Our Dead Bodies [Anthology]

by Wright, Jerry

  Cindy looked at Ray. “Only take one bite or they will not cross over,” she said and Ray, even though his mind was working slower than before, understood her instruction.

  “We will eat well when everyone has made the crossing,” Cindy whispered and the two of them lay there watching the strange spectacle of drunken bikers having sex.

  Jenny Fuller, a pretty young student, had been riding hard on top of Jerry Fallon, an ex-convict and gangster from downtown Los Angeles for about twenty minutes and finally got off him to announce that she needed to take a leak in the bushes.

  “Don’t worry, I will keep your spot for you,” Angela Brown said with a naughty grin and climbed on top of Jerry as soon as Jenny started walking to the dark bushes surrounding the clearing.

  “You take her, I want to have me some man meat,” Cindy whispered and Ray started crawling slowly to the place where he’d seen Jenny enter the bushes. He crawled through some thorny patches and even when a sharp stone cut through the skin on his right knee Ray felt no pain. His vision was clear and his mind was sending a determined message to his body. He was determined to take Jenny and nothing was going to stop him.

  Ray saw Jenny sitting behind a green shrub with her back towards him. Her bare back was white in the light of the moon and she was totally unaware of his presence. The strange words which Cindy had been reading to Ray earlier, before their crossing, were now thundering through his mind and he somehow fully understood their secret meaning.

  With one final stretch, Ray crawled to within five feet of Jenny. His hands made a scraping noise as he got to his feet and Jenny jumped to her feet in shocked surprise.

  “What the fuck…oh, it’s only you Ray,” she said when she saw Ray standing in front of her, “why are your eyes so red, have you been mainlining heroin again?”

  “Crossed over, taking you with me too,” Ray said and Jenny laughed out loud.

  “Yip, you’ve definitely been shooting some strong shit up your veins,” she said and then Ray grabbed her with cold, deadly hands around her throat. She tried to scream but his grip was like steel and the last things she saw was his open mouth before he sank his teeth into her face and tore out a large chunk of flesh out of it. A strange sensation rushed through her body as she died and regained consciousness again, almost immediately. It felt as if some strange poison had been administered to her system and she felt alive and dead all at once. Ray let her go and stood back to look at her maimed face. There was a large hole in her left cheek and it should have hurt, but for some reason she felt almost grateful to Ray for what he’d done. She couldn’t feel anything and her mind was devoid of the troubling emotions that seemed to haunt her when she was still human. All she felt now was a desire to eat some human flesh and she would have jumped right on top of the leader of The Zombies to take a bite out of him, were it not for the foreboding cross that she saw around his neck.

  “Here, you will need this,” Ray said and took a necklace with a cross from the pocket of the strange red robe he was wearing. It took all of Ray’s efforts not to simply rip the rest of Jenny’s flesh right off her bones. He hung the cross around her neck and repeated the instructions that Cindy had given to him.

  “We first get all the other members and then we eat well. For now only take one bite,” he ordered and Jenny nodded her head. Her thoughts were focused, even though the rate at which they traveled through her mind had slowed down considerably. When Cindy saw Ray and Jenny approaching she looked pleased. She ran her cold eyes over Jenny’s face and noticed the bloody wound where Ray had taken his deadly bite.

  “We’ll get your clothes when all the others have crossed over,” she said to Jenny and Ray looked back at the clearing where the orgy was still in full swing.

  “Where’s Jenny?” one of the guys shouted, “I got something large she can put in her mouth!” It was Mark Spock and he was his usual jovial self.

  “Went for a piss Mr. Spock, probably passed out in the bushes,” another biker retorted, “why don’t you take you starship and go look for her?” Mark just laughed at the little joke and got up to go and look for Jenny to show her his large surprise.

  “I will take this one,” Cindy said softly. Ray and Jenny watched as she slowly made her way over to where the drunken biker entered the bushes to find Jenny. They only heard some muffled moans and then a tearing sound as Cindy’s teeth sliced through the unlucky biker’s flesh. It was only a few minutes later when Cindy returned with Mark Spock, the undead biker, following closely behind her. He had a large chunk of flesh missing from his upper arm and the cross around his neck looked somewhat out of place on his naked, overweight body.

  “Now you and Jenny take the next one,” Ray ordered as Mark and Jenny, the two newly crossed over members of the motorcycle club, looked at him expectantly. Cindy looked at Ray with approval and Ray realized that he had taken back full leadership of The Zombies. It may have been Cindy who had initiated the whole thing, but he was now fully back in charge and it felt good.

  When one of the older men in the group wandered off into the bushes to relieve himself, Jenny and Mark made their way over to where they’d seen him entering the woods.

  All of a sudden all hell broke loose and a series of terrible screams cut through the night.

  “Get off me you motherfuckers! Aaargh!” the unfortunate biker screamed as Jenny and Mark jumped on top of him. They sank their eager teeth into him and ripped large pieces of flesh off his body while he was still alive.

  Ray and Cindy rushed over to the place where the massacre was taking place and they were just in time to see Jenny and Mark finishing off the old geezer.

