Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 39

"To..." She searches out his face above the light. Again she nods. "Yes," she says. "Yes, I guess so."

"Eight minutes." The light clicks off, and he's gone.

19.

Bill with his Tekna light in the apple orchard. Gun in hand, swollen wrist. Incursion. Evasion. Stealth. Sentry removal.

There's one up ahead, HE'S DEAD, JIM. No s.h.i.t, Sherlock.

things on trees food once but no more smell i remember made water in my mouth, but nothing now is light toward light for food with light she with light her hands would hold the treefood would feed would let into my mouth and i would eat the food of the tree but not the food that is her hand that holds the light and behind the light is food and if i reach the light i will eat and i will be and i will know Bill holds the flashlight in sprained right wrist and raises the gun in his left hand. Marly unlocks the dark storage closet-become-armory, takes a flashlight from a shelf, plays it around the room, and begins cramming boxes of ammunition into an orange crate. Dieter pushes his bullet-riddled body from the floor and staggers down the dark hall; behind him the power-room door thuds shut. Bonnie grows cold half-in, half-out the front door of the habitat. Leonard awaits the dawn on the limb of a South American tree. Haiffa bobs gently on the ocean, nuzzling the little sandbar. Sailor sets a final charge. Pigs run blindly through dark geometry of cropland. Bill aims and fires at the thing that gropes toward his light, bracing for the recoil. Marly shoves packets of dried food into a plastic garbage bag. Click: Bill stares in wonder at the gun. the light i reach for behind the light is always food Heading for the front door with supplies and a slung carbine, Marly sees Dieter shambling away from her down the dark corridor. Sailor pauses at the air-lock door when he hears Bill's scream. He smiles, he claps softly, he bows. He leaves; wait for the encore, folks. "Dieter?" Marly ventures. Leonard stands in the tree and peers into the lightening east.

Dieter turns toward Marly. Sailor trots down the hill and opens the driver's door of the Ryder truck. Marly drops orange crate and garbage bag, saying, "s.h.i.t." Dieter's eyes fill with something not recognition. Leonard drinks in the faint coral tinge bleeding into the horizon. Jo-Jo drinks in tincture a Bill beneath apple blossoms. Marly raises the carbine. Dieter's face is a rictus she remembers from o.r.g.a.s.m. Sailor turns the key, depresses the clutch, puts the truck in gear, and eases onto the road. Bill stares unblinking at the infinity of departing night above the gla.s.s roof of his little pocket of civilization. Marly lowers the rifle. Dieter reaches for her needfully. Leonard sits again on his leafy throne, feet dangling, to watch the sunrise. Marly picks up garbage bag and orange crate, turns, and steps over Bonnie holding the front door for her.

light then food i move from sound not from the box but sounds i hear anyway and she holds out her hand Sailor drives a mile away and pulls off the road beside a low hill, turning the truck to face the Ecosphere. Sparkle of gla.s.s and aluminum by dawn's early light. Marly runs from the air lock, throws bag and crate into the back of the Land-Rover, sets carbine on pa.s.senger seat, slides key into ignition. Sailor glances into the long side-view mirror. He will wait until the sun clears the horizon. Faint buzz from under the hood: battery dead.

s.h.i.t.

and the sound louder and others move with and she looks at me with her hand out to me and her mouth opens and sound from it Leonard on high looks down on Marly opening the hood of the Land-Rover outside. Let her go; let them all go. Leonard knows who he is now; the death inside him has found the pure unfilterable fundament of death without. Sailor opens the door and gets out. The sun is a dome on the horizon, a frozen nuclear explosion, the Eye of G.o.d. Marly removes the battery and tosses it onto the asphalt. Spare in the back of the Rover; Bill is-was?-nothing if not redundant. Motion turns her head: A figure inside the Ecosphere presses against the gla.s.s, flattened dead features of its face above a T-shirt that reads rugby players eat their dead. Sailor breathes in the cool morning air that blows across the desert floor. He pulls the elastic band from his hair for the breeze to have its way. He feels very alive. In the distance the ecosphere gleams like a discarded toy. Marly slams down the hood, gets in the Land-Rover, and turns the key. Once, twice, and it starts. She squeals out of the lot, and Leonard waves good-bye.

