Jax and the Beanstalk Zombies (4 page)

Planting her palms on the firm cloud ground, she hefted herself up and out of the tunnel. Her heartbeat raced as she stood guard, watching for anything out of the ordinary. Hell, who was she kidding? They’d just climbed a magic beanstalk and were walking on clouds. This whole event was out of the ordinary, even for her. And she’d once avoided cross-town traffic by taking a flying carpet.

Antoine hauled himself out of the tunnel, followed by Jax. A bit of white fluff clung to his broad shoulders and it took everything she had not to brush it off for him.

“Alright, let’s head toward the castle.” Antoine marched forward, his head turning from side to side as he kept a watch on the perimeter.

“Worried?” she asked.

“Not at all.” He chuckled. “Just keeping a lookout for that fat goose.”

It took ten minutes to get to the castle. The gray stone walls stretched up farther than Veronica could see. She pressed her hand against the cold, rough surface. There weren’t any doors or windows that she could find.

“Is it a wall?” Jax asked.

“No. Like the rest of this place, it’s magic.” Antoine pulled out a heart locket hanging from a gold chain around his neck. He flicked it open and held it out toward the stone. “Three you require. Three we be.”

The air shifted around them, revealing an oak door so big, a twenty-foot-tall man could walk through without bumping his head. The watermelon-sized door knob was way out of reach.

“So how do we get in?” Jax pushed against the door with both hands.

The creak was nearly deafening, but the door swung open enough for them to squeeze through into the darkness beyond.

As soon as she crossed the threshold, unease tickled her shoulders. She searched the black void for the cause but couldn’t see a damn thing.
Get a grip, Veronica.
This wasn’t the first dark and scary place she’d gone to hunt for treasure. It wouldn’t be her last.

At least she hoped not.

“I got your back.” Jax’s voice gave his location away as being behind and slightly to the left. “Let’s get what we need and get the hell out of here.”

They turned on their flashlights, illuminating a great hall with two doorways on each side leading to other rooms. A giant-sized side table had fallen over. Broken pieces of huge wooden furniture littered the floor. Over, under and around they went, until they reached the first doorway.

Antoine held up a hand. “Let me search the room. You two stand guard here. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

Without waiting for a reply, the older man shuffled into the room. Within a minute, all she could see of him was the beam of light from his flashlight bouncing off the stone walls.

Veronica leaned against the broken table leg behind her and faced the room where Antoine had disappeared. Jax stood on the other side of the doorway, his presence easing her nervous willies. The minutes ticked by as Antoine’s light moved in a circular pattern through the room.

She must have stared too long without blinking because her right contact began to irritate her eye. When she closed her eyes for a few seconds then blinked to rewet her eyes, the pain eased.

A soft giggle broke the companionable silence.

She turned and gave Jax a dirty look. “What’s so funny?”

His wide-eyed gaze was locked on something behind her. “I’m not the one laughing.”

Chapter 4

The urge to sprint away squeezed the air from Veronica’s lungs. But she forced herself to ignore the heebie jeebies highjacking her courage and concentrate on her training. Calm. Cool. Collected. Play it smart, and they’d all make it out of here.

“Don’t make any sudden moves.” Jax kept his gaze on the thing giggling behind her. “Slow and steady.”

Whatever was behind her sounded like a five-year-old girl who’d just sucked down a balloon’s worth of helium in one gulp. The high pitched and slightly wheezing tittering blew the loose strands of Veronica’s hair forward, making her earlobe itch.

She stared at Jax. He’d promised he’d have her back. Well, now was the time to prove it. Exhaling a shaky breath, she eased toward him. One foot in front of the other. Repeat.

“Down now!”

She dropped to her knees.

A long knife whizzed over her head.

A grunt. A
thunk
. Then, nothing.

Jax was beside her, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. “What was it?”

“Fuck if I know.”

She pivoted and strode with him to the humanoid body, which had crumpled to the floor. What was left of the dead man’s clothes were scraps of what might have been blue cotton, but had faded to a washed-out gray. His pants hung to the middle of his bony shins. When alive, he must have stood at least seven-feet tall, and his feet were huge.

Using the toe of his boot, Jax pushed the body over.

His knife had pierced the creature’s right eye, gone in straight to the hilt, but without spilling any blood. Veronica’s stomach heaved and she knew if she looked in the mirror her pale skin would be more than a little tinged with green. She concentrated on taking deep breaths of cotton candy-scented air.

“That’s weird.” Jax pulled his knife free.

“What about this place isn’t weird?”

“No, look closer.” He hunkered down by the body and pointed the beam of his flashlight. “He’s missing a chunk of skin under his eye. It’s almost as if it rotted away.”

Her heart hiccupped. Those were rumors, old wives’ tales. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Look for yourself.”

That was the last thing she wanted to do, as evidenced by her roiling stomach, but she still ended up squatting beside Jax looking at the dead creature’s face. Torn, puckered ashen skin circled a one-inch-in-diameter hole directly underneath his eye socket. Quarter-sized purple sores dotted his face and exposed skin. Ragged teeth poked outward from his gaping mouth.

“It can’t be.” There had always been stories. Her cousin Lulu had whispered the tale to her late at night as a test of pre-pubescent courage. No one ever had experienced an actual sighting–well, and lived to tell the tale. The proof, however, lay dead in a heap at their feet.

