Authors: Tim Curran
Zombie Pulp (12 page)
It was Saturday and on Saturday afternoons, Emily and Missy Johnson used to go play in the vacant lot across the alley. There were stands of trees to every side and it was like their very own kingdom. They liked to play very dramatic games as all little girls did. Usually, they would pretend they were sisters and their parents had died in a plane crash and they were hiding from the bad people who wanted to kill them. Or they would pretend one of them was dying from an incurable disease and the other was a doctor or a nurse trying to save them. But in the end, the sick one always died. And that was funny, because now one of them had
really
died.
Out the window, Emily saw Missy riding her bike down the alley. She had her plastic Barbie case with her. You opened it up and it was a little salon with mirrors and a wardrobe, lots of little dresses and shoes. She was going over to the vacant lot.
Mother had warned Emily that she was never to leave the house, but since she was all dressed up, she decided it would be okay. She went out into the backyard and right away Mr. Miller’s beagle down the alley began to howl. Emily walked over towards the vacant lot, her high heels clicking on the concrete. She saw Missy there. Missy had her back to her. She had her Barbie case open and was singing as she dressed Skipper and Stacey.
Emily came up behind her like she always had. “Boo,” she said.
Missy turned and screamed like Emily had never heard her scream before. She scrawled away on all fours and ran, screaming the whole while. Emily called out to her, but she wouldn’t stop.
Emily went back home.
On the way, Mr. Miller drove down the alley in his car and she waved to him. He just kept staring…staring so much, in fact, that he drove his car right through his own fence.
*
The neighborhood was busy after that.
Cars drove up and down the street and a lot of them were police cars. Lots of people gathered outside the house with Mr. Miller. Missy’s mom and dad were there, too. By the time Mother came home, there were people everywhere and lots of policemen in uniforms. They tried to stop Mother, but she ran from them and came inside.
“What did you do?” she said to Emily. “What did you do?”
“I went outside,” Emily said.
Mother locked the doors as fists pounded on them, wanting to be let in. There was a lot of shouting and yelling as night came.
“We have to get out of here,” Mother said. “We have to go somewhere safe.”
“The cemetery,” Emily said.
“Yes, that’s where we’ll go.”
But then there was more pounding at the door and finally something kept ramming it until it came off its hinges. Then the police came charging in and Mother ran right at them, screaming and fighting.
“Run, Emily!” she called out.
“Run!”
So Emily did.
She ran out the back way and almost made it to the vacant lot when she heard the barking of big dogs. Men were running through the neighborhood with flashlights. Emily went into the vacant lot and hid in the grass. She dug up Mrs. Lee’s baby where she had hidden it in the dirt under the big rock, brushed the crawly things off it. Then the men came and put flashlights on her, blinding her.
“Dear God in heaven,” one of the policemen said.
Emily shook her headless baby at them and hissed, showing her long teeth.
The dogs that were with them were howling and baying and snapping at their handlers. The men let them go. The dogs came right at Emily, sinking their teeth into her, tearing open her dress-up clothes and biting free flaps of flesh and crunching bones. Lots of people cried out, but they didn’t come any closer. The dogs chewed and rent and split Emily, yanking off her limbs which kicked and clawed in the grass, fingers looking for something to grab. The dogs did not stop. They were mad and frothing and snapping and biting.
Emily kept screaming until there was nothing left to scream
with.
Then there was just silence and the growling of dogs and people whimpering.
So fifteen days after Emily came out of her grave, what was left of her was shoveled back in there again.
DIS-JOINTED
It was raining when they murdered Pauly Zaber.
And it was coming down in buckets and pails when they dragged his corpse from the trunk of Specks’ Buick. Zaber had been a big man and he made a big corpse. Wrapped in sackcloth, a lot of it, he was roped up like a steer. Getting him in the trunk was tough business and getting him out was something else again.
“Just grab hold,” Specks said. “He’s dead for godsake, he won’t bite you.”
But maybe Weams and Lyon didn’t quite believe that. Sure, they’d helped Specks murder Zaber and their hands were just as red as his, but now handling the body after it had been cooling an hour…there was just something obscene about that.
Lyon reached in there, taking hold of the ropes, started yanking along with Specks, drawing the dead man up. “I’m doing my bit,” he said, raindrops beading on his face. “Tell Weams to do his.”
Weams was going to tell him to go to hell, maybe tell both of them that, but instead he reached into the blackness of the trunk, started pulling, feeling that awful weight shifting under the tarp. He kept his lips pressed in a white line and he wasn’t sure if that was because of what he might say or to keep himself from screaming.
Because that was a real possibility.
“On the count of three, girls,” Specks said. “Up…and…out…”
It was nasty work.
The rain hammering down, the ground gone to sluicing gray mud. The trees rising up around them black and gnarled, ribboned with crawling shadows that were viscid and horribly alive.
Weams kept imagining that maybe Zaber was still alive, that three rounds from a 9mm hadn’t been enough to put that pig down dead. That under the tarp, maybe he was awake. Maybe he was thinking things.
Zaber made a big corpse, all right. A huge, porcine man whose idea of eating light had been a porterhouse smothered in clam linguine. He tipped the scales at 400 pounds. A big, meaty fellow with eyes just as black as coal dust and a vicious temper. People said he once ate a guy that didn’t pay up on a loan…but you couldn’t believe everything you heard. There was only one thing for sure about Pauly Zaber: he was a loanshark and if you didn’t make your payments, he would hurt you.
