Resurrection (Eden Book 3)

by Tony Monchinski

  “What are they?” Troi whispered so only those on the bluff could hear her.

  “Mutant family Robinson,” Little Red quipped a little too loud.

  “Red,” said David.

  “Hey, Red.” Cosmo addressed her. “You want to come on down and play with the boys?”

  “No.”

  “Show her what we’re playing with, Cletus.”

  The thing named Cletus lifted its hand away from its groin and showed them the severed male human head it gripped by the hair. An enormous, engorged penis jutted from its overalls.

  “That’s that guy!” said Evan.

  Troi looked away.

  “Oh…” said Anthony.

  Guffaws and hyena-like laughs echoed out of the trees below.

  “How many of them are there?” Riley asked quietly.

  “Who knows?” answered David. “They breed like rabbits.”

  “Now you know how we feel about that sort of thing, Cosmo,” said Keith.

  Cletus, laughing, fitted the head to his swollen member again.

  “Say hello to Mergatroid,” said Cosmo.

  Another creature stepped into view. Huge like the other, this one was distinctly female and wore some kind of dress made out of canvas. In her enormous hands, she clasped Bertha. The Hawk MM1 grenade launcher looked minuscule against her gigantic frame.

  “Damn!” Ev blurted when he saw the weapon.

  “Hello, Mergatroid,” acknowledged Keith. “Damn, you got big, girl.”

  “Didn’t she?” Cosmo sounded proud. “You know, we’ve done good, avoiding trouble between us and Thomas and you. Now why’d you want to go and ruin that?”

  “I’m not.” Keith’s voice was firm. “And I am sorry to hear about Winslow and Chilly. Guntag too.”

  “Look at that one…” Troi pointed as Mergatroid raised its dress and let loose a stream of thick, noxious urine that steamed in the evening air.

  “Man, that thing has a small pecker,” said Evan, thinking of the possible side effects of too much radiation on the genome.

  “That’s not a dick,” announced Red. “That’s her clit.”

  “Winslow wasn’t even but three,” Cosmo lamented. “Just send ‘em down to us, Keith.”

  “No can do.” He spoke over his shoulder. “Get them out of here.”

  “Follow us.” David said to the four. “Red.” Little Red ignored him.

  Anthony, Riley, Evan, and Troi followed David away.

  “You know what this means, right?” Cosmo yelled up to Keith. Another of Cosmo’s monstrous children had stepped out into the open. It clutched an undead about the neck. The zombie shook in place, spasmodically.

  “What? Some Hatfield and McCoy bullshit? Come on Cos…”

  Red stepped forward to the edge, next to Keith, and before he could react she opened fire with her N4, spraying the ground around Cosmo. The man didn’t flinch. He stood there until Red had fired out the three hundred round drum magazine.

  A deep, guttural sound of hostility emitted from the acromegalic thing gripping the zombie.

  “Easy, Cleetus,” Cosmo said.

  “Oh, Red…” Keith blew out his breath.

  “That was a stupid thing you did,” said Cosmo. “Shooting at me like that. Even stupider thing is you didn’t kill me.”

  “I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

  Mergatroid and Cletus had faded back somewhere among the trees and dark.

  “You go back and tell Thomas,” said Cosmo. “You tell him the peace between us is over. And you be honest, and you tell him you fired on us first.”

  “You go home and fuck your wife or sister or daughter,” shouted Red, “or whatever she is.”

  “You’ll regret you said that,” promised Cosmo.

  A roar preceded a circular object that flew out of the trees and landed at Keith and Red’s feet. It was the human head Cletus had been sodomizing.

  “Now why’d you go and do that, Cletus?” Cosmo was walking calmly back to the trees. Red looked down at the head and considered kicking it back down at them.

  “Your brothers weren’t done playing with that yet.”

  She decided against it.

  * * *

  “Ma’m? May I sit?”

  Gwen looked up from her table in the hospital cafeteria. A young woman in uniform was standing next to her table, looking down at her expectantly, not unfriendly. She had her leather visored hat under her arm.

