The Undead (Zombie Anthology)

by D. L. Snell

  Worst of all, the obese woman was still clinging to life.

  Wobbling on her knees, she made an attempt to reach Darius, who fell on his ass after she dropped him. Confused and overcome by fear, Darius crawled backwards away from his mother, right into the arms of the famished undead.

  Her head turning jerkily, loose meat bobbing and spitting, the obese woman spotted Kane and, with one eye left, begged him to put Darius out of his misery. A second later, she was completely surrounded by dead folks who began to feast with impunity.

  Kane, who was still watching through the scope, turned the gun on Darius as hundreds of ravenous hands yanked at him. Darius was a crying heap, balling tighter as his clothes were torn from his body and his naked flesh touched first by the chill of night, then by skin hardened to edges, protruding bone ripping like talons, and finally by teeth meeting teeth.

  Zeroing in on Darius’ head, Kane tried to keep a steady hand. He promised himself a direct hit this time. Darius managed to escape their grasp only to be recaptured again and again, as there was nowhere for him to run.

  “MommmmMeeeeeeee!”

  Once he was certain that he had Darius in his sights, Kane closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

  CLICK!

  The gun was empty.

  “No! No! No!” Kane inspected the empty chamber as if he expected a round of ammunition to magically appear.

  Thankfully, Darius’ screaming was short-lived, though memorable in its bubbly-pitched urgency. It ended in a gurgle, suggesting that Darius’ throat was torn out. Kane had already looked away, so he couldn’t be sure.

  Now there were only zombies. Hundreds of them, thousands counting the lone roamers that began to arrive from deep within the neighborhoods that bordered the Megamart plaza. Fat, thin, old, young, recently deceased, and long dead, they approached with dumbed-down determination that made their primal desire seem all the more frightening. Lazy yet eager, their feet dragged and slid as if a normal gait was foreign to them anymore, foreign as the tear that crawled down Kane’s cheek.

  A curious blur exploded from the ass-end of aisle seven. Without hesitation, Kane lifted his shotgun, thrust off the balls of his feet, and pulled the trigger in mid-stride. CLICK!

  “God-dammit!” Energized by the sudden activity, he forgot that he was out of bullets.

  Kane’s knee-jerk decision (to hunt Jason down) was probably the wrong one. The zombies were more of an immediate threat to these people, who seemed to forget about Jason for the time being. However, he continued on his path, reminding himself that there was probably ammo back in Sporting Goods.

  He . . . they were headed for the manager’s booth. Jason knew that much. Although he had a good idea why (fuck it, he was positive: to fuck the brown-skinned hottie, probably kill her too, maybe kill her, then fuck her), the image that that cued up set the wheels of shock in motion and he, the limited, new Jason who lurked deep inside the overthrown shell, couldn’t afford the extra baggage if he was to maintain the cursory hold on bits and pieces of his inner self. Boring liked to irritate him by making him suddenly wake from his trance-stupor feeling as if he had only been dreaming. Then—BAM! It came back with a vengeance, affecting him like it did the first time he realized that someone . . . something else was inside him.

  He . . . they were on their way up the short, narrow stairway to the manager’s booth, climbing them with purpose, leaden feet lingering with each step to allow the shockwaves of impact to travel up from the floor to the fire in their loins. If there was an upside to being possessed, this was it. The sting of lust was like nothing he’d ever felt, and he had done his share of experimenting. His dick was as hard as a rock. It felt good, damn good: so good, in fact, that he greeted the zombie feeding frenzy that he passed with the same indifference that he showed to the random acts of violence he occasionally walked up on while cruising through the ’hood high as fuck. When their eyes met (his and Kane’s), Jason flashed a detached smile, looked away, and continued on, his mind tripping on lust that dripped from his penis, his eyes zeroing in on the brown-skinned hottie through the booth windows.

  At the time, Kane was up to his waist in zombies, thrashing the chainsaw with the “Clearance” tag dangling from its handle from right to left, jagged teeth biting deep into and through flesh and bone and muscle. Like some badass zombie-killing machine, Kane swung with all his strength, teeth mashed together, lips curled into a snarl. Behind him, two collegiate types with aluminum tee-ball bats took out the stragglers and the ones smart enough to attempt a sneak attack from the rear.

