The eighth blew off the tip of Betty’s left breast.
There was no ninth.
Betty Davis Wolfe died slowly.
There were no dead relatives waiting to welcome her, no light shining at the end of a tunnel, just her failing flashlight in this drug-runner’s tunnel.
She died wishing she’d had a last cigarette.
When she woke to the afterdeath, what she desired was not a smoke.
17
Mystery Train
Piggy was too pooped to pop. She was like the hobo campfire, flamed out and burnt down to dying embers. Lethargic, gorged on hobo blood and meat to the point where she didn’t want to move. Warm liquid seeped out of her anus. She reckoned it was the blood she’d imbibed from that silly skull-fucker Sop. Hadn’t he been shocked when she chomped his drippy little dick off! One fell snap of the teeth and his limp sausage was in her mouth and he was screaming his ass off, but not for long. By the time she’d chewed the blood out of his cock and spit the thing on the ground, he was flat on his back, passing out. And that was when Piggy made a pig of herself. She took the stump of his dick in her mouth and sucked and sucked and sucked the blood out of him. Couldn’t call it cocksucking because his cock was mostly gone. But that was some sweet nub-sucking, right? She drained him nice and slow and didn’t stop until his heart did. When she was finally done, she rolled over and saw that Sick had bested Suck by chewing his throat out like a fast-food junkie. Piggy preferred dining at a more leisurely pace and figured that made her a more refined diner than hobo Sick, who must’ve wandered off to find another snack. Suck was just now stirring to life (or non-life) and would likewise be about the business of finding food with a heartbeat.
Piggy thought this was some weird shit, all right.
Weirder still was how quickly it became second nature to her, this new way of life, or undeath, or whatever the devil you called it. What wasn’t so weird was that her suicidal impulse had survived her death. Doing away with herself now was a bigger challenge. A harder row to hoe for any ho. But she knew she could do it. And now that her gut was so full of blood that it was leaking out her ass, it seemed the ideal time to end this nasty-ass excuse of an afterlife. And she knew just how to do it.
She rose from the earth. Like a slow shadow, Sop the Dickless Dead rose a moment after her. He looked at her, his blanched face shrivel-wrinkled in death, then he shambled away in shame. Or maybe just to find warm-blooded victuals.
Piggy heard the distant train whistle and hobbled as fast as she could toward the tracks. She slipped and slid down the embankment to the rail bed and then slipped on the gravel thereabouts, but she beat the train to the tracks and stood there with her arms outstretched in a kaput parody of crucifixion.
She looked up at the fabled rosy-fingered dawn, renamed it bloody-fingered dawn of the dead, and then looked at the Cyclopean beam of light shining from the mighty engine that would (with any luck at all) turn her already mangled body into mincemeat, and she said (without sound), “I’m not Piggy Poop. I’m Peg Pope and I quit this world of my own free will. God damn it all to hell!”
She couldn’t know for certain where this mystery train might take her. But if it wasn’t the Oblivion Express, she was going to be appallingly pissed.
18
Paradise Denied
Nadif didn’t know how to be dead. Dead in the way the two Mexicans who killed him were. Dead but still going. Going about the business of killing. And eating. Human flesh. Once he was dead, or at least without breath and a heartbeat, the murderous dead left him alone. They—and now he—wanted only living flesh and streaming blood. How could this be?
What must Allah be thinking to allow such a thing? But no, this was not Allah’s doing. This was Satan’s. Allah was simply sitting back and letting it happen as punishment for this crazy-quilt continent of infidels. Was this not right? Nadif didn’t know. Could only guess and his guesses were not so good now that his brain was dead and his consciousness was running unknown ethereal circuits, plagued with power surges and brownouts, the brownouts characterized by mindless walking and virtually no mental activity. And beneath it all, the constant craving for warm blood-in-the-flesh.
Was this a test? A test of his will to fulfill his mission? The canisters of Black Death remained in his backpack but he was far afield from his jihadi job, and his feet seemed to be going their own way. His feet cared nothing for the Grand Jihad. Was his spirit strong enough to prevail? He wanted to face Mecca, drop to his knees and pray for strength but his feet kept walking the cursed land, in search of the only thing that would satisfy his infernal craving.
