I can see he’s delirious, going in and out of consciousness.
“Bless you my sons. This day you will be in heaven with me,” he says.
“That would be nice,” Tim answers.
We bring him to a sofa and lie him down. He’s bleeding and all his wounds are festering with puss and maggots. Flies buzz around us.
“How did he survive?” asks Tim.
“By the will of the almighty, my sons,” he says.
“Can you tell us anything?”
“Help the others. I’ll be OK.”
“But are the bitches coming back?” I ask.
“Yesssssss. They will be here soon and you will become one with us and the Lord,” he says.
“I don’t think so, buddy. Can you tell us what’s going on here?” asks Tim.
“They use our blood and flesh as part of a….”
We hear the metal gate outside grinding open and the sounds of gravel crunching on the driveway. Tim runs over to the window.
“You ain’t gonna believe this. Them nuns are driving. Did you know they could do that?”
“Shit no. How is that even possible?”
“Now what?”
“Put him in front of the cross like he fell off. Let’s hide upstairs.”
“Yes,” he says. “Upstairs. They don’t go upstairs. Never. But first do me a favor.”
“Sure. What?”
“Kill me.”
“What?”
“Please kill me. I can’t go through this anymore.”
“But….”
Tim takes the claw hammer and smashes the guy’s skull in with a solid thwack that spatters brain and blood all over. The family-friendly cameraman I once knew no longer resides in Tim’s bones. The man has changed, but I am not complaining. Drastic times and all that.
“Come on. Drag him over here,” he says. We drop him at the foot of the cross, toppled like he struggled, fell and crushed his own head.
“Let’s get upstairs,” I say.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” says Tim as he runs for the stairway. “I hope that poor fucker was right.”
CHAPTER 10
The second floor was a catacomb of small bedrooms. Really they were just cubicles with small cots with straw mattresses and a tiny bedside table with a lamp. The beds had not been slept in nor were they made. In the main corridor was a large grate in the floor which gave a view of the main living area below. I had seen this sort of thing in older houses where the heater was in the cellar and would generate heat in the upper stories simply by its rising through strategically placed vents in the floor. There were no blowers or any type of electrical assistance whatsoever; just convection.
Tim went into one of the cells and looked out a small window. He signaled to me to come over. In the courtyard below were a large van and a station wagon. The wagon had about six or eight nuns in it, all of whom stood by while two nuns unloaded the van. In the van were four guys in prison uniforms. It was obvious what had happened. The nuns were probably regular visitors at the state penitentiary to bring food and religious guidance to the bunch of miscreants within. When the GaGa hit, the bitches, formerly ladies of the cloth, took to using the prison as a stock yard, some part of their brain still latched onto their old daily routine. Those criminal fuckers could not get out and the nuns knew how to get in.
Here’s what scared me the most. Those nuns were organized. Dead, yes, but somehow communicating and thinking. My only guess was either the virus had evolved in them, beyond something we’d ever seen before, or all of their prayers over the years had given them some kind of divine power.
The guys were in shackles and tied to each other chain gang style. One of the nuns had a gray outfit on, the others were in typical black and white. She was obviously the Mother Superior or whatever she was called because she was giving silent orders to the others who said nothing but simply prodded the guys into the convent with pitch forks which they had gathered from where they had been left along the side of the building facing the orchard. I had seen them on our reconnoiter but hadn’t thought twice about it. I mean, nuns make their own shit and grow their own food and such. I guess they still do but it ain’t corn, nor wheat, nor roses, my friends; it’s fucking creeps from the local pokie.
The guys’ mouths were taped shut, but they were screaming anyway. Several of them had bloodied arms and legs and unless my imagination had got the better of me, there were tears in the clothing like they had been bitten by dogs. But I’m sure it was the bitches putting the fear of God in these bastards the best way they knew how: tooth and nail.
We watched with wide eyes and I kept thinking they were going to see our balloon like a giant, swollen testicle in a field of pubic corn husks, or hear MG’s whimpering, but they were too damned focused on their catch.
