Planet of the Dead (Book 2): War For The Planet of The Dead

by Flowers, Thomas S.

  "Listen, bitch. You come out now and I promise to take it easy on you--you hear me?" Vinnie called again. He was getting closer. There weren't too many places to hide on Wynwood. All the bars were locked. Shops closed. There were just the murals and sculptures and the shuffling groups of undead.

  "Oh shit, get the fuck off me asshole!" Diamond yelled. There was a scuffle. Following this was another gun report and a wet thud as a corpse hit the pavement. "Come on, man. There are too many of them out here!" she shouted, fear creeping into her voice.

  "Hold on," Vinnie whispered.

  Christy licked her dry lips. On tiptoes, she peered through the opening of the vent. Where were they? She could only see T-Money. He was watching something. Where did Vinnie go?

  "Got you, bitch!" Vinnie shouted gleefully.

  The port-a-john rocked back and forth, violently.

  Christy screamed.

  Back and forth, back and forth the world began to tilt.

  "Vinnie, stop, please!" Christy bawled.

  Laughing all around her.

  The john rocked one final time and then fell over. The unit turned and hit the ground hard. Brown putrid liquid rushed over her face and skirt and tank top, soiling her flesh and everything else. Fumbling, slipping on piss and shit and worse, Christy kicked the door open and rolled out onto the pavement, followed by a wave of murky, rancid smelling sludge. She spit, pushing herself off the ground. Her hair; everything reeked of human waste.

  T-Money and Diamond were bent over laughing.

  Vinnie stood nearby, his shotgun perched across his shoulders with one hand, and with the other he was adjusting himself. His smile was wide and vile, revealing several gold teeth. His bald white head gleamed in the glow of the street lamps.

  "That's what you get, bitch!" he howled, giggling between words.

  "You sure you want that H now, Vinnie?" T-Money spat laughing. "If it's on her, that's going to be some stinky smack."

  "Going to be some real good shit," Diamond squealed. Her and T-Money were holding each other up from falling to the ground laughing.

  The humor in Vinnie's face melted into a growl. He aimed his shotgun down at Christy. "Don't matter--this is a message to anyone with the balls to fuck with me. Don't steal from Vinnie." He pumped and chambered a shell.

  "Please, Vinnie. Don't. I'll take care of you--just please don't kill me," Christy begged, still on her knees, hands clasped in prayer. Her skin glistened in brown waste. Once blonde hair matted with yellowish froth.

  Vinnie choked, pretending to barf. He spat. "I ain't putting nothing in your skank ass, you nasty bitch. I'm going to blow a hole through your saggy tits, carve my name on your forehead, and let you come back as one of them undead assholes and let you walk around Miami."

  Christy whimpered.

  "That's cold as ice, V," T-Money cooed, still grinning ear to ear.

  "Fuck cold, that's free advertisement," Vinnie said.

  "Shit!" Diamond yelled, spinning around, aiming her piece. "We've drawn a crowd."

  Looking around, Christy had never seen so many of them. The living dead were marching awkwardly toward them from both sides of the street. Some were even coming from between buildings, falling over tables left out for once upon a time overindulgent patrons. Rotting walking corpses, a kaleidoscope of ethnicity--the expired beauty of Miami. Wounds unimaginable and others mundane. Swollen, purplish bite marks. Severed arms, missing chunks of bluish flesh. Gunshots and knifes still stuck deep in cold meat.

  "Motherfucker!" Vinnie hissed, turning on his heels, aiming his shotgun at some other woman, this one in a high red skirt, stumbling in broken pumps. An infected looking wound in her neck pussed, a viscus reddish fluid dribbled down into her cleavage.

  A barrage of gunshots went off.

  T-Money.

  Diamond.

  Vinnie.

  All aimed and fired into the mob of dead.

  The woman in red fell, red flowed from the bullet hole in her head.

  Others fell as well, but not all. There was too many to get them all.

  "We gotta get the fuck out of here, V!" T-Money shouted, slamming another clip into his piece. He aimed and continued to fire.

  "Fuck!" Diamond screamed. One of the undead had her in a tangled dance. She pushed against the dead man, but he crawled onto her like a rabid beast. With a snarl, the rotting man sank his putrid teeth into her exposed shoulder.

  "Diamond!" T-Money shouted. He aimed and shot at the dead man--his brains spraying Diamond's face in red chunks. The dead man slumped down, taking her with him. "Diamond, you okay?" he called.

  She did not answer.

  More and more of the dead came.

  Drawn by the herd.

  Drawn by the gunshots.

  The chaos.

  The blood.

  Vinnie aimed and fired in rapid succession until the shotgun clicked. "I'm empty!" he yelled. And then he screamed as five clambered on him, pulling, pushing him to the ground. He fell beside Christy, kicking, punching, but there were too many. They bit and clawed and ate. She watched in wide eyed horror as they dug into his exposed stomach and opened his guts, greedily pulling out noodle-like cords of meat. Devouring with a hunger she knew all too well.

  Vinnie cried and moaned. Blood bubbling from his open mouth until he lay still.