The irony was not entirely lost on him that he had been prepared to die hideously of the Black Death, so long as Paradise waited to welcome him on the other side of death, but now here he was stranded in a hellish realm where death itself was a permanent state of being. This was too diabolical for words. This was—
Something slapped his arm.
A moment later came the echoing pop of distant gunfire. Someone was shooting at him.
Up ahead a cluster of three or four other dead walkers also drew fire. The tallest one’s head exploded and he went down like a marionette whose strings have been all at once severed.
Another slug slapped into Nadif, this time striking him squarely in the chest and knocking him backward to the ground. As he got slowly to his feet, Nadif’s memory lazily looped back to his combat training at various camps in the Horn of Africa and he recalled his abbreviated training with a high-powered Russian sniper rifle. By the time he was standing again his sluggish mind had worked out that right now there were at least two shooters taking pot-shots at him and his … kind. Zombies. Zionist zombies?
There would be a big exit wound in his back. One of the backpack canisters containing weaponized plague had most likely been breached. The virus would be wasted here in this wasteland.
He thought he should remove the backpack and note the damage but as soon as the thought came into his head, it evaporated and he walked on into the dawn, thinking single-mindedly of finding bloody sustenance.
Nadif paid little mind to the sniper’s slugs snapping past and sometimes slamming into him. They were hardly more annoying than aggressive insects, hungry horseflies or fat mosquitoes.
19
Man Walks Into A Bar
Cruz came to with a shotgun muzzle pressed hard against his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.
“What’ll it be?” the shotgun-wielding bartender asked.
“Uh, shot of tequila,” Cruz said. “Make it a double and uh, hold the buckshot.”
The bartender pulled the shotgun away. Cruz raised his head off the bar and rubbed the throbbing knot over his left ear. The last thing he remembered was sitting down at the bar and then the bartender swinging a shotgun at his head in the manner of a batter going for a bunt.
“Can’t be too careful,” the bartender said, “what with all the wild shit coming down.”
“Right,” Cruz said. Who was he to argue with a psycho strapped with a shotgun?
The bartender set the shotgun down and poured Cruz a shot. “Now that the world’s turned into a fucking Romero movie, a guy can’t be too careful, ya know?”
“Right.”
“Could’ve just gone ahead and shot you, you know. But I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Little love tap to see if you woke up dead or not. Sometimes you can’t tell right off the bat. If a dude’s dead or zombied out or normal. One thing that ain’t like the movies, a headshot don’t put the deaders down. I can prove that shit. You wanna see?” “Uh, no, that’s all right,” Cruz said after he downed the shot.
“C’mon, what’s it gonna hurt? Ain’t like you got something else to do. What with the world gone to shit and dead. Hell, I would’ve closed up hours ago but I don’t wanna have to go home to shoot the wife, you know? Ain’t got the heart. It’s all over the news. They don’t come right out and say all the dead are walking but a little reading between the lines t
ells the tale. Me, I’ve seen it for my own damn self. Hadda blow away two dead cocksuckers. One a good customer too. Come on, pal, it ain’t gonna kill you. Come meet Joe the Dead.”
Cruz didn’t move. He said, “How about another shot of tequila?”
“Sure, sure. After you see Joe. Joe the Dead. Ain’t got no head but he keeps going and going like that fucking battery-hyped bunny beating a bass drum. He’s locked in the ladies room. C’mon, he can’t hurt you. He’s so shot to shit he just lies there twitching.”
“No thanks,” Cruz said. “I don’t have the stomach for it right now.”
The bartender scowled, leaned close and lowered his voice: “You better find it real quick, buddy. Dude in the booth over there’s got plans for you. And he don’t strike me as somebody you wanna rub the wrong way.”
Cruz turned his head as casually as he could to get a look at the dude in the booth.
Blink-click: mental snapshot: man in a red hoodie, hood up to conceal his face. The same guy.
