Tourist Visa by Katherine Tomlinson

TOURIST VISA - KATHERINE TOMLINSON

Roddy’s eyesight wasn’t too good because of the diabetes so when he first spotted the woman in the bright pink business suit, his first thought was that somehow a migrating flamingo had gotten lost and ended up in the Van.

That’s strange, Roddy thought, which was about all he could muster by way of analytical thinking before he’d topped up his blood alcohol reserves with a morning snoot of Night Train.

As he got closer to the woman he could see she was Asian—Chinese or Vietnamese or Korean or something with slanty eyes anyway—and he wondered if she had decided to hit the beach on her way to work and had just gotten caught up in a reverie sitting there on the sand with her shoes off.

That happened to Roddy sometimes.

It bothered him that the woman had taken her shoes off.

He could see the sand around her was littered with bits of broken glass and scraps of rusted metal.

She’d put her purse down on a pile of bladder-wrack that still looked fresh enough to harvest. Roddy knew people who used the sea vegetable to treat a variety of ailments, including a broken thyroid.

Personally, he wouldn’t eat anything that came out of the Pacific at this part of the beach.

He’d heard that they’d found caffeine pollution in the waters off Oregon and figured it was only a matter of time before it showed up in Vancouver, like the mass of tsunami debris that was starting to wash up all up and down the coast.

He walked toward the woman quietly, his hand out as if approaching a skittish animal.

The woman turned her head as Roddy approached and smiled at him.

She was pretty, with delicate features framed by a veil of silky black hair.

The hair looked a little dirty, but it had been a long time since a pretty woman had smiled at Roddy, so he wasn’t going to complain.

Truth to tell, Roddy’s hair wasn’t that clean either.

She said something to Roddy that he didn’t understand and reached out her small hand to meet his.

He closed his fingers around hers and was ashamed of how grimy and cracked his hand looked.

She pulled him toward her with surprising strength.

Off-balance, he fell on the sand with a bone-jarring crack.

Damn woman, what is your problem? he thought and it was the last thought he had before she chomped down on his throat and tore it out.

The next thing Roddy knew, he and the woman were at the Seawall, ambling along like any tourist couple except that she was barefoot and his shirt was covered in blood from where she'd bitten him.

Roddy zipped up his dirty windbreaker and kept his head down and if anyone noticed that there was something peculiar about his gait or the awkward hunch of his body as he lowered his chin to cover the gaping wound in his throat, they’d politely averted their gaze.

Roddy and the woman walked the full length of the path and then stood there at a loss until a tourist approached them to ask a question.

The question had made no sense to Roddy, who was having more trouble than usual processing his thoughts. When the tourist repeated the question, he’d bitten out her throat, just as the woman in the pink suit had bitten him.

There had been screams and a lot of blood and some animal instinct buried in what was left of Roddy’s mind told him that he and the woman needed to move and move now.

Behind them, the tourist got up and lumbered after them.

It was mid-day by then and the path was crowded, but when the tourists saw the trio coming, they scattered out of the way and many reached for their cell phones. Some took pictures of the trio and others called 911.

The first couple of calls were dismissed as pranks but when a tech-savvy Iowan in an Edmonton Oilers jersey emailed a picture of the three, officers were dispatched to the area. By then Roddy and the tourist and the woman in pink were moving east through the park and headed for downtown. A mounted patrolman in the park spotted the three but when he tried to get close to them his horse shied and threw him. The cop landed hard, breaking his left arm and ankle and could only watch helplessly as they disappeared through the trees.

It was lunch time as the woman in pink and her companions emerged from the park. People on the streets were wrapped up in their own concerns, concentrating on running errands and going to the bank and grabbing a bite to eat. Fixated on their own trajectories, nobody really noticed the man and two women walking against the flow of pedestrian traffic.

Not until a man leaving a restaurant on Jackson Street bumped into the woman in pink. He’d looked at her and then at her bare feet, filthy now from walking, and he’d been confused. “Are you lost?” he’d asked her in English and when she hadn't replied, he’d repeated the question in Japanese.

The woman had nodded slowly in answer to his question but had made no sound.

Roddy and the tourist had exchanged glances with each other, then moved as one to flank the man from the restaurant.

He sensed no danger until they were much too close for him to run, and as Roddy bit into the succulent flesh beneath his chin, he heard the woman in pink say something short and sharp.

He turned to look at her and the tourist sank her teeth into the gory wound Roddy had opened.

