It hit the foam with a splash that rushed across Chuy’s chest and face, pummeling him. It was all he could do to keep a hold of his grenade. He fought—fought hard to retain consciousness.
“Good luck, ese!” he heard Marisol shout. Marisol was fine, he thought. It was good to have a fine woman cheering you on when you gave your all. Saltwater filled his nose and his eyes and made him choke, and then there was no more sound.
The squid took him down, fast. He felt pressure building up in his ears until they popped so hard blood spurted out of his head. He saw the light fading, the last rays of it reaching down from above but not quite reaching. He saw the seaweed on the rocks give way to gray algae, colorless algae, and then he saw the bottom and the dead men looking up at him.
They were little more than skeletons. Dead people who fell in the harbor and couldn’t get out again. Exposed bone turned to rock, water-logged flesh turned white and fishy, their hands all missing knuckles and fingers, their feet rooted to the bottom muck. Their eyes were still human. He could see human desires and needs in those eyes. They were hungry. So hungry.
He wasn’t going to be one of them.
The fish brought around its beak to nip off his foot, and he couldn’t stop it. This was its world, and his lungs were bursting. He pulled the pin on the grenade and offered it up. Here you go, pez pendejo. Eat ’em up real good.
Pale Moonlight
D.L. Snell
Crying, Nathan swung the axe. The beveled steel chopped into the stair. It squeaked against the wood as he wrenched it free and swung again and again and again.
Nathan didn’t know that he was crying, didn’t notice the hot, salty tears trickling through his thick beard. He was deaf to his own mutterings and numb to the snot stinging his left nostril. He was blind to the shaggy brown hair that tickled his dense and wiry eyebrows. He was too busy thinking about his father Jon, about how those . . . those things had slurped the intestines out of Jon’s gut, how, beneath the pale light of a nearly-full moon, Nathan had pressed a gun to his own father’s head, and—
“Arrrghh!”
Swinging with all his might, Nathan buried the axe into the stair. He tried to dislodge it, but it was caught in a stud.
Nathan cursed, spraying spittle and ropes of mucus. He slammed all his weight against the axe handle, pushing, face boiling red and teeth clenched. The axe began to move. Just a little.
He stopped with an exasperated splutter and wiped his sweaty brow on the back of his arm. He had rolled back the sleeves of his flannel shirt, so his arm hair came away from his forehead matted and wet.
Great. Just fucking great. He hadn’t even demolished one step, let alone enough to keep those bastards out of the upper story, and now the goddamn axe was stuck.
Fighting the constipated aggravation that boiled in his chest, Dane slammed his body into the axe handle. The blade budged again. Another inch.
Then, a bad odor died in Nathan’s nose. He stopped pushing against the axe and looked over his shoulder. He sniffed. Even through all the snot, he could smell rotting meat. And now that he was alert, he could hear something dragging across the concrete walkway outside. He could hear sluggish footsteps.
The gun he’d used on his father, a Smith & Wesson .38 special, was tucked in the waistband of his jeans. He tried to pull it out, but the hook-like hammer snagged the inside of his pants.
Nathan flinched as glass shattered in the parlor to his left. A wall blocked the room from view, but he could hear the windowpane shards crunch under a dozen feet. He could hear groans.
Nathan yanked on the gun. Something ripped, and the weapon sprang out. Its chamber echoed with a phantom gunshot, and its steel retained the pallid glow of last night’s moon, the same moon that had formed cataracts on his father’s staring eyes.
Shaking, cringing at the feel of the gun’s oily wooden grip, Nathan leapt down the stairs onto the polished oak floor. The front door was straight ahead, with a patchwork rug at its foot. Nathan bounded toward it, glancing left into the parlor, his arm held out sideways to point the gun through the archway.
A pasty hand, veined with blue, shot out at his throat.
Nathan screamed and fired. The .38 shouted, bucked slightly, and the zombie’s bloodshot eye disappeared. The ghoul stumbled back into the arms of its brethren. The others didn’t try to catch it; they just trampled over its body, their groans muffled by the lingering gunshot.
