Officer Barcomb vs. The Undead

by Darren Barcomb

  They have to be.

  “Come here,” Beat said, waving her over with an enormous, pale hand. He put it on her waist. His hand was so cold she jumped. “What’re you afraid of?” he said. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

  Shannon tried not to look around the room at the trophies of the other girls who had let Beat down. There were locks of hair in jars, pieces of jewelry, a clean skull from which all the flesh had been boiled and peeled off. She counted over two dozen trophies; she understood this was not a new personality trait for this rhinoceros of a man. He was like this before everything happened. But all these trophies were fresh. She was terrified, but if she showed even a trace of it he would get turned off.

  That was the fastest way to make her way onto his trophy shelf.

  Turning around, she backed up into his crotch, rubbing her ass against him. She could hear him catch his breath. She was onto a winner.

  The door burst open.

  “We got bad fuckin’ news!” It was Franky, one of Beat’s regular hook-up girls.

  Beat pushed Shannon away and she landed hard on the tiled flooring, her elbows searing with pain.

  “He’s back!” Franky said.

  “He’s supposed to be in South America!” Beat said. His face had turned pale. Shannon had never seen a man so big look so goddamn scared. He started pacing and looked out of the ceiling to floor windows. “Shit!” he said. “He’s not gonna be happy. He’s gonna be far from fuckin’ happy. The guys cleared him out, took all his cash, all his supply.”

  “We can tell him we tried to stop them,” Franky said.

  Beat shook his head. “He’ll tell us we failed.”

  “Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

  “We have to kill him,” Beat said. He grabbed a handgun from off the coffee table.

  “Are you fuckin’ nuts?” Franky said. “Have you seen his guys? Boris is with him. You don’t kill Boris.”

  “I can do it. If we kill him, his men will back off. We’ll be in charge.”

  “We can’t. You can’t kill him.”

  “What, you in love with him or something? After all the shit you seen him do?”

  “Shut the hell up,” Franky said, punching him on the shoulder. “We just fuckin’ can’t. He ain’t the kinda man who just dies because you fuckin’ want him to!”

  Shannon started to stand up when she heard a deafening bang. Without quite knowing why she wanted to, she found herself slowly lying back down on the floor. She felt very tired all of a sudden. She felt tired and warm and when she looked down at the white tiles beneath her, she saw that they were slowly being hidden by a pool of dark red blood. Looking down, she saw that the blood was coming from a hole in her stomach.

  Oh, she thought. That’s not a great sign.

  Shannon was utterly calm for a moment, just observing her blood flooding out onto the floor around her. She felt her breathing getting shallower and could hear these strange little squeaking sounds. The squeaks were coming from her own mouth, and they repeated, becoming louder until they became screams.

  Shannon didn’t quite understand why she was screaming, but she knew she had to do it.

  “Oh, fuckin’ shut up,” Franky said, grabbing Beat’s gun and shooting Shannon again in the back.

  The pain was unbearable and it sent Shannon into complete lock down. She could hear and she could see, but she couldn’t move and she couldn’t control her body. She lay there, looking at the blood pooling around her on the floor, silent now and listening.

  She heard a door open and several men with heavy boots entered. Then a man with lighter shoes came in. His shoes sounded pointed, expensive, and he moved slowly. When he spoke, he sounded different. He spoke as slowly as he moved and there was a trace of an accent. Shannon had divorced her mind from her body by this point and felt no pain. She observed. Her own being was not part of her observations.

  Middle Eastern, she thought. He sounds like he’s from Iraq or something.

  “Put down the gun,” he said, almost gently.

  “I put down the gun and you’re gonna kill me, man,” Beat said.

  “You tell your guys to put down your fuckin’ guns,” Franky said.

  “What’s your name?” the Iraqi man said.

  “Fr-Franky.”

  “You’re a good-looking girl,” the Iraqi said. “I always have room for good-looking girls in my villa.”

  “Look,” Beat said. “I worked for you a long time. I’m loyal. I didn’t know you were coming back.”

  “So you rape and kill my women? You allow people to steal my possessions?” the Iraqi screamed. “This is how you work for me? This is loyalty?”

  “You move and I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head right off,” Franky said.

  “I don’t know you,” the Iraqi said. “And you clearly don’t know me.”

  “I know you’ll be the first one to die if anything happens.”

  Shannon’s world was fading fast. Her vision was failing her. The last thing she ever saw was the moonlight shining off her freshly spilled blood. She lay there then, listening, holding on with no real panic, no real despair. Shannon felt as if she was simply falling asleep. It reminded her of her parents’ long conversations during car rides when she was a kid. She’d doze and catch bits and pieces and never really try to understand what was being said; she’d just enjoy the sounds they made and let them lull her into sleep.

