“Listen,” I said. “I appreciate your kindness, but I got to get going. Does that road lead back up north?”
“That road goes to hell, boy. Have some more meat. We’re all done with her.”
“No thanks. I am thankful to you, though.”
After a time, he started removing his boots and when he had finished, he signaled to the boy behind me who took off his and put the man’s on. The boy’s boots were more tattered than the tall man’s and a rank odor seeped out the top of them.
“Now you take those boots, mister, hear? And gimme your gun there.”
Outnumbered, I took off my boots and placed them neatly in front of me, handed over my pistol. The boy took the boots and handed them to the tall man who slipped them on. He stomped a few times, did a quick jig and said, “These is fine, right fine. I thank you.”
I put on the boy’s boots without saying a word, the boy with the rifle standing suddenly and looking shiftily between the tall man and me.
“Should I shoot ’im, Pa?”
“No, I don’t think so. He seems tame enough. Let’s get goin’.”
“But what about…?” the boy with the rifle said.
“I told you that fire would work. I don’t need to wait no more. We done good enough. Pack up.”
One boy picked up the dishes and the skillet, dumping the lump of meat into the dying fire where it caused a shower of sparks to fly up through the damp air. The rain had stopped. The boy behind me stroked the back of my head. “He’s a pretty one, Pa,” he said.
“Not tonight, boy. Best we get goin’.”
The three of them slipped off into the darkness as if they were made of it, the night closing behind them. At my back, the dim edge of the sun peered beneath the cauldron lid of the sky.
I had two choices and when I thought about it, they were reduced to one. I had to
follow those guys. They had guns and ammunition and while they did not have any food that I could discern—the meat in the fire had charred to a black rock—the guns were at least a way of safely searching.
I gave them a ten minute head start. The sun was rising but a thick cloud cover kept the darkness as my ally. They had taken a narrow dirt path through the reeds by the water—could’ve been a boat landing for local fisherman—to a small roughly paved street that ran east. It was away from Tim and Hadley but I needed to accomplish something and besides, the old fucker had my boots.
CHAPTER 17
I kept to the brush beside the road and I could see the men a few hundred yards distant also keeping as much out of sight as possible. The new reality had scared even these thieving assholes. On the other hand, they could’ve killed me. Whatever was keeping them in hiding--the bitches of course--was also creating some sort of brotherhood between dick swingers. It wasn’t much of a trade-off, but it was better than nothing. I felt that I needed to steal the guns and my boots back. I would return the favor by sparing them, if I could.
After about a half hour of hide and seek, they paused near a small house about a hundred yards off the road. It had a bunch of pick-up trucks parked all around it, but they were old and dilapidated; looked like they were the family’s fifty year supply. A newish one was at the side door near a shed. If there was someone in there, they were acting like no one was home.
The three men hid by a stand of live oak that clustered at the mouth of the dirt driveway. The grass all around was tall enough to cover most of the parked trucks, all of them, I now noticed, various shades of red depending on how old they were and how much damage the weather had inflicted.
They waited a few minutes and with hand signals moved slowly up the drive, crouched and tightly sprung as if they were ready to pounce on something or away from it. I could go back now but I’d be empty-handed and worse off than when I left. When the men were fifty feet from the house, I climbed the stiff limbs of a live oak and hid in the dense browning foliage. Whatever they were going to do to whoever was inside was not my problem; for all I knew the inhabitants might have been worse than these guys. There could even be bitches holed up inside. A window was open and a ragged white curtain hung out, rubbing the grey shingles like a ghost’s hand stroking a corpse. I’d have to wait either way.
They sidled up the driveway and hand-signaled each other to separate. The young boy sneaked up to a window and peeked inside. He raised his hand, got the others’ attention and nodded his head in the negative; he could see no one inside. The elder son circled around back and, out of sight from my perch, apparently signaled the same way. The old man, now clearly visible as the noon sun peered through the cloud cover, walked stealthily toward the back door. I could see my boots on the old prick. He put his back against the left wall surrounding the door which had a window in it, like he’d probably seen the cops do on the three million TV shows that feature police. He peeked in through the glass, weaving his head like the snake he was. He signaled to the other two who quietly and carefully rounded the house and stood beside him. He reached for the door knob and turned. Whether it was my imagination of not, I heard the squeak of the knob and saw the door open ever so gently.
