“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s circle it and case the joint. If it looks clear, we’ll use the tap to refill and take whatever food we can carry. They might even have guns and ammo. I’m not big on drinking lake water and getting the runs at a thousand feet up.” Tim looked at me as if to say, “Man, you are some pussy,” but he thought better of it and just answered, “Come on. Let’s do it.”
CHAPTER 12
We followed the double yellow-lined road back toward the west, keeping to the trees that fringed it. It was no more than a mile back that we saw the hulking silhouette of the house which was actually a log cabin—not one like Lincoln lived in, but one of those fancy, machine made types with a metal roof and a wrap-around porch. There were four Adirondack chairs sitting on that porch empty and aimed at the lake. At this angle, the surface looked like it was covered with about a million silver dollars floating in the light of the moon. A few clouds passed by, covered the moon and threw everything into a dark so dark it was like the air had turned to ink. It was then that we saw a small flicker of light through one of the windows. It was a kerosene lamp. MG just settled into a bed of pine needles—these things were everywhere—and Tim and I did the Indian thing and crept over for a better look.
Peeping in as slyly as we can, we see a man, a woman, obviously his wife and two younger girls sitting around a table—looks like they’re playing a board game or cards. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the GaGa has not hit here. Frankly, in hindsight, it should’ve been obvious. This place is in the middle of nowhere. People that would have used that parking lot had to come from other places and my guess is they were—most of them—infected and then eaten. These guys got away with it through either good luck or good sense. The fact that the mother and kids are not making their way through the dude’s intestine is a testament to the smarts as far as I’m concerned. This will never be known as “the time of the Lucky.” The GaGa makes no allowance for luck. It is the end all be-all of a major Earth-Fuck.
“Check it out,” Tim whispers. “He’s got an arsenal on the wall.”
I’m seeing at least ten rifles or shotguns and a bunch of pistols laid out on a sideboard and a mountain of ammo that looks like the Cheops pyramid.
“Should we knock?” I say like a total dumbass.
“Are you a total dumbass or what?” replies Tim. At least I know where I stand, I think to myself.
“Well, we’re on their side—we’re guys and we must be okay?”
“Yeah, right, like those guys back in Kansas. We make a peep and one of us is gonna have a hole as big as the Holland Tunnel in his head. Listen. Back up into the undergrowth. I’ll stand to the side of the door. Shout a greeting in your friendliest voice. If he comes out firing, I’ll shoot his ass. If he comes out with a question on his lips, we’ll try to make peace. Either way, we’re getting provisions.”
“When did you become chief of this operation?” I ask.
“I’m not. You can lead, friend, but I got to voice my opinion if I think you’re going to get me killed for no good reason. Comprende?”
“I’ll get in the bushes; signal me when you’re ready.”
I get out behind a tree and say loudly, “Er, excuse me, sir…I’m out here and I mean no harm. I’m a friend not a foe. Hello? Hello?”
Two shots in quick succession hit the tree I’m standing behind. Chips of bark fly off. I can see the flash points from inside the house. He’s shooting at me through a partially opened window.
“Sir…are you fucking nuts?” I shout. “I’m a newsman trying to get east…”
Three more bullets hit that tree. I’m thinking this prick is going to saw this tree down with a rifle.
Tim has sidled up to the window, crouches down just below and grabs the barrel.
“Didn’t you hear him, you stupid dickwad?” he shouts. “We’re just passing through. Cut us a break. All we need is water.”
“Got any females with you?” he asks.
“Fuck no,” I answer. “We’re clean. Been on the road for two weeks.” I am not going to mention the balloon.
The guy waits, sizes us up. “There’s a shower stall out back. Strip down, shower and scrub and cover up with towels. I got duds in here I can give you. I’ve got my wife and two daughters in here too and I don’t want them contaminated. Go clean up. I’ll explain later. And I got more than this rifle here and so does my wife. Check your bullshit at the door and you’re welcome.”
“Deal,” I say. “Thank you.”
