Zombie Bitches From Hell

by Campbell, Zoot

  “They did it man, they fucking did it – they went and killed us all.”

  Somehow Artie, with a strength that belied his slight frame, slipped his arms up and around Tim like an aging python, and he got him in a kind of a headlock.

  “Tim, please,” he said between panting breaths and through gritted yellow teeth. “You heard what the guy said. Please, settle down! You’re gonna get us all killed!”

  But Tim kept screaming and straining against Artie’s grip. He still grasped the shovel and was swinging wildly. I couldn’t get near to help.

  BLAM!

  There was a thunderous boom. And there stood Dick, coveralls soaked in blood, a shotgun in his hand. “Hey look what I found.” There was the sound of the weapon being cocked again. He leveled it at Tim. “Now, drop the shovel, Tim, and step away, slowly from Artie.” Tim looked like he wasn’t going to comply for a moment, I saw Dick’s finger tense on the trigger. And suddenly Tim just collapsed in heap, whimpering at Artie’s feet, the shovel falling loose from his hands. There was sunlight streaming in, illuminating a pillar of dust in front of him from a gaping hole the shotgun had blasted in the roof of the barn. With that shaft of light before him and his long hair plastered on his face by sweat and tears, Tim looked almost like Christ in a Raphael painting.

  Tim just curled up in a fetal position on the floor rocking back and forth. The guy from the pharmaceutical company, Keilar, wasn’t doing much better. “Isolation Madness” is what Artie called it. I remembered seeing a show on 60 Minutes about what was happening to prisoners in America’s Supermax facilities and they said that prisoners who are isolated for prolonged periods of time have been known to experience depression, despair, anxiety, rage, claustrophobia, hallucinations, problems with impulse control, and an impaired ability to think and concentrate – add a few Zombies outside the walls and I guess it doesn’t take long to go through all of the above.

  Dick lowered the shotgun. I had to admit I was glad to see the big fellow. “Found these too. Made my way over to the main house. You’re pretty good with that bow, old man, but why don’t you try something with a little more firepower.” He unslung a deer rifle from his shoulder and passed it with a box of cartridges to Artie. From a deep pocket in his overalls he produced a .38 revolver, turning to me he said, “You ever use one of these, Kid?”

  “Only in the Arcade, but it can’t be that different,” I said accepting the pistol and ammunition.

  Artie cocked the bolt on the 30-30, and sighted down it like a pro. Again we looked at him incredulously. “Two tours in Korea. You hear that?” said Artie.

  “Hear what?” I said. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s my point, boy... the things out there, they been moaning and groaning and tearing at those boards since you all came in here. Now I don’t hear a thing.”

  There was a thump on the roof, and then another, followed by a loud crash. With all the fury of a howling banshee one of the wild women tore through the hole Dick’s shotgun had made in the roof. She leapt down and was on Tim’s quivering form in an instant.

  Tim was being shredded faster than a stack of documents at Goldman-Sachs. Dick let go with both barrels and the thing on top of Tim exploded in a hail of red mist. Behind her, another, dressed in a cheerleader outfit, dropped to the ground, landing lithely. She cartwheeled over to a panic stricken Kielar, and sunk her teeth deep into his neck. I heard the crack of the deer rifle as her head burst open in a shower of blood and brain matter.

  Two, three, four—I lost count—dropped down after her. I took out the gal in the Armani business suit and the biker chick with the revolver. Artie nailed the jogger, the cop, and the girl in the Starbucks uniform, who I could swear had made me a double espresso Latte with no whip just a few days ago. The bodies of crazed women were stacking up like so much cordwood, when Dick yelled, “We gotta get that hole closed! I’ll get them to chase me, you two seal the roof!” He started running. “Hey, over here, you psycho bitches, come and get three hundred pounds of one hundred percent pure Grade A dark meat!” He took off, at least half a dozen or more of the hells belles behind him. But for the moment, the onslaught had stopped.

