Cousin Harry and Uncle Twirly rose from the dead, skins pale, eyes red, and mouths hungering for human flesh. They fell upon the not yet dead and the still living, ripping flesh with bared teeth and bloody fingers. The people they didn’t outright dismember were doomed to return as zombies. Doomed to be the "dish of the day" and the rise again--tongues lolling, skin pale, eyes dead red and evil.
Cecily and Tina grabbed their knives. I scooped up the oversized forks and shoved the spatulas into the side pockets on my cargo pants. We stood in a half-circle like Samurai.
Once again, a horde of hoary men, their wives and children came at us, this time with malice in their dead minds. Their mouths bleeding, lips slobbering blood and gore, hands clawing at us like beggars ripping cats apart when they don’t want to starve. A blood-drenched dead man charged me. I shoved a grilling fork in its eye and shoved it onto a grill. It sizzled and burst into flames. Tina sliced through another zombie neck with the meat cleaver. The three of us ran toward the cooking van, leaving the bloody tools not sure if zombified blood and gore was contagious.
The park police arrived, turning off the main drive and down the narrow lane to the shelter. The cruiser’s lights flashed, four-way blinked. We yelled and waved warnings at the two policemen. They didn’t pay any attention. Instead, they stopped next to the tables. The driver got out of the car, gun drawn and pointed to the sky. He ordered the dead to cease and desist. They swarmed over him, teeth ripping his face, hands tearing chunks of flesh from his body. The second policemen called for assistance on the radio before my former relatives, now zombies, pulled him from the car and ripped his arms and legs from his body. The crowd separated to feed on his pieces.
Straggler zombies wandered towards other car parks and other groves, seeking victims.
Epidemiologists and pathologists speak of disease-causing organisms as if they are alive and seek to preserve and continue their species. A disease too virulent will go extinct. The faster a disease kills its victims, the faster the disease itself dies with the last victim. However, when the dead can walk, when they contaminate the ground, when they leave contagion so virulent that a single infectious touch creates the next victims, the disease achieves some form of sentience and seeks to conquer the world, to remake mankind in its image--humanity reborn in death, Quasimodo, false life, horror beyond death, gangs of collective malevolence, a decaying, rotting, flesh-eating race of mindless drones, savagely seeking blood, merciless Ubermensch who's only thoughts were consuming the living.
I thought that I coherently explained the situation to Cecily and Tina but they looked at me like "dude what's this hysteria-fueled blubbering?" If armed police couldn’t deter these abominations from their path of mindless cannibalism, Cecily, Tina and I didn't have a chance. So I bluntly said that we should escape before the dead reached our van and ate us. We drove toward the park entrance and ranger station, making cell phone calls to the authorities describing the fiends they were up against.
It took twenty minutes to get to the entrance of the park over the speed bumps and winding roads. We passed several pavilions where bodies hung from open doors on crashed automobiles, grills burned dead flesh, slime bubbled in the creek, footprints trailed off the roads and into the trees. We heard animalistic howls as the dead and near dead peeked from between the trees. Every few minutes, a gunshot echoed between the hills and valleys.
Four sets of sawhorses and armed troops blocked the park exit. Behind the barrier, an olive drab troop truck with a canvas-covered back flanked by a pair of jeeps with machine guns made clear no one should pass. A sniper let off a round, gun pointed to our left. I looked over and saw a blood-soaked zombie with its head blown away fall to the ground. A second shot pocked the asphalt in front of us about fifty feet from the barrier. They made us get naked to be sure we didn't carry the green slime or weren’t bitten. So assured, they ordered us into the troop truck.
Nothing mechanized left the contaminated zone because it might carry the slime and with it, the infection. No one knew if the microbe or virus could live without the slime and no one was going to take the chance. When a trooper said that the park would soon be a sterile zone, the grimaces and impostures of the other soldiers made him stop talking as if explaining as if this knowledge was not to be said or not to be shared.