  “Go ahead.” Gwen turned one bony hand up in assent.

  “Thank you.”

  The woman settled into the seat across from Gwen. There were only a few other people in the cafeteria at this time in the evening. A nurse sat smoking a smoke-less cigarette as she read a print magazine on her break. There was the occasional muted clang from the kitchen.

  “My name is Weigand.” She placed her hat on the table. “I’m a lieutenant in the Department of Public Security.”

  “You’re here about the zombie,” Gwen cut through the small talk, “is that it?”

  “Well, yes.” Lieutenant Weigand looked momentarily befuddled. “You’ll have to forgive me. This is all so…odd to me. I don’t really know how to proceed.”

  “Just proceed, Lieutenant.” An untouched cup of coffee had stopped steaming in front of Gwen.

  “You can’t keep doing what you’re doing to the zombie, ma’am.” Gwen thought the woman looked uncomfortable telling her this.

  “Because?”

  “Because the Zed is property of the state, ma’am. Same way you couldn’t deface a bus or train. We can’t have you going and chopping parts off our undead.”

  “Our undead?”

  “I think you understand me, ma’am.”

  “It’s all he’ll eat.”

  “That’s…” Lieutenant Weigand was at a loss for words. Of course she knew what Gwen was doing with the limbs she cut off from the zombie outside the hospital, but Weigand couldn’t believe she was having a rational conversation about it. “That’s unfortunate. The doctors are working to find—”

  “The doctor’s aren’t going to find shit. Pardon my French. Mickey survived out there, all those years, by eating what he did.”

  “Of course your friends’ presence has led to all sorts of interest in the latent preservative properties of the undead—”

  “Of course.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry. Try to see this from my point of view. It’s absurd that I’m sitting here having this conversation with you.”

  “That I agree with.”

  “Obviously you’ve got your own concerns,” Weigand ventured, and Gwen remained silent because the lieutenant was correct in her assessment. “So let me say my peace and I’ll leave you be. You can’t go doing what you’ve been doing anymore. We’re going to be stationing an officer outside with the zombie—”

  “You’re providing protection for them now?”

  “—and there will be an officer assigned to your friend’s room at all times. That officer has been instructed to accompany you whenever you leave the room. I hope you’ll understand.”

  “He’ll starve. You know that.”

  “I hope you’ll understand.” Weigand stood, taking her hat from the table. “Please understand.”

  “I heard you, Lieutenant.”

  “Good evening, ma’am.”

  The Game of Death

  “So this is it, then?” Gammon pondered aloud. “We’re at war with Cosmo and his people?”

  “Looks that way,” replied Thomas.

  Anthony, his sister, and their two friends sat around the fire pit. They were tired, but they were grateful, and shared a meal with their saviors.

  “What—who are they?” asked Riley.

  “Cosmo and his family have been out there for a long time,” said Thomas. It had become clear to Anthony and the others that this white haired man, whose face was etched with hard living, was the leader of the group. “Probably a lot longer than all this. Before the zombies, that is.”
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br />   “They’re human?” Troi asked.

  “They’re human,” said Gammon. “Just.”

  “But they’re all…”

  “Yeah, they’re all fucked up. Radiation will do that to you.”

  “Inbreeding doesn’t help,” Red added contemptuously.

  “That is true.”

  On the walk to the camp, the little red-haired woman remained quiet, but the brothers—Keith and David—had done their best to assure the newcomers that they were safe, that they were beyond the reach of Cosmo and his murderous ilk. Together they had trekked well into the night, talking as they travelled, and after a few hours they reached the camp. The camp was comprised of dozens of log cabins of varying sizes. Outside each cabin rested washboards and stacks of firewood. Most cabins had some kind of fire pit, mostly made of stone, built into the ground outside them.

  “We shot one of them like—I don’t know—a hundred times at least,” Troi was saying. “And it still got up.”

  “Must have been Chilly,” Keith said to David.

  “Tough, huh?” David grinned.

  “There was a little one,” said Riley. “It was all…”

  “That would have been Winslow. He must be, what, two now?”