As he reached for the door, Nathan’s foot slid on the rug. His head hit the floor. It bounced, and a bright explosion blinded him temporarily.
Whimpering, he clambered to his feet and twisted the doorknob. Soon, he would burst out onto the porch, into the light of the newly risen moon, a nearly risen full moon.
Nathan yanked the door open.
Zombies crowded the porch. They groped and lurched forward.
Nathan stumbled back, feet tangling with the rumpled rug. He windmilled his arms to keep balance, but the weight of the gun bowled him over. He stubbed his tailbone on the floor.
The cannibal corpses seized his legs and started to drag him through the door. The intruders from the parlor were closing in, too. And the moon wasn’t out yet.
With two shots, Nathan brained the duo clogging the doorway. He kicked their hands away, feeling fingers break beneath his Timberlands. Rolling into a crouch, he shot a parlor zombie in the collarbone, leaving a smoking hole in the thing’s plaid shirt. The ghoul, beer-bellied and suffering male-pattern baldness, staggered back, but kept coming, pushed forward by the ones behind it.
Using his last bullet to deter the parlor zombies, Nathan strafed toward the kitchen, toward the back door, but corpses were already spilling out of the dining room. They seized the back of his vest and pulled. Nathan fought, knowing that most his extra bullets were in the vest pocket. But the zombies were surrounding him. Some were already snapping teeth at his face, and their breath was fetid because it didn’t come from their lungs; it came from their bloated stomachs and intestines.
Managing to shrug out of the vest, Nathan pushed past a skinny female zombie that had her hair up in a bun. She swiped at him, but he dodged her, pounding up the stairs. Another zombie, this one a gas-pump attendant wearing a STIHL cap, snagged Nathan’s ankle. Nathan fell and hit his head on a stair. He plunged his boot into the gas-pump attendant’s face, breaking the twisted spine of the cadaver’s nose. But the bastard clung, and more zombies were lurching up the staircase.
Nathan kicked again, shattering the attendant’s nicotine-stained teeth. Then he smashed the ghoul’s fingers between his boots. The attendant released him, and the other dead bodies reached forward. Nathan escaped their flailing hands and scrambled up the staircase. The zombies swatted at his heels.
At the top of the staircase there was a hallway, the oak floor carpeted with a strip of royal blue. The left wall was lined with dormer windows that overlooked the dark front yard. The right wall was lined with doorways.
Kicking open the second door, Nathan ducked into the darkness. An arm darted through the doorway and grazed his shirt collar. He slammed the door and the limb snapped, withdrew. Nathan shut the door and turned the lock with shaky hands. He flicked on the light switch, but the bulb popped and the light didn’t come on.
Out in the hallway, zombies began to beat against the door. Their shadows moved in the light that leaked through the seams.
Eyes adjusting to the dark, Nathan moved to the nightstands beside the bed. A candle and matches stood on the nightstand’s tabletop. Trying to light the wick, Nathan wasted three matches. When he got it right, candlelight flickered across the glass in a picture frame, illuminating the photograph within: though he was smiling and draping an arm around Nathan’s mother, Jon’s eyes were grave moons.
Nathan looked away, shuddering.
A zombie hit the door and its attack sounded like a distant gunshot.
Nathan dug into the pockets of his jeans. One pocket contained lint. The other held a single bullet.
Moaning, groaning, the zombies continued to pound on the door.
Nathan went to the only window and threw open the gossamer curtains. The candle made enough light that the glass reflected the bedroom. It also reflected Nathan’s face, but he ignored his own sunken eyes; they were too much like his father’s.
With a grunt, Nathan slid the window open.
In the yard below, zombies stopped crunching over mats of dead oak leaves and looked up. They moaned louder, gurgling, their useless lungs flatulating. Some were partially eaten, arms gnawed down to the bone and clothes blotted with russet blood. Others looked normal except for sallow skin, bruised purple in spots, except for torn shirts and missing shoes. But they all had one thing in common: they were all headed toward the house, toward Nathan.