We knew what he meant by burn out the contagion. Their nervous twitching spoke louder than words. A burly soldier with a flamethrower released the step van's brake and let it roll off the road. When it was twenty feet into the grass, he unleashed dragon-like fire. The van became a fa-whooming explosion as pork fat, propane cylinders, gas tank, and tires blew flames fifty feet into the air and scorched the ground for ten feet.
Now I might be a weakling, a nervous worrywart, a true nerd with a minus rating in the dating department, and a jock-sniffing fool, but I'm not stupid, not at all stupid in common sense way or an IQ way. Torching the van was an act beyond arrogance and stupidity. Across the fields, the keening of zombies announced their presence. I gave Cecily and Tina that look. The look we all know--bad shit coming down. They returned my look with the nod of understanding. We were knee-deep in semi-intelligent boo-rah and shit. No one would leave the park alive if we stayed with these fools. The van explosion was the dinner bell for zombies and its smoke signal could be seen for miles.
And the dead did come faster than anyone expected and by the dozens. The soldiers called out their kill numbers as they shot the zombies. The truck driver left the cab to shoot his share. I climbed into the driver’s seat and put the truck into gear. Behind us, the soldiers yelled profanely as we drove off. We heard machine gun bursts and hand grenade booms. Logic was lost to fear.
There were ten strangers sitting in the back of the truck who urged us away from the park. We drove barely a hundred feet down the road before hearing multiple rifle shots together, and then the rapid fire of machine guns, followed by the explosive whoosh of rocket propelled grenades and the ground shuddering with the explosions. Cecily didn’t stop. She screeched tire around the curves, leaving the booms, the bangs and the screams of the dying behind us.
A State guardsman in the truck told us that the zombification started sometime after midnight with reports of deaths at a drug house bordering the park. The house sat above the parklands at the headwaters of the creek that meandered through the park. Whoever owned the drug house was long dead. The toxic waste from the illegal chemicals gave birth to the slime. All creatures bright and beautiful turned to creatures of death and mindless bloodlust.
None of us knew where to go or what to do other than to get away. I told the guardsman that this was my family picnic and the first time we ever roasted a pig. He laughed. He said no one in my family cared about a roast pig after they touched the slime. They only cared about eating flesh from the bones of the living. I think I told him that's what the family did anyway; gossiping and picking at family foibles like crows pick the bones of road kill. He directed me away from the city. The military built a safe haven called Fortress Eighty Four south of the main road. It would be our safe haven.
As we reached the gates of Fortress Eighty Four, the sky behind us turned red with the flames of fuel air bombs. A shockwave blew over us and the ground shook as the parkland was sterilized. They burned the forest to ash and the ground beneath to cinders. Still, it wasn’t enough. The virus escaped, maybe infected forest critters or birds escaped the flames or possibly insects carried the slime. Regardless, the contagion spread as the disease fought to survive even when surviving meant the death of all living species. We lost the skirmish of Mingo Park and the first battle of the undead war.
That was ten years ago. My first and last family picnic began the morning of a bright and sunny day and ended in death. It seemed like biblical judgment--famine, pestilence, war, and finally death, never-ending death.
Cecily, Tina and I stuck together and worked out that sex thing. I don't like girls and they don't like boys so we conceived our expected two children each
in most odd and unusual ways. We live under the dome of Fortress Eighty Four, an enclave of the human race, several thousand survivors waiting for the zombie virus to die.
Each day we grow vegetables, raise and butcher livestock, crush wheat to flour, and put out three meals for our enclave. On a scale of one to ten it's like a minus thirty-five compared to life before the plague but it's better than the fate of the dead. We teach our kids to never ask for whom the bell tolls, the last judgment takes place every day and it tolls for you on picnic day, with the silver bells of a food truck. Each night, our children sing of the three valiant fighters who won the first skirmish of the Barbecue Pit. After the history, they scare each other by describing our exploits with toy Santoku knives and pretend spatulas.
