Bobby warily approached the booth.
The air changed. It was as if the Devil had brought a little of hell’s atmosphere with him. It fairly crackled. It smelled not of brimstone but of cloves and cinnamon and something long dead and mouldering.
The Devil raised a hand and the TV over the bar came to life. A local news anchor who looked like she hadn’t bothered with the usual makeup and hairspray was saying: “… and demonstrators on both sides of the issue are already gathering in downtown Phoenix in spite of the governor’s warning to stay away. Similar demonstrations are also planned for other Arizona cities, but no word yet on what’s happening at those locations. We’ll be going live to our on-scene reporter shortly.”
Then the Devil was in Bobby’s head. It was a voice that required neither tongue to speak it nor ears to hear it, yet it was melodiously full and powerfully seductive.
It said, Go there and record what you see in the book. Report faithfully. Soon there will be no electronic record and no electricity. Your way of life is about to be wiped. Set all you see down in these pages and keep them safe.
Bobby grew woozy. Blood roared like an ocean in his ears and he thought he was going to faint. He leaned forward to brace himself on the table.
The Devil’s hands were long, bloodless and without a trace of hair. They were delicate. One of them produced an ornate black pen of a type Bobby Cruz had never seen before, obviously antiquated and adorned with ram’s-head horns. He knew without looking that the Devil’s fingers would be devoid of fingerprints. Angels had no fingerprints. Neither did a fallen angel. Cruz knew this without knowing precisely how he knew it.
TV voices came back into his ears: “That’s right, Janis. Now that the CDC has been called in and the National Guard has been called out, you would expect smaller crowds here in the streets of Phoenix, especially so early in the morning, but as you can see, the crowds on both sides of the illegal immigration issue are large and growing. And tempers are already flaring. The riot squad only moments ago arrived and are beginning to deploy. They’re using bullhorns to tell the crowds to disperse but no one is showing any sign of leaving this tense scene. And as you just reported, Janis, the governor has said she won’t hesitate to declare martial law if necessary, which it well may be, with emergency response systems all over the state so overloaded as to be virtually nonexistent. Arizona is in a crisis of unimaginable consequences and nobody knows how this bizarre series of events will end or how far the growing chaos will spread. I can tell you, there is a feeling of panic bordering on hysteria out here on the streets and a sense that things are about to explode. Whatever the outcome, we will be here to bring it to our viewers, for as long as possible. But as one riot cop told me just minutes ago, ‘When the dead walk, all bets are off.’”
Cruz picked up the pen and the leatherbound book. He thumbed through pages and saw that they were all blank, as he expected. He licked his parched lips, reached down in his gut for the courage to address the red-hooded entity and said, “For the record, who are you?”
You know who I am. You may call me Bub. But don’t call me Nick or Scratch.
“As in Beelzebub, Lord of Flies?” Cruz all too vividly remembered the attack of the fierce flies in the back of the truck. He couldn’t remember much of what happened after that, but he remembered enough to know that it was probably best not to remember too much horror.
Don’t be so pedestrian. Use those qualities for which you were chosen. No scribe of mine should be prosaic. Moreover, I am not the story. The story is the final fall of man.
Bobby nodded. “Uh, one more question. Where is God in all this?”
Don’t be obtuse, Cruz. He is the author of the entire epic. He wrote it in genetic codes and in the dark matter of the spirit. He should have stopped with the angels and kept it all in the spiritual realm. When you create a material realm and then make flesh self-aware, how else can it end but badly? Now go, scribe, once more into the breach.
He snugged the book under his arm, pocketed the ram’s-head pen, turned on his heels and started away. Then he stopped, half turned and said, “Why me? Would you mind telling me that?”
Bub gave a slight shrug. Because you were ripe for it. And you’re not a complete moron. I’m the only thing between you and a life of zombie bloodlust.
Bobby Cruz nodded and then headed out into the wild streets.
24
When The Dead Walk, All Bets Are Off
Nuts. Everybody was. The whole scene was soup-to-nuts insane and getting crazier by the minute. By the second. How the hell he was supposed to capture this bedlam-hits-the-streets shit on paper was beyond him.