  Looking for something we could use to seal the breach, my eyes fell on the table where Jerry had lain unconscious through the melee. It was empty except for his sequined dinner jacket covered in entrails. Feeling the bile rise in my throat, I swept what was left of Jerry off of the table. “Come on,” I said to Artie, whose skin had gone as white as his hair. “You couldn’t have done anything more for him, now help me with this table.”

  Artie and I had just managed to secure the roof with the tabletop, when I felt searing hot pain as nails raked through my back, the force of the creature’s blow throwing me forward like a rag doll, and right through the hole in the loft floor that was the make shift latrine. I landed unceremoniously in a pile of piss and crap, next to Jerry’s severed leg! I heard Artie’s screams above, and then a wet thud as Artie’s head landed in the sludge next to me, his blind bloodshot eyes staring upward. I stared back at those blank dead eyes, transfixed, unable to move. My reverie was broken by the loud crash of the heavy barn doors bursting open. Dozens of the deranged women burst in. I still had the revolver and started firing wildly. As each harpy I hit fell, those behind her just trampled over it like a stampede of horny fourteen- year olds at a Jonas Brothers concert, trampling it into pulp. The barn floor ran thick with ooze.

  I tried to run but my feet could not find purchase in the slick covering of gore and waste, and the first bitch grabbed me, sinking her teeth deep into my belly. She tore free with a sickening rip, threw her head back and hungrily gulped down a huge wad of my flesh and insides like a penguin swallowing a herring. Holding my torn guts with one hand, I fired point blank through her left eye, tearing off half of her head in the process.

  I half slid, half ran to the furthest reaches of the barn, back down a long corridor of unused animal stalls, firing blindly behind me. I reached a back wall, and stopped slumped against it, practically spent. I knew the ravenous pack would soon be upon me. The revolver was empty. I groped around in the dark and prayed for something that could help me make my last stand. Pay dirt! You know the old saying about no atheists in foxholes!

  As the first of the horde reached me, the roar of the chainsaw I had stumbled upon was deafening as I cleaved her in two at the waste. Blood and body parts spattered everywhere as I dealt similarly with her sisters.

  I crawled back along the waste-covered floor of the barn, covered in blood, no way to tell how much of it was mine, when my foot caught in something – a loop of rope in the floor. “Root cellar”, something in my mind hazily recognized. I felt back along my leg and slipped my foot out of the rope, and sure enough it was attached to a trap door in the floor. It took just about all my strength to open it. It closed with a loud thump above me as I painfully crawled down. I was in total darkness. The floor of the root cellar was damp and spongy. It smelled like wet dog. I fumbled in my pocket for the Zippo; it sparked a few times till it lit.

  “You look like shit.” I said the figure before me. It was Dick. He was sitting propped up against a support beam, breathing hard dripping gore, a stark white bone protruding from his thigh.

  “You don’t look so good yourself.”

  “Any rounds left?”

  The moans and shrieks of the ghouls and the shuffling footsteps in the barn above grew louder and steadier.

  “Nope.”

  “Can you fight?”

  “Barely lift my arms, think my leg’s broke...you?”

  “Out of ammo, no more gas in the chainsaw, couldn’t find any other weapons. I’m pretty sure I left a good part of my guts all over the floor up there.”

  “You’ve been bit?”

  “Several places. You?”

  “Yep.”

  “I did find this though.”And I passed him Artie’s bloodstained flask. I was feeling really dizzy. Dick’s face was fading in and out, an
d his voice sounding more distant.“You sure only women turn into those things?”

  “Can’t say I’m sure ’bout anything any more... I never did get your name, kid.”

  “George – it’s George.” My lying continues.

  “Well! Here’s to you, George...”

  “And to you, Old Timer...”

  Dick raises an ax over my head and brings it down.

  ***

  I awake with a jump that makes everyone look at me.

  “Hey,” said Tim. “You okay?”

  I looked at him and the quiet group of men who were sitting at the table playing cards.

  “You okay?” he repeated.