The next moments are still vivid.
Tim and I tiptoe over to the heat vent and watch the action. The door is kicked wide open and we can first hear the men screaming through their muffled mouths. The bitches are chittering with their teeth like squirrels that haven’t eaten in a year. There are six guys and they are all herded into the room right below us. One of them tries to kick out at a nun and she goes for the offending leg, biting through the tough striped fabric and tearing away at the flesh of his shin. He howls and is then smashed in the face with a right hook from Mother Superior. He is knocked out colder than a wedge.
She motions to two of the nuns to untie him from the pack and he is stripped naked. It is then that the bitches howl because they have seen the guy that we tried to help. He’s in the other room but we hear the ruckus. He is dragged in and laid out next to the new guy. The signal is given and he is devoured from the balls up through his gut. His face is stripped of flesh and his nose is crunched in the jaws of a zombie bitch like a walnut in a nutcracker. She pulls it away with her teeth and what little blood the fucker still has in him pools around the floor where one of the bitches is lapping at it as it leaves a huge stain on the fancy Oriental rug. Nothing goes to waste and he is stripped bare to the bones, which are dragged out of the room and out of our line of sight.
Two nun bitches bring the empty cross that he had formerly occupied into the room and the new guy is nailed in place of the old one. He wakes up in the middle and screams through his duct tape gag until a reddish foam seeps out of his nostrils. I’m thinking that whatever this guy did that landed him in the hoosegow, I hope it was worth it. Then I think that if more of these fuckers knew that this might happen to them, people could throw their locks away, women could walk naked down the street and kids would never need to be afraid of strangers because no one, I mean no one, would want this as a punishment. Justice has a way of finding you, I think. It sure found these bastards. Tim looks at me like he knows what I’m thinking and gives me a thumbs up. That guy has got to have ESP or something, but then I realize that I can hear someone on the stairs coming up toward us and he’s giving me the high sign to maybe get the fuck out of there. But to where?
We each slip into one of the cells. I can hear Tim slide under a cot. I do the same. We hold our breaths. A nun bitch ambles along the corridor. She enters one of the rooms and shuffles around. She comes into my room. I can see her face smeared with blood from the feast downstairs. She smells the air, raising her face like a hound on a scent. But the blood is masking my smell and she has some guts stuck near her nostrils. She leaves. I assume she does the same thing throughout the rooms, finding nothing. I hear her shuffling down the corridor, mumbling and gnashing her teeth until the sounds of her returning downstairs die away.
Tim opens the door to my room and says, “That was fun.”
I climb out from under the cot. He signals to me to return to the grate with one hand, the other with his finger on his lips. Like I need to be reminded to be quiet, the dumb fuck.
The convict has been nailed to the cross and one of the bitches has jammed barbed wire onto his head like the crown of thorns. They drag the cross to the corner of the room and heave ho it up int
o the corner, the convict moaning and groaning, a puddle of urine on the floor where he was. The others have been pushed and shoved down the cellar steps and I can hear them grumbling and pleading through their gags with an occasional yelp that indicates the biting is still going on to keep control. The cellar door slams and the two nun bitches who got the convicts into the cellar join the rest around the current crucifixion.
The mother superior raises her arms and begins to chant some shit that sounds like Latin. I look at Tim and he shrugs as if to say, “This is the wackiest shit ever.” Which it is. I can’t make out a word but I see her take a large curved carving knife from under her robe and as she raises it, she speaks, actual fucking words, even if they’re a guttural scraping from decaying vocal cords, “Take……eat…for it is my body.” Least that what I make of it. And she slices a slab off his calf as the other bitches kneel. The convict screams and moans and bleeds. The mother superior takes a bite of the meat and passes it around to the others who each take a slurpy chomp.
