4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (8 page)

“Uh, shot of tequila,” Cruz said. “Make it a double and uh, hold the buckshot.”

The bartender pulled the shotgun away. Cruz raised his head off the bar and rubbed the throbbing knot over his left ear. The last thing he remembered was sitting down at the bar and then the bartender swinging a shotgun at his head in the manner of a batter going for a bunt.

“Can’t be too careful,” the bartender said, “what with all the wild shit coming down.”

“Right,” Cruz said. Who was he to argue with a psycho strapped with a shotgun?

The bartender set the shotgun down and poured Cruz a shot. “Now that the world’s turned into a fucking Romero movie, a guy can’t be too careful, ya know?”

“Right.”

“Could’ve just gone ahead and shot you, you know. But I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Little love tap to see if you woke up dead or not. Sometimes you can’t tell right off the bat. If a dude’s dead or zombied out or normal. One thing that ain’t like the movies, a headshot don’t put the deaders down. I can prove that shit. You wanna see?” “Uh, no, that’s all right,” Cruz said after he downed the shot.

“C’mon, what’s it gonna hurt? Ain’t like you got something else to do. What with the world gone to shit and dead. Hell, I would’ve closed up hours ago but I don’t wanna have to go home to shoot the wife, you know? Ain’t got the heart. It’s all over the news. They don’t come right out and say all the dead are walking but a little reading between the lines tells the tale. Me, I’ve seen it for my own damn self. Hadda blow away two dead cocksuckers. One a good customer too. Come on, pal, it ain’t gonna kill you. Come meet Joe the Dead.”

Cruz didn’t move. He said, “How about another shot of tequila?”

“Sure, sure. After you see Joe. Joe the Dead. Ain’t got no head but he keeps going and going like that fucking battery-hyped bunny beating a bass drum. He’s locked in the ladies room. C’mon, he can’t hurt you. He’s so shot to shit he just lies there twitching.”

“No thanks,” Cruz said. “I don’t have the stomach for it right now.”

The bartender scowled, leaned close and lowered his voice: “You better find it real quick, buddy. Dude in the booth over there’s got plans for you. And he don’t strike me as somebody you wanna rub the wrong way.”

Cruz turned his head as casually as he could to get a look at the dude in the booth.

Blink-click: mental snapshot: man in a red hoodie, hood up to conceal his face. The same guy.

Bad juju coming off him in waves.

Baad
juju.

“What’re you talking about?” Cruz asked as quietly as he could. “What plans?”

“Fuck should I know? Ask him. He’s the mystery man on the news. Where he shows up, the shit goes down. They been showing cell-phone pictures of him. They think he’s some kinda terrorist but he’s something a damn site worse than that.”

Cruz stole another glance. It looked like the guy
had
no face.

Bartender whispered, “Get off your ass and come with me. I don’t want on this guy’s bad side. Let’s go. Joe ain’t getting no fresher.”

“Right,” Cruz said, sliding off the stool. “Tell me, what city is this?”

“Jesus Christ. Phoenix. Where the fuck ya think?”

Cruz shrugged. “I have no idea how I got here.”

“Yeah, well, that could be the least of your problems, pal.”

Wyatt put the crosshairs on the guy’s forehead and fired again. In the scope it was great the way the wetback drug mule’s head came apart.

“That did it,” Clint attaboyed him. “Put him down
that
time.”

“Dink’s dead but won’t stay down,” Wyatt said, using the term his granddaddy often used for the Vietnamese whenever he told war stories. “Watch. He’ll pop back up in a minute. Weird shit happening here, bro.”

“End Times, dude. Time to be lewd, crude and screwed.”

“Not before we get that dope,” Wyatt said.

“We got three backsacks full. That ought to do us dumb awhile.”

“We get this one and then haul ass before the Border Patrol’s choppers start chopping.”

“Whoa, there he goes! He’s getting up again. That shit is ill.”

Yes, it was, Wyatt had to agree. Yesterday the world was the same old ass-dull place it always was, and now here they were a few hours into the next day and the dead were walking and it was even weirder than the news guys knew or were saying. Maybe it
was
the End Times. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was the perfect time to put their longtime plan in effect.

