The Zombies of Lancaster

by Frank Weltner

  "Them zombie boys don't have a chance with that woman hitting on them," one of the soldiers said. "We need girls like her on our team, for sure. If those zombies had soldiers as good as her, we'd all be overrun in a minute!"

  "God bless her! And to think we killed her husband."

  The Christian racists continued bashing the brains of the zombies, as their offspring followed up by smashing their skulls with their own bats behind them and yelling, "Clear! Clear!" Within minutes, the raging cultists were covered with blood from head to toe.

  "Come here, you bastards!" Donna yelled.

  She affixed her club to their heads one by one as she shattered their skulls with total abandon.

  "Clear!"

  She struck again.

  "Clear!"

  No one needed to tell her what to do. The decadent Christian racists were her new family. When it came to people versus the dead, Donna knew instinctively whom she must protect. Her personal survival goal was completely self-evident, and one look at the alternative was more than enough to reinforce it in Donna's mind.

  A small boy stepped into the fray. A zombie bit him, and his father dragged him away and clubbed the boy's head until it was flattened like a pancake.

  "I told you they'd bite you, boy! You didn't listen!" the man told him as his child body continued to emit tiny flickers of motion from his arms and legs as death settled in across his relaxing nerves. Angry as the father was at what his son had done, the man was in tears over his needless death. He picked him up and hugged him.

  Donna beat a zombie whose mouth was less than three inches from her face. "Where'd you come from, bitch?" she yelled. Donna pushed her back. A minute later that same fallen zombie, still animated, had crawled out from the boots that were stomping the ground. Then, a man doing cleanup at the back of the pack clubbed her zombie head a second time and sent her into a new hell which he guessed was some sort of post zombie land. "That's the way it goes," Donna mused. "Just inches from escaping the battle. Now, that zombie is dead forever." Then, she remembered what happened to Fredrick, her poor dead husband and what a nice husband and father he had been. You just never knew. Your time could end in a heart beat. And, besides, who would ever have dreamed up a nightmare like Jesus Town and the Aryan redneck creeps who had piled into the place and ruled it like some insane angels posing from behind hell's doorway. Life was so surreal in this new world of hurt and death that Donna wondered why she had not yet tipped toward insanity and suicide like so many seemed to be doing these days. By now, Donna was blood splattered along with everyone else. She looked out over the battle. The racists were all bunched up and clubbing the zombies. She approached the deadly cluster and clubbed two more emerging zombies. Donna shouted, "Clear! Clear!" then stomped their heads. "Clear! Clear!" she repeated. How had so many broken through the walls of the town, she wondered? She figured someone let them in, maybe someone bitten who turned and opened the flood to the hellions of droolers who were so set on removing so many familiar life forms from the earth.

  "Fuck it!" she yelled. Despite herself she succumbed to the town's most urgent Jesus fervor and yelled, "Kill them for Jesus!" Her club swung fast and furious. Her training in the Jesus Town conversion meetings was evidently working. She found herself loving Jesus and hating black people. In Donna's redneck cultist vision, the entire world had become a frigging racist conspiracy, and the government had really designed zombies but the experiment got away from them. Now, the world had to die at their racist Christian hands in a place called Jesus Town. "Only Jesus can save us!" she screamed, and her racist compatriots grunted in agreement and fought even harder. Things were falling into place, and the insanity was becoming as real as brain surgery to her and just as effective. In a world this insane, Jesus Town seemed normal. She found herself energized more and more even as her arms began to tire of wiping out the hordes of zombies flooding past her from all sides in the streets with their zombie arms pointing straight ahead into some unseen, freaky, and anti-sacred hell that the zombies evidently thought they were seeing in their final days.

  "Fight for Christ!" she yelled.

  She made her loudest noises on the subject over and over as she shouted out their stock phrases knowing it would inflame the white Christian militia and insure their best chance of survival against the zombie onslaught. They were clubbing the zombies alongside her in a frenzy of fear. What was left of the little bands of humans in Jesus Town fought fiercely for survival amid this deadly straggling surge of zombie predation and madness. The trails of biting and surging zombies never seemed to end but kept coming at them with their reaching arms of death and despair.