But now he was dead, cold, had eaten three slugs from a 9mm and that’s all she wrote.
Specks, Weams, and Lyon were grunting and puffing, swearing and groaning, but finally they got their sackcloth package up onto the lip of the trunk, balanced precariously. And that’s when one of Zaber’s huge arms slipped out of the canvas, his hand landing on Lyon’s own with a wet slapping sound.
Lyon screamed.
You could say it was shock or superstitious terror, but all that mattered was that Lyon screamed like a little girl with a high, shrill wailing sound. He let go of Zaber and the sudden weight of the corpse overwhelmed the other two and it fell to their feet, slopping in the mud…both arms out now.
“He touched me!” Lyon stammered, rubbing his hands on his wet pants. “Jesus, he touched me, he
touched
me!”
Specks took hold of him and shook him. “He’s dead, you idiot, he can’t hurt you now! He’s no more dangerous than a side of beef.”
“But cold…damn, he’s so cold…”
Weams wasn’t hearing any of it. He was just looking down at that lolling, grisly bundle, thinking how with those flabby white arms hanging out of the sackcloth Zaber looked like something being born, trying to pull itself free of a placenta.
“Lend a hand,” Specks said.
They took hold of Zaber’s legs under the canvas and dragged him through the muck down the trail. The undergrowth was wet and dripping, the trees tall and skeletal. The night was damp and cool and ominous. When they made the shack, Specks unlocked it and they dragged Zaber inside and deposited their burden on the plank flooring.
Specks found a lantern on a hook, lit it.
“Nobody uses this place,” he told them, the shadows crawling over his face in the flickering yellow illumination. “It’s perfect.”
And maybe it was. Just a desolate tumbledown shack far from the city nestled in a desolate stand of woods like a pea in a poke. The sort of place that stood for fifty winters and might stand for fifty more, or just fall to jackstraw ruin next month.
Specks said, “I’ll be back in a minute with the goodies. If he moves…just scream good and loud.” He thought that was funny. “But not loud enough to wake the dead.”
Then he went back to the Buick to get the tools, leaving Weams and Lyon alone with Big Pauly Zaber, the former syndicate shylock that had made all their lives hell. But he wasn’t going to be doing much of anything now.
“I think,” Lyon said, “I think we screwed up big here, I’m sure of it.”
Weams chuckled low in his throat. “Do you really think so?”
“Fuck you.”
Zaber’s corpse shifted in the sackcloth, one hand sliding free, knuckles rapping on the floor.
Lyon sucked in a sharp breath and did not seem to be able to exhale. Weams just stood there, filled with a gaping terror that was oddly blank and dreamlike. He couldn’t seem to get his mouth to close.
“Gravity,” Lyon said, like maybe he was trying to convince himself.
The shack smelled of moistness and age, black earth and mildewed leaves. It was a heavy, vaporous odor that got thicker by the moment. Both men just looked at each other, then away, their faces gaunt and chiseled by stress, their eyes jutting from their skulls, glassy and unblinking.
Then Specks was back.
He handed out crowbars and hammers from his sack of tools, left the shovels leaning up in the corner. By the shifting lantern light, they yanked up the rotting planks one by one until the clotted black earth below was revealed and a fetid, loamy stink filled the shack.
“Okay, girls,” Specks said, stripping down to his undershirt—a tank top, of course, to show off all his gleaming muscles—and grinning like a skull in a basket. “You know what happens now.”
But Lyon shook his head. “I just don’t know if I can.”
“Oh, you will,” Specks told him. “By God, you will. We’re in this together and together we’ll do what has to be done.”
Specks told them to start digging while he unwrapped their package. He used a knife, cutting the ropes free from the sackcloth, exposing Pauly Zaber’s huge, naked corpse like a grim surprise under a Christmas tree. Zaber had gone white as lace, distended and obese, a thickset rage of chins and pendulous tits, an immense belly like some fleshy beach ball inflated to the point of bursting. And everywhere, just bleached and rolling. The only color on him was the tattoo of an eagle on his chest…and that looked like something hit by a truck now, a mangled crow at best. The artwork had been shattered by blackened bullet holes, streaks of gore that oozed and dried.
He hadn’t bled very much and Specks was quick to point out that was because one of the bullets had shattered his heart. When it stopped pumping, he said, Zaber stopped bleeding.
Weams said, “Look…look at his face…”
It was a white, greasy mass, thick-lipped, one eye open and staring, the other retreating into a pouch of fat. Maybe it was rigor mortis or something, but his mouth was drawn into a lurid, toothy grin. There was something vile and perverse about that.
Specks had a hacksaw out. “Who wants to go first?”
Lyon made a whimpering sound and almost lost his lunch when Specks laid the teeth of the saw against Zaber’s pudgy gullet and began to draw it back and forth, back and forth. Weams had to take him outside. And when they were both there, the night closing in and the rain on their faces, they both got sick, the nausea boiling up and out of them in tangled, gagging tides. But it was more than just what Specks was doing in there, but the
sound
of it. That shearing, meaty sound like a crosscut saw ripping into a ball of suet. And when Specks struck bone…Jesus.
Weams and Lyon had a smoke out there, pulled from Specks’ flask of whiskey, and wondered to high heaven how they would ever purge this night from their minds. When they went back in, Zaber’s legs and head were missing. Specks had cut them off and bagged them in green Hefty garbage bags. There was blood soaking into the soil, blood smeared right up to Specks’ elbows.