  As a result of his symbiotic sickness, Jason’s interpretation of events was beginning to filter through a haze that made things drag and skip and mold to fit some unappeased adolescent fantasy scenario.

  80s Teenage Fantasy

  An arm, pock-marked with day-old bullet-hits, reaches into the frame, fingers spread, opened palm easing into contact with the black door marked, Manager’s Booth. Employees Only Beyond This Point.

  The door swings open, the room inside falling upon our eyes gradually. Inside, a portable MP3 boom box cues up Broken Wings by Mister Mister.

  Her back is to us. Peeking out from beneath her white sheer blouse knotted at her sternum, the nape of her back, smooth and tight as can be, begs for attention. She is wearing tight jeans, the kind the white trash girls liked to sport. Kane called them camel-toe jeans. As she squats, fumbling with something on the lowest shelf of a dented metal bookcase, the pants formed a second skin against the meaty “W” of her hips and ass. Her legs are slightly thick, just enough to make the rebound jiggle of her apple-shaped ass linger against the scrotum after each thrust. She knows that she is being watched. If it wasn’t evident before, it is now as she stands with a serpentine sway, leaving her ass to jut out at the end of her hypnotic rise.

  Her thick, raven locks flop and slide across her back as she pivots her head from side to side, then turns to face Jason.

  The music swells!

  A gust of wind lifts her hair from her shoulders, where it whips horizontally two feet behind her, snapping like a flag in the wind. Her eyes light up as if she’d been expecting him, longing for his specific touch. They creep down to his crotch, and back up with a naughty glint. Against her glistening brown hue, a white lace bra screams at us as she loosens the knot in her shirt and lets it slide from her arms, her erect nipples making a strong case for freedom from underneath. Her breasts spill out from the top while below, her waist and the suggestion of a finely tuned abdominal wall lure our eyes in pursuit of her dexterous fingers as they unsnap her jeans and drag the zipper down. The V-shaped opening gives us a preview of what lies beneath.

  She glides toward Jason as if on wheels. They embrace.

  As they kiss, Jason, too, succumbs to the cinematic wind, and an overall feeling of flight, the song’s pop antics, merged with easy-listening sedative qualities, lulls his brain into a cloudy bliss.

  When he opens his eyes to reassure himself that this is really happening, we see via Jason’s point of view that the three rectangular windows set high on the right side of the room project a scene of fast-moving clouds.

  CUT TO:

  They are naked on the floor, the brown-skinned hottie on her stomach, Jason thrusting away on top, watching her plump ass bounce to the rhythm. Her face, turned sideways, enough so that she can occasionally seek out his eyes to truly understand his hang-jawed rapture, rests on her folded forearms. Looking down upon her, Jason uses her reaction to fuel his stamina while at the same time fighting to stifle the cum that crawls slowly toward the light.

  CUT TO:

  We find them in missionary position. It seems like hours have passed, but judging from the song, which is only half-over, it has only been a few minutes. Lifting his torso off hers, Jason arches his back to thrust deeper, and, bracing himself with his right hand, he reaches down and manipulates her breast, circling her nipple with his fingertips, pinching and pulling it taut before letting it snap back into place
. Her perfect face is alive with ecstasy. For the tenth time at least, Jason establishes the fact that he never would’ve gotten a girl like this on his own. In a moment of genuine emotional connection, he caresses her face, cradling the side of it in his palm. He lets his hand slide down to her neck and around.

  The music begins to distort. . . .

