4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas by Cheryl Mullenax Page B

Dead
    Border Patrol Agent Betty Davis Wolfe knew they were not alone in the tunnel. Something or someone was directly behind her, watching them. She could feel its presence just as surely as if it had reached out and tickled the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. Her partner was on his hands and knees three feet ahead of her, following his flashlight’s beam deeper into the inky black tunnel.
    Crawling along with her rear end raised and vulnerable was not a position a woman wanted to be in, especially in such a cramped and confining space as this tunnel under Nogales. Especially when she felt such a palpable presence at her back.
    She told herself it was her imagination, sparked by her extreme dislike of cramped spaces. A cigarette would calm her wired nerves. She hadn’t had one in more than four hours. She had been about to light one up but then they found the trapdoor in the floor of the empty warehouse, opened it up and now here they were, checking out the secret tunnel running from the other side of the fence in Mexico, smack-dab straight into Nogales, Arizona. Underground USA. There were many miners in Mexico, which meant a lot of guys had the know-how to engineer a tunnel like this one, shored up with wooden beams and even air-conditioned by a long plastic tube that resembled a fat green snake. It would’ve cost a drug cartel a pretty penny to have this tunnel dug but the profits from the product they could run through here would have earned them
prettier
pennies—a hell of a lot of them.
    That was, if Border Patrol Agent Betty Davis Wolfe and her partner Alejandro Bravo hadn’t found it and already called it in. Betty had wanted to wait for the team to get here before they went down but Bravo Macho (as Betty called him when she wanted to needle the cocky little guy) couldn’t wait, so here they were, just the two of them, with backup a long way away.
    God but she was dying for a smoke.
    Then she smelled it. Whatever the hell was behind her
was
behind her. There was no doubt now. This was not imagination. She smelled the stinking son of a bitch.
    She reached back to her right hip and unholstered her Heckler & Koch P 2000 .40 caliber automatic. The only way to turn around to face the rear was to sit and turn. There would be a few seconds of darkness before she would have time to draw and thumb on her flashlight with her left hand. But first she had to alert her partner.
    “Hold up, Bravo, I’ve got somebody on my tail,” she said and then turned as fast as she could and shot the flashlight beam into the darkness.
    Nothing there. The light played on the wooden beams at the tunnel’s ceiling. The beams made her think of the ribs of some giant serpentine beast, as seen from inside the monster. Jonah in the whale. Or was it Pinocchio?
    “Where?” Bravo asked. From the sound of his voice behind her, she knew he had also turned around. Which meant he could also see that there was no one there. His beam joined hers and the tunnel looked more like a tunnel and less like the inside of a dragon or giant serpent.
    “I smelled it,” she said.
    “Smelled what?” He didn’t disguise his disgust for her rookie-like jumpiness.
    “I don’t know. Shit.”
    “You smelled shit?”
    “No. I mean, maybe. I don’t—”
    Bravo Macho screamed. It was a very unmacho scream.
    Betty spun on her ass and put her light on a dark-skinned man burying his face in the side of Bravo’s neck. And on the blood spilling onto the shoulder of his uniform. Was the guy actually going vampire on Bravo?
    Wiry Bravo hit at his attacker with his flashlight, clocked him a good one on top of the head but the guy didn’t let go. His thick, hairy arms were wrapped firmly around Bravo’s torso, holding him fast.
    It was then that Betty saw that the attacker was totally naked. This was almost as shocking as the fact that he was eating her partner’s throat. Why should the man’s nudity be so deeply disturbing?
    She drew a bead on the naked