Cruz didn’t know this city very well, but it wasn’t hard to find the heart of the action. All he had to do was follow the howling sounds of mass destruction, madness and violent death. Downtown Phoenix had indeed become an extended scene from a George Romero zombie movie-turned-reality-TV-show on steroids, on crack, on crystal meth and mad mushrooms. In the highest fevers of his imagination, Romero had never dreamt anything to rival what Bobby Cruz saw unfolding like the giant wings of a fallen phoenix struggling mightily to rise from this ashes-to-ashes nightmare necropolis.
The dead walked.
The dead ran.
The dead took down the living and feasted on their yummy bleeding flesh.
The living fought back. With whatever makeshift weapons they could find, including severed body parts and heads.
What had started as a sprawling rumble between opposing groups of demonstrators quickly deteriorated into an out-for-blood free-for-all when ravenous zombies began popping up on both sides and even within the ranks of the riot squad. It seemed to Bobby that a disproportionate number of zombies wore the purple shirts of union thugs. One such unlucky ghoul stumbled along the sidewalk with a teargas canister spewing acrid fog from a big hole in his belly.
Fires broke out. Streets became hellishly fogged with smoke and teargas.
Streets ran with blood. With bile. With urine. Feces. Phlegm. Pus. With every kind of bodily fluid there was, including semen spilled during various instances of rape, gang-rape and all manner of rock-out-with-your-cock-out buggery. It was a veritable orgy of carnal degradation and neo-death. Death is the new life, Bobby mused.
He saw it all from the relatively safe remove of the arched balcony of a church tower, one tier below the bell tower. He stood transfixed. Unable to stop watching the carnage. Writing anything in the Devil’s Book was impossible. His job now was to witness and remember. Later, he would set it down on unholy paper. What he was seeing now he would never forget, so long as he lived, and probably longer.
A helicopter fell out of the sky and crashed into the side of an apartment building just before noon. There was no fiery explosion, as there most certainly would’ve been in the movies. Just the impact, and then the flying machine tumbled lazily to the pavement below, crushing a handful of rioters or demonstrators or whatever the hell you wanted to call them now.
Cruz figured demonstrators had it about right. Demonstrators at the end of the world. As we know it. And love it. So … Goodbye to All That. You Can’t Go Home Again. But It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleedin’. Look Homeward, Angel, but you can’t get there because of this Idiot Wind so all you can do is Ring Them Bells down on Desolation Row and forget those Subterranean Homesick Blues ’cause When The Deal goes Down It’s A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall. Bob Dylan and Thomas Wolfe warred in his head, and that seemed to Bobby to be about right, given what was going on round about him.
To remain sane you had to go a little mad.
At noon a U-haul truck came barreling up a street that was supposed to be closed to traffic and slammed into a gaggle of street fighters interspersed with blood-crazed dead.
It was at this moment that the cartoon lightbulb went on in Bobby’s head: The ranks of the living-dead crazies were growing exponentially. At this rate, the dead undoubtedly would triumph in the end. It was a mathematical certainty, short of divine
intervention, which Cruz didn’t expect, not after his tête-à-tête with Satan. The dead had the numbers advantage and it wouldn’t take long for this zombie craze (what else could you call it?) to break out of Arizona and spread to other states, even other countries as long as planes remained flying. For all he knew, it could’ve started in other states as well, if Beelzebub or his minions had gone there with his zombie-making flies.
On the other hand, it seemed fitting that the original outbreak was at the Arizona-Mexico border, the site of so much hostility, hate, fear, envy, violence and specific depravity related to drug cartels, human trafficking and political huckstering. Surely hell’s dark forces were drawn to such places like flies to shit. Surely Satan (Old Nick ‘Beelzebub’ Scratch himself) loved such sinful symmetry. And if Big Red Riding Hood wasn’t lying about God being the author of civilization’s crazy clusterfuck entire, then there it was in a God-given nutshell.
Zombies Gone Wild. Mankind mostly gone.
In the distance, about a mile from where he stood on the church-tower balcony, a jetliner came screaming out of the sky and crashed into a tall building.
Jet-fuel fireball.
