Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (55 page)

Oh, God. God, no.
She’d hit him full speed right at the jacket pocket level, and what remained of the bag of gravedigger powder had burst all over him and into the air.

Rocko had smacked his head against the tile floor and was lying motionless, the gun somewhere out of sight. A trickle of blood ran from his mouth. Bobby shoved the woman away from him and tried to get to his feet, but she grabbed him by his legs and began to pull herself up his body with claws as strong as iron. Her wrinkled buttocks clenched, bare feet scrambling against the tile, and he thought of a possum he’d seen as a kid that had been run over in the road, its hind legs crushed, dragging itself across the asphalt.

The powder was everywhere.

He managed to get a hand on the edge of the gurney table, and he was almost upright when something brushed against his fingers. He looked down at his hand to see naked toes wiggling against him from under the gurney’s white sheet.

Near hysterics and summoning more strength than he knew he had left, he drove his knee upward and caught Denise James smartly under the chin. Her head snapped back and her grip loosened, and he lashed out at her again in a roundhouse kick, catching her flush on the temple with the top of his shoe. She went down hard, her head hitting the floor with a sickening crack.

Her tongue her tongue is severed bitten right through—

The tongue lay on the tile like a fat, purple worm, wriggling of its own accord as if trying desperately to reach him. At that point Bobby very clearly felt one corner of his mind unhinge, and he grinned through what appeared to be a reddish mist that had begun to descend over his eyes. He realized that he’d been wrong before; it wasn’t a possum she reminded him of, but a dog. A big, mean bastard that liked to rip into flesh. One with a taste for human blood. He’d seen that dog before, in fact it had haunted his dreams for years; that dog had had a taste of him and found it good, and now it was back for more.

“Gimme back my face!” he screamed, and as she tried to rise he stomped down on her head with everything he had, feeling something crack and give, and then he stomped down again, and this time the feeling was like stepping on a rotten pumpkin out in the field, a bit of resistance and then soft, gooey sickness. He raised a red, dripping sneaker and brought it down one more time, until Denise James’s skull was nothing but a shuddering, oozing pulp of cartilage, teeth and muscle. Dimly he heard himself shouting, the sound of a damned man, and through that sound a single clear thought cut its way to the surface: maybe his was not a death wish at all, maybe he was the dead one, maybe death was your mother’s trailer in Indian Road park with cinderblock front steps and a clothesline in the back, and a job cutting up corpses with a sociopath for a partner, a fiancé lying cold in the ground from your own bad stash and $75 in the bank with no real way to pay the bills other than smuggling the very thing that had nearly suffocated him before the dog’s jaws finally brought him to his knees.

Maybe death was having nothing ahead of you, and nothing behind.

Or maybe it was the face of the stranger that stared back at you from the mirror every morning.

“Gimme back my face,” he muttered again, and stumbled backward, away from the ruin that had been Ms. Denise James. Her foot twitched on the tile. He tried not to look at it. His pact with God earlier was no good, he realized now. Because God was dead too. He had to be, if this was how the world ended up.

The wetness of his urine had grown cold and his pants stuck uncomfortably to his skin. He became aware of other sounds in the room. Wet, ripping sounds, and other draggings and hollow thumps. He looked up to see the young, naked woman from the gurney (Jen Siegel from Wiscasset?), her of the pink, wriggling toes, her back to him as she sat astride the jittering body of Rocko. She lowered her face to tear at his neck, and if Bobby hadn’t known better, he might have thought it was a lover’s embrace and tender kiss.

Gravedigger…

He glanced around the room to see the two other corpses (Edward? Marlene?) rising up off their gurneys like puppets pulled by invisible strings, and he could now clearly make out the sounds of other things thumping against the closed and latched doors of their lockers, the sound like someone beating the hull of a wounded submarine.

Bobby DeCourci screamed.

Jen Seigel’s head whipped around at the sound, and she hissed back at him like a cat before leaping to her feet. Edward and Marlene were up and moving now too (Edward had a bum leg, which made him limp in death as surely as it must have in life), and Bobby stumbled backward, sobbing helplessly now, until he was up against the wall.