  Hours later, the mop up continued unabated. She was forced to work in several of their Ford-F150 pickup truck's by a local militia that had drafted her on the spot. She was alternately driving and heaving brain smashed zombies into her assigned redneck pickup bed. The zombies rested in the pickup bays with their lifeless arms and legs hanging over the truck bed walls waving in unison atop the bumpy roads like lackadaisical death flowers. Their arrangement seemed quite haphazard. Most of them were still dripping. Drool, blood, and body parts clung to her small truck as well as to her clothes and coated her face from the earlier fire fight. She proceeded down the road to places where smoke poured forth. These glowing beads of orange inside the woods and toward which she drove the bodies were the bonfires that served as flaming repositories for fallen zombies and people alike. With so many deaths on occasions like this which seemed to occur with greater and greater regularity, all society could come up with were fire holes to contain the horror and prevent even more plagues from rotting out even more bodies. Hundreds of lost zombie parts were left behind. These parts already generously sprinkled the streets, lawns, sidewalks, and highways.

  Donna saw no end to the reeking gore, because the madness of death stalked the earth amid these sordid hordes. These had been the dead ones who were willing to walk for decades and never die. To humans like Donna, it appeared as though endless zombies continuously stumbled ahead in their drunken madness as though it was the only thing the zombies found worth doing. Donna knew these deadly killers were the perfect vehicles for man's endless dying. Stumbling forward with raised arms was for them as natural and American as apple pie, Christmas trees, and doughnuts. As Donna watched her final load of zombies burning in the pits, she marveled how their fingers moved rhythmically like dark erratic spider legs within the flames. Their flickering orange pyres engulfed their spastic appendages. Their faces burst into flames and entered into the air like ghostly spirits moving in shadows of dust that flowed in tiny spirals within the glowing heat.

  #

  When they were ordered to go home, Bill was also covered in blood. They stepped into the shower. The water was ice cold as usual, and the gore relinquished its grip upon their flesh with great reluctance. Like glue in a child's art class, the blood clung to their bodies and refused to let go without a great amount of water and moving bristle brushes all of which were designed to insure that the zombie coating eventually relinquished its hold.

  "It was one of the worst breakouts I've ever seen, Bill! It was even worse than Lancaster!" Donna mumbled into his ears as she rested inside her husband's bed. "I just grabbed a piece of lumber and did my thing with the rest of them. There were so many bitten today! So many! One was just a boy, and his father smashed his head and yelled at him for trying to help. He cried because it was a useless waste of a beautiful kid's life, especially since that little boy was simply a tiny Christian Aryan just like us. I tell you it broke my heart to see it, Billie."

  Billie Reynolds hugged her close as he kissed her lips. He had learned to love her. His family had been exterminated by the plague. Only Billie and his brother remained in a larger clan of eighteen people. In fact, most of his friends had to be smashed once they
were bitten or had resurrected and morphed into the familiar faces of the walking dead that he had seen too much of.

  "The lord was with us today," Billie said.

  "Yes. He was. He stood beside us."

  "I love you," he told her.

  It was true. Billie loved her in the deepest part his soul. She was the completion of his life. He would die for her in a heart beat.

  She smiled. Over the weeks of pain and propaganda sessions, she had come around. She had been unable to sustain her hatred for Billie and his brother forever. Life was too precious and too sad to live it in bitterness. Even what happened to her family and her husband, as bad as it was, had paled even more by comparison to the millions who had no children, parents, or distant relatives left at all. Most of their recent history had been washed away inside a wickedly fluid past in which death and struggle was all that they remembered.

