by TW Brown
Hell Hath No Fury…
An ALL female zombie anthology
* * * * *
Edited By TW Brown
Cover by M. Lawrence
Design by Shawn Conn
PUBLISHED BY:
May December Publications LLC
Hell Hath No Fury…
©2011 maydecemberpublications
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living, dead, or otherwise, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author or May December Publications.
Dedication
Dedicated to the Ladies…Truly God’s greatest invention
Foreward
After reading a number of novels and shorts in the zombie genre penned by women (Amelia Beamer, Rhiannon Frator, and Tonia Brown—who appears in this very anthology) I decided that the ladies needed their own book. No, I’m not claiming to be the originator of this sort of anthology, but I will stack this collection against anybody else’s with pride.
In these pages you will find thirteen examples of amazing, and often disturbing zombie fiction. It is with great pride that I stamp this collection with the May December Publications logo. As the Editor here at MDP, it was my honor to have these ladies send in their stories to be considered for this anthology.
Now…I invite you into a baker’s dozen of sometimes vile, sometimes humorous, but always exceptional zombie tales.
Ladies…your audience awaits.
TW Brown
Mother’s Day 2011
Contents
1
Sliding Into Second by Elsa M. Carruthers
2
Chick Magnet by Tonia Brown
3
Waking The Dead by Chateau Boudreau
4
Cranial Rewire by DA Chaney
5
Population: Zombie by Candace Gleave
6
The Petitioners by Rebecca Lloyd
7
Snowcombe by Emma Tett
8
The Candidates by Jordan Deen
9
Pieces by Rebecca Snow
10
Tips by Dina Leacock
11
The Baseball Bat and the Axe by Hanna Masaryk
12
13
Love Stinks by Stacey Longo
Zombie Love Song by Jennifer Allis Provost
Elsa Margarita Carruthers is a recent graduate of Seton Hill University's MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program. She lives in California with her family and Dude, the Wonder Dog. She's very shy, but will come out for books, thrift shops, music, movies, and good food. She's also online as horrorlitchica on Livejournal and Twitter, and Elsa M Carruthers on Facebook.
Introducing a fellow author's short story is always nerve-wracking, because you want to make sure that readers want to turn the page and read their work. I guarantee you will with this next story, as Elsa is an amazing writer, and I'm surprised that I've come across her for the first time in this anthology.
I think you'll really enjoy reading this story; it's fast-paced, clever and thought-provoking. I like stories that make me stop and think, or just make me keep wanting to turn the page - and this story did both! I don't think I can do any better than urge you to turn the page and read Elsa's work Sliding into Second, you won't regret it.
Sliding Into Second
By Elsa M. Carruthers
Helen could feel them circle her house, closing in. She sat in her living room, lights dimmed, and her lacy, ruffled curtains replaced by a heavy red blanket that she had laboriously nailed onto the window frame an hour ago. She still had the rest of the windows and doors to see to, but for the moment, she just sat.
The TV in front of her went black around the time she pounded the last nail in, but she hadn’t bothered to shut it off. That meant that the cable company had finally cut the connection, which meant that the phone and internet were also gone. No problem really, no one had wanted to talk to her in weeks. The only communication she got lately came in the form of fat letters from lawyers and doctors.
Something crashed through the back bedroom window and thudded on the floor. A big rock or something else equally heavy, she guessed by the sound. She knew she should run and board up the window, or by nightfall, the kids, encouraged by their parents, would throw burning paper sacks full of shit through the broken window and she’d spend the night stomping them out and worrying about her house burning down. But not now. A bone-deep exhaustion settled on her like a heavy blanket and she couldn’t make herself get up.
Fever burned her cheeks and split her dry lips. But it was too early for another pill no matter how much she wanted one. Just last month, Dr. Hathaway told her that more than the prescribed amount would kill her instantly. She said that as she nervously flipped through Helen’s file. Worse, she stood at the other end of the exam room, her other hand clutching the doorknob as if she couldn’t get away fast enough. I’m running out of them anyway, she thought, as sleep crept up on her. Helen sank deeper into the cushions, asleep before her head rolled to rest on the back of the couch.
