the undead and the kids had pushed even further back, up into the piled luggage in the cargo area.
“Medical is on the way,” I said, pulling out a bandage and putting it on the man’s neck. “I need you to apply pressure to this, ma’am. Now don’t go anywhere and just stay in the car. You’re going to be okay. We’ve got this.”
To make sure they didn’t leave, I took out the keys, then shot two of their tire. It sounds cruel but I’d already seen the bite mark on the mom’s arm. She needed to not leave town. And the kids were shortly going to be orphans.
It took a few minutes to clear the scene of walking dead. When we were done, the interstate was littered with bodies and still jammed up. Which was how it was going to have to stay until MCB had the bodies cleared and the scene under control. Including rounding up all the witnesses and bitten.
I didn’t like their job but I agreed with it. Pity the converse wasn’t true.
I’d leave it to the Feds to shoot the bitten in the head. There was probably more than that one mother and father. That was what MCB was for. Hopefully, Robinson would have the decency to do it at the hospital and away from the kids.
As we walked away from the scene, I heard the bark of a 10mm. I didn’t even look. I could tell by the screams and the direction it had come from the station wagon.
So much for decency.
* * *
There had not been another kifo eruption for weeks. I tried using the rune of Onesh I had picked up in Britain, hoping that it would point me toward evil sort of like Madam Courtney’s crystal charm. Only it did not work as advertised. It spent most of the time hanging from Honeybear’s mirror, doing basically nothing.
Until one day I was driving back from a call out with Decay and he noticed the rune had started to pull unnaturally, almost like it was magnetized. Since it hadn’t worked at all so far, there had to be a kifo worm really near.
The area was pretty standard New Orleans neighborhood. Narrow houses that went back much further than you’d expect. Some of them were barely ten feet wide and half a block deep. Some were brightly painted, others plain. All had bars on their windows. Fairly well kept up. Working class rather than ghetto. 424 South Clark was a duplex. Narrow, story and a half, white. There was a garage, apparently, on the bottom floor with living quarters on the top. The garage and upper were split.
“Cover story?” Decay asked as we got out.
“Depends on if they’re locals or not.” I was trying to play the new MCB’s game as much as possible but if they recognized us as Hoodoo Squad I’d just run that gambit.
The woman who answered the door was Hispanic, in her thirties and had apparently been sleeping from the look of it. We’d had to knock quite a long time to get her up.
“No buy!” She had a thick accent. There was an inner door and an outer barred and screened door. She’d opened the inner but clearly wasn’t opening the outer. “Go ’way!”
“Madam, we’re checking out a report of some trapped methane gas in the area,” I said in Spanish. “We just need to do some tests in your garage.”
“What kind of tests?” she asked suspiciously.
“Methane gas is naturally produced by decay. It can build up in enclosed lower areas and lead to spontaneous fires and even explosions.”
“Who you with?” she asked.
“The EPA,” I said.
Decay was wearing his usual cargo pants and boots and the scalp lock and piercings were sort of obvious. “You don’t look like EPA.”
“We’re contractors, ma’am.”
“I’m calling the police.” She started closing the door.
“Good. Ask for the Sheriff’s Special Investigations Unit.” I pulled out an MHI card. “Tell them I had this. They can explain everything.”
She looked at the card and blanched. “This is magic stuff.”
“The way things are working these days, I can neither confirm nor deny. But we have readings on something either in your house or your neighbor’s.”
“I let you in the downstairs,” she said, still suspicious. “But not upstairs.”
“That’s fine.”
When she let us in, I saw there was an Astra .25 dangling in her hand. “You try anything, I shoot you.”
“I think she’s immune to your charms, Chad,” Decay said, grinning.
“How long have you lived in New Orleans and have you ever encountered anything weird? Weirder than normal that is.”
“Yes. I work at the hospital. Nurse’s aide. I know about the magic. This town is cursed.”
Then there was no use lying. “Get out the rune, Decay.”
Decay pulled it out and followed the swing towards the back of the garage. Behind the single-car garage was a section of rooms and hallways. Most of it was filled with various buildup of residents. Papers, toys, old bicycles. Whoever owned the rental clearly had never moved anything out that was left behind, just moved it to the ground floor.