We shower in ice cold water but without even realizing it, we haven’t washed in over two weeks. No wonder MG sleeps most of the time as far away from us as he can. I guess we smell pretty ripe. I guess again that we’re used to it.
An hour later we’re past the introductions and sitting down to a duck dinner while MG rests in the leaves outside the door. He’s got a few bits of duck meat he’s wolfing down as well.
“I catch them on the lake. It’s easy and makes no noise. Use a capture net. Ducks are pretty stupid. Dig in, fellas.”
They’re stupid? I think. They ain’t being chased by a bunch of cannibal zombie bitches.
Turns out his name is Doctor Paul Walters. His wife is Agnes. He’s got a twelve- year-old named Samantha and a ten-year-old named Hadley. We make some small talk but we know the spirit of the GaGa is in the room only no one wants to talk about it.
“Listen, guys,” Doc says. “I’m in charge of an operation at the hospital in town. We’re doing government research on the disease. Finster Teachers College is about ten miles north of town…mostly women students and they got infected when some books arrived from back east. That’s the theory anyway. They killed and ate most of the male faculty and…”
“Paul…the children Must we talk about this over dinner?” his wife says.
“Sorry, dear. Pass the salt will you, Tom?”
“It’s Tim. Here’s the salt.”
Later, we sit around a small fire in the fireplace and things even seem slightly normal. Of course, they are most definitely not. Doc says he’ll tell us more tomorrow. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that horse shit. But I’m not minding the peace and quiet and I can see Tim is looking chilled out and the way he might have been before all this started. I remember him then, but I never knew him. Funny, that’s the way it is. You meet people, work with them, even, but you don’t bother knowing them. You store them away in some file cabinet in your head and then don’t ever bother adding anything or even remembering to check back. Then the shit hits the fan and all you’ve got in the world is a stranger you thought you knew. Now you need him to live. It and mostly everything else is fucked up. Isn’t it?
CHAPTER 13
The hospital sits low and squat on a hillside just off of Main Street. It’s got a walled-in parking lot, a great thing to have in place when your building is going to be used as a fort. At 40 foot intervals, soldiers with rifles are posted. A makeshift watch tower has been erected with a giant Klieg light and there’s a row of sandbags as an inner barricade fifty feet beyond the fence. Very Afghanistan, I’m thinking.
Doc Walters pulls up to the gate.
“Hey, Jim,” he says lowering the window. “I’ve got some recruits with me. Open up.”
“Sure thing, Doc. Frank has been asking about you.”
“Good. I like to keep him guessing.”
“Say what?” the guard asks.
“Nothin’. Thanks for the heads up.”
Of course the Doc has a special “reserved” space but it looks like there are not many other vehicles. But rank has its privileges. Just as we pull in, a large United Van Lines 18 wheeler pulls in and goes past where we’re parking to an area at the back of the building. We get out and go over, led by the Doc who’s very animated like he just won the lottery or something.
On signal a bunch of orderlies and guards come running out and they’re holding cattle prods and steel rods with what looks like a large pin cushion on the end.
“
Ready,” yells one of the attending white coats. The driver opens the rear door, pulls the ramp out and runs for cover.
The GaGas start pouring out the back, stiff and disoriented, slow-moving and mostly naked. Many of them are wearing Denver U. t-shirts or hoodies.
“A wonderful batch, Carl. Wonderful. I knew those dorms would have a supply,” says the Doc like its Christmas Eve under the tree.
There are about forty of these co-eds, all pale and pink, the white eyes blank as ice cubes. They immediately attempt to attack the men but these guys know what to expect and the bitches are prodded and poked and eventually led into the double back door of the hospital just to the right of the old Emergency Room entrance.
“Carl,” says the Doc. “That blonde with no shirt and the warm up pants,” he gestures. “Put her aside in the special room.”
“Anything you say, Doc,” and good old Carl throws a net over the blonde who sets up to howling and snarling trying to bite Carl and his helper as she’s led into the E.R.