  “Cosmo said three,” amended David.

  “Three.”

  “He looked…”

  “Anencephaly,” said Thomas.

  “What is that?” asked Riley.

  “Anencephalictic babies,” said Troi, “are born without most of their brain.”

  “No forebrain,” said Gammon.

  “Usually missing a piece of their skull and scalp too,” said Thomas. “It’s sad. How’d you know that?” he asked Troi.

  “I work in a hospital.” Troi had learned about anencephaly and hydrocephaly and a thousand other ways a baby could go wrong.

  “How’d Winslow live that long?” Gammon sounded amazed.

  “Because Cosmo,” said Thomas, “as churlish and ill-tempered as he is, loves his children. In his own sick way.”

  “You see babies like Winslow where you’re from?” Gammon asked the four.

  “No,” replied Troi. “They don’t last that long.”

  “A lot of anencephalics are miscarried or stillborn.” Gammon nodded. “Most that survive birth don’t last too long.”

  “She works in a hospital,” Evan said approvingly of Troi.

  “We—where we come from,” Anthony said, “when a woman gets pregnant, she has tests.”

  “They test her and make sure the baby is okay?” Thomas appeared keenly interested.

  “Yes.”

  “And if the baby isn’t okay?” The older man leaned in.

  “They abort it.”

  “They murder it,” Thomas said matter-of-factly. “Is that what you mean?”

  Anthony swallowed. “They get rid of it.”

  “They get rid of it.” Thomas looked down. Everyone was silent for a moment and Anthony wondered what he had said. The old man spoke to Gammon. “You hear that, Ed? They still can’t speak honestly about what they do.”

  “Doesn’t sound like they can.”

  “Tommy, do your old man a favor and go and get Johnny and Phil. Bring ‘em out here, okay?”

  Tommy rose from his spot and walked off into the night.

  “Tell me something,” Thomas invited the four friends. “Take a look at Merv here.” Anthony and his friends looked at the young man seated on one side of Thomas, the young man with the hair lip. “Would a boy like Merv be allowed to survive in your society?”

  “Well, yeah, sure,” Anthony tried not to stammer. “I mean, there’s no law—”

  “There’s no law mandating abortion?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Well look at that, Ed. Progress.”

  “But most people wouldn’t…” When Evan saw how Troi, Riley, and Anthony were looking at him he shut his mouth.

  “But most people wouldn’t want to have a baby like Merv.” Thomas finished his sentence. “That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah, but…”

  “But that’s too harsh, isn’t it? I mean, Merv looks—what? Merv looks happy? Hey, Merv, you happy?”

  “Yuh, dah. I’m huppy.”

  “That’s good, son.”

  “I think I was misunderstood…” Evan tried to undo any damage he thought he might have caused.

  “Oh no, you were understood crystal clear,” said Thomas. “Merv was born with a cleft lip. That’s all Merv’s got going on. Would your society have encouraged Merv’s momma not to have had him?”

  “No.” Troi thought she could iron this out. “There’s a simple operation—” Riley was shooting her warning looks, but Troi was unaware “—that could fix that.”

  “See…” Thomas lit a hand-rolled cigarette. “That’s where we see things differently.” He said it to Troi and her friends, but he was addressing Gammon and Keith and Red and Tommy and his people. “Your society sees Merv here as someone that needs to be ‘fixed.’ We don’t.”

  “Okay,” said Anthony. “That’s cool.”

  “Yeah, how’s this—this cool?”

  Evan inhaled sharply, startled by the four legged, four armed thing that walked into the circle of fire with Tommy.

  “Hey dad,” said Johnny.

  “Hi dad,” said Phil.

  “Boys.”

  “You wanted us?” asked Phil. Both looked like they had just woken up.

  “Yeah, I wanted to introduce you boys to our guests. Boys, introduce yourself.”

  “I’m Phil.”

  “I’m Johnny.”

  “Hi, pleased to meet you.” Riley didn’t miss a beat. “I’m Riley.”

  One by one, Anthony, Evan, and Troi told the conjoined twins their names.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Johnny.

