Zombie Kong - Anthology (4 page)

“Yeah, buddy, candy… red. I brought you some.” He rolled away from Lindstrom, shouting, “Candy, Manny. Red!”

Lindstrom barely had time to scream before he was squeezed in the huge paw, the high-pitched sound squelching to an end. Cesar closed his eyes, flinching with each wet plop of gore hitting the ground, parts of Lindstrom dropping from Manny’s hand or mouth. He pressed his fists to his eyes, laughed, and had a hard time stopping it, in the same way he couldn’t stop throwing up mid-retch.
I’m going mad right here on the jungle floor. This is it, oh fuck.

He opened his eyes when the ground rumbled. Manny stepped toward him, stringy remnants of Lindstrom hanging from his chin.
Eat, candy, candy, eat, want, red, red, red
.

The laugh threatened again, until Manny’s sign for
eat, eat, eat
became his hand hammering his own mouth, ‘
EAT, EAT
’ no longer a request, but a desperate demand.

Manny roared and reached for Cesar, who rolled, scrabbling backwards on all fours. As Manny’s hand caught him, he screamed, “Friend, Manny’s friend, oh
God!”
and the pressure eased. Manny withdrew his hand, tilted his head, signed
candy, red,
and the knuckle touch that had become his sign for
friend.
Cesar waited, hoped, almost begged, but Manny never signed
sorry
.

“Friend, Manny, friend… I’ll bring you… more candy. Just like I always have. Just like always.”

Rico. He could lure Rico out here. That fucking bastard, this would be a right end for him. Tourists who might not be noticed right away. No,
no
, what was he thinking? He couldn’t… he’d find drug dealers, pimps… promise them big paydays if they’d come out here for the score. Shouldn’t be that hard. Most were the ones everyone else was scared of. They wouldn’t see Cesar as a threat. And what kind of lives did they have, anyway? They hurt people all the time. He could bring them here… but already Manny didn’t seem easily satisfied. Lindstrom had said
strength, hunger, size
. What if he kept growing, kept wanting more?

Cesar knew a man who took money from people, transported them in the back of a produce truck across the border, and handed them off to another man who demanded more money from them before he’d let them go. A few had money sent from family for their freedom. Most had already spent everything to get there. Cesar didn’t know what happened to them––he’d never wanted to ask. He couldn’t stop the cruelty that went on in the world just by knowing about it any more than he could have stopped it in the lab or in nature. Maybe… maybe he could pay the man a little extra to take a detour…

“Jesus!” he cried out. What was he thinking, what was he doing? He’d gone from Lindstrom to imagining mass murders in the space of five minutes. But he was responsible for Manny. He was Manny’s friend. He signed
friend
, but Manny only pressed his hands together now, a pale imitation of the gesture he’d once known so well. The pressure caused a chunk of black flesh to burst and drop from the gorilla’s finger.

“God, oh God.” Cesar wept, his breath hitching. “I’ll get you some candy, buddy, good red candy,” he blubbered, wiping tears and snot from his face with his sleeve, gagging at the smell on his clothes from Manny’s hand. Christ, he’d left himself no choice. He couldn’t abandon his friend now––he wouldn’t.

Anything could happen while he was away. Manny could be discovered, he could die from whatever they’d done to him, he could go on a rampage in a populated area and be all over the news. Cesar couldn’t help that, couldn’t stop it.

But if those things didn’t happen––and Cesar sensed they wouldn’t; Manny would wait for him as always, at least for a while––then the day would come when Cesar would die in this jungle. He knew it now as sure as he knew anything. Maybe a fitting end, he thought, for having a hand in this. One day, what he brought Manny wouldn’t be enough, and his friend would turn on him again, but this time he wouldn’t stop. And when that day came, Cesar would try to understand that Manny didn’t have a choice, no more than he did. Nature was cruel, but Cesar would be kind until the end, Manny’s friend the whole way through, just like he’d promised.

DAVID NIALL WILSON

In Today’s News… (Meanwhile, in Suburbia, Part One)

“Herman, would you take out the trash?”

The voice cut through twenty pages of the daily paper and the silence of the kitchen like a well-honed blade. Herman Hislop had only two or three actual joys in life, and two of them were morning coffee and the paper. That knowledge in hand, Greta set out daily to deny them.

