Battle of the Network Zombies

by Mark Henry

  “Damn.” I huddled in closer to Wendy and pointed for the gap underneath the truck as a safer option. We crept under slowly, trying desperately not to attract attention from either the yetis or the zombies, newly released from their contract to Mama.

  I didn’t have to worry. The guys hiding with the deejay began to scream and were swarmed. The yetis weren’t faring much better, despite their distinct size advantage. The mistakes tore through the bar for fresh meat like a line of termites through dry rot. Blood streamed in great crimson arcs across the walls and ceiling. A yeti stumbled out into the open, four zombies chewing at her knees and arms. The left leg went first and the creature toppled, valiantly tearing apart a pair of zombies in road crew overalls on the way down—the sounds of their spines stretching and snapping one after the other filled the room for a second and then they were tossed into the air like confetti.

  Writhing confetti.

  There had been six yetis, including Hairy Sue, at the start of the battle. So when I peeked out from under the truck and saw that there were only four, yet at least thirty of the supercharged zombies still battling, my thoughts started to shift toward escape. Then, the deejay staggered out from behind his wheels of steel, his jaw twisted at an odd angle and bloody tongue lolling out of a mouth split open at the sides like an amateur episiotomy. Five more freshly revived corpses trailed him out. One lurched forward, juggling his loose bowels, while another crawled behind him snapping greedily at what could have been a shoulder blade or a nice shank.

  I do enjoy a nice shank, from time to time.

  Mama’s zombies travelled in packs. They separated the remaining yetis and circled them, attacking from all sides and gnawing with ferocity and numbers, the supernatural equivalent of piranha. Two more of Hairy Sue’s peers dropped without taking out a single mistake.

  “These fuckers are organized,” I whispered to Wendy.

  She stopped filming and stared, her face paler than usual. “We gotta get the fuck outta here.”

  “Agreed. And before they’re done with the soft-skinned woodland folk.”

  “No doubt. I almost feel sorry for them.” Her voice was distant, almost dreamy—probably all the meat scent hanging in the air. She twisted toward me. “But how? Mama’s blocked all the exits.”

  “Maybe that spell ended when she died, just like her control over the mistakes. Stay here. I’m going to check in with the other undead.”

  I patted the undercarriage of the truck, an idea already forming, and pushed myself back out, curling up slowly to avoid the attentions of some hungry perv’s cadaver. Gil and my mother were in the same position, frozen like that in fear.

  I opened the door and crept my head in. “I think the smoke has dissipated, but if you’re comfy like that I can fill up the cab with some more.”

  “Mow,” Gil mumbled underneath his undoubtedly clammy palm. His head shook slightly, as he pulled his hand away from his ear and then let the other one fall. Ethel followed suit.

  “Does this bad boy have keys?” I asked.

  Ethel nodded. “They’re in the office.”

  I looked past the tailgate toward the hostess station and knew that just beyond that was the door. There were a couple of the less stable zombies bumping into each other and bitching in that groany way of theirs. I looked back at Gil—his face was green with whatever Chase screwed into him. Useless.

  That only left Ethel.

  I glanced her way to find her staring intently at me, seemingly ready to act. I could smell the violence on her, just below the surface, and I knew I needed it.

  “All right, Mom. I guess it’s you and me.”

  She grinned.

  “Gil, get Wendy up in here—she’s underneath us—and shut the door. And, sweet baby Jesus, don’t slam it. Got it?” He nodded. One of his hands crept to his crotch, kneading some shame away, his faced more pained than usual.

  “You ready?” I asked Ethel.

  “Damn straight I am, let’s kill us some creepy crawlers.” She squeezed herself over Gil and bounded out of the car, crouching and heading forward with much more stealth than I’d have given her credit for. I followed and watched her extract the metal testicles from the hitch and send them sailing through the air and straight through one of the shambler’s heads.

  Leaving two.

  I slid in behind her and whispered, “We don’t need to kill them unless they notice us, and since we don’t smell like food, they’re less likely to…”

  “Oh, I get you.”

