Colin’s heart twitched at the hum of an electric motor coming from the top of the stairs. Behind him, the dead girl stripped the flesh from Timmy’s stomach and gnashed it between her putrid black teeth; blood coated her lips. He pulled his arm back as the shadow of Dora’s motorized cart slowly approached the open doorway.

  Although he’d only known him for the past twenty minutes, he hoped Jason was okay. There was no telling what they would’ve done to him during the short time he was down here with her. He couldn’t shake the thought that the dead girl would soon have her fill of Timmy and then come stumbling toward him again.

  Dora parked her motorized cart and fired a menacing gaze at Colin. She glanced at the carnage behind him, her face and eyes frozen with fear. She hissed, her gaze flickering from her two dead grandchildren to Colin and gave a deflated sigh. Tears streamed down her cheeks when the dead girl sunk her teeth into the left side of Timmy’s face, pulling the skin away like a piece of flesh-colored taffy.

  She trapped her grandmother in a cold menacing stare, held the chunk of flesh between her fingers and chewed. A river of juice and bright-red blood dribbled down her chin, wiping bits of Stacey’s flesh away.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  She raised the gun and let off a deep angry scowl. Colin hissed between loosely-clenched teeth, reared his left arm back and pitched the bat up the staircase. It flew end over end and struck the top of Dora’s left hand with a devastating thud.

  She howled in pain. The gun fell from her hand and clambered down the staircase. It slipped through the crack between the first and second steps, tossed a peal of light across Colin’s face and fell onto the rough concrete floor below.

  She whined as the scooter toppled over and struck the floor with a metallic clang. She barked out in pain and rolled onto her right hip, her bones rattling like dice.

  Colin heart a loud groaning sound from behind him and refused to turn around, knowing that Stacey would be on her way out of that dark hollow prison with the same ravenous hunger as the very thing that turned her. His heart thudding, he raced up the stairs and into the kitchen.

  Jason knelt down on the floor and sat up, his face beaming with relief. His hands had been tied behind his back with the same colorful bandanas they’d stuffed into his mouth. Rosie sat in an old high-chair with a dingy white tray; her fingers were jammed halfway into her mouth and a line of drool slid down onto the front of her onesie.

  He untied Jason’s hands and removed the bandana from his mouth and pulled him onto his feet. He spun around, glanced over his shoulder and peered into the living room. Dora was crawling across the floor, stretching her left hand toward the overstuffed couch sitting on the far right corner.

  Jason gazed over Colin’s shoulder and eased Rosie out of the high chair.

  “Where’s Stacey?”

  There was no other way to tell him. When Jason met his gaze, the optimistic look on his face crumped into a mask of shock and terror. He backed away, tears brimming in his eyes.

  “No, no, no.” Jason said. “We were supposed to go to Texas and see our parents and have barbecues on my brother’s front porch and watch the fireworks on the Fourth Of July like we always do every year and she’s supposed to get married and make me an uncle and... and...”

  Colin embraced him, pressing his face against his chest. He raked a hand through the boy’s hair, slid it down against the nape of his neck and patted the middle of his back.

  “We need to get the hell out of here?” Colin said.

  The three dead people appeared from the open doorway and crawled toward a helpless Dora. She caught the stench wafting through the living room and rolled onto her back. Colin disengaged the lock on the back door as Jason slid his little sister out of the high chair and back into the sling strapped across his chest.

  When she saw the trio of zombies crawling toward her, she snatched a quick breath and swallowed so hard her throat gave a loud dry click. Their lifeless milky-blue eyes probed the core of her chest, tearing it apart and gripped her heart inside of their cold remorseless gaze.

  “Oh God no.” Dora said. “Please help me please. I’m sorry okay I’m sorry.”

  Colin pressed his hand against Jason’s back and led him out of the house.

  They were halfway down the alley when a loud panicked scream burst from the house and sent a flock of birds bursting out of a nearby treetop and into the soft purple sky.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WITH the fury of a child throwing a tantrum in a supermarket, multiplied by a thousand, Pixie Sorenson stormed into her and Malik’s bedroom, held the door open and screamed, “Fuck you, you lying bitch.”

  She slammed the door shut and sending a series of loud vibrations across the house that sent picture frames swaying and scraping across the walls and knickknacks rolling onto their sides along the shelves they sat on. She didn’t want to speak or see Teresa Quintero ever again. Every second she’d spent staring at her had felt like someone had ripped her heart clean out of her chest and kicked it into some other dimension she couldn’t reach.

  And what was it with that look on her face?

  Remorse? Sympathy?

  How could anyone like her know what those things even meant?

  She never liked Malik in the first place and would’ve done anything she could do to get him out of the picture so she could tell them what to do without any protest from him or her. She knew what really went on in that store but Teresa was too much of a chickenshit to admit it, admit that she’d got Malik’s attention and shot him in the back of the head and planted her throwaway piece into his hand and made it look like he’d shot at her.

  She was just as corrupt as they come. Now because of her, Malik was dead and she was still trapped inside of this godawful fucking place with a chain-smoking cook and a Latino cop with an itchy trigger finger.

