Metahumans vs the Undead: A Superhero vs Zombie Anthology by Gina Ranalli, Rhiannon Paille, Eric S Brown, Anthony Giangregorio, Gouveia Keith, Dixon Lorne, Joe Martino, Rebecca Besser, Frank Dirscherl, A.P. Fuchs Page A

but that was a long time ago. Now, he reached into his ear, turned up his hearing aid, and pulled himself up to his walker. Grunting with each step, he headed into the sitting room. The sound came from a two-way radio perched on its charger on the center coffee table. Smiling, he heard Kory’s voice calling his name. But the smile died down as he realized that instead of his usual excited boyish shout, Kory’s voice was filled with fright. “ Fantom — Are you there, Fantom ? I need you to answer, I really need you to — ”
    Settling down into his easy chair, Missouri fumbled for the radio, bringing it up to his lips with shaking hands. With some concentration, he managed to press the send button, all the while wishing the controls were twice their size. “I’m here, Kory. What’s your twenty?”
    Usually, the boy would give a fantastic location — the jungles of Sumatra or the deserts outside Karnak ; wherever his imaginary games had taken him that day — but not today. “My bedroom. I’m scared, Fantom .”
      In the fifties, he’d stared down the approach of an entire battalion of Red Army super soldiers and not felt a single twinge of worry. But the quiver in Kory’s voice tightened a knot in Missouri’s gut that forced the air out of his lungs.
    “What’s wrong?” Missouri asked.
    “There are people in the backyard,” Kory whispered, breathing into the microphone, each exhale transmitting a seashore wave of static to Missouri’s ear. “They’re trying to get inside through the back door. And . . .”
    “What is it? You can tell me. Remember, the better the intelligence — ”
    Kory finished the sentence in the same panicked voice. “ — the easier the victory. This is . . . different , though. I don’t know that you’ll believe me.”
    “Try me,” he said. Those were the same words he’d spoken to Minister Mayhem when the rogue German rocket scientist had told him that even he couldn’t stop the simultaneous launch of ten missiles bound for Washington D.C. Mayhem had been wrong. Once the press printed an account of their confrontation, it had become something of a catch phrase that reporters injected into all stories of his exploits, whether he’d actually said the words that time or not.
    “I th - th -think,” the boy stuttered, “they’re dead.”
    Missouri let the radio slip from his hand. It dropped down onto the table with a hard plastic thud. Dead people trying to invade Kory’s house. It should have seemed ludicrous, something to be taken as nothing more than a product of a frightened child’s imagination. The rational side of his brain insisted they must have been crooks wearing scary masks, and yet —
    A memory lingered, fighting to surface after being buried under half a century of adventures, indistinct in detail but overpowering in dread. He couldn’t remember the name of the Khmer Rouge general’s name, but the curling scar under the man’s blood-red right eye remained in his mind. It had formed a question mark. The general had practiced a form of Far East black magic and successfully resurrected hundreds of murdered peasants from the Vietnam border. They’d come back as murderous zombies, lifeless but animated, using their hands and teeth as weapons to terrorize a cloistered Buddhist sanctuary that had resisted the Rouge. Missouri couldn’t remember the battles he’d fought with the dead — he’d drank all those memories away decades ago — but what little he could remember sent an electric chill across his wrinkled flesh.
    Picking up the radio, he said, “I . . . believe you.”
    “I’m scared,” Kory repeated.
    “Where are your parents?”
    “They went . . .” — his voice trailed off — “. . . out.”
    Missouri shook his head and clenched down on his dentures. He wasn’t sure whether Kory knew it or not, but he knew where the boy’s parents went when they were “out.” There were two bars in town: one on Third Street where they served bar