  We put our backs to the wall and inched around the corner behind the little hostess podium. The papers on its top were spattered with blood. As we reached the door, a zombie lurched towards us, fingers atrophied into perilous-looking claws. I opened the door and before the zombie could moan a single, “brains”80 Ethel reached out for its claws and jerked it into the club’s tiny office.

  “Shut the door,” she hissed, drilling her thumbs into the thing’s eyes. It spasmed, as Ethel helped it onto its back, rolling up an issue of Sunset and driving that down into the eyehole.

  “I think you got it.”

  “You never can tell,” she said, standing up daintily and brushing her hands off on a neat wool skirt. Her eyes searched the room, a question on her face before she spoke. “Where are those g.d. keys?”

  I opened the top drawer of an old filing cabinet, pharmacy green and heavy with sin. The employee files. “A whole horde of stripper yetis,” I said. “Who’d have ever believed that back in Rapid City?”

  “I know it. I’d never even thought of such a thing. Or even believed they could exist at all. Oh.” Her face brightened. “I remember.”

  Ethel scooted up next to me and opened the next drawer down. A set of keys hung inside on a little hook.

  “You know, honey. We’re going to make it out of this.”

  I cringed. The nurturing made me want to vomit, especially coming from her. “Let’s just go. And don’t jingle those out there. You’ll draw attention to us.”

  When I opened the door, I realized the keys were the least of our problems. A swarm of the zombies must have been hunting us and they stood outside two deep, ten in all, snarling and teeth snapping. I shut the door as they collided with it.

  “Well, that’s not good,” Ethel said.

  “Get the chair and slide it underneath this knob. Won’t keep ’em out long, but maybe long enough.” I tapped my fingers against the wall. “Is this hollow?”

  “Um. I think so. Drywall probably, maybe a little insulation. It’s still loud as hell in here when the girls are dancin’.”

  I picked up a pair of scissors from her desk and stabbed it straight through.

  It was probably the first time I’d smiled at my mother that didn’t involve me trying to get something from her. “This is how we’re getting out of here then.”

  Ethel joined me at my side and drew her fist back.

  I snatched her hand. “Aim for the spot I stabbed through. Vampire strength or not, if you hit a stud it’s gonna take a while to heal your busted hand.”

  She nodded and punched straight through to the inside of the club. The sound of struggle grew as she kicked and knocked out a ragged opening between two studs. It was nearly completed when the door behind us came off its hinges and several of the dead men scrambled in, luckily stumbling over the chair and creating a ridiculous pile-up.

  I pushed Ethel through the gap, screaming, “Suck it in.” And just as I moved to go out myself, one of the zombies reached out and sunk his fingers into my shoulder, digging through Alexander McQueen’s sumptuous fabric with such frenzy that my skin tore beneath it. A black stain spread across the side of my dress and I turned, so furious that he’d ruined one of the last great pieces of clothing I owned, I jabbed the point of the scissors through the base of his nose and into his brain. I pushed his quickly fading body at the approaching zombies and squeezed through and out into the gap between the truck and the wall.

  The door was open and I dove in,
slamming it behind me.

  “Jesus. They got you.” Wendy poked at my shoulder.

  “It’s not so bad,” I said. “You should see the other guy.”

  We chuckled for a moment, then realized it hadn’t been funny in years and stopped.

  “So when I crank the engine, we’re going to draw a lot of attention.”

  “Absolutely.” Gil nodded.

  Through the passenger window, I could see what looked like Hairy Sue fighting off ten of Mama’s voodoo zombies, snapping off heads and cannoning them toward other approaching ghouls.

  “You all ready to get out of here?” I asked.

  “Is that even a real question?” Wendy sneered.

  I cranked the engine and three things happened.

  One, Ms. Hairy Sue’s head twisted in our direction and she barreled through zombies at breakneck speed, tossing them off left and right81 until she dove into the bed of the truck, just as, two, I dropped the transmission into drive instead of reverse and stood on the gas pedal. And three, the tires squealed against the wood floors for a second and then we were speeding toward the back wall of the Hooch and Cooch.