Nathan ignored them and looked straight down, scanning the face of the house. The white siding, though overlapped, provided no handholds, no way to climb down, and the drop was nearly fifteen feet onto a brick patio; the overhang of the roof was too high up to reach, and the neighboring window, also too far away, led into a sardine can of the undead.
Nathan pulled his head back through the window and glanced over his shoulder toward the bedroom door. Something black jumped out at him. It was just the dresser’s shadow, stretched into a tilting, two-dimensional skyscraper; the shadow recoiled only to leap again.
It sounded like the zombies were kicking the door now, slamming into it with all their weight. The door was shuddering. The doorjamb was splintering. And the stink! Flesh liquefying into seaweed-green rot. Bloated bodies belching green gasses.
Nathan only had one hope left.
He looked over the skeletal branches of the Oregon white oaks, and he searched the gangrene-soaked clouds for something that glowed like an incandescent bone. The moon had been nearly full last night when Nathan shot his father. Tonight, it would be completely full, and the shortage of bullets would no longer matter.
Behind him, the door bucked; it shifted back and forth. Nathan glanced back, then fixated on the sky again. And just as the clouds drifted past, Nathan saw it: the lunar skull, ghostly and round as a coin. It had just risen past the distant mountains.
At the mere sight, Nathan’s hackles constricted and stood on end. His heart began to gallop, and his pupils dilated to the size of dimes. He felt his bones become restless beneath knotting muscles, and his beard began to itch.
The door lurched forward as zombies hammered it. There was one more crack, and the jamb gave way. The ghouls stumbled into the room.
Nathan’s skeleton twisted, reconstructed. He screamed as his fingers went momentarily arthritic. He dropped the gun, and his fingernails protracted into claws. His pants, shirt, and shoes stretched against his bulging muscles, then ripped. His jaws and nose began to elongate into a snout, shoving knives of pain through his sinuses. His teeth grew into sharp canines. His eyes went black.
Unafraid, the zombies came forward and tore at his already ripped clothes. They dragged him down, and Nathan screamed, not from fear but from the pain of shifting bones. The cannibals sunk teeth into Nathan’s rippling muscles, which were sprouting wiry, black hair. They piled over him, moaning and gnashing flesh.
Nathan’s screams curdled, gurgled, and ceased altogether. The only sounds were hungry slurping and munching.
Then, a low growl. And a snarl.
Suddenly Nathan sprang up. He was a canine, covered with black hair. Zombies hit the wall, the bed, the closet door. One crashed into the window, shattering glass, and another bounced off the edge of the dresser.
Nathan shook off the clinging flesh-eaters and his skin mended over his wounds. Still, the creatures ambled forward, moaning. Nathan lashed out, severing arms, slashing faces. Entrails, runny from putrefaction, piled at his feet. A severed head bounced off the mattress and rolled, thumping into a corner. A bloated carcass toppled with half its skull clawed away. A dead woman fell with her face chewed off.
Nathan ravaged his way out of the house while zombies clung to him and bit away chunks of hairy flesh; their virus withered in Nathan’s blood.
Outside, Nathan shook off the pests and stomped their heads to smithereens.
He looked up and he saw his father.
Jon was pale and bloated. The belly of his flannel shirt was ripped open to reveal the cave of his disemboweled gut, and a bullet hole blemished his forehead: Nathan’s shot must’ve missed Jon’s brain; then, after a pre-undead coma, Jon must’ve woke in his grave and clawed his way out.
With dirt still packed beneath his jagged fingernails, with dirt still caked to his shirt, Jon stretched out his arms and tottered forward. His moan was more of a chortle.
Snarling, Nathan slashed his claw through the air. But inches from Jon’s sagging cheek, he stopped himself. He took a few steps back.
His father groaned, and the moon reflected in his dead eyes.
Feeling the burn of a single tear, Nathan shrugged away from newcomer zombies and loped across the yard. He howled as he crashed into the withering stalks of corn, and the moon watched over him; it was milky and pale, just like his father’s dead and staring eye.
