The Cocaine Chronicles (25 page)

In less than an hour and a half the two reached Jane Corso’s modest frame house, inherited from her grandmother, in Clarksdale, not too far from the Sunflower River. It was in a dead-end lush with overgrown shrubs and set down the slope from a small hill. Its location along an unpaved street gave it a semi-rural feel; the nearest house was half a block away.

Corso and her friend with the tattoo, Ella Fernandez, worked at the Diamond Stud Casino over in Tunica. Corso was a dealer and Fernandez a waitress.

“Like old damn times,” Corso said, working the probe in Holmes’s exposed shoulder area. She’d numbed the wound as best she could using a paste made from some of the coke and Lidoderm, a medicine for cold sores, she found in the medicine cabinet. Holmes sat rigid and gripped the sides of the chair’s seat, grinding his teeth.

“You know, I—”

“Hush, Spree,” she said, a suggestion of a smile on her face. She kneaded her bottom lip with her teeth while she dug for the slug fragments in him.

It wasn’t merely nostalgia or a longing to see her that had brought Holmes to her abode. Jane Corso had been a nursing student at one point—before acquiring a taste for the nose candy and shady men like her current patient. “Ah,” she said, removing the probe with part of the bullet. She held the tweezers to the light, examining her find.

“If you could finish up before I pee on myself, doc, I’d appreciate it,” Holmes said, sweat moistening his face and chest.

Corso’s sometimes pale green eyes lightened with mirth. “Best be cool or I’ll really put you under and do a Lorena Bobbitt on you.”

“You tell him, girl,” Ella Fernandez encouraged. While Corso was in street clothes, Fernandez wore her casino uniform, given her shift had ended after the men had arrived. A short cowgirl skirt barely covered her ample rear and was complemented by a fringed leather vest with a revealing scoop. She and McMillan were sitting on the couch and he was regaling her about his real and exaggerated criminal exploits. They rested against an Afghan comforter spread against the back of the couch.

Fernandez had already snorted up three lines of blow from the glass-topped coffee table. There was a current
TV Guide
, a discount-store 1.75-liter bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a few plastic cups, a pack of Kools, and a Zippo on the coffee table, as well. Corso had heated the ends of her tool with the lighter.

More digging and more discomfort and Corso extracted the remaining piece from Holmes. She stitched the gash closed. After that, she handed a grateful Holmes a plastic cup with a dose of Jack Daniel’s sloshing in it. McMillan’s bloody ear had also been stitched and taped.

“You always gotta do it the hard way, don’t you, Spree?” She rubbed the side of his close-cropped graying hair.

He grinned thinly at her. “Bust my balls, why don’t you?”

“I intend to.” She took his hand and led him toward her bedroom. On the couch, McMillan was busy licking coke from around one of Fernandez’s bare nipples. The green flamingo tattoo on the topside of her breast filled his vision.

Near 2:00 in the morning, Holmes and Corso lay awake in each other’s arms.

“You heading for New York or L.A.?” Corso put a leg over his.

“L.A.”

“Give that heartless city another go, huh?”

He didn’t answer right away. “That’s where we were going to make it,” he finally allowed.

“We almost did, Spree. We sure gave it a good run then.”

He pulled her tighter to him and kissed her, lost in what could have been. They soon started to doze off.

“Funny that song would be running through my head,” Corso muttered, her head on his chest.

“‘I Love the Night Life,’” Holmes remarked. “Alicia Bridges.”

“How’d—” she began.

“You’re not dreaming it,” Holmes said, “I hear it, too.”

Suddenly there was a loud blast of wood splintering and the crash of the front door being ripped from its hinges.

“Spree!” McMillan yelled over Fernandez’s scream from the front room.

Holmes and Corso had already scooted out of bed. He quickly slipped on his boxers. She tossed the six-shooter to him, which had been resting on the night stand next to a rolled-up dollar bill. He tore into the living room, assuming that somehow muscle sent by Crider and Wild Willie had found them. There was no way he could have anticipated what was waiting for him.

“The fuck?” he breathed.

“Do something, Spree,” McMillan pleaded. He was naked and pinned against the wall. Fernandez was clad in her panties and lying half off the couch on her back, her eyelids fluttering. A bruise welled on her jaw.

