4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (6 page)

He looked about the room as if there might be some answer to his dilemma waiting there. Could he pry himself out of her with something? Like a shoehorn? No, that would damage her and raise terrible questions. And he might damage himself in the process.

His cell phone rang. His ringtone was the ring of an old-fashion phone, a subtle point of rebellion against the high-tech takeover of civilization. It seemed silly now. How civilized was it to be stuck in a dead adulteress’s snatch?

It had to be his wife Jean calling. It was almost midnight and she would be worried.

He sat up with Jamie straddling him like a life-size rag doll and scooted to the edge of the bed. Then he stood up and walked with her like a drunken acrobat across the room to slip a hand into his trousers and extract his phone. His wife’s name appeared in the LED display. He did not open the phone. He let it ring. And ring. What could he possibly say to her now?
Sure, honey, I know I’m a man of the cloth but I’m also a man of flesh with wicked carnal appetites
. No way would
that
do. He would call her back later, once this pressing situation was resolved. He was confident that he could think up a suitable explanation, as long as he didn’t have to come up with a way to explain how he happened to be in a motel room with a dead woman. And the only way to avoid that was to get his dick out of her and slip off into the night. The room was registered in Jamie’s name. All he had to do was get
unstuck
. But Jamie was holding him fast, not unlike Bre’r Rabbit and the tar baby.

He had an idea. A cold shower and lathered soap. It was worth a try. Like soaping up to get a ring off your finger, right? “Damned right,” he muttered.

He headed toward the bathroom. Walking with a woman attached to his loins was murder on the lower back and thigh muscles. He walked with an exaggerated and contorted swagger, bent backward at the waist, swinging his hips and swinging Jamie as well. He thanked God that she wasn’t a large woman. The unusual movement produced novel sensations on and within his swollen penis, sensations not unpleasant, and he realized in horror that he was inching closer to climax. He scolded himself:
If you come in a corpse you’ll be damned beyond redemption.

As he was doing his preposterous walk through the bathroom doorway, Jamie’s head banged against the doorframe.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, automatically.

Idiot, talking to a dead woman
. No sooner had the thought run through his mind than the dead woman opened her eyes.

“
Jesus
, Jamie?”

Her dead eyes fixed on him and her mouth went through a swift series of juddering contortions. He thought for a moment that she was trying to say something but then she bared her teeth and he realized too late that she intended to sink them into his neck. Which she did, viciously and with surprising power in her jaws.

In trying to get away from her perfect teeth and evil intentions, Thomas fell backward, banging his head on the floor and knocking himself out. When he came to, he came to a world of pain and hellish suffering.

The woman he’d made an adulteress—a woman dead but in no way departed—was eating him alive, bite by ripping bite.

He fought back in desperation. He pummeled her head and face but they were at such close quarters that he couldn’t put much force behind his blows. Between bites, he managed to put a forearm under her chin and jam it into her throat and then rolled over into the missionary position. She snapped her teeth at his face. He bore down now with both his forearms in her throat. Their feet were in the bathroom, the rest of them in the bedroom, where the carpet was collecting his spilled blood. That which wasn’t spilled, Jamie had already claimed. And she showed no sign that she would soon be sated.

She snapped. She made guttural sounds in the back of her throat, even as he exerted still more pressure, trying to crush her throat, trying to return her to the everyday realm of the dead.

But she would not give up the fight to remain here in the half-life of living death. Jamie—if it
was
still Jamie inside this ferocious corpse—fought with as much strength as she’d had in life. Maybe more. And now Thomas was having a harder time fending her off because his skin was so slippery with blood.
His
blood. He was losing too much of it and was rapidly growing weaker.

The phone. He had to call for medical help or he wasn’t going to survive.

He tried to drag himself (and his zombie attachment) across the carpet with one hand while keeping the other arm on Jamie’s throat. But his arm kept slipping off her and she kept biting his forearm, her teeth digging in like big-gauge needles. And the more she bit, the more he bled, the more his arm slipped, the more she bit, the more he bled …

(Was that his phone in his hand? His thick thumb tapping 9-1-1?)

