Battle of the Network Zombies by Mark Henry Page B

vamping, but this would be the first time I’d done it for free and to save my own skin. Chad’s face was so cold. When I opened his mouth a quiet sigh escaped. There wasn’t much time. I bit into the insides of my cheeks and pressed my mouth to his, filling him with a silent blood scream. He gagged and coughed and eventually swallowed and a moment later opened his eyes. I dragged him to the bed and stripped off his pants.
    “Just in time for the police to break down the door.”
     
    “Jesus,” I said. “What did the police do?”
    “Nothing. What could they do? Chad wasn’t dead. There were no signs of foul play. They just chalked it up to a crank call and left. Though the judgment was obvious and overly dramatic, I think I smelled closet on one of them.”
    As he would.
    “What did you do with Chad?” I asked.
    “He’s sleeping off the vamping and whatever drug Chase laced his blood with. I went back over his neck after the police left. He hadn’t been opened at all; Chase must have poured some blood in there to make me think Chad was clean. Asshole.”
    “What are you going to do with him?”
    “No idea.” Gil’s sighed, a wry smile dancing on his lips. “He is awfully cute, though.”
    “Silver lining, maybe?” Wendy asked.
    He shrugged. “Doubtful.”
    “What were the second and third gifts?”
    “No idea.” Gil looked back at the zombie pit. “And I’m in no hurry to find out.”
    Gil barely finished telling his tale of woe—if that’s what you want to call it (how the hell one gets date-raped twice by the same guy is beyond me, of course we are talking about Gil and he does tend to moon, so…)—when the stone-faced hostess shuffled past, an unholy trinity shading her wake like an oil slick. Ashley, Kelley, and Casey weren’t top tier reapers but they had the requisite bitchiness and the smallest one did flick a butterfly knife like a baton, so you didn’t want to fuck with them.
    I shoved Gil forward and slouched into my seat. “Oh, my God. Tell me they didn’t see me.”
    Wendy looked over her shoulder. “The evils incarnate are too busy taunting their chef.” She angled away so I could peek around.
    The poor guy stood his ground against an onslaught of snapping jaws and drunken catcalls. One of the reapers, Kelley, I think, though they all sort of bleed together—just slap a “y” on the end of a regular name and you’ve got a reaper—flicked her tongue at the trembling foodie lasciviously.
    My understanding is this: they take a regular little girl, presumably some foul little brat—already adept at torturing her parents—and strip away what little humanity she has squirreled away beneath her retainer through rigorous bitch training in the reapers’ secret lair, aka The Pretty Princess Party Palace. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but all you need to know is, they’ve got big teeth, clean up messes faster than a Jean Reno character and twirl their pigtails with razor claws.
    Also that one of them was waving at me, nudging her pals and grinning.
    “Damn it.” I reached for my purse and scooted off the chair. “Grab your shit, we’re going.”
    “What’s the hurry, they seem perfectly happy to eat their dinner and leave you be.” He patted my wrist and his face was so calm I wanted to believe the words falling out of his mouth.
    Our chef arrived with a rolling tray of carving knives, forks and metal shakers like Shinto arches marked with Japanese characters. They could have been spices, though that was unlikely—zombies couldn’t eat spices without the inevitable purge hitting. A trio of wine bottles filled with liquids of various darknesses. Blood, to be sure, but bile and what looked like a thick jaundiced mucus.
    I glanced at Wendy, whose face said it all.
    Gross.
    It’s one thing to take a whole body, but when you go at it in sections or break a body down into parts like a cut-up fryer, it’s somehow less appealing. That’s not to say that I