“Look at the state of you two. You’re not getting in looking like that. Now fuck off, the pair of you!”
“But…but…” the traumatized man seemed as shocked as Andy felt.
Gemmel was a maniac.
A fucking lunatic.
Two sheets to the howling goddam wind.
There was job dedication and then there was this shit!
“Gemmel…” Andy said.
“Shut the fuck up, son. The dress code is the dress code. I let these two fuckers in, next up we’ll have half the city stinking up the place. They’re not hurt. They can move on.”
He leaned forward, towering over the reeling couple. “Now get the fuck away from my door, pal, before we add to that nice red sheen you got there with some of your own blood.”
The woman sobbed. The man cowed. “Are you fucking nuts?! I just told you they’re killing people out there! You have to let us in. They killed Terry…they…”
“I don’t give a freewheeling fuck about ‘Terry’…”
“…they ate him!”
Andy was unsure if Gemmel had heard that last part, but he sure as hell had.
The big man was far too wrapped up in his duties, far too damn crazy, to be able to read. If he had heard them, he didn’t look to be giving a shit.
‘They ate him’.
That’s what the man had said.
That couldn’t be true.
Could it?
Andy had seen plenty of riots covered on the television, and had seen his fair share of the violent repercussions of such social outcry from the comfort of his couch, but in all the news reports, from all the channels, he’d never heard of…
…that.
If it was real, what was it?
Mass hysteria?
A terrorist attack of some kind?
A bath salt epidemic?
That shit could make a man hungry, apparently.
His reverie was stolen by Gemmel’s low timbre, as the doorman put his huge hand on the man’s shoulder.
“You have less than three seconds to get your ass the fuck away from my club, before I use your dick to clean my teeth,” he growled.
The woman stopped sobbing. Only for a moment. Only long enough to look up at the distraught man holding her and plead with him.
“We have to keep moving,” she said.
“You’re a fucking crazy person,” the man said to Gemmel in disbelief.
“And you’re not properly dressed. Now off you fuck.” Gemmel answered, not missing a beat.
The man looked over his shoulders, back up the side-street, towards the main strip beyond. He turned back, steadied his hold on the weeping woman and, shaking his head, he began stumbling in the opposite direction.
“Take a left up ahead,” Andy called when he was around ten feet away. “Follow the road up and you’ll come out on Tenth…”
He felt like a fucking shmuck. A real piece of shit.
“Thanks for nothing, assholes. I hope they eat you up and shit you out on your precious doorstep!”
Andy could appreciate the man’s case against them.
As the couple staggered off up the street and around the corner, lost to the night, he turned back to his colleague.
His boss.
The raving lunatic doorman, who seemed to think he was guarding fucking Valhalla, and not some shitty club in the ass crack of America.
How could he turn them away?
What the fuck is wrong with this guy?
Is this PTSD?
Is this big fucker still fighting in Iraq?
Is he a bargain basement Rambo, or just the very definition of an asshole who takes his work far too seriously?
I should be back at my apartment studying.
What the hell am I doing here with this goddam goon?
So many questions, and no answers.
Andy already knew he wouldn’t ask.
Still, the man’s chilling words howled through the channels of his mind like a poisonous wind.
They ate him.
Jesus fuck…
To hell with this, Andy thought, even if the man was shocked of his mind and talking gibberish, Something was definitely going on out there on the strip. It was still far too damn dangerous to hang around, bath salt huffing cannibals or not.
It was time to make like a tree and split, as a famous onscreen bully would say.
Andy took a step back from Gemmel. He’d already decided in the moment that to make nice and ask politely to leave his station would probably find him on the receiving end of one of the big goon’s pile drivers, and he had no intention of ending up like that poor drunk bastard that had ushered in this long night of total fuckery.
Nope.
He would slowly recede from the big man’s periphery, and then run like the devil was closing in with the horn and a big red hard-on.
All he wanted to do was get home – out of the city, away from the mad orbit of Gemmel, and the possible danger that lay on the street beyond. Get back to his apartment, where soft silk pajamas and Netflix awaiting him, as comforting as a mother’s breast to a babe.
And then he heard it.
Not sirens.
Not screaming either – that had died away during the confrontation with the terrified couple, leaving an eerie hush over the usually bustling streets beyond.
That eeriness was now punctuated by something Andy’s mind couldn’t quite fit into any semblance of rationality.
It came rolling down the city’s concrete corridors, and flooded the side street where he stood, like a tidal wave.
The deep, discombobulating bass of the wholly unnatural sound seems to rattle his bones. He felt bile rise up in his throat and threaten to spill over.
It took a few seconds of standing there, numbed by what he was hearing, before Andy’s mind found any kind of purchase.
There was on one thing that sound could be.
It was moaning – low and guttural. The sound of a thousand – a hundred thousand – lost souls, echoing through the city’s concrete maze. A low, discordant hum that froze his blood in his veins and turned his mind to mush. An unceasing requiem that was drawing ever so closer.
So close now, he could pick out individual voices amidst the wall of impossible sound.
