Jack Zombie (Book 2): Dead Hope

by Flint Maxwell

  I want nothing more than to get out of this chair and hold her.

  “Darlene,” I say, trying to muster up a smile. It’s not easy. There is no light at the end of the tunnel here. I know that now. I know we will probably die in the very place we were dying to get to.

  There is a long, drawn out moment of quiet where all we can hear is Norm’s raspy breathing, and the muffled sounds of wheels going over gravel.

  “I don’t get it,” I say. All the beaten faces and hurt eyes turn to me. “Spike got what he want. He got Herb. Why does he want us?”

  Tony chortles. “It was never really about Herb. Don’t get me wrong, the kid is special, but so is a hundred other Edenites. It’s about control. Spike and Butch crave it, so when a citizen goes missing, they find them.”

  This causes Norm to stir, his eyes fluttering. The left one holds open, though it is almost swollen shot.

  “Spike is not a man who forgives and forgets,” Tony continues, glancing at my older brother. Then his voice drops into a clichéd southern drawl. “He’s the rootinest, tootinest, yee-haw, honky-tonk this side of the Mississippi!”

  Abby sits up a bit straighter.

  Darlene shakes her head. “He’s gone crazy. Look at him.”

  “No,” I say, “he started to say the same stuff back in the trailer.”

  “Yeah, he was already slipping,” Darlene says.

  “You’ll see,” Tony says.

  “Uhhhh,” Norm says. “Little brother.” He tries to smile, his bloody lips peeling back to show red teeth. Some of them are missing.

  It hurts me, too, but I smile back at him. “Good to see you again, Norm.”

  “Listen to Tony. H-He knows what he’s t-talking about,” Norm says. He smiles again before he closes his eyes and continues his raspy breathing. It’s terrible to look at him like this. My brother who has helped protect us for the last six months reduced to a shell of himself.

  “Damn right I do,” Tony says. “I was here after Spike took over. Norm has seen it single-handedly.” Tony laughs. “You’ll see. Think Butch Hazard is bad, wait to you get a load of this psycho son of a bitch.”

  Wait until that psycho son of a bitch gets a load of me.

  I look to Darlene. Her teeth are chattering. Seeing this douses my anger. Now, I just feel bad for her, for my brother, for all of us.

  Abby shakes her head back and forth. “Well, it was nice knowing you guys,” she says. “I’m gonna try to die on my own before some psychopath can murder me. So excuse me.” She leans her head back as if she’s going to sleep.

  I got to find a way out of here. I can’t let my family die. Not even Tony or Herb.

  The door opens and a figure stands beneath the frame, backlit by the daylight. Somehow, he seems to darken this light. This figure wears a cowboy hat.

  His voice is an almost perfect echo of Tony’s southern imitation. “Welcome, guys and gals, to Eden’s first ever reverse dinner party!”

  Then he is gone, yelling, “Yee-haw!” as he pushes in a party of zombies.

  35

  I count five of them. They are not the normal type of zombies you see strolling around abandoned streets and sidewalks. These are creatures that have almost been domesticated. They wear clothes that are unmarked, unsoiled, and clean. Pristine white jumpsuits. There is little black ink leaking from the corners of their mouths. I notice, in the glare of the light overhead, one zombie woman seems to have a black smear on her chin, as if someone was close enough to wipe the mess away. Their eyes blaze with dark gold, eyes of zombies well-fed. Dare I say, happy zombies?

  I jerk in my chair, the chain rattling. This is mostly a reaction than an attempt to escape. I know I am not strong enough to break these chains, but the fear and adrenaline coursing through my veins tells me I am.

  Darlene’s fear and adrenaline must be telling her the same thing because she’s about to pop her arms out of her socket to break free.

  The zombies inch closer.

  Even Tony feels the heat of death licking against his skin. He squirms and shimmies, trying not to get his face anywhere near the approaching dead.

  All the while, some man laughs like a cartoonish villain in the background.

  Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

  Think of the Wicked Witch of the West on acid except replace the high, shrill laughs with deep, gruff laughs instead. And except flying monkeys we got some lab experiment gone wrong.