“In a bit,” he said, knowing it was pointless. “I’m reading the paper. Did you hear about the new mall out near Lavender?”

“Just what we need… another place for gangs to hang out and people to waste their money. The trash men will be here soon. Can’t you take it now? You know if you wait, it will be too late, and we can’t go another week without…”

“Blah, blah, blah.” Herman had heard it so many times he could have recited it like the litany. She ground her words through his concentration, banging the pots in the sink for emphasis.

If he took the trash to the curb, settled the can where it could be picked up, and came back, he would find that she’d poured out his coffee and the paper would be nowhere to be seen. She would tell him the coffee had gotten cold and bitter, and that she’d cleared the table for whatever craft project she had in mind for the day. More likely, he thought, she’d have one of a number of local delivery and repairmen in the minute he left for work, and she was trying to make the place look good for them. Never for him, of course. He was just the guy who stopped in to take out the trash and listen to her bitch. He was good at both, and that was enough for Greta.

With a sigh, Herman folded his paper carefully and placed it on the table. He took a long sip from his coffee, which, admittedly, was very good. He pushed back his chair and started to rise. As he did, the earth gave a shake, like a great, shaggy dog trying to rid itself of fleas. Herman reached instinctively for the table and his coffee. Somehow, he managed to keep the latter from dropping to the floor, and as the room stilled, he gulped it down quickly, reveling in the tiny, momentary victory. He carried the cup to the sink and placed it inside.

There was a horrible grinding sound from outside, as if something heavy was being dragged.

“That’s probably the garbage men,” Greta said. She had hold of the counter firmly, and turned to glare at him, as if the earthquake could be his fault. Something he did to irritate her, like drinking fresh coffee or reading the paper.

Herman turned, tucked his paper defiantly under his arm, and grabbed the garbage bag Greta had placed by the door. He had barely hit the sidewalk when the second tremor nearly knocked him from his feet.

“What in the world?” he muttered. He stood his ground, and when the earth’s shaking gave way once more to the loud, dragging grate, he lifted the lid on the rolling trashcan, dropped in the bag, and took the handle in hand. He started off toward the end of the long, curving drive that led out to the street. There was no sign of the trash men, as he’d known there would not be. They never picked up before noon, as Greta was well aware.

Herman clutched the paper tightly under his arm, and with one hand, managed to work the can into place beside their mailbox. He was having quite the morning. His paper was intact; he’d finished his coffee. Things were shaping up nicely. If he could just get out the door and off to work without another round of kvetching from Greta, he could actually mark the entire day in the win column.

He turned back toward the house, and he stopped. He stared. He glanced up, confused. As he watched in silence from the end of the drive, a massive foot covered in long, matted brown fur, with toes tipped by broken, yellowed claws, came down firmly on the roof of his house. It landed with a sickening crunch of wood snapping, walls collapsing, and a single drawn out scream that cut off very quickly, and very suddenly. Herman stood very still.

With one foot firmly planted, the fifty-foot tall gorilla slowly dragged its other foot through the Williamsons’ back yard, taking out their garage and their shed without slowing. The thing let out a deep, growling moan. It did not notice Herman, paper clutched to his side, and eyes wide. A couple of minutes that seemed like hours passed, and then it lurched off toward the interstate, leaving a wake of screaming people, honking horns, and crushed homes in its wake.

As if in a dream, Herman walked back up the drive to his house. He stepped through the rubble that had been the outer door and into the remnants of the kitchen. The table was gone… crushed to splinters and rubble. There was a large red stain on the floor that he knew must be Greta.

Unbelievably, the coffee pot was intact, standing beside the sink on the counter, which had not been touched. Greta had pulled one chair over to stand on so she could reach a high cupboard. Herman studied the chaos. A moment later, fresh coffee on the counter, he sat back in his one remaining chair with a contented sigh. He flipped the paper open to the article on the new Lavender Mall, and he smiled. They were planning a coffee shop, and right next door, a newsstand. It was shaping up to be a very, very good day.

