Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (42 page)

“There is nothing selfish about our motives or those of Brother Lazarus. In fact, as penance for loosing the germ on the world in the first place, Brother Lazarus injected a virus into his nose. It is rotting slowly.”

“Thought that was quite a snorkel he had on him,” Wayne said.

“I take it back,” Calhoun said. “He
is
as dumb as he looks.”

“Why do the dead folks wear those sil y hats?” Wayne asked.

“Brother Lazarus found a storeroom of them at the site of the old amusement park. They are mouse ears. They represent some cartoon animal that was popular once and part of Disneyland.

Mickey Mouse, he was cal ed. This way we know which dead folks are ours, and which ones are not control ed by our regulators. From time to time, stray dead folks wander into our area.

Murder victims. Children abandoned in the desert. People crossing the desert who died of heat or il ness. We’ve had some of the sisters and brothers attacked. The hats are a precaution.”

“And what’s the deal with us?” Wayne asked.

The nun smiled sweetly. “You, my children, are to add to the glory of God.”

“Children?” Calhoun said. “You cal an al igator a lizard, bitch?”

The nun slid back in the seat and rested the derringer in her lap. She pul ed her legs into a cocked position, causing her panties to crease in the val ey of her vagina; it looked like a nice place to visit, that val ey.

Wayne turned from the beauty of it and put his head back and closed his eyes, pul ed his hat down over them. There was nothing he could do at the moment, and since the nun was watching Calhoun for him, he’d sleep, store up and figure what to do next. If anything.

He drifted off to sleep wondering what the nun meant by, “You, my children, are to add to the glory of God.”

He had a feeling that when he found out, he wasn’t going to like it.

[5]

He awoke off and on and saw that the sunlight filtering through the storm had given everything a greenish color. Calhoun seeing he was awake, said, “Ain’t that a pretty color? I had a shirt that color once and liked it lots, but I got in a fight with this Mexican whore with a wooden leg over some money and she tore her. I punched that little bean bandit good.”

“Thanks for sharing that,” Wayne said, and went back to sleep.

Each time he awoke it was brighter, and final y he awoke to the sun going down and the storm having died out. But he didn’t stay awake. He forced himself to close his eyes and store up more energy. To help him nod off he listened to the hum of the motor and thought about the wrecking yard and Pop and al the fun they could have, just drinking beer and playing cars and fucking the border women, and maybe some of those mutated cows they had over there for sel .

Nah. Nix the cows, or any of those genetical y altered critters. A man had to draw the line somewhere, and he drew it at fucking critters, even if they had been bred so that they had human traits. You had to have some standards.

Course, those standards had a way of eroding. He remembered when he said he’d only fuck the pretty ones. His last whore had been downright scary looking. If he didn’t watch himself he’d be as bad as Calhoun, trying to find the hole in a parakeet.

He awoke to Calhoun’s elbow in his ribs and the nun was standing beside their seat with the derringer. Wayne knew she hadn’t slept, but she looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She nodded toward their window, said, “Jesus Land.”

She had put that special touch in her voice again, and the dead folks responded with, “Eees num be prased.”

It was good and dark now, a crisp night with a big moon the color of hammered brass. The bus sailed across the white sand like a mystical schooner with a ful wind in its sails. It went up an impossible hil toward what looked like an aurora borealis, then dove into an atomic rainbow of colors that fil ed the bus with fairy lights.

When Wayne’s eyes became accustomed to the lights, and the bus took a right turn along a precarious curve, he glanced down into the val ey. An aerial view couldn’t have been any better than the view from his window.

Down there was a universe of polished metal and twisted neon. In the center of the val ey was a great statue of Jesus crucified that must have been twenty-five stories high. Most of the body was made of bright metals and multicolored neon, and much of the light was coming from that.

There was a crown of barbed wire wound several times around a chromium plate of a forehead and some rust-colored strands of neon hair. The savior’s eyes were huge, green strobes that swung left and right with the precision of an oscil ating fan. There was an ear to ear smile on the savior’s face and the teeth were slats of sparkling metal with wide cavity-black gaps between them. The statue was equipped with a massive dick of polished, interwoven cables and coils of neon; the dick was thicker and more solid looking than the arthritic steel-tube legs on either side of it; the head of it was made of an enormous spotlight that pulsed the color of irritation.