Happy Anniversary
Paul “Deadeye” Dick
It was a month before our Twentieth wedding anniversary when the illness began. I’d always feared she would catch something working as a nurse, but my wife, Lynn was always a picture of health, so strong, so vibrant. She was so untouchable, perfection. She got me through a lot of dark times when I came back from the war in the Middle East.
I had nearly lost my life in a chemical attack on our firebase. Five of my platoon mates died blinded and choking on their flesh that ran like candlewax on their faces…eyes popping like boils. They clawed at their flesh and it melted their hands.
Seeing what the chemical had done to those unlucky to not get their masks on in time, had unhinged my mind... I came home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She cared for me as well as those at the hospital. The woman is a saint.
It came as a complete surprise when she got sick…First the headaches. Then she got steadily worse. Her temperature rose and fell. Then the blisters and the feeling of insects inside her gave way to constant itching and scratching.
Her skin started to desiccate and flake off. She was covered in wedding day confetti again, but this time we were not smiling. Her clawing at her skin reminded me of those I lost in the war.
She started to bleed herself badly. Wearing mittens at night and swamping herself in emollient cream by day. She didn’t want to go out anymore, our love life died. Instead she just wanted to hold my hand and tell me, repeatedly that she loved me.
I dared to kiss her once to show I still loved her, but I didn’t kiss her again after that. For a part of her skin had come away from her brow attached to my lip…
I never held her hand for long either, even when I wore
her latex gloves.
The chest infections were next. Her constant, rasping breath and wracking coughs made me start to loathe her as much as care for her. I hate myself for feeling that way, but I got barely 2 hours of sleep a night.
All she said when she woke me up was she was sorry…and she loved me. The coughing fits and sudden sharp, pining breaths in the night meant I had to nebulize her asthma attacks, if need arose, 24/7.
But the worst were the seizures. A sudden involuntary noise, hooooo, gave birth to involuntary shaking as if she was the epicentre to her own private earthquake. The Gran-Mal seizure hit like an express train.
It hurled her onto the floor, and other times across the room banging into one piece of furniture after another like she was a human pinball. One occasion, she physically crumpled inwards as if she was being crushed. She was a human ragdoll in some invisible, giant, tantrum addicted child's hand that was working its frustrations out on her.
I was a helpless witness to all of this… she became a thin, disgusting, drooling, idiot-grinning thing, that soiled itself where it lay and gurgled a deep retarded laughter. Her mouth was part sardonic sneer, part grimace, mocking itself by dying by inches.
Her body began to spasm at weird angles, popping bones, and reformed them as she turned around in her skin. She collapsed into unconsciousness while I hurriedly phoned 911. I sat on my front steps when the paramedics came and went. My mind, body and soul in tattered, ragged pieces…
They asked if I wanted to go with her but all I said was I wanted to sleep and hope the doctors manage to cure her and give me my wife and my life back. The paramedics muttered something under their breath about me being a callous prick. But they didn’t understand what I had went through in the war and what I had went through as her career.
Tom from next door came to console me and he too had a haunted look on his face…I had heard he and his expecting wife, Jen, had lost twin sons recently. But I hadn’t gone round to help him as Lynn had got sick so suddenly.
I felt so guilty for not helping Tom as Lynn had helped his wife when she was throwing up with morning sickness. Not long after that, Lynn got sick herself. I secretly blamed them for that. Could Lynn have got sick from someone else throwing up?
I believed so…but it wasn’t Tom or Jen’s fault either – not really…And they already paid a heavy price. I seen that look they wore on their faces before…On the faces of Officers who lost men under their command they were close to. Men they considered family…
I had heard both their screams as apparently she had miscarried the kids in the toilet before the paramedics arrived. Tom said he was up to his elbows in his own son’s blood picking parts of them out the toilet bowl. I didn’t really want to know any other details. But Tom told me all anyway like he was confessing his sins.