20.

The sun clears the crooked line of mountain-limned horizon. Sailor goes to the back of the truck and raises the door. He removes a box from the wood-slatted bed, and from it removes another box. He raises the telescoping antenna in back of this, and presses a b.u.t.ton. A red light glows: charge okay. He carries the box to the front of the truck and sets it on the high hood. He hoists himself up beside it, then sets it in his lap and throws another switch. Another red light winks on above the white-painted word armed. Sailor cracks his knuckles and looks to the framework of aluminum struts supporting triangular gla.s.s panels in the distance.

"It is a far, far better thing I do," he says, and flourishes a finger.

"Oh, no, you don't."

The finger pauses. He glances right. The wind blows his hair over his eyes.

He shakes his head to move it out of the way. The Chinese woman stands on top of the hill, carbine trained on him. They stare at each other across the orange-lit slope. The rifle barrel traces a curt line to the right; Sailor sets the transmitter aside. She juts her jaw; Sailor eases down from the warm hood of the truck. She heads down the hill toward him; Sailor spreads his fingers and holds his hands away from his body.

"Have a seat," she says.

Sailor sits.

"Hands on top of your head."

Sailor puts his hands on top of his head. "You never let me have any fun," he says.

"What were you going to do," she asks. "After this?"

Sailor shrugs. "Don't know. Got a bunch of s.h.i.t in back of the truck. Oregon, maybe. Find some a.s.shole survivalist's nuclear bomb shelter, set up camp. I try not to think that far ahead anymore. How 'bout you?"

Her turn to shrug. "Yosemite, maybe."

He grins. "Bears and 'possums. Racc.o.o.n stew."

"This what I think it is?" She nods toward the transmitter on the hood.

"Ain't about to play no rock and roll, if that's what you mean."

"That's what I mean." She keeps the carbine aimed toward him and grabs the transmitter. The two red lights shine steadily: charge okay, armed. And a b.u.t.ton with no light: detonate.

She looks back to see him wincing under the vacant, one-eyed stare of the rifle. "Nervous?"

"We've got to stop meeting like this."

"I can't let you do it," she says. "I'm sorry."

"Why not?" Sailor lowers his hands. "You like the rest of those a.s.sholes? Are you endeavoring to persevere?'

"No." She lowers the rifle to the road and holds out the transmitter. She takes a deep breath. "Because I want to."

She extends her hand-.

21.

Dieter exploring the aquarium of the dead, intrepid Martian explorer alone and yet accepted, finally where he belongs, cartographer of the d.a.m.ned- Bill reborn, rising with the dawn, finally at peace with the world, content at last with a single purpose and mission: to feed- Leonard arboreal, monument to Darwin descending; Leonard Rex Mortum, King of the Dead; Leonard with power at last, returning to earth enlightened to survey these his new people, this the new necropolis- others but nothing for them i walk there is light past the treefoods i go near i press my face against the clear toward the light i shut my eyes and she is there with the soft of her hands and there is music and roger she says Roger come dance with me, and I take her hand, and I open my eyes, and there is music, and light, and I remember-

22.

and brings her finger down.

19/ David J. Schow Jerry's.

Kids Meet Wormboy.

EATING 'EM WAS MORE FUN than blowing their gnarly green heads off. But why d.i.c.ker when you could do both?

The fresher ones were blue. That was important if you wanted to avoid cramps, salmonella. Eat one of them green ones and you'd be yodeling down the big porcelain megaphone in no time.

Wormy used wirecutters to snip the nose off the last bullet in the foam block. He snugged the truncated cartridge into the cylinder of his short-barreled.44. Full deck. When fired, the flattened slug would pancake on impact and disintegrate any geek's head to hash. Them green ones weren't really "zombis," because no voudou had played a part. They were all just geeks, slow as syrup and stupid as h.e.l.l, and Wormboy loved it that way. It meant he would not starve in this cowardly new world. He was eating; millions weren't.