  “Too late for this one,” Cindy said and helped to drag the dead biker deep into the woods, whilst the rest of the drunken bikers stopped their sex orgy and shouted in highly concerned tones to find out what was going on.

  “What the fuck! What are you doing over there!?”

  The four Zombies kept dragging the old biker until they had his body about a hundred yards away from the clearing. Jenny and Mark immediately resumed their bloody feast and Cindy joined in by ripping some tasty flesh off the old guy’s thigh. Ray found his own spot of delicious meat on the old biker’s upper leg and within minutes the four undead bikers were looking down at the corpse of the old biker. His skeleton was clearly visible and there was no point in hanging a cross around his neck. There was no flesh left on his body to protect from the hungry undead.

  “Now we’ve eaten well, from now on only one bite,” Ray ordered and the undead bikers looked at him with slightly guilty expressions on their faces.

  “Better hide, they’re coming,” Mark said as the voices of the rest of the bikers drew closer. They had a flashlight shining through the trees and it lent an eerie, unreal atmosphere to the dark woods.

  There were still about ten bikers left who had not yet crossed over and it would take careful planning to get all of them, Ray thought as he led the other three to a particularly dark place amongst some dense growth.

  “There’s nothing here and I’m fucking scared,” a young woman said in a high, shrill voice, “please come back to the camp with me?”

  “I will go with you,” a young biker suggested and they started making their way back to where the fire was still burning.

  “Come, we will take the two of them together,” Ray said and soon the four zombies were following closely on the tracks of the scared young girl and the guy who’d offered to take her back to the camp. The two bikers didn’t even know what hit them and for once the undead bikers were somewhat disciplined, as they only took a single healthy bite out of each of the living before helping them to cross over.

  “Here, this is yours. Don’t ever take it off,” Cindy said and hung a cross around each of the two new undead members’ necks.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Aaaaahhh!” someone screamed, terrified.

  “Don’t look at it,” a man’s voice spoke up and the rest of the bikers tried to tear their eyes
away from the corpse of the old biker which was partially visible under a large bush. Parts of his skeleton showed through his ripped clothes which still clung to parts of his dead body.

  “There must be some kind of lion or dangerous animal out here,” Charlie Rickets suggested and this suggestion was quickly accepted by the rest of the group. It made sense and, even though the sight of the ripped up remains of the old biker had been terrible to behold, at least the thought of him meeting his end by means of a carnivorous wild animal brought the whole thing back to some level of natural explanation.

  “Let’s go back to the camp, we will come and bury him tomorrow,” Charlie suggested and a quick consensus was reached that this was the best way to proceed.

  “I still haven’t seen Ray or Cindy and Jenny and Mark Spock are also missing,” someone else spoke up and everyone looked around at the rest of the group as if they were hoping to see the missing bikers reappear magically in their midst.

  “There’s nothing we can do about it now, let’s wait until morning and then we’ll send out a search party,” Charlie said in an authoritative voice.

  “Can’t we just drive the fuck out of this godforsaken place right now?” one of the younger girls asked with a pleading voice.

  “There’s no way we can drive anywhere tonight on our bikes. We’re all pissed and it’s just way too dangerous,” Charlie said.

  Everyone seemed to agree that this was true. The fact that Charlie Rickets had been sandwiched in between two naked biker chicks only half an hour earlier, whilst drinking whiskey from a bottle at the same time, didn’t seem to be much of a concern to anyone. He’d taken over leadership in the absence of Ray Mason and was now looked up to for guidance out of this mess.

  When the group arrived back at the camp they put some more wood on the fire and then all huddled close together to see out the night. Being a gang of drunken bikers, and not a well-organized group of military personnel out on a mission, no one thought that it might be a good idea to put out an alternating guard for the evening and soon everyone in the group was snoring away in a concerned, drunken slumber. From the darkness of the woods, six pairs of bloodshot eyes were looking at the group of sleeping bikers and the heavy breathing of the undead stalkers was the only thing that betrayed their impatience.

  Suddenly the soft sounds of violin music penetrated the stillness of the night, as Cindy switched on her little radio.

  One of the girls in the campsite got up in a half hypnotized state and started walking towards the sounds of music coming from the woods.

  “Leave this one for me,” Ray said and watched as the girl approached them. She was clearly sleepwalking, as her eyes were empty and she had no expression on her face. She came closer and closer and, finally, she was no more than ten feet away. The young girl walked right up to the end of the clearing and as Ray searched the dark recesses of his mind he could still remember her name through his fuzzy thoughts. Angelique…he couldn’t quite remember her surname; he was more interested in finding put what her flesh tasted like. Hopefully, they could all control themselves and not rip her to shreds the way they’d done with the old guy.

  Just as she was close enough for Ray to make his deadly move he froze in his tracks. She was wearing a cross around her neck and he was totally incapable of completing the deadly plan of attack he’d formed in his mind.

  “Bad luck Ray,” Cindy said as the girl walked back to where the rest of the bikers were sleeping.

  “Where did you go off to, don’t you know there’s a dangerous animal out there somewhere?” a young biker asked as she lay down next to him.

  “Had to go and see the music,” Angelique replied and fell asleep almost immediately after saying that.

