Rockabilly Hell

by William W. Johnstone

  Cole stopped three times to check out bodies. One in the middle of the street, one lying dead on the sidewalk, and the other hanging from a tree limb.

  Eddie King was filming it all.

  The man at the address on Windsor Drive was hysterical, and Cole hated to deal with hysterical people. You didn’t know what the hell they might do.

  Cole finally got him calmed down enough to make sense.

  “My wife, she don’t like guns. So when I gave up hunting, I sold all my guns. I didn’t want to, but I did to please her. All I had to protect us tonight was this here.” He whipped out a long butcher knife that almost put Cole into cardiac arrest. Cole took the knife away from the man as gently as possible, and the man said, “Phil over there, the dead guy, he was my neighbor for years. We got along fine. I don’t know what caused him to go off his nut like he did . . .”

  It was a story that Cole was to hear several dozen times during the long night that stretched before him. Neighbor turning on neighbor, husband turning on wife, wife turning on husband, brother killing sister, sister killing brother. At three o’clock, Cole drove back to the sheriffs office for something to eat and some coffee.

  “Chain him to a goddamn tree if you have to!” Al was on the radio, talking to a deputy. “But don’t bring him back here. We’re full. City’s full; we’re all overflowing with nut cases.”

  George Steckler and Scott Frey had arrived. They both smiled and shook hands with Cole. George saying, “I think the Bureau ordered us in here hoping we’d get eaten by a ghost . . . or whatever ghosts do with victims.”

  “He’s learning fast now,” Scott said, jerking a thumb toward his younger partner. “Center for Disease Control is flying people in at dawn. They seem to think some sort of virus bug is causing all this.” His tired eyes twinkled, and he smiled. “When the SAC heard me tell them it was being caused by the devil, he immediately ordered us in here.”

  Cole introduced the Bureau men to Laura. “She’s all right, guys. Good people. She won’t do a shaft job on us.”

  “That’ll be a refreshing change,” Scott said with a tired smile.

  “Oh, shit!” they heard Sheriff Pickens yell over the phone. “Well, let them kill each other then. Hell, no, I won’t send anybody out there.” He slammed down the phone and told a young woman, “I’m not here. I’m out of pocket, understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Al walked over to Cole. “You remember me telling you about the Chambers and Hensley families?”

  Cole nodded.

  “They live right across the road from each other; way to hell and gone out in the country. They just declared war on each other. Sounds like Heartbreak Ridge out there. Hell with ’em. I hope they kill each other off.” He wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Jesus, what a night!”

  “National guard in place?” Cole asked.

  “Yeah. Finally. We’ve got every road and pig path in the county blocked off. Governor is sending in more guard troops right now to beef things up.” A deputy handed him a clipboard. Al scanned it quickly. “Over three hundred dead so far. And still counting. God only know how many more are dead in their homes and not listed on this. Eighty fires reported by 3:00 AM_____”

  “Are you fucking serious?” one of the women answering the bank of phones suddenly yelled.

  The buzz of conversation stopped, and everybody turned to look at her.

  “They’re doing what?” she shouted over the phone. “Clyde, have you been drinking?” She listened for a moment, her face turning beet red. “Clyde, don’t you tell me to stick this phone up my ass, you damned old drunk. You—” She listened for another moment. “I just don’t believe that . . . What? ... What?... Well, fuck you, too! Clyde? Clyde?” She held the phone out at arm’s length and stared at it for a moment.

  “What’s the matter, Jane?” Al called.

  “That was Clyde Farmer.” She shook her head. “But he didn’t sound drunk to me.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said the dead are crawling out of their graves and walking around . . .”

  Everybody stared at her. George’s mouth dropped open.

  “He said he put up with that damned old bag he was married to for forty years. Said he was so happy when he buried her, he stayed drunk for a week, partying. Now she’s back, trying to get in the house. Said she was butt-ugly alive, looks even worse now. Said she was on the back porch, beating on the door and grunting.”