  T-Money ran for one of the breweries. In the alleyway he met another oncoming herd of hungry dead. Christy watched the shadows on the painted brick like some sick puppet show. Listening to his pleas for mercy and unanswered calls for his mother.

  Christy closed her eyes, waiting for the eventual.

  The living dead swarmed around her.

  And passed without interest.

  She opened her eyes.

  The dead milled about, picking at the last of Vinnie and his gang. Not caring about her--they didn't want her. She looked at herself, trying not to make sudden moves.

  The shit.

  The piss.

  They think I'm one of them.

  She stood, slowly.

  Still, nothing.

  And then carefully, shuffling, Christy Stokes walked among the dead, untouched, unnoticed, and made her way to her rent-by-the-hour motel room outside of Wynwood to get the fix she so desperately earned without bothering to wash away the filth that had dried to her skin. The spoon boiled with the shit she stole from Vinnie. The needle went in hot and a second later, her eyes rolled as she fell back on the stained mattress. Not long after that, she woke with milky eyes and stumbled around her room, needle still intact, moaning and hungry for a different kind of fix.

  Monk

  Albuquerque,

  New Mexico

  Monk had never been prouder. He recalled when he had first baptized Drake in Herrmann Park, back in Houston. Like with many of the new initiates, he'd been skeptical. Not many made it past the Marking--the bite on the hand, the sigil and first stage of initiation. And many more never passed through the taking of the Offering. Yet, Drake did, much to Monk's delight. And now, their numbers swelled. Part of it, he knew, had to do with folks realizing the world wasn't bouncing back, that perhaps it never would, and they saw the choice they had to make. All things lead back to the flesh. The meat. The blood. Survival would take faith in the power of those things, a faith that required a certain level of belief that many do not have the stomach for.

  "Has the Offering been prepared?" Drake asked. He wore the robe of an abbot, for that is what he now was. Scarlet with a purple sash. His recently shaved head gleamed in the spotlight overhead. His now shaggy beard inching down his throat. Feet naked but clean.

  Monk nodded, smiling. He didn't mind being superseded in rank by a younger member of the Church. Especially not by one with such a gift. The moment Drake had partaken of the Offering on that very first night, he took to the Way vigorously. Preaching, spreading the Word unlike anything Monk had ever seen or heard. The Elders had been stunned but accepted this new style of conversion. In the old world such acts of f
aith had to be done in secret, hidden from unbelievers who put their faith foolishly in the doomed system of man. But in this new world--with the lack of authoritative intervention, tradition adapted, and the Church flourished.

  Besides, he was enjoying his new position far too much to abandon for pomp and circumstance.

  "Yes," Monk said, he gestured beyond the curtain that shielded them from the stage. "Brother Jeb and Brother Cayce are watching over it."

  Drake nodded with a satisfied exhale. He rested a hand on Monk's shoulder. "Thank you, Brother. Tonight--there's an urgency out there, can you feel it? These people have come looking for direction, purpose...hope. They've come with empty bellies--"

  "And we will feed them," Monk confirmed.

  Drake nodded and with a final deep breath, he stepped out onto the stage of what used to be Calvary Church. In the audience was seating for over 16,000 people. Tonight, there was only five hundred filling the void.

  Monk watched from behind the curtain as Drake, their newly appointed Abbot, strolled to the center. He stopped at a podium prepared for him in advance. To his right the Offering sat strapped to a wooden chair that had been nailed to the floor. Drugged, gagged, his head bobbed against his chest.

  The Abbot looked down at his notes and then out into the crowd and said these words, "Seven hundred thousand were killed in Seattle yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, 'Who did it? Who gave the order to launch that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?' or 'Was it a Republican or a Democrat?' The answer should be, 'We all did it.' Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and all the other bombs that will continue to fall. We all did it. Earlier today, just down the street, policemen and soldiers killed unarmed civilians. A few hours later, two young men on a motorbike shot and killed a child in search of her mother. I witnessed this with my own eyes. Fires have broken out, lootings, murder, and across the Nation, as we've seen on the news, the dead have swallowed the living. And across these so-called United States, an angry, guilty people cry out their mocking shouts of indignity and say 'Why?' or 'Who?' Everyone then deplores these dastardly acts. But you know the 'who' of 'Who did it,' for it is really rather simple.

  "The 'who' is every individual who talks about the problems of the world and spreads the seeds of hate to his neighbor and his son without a single shred of solution. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter. The 'who' is every governor who ever shouted for law and order and became a law violator. It is every senator and every representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the world that things aren't really like they are.

  "It is all the Christians and Muslims and Jews and all their ministers who spoke too late in anguished cries against violence and the spread of nuclear warfare against the living dead. It is the coward in each of us who clucks admonitions. We have years of lawless preachments, years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a lifetime well before the dead walked the earth of telling school children the opposite of what the history books say. We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and selfishness and greed and stand indicted before our young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already living dead institution. We are cursed because we consume each other without the courage to fully realize the potential of what we're doing.

  "Yesterday, while Washington, which prides itself on the number of its institutions of democracy, was attending worship at Senate hearings, a bomb went off and troops surged into the city, a force which has been praised by our own military leaders and cowardly governing authorities. This forceful takeover has solved nothing. Our Capitol, our Country has fallen. And who now controls the rest of our nuclear capabilities? Who is keeping watch of our shores against opportunistic enemies? Whose finger is poised above the switch?