Holmes extended the gun and shot at one of the things that had invaded the home. The bullet punctured the creature’s eye socket, and that should have dropped any man, but as Holmes was rapidly grasping, these were not normal beings.

“
Zombies
,” Corso gasped from behind Holmes.

The one with its hand around McMillan’s throat was dressed in tattered clothing of an unmistakable vintage. He had on a dirt-stained silk shirt with billowing sleeves, once-tight bell-bottom slacks, a belt with a huge lettered buckle, and platform shoes. The other creature was wearing what had formerly been a white suit with a matching vest and a blue super-fly collar-point shirt, open and exposing a bony chest crawling with blind earthworms. This one had a raft of gold—now moldy green—chains and medallions draped around its neck, and the remnants of a puffy Afro full of leaves and twigs. He held onto the two bricks of coke.

The feculent odor rising from the two zombies was overpowering and caused Corso to gag. Holmes was more concerned about his dope. Medallion zombie had turned toward the door and Holmes shot him in the knee. The bone popped and the creature stumbled as if it had stepped into a pothole. Holmes ran forward but bell-bottom zombie hurled McMillan, and he had to prone out to avoid being struck.

“Thanks for breaking my fall,” McMillan groaned, after colliding with the now broken TV set.

“They’re taking our powder!” Holmes yelled, launching himself and tackling the bell-bottomed one. The monster made a guttural sound and hit him so hard behind his neck that Holmes was knocked to the floor, dazed.

“
Coke
,” Afro zombie growled to his buddy.

“
Ughh
,” the other one said, smiling. Dung and beetles spilled out of his maw.

The two shambled out the hole they’d made ripping off the door. Afro zombie walked lopsided due to its decimated kneecap.

“Spree, Spree, get up.” Corso shook him.

Holmes rose to a knee like a fighter taking an eight.

“Come on,” Corso said, heading out in pajama bottoms, her pump shotgun cradled in her arms. That was the other thing that Holmes liked about her—she always had his back in a scrap.

The two zombies were moving up the hill behind her house and Holmes and Corson went after them, joined by a limping McMillan who’d tied the comforter around his waist.

“Wait a minute,” Holmes said to Corso, who was taking aim with the scatter gun. “Bad enough we’ve been shooting off pistols, but we’re not that isolated around here. You start using that sumabitch, somebody’s bound to call the law. We’ve got to follow them.”

“To where?” she asked.

“Where they can snort up the shit.” He trotted after the pair, clad only in his boxers. The two creatures were nearing the top of the rise.

“Greedy motherfuckin’ zombies!” McMillan exclaimed. He looked around and spied a rock about the size of his fist. He picked it up and threw it, hitting the bell-bottom zombie in the back.

The thing turned around, growling and flailing his arms. He charged at them and Holmes grabbed the shotgun out of Corso’s hand, swinging the stock at the thing’s head. This knocked loose some gray, dry flesh, but it kept coming. Holmes made to swing again and the creature caught the weapon and snatched it out of his hands. He broke it apart by banging it against a thick tree trunk. As this transpired, Afro zombie made it over the top and disappeared.

“Get the coke,” Holmes directed McMillan. “We’ll take care of this undead shithead.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice.” McMillan went wide when the zombie lunged for him, but as its muscles were atrophied and its joints long since dried out, it couldn’t move with the attenuation and speed of a live person. McMillan got past and went up.

Holmes shot the zombie again and it turned toward him, snarling at the continuing irritation of Holmes putting bullets into it. “I need an axe or something to cut the head off or burn it,” Holmes said.

“I’m with you, Spree,” Corso declared.

They exchanged a quick, meaningful look, then the thing was upon them, clawing and snapping its jaw. Holmes was down on his back and he drove a fist into the creature’s rib cage. Some of the brittle bones cracked, but it was taking all of Holmes’s effort to keep the monster from biting into his head. He had both hands pressed under what was left of the zombie’s clacking jaw, the rancid breath making his eyes water. The stitches on his wound ripped and he pumped red from atop his shoulder blade.

“Get off!” Corso screamed, jumping on the zombie’s back and pummeling him.

“
Coke
,” the creature intoned. It reached around and pulled Corso off by her hair and flung her away. It got its bony hands around Holmes’s neck and squeezed, causing him to gag. The zombie’s jaws opened and unhinged, and the thing bent down to eat the man’s face off.