Shoot & Loot they called it. They had trained themselves with their self-styled sniper school. No actual teachers, just books, videos and related internet sites. It was a short leap from being boys raised on hunting to becoming men skilled in the deadly art of killing with long-range weapons. Once they were proficient in shooting, they worked on refining the Loot part of their plan.

The drug cartels used the Arizona-Mexican border for smuggling dope into the U.S. Everybody knew it, just as most folks knew the Feds did next to nothing to stop it, mostly because of dumb-ass political reasons. The way Wyatt figured it, the drugs were theirs for the taking. The “mule” trains were usually guarded by guys with automatic weapons but a couple of Red White & Blue American boys with sniper rifles could take out the guards at a safe distance, no problem. Then all they had to do was put down as many mules as they could (all you had to do was wing them, not kill them) and go down and collect their dope-crammed backpacks.

Shoot & Loot, baby. Protect the good old U. S. of A. from illegals and get paid in dope. This was a shooting war and the spoils of war went to the best shooters with the best battleplan.

The only wrinkle in the plan was that these walking dead motherfuckers messed up the One Shot, One Kill sniper’s credo. Apparently, you couldn’t kill these zombies with
any
number of shots. That
Shoot em in the head
shit worked only in the movies, not out here along the fucking border. But that was okay. Wyatt was digging the shit out of shooting dudes who were already dead (or supposed to be). It took any guilt right out of the fucking picture. Even with that freaky eyeball in the sky watching like the eye of some goddamn god.

God had to cut you a little slack for blowing away living dead dudes humping dope.

“That’s five mules down,” Clint said. “Let’s go get us some drugs, dude.”

“Hope none of them zombie shooters accidentally gets off a lucky killshot,” Wyatt said.

“Nah, man, you can see they ain’t even holding their weapons no more. They still kicking but they can’t shoot shit. Ain’t in their minds to do it.”

“Reckon you’re right, clit.”

“Don’t call me that shit,” Clint said.

Wyatt chuckled. It felt good after the extreme stress of their first Shoot & Loot. He said, “Let’s hike down there and get the shit. Check out these zombie motherfuckers up close and personal, like.”

Nadif was more than a little amazed that he could still see even though his eyes and much of his cranium had been destroyed by the last sniper’s shot. He didn’t know if this was a good thing or a very bad one. That the disembodied soul could still see was not so surprising. That it must witness such abominations was. Where exactly were the soul’s eyes located? he wondered. Was he somehow seeing now by the grace (or curse) of the great eye in the sky? (An image of his beloved’s eyeball hanging by its stalk over her bloody cheek flashed through his memory, then faded as fast as summer lightning.)

Two young men stood over his spasming body. Infidels. American devils with scoped rifles. His destroyers. Mocking him. Laughing at him.

Nadif’s soul smiled. Now he understood. Allah was granting him a divine favor, a blessed boon. Allah was allowing him to see that the exquisitely weaponized plague virus was about to be passed on to these two ignorant devils and carried back into their homes and environs, thence to spread as if on fiery desert winds. The onset of symptoms would be unnaturally rapid and cruelly devastating. Best of all, the organism would remain insidiously virulent as it spread through the population.

Nadif’s soul shouted:
God is great!

Allahu Akbar
.

Dude was the Devil. Bobby Cruz had a nose for news and his news nose told him so:

This dude in the red hoodie is the honest-to-God Devil.

And unlike most people in the news business, Bobby believed deeply in the Devil, and had done so since he was old enough to grasp the concept of Ultimate Evil Personified. Six, as he recalled. That was how old he was when he actually saw in his mind’s eye Satan rising from the ground to grab him and take him down to hell. A childish image now. But was it really? If the dead could rise, then why couldn’t the Devil come up from hell? He could. The question now was: Why? And what did the Devil want with Bobby Cruz?

“Go on,” said the bartender. “Ask him. If you got the balls. But first you gotta see Joe. I call him Joe the Dead after a character in a book a customer left on the bar one time. By William Burroughs? You heard of him? Faggot addict, dead now. Boy, did he come up with some crazy faggy shit. Anyway, here’s Joe.”

The bartender threw open the Ladies Room door and the smell of death and deodorizer hit Bobby full force in the face, kicked open his sinuses and blew them out like a teargas bomb. His eyes ran with tears. Runny eyes, runny nose-for-news.