It occurred to him that this was hell. God wasn’t waiting for him to die to send him to hell. Hell was right here, right now.

Apparently, hell was a porno zombie movie. And Thomas was damned to play out his part. For the moment Zombie Jamie was mostly chewing scenery but if he passed out from losing too much blood, she would freely feast upon his flesh until he was nothing but gnawed bone—or until she exploded like an overfed tick.

Will I be like her when I die?
No RIP for Zombie Tommy. Tommy Zombie. Tomby. Zero, none, nada. Not for Zommy.

Mommy?

Such were his last living thoughts as his bloody arm slipped, slid and slithered off Jamie and he collapsed face-first on the carpet.

At the end (if
the end
it was), her teeth didn’t hurt him anymore. They only tickled a little.

Head’s in a hatbox.

Stinking to high heaven.

Ranker than a cat box.

This cat with no hat.

Pedro passed his time in the box making bad rhyme, influenced by his love for Dr. Seuss. How his grandkids Juanita and Jorge had loved having him read those stories! But this, this was not a tale for kids.

He had never been sure he could believe in God or trust that there would be an afterlife but he sure as the devil hadn’t expected anything like this. His head in a hatbox, his body back there on the prairie by the side of the road, doing God-knows-what?

This was some kind of bad joke. Unless he was dreaming, which he didn’t think he was. He wasn’t capable of dreaming up anything this wild and crazy. No way. Not bullheaded Pedro, no.

Pedro the Undead Head, maybe.

An hombre could go loco in such close confines.

The worst was this thirst. Or hunger, whichever it was. Thirst, yes. For blood. That he could recognize it for what it was, was some sort of miracle in itself. It was the heart of the curse of being an undying corpse. The Baddest Sheriff in America was no novice at deduction. That this was a curse rather than a gift was a logical conclusion.

He’d also deduced that he was riding in the front seat of the truck, in the hatbox his killers had dropped him into, now resting between the two killers who were arguing over what they should do with his decapitated head. The pickup’s radio was on an all-talk station and some nitwit scientist was laying out his theory that the big eye in the sky was there because of global warming (which he used interchangeably with “manmade climate change of the catastrophic kind”).

“Put his fucking head on a spike at the border, as a greeting to all crossers,” the driver said.

“No, we stick to the plan,” said the other guy, “and deliver it to his daughter. That way it hits the media big time. And that’s the whole point.”

Pedro wanted with all his heart (not the one still in his headless body back there on the side of the road, but the metaphorical one) to break out of this box and chew these two
pendejas
to death. Trouble was, he couldn’t move. All he could do was work his broken jaws. And his good eye. He couldn’t blink or jaw his way out of the box or jump out and attack anybody. He couldn’t talk or yell without working vocal chords in a voice box and lungs full of air. He’d already tried. All he could do was mouth silent curses at his killers.

Yeah, this was hell all right. No doubt about it.

And Pedro was in it for the duration. Didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that. He wasn’t sure what he might’ve done to deserve such torment but like they said, God works in mysterious ways. And the Big Guy couldn’t get much more mysterious than this hellish horseshit.

The driver said, “I don’t care what we do with it as long as we get rid of it quick. Fucking head’s haunted, man.”

“I told you, that was reflex action,” the passenger said. “Like when you cut off a snapping turtle’s head, it can still bite the shit out of you. I got the scar to prove that shit.”

“No, man, did you see his eye? It was still looking at us. Seeing us, man.”

Pedro’s heart (not the unbeating one) sank at the thought of his daughter Maria opening up the hatbox and seeing her father’s hideous dead head. That he would have to
see
her seeing him filled him with horror. And murderous rage.

He wanted to tear into these assholes so bad he could almost taste it. Taste
them
. Not their assholes, their throats, where rich blood ran in tasty arteries, blood that would pump into his mouth in thick spurts if only he could sink his teeth into their tender flesh.

Ay yi yi!

