Zombie Angst

by Jim Couper

  Court cases concerning physical abuse, violations of habeas corpus rights and charges of wrongful imprisonment could have tied up the legal system for years had there been money to be made. No one offered pro bono work on behalf of a decomposing, cannibal corpse. An imprisoned zombie, told she had the right to make a phone call, dribbled a sticky purple liquid onto the phone and mumbled brain.

  In the crowded jail cell a couple of zombies had collapsed from malnutrition, claustrophobia or suffocation and that brought about the creation of the SPCZ. The organization inspired private collections of undead in backyard pens so they could be treated with respect. The new group adopted pets from the SPCA, PAWS and TRACS, tossed them to zombies, and looked away as captives nibbled here and there. Rabbits, dogs, cats, iguanas and other creatures, placed before the cannibals, did nothing to sate their hunger. When a few calories short of dropping from starvation zombies bit into a hamster, hare or hedgehog, but only human organs pleased their particular palate. One zomb, for unknown reasons, took a particular liking to rabbits’ feet and left several unlucky bunnies bumping around on bloody stumps.

  Jane's information update via the media ended when an army transport unit arrived to clear her cells. Carefully shuttling zombies, one by one, to the army troop carrier took too much time. Unbinding their legs, to let them lurch more quickly, created unnecessary risk. The solution was to strap lurchers onto stretchers for trip from clinker to transporter and then stack them horizontally. As the last one passed her Jane wondered about being a zombie. Did they have awareness of their miserable state or were they numb as a worm? What hell could be worse than being trapped in a body driven to eat the living? As she looked at the bodies stacked in the truck she thought of German concentration camps and considered that gas ovens might be a fair way to treat the killers. Except they probably couldn’t be gassed. The Colonel had experimented with agent orange, pepper spray, mustard gas and various chemical concoctions and failed. Zombies didn’t breath.

  Jane ordered her men to scrub the cells with lye solution and release air fresheners. A small weight had been lifted from her little life.

  28

  Mort had so many questions he didn't know how to begin getting answers from the enigmatic Doogie. Posing a question took thought and preparation and sometimes, when he got to the end of that process, he lost sight of where he started.

  In his head, the questions had no end. How long would he live, why did he eat people, what was his email address, why did he feel no pain, why did he not have bowel movements, why did Doogie collect bodies, why could his fingers not operate a phone?

  Mort had picked up phones from felled victims and tried to call Melody, but his fat fingers refused to go where he aimed. He had no memory of his number and randomly jabbed at keys. He wanted to tell Melody he loved her and eating Uncle Albert was just a minor misjudgement he wouldn’t repeat. He wanted to tell her he would shower every morning, use skin care products, eat pizza and apple pie and dress like an insurance salesman. Everything would be fine.

  One time, as he lumbered with a group, his pudgy fingers hit a number he remembered – 911. A concerned operator figured out he was lost in the woods and in danger of being found by zombies. She told him to stay on the line and the army would locate him. It would take several hours since help calls flooded in every minute. She said to check the phone's power supply and when he did that the case came apart and batteries fell out.

  Help, in the form of two camo-clad privates on an ATV, arrived as predicted, two hours later. Before the army men realized they were answering a distress call from a zombie, several of Mort’s accomplices, directed by Doogie, ambushed them and enjoyed. Heady got more than her share, chewing violently. Blood squirted from pink and purple pieces, oozed between her teeth and streamed down her chin. She scooped like a pro.

  Mort wondered about her digestive system and figured an hour should allow her stomach juices to process 10 ounces of meat and a half-cup of brain. After time passed he unwound tape that bound her midriff. Bite-size pieces of chewed liver and kidney fell out. So did her own organs, the ones from another that Mort had stuffed into her. Mort tried to pick up those wet, mouldy bits from the ground, but they slipped through his fingers. As he fumbled with tidbits and chunks, two zombies dropped to their knees and lapped up everything, dirt and all.

