Zombie City: Episode 1 Read online

  Chapter 3

  The image of the dead-eyed yuppie slammed its way to the front of Shane’s mind. The resolve he’d felt just a moment ago seemed to vanish, and the nausea in his stomach came seeping back.

  But it wasn’t the yuppie’s eyes up on the screen. It was an illustration. An exceptionally vivid illustration, but an illustration nonetheless.

  Below the eyes there was a word, “Voodoo,” written in a font that looked like dripping blood.

  “Voodoo,” Shane said, getting a grip on himself. “What the fuck is that?”

  He looked up at the glaring eyes for a few more seconds, wondering. And then a flash of anger took hold of him, irritation at being so easily rattled, at being stopped in his tracks by an overdone drawing. He was already running late. He had to get the kitchen clean in less than two hours.

  Shane dropped his eyes from the screen, resumed his passage across the room.

  At the far side of the lobby, a tunnel passed through the wall. The tunnel was about eight feet tall and ten yards long, lit inside with pink neon rings. Except for the obnoxious color, it looked like something out of Star Wars.

  Shane walked through the tunnel and into the main area of the building, a cavernous space that had probably been some sort of factory before ZapPow! got the lease and started its renovations. Now, with the main overhead lights shut off for the night and the only illumination coming from the sparse emergency bulbs, it felt sort of like a massive canyon. The ceiling soared five stories above the ground level, and each story had its own floor, a wide platform running along the rear and side walls, behind a guardrail.

  The ground floor, where he stood, was an open area primarily used for press events and ZapPow! employee meetings. Another giant screen hung from the wall on the left, at the back of a low stage faced by several rows of chairs. Shane glanced to that screen now, saw the same glaring eyes he’d seen on the screen in the lobby—though the eyes here were superimposed on a ZapPow! pink background, and the words “ZapPow! welcomes Voodoo, the next level in energy drinks!” showed in that same blood-splatter font.

  The rest of the ground floor had been laid out as a conference area, with expensive rolling chairs surrounding large tables, the walls lined with couches. Dozens of empty tallboy cans, painted the same blood-red of the Voodoo words, littered the tables. Dozens more overflowed from the numerous trash bins.

  Shane strode across the room, picking up an empty Voodoo can on the way. He lifted the can near his face, trying to get a good view in the dim light. The blood-splatter “Voodoo” at the top, the glaring eyes below, and at the bottom a slogan: “It’s Black Magic!” He turned the can in his hand, read the spiel printed next to the nutrition label on the back.

  “Voodoo is the next level in energy drinks,” the words said. “A proprietary blend of taurine, ginseng, caffeine, acai, and the sacred herb Mucuna—traditionally used by Voodoo priests to enhance concentration and focus. Drink it, and feel the Magic!”

  “All this shit tastes like cat piss to me,” Shane muttered, tossing the can in a wastebasket near the end of another table.

  He dropped down the stairwell at the back of the room, pulling on his rubber gloves, heading for the cafeteria and the kitchen in the basement. It looked as bad as he’d ever seen it: the kitchen destroyed—flour on the walls, sauce dried to crust on the counters and floors, the sink brimming with dirty dishes—and the cafeteria in a similar state to the conference area on the ground floor, with every table covered by empty cans of Voodoo.

  Shane surveyed the mess, letting irritation harden his resolve.

  “Two weeks,” he said. “Two weeks, saving every penny.”

  And then he threw himself into the work with a vengeance.

  For an hour and a half he mopped floors, scrubbed counters, and washed dishes. He cleared and wiped down tables, cleaned out the microwave, sprayed every surface with sanitizer. He emptied the trash cans into a cart, replaced the bin bags, took the full bags to the compactor. He did all of it at a frenzied pace, focused on the task, mind empty of everything else. By the time he was dropping the last floor mat into place in the kitchen, he was breathing hard, his arms and shoulders tired, his back sore, his hair wet with sweat. He felt his blood running, felt wired from the manic pace.

  Shane wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm, and took the steps back up to the ground floor two at a time.

  It looked exactly the same as it had looked an hour and a half ago—the tables littered with red cans, the trash bins overflowing, the chairs dragged here and there instead of being pushed back into place.

  Exactly the same. Not a single thing had been done.

  “Where the fuck is Terrance?” Shane growled to himself.

  His frenzied rush through the kitchen cleaning had managed to make up some lost time, but there was still a lot of work to do. If Terrance didn’t show up, he’d have to bust his ass all day, and skip lunch and all his breaks, just to do a minimal cleaning of the rest of the building.

  “Fuck,” he said, striding across the room, using his agitation to quicken his steps. He passed through the tunnel, crossed the lobby, opened the door to the hall with a key from the key ring, and went back to the cleaning staff lounge.

  The lights flickered on as he entered the room. Everything looked untouched since he’d clocked in almost two hours ago. He glanced at the phone mounted on the wall by the time clock table, saw that its message light wasn’t blinking. Terrance hadn’t called in sick, then.

  He went to the timecards, and pulled Terrance’s card from the rack. He looked at the card, and for a moment the room seemed to spin around him.

  Terrance’s card showed a start time for today: four a.m., on the dot.

  “But I was here,” Shane mumbled, “and he hadn’t clocked in yet.”

  Another sudden flood of rage took hold of Shane, and it was all he could do to keep from crushing the timecard into a ball. Instead, he threw it across the room with all of his might. The card flew a half dozen feet, and then flipped and tumbled to the floor beside the table.

  “What the fuck!” Shane shouted.

  For a moment he looked around, desperate to get his hands on something he could break. He looked at the phone, he looked at the time clock. He gritted his teeth and clenched his hands to fists and squeezed so hard that his whole body started to shake.

  “This fucking wage-slave job is going to drive me crazy!” he hissed through his clenched teeth.

  A wave of heat washed over him, and then faded, taking most of the rage with it. He closed his eyes, pulled in a few deep breaths, relaxed his hands, let his arms hang heavy at his sides.

  “Maybe I should walk out right now,” he murmured, eyes closed.

  But the thought of his nearly-empty bank account came to him.

  “Two weeks,” he said, “saving every fucking penny.”

  He walked over to Terrance’s time card, bent down to pick it up.

  And froze with his hand just a few inches away.

  The card had fallen face down, and on its back side was a red fingerprint.

  He picked the card up, puzzled. He brushed his thumb over the fingerprint, smearing it.

  It was blood. And it was fresh.