Odd Jobs for the Undead - A Zombie For Hire Story

Chapter 3

I stayed in the garden for twenty minutes or so watching ants carving up a worm and taking the bite sized bits back to their nest before I headed home.

Day time is no time for a zombie to be out and about. Too many people on the streets. Too easy to get jostled in a crowd and have a spleen rupture.

The closest manhole was just around the corner. I waited until I thought no one who would care was watching, then popped the lid with a mini-crowbar I carry with me. Two shakes later I had the lid back in place and was climbing down the slippery rungs to the maintenance tunnels.

I dropped the last few feet, splashing down in a puddle of fouled water. I could hear the rats that lived down there scurrying away in a huff. Out of my coat of many pockets I produced a small LED flashlight and clicked it on. Shining the light on the wall I found the underground equivalent of a street sign - chalk markings left behind by other subterranean travelers that could tell you where exactly you were in the city if you knew how to read them. I'd only been in this tunnel a couple times and still needed to check my bearings to make sure I didn't end up coming out by the Golden Gate.

There are miles and miles of interconnected storm drains, utility tunnels and sewer lines beneath San Francisco. The oldest of them were mapped out during prohibition and used to smuggle booze to the city's speak easies and brothels. There's even an abandoned US Army base that was set up during WWII.

I was almost home when I saw a light coming toward me. A few seconds later I heard someone call out in Chinese.

"Just passing through," I called back.

The light stopped moving forward. I heard whispered conversation, then the light started coming toward me again. I stepped to the side of the tunnel to make room.

A Chinese man wearing orange gang colors approached, flashlight in one hand and a wicked looking knife in the other. He pointed the knife at me and spoke again.

"Go ahead," I told him. "I don't want trouble."

I try to avoid the tunnels the asian gangs use for moving smack, women and bootlegged DVDs, but this route was the fastest way back to my pad.

I lowered my eyes and stared at my feet. The gang banger decided I wasn't a threat and put the knife away, then motioned down the tunnel. He wasn't alone. There were a half dozen young asian women behind him and another man in orange bringing up the rear. The girls all kept their faces averted as they walked by, but the two bangers never took their eyes off me until they'd passed.

I felt for the women, some of them barely looked grown up, but there wasn't anything I could do. And as long as I left the gangs alone, they let me pass unmolested.

Five minutes later and I pushed up the cover outside my home. A quick look to make sure nobody was around, and I climbed up to the surface. It was a mostly unnecessary precaution in this neighborhood. The Dogpatch is a little slice of heaven in known for its decaying warehouses, rusting shipping cranes, and wild dog packs.

I stepped quickly to the corrugated steel door of the building I was squatting in. I'd chosen a prime location, with views of other abandoned warehouses from every broken window in the place. Waiting for me outside was a beat up old red bodied Igloo cooler. My daily delivery from Lo Wang's Meat & Seafood.

I squatted next to it and cracked open the lid. Inside was a bloody mess of raw cow intestines, hearts, and stomachs. I was about to shut the lid when a length of bowel slid to the side revealing a plastic container filled with two or three brains.

Dinner and desert, I thought happily.

Picking up the cooler, I opened the door to Casa de Zombie.