We followed the swinging amulet back into a cluttered room and found one of the fungal symbols under a pile of old newspapers.
“Oh shit,” Decay muttered.
“Don’t touch it! We need to back out of here fast.”
It was the largest one I’d seen. I was pretty sure the only reason it had never triggered was the area was deserted and the residents stuck to the upper floor. One kid down here playing around and there’d have been another kifo outbreak.
When we were back in the sunlight I took a deep breath. “Ma’am. Get everyone out of the house. Is there anyone next door this time of day?”
“No, and I’m the only one home.”
“We need to evacuate the neighborhood. Don’t go back in that house. Not for anything.”
* * *
“You sure it’s a kifo?” Agent Robinson asked. “There hasn’t been an emergence here.”
“Same symbol,” I replied.
After I had alerted Franklin and the team, we had done as directed and brought in the MCB. Campbell had dispatched Robinson, whose career was more or less at nadir after having overseen a Class One event which turned into a Class Four. I wasn’t privy to the internal discussions but I was pretty sure that letting a handful of slow zombies out of a fenced-in cemetery to close down a busy freeway wasn’t well regarded in MCB circles.
As the first agent on scene, Robinson was being even more twitchy and hypersensitive than usual. “And you used a rune of Onesh? A likely story. MCB has tried that. The rune doesn’t work in New Orleans. All it does is swing around in circles!”
“My theory is if there’s a mava beneath the city, it’s putting out jamming signals like mad. But at the same time, all the effects, including kifo worms, are putting out other jamming signals. The reason the rune swings in every direction is there’s stuff all over the damned place. So you need to get close. We drove right past it, and that symbol is by far the biggest one we’ve seen. Probably the only reason we picked it up.”
“I can’t afford any more debacles. Before I allow any actions I need to see this so-called symbol with my own eyes first,” Agent Robinson insisted.
“Okay,” I said. “But be careful as hell. Don’t touch it.”
“I know what I’m doing, Gardenier!”
* * *
“You’re a witness,” I said, pointing at Lieutenant Bechard from SIU. The sounds from the interior of the house had finally died down. “I told him to be careful!”
* * *
“Thi
s worm is a zit ready to pop, Special Agent,” I told Campbell. “I warned Agent Robinson to be careful with it.”
Robinson had never exited the house.
“I was present, sir,” Lieutenant Bechard agreed. “Agent Robinson was…dismissive of Mr. Gardenier’s warning.”
When the rest of the MCB had shown up, Campbell had ordered the police to evacuate the entire neighborhood. They’d gone with a build-up of methane gas again. Freaking methane gas. It was everywhere!
“Damn it, Robinson…” Campbell was looking a little ragged. The news was reporting that all the deaths related to the cemetery breakout had been caused by a multicar pileup, but the local MCB must have been scrambling to track down and intimidate into silence any passerby who had seen the undead or our clearance thereof. And now it looked like his right-hand man had just gotten eaten by a kifo worm. “He should have known better. You should have known better.”
“How was I supposed to stop him? You guys don’t listen to me!”
“Why would we? Even though our director is too stupid to see it, I still think you’re corrupt and covering for a cult.”
Luckily for Special Agent Campbell, that was when Franklin walked up and interrupted us. “I’m sorry for your loss. I think what’s been going on with it is it’s been growing for a long time without any actual food input. It’s been down there in that basement waiting for something to come along; sadly, that was your man.”
Campbell was seething and searching for someone to blame. “Have you looked at this thing?” Campbell asked Lieutenant Bechard.
“Special Agent,” he spit out some dip. “You can shoot me in the head if’n you want, but I ain’t goin’ in that fuckin’ house. Not after what I heard.”
“I’m not even real comfortable about bringing in the bomb pig. I’d guess that the bigger the symbol, the bigger the worm. And that was one damned big symbol.”
“I hate this town,” Campbell said.
“Embrace the suck,” I said. “You going to let us do our jobs or not?”
“Just get rid of this thing,” Campbell said. “And…see if you can recover Agent Robinson’s body.”
Franklin and I exchanged a glance. We both knew that Robinson was being digested in the belly of the mava paṇauvaā. But we decided not to push things. “We’ll check.”