Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (35 page)

The finger squeezes, the hammer descends, the bul et flies, the locker of Deke’s being sprays onto the sand. Father forgive them.

Marly ducks back behind the tree. Jesus Christ, they
kil ed
him; they shot Deke—

No. No. Think. Piece it together. Deke was dead already.

Al right. Then maybe Bil and Leonard knew what was happening here, what this madness was al about.

Sweating in the artificial subtropic night, she steps out from behind the tree. She lowers her rifle and waves. “Hey,” she cal s.

Bil whirls and fires. The .44 magnum goes off like a cannon. Behind her she hears the bul et slam into the tree. A splinter strikes her arm.

She drops, rol s sideways, and ends up prone with the butt of her carbine against her right shoulder, left eye sighting. “It’s Marly,” she cal s. “Drop your gun.”

“Marly—” Bil heads toward her.

“Drop your gun, or Deke’s gonna hold the door for you on his way in.”

He hesitates, possibly thinking about the independent clause of Marly’s sentence, but drops the gun. His left hand goes to his wrist.

“You, too, Leonard.”

“Listen, Marly, there’s muh, muh,
more
of those things around here. I don’t think it’s such a g-g-good—”

She pul s the trigger. The rifle doesn’t buck nearly as much as she thought it would. A plume of sand kicks up behind Leonard’s right leg, and he drops his rifle. Marly stands and heads toward them. “Now what the hel ’s going on?” she demands as she approaches.

“Someone’s b-b-broken into the station,” Leonard says from the beach.

“Infiltration,” adds Bil . “Carnitropes for distraction. Behind enemy lines. Liberating the soles in limbo. Tactical incursion, hit and run, select firepower for multienviron-ment guerril a warfare.

Strategic placement, Staff on alert.” He is breathing heavily. His right wrist is swel ing.

Marly looks at Leonard, who shrugs and looks momentarily worried. Bil , he seems to be indicating, is playing poker with a pinochle deck.

“Grace is dead,” says Leonard, and Marly feels something with blades unfold in her chest. Not because she cared especial y for Grace, to be quite honest, but because their hermetic group is irretrievably reduced. Change has been introduced into the system; ripples wil spread from this splash. About fucking time.

She indicates the corpses on the sand behind Leonard. “One of them?”

He nods. “Huh-Haiffa, too, we think.”

“I saw what happened with Deke. Why did he stop? He had you, but he just stopped.”

“Because I liberated him,” replies Bil . “I freed him, I cast him from limbo. Because I blew his goddamn brains out.”

“Why did he stop attacking you before Bil shot him?” Marly firmly directs her question to Leonard, who shrugs.

“I don’t know. One m-minute he was al over me, and the nuh, next it was like he’d smel ed bad muh-muh-
meat
, or someth…” He stops.

Marly frowns.

“B-b-bad meat,” says Leonard. “Oh, my God. That’s it. Cul s from the herd. Cel ular awareness.”

He looks at Marly. “Jesus Christ, that’s it.” His stutter is much slighter.

“It’s an extremely good pistol, actual y,” says Bil .

Marly ignores him. She is uncertain what to do. Now Leonard seems to be popping his excelsior, too.

“Hodgkin’s disease,” says Leonard, and thumps his chest. For a moment Marly thinks it’s another
non sequitur
, but then she realizes.

“You son of a bitch,” she says. “You never said—”

And the lights go out al over the Ecosphere.

[17]

Bonnie sits in lotus on her bed.
Om mani padme om
.
Om mani padme om
. She uses the litany as a kind of squeegee to wipe away the karmic scum she feels she has accumulated tonight.

She is just beginning to feel relaxed when the lights go out. She sits in darkness for a moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

She hears a faint noise like popcorn popping in the distance.

She debates whether she should stay in her room. What decides her is the realization that the air vents probably aren’t working if the power is out. She’l want to be outside.

But… outside? The men are stalking each other, and probably Marly playing their adolescent army games along with them. Outside? No; let them get it out of their systems. Of course there are carnitropes out there, the reanimated corpses, but Bonnie feels no superstitious dread whatsoever toward them. They didn’t
ask
to be what they are, and what they are is real y not very different from plants. Hungry plants, mobile plants, but plants al the same. And Bonnie feels a kinship with plants. She certainly does not feel
threatened
by them, just as she does not feel threatened by the carnitropes. You could outrun them, outsmart them, out-anything them.