One of the nuns rises to her feet, goes into the kitchen and comes back with a water glass. She goes to the convict and catches the blood seeping from his wounded leg and catches it. In the glass, there is some milk probably left over from who knows where and the blood and milk mix like a strawberry malt.
The mother superior takes the glass and mumbles and moans, and through the guttural tones and scratchy nonsense I can decipher the words: “Drink this for it is my blood which is a covenant with you.” She takes a big gulp and I can feel weeks of rations rise from my stomach into my mouth.
She passes the glass around and they each take a sip. Just when the last decomposing nun has drunk her fill, I let go with a barf the size of Cleveland and it drops through the grate and lands on a nun bitch’s head kneeling there like Mother Teresa from Hell.
“We’re fucked, good buddy,” says Tim. I think he’s right.
Two of the nuns start lapping at the vomit on the one’s head. The rest begin their howling and start for the stairs. We head for the window.
It’s locked and we can hear the shrieking, howling bullshit and the clunking of the undead feet on the stairs, the Mother Superior shouting in some hideous garbled language.
Tim picks up the small nightstand and jams it through the window, knocking the glass, the mullions and the frame out like it was hit with dynamite.
“It’s a long drop,” I say.
Tim climbs out but I see him standing there beckoning me out. There’s a ledge he’s standing on. I climb out and we side walk our way along the ledge and rain gutter to a huge copper downspout. It’s like a firepole. Tim shimmies down as I see the bitches climbing out after us. I fire a round from my pistol but the damn thing bucks and I blast a hole through the shingles above. Fuck it, I can’t shoot well while trying to play Spider-Man. I follow Tim and we’re on the ground as the first nun bitch reaches the downspout and goes flying down it like a sack of shit wrapped in white and black gift paper. Tim is in the station wagon and it looks like he’s going to take off without me, but instead he turns the key and rams the nun bitch between the bumper and the side of the building and her eyes pop out of her head and hang there by the threads which ooze that tar-like black shit. He puts it in reverse and she collapses, then puts it in gear again and floors it, hitting her so hard while she’s crumbled that her ribs pop out through her habit and the downspout, which is what he was aiming at to begin with, comes down but with the Mother Superior hanging on to it. The others are on the ledge but start heading back through the window, which means they’ll be pouring through the door in a few seconds.
“Time to go, buddy,” I yell. But the Mother Superior bitch is on the hood of the car now and beating her head against the windshield to try to break it to get to Tim. He moves forward by flooring it again and jams on the brakes. She slides off but as she goes over the hood ornament, it slashes open her face, pulling some stringy arteries, veins and nerves along with it. She drops off the end of the hood but leaps upper faster than you can say, “Hail Mary” and she’s on the attack again.
Tim jumps out of the car and I figure he’s going to run for it, but, no, he’s on the offensive. I slide in to the driver’s side while he pulls the bitch off the hood. She’s snapping like a mad dog in fast motion, the grinding clacking teeth going a mile a second. He wrestles her off but she clamps down on the window of the open car door and crunches the safety glass into a billion little jewels. He punches her in the face where the gash is and her eye gets pushed back into her head.
“Get ready,” Tim yells. But I’m seeing bitches staggering out of the door as if the condition of the Mother Superior has made them loopy. They’re actually groping and bumbling around, arms outstretched like in a grade B movie.
“Better hurry,” I yell.
He drags the Mother Superior to the ground while she kicks and screams and pieces of glass fly out of her mouth like popcorn in a popper and holds her head under the wheel of the car.
“Back it up slow,” he shouts. I do and I can feel the crunch of something under the wheel which is, of course, her fucking head.
“Go, dude, go,” he says. I gun it and I can feel the squash of skull and brains.
Tim runs around and jumps in the back as the first nun bitches stumble over to us. We fly out of there and stop a hundred feet away. The undead nuns are gathered around the body of Mother Superior and trying to put the brain back in the head and one of them is holding the jaw and kissing it as she tries to fit it to where the bitch’s mouth used to be.
“Man, look at that shit,” Tim says.