  CUT TO:

  This time it was different, waking to reality, or something close to it. His fantasy girl had suddenly hulked-out on him, thrashing violently beneath him, once beautiful beyond words, now wrought with bruises about her face and upper chest, and gulping open-mouthed as Jason tightened his grip around her throat. Instead of the usual symbiotic sucker-punch that kept Jason disconnected, the detached haze that currently separated him from reality was from shock, then horror, then shame, each coming right on the heels of the other. Jason had no time to react, to brace himself for whatever might come next. He expected that it would be the same old shit. Boring and his fucking tricks. . . . However, it had been a full five minutes (the moments of clarity usually lasted a minute at most), and in that time, things had melted to extra sharpness: the abrupt wave of pain as the brown-skinned hottie wrapped her thick legs around his waist and squeezed, the volume at which her twisted, ugly expression screamed utter contempt, the sting of her palm as she slapped him across the face again and again, the burning sensation as she clawed him and dragged her hand down his cheek, neck and chest, or the fact that her naked body no longer incited a sexual response. Worse yet, it made him feel sick.

  On the radio, an advert for tea, distinctly am because of its lack of texture. The sterile whine of an old-fashioned teakettle cut through the kinetic stillness in the manager’s booth. The surgical brightness intensified to a white-hot glow that sizzled.

  “SOMEBODEEEEE HELP MEEEEEEE!” she screamed, thrusting her face up at him as if she intended to somehow stun him with the weight of her audible wrath.

  He hadn’t figured her for an around-the-way girl, but he knew that accent well. It was one that he ran from until he found himself. Based on the way she doctored her moaning to sound more innocent (or maybe that was his mind’s doing), he pictured her being more soft-spoken, all breathy and sweet. It was clear now that she was running from the same thing that he used to. She probably worked around mostly white people, which, by the looks of her (she was all that, and then some), she saw as a haven from the catcalls that always reached her physically, their sensimilia-soaked words like hands tugging at her belt, fingers sliding across her ass and digging in for an ample chunk to squeeze. They called her names like “shawtee,” or “thick legs,” or “bitch” if she didn’t respond. Sometimes, they even followed her for a block or two, looming over her with their primal funk, arms spread as if they were about to wrap them around her and snatch her up at any moment. This was where she could take off the mask of bastardized masculinity that she, and other girls like her, wore as a result.

  Her name was LaToya. Her nametag had been pinned to her shirt the whole time, but Jason only just noticed it as she slid backward on her hands and ass, reaching for her clothes along the way and trying her best to cover herself, first with her arm, then with the shirt.

  Jason sprung to his feet and attempted to follow her, arm extended, hand upturned to translate peaceful intentions, his flaccid penis dangling, pubic region encrusted with blood and vagina secretions. He stopped to pull up his pants and underwear from around his ankles.

  If he fell on his ass, LaToya might get back at him, she might run out the door, right into the hands of the . . .

  The zombies. . . . Jason hurried over to the rectangular windows that looked down into the aisles.

  There were two people left: Kane and a younger man in his late teens or early twenties, surrounded behind the four glass bins that encased the deli area by a contingent of zombies. Even the slow-shuffling dead situated farthest from the deli counter acknowledged in some way (a look, body language, a grunt) their stake on the last three warm bodies. Some of them had stopped on their way to fixate on familiar things (cereal boxes with funny characters, brand names they preferred in life, flashing tabloid magazine covers, clothing, stereo equipment, jewelry), hanging onto something similar to memory that, for a millisecond, sparked to life.

  These were real people, these mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and nasty little secrets reduced to chewed-upon pieces and fought over with deadfuck zeal. The lucky ones hoarded prime cuts, whole arms and legs and pulled-apart torsos, and large, unidentifiable chunks, and swatted at opportunistic hands hungry for more than just scraps. Jason had seen many of these people alive only minutes ago.

  ALIVE. . . .

  ALIVE?

  The word climbed up Jason’s spine and sunk its venomous fangs into his brain-anesthetizing warmth, from his core to the external personal space that his aura claimed. Beneath the layers of noise—shotgun blasts, an authoritarian voice (Kane) yelling profanities, the background moan, the fucking electronic ads attacking from every direction, and the old Beastie Boys song, “So What’cha Want,” that spilled from the overhead speakers—Jason could actually hear the dead folks chewing.

  Three quarters of Megamart’s inventory lay smashed and broken on the floor. Food and liquids coated whole aisles both sticky and slick, and stole some of the zombies’ feet from under them.