It was death.
He knew it just as sure as he knew this job was a terrible fucking idea.
He’d know that sound anywhere.
Andy had seen enough old movies and watched enough television shows to know that there was only one thing on earth that made a sound like that.
Except that ‘one thing’ didn’t exist.
Not in the real world.
Not in this mundane world of I-pods and exam papers, disappointing dates and student fees.
Andy stood, still as stone, as the impossible notion rang around his head like a dinner bell ringing in hell.
And then, just like that, they came.
Andy wasn’t sure, but he thought he may have screamed. If he had, the sound had been utterly drowned out by the hellish cacophony of the approaching tide. One second, the entrance to the street was empty. Nothing up there but the streetlight’s hollow glow and that awful sound.
Then there was one.
Then, in the blink of an eye, there were a dozen.
Two dozen.
They lumbered, shifted and loped just like the drunk had done, but these were no drunks.
He stood, eyes wide, as the light of the street was blocked out by the horde of shambling, groaning things. The smell of decay and death followed them. The very air around him tasted of copper. The bittersweet and unmistakable odor of blood stung his nostrils.
As they drew closer, entering into the light of the side street, he saw.
Oh my fucking god, he saw.
He’d been right.
It was an army.
There had to be at least fifty of them and they were very, very fucking undead.
As though thinking with one hive mind, the r
otting, bleeding horde moved down the alley like a dead sea, cutting off from a yet greater group that continued on down the strip.
Intestines spilled from torn open stomachs.
Eyeballs swung on stalks, kissing pale dead cheeks.
Some had arms missing – they moved forward, appendages outstretched, bones protruding from red, tattered stumps and reaching with hands no longer there.
Teeth gnashed around loosely swinging chunks of pink and red meat.
And as one, they lurched right in his direction.
Zombies…
Andy turned to run the opposite direction. He’d seen enough movies. He could outrun these dead rotting bastards. He just had to get the hell out of dodge before…
Andy moaned, sounding like one of the dead himself, as he looked on what awaited him at the other exit from the damnable street.
He hadn’t just sounded like the dead…Andy was pretty sure he was dead.
It was just a matter of time. Moments.
There were even more of the rotting, hungry corpses advancing from that direction. The lack of light in that lesser used entrance added yet more menace to an already terrifying sight. Shadow after shadow - a living, not-living swarm – ready to fall upon him and tear him to shreds.
Andy spun on his heels, panic threatening to send him to his knees, and ran for the entrance to the club.
He was stopped by Gemmel.
In the madness, he’d all but forgotten about the hulking nut-job, but now the big man stood before him with eyes on fire and a huge smile on his face. He looked utterly insane.
He looked like he was cool with this shit!
Enjoying it!
“Let me by!” Andy screamed, pushing into Gemmel with all his might. The man barely moved.
“Door’s locked anyway,” he grunted.
“What the fuck!? Let me in! Are you seeing what the fuck I’m seeing!?”
A grim smile on his face Gemmel stepped aside.
Andy rushed by him, climbing the three steps to the venue’s doors. They were closed. He grunted as he ran face-first into the large wooden doors. There was a crack, not heard but felt, as his nose shattered against the hard oak. Blood ruptured and synapses exploded in his mind as the pain shot through his skull like electricity. Shaking his head, he immediately reached for the door handles with shaking, weak hands.
The door never shifted.
Locked!
The crazy bastard had locked the fucking doors!
Turned, he saw Gemmel place the keys into his lower pocket.
“What the fuck are you doing!?” he screamed.
“Told you, pal…” Gemmel pointed to the sign – that fucking sign – above the door. “Dress code.”
“What!?”
“We have a job to do.”
“A job!? Those are fucking zombies, you crazy fuck! They’ll fucking rip us up and eat us, and then we’ll come back just like them, staggering around like moronic assholes! Open the doors!”
On both sides of them, the dead were closing in.
Andy felt warm piss run down his leg as the hungry, ravening things moved towards them.
“OPEN THE FUCKING DOORS!” he screamed, through the tears that streamed down his face.
“I told you…I take my job very seriously.” Gemmel said, smiling that mad-bastard smile. “Just you stand back. I can take these assholes.”
“Jesus fuck!” Andy turned back to the door, began kicking, punching the wood. He felt his knuckles crack, felt his fingers splinter and snap as he hammered the wood and wailed for help.
No one came.
Apparently those inside were a lot less mentally ill than his boss.
The pain barely registered. Terror shut down his senses like a breaker switch, as he turned to look at Gemmel with his back slammed against the doors behind him, as though he could simply melt through the wood and into safety.
The first of the dead approached the stairs.
It moaned, low and anguished, as it reached for Gemmel.
The big man swung an enormous right hook, catching the ghoul on the jaw. Teeth and bone shot like bloody piano keys from the thing’s rotting face. As it fell over, Gemmel brought down one of his steel-capped boots on its head. The zombie’s skull opened like a rotting pumpkin, spilling grey matter and meat in all direction.
Another two approached.
