Zombie Pulp (6 page)

I cooked about a dozen more of them, trying to cut us a path to the front door but it was no go. Maybe the walking dead will never understand quantum physics or write a truly great sonnet, but they are not entirely stupid. They knew we’d be making for that door and there had to be hundreds crowded in the parking lot waiting for us.

It was hopeless.

Taking Sylvia by the hand, we circled around back, clinging to the shadows thrown by the outbuildings, the generating station, and the water tanks. The action was lighter back there. We found a shadowy crevice between a couple tanks and we waited.

“
There’s too many of them,” Sylvia whispered in my ear. “We can’t make it.”

“
You got a better idea?”

But she didn’t.

I had this crazy idea that if we could wait until daylight, we might have a chance. The Wormboys were more sluggish in direct sunlight.

That was my plan, anyway.

13

I don’t know if they could see in the dark or just smell prey, but about five of them showed within minutes and they knew right where we were like they were being guided by some unseen intelligence. I had no choice but to toast them. And in the light of those shambling human corpse-fat candles, I saw there were at least a dozen others closing the gap. I saw a face that was infested with crawling red beetles. They skittered out of holes and tunnels in the cheeks and forehead, nipping and chewing, carrying bits of tissue back into their nests in the skull like cartoon ants stealing away with picnic goodies.

More faces came into the field of light.

Many of them were clustered with feeding insects, but many others had no eyes. They’d been sewn shut and these ones were hunting by sound alone. Sylvia pressed her .9mm into my hand without me asking for it. It was so greasy from her sweaty palm that I nearly dropped it.

The lead Wormboy—I don’t know what else to call him—was this massive naked man who’d apparently lost his own skin at some point because he was wearing what at first looked like a rippling pale poncho but soon revealed itself to be a patchwork of human skins sewed into a single garment and then tacked to the muscle and tissue beneath. It fluttered in the wind. I saw a section that was tattooed joined to another with a single flaccid breast which itself was stitched to another with a puckering navel. His face was a creeping mass of fungal rot, green and dripping, moving with slow, greasy undulations over the jutting skull beneath.

I shot him point blank in the face and then put another through the side of his head and he crashed drunkenly to the ground, his hastily-sewn garment/pelt/skin bursting open. The others fell on him right away, stripping him like carrion birds. He was torn open, his wormy guts ripped free, rib bones snapped off and gnawed, skull crushed and the gray slime within sucked up by anxious mouths.

Then I saw something that turned even my stomach.

By that point, I assumed it impossible to be sickened.

But I was wrong. The zombies that were busy feeding on him suddenly reared away, stumbling, crawling, tearing at their throats and making hissing/gobbling sounds and then I watched as they began to regurgitate what they had just eaten in clotty globs of worms, inky fluid, and rancid meat.

Maybe there was something after all they couldn’t abide.

Sylvia and I ran. I don’t know where we thought we were going, but we were determined to get there. Then something smashed into us…a couple big Wormboys and I heard Sylvia scream as she was pulled away into the night. A Wormgirl came at me and I forgot the gun tucked in my pants and went at her with absolute rage. I don’t think she was prepared for it. I launched myself at her, breaking her face open with my fists, then clawing her skull clean of flesh until she fell to her knees and I cleaved her head open with one good punt.

I was alone.

But they were coming for me.

ill

14

I ran for the parking lot, thinking that if I couldn’t make the front door there always the vehicles parked just off the tarmac. If worse came to worse, I’d find one with keys in it and take off into the night, circle around until dawn. But to my surprise, the parking lot was nearly deserted. I used up the last of the fuel in the flamethrower to toast a few stragglers and then I was beating my fists against the flaking green steel door, screaming for help.

Doc opened the door for me and said, “What in God’s name have you done?”

I whipped out Sylvia’s .9mm and put the last round through his left eye socket. Then I threw him outside to the wolves. And as I did so, I saw thousands of the dead massing for a concerted attack.

I slammed the door, locked it, then the siege began.

The shelter was not intended to withstand the barrage it took.

The doors did not come off their hinges, they
blew
off them. The children were all locked down in the bomb shelter beneath, but everyone else was on the main floor. There was no time to set up any defenses. There was no time for anything.

The dead rushed in.

Wormboys and Wormgirls came in with axes and machetes and knives and cleavers and sharpened broomsticks. They brandished decapitated heads on poles, chewed and worried things spattered with old blood. Some were naked, others dressed in shrouds and rags and shapeless ponchos that looked to be sewn together out of tanned human hides. Naked bodies were painted with arcane symbols. Some were bald, others without scalps, still others had their hair greased into mohawks and scalp locks with corpse fat. They were adorned in necklaces of human scalps and loops of dried entrails. Some wore death masks. Most had the carved, slit, and beaded faces of warriors. A few had gotten truly creative and inserted needles into their faces, spikes, shards of broken glass. They had removed hands and replaced them with blades and cleavers.

They didn’t waste any time.

They mowed down the survivors. The air was cacophonous with shrieking and screaming, people begging for mercy, praying to gods that would not listen…and the gnawing, tearing, and grinding sounds of the living dead as they fed. Blood sprayed the walls, pooled on the floor. Limbs were broken, chewed, tossed aside. People were disemboweled while they were still alive. Sylvia’s husband was eviscerated with a butcher knife and when he screamed, flopping on the floor, his own entrails were stuffed down his throat.

It was a slaughterhouse.

They must have got poor old Shacks, too, but I never saw it.

I fired every round from every gun I could find. I fought and killed and maimed, but it was hopeless. Entirely hopeless. The dining hall lived up to its name because that’s where everyone was ritually devoured. Everything was red and dripping, feeding sounds echoing out, bodies quartered and skinned and peeled and then quartered again.