She glanced up at Jax.

“Zombie,” they said together.

Somewhere out in the darkness another giggle sounded.

Then, another.

They snapped off their flashlights.

The world turned inky black.

She strained in an attempt to pinpoint the zombies’ location by hearing but that information remained elusive. Fear settled in her stomach like a bad Mexican dinner, making her queasy and clammy.

“We have to get Antoine and get the hell out of here,” Jax whispered.

God, yes. All she wanted to do was run screaming for the beanstalk. But they couldn’t. She squeezed his forearm. “Agreed, but we need to be smart about this. We can’t attract their attention.”

“I know you like to make a plan for everything, but we have about two minutes before we’re lunch,” he snarled.

If they went into ninja mode, it could work. “Brunch, it’s only ten thirty in the morning.”

Jax looked like he was barely restraining the need to shake her senseless. “This is not the time or place for semantics. What’s the plan?”

“Zombies are attracted to shiny things, movement and sound. So, stay low and move slow. Once we’re inside the room, we can pick up the pace to find Antoine. He’s still using his flashlight so it shouldn’t take long to find him. We have to find him before they do.”

Another set of giggles rang out. This time, closer.

Sliding his fingers between hers, Jax squeezed her hand. “Let’s do this.”

Smooth as a freshly swept ice rink, they stood and slunk toward the door. With each step, her eyes adjusted to the darkness, revealing a strange world of giants and their belongings. Half of a ten-foot chair tilted against one wall. A cracked coffee cup, nearly as tall as her stood like a lonely sentry in the hall. Distracted by all the oversized scraps of giant life, when she stubbed her toe on something solid, she pitched forward.

Jax wrapped his arms around her waist and yanked her securely against his body before she could land on the hard, stone floor. “I got you.”

Something heavy scraped across the floor behind them, the sound echoing up to the high-vaulted ceiling. Footsteps sounded–not soft and careful like theirs, but clomping and clumsy. A trio of snickers followed.

She couldn’t judge in the cavernous space’s darkness how close the zombies had gotten or how many there were. At least three. Probably more. All the zombie speculative research she’d read hypothesized that they traveled in packs of ten to twelve. Technically brain dead, they didn’t move according to any logical pattern, instead being drawn to light, sound and movement, forever pushed onward by a hunger for brains and other internal organs. The giggling was a total new one to her.

Securely on her feet again, she and Jax tiptoed through the open doorway, searching for Antoine’s ray of light.

“Come on, Antoine, where are you?” she mumbled to herself. Her pulse jackhammered in her throat.

In the vast gloom, a faint glow appeared in the distance.

“There!” she said.

Springing forward as one unit, she and Jax hurried across the booby-trapped floor, scurrying over broken furniture and under what little remained standing upright. She clasped his hand, tethering herself to the safe reality of Jax even in the midst of all this madness.

Out of nowhere, a gangly, twelve-foot-tall zombie appeared in front of them.

His bottom lip hung by a skinny sliver of skin that wobbled when he reached out a hand with only three fingers toward them.

Goosebumps marched up Veronica’s skin. The scream escaped her mouth before she could remember her warning to Jax to stay silent.

It bounced off the walls and set off a series of giggles from the room’s hidden nooks and crannies. His compatriots’ noise distracted the zombie, who swiveled his head, toward the noise. But only for a moment before he returned his empty gaze to them. What had been a high-pitched giggle became lower, heavier. The zombie swiped his shriveled tongue across his gaping mouth.

Jax whipped out a sharpened expandable baton and, in one fluid motion, brought it down against the zombie’s neck. The blade sliced through its rotting flesh like a knife through warm butter. The head tumbled off, landed on the floor with a thud and rolled away into the shadows.

“He’s all laughed out,” Jax said.

Veronica fought to push away the fear threatening to blind her to everything else. “What about the others?”

“We just have to hope they come at us one at a time.”

“Then we kill them?”

He turned and grinned. “That sounds like my kind of plan. Let’s get Antoine and get the fuck out of here.”

Sticking to the shadows, she hustled through the obstacle course of giant-sized wreckage, following Antoine’s beam of light fifty yards ahead.

She grabbed the spongy-gripped garden shovel in her tool belt. At seven inches in length, to do any damage with it she’d have to get into close quarters with Mr. Tall, Dark and Dead but it was much better than the alternative.

Holding her breath with every step and exhaling only once she’d made it from one safe spot to the next, she made her way through the debris. Damn, what she wouldn’t give for a nice pair of night-vision goggles. And a bazooka outfitted with one big-ass silencer.

The farther they traveled into the room, Antoine’s illumination grew from a thin ray to a large swath of light. Only a few more feet and they’d be there.

“Why hasn’t he called out to us?” Veronica whispered, seeing visions of Antoine running from reanimated corpses. “Tried to find us? He had to have heard me scream.”

Jax shrugged. “We’ll find out in a minute.”

She dashed from their hiding spot behind an oversized book to a still-upright chair. Antoine’s light crept around the corner, illuminating a human-sized bloody handprint on the chair leg. Refusing to contemplate who had made it, she peeked around the curved wood.