4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (3 page)

She watched the giant eye watching the moon rise. Or was it watching Magda? No, of course not. She was too insignificant to warrant attention of the great evil eye of the Devil. She had to trust that God’s angels would watch over her and come to her when it was time to transport her soul to Jesus.

She was feeling sick now. As if she might throw up. She shivered against the cold. I don’t have long, she thought.

Something all at once blocked out the moon.

Magda’s breath caught in her throat. The dead woman was standing over her, her eyes shining red in the moonlight.

“Oh mi dios,” Magda said just above a whisper.

Then the dead woman fell upon her and began to snap at her with yellowed teeth. Magda fended her off as best she could, but being paralyzed below the waist was too great a disadvantage and the dead woman quickly overcame her and tore into her throat, ripped chunks of flesh from her face and then started on Magda’s small breasts as if they were the finest delicacies. She stopped resisting and gave in to the savage assault. The pain became something else, a sensation she did not recognize, something well beyond mere physical sensation.

Something shifted inside her, knocking her off-center. She couldn’t tell whether she was leaving her body or sinking deeper into its transient flesh.

Just before death took her, Magda looked deep into the Devil’s eye in the night sky and knew God’s angels were not coming for her.

At the last, she knew that Death was not taking her. Death was
joining
her, slipping inside her as evilly as her rapists had.

But unlike the rapists, Death had come to stay.

“Shut the fuck up,” Peg said to the ghostly chorus in her head, the evil little cherubs going,
Piggy Poop, you’ve been duped. Duped by Death, don’t hold your breath. Comes the hour round at last? No, says Death, you can kiss my ass
. “You’re no Greek chorus. You’re a fucking
Geek
chorus.”

She would’ve offed herself eons ago (back when she was evil eighteen) if she hadn’t become convinced that she was the honest-to-God antichrist in the fucking flesh.

Eons if she
was
the antichrist because the antichrist could exist outside of time like Jesus and the angels (by Peggy Pope’s logic anyway), and why
not
a chick as antichrist? The dark female principle (as in
dark hole, Hell, the pit
) would make a perfect counter to the shining masculine light of Christ, right?
Sure as shit, Peggy Pissy Pants
. The possibility that she was the antichrist gave her a reason to keep living, to stuff the pin back in the grenade, so to speak. But then it was back to
Pull the pin, Piggy Poop
when she could no longer make herself believe the whole End Times schmear because she just couldn’t swallow the preposterous notion that God actually existed. It was fantasy, a ginormous fairy tale, supernatural Pablum for thumbsucking shitheads and assorted slurps of Shit World.

The long and the short of it being that Peg Pope didn’t exist eons ago because she wasn’t the antichrist because there was no antichrist because there was no Christ because because because blah blah blah.

But now this big eyeball was up there looking at her and the frigging thing blinked and changed everything. Now she could believe
any
thing because
any
thing was possible. She could go back to being the antichrist if she’d half a mind to. She laughed, the idea of having half a mind tickling like a feather in her funnybone cerebellum. Say what
? Say amen, motherfuck. I’m still here.

Still on the bridge after sundown. The geezer trying to raise Cain with his raised cane had moved on and was no doubt preaching the Word to elsewhere
slurps
dumb enough to hear it. When he’d got close enough to spray Peg with his spittle and to gaze into her Goth Girl whiteface, she put the fear of the Lord or Lucifer into him by saying: “Get the fuck off my bridge or I’ll throw your narrow old ass off it.” As he hobbled away tapping his cane on the sidewalk, she shouted: “I am the End Timer come to end Shit World!” A glance up at the eye in the sky put an end to that lie.

There was of course an easy way to find out who she was and what was what. She could go ahead and jump. “It is what it is,” she said to the eye aglow in the night sky. “Or it ain’t what it is. It’s either splat! and die, or splat! and
Dig that bitching eye. Wow, dude.”

She looked off at the Santa Rita Mountains to the south. A wind blew up so strong that she thought it might smack her off the bridge. Then it came to her that it was a devil wind from no place on this earth, a wind carrying something momentous. Just as quickly as it had come, it died. Or departed. Leaving in its wake a pair of buzzing flies.
Fucking flies?