I should have felt an awful, eating guilt knowing that I had brought it all into being, that I was the stillborn breath of life that animated the entire nightmare. But I felt no guilt. Not then. Death was coming from every direction, empty-bellied, gape-toothed, diabolical and gluttonous…higher realms of self-loathing were denied me. There was only survival or, in the case of those in the shelter, lack of it.

I fought my way free of the dining hall and dorms with only one thought in my mind: the children. They were locked away downstairs and I had to keep them safe. The blood of those self-centered, egocentric assholes who were dying in numbers—the adults—meant very little to me by that point. It was the kids I thought of. The kids I lived for. The kids I fought for.

I darted down an interconnecting series of corridors knowing I had to get to the lower level before the undead did. I had only a bloody machete in my hand that I had taken from a Wormboy. There was no one or nothing in the hallways leading to the stairway door that went below. I felt a weird exhilaration of good luck, but it did not last.

There was a sudden stench in the air that cut through the usual stink of putrescence that had now flooded the compound. This was stronger…dank like subterranean pipes clogged with ancient filth, like backed-up sewage, the gurgling ammonia odor of urine.

I turned and there was Dragna.

I had thought—I suppose we all assumed—that Dragna, the zombie master, the lord of the ravenous dead, would be a man, but it was no man. It was female…but I wouldn’t call what I saw a woman exactly. It held my eyes, made them feel varnished into sockets of flypaper, frozen, sticky with salt-tears and immobile, unable to look away from the hideous mass of corruption that was wallowing in its own juicy foulness.

At first, I thought what I saw was two naked women and then three, perhaps four that had been melted into a running, pliable human clay and then fused together under great, damaging pressure. But no…it was a single woman or something that had once been a woman…a huge, lolling slab of a woman with swollen balloon-like, blue-veined tits, seven or eight of them, bouncing against a green-gray, fungus-threaded, ulcerated flab. And not one but several enormous corpse-glutted, pendulous bellies slopping from side to side like feed bags stuffed with mush, a trickle of fluid black as ink leaking from puckered navels that looked like blow holes.

In one bloated hand she held a spear and impaled upon it, a squirming infant blown up with gas…blackened, tiny face smeared with blood, its mouth a pulsing hole ringed by sharp milk teeth.

And she was coming for me, coming to drown me in oceans of flaccid rot.

I should have screamed.

I should have ran.

But I just stood there as she came forward, filling the corridor with a black, fetid stench of corpse-gas and decomposition. From her greasy, mucid bulk I saw faces, dozens of agonized faces erupting like blood blisters, rising like bubbles of dough, each of them eyeless and the color of gray sausage, mouths opening and closing and spraying a mist of sputum. She was looking at me, not hating exactly…but almost amused beyond her voracious charnel appetites that I dared stand against her. Her face was a bulbous and liquefying clot of fleshy gruel-like white pulp riddled with graveworms and carrion beetles nesting in the hollow of her nose. Each time she exhaled out came a cloud of black, buzzing flies. Loops of greased, matted hair hung in her face and seemed to coil like flatworms.

She smiled at me with a crooked, saw-toothed pumpkin grin of gnarled teeth.

But it was her eyes that held me.

They were huge gloss-white yolks, veined with blood and oozing a clear fluid. They had no pupils…yet she was seeing me with a gyroscopic intensity, looking not just at me but into me and filling my brain with graveyard imagery…demons and corpseworms with the faces of mewling infants, babies cooked in fat-bubbling pots and oil-skinned women who offered me vaginas sluicing with steaming larvae.

She came closer, her breasts pulsating, throbbing with sloshing milk, lactating freely with a grayish bile that ran down her flab and squirted through the air.

Opening her mildew-specked thighs, she gave me a glimpse of the corkscrewing darkness between her legs that dripped with slime like a slobbering mouth, teaming with parasites…insects and hookworms and green suckering planaria.

And it was with that second mouth, I knew, that she would eat me…after she made me suckle the fleshbags of her tits.

Maybe I should have run like I said, but I was all that stood between her and the children. Such was her arrogance and appetite, she had come to feed on the children alone, to stuff herself with sweetmeats and kidflesh, selecting the most succulent cuts and rarest treats for her own discerning palate before turning her hordes loose on what was left.

She probably expected me to cry and cower and shiver, terrified and overwhelmed, struck mad by her horror as others had been…but she didn’t get that. Machete held high, I attacked with a mindless ferocity and she reached out for me, her tongue like a thorny rose stem flaking into petals…and we collided there in the corridor. All those faces began to scream and maggots began to fountain from her mouth and eyes, her breasts and cunt, the ulcers in her hide…they came out in a slimy pink flood to drown me.

And as she took hold of me, I brought down the machete again and again as I gagged on her mortuary perfume, snotty tangles of blood and foam and slime gushing from her. Carrion paste blew from her mouth and the channel of her nose as I slashed her open and beat her down. Then she fell apart…bursting into a pink river of tissue and worms and rot and sticky ova. I fell away as it flooded the corridor, rushing past me in hot rivers of decay. I saw a dozen malformed, grotesque fetuses drowning in that outpouring, crying out with mewling voices that echoed into nothingness.

The revolting waste of Dragna went to a boiling steam that was hot and suffocating. In the end, I sat there, shocked and mindless as she evaporated around me.

15

It’s been two weeks now since I destroyed her.

Two weeks since the adults of the shelter were exterminated.

Two weeks since I cleaned out the compound and burned the remains in a huge funeral pyre in the parking lot and two weeks since I gathered the children together and told them we are a family and we must look after one another and care for another and only this way can we survive. It sounded like one of Doc’s speeches and I felt an eerie sense of déjà vu while I gave them the spiel. But I believed it. And I think they did, too.