The Zero Dog War by Keith Melton Read Free Book Online Page A

Unrighteous Order of the Falling Dark
    EZ Pantry Convenience Store
    SE 12th Street , Portland, Oregon
    1:06 p.m. PST April 10th
     
    Necromancer Jeremiah Hansen sat in the driver’s seat of the yellow school bus with his zombie horde. He wore a Mariners hat, red and black flannel and hiking boots, and sported a devil goatee to jack up the evil quotient in his publicist photos. Just another average denizen of the Pacific Northwest driving a bus full of undead people.
    The bus stank like a morgue low on formaldehyde. Jeremiah made sure he only breathed through his mouth. Even though he was a necromancer, the smell of dead flesh didn’t exactly make his mouth water. He glanced in the wide overhead mirror at the seats behind him. Every seat was crammed three deep with zombies…except in the case of zombies of larger girth, which were two to a seat. And the undead Samoan guy, who took up the entire bench by himself. Jeremiah also had the aisle packed full of zombies, which was not ideal, since they’d rattled around like crazy the entire trip, stumbling and falling and moaning as he’d driven from his factory lair, skirting downtown and crossing Hawthorne Bridge during lunch hour.
    Jeremiah looked at his watch and chewed his lower lip as his heart beat faster in anticipation. His skin felt tight, like vacuum-sealed plastic wrap, and he wished he’d downed less coffee. The big moment had arrived, a turning point in his career toward achieving Zombie Overlord status. After this, he’d be able to make an offer to the top candidate of his resume call on the online job board. He really needed someone still living to help him run his expanding commercial enterprise. Zombies were great for grunt work and for eating the bodies of competitors. Finesse, however, they did not have…and they weren’t known for their scintillating conversation skills either.
    As if to prove him right, a zombie moaned behind him in one of the front seats, and he glanced at her in the mirror. She’d been beautiful in life, noble features, stunning blonde hair that was falling out in clumps, vivid eyes…or eye, since one of them was now missing after a crow had pecked it out. A great body…well, her skin seemed rather gray and greenish in places, and prone to lividity…but she had great tits. Too bad he wasn’t into the whole necrophilia freak show like some of those other perved-out necromancers.
    He sighed. When he was rich and successful, he’d get himself a nice living girl. Yeah, someone intelligent (but not more intelligent than him) and able to help him in his quest for market domination. Someone beautiful, of course, who didn’t reek of decay but smelled more like waffles, and loyal . She had to be a hundred and fifteen percent loyal. That’s all he wanted. Oh, and someone with great tatas, because, let’s just face it, woman tits were God’s way of rewarding men for being created first. Those feminist necromancers could take their burial-shroud-burning ways and their bumper stickers that read: A woman needs a man like a corpse needs Viagra and shove them.
    More zombies moaned. He mused on whether or not he could teach them traveling songs, “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer” or “Kumbayah” or something. Or maybe he could teach them to moan in chorus and take them on the road, maybe Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Corpse Choir. Could be big.
    Nah, who was he kidding? Better to stick with something simple, like monopolizing the gelatin-manufacturing industry.
    The zombies stared out the windows with their flat, empty eyes at the people strolling by and the cars driving past, which is why he’d kept the windows closed and locked. The smell was one thing, but hungry zombie moaning was hard to ignore. He’d been parked on the one-way street for the last half hour, waiting for the Safe Steele armored car to arrive and restock the ATM at the convenience store. He’d parked past the intersection, just beyond the chain-link fence that bordered