Big-ass horseflies. When the first one bit her she yelped and swatted at it in anger. Missed. Then the other one dive-bombed her and took a bite out of her throat.

This one she smacked good. Splat! Splattered its guts. She wiped the goo off her throat and examined the foul mess on her fingertips. Blood mixed with a sickening green gunk and a pallid pus-like substance.

It reeked.

It smelled like backed-up drainage from rotting corpses clogging a sewer line.

It reeked.

She retched. She held onto the concrete rail.

Dizzy.

Shit.

Horseflies from hell.

She looked one last time into the eye in the sky, wished she could spit in it but instead said, “That’s it. I take no more shit. I’m ending Shit World right fucking now.”

And she somersaulted over the side and went splat! when she hit the tracks.

A short while later, she got up and started walking on broken bones. Leaving behind a lot of blood and a bit of brain.

The patio outside their Nogales motel room. Jamie chain-smoked and slapped at no-see-ums and a particularly persistent black fly. Thomas stared meditatively at the great eye overhead, occasionally shaking his head in wonder or disbelief.

“Can we please go in now?” she asked. “These bugs are eating me up.”

Thomas grunted.

Jamie said, “How long can you sit and look at the goddamn thing? Let’s go in. It’s obviously not going anywhere.”

“Um-hm.”

She said, “I have to be home by midnight or John boy will get suspicious and once the son of a bitch catches scent he’s like a fucking bloodhound. There ain’t no quit in the man. Believe me, we don’t want him sniffing us out. He’ll kill us both. And his cop buddies will cover for him. So chop-chop. Get a move on. Hot night in Fuck City.”

“I can’t
believe
you,” he said, finally taking his eyes off
the eye
. “Don’t you know a miracle when you see one?”

“Jesus! We didn’t come here for miracles. It’s a no-tell motel, for Christ’s sake. We came for screwing our asses off and so far you’ve let me down big time. I could’ve saved my money and stayed home with my vibrator. Mr. Mojo ain’t afraid to go up my ass either. Unlike one ass clown I could name. Reverend.”

“Could you be any cruder? My God …”

“Oh, I can be a lot cruder, Jesus boy.” She flipped her cigarette into the deepening dusk surrounding the patio. “And I can make you love it.”

A small plane with navigation lights blinking passed in front of the eye gleaming in the moonlight. Thomas looked up and said, “The thing must be outside the earth’s atmosphere. As high as the heavens. I wonder what the space station sees.”

She slid out of her chair and knelt between his legs and unzipped him. He tried to push her away and stand up but she kept him pinned to his seat. Her fingers found his limp cock, brought it out into the night air and took its bulbous knob in her mouth. It began to swell and quickly became a mouthful.

“Somebody could see us,” he protested weakly.

“So what?” she said around his dick, sounding tongue-tied. “Nobody knows us here.”

She sucked hard and bobbed her head until he groaned, then she pulled it out and said, “C’mon, we’re going inside so you can fuck me proper.” She yanked him out of his chair by his dick but this time he didn’t object. She led him to the sliding-glass door, opened it and pulled him into the stale, frigid air.

She undressed in a hurry. “I’m itching like a bitch. Those little fuckers feasted on me. Didn’t you get any bites?”

“A few, I guess. Mostly from you.”

“Ha. So you did notice. I was beginning to think you were a fucking zombie. I’d hate for my best efforts to go unnoticed.”

“I noticed. Why else would I let you lead me around by my … thing.”

“Don’t play the prude. It makes you sound like a phony. And don’t kid yourself. When you whack off with your left hand your right
does
know what you’re doing. Now get your clothes off.”

She poked the head of his erect penis with her fingernail and said, “You’re going to put that in my ass or I’ll start screaming bloody murder. Don’t think I won’t.”

“Jamie, please …”

She slathered massage oil between her legs, front and rear, and then climbed onto the bed, remained on her hands and knees and waggled her ass. “Come and get it, big boy. Climb on and pop it in the poop chute. It’s a dark ride.”

He obeyed. He positioned himself to mount her and she reached back to guide him into forbidden territory. He went in slow, an inch at a time.

“Oh … yeah,” she said. “How’s it feel?”

“Um, tight. Good.”

