Rednecks Who Shoot Zombies on the Next Geraldo (4 page)

Tom’s eyes worked their way up the painting, following its dynamic.
 

From on top of the stage, a small group of survivors reached down plaintively for the child. The people were dressed in rags, their faces wracked with expressions of anguish and pain.
 

Which is where the mood of the mural changed abruptly.

For immediately above the stage, painted in her own lunette, stood a woman clad in a blue, girdled tunic and white veils, with her arms outstretched, looking up toward the heavens. She radiated feminine charm, her form steeped in shimmering rays of sunlight that focused and radiated fanwise from the top of her head. Behind her was a second horizon crowded with emerald knolls, a silver sea, and skies hung with stars shining with the transparency of colored diamonds. Upon closer examination, Tom could see issuing from the woman’s mouth, the diminutive, wispy form of a child.

Doc had backed away also, similarly captivated, muttering. Tom strained to listen to what Doc was saying and realized with horror that he was identifying the human remains that comprised each color: the off-white compost of mashed brain tissue and cartilage. The royal purple of bronchus pulp. The navy blue of cardiac muscle. The vinous red of oxygen-rich life-blood siphoned from the hearts of who knew how many men. The jaundiced wash of urine, and the pea tinge of bile. Earth tones molded from defecate, liver meat and hair. A mosaic the size of an Olympic swimming pool entirely fashioned from fingernails and teeth.
 

Tom continued to stare, slack-jawed, as images and their implications continued to blossom in his head, pumping the feelings of crawling dread that he’d felt while riding with the convoy to a fever pitch—

—
Although the work of many hands, every painted area shared a consistency of passion. Tense, rapid strokes flowed over the surface, sometimes blending smoothly, at times contrasted, creating figures that were amazingly solid and compact. Areas of stark simplification, equilibrium, purity and tranquility with radical distortions in splintered effect and ornamental array
—

—and burned there, swelling, stripping him bare—

—
An autonomous organism of line, rhythm and color with a progressively decorative style of harmonies and contrasts. Impressions rendered sensually, suffused with almost Samaritan compassion while evoking terrible reality with the frenzied exaltation of self-expression. Movement and energy concentrated into whirling elliptical shapes and abstract diagrams of motion
—

—forcing him to confront what had happened to the world. After the Crisis, after the End of the World, when regeneration and reconstruction should have been priorities, society had driven itself deeper into the atrocity, adapting and exploiting rather than cleansing, making the world vulgar. People had been pushed by a fanatical sense of self-righteousness distorted by hate and violence and pain, endless pain—

—
A rejection of constraints and irrationalities emanating from the temperament of creation, a relationship with color as aggressive as an explosion of suppressed violence, not grotesque and desperate, but proud in its original purity and aspiration
—

Tom looked at the row of militiamen and observed: even these stupid fucking rednecks knew something wasn’t right. They had fallen into a stupor, the sort of pathetic reverence you get when you’ve been morally and spiritually one-upped. Except Tom knew it was more than that. His father and Muss had created their own Hell within Hell—of which Tom was now a part—and these rotten, brain-dead cannibals had done this. Spawned beauty from holocaust.
 

The zombies, Tom realized, must then experience their own primitive versions of hatred, fear, loneliness—

Love? An epiphany of bliss projected in the form of spontaneous creativity. Childlike, but with a dimension that was both religious and mystical, portraying a universal image of respect and caring and humanity. Boasting the somber harmonies of redemption. Of the sacred and the profane. Ideas and feelings conceived in the vertigo of a hundred dead minds consumed simultaneously by both anguish and fecundation—harmonies playing together, complimenting and answering one another, emanating a sense which was
—

Evolved.
 

Tom grabbed the Uzi from Bigelow’s hands. He let loose a primal scream and opened fire, the stream of 9mm shells exploding into the wall with a violent cacophony that shook the room. Tom yanked out the spent clip and scrambled through his pouch for another.

Tom felt the stares of Muss and the other rednecks as they stood around, unsure of what to do. Tom stopped firing and turned and watched Muss slide the breach of his M-16 open to check if a round was chambered, then let it go with a
clack!
Soon, the room was filled with the synchronized clacking of metal as the redneck men pulled back the breaches on their weapons—as if they realized that was the only synchronization they were capable of.