  No digestive action had taken place within Heady so Mort rebound her, sans innards no longer available. The idea of taking a look at her brains tempted him, but he decided they had probably been rejected and sat like orphans in her cranium. His emulation of Dr. Frankenstein had failed. Heady would be a poor choice as a someone's bride.

  Doogie dragged the ATV rescuers’ remains to soft soil near a crooked pine and buried them. Next he directed his army of misfortune to retrace a rural route from the previous 24 hours, exhuming revitalized bodies buried in shallow graves.

  Finally Mort pulled together some courage and asked, "Wat do with bodies? Wat ith plan?"

  "Noow recroots," came the reply.

  Mort’s stiff frown indicated he received no satisfaction from the vagueness. Doogie added, "In foow days all be understoood. Mooonlight Army will oovercome. Tooo many of no mind, no stoomack. Tooo many unfortoonates. Remember Prometheus?"

  Mort vaguely recalled some Greek guy who had his liver eaten by a bird every day. It always grew back. Was Doogie going to train a Canada goose to eat liver?Given the present state of his intellect, Mort knew that questions had no clear answers. However, things upstairs were on a bit of an upswing. Memories flowed more easily. Images and sounds of children playing, perhaps his children, flitted through consciousness.

  “More inthormathion,” he requested, but Doogie’s answer again proved unsatisfactory,

  "Patience sees all."

  Doogie appeared to be getting shorter as he shuffled, barefoot, to a pile of rock then rolled the heaviest ones aside and helped a day-old corpse wake to a second life. The fallen soldier, a victim of gastro-intellectual consumption, received a pair of sunglasses and directions to a spot on the left flank where dozens of other soldiers stood at attention, or something resembling it. Another 20 waited on the right side and a similar number stooped in front and behind. The motley group ranged from a fresh businessman in a fine suit who died of a heart attack just days before the uprising to a decade-dead grandmother with worms and maggots dripping from festering eyes and nose. Soldiers with caverns in craniums and abysses in abdomens filled out the ranks.

  After helping a last soldier out of her shallow grave Doogie led his land armada to a ridge slightly above Peachland’s south suburb. Below them carefree children played in the large yard of an elementary school. At its main entrance, and inside four corners of the unfenced schoolyard, army Jeeps, with four soldiers in each, provided protection. Doogie stared until the school bell rang and simultaneously his bell apparently rang. Children went inside, two Jeeps drove off and Doogie pointed to a remaining Jeep and its four soldiers and said to Mort, "Trees give yoo cover. Yoo doo that one. Take with yoo 20. I doo other twoo. More army will come, but tooo late."

  Like Napoleon preparing for Waterloo, Doogie scuffled among his troops. He lifted sunglasses and looked into each pair of yellow, watery eyes and said clearly and firmly, "Doo not eat children." Mort, thinking of his own preschoolers, felt relief. Despite imagining how delicious they would taste, he couldn’t abide the thought of biting into them and prematurely ending their first little lives. He had a twinge of guilt about the cat.

  Doogie waved the left flank forward and Mort lumbered to its front. He had led outings of math classes to study Fibonacci numbers in nature, but never had he imagined leading a squad of anthropophagi in an assault on a school. Warriors under his charge clumped down the hillside slipping and falling, but not making a sound, other than the requisite, whispered, brain. Why, he wondered, did they have to say that? Why not spleen, liver or gland? Or vegetarian with romaine or grain.

  Alert soldiers aimed weapons towards the attac
kers before the first one emerged from the forest. A light breeze blew from behind: the odor gave them away. Someone should have thought of that. Two machine guns, a bazooka and a mortar pointed towards them. Then another Jeep raced up and the armament that pointed in the direction of Mort’s men doubled. He had no idea what to do. To continue would be suicide and to disobey Doogie's plans would be insubordination, if not an act of treason to the zombie nation. Mort froze behind a tree and gunfire roared from Doogie’s end of the school yard. The recently arrived Jeep raced back in that direction. Mort didn’t wave his troops forward in a show of leadership. Instead a former nurse, dressed in pale blue, stepped out from behind a tree and showed the way. A machine gun opened fire and an expert sniper put so many bullets through her head that it became an overripe pumpkin falling apart in the field. Mort’s troops interpreted the destruction of the nurse’s top as a sign to advance and moved forward from behind trees. They could smell the flesh of children and that was all that mattered. A mortar landed at the feet of one and blew body bits into branches. A bazooka removed the left half torso of a middle-aged man who once had been a hunter and now was hunted. Another shot cut a grandmother in half and her twitching arms and legs decorated the schoolyard grass. Mort’s battalion of dimness hadn’t made it half-way across the field and already it was being blown asunder.

