Dead Man's Hand by Richard Levesque Page A

seconds later, I’d been frisked and
was being pushed forward along the side of the van, toward the
doorway into the drug lab and whatever else lay beyond.

 
    Six
     
    I’d never been anywhere near a roller lab,
but I knew I was in one now. Across the room from me was a large
open tank, the size of a modest aboveground swimming pool in the
suburbs. Pipes ran in and out of it, leading to larger tanks and
smaller ones, passing in and out of this main room and through the
walls, no doubt to other vats and processors, eventually ovens and
weighing and bagging rooms. The smell was only a bit stronger
inside, and I would no longer have said brown rice and bananas—not
quite. Still that odd combination was the closest I’d have been
able to get.
    While the drug manufacturing equipment all
around me did draw my interest, it was only to the degree that it
made me wonder just what I’d gotten myself into and if there was
any way I could use what I knew about rolling or about Pete or
Pixel or the Grommets or even Drea and zombies to get myself out of
this, to get the damned gun away from my head. The attempt at
strategizing was fleeting though, giving way to disbelief as I saw
how many bodies were scattered across the floor.
    Five wore tan coveralls; three of these were
near the van’s back end, one slumped against the far right wall,
and the last was on the catwalk that ran around the rim of the
largest vat in the room, its head and one arm hanging over the
edge. Two other dead men wore street clothes. One lay with his face
away from me, slumped on the ramp leading up to the catwalk around
the vat. The other was practically at my feet. Blood pooled on the
floor around him, having spilled from the dead man’s throat, half
of which was gone, the flesh around the wound ragged and torn. The
dead man also had a single bullet hole in his forehead—his
compatriots’ way of thwarting the virus transmitted in the bite
that had killed him.
    Aside from the hum of machinery, the place
was silent—no moans, no cries of alarm or pain. Other than my
captor, I got no sense that any of Grommet’s boys were in the
place, not even Neat Pete. I knew his couldn’t be the body on the
ramp; its clothes looked too cheap.
    After a few seconds, the man with the gun to
my head pushed me toward the ramp where the body lay. Soon, I could
discern that the dead man had snow-white hair and dark age spots on
the one arm that pointed up the ramp—looking like it was somehow
trying to get away from whatever had happened to the body it was
attached to. The dead man’s age and shabby clothes told me this had
been Drea’s driver. By the time we were close enough for me to get
a good look at the body, I could see that a huge flap of flesh hung
down the side of his face and that there was a bullet hole in his
head similar to the first corpse I’d seen.
    At first, I’d assumed that the bodies in
coveralls had been lab workers caught in the crossfire, but now I
saw more closely the body on the catwalk ahead of me. It was one of
Drea’s zombies. More specifically, it was Lester Rincon. While the
body’s left arm was hidden from view, hanging with its head over
the edge of the vat, the right arm lay at its side, the hand
cleanly sliced off with the white bone poking through the flesh. It
was impossible to look at that neat stump and not think of the hand
in Pixel’s run-down refrigerator.
    There was no way to know exactly what had
happened here, but my guess was that the zombies had somehow gotten
loose. The men in street clothes were Grommet’s boys—which Grommet
I couldn’t say for sure, but I had a hunch. They’d been attacked.
And when the dust had settled, the score was five former zombies,
two dead gangsters, and one dead old man. The living had been
bitten and put down, the undead dispatched with shots to the head.
Doing the math left one zombie unaccounted for, sort of a word
problem from hell, and I had to hope that the man who’d captured