Gemmel stepped forward to meet them. These two looked like lovers – a man and a girl – freshly dead and still infused with the illusion of life. The man had a huge gash on his cheek and the girl was naked from the top down. One tit swung slowly as she lurched forward, the other tit was gone, and in its place a vicious looking red hole oozed blood.
With a roar, Gemmel smashed their heads together.
Andy watched in shocked disbelief as the corpses heads seemed to dissolve into each other, becoming one. He screamed as the man’s right eye popped from its socket in an explosion of red, and together the two dead fucks hit the pavement.
“Come on, you bastards! It’s fucking Happy Hour!” Gemmel roared.
Andy half expected the swarm of ravenous dead to turn around and head off for an easier meal.
No such luck.
Well, of course, he thought. They’re fucking brain-dead.
Had Gemmel worked that out yet?
Was the big dumb fuck simply itching to die, or had he somehow went through his whole life never seeing a horror movie or exploring modern culture.
And what the hell did it matter, anyway?
The full force of the swarm was closing in now. Perhaps Gemmel, in his shit-flinging insanity, hadn’t worked out that these creatures wouldn’t be approaching in single file to get their heads caved in. The doorman had been lucky so far, only having to deal with the undead that led the pack, but now…
Now they were everywhere.
They surrounded Gemmel on all sides, ignoring Andy as they closed in on the one man army.
“You’re not getting fucking in, you goddam lowlifes!” the big man roared.
And then they fell on him.
Andy wanted to look away, but he couldn’t.
Gemmel forced his big sausage fingers through the eyes of one of the dead. Jellied viscera and blood splashed on his face as he held the living corpse’s head like a bowling bowl in his huge grip.
Andy was almost impressed, but who had time for crazed admiration when you were shitting in your pants and about to become dessert.
As he watched in total shock, he caught Gemmel’s eyes, just for a second. “Hold the door!” Gemmel growled.
And then they fell on him as one.
It took a while for Gemmel to begin screaming.
He roared and cursed and spat and writhed as rotting, hungry teeth clamped down on his shoulders and grasping hands tore his ears and scalp from his head. He even managed to laugh maniacally as foul, moldering fingers found his own eye sockets and slowly squeezed.
By the time they had pulled him to the cold wet ground - blind and mangled – and were tearing his precious security outfit from him like they were unwrapping chocolate, his defiant roars were all done.
They opened him up with broken nails and stabbing, protruding bones, and fed on his steaming, stinking guts; he was squealing like a little girl by then.
Andy watched, crying, as the dead pulled apart the once proud and bat-shit crazy Gemmel like he was nothing.
And then they turned to him.
As one, the horde began climbing the steps.
Three steps to go…
Please let my mom be okay.
Two steps to go…
I miss Sandra so much. I never should have broken up with her.
One step to go…
I want to believe in you, Jesus. Please, if you’re out there, help me.
And just as the rotting dead began to pull him forward into their mass, with stinking mouths open wide and hands fixed to tear and shred and rend, he thought of job dedication.
And of Gemmel.
>
And of just how damn hard it was to get into a club in the city these days.
Then, he thought of death.
Begged for it.
Prayed for it.
He screamed for it till his throat was torn apart and his Larynx and vocal chords were pulled free, chewed up and swallowed.
It didn’t come quick.
Figured.
WHEN ALL THE LIGHTS GO OUT
The world is dying – Pete Kember
Lennon reached across the old man’s fine oak desk, careful not to get any of the brains or fragments of skull on him. He snatched up the hastily scribbled note Harry had left behind as his last statement on the world and its woes.
He didn’t mind so much getting his hands dirty; it just seemed sort of disrespectful to his recently deceased boss of five years to have to wipe off parts of that fine brain like snot on a handkerchief.
Fine brain, he mused.
Not so fine now, of course.
Holding the bloodstained note in his shaking left hand, Lennon studied the remains of old Harry Bettany.
God damn.
Half the poor guy’s head was missing. His one remaining eye seemed to weep for the world, and what was left of his lower jaw hung loose, as though froze in an eternal state of sorrow.
Looking at him, Lennon felt his heart sink. Strangely, he never felt the urge to vomit, nor to turn tail and run. It was jarring, and he was aware of his accelerating heartbeat and the overwhelming urge to cry, but there was nothing repugnant about the scene before him.
This was just what the world looked like now.
The old man’s one kindly eye seemed to bore into Lennon as he gazed on it. Seemed to know his soul, share the infinity of his sadness.
Lennon leaned forward and searched deep down in the depths of that one lonesome, bloodshot eye, looking for…
For what?
The answers?
There were no answers.
Lennon sighed, clutching Harry’s suicide note tight in his hand.
He tried to ignore the other half of Harry’s face as he afforded the kind and wise individual what passed as a goodbye, but it was impossible.
The shotgun that hung limp in Harry’s hand had done its work well.
The cranium that had housed that once fine upstanding mind was a hot mess of steaming grey, pink and purple fluids that sloshed in blood, thick as soup.
Consumed- The Complete Works Page 26