When There's No More room In Hell: A Zombie Novel
Page 33
Hussein approached Marcus and Ian as they stood discussing routes on the maps. “Yan has told me about the problems we may face in Serbia. Are we still going ahead?”
Marcus nodded, “Yes, we are. We have to cross that area anyway, either that or take the long way around and pass through Romania. We could have just as much trouble there too. Sini and Yan are our friends, and we have to help them as far as we can.”
“Yes, I understand that. It is strange, a month ago, I never saw you as real people. I saw you as animals, worse than pigs. But you are no different than us.”
“Except we don’t wear dresses on our days off,” Ian mumbled from the corner of his mouth as he looked in the opposite direction, away from Hussein.
Hussein smiled, “Well, Mr Ian, it keeps the air circulating and stops us from getting, how you say it, sweaty balls?”
Ian almost choked on his cigarette and spluttered a laugh. Still coughing, and thumping his chest with one hand, he leaned over and patted Hussein on the back in complement for his quick retort.
Hussein nodded his appreciation at the now red-faced Ian and turned back to Marcus. “Anyway, I find it a very honourable thing that you are doing. I am pleased to be part of it, and I speak for Zaid and Ahmed too. They think that you are great men and great soldiers too.”
“Thanks, Hussein,” Marcus replied with a smile. “I quite fancy you too.”
Ian creased up into more laughter, snot and drool exploding from his already strained nasal passages. Hussein looked perplexed for a moment and then, realised that they had cracked yet another joke at his expense. He laughed along, not fully understanding the joke but able to construe that it wasn't meant in a malicious way.
“I'm still getting used to your humour, Mr Marcus,” he smiled.
“Yeah, wait till we start the fart jokes. You'll be completely lost.”
They crossed the border close to a Serbian town called Pirot and pushed through the low farm lands to the south, heading for central Serbia.
With Yan and Sini acting as the convoy commanders, they were able to talk their way past many army units that took an interest in them. Mainly, it was a case of one of them climbing into a turret and shouting insults at the soldiers or patriotic slogans and the soldiers would holler a reply. Mostly, the banter was enough for the troops on the ground to wave the vehicles by, showing disinterest and more than likely, they had had their fill of looting and raping their way through the dozens of burned and massacred villages that the team had already passed by.
Piles of bodies lay in the baking sun, attracting swarms of flies and birds as they rotted and bloated in the heat at the roadside. Their destroyed villages, now just smouldering and collapsed ruins behind them, having been picked clean by the marauding troops as they swept the land.
On more than one occasion, Marcus saw tears streaming down Sini’s face as they passed through the massacred towns and saw the heaps of his dead country folk sprawled at the roadsides. Men, women and children, soldiers and civilians alike were targeted by the alcohol-fuelled anarchy that the rogue army units brought down on them.
At first, they had stopped at the sites of the carnage to check for survivors and see what help they could offer. They soon realised that they need not bother. No living people were ever found. A few dead had managed to reanimate and stagger about in the ruins, but the majority of the people had been executed with head shots.
The team stood around a large depression in the ground on the outskirts of a large village. It was full of bodies. Heads and limbs poked up from the pile with the bodies being twisted and clumped together, having been tossed into the pit after their execution.
Flies had found them and thousands of little black dots swarmed and buzzed through the air above the pit. The massacre couldn't have happened more than twenty four hours earlier judging by the look of the dead, but the pungent, sickly-sweet smell of rot was already rising into the air as they festered in the blistering sun.
Ian and Marcus stood to one side, looking down on a line of dead men that looked as though they had been executed separately from the rest. Marcus guessed that they were the town leaders and had possibly been killed last, after being forced to witness the murder of the all the men, women and children.
“Why do you think they left them separated?” Ian asked as he looked down along the line of dead.
Marcus grunted, “Fuck knows. Maybe they just couldn't be arsed picking them up and tossing them into the pit after they had humped and dumped the others?”
“Bodies never look like they do in movies.” It was a rhetorical statement from Ian. They had all seen hundreds of bodies and created many themselves, but now and then there were always a few that caught the attention. Not that there was anything in particular about them, just sometimes, it played on the mind and made them think of their own mortality.
Many times, Marcus had looked on the still and lifeless body of a person and thought to himself, Just hours ago, that was a person; a living, breathing, thinking and feeling person. Now, they’re dead and will never live again. Their desires, memories and ambitions, lost with them.
In the movies, dead people always look pretty normal, even attractive to a degree. Gunshot wounds; always represented by just a neat hole in the front of the head and a trickle of blood running down the face, eyes staring into space.
In reality, the entry point would often be caved inward, the bone being smashed and fragmented by the impact of the solid slug and the vacuum in the wake of the bullet causing the bone to implode as it pushed its way through. The exit wound was normally just a jagged hole like a collapsed 3D jigsaw puzzle where the bone had been blown outward, leaving the skull to crumple in on itself while the remnants of thick blood and brains oozed from the hole.
The face would lose its normal shape with the integrity of the skull being destroyed, making the features unrecognisable sometimes. With the lack of blood pressure, the nose loses its plumpness as well as the lips and the cheeks, and the eyes look sunken, giving the impression of the dead having lost weight.