Wormboy's burden was great. It hung from his b.u.t.thole Surfers T-shirt. He had scavenged dozens of such shirts from a burned-out rockshop, all Extra-Extra Large-Large, all screaming about dead 'n gone bands of which he had never heard-Dayglo Abortions, Rudimentary Penii, Shower of s.m.e.g.m.a, Fat f.u.c.ked Up. Wormboy's big personal in-joke was one that championed a long-ago alb.u.m t.i.tled Giving Head to the Living Dead. That one didn't get washed much.

The gravid flab of his teats distorted the logo, and his surplus flesh quivered and swam, shoving around his clothing as though some subcutaneous revolution was aboil. Pasty and pocked, his belly depended earthward, a vast sandbag held in check by a wide weightlifter's belt, notched crotch-low. The faintest motion caused his hectares of skin to bobble like mercury.

Wormboy was more than fat. He was a crowd of fat people. A single mirror was insufficient to the task of containing his grandeur.

He was preening when the explosion buzzed the floor beneath his hi-tops. Vibrations slithered from one thick stratum of dermis to the next, and gradually brought him the news.

The sound of a Bouncing Betty's boom-boom always worked like a Pavlovian dinner gong. It could smear a smile across Wormy's jowls and start his tummy to percolating. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up binoculars and stampeded out into the graveyard.

Valley View Memorial Park was a cla.s.sic cemetery of venerable lineage, far preceding the ordinances that required flat monument stones to benchmark the dear departed. The granite and marble jutting from its acreage was the most ostentatious and artfully-hewn stonework this side of a Universal monster movie boneyard, despite the fact that the tract had been brought low in its dying years by the lawn-efficiency dorks and their weed-whackers, grooming character-less vanity plates in a suburbia for the lifeless. In the older sections, stone cold angels still reached toward heaven. Stilted verse, deathlessly chiseled, eulogized the more venerable departees.

Most of the graves were unoccupied now. They had prevailed without the fertilization of human decay and were now choked with loam and healthy green gra.s.s. Those newer tenants had clawed out and waltzed off several seasons back.

Wormboy's current address was at the crest of Valley View's oldest hilltop, reached by a modest road which formed a spiral ascent path and terminated in a cul-de-sac-parking, way back when. Midway up it was interrupted by a trench ten feet across and twelve deep. Wormboy had excavated this "moat" using the cemetery's scoop-loader, and seeded it with lengths of two-inch pipe sawn at an angle to form funnel-knife-style pungi sticks. Tripwires knotted gate struts to tombstones to b.o.o.by traps, and three hundred antipersonnel mines lived in the earth, waiting. (Well, two hundred and ninety-nine, just now. Wormy was big on inventory. It kept him alive.) Every longitude and lat.i.tude of Valley View had been lovingly nurtured into a Gordian Knot of killpower which Wormboy had christened his "spiderweb." The Bouncing Bettys had been a G.o.dsend. Anything that wandered in unbidden would get its legs blown off, or become immovably gaffed in the moat.

Not long after the day the geeks woke up, shucked dirt, and ambled away with their yaps drooping open, Wormboy had claimed Valley View for his very own, fulfilling that aspect of the American Dream. He knew that the dead tended to "home" toward places important to them back when they weren't green- pre-green-and therefore, they would never come trotting back to a graveyard.

Wormboy's previous squat had been a defrocked National Guard armory. Too much traffic in walking dead weekend warriors, there; blowing them into unwalking lasagna just took too much d.a.m.ned time and powder, plain and simple. After seven Land Rover-loads of military rock-and-roll, Wormy's redecoration of Valley View began to reflect his personality, as good homes should. The whole graveyard was one big mechanized ambush. The reception building and non-denominational chapel were ideally suited to his needs... and breadth. Outfitting the prep room was more stainless steel than in a French kitchen in Beverly Hills; where stiffs were once dressed for interment, Wormboy now dressed them for din-din. There was even a sub-zero morgue locker seating thirty, the world's biggest refrigerator. Independent generators chugged out wattage (since power had stopped coming from the cities several years ago). Wormy's only real lament is that there would never be enough Julia Child videotapes to keep him jolly. Her final season show wasn't even a wrapup; that had been disappointing, too. She never saw what was coming.

