The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(23)
The sousprefet seemed happy to see a couple of Western nassaras and chatted for a little while with us in English. Then he told us he needed our services even before we mentioned our own mission.
The job would pay our rent for the next couple of months—40,000 CFA or its equivalent in supplies to burn out a house of zombies. You’d think people wouldn’t use paper money or coins anymore. But you can’t carry that much in supplies everywhere you go and there was no way in hell anybody would take credit the payer probably wouldn’t honor. So, money still got passed around, increasingly tattered and with different countries on it, but still useful. A bit like the bottles people still brought to bars in exchange for beer and soda because some enterprising souls were still making both. The sousprefet and his gendarmes could have done the job themselves, but this was in the compound of a local traditional chef. Nassaras were good for the more delicate zombicide jobs. Being from a foreign tribe, we weren’t supposed to have a stake in the local politics, so we had a rep for being impartial.
Josie and I discussed it. We wanted to get over to see Roger and Cyndi right away, but we already knew from experience that whatever condition they were in, they’d probably been in it for two weeks already. Besides, we could really use the money and the sousprefet’s goodwill if things had gone sideways with them. We agreed to do it.
We stocked up on kerosene in the marché, buying it in old, plastic palm-oil bottles. There was red sediment at the bottom of each one. Any petroleum product was strained through a cloth to get out the dust, but that wasn’t 100 percent successful. That would matter for a car, but not for our purposes. Zombies would burn just as well with dirty kerosene.
They’d shut up all the infected, living and dead, inside a large hut in a compound. Nobody had been out for seven days. That made the job a simple one of torching and watching it burn, slicing and incinerating the zombies who tried to escape. The only glitch came when a woman burst out of the burning hut, clutching a baby. We nearly hacked her before she screamed and the baby started howling.
Zombies don’t talk. They can make a weird sort of grunt, with air coming out through the vocal cords, but they can’t talk. Or scream.
We doused both woman and child with gin (my own way of dealing with the outbreak, so I always had some on me) to disinfect them as best we could. Then we pronounced mother and child “clean.” This practice didn’t usually thrill the local Muslims, but they were fine with the logic of cleaning off zombie virus as long as the booze didn’t make the person drunk. Judged living again by the nassara zombie-hunters, both survivors were taken away gently to be fed and given a real bath.
And that was the job. We’d insisted on the 40,000 CFA up front. That would have been not quite a hundred bucks American if the U.S. still existed. Normally, we’d have pocketed it and gone back to Maroua in high spirits.
But we weren’t here on business, or fun. We were here to check up on two of our own.
The sousprefet grabbed two gendarmes and led us there himself. He seemed to know what we were in for, but, our friends being nassaras, he’d probably been hesitant to go in.
“If you find anything, we’ll pay the usual rate,” he said. This seemed awfully generous until he took off down the road with the two gendarmes without paying us first. Figured we wouldn’t get any backup, though I could see the hold-off on payment. Roger and Cyndi might be okay. And if they weren’t, he might want the house after we burned it out. The cement walls wouldn’t be damaged, nor the tolle roof.
The compound was ominously silent as we let ourselves in through the gate with a little machete-prying. We went in machetes-first. Once we established that the coast was apparently clear, we brought in our bottles of kerosene. We laid them out along a line on the dirt path up to the cement porch, dropping small matchboxes as we went. We’d long since learned how to play zombie-hunting like a video game. You wanted to lay down ammunition coming in along the routes where you’d be most likely to come hell-for-leather back out, screaming and scrambling to avoid those clutching hands and snapping teeth. Zombies weren’t too fast and they weren’t too bright. They didn’t last all that long, either, maybe six months. But once they got fixated on you, they’d keep coming and they’d run you down if you didn’t burn them, pin them or find sanctuary.
The house was probably bigger than would be comfortable, or safe, for a single volunteer or even two. Peace Corps Admin had made some weird decisions in the past about security on that score, not that it mattered now. I’d learned fast during training to take care of my own safety as much as possible; in fact, Josie and I had bonded then over our cynicism about some Peace Corps policies. We’d been in Community Development before the outbreak, if you can believe it.
We busted into the house fast, machetes and matches out. We thought we were ready for what we’d find.
We weren’t.
The house had an open plan to allow for the February heat in the middle of the dry season. It had three bedrooms coming off a huge, airy living room that shaded off into a back porch with big clay pots, round and red.
In the middle of the living room, near a wooden couch that had been turned over and smashed, lay a zombie. It had been staked down with a metal spike through the ribs. Impressive. Whoever had done it must have used a sledgehammer. The zombie kept trying to get itself free, but couldn’t do so without ripping itself in half. Even so, it was still trying, scrabbling feebly at the cement floor.