The wind blew steadily and its waves were reflected by the tall, reedy grass of the surrounding lawn. A few grasshoppers took off and followed the wind to the house where they collided with it with a tick, tick sound. It was then I saw the first glint of red hair in the tall grass. At first, it looked like some sort of huge wildflower, a Texas rose or a Japanese peony. I rubbed my eyes. It was still there but it was not a flower. And if it was, it wasn’t the only one. It was a woman and before long I could make out other heads hidden in the grass; brunettes, blondes, even a few grays. From where I sat in my tree, I could count fifty or so. Two were behind a ’54 Chevy pick-up that had two rusted banged-up oil drums in its bed. Behind the drums, two girls peered out, frizzy-haired kids that were maybe ten or eleven years old. Could’ve been twins.
One of the gray heads lifted itself to a full standing position and I could see it was a bitch. She walked steadily toward the door of the farmhouse like grandma coming home from a church social. She raised her arm when she was but three or four feet away and as she did this, a shotgun blast cracked the air and grandma’s head burst into a million shards of brain skull and blood. The body collapsed like a deflated balloon, but the signal had been given.
The grass was swarming with zombie bitches. The fifty I saw was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There must have been three hundred. They were chittering and shrieking like a biblical plague from hell. The guns started firing and bitches were blown to pieces. Shotguns loaded with rifled slugs that could bring down a grizzly made holes the size of bowling balls. Heads were shattered, limbs lopped off, legs left dangling by stringy sinews. But they kept coming on. They surrounded the house and started scratching and tearing at the door. The idiots inside fired through the door, which only helped the bitches’ cause, because the door flew open with one shotgun blast and knocked four bitches to the ground. They got up, and with huge splinters of wood from the shattered door sticking in their faces and tits and bellies, they still came on.
I could hear the men inside shouting and calling to each other. These undead gals were piling up at the open door as the men inside fired and the old bastard that took my boots stuck his head out of a second story window and fired down at them. He fired both rounds of his double barrel shotgun and the awkward angle made the butt jump up and hit him in the face. He fell forward and was dangling just out of reach of the zombies but one of them climbed on the accumulating heap of bodies and reached his hair and yanked him down just as one of his sons grabbed for his foot which had hung up on the window sash.
The tug from below was just too strong. The boy looking out the window yelled “Pa! Pa! They got Pa!” just as they covered the old fuck like locusts. They did not kill him, though. They lifted him up screaming and kicking and dragged him toward a large tree that spread its limbs over the dirt drive. My God, I thought, they’re so organized.
Meanwhile, other women crowded through the door and shouts, screams and long howls of pain mixed with sporadic gunshots escaped from the windows and mingled with the locusts clacking and the distant caws of crows from beyond the woods. In a few minutes, the sounds ceased and zombies quietly and slowly exited the house each with a bounty of limbs, muscle tissue, inner organs and genitals. Most of the undead were covered in blood as if they had been washing their hands in it. They joined the others surrounding the still kicking and screaming old man and shared the bounty with them. All of them now patiently watch the old man writhe.
With a signal from the gray bitch, two of the younger ones start stripping the old guy down in a very orderly fashion. They remove his—my—boots and toss them far, as if to keep him from using them ever again. They land in the tall grass about thirty feet from where I’m hiding. I slip off the stinkers they traded with me in preparation for a pick up and getaway. But I continue to watch. This must be the fourth stage development of the bitches. Some form of intelligence returns; communication through grunts, chittering and hand signals. This is at least good enough to organize, launch an attack and a whole bunch of other maneuvering which to me means the end of the world as we know it and forever into the future. This ain’t Earth anymore. It’s the Planet of Bitches.