Bad juju coming off him in waves.
Baad juju.
“What’re you talking about?” Cruz asked as quietly as he could. “What plans?”
“Fuck should I know? Ask him. He’s the mystery man on the news. Where he shows up, the shit goes down. They been showing cell-phone pictures of him. They think he’s some kinda terrorist but he’s something a damn site worse than that.”
Cruz stole another glance. It looked like the guy had no face.
Bartender whispered, “Get off your ass and come with me. I don’t want on this guy’s bad side. Let’s go. Joe ain’t getting no fresher.”
“Right,” Cruz said, sliding off the stool. “Tell me, what city is this?”
“Jesus Christ. Phoenix. Where the fuck ya think?”
Cruz shrugged. “I have no idea how I got here.”
“Yeah, well, that could be the least of your problems, pal.”
20
Shoot & Loot
Wyatt put the crosshairs on the guy’s forehead and fired again. In the scope it was great the way the wetback drug mule’s head came apart.
“That did it,” Clint attaboyed him. “Put him down that time.”
“Dink’s dead but won’t stay down,” Wyatt said, using the term his granddaddy often used for the Vietnamese whenever he told war stories. “Watch. He’ll pop back up in a minute. Weird shit happening here, bro.”
“End Times, dude. Time to be lewd, crude and screwed.”
“Not before we get that dope,” Wyatt said.
“We got three backsacks full. That ought to do us dumb awhile.”
“We get this one and then haul ass before the Border Patrol’s choppers start chopping.”
“Whoa, there he goes! He’s getting up again. That shit is ill.”
Yes, it was, Wyatt had to agree. Yesterday the world was the same old ass-dull place it always was, and now here they were a few hours into the next day and the dead were walking and it was even weirder than the news guys knew or were saying. Maybe it was the End Times. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was the perfect time to put their longtime plan in effect.
Shoot & Loot they called it. They had trained themselves with their self-styled sniper school. No actual teachers, just books, videos and related internet sites. It was a short leap from being boys raised on hunting to becoming men skilled in the deadly art of killing with long-range weapons. Once they were proficient in shooting, they worked on refining the Loot part of their plan.
The drug cartels used the Arizona-Mexican border for smuggling dope into the U.S. Everybody knew it, just as most folks knew the Feds did next to nothing to stop it, mostly because of dumb-ass political reasons. The way Wyatt figured it, the drugs were theirs for the taking. The “mule” trains were usually guarded by guys with automatic weapons but a couple of Red White & Blue American boys with sniper rifles could take out the guards at a safe distance, no problem. Then all they had to do was put down as many mules as they could (all you had to do was wing them, not kill them) and go down and collect their dope-crammed backpacks.
Shoot & Loot, baby. Protect the good old U. S. of A. from illegals and get paid in dope. This was a shooting war and the spoils of war went to the best shooters with the best battleplan.
The only wrinkle in the plan was that these walking dead motherfuckers messed up the One Shot, One Kill sniper’s credo. Apparently, you couldn’t kill these zombies with any number of shots. That Shoot em in the head shit worked only in the movies, not out here along the fucking border. But that was okay. Wyatt was digging the shit out of shooting dudes who were already dead (or supposed to be). It took any guilt right out of the fucking picture. Even with that freaky eyeball in the sky watching like the eye of some goddamn god.
God had to cut you a little slack for blowing away living dead dudes humping dope.
“That’s five mules down,” Clint said. “Let’s go get us some drugs, dude.”
“Hope none of them zombie shooters accidentally gets off a lucky killshot,” Wyatt said.
“Nah, man, you can see they ain’t even holding their weapons no more. They still kicking but they can’t shoot shit. Ain’t in their minds to do it.”
“Reckon you’re right, clit.”
“Don’t call me that shit,” Clint said.
Wyatt chuckled. It felt good after the extreme stress of their first Shoot & Loot. He said, “Let’s hike down there and get the shit. Check out these zombie motherfuckers up close and personal, like.”
