He drove slowly on. A Rottie fell from a third-story window and hit head-first on the ground below. It lay unmoving a moment, then pushed to its feet and staggered forward, its neck obviously broken, head hanging obscenely to one side. Draven was tempted to get out of the vehicle and shoot the thing in the head to put it out of its undying misery, but he was beginning to suspect a bullet in the brain wouldn’t lay these abominations to rest. Probably nothing short of cremation would stop them. Saturation bombing with napalm might do it, but crematoriums would be much tidier.
His cell phone rang. He flipped it open and answered. It was Melanie Fisher.
“Bad news,” she said. “There are reports of men with guns trying to get to Bug City. The police intercepted a convoy of pickup trucks and turned them back, but there may be more on the way. They call themselves The Exterminators and say they are going to eliminate the Rotties once and for all.”
“Great,” said Draven, lighting a cigarette.
“Draven…?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful.”
“Bet your sweet ass,” he said, then shut the cell and accelerated to the next corner, where a naked Rottie walked in place, forehead against a streetlamp pole, going nowhere.
He stopped at the curb fronting Raven’s spray-painted wall. He put on the breathing apparatus (a mask connected to a canister of oxygen worn in a canvas sling on his back), shut off the engine and stepped out of the vehicle. He pulled a digital camera from his jacket pocket and approached the brick wall. The nearest Rotties were milling about in the street twenty meters from him, oblivious to his presence. In the distance behind them, another scattered handful wandered a grassy area near the electrified fence.
Draven stared at the woman’s handiwork. Beneath a shapeless blob of red paint were three crude but unmistakable letters: G O D. Below the letters was a misshapen arrow pointing downward. He raised the camera to his eye and snapped off six shots. He looked around to make sure his flank was still secure, then took four more shots.
He wasn’t a religious man, so he was somewhat surprised by his reaction to Raven’s “GOD” graffiti. Chills prickled his arms and scalp, and he felt a falling sensation in his gut as if he were in an elevator suddenly lurching to a stop. He stared at the wall, trying to fathom the meaning of the down-pointing arrow under God. Did it mean the woman thought God was here? Was it a distress signal to the Almighty, the arrow intended to direct Him here from Heaven? Did it mean God was buried here, entombed beneath the arrow? Did it mean anything at all, or was it only a religious delusion of a decaying brain?
He shot one last picture, stuck the camera in his jacket and walked toward the building across the street—the direction from which Raven originally had come to spray her message on the wall. He didn’t relish going into any of these buildings, but he had to begin his search somewhere, and it seemed a logical choice. If there were 1,400 Rotties within these fences, then most of them had to be inside the buildings; there weren’t that many wandering about outside. Maybe a shred of primitive instinct to seek shelter drove them indoors.
He stopped in the doorway of building F, pulled his Mag-Lite from his back pocket and stepped inside. There was no electricity in any of the buildings and Draven felt as if he were entering a shadowy cave—or a giant tomb. He heard nothing but the rhythmic hiss of his breath in his oxygen mask. In front of him was a stairway to the two floors of apartments above. He clicked on the flashlight and started on the ground floor, going from unit to unit, but to his surprise he found the ramshackle apartments empty. Where the hell were the Rotties?
He took the thin concrete-and-steel steps to the second floor. He kicked a door open and his beam of light fell on a naked corpse standing in front of a TV with a shattered screen. In profile, her partially decayed breasts sagged to her enormous belly. The woman must’ve been pregnant when she succumbed to the virus, and Draven willed himself not to think of the never-to-be-born infant slowly rotting in her womb. She turned sluggishly toward the source of the light beam, her eyes holding the light like cloudy mirrors. Her pregnant belly was unnaturally low-slung, the dark purple head of the dead baby protruding from her vagina. Draven guessed that the walls of her womb had yielded to rot and gravity had brought the infant to its obscene impasse. He left them there and went on to the next unit. Fifteen minutes later he’d completed his sweep of F building, having found only six Rotties—none of them Raven. He decided to go back to Building G, marked by the inexplicable graffiti.
