Zombie Bitches From Hell

by Campbell, Zoot

  Tim fires down and the balloon begins its slow descent. Hadley is up and clinging to me.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her, but I mean we need to worry. Big time.

  As we drop out of the sky like a half-shot pheasant, we pass over a large compound lit up like a small town. It has a wire fence perimeter with watch towers like a POW camp. There’s a large cleared area in the middle surrounded with tents and sheds. I can see maybe fifty or sixty guys scurrying about heading in the same direction as us. A Hummer in bright yellow cranks up and aims its roof lights at us as it follows our path downward to a clearing just past the camp to the east.

  Tim does a great job bringing the balloon in and in a few seconds we’re surrounded by a large group of guys that look paramilitary—cammy pants, t-shirts, shaved heads and guns, all of them shouting some shit, one of them waving a tattered American flag on a pole.

  “Stay out of sight, Hadley,” I warn her, as if she hasn’t figured out the routine by now. She crouches at my feet with MG in her arms. The Hummer pulls up and a big dude gets out, one of those asshole professional wrestler types, big as an outhouse and looking like he’s got the stink to match. He’s the jerk-off with the bullhorn.

  “Step out of the vehicle with your hands up,” he says like this is a rerun of Cops.

  “Sir,” says Tim. “I can’t put my hands up and climb out of this gondola at the same time.”

  A shot rings out whizzing past Tim’s ear. “Give it a try,” the bullhorn bleats. Tim and I do.

  “Welcome to Camp Fuck You,” he shouts. A sheep flock of laughter rises from the crowd around us and drifts off into the woods.

  With their guns aimed at us, we get frisked. Nothing, of course. Not even our balls.

  “Welcome, men. This is one of the last holdouts of the white race in the great US of A. We are all one hunert percent American born and raised and don’t countenance no Jews, niggers, nor your yellow people and especially no wetbacks. If they are out there, let the crazy bitches have at ’em. In here, we abide by the Golden Rule: I am the ruler!”

  The crowd cheers this ignoramus.

  “Now, y’all got that straight? You’re good and white, I think. And I ain’t seein’ no Jew beaks. You ain’t heebs, are ya’?”

  “What’s a heeb, your honor?” asks Tim.

  “Why it’s a goaddamned heathern Jew!”

  “Well, then no your honor, we’re Christians. And it’s heathen, not heathern.”

  “You’re lookin’ like you might be a A-rab. You ain’t no monkey-dicked-fuckin’ A-rab, is you?”

  “Your honor, my name is Tim Riley. This is Kent Zimmer. Do they sound like A-rab names? Meaning no disrespect, of course.”

  “Zimmer? That a Jew name?”

  “My father’s ancestors are German, sir,” I reply. “Check this out.” I whip out my dick which is as uncut as a newly purchased Halloween pumpkin. “Do you think either a Jew or a Muslim would have a pecker that looks like this?”

  “No, I guess not. You’re not queer, are ya’?

  “I’d tell you to ask my wife, but I killed her when she ate my son. Is that sufficient, you dumb motherfucker?” Tim says. I put my dick away—the first time I needed it in months for anything other than pissing.

  “I like your style boys,” he replies. “But let’s not get carried away. I’m Rex. This is my band of merry men and we’re…”

  “Hey, Rex, check this shit out,” one of his henchman yells from the direction of the balloon. He’s lifting Hadley out by the back of her jeans. She’s kicking and screaming. MG is nowhere to be found. Damn dog probably jumped out and ran after a squirrel.

  Rex walks over to the guy holding Hadley.

  “Hey, you boys travel dangerously. This little cunt is murder on the hoof. Who is she?”

  “She’s my niece,” I reply. “I’ve sworn an oath to protect her. She’s clean. Look at her eyes.”

  Rex looks Hadley up and down.

  “Put me down, you sonafabitch!” yells Hadley. “Put me down!”

  “Hey, let her go. She’s just a kid,” I say.

  “She’s just a kid? Yeah, like a rag-head airline pilot is just a poor boy tryin’ to make a livin’,” says Rex.

  The guy holding her let’s her go. She hits the ground running toward me. A shot rings out and blows Hadley’s chest out from the back. Her eyes catch a look at mine for a millisecond.