In short order he is stripped naked. He is struggling and cursing, but the more he does the more they stare and tighten his bindings. They look at him as if he is some weird specimen never before encountered. Many of them who do not participate in the stripping have a weird way of tilting their heads, like dogs that are hearing a strange but appealing sound. The ragged clothing is passed around to the onlookers who sniff it, examine it and lick at it, particularly the crotch of his pants and the armpits of the shirts. Two of them have a tug of war over his stained boxer shorts but a scowl from one of the grays puts a quick end to that and the red-headed victor stuffs the shorts in her mouth and stands there with a vacant, serene expression like she’s tasting caviar for the first time. I nearly puke from the thought of those asshole smelly, scorch-marked rags that fucker has wrapped his putrid crotch in without a washing for maybe a year or more. Reminds me once of a college girl I knew back in the good old days. She’s driving this Mazda convertible into the service department on a hot Denver afternoon with the top down and she’s wearing tight jeans and a sports bra top. I volunteered to follow her to give her a lift back to the dorm while her car gets its oil changed and other shit like that, which now seems so trivial and unimportant and fucking dumb that I cannot believe anyone ever cared about that kind of stuff now that the world has gone so far down the toilet. But it was good, those days, and I would trade both nuts to go back there and do nothing but give lifts to girls and guys and anyone who needed them just so that I don’t have to be here and now today.
So, she gets out of the car and goes to the service writer’s desk and he’s all flirty and bullshit and she says, “See you later,” and turns and walks back to where I’m waiting and the service dude and a mechanic type rush over to her car, open the door and sniff the seat where her sweaty beautiful crotch was just sitting. They guffaw at each other and the mechanic idiot gets in, starts it up and drives back into the cave-like service department. Probably jerked off to that smell. I’m thinking, guys do that shit. They sniff shit, sniff dirty panties and dirty socks and other wacky crap and get off on it but girls never do that shit. Never. Until now.
So the old dude on the tree stops the cursing and shouting and squirming and sort of hangs there limp and given up. But he starts pleading and tears are running down his face and he’s saying things like he had two daughters who he loved and maybe they could help him find them and his wife also who was sick with the gout and breast cancer and how terrible it is that women get breast cancer and that they should be able to get cured and it’s not too late to stop all this killing and murdering and eating and maybe he could get the women to a hospital where they could be treated for whatever it is that has made them so…
But he is interrupted by a tall brunette who stares him in the face, races up and gently takes his face in her two hands and seems to want to pity-kiss him as if to say, “You’re right. This is all so crazy. We should help each other, not kill each other.” So she moves in for what looks like a giant French kiss and she instead digs in with her teeth through his lips and comes away with his tongue. Blood spurts from his mouth and he’s gurgling shouting; piss squirts out his dick and another bitch runs toward him and drinks it right from his limp worm like it’s a lawn spigot. She gets pushed away and another bitch finishes the drink then bites the dick clean off as if her teeth were bolt cutters. The gray pushes her out of the way and slits open his nut sack with a blade that appears from nowhere—might have been in her hair--and pulls the testicles out, holds them up for the group to see. The collective moaning and humming is deafening. She then swallows them whole as if they were oysters from a half-shell. His screaming is more a squealing as he continues to jerk hard at the ropes till they rope burn their way into his flesh and he’s cross-crossed with bleeding slits from where the bindings hold him to the tree.
The gray head turns back to him holding what looks like a sharpened rib bone. She turns to the assembled bitches who make a groaning, humming sound that would be enough to drive any sane person completely schizo—but in this world, nightmares are the rule, not the exception. She raises the bone, turns to the tied-up geezer and chitters her teeth. He looks up, blood oozing from his gaping maw. With a quick downward slash she cuts through the layers of skin and muscle just below his ribcage. He screams through the blood which spurts on the bitch. She raises the bone again and makes another slit on his abdomen creating a triangular flap that she peels downward to reveal the dude’s liver. She reaches for it and tugs out one of the lobes, like an udder on a cow. The other bitches kneel down and crawl to the guy whose head is swaying back and forth, eyes closed like he’s praying which, would not be a bad idea at this point because it’s as useless as anything else the old bastard might try. But I am pitying him, forgetting what he did and what he likely has done since civilization vanished from this fucked up planet.