  The young guy sat up straight and then he heard the music coming from the edge of the woods.

  “Karl, wake up!” he said and shook another biker who was sleeping close by.

  “What the fuck?” Karl said as he woke up and rubbed his eyes in disgust.

  “Listen to that music,” the young biker replied and Karl craned his neck to hear the sweet sounds coming out of the woods.

  “Let’s go and see where it's coming from,” the young guy suggested and Karl, imagining how he would be admired by the rest of the bikers if he had a cool story to tell the next morning about finding the source of the music in the dark of the dangerous night, agreed to go and find out where the sounds were coming from.

  They walked ever so slowly to the place where the radio was playing and the six undead bikers got ready.

  “We need them to help fight so don’t eat up,” Ray said and the zombies nodded their heads slowly.

  Karl and the young guy never saw what was coming until it was way too late. Three undead bikers jumped on each of them and, with surprising discipline, took small bites out of their flesh to help them across the river to the darkness of everlasting undead life.

  Some of the bikers next to fire looked up from their drunken slumber to see where the rustling sounds and soft moans were coming from, but they were too late to see the end of two more men from their number.

  “Now we are as many as they are,” Ray said as eight pairs of undead eyes looked at the eight remaining bikers next to the fire.

  “Get ready, we take them now before morning sun,” Ray said and the other zombies looked at him with approval in their bloodied eyes.

  “Attack!” Ray shouted in a terrible voice and the eight undead bikers rushed forward with surprising speed and landed upon the rest of the living members of The Zombies motorcycle club before anyone could even think of mounting a defense. Each undead zombie jumped on his own prey, except for Jenny, who was left staring at the cross dangling from Angelique’s neck.

  “Get away from me you monster!” Angelique shouted and held on to the cross when she saw Jenny staring at it with puzzled eyes.

  “You’re afraid of this, aren’t you? You satanic piece of shit! I should have never let you talk me into coming here on this godforsaken trip!” Angelique screamed as the rest of the bikers were killed and turned into zombies right in front of her eyes.

  “Why don’t you take off that cross and join all of us?” Cindy said with blood dripping from her lips. Nineteen undead bikers stood together, all of them with their eyes fixed on Angelique.

  Get away from me, just get away!” Angelique shouted through her tears and sent up a silent prayer, promising to mend her ways and to stay away from satanic biker gangs for the rest of her days, if only she was spared to survive that terrible night.

  “We will wait until you fall asleep and take off the cross,” Ray said with an ominous smile and the zombies retreated with him to the edge of the clearing to wait for Angelique to fall asleep.

  They sat there staring at the only remaining living member of their motorcycle club, but Angelique never once lay down for the rest of the evening and she was still sitting up straight when the first rays of the morning sun broke through the trees to announce the arrival of a new day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “What the hell happened here?” Captain John Wesley asked with a deeply concerned tone in his voice as he helped Angelique O’Leary to her feet.

  “Undead…all of them zombies,” Angelique mumbled and the police psychiatrist scolded Captain Wesley for his harsh approach.

  “Twenty of her friends are missing and she’s been left alone here all night, you can’t interrogate her that way!” Doctor Riley said as she draped a blanket over Angelique’s shivering frame.

  “Well there’s a dead body lying a hundred yards from here under a bush and it’s my job to find out what the hell caused him to meet his end that way. Looks like he’s been eaten alive!” Captain Wesley said too loudly, before marching off in irritation while Doctor Riley offered Angelique some sugar water to help with the shock.

  “Don’t you worry dear,” Doctor Riley said, “trust a bunch of bikers to run off and leave a young girl alone when there’s a dangerous animal around!” she added and Ang
elique decided, right there and then, that this was going to be her official version of the events of the previous evening; that some animal had attacked the group and that they all drove off in a mad rush on their bikes, leaving her to fend for herself.

  “Where do you want us to take you, my dear?” Doctor Riley asked, “Do you want to go to a hospital?”

  “No, I want to go home to my parents,” Angelique whispered while she clutched the cross that had saved her life, “I haven’t seen them for nine months and I want to go to church with them again just like the old days.”

  “No problem, I will drive you home myself. And don’t you worry about Captain Wesley, he can take your statement later,” Doctor Riley said and helped Angelique into an official police vehicle.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nine motorcycles appeared on the horizon. Each was driven by a male biker and had a female on the back, clinging to the male body in front of her. Some of these bikers had chunks of their flesh missing, but this fact was obscured by the black leather outfits they were wearing. One or two members of The Zombies motorcycle club were missing some flesh from their faces, but these bikers simply never took off their helmets, even when The Zombies stopped along the way; like when they were hungry and needed a bite to eat.

  Ray Mason was still their leader and, to be honest, he preferred the way things were after they had all crossed over to the other side. They no longer paid for things like gas and food. Gas was simply taken without payment. If anyone complained about it, they would become lunch or dinner for The Zombies.

  The bikers found themselves somewhere on the dusty road between Spring Valley and Las Vegas and Ray slowed his motorcycle down to signal that they would be stopping at the roadside bar which had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

  When all of their motorcycles came to a roaring halt in front of the bar one or two of the patrons inside peered out the window to see what was going on.