  “No! Fuck no!” I shout as I run to her crumpled-up body. “She was just a kid, just a kid.” For the first time since all this has started I break down and cry my eyes out.

  “Too young for fun, boys, and too old not to be dangerous. She was gonna turn soon enough and she’d be eatin’ your balls like Double Bubble bubble gum. That’s what you needed? You two shits. I just did her and you both a favor.”

  I look up and he knows I’m going to rush him, rip his eyes out and drive my shoe so far up his ass my foot will come out his mouth, so he points his gun right at me. “I wouldn’t. Not less you meanin’ to disrespect my hospitality. This here is the way the world works now, boy.”

  Maybe he was right, I’m thinking. Nothing I can do now. I let her down, but what was the future? I go numb and put it behind me. Don’t know what else to do.

  “You’ll thank me for this, boys,” Rex says. “Jimbo, Arnie. Get these guys to the med tent. And bury that stinkin’ kid.”

  ***

  “It’s fresh,” the man known only as “Rex” grunts. “No worries.”

  His voice is firm and tense, deep and guttural as if he’s speaking to zombies, not survivors. Although, from the looks of his seedy, humorless crew, he might as well be most of the time.

  With glistening fingers the hulking figure bathed in firelight tears a juicy leg from one of the fresh chickens spread out on the table before us and shoves the fat end into his mouth, sucking at the tip greedily before yanking the bone, flesh-free, from his gaping maw; rotted but gargantuan teeth smile back, the wide gaps stuffed with flesh.

  I look hesitantly toward Tim, licking his blistered lips next to me and already reaching for a wing. I don’t want to partake of anything these jackoffs have provided, but I’m hungry and join him. The taste of hot, sizzling, juicy flesh assaults my taste buds, providing an almost painful sensation as my confused stomach threatens to send back the first fresh food it’s tasted in, what… six weeks?

  “Sure beats canned beans,” Tim announces to the table full of healthy-looking men, all featuring shaved heads and distrustful glances and headstone-sized teeth identical to Rex’s.

  They grunt appreciatively, watching us carefully as their large-knuckled fingers caress the butts of the shotguns propped casually on each knee.

  Has it only been half-an-hour since we stumbled on their camp from the road, the smell of a roaring fire and the klieg lights surrounding the walled encampment beckoning us like moths to the flame?

  A guard had frisked us, finding only two moldy backpacks full of stale candy bars and the last of our canned food, the remainder of a vending machine raid back a ways.

  We were immediately strip-searched and deloused in a military style tent, shoved into sweatpants and flannel shirts and our old boots, and suddenly here we are: in Rex’s private tent feasting on roasted chickens and grilled corn.

  Southern fried rock wafts in from outside as a tent flap opens and a leggy young blond dressed in a cheerleading outfit stumbles inside. The men at Rex’s table gawk appreciatively at her long, slender legs, slender waist and generous breasts, barely concealed beneath the top half of her too-small costume. Her mouth is tied with a gag and duct-taped for good measure.

  Her hair is greasy and long, but her unkempt mane only adds to her evocative allure. Her eyes look haunted but focused, grimly set on completing her task, that being setting another tray of cheap canned beer on top of the wooden picnic table next to the open bag of potato chips.

  Rex grabs her wrist but the cheerleader barely flinches; only regards him with cold, dead eyes. Her skin has a
grayish tinge and a marble texture, but even from across the room I can see the life in her eyes and the grim set of her jaw.

  “Say hello to our new friends, Buffy,” Rex says while licking his lips. He regards us with empty, dark eyes and says, “Buffy’s one of our prized possessions, fellas. Prime, grade-A tail from the local women’s college about two clicks yonder. We ran across ’em on a hunting party a few months back, chowing down on their dean, the dumb motherfucker; twenty-eight sorority girls just itching for a little male companionship, right, Buffy?”

  The cheerleader regards Tim and me with contempt, but remains motionless, even as Rex crudely yanks up her blue and yellow skirt to reveal a daring pink thong beneath. It looks crooked and ill-fitting as if, like the rest of her costume, it was chosen for her rather than by her; as if she’d been dressed by another rather than allowed to dress herself.