Cruz could easily imagine the sort of onboard zombie drama that likely brought down the plane. How could he not?
He yawned. He was very tired. He could quite easily curl up right here for a catnap.
What’s the matter, old man, is this end-of-the-world action boring you?
Was the voice asking the question his or Satan’s. In the end, Bobby Cruz didn’t figure there was that much difference.
25
Virulence
Clint was sick as a dog. Sick as a mangy coyote with half its guts hanging out and dragging the ground. Sicker than cancer-ward shit. He felt like he was sure as shit dying. He said so to Wyatt. But Wyatt didn’t hear him. Wyatt was on the floor, delirious and puking his guts up. And from the smell of him, shitting his britches.
The world was made of shit.
Clint wanted to get up off the bed and look again in the mirror to see what those sores under his armpits and on his neck looked like now. He was afraid to look at the ones he felt in his groin. He sat up, got dizzy and fell back onto the bed. He had already stripped down to his Joe Boxers so all he had to do to check out the sores in his pits was turn his head, lift his arm a little and look. He got up the nerve and looked.
“Jesus fuck! Gah!” The sores were hideously swollen and leaking bloody pus like big infected blisters. And the leakage stank to high heaven. The ugly sores had gone from red, to purple and now to black. Oozing that vile shit. Clint retched but didn’t hurl, not yet. The steak & eggs breakfast he and Wyatt had had at the Waffle House after they’d stashed the dope was not agreeing with his stomach, and in fact it felt like the breakfast was eating him.
Feverish, aching, coughing.
“Dying,” he said in a terrifying rasp. Because of that fucking zombie mule with those silver cylinders in his backpack that looked like hardware from a sci-fi movie, the cold shiny ones that always contained Very Deadly Shit.
Fucking terrorist!
Clint clumsily grabbed his cell phone off the nightstand, flipped it open and touched up his mother’s number. His thumb made a bloody smear on the touchpad. Fuck that. Call 9-1-1. No! You can’t do that. Not with that bag of dope in your room. Shit! Oh shit, I just did. Shit myself. Mom!
He hit SEND. No answer. She always answered. Where the hell was she? Her car was still in the driveway. Here he was, still living in the little cinderblock bunkhouse in his mother’s backyard, a grown man of twenty-one fucking years.
And that’s all the years you get, numb nuts. All because you and jerkoff over there on the floor decided to cowboy up and go outlaw on the border. Fuck me!
He wanted to get in the shower and wash this oozing shit-bloodpus off himself. Escape the stench if he could. But he knew he couldn’t. Couldn’t make it, not even if he crawled to the shower stall, which was no more than a hearty fart’s distance away. As a fucking crow flies. Or farts. Crowfart. Losing my mind. Call mind-one-one. Fuckme-momma-it-hurts!
Someone at the door. Mom? He managed to call out: “Ma!”
The doorknob rattled. Had he locked it? No. It was swinging open. Somebody just standing there. Mom! Thank God. She shuffled into the room. Shuffled? Mom didn’t shuffle, unless she was soused on Johnnie Walker Black Label. This was not good.
Clint said, “Mom, I’m sick.”
She said nothing. Just shuffled forward, coming toward his bed.
“Take me to the hospital,” he said. “Bad sick.”
He retched. Vomit gushed from his mouth and nose. He rolled onto his side, coughing to keep from choking on his lumpy puke.
Mom shuffled.
Clint puked.
Mom shuffled.
Clint panicked when he saw her face. It was pasty white, her smoker’s wrinkles deepened in shadow, her eyes cloudy with deaddog fogginess. There was a blood smear across her mouth, skewed like lipstick applied by a drunken hand.
Mom was a fucking zombie.
“Mombie,” he said, giggling stupidly, deliriously.
The rifle. In the corner of the room. If he could make it all the way over there …
He scooted to the edge of the befouled bed but he was too slow and it was already too late. His mother fell upon him with all of her two hundred pounds and sank her teeth into his painfully inflamed groin.
He screamed.
She ripped and tore with her teeth. She chewed his flesh and slurped the brackish bloody stew pouring out of him.
Black blood. Black Death. Dead mother.