  “Yeah. I’m okay. Just a dream.”

  “Dreams are good for you,” said Jerry. “They get rid of your fears and anxieties. One time I dreamed I was on a motorcycle with James Dean. I was holding on real tight and he made this turn, but the road was near a cliff and…”

  “Whatever,” said Artie. “Jerry, no one wants to hear your fairy godmother stories tonight. Let’s turn in. It’s late.”

  I go down the ladder and stand outside the door breathing the clean country air real deep. The corn stalk are still, no women in sight. Maybe they moved on. Who knows. Then, my eyes spot something heading my way and my heart kicks into overdrive but not out of fear. Hadley is walking toward me in her little pink shirt and jeans with a kitten patch sewn on one of the pockets.

  “Hadley, honey, how’d you find us?”

  “I just followed the trail. You know I was a Brownie for six years, now I’m a Girl Scout. We can do things like follow trails. I had two merit badges for woodland survival.”

  “That’s cool. But didn’t Tim tell you to stay with the balloon?

  “No.”

  “Oh, I thought he told me that. Come on in. Let’s get some sleep.”

  She followed me up the ladder and I tucked her in on top of some loose hay, sifting some stalks out of hair. I didn’t alert the others. I didn’t want them to know a female was in the barn. I’d deal with it in the morning, after both me and Tim had a good night’s rest. She closed her eyes and fell asleep in thirty seconds. I still couldn’t believe she’d made it here without incident. She was tougher than I’d pegged her.

  “Poor kid,” I said under my breath.

  I rolled over and pretended to sleep but just waited for the hours to pass, listening to grunts, groans and farts until the sun crept up the side of the barn and made bright stripes on everything. When I went to where Hadley had bedded down, she was gone.

  CHAPTER 19

  We said goodbye to the geezers, who wished us luck and let us take a few supplies, but not much. It took Tim and me a while to get back to the balloon but we made it without any problems. We even snatched some of those guns the Deliverance Family had dropped. The bitches were either hibernating or had moved on looking for more populated areas.

  We found Hadley there and I wanted to ask her why she’d come back during the night by herself but the more I thought about it the more I figured she’d never been to the barn in the first place. That barn was just too full of bad mojo affecting my inner eye and my gut told me I’d hallucinated her arrival. Either way, she was safe and hugging MG so I let my confusion go. By nightfall we were aloft once again. It was good to be back up above the ground, looking down on all the destruction below. I counted the fires dotting the landscape like flickering jewels to pass the time. And it sure passed as slowly as an ornery kidney stone.

  “We’re almost out of fuel,” Tim said later. I think he said it, I was so zoned out I couldn’t be sure.

  ***

  At some point I came out of my haze and I could just make out the New York City skyline. The sun was behind us and the golden light caught the windows of the Empire State Building just above a thin layer of clouds that hovered over the city. Stinking New Jersey sat below us, thick with industrial buildings, squalid with refinery stacks and the huge cannon-like incinerator stacks. Newark Airport, one of the busiest in the country, was lit by the oblique rays of the setting sun. Birds circled the control tower and tall grass had conquered the expansion joints on the runway. From this altitude, about 1,600 feet by the altimeter, the runways looked like the handprint of a gigantic robot that had decided to do a one hand handstand. Docked airplanes sat in corners and against terminal buildings like they were hiding from the robot. “Terminal buildings.” Good choice of words.

  The Meadowlands, a huge tract of some of the most polluted swamp land on planet Earth, stretched its hairy footprint north and east. It’s the stink appetizer in New Jersey just across the river from the Big Apple. As we floated by, I could see the bitch paths worn through the tall reeds and cat-tails, the telltale signs that bitches were on the prowl in sufficient numbers to keep the weeds flattened down. Several trails ended at the Hudson River but others connected warehouses north and south as if they had been busily visiting each other.

  The Reynolds building in Passaic had what looked like a fire glowing in one of its windows, the penthouse office complex. As we passed a mere hundred feet or so to the north, we saw it was no fire at all but a cluster of red lights.