  She paced across the room, sat on the edge of the bed, slid down onto the stretch of beige-colored carpet on Malik’s side of the bed and glanced down at the large ribbed golden picture frame sitting on the floor. She saw her reflection in the glass and greeted it with a sour expression that accentuated the tiny creases along the corners of her eyes and mouth. The soot-black mascara she’d applied was now trickling down her cheeks in thin obsidian tears; her soft pink lipstick lay like a faint smudge across her mouth.

  She just wanted to look good for him when they came back so that he could relax and they could squeeze in some “private time”. She’d put on his favorite dress of hers, the silky pink number with the plunging neckline bordered by a thin black lace collar. She didn’t bother to wear anything else underneath because they didn’t want to waste any time once he got back.

  She glanced down at the picture again and felt her cheeks redden. Her face crumpled, squeezing a fresh set of thin gray tears from her dark narrow eyes that trickled down her cheeks. She bit down on the bottom of her lip until she could taste blood and shuddered.

  Sadness tightened inside her chest.

  She gave a loud-choking sob and glanced at the photo through wet blurry tears. The photo was taken long before everyone had to run for their lives. It was taken inside of one of those photo booths inside of The Salter-Greene Mall on a mid-summer day in July when the heat was tolerable.

  In the photo, they’d sat in front of a ruffled blue curtain. He wore his gold and white sleeveless tee-shirt, a pitch black CALL OF DUTY ball cap and blue nylon basketball shorts. She’d worn a blue jean skirt with open-toed brown leather sandals and a long sleeved green shirt; her hair was much shorter and lighter back then.

  Their faces were pressed together and their arms were slung around the other’s shoulders while they stuck two fingers above the back of each other’s heads to form a pair of bunny ears. Thin white smiles spread across their faces, their eyes glinted with a mixture of love and joy. It wasn’t just any photo that they could stare at before tossing it into a box of other photos that would never see the light of day again.

  This was one special. They’d already confirmed their relationship on Facebook ten minutes before taking this picture. Not all of the CGI effects in every corner of Hollywood could duplicate the happiness or the emotions they’d felt during that special occasion.

  They’d met at a time when neither one of them were looking, which has been when most couples come together. She’d been working the night shift at The Waffle House on Interstate Thirty-Three five miles outside of Lancaster, Ohio when Malik’s three-person “crew” had come in around ten till eleven and ribbed each other for almost twenty minutes but not Malik himself.

  Malik hadn’t even touched his food because he’d been too busy watching her. She’d chalked it up to just another customer with an itch in his pants; the last man to look at her like that was a sixty-five year old trucker who joked about giving her an extra twenty bucks if she went back to his truck with him.

  After her shift ended (she’d worked the nine p.m. to six a.m. shift), she tried to start her blue Toyota Yaris and gave up after two tries. She’d found herself stranded in the middle of the parking lot in a not-so great neighborhood. Before she could reach for her cell phone, Malik pulled up beside of her in a maroon Cadillac SUV and offered to give her a ride home.

  She had some suspicion that he’d been sitting in the parking lot across the street waiting for her to come out of the restaurant so he could work up the nerve to ask her out. She went back inside to ask her boss if she could leave her car there as long as she’d picked it up in the morning. She’d accepted his offer long as he kept his hands where she could see them.

  Their first encounter, however, would not be their last. He’d kept coming by the restaurant to see her, ordering the same thing every time and always asking for her section. After a long and lengthy chat with her bathroom mirror, she decided to let her guard down and accepted his offer.

  On the night of their fourth date, she caved in. That night, she learned that he was an architect in the act of lovemaking. His big dark hands, soft dark lips and smooth fingertips were the stuff that most women dreamed about but never had; they set all of her sensations on fire and released a tantric sexual energy that she never knew existed until that one fiery passionate night between her first orgasm and his last.

  He would convince her later the next month to quit her job so they could be together and he could give her the life of luxury and happiness he thought she deserved. She agreed with him because the more she thought about her chances of making it in this world on a waitress’ wages was like trying to squeeze water from your fist.

  And the drugs? He wasn’t only a great lover but he could get the best shit this side of The Buckeye State and it’d be just as good. She never loved him for the expensive gifts he’d showered her with on a daily basis or the black credit cards she’d kept attached to her hips but because he’d made her happiness his number one concern.

  There was always two sides to every person and Pixie had seen that when it came to being with Malik: there was his tough side and then there was his gentle side. He never brought the former to bed with him because he’d never believed in treating a woman like that, nor did he ever bring the latter out for the world to see. Love like that was hard to come by even before the world went to shit.

  The photo staring back at her was evidence of how special she felt when she was near him. He’d seen something about her that no one else saw and it made her feel like she was better than what she’d made herself out to be. After they’d taken this photo, she’d insisted that they have it enlarged and put in a frame so they could look at it whenever they wanted to.

  Who knew this would be the first time she’d look at it without him? Who knew that this morning would be their last “wake-up call”?

  The more Pixie thought about it, Malik wasn’t gone. All she had to do was close her eyes and he was there in her dreams where he would always keep her warm on those cold lonely nights when she hungered for his touch the most. She could feel him right now, feel his thick powerful arms wrap around her thin pale body, pulling her spine against his flat muscular chest, enveloping her in the thick muggy folds of their body heat.

