I stepped around the table to examine the face. As I got close to see over the chest, I discovered there was no head. The neck had been neatly sliced from the shoulders.
I started to ask myself who this man was when my foot dragged through a pile of clothes on the floor. Heavy shoes, black trousers, a white shirt and lab coat soaked with blood. Hennison’s clothes.
This corpse belonged to Hennison.
What happened to his head?
I tripped on something.
Something hairy and decayed.
Cleto’s head. Hennison had abandoned it to take parts from the canister.
He had mentioned refining the reanimation process so that even Reginald could do it. Rather than die, Hennison had himself decapitated to preserve his living brain and escaped. He would get another body later.
Where had he gone?
There was another door at the back of the lab. Dirty footprints led across this threshold.
I took one side of the door, Jolie the other. I signaled that she kick the door open and I’d rush inside first. With fingers poised over triggers and our fangs at combat length, we did the silent count head bob. On three, she kicked the door off its hinges and I rushed inside.
Reginald was hunched over a small cart. Sonia shoved clothes into a Pullman suitcase. The two psychotronic diviners sat on a table next to the suitcase.
Reginald’s lab coat was still bloody and stained from yesterday’s fight. Sonia wore a gold leather jacket over leopard-print leggings and gold stiletto-heeled pumps. The jacket was unzipped midway and her enormous breasts seemed ready to launch themselves like weapons.
Tools, instruments, and dozens of jars and bottles were crammed into a metal shipping container.
Seems these two were ready to escape. And Hennison?
At this angle I couldn’t see much of Reginald’s face. With him being a zombie, I really couldn’t tell what he was feeling, but he acted annoyed.
Sonia gave an exasperated groan like Jolie and I were a sudden nuisance.
The cart emitted a whirring noise, various clicks, and a rhythmic sucking, like the action of bellows.
“Step aside, Reginald,” I ordered. “Is that Hennison?”
Reginald stood. By his feet sat Hennison’s head on the cart. His complexion resembled the skin of a frozen, uncooked chicken. His neck was clamped inside a ring suspended over the cart. Lights blinked along the neck ring. Servos, tubes, and wires ran into his neck stump. Blue reanimation fluid bubbled from a gallon-size glass bottle by his right ear. By his left ear, a piston slid back and forth inside a clear plastic cylinder in time to the sucking noise. The servos under his neck clicked to animate his face.
He stared from dark, bruised sockets. His eyes searched for me and I could tell his head strained to face me. The wheels under the cart rotated and it pivoted so that Hennison could look at me straight on.
“This is…not a good…time…for me,” he said, his voice halting and mechanical. “Could you…come back…later?”
“No can do,” I replied. “I’ve got a schedule to keep.”
Hennison sighed and his face wrinkled like a deflating balloon. “I’m not…in a very…good…position…to negotiate…am I?” The cart inched crab-like so he could face Jolie.
She said, “No.”
A plastic drinking straw angled from the front of the cart to his mouth. His lips reached for the straw and drew the tip close. He sucked on the straw and a gurgling sound came from three cans of Red Bull connected to a plastic manifold.
For a decapitated head sitting before his executioners, Hennison certainly seemed calm.
Son of a bitch was up to something.
Sonia held up a sweater. “You think you have problems? Look at what Mr. Mad Scientist expects me to wear. Do you know what this is?” She shook the sweater in one hand and whined, “An irregular.”
Reginald sprang for me, whirling about with a meat cleaver. I gave him three quick shots in the chest. A fourth in his head at near point-blank range flung his brain matter against the wall like a bowl of black pudding. His body flopped against the table and dropped to the floor.
Sonia raised a revolver from behind the sweater.
Jolie capped her with two well-placed shots in the chest. Silicone gel sprayed from Sonia’s jacket. She dropped the sweater, grabbed what was left of her boobs, and shrieked.
Jolie aimed at her face.
Sonia let go of her left boob and covered her nose. “Leave this alone. It finally looks perfect.”
“Too bad.” Jolie fired.
Sonia toppled backward and slumped to the floor, a mass of bleached hair covering what was left of her face.
Hennison darted forward on the cart. He rammed Jolie’s shins and she jumped away, more surprised than injured.
The cart raced through the door and into the other lab.
An electrical cord spooled out the back of the cart. Midway into the outer lab, the cord went taut and the pronged end popped from an electrical socket next to Reginald. The cart slowed. Hennison rocked his head in a futile attempt to keep up the momentum. The cart wheezed to a halt.
I grabbed the electrical cord and pulled it hand over hand. As I reeled him toward me, Hennison kept repeating, “We…can…talk.”
I knelt beside him and spun the cart to face Jolie and me.
“One shot,” she said.
“Lacks irony,” I replied. I studied the mechanisms keeping him alive.
“You…don’t have…to do this. I have…money.”
“I don’t need money. I need revenge.” I disconnected the tube supplying the reanimation fluid from a central fitting under his neck. I unhooked the tube pumping the Red Bull and attached it to the central fitting. Red Bull gurgled through the manifold and the neck tube. Hennison’s servos clicked like berserk crickets. His face contorted in spasms.
He gasped and coughed. He chattered uncontrollably as un-diluted caffeine went straight into his tissues. The lights on the neck ring flashed faster and faster and one by one went out. His skin turned puke green. His eyes bugged out. With a final zombie “ghaw,” his tongue, black as a tire, extended between eggplant-purple lips.
Dr. Hennison was dead.
“Better make sure,” Jolie said and ventilated his skull with her pistol.
She asked, “What about the psychotronic diviners?”
“Leave ’em. The bomb will destroy them.”
Now to escape.
While Jolie and I had taken care of Hennison, zombies swarmed into the outer lab. Their lusterless eyes gazed at us. Pus and blood oozed from their sores and out of the corners of their mouths.
I shouted, “Give it up. Your boss Hennison is dead.”
There was no reaction from the zombies. They pushed into the room and bumped against one another.
The zombies separated into three files to advance along the walls and down the middle of the room. They moved slowly and deliberately as if they had all of eternity. Which they did. So did I, but I didn’t want to spend it here.
Their bodies filled the room and blocked the exit. We couldn’t afford to waste ammunition by fighting our way through the lab. I’d make a shortcut to the hallway.
“Keep me covered. I’m gonna punch through the wall.”
Jolie fired as I pounded a hole in the drywall and slipped through.
Out in the hall, still more zombies continued to stumble down the stairs. We weren’t much closer to an escape.
Jolie scrambled through the hole and stood next to me. Smoke curled from her pistol.
The wall buckled. Dozens of grimy zombie hands broke through.
We fired careful head shots to conserve ammo. One zombie per round. Eyeballs, gore, and bone splattered through the air.
With every spent bullet, a sense of desperation and futility rose within me. I felt like the floor beneath was a plank that kept getting shorter and narrower.