The woman in pink said something else, something more urgent this time, and began walking toward the restaurant the man had just exited.

The glowing kanji of the restaurant’s signage hurt Roddy’s eyes but drew him in like a magnet.

The tourist followed Roddy and the doomed diner stood up, shook his head to clear it and after straightening his glasses, which had fallen off during his brief struggle with Roddy, he headed for the restaurant as well.

The raw fish odor inside was a visible stink, a sharp yellow-green briny smell that reminded Roddy of the beach at low tide. He’d always been sensitive to smell and now an olfactory tsunami assaulted him and he nearly staggered under its weight.

Roddy had never liked sushi. In his 20s he’d lived in Los Angeles where you could get sushi in any supermarket but nobody even knew what poutine was. He’d tried to make his own with frozen fries and large-curd cottage cheese but it really wasn’t the same.

Roddy and his group blocked the door to the street and the bus boy who ran out the back door of the restaurant had slammed it behind him in his panic and trapped everyone else inside.

What happened next happened fast and it wasn’t pretty.

The sushi chef, who also owned the place, attacked the woman in pink with a Bunmei Yanagi Sashimi knife with a ten and a half inch blade. The knife had cost him $149 and had served him well preparing lunch and dinner for his customers for the last ten years. It was, however, a woefully inadequate weapon when directed against the walking dead who had no longer had to worry about damaged organs and ruptured blood vessels.

His last thought was that what he should have grabbed was the cleaver on the counter behind him.

By the time the cops arrived at the Japantown restaurant, all that was left for them to find was a lot of blood on the furniture and a lot of dead koi on the floor, collateral damage from the broken fish tank that had supplied the ambience and inspired the name of the restaurant, which translated to “The Happy Carp.”

A bystander stuck his head in and snapped a photo of the carnage, which he tweeted to straight.com, which did not make the cops happy at all.

The woman in pink and her posse continued to make their way into the heart of the city, almost as if they had a destination in mind but by the time they reached the Vancouver City Centre Skytrain station, the growing group was nearly surrounded by heavily armed police officers who remembered the 2011 Stanley Cup riot and were determined not to let the situation get out of hand.

A line of officers sealed off the entrance to the station because the last thing anybody wanted was the mob to move out of the city into the ’burbs where it would be harder to contain.

Three different translators were rushed to the site to address the mob, including Hiroshi Jinnai whose father had worked at the Fukushima nuclear power plant and had perished in the meltdown following the earthquake there.

The woman in pink seemed to understand Hiro’s questions but did not react to his warnings that the police would use lethal force if attacked. As Hiro nattered on, she simply looked at him mildly, her brown eyes liquid with unshed tears, her face a pale oval in the gathering darkness.

The standoff lasted for only a few minutes, but survivors would later have a hard time saying how long those few minutes had actually been, with some estimates as high as half an hour.

All agreed, though, that it had been Roddy who’d made the first move.

The combined scent of all the meat pressing close around him had filled his nostrils with a gnawing hunger that took him to the edge of madness.

He’d looked toward the woman in pink for a sign or a signal, but she seemed lost in her own thoughts, or whatever passed for thoughts through her dead brain.

Roddy had lunged at the nearest cop, moving much faster than the young officer had expected.

The cop had pushed back with his riot shield but Roddy had three inches and nearly a hundred pounds on him and had simply steamrolled over him.

The shooting started soon after that and the cops had to turn on their own at a certain point as the group of walking dead created new corpses to deal with.

In all, 357 people died, which put the loss of life ahead of the Princess Sophia sinking in 1918.

Service on the Skytrain was disrupted for almost 36 hours until the bodies could be removed and the premises decontaminated.

The human body contains 5.2 liters of blood. Multiply that by 357 people and that’s almost two thousand liters of the stuff, all of which had to be siphoned up and destroyed like medical waste.

Most of the tourists were identified immediately because they had their drivers’ licenses and passports in fanny packs and rucksacks they were still carrying.

Roddy was recognized from news photos by a volunteer at the Rain City Housing office, who arranged for his body to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific. An autopsy had shown Roddy was infected with MRSA, a superbug endemic in Vancouver’s homeless population. That was listed as the cause of death because no one wanted to talk about what really had happened to him.

Mika Kimura, the woman in pink, was identified by the Juki Net card in her purse, which was wrinkled and faded but still readable, along with her address. She’d been missing since April 11, 2011 and her family was grateful to have her back after all that time, grateful enough not to ask too many questions that the coroner didn't know how to answer.

