Gold Guns Girls (Cities of the Dead)

Gold Guns Girls

  By William Young

  Copyright 2011 William Young

  Moscow, Russia – Day 209

  Fyodor Volkov had everything in the world he had ever wanted, and it meant absolutely nothing. It was worth nothing, too. Mostly, anyway. He had spent twenty years climbing to the top of his ... field ... and now that success was rendered moot. He was busy surviving from day to day just like everyone else, foraging for food and water, avoiding military patrols and killing zombies.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling in the darkness of the bedroom. Fyodor had no idea what time it was, the clocks on the various pieces of electronics had stopped working when the electricity had died months ago and he had never been one to wear a watch. He moved his hand and felt Natalie’s bare ass beneath the sheets. He glanced over and saw the river of blonde hair cascading over her naked shoulders and across the sheets pulled up over the small of her back. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever made love to.

  Scratch that. She was the most beautiful blonde he had ever had sex with. Fyodor Volkov had never known love, not romantic love, anyway, and had learned over the years to stuff the desire for such a connection into a small recess in his mind near the spot where his skull met his spine. Sex was easy for him, made almost simple by the fact he had become rich in his twenties, was good-looking and had figured out how to talk women into bed before he had money or status. He had game, and he knew it.

  He squeezed Natalie’s ass between his fingers and thumb, a quick pulse that might have made it through to her deep sleep sub-consciousness as a sign of affection, slipped out of bed and walked into the living room. He pulled up a bottle of Stoli from an end table and tilted it into his mouth, letting the vodka slip in over his tongue and fill his cheeks.

  And now here he was: thirty-eight years old, two bastard children – probably dead, along with their mothers, but whom he loved (the children, not the mothers) – apartments in New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Dallas, a custom-built Ferrari, a Sports Illustrated swim-suit model from Texas sleeping in his bed and everything he wanted whenever he wanted, and it might as well have been nothing.

  He tapped a cigarette out of a pack and flamed it to life with a gold-plated lighter Natalie had given him last Christmas. He inhaled deeply and held the smoke in his lungs, noting the sensation of fullness that was only slightly different from a lungful of air, and then blew the smoke out in a stream. He stared at the cloud of smoke as it twirled in the currents of the room, thinning out and fracturing as it dissipated.

  “Hey, Vasily, wake up,” Fyodor said, kicking his drunk friend lightly on the bottom of a foot protruding from a blanket where Vasily lay on the couch.

  “What?” Vasily asked. He hadn’t been asleep, either.

  “Do you think zombies can die of lung cancer?”

  Vasily opened his eyes at this. “What?”

  “Lung cancer,” Fyodor made a demonstration move with his cigarette, lifting it in the air for Vasily to observe, then took a drag from it. “If you had lung cancer before you turned into a zombie, would the cancer keep eating away at you after you were a zombie?”

  Vasily laughed. “I would bet it would make them stronger and more able to kill us. Wouldn’t that be poetic justice, my friend? The undead gaining strength for the vices that would have killed them in their living lives. Only God would be so ironic.”

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  “I also don’t believe in zombies. And, yet, … zombies.”

  Outside, there was a staccato of fire from an AK-47 machine gun, a sound familiar to both of them not so much because one heard it all the time anymore but because they had used them themselves on many occasions before the world had gone to the dead. The sound made almost no dent on the reality of either man, and Fyodor took another swig of vodka before handing the bottle to Vasily.

  “What idiot goes out in the dark of night anymore?” Fyodor asked of nobody.

  Vasily suppressed a burp. “And with an AK? Only a fool goes out there anymore with anything less than a Saiga shotgun of some sort.”

  Fyodor motioned with his head and Vasily followed him out of the living room with the bottle of vodka. They went up the steps to the second floor and entered a common room appointed with leather furniture. A large LED TV and a surround-sound speaker system were mounted to the walls. A leggy brunette wearing nothing but her underwear was sprawled against the arm of a couch in a stupor, her eyes glazed over and fixed on nothing. She turned her dark eyes up at the two men as they paused in the room.

