Zombico

The rain pelted into Roberto’s skin like icy bullets, blasting against his leather clothes with the fury of heavenly rifles that thundered up in the clouds with blue fire; down on earth, a shot exploded from the muzzle of his earthly shotgun.

A flash of hot fire, and the rain steamed to give way.

The zombie a few feet in front of him flew back as its head burst open like a ripe melon, skull and leathery wrapping of dead skin shattering to spray moldy fragments of brain. The droplets splattered against his skin, mingling with the rain. The leather shone jet black with moisture, and its stank repugnantly with the same. Roberto frantically brushed the quivering droplets from the gleaming shotgun, and shoved a new shell into it.

Click.

Mud flew under his boots; he kicked it into the glazed dead eyes of the zombie crawling towards him. It groaned like a sagging bed and grabbed onto his leg with spidery white fingers, lips peeling back to reveal purple gums and teeth blackened by age. Its eyes revolved, aim, shoot. Rank odour of gases gushed from its hideous maw. The barrel slid roughly in between the thing’s teeth.

Muffled boom, and annihilated tissue flew. Another hand, gripping onto his own. Terrible bony strength, driving welts into the skin under his leather. A zombie, by him. Shotgun tossed, Roberto unsheathed his knife and hacked through the wrist of the corpse’s hand. Blood, turned to black ichor by ages of deoxygenation spouted in a fountain. Shuddering with familiar revulsion, he scrambled to extract the shotgun from the muck under him, load it, and blast the stump handed walking undead woman away. Zombie, rather. No man or woman. It.

Breathing heavily, Roberto looked around. That was the lot.

Sweat, black blood, and cold rain flooded down his young face and drowned his nostrils, leaving him breathless and gawping like a fish. The corpses around him, now permanent in their designation, stank to high heaven and beyond, making it all the worse for his nose. Out of the haze, from behind a tombstone, a woman sheathed in black and masked upto the bridge of her nose came running to pick him up. Aubrey. And another guy, with a camcorder wrapped in plastic gripped in one hand, and a Magnum tucked behind the belt. Roberto gasped and spluttered.

"That was intense." Aubrey winked behind the mask, and the other guy, Domino, gave him a thumbs-up and switched off the camcorder. There they were.

Evil vanquished. Perfect.

Aubrey, the masked woman. A mystery in shady circles of electronic communications, UFO obsession circles on the internet. Her name had appeared in tabloids quite a few times.

At age eleven, she saw a light in the sky. A beautiful light, white and blue and pink. Hovering in the night sky like a descending star. Some reporters had even induced form her masked lips in interviews behind blinds the word "disc" or "circle". A disc of light.

She had gone missing for seven days, and then appeared unharmed and blooming in health in her little backyard, overwhelming her family. The next day her father died of tuberculosis, and Aubrey told her mother she had been touched by God, taken into the sky by angels through a portal of light in the night sky. And by her deathbed, frustrated by the chanting of her grandmother and delighted by reams of incense, she placed her little hands on her father’s head, and woke him out of death.

The only problem; the corpse remained a corpse. A zombie.

Aubrey, touched by God(?), given the power to raise the dead. A heavenly experimentation? UFO? Alien abduction. Aubrey the masked, eternally hidden. Mystery of the internet and tabloids, claiming that men in black suits chased her with guns and sunglasses. She had two friends, called Roberto and Domino.