“Wyatt!” he screamed. Clint was too weak to fight off the mombie, and all he could think to do was call on his friend to help him. Save him. But Wyatt was probably weaker than he was.
God it hurts! Killing me.
But wait.
Wait, what?
Wyatt was getting up. Thank you Jesus, he was up on his feet. Shuffling toward the bed.
Wyatt elbowed Clint’s mother aside, bent down and chomped into Clint’s throat with his picture-perfect teeth, devouring his friend’s final scream.
26
Out of the Box
Pedro felt the world turn upside down and rolled with it because that was all he could do. Over and over the truck tumbled, finally crashing into something big enough to stop it.
And Pedro was out of the hatbox, his mouth ending up miraculously close to the neck of the hombre who’d hacked off his head with the machete.
There was a God after all!
Pedro worked his wrecked jaw just enough to inch his head closer to paydirt. He didn’t know if the crash had killed the dude or not. He didn’t care. He was going to eat out his throat. He worked his mangled jaw. Snapped his teeth, though they were badly out of alignment. His lips brushed the man’s jugular. A pulse!
Pedro bit into the warm flesh and drank deep.
It didn’t matter that the blood he imbibed immediately dribbled out of his neck by way of his dissected esophagus. It was the sweetest drink he’d ever had.
27
Jake Moon Snake Rides Again
Jake Moon Snake took a hit of tequila, set the bottle between his legs and then gunned the Mustang down a stretch of Oklahoma highway not far from Anadarko, steering with his right hand while drawing a bead with his left on the sudden target of opportunity. He wasn’t a natural lefty but he was getting pretty damn good at picking off deadheads with the .357 S&W Magnum snugged in his left fist.
Few things in life were more important to Jake than keeping his Magnum and his Mustang in good working order, well-oiled and loaded.
His new thing in life was shooting deadheads in the face. Maybe you couldn’t kill these zomboys and zombabes with headshots like in all the horror flicks but if you blew their jawbones apart they wouldn’t be eating anybody. Jake figured he was doing his civic duty with his drive-by roadkill shooting.
Wasn’t like he was actually killing anybody. The deadmeat
dickheads were already dead. No harm, no foul. Still, he worried sometimes that he was enjoying it too much. But tequila kept his worries at bay and kept him as well-oiled as his Magnum and Mustang. Even so though, he could never quite shake the feeling that that creepoid eye up in the sky was watching him extra close. Keeping an eye on him. Judging him.
The Mustang was a vintage 1965 red beauty with a rebuilt engine. The Magnum was a monster with a scary-long Dirty Harry barrel. The tequila wasn’t top-shelf but it did the job just the same.
He glided over into the opposite lane and fired when he was less than ten yards from the target.
It was a good hit. The zomboy’s face blew apart, the lower jaw suddenly just gone. The dead dude kept on walking. Jake saw this in the rearview and gave a little salute with the smoking barrel to the brow. “Walk on, freakoid,” he said.
Several miles later he came upon a couple of hitchhikers. Boy, girl. Young, scared. Scared to death the zomboids would find them and eat them. Jake wouldn’t have stopped for them but for his soft heart. You grow up soft when your Mom and Pop are hippies who have their kid (namely Jake) too late in life and give you a groovy name like Jake Moon Snake and proceed to fill your head with every counterculture cliché in the book. Peace, Love & Fuck the Man! Kick out the jams! Up against the wall! And while you’re at it, how about some of that far-out free love and some trippy-dippy acid.
When he was old enough to figure out the contradictions, Jake called Bullshit! How can you be into peace and love while you’re starting the revolution? Besides that, you’re both too late. All this hippie shit ended when the war in Nam did. The revolution went undercover into the heart of America and now the radicals are running the government. Congrats on that. Now we’re all fucked, the whole freaking world. God is dead and the dead are on the move, taking over and looking to eat us for fast food.
Still and all, Jake didn’t hold any of that too harshly against them now that he was grown and they were dead (really dead). He dug the nomadic life and staying mostly on the road. And his name was pretty cool most of the time, like now with these two young hitchhikers.
Deadcore: 4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas Page 7