“Bet your ass, baby. Now all the way. Reach around and finger me while you fuck me. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ, that’s wicked good!”

When the screams started in the next room, they paid no attention. They went on with their fucking and didn’t finish until the police sirens screamed up outside.

Pima County Sheriff Pedro Delgado wasn’t going down easy. The Baddest Sheriff in America sure as hell was not going down without a wangdangdoodle of a gunfight. Funny thing was, Pedro didn’t much give a rip if the three
chollos
killed him or if he killed them or they all killed each other.

Pedro was old. Sixty-six. Way he saw it, it was better to die by gunfire with his Old Gringo boots on than to die pissing himself in some reeking retirement home. The handcrafted boots were Tattoo Eagles, the style he’d made famous—so much so that the good folks at Old Gringo sent him a new pair free of charge whenever he wanted them. He didn’t reckon he’d be needing another. Seeing as how he was likely to die here on this lonely stretch of desert road unless these
chollos
were as stupid as they looked—which hardly seemed possible. Nah, he figured they knew their business and business was pretty damn good, what with things going red hot along the border these days and politicians shooting off at the mouth, playing one group of folks against another, and with what some folks called The Machete War off some dumb-ass propaganda movie seemed about to break out for real between Mexico and the States, Machete being this Christ-like warrior avenger bent on taking it to white folks for being the white wicked spawn of Satan or something.

Lord knew Pedro had no shortage of enemies. When a lawman actually does his job, he makes plenty of enemies. The reason he was hated with so much venom was because his political enemies couldn’t get away with calling him racist. Pedro Delgado was a third-generation Mexican-American. They couldn’t very well accuse him of being racist for locking up illegals from Mexico. And that pissed them off so bad they couldn’t shit straight. He was a stickler for enforcing the law and they couldn’t tolerate that because it queered their deal, wrecked their grand agendas. They were desperate to knock his dick in the dirt but couldn’t figure how to do it so it would stick. So they’d sent these three shooters with gang tattoos and blue bandana do-rags to gun down the Baddest Sheriff in America.
Tres amigos.

“Bring it on, amigos,” he said, hunkered down in an arroyo with his gun out and ready. “Let’s get this hooraw over with. I ain’t getting’ any younger. And you boys ain’t likely to get any older.”

He should’ve seen this coming but when their pickup had barreled up behind his cruiser with lights flashing and horn honking, Sheriff Delgado had cut speed and pulled over to see what the trouble was.

Quick enough he saw trouble aplenty. That was when the three
chollos
jumped out of their truck with guns drawn, one of them waving a machete with his left hand. Pedro thanked the good Lord his reaction time was still pretty swift for a man of his age as he slid across the seat and ducked out through the passenger door and the assassins threw a hail of hot lead into the Pima County cruiser. One round knocked his hat off and a fragment of another clipped his earlobe and stung something fierce. Pedro drew and returned fire just to keep the boys honest, not to actually hit them because he had no clear shot.

The punk wearing a straw cowboy hat over his do-rag yelled “La raza!” and winged another shot at Pedro’s hatless head. The shot punched a hole in the passenger-door window, missing his head by a good three inches. And that was when he decided to low-tail it for the arroyo just off the side of the road without trying to grab the cruiser’s scattergun. He reckoned the 12-gauge would be of little use to a dead man. Then the
chollo
in the hat demonstrated that he wasn’t as dumb as he looked when he reached into the cruiser for the scattergun. Pedro aimed his pistol and snapped off a shot at the man’s head.

Missed.

He blamed the miss on the darkness, though the moon was plenty bright and there was good light from the pickup’s headlights and the cruiser’s too.

Pedro pulled his rosary from his shirt pocket and began to worry the wooden beads as he kept the pistol pointed toward the road and in the general direction of the three asshole hombres determined to kill him. His late wife had given him the beads years ago and made him promise to always keep them near his heart when he was on the job. He wasn’t a devout Christian but hunkered in this arroyo he was no atheist in a foxhole either.

“Lord,” he said, “I hope you can forgive me for having to kill these men. Or if it goes the other way, I hope you don’t find my sins too offensive. Lord knows I most always tried to do the right thing. Forgive my failures if you can. Amen.”