Eyes never close or remain completely open together, especially with a traumatic death. At least one eye is always half open, with the other either wide or closed. The eye itself would become flat without the blood pressure to keep it rounded and the white of the eye turns dull while the pupil expands and takes up nearly all the iris, resembling fish eyes. The mouth would always end up gaping open, leaving a gormless expression on the face.
The dead never died in a dignified position either. If someone is shot, they’re not dying naturally and they are not going to fall into a natural position. Most of the time, they would land in a twisted or sprawled, spread eagle position, the clothing always seeming to ride up from the waist or a shoe would come off. To Marcus, he was always given the impression that their clothes didn't fit them anymore after death.
“Nope,” Ian sighed, “there's no such thing as a good looking corpse.”
Sini and Yan came from the town of Temerin in the North and as they came close, they said their goodbyes and went to find their family and friends. Marcus, Stu, Ian, Jim, Hussein, Zaid and Ahmed stood and watched as the vehicle disappeared from sight.
With heavy hearts, they turned and climbed back into their SUVs. They had given their two Serbian friends as much ammunition and food as they could spare to help them on their way, and the loss, both in manpower and friendship was felt immediately within the team.
Marcus told them of their intended route and that they were welcome to follow them if they changed their minds.
Hussein took over as the driver of Marcus’ vehicle and Zaid climbed behind the wheel for Stu. They travelled in silence for a while, all of them lost in thought. The strain was starting to show on all their weather-beaten, bearded faces. They had been hard on the road for over a month and they were now running on their reserves. They needed to find somewhere to rest for a day, maybe even two.
They could’ve gone with Sini and Yan, but Marcus felt
that it could attract too much attention to them if they approached any major built-up areas, and the two Serbs had insisted on going alone and that Marcus and the rest of the team were to push on and make it to their own homelands as quickly as possible.
That evening, they found a place to rest. A wood line, a few hundred metres back and overlooking the road running in front of them, providing the team with good cover from view and advanced warning of anyone approaching.
They rested for the whole of the next day and into the evening before deciding that it was time to move again. They pushed on and headed for the North, hoping to make it across into Hungary the next day.
Close to the border, Ian’s vehicle had a blow out. The tyre exploded like a grenade and they came to a stop. Jim and Ian began fixing it while everyone else saw to their own vehicles, replenishing what fuel they had used and checking over their own tyres to avoid any more stops.
They were in the middle of nowhere, close to Lake Zobnatica in the North of Serbia and no more than fifty kilometres from the border. Thick forests flanked them on both sides with trees that were so tall they left just a thin slither of blue sky above the road, casting the ground into perpetual twilight.
As they huffed and sweated, heaving off the damaged tyre and discarding it as they replaced it with one of the spares, an agonising scream rang out from their rear. Marcus turned to see Zaid approaching from around the back of his vehicle, clutching his neck with blood oozing between his fingers and running down his arm. He staggered and swayed, using his spare arm to guide him along the vehicle as he tried to remain upright against it.
He struggled forward, gurgling something through his damaged throat. Marcus drew his pistol as a figure lurched out from behind Zaid. Fresh blood smeared across its pallid face and neck, its pale features shimmering in the gloom as it began to lumber after the wounded man, its arms outstretched in an attempt to grasp its prey and to stop it from escaping.
Marcus closed the gap, pulling Zaid behind him and pushing him toward the rest of the team and into Hussein’s arms. He raised his pistol and pointed it between the infected’s eyes. It had been a man once and he stopped still just a few feet in front of Marcus, his faded dull eyes staring down the barrel of the gun pointed straight into his face. He seemed to straighten up, almost with a touch of pride or dignity, then he looked beyond the pistol and focused on Marcus, his mouth gaped and a loud lingering whine erupted from within as strings of blood dripped from his teeth and lips.
Marcus squeezed the trigger, the pistol bucking in his hand, a loud crack that echoed through the trees as the round left the barrel. The left eye of the dead man in front of him disappeared into the back of his head, ripping the skin and tissue of the cheek with it, and he collapsed to the ground as his knees gave way.
Everybody checked their immediate area, ensuring there were no more infected creeping up on them. Marcus and Stu approached Hussein, who sat with Zaid across his lap. He looked dead, but Marcus saw the rise and fall of his chest.
“How bad is it?” he asked.
Hussein looked up at him, his eyes wet with tears. “I don’t know, but we know what will happen to him.”
Stu crouched and began checking over Zaid’s unconscious body, and after a minute, he spoke. “It’s not that serious actually. Well,” he paused and thought, looking back down at Zaid, “under normal circumstances it wouldn't be. He won’t die from blood loss, but he will turn eventually. We know that.” He turned as he said his last statement and stared questioningly at Marcus.
Hussein looked down and pulled his friend close as he sobbed over him.
Stu asked, “Do you want us to take care of him?” The question was intended for Marcus, but he looked at Hussein as he said it.
“No,” Marcus shook his head from behind him, “we give him a chance.”
They dressed the wound and treated Zaid for shock and blood loss, then loaded him into the second SUV, where Marcus could keep an eye on him as Hussein drove. They moved on.