It’s funny now that I’m facing my own end for real, I find out I wanna live.

Jesus, yes, he did.

I want to live.

He looked around desperately for an opening. There, under the third gurney, was Rocko’s gun. As Jen Seigel leaped at him he went low in a baserunner’s headfirst dive, sliding across the bloody tile on his stomach and then pulling himself the rest of the way with his arms until the gun was in his hand. Then he rolled out from under the gurney, scrambled to his feet, turned to Edward Needleman and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Check the safety, you idiot…

He pressed the orange button on the side and then pulled the trigger again.

The gun bucked in his hand and Edward stumbled. He turned to fire twice at Jen Seigel, who had almost reached him now, and she fell sideways. Marlene hung back, watching him warily, a glint of intelligence in her eyes. Was she the freshest corpse? Bobby wondered. He tried to recall what Rocko had said. Something about Denise James being dead too long to remember…

Edward and Jen were back on their feet and coming at him again. He didn’t know how many more bullets were left in the gun, and there were too many of them between him and the door. There was no way out.

Something nagged at him as he waved the gun from one to the next, trying to figure out which one to shoot, something about how these people were acting, not quite like animals, but as if they had some semblance of intelligence; Denise James biting off Damon’s cock as if it retaliation for his earlier violation, her hiding in the closet and waiting for just the right moment to jump him, and now Marlene looking almost as if she were trying to plan a path of attack.

But it wasn’t until Rocko stood up that his way out clicked into place.

And even then, the sheer magnitude of what he was about to do nearly overwhelmed him. He had lived the past few years swearing on his mother’s grave he would never touch the stuff again, and yet his body always ached for it. Even now, he felt that ache deep in his belly. Once he stepped back on that path, there was no turning away again…

(…that to start up again would mean death, that he would not be able to stop, no matter what happened to him, and that sooner or later he would end up on one of these tables, with someone else sticking the line into his veins to drain him dry.)

But what choice did he have? If he tried to make it to the door, they would rip him apart. None of the corpses seemed to have any interest in each other; for whatever reason (and did the why really matter?), they were interested only in the living. That and the powder that kept them animated.

“Gimme,” Rocko said. His voice sounded like he’d swallowed an aquarium full of gravel. His throat was half torn out. One eye was gone, in its place a bloody socket touched with the white gleam of fresh bone. He stumbled forward, silver buckles on his biker jacket tinkling. “I can
smell
it. Gimmmmeeee…”

Bobby stared at Rocko’s ruined face and wondered if he had perhaps lost his own mind. Yes, in fact, that seemed to be a distinct possibility. He put the gun on the gurney, then dug into his jacket pocket and withdrew the popped baggie. A bit left in one of the corners. Then he dumped a small amount of the powder into his other palm and took a deep breath.

Well ain’t this ironic, Bobby my man? You spent every waking hour the past three years trying to keep from stuffing blow up your nose and ending up feet first to the furnace, and now it’s the only way for you to stay alive. After a fashion, anyway.

He chuckled. Ironic, all right. And as he lifted his palm to his nose, he found himself wondering what Emma might look like after three years in the ground.

The rush hit him almost immediately, that great, sweeping rush, prickles running up and down his limbs and turning his blood to glass. The red haze that had obscured his sight returned, and with it came an almost unbearable itch.

When he opened his eyes again they were almost upon him.

Bobby DeCourci didn’t hesitate. He swept the gun up and pressed the barrel to his own chest directly over his heart.

He figured he had just enough powder in him to find J.D. and the source. After that, maybe he’d pay Emma a visit. He wondered again how bad she might look after three years. And after that long, was there enough left of her brain to make her function again after some of this gravedigger powder?

Gravedigger. Keep me sane. Bury me deep, so that I can’t rise again…

DeCoursi pulled the trigger.

