John and Michael Jackson stood on the prow of a small boat that had been painted black. The boat bobbed underneath the ruined hulk of the Bay Bridge, gently rocking on the waves. The boat was a bit like a small pleasure craft, pointed with a kind of a canopy covering the forward part of the boat. The boat had been modified heavily with steel plates welded over most of the upper sides of the boat. A large, menacing looking machine gun was bolted to the top of the small boat. John had never seen an M-60 machine gun before, except in that Rambo movie.

“Why are we stopped out here?” asked John.

“I wanted to show you what we were talking about earlier,” said Michael Jackson.

John slowly became aware of large fins cutting the water next to the boat. One of them came right at the boat and John could see water falling away from a sleek black torpedo shape underneath it. John got a little scared when he realized that the fin came up to about his midsection, and he knew that the deck of the boat was about a foot over the waterline.

The boat lurched as the huge shark nudged it. This seemed to get Michael Jackson’s attention as well. He pulled his weapon up to his shoulder.

“Time to get him off of us,” said Mike. “He probably thinks we’re a great big seal by now.”

John looked towards where Mike was aiming. They were about 50 feet out into the bay at the Embarcadero, and there was a pier stuffed with zombies cutting a path into the bay almost to where they were. The end of the walkway had no railing, and every once in a while a zombie would fall off of it and disappear. John watched as one fell off and a large fin cut towards the end of the dock.

Mike was waiting for the zombie behind the recent plank-walker to reach the end of the dock. Almost as if he’d done this many times, Mike expertly shot the zombie straight through the brain. The effect was electric. A collective wail went up from all of the zombies on the dock and a large portion of the zombies on the Embarcadero ahead of the dock. They scrambled towards the scent of fresh blood, starting a stampede towards the downed undead fountaining gore from a gaping head wound.

The sharks took notice too – a large chunk of meat fell into the bay, acting like chum. The large fin menacing their boat disappeared, and John guessed that it had joined the large number that had started to circle the end of the dock. Mike lifted his gun up again and flicked a switch on the side. He pulled the trigger and a staccato burp issued from it as three rounds flew into the mob of zombies at the end of the dock. The scent of fresh blood drove the zombies into such a frenzy that they started flailing off the end of the dock and into the waiting teeth of the school of Great White sharks waiting there.

The water boiled red, as the sharks tore every zombie falling into the water apart. The scent of the bloody water caused another stampede towards the end of the dock, and before John could think the entire dock had been cleared of zombies; they had all walked off it to their doom.

“Zombies are really fuckin’ stupid,” growled Michael Jackson.

“Wow,” was all that John could say as he watched the blood red foam subside.

###

Lloyd and Sam regarded the giant plastic wrapped package with a lot of concern.

“Did you have any idea he had this much?” asked Lloyd.

“Hell no, I thought he was small time,” said Sam.

A day earlier, Sam had listened when Lloyd complained about not knowing many coke dealers before the zombification of the city. When pressed, Lloyd said he’d just wanted to know where he could go pilfer some in case he had the hankering to do any. Sam was getting used to this stockpiling of drugs by Lloyd. She viewed it as his response to the disaster, the hoarding of things that he remembered from his old life as being something you could point to and say See that? That’s a sign of civilization. At that moment she decided to indulge him a bit, and told Lloyd about her friend Dougie. Lloyd followed her to Dougie’s apartment, where they presumably had to fight off the zombie version of Dougie. It was not a real problem, but Lloyd was taken aback to find out that an old Chinese man in a cowboy hat was a coke dealer before he became a zombie.

After rifling through his apartment, they hit the mother load – a full kilogram of a white substance that tasted quite a bit like cocaine. Sam had been shocked to see it, but Lloyd didn’t seem all that fazed by it. Watching Lloyd handle the brick gave her a bit of a start – he was actually preparing it for storage, much to her surprise.

“Uh, Lloyd, don’t you want to try some of that?” she asked.