His binocs were overpriced Army jobs that had cost taxpayers, on paper, $7500 per pair. Wormboy thumbed up his bottle-bottom specs, focused, and swept the base of the hill, using the illuminated reticule. Smoke was still rising from the breach point. Fewer geeks actually blundered in, these days, but now and again one could still be snagged.

That in itself was peculiar. As far as Wormboy could reckon, geeks functioned on the level of pure motor response with a single directive-seek food- and legs that made their appet.i.tes mobile. Past Year One, the locals shunned Valley View altogether, almost as though the geek grapevine had warned them this place was poison to their kind. Could be that Valley View's primo kill ratio had made it the crucible of the first bona fide zombi superst.i.tion.

Wormboy was tickled by the thought of being an innovator.

G.o.d only knew what geeks were munching in the cities, by now. As the legions of ambulatory expirees had swelled, their preferred food-live citizens-had gone underground, so to speak. Predator and prey had swapped positions without noting the mordant irony of it all. Survivors of what Wormboy had named Zombi Apocalypse had gotten canny, or gotten eaten. Geek society itself was akin to a gator pit; he'd seen them get cheesed off and chomp hunks out of one another. Though their irradiated brains kept their limbs supple and greased with oxygenated blood, they were still dead... and dead people still rotted. Their structural integrity (not to mention their freshness) was less than a safe bet past the second or third Halloween. Most Wormy spotted these days were minus at least one limb. They digested-sort of-but did not eliminate. Sometimes the older ones simply exploded. They clogged up with gas and decaying food until they hit critical ma.s.s, then kerblooey-steaming gobbets of brown mulchy c.r.a.p all over the perimeter. It was enough to put you off your dinner.

Life was so weird. Sometimes Wormboy felt like the only normal person left.

This movable feast, this walking smorgasbord, could last another year or two, max, and Wormboy knew it. His fortifications insured he would be ready for whatever trundled down the pike when the world changed again. It wasn't nice to fool Mama Nature, but for now, it was a matchless chow-down, and grand sport besides.

The six-wheeled ATV groaned and squeaked its usual protests when Wormboy settled into the wide saddle. A rack welded to the cha.s.sis secured his geek tools-pinch bar, fire axe, scattergun sheath, and a Louisville Slugger sporting a lot of chips, nicks, and dried blood. Papaw had given him that bat; it was virtually Wormboy's sole childhood souvenir. He kick-started and the all-terrain balloon tires did not burst under his weight; he was good to putter down and meet his catch of the day.

Geeks were capable of sniffing live human meat from a fair distance. Some had actually gotten around to elementary tool use. But their maze sense was zero-zero; they always tried to proceed in straight lines. Even a non-geek would need a load of deductive logic just to pick a normal path toward Valley View's chapel without getting divorced from his or her vitals-much more time than generally elapsed between Wormboy's feedings.

Up on this hilltop, his security was a.s.sured. He piloted his ATV down his specially-configured escape path, twisting, turning, pausing at several hot junctures to gingerly reconnect tripwires and det cord between him. He dropped his folding-metal Army fording bridge over the moat and tootled across.

Some of the meat hung up in the heat flash of the explosion was still sizzling on the ground in charred clumps. Dragging itself doggedly up-slope was half a geek, still aimed at the chapel and the repast that was Wormboy. Straight lines. Everything from its navel down had been blown off.