Soon after, they cleared the forest. The sun blinded them as they came into the open. “Stop,” They heard Ian say from the lead vehicle. “Shit, Marcus, I think you need to come up and see this.”
He motioned for Hussein to push forward and to come alongside Ian to see what the problem was. Before them was a wide expanse of open ground that stretched far into the horizon and into the distance on either side of the road. Hussein stopped the vehicle suddenly, slamming on the brakes and causing it to lurch forward as he stared, open mouthed, through the windshield at the sight before them. Marcus didn't notice the jerk as the vehicle stopped sharply as he too was gaping out the window; the radio slipped from his hand and clattered to the foot well of his seat.
On either side of the road, tall wooden posts lined the route and nailed to each post, a body, flailing and struggling against its bonds as they saw the team approach from the trees. The poles stretched far into the distance, and as far as Marcus could tell, there were bodies attached to all of them. He regained his composure and glanced into the fields to the left and right. There too, more bodies, impaled on tall wooden stakes, hanging by the neck or crucified. With every possible method, bodies were erected onto posts in endless lines across the open ground. Everywhere they looked, they saw the scarecrow figures, pinned to the wood above the ground and unable to break away from their bondage, left to rot in an eternal torture.
Everyone began to dismount from their vehicles. No one had advised that they take a closer look, but the spectacle was too overpowering and Marcus and his men couldn't help but be horrified by what they saw. It was almost hypnotic.
“There must be thousands of them, Marcus,” Ian said as he noticed his friend standing at his side, staring up at the figures stuck to the long posts above them, gawking from one body to the next.
The body directly above them looked down, twisting and straining against the post, grasping at the air that separated it from the living human flesh below. It grunted and wailed continuously, causing the other bodies close by to join in the tortured chorus of the dead. Soon, the entire field on either side of the road was a deafening mantra of wailing voices, all reacting to the sounds of the other moans close by to them.
Marcus didn't reply to Ian, he couldn’t, he just nodded and continued nodding for sometime without realising it. Some of the bodies had placards attached to them, written in Serbian and unintelligible to anyone in the team, but from what they could guess, the placards probably read supposed crimes that had resulted in the cruel and final punishment.
Without a doubt some, if not most, had been alive before they were put into the field as part of a gruesome display of man’s inhumanity to man. Marcus suspected that many would have survived for a lengthy period of time, particularly the ones who had been crucified, before they succumbed and died before reanimating.
He looked up at the nearest body. He couldn't tell if it had been male or female. Its skin was black, with large fluid-filled blisters all over it from baking in the hot sun. Its ribcage was ripped open, a cavern where its innards had once been and its dull white bone tips poking through the rotted flesh. The skin of its face was stretched tight over the skull, and the eyes were all but gone, but it knew they were there as it snarled and moaned at the men below, flailing its arms in an attempt to reach them.
Some of the bodies were little more than torsos, nailed to the poles or stakes that had been driven into them from the rectum and up through the neck. Some bodies were completely decomposed with nothing left except for bones, held together with dried out sinews. In some places, just heads on pikes were visible, the jaws still flexing but making no sound from the lack of vocal cords.
Flocks of birds and insects swooped and dived continually above the spectacle, as they spotted another particularly tasty morsel on one of the dead. The smell was overpowering. There was very little breeze and the stench of the thousands of rotting and putrefying bodies lingered in the air like a thick haze, permeating into everything.
Four trucks emerged from the tree line and headed toward them.
Stu was the first to react. “Stand to,” he screamed, snapping the attention of the rest of the men back to reality. They all spun and saw the trucks and turned to run for their vehicles.
Before they could move, a stream of tracer rounds zipped in front of them, cracking loudly as they split the air and creating a demarcation line that told Marcus and his men not to move any further. They all stopped in their tracks and glanced nervously to each other. Whoever it was that was approaching them, they had them zeroed and any attempt to move, they would be cut down before they could take more than two steps.
The trucks pulled up in a screech of brakes and men began spilling out from the back of them, shouting commands and orders to one another and gesturing with their rifles. They were dressed in mixed uniforms of different nationalities, including civilian clothing. Nearly all of them wore a bandanna of some sort. Not a good sign as far as Marcus was concerned. Nearly everything he had seen or read of atrocities in the Balkans had been committed by men wearing bandannas. It was a rebel thing.
A man, who appeared to be their commander, approached and began shoving people in different directions and shouting. They began to climb in and out of the vehicles as their new prisoners stood and watched, helpless to do anything. Their weapons were removed from their belts and collected in a pile in front of the rebel commander. He picked up Marcus’ pistol and hefted it in his hand, then looked approvingly at Marcus with a smile.
“Thank you,” he said.
Two men appeared from the SUV, Zaid between them as they helped him from the vehicle. The rebel commander approached them and ripped the dressing away from the injured man’s neck, causing Zaid to wince with pain. The rebel commander studied the wound for a short moment then nodded. He stepped back and without a moment’s hesitation, he raised the pistol and fired a shot into Zaid’s face. His head snapped back, then forward as he fell to his knees and onto his face, causing a cloud of dust to rise around him as he landed.