  She heard footsteps parading across the hallway toward her bedroom door. It would take her a while before she could get in the hang of calling this “her bedroom” now.

  There was a knock at the door. She embraced the picture frame and closed her eyes, hoping that whoever it was would go away and leave her alone.

  “Hey, Pixie. Can we talk?”

  She rolled her eyes when she heard Teresa’s faux sympathetic voice outside the room. She didn’t want to set the picture frame down although the small golden tab at the far right corner of the frame was prodding against the front of her right shoulder. She could still feel his presence nearby and by letting this picture frame go it was no different than pulling the plug on an old relative.

  “Come on, Pixie. I want to talk to you about it some more but I can’t make you do something you don’t want to do right now. I know you just need some time to think and well…” Teresa said. “whenever you’re ready to talk I’ll be here to listen.”

  She sighed, her nostrils flaring, and set the picture frame onto the bottom shelf of her bedside table. She braced her right hand against the edge of the bed and used it to hoist herself off of the floor and onto the edge of the bed. She rose up on her feet and, her eyes and face still wet with tears, walked around the foot of the bed.

  “Hold on.” She said.

  She traded her silky pink number for lazier attire. With Malik gone, she didn’t feel like her usual self, physically or sexually. She would never open these arms, spread those legs or pucker those lips for anyone else for as long as she lived.

  No one could come closer to being the lover that Malik Jones (or King J as he was referred to around the block) was. No one.

  She pursed her lips, drew back a long breath and prepared herself. She wrapped her thin-fingered hand around the scarred brass doorknob, slid the door open and found Teresa standing outside with a soft apologetic look on her face. Her hands were pressed together in a mock prayer as she planted one foot across the doorway to keep Pixie from shutting the door.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  Pixie nodded.

  “I never wanted there to be any bad blood between us.”

  Teresa leaned in for another hug and pressed her left shoulder tightly against Pixie’s right. An uneasy feeling came over her, seeping into her bones and prickling her skin. A thought crossed her mind, one that she’d never thought about until now.

  Had she been flirting with her?

  Was Teresa a khaki-wearing dyke?

  Had she killed Malik with the intention of having her all to herself? It wouldn’t surprise her in the least. She way she walked, talked and handled herself was viable proof of that. She’d always thought of her has a “girlfriend” but not in a romantic sense.

  She wasn’t sexist.

  In her eyes, to each his own. In this case, to each her own.

  “Dominic wants to talk to you about dinner.” Teresa said. “I’m gonna take watch from the living room and join you guys later. Okay?”

  Pixie raised her finger and said, “I’ll be down there. I’m gonna change my shirt.”

  Teresa met her gaze, her face creased with confusion, and strode back down the hallway. Pixie shut the door, crept back across the room toward their (yours now, bitch) tall oak dresser standing across the foot of the bed and eased the curtains aside. She peered out the window, squinting through the network of branches stirring lazily in the breeze and tucked the curtain behind the back of her choke-purple jewelry box Malik had snatched from the consignment store sitting at the end of the street beyond Gibson’s.

  She crouched down low, peered over her shoulder to see if the coast was clear and began to flash a series of hand gestures out the window. A figure appeared out from behind the tree standing in the dirt behind the sidewalk and answered with a hand gesture of its own. She couldn’t see their face but that was okay; she didn’t need to.

  All she needed to know was that she wasn’t alone and that had Malik done his part and took that dyke bitch out of the picture like he said he would then things would’ve turned out different. They’d be the ones giving all the orders, telling that overgrown fat ass what to do and when to do it and remind him that even the tiniest bit of refusal would result in dire penalties. They knew what to do and so did she; they all knew their role and, just as they were meant to, would play them down to the T.

  She sent three more hand gestures.

  Three more were sent back.

  She and Malik had been trading hand gestures with them for weeks, planning for just the right moment when to claim this place as their own. They couldn’t wait to sick the dogs on her and make her eat that fucking badge for breakfast. Soon, this would all be hers and no lesbian Latino cop was going to get in her way.

  Pixie grinned and nodded. She watched the figure scurry away, its shadow a dark contrast against an even darker shade, along the sidewalk toward Gibson’s. In the past two minutes, she’d learned everything she needed to know about what really went on at Gibson’s. Sadly, Teresa had been telling the truth.

  She’d killed Malik and stripped Ninth Street of a true and courage king.

  But one thing she should’ve known before she pulled that trigger. Don’t fuck with The Queen Of Ninth Street.

  She let the curtain fall back into place when she saw something out of the corner of her right eye. She peered out the right side of the window, squinting past the tree branches once again and saw something running toward the house. She tugged the drapes together, ran out of her bedroom and down the stairs.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THEY ran out of the mouth of the alley, scurried across the street and stumbled to a halt in front of a Mom and Pop convenience store, its windows boarded up nice and tight. The store’s neon sign was as dead and dark as the decade it’d came from. A trio of self-serve gas pumps sat ten feet away from the front entrance, its bloody white shell dog-eared by large pockets of rust.