  Jason felt a breeze blow past him.

  LaToya. . . .

  By the time he turned, she was already out the door and calling to God as she tumbled headfirst down the narrow steps just outside the booth. This time her nudity frightened him.

  Standing dumbstruck, paralyzed by the magnitude of evil he had helped wrought so far (and on top of everything else, he expected at any moment to be snatched away from this reality again), a fire ignited in Jason’s arm, an unnatural warmth that he was now able to control, his mind charting a path up to his shoulders, his head, and down to the rest of him until the bullets in his flesh began to fidget.

  “This is it, kid.” Spine-tingling honesty spiked Kane’s tone and made the younger man, Doug Springsteen, start to out-and-out cry. “Close your eyes and turn away. I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.”

  Kane turned the shotgun on him and motioned with a matter-of-fact jerk of the barrel for him to turn.

  “No! No, wait. . . .” Doug pleaded. “There must . . . there must be an—”

  “What? Another way? Sure there is.”

  Kane looked to his right at . . .

  . . . hundreds, no, thousands of dead-ass humans looking back at them, all with the same “I’m gonna eat your ass” expression.

  Kane pivoted with the shotgun, ready to pick off anything that attempted to climb over. “I’m gonna do myself right after if it makes you feel any better,” he told Doug.

  He was down to ten bullets (the box of ammo that he found in Sporting Goods was nearly empty when he got it), and he knew it wouldn’t be long before the bang of the shotgun, which still seemed to half-startle them momentarily, was too old a memory to keep them at bay.

  “Whatever you decide, you’d better make it quick.”

  The zombies were starting to climb over the counter. Kane followed the first one up with his shotgun and blew it back into the four or five who intended to follow.

  “Fuck!” Kane backed toward the absolute middle of the deli and right into Doug, who was whimpering noisily. “This is pointless, kid. If you don’t give me an answer by the time I’m down to two, I’m going to decide for you.”

  The pressure squeezed a warm stream of piss from Doug’s bladder. Lying too thick and moist inside his lower jaw, his tongue wouldn’t let him answer.

  Kane slid Doug one last glance as four, five, six zombies made their way over the counter. Kane shook his head and placed the barrel beneath his own chin. He closed his eyes and curled his finger around the trigger.

  “Suit yourself, kid.”

  “Wait . . . look. . . .”

  Up on the stairs, a mess of
a man (Jason) invoked a Jesus Christ pose and shook violently, flesh undulating, eyes on their way up and back. So far, Kane had only seen the aftermath of the bullet-swarm, and he’d heard the officers who survived the bus station trying to figure out just how Jason took so many rounds without falling. Experienced cop eyes told them that Jason wasn’t a zombie. Zombies had their own specific hue. They figured him more for an addict.

  “Must be some good shit,” one of them quipped as Jason wobbled on his feet after they unloaded full clips into him. There were fifteen cops at the scene, twelve of them who’d participated in the gunplay, each locked and loaded with full twenty-two-shot clips. That equaled 264 rounds, and still he refused to fall. Overkill, maybe, but Jason had just killed a cop . . . a rent-a-cop to be specific, but that was close enough.

  “Good shit indeed,” replied another. “Where can I get my hands on—”

  A bullet ripped through his throat, stealing his last word. On his way down, he saw what looked like a circle of blue-men dancing around another, who stood with his arms extended, recycled rounds jumping from his body like an organic turret.

  Based on what he knew, the look on Jason’s face told Kane to . . .

  “Getthafuckdown!” Kane said. “Everybody, getthafuckdown!” Less than an hour ago, he was addressing a group of people, and his mind had yet to fully acclimate to the drastic reduction.

  Doug blacked out when his head hit the floor, bounced, and smacked again under Kane’s weight. He opened his eyes and almost lost it at the sight of Kane’s face, larger than life, and so close to his; then the extra pressure on his lungs and stomach indicated that someone was on top of him. A man. He could smell old coffee on his breath, and feel stubble when their faces touched. Oh God, what had they talked him into? He must not have locked the door to his dorm. But wait, he didn’t remember drinking last night. . . .