The old gray is milking the liver the way you’d wring out a sponge one-handed and the other zombies are kneeling and drinking sips like it’s communion wine. I can see the bony knuckles on her hand covered in blood as she squeezes and squeezes. When it’s wrung dry, she pulls out some more liver and finally the dude seems dead or collapsed anyway from shock and blood loss.
When there is no more to drink, the gray one lets out a shriek which defies all description and the other undead femme fatales descend on the guy and eat away, the way I’ve seen so many times in the past. He’s not dead, but twitching, his face contorted and jerking as the chewing, grinding and tearing finally releases him from his agony. The thighs have been stripped to the bone, his calves looking like corndogs on a stick with the feet at the bottom. Eventually, the carcass falls from the tree in pieces and the girls go at the rest of the meat. The head, as usual, is carried off. Most of the bitches leave but some younger ones, maybe twelve or thirteen years old are sitting picking at the bones and gristle, chewing toes and fingers, squeezing the colon until the shit is out of it then chomping on it like it’s a rope of salt water taffy.
I count four girls; the oldest is maybe fourteen. Their backs are to me and clearly the pack has left making a wide swath through the cornfield. I’m thinking this is my time to make a break for it. I can see where my boots have landed and I creep on hands and knees to where they are. I’m in the tall grass covered from view when I hear a wheezing sound, maybe more of a whistle like you make when your nose is full of snot but louder. One of the pubescent bitches has sensed me somehow. I can see throug
h the grass that they are on their feet quick as cats that have spotted a mouse.
I stand and start to run but have not planned this part of it. The house is no man’s land so I head toward this ramshackle old barn, gray wood with faded blotches of red paint and a sign that says MURPHY’S OIL SOAP in big white letters that are also very faded and worn. I’m running toward the barn although why, I don’t know. One of the little girls tackles my legs like a defensive back and I fall flat on my face, my mouth full of dust. She starts tearing at my calves with her teeth and I turn and kick her with the heel of my boot and strike her full in the mouth knocking out all her front teeth. She doesn’t make a sound, just goes down again for another chomp but it’s nothing. Feels more like a pinch so I kick her again this time connecting with her eye which caves in along with the side of her face. She yelps. I see others coming on slowly but steadily. I try to get up but the little one has a death grip on my leg. I kick at her maybe three or four more times until my heels have made a meatloaf out of her once cute as apple pie fucking face. Now others are standing over me watching and drooling, inhaling deeply as if smelling me before the eats.
A shot rings out and one of the bitch’s heads explodes leaving a stump and a piece of jaw with nice white teeth. Guess Mommy took her to the dentist; the braces are very shiny and clean except where a tatter of the old dude’s meat is stuck and hanging. She drops. Another shot and the second bitch goes down, a huge hole where her little sweet tummy used to be. Two more fall flat as their heads bloom open. One is still over me, and too many more to count at the tree. I see Tim running over with his rifle but the thing is jammed and he’s running and cursing and yanking on the bolt action but it is stuck.
The last one sees this, looks at me stuck on the ground with my legs under the first bitch, looks at Tim and charges him. He sees her coming, raises the rifle butt to smash her goddamned head in but misses and she leaps through the air, pushes him down, crouches ready for the chomp at his neck. He’s screaming, “Get the fuck off of me!” when an arrow from out of nowhere whizzes through the air and goes right through her head from ear to ear like one of those dumbass fake arrows with the wire hoop that used to make people laugh but now it’s just stupid, plain stupid. She topples over; Tim raises the butt again and smashes her face in, her teeth stick to the butt.
Zombie Bitches From Hell Page 10