As soon as he went through the doorway he knew he’d hit undead pay-dirt. Rotties congregated at the foot of the stairs, on the stairs and in the doorways of apartment units. Some of them turned in his direction and looked at him with dead eyes. Unlike the living-dead in countless zombie movies, these walking corpses didn’t grunt, growl or shriek “More brains.” With no air in the lungs, they couldn’t vocalize at all. There was only the low murmur of shuffling bare feet.
Draven played his light in their faces, looking for Raven. Some of them backed away from the light, others moved toward it. Remembering the man who’d pounded the ambulance, he warily advanced into the huddle of zombies. The stench found its way into his mask. He ignored it and weaved his way through them and toward the first apartment.
A mummified hand knocked his oxygen mask askew, and he lashed out with the Mag-Lite in a moment of panic. The heavy flashlight thumped into a wide, putrefied face and dislodged the dead man’s nose and caved in his cheek. Another hand latched onto the back of Draven’s jacket and yanked him off balance. He swung around with the club-like Mag-Lite and cracked it against the aggressive Rottie’s skull. The light didn’t go out.
As with one mind, the undead crowd washed over Draven like a relentless ocean wave and took him under.
The dead sea of yellow-clad corpses suddenly parted above him. He was on his back, looking up into the face of the woman he’d been sent to find. Raven had found him.
* * *
She extended her slender hand to him, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch her and stood up on his own. His mask hung below his chin. He left it there so he could speak clearly to her. “My name is Draven,” he said in a loud, clear voice. “I’ve come to take you out of here. Do you understand me?”
Though her eyes were death-clouded, he perceived intelligence behind them. She silently mouthed his name.
Your name is on the lips of the dead.
The other Rotties stood motionless around them, leaning in expectantly. Draven sensed they were watching this meeting with great reverence, as if he were an envoy from the world of the living, here to impart a message of profound import to their leader.
“Will you come with me?” he asked.
Her face didn’t appear any worse for the wear than it had when her photo was taken. The eggheads were apparently right about the unnatural rate of decay. And yet, most of the other Rotties seemed more rotten than Raven, their flesh slowly yielding to the ravages of decomposition, while her skin remained fairly smooth, though deathly pallid. What, Draven wondered, made her different?
He stared into her unblinking eyes, waiting for an answer, a nod, any sign that she understood his question. “Come with me,” he said. “Please.”
A helicopter’s rotors thumped the air above the building. The Rotties stirred, reacting to the sound. A ripple ran through the herd. Raven raised her hands and immediately calmed them. Draven was astounded by her easy control over her dead fellows.
As he was about to reach for her arm to regain her attention, gunfire erupted outside. Draven pushed through the stinking bodies and looked out the nearest window. Outside the rear fence three men with rifles were shooting at the scattered handful of Rotties in front of them. One of the targets spun around and fell to the weed-choked ground, bits of decayed flesh flying from its face.
“Son of a bitch,” Draven spat. He rushed outside, drawing his .45 from his shoulder rig.
The wounded corpse was on hands and knees, trying to get up.
The police helicopter hovered over the armed Exterminators, its loud-speaker ordering them to drop their weapons, but the three riflemen continued to fire at the walking dead.
Draven stood in the middle of the narrow street, assumed a two-handed firing stance and snapped off four shots through the chain-link fence. He didn’t expect to score hits with his handgun at this distance. His intention was to scare the shooters off. But they continued to fire. And now they were firing at him.
The cell phone in his pocket chirped and a rifle slug thumped the asphalt at his feet. Draven quickly calculated trajectory and adjusted his aim accordingly, then fired again. One of the riflemen went down. The two remaining Exterminators increased their rate of fire, apparently infuriated by the loss of their fallen comrade.
A high-powered slug ripped into Draven’s left shoulder and a millisecond later a slug drilled into his forehead, cut a fatal swath through his brain and blew out the back of his head.
* * *
Melanie Fisher and Dr. Todd saw Draven’s death on the live-feed screen. Though there was no sound accompanying the picture, Fisher “felt” the devastating head-shot in her belly. She collapsed into the seat and buried her face in her hands.