She gropes around her modular dresser until she finds a miniature Tekna flashlight. She twists the ridged section ringing the lens, and the light comes on. She slides the circle of light around her room and is reminded of a germ under a microscope. Light is the only weapon she needs.

She fixes the circle of light on her door and makes her way toward it.

“This is it.” Dieter opens the power-room door and begins to enter.

“Stay right there. Turn on the light.”

“I can’t stay where I am and turn on the light.”

“Turn on the light, asshole.”

Dieter leans in and turns on the light. He takes short steps as he is prodded in. The door is shut behind him. He turns to look at his captor for the first time and is unsurprised to recognize the long-haired young man who came begging last week. Was it last week? He’s not sure how long ago it was. Time flies.

“Yeah, it’s me,” says the young man. “You just stay right there. Lace your fingers and put your hands on top of your head. We’re playing charades and you’re a sequoia, got it?”

Dieter doesn’t get it, but he nods anyway and does as he’s told.

The man keeps the submachine gun trained on him as he shrugs out of a nylon daypack. He bends and unzips it, keeping the gun on him, then pul s out a box about the size of a cardboard pencil case. The box is olive-drab and curved like a hip flask. In upraised letters one side reads FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. He carries box and backpack toward power-converter controls, circuit breakers, generator controls, voltmeters, regulators, and stacked banks of power-storage batteries. He sets the box face-down on a bank of controls, pul s out a little white box with square buttons that looks like a portable radio, connects it to the curved box, and trips a toggle switch. He sets another curved box against the battery bank. “Nice little ratbox you people have here,” he says conversational y as he goes about his work. “Al the comforts of home. Air conditioning. Barcaloungers. MTV.”

“What do you want from us?” Dieter asks.

“Nothing.” He glances at him. “Real y.” He shrugs. “Used to want a hamburger or two, but hey, that’s life in the big city, now, isn’t it?”

“Look, man,
I
wanted to give you some food. I
told
them we should, that it was only the right thing to do. But they wouldn’t—”

The man waves him to silence. “Water under the bridge,” he says. “Let the dead past bury its dead, I say.” He indicates the row of circuit breakers. “Main power switch?” he asks.

Dieter shrugs. “I’m a marine biologist,” he says.

“Mmph. Chust fol owink orders, huh?”

Dieter says nothing. The man rises and goes to the row of circuit breakers. He throws a knife switch. Nothing happens. He pul s another one. Nothing. Another.

“ ’S awright,” he says. “They’re doing something somewhere.” He continues throwing switches.

The lights go out, and Dieter makes his move.

Sailor waits until he hears the door latch jerked down and the door snatched open. He fires a burst on ful auto, sweeping the barrel in a tight crescent. The clip is empty in seconds. He thumbs the release, pul s out the empty, drops it, pul s a fresh one from his back pocket, and slaps it in. He bends and gropes until he encounters the backpack. He pul s out a penlight and switches it on, then attaches it beneath the squarish gun barrel with electrical tape and plays it around the room.

The body props open the door. Bul etholes in a slight diagonal to either side of the door frame.

Sailor shoulders his pack and steps over the body. “One duuumb fucker,” he says. He trains the penlight beam down. Al back shots, a whole bunch of them. They don’t count for shit in the long run, but that’s al right. It’s Sailor’s party. The more, the merrier.

Flashlight beam guarded with one hand, he steps past the body and makes his way down the hal .

Bil doesn’t waste a second: He knows where his gun is, and when the lights go out, he bends, scoops it up, and runs. He doesn’t need light to find his way. Hyperacute kinesthesia. Night sense. Geared to register motion. Under siege. Trojan horse. Marly and Leonard cal ing, but he keeps running. Charlie’s out there. In the bush. In the desert. In the marsh. In the fields. In their own back yard.

Gotta deploy. Gotta recon. Stay low. Hit and rol . Hit and run.

He reaches the screen door easily and negotiates the access corridor in a westerly direction. He emerges in fresher air and croplands. Out there. Waiting.

Footsteps. Running toward him. Breathing, low, from the ground.
Crawling
, sneaky sons of bitches. Pale figure coming toward him on hands and knees. He raises the magnum and fires.