  I watch as Rex eyes her warily, a small silver taser near his hand on the roughhewn picnic table in the camp leader’s expansive tent. Rex strikes me as a man afraid of nothing, not even a camp full of wiry, neo-Nazi thugs, but something in this woman’s eyes has his fingers chained close to a few thousand volts of electricity.

  She turns to leave. Rex lets his guard down and, immediately, the cheerleader turns and with a gnarled hand slices at his cheek with razor sharp nails.

  Blood from a thin gash across his jaw line glistens in the firelight as he stands, stun gun at hand and shoves it deep into the wanton woman’s neck; the sizzle of human flesh burning singes the air as she bucks with the current of electricity jarring her body.

  When at last she is stunned and helpless he tosses the taser casually onto the table and with a dirty fist punches her once, twice, three times on the side of the head; along the way something cracks, but the woman shows no pain, only a dazed kind of patience as two of Rex’s thuggish minions drag her, kicking and screaming, from the tent.

  My stomach is nauseous with the strength behind Rex’s punches, with the slickness of his greasy skin on the side of her head, with the gleam in his eyes as he held nothing back while unloading his massive strength directly at her face.

  Tim swallows audibly and Rex zeroes in on it.

  “You like her, pal?” Rex barks, dropping back into his seat with a healthy sheen of sweat glowing across the many skull and naked women tattoos covering his shoulders and arms.

  I nudge Tim under the table, still uncertain as to whether we’ll stay in the small, quasi-military camp, but he stoically nods.

  Rex leans in conspiratorially and explains, “You can have her after dinner. One of the boys will show you to the Cat House on the edge of camp.”

  “You m-m-mean?” Tim stammers, no need to finish his sentence as Rex nods. “B-b-but how do I pay for her? I ain’t got no money, Rex.” I can see that Tim is playing the game for higher stakes.

  Rex fixes him with a steady eye, licking his lips as he rubs the swollen knuckle of one hand with the other.

  “None of us do,” he explains. “Labor is the only currency here in this camp. For a prime filly like Buffy there, you need to work two days.”

  “Sold,” Tim blurts before Rex can finish, causing the table of greasy men with shaved heads to bray with laughter.

  Tim, all 105-pounds of him, laughs back, aware they’re bawling at him, not with him. I’d defend him but he’s just my traveling partner, not my friend, as far as these idgits know—I got to play along. We ran into each other on a hunting party awhile back and since we were both headed the same direction decided to team up. That’s the story for now. And we’ve probably said less than two dozen words to each other since. I figure if they think we’re just two unrelated stragglers, they can’t use one against the other. That’s what I’m hoping. Tim looks sideways at me and I know we’re in synch. Still, I think Tim is out of his depth here. If Rex can barely control Buffy with his massive fists and the use of a stun gun, what’s Tim going to do?

  “What about you, pretty boy?” Rex barks in my direction, his calculated leer sizing me up like the runt of the litter. “You willing to risk two days of hard labor on one of our work crews for an hour in heaven with the sorority girl of your dreams?”

  I shrug and say, “I don’t know, Rex; I’ve never made it with a zombie before.”

  “Zombie?” Tim asks, looking at me as if I’ve just told him there’s no such thing as Santa Claus. “What? You never said nothin’ ‘bout making it with no zombies, Rex!”

  Rex barely looks at him as he asks, “What’d you think she was? A debutante? You know any human women can take a beating like that and stay standing?”

  Then he ignores him, looking at me with his dead, soulless eyes. “How’d you know, smart boy?” he asks, massive fists clenched atop the table.

  Only then do I notice the rough, homemade letters tattooed between each knuckle of his massive, sausage like digits. On the fingers of his left hand is spelled out the word “W-H-I-T-E” while, on the left, the fingers spell out “P-O-W-E-R.”

  I shrug again and say, “I’ve seen that phenomenon on the road, Rex. For some reason the female zombies regenerate their form, even their warmth, allowing them to look beautiful even as they crave human flesh. I never imagined they were trainable, though.”

  I’m in this BS up to my nuts and sinking fast.

  “Trainable and doable,” Rex boasts, as if he himself is the cause for this medical mystery. “Plus they have a little extra talent in store for us after dinner, if y’all agree to stick around, that is.”

  “Extra… talent?” I ask of Rex and the rest of the chrome domes.