  Military manoeuvres appeared not to be one of Mort’s strengths and as he stood beneath a willow, bewildered, he tried to count his strengths and came up empty. Without him, his men surged forward and pieces of shattered heads fell to the dirt. Mort left the weeping willow to follow his mock-army and a bullet knocked a chunk of puffy flesh from his thigh. The hole in his fresh pants caused more concern than the hole in his leg.

  A machine gun made Swiss cheese of the fastest lurchers who steadfastly and fearlessly shuffled towards the school. Yells, screams and gunfire continued from the far end of the yard where Doogie said he would launch his attack. Mort had no idea how that siege progressed, but he knew his own had little chance of success. He tried to shrug his shoulders, but getting upward movement from them proved difficult. Another of his soldiers, so punctured by gunfire that she became semi-transparent, made a slow motion descent to the earth from which she came. The bazooka found another mark, removing a former engineer’s head. The army must have stationed its best marksmen at the school, thought Mort in his vague way. Protecting children with the best soldiers was an idea he approved of although he wasn’t warm to having his own head vented. Within a few minutes Mort stood with just eight compatriots. Bazooka and machine gun reloaded and fired at them. A familiar rat-tat-tat-tat erupted and he looked down at his body for new holes. Instead gunner, driver, mortar operator and bazookaman all tumbled to the sod beside their Jeep. Down the field Doogie stood behind a smoking machine gun on a tripod and signaled that Mort should cross the field and join him.

  Doogie and his squad had overpowered three Jeeps with armament while his group could not take just one Jeep and four soldiers. A career as a military strategist did not await, although he had to concede that Doogie claimed advantageous positioning with his tree cover almost reaching the school.

  A morgue of carnal decrepitude had to be waded through to reach Doogie. Soldiers’ bodies had been ripped apart by undisciplined hyenas and coyotes under Doogie’s command. Shreds of lungs, a broken heart, a stretched duodenum and shards of skull rested on red dirt and grass. Mort’s men munched on leftovers.

  In shallow troughs etched into soft schoolyard soil, bodies of intact fallen soldiers found peaceful rest, courtesy of Doogie’s men. Hungry salivating cannibals circled the graves and wanted to devour the fresh kill that still contained a few edible parts. Doogie kept them at bay with stern glances and hands pressed to chests. When one came forward, rock in hand, with obvious intent of cracking a dead soldier’s cranium Doogie yanked off its sunglasses. The creature doubled over, dropped its rock and hid eyes in hands. Doogie watched it suffer then threw the glasses onto the dirt at its feet. The beast grabbed them and cowered back into the crowd that had backed off a couple of steps.

  The sky came to life when two helicopters, firing machine guns and dropping fragmentation bombs, roared above the school yard, too late. The dead had smashed through the front door and Mort merged with the surging mob. About 15 staff and a couple of classrooms worth of children huddled at the back of the gymnasium. Doogie separated children from staff and when a muscular teacher punched him Doogie dined in front of the screaming kids. With that done he herded the children into a classroom. Zombies guarded every school exit, their teeth their weapons. Outside, sirens wailed as fire trucks, police, ambulances and army vehicles of every type jerked to a halt on the street in front of the school. Reporters, photographers and television crew followed.

  Doogie's unique voice came over the school's inside and outside speakers: "Noo child be hurt if yoo obey. Noo guns, noo gasses, noo big bangs. Yoo light schooolyard and light around schoool. Point flooodlights away from schoool. Yoo leave that zone. In mooorning we talk. Yoo have 20 minutes tooo doo it. Thank yoo."