Wormboy dismounted and unracked his pinch bar, one end of which had been modified to accept a ten-pound screw-on harpoon head of machined aluminum. A swath of newly-muddied earth quickly matured into a trail of strewn organs resembling smashed fruit. The geek's brand-new p.r.o.ne carriage had permitted it to evade several of the Bouncing Betty trips. Wormboy frowned. His announcement was pointed-and piqued-enough to arrest the geek's uphill crawl.

"Welcome to h.e.l.l, dork breath."

It humped around on its palms with all the grace of a beached haddock. Broken rib struts had punched through at jigsaw angles to present mangled innards, swinging from the empty chest cavity like pendent jewels. One ear had been sheared away; the side of its head was caked in thick, stale blood, dirt, and pulverized tissue that reminded Wormboy of a scoop of dog food. The geek returned Wormboy's gaze with bleary drunkard's eyes, virulently jaundiced and discharging gluey fluid like those of a sick animal.

It was wearing a besmirched Red Cross armband.

A long, gray-green rope of intestine had paid out behind the geek. It gawped with dull hunger, too long unwhetted, and did an absurd little pushup in order to bite it. Teeth crunched through geek-gut and gelid black paste evacuated with a blatting fart noise. Sploot!

Disinclined toward autocannibalism, it tacked again on Wormboy. A rotten kidney peeled loose from a last shred of muscle and rolled away to burst apart in the weeds. The stench was unique.

Impatient, Wormy shook his head. Stupid geeks. "C'mon, f.u.c.kface, come and get it." He waggled his mighty belly, then extended the rib-roast of his forearm. "You want Cheez-Whiz on it or what? C'mon, chow time."

It seemed to catch his drift. Mouth champing and slavering, eyes straying in two directions, it resumed its quest, leaving hanks and clots of itself behind all the way down. It was too G.o.dd.a.m.ned slow... and wasting too many choice bits.

Hefting the pinch bar, Wormboy hustled up the slope, one mountain conquering another. He slammed one of his size eighteens thunderously down within biting range and let the geek fantasize for an instant about what a crawfull of Wormboy Platter might taste like. Greedy; they were always too obvious and greedy. Wormboy threw his magnificent tonnage behind a downward thrust, spiking his prey between the shoulderblades and staking it to the ground with a moist crunch.

It thrashed and chewed air. Wormboy imitated it, crunching up his pillow face into a mimic of zombi maceration. He strained, red-faced, and liberated a ba.s.so fart as punctuation, then waved bye-bye, boo-hoo, letting the geek watch him pick his way back down to the ATV. He wanted it to see him returning with the axe. His work sweat had broken freely; the exertion already had him huffing and aromatic, but he loved this part almost as much as swallowing mouthful after mouthful of that ole style, down-home, Country Kitchen cookin'.

The axe hissed down, overhand. A bilious rainbow of decomposing suet hocked from the neck stump while the blue-green head pinballed downhill from one tombstone to the next. It thonked to rest against the left rear wheel of the ATV Wormboy lent the half-torso a disappointed inspection. Pickings were lean; this geek had been on the hoof too long. Burger night... again.

He looked down and sure enough, the lone head was fighting like h.e.l.l to redirect itself. Hair hung in its eyes, the face was caved in around the flattened nose, the whole of it now oozing and studded with c.o.c.kleburs, but by G.o.d it tipped over, embedded broken teeth into packed graveyard dirt, and tried to pull itself toward Wormboy-it was that hungry.

Wormboy ambled down to meet it, humming. He secured the axe in its metal clip and drew the ballbat. Busting a coconut was tougher. The geek's eyes stayed open. They never flinched when you hit them. On the second bash, curds of blood-dappled brain jumped out to meet the air. It ceased moving then, except to crackle and collapse. The cheesy brain stuff looked tainted, the color of fish-bellies. Wormboy pulled free a mucilaginous fistful and brandished it before the open, unseeing eyes. He squeezed hard. Glistening spirals unfurled between his fingers with a greasy macaroni noise.

"I win again."