Three days after Mika was returned to her family in Japan, the car she’d died in washed ashore as part of a tide of tsunami wreckage that had completed its journey across the Pacific.

Her faded red Toyota Auris was bumper-locked to a black Nissan Serena with its driver’s door rusted open.

The owner of the Nissan, Chiho Kakizaki, would be found a month later when she wandered into a busy intersection of Portland and was hit by two cars from different directions.

She tore out the throat of the first EMT to respond to the accident and was killed on the scene by a traffic cop who’d read all about the Vancouver incident and didn’t hesitate to bash her brains in with his tactical baton.

BIO: Katherine Tomlinson’s fiction has appeared on A Twist of Noir, Shotgun Honey, Powder Burn Flash, ThugLit and Luna Station Quarterly. Her most recent book of short stories, 12 Nights of Christmas, is now available. She lives in Los Angeles and sees way too many movies about zombie apocalypsi.

Brain Food by Katherine Tomlinson

BRAIN FOOD - KATHERINE TOMLINSON

They say when you die that hearing is the last sense to go. With me, it was smell. The last thing I remembered was the aroma of the blood gushing from my torn throat.

 

It smelled delicious.

 

When I woke up everyone in the lab was milling around like groupies backstage at a rock concert with no real objective except being there.

 

The researcher who’d killed me was chowing down on Dr. Lowenthal, whose field of research was schizophrenia.

 

I’d never liked Dr. Lowenthal. He didn’t really think that anyone who didn’t have a degree from Princeton belonged here doing research. My degrees from Duke and Stanford did not impress him.

 

I wondered if his brain was tastier than mine or if taste was even an issue to zombies.

 

The researcher who’d bitten me was a stranger; probably one of the Canadians who was doing research in the main hospital.

 

He wasn’t interested in anything but the man-meal he was enjoying.

 

I looked around to see if anyone was still alive.

 

They weren’t.

 

Trevor Pippen lurched by me, mouth agape, eyes vacant. He gave a grunt of what might have been recognition but it was hard to tell.

 

Poor Trevor. He’d been doing promising work; was on the verge of some important discoveries into the origins of autism spectrum.

 

There was a lot of grunting going on in the lab, which surprised me. Twenty minutes ago the combined brain power in the room had been equal to the entire faculty of a state university; now everyone but me seemed to have regressed to Neanderthal-level cognition.

 

I attributed my continued brain function to the Goji-berry smoothies I had every afternoon while everyone else was getting their Starbucks fix. You are what you eat.

 

And I was ravenous.

 

I left the lab and went looking for dinner.

 

The hallway was lined with shambling figures, most of them disfigured by bite marks and open wounds where eyes and ears and skin used to be.

 

Some grunted as I went by but none tried to stop me.

 

Once I got into the hospital proper, I saw it was mostly deserted.

 

I could see smears of blood on the otherwise pristine walls, and there was a pile of gently steaming viscera next to the entrance.

 

I hate to see people waste food.

 

I was still hungry after polishing off my snack, so I kept moving.

 

Somewhere alarms were going off.

 

I wondered if anyone would come in response.

 

It’s the end of the world as we know it, I hummed. And I feel fine.

 

Fine, but still hungry.

 

Have you ever had a hankering for something and only that something will satisfy? And if you don’t eat that particular thing, you’ll never feel full? Like if you want a Mrs. Field’s semi-sweet chocolate chip cookie but you have a handful of animal crackers instead? And then another handful. And then finally you go get the damn cookie you wanted in the first place. Like that?

 

That’s how I felt.

 

The viscera had dulled my appetite but I craved brain.

 

And not just any brain.

 

Like everyone else who worked in neuroscience study at Princeton, I’d paid a visit to a locked room to gawk at the two jars filled with neatly cubed pieces of what looked for all the world like gefilte fish floating in formaldehyde.

 

I’d been revolted by the sight at the time, but now those yummy morsels called to me. I could smell their savory succulence through the glass of their containers and through two closed doors.

 

Those doors had been torn open by the time I got to the room.

 

I could see a figure in a lab coat was hunched over one of the jars, his fingers deep inside, clutching a handful of cubes but unable to pull his hand and the brains out at the same time.

 

He turned around when he heard me come through the door and gave a ferocious, feral grunt.

 

His hand still trapped in the jar, he clutched it to his chest like a football.

 

I recognized him as a “brainiac,” one of the many post-grads who migrated to the campus every year to study Einstein’s brain.