  She had learned to love Bill Reynolds and was okay with loving him as her husband. Sure, he was ignorant beyond compare. No one like him had ever appeared in her past. That had been a place where people like Billie would have been cast aside in a New York instant. But in Jesus Town, Billie was mainstream. Racial hatred, belief in God, and beer fighting all the time with half drunk men and women as well as with zombies was the average daily fare, so much so that it passed as normal. In fact, the total abnormality of life in this cowardly new world of drinking, running, preaching, fighting for survival, and brushing with what had once been and still was absolute human trash like Billie and Wesley Reynolds was the new normal in which she was now forever entwined. She would never leave. She had forgotten so much about that other world she had lived in where normal people were the rule that Jesus Town's racist rants had become all the rage for her. Whatever history had been before Jesus Town had become just a vague memory lost in a wavering miasma of darkness.

  "I love you, also, Billie Reynolds," she said.

  Billie moved atop her, feeding his seed inside her day after day. It was reassuring to have him wanting her. His friendly mounting had become familiar and loving. Fredrick had become just a rapidly fading moment in her life. What she loved most about Billie and Wesley and all the other guys in the white Christian racist church was the way the men wanted children from their women. They had placed all women on a pedestal constructed out of their own self-deceptions. Even Bertha had been married off to one of them, old as she was, and her far younger redneck husband was handsome and fine. He prayed for her to produce white children for him whom he could endlessly train to recite those ancient Christian stories that meant so much to everyone in Jesus Town.

  She prayed fervently that her children would survive and produce more white babies like themselves with which to bless Jesus Town's pure racial inhabitants, all of whom were Teutonic gods with pale skin, blond hair and flashing murderous soldier eyes wielding swords and arrows in their muscular hands and wanting to wipe out all non-whites in their wars of religious bigotry. She had learned how this was a good thing. Racist rants were simply the game of the day, and if you didn't fit in right to this scheme, then, like Fredrick Schneidholst, you might also be taken behind your house and shot dead. Better to play along, even to believe in the madness than to offer yourself as another victim of their seedy and wanton illegalities based on their wickedly shaky interpretations of the Bible.

  Someone outside thumped against her trailer in the middle of the night causing Donna to awaken. Her handsome new husband, Billie, as she called him was sound asleep, so she got up and cracked the door. Seeing no one there, she went outside. This night was quiet and beautiful. The stars shone high above, making Donna remember what a wonderful planet the Earth was, even with the malfunctioning evolution which had spawned the deadly Amish virus that had infected almost all of Lancaster, Pennsylvania and turned it into a living and dying hell hole of flames and zombie deaths. She breathed the air in deeply. It was so fresh. With no motors polluting the atmosphere in this new world of zombies and hunted down humans anywhere in sight, the sky seemed more beautiful and clearer than ever. A few dogs barked across Jesus Town, reminding Donna that people used to have pets whom they loved like children before the zombies started grabbing them off the streets and eating them. While she was thinking these thoughts, someone grabbed her from behind and tossed her to the ground. Donna screamed. She turned to see three zombies peering down upon her. She saw their outstretched arms hovering like strangely distorted angel wings as they reached down toward her throat with claw-like hands. Drool oozed down upon her in a wet string from their lips, and a glow of vileness flickered inside their darkly sunken eyes.

  "Oh my God!" she yelled. "Billie! Zombies! Help me for Christ's sake!"

  Donna scrambled to her feet. The closest zombie had grabbed her robes, and she had to struggle to free herself by slipping out of it. She was naked, but at least she was free of them. She ran for her life. The zombies followed her. She could hear their footfalls clomping against the dirt, tearing up the grass. When she glanced back, they were still only fifteen feet away. Their zombie hands reached straight ahead. Their fingers writhed in the darkness and pointed in her direction as they grabbed at her. They wanted to pull her down to the ground, then bite her throat, tear open her jugular, sip her splattering blood, rip her open and pull her entrails out, toss them into the air, and eat them.

  "Help! Wake up! Zombies!"

  "Help me!"