  “This I have to see,” Cole said. “Where does he live? I’ll go check it out.”

  “We’ll tag along with you,” Scott said.

  Al sat down and put his face in his hands. “Dear god! What else is going to happen?”

  Thirteen

  Katti insisted on coming along. But she did agree to ride with Bev and Hank Milan. Al rode with Cole, George and Scott following in their own car. None of them saw any walking dead during the ride out to Farmer’s house, about two miles outside the city limits.

  “Jane did say that this Farmer person drank a lot, right?” Cole asked.

  “He doesn’t drink that much,” Al said glumly. “But he is a practical joker.” He shook his head. “No. He wouldn’t joke about something like this.”

  “Twenty-eight, where are you going?” the voice of Captain Boyce popped out of the speaker.

  “Come on along, Andy,” Cole told him. “We have reports of people climbing out of their graves and walking around.”

  Andy did not respond for a few seconds. “Ah ... 10-9 on that.”

  Cole repeated it.

  “I’m right behind you,” Andy said.

  Those out at the hunting camp were asleep. They had drunk too much and fallen asleep in the arms of their paid lovers. They were blissfully unaware of what was taking place all around them. All that was only a few hours away from changing. Dramatically so. The security people they had hired out of Memphis had said to hell with it, and were asleep in their cars.

  Earlier in the evening, Nick Pullen had run into Albert Pickens, who had linked up with Arlene, who had found a couple of her less than moral female friends, and the five of them had headed out to Victoria’s place. Victoria, on her way into town, had stopped Win Bryan, and he had followed her back to her mansion. The seven of them had then proceeded to have their own little party, and were all passed out in a drunken stupor. They did not know the town and county had erupted in violence and madness.

  That was about to change. Abruptly. And with startling consequences.

  Cole turned into the driveway of the Farmer house, his lights on high beam. It appeared that every light in the frame house was on and burning brightly.

  Cole pointed to Hank, sitting behind the wheel of his car. “Stay here and keep the motor running. If things go bad, get the hell out of here.”

  Jim Deaton and Gary Markham were answering a call on the other side of the county.

  They could all hear the hammering and grunting coming from the rear of the house.

  They could also smell the rank odor of rotting flesh.

  Clyde Farmer stepped out onto the front porch. The older man had a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a pistol in the other. “It’s about goddamn time you got here, Al!” he hollered. “Now, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but I do know it ain’t normal. They’s a half a dozen of them damn things on my back porch. They done busted out all the winders, and they’re smellin’ to high heaven. They stink so bad I done puked up my supper. Get ’em outta here!”

  “Drunk,” George said.

  “Yeah,” Cole agreed. “But what is causing that smell?”

  “They can be kilt!” Clyde hollered. “But you gotta shoot ’em right ’tween the eyes. I done shot two. But as bad as I hated that bitch I was married to, I just can’t bring myself to shoot her. If I could have, I’d a done it years ’fore she croaked.”

  “Shotguns,” Al said. “Everybody get shotguns and stuff your pockets full of shells.”

  “You don’t believe—�
�� George began his sentence but did not finish it.

  “I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Jumpin’ Jesus Christ!” Captain Boyce said, pointing toward the rear of the house. “What is that?”

  Al sighed. “Henry Harper. I attended his funeral about ten years ago.”

  The gaunt figure of a man stood in the light at the rear of the house. His face was mottled with rot, and his clothing was ragged.

  “What the hell has he got in his hand?” Scott asked.

  Henry lifted the hand in question. He was holding a human arm.

  “He tore that offen old lady Mosby,” Clyde called from the porch. “After I shot her off the porch. You ’member her, Al.”

  “Dead for years,” Al said softly.

  “He’s eatin’ on it,” Clyde yelled.

  “Oh, shit!” Boyce said.

  Henry Harper started lumbering toward the front of the house. Other shapes appeared out of the darkness and followed his lead. Stumbling and staggering and lurching toward Cole and the others.