  “Wait!” Wendy, Gil, Ethel and even Hairy Sue screamed in unison. “Wrong way!”

  And then we were all screaming as the truck barreled through the wall and out into the air over Ballard. We skidded off a steeply pitched roof in the next moment, banked off the side of a bridge piling and then finally found the ground again, though barely. The angle was too steep to do anything but keep us from going end over front.

  Or at least I thought so—it was hard to think about anything when you’re busy screaming.

  We flipped and tumbled—and do you think any of us had managed to remember a seatbelt? Not a chance. The four of us bounced inside the cab like corn in an air popper.

  The truck finally settled into a gulley behind three stories of brick and wrought iron with clothes strung up on lines between a pair of fire escapes.

  Thank God. I started to speak but realized my neck was broken, twisted nearly all the way around and facing something even more upsetting.

  The truck was pointed back up from where we came and the Hooch and Cooch, never the most stable of buildings, was quickly losing its battle with gravity. Creaking timbers gave way to the screams of splitting pilings and the loud shirring of corrugated aluminum roofing. In a matter of seconds, too quick for any of us to make a decision to run, crouch or do anything other than scream—not that we could have for all the broken and dislodged bones poking out everywhere—the building crumbled from the cliff and pummeled us with falling foundation, beams and assorted dead things.

  My last thought was: I hope my face will be recognizable enough for an open casket.

  CHANNEL 18

  Friday

  6:00–7:00 P.M.

  Reaper School: Spring Broken

  The reapers take the cadets on an extended field trip to Ft. Lauderdale, where all HELL breaks loose with the local college boys. The girls must use their fledgling brainwashing skills.

  I really love sleeping.

  I miss it.

  You never understand the value of those comatose hours disconnected from reality until you die and lose them forever. I suppose insomniacs get it, those long hours of agonizing wakefulness, images racing behind their eyelids, replay of the crappy-ass moments of their day on a seemingly endless loop, not to mention the 2 A.M. refrigerator assaults and misguided masturbation that ends up getting their hearts so jacked they have to watch infomercials about hermetic sealers to calm down.

  It’s all so terribly boring.

  The daydreams and fantasies help, but it makes for a horrendously long existence, especially considering my distinct difficulty, rotting. Though I have a few fantasies that I indulge in quite frequently like not cramping up and exploding after a donut binge, blushing—rouge only goes so far—or making friends without the hidden motive of eating them later. I imagine myself without dark veins and the little areas of sag. Smooth. Resilient.

  Wendy’s body seems to be going a little quicker than my own. I’ve noticed loose spots in need of fills and bruising that doesn’t seem to ever subside.

  A quick trip to the reapers could cure that for sure, but that costs money.

  My eyes snapped open at the thought.

  Hillary gawked at me, lashes batting and blond hair hanging in perfect ringlets from underneath a paper nurse cap, like the many coils of a snake pit fat and swollen with babies.

  It had to be the blond one.

  “Wakey-wakey, Amanda!” The words rolled off her tongue in a grating singsong rhythm, interspersed with smack off her Hubba Bubba. “You’ve had yourself a wittle accident, now haven’t you?”

  It took a moment to gather up the fragments of my memory and make sense of a truck crashing through a wall, careening off a steep embankment and the loud crashing din of an entire collapsed building being tossed atop the wreck like the final grave dirt. Must have been all the screaming that threw me.

  “Christ,” I muttered, though it hurt to even speak. “How am I even here? How am I anywhere?”

  “Well, we used shovels.” She blew a big pink bubble, poked it down and then stretched the gum out to an irrational degree. “We didn’t. The lowly werepeople we recruited to help certainly did. Nice folks, we found them on the side of the road with signs.”

  “Cheap labor. That’s great.” I lurched up on my elbows.

  “The cheapest. Worked for clinic credit which is always a great help to us in these deeply troubling financial times.”

  I ignored her hint toward my bill. “You couldn’t just wave it all clean? Make it like it was?”