  Standing tall, on the bed of a pick-up truck, Colonel Mayhew-Shostakovich put a hailer to his mouth and responded, "Release the children and your safety will be guaranteed. If you ..."

  Doogie's voice boomed, "Yoo have 19 minutes."

  Mayhew-Shostakovich issued orders. "You heard that sucker, excuse me, so get to work. Privates Nelson, Cheadle and Armstrong, take three men each and set up enough lighting to flood the yard. Corporal Dylan, you're job is to get everyone except military, fire, Red Cross and police out of here: set up a no go zone, 50 yards for those authorized, one mile for everyone else. Get media outta here. Listen up Sergeant Archibald. Parents will arrive. Set up a compound for them and brief them. And Corporal Cooper, I don't care if you have to plant land mines: nobody gets into the no-go zone. Work fast. Everyone else kiss off, excuse me."

  Sergeant Dougherty arrived in time to hear Mayhew's orders. His ability to think clearly and quickly under pressure again impressed her. Within minutes the military had cleared everyone from schoolyard and surrounding streets.

  Arriving parents learned rumors and news reports had minimized the situation: something far worse unfolded before them. No parent’s most horrid night terrors could compare to the reality of having a child captured by a filthy amoral creature arisen from the grave. At least a pedophile could be tracked down. A kidnapper could be captured and incarcerated. A ransom could be paid. But only one thing could appease a zombie.

  The front door opened and four decrepit creatures shuffled into the afternoon’s lazy light. Each held a crying child, like a sack of spuds, over its shoulder. The four moved to the Jeep where many of Mort’s men had failed, grabbed four dead soldiers and dragged them by the heels to the front door. Jane could hear the helpless children, on zombies' shoulders, screaming and pleading for help. A little girl struggled to get free and her captor smacked her bottom.

  After dead soldiers had been dumped at the door, the four zombs, each still shouldering a child, gathered shovels, picks and other tools from Jeeps. As they grabbed utensils a green Jaguar shredded sod as it tore across the grass at high speed towards them. A young woman wearing a green bicycle helmet drove while an older woman sporting bright red hair waved a rifle out the passenger side window. The car appeared destined to fell all four creatures and four children at 50 mph. Brake lights lit and it skidded sideways on the lawn thumping zombies’ knees and knocking them over. The aim was perfect, the fall gentle and the children didn’t receive so much as a skinned knee. Two women, Jillian and Cindy, leapt out, grabbed two children from fallen zombies and pushed a boy and a girl into the back seat. The first revenant to get to its feet received a barrage of bullets from the rifle aimed by the passenger with flowing red hair. Its left thigh disappeared. Another bullet shattered its kneecap and bits of bone sprayed outward. While the passenger aimed low and fired, the driver who sported an early pregnancy bulge, whacked zombie legs with a metal po
le. The women had a plan: they targeted a weak spot − knees. The two zombies hit hardest by the car dropped their salvaged tools and tried to rise on mangled limbs. One toppled over because its right leg had no more rigidity than a sack of jelly. The other bumped along on knees and grabbed the car’s back door handle: two children inside hollered. The redhead sailed through the passenger doorway in time to hit the lock button. Her friend used her pole to assault the head and knees of the zombie that held onto the door. Another zomb, riddled with bullet holes, grabbed the driver from behind and bared its teeth. The redhead swung a shovel with such force the clang against the zombie's head reverberated through the schoolyard and knocked the beast off its feet. The little girl on its shoulder slipped free and ran to the redhead who put her in the car and relocked its back doors. While she took care of the children's safety two zombies got hold of her companion’s ankle, took her down and wasted no time getting to choice parts. They ripped the fresh, warm bun from her oven and devoured it.

  "Mommy!" screamed a voice from inside the car. Police and soldiers 100 yards away heard it. Two snipers targeted zombies and took the occasional shot, but for the most part could not fire for fear of hitting children, schoolroom or attacking women.

  A voice over the speakers boomed, “Doo not shooot. We hold yooor children.”