21
Plague Be Upon You
Nadif was more than a little amazed that he could still see even though his eyes and much of his cranium had been destroyed by the last sniper’s shot. He didn’t know if this was a good thing or a very bad one. That the disembodied soul could still see was not so surprising. That it must witness such abominations was. Where exactly were the soul’s eyes located? he wondered. Was he somehow seeing now by the grace (or curse) of the great eye in the sky? (An image of his beloved’s eyeball hanging by its stalk over her bloody cheek flashed through his memory, then faded as fast as summer lightning.)
Two young men stood over his spasming body. Infidels. American devils with scoped rifles. His destroyers. Mocking him. Laughing at him.
Nadif’s soul smiled. Now he understood. Allah was granting him a divine favor, a blessed boon. Allah was allowing him to see that the exquisitely weaponized plague virus was about to be passed on to these two ignorant devils and carried back into their homes and environs, thence to spread as if on fiery desert winds. The onset of symptoms would be unnaturally rapid and cruelly devastating. Best of all, the organism would remain insidiously virulent as it spread through the population.
Nadif’s soul shouted: God is great!
Allahu Akbar.
22
Joe the Dead
Dude was the Devil. Bobby Cruz had a nose for news and his news nose told him so:
This dude in the red hoodie is the honest-to-God Devil.
And unlike most people in the news business, Bobby believed deeply in the Devil, and had done so since he was old enough to grasp the concept of Ultimate Evil Personified. Six, as he recalled. That was how old he was when he actually saw in his mind’s eye Satan rising from the ground to grab him and take him down to hell. A childish image now. But was it really? If the dead could rise, then why couldn’t the Devil come up from hell? He could. The question now was: Why? And what did the Devil want with Bobby Cruz?
“Go on,” said the bartender. “Ask him. If you got the balls. But first you gotta see Joe. I call him Joe the Dead after a character in a book a customer left on the bar one time. By William Burroughs? You heard of him? Faggot addict, dead now. Boy, did he come up with some crazy faggy shit. Anyway, here’s Joe.”
The bartender threw open the Ladies Room door and the smell of death and deodorizer hit Bobby full force in the face, kicked open his sinuses and blew them out like a teargas bomb. His eyes ran with tears. Runny eyes, runny nose-for-new
s.
The body was on the floor by the first stall. Its head was completely separated from the hideous blackened stump of its neck. From the looks of things, the bartender had blown the head off with several close-range blasts. The eyes in the head were intact and looked up at Cruz and the bartender with worried puzzlement, as if Joe the Dead were wondering if they were going to play football with his head.
His arms and legs had likewise been blown off and lay twitching several feet from their stumps. One bloody hand was trying to drag itself across the wet tile with its fingers, like a wounded rat seeking to hide in a dark corner.
“See and remember,” the bartender said. “I think that’s what the man in red wants you to do. Like some sort of reporter for the end of the world. Like the red dude’s disciple.”
“He told you this?”
“Well, not in so many words. Not in words at all. Guy never speaks. He puts thoughts in your head. Slips em right in there somefucking-how. That’s why I gave you a whack on the head when you sat at my bar. He made me do it, I think, just to knock you off balance, sort of like a master smacking sense into his apprentice. Him being the master, not me. Call me crazy, but I think he’s an angel. Not the airy-fairy type. More like the ones God sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Cruz, wiping his eyes. “I’ve seen and smelled enough of Joe.”
“Yeah. Rest in pieces, Joe.” The bartender chortled at his own trite joke.
23
Beelzebub
They left the Ladies Room and returned to the bar. The Red Hoodie Devil remained in the booth, his face—if he had one—remained hidden in suggestive shadow.
Bobby wondered what would happen if he took the bartender’s shotgun and pumped some slugs into the red-hooded son of a bitch.
The Devil laughed inside Bobby’s head. Laughed so hard it rattled Bobby’s eyeballs and gave him a splitting headache.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” he said, pressing both hands to his head as if to keep it from splitting apart. “So what do you want with me?”
The Devil plopped a leatherbound book on the table in front of him.
Deadcore: 4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas Page 6