  The Iraqi man spoke again. Shannon didn’t catch it. She tuned back in later and heard him say, “The first one of you to kill the other, I will forgive completely. There will be no repercussions. You have worked for me, Beat,” he said. “When someone points a gun at me, their life is forfeit. This is a once in a lifetime deal.”

  There was a long pause, panicked breathing.

  The Iraqi sounded calm: “I have five men. Either one of you kills the other, or my men kill both of you.”

  “You’ll die, too,” Franky said.

  “Do you know my story, little girl?” the Iraqi said. “Do you know where I grew up?

  Franky was silent.

  “You look beyond these walls and see death and hardship and the end of the world and you quake in your little boots,” the Iraqi said, with an eerie calmness. “You see bodies on the streets and hear gunfire wherever you go. You see dead women and children with the flesh stripped from their bones and you ask, ‘Where is God?’ For me, I look out at burning buildings and I smell burning bodies and I am reminded of home. Where I grew up, children did not live long. Your country cut off our food supply for decades. When a mother and a child came close to death, when they were starved down to the very bones, the mother would find a neighboring family who were also knocking on death’s door and she would arrange a trade. Do you know what she would say to her neighbor?”

  No-one spoke.

  “Your arm is getting tired pointing that gun at me,” the Iraqi said, sounding like he was smiling. “Well, let me stop talking in fictions about people without names. I will tell you what my mother said to her neighbor. I was ten years old. My brother was three. I had never and have never again been so hungry in my entire life. That kind of hunger, it sharpens the mind. It prepares you for anything. My mother took my three year old brother – Rizwan was his name – and she spoke with her neighbor, the father of my very best friend, and this is what she said to him: ‘You take my child. Kill my youngest son and eat him. And I will do the same to yours.’ Few children made it past ten years old. For the parents, for my mother, she could either allow herself and her family to die or she could lose one and perhaps have more children later. I survived,” the Iraqi said, “only because I ate the flesh of my best friend. Like the rest of the children of Baghdad, I was not expected to live beyond my tenth birthday. Everything after that is a gift, and I will never again allow an American to dictate terms to me. One of you will die or both of you will. Those are my terms.”

  Shannon drifted away as Franky started to speak.

  She came b
ack when gunfire jolted her back to consciousness. It was a single shot followed by the sound of a body hitting the floor.

  “You have regained your honor,” the Iraqi said.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Torrento,” Beat said. “It was all her. I didn’t want to-”

  There was second gunshot and another body hit the floor.

  Shannon must have moved, because suddenly she heard someone standing over her, saying “This one’s still alive.”

  There was the sound of pointed, expensive shoes clicking over towards her. Torrento, that was what Beat called him.

  “I don’t know this woman,” Torrento said.

  Shannon tried to open her eyes. Small rays of light poked through and she could make out shapes, but little else. Still, she was grateful for one last look at the world.

  “Cut her up and feed her to the dogs,” Torrento said. “These two, I want their heads on sticks on my wall by morning.”

  Shannon could hear Torrento walking away. He stopped near the door.

  “And don’t kill their brains,” Torrento said. “I want their heads to live up there for a very long time. Put them up next to all the others.”

  Shannon felt a warm hand on her head, pushing through her hair. Sense memory kicked in and she found herself dozing on a comfortable sofa with her head resting on an old boyfriend’s lap as he stroked her hair and talked about plans for the weekend. Life was easy and they had a lot to look forward to.

  The hand grabbed a fistful of Shannon’s hair and pulled it back.

  There was no pain as the blade of a knife drew a line from one side of her exposed throat to the other, opening it up and releasing what little blood she had left onto the floor.

  Shannon’s last thought, as with most people, was an incoherent, jumbled panic.

  The hand let go of Shannon’s hair and her face hit the cold floor with a slap.

  Chapter 5: The Easy Way Out

  Two zombies were climbing the tree. Their cold, dead hands grasped at the wet branches and pulled them up through the rain, closer and closer to the ramshackle tree house where Haws and Ash were holed up. And the closer they got, the more noise they made: snarling and shrieking. A dozen zombies now surrounded the bottom of the tree. The fireman zombie still attacked the tree with its axe. Haws looked dumbstruck.

  “Zombies can climb trees?” Haws said.

  Ash nodded gravely and said, “I guess zombies can climb trees.”

  “Shitting fuck,” Haws said calmly.

  “You’re taking this news very well,” Ash said.

  They watched as the two zombies climbed slowly up the branches. When one slipped, it grabbed for a branch and in catching it, its rotting arm was ripped violently in two as the rest of it fell to the ground below. With a broken spine, the zombie writhed around on the floor and moaned, unable to move. Beside the broken-backed zombie stood the fireman zombie. It was hacking away at the tree with its axe, slowly but surely destabilizing the enormous trunk. Haws and Ash held on tight as the enormous tree began to sway.