Now as Tom consoled me about my wife, he told me that his wife had started to get similar blisters and fever as my Lynn had done…He thought it was the start of some kind of virus epidemic…He ran through all the half heartened conspiracy theories he had formulated or heard about from the various media outlets. Everyone talked and debated on the innumerable conspiracies from a Government biochemical fuckup, controlled experiment gone wrong, terrorist biological attack to even something from the darker regions of outer space.
It was pretty cut and dried that Tom was in the early stages of a nervous breakdown from his appearance and who could blame him? I wasn’t that far behind him. I had barely recovered from my PTSD…
I listened dispassionately to his bullshit theories… all I could think about was my Lynn. But the facts of the matter were that both our wives had come down with this virus. The facts were his kids were stillborn.
He told me he had informed the paramedics he incinerated the kid’s remains when they wanted to take them for autopsy. Why would they ask that? Tom had lied. He couldn’t bring himself to bury them or burn them. As I stared at him…trying to find the balls to ask what he did with them. Tom ran off when he heard the sounds of alley cats at his bins.
He started yelling at them to get away from his…What did he say? No, he wouldn’t be that stupid surely. A sudden chill wave washed over me as I hit the ground as I went into shock.
Tom and another neighbour found me and called an ambulance. The paramedics gave me a sedative and told me that the safest place for me was my home right now. They couldn’t admit me as the virus had claimed half the town.
They had run out of bed space… I don’t know how long I slept when I was awoken in the night by the cats back at Tom’s bins again. I chucked water at them but they didn’t move. They were intent on eating something in the bins.
A few nights stay in hospital. Lynn was returned to me with the strongest Epilepsy tablets on the market and several other medicines which barely held her condition in check. Her hands continually shook as if something was trying to bust loose inside of them.
But it wasn’t epilepsy. The epidemic increased… people panicked, bought supplies…some killed each other…law and order broke down, Television stations went dead and people boarded themselves up in their home. We were forgotten.
Three days before our Anniversary, she pleaded with me to kill her. She couldn’t bear the pain anymore. She said it wasn’t fair to me. . . . Let me go.
Tears of guilt, relief and love, all the wide range of emotions spread out for none to see. All the emotions soaked my shirt as I gave her an overdose of sleeping tablets and held a cushion down over her sleeping face.
So did Tom. He slid a note under my door saying goodbye. Jen had died in the hospital. He said he was going to take an overdose and hopefully would be reunited with Jen. He cryptically said something about babysitting his boy. Take care of them.
The alley cats kept coming back to the food in Tom’s bins. They must have fought viciously over the meat as I looked out to see yet another dead cat almost torn apart - with blood all over the bin…
Two days before our Anniversary, Lynn came back…. But no vestige of my wife remained, just an enraged version of the epileptic idiot thing. She came scuttling at me on all fours like a deranged, hungry spider. Impossibly strong, screeching like a demented chimp.
Her teeth and nails seem to have grown into jagged shards, biting and clawing me, before I knifed her repeatedly to death. I dragged Lynn’s body downstairs into the hallway and covered her with a duvet…wrapping it round her with gaffer tape. Bleeding from my wounds and shock of her resurrection, I passed out. ..
Babies don’t sleep as well as I did that night…I sleep for nearly 24 hrs.… I dream for once of happier times, the day Lynn and I first met, our courting, our lovemaking, they day we got married. She turns around as she looks at me with so much love and she screams as her face dissolves. Her scream sounds like a cat wail.
I awake to the cats the next night at Tom’s bins yet again, they’re yowling and wailing make me snap. I decided I was going to shut them up once and for all. I removed the wooden boards from my back door and went out with my service .45 and fired at the cats, killing what were already dead... sending what was not packing. The bin fell over…
Something moved amongst the rank food in the spill from the open bin…something under the corpses of the cats. Bloody, obscenely pink, wrinkled, things moved from under the dead cats, they wailed just like the cats did.
Undead War (Dead Guns Press) Page 8