  I’d take flying monkeys over these bastards any day.

  The lead zombie puts his arms out — the Frankenstein position — and heads for Norm. He is almost too gone to notice, but not gone enough to die without pain. I hold my breath as this unfolds in front of my eyes. I wait for the rip of flesh, the scream, the sound of blood raining down on the concrete floor, the death gurgling, and the munching. As I wait, I turn my head away and look at Darlene.

  She has since given up her mad struggle to break free of the chains.

  I say, with my lips quivering, “Close your eyes, Darlene. Picture our life back in Chicago. The pancakes in the morning, the boxes of wine and bad movies. Picture all of the good times.” I have to stifle a sob. “It will all be over soon.”

  She nods, a fresh tear spilling down her face, clearing a small pathway through the dirt caked on her cheeks.

  I close my eyes, too, waiting for this all to be over.

  36

  Once the laughing from near the door stops, I hear nothing besides the sounds of our own labored and frightened breathing.

  This is when I open my eyes.

  I see Darlene in front of me, her eyes still closed, Abby and Norm next to her, their eyes open as much as their swollen faces will allow but not seeing anything. Behind them, the zombies hover. They look across the table, the one behind Darlene — a middle-aged man with a heavy beer gut now full of dead organs — looks at me, while the zombies behind Norm and Abby look at Tony and the empty seat next to them.

  What the hell is going on?

  These ravenous beasts have fresh meat right in front of them, yet we aren’t getting torn apart yet. What gives?

  Then a voice drifts through the air. That southern drawl. “Now, y’all wanna watch this. This here is a B-yoot.” There’s a silence again, but the rattles in the back of the zombies’s throats begins to rev up. “Now, Butch!” Spike shouts.

  A cold hand touches my neck about the same time the other cold hands touch the rest of my group. I see a flash of light beneath the collar of the middle-aged zombie behind Darlene. It blinks once then twice with the movement. Then it begins to bend over her, its mouth hung open, rotten teeth and thin lips bared.

  Truly, I am at a loss for words. Hell, I can’t even scream.

  But Darlene does when those grayish fingers close around her throat.

  “Stop it!” I shout.

  Useless words.

  This is something Spike and Butch Hazard want to hear. They want me to beg and plead for my life. I thought I was better than that. But when you see the love of your life about to be devoured by a zombie, when everyone you care about are in the clutches of a madman, then you don’t know what real fear is. Only then would you understand my desperation, my will to survive.

  Here comes the laughter again. Ha-ha-ha-ha! I think to myself that is the last thing I am going to hear besides the sounds of my own vital organs being torn out.

  Instead, I hear an explosion, not the type of action movie explosions the American culture was so familiar with before all this shit went down.

  No, it’s a wet explosion.

  The sounds of ripe watermelons thrown off a ten story building, splattering below.

  We are drenched in blood.

  37

  My ears ring as if a shotgun went off just inches away from my head. Something stings my eyes. There is a dull, meaty taste on my lips. I cannot bring my hands up to wipe away whatever is dripping down the side of my face. My head is swimming, rocking back and forth on the edge of insanity.

  I think I know wha
t happened, but I don’t want to admit to myself that it has happened. Part of me thinks dying would’ve been better than going through this.

  “Yuck!” Abby says.

  “Jack. Oh, my God! Jack…eeeeeeep!” Darlene yells.

  I open my eyes.

  I am both happy and thoroughly disgusted to know that my initial thoughts of what happened were right.

  The first things I notice, besides the brains and bits of skull fragments stuck to the steel table like stepped-in gum, are the headless zombies standing behind Norm, Abby, and Darlene. Red rivers drip down the fronts of their formerly pristine white jumpsuits. The zombie behind Abby still has part of its spine sticking straight up in the air from the meat-stump where its head was.

  Tony gives a great shake beside me, like a dog whose just come inside from a great rainstorm. Bits of blood spray me in a fine mist, rotten flesh slaps the floor.

  Darlene is pretty much doused in red. All that is untouched is the hollow part of her eye sockets and the dimples on each side of her quivering mouth.

  I am breathing hard and fast, though for how long, I don’t know.