SIMON McCAFFERY

The Boys In Company Z

For Angela

After nightfall, the jungle around us crawls with shadows and insects attack in clouds, but tonight something is wrong and everyone feels it. I slowly register the
silence
surrounding our campsite, dug into the grassy hillside east of Phu Bihn Valley, illuminated dimly by red blackout lanterns. The trees and canopy above us should be alive with the screeches of birds, the rustle of hunters, and the small, shrill cries of prey, but I only hear the blood pulsing in my eardrums. Lieutenant Tompkins and his handpicked squad of soldiers stare into the blackness, pure coiled violence, locked and loaded.

It is August 1968. While others of my generation riot in the streets of Chicago at the Democratic Party’s national conference, I am halfway around the world, realizing the sheer stupidity of volunteering to leave the Cambridge SOG labs to serve as a technical advisor in my first in-country field op. We have been hiking for three hot, uneventful days since insertion into Laos, a “cold” LZ east of Ban Muang-Èt. So far we’ve had zero contact with Victor Charlie or locals. Two “indigenous personnel” and seven Green Berets from the 5th Special Forces Airborne Group packing lethal firepower surround me, but this thought brings me little comfort. I am twenty-four years old, a newly minted chemical engineer. I have never fired a gun.

Something large crashes through the underbrush and staggers into the bloodshot light. SOG operatives use Soviet Block North Vietnamese Army weapons only, so Tompkins’ men aren’t carrying Mike One-Sixes equipped with night vision scopes. We’re dressed in camouflage bearing neither American nor NVA insignias. No dog tags or other I.D. Flashlights strapped to AK-47s with electrical tape flare to life, converging on the mammoth shape blundering toward us. I hear Weller cock his Soviet RPK, a replacement for the standard M60 Hog.

“It’s just a cow, you assholes,” Tompkins says, his light reflected in the animal’s large, milky eyes.

It’s a big tawny steer, to be more precise, missing part of one horn. It looks precisely like the one we encountered the previous afternoon on the outskirts of the tiny, nameless village we designated Agent Green-6 Test Case Number One. The village is a known VC way station, and Tompkins’ orders were to test Green-6’s effectiveness on the enemy before we introduce it into the Black River, another day’s trek from our current position. The Black River feeds thousands of gallons per day to NVA stationed all along the trail through secret gravity-fed pipelines. After we dumped a canister of Green-6 into the local water supply––a gurgling, serpentine creek––we crossed what passes for a small tropical pasture before melting back into the jungle. Fowler is the youngest of the Berets. His father was an Austin cattleman. He walked up to the domesticated steer, patted its broad chestnut head while it stoically chewed grass, and slit its wrinkled throat with an eight-inch sawtoothed Bowie knife. Stepping back from the gusher of blood, he’d quoted Napoleon. “An army marches on its stomach.” I had had to look away, nauseated, afraid I might regurgitate my B-2 individual combat meal ration (beans with frankfurter chunks).

There’s no mistake: the thing shambling into the edge of our camp is the same animal. It doesn’t blink in the harsh beams of light. Its beautiful auburn coat is now a matted cape of flies. It raises its head and emits a horrible whistling bellow, baring gore-streaked teeth; the gaping sickle-shaped wound is stretched open like a giant blood-caked smile.

“What the f––” Fowler sputters, and the dead steer-thing charges into a burst of automatic fire and muzzle flash. Fowler’s bullets crash into its skull and it collapses on top of the lanterns and compact camp stove.

Tompkins utters a string of profanities and orders Fowler to cease firing. The echoes of Fowler’s gunfire roll away across the valley before being absorbed by the muggy night air.

Silence. Darkness, except for the bobbing spooklights.

Fowler stalks over to the steer’s crumpled tent-pole body, prods its hide with the muzzle of his rifle. The body releases a belch of gas. The stench of raw, rotted beef makes me slap a hand over my nose and mouth.

“Okay, which one of you fuckers put LSD in my canteen, because I
killed
this bag of meat deader than shit five klicks from here––”

Fowler doesn’t finish. Something titanic steps out of the jungle, reaches down, and lifts him high into the sultry air. One of the Berets screams. I glimpse an impossible black-haired nightmare face, and hell-fired eyes.

Fowler shrieks once and I hear a wet crunching sound.