  Her mood changed in an instant, as was common with this particular reaper. Hot one minute, cold the next, or rather, various degrees of cold. She snapped. “Listen, you dead bitch, if I’d had my way, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. We’d have let the city churn you up with the rest of the debris and haul you off to the dump where your kind of trash belongs.”

  “Jesus,” I groaned. “Harsh.”

  “It seems you and your motley crew have some friends.”

  My “motley crew.” I assumed Britney—or whatever the little shit’s name was—didn’t mean the band. And I hoped to hell she meant Gil and Wendy, but I really hoped she didn’t mean…

  “Your mother has been asking about you.”

  “Oh, God.”

  The demon in the little girl suit cackled and skipped off.

  If I were that kid’s mom she’d be so grounded.82 I watched her flick the files of each hospital bed she passed, startling Mama Montserrat, in particular, miraculously free of bite trauma and cocooned up tight like Travolta in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Across the aisle, Hairy Sue, shrinky-dinked down to a size 0, convalesced on her back—a position with which I’m certain she’s quite familiar, although I imagine her knees get more of a workout—both legs stuck straight out, casted and lassoed in traction cables.

  When I twisted to my left, I nearly jumped out of the bed in horror. Wendy lay prone on the hospital pinks—notice a pattern—her tits and snootch covered by a pair of thin throws of fabric (also pink). In the few spots her pale flesh wasn’t marred by puffy purplish bruises, a thick pus pooled around each of the hundreds of needles stabbing into jaundiced sores, painfully—maybe not for her, but it was certainly painful to look at, even more so than one of her woefully tragic outfits. A Tesla device hung from the ceiling, arcing electricity to each of the vile protuberances. They hopped and vibrated with each jolt.

  What’s worse?

  Wendy’s paralyzed Cheshire smile, that’s what. Toothless, except for her two front teeth, she beamed at me, eyes wide and seemingly waiting for something.

  “What the fuck are you grinning at?”

  The grin turned into a smirk.

  “What?” Wendy is frustrating, sure, but this was hitting new levels. It’s not enough that we were broken and nearly killed; she was getting some weird joy out of it.<
br />
  I tore my eyes away and laid back into the less than sumptuous pillow. That’s when I noticed my very own matching Tesla coil, humming and sparking and dripping electricity into my needled flesh. The sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant, just gentle jolts followed by the odd pulsing of flesh. The worst bit was the expulsion of fluids from the needle prick. It glugged like fresh crude, only yellow and rank with a fetid rottenness that hung around me like a cloud.

  And. It was ugly.

  Pig-fuckingly ugly.

  Passing out would have been a welcome relief. Especially since I suspected the reaping bitches added this little part of the treatment for their own pleasure, rather than any real curative properties.

  “Hillary!” I screamed. “Hillary! I want out of here.”

  Wendy chuckled.

  “Shut up,” I hissed, from the side of my mouth. “Hillary!”

  Whether I was in their back pocket or not, I fully intended on wiping the floor with the little cooze for this insult.

  Another of the reapers bounded up to the bed. “Hillary’s taking a very important phone call and can’t be disturbed just now. I’m Britney.” I craned my head to look past her down the ward. Sure enough, the little blond midget chattered into her cell, twisting her hair casually with her free hand. When she noticed me glowering, she shot me the finger and a wide grin.

  “Bitch!” I turned to Britney and smiled, I hoped sweetly, though really that would be a stretch. “Hi, Britney. Can you gather up some of your dear friends and get these needles out of me and my…friend?” Also a stretch, at this point.

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t do that. The little shocks you’re getting help move all the healy goodness through your dead flesh. Kind of like vitamins. Just think of it that way. Pretty blue vitamins. Okay?”

  I snatched at the lapel of her pink uniform and pulled her close. Her carefully constructed smile gave way to the evil underneath her skin. Britney’s lips pulled back to reveal rows of tiny shark teeth. Her tongue played on the sharp peaks. “Yes?” she growled. “You have a question?”