 

I guess he was really into his research.

 

“Get out of here,” I said and he drew back, frightened by my voice.

 

“Go on,” I insisted and he shuffled toward the door.  Slowly.

 

“Leave the brain,” I said.

 

He grunted and shook his head.

 

I ripped his head off and threw it into a corner, grabbing the jar before the rest of his body collapsed on the floor.

 

Slow zombies…they’re at an evolutionary disadvantage.

 

I reached into the jar and plucked out a bite-sized morsel and popped it in my mouth like a cheese cube at a cocktail party. The texture reminded me of semi-firm tofu.  I’d been a vegetarian in my former life but that was no longer a lifestyle option.

 

Albert Einstein once said, “Hunger, love, pain, and fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation.”

 

I was going to have to work on “love.”

 

BIO: Katherine Tomlinson is a journalist-turned-fictionista. Her most recent collection of short fiction is Toxic Reality. A group of stories set in her paranormal Los Angeles, L.A. Nocturne II, will be published this spring.

Bagging Some Zs by Katherine Tomlinson

BAGGING SOME Zs - KATHERINE TOMLINSON

 

Ike Hackett had been unemployed for two years before signing on with the county as a Z-catcher. The work wasn’t hard but it was dangerous and most of Ike’s colleagues had been as desperate for an income as he was. The hazard pay was generous but the life expectancy of a Z-catcher was only slightly longer than patients with stage IV pancreatic cancer.

 

At first, Ike had been shit-scared every minute of every shift. His training officer was so careless about following protocol that Ike was convinced he was trying to get himself killed and Ike along with him.

 

Ironically, his training officer did have stage IV pancreatic cancer and was hoping to die on the job so his wife would inherit a fat insurance payout.

 

He got his wish but Ike barely escaped without being bitten.

 

After Brian’s death, Ike was assigned a new partner, Randy.

 

Things were better after that.

 

Ike admired Randy. He never asked Ike to do something he wouldn’t do and there was nothing he couldn’t do better.

 

He taught Ike the best way of checking the zombie traps on their route and the safest way to deliver them to the euthanasia centers (known as the House of Zzzs because it was where they put the Zees to sleep).

 

The delivery was the most dangerous part of the job. Zees weren’t smart but they could sure as hell smell the stench coming from the crematorium at the back of the facility. They knew that nothing good happened there.

 

Randy was a popular guy and the alpha of a group of catchers who called themselves Z-Dawgs.

 

Once he teamed up with Randy, Ike became an honorary member of the Z-Dawgs and started hanging out with them on their time off.

 

It was Randy who introduced him to the Zee Fights. One of the Z-Dawgs had built a holding pen in his basement and after hours and on weekends, the guys would get together to hold Zee Fights, death matches between undead contenders fought in a backyard sand pit.

 

Ike had seen the videos on YouTube but nothing prepared him for the thrill of the real thing. It was the bloodiest of blood sports and best of all—unlike fighting dogs or fighting cocks—you couldn’t kill a fighting Zee just by wounding him or her.

 

Even the winning zombies were only good for a couple of fights though, because after that, the minute they started fighting, limbs started falling off and they just stood there as their opponents chopped them up like the Black Knight in the old Monty Python routine.

 

So there was always a need for fresh meat, so to speak. No one could build up a stable of fighters to gain an advantage.
On the other hand, some of the Zees were natural-born fighters, and not the ones you might think.

 

A lot of the former athletes were crap in the pit, for instance. Ex-military were often pussies. Given his druthers, Ike always bet on the housewives. The zombiefied soccer moms were fierce competitors, ferocious and wily.

 

Ike found that playing recordings of a distressed baby’s cry was all he needed to do to get their blood up before a match. It was too bad you couldn’t breed the Zees to fight, to pass those competitive genes on.

 

The fights brought in big money.

 

You had to know somebody who knew somebody to get invited to them, but word got out and the crowds grew.   
The Z-Dawgs shared out the profits even-steven and they were all rolling in cash.

 

Ike invited his brother Mitch to a fight and he was so upset Ike had to talk him out of calling the police.

 

Randy wasn’t too happy about that.

 

Randy was big on rules and he had a whole series of protocols they were supposed to follow when they were alone with their fighters before and after matches. No one wanted the gravy train to come to a screeching halt, so the Z-Dawgs followed his rules.

 

But accidents happen.