Seconds later, Letty came to her, riding the waves of her dream. Letty walked into the living room wearing the same long, strapless sundress she wore on their first date. For some reason, Letty’s body was backlit and Helen could see everything. She watched the side swell of her heavy breasts and full curve of her lower belly rise and fall, and the way the dress fabric caught on the slight kink of trimmed pubic hair every now and then. Despite herself and everything Letty did, she still longed for her.
“Letty?”
“Yes?” Letty lifted her head.
Helen recoiled in disgust. Letty’s face was a tangle of cystic acne and open lesions. Pus oozed out of her dead eyes. Her once sensuous lips turned up in a salacious grin, and she ran a thickly coated tongue across her over-blackened teeth. Letty said a few words, but Helen couldn’t make any of them out.
Something thudded, and then burst against the front door, shattering her sleep. A moment later, she smelled the strong ammonia of concentrated piss. She pushed herself to the door, ready to pull it open and scream at whoever threw the bottle. But scream what? That it wasn’t her fault? That Letty had infected her, and not the other way around? That somewhere in South Texas, Letty went with Nick to brothels full of small children and came back with SuperSyph? No one cared. They just wanted her and the nasty disease she carried to disappear.
“Dirty, child molesting whore!” That was her neighbor Stan Jenkins. She recognized him by his wheezy gasp for air after every word.
“Hey, you nasty, cunt-licking disease bag! I just shit on your lawn. How do you like that?” His voice trailed like he was running. Then he screamed again, this time from right under the window.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a second while the screams and attacks to her home continued. Finally, unable to control herself, Helen screamed, “I didn’t do it! It was Letty! She brought SuperSyph! Letty!” Spittle sprayed out of her mouth, and her voice went hoarse. She flipped the cover on the peep-hole and put her eye to it. No one stood outside. And as far as she could tell, there weren’t any glass shards from a broken bottle. It looked like no one had been out there at all.
She shook her head a little as a vague, unsettling feeling of apprehension wrapped around her heart. A soft scuttling sound came from her left and she looked up to see Letty standing there with
her beautiful olive skin glowing against an orange tube-top and tight, high-waisted skirt. Letty sneered at her and pointed to the sunburst shaped mirror that hung by the door.
When Helen didn’t move, Letty grabbed her by the face and shoved her to the mirror. Helen already showed symptoms. Her hair was falling out, and patches of skin sloughed off around her temples and cheeks, leaving spots of mottled flesh exposed and raw. And, oh damn, her eyes, once her favorite feature, sank into her newly skeletal face where they leaked thick, yellow mucous.
“Stop! No more! I know what I look like, and it’s all you fault.” Helen turned to beg Letty to let go of her, to leave her alone, but her ex wasn’t there. Her heart thumped hard. Rest, that was all she needed. She shouldn’t have worked so hard in the heat. God, it must be about eighty-five degrees. She’d just turn down the air conditioner and…
Someone pounded on the door.
“Hello?”
No one answered. After several moments, Helen’s heart pounding away like a jackhammer, she heard it. Softly, almost in a whisper, came the first words from an old standard. Was it The Very Thought Of You? The smooth notes mesmerized her; she listened closer. No. No, it wasn’t that one. It was Beyond the Sea. That was the song playing, and her mind strained to remember who sang it because she couldn’t place his voice. It grew louder and louder, and she could make out all the words. A few seconds later, it played so loud that she pulled the door open, yelling for whoever it was blasting the song to stop. That’s when she saw them. Her neighbors flooded her yard and driveway. People stacked up around her blue Prius, and through the gap of someone’s legs, she saw that its right front tire was flat.