“Look!” said Todd. “There she is!”
Fisher looked up at the screen. With the enigmatic wall-painting in the background, Raven walked to Draven’s body and squatted stiffly over him. The dead woman cupped Draven’s face in her hand, then bent down and pressed her lips to the wound in his head.
“My God, what’s she doing?” asked Todd. “Is she…drinking his blood?”
After a full minute, Raven pulled away and stood up.
“No,” said Fisher when she saw the impossible thing that happened next.
Draven sat up in the street and looked around like a man waking in unfamiliar surroundings. Raven extended her hand. Draven accepted it, and she pulled him to his feet. He touched his fingertips to the back of his ruined skull, looked at his fingers, and then walked hand-in-hand with Raven toward the building. A small crowd of Rotties assimilated them with welcoming arms.
“Jesus Christ! What the hell just happened?” Todd demanded.
“I’m not sure,” Melanie Fisher said, “but I think she just gave him the kiss of life.”
Read an excerpt of Randy Chandler's HELLz BELLz, now available on Kindle and Nook!
Randy Chandler's out-of-print and hard-to-find novel HELLz BELLz is back in ebook, on Kindle and Nook.
When an ancient bell begins to toll in an abandoned church, the town of Druid Hills descends into a night of unholy hell. To survive, the less crazed citizens must fight for their lives as they battle their own primitive urges to commit unspeakable acts. Before the night ends, some will discover that there are fates worse than death.
Praise for HELLz BELLz
“The tension is built with the skill of a professional, and it is added to by the reader's knowledge that every character is expendable. Hellz Bellz is good fun. There is sex, violence and a hell of a story. This novel reminds me just a little of early-Stephen King mixed with everything Richard Laymon ever wrote. This one, you should read.”
—SFReader
“Oh intellectual horror, how I’ve missed you!! After one too many mind-numbing books, Hellz Bellz is a treat to be both desired and consumed.”
—Horror-Web
CHAPTER ONE
* * *
The church bell began to toll at sunset.
Joe Carr lifted his eyes from the steamy sidewalk, turned his head and looked up at the abandoned church on Holy Cross Hill. He shook his head in perplexed wonder and pushed through the smudged-glass door of the Jiffy-Quick Mini-Mart. Crossing the threshold, he felt a fleeting sense of déjà vu.
The cowbell above the door clanged and the clean-shaven Pakistani behind the counter glanced up from a newspaper and gave Joe a wary nod. Joe figured the guy saw every customer as a potential robber, so he smiled to show he was no threat. But behind the plastic smile he was thinking: Just an ordinary Joe, fuck you very much.
“Nice and cool in here,” Joe said as he walked up to the counter. He shivered against the air-conditioner’s chill. Too damn cold, but still better than being out in the hot soupy air of the endless late-summer heat wave. “I need a pack of Benson and Hedges menthol.”
The Pakistani reached to the rack above his head, pulled down the pack of smokes and slapped it on the counter like a Blackjack dealer slapping down a winning ace. “Anything else?”
Before Joe could say, “No thanks,” the cowbell clanged again and the man went into a paroxysm of anger and sputtered, “You get out of here. I call police.”
Joe looked back to see who had set off such an intense reaction from the Pakistani.
A rat-faced man with long greasy hair raised his middle finger and proudly presented it to the storekeeper. His lips peeled back in a gap-toothed grin a hockey goalie would’ve been proud of. His faded grease-stained jeans looked pretty good compared to the ragged Army fatigue shirt he wore unbuttoned to his hairy belly, its sleeves cut off at thick shoulders, his shoulders and forearms etched with violent swirls of skin art.
Joe stared at the muted colors of the man’s tattooed flesh. Things seemed to be moving around there, as if some of the tattoos were alive and crawling up and down his thick arms.
“What’re you looking at, asshole?” the illustrated man asked Joe.
“You are a thief!” the Pakistani shouted. “I don’t want you in my store!”
“Nothing,” Joe mumbled, looking at the floor.