“Hey, shit-breath!” Ella Fernandez hollered. She brought the Jack Daniel’s bottle down on its head. The thick glass broke apart, causing a dent in the side of the creature’s skull. The alcohol spilled over its upper body.

“I got something for you, dead bitch,” Fernandez avowed as the zombie started for her. She lit the Zippo and threw it on him, catching his head on fire. The zombie wailed and stomped about.

“I guess it doesn’t like fire,” Holmes observed in his grass-smeared Fruit of the Looms. The zombie was running around in a circle, screaming. It bumped into a tree and knocked itself down. But it didn’t have enough presence of mind—or enough of a brain left—to roll and put out its now totally aflame body. It got back up and screamed some more as it clomped around, continuing to burn.

Corso helped Holmes to his feet. “Or it’s the way he died,” she said.

Fernandez breathed deeply, her heavy breasts rising and falling, the flamingo contracting and expanding. She was still only dressed in her panties.

“Good work, Ella,” Holmes told her. He then asked Corso, “What do you mean?”

She started to run up the hill without answering. “We better get up there.”

“The ya-yo,” Holmes remembered, as he and Fernandez also took off. At the top it was a regular zombie jamboree. There were eight more of them that had crawled out of their graves, all dressed in disco regalia.

A female zombie milled about in what was left of a miniskirt. She wore torn fishnet stockings over charred legs, and a stretch velour top hugged a worm-infested chest. Another was clad in a spangle-studded safari suit and a broad-brimmed pimp hat. Part of his entrails hung from a gap in his silk shirt. Yet another was in hot pants, thigh-high platform boots, and her angel-sleeve blouse was being ripped off by another zombie in a poncho, gaucho pants, and dingo boots.

The zombies were growling and snarling and tearing at each other to get to the cocaine.

“Holy shit.” Holmes held his head, ignoring his freshly opened wound, and marched around in total befuddlement. “What the fuck?”

Corso gulped. “They’re the ones who were killed in the fire.”

“What are you talking about, Janey?” Fernandez asked.

“New Year’s Eve, 1980.”

The miniskirted zombie had pulled the arm off the one in the gaucho pants and was beating him with it. “
Coke, coke
,” she repeated, as she drove the other one to the ground.

“Some local talent built a club down here, inspired by Donna Summer, Studio 54, you know, all that,” Corso said.

Holmes stopped pacing. “There used to be a disco here?”

“Yeah. It was called, and this would prove to be ironic, the Disco Inferno. From what I understand, it was a popular place from 1976, when it started, to the night it burned down.”

“The Bicentennial till the death of disco,” Holmes gasped. Not a religious sort, he nonetheless sent a prayer up that the sky would rain gas and the Lord would then add a few lightning bolts to set the zombies ablaze.

Fernandez said, “You must have been a kid then.”

“She was old enough,” Holmes grinned wanly, grabbing some foliage to light with the recovered Zippo. He had to save his score.

“I’d already run off, wound up in L.A. Got involved with a creep that strung me out and pimped me out to this porn fuck. Even better that I was underage.” Despite the humidity, she wrapped her arms around herself. “That’s when I met Spree. The man in the white Charger—with a four on the floor.”

Holmes gazed at her through the small fire he’d started with his crummy torch. “It was your ass that mesmerized me.” With that, he ran into the thatch of zombies, but they were fevered and ignored his pathetic flame as they tore and ate into each other. He found McMillan on the ground, shivering.

“Aghhh,” he grimaced when Holmes tugged on him. “Fucking freaks broke my arm.” He got up, staring. “We’re fucked.”

The zombie in the thigh-high boots had jumped on the back of another who wore a torn gold-lamé cape. The cape man had gotten ahold of one of the bricks, or what had been the brick. He dipped his face into the powder, snorting madly like Pacino in
Scarface
. Thigh-high ripped the top of his head off and bit into his pulsing brain. She gobbled up pieces of the matter. The two stumbled about in stoned nirvana.

Holmes’s flame petered out. “This ain’t right,” he lamented. “We gotta save our shit.”

“Forget it, Spree,” Corso advised, joining him. “These monsters will tear you apart if you get between them and their coke.”

“It’s not theirs!” he cried.

“It is now,” Corso declared.

“’Fraid she’s right,” McMillan agreed, holding his busted arm. “Crider’s spell or mojo or whatever the hell it was has us whupped good.”