The bus went around and around the val ey, descending like a dead roach going down a slow drain, and final y the road rol ed out straight and took them into Jesus Land.

They passed through the legs of Jesus, under the throbbing head of his cock, toward what looked like a smal castle of polished gold bricks with an upright drawbridge interlayed with jewels.

The castle was only one of several tal structures that appeared to be made of rare metals and precious stones: gold, silver, emeralds, rubies and sapphires. But the closer they got to the buildings, the less fine they looked and the more they looked like what they were: stucco, cardboard, phosphorescent paint, colored spotlights, and bands of neon.

Off to the left Wayne could see a long, open shed ful of vehicles, most of them old school buses.

And there were unlighted hovels made of tin and tar paper; homes for the dead, perhaps.

Behind the shacks and the bus barn rose skeletal shapes that stretched tal and bleak against the sky and the candy-gem lights; shapes that looked like the bony remains of beached whales.

On the right, Wayne glimpsed a building with an open front that served as a stage. In front of the stage were chairs fil ed with monks and nuns. On the stage, six monks—one behind a drum set, one with a saxophone, the others with guitars—were blasting out a loud, rocking rhythm that made the bus shake. A nun with the front of her habit thrown open, her headpiece discarded, sang into a microphone with a voice like a suffering angel. The voice screeched out of the amplifiers and came in through the windows of the bus, crushing the sound of the engine. The nun crowed “Jesus” so long and hard it sounded like a plea from hel . Then she lept up and came down doing the splits, the impact driving her back to her feet as if her ass had been loaded with springs.

“Bet that bitch can pick up a quarter with that thing,” Calhoun said.

Brother Lazarus touched a button, the pseudo-jeweled drawbridge lowered over a narrow moat, and he drove them inside.

It wasn’t as wel lighted in there. The wal s were bleak and gray. Brother Lazarus stopped the bus and got off, and another monk came on board. He was tal and thin and had crooked buck teeth that dented his bottom lip. He also had a twelve-gauge pump shotgun.

“This is Brother Fred,” the nun said. “He wil be your tour guide.”

Brother Fred forced Wayne and Calhoun off the bus, away from the dead folks in their mouse-ear hats and the nun in her tight, black panties, jabbed them along a dark corridor, up a swirl of stairs and down a longer corridor with open doors on either side and rooms fil ed with dark and light and spoiled meat and guts on hooks and skul s and bones lying about like discarded walnut shel s and broken sticks; rooms ful of dead folks (truly dead) stacked neat as firewood, and rooms ful of stone shelves stuffed with beakers of fiery-red and sewer green and sky blue and piss yel ow liquids, as wel as glass coils through which other colored fluids fled as if chased, smoked as if nervous, and ran into big flasks as if relieved; rooms with platforms and tables and boxes and stools and chairs covered with instruments or dead folks or dead-folk pieces or the asses of monks and nuns as they sat and held charts or tubes or body parts and frowned at them with concentration, lips pursed as if about to explode with some earth-shattering pronouncement; and final y they came to a little room with a tal , glassless window that looked out upon the bright, shiny mess that was Jesus Land.

The room was simple. Table, two chairs, two beds—one on either side of the room. The wal s were stone and unadorned. To the right was a little bathroom without a door.

Wayne walked to the window and looked out at Jesus Land pulsing and thumping like a desperate heart. He listened to the music a moment, leaned over and stuck his head outside.

They were high up and there was nothing but a straight drop. If you jumped, you’d wind up with the heels of your boots under your tonsils.

Wayne let out a whistle in appreciation of the drop. Brother Fred thought it was a compliment for Jesus Land. He said, “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

“Miracle?” Calhoun said. “This goony light show? This ain’t no miracle. This is for shit. Get that nun on the bus back there to bend over and shit a perfectly round turd through a hoop at twenty paces, and I’l cal that a miracle, Mr. Fucked-up Teeth. But this Jesus Land crap is the dumbest, fucking idea since dog sweaters.