  “Jimmy Jenkins is with ’em, too,” Clyde hollered. “But he wasn’t dead yesterday, ’cause I saw him downtown. I think if they scratch you or bite you or something, you can get infected. Then you’re one of them. I’d be careful, if I was you boys.”

  “I just cannot accept this,” George found his voice. “I see it, I smell it, but I cannot accept it.”

  “You’d better accept it,” Scott told his partner. “And do it real quick.”

  Henry and his friends were making slow progress, but heading their way, stumbling along, grunting and making other disgusting subhuman sounds as they lurched along.

  “There’s Jimmy,” Al said. “Clyde was telling the truth.”

  The young man was dressed nicely, in pleated pants and dress shirt. But his face was deathly pale, his eyes strange-looking, and his lips blood red.

  Al shucked a round of double-ought buckshot into his twelve-gauge riot gun. “Shoot them,” he said wearily. “Head shots. Let’s put them back into their graves, where they belong.”

  The night roared with gunfire. Heads exploded from the impacting buckshot. The walking dead flopped on the ground, jerking in their second death spasms.

  Just to see what would happen, Cole deliberately fired into the chest of one rotting man. The buckshot knocked him down, but did not kill him. Howling, his breath fouling the night, he crawled to his knees and rose to his shoes. He staggered toward the living.

  Cole took aim and blew the man’s head off.

  “You didn’t get ’em all, Al!” Clyde called from the porch. “Two, three of ’em took off toward the woods out back.”

  Al walked to the rear of the house, staying wide of the rotting bodies on the side yard, sliding fresh rounds into his shotgun as he walked. The back of the house was ruined. The walking dead had managed to break down the back door and smash all the windows.

  Laura and Eddie had pulled in to the drive just in time to film the last few minutes of the hideous scene.

  “Dumb move,” Cole called to them. “It’s very dangerous out here.”

  “News is news,” Laura said. “Besides, all the other crews are out and working. They’re all over the county.”

  “Goddammit!” Al yelled, returning from the rear of the house. “Don’t you people ever listen to warnings from law enforcement?” When he did not receive a reply, he turned to Clyde. “You can’t stay here, Clyde. Those . . . things might be back. Get in the car. We’ve opened shelters in town.”

  Clyde was standing over the nearly headless body of his wife. “Maybe this time, goddammit, you’ll stay in the ground,” he told her.

  * * *

  Federal Judge Warren Hayden got up to go to the bathroom. He was still drunk. He staggered down the hall, wondering why the rear window of the hall was wide open and letting skeeters in and good cold air from the central air out. He stumbled toward the window and put both hands on the sill, steadying himself for a moment. He wrinkled his nose at the foul odor that assailed his nostrils.

  “Phew!” he said.

  A second later he was staring into the dead eyes of a man he’d sentenced to life in prison, back when he was a district judge. The man had died there, and the body brought back home to be buried. Judge Warren Hayden had known all along that the man was innocent of the charge. Warren had been part of the frame-up in order to get a piece of the man’s acreage... which had been turned into a subdivision. Made him a lot of money.

  Which wasn’t going to do him a bit of good now.

  Cold, clammy, rotting hands closed around the judge’s throat. Gagging, Hayden fell back, dragging the walking dead with him. They tumbled to the hall floor.

  Grinning, the undead opened his mouth and kissed the judge on the lips. A soul kiss. Lots of tongue action. Several maggots dropped from one mouth to the other.

  Now the judge and the walking dead were kindred spirits. As one.

  One of the whores from Memphis had been in the hall bathroom. She heard the noise and stepped out, stark naked. She froze at the sight. Opened her mouth to scream. Hayden’s hand reached out and closed around a rather shapely ankle. She started screaming just as more of the walking dead began climbing into the hall. A naked man grinned at her, the odor of the grave almost causing her to puke. Then she saw he had a huge erection, and really started hitting the high notes. Cold rotting flesh pressed against warm living flesh. Putrefying lips touched hers. A rotting tongue slipped between her wet lips, just as the walking dead got his first piece of nooky in more than ten years.