  Lights began to come on in the trailers. Doors opened. Rednecks with guns had jumped from beds scantily dressed or totally naked looking out over the trailer court's tiny lawns watching vigilantly with bats and rifles in their hands. Several aimed and fired at the horde of twenty-five animated corpses reaching ahead for Donna and anyone else they hoped they might grab to bite. Guns began firing everywhere. Donna heard the zombies' corpses hitting the ground in loud thumps behind her. Young men and women ran to her rescue, and she heard Billie shouting behind her. He had awakened and was firing away trying to save her! "Thank God," she thought, "that Billie and his friends have the stones and sense of importance as white people to roust themselves to save people like Donna herself whom they hardly knew. It was enough to them that she was white, European, and Christian. They were totally willing to give their lives if necessary to save hers in the hope that their beloved race might survive the raging infection. The plague was threatening the only part of the human race that these rednecks respected, their own part, for they would never lift a finger to save those whom they considered to be non-humans and whom they derided with the belittling terms of "stupid fucks," “niggers,” “spics,” and “orientals.” She tripped and fell to the ground having lost her footing and felt vampires laying their icy hands upon her. She jumped up quickly and ran up the stairs to the nearest trailer porch where a family was firing guns at her zombie pursuers and found them hurrying her into their trailer home and safety.

  Outside, guns blared through the cold night vapors. The woman of the house, who was a redneck about sixty years old and had produced six or more kids for her husband, was named Ruby. After a quick introduction, Ruby held Donna to her heart and told her that her clan would take care of her tormentors and that Donna no longer had to worry about being bitten. Ruby then examined her naked body and told one of her children, a boy named Arnie, to run to her closet and bring Ruby's best sleeping robe, which he did immediately.

  "We are going to save you, dear. You poor thing, being chased by those half living pieces of non-human shit out there. If it'd been me I would have died from fright!"

  "I'm almost dead of fright, to be honest!" Donna said. Her words hardly came out, because she was fighting to breathe. "Those unearthly creatures are so vile! I am just shaking in fear from having been nearly infected! I am so happy you saved me."

  A ruckus ensued on the deck outside, then a knock at the door. It flew open and Billie Reynolds came into the room loaded with guns and embraced her.

  "Did they bite you?" he asked.

  "No."

  "I need to check
you!"

  "My name's Ruby," the redneck Christian lady said, "and she's just been checked. She ain't been bit. That's for certain."

  "Oh, thank God!" Billie said. "My prayers have been answered!"

  "This here is Ruby," Donna said. "Ruby, this is my husband, Billie Reynolds, and we live on the next street in this trailer court."

  "Better get your family together, Ruby," Billie told her. "We may have to make a run for it, because there's hundreds of them out there, and it looks like a thousand more pushing in from the roads right behind the trailer court."

  "I figure we are in a real pretty shit, then," Ruby said.

  The door opened, and one of her sons yelled for them to come out to the pickup and be prepared to haul ass.

  "We can't stop them! Get your asses to the truck, and let's be gone from here and right now! I mean it!"

  They got clothes and shoes for themselves and Donna, Billie, and those out on the porch with the guns. They grabbed their ammunition also.

  "Move ass, kids, and be careful not to fall or get bit!" Ruby yelled.

  The door flew open and they stepped out onto the porch and into the bed of the pickup truck which someone had backed up right to the porch. In a second, all of them were inside. The truck rolled through a mass of zombies as it mowed them down in search of whatever escape route they could find. Meanwhile, Billie, Ruby, and her kids were firing rifles and pistols into the heads of the biters and kicking at the heads of the other zombies clinging to the truck's sides until they eventually fell off into the street. Eventually, the clingers were overcome, losing their grips. No one cared one shit about what happened to them later but hoped their skulls would be suitably crushed by others so that the world would be cleared of them. As for now, they could see that the fallen zombies were being stomped into the ground by the runaway herd of their own kind who streamed along beside them and behind the pickup, reaching for the people inside, until they were felled by the pounding of bats and clubs. Donna held her own, pumping shells into zombies one by one, then clubbing their heads when she was out of ammunition. So did the older kids who seemed to be very close to the age of men, including Billie who was doing his best to kill every single one of them.