  “That’ll be all, boys,” said their father. “You all go on back to bed, now, hear? Merv, you go with ‘em.”

  “Night dad.”

  “Night.”

  “Night, dah.”

  “Goodnight, Merv.”

  “Gu-night, Uncle Ed-uh.”

  “Night, Merv.”

  When the boys had gone, Evan tried to turn the conversation elsewhere. “You guys have any idea of how much radiation is in the atmosphere?”

  “We’re all going to be dead before we’re forty-five, fifty,” replied Tommy.

  “But kids like Merv? Like his brothers Johnny and Phil?” said their father. “They might have a chance. You see what I’m saying?”

  “How?” asked Anthony.

  “Ask Darwin,” said the old man. “Evolution. We’re going to change—as a species. Or else we’re all going to die of cancer like Tommy said. Except for people like me and Ed and Keith and David here, people who were already in our twenties or thirties when everything went down.”

  “You think we’re going to…evolve to be able to handle this?” Riley asked.

  “Yeah, sure. Mutation and random selection. Ain’t that what it’s all about?”

  “I never thought about it that way,” said Evan.

  “Okay, but follow me on this…” Thomas leaned in again, confidentially. “So when a society—either explicitly through its laws on the books, or implicitly, by unofficially encouraging and sanctioning it—when a society does away with its folk who are different, when it doesn’t even give them a chance, what is it doing to its future?”

  “So aborting—murdering as you put it—these babies is wrong,” asked Riley, “because, what? It’s shooting ourselves in the foot?”

  “It’s simpler than that,” said Thomas. “It’s wrong because they’re human beings. We’re human beings. That’s why it’s wrong.”

  “Pretty elementary, huh?” added Tommy.

  “You don’t have to believe in a god to know it’s wrong to play god,” said Gammon.

  “That’s one of the many things I like about you, Ed,” said Thomas. “You got a way of boiling things d
own to a pithy sentence or two.”

  “Glad somebody appreciates it.”

  “I don’t know,” said Anthony, thinking of their encounter in the woods. “What about Cosmo and his...family?”

  “Oh.” Thomas waved his hand. “They just ain’t right.”

  “How long have all of you been out here?” Evan asked, still attempting to get on another subject.

  “How longs it been, Ed? Twelve years?”

  “Fifteen,” said Keith.

  “Keith’s right,” confirmed Gammon. “Fifteen.”

  “Fifteen years already…” Thomas smoked his cigarette. “Fifteen year. Damn. That’s quite a length of time, isn’t it, Ed?”

  “It is.”

  “Hey, let me see one of them rifles you’ll are carrying there.”

  “Here,” said Evan, handed the old man his Model 7. He was glad to be off the whole topic of birth defects, prenatal screening, and abortion. It was obviously a sore spot for these people.

  “Interesting,” said Thomas, hefting the weapon in one hand. “Don’t weigh but nothing. What is this—some kind of plastic alloy?”

  “I have no idea,” admitted Evan. “I just know how to shoot it.”

  Thomas had dropped the magazine. Checking to make sure the chamber was clear, he turned his attention back to the mag. “Case-less ammunition.” He nodded. “What they got in these as a propellant? Nitrocellulose?”

  Evan held up his hands.

  “That’s right,” Thomas said as if he were reminding himself. “You only know how to shoot it. Guess that’s all you’d need to know too.” It wasn’t menacing the way he said it, just an observation of the facts. “Bullpup magazine. Barrel mounted flashlight. What else can you mount on this rail?”

  “Grenade launcher,” said Evan. “You can load it with modified rounds.”

  “Modified how?” Thomas was genuinely curious.

  “Everything from fletchette to gas to net.”

  “Net?”

  “Yeah, you know. Like if you want to catch something.”

  Riley felt slightly uneasy since they’d arrived in the camp. Sure, she was glad to be away from the mutants in the forest, but there was something about these people that concerned her, something she couldn’t articulate even to herself. When Evan handed his rifle over to the old man, that feeling of unease intensified.