A moment later they all opened fire, bullets tearing concrete, corrupting the mural with a network of gouges and fissures. The rednecks were doing little damage to the integrity of the wall.

Tom emptied another clip before he threw down the Uzi and grabbed a shotgun. Grasping the grooved slide-handle with a sweaty hand, he pumped six blasts into an area of the mural, which was particularly vivid—swirls of deep blue streaked with highlights of white.
 

He reloaded four more shells when a portion of wall next to him exploded, sending flaming debris streaking in all directions. Tom was knocked to the ground by the concussion, stunned.
 

After a few moments he mustered the strength to struggle to one knee and scoop up the shotgun. Some asshole had used a LAW rocket. The explosion had created a breach in the wall.

The rednecks had scattered. One unfortunate dickweed had been standing too close to the blast; one of his legs and both of his arms lay in a bucket-wash of gore on the ground. Tom backed up the wall to his feet. His head was still spinning. From outside he could hear the steady popping of automatic gunfire and the occasional muffled
wumf
of an explosion. Through the hole in the wall, Tom saw rednecks with torches—flaming gun stocks, anything they could burn—run by, whipped into a psychotic mob, setting parts of the slaughterhouse on fire.
 

Someone outside was yelling something now, but Tom was too groggy to hear what it was.

Straining, Tom peered more intently out the hole. The smoke from the fires had made the outside world hazy. He could barely make out the men outside.

Tom heard the voice become more insistent, urgent.

Someone was coming.

Tom pushed two more shells into the shotgun.

He looked up; the shape—two shapes—was much closer, advancing in a nimbus of firelight. They climbed through the breach and shambled toward him, heads lolling to one side, dead eyes fixed and focused...

“Deadheads! Deadheads everywhere!” Tom heard the voice outside shriek. He snapped into awareness finally—too late, he thought, to defend himself from the approaching ghouls.

He flinched in anticipation of the attack, but the zombie couple—a man and a woman—had stopped and were staring at the ruined mural.
 

Tom fired. The shotgun pellets pocked the man’s backside, tearing chunks of meat from his buttocks and thighs. The man fell to the ground. Tom ran, crouched like a linebacker, and plowed full-force into the woman. With a crack of bone, she crumpled under the assault.

The woman lay on the ground, clutching frantically at Tom. He shrugged free from her grip, slapped her a few times before bashing her face with his boot until her head caved in.

With a raspy cry—of anguish, maybe—the man leaped at Tom, propelling them both through the hole and into the mud outside causing Tom to drop the shotgun. As Tom struggled to his feet, he looked into the zombie’s eyes and saw something different—not the glazed, hopeless stare of the dead, but eyes alight with purpose. With passion. The man tore at Tom’s clothes, then clasped his hands around Tom’s throat. Tom clawed desperately at the man’s face, his fingernails gouging trenches in the rotting flesh, but it was too late. The zombie had him.
 

Just as Tom began to black out, the man was hit by a stray bullet and spun off his feet. Tom dropped into the mud, rolled over and hacked up some dry heaves. Then Tom turned and saw that the man was sitting up clutching his stomach—the bullet had traveled lengthwise through his torso, disemboweling him. Tom sloshed through the mud on his hands and knees and recovered the shotgun. He got up, ran over and kicked the man down. The man tried to protect his face with his arms. Tom batted away the dead hands, jammed the shotgun against the man’s throat and pulled the trigger. The blast sent the man’s head cart wheeling.

Exhausted, Tom walked to a gnarled tree stump and sat down heavily. His fatigues were torn, his skin caked with mud. The battle, which was still raging at the other end of the slaughterhouse grounds, brought the gloomy dawn alive with tracer rounds. Tom watched the carnage with glazed, lifeless eyes. It seemed as if he had been here forever.

Tom watched the zombies swarm as if spurred by religious fanaticism, like worshippers rushing to defend a blasphemed temple. A few of the rednecks had formed a skirmish line and were emptying their weapons into the onslaught. The first few waves of living dead were stopped, pitching and convulsing with each hit, and sent toppling into the mud. But more kept coming. From the woods, from the open fields. It was as if the ghouls had used the stillness in the slaughterhouse to lure the rednecks into an ambush. It didn’t take long before the skirmish line was overwhelmed.
 