  “We’re gonna have to do something about that fuckin’ fireman,” Haws said.

  Haws pulled his shotgun out and aimed down.

  “Haws, don’t-“Ash began.

  The shotgun blast lit up the darkness of the tree house and the fireman hit the ground. Haw laughed and said, “That takes care of that.”

  Ash frowned and said nothing. She waited. Then she heard precisely what she expected to hear next.

  The forest came alive with the sound of the dead.

  The zombies shrieked for blood. They ran as fast as they could towards the tree in which she and Haws sat.

  The fireman sat up in the dirt. Its helmet was cracked, having taken the force of the shotgun blast, and its head beneath was unharmed, beyond being already dead. Its brain was intact. It screamed unintelligible obscenities through a rotten tongue.

  “Fuck,” Haws said.

  “We don’t have enough ammo to take them on,” Ash said. “How many rounds you got?”

  “A handful of shells is it,” Haws said.

  “Keep two,” Ash said. “We might need them for ourselves.”

  The tree started to sway. The zombies at the bottom were beginning to climb it. The base of the trunk, where the fireman had cut, groaned under the weight of the twenty new bodies clambering up its sides.

  “You can fucking put a sock in that shit,” Haws said.

  “I’m going down.”

  Haws handed Ash his shotgun. “Wait,” Ash said,

  “What the fuck are you going to use? Don’t be an asshole.”

  Haws made two fists with his hands. “I got everything I need to take care of any motherfucker that moves,” he said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit up here talking about killing myself like some little pussy.”

  Ash grabbed his arm. “Look,” she said, “what the fuck are you trying to prove? You’ll get yourself killed just as fast going down there as you would if you put this damn shotgun to your head. You can’t take on twenty of those things by yourself.”

  Haws, with one leg on the next branch down, looked up at Ash. Since the start of all this, Haws was the one guy you could count on to be cracking jokes and grinning from ear to ear. Ash thought he genuinely enjoyed it all. He didn’t worry her, but she was glad she wasn’t his enemy. Right now, though, there was no joke and there was no smile.

  “It’s over,” Ash said, trying to hold back the tears. “It doesn’t have to hurt. There’s no shame in doing it ourselves. We lasted longer than anyone else. This is a win.”

  Haws shook her hand off his arm and looked down at the horde of zombies. “Suicide is for fuckin’ cowards,” he said. “I don’t give two shits how hard or how scary shit gets, that ain’t an answer. Ain’t no way to go out.”

  “It’s not the same,” Ash said. “Ever since this whole thing started, we’ve been on borrowed time.”

  “It’s always the same,” Haws said. “Giving up is giving up. I’m not going out like a bitch.”

  “You can’t take them all on yourself.”

  “Watch me,” Haws said. And his smile returned. He lowered himself down to the next branch down. A zombie was crawling slowly up between the branches, gasping and gnashing broken teeth together. Haws put a boot through its face and sent it tumbling down the tree. It hit every branch on the way down and lost limbs and chunks of flesh and bone with every impact, until it hit the floor as almost a mush of dead meat. It was a hell of a climb down, especially with the tree swaying as the fireman hacked at the trunk, but it was better than staying, Haws thought. He wasn’t gonna let a bunch of deadheads finish him off in some shitty little forest in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t gonna hide in some kid’s tree house until his time was up.

  And, seeing him move, Ash decided she wasn’t either. She broke a plank of wood from the wall and tucked it into the back of her belt. “Hold up,” she said. “Let’s get this shit done together.”

  Haws looked up. “Atta girl,” he said.

  The climb down was much easier than the climb up, even with the rush prompted by the bloodthirsty zombies headed in their direction. They had pulled themselves up the tree branch by painful branch after an attack on the group left everyone scattered and running for their lives. Haws nearly fell at least twice, his muscular frame not suited to the kind of nimble maneuvering required to weave through the branches. Ash had to drag him up onto the tree house.

  The tree swayed and started to tip as Haws and Ash neared halfway down. The fireman was getting through.

  “Don’t stop,” Haws said.

  Haws kicked out at a zombie who met him on the way up. His boot smashed its lower jaw off and it kept coming. Haws kicked again at its chest and his foot went right through its ribcage, through the rotten mush which had once been internal organs and out the other side. The zombie fell off the tree, releasing the branch it was holding, and got stuck on Haws’s boot, weighing him down and nearly pulling him off the tree.


  “Fuck!” Haws said. “Need a hand here, Ash!”

  Ash swung to the next branch down and grabbed the zombie by the arm and yanked as hard as she could. The arm ripped clear off the body and Ash felt herself begin to fall. Haws watched in horror as her Ash’s slipped from under her and she slid down into the dark branches below. Her scream stopped for a moment as she became tangled, then began again as she plummeted farther down.