Dead Man's Hand by Richard Levesque

though, struck me as the more important object of
investigation, so I crept up to it, looking and listening for
anything amiss.
    The passenger door was unlocked, but I
didn’t open it—just went to the front of the van to peer through
the windshield. I could see nothing, no one living or dead or
anywhere in between. Heavy metal mesh formed a barrier between the
cab and cargo area in the van, the kind that would have been strong
enough to keep the driver safe in case the zombies broke their
restraints in the middle of being transported. Peering through the
glass, all I could see for sure was that the van’s two back doors
hung wide open, as though it had expelled its contents into the
building.
    I squinted and then rubbed my hand against
the window, hoping in vain to be able to see for certain what was
inside the drug lab, but the mesh was too thick for me to be able
to make out anything but what looked like large tanks or vats with
a maze of multi-colored pipes running from place to place. My guess
about the place being a drug lab seemed to have been right, and now
I hazarded a new one.
    Given my area of professional expertise, the
drug trade wasn’t something I knew much about. My clients tended to
get themselves into trouble over other things. But that doesn’t
mean I wasn’t up on the latest trends. The drug lords, the Grommet
brothers predominant among them, had started manufacturing a new
product a few years back, and it had caught on among the normals in
the city. The trick of this one wasn’t that it was an upper or a
downer or a psychedelic or a euphoric but rather that it was all of
those in one, a drug that would cycle from one effect to another to
another, randomly and with equal intensity. It had a long chemical
name, but the kids called it “roller” as in roller coaster, and
using it was either “rolling” or “coasting.” The drug could be
eaten, snorted, smoked or shot up. Total versatility, depending on
individual taste.
    I told myself that I was looking into a
roller lab, one that was now home to half a dozen zombies along
with Neat Pete and maybe others. With a reassuring check of my back
pocket to make sure I still had Drea’s antidote with me, I tried to
decide if I should venture in or hang it up and tell Pixel it
wasn’t worth the risk.
    And at the moment that choice ran its way
through my thoughts, I decided to bolt. And not because of zombies.
I don’t know if it was a shift in the breeze or some change in
pressure inside the building, but I smelled something now, or maybe
only just realized that I’d been smelling it already, just figured
out the significance of the scent wafting out of the building:
brown rice and bananas.
    Pixel was a roller. It didn’t mean she as an
addict, or even that Pete was her connection. But what were the
chances that the hacker with a little habit and the dapper killer
with access to her drug of choice should just happen to hook up?
Maybe the satyr attack had never happened. And maybe it had. It
didn’t matter. Sure, Pixel had the dead man’s hand, but the story
of how she’d gotten it suddenly looked shaky. And while I didn’t
think there was any way she could have engineered my presence here
just from our conversation the night before, I knew for sure that
the steel mesh in the van wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t see all
the way through. When you threw zombies into the mix, there was no
way I was about to move another inch toward that doorway.
    In my head, I was already out the gate and
heading for my car, the cold kiss-off I’d give Pixel already
forming itself in my thoughts. But before I could get my feet in
sync with my mind, I felt the hard steel of a gun barrel pushed up
against the back of my skull, just to the right of my left ear.
    “ See anything you like?”
came the quiet voice, one I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Neat Pete,
but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t have talked my way out of this
even if it had been Pete. A few