“And look at this place. You could use some knick-knacks or something in here. A picture of some ole naked gal doing a donkey, couple of pigs fucking. Anything. And a door on the shitter would be nice. I hate to be straining out a big one and know someone can look in on me. It ain’t decent. A man ought to have his fucking grunts in private. This place reminds me of a motel I stayed at in Waco one night, and I made the goddamn manager give me my money back. The roaches in that shit hole were big enough to use the shower.”

Brother Fred listened to al this without blinking an eye, as if seeing Calhoun talk was as amazing as seeing a frog sing. He said, “Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite. Tomorrow you start to work.”

“I don’t want no fucking job,” Calhoun said.

“Goodnight, children,” Brother Fred said, and with that he closed the door and they heard it lock, loud and final as the clicking of the drop board on a gal ows.

At dawn, Wayne got up and took a leak, went to the window to look out. The stage where the monks had played and the nun had jumped was empty. The skeletal shapes he had seen last night were tracks and frames from rides long abandoned. He had a sudden vision of Jesus and his disciples riding a rol er coaster, their long hair and robes flapping in the wind.

The large crucified Jesus looked unimpressive without its lights and night’s mystery, like a whore in harsh sunlight with makeup gone and wig askew.

“Got any ideas how we’re gonna get out of here?”

Wayne looked at Calhoun. He was sitting on the bed, pul ing on his boots.

Wayne shook his head.

“I could use a smoke. You know, I think we ought to work together. Then we can try to kil each other.”

Unconsciously, Calhoun touched his ear where Wayne had bitten off the lobe.

“Wouldn’t trust you as far as I could kick you.”

“I hear that. But I give my word. And my word’s something you can count on. I won’t twist it.”

Wayne studied Calhoun, thought: Wel , there wasn’t anything to lose. He’d just watch his ass.

“Al right,” Wayne said. “Give me your word you’l work with me on getting us out of this mess, and when we’re good and free, and you say your word has gone far enough, we can settle up.”

“Deal,” Calhoun said, and offered his hand.

Wayne looked at it.

“This seals it,” Calhoun said.

Wayne took Calhoun’s hand and they shook.

[7]

Moments later the door unlocked and a smiling monk with hair the color and texture of mold fuzz came in with Brother Fred, who stil had his pump shotgun. There were two dead folks with them. A man and a woman. They wore torn clothes and the mouse-ear hats. Neither looked long dead or smel ed particularly bad. Actual y, the monks smel ed worse.

Using the barrel of the shotgun, Brother Fred poked them down the hal to a room with metal tables and medical instruments.

Brother Lazarus was on the far side of one of the tables.

He was smiling. His nose looked especial y cancerous this morning. A white pustle the size of a thumb tip had taken up residence on the left side of his snout, and it looked like a pearl onion in a turd.

Nearby stood a nun. She was short with good, if skinny, legs, and she wore the same outfit as the nun on the bus. It looked more girlish on her, perhaps because she was thin and smal -breasted.

She had a nice face and eyes that were al pupil. Wisps of blond hair crawled out around the edges of her headgear. She looked pale and weak, as if wearied to the bone. There was a birthmark on her right cheek that looked like a distant view of a smal bird in flight.

“Good morning,” Brother Lazarus said. “I hope you gentlemen slept wel .”

“What’s this about work?” Wayne said.

“Work?” Brother Lazarus said.

“I described it to them that way,” Brother Fred said. “Perhaps an impulsive description.”

“I’l say,” Brother Lazarus said. “No work here, gentlemen. You have my word on that. We do al the work. Lie on these tables and we’l take a sampling of your blood.”

“Why?” Wayne said.

“Science,” Brother Lazarus said. “I intend to find a cure for this germ that makes the dead come back to life, and to do that, I need living human beings to study. Sounds kind of mad scientist, doesn’t it? But I assure you, you’ve nothing to lose but a few drops of blood. Wel , maybe more than a few drops, but nothing serious.”

“Use your own goddamn blood,” Calhoun said.

“We do. But we’re always looking for fresh specimens. Little here, little there. And if you don’t do it, we’l kil you.”

Calhoun spun and hit Brother Fred on the nose. It was a solid punch and Brother Fred hit the floor on his butt, but he hung on to the shotgun and pointed it up at Calhoun. “Go on,” he said, his nose streaming blood. “Try that again.”