Hotline
Russell A. Calhoun
“How long have we been here?”
I looked up from my computer and stared across the office. Though his workstation was partially hidden in the shadows, I could still make out the scowl on Joe’s face.
I was taken aback slightly, as Joe had not been a man of many words. In fact, in the past week, I remembered him saying barely more than a handful of sentences.
“How long have we been here?” he repeated, more to himself this time. A hint of exhaustion had crept into his voice.
I stared at the computer monitor, gathering my thoughts. Within the line of text, I caught a glimpse of my reflection, blurred and distorted on the phosphorous screen.
Christ! It seemed like an eternity since the first reports of zombiefied corpses started showing up on the evening news. But I knew it hadn’t been that long. I tapped my stiff fingers against the desktop as I wandered through the maze of memories.
“About six months, I guess,” I finally answered.
“Damn waste of a life if you ask me. How much longer must we exist this way? Tired, afraid . . . hungry.”
I wished I had an answer for him. But I didn’t, not a good one anyway. Not one he wanted to hear. I knew deep down in my gut that we were going to be here a long time.
The long fluorescent tube suspended above my desk flickered and buzzed like a wasp trapped inside a glass jar. The wastebasket next to my left leg emitted a sound of muffled scratching. I peered over its rubber lip. Between its blue walls laid our pet, Wormie, bits of yellowed newspaper clinging to his leathery gray flesh. His black, stumpy teeth tore into the rotting remains of the rat I had caught yesterday; scraps of rat flesh clung to the corners of his black lips.
Joe and Wormie had come into my life on the same rainy night. I had been ambling along the dark, glassy-wet streets on my nightly ritual to fill my ravenous stomach, which had been growing increasingly more difficult.
Above, the sky rumbled as if it, too, were hungry, hungry enough to swallow the earth. But I continued to walk. I rather like walking after a strong downpour, the way the air smells pure and the way it feels cool against my skin.
And how the streets are cleansed of the blood and gore. At least temporarily.
I ran into only five zombies that night, out like me, looking for food. They lumbered down the street, uncaring
of the puddles of rainwater under their skeletal feet.
They didn’t see me, but to be on the safe side I slipped into a darkened alleyway nestled between Harry’s Hardware and a boarded-up antique shop.
I soon found that I wasn’t alone.
In the alley, three teens were playing with a baby, little Wormie. At first, I just watched, hidden safely by the night’s shadows. Wormie’s left arm had already been crudely hacked from his body. It lay next to the squirming baby, rancid blood oozing from its jagged stump. One of the boys took his greasy knife and began to carve the flesh of the right arm. The other boys hooted and hollered.
Wormie snarled and tried to bite any body part that drifted too close to his clicking nubs.
Farther towards the back of the alley, the punks’ rottweiler had its blood-soaked muzzle buried deep in the dead mother’s vacated womb.
I had seen enough.
I retrieved the snub-nosed .22 from my leather jacket and squeezed the trigger. I always had lousy aim. The bullet whizzed past the nearest teen, missing his ear by a mere inch. It compacted on the hard asphalt.
The punk marched towards me, slashing his knife back and forth.
Swoosh. . .swoosh. . .SWOOSH!
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black shadow. A gunshot shattered the night’s silence. Joe’s bullet made contact, defacing the brick wall with brains and bone.
Two more squeezes of Joe’s trigger finished the teens’ night of games.
Two of the zombies I had seen earlier must have heard the commotion and had hobbled into the alley to investigate.
“Come with me,” Joe said, tugging on my jacket sleeve.
I bent down to scoop up the baby.
“No. Leave it here.”
I said nothing, but instead picked up the squirming bundle, careful to avoid its gnashing teeth.
Still gripping the pistol, Joe escorted me to an old abandoned warehouse near the east edge of the town, where he introduced me to the ragtag team he had assembled. There was Marty, a squat, scruffy man, his black hair always a tasseled mess. Marty was the communications and computer specialist.
The Undead: Zombie Anthology Page 2