The body was on the floor by the first stall. Its head was completely separated from the hideous blackened stump of its neck. From the looks of things, the bartender had blown the head off with several close-range blasts. The eyes in the head were intact and looked up at Cruz and the bartender with worried puzzlement, as if Joe the Dead were wondering if they were going to play football with his head.

His arms and legs had likewise been blown off and lay twitching several feet from their stumps. One bloody hand was trying to drag itself across the wet tile with its fingers, like a wounded rat seeking to hide in a dark corner.

“See and remember,” the bartender said. “I think that’s what the man in red wants you to do. Like some sort of reporter for the end of the world. Like the red dude’s disciple.”

“He told you this?”

“Well, not in so many words. Not in words at all. Guy never speaks. He puts thoughts in your head. Slips em right in there somefucking-how. That’s why I gave you a whack on the head when you sat at my bar. He made me do it, I think, just to knock you off balance, sort of like a master smacking sense into his apprentice. Him being the master, not me. Call me crazy, but I think he’s an angel. Not the airy-fairy type. More like the ones God sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Let’s get out of here,” said Cruz, wiping his eyes. “I’ve seen and smelled enough of Joe.”

“Yeah. Rest in pieces, Joe.” The bartender chortled at his own trite joke.

They left the Ladies Room and returned to the bar. The Red Hoodie Devil remained in the booth, his face—if he had one—remained hidden in suggestive shadow.

Bobby wondered what would happen if he took the bartender’s shotgun and pumped some slugs into the red-hooded son of a bitch.

The Devil laughed inside Bobby’s head. Laughed so hard it rattled Bobby’s eyeballs and gave him a splitting headache.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” he said, pressing both hands to his head as if to keep it from splitting apart. “So what do you want with me?”

The Devil plopped a leatherbound book on the table in front of him.

Bobby warily approached the booth.

The air changed. It was as if the Devil had brought a little of hell’s atmosphere with him. It fairly crackled. It smelled not of brimstone but of cloves and cinnamon and something long dead and mouldering.

The Devil raised a hand and the TV over the bar came to life. A local news anchor who looked like she hadn’t bothered with the usual makeup and hairspray was saying: “… and demonstrators on both sides of the issue are already gathering in downtown Phoenix in spite of the governor’s warning to stay away. Similar demonstrations are also planned for other Arizona cities, but no word yet on what’s happening at those locations. We’ll be going live to our on-scene reporter shortly.”

Then the Devil was in Bobby’s head. It was a voice that required neither tongue to speak it nor ears to hear it, yet it was melodiously full and powerfully seductive.

It said,
Go there and record what you see in the book. Report faithfully. Soon there will be no electronic record and no electricity. Your way of life is about to be wiped. Set all you see down in these pages and keep them safe
.

Bobby grew woozy. Blood roared like an ocean in his ears and he thought he was going to faint. He leaned forward to brace himself on the table.

The Devil’s hands were long, bloodless and without a trace of hair. They were
delicate
. One of them produced an ornate black pen of a type Bobby Cruz had never seen before, obviously antiquated and adorned with ram’s-head horns. He knew without looking that the Devil’s fingers would be devoid of fingerprints. Angels had no fingerprints. Neither did a fallen angel. Cruz knew this without knowing precisely how he knew it.

TV voices came back into his ears: “That’s right, Janis. Now that the CDC has been called in and the National Guard has been called out, you would expect smaller crowds here in the streets of Phoenix, especially so early in the morning, but as you can see, the crowds on both sides of the illegal immigration issue are large and growing. And tempers are already flaring. The riot squad only moments ago arrived and are beginning to deploy. They’re using bullhorns to tell the crowds to disperse but no one is showing any sign of leaving this tense scene. And as you just reported, Janis, the governor has said she won’t hesitate to declare martial law if necessary, which it well may be, with emergency response systems all over the state so overloaded as to be virtually nonexistent. Arizona is in a crisis of unimaginable consequences and nobody knows how this bizarre series of events will end or how far the growing chaos will spread. I can tell you, there is a feeling of panic bordering on hysteria out here on the streets and a sense that things are about to explode. Whatever the outcome, we will be here to bring it to our viewers, for as long as possible. But as one riot cop told me just minutes ago, ‘When the dead walk, all bets are off.’”