Seeing all of the people on her lawn crowded in on each other like roaches sent her into a panic. Her hands clenched the cuffs of her sleeves. Sweat slicked her body, and the first egg smashed into the post on her left. Then an avalanche of eggs and small rocks came flying at her. One egg hit her dangerously close to her eye, the sulfur smell of its decay scaring her more than the actual hit. And her bowels let go. A hot runny stream of shit ran down her leg and pooled in her slipper.
God, why couldn’t it all be over? She wouldn’t have come out at all except that someone had called the police. He kept pounding the door, and when she answered, he insisted they, “Step out onto the porch and work this out. We don’t want to disturb the neighborhood, do we?”
“No, of course not,” she said, and stepped onto the porch in her pink, cotton housecoat and soft slippers; her balding head turning goose-fleshed because she didn’t have enough time to grab a scarf.
The shouts and threats were deafening. Neighbors, people she had known for years and come to think of as family, threw trash, sticks, whatever they could lay hold of. Dimly she wondered why there weren’t more police offers around to hold them back. This was still her house. Still her property.
They spat at her and gnashed their teeth. Some laughed and pointed to the brown-black streak that ran down her leg. Finally, to Helen’s relief, the officer gently pushed her back into the house without a word.
She shut the door behind her and wondered if she should open a window; her house was starting to smell stale, musty even. Then she thought better of it. She didn’t dare open any doors or windows with that mob outside. Maybe if she watched some mindless show, it would help her cope. Had she turned off the TV? She didn’t remember shutting it off. Confused, she grabbed the remote, and when that didn’t work she slapped the top of the cable box a few times.
No, that wasn’t it. The cable was cut off because she hadn’t paid any of the bills. She trembled a little, knowing that her confusion meant that she had crossed into the second stage of the disease.
There were some drugs to help, but really, not much hope of a recovery. At least, that’s what Dr. Hathaway told her when she explained that about thirty percent of patients with SuperSyph go on to stage two. The pills she currently took would supposedly help with fever and pain as well as prevent her from sliding into stage two if it turned out that she were one of the unlucky patients that made up the thirty percent.
With a deep sense of dread, Helen asked the question. “If I go to stage two, then what?”
Dr. Hathaway let out a long sigh and cleared her throat. She smoothed a few dark strands of hair back into her bun. “I doubt that is going to be an issue. You were very healthy before you contracted SuperSyph, and you are taking good care of yourself. Let’s just worry about keeping you well.”
“Please,” Helen said.
“Okay,” she said after a long pause. “You already know that stage two patients are prone to extreme violence and…” the doctor paused.
Helen knew she was about to say cannibalism. The news ran stories about it daily. Junkies who suddenly ripped at their faces. Prostitutes who killed and supped on the brains and soft tissues of their Johns. And then, SuperSyph hit the suburbs. Those stories ran all day and night.
“Ahm. But, generally, you’d eventually lose all higher function. You’d start to have paranoid hallucinations, hear and smell things as the disease attacked your brain and nervous system. And you’d become incontinent. But, really, you don’t need to worry about that. The CDC is working on a vaccination; they’re very close. That’ll go a long way towards a cure. And, you’re healthy. No worries.”
But Helen did worry. All that, and the virus would continue to eat holes in her brain until even that pathetic existence wouldn’t be possible because she’d either be put down like a rabid animal or the disease would eventually stop her heart. Helen left the clinic on that gray, cloudless morning like a condemned woman.
When she got home, she called her parents who grew more and more frustrated at her unstoppable sobbing. She finally took in a deep breath and said it. “Mom. Dad. Letty. I have SuperSyph. That’s what’s the matter.”
They directed her to a hospital information bank and hung up before she could draw another breath. The care centers were totally full, and all the hospices were closed to SuperSyph patients. She couldn’t afford a live-in nurse, and somewhere, deep in her heart, she knew she was one of the thirty. No one wanted her; this was worse than what she learned about the AIDS outbreak in the 80s.
Something sticky and thick jelled in her sneaker. It could be one last period; she’d stopped keeping track a long time ago and every once in a while she was still surprised. She shuffled down the long hall toward the bathroