“Sure ya do, come on. Say ‘No fuckin’ way.’”
“What?”
“Don’t gimme an argument, just say those words, ‘No fuckin’ way.’”
“All right, ‘No fuckin’ way.’”
“There, ya see?”
She was right. He did have an accent. Latino. Ever so slight. He couldn’t hear it at all himself. “You’re the one with an accent!” he said. “You say it. Say ‘No fucking way.’”
Charlie did. She had an accent, too. “New York.” The doctor pointed an accusing finger at her as if having caught her in a lie. “You are New York all the way!” His “You” sounded a bit like “Djoo,” “York” a bit like “Djork.”
“So we both got accents,” said Charlene. “So machines can’t figure out what we’re sayin’. Fuck machines. Did you ever have a problem figurin’ out what I was sayin’?”
“Never.” He looked at her directly, with warmth in his eyes. “Everyone else, almost everyone I’ve ever known, it seems that I’m always trying to figure out what they’re saying. You? Never.”
Charlene found herself hoping that this was some sort of a compliment. Maybe even more than a compliment.
That’s when the doctor pressed the button on his microphone and said, for publication, “White male.” Before he went on, he let go of the button and spoke to Charlene. “Let’s see how that gets fucked up. How’s it gonna come back?”
The electronic brain recorded “write meal.” When Acocella later dictated the word “occlusion,” what registered was “confusion.”
* * *
The doctor never knew any of this. After 10:36 on the night of John Doe, he never got a free moment to check the text. He never got a free moment to do much of anything.
Except try to survive.
Forty-eight hours later, when an electronically translated text of what Acocella ended up babbling into his microphone reached the computers at the VSDC, Terry McAllister, Elizabeth O’Toole, and John Campbell, who hadn’t left to go shoot himself yet, were hard pressed to make heads or tails of it.
They were able to tell, with certainty, that the frenzied message from San Diego was an eyewitness account of the same sort of phenomenon that had been reported, by computer count, 300,642 times in the last two days. They couldn’t be sure that San Diego was the first incident, so they kept digging. Two of them did, anyway, for four more days after Campbell bailed out, until Elizabeth O’Toole looked at Terry McAllister, shuddered, and said, “I really think this might be the end of the world.”
“If it is … then what the fuck are we hangin’ around here for? I got some good tequila over at my place.”
* * *
Within forty minutes of John Doe’s arrival in the autopsy room, Charlene Rutkowski, Bronx bombshell, had effortlessly extracted two more bullets and several vital organs from inside the corpse. Her moves were so efficient, her manner so offhanded, that one might have mistaken her for a waitress at Manhattan’s Carnegie Deli. Lung. (“Here’s your sandwich, sir.”) Kidney. (“Here’s your side order.”) Liver, spleen. (“Here are your complimentary relishes.”)
She plunked the bullets into a piss-pan, used scalpels to slice off organ samples, which she submerged in preservatives while pitching the bulk of each organ into its own biohazard bag. There were a dozen such bags standing open on wire skeletons. Finally she came to the heart.
“Wait!” Acocella looked up from his binder. “Not yet.”
“Why not?” asked the diener.
“He was hit four times. We have to find the last bullet. Or find where it exited. We need to prove that the gunshot wounds were survivable, that it wasn’t a GSW that shut this guy down.” “GSW” was autopsy-room shorthand for “gunshot wound.”
“The reason we’re here is because PD wants it to be a GSW.”
“I am out to prove they’re wrong.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to embarrass them. Annoy them. Because they’re assholes. What difference does it make?”
“Come on. The truth.”
Acocella looked up from his binder.
“Because they never thought twice about this,” he said, his anger showing. “Fucking detectives see Mexicans with guns, figure they can blame it all on them! So they want me to prove they were right! I don’t know who shot the guy. All I know is … I might have been able to save him!”
Acocella stepped away from his binder, walked over to the exam table, picked up a scalpel and a probe, and began to dig at John Doe’s flesh. It wasn’t very long before he shouted, “Ah!” and used forceps to pull a bloody lump of lead from the tissue beneath John Doe’s left shoulder blade.
“Sorry,” Charlie apologized. “I shoulda found that.”
“The point is we did find it.” Acocella examined the damage caused by the missile. “Non-lethal.”
Using the forceps to hold the bullet up into brighter light, he smiled. “This puppy never killed the poor bastard.”
“So, what d’ya figure,” asked Charlene. “Heart attack?”
“Likely,” said Acocella.
“Couldn’t hardly be anything else, right? Nothin’ hit this guy’s vitals. He’s old. Out of shape. A kid in a Halloween costume could have scared this guy to death. Four bumps from an Uzi? Forget about it. Heart attack. Gotta be.”
“If you’re right, then I was right. Maybe he could have been resuscitated!”
They both worked on the corpse for another fifteen minutes or so until Acocella was satisfied, from examining all the insults, that none of the Uzi’s bullets had dealt anything close to a fatal blow. He gave Charlene permission to extract the corpse’s heart and he went back to his binder.
As she set to work with a long-bladed knife, the doctor pushed the button on his microphone and, for publication, said, “Cause of death not … repeat, not … ballistic insult. Proceeding with examination of the heart. Check for occlusion. Cardiomyopathy.” He released the button and spoke more softly, not for publication, partly to himself, partly to Charlene. “Not just on the left. Could have been an arrythmogenic right ventricle. Or it could have been purely electrical. An inherited condition. IQTS. Brugada.”
Within minutes, Charlie had carefully lifted the heart out of John Doe’s chest cavity. Before she could transfer it to an examination basin it slipped out of her hands and dropped heavily to the floor. She had lost her grip on it. She nearly lost her grip on sanity when the eviscerated corpse on the autopsy table began to move.
Entirely on its own.
Acocella saw the movement. “Jesus,” he uttered in a barely audible whisper before—by reflex more than religious faith—he made the sign of the cross and said, a bit more loudly, “Madre de Dios.”
“How long…” asked Charlie with a tremor in her voice. “How long after a man dies can the body still have muscle contractions?”
“There have been cases—”
The corpse interrupted by opening its eyes. It turned its head, drawn by Acocella’s voice, and looked directly at the doctor. Beneath sagging lids, the corpse’s eyes were clouded with mucous. The irises, once the color of black coffee, had been turned mocha by some deathly internal milk.
Acocella was seven feet away from the corpse. Those dead eyes were focused on a point much farther away. They seemed to be looking right through the doctor, at something way out on the horizon. Rather than actually seeing the man, the corpse seemed to be sensing his presence. Acocella felt something far worse than a chill. It was as if all the blood in his veins was suddenly replaced with ice water.
“Is … is this really happening?” asked Charlie, that tremor in her voice worsening. Acocella never answered her. John Doe did, in a way. The corpse turned its head again, drawn by her voice now, and cast its blank gaze in her direction.
“Wanna dance?” The corpse never said this, but Charlene heard it.
MERCY KILL
by Ryan Brown
I wanna get this down while it’s still fresh, especially as I�
��m not quite sure what the future holds … or if there’ll even be one.
My name’s Marvin Whatley, and I figure I’ll begin at the juicy part, when I finally reached Pam’s double-wide at dusk and stormed inside to save her life, to take her away from all this, to make her my own once and for all.
My platoon sergeant would’ve called it my objective or my mission. Either word fits, seeing as how in the past twenty-four hours the whole world had gone bat-shit crazy.
Good news, Pam was there. Bad news, her face had been completely chewed off. As had all her limbs, save for one arm.
I hope you’ll forgive me for not going into much more detail. Not an easy thing to see, your childhood sweetheart reduced to a writhing, faceless torso on the floor of her tore-up trailer house, the only recognizable part of her being the bloodied-up Lynyrd Skynyrd concert T-shirt you’d bought her on a date, sophomore year.
Here I’m back from Nam only one day, and already I’m fightin’ another war. And this one I sure as hell didn’t sign on for. Saw a lot of blood and guts over there along the Mekong, but nothing like this. This is a whole other deal.
Did I mention the dead started rising yesterday? Started eating people, too, which made other dead people rise, like some kind of bass-ackwards epidemic. They’re saying the cause might be radiation from a Venus probe or some damn thing.
Doesn’t matter.
All I knew at that moment was that Pam had been half eaten; she’d turned into one of those undead things, and would probably be making a run at eating me if she’d still had the limbs to get herself up off the linoleum. As it was, about all she could do was wiggle around in her own pulp.
My heart was broke clean in two. I wanted to tear my hair out, break a lot of shit, cry until I was cried out.
But I’m a soldier.
I’d seen buddies get blown to bits. Learned real quick in that goddamn jungle to survive first, cry later.
I’d heard you could kill one of those ghoulish things only by destroying their brain. If I’d had a gun I’d’ve shot Pam in the head right then and there rather than let her go on wallowing in her own entrails. But I didn’t have a gun, and there wasn’t time to think up another way to put her out of her misery because through the open door I could see some thirty or more ghouls approaching the front of the trailer in that slow, drunken walk of theirs.
Survival instinct took over.
Stepping over Pam, I moved to the small window above the turntable and saw they were approaching from the back, too. The trailer was surrounded.
I returned to the kitchenette, and as I was rifling through the drawers in search of anything that might be lethal, something clamped down on my ankle.
Pam. She’d managed to schooch across the floor and take hold of me with her one remaining arm.
Jerking my knee up, I kicked free of her grasp before she could get her teeth sunk in. I snatched a butcher knife from outta one of the drawers, backed into the corner of the trailer, and took a moment to consider my situation and what I should do about it.
I was horrified by the sight of what had become of Pam, but also fearful I might wind up just like her—undead.
Been there, thank you. A year spent slogging through that godforsaken Delta, tired, hungry, wet, too damn far from home, sometimes not caring if the next booby trap had my name on it. That’s as close to being undead as I ever wanna get. I for sure as hell didn’t wanna become a bloodied-up goddamn ghoul craving human flesh.
While such a fate certainly didn’t appeal, I had an even better reason to survive: I aimed to get the fucker responsible for me not making it to my girl in time to save her life. But more on that later.
I figured I could take out one or two ghouls with the butcher knife, maybe break off a chair leg and use it to clobber a few more. Trouble was, that still left too damn many.
The odds of success sucked.
Seeing as how they’d honed in on the trailer, they clearly smelled blood. Living blood. My blood.
Desperate for ideas, I looked down at Pam and damned if that sweet girl didn’t present a possible solution—camo. Here I’d been dreading the notion of winding up just like her when it suddenly occurred to me that becoming like her might be my only way out of this. What if I could mask my appearance, my smell, so I’d be just like one of them?
With no time to think it over I stepped over Pam again and toppled to the narrow floor space just beyond her, where a good deal of her innards still lay in a glistening heap. Fighting not to puke, I rolled around in it, covering myself head to foot with gore, even taking fistfuls of the stuff and slathering it across my face the way I’d once smeared on jungle mud for camouflage.
About the time I got back to my feet, the first flesh eater to make it up the steps was standing on the threshold. His face was caked with blood and his spleen was dangling from his midsection.
It was Tidwell Sweeny, who rotated tires over at the Conoco. I knew him right off from his greasy coveralls and cauliflower ears.
As he lumbered into the trailer, I froze, held my breath, and let my jaw hang slack just like his was, trying to look dead.
Or undead.
Through gray lifeless eyes, he seemed to study me with no visible hostility. It looked as though my ruse had worked, that my life force—or whatever you wanna call it—was undetectable beneath all the blood and entrails.
Then he lunged for me.
Jaws chomping, the sumbitch went straight for my jugular. I managed to dodge him and in the same motion, acting on a soldier’s instinct, drove the butcher knife all the way to the hilt into the base of his skull. The fat bastard toppled like a stack of retreads.
My rush of victory didn’t last long, ’cause the rest of the ghouls were still steadily approaching. I could hear ’em now. Christ, I could smell ’em.
If Tidwell Sweeny’s actions had been any indication, appearance alone wasn’t enough for them to mistake me for one of their kind. I needed …
Goddamn, I needed to become one of them.
I recalled meeting a guy at a bar in Da Nang. Davie something-or-other. A sniper. Special Forces. He’d been about to ship out, headed home after two tours.
When I asked him the secret to going home alive, he told me he’d served both tours on a strict diet of raw fish, rice, and green tea. Gook food. Claimed that in the jungle the enemy could smell a stomach full of good ol’ American pancakes and hot dogs from a mile off. Said it was a body chemistry thing, as if the smell seeped right out of our pores. So he put gook food into his bloodstream, and swore up and down it’d saved his life.
I’d forgotten to ask him how long it took for this body chemistry thing to kick in, but I was pretty sure I was about to find out.
Just as another ghoul stumbled into the trailer, I tore off my first bite of Tidwell Sweeny’s spleen. I’d like to say it tasted like chicken. Truth is, it tasted like shit. Warm, salty, chewy. Godawful.
But the flesh-eating version of Shelly Cleaver—night manager over at the roller rink—paid me absolutely no mind. Neither did the next ghoul to wander in, or the next. Maybe it was a bloodstream thing after all.
For good measure, I choked down a few more hunks of spleen and, just like that, I’d become just another face in the undead crowd. Soon a good fifty of us at least were shambling around outside the trailer. By now it was full dark, which I hoped would help me get hell and gone from there.
I started drag-stepping my way toward the edge of the group, planning to sprint free as soon as I was clear of the park’s main gate.
But before I reached it, a gunshot rang out and the skull of the ghoul beside me burst open, sprayin’ brains and hair. The man fell to the ground with a thud.
My army grunt impulse was to hit the deck, but somehow I managed to remain standing, ghoul-like, as I turned toward the source of the gunfire.
Soon as I did, some half a dozen pairs of headlights flashed on and more rifles than I could count began firing. Bodies dropped all around me as the headshots h
it their marks.
I stood rigid, watching the shooters move closer as they reloaded. They were uniformed lawmen—all Stetsons and swagger. By the time they’d split the distance between us, I could hear their laughter.
And I’ll be damned if leading the pack wasn’t the same sumbitch I’d vowed not five minutes before to seek and destroy—Assistant Under-Deputy Shane Garrett.
He was the one that kept me from saving Pam in time. He was the reason I’d never kiss my girl again, hold her tight, make sweet love to her.
Garrett may not have killed Pam, but it was because of him that she’d wound up a flesh eater, which is a much worse fate than death.
’Least in death, Pam would still have her soul.
I wanted to charge him then and there, but I’d have been brained before getting anywhere near him. No way was I going to break character now. The sumbitch would have shot me regardless, but I’d rather let him think I was already dead than give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d taken my life hisself.
As the lawmen approached, they kept their rifles shouldered. Every couple seconds another few shots rang out and more bodies around me fell. In no time the gunmen were upon those of us few ghouls still standing, close enough for me to smell the menthol in their snuff. They were all smiles as they lowered their rifles. Clearly, ghoul shooting had become sport for these assholes.
I let my eyes glaze over and dropped my jaw to allow a red rope of drool to stretch from my bottom lip. Garrett spat chaw through a sinister grin as he scanned our pale, blood-smeared faces. When his eyes fell on me I made a point not to blink, to literally look straight through him, even as I watched his grin widen.
“Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch,” he said.
No shit, I thought.
“What?” asked one of the deputies.
Garrett pointed at me. “It’s that fucker, Whatley.”
“The soldier boy you dragged into the station house last e’ning? The one who threatened to separate you from your privates first chance he got?”
When a few of the others chuckled, Garrett swung his rifle their way. “Any o’ you still think that’s funny?”
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