Pain stitches his sprained wrist. Tough shit. Gotta be tough, son. No pain, no gain.

Squealing, labored breathing. Stubby, flailing legs in front of him. A goddamn
pig
, for Christ’s sake!

Wrist throbbing, he stalks the cornfields. There,
there
, two of the fucks. Zip, zip, good as dead.

Good as dead
— hah! Better soon.

He stalks. Three shots left? Let’s see: one that liberated Deke, one that missed Marly, one for makin’ bacon. Yep: three left.

They’re turning for him now. Stupid bastards, not even brains enough to hide. Couldn’t sneak up on a goddamn slug. He walks right up to the nearest. Gun against the nose. It grabs the barrel.

“Say goodnight, Grade,” he says, and pul s the trigger—but the sonofabitch has grabbed around the
back
of the gun, and the hammer won’t cock back. Bil tugs the gun and the creature merely fol ows. The other one is pretty close now. Bil puts a foot on its stomach and shoves. The gun slides free. Bil steps back. Too close to take time to aim. Head a hard target. Policeman crouch, good form, squeeze…

Boom!
and the fucker slams backward like it’s been sledgehammered by God himself. In the muzzle flash the T-shirt reads SAVE THE WHALES.

Bil ignores the pain in his wrist as he takes aim and fires at the second staggering figure.
Boom!

EAT ME, reads the shirt.

Bil laughs. “Eat
this
, shit-for-brains!” He waves the magnum. His wrist is on fire. He is alive.

He runs for the staff HQ. Ten feet in front of it, the door is flung open. He fires automatical y: last bul et, quick on the draw, and right in the goddamn
forehead
, yeah! What’s her T-shirt say? He bends, pul s a flashlight from the twitching fingers, shines it down.

No T-shirt. Kimono, parted to expose one breast. Doesn’t say a thing. Germ circle of light slides up to dead eyes, dril ed forehead, red hair.

Bonnie.

[18]

Leonard walks the forest of the dead. He is one of them and they leave him alone. He is tainted.

He is taboo. He is
bad meat
.

Leonard laughs.

In the distance, gunfire.

Sweating he wanders smiling through lush tropics. He’l make it. They’l leave him alone. Leonard alone may run the gauntlet of the dead. The rejected cul triumphant. Darwin in reverse: Those who have not survived wil al ow the genetic undesirable to continue.

Another shot.

Leonard pauses. There is more to fear from the living, he realizes.

Then I shal climb a tree. I wil sit in a branch and await the dawn. And then? I wil be free. To do whatever I want. For as long as… as I have left.

He finds a tree and hoists himself up from the leaf-carpeted ground.

Marly thinks it’s about time to abandon ship. At the first sound of gunfire she was acting out of concern for the Ecosphere and the safety of the others, but now she realizes that the Ecosphere has been a ghost ship for quite some time, Flying Dutchman in the Arizona desert, and the truth about her crew is that it’s
always
been every man for himself. The current situation merely brings the point home.

Nope: too late to repair the leaks, to Band Together As A Unit; no returning to Those Golden Days of Yesteryear. Time to jump in a lifeboat and row for shore.

Marly exits the access corridor and crouches low near the glass. In her pocket is the key to the armory, taken from Deke’s body on the beach. In the armory are the keys to the Land Rover, along with more guns and ammunition.

She runs forward, bent low, carbine ready. She nearly trips over the body of a pig. Half its head has been blown away.

Bil theasshole.

She hurries on toward the habitat. In the darkness every shape is a threat. Why didn’t she think to grab a flashlight? Wel , this wasn’t exactly the sort of emergency they’d planned on.

But wasn’t it exactly the sort of emergency they should have considered? Didn’t crop blights sort of pale in comparison?

She heads toward the three tal rows of corn; from there she can survey her surroundings before proceeding.

Body among the stalks. Face up, face gone. SAVE THE WHALES beneath. She steps around it and puts some distance between it and herself, then kneels in the rich soil. Tang of nitrogenated fertilizers.

She looks toward the staff quarters. The door is partway open, propped by a body. She can see it only from the waist down; from the waist up it is inside the building. Too dark to tel who it is.

Cornstalks rustle.