  Judge Roscoe Evans was the next to step out of his bedroom and into the hall. He took in the copulating scene through disbelieving eyes. Roscoe was sexually kinky to the core, and would try anything once, but this was ridiculous.

  Wearing only his house slippers, Roscoe let out a bellow of fear and took off up the hall and into the den. He tore open the front door and ran out into the night, shrieking at the top of his lungs.

  Conditions rapidly went from bad to worse inside the hunting camp.

  * * *

  Untangling himself from the naked flesh of the women who sprawled on the big bed and on him, Nick Pullen crawled out of bed and started for the bathroom, when he heard a noise from the living room. Naked, he padded up the hall toward the lights that someone forgot to turn off.

  He stood in the archway and stared in utter disbelief. The room was filled with rotting, stinking, men and women in various stages of ragged dress. The smell was awful.

  As if controlled by one mind—which they were—the walking dead began lurching and staggering toward him.

  Nick found his voice and began screaming. He turned and ran into the first room he could and slammed the door, locking it securely. Breathing a sigh of relief, he turned away from the door. He almost passed out from shock.

  Half a dozen . . . things stood there, grinning at him, the rotting lips pulled back in hideous smiles. They began to shuffle and lurch and stagger toward him.

  “Oh, my god, no!” Nick managed to say.

  It was the last comprehensible sound that would pass his lips.

  * * *

  Sheriff Al Pickens sent squad cars all over town, with deputies on the speakers, warning people: Stay in your homes, lock the doors and windows, and don’t open them for anyone. He instructed his deputies to tell the people that someone had contaminated the water supply, and whatever the contaminant was it had driven some people insane. They were easy to spot by the lurching, shuffling way they walked. Don’t get near them, and whatever you do, don’t let them in your house or let them get their hands on you. Shoot if you have to, and always aim for the head.

  After his people had left, Al said, “I never thought I would ever give instructions like that out of this office.”

  “What else could you do?” Hank asked. “The people had to be warned.”

  “Yeah. But what do you really think they’re going to do, when they see their Uncle Joe or Aunt Faith or father and mother
or brother and sister who have been dead and buried for ten or so years? Shoot them?”

  “Point taken,” the priest said.

  “Sheriff?” dispatch called. “Frank reports some really weird goings-on out at the Staples Mansion. Those . . . ah, things are lurching around all over the place.”

  “Good,” Al said.

  Cole and the others in the group nodded their heads in agreement with that.

  “Sheriff,” dispatch softened her voice. “Frank also said that Albert’s pickup truck is parked out there.”

  Al’s face did not change expression. He nodded his head. “I made up my mind several days ago that somebody behind a badge would probably have to shoot my son, before this was all over. I just may be the one to do it ... whatever form he appears in. What other cars or trucks are out there?”

  “Arlene Simmons’s car. Nick’s truck. Win’s truck.”

  Al looked at Cole and the FBI agents. “We might as well take a drive out there and see what’s going on.”

  * * *

  The guards at the hunting camp had been the first to become one with the walking dead. Of all the people in the lodge, only two made it out safely: Roscoe Evans and Silas Parnell, both of them on foot, and both of them naked as the day they were born.

  They literally ran into each other limping and slapping mosquitoes, as they made their way down a gravel road that led to the blacktop.

  Bob Jordan, riding with Chief Deputy Starr, spotted the two men. “What the hell is that over there?” he asked, pointing to a side road leading off from the blacktop.

  Tom pulled over and put the beam from his spotlight on the two dark shapes.

  He chuckled. “District judges Silas Parnell and Roscoe Evans.” His smiled faded. “Big corporation owns a hunting camp several miles down this road. I bet that’s where they’ve been, partying with whores until those things attacked . . .” He trailed that off.

  Bob took it. “And they got out alive. So that means whoever they were with, didn’t.”

  “Yeah.” Tom got on the speaker. “Come on over here, gentlemen. I’ve got a couple of blankets in the trunk.”