Tom spotted Diane, her M-16 spent and cast aside, attempting to hold a group of ghouls—all male—at bay with a huge combat knife. One of the more brazen leaped at her. The zombie took the knife in its gut, but then Diane was defenseless. The rest leaped at her. Diane died in a geyser of blood, the dead penis between her breasts but a morsel in the banquet of her flesh.

Good riddance, bitch
, Tom thought.

Finally, the armored cars organized and formed a dusty circle around the melee, the crews patiently waiting for the inevitable outcome. As the last few rednecks went down, the cars opened up with .30 caliber machine guns. The zombies were almost instantaneously destroyed.

The slaughterhouse was almost completely consumed in flame; fiery mushrooms boiled into the dark sky like liquid in a cauldron. The heat felt good on Tom’s face as he headed toward the jeep.

“Muss!” Tom yelled.

Muss ignored him and clambered behind the jeep’s M-60. A thick belt of ammo spilled from the weapon into a large ammunition box. Muss swiveled the weapon, zeroed the rear area of the garbage truck and opened fire. The zombies penned inside the truck tried to hide behind one another as the 7.62mm shells punched holes through their bodies and the steel walls behind them.

Tom stopped.

Muss fired until the gun overheated, and then jumped from the jeep and finished off the survivors with a Magnum. Muss turned from the truck and was about to shoot one of the rednecks in blind rage when Doc rushed up, oxygen tank in tow, and stood between them.

“Muss, no!” Doc screeched. “This one’s human!”

“What’s the difference, anyway?” Muss said to no one in particular, and then shot Doc in the face.

“Load the fuck up! We’re outta here!” Muss ordered, stepping over Doc’s corpse.

The rednecks stood fast, weapons cradled in their arms.
 

“You heard me, you fucks—move it!” Muss bellowed. Still nothing. Muss held up the Magnum and cocked the hammer.

“Fuckin’ JUDAS!” Tom heard a voice shriek from behind him. The priest pushed his way through the rednecks and pointed at Muss accusingly. “Away with thee, for thou hast sinned!” he bellowed, red-faced from grandiose glee.

Muss stared at the priest, first with a murderer’s calm, but then with waning confidence. The slaughterhouse fire had died down; the remaining flickers cast spectral shadows and exaggerating the sharpness of the landscape. Tom felt something indiscernible slide away, and take with it whatever respect and loyalty held these men together. Muss seemed to deflate with the loss. No putting on faces, now. Muss was done. And that brought Tom forward.

Bigelow stepped between Muss and Tom. It looked to Tom as if Bigelow was about to cry. “But what crime has been committed?” asked Bigelow.

“Judas!” the priest yelled again.
 

“Outta the way, geek.” Tom said.
 

“It isn’t right—” Bigelow started, the sudden pressure of steel stopping him short.

“That’s a good boy,” Tom nodded, pressing on Bigelow’s balls with the shotgun. “Now move aside.” Bigelow carefully did what he was told. As soon as he was out of the way, two rednecks stepped forward. But instead of holding him at bay, they simply patted him consolingly and led him back to the convoy.

“Looks like my bringing you here was a good idea,” Muss said slowly. “You belong here, Junior. We all do.”

There was dead glee in Tom’s eyes; he grinned like a skull. From behind, someone pushed a cool, lead pipe into his hand. He took a step forward. “Looks like it was. I feel right at home here.”

Flecks of white ash from the fires peppered Muss’s eyebrows and hair. “I...I took care of yer daddy for a lot of years—“

When Tom used the pipe on Muss’s skull, the bone separated from the vertebra with an audible crunch. Muss neither fell, nor cried out. “Fuckin’ martyr,” Tom said, and swung the pipe again. This time, Muss toppled over.

Once Muss was down, Tom retrieved a chain discarded in the jeep they’d ridden in and wound it under and around Muss’ arms. Then, with a winch, he hoisted Muss’ mammoth bulk over the limb of a solitary dead tree in the yard. Tom thought he saw a glimmer of life in Muss’s face as the psycho priest fired up a pocket blowtorch and took it to the body, but Tom decided it was just a trick of the firelight.