  But we are alive — I am alive.

  “I love you, Darlene,” I say.

  She opens her mouth to speak, but the sound of the door stops her.

  My eyes drift over there as a figure dressed in a black overcoat and a black cowboy hat walk in, spurs jangling on the heels of his cowboy boots. He has a smile on his face, and a mouthful of rotten teeth, toothpick hanging from the corner of his mouth. “What an entrance!” he says.

  “Here he is. The rootinest, tootinest — ” Tony begins.

  A blur of steel flashes from this man’s hands. My heart stops as I focus in on the steel. It is an old school six shooter, something a cowboy would’ve worn on each hip almost two hundred years ago.

  “Shut up, Richards. I don’t want to have to do ya like Butch did your boy.”

  Tony shuts up.

  “Now,” the cowboy smiles, “let me introduce myself.” He stands at the head the table, flicks a way something off of the edge that might be a piece of a forehead or and mutilated eyeball, I’m not sure. “I’m Spike, y’all probably heard about me. I run this here place, been running it for…hmm,” he brings the barrel of the gun up to his hairline and scratches. “awhile, I guess. People like to call it Eden. I just call it home.”

  Others would call it Hell, I think.

  He finally holsters the weapon. I mean, after all, we’re about as dangerous as kittens right now with our hands cuffed and our faces plastered in zombie goo.

  “And y’all disrespected my home,” he says.

  The gun doesn’t come out again, but he pulls something free from the back of his pants. On his gun belt is a leather scabbard. If it is any longer, I would think it houses a sword. It doesn’t and it isn’t. Instead, it’s a long hunting knife, the kind Western pioneers used on the great plains to skin buffalo, I’m sure. Honestly, I have no idea, but this Spike guy is a walking, talking cliche. I hear Tony’s voice echoing in my head: Rootinest, tootinest…

  “Which one of you assholes is the leader?”

  “I am,” I say. I may be cuffed to a chair and covered in rotten zombie brains, but I am no coward. I am Johnny Deadslayer. “Name’s Jack Jupiter, pard.” I smile and it feels so weird to smile at this point.

  “Well, Jack Jupiter, I got some bad medicine for you,” Spike says. There is a silence as his flint-colored eyes meet mine. He has a look about him that is crazy enough to make me want to turn away.

  I don’t.

  Norm snorts. It’s a painful, fluid snort, but it’s also unmistakably his agonized form of laughter. “Bad medicine,” he says. “Talk n-normal, jackass.”

  Spike turns his attention on Norm. “I already took a finger,” he says, brandishing that big knife, “now don’t make me take your tongue, too.”

  “Leave him out of this,” I say. “I’m the leader of the group, talk to me.”

  Spike arches an eyebrow, tips his cowboy hat. “Fair enough, friend.”

  “Good. You got what you want, right? You got Herb, now let us go.”

  A smile slowly spreads across Spike’s face. “Yeah, I got the big blacky, but that ain’t what this is about.” He barks a short burst of laughter and gets up from the table. I hear his boots squelching in the blood and zombie brains. “No, Jack Jupiter, this isn’t about what I want and don’t want. See, I always get what I want. That’s the great thing ‘bout this fucked up world we live in now. Ain’t hard to take from the weak,” he taps the butt of his pistol, “when you got the steel to do the takin for ya.”

  He rounds the table, and stands directly behind Norm, then he begins to sidle in between him and Abby. He tips his hat at her and says, “Pardon me, miss.” It’s such an alien gesture to see this among the brick walls and sterile lighting and statue like zombies. I can’t help but think he took a wrong turn in a time machine and ended up here instead of 1850’s Texas.

  “Jack, the reason you and yours is tied up in some abandoned stock room in my kingdom of Eden is because you disrespected me.”

  And what does he call this? Chaining, beating, and scaring people who should be guests.

  “We just met you!” Darlene squeals. Her face is paper-white, and she is shaking.

  “May be, ma’am, but you’ve been quite acquainted with my right-hand man Butch, have ya not?”

  Darlene doesn’t answer.

  “I wouldn’t be proud to call that son of a bitch my right-hand man,” Abby wheezes. “He’s a murderer.”