Pedro wasn’t sure, but he thought his mouth maybe watered a little.

Bobby Cruz couldn’t remember how he got here. Didn’t really know where
here
was. Wasn’t sure it mattered very much, if at all. Here, there, everywhere. Nowhere.

There were lights. Streetlights. Neon signs. Few cars cruising the streets. Tires hissing over wet pavement.

Damndest thing. He felt like he was in someone else’s body. A stranger’s body. Walking around in it, taking it for a lazy spin the way punk-teen carjackers used to go joyriding on “borrowed” wheels.

But that wasn’t quite right either. There was something else going on here. A strong feeling that he was under the control of someone or some
thing
else. Something was taking
him
for a joyride. But that wasn’t right either, because there was no joy here, and there wouldn’t be any. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he knew that he did. No joy.

He’d been manjacked and he felt certain that he was heading for one hell of a crackup.

And somebody was watching it all happen. Watching
him
. He looked up at the night sky.

When he saw the eye he remembered.

He was on a story. The sacked reporter going undercover and incognito for a border-crossing exposé. Then he remembered being stuck in the back of the old U-haul truck with the monster flies attacking him and his fellow travelers.

And the weird dude in the red hoodie. Lord of Flies.

And that fucking crazy eye up there seeing everything. Maybe even making it all happen.
Was seeing believing?

And that was where his memory went blank. Whatever happened after that, he had no clue.

No matter. There was a bigger story here. Much bigger than the one he’d set out to do. It didn’t take a crackerjack reporter to get that.

And Bobby Cruz felt that he had been chosen to write it. He was to be the scribe who sets it all down for posterity.

All he had to do was sniff it out.

Scare it up and write it down.

The Real Story
by Bobby Cruz. Or whatever it was to be called. He would be told when the time came. He had faith in that much. Someone or some
thing
would clue him in.

A bar up on the right. Beer lights flashing in the windows.

Yeah, he could use a drink. He had a bitch of a thirst that wouldn’t quit.

And who knew? There just might be a lead to his big story waiting for him in there.

Something told him it was.

Magda Menendez was good and dead. Her flesh was meat-locker cold in this barren land’s night winds. Dead. Yet aware of everything. She didn’t understand how this could be. How she could be so intensely aware of her surroundings. How could death be such an eye-opener?

The panties on the rape tree fluttered like little pastel ghosts. A coyote yipped in the distance. A scorpion strutted by. A spider skimmed over sand.

It was true: Magda was trapped in a broken and abused body, decay already eating away at the edges of her timid existence. But somehow it did not distress her. Somehow it seemed as if it were meant to be exactly like this. If the vultures came in the morning to do their part in eating Magda out of the world, that would be fine and natural. God put bacteria and buzzards on the earth to clean up the mess death leaves behind.
Life
leaves behind.

There was no pain. Where in life there were aches and pains of every variety, now there was only the sluggish heaviness of gravity and an all-over numbness akin to the effect of Novocain dentists use to deaden your mouth.

It came as a surprise and a revelation that she could move the unbroken parts of her dead body. At first this horrified her. It was ghoulish. It made her an evil instrument of the Devil. But then she found the rosary she had put on like a necklace before she left home, and she lifted it off over her head, kissed the attached crucifix and mouthed her heart’s prayer: “Hail-Mary-full-of-grace-the-Lord-iswith-thee-Blessed-art-thou-among-women-and-blessed-is-the-fruitof-thy-womb-Jesus-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinnersnow-and-at-the-hour-of-our-death. Amen.” Then she amended: “Now
after
the hour of my death. Amen.”

She made the sign of the cross with the rosary, fingers brushing the mutilated remains of her chewed-up breasts. The woman who’d done the chewing had apparently eaten her fill and stalked off into the dark. In search of fresher meat?

Magda wondered where she herself would go if she could walk. Where was there to go? If a dead Catholic girl cannot go to Heaven, why go anywhere? No, it was just as well that she could not get up and walk. She believed with certainty that there was no decent destination for the walking dead.