  "There are no policemen; there are no sheriff's deputies; there are no soldiers left in Albuquerque. And we are the better for it. Do not misunderstand me. It is not that I think that policemen or those troops out there had anything whatsoever to do with the killing of innocent children or the bombings delivered by President Johnson. It's just that a Nation who uses nuclear weapons as a force must see its failure to prevent the ruination of our once fertile lands and our species. We throw rocks and bottles and they respond with bombs. And we simple citizens don't seem to know why our Nation has become so lawless. We don't understand why the hierarchy fell so quickly. We don't understand why the system turned on itself. Brother against brother savagery.

  "Seattle is not the only city in America where a nuke has fallen that was witnessed by local ministers who together told the people to do their duty--what duty? To perish without a voice to be heard. The ministers of the old faith of the United States who have done so little, call for prayer in a self-destructive country, and in the same breath, speak of our Nation's 'image.' Did those same ministers visit the families of the deceased in their hour of travail? Did many of them go to the blasted homes and express regret in person or pray with the crying mothers along the edges of the radiation safe zone?

  "Who is guilty? The dead populist president elected to drain the swamp in Washington and who moves so slowly and looks elsewhere for leadership? A newly sworn in president who shrugs his shoulders and looks to the Generals for leadership? The news which has tried so hard of late, yet finds it necessary to lecture Americans every time a city light is extinguished? Governors who offer safety and refuge but mention nothing of the failure to preserve law and order? And what of those lawyers and politicians and scientists who counsel people as to what is happening--how the dead are in fact resurrecting, when they don't have a clue?

  People, the old way of life is dead, walking amongst us, consuming without mercy or thought or recourse. No one accepts responsibility, everybody wants to blame somebody. We live in a country with a reward system like Topsy, the elephant electrocuted at a Coney Island amusement park back in 1903, as a sort of sacrificial offering, a balm for the conscience of the 'good people,' whose ready answer is for those Conservatives who moan for liberals to shut up. People who absolve themselves of guilt. And the liberals who tell us they are not to blame but then proceed to discuss the guilt of everyone else. And that's the way it is with political parties. They condemn those with whom they disagree while they sit in fearful silence when push comes to shove and the Nation demands an answer."

  Drake paused, catching his breath. Sweat beaded his forehead.

  Monk stood gazing from the background in awe.

  The Abbott continued, glaring peacefully at the audience, holding out his hands.

  "I ask again," he started, "who is really guilty? I'll tell you. Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to understand that the only real faith is in the power of a sacrificial Offering, the deepest commitment every citizen who has ever said 'the government ought to do something about the living dead,' every citizen.

  "Every school board member.

  "Schoolteachers and principals.

  "Every businessman.

  "Judges and lawyers.

  "Every scientist and policeman and soldier who has corrupted the minds of our youth.

  "Every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of actionless faith, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who launched those nukes on our Nation.

  "Brothers and Sisters hear me. The United States is not dying, it is dead. But we are not--you can still take a stand. We have provided an Offering for you today." The Abbott gestured behind him to his right at the man strapped to the chair, "If you wish to partake, eat, for this is our Body, this is our Flesh. For those who believe, they shall not know fear, not from men nor the living dead who walk our streets. Those who partake and are Baptized through flesh will have ascended above this pestilence to a higher plane."

  The Abbott gazed upon the assembled.

  "Come and eat," he offered.

>   As rehearsed many times before in many different towns in many different states, Monk pushed a stainless-steel trolley out onto the stage. Medical equipment set carefully on top gleamed in the overhead spotlights, an electric bone saw, breadknife, scalpel, and hammer with an elaborately curved hook and skull chisel. And beside all this, a hotplate. Stopping next to the Offering, he undid the sash of his plain brown robes and let them fall to the stage floor. Standing before the parishioners unashamedly naked, he donned a butcher's apron in its place.

  Brothers Jeb and Cayce watched the Offering for signs of struggle.

  Monk picked up the scalpel and penetrated the flesh of the Offering, cutting along the forehead and back of the head.

  The Offering--a twenty something white male of good breed--woke and screamed, thrashing wildly against his bonds.

  Brother Jeb and Cayce stepped forward and held the Offering's head to keep it from moving as Monk performed his service.

  With the bone saw, he began sawing through what remained of flesh. Blood trickled down the Offering's boyish face. The electric whirl and constant crunch of bone echoed coldly throughout the auditorium until finally the cut was complete. Using the hammer and chisel, Monk tapped against the line.

  With each crack of the hammer, the Offering jolted in his seat.

  Satisfied, Monk pulled the top of the Offering's skull off with a wet suckling sound.

  The Offering--the son of the former pastor of this church Monk recalled, gave a final gurgling moan, his eyes rolling, and drool drooping from his lips.

  Flipping on the hot plate, Monk began probing the exposed brain. Selecting a piece, he used the scalpel and removed a cubed section of reddish blue matter from the cerebrum and placed it on the hot plate.

  The meat sizzled.