Free Zombie Zero by J.K. Norry Page B

desperate hunger, and food he couldn’t eat, so he kept looking at it through hers.

Chapter 8
    In a privatized prison, which received thirty-five thousand dollars a year for each inmate it could coax or keep inside, Warden Johns literally sat at his desk counting his money. It wouldn’t be long before he could retire and live forever in the Philippines, instead of only spending two weeks a year there. They were just numbers on a computer screen, but they meant more than that to the warden. They meant freedom: sweet, intoxicated freedom in the arms of a blurred stream of beautiful exotic women who couldn’t say his name right even if they knew it. At the same time, in the same country…
     
    Elayna was not going to eat anyone. Maybe Maya hadn’t gotten as deep into her mind, or maybe the thought just turned her stomach a little too deeply. Whatever it was, she was not going to eat anyone. She would fight the gnawing hunger in her gut until it consumed her from within. She would let the pieces of her skin that kept falling in her lap sit there for anyone to notice. She wouldn’t smile, and show her teeth; but she wasn’t going to eat anyone either.
    Elayna could still see through Maya’s eyes; the more her resolve strengthened, the more fuzzy the images became. It happened gradually over the long flight. She watched through Maya’s eyes as Maya watched through the others’. She watched her father land first, calmly hail a cab and climb in. He left his luggage spinning round the airport carousel; they had only packed to avoid arousing suspicion. His deodorant wasn’t going to stop him from stinking like rotting flesh, and his toothbrush would fray to uselessness if he tried to use it. He didn’t even need the passport or money in his pocket anymore, or he wouldn’t in a few days; all of that would be useless paper soon if Maya had her way.
    Mallory bit the driver as soon as he closed the door behind him. The man opened his mouth to scream, or protest, but a strong hand covered his mouth. The hand became stronger as change swept over them both. Raw primal power coursed through the professor’s body, and he held the other man easily. He felt the driver begin to tremble as the bite did its work. There was only a few moments of struggle before the man relaxed in his grasp and sighed.
    “Drive,” Mallory said. The car pulled away from the curb as Elayna watched from her unique vantage point. She thought for a moment that it had been a lucky find, for him to climb into a car in China and have the driver speak English. Thinking about it, watching the scene, she realized that hadn’t been the case at all. She realized it when the driver spoke words that she had no reason to understand. Somehow she knew what he had said, as did Mallory.
    “I know,” Mallory responded. “I know you’re hungry. I am too. We need to get away from the airport. Go somewhere with people that isn’t too busy this time of day.”
    They were communicating in images sent from one twisted mind to another. Elayna saw them as clearly as the scene, or her own rotting hand in front of her face. The professor sent him a string of pictures: the cab stopping again and again to pluck someone off the street, only to drop them changed a block or so later. Many of the images were of the driver or the professor rending flesh with their teeth, splattering blood about in what looked like an ecstatic feasting.
    Elayna tuned out the scene before they could pick up their first victim. She thought of Todd next; immediately she felt awash in a sea of power and blood and hunger. It was hard to look back in his thoughts to see if his first bite had been deliberate disobedience or if the twisting hunger had simply been too much for him. He was still aloft, but the airplane cabin had become a sodden mess of blood and bodies. There was not a single human left aboard. All of them had changed, bitten by Todd or someone that he had bitten. Many of them had changed