  “We’re out of coke,” Mariya said, her voice hollow, the words matter-of-fact, plaintive almost, but not desperate.

  Fyodor and Vasily exchanged a look.

  “Have some champagne, honey, there’s plenty in the wine cellar,” Fyodor said, taking the bottle from Vasily and tipping a sip of vodka into his mouth. He turned to Vasily and said, “I’ve never seen a person go through so much coke in so short a time. Does she eat?”

  Vasily shrugged. They walked out onto a balcony and took a helical staircase up to an observation deck atop the house. Broken clouds moved across the night sky, obscuring the stars, but both men ignored the beauty of the heavens and fixed their eyes on the horizon, which was aglow.

  “I can’t believe they burned the fucking city down,” Vasily said, watching the distant smoke columns merge with the clouds.

  “Of course they did. We’re Russians. Nobody but Russians get to live in Moscow,” Fyodor said. “Napoleon and Hitler both learned the hard way. Now, my friend, the undead learn.”

  A series of thunderous booms undulated through the night followed by the sound of distant whistling. The two men turned their heads in a direction and waited a few seconds for the same number of explosions to echo from the horizon. Fyodor took another swig of vodka and set the bottle down on a hand railing.

  “Still fighting the last war, our glorious army at work killing zombies with howitzers,” Fyodor said, patting through his pockets for his pack of cigarettes and bringing one alight. “I don’t know when it became the custom of every Russian army to destroy everything in sight as a means of waging war. If we’re losing, we burn it all down so the enemy can’t have it, and if we’re winning, we blow it all up so the enemy can’t have it.”

  Vasily laughed.

  “Vasily, we’re all or nothing as a people, and soon we will be nothing. For our entire history, nobody has been able to conquer us, not really, not fully, but now, at the apex of human achievement, when life is easy, when you can watch porn on your pocket phone, get any drug you desire, eat anything you want, have any girl you choose, we finally found a way to kill us all off. Only, we didn’t kill us all off, we just found a way to make all of the stuff we made to make life easy completely useless to us. Now, all we want is to wander the earth undead, trying to eat the brains of our fellow man.”

  There was some rustling on a chaise longue and the two men quickly turned their heads to the noise. Fyodor was instantly relieved to see Nikita push her chestnut hair off her face and tuck some locks behind each ear. Her eyeliner streaked down her cheeks from having cried, but Fyodor had no idea what she might have been crying about.

  “This used to be such a nice dacha to come to for a weekend trip, Fyodorovitch, but now it’s just a fucking prison,” Nikita said, her voice soft. “A gilded cage. I want to go home.”

  “You can’t go home, Nikita, the army is burning it down as we speak,” Vasily said.

  Nikita let out the barest trace of a whimper, but she had already cried all of the sadness out of her, leaving nothing but a hollow spot inside her where she should have felt sorrow or despair. She felt nothing bu
t the heaviness of helplessness. She had been an actress of minor fame when she had met Fyodor, and his connections had made her a success slightly more than less-than-minor when he had been dating her before he met Natalie. She had come to him after the government had quarantined the city, and he had used his connections to bring her to his dacha along with Natalie and a couple of other girls to wait out the plague. It had all started out as a party.

  “Are you going looting tomorrow?” Nikita asked.

  “Foraging, Nikita, not looting,” Fyodor said, taking the bottle from the railing and handing it to her.

  “Whatever. I want to go this time; I want to see some of the world out there on the other side of the fence,” Nikita said.

  The two men looked at each other and Fyodor gave a slight nod. “Sure, Nikita, we’ll get you up after dawn.”

  Fyodor motioned with his head and he and Vasily went back down into the house. Fyodor picked up a Desert Eagle .50 caliber pistol off the kitchen counter and snugged it into his waist band while Vasily grabbed a shotgun from it’s resting place in a corner of the room. They stepped outside onto the patio and paused, listening for the sound of an undead walker that might have made it through the fence. None ever had, but there was no reason to be lax. All