Jarvis, Paul, and Lady Bee came back from the store shaking their heads. “Cleaned out,” said Bee. “It’s a mess, but there’s nothing useful.”
St. George sighed. “Well, we all knew there was a good chance of that. It’s a main drag.” He tipped his head to the next storefront. “You guys want to take the psychic?”
Lady Bee gave a too-sharp salute and clicked her heels together with a smirk.
*
An ex stumbled across the road to them. It had been an older man with a wiry frame and a thin mustache. It reached out and Lee pushed it away with the tip of his rifle. “Hey, check it out.”
Al and Hector glanced over at him. “What?”
“It’s Vincent Price.” Lee shoved it back again. “That’s gotta be worth major points.”
“Vincent Price is dead,” said Al.
“Well, yeah. They’re all dead.”
“He was dead before this, fuckwit,” said Hector. “Like, twenty years ago.”
The other man scowled. “Are you sure? This sure looks like him.”
“Sure,” nodded the tattooed man. “He’s dead.”
“Maybe he came back anyway.”
Al shot him a look. “How the hell would he come back anyway?”
Lee shrugged. “It’s Vincent Price. If anyone was going to come back as a zombie it’d be him.”
“No,” said Al, “if anyone was going to come back as a zombie it’d be Bela Lugosi. But he won’t, because he’s dead, too.” He slid a machete from the scabbard at his side and chopped through the ex’s neck.
*
“Well, that’s something y’all don’t see every day,” said Jarvis.
At the center of the psychic’s shop stood a round table decorated with colored scarves and cloths. Half a dozen stubby candles had been knocked over. A crystal ball had fallen from the tabletop and its dusty shards lay near one of the legs. Tarot cards were scattered and turned at all angles.
An ex sat behind the table, clacking its teeth at them. It had been a woman once, Asian by the look of her. It was in a wheelchair. With the brakes locked, it was wedged between the seat and the table. Rings shivered on its bony fingers as it reached mindlessly back and forth with its hands. Every third or fourth pass it would snag a tarot card and slide it a few inches on the tabletop.
“Either y’all want to guess how long it’s been sitting there like that?”
“At least two years, looking at the dust,” said Bee. “Maybe more. She could’ve died right at the start of the outbreak.”
“Looks like she tried to give herself one last reading,” said Paul. “Guess she believed this stuff.” He prodded open a small fridge with his foot and recoiled from the smell he set loose.
“People believe a lot of crap when things get bad,” said Jarvis. He reached out and pulled one card from the table. The ex clawed at the metal rings of his sleeve with feeble fingers. He held up the image of the black knight with a skull face. “Death,” he said with a smirk. “Guess she was right on that.”
“The death card doesn’t mean death,” said Bee. “It means a transition. A change.”
Jarvis slid a bowie knife from his belt and stepped behind the ex. “Well, so she was still right,” he said. He grabbed its hair, pulled its head back, and sawed through the neck. When he was done he tossed the skull in the corner. “Let’s see if there’s anything good in the back room.”
*
As St. George predicted, the rest of the small plaza was picked clean. The big score was the fifty-odd gallons of gasoline. It took half an hour to pull it all up using a small hand pump. The scavengers killed another eight exes while they waited.
Two hours later they knew the next three buildings had been stripped clean of useful materials, too. Another sixteen exes dead, five of them with their necks snapped by the hero’s bare hands. The scavengers grumbled. Things had been getting tight in Hollywood proper, but it’d been a while since a mission was this unsuccessful.