Coming Home

DAVID NIALL WILSON

The eerie, glowing signal lights made luminous trails in the darkness as they swung upward, signaling for the helo to lift off. Billy watched with an odd, distracted concentration. He could see the quick, precise movements of the flight deck crew below as they scurried about. The moon hung like a huge, surreal ball above them.

In the distance, shrouded in the most complete cloak of darkness Billy had ever seen, lay the Virginia shoreline. There were no lights to mark the location of the city, and that bothered him the most of all. From the anchorage they were in the warm glow of Norfolk’s millions of watts of fluorescent light had always been a cheerful sight on their homecoming. Without it, he almost had to wonder if it weren’t just some navigational glitch––if they weren’t actually far out to sea where the only illumination you ever saw was the glittering reflection of the ship’s running lights and the phosphorescent glow that churned up in the wake. On the open ocean the darkness was peaceful, a pleasant feeling of isolation from the world. Here it was the emptiest void he’d ever looked into, and somewhere in it his family waited.

As the helo swung out in a long arc, leaving the flight deck behind, he let his thoughts follow. He had plenty to think about. Twenty miles away his small white three-bedroom house was waiting; Jeanne, Eric, Robin…even the damned dog, Bubba. Images of all of them swirled through his memory with eerie clarity.

They might as well be a thousand miles away. The mission was to be quick and very limited. No side-trips to check on the well being of individual families would be authorized. That wasn’t how the Navy worked.

There were ten of them altogether, Lt. Hoy, the pilot, the regular flight crew, Wayne, Mark, Jeff, and himself, and five marines, one a grizzled, stocky Gunnery Sgt. whose grey hair and dead eyes spoke of years that had aged him but never passed the normal course of time. The man’s name was Wagner, but the crew, sailors and marines alike, called him “Ice.” Quite the happy group, though Billy could only give them a small percentage of his concentration.

Not knowing was the worst. If they’d had good, steady communication with Norfolk everything would seem more real, more controlled. As it was, they were flying into a dark unknown that not only included their own dubious safety, but that of their loved ones. A brave man will risk himself without thought, but even the bravest balks at a threat to his home, or the one he loves.

Billy wasn’t exceptionally brave, but he’d volunteered for this one anyway. Anything to get off that damned ship and do something. One more fucking minute on that ship, sitting and wondering what the hell was going on, and he’d have been going over the side and trying to swim for it.

The idea here was simple. Since they’d lost communication with Norfolk completely now, they were sending one lone helo on a scouting mission. As soon as they made contact, or determined the problem, they were to head back. At the first sign of trouble of any sort, they were to abort and return to the ship. Shit. Billy could see the reflected glitter in Ice’s eyes. There would be no returning without answers. Orders were one thing, reality another.

The mission brief had been pretty wild stuff. The stony-faced Marine Captain, Grief had been his name, had lain it out in quiet, calm tones, as though his words were as ordinary as any routine message. Zombies. Dead bodies rising up and taking over towns, defeating military units. Communications less and less frequent, and finally dead. Their last orders had been to return to sea––not to land at any cost.

Of course, the skipper had had other ideas. He knew, for one thing, that something bad was happening, and if there was any way he and his crew could help, then by god, he was going to do it. Captain Key was a hard-nosed old sailor. He’d been sailing the seas on Navy vessels since they had wooden decks and fought real wars. He wasn’t the type to run from a conflict, and his own family and those of his men lay somewhere in the shadows that now shrouded the Norfolk coastline.

Of course, Billy had heard the rumors flying around the ship, some of the same he’d just heard, others even wilder, but it put a new and disturbing perspective on things to hear it from the chain-of-command. To hear it legitimized.

The miles shot beneath them quickly, the only sound the whirring of the blades as they chopped through the air. Soon the waves gave way to beach, rocky bluffs, and finally land. They swooped in low, coming up on the Naval Air Station and reaching out with electronic fingers to the control tower below. The base was shrouded in shadows, an odd, glowing panorama, stark and empty in the silver-edged light of the moon. There was no answer from the tower, only static. Circling, the Lt. tried all of the air-emergency channels and even a couple of CB channels, but only the static reached them.