  Tim pointed. “Look at that. There’s a cross in the middle of those lights.” Through the binoculars, I could see a cross made from fresh lumber probably looted from one of the many supply stores that hovered here just in handy-dandy reach of New Yorkers yearning to renovate their thousand-dollar-a-square-foot apartments.

  In heaps around the lights were human skeletons arranged in an orderly fashion, all sitting and looking at the cross. On the cross, a blonde zombie bitch was nailed through the head, abdomen and feet. Her arms were tied with cable; a noose tugged taut around her neck. Her hair was down to her ass.

  “Check it out,” I told Tim, handing him the binocs.

  “Man…” he said as he looked through.

  A sudden updraft caught us and shifted us toward the building. Tim ran to the jet control and full-blasted it, but it was too late. The gondola slammed into the side of the air conditioning apparatus on the roof, the whole gondola tipping hard to the side. Hadley was knocked out and over. I reached for her arm as she went by but I grabbed nothing and she fell to the roof below, about twenty feet.

  The gondola dropped and hit the roof, the balloon cables snagged on a cellphone tower. Tim tried to lift up but the force of the propane blast made the tower creak and moan, so he shut the gas down. Too late. We were tethered to the building. Tim had blood coming from his right ear where he’d smashed into the gondola rail. My wrist felt like a gorilla used it as a back-scratcher.

  “Hadley!” I yelled, hoping to God I got a response. She was rolling around in pain, her lungs knocked clear of air. I start freaking out big time, reach one foot tentatively onto the rooftop, sliding from the basket warily as I quickly assume a defensive position on the tar. She looks up and coughs once, then gets up and takes my hand. I lead her back to the gondola and tell her to stay put. She wraps her arms around MG and lets the dog lick her face.

  The pistol in my hand is cold, blue steel while the rifle on my back is light and sleek, to say nothing of the knife strapped to my left ankle. My eyes scout every nook and cranny on the deserted rooftop, looking for any signs of life or, for that matter, afterlife.

  I hear Tim’s familiar boots crunching on the rooftop gravel behind me, his breath sour and stale from another meal of Slim Jims and stale fruit roll-ups from our dwindling food stash.

  “That’s it, Kent,” he breathes on my neck. “This is home until we find some gas and refuel.”

  “Spot any undead?” I ask, craning left and right and seeing none myself.

  We climb the six short steps down from the ledge to the roof proper, leaning as far as we dare over the side to peer down twenty stories below. My stomach lurches to see the sight of a well-organized bitch horde patrolling the perimeter.

  “What do you think?” I ask Tim. “Two hundred or so?”

  “From the looks of it,” he
sighs, wiping his hair before putting on his backward baseball cap. “I hate it when they get organized like that.”

  I watch half the horde pace patiently to the left, the other half to the right.

  “Get used to it,” I say, turning around to avoid the depressing sight. “It’s like they get smarter with each passing day.”

  “Not smart enough to talk, though,” Tim points out with a grin. “At least not more than grunts.”

  Good old Tim; it all comes down to good guys and bad guys with him, even now.

  We scout the perimeter of the rooftop, every inch of it, just in case. It takes a while and by the time we’re done my legs are sore. Floating over New Jersey looking for fuel has left me feeling out of shape and lazy.

  I wipe my brow with a handkerchief from my back pocket and rest on the bottom step of the roof. Tim leans against the railing behind him, tall and wiry with eyes that don’t miss a trick.

  Tim clears his throat to get my attention and says, “Sun’s getting low, Kent.”

  I swallow and think, God, I hate the night.

  “Right,” I say out loud. “Let’s see what treats this building has in store for us.”

  He helps me to my aching feet as we approach the metal door leading down from the roof. I can tell from the swollen bolts and scarred lock that it’s been barricaded, but by now what hasn’t been?

  Months of straight-up zombie sieges have left every building in every city a fortress, though by now most of them have been deserted – or overrun.