As I’m about to drive away, I see the cellar window and there’s a dude looking out with duct tape on his mouth and a please-don’t-leave-us-here expression.
“Tim. Those prisoners. Whatdya think?,” I say. It was his idea to look for any living men inside.
“Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” says Tim as he puts his foot on top of mine and jams the gas pedal to the floor, crashing us through the fence toward the balloon. “Appeal denied.”
CHAPTER 11
The wind had finally tapered off and the moon’s silver face shone through the clouds which scudded across the sky like rats following the Pied Piper of Hamlin. Tim was staring at the GPS and MG was asleep, curled up against the side of the basket out of our way, a position he learned worked best for his lazy self.
“It says we’re in northern Ohio, near the border,” said Tim.
“Shit. I guess we’re lucky it’s not worse. The fuel looks okay but we need to stop for water.”
“Let’s ride at three hundred feet and keep your eyes sharp for someplace we can get some…and land safe.”
The balloon glided on a smooth breeze that followed us, the tops of tall pines aimed up like arrows in a huge quiver. The forest we were over spread in every direction and after an hour or so of moving slowly we saw the shimmer of a huge lake below, its silver edges like the scales of a fish.
“Lake Minooka,” said Tim.
“Water, water fucking everywhere but not a drop to drink,” I said. “We can’t land anywhere.”
“Where there’s a lake there are lake houses. Where there are lake houses, there are roads and all we need is a two- lane with a straight stretch and we’ll be all right. Keep looking for a roof or a dock or something that says, ‘This is my fancy fucking cabin on this fancy fucking lake.’”
Staring down at the lake, I could see the lapping of small waves, edging white in the full moonlight as they lapped at a long dock stuck out into the water.
“There’s one…a boat dock. Look…I can see the shine on the metal roof.”
Tim peered over the edge of the basket right next to me with his arm extended down as he guided the balloon lower and lower, his finger pointing like a divining rod, mind-reading his way to a driveway, then a road. Like a flare, at least to me, I saw the glint of a double yellow line between the trees.
“There’s a road. Check the GPS.”
; “Nothing here,” said Tim. “The fucking thing is telling us we’re ‘off-road.’”
“Let’s just follow the goddamned yellow line. There’s got to be a break in these trees somewhere,” I said. MG grunted in his sleep.
Within minutes, we were close enough to the tops of the pines to reach out and touch them.
“Take it easy, Timmy me boy. We don’t want to get skewered on these things.” There below us, the trees parted and a parking lot almost as big as a football field unrolled beneath us, its criss-cross grid of parking spaces illuminated by the moon.
“Damn. Finally. Bring ’er down…lean right…lean right…lean…” The basket bottom dragged on the loose gravel and ground the macadam, making us lurch forward where we came to a sudden stop, one of our lines wrapped around a “Parking By Permit Only” sign.
“Remind me to get a permit before we come here again,” I said. MG had jumped up startled by the tipping of the basket. “It’s okay, boy.” I patted his grizzled head. Tim had his rifle out and I snapped the release on my holster. I never thought I’d be the type to find the handle of a pistol so comforting and so sub-consciously re-assuring. Tim powered down the jets.
“Let’s sit a spell. Make sure no one spotted us,” said Tim.
I let five minutes pass on my watch. No sound but the gentle breeze rustling the pines. Sounded like the beach, a distant surf breaking far away.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Looks fine.”
MG was the first out by way of my hands on his hairy dog ass, nimbler than anyone would imagine. I climbed out carefully, holding the three gallon milk containers which had already saved our asses.
“Let’s head back toward that house.”
Tim had a worried look on his face. “You think that’s a good idea?”
“Sure,” I said. “There’s nobody going to be up here.”
“Dude, I think you’re wrong. Look, it’s only just turned September. There could be a whole family in that house that was here for summer vacation and they’re holed up. Why not? That’s what I’d be doing.”
Zombie Bitches From Hell Page 6