He licked the gelid residue from his trigger finger and smacked his lips. By the time he got back to the torso with a garbage bag, the Red Cross armband had begun to smolder. He batted it away. It looped in midair and flared, newborn fire gobbling up the swatch of cloth and the symbol emblazoned thereon, leaving Wormboy alone to scratch his eczematous scalp over what it might have meant.

Little Luke shot twin streamers of turbid venom into the urine specimen cup against which his fangs were chocked, Providing like a good Christian. He did not mind being milked (not that he'd been asked); it was necessary as a preamble to the ritual. He played his part and was provided for-a sterling exemplar of G.o.d's Big Blueprint. His hypodermic teeth were translucent and fragile-looking. Cloudy poison pooled in the cup.

Maintaining his grip just behind the hinge of Little Luke's jaws, the Right Reverend Jerry thanked his Lord for this bounty, that the faithful might all partake of communion and know His peace. He kissed Little Luke on the noggin and carefully deposited all four feet of him into the pet caddy. Little Luke's Love Gift had been generous today. Perhaps even serpents knew charity.

Jerry pondered charity, and so charitably ignored the fact that his eldest Deacon was leaking. Weaving back and forth in the vestibule was Deacon Moe, his pants soaked and dripping, on standby. He was not breathing, and his cataracted eyes saw only the specimen cup. The odor that surrounded him in the cramped s.p.a.ce was that of maggoty sausage. Without a doubt, he was a creature of wretchedness, but he was also proof to the Right Reverend Jerry that the myth had delivered at last, all skeptics be d.a.m.n'd.

The dead has risen from their graves to be judged. If that was not proof, a real miracle, what was? Back in the days before, the regular viewers of Jerry's tri-county local access video ministry had long drawn succor from miracles infinitely more pallid-eased sprains, exposed Jezebels, restored control of the lower tract, that sort of thing. Since this new ukase had flown down from Heaven, it would be foolish for Jerry to shun its opportunities.

Jerry savored the moment the dead had walked. He relished this revelation which had vindicated his own lagging faith, dispelling in one masterstroke the doubts that had haunted his soul for a lifetime. There was a One True G.o.d, and there was a Judgement Day, and there was an Armageddon, and there was bound to be a Second Coming, sooner or later, and as long as these events came to pa.s.s correctly, who cared if their order had been juggled a bit? The Lord had been known to work in mysterious ways before.

Once his suit had been blazing white, and pure. With faith, it would shine spotlessly again. Right now he did not mind the skunky miasma exuding from the pits of what had once been a $1500 jacket. It helped blanket the riper and more provocative stench of Deacon Moe's presence. The congregation was on the move, and there was little time for dapper grooming in mid-hegira.

Jerry beckoned Deacon Moe forward to receive communion. From the way poor Moe shambled, this might be his last chance to drink of the Blood, since none of the faithful had meshed teeth lately on the Body, or any facsimile thereof.

In an abandoned library, books had told Jerry what rattlesnake venom could do.

In human beings, it acted as a neurotoxin and nerve impulse blocker, jamming the signals of the brain by preventing acetylcholine from jumping across nerve endings. The brain's instructions were never delivered. First came facial paralysis, then loss of motor control; the heart and lungs shut down as the victim began to drown in backed-up fluids. Hemolytic (blood-destroying) factors caused intense local pain. Jerry had tasted the venom he routinely fed his quartet of Deacons, and it was nothing to fret about-so long as your stomach lining had no tiny holes, ulcers, or perforations to convey the stuff into your bloodstream. The bright yellow liquid was odorless, with a taste at first astringent, then sweetish. It numbed the lips. There was so much books could not know.

In walking dead, former human beings, however, Jerry discovered that the venom, administered orally, easily penetrated the cheesecloth of their internal pipework and headed straight for the motor centers of the brain, unblocking them, allowing a certain Right Reverend to reach inside the reanimated dead mind to tinker with light hypnosis. He could program his Deacons not to hunger for him in that way. More importantly, this imperative was then pa.s.sed among the faithful in some unspoken and mystical way reserved to only these very special children of G.o.d.