 

It was absolutely not his fault that Ike got bitten by a victorious Zee who had been a gym teacher in her former life. She’d come lurching out of the pit and thrown her arms around him. Ike was so surprised by the human moment that he stood there a second too long—long enough for her to bite half his cheek away.

 

Randy shot her in the head and then turned the shotgun on Ike.

 

Ike had grabbed the gun out of Randy’s hand and used it like a baseball bat to lay his friend out.

 

Well, ex-friend.

 

Zees don’t have friends and Ike was a Zee-to-be now.

 

He knew Randy would be coming for him.

 

He knew he should just turn himself in at a sleep center.

 

But before that, he was going to get himself a good meal.

 

Mitch looked like he’d be some good eating.

 

BIO: Katherine Tomlinson used to be a reporter but prefers to make things up. Her zombie story “Z-Cruise” will appear in the Hersham Horror anthology Alt-Dead this fall. Her story “A Dream of Blood and Fire” will be published by Trestle Press as part of Paul Brazill’s Drunk on the Moon anthology. She writes the serial novel NoHo Noir for the local news site patch.com.

Dead Letter by Katherine Tomlinson

DEAD LETTER - KATHERINE TOMLINSON

The first inkling Beatrice had that something was wrong was the sound of her dog’s agonized yelping.

Suzie-Q was a barkie little dog, a soft-coated Wheatan terrier, who patrolled her fenced-in domain with the intensity of a Blackwater contractor, but her yapping was usually of the happy, “Hi, howya doing?” variety. This was fear and pain and it brought Bea on a run from the kitchen to the front yard.

By the time she reached the door, the dog had limped up the steps to the porch where she stood trembling and shaking and holding her front paw, which looked shredded.

Beatrice scanned the area for another dog but the only thing moving on the street was the postman, who was shambling up the sidewalk with his usual lack of awareness for things going on around him.

Beatrice had often wondered if his personality fell somewhere along the autistic spectrum. He never made eye contact and he rarely spoke. She had given up trying to be nice to him and lately it was hard even to be civil because she was convinced he was stealing her Netflix movies.

The company’s e-mails had started to get a little testy the third time a movie disappeared on its way back, so she’d started mailing the red envelopes from a post office box near where she shopped for groceries. It was inconvenient, but worth it not to have her account cancelled.

Bea brought Suzie-Q into the house and gently washed her paw with soap and water. The dog squirmed and thrashed and nipped at Bea’s hand hard enough to draw blood before Bea was able to see what had caused the injury.

Is that a bite mark?

Bea sponged away a little more blood and was horrified when the margins of the wound were revealed. Instead of the punctures she’d expected, the tooth marks looked like they had been made...

...by a human?

Bea’s thoughts immediately went to her postman.

He didn’t like dogs and had once threatened to stop delivering mail to a family across the street after their dog had growled at him.

He was strange, no doubt about it, but strange enough to bite a dog?

After she’d wrapped Suzie-Q’s paw and given her a piece of chicken as a treat, Bea decided to call her post office.

The phone rang and rang and rang before it was finally picked up.

“Arrgghhh,” someone mumbled into the phone.

“Hello?” Bea said. “Hello?”

“Mmmmrgggh,” said the person on the other end.

“Yes, I’m calling to...”

“Mmmrggargggh.”

“I’d like to speak to a supervisor.”

The phone went dead in Bea’s hand.

Oh, for God’s sake, she thought, absently rubbing her hand. It was starting to throb where Suzie-Q had bitten it. She started to dial again and then put her phone down with a sigh. Talking to the guy’s supervisor probably wouldn’t do any good. He was a bureaucrat and would probably just brush her off with some sort of civil servant speak.

No, the best thing to do would be to confront him directly and demand an explanation from him. If he couldn’t explain himself, then she would call the police. Or maybe a lawyer. If she had to take Suzie-Q to a vet, she wasn’t going to pay the bill.

And if she needed a doctor to treat her hand, well...she wasn’t going to pay that bill, either.

Bea couldn’t find Suzie-Q the next morning, so by the time she saw the mail truck lurch to a stop across the street, she was itching to give the postman a piece of her mind. It didn’t help that she’d been up almost all night. Her bitten hand had gotten infected and was red and swollen and pain was pulsing through it in synch with every beat of her heart.

Bea was across the street before the postman had even turned off the engine.

He saw her coming and lunged at her, biting at her face.

Instinctively, she bit back, crunching through bone and gristle.

Bea had intended to give him a piece of her mind but he’d ended up giving her a piece of his instead.

It was quite tasty.