  Spike chuckles. “You gotta be sometimes. I’m sure you ain’t squeaky clean yourself, princess.”

  “Look at them,” I say. “Look at the women. They’ve been beaten. What kind of man administers beatings on women?”

  Actual concern shows on Spike’s face. “Butch said y’all were already like that when he found ya. World’s tough and all.”

  “You wouldn’t know how tough it is out there when you’re hiding behind these walls,” I say. “You’re about as tough as Butch is worthy of being a right-hand man.”

  Spike pulls his upper lip in a snarl. “Don’t try to act like you know me, boy. You don’t.”

  “Oh, I know a lot about you. I have heard some great things. Funny things.”

  Spike’s eyes open wide, a fire igniting inside of them.

  “It’s kind of hard to be afraid of a guy who runs around playing Cowboys and Indians, dressing up like a poor man’s John Wayne. Yeah, Spike, I know you used to work in the Wild West wing of the theme park. I know you got fired because you didn’t like losing all the time, that you went off script and shot your cap gun at the White Hat, and when he didn’t fall over, you threw a temper tantrum. What was is they compared it to, a kid who didn’t get that action figure he wanted for Christmas? Yeah, I think that was it. Then you tried to fight the White Hat and got your ass handed to you on a silver platter. Boy, that was a helluva story, helped the time fly by in your little prison. You’re a laughing stock around here. Not even Butch respects you.”

  I’m smiling now despite none of this actually humoring me. I know I am on thin ice. I do not have the upper hand here. We are this crazy asshole’s captives, and he has a gun and a knife, and exploding zombies. So no, this is probably not smart, but what choice do I have?

  “Shut your mouth,” Spike says. “You shut your fuckin mouth right now.” The Southern drawl is gone, replaced by the last semblances of something New York or perhaps New England. It’s distorted enough for me to not rightly know.

  I feel everyone’s eyes on me. Even Abby and Norm, whose eyes are almost swollen shut, have opened theirs as wide as they can. Tony, too — the guy who respects this cowboy the least — is now hardly breathing when I look at him, his face telling me I should’ve shut up while I still can.

  But, of course, I’m not going to shut up. I’m pissed. I’m scared. I’m tired of assholes trying to push me and mine around.

  “You are just a f
igurehead. Butch is the one who really runs this place. He goes out there and does what needs to be done for Eden while you sit back with your feet up, shooting off cap guns.”

  “Enough!” Spike yells.

  The gun comes out in a blur and he wraps his arm around Norm’s neck with the hand that holds the hunting blade. “You wanna find out if this here’s a cap gun, partner? Want me to prove it to you? This your brother, right? Wanna see what his brains look like?”

  I bite down hard enough for my molars to pop and turn to dust. I went too far. My stomach clenches as I think I just put the nail in my brother’s coffin.

  “No,” I say. “I told you to leave him out of this. This is between me and you. Leader versus leader.”

  Norm’s face is screwed up in pain, but somehow I notice him smiling. This son of a gun is beaten, missing a finger, on the cusp of death, and he’s smiling. It causes me to smirk too.

  “This ain’t funny,” Spike says. “You disrespect me and I kill. Simple, pard.”

  I see the murder in his eyes.

  I scramble for something to say. I’m no longer fueled by that wave of adrenaline that comes over me in times of great stress and uncertainty. I have to think like Johnny Deadslayer. What would he do? He wouldn’t let his brother die. He wouldn’t let his group be disrespected and humiliated.

  I think back to all the old Western movies Norm and me used to watch before he got too old to hang out with his little brother. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Tombstone, Once Upon a Time in the West, these all flood back into my mind. Clint Eastwood snarling across the way at Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach, that haunting music playing in the background. Val Kilmer saying, “I’m your Huckleberry,” in Tombstone. Man, that was the pinnacle of my childhood.

  There’s one thing I picked up from those movies that I think is useful to me right now.

  Spike cocks the hammer back on his pistol. The full click stops the words in my throat. Norm is trying to move his head away from the barrel, but he doesn’t get too far, being confined and cuffed to a chair and all.