“Bullshit,” the man said as he came forward, knocking over a wire rack of over-priced potato chips.
Joe stepped back and bumped into the counter.
Rat Face stepped on a bag of chips. Cellophane crinkled. Chips crackled. Joe’s heart pounded on his eardrums.
“My money ain’t no good here?” Rat Face yanked the little chain hooked to his thick belt and a greasy-looking wallet popped out of his jeans pocket. The wallet looked like it had been run over by a fleet of eighteen-wheelers with leaky crankcases. “I’m a paying customer, you rag-head goat fucker.”
The storekeeper did some more sputtering, finally getting out the words: “I call nine-one-one.” He had the phone in his hand and was holding it like a weapon.
Joe was close enough to Rat Face to smell his stench, and his stomach did a rollover, sending a hot surge of bile up his throat. He decided to get the hell out of there and do his cigarette shopping elsewhere, but as he took his first step toward the door, Rat Face planted his filthy thick-knuckled hand in the center of Joe’s chest and stopped him.
“Hold up, Bubba,” said Rat Face, “you’re my witness. You see this guy threatening me wid dat phone?”
The Pakistani started punching digits, but before he hit the third number, Rat Face reached over the counter and snatched the phone away, laughing. It was a dirty, rumbling sound, like the thunder of hot-rods on a dusty drag strip.
Joe found his voice and said, “Let’s just—”
“You son of a bitch,” Rat Face spat, dropping the phone. He was talking to the storekeeper who had pulled a pistol from under the counter and was pointing it at him.
There was a long nerve-wracking moment of thick silence.
Rat Face stared at the Pakistani. The Pakistani stared back. Joe’s eyes went back and forth between the two men faced off across the counter.
The air-conditioner hummed.
Up on Holy Cross Hill, the iron bell in the belfry of the forsaken church continued its somber tolling. Who’s ringing that damn bell? Joe wondered.
Then the door opened, the cowbell clatter-clanked and a girl in cutoff jeans and a skimpy halter-top sauntered into the store. She didn’t look toward the three men frozen at the counter, but went straight toward the refrigerated beer on the back wall of the Jiffy-Quick.
“Your damn Skippy,” said Rat Face, smiling at the man with the gun.
Joe took a second to wonder what the hell that m
eant, then he moved on to the real question: Is somebody going to get shot?
“Give me the phone,” the Pakistani demanded. He had the pistol’s muzzle zeroed on the longhair’s chest.
“Fuck you, come get it,” said Rat Face.
The girl in the red halter-top pulled a six-pack of brew from the fridge, let the glass door shut with the sound of a smacking kiss, then turned toward the counter and froze when she saw the gun in the storekeeper’s hand.
Joe shook his head, trying to signal her away. But her wide eyes never left the gun. Joe’s eyes drifted down to her jaunty breasts. The cold air in the store had puckered her nipples and they poked against the thin halter-top, tweaking the single-minded little soldier in Joe’s pants. The little trooper’s helmet nosed against Joe’s zipper, unmindful of mortal danger.
“You think I will not shoot you?” the incredulous storekeeper asked Rat Face.
“You ain’t got the balls, sand monkey.” Rat Face sneered, flashing his gapped teeth.
Outside, the church bell kept up its ponderous bonging.
Joe had had enough. He was not going to be hostage to this tableau of macho craziness. He moved toward the girl with the six-pack. She finally tore her eyes from the gun and fixed them on Joe as he walked toward her. “We have to go,” he said simply, softly.
She gave him a questioning look, then glanced down at the six-pack of beer in her hand. She had a hard-edged prettiness that reminded Joe of a country & western singer he couldn’t quite put a name to. She was probably in her mid-twenties, with bottle-blonde hair and a tight little body. If he had to guess, he’d say she lived in the run-down tenement building off Old Boston Road, two blocks from where they now stood in dangerous limbo. She looked up at Joe again.
“Forget the beer,” he said. “We gotta go.”
She nodded. She put the beer on top of a stack of soup cans, keeping a wary eye on the two men at the cashier’s counter.
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