“Why?” asked Lloyd. “I just need it for later.”

“Later? What are you going to do with it later?”

“Well, it’s if we need it,” he said. “In case of emergency.”

“What are we going to need a kilogram of cocaine for?”

“It is an anesthetic,” he replied. “We might need to do local anesthesia sometime, and sprinkling cocaine on a wound would help kill the pain.”

His answer made perfect sense, but this was because Lloyd had spent hours thinking about what to say in reply to this. He didn’t want anyone to know what he was up to. Sam might just try to stop him.

“So, you don’t even want to do a line to see how it is?” asked Sam.

“What, you wanna do some drugs?” asked Lloyd.

“Maayyyyybee,” said Sam.

Lloyd pulled a large tack mirror off the wall and laid it on the kitchen table. He dumped a small pile from a hole in the end of the package onto the mirror, and it was easily larger than anything either of them had ever seen before. Lloyd went to a kitchen drawer and pulled out a pair of razor blades. He set to work chopping it up, and idly started to make the powder into various Satanic symbols on the mirror, much to Sam’s amusement.

Lloyd only did a little bit – he didn’t really like coke, and besides he needed all the drugs he could get his hands on for the spell he’d found in the book that had started all this mess.

###

The harsh Nevada sunlight blinded the President as he walked down to the tarmac of the Area 51 airbase. Air Force One needed some maintenance, so a crew was busy hooking a tractor up to the front nose gear while he was walking down the stairs. The base bristled with activity – no sooner had he and his entourage disembarked than the airplane was towed into a massive hanger next to the receiving center. As they walked towards the receiving center in the harsh light, the President saw the plane start to sink into the concrete, lowered into a massive underground hangar that he remembered they had there.

“Mr. President, the ambassador arrived last night,” said a man in a decontamination suit. “We have spent the last 12 hours preparing to move him into a sterile environment where he can work with our team on the solution.”

“That’s great news,” said the President. “May I meet with him?”

“Um, I guess…” started the man. “He’s a bit disconcerting at first.”

“I’ve only spoken to him on the transmitter, I really would like to meet him face to face,” said the President.

“Well, as you know, his species communicates through telepathy in their normal state,” started decon man. “The transmitter is a sophisticated organic computer that transmits their thoughts into words, but it is both efficient and terrifying to communicate with them in person without that buffer.”

“Sounds like talking to Dick,” said the President in all seriousness, and several members of his entourage laughed out loud.

The man led them into the receiving area past a couple of heavily armed men. The elevator was just inside the door. The president looked around as the entire entourage piled into the huge lift – each wall of the elevator was roughly 30 feet long, a giant aluminum box on a hydraulic actuator. As he passed the door, he noticed that the buttons numbered well into the hundreds. On the surface, it was only one story high.

The man pressed the very bottom button, which lit up red. As soon as the massive blast doors closed, the President felt his stomach drop out and they slowly started to sink into the earth. The man started talking to him again.

“If you have line of sight with him, this initiates the telepathy. For an instant you’ll see him as he really is, and then his brain power will sync with you and you’ll be a bit more comfortable with him. If you are immune to his telepathy, as twenty percent of all humans are, we’ll have to pull you out quickly and sedate you. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back.”

“What do you mean, immune?” asked the President.

“Well, some people just can’t interface with him, so they see him for what he is. Which is to say that he’s a big pile of slime that extrudes tentacles to violate your orifices while he communicates with you. This usually drives you mad when you see it for real, but I assure you it’s nothing that can cause any real damage.”

“Jesus”, said the President.

“Oh, and don’t say that while you are in there with him,” said the man in the decon suit. “It really pisses him off.”

“What do I call him?” asked the President.

“Well, his name is hard to pronounce in its full form but he gave us a short form to use. Just repeat this after me: ‘Gnarly Thotep’.”

Chapter 6: Coming Soon - 4/10/06 >>