“Move it, you fucking whore,” yells Carl. He stabs at her ass with the prod. “Get the fuck in there.”
She screams, but obeys. Like a beef cow entering a slaughterhouse.
“We’ve been scouring the area for supplies of reproductively young victims for the important work we’re doing here. It seems like an easy task, but Carl and I pour over municipal maps for hours thinking, ‘where would we congregate if we were infected.’ You see, they’re a good deal like animals out of their natural habitat. Remember that scene in King Kong where the guy is trying to figure out where in New York City this giant ape will go. You see he’s not in the jungle anymore. So Jack, I think his name is, sees the World Trade Center—obviously it was there when the movie was made—that was a tragedy, wasn’t it, and notes that it resembles the two promontories that the ape called home back on his island. I think it was called ‘Skull Island.’ I love a good movie, you know. Miss them terribly. Now it’s just me and the wife and the kids hitting the Parchesi board. It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got. Oh, I’m boring you. Sorry. Yes, we try to figure out, as I was saying, where the bitches would congregate. You’ll love this. We found almost a hundred of them in the designer section of Saks Fifth Avenue downtown. Now, mind you, they were not doing anything there other than eating the male sales help that had the misfortune of hiding in a department store. But no, they were simply milling about. Perhaps they thought it was familiarly comforting or something. I really have not devoted much time to the mindset of these creatures. Once I get past the physiological changes, I’ll focus on their minds, such as they have minds.”
Doc turned abruptly about and said, “Now, boys, follow me.” Which we did. Tim nudged me and said, “This guy has more loose screws than a hardware store.” The Doc smiled as in a world of his own. Don’t know if he heard the remark or not. Don’t care.
We’re led up the main building steps. There’s a statue of some dude in a toga holding an implement.
“Must be the God of Medicine,” Tim says pointing. “That motherfucker is spinning in his grave.”
We follow the Doc down a long corridor through three sets of double doors until we reach a place called “Outpatient Clinic.” Doc calls it the “ward.”
The ward was a large rectangular room with green tiles and milky white walls. Dead TV screens with their thick black cables stuck through the walls still watched blankly, their glassy reflections twisting the scene in kaleidoscope style. There were twenty beds, two rows of ten in the middle of the room. Along the periphery, rolling metal tables loaded with blipping beeping monitors and wires like the head of Medusa. The patients lay in the beds, all young women, all the victims of GaGa. The Doc was right. They looked almost normal. The third stage of the disease rejuvenating their bodies. They were flushed pink, maybe a little too pink, more like large babies than college co-eds. Their faces were blank and chalky but the beeping monitors clearly showed these were not dead people and they were not undead either. They were re-born dead people, revitalized dead people. We’d have plenty of time I hoped to come up with a fitting term that we could use to tell future generations what was born by our generation. Words would escape the most talkative morons who saw this.
The girls’ eyes were milk white, the irises, just as the doc had said, were pure white, the pupil a tiny black hole, empty like a shark’s eye. Many of them moaned, some made that rasping sound that became their signature voices. It was all a deep base sound like the sound of trucks passing over an elevated highway very far off. Rumblings, sputterings and an occasional minute squeal—was it a truck braking? No, it was the signal of pain as one of the orderlies changed an IV.
They were being fed through clear plastic tubes inserted into their tracheas—intubation I think they called it. The bottles that fed the tubes held a hideous concoction of what was clearly flesh and blood although from what animal, I would not find out.
“Fuck, Kent, they’re feeding them ground-up people. These fuckers are crazy, man, crazy,” Tim said under his breath. I could see his hands shaking.
“Listen, bear with it. It’ll be okay. They’re on our side, right?”
“Who the fuck knows.”
The girls’ arms and legs were tied down with thin leather straps and they were all uniformly spread eagle, a thin sheet covering them from toe to neck. From each bed, next to the traditional clipboard, hung a tube of KY jelly.
Doc Walters finally came over to us after checking some charts and conferring with a few of the orderlies.