  They murmur among themselves giddily, like drooling dogs around a bone, but Rex is thoughtfully quiet, his question still on the table as he continues to glower menacingly in our general direction.

  The mood in the room is civil but cloyed, Rex’s large eyes hooded but also masking a not-so-hidden undercurrent of violence and psychosis. I’ve seen his type before on the road in the good old days. Men who once were powerless, despite their massive size. Whose lack of education or formal breeding made them servants to smarter, wiser men; in many instances, men like myself.

  But once the infestation started, once violence prowled our streets, ate our families and threatened life and limb, men like Rex – crazy, violent, scary, angry men like Rex – became leaders.

  By now, after the bitch takeover, that power has gone to their heads, their every wish catered to by weaker, greedier men, their every desire fulfilled by the complete and utter breakdown in order, rules and laws. Now these men make the laws, enforce the laws, have become judge, jury and executioner. And men like me, to say nothing of men like Tim, are at their mercy; what’s worse, they know it – and so does everyone else at this table.

  Tim looks at me, and I see the decision already made in his eyes; so does Rex. The others look at me expectantly, hands on the butts of their sawed off shotguns, bellies full of fresh meat and vegetables, as if daring me to say “no.”

  I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m weak and, frankly, I’m numb. Life after the outbreak has been brutal, unkind and bleak, and to say I’m not aroused by the bevy of beauties tending to Rex and his partners in crime, however crude, would be to lie openly – and loudly – to myself. Besides, I’m not sure Tim and I really had a choice the minute the lookout caught us in his sights less than an hour ago, stumbling and dirty from the road.

  I nod quietly and Rex’s graveyard smile of big, rotten teeth and dark, fleshy gaps barely manages to conceal his contempt at my presence. He may not be glad I’m here, but if I’m still alive, there must be a reason for it.

  I only hope I can convince Tim to escape before I find out what that is.

  From beyond the thick walls of the canvas tent an alarm sounds, one of those hand-wrung numbers with the tripod and the crank that sounds like an old air-raid siren from one of the first world wars; you know, the wars between humans.

  The men of Camp Alpha stand abruptly, most slapping their hands together and wringing them
excitedly as they stream through the canvas tent flap. Rex sits with us, the first sign of life springing into those dark, liquid eyes as his crooked smile splits over those hideous teeth to announce, “Trust me, you boys are gonna be glad you decided to stay. Come on, let’s check out the main event.”

  With that, he stands, knees hitting the edge of the table as he rises and pivots in one fluid motion. Tim follows quickly while I linger behind, stuffing a few stale rolls and snack cakes into the pockets of my pants.

  Outside the tent the camp is in pandemonium, the sound of the siren wail ever present and mingling with the cries, grunts and curses of nearly a hundred men, most baring tattoos of swastikas on their arms, shoulders, some even at the back of their clean-shaven necks, grimy with dirt and sweat but clearly visible as they scream across the open area in the middle of the camp to a high, fenced wall at the far end.

  Tim springs ahead, desperate to keep up with Rex who has all but forgotten us in his hurry to be the first inside the circular fencing.

  I call out, “Tim,” but he rushes forward intently, waving me forward without looking back.

  I slow to a crawl as rough, sweaty bodies stream past, grunting impatiently as I move slightly to the side.

  Left behind, ignored, I use the precious time to recon the encampment. It is bordered on all four sides by a high fence. The base of the fence is chain link, but it’s been buttressed over with everything from road signs to car bumpers, from license plates to metal doors. Across the top runs several rings of rusty barbed wire, stopping only at the four rickety guard towers from which armed snipers aim klieg lights and rifles at rare passersby.

  Even if the fence itself weren’t impenetrable, the camp’s inhabitants create an “inner wall” amongst themselves. It only took me a few seconds inside the high, patchwork wall to realize that the camp is full of white supremacists; neo-Nazis who used the outbreak as a platform to fuel their psychotic ideas about America’s growing race war. As such they have taken natural selection to the extreme. Every man inside is white, although it’s hard to tell from the filthy layers of sweat, dust and lust that cover every inch of their half-naked bodies. Their preferred form of dress is jeans or khaki cargo shorts and they all wear sweat-stained wife beaters, the better to show off their offensive tattoos and bulging muscles.