“You see, we’ve discovered that roughly fourteen hours after the second phase begins, what we call the morbid phase, regeneration begins and the rapidly putrefying flesh of the dead victims of the GaGa re-invigorates. The heart and lungs resume their function and the rest follow, not unlike the newborn brought forth from his mother’s womb on the delivery table. We call this third phase, ‘regenerative’ and the victims are called ReGens.”
“Interesting,” I say, sounding every bit the total moron I think I am.
“I think you’ll find this more interesting,” he continues. “We’ve failed miserably with artificial insemination. We don’t know why it didn’t work but it didn’t. If we’re going to turn the less than zero population growth problem around and follow the initiative from the Pentagon, this process has to succeed with at least a fifty percent success rate. Seems we’re on the right track.”
I looked at him and knew Tim was glued to the floor.
“These girls are all at the most fertile point of their cycles. We monitor them very carefully. It’s just a matter of…”
A door opened and a trooper walked in with an AK-47. He sat in what looked like a sawed-down version of a life-guard bench, the kind you see with the “Lifeguard on Duty” sign attached to it on almost every beach. Doc Walters signaled to one of the long white-coated orderlies who left and came back through the door with six soldiers, the same National Guard types that were out front and manning the perimeter and monitoring the halls. They were in their boxers and T’s.
The orderly told them, “Pick your mate, boys. You’ve got sixty seconds.”
The men wandered quickly through the grid of beds, some looking at faces, some squeezing breasts and thighs, a few looking under the sheets.
“Make it snappy,” shouted the Doc, making me nearly jump to the ceiling.
“Calm down, Kent,” he said. “This is just part of life. We’re making life here. This is where the human race will begin again. I’ve even thought of calling this hospital ‘The Eden Institute.’ Get it? This is the new Garden of Eden and while we have a number of Adams and a great many Eves, it’s basically the same thing. Don’t you see?’
Tim coughed one of those coughs that actually says, “Bullshit!” but the Doc, he was too into the glory of this mess to notice the comment. I scowled at Tim with that same look your mother gave you when you were in church and you farted and giggled. You know, the look that says, “Make another sound, Junior, and you’ll
be pushin’ up daisies.”
Eventually the guys all chose the girls they wanted and stood at attention. The guard with the AK-47 tightened his grip on the gun and with a signal to an orderly, the lights went on half power which, if you know anything about fluorescent lighting, makes some of them flicker on and off like a coming electrical storm.
“This is part of the mood we like to establish,” said Doc Walters. “We’re not animals here.”
The guys undraped the women who were still tied down. The girls were unbelievably beautiful—at least from the neck down. They were chronologically college girls, 18 to 21 or 22. But their skin was even younger. They had rejuvenated to the extreme. Perfect skin as if it had never been touched. I guess it hadn’t except in the herding process. Each man approached the task at hand in a different way, each slathering his hard-on with a dollop of jelly. But in no time, the guys were on top of them or yanking them awkwardly up so their knees were pointed upward, oozing black where the straps dug in. Something inside me was completely revolted. I’ve been to frat house parties that were certainly as close to a Roman orgy as you could imagine. But this was sick. Real sick and I did not want to watch anymore. Tim stared dumbfounded. But the Doc, he was taking notes and periodically checking his watch. The girls were moaning or squeaking and the ones who were present but not involved picked up the sound until the room was filled with a drone like a humongous beehive. I put my hand over my ears but it didn’t help. I started to leave and Doc said, “Want a turn? It’s not bad, you know. It’s a cold cunt, but I remember in my youth that I would gladly have taken…And think of it, you’ll be contributing to humanity. Maybe a session in the prep room would help. Eh?”
“What’s the prep room?” I ask.
“Just a TV and some porn vids. Nothing outrageous. Believe me, just about everyone here has had a go. It’s for the good of mankind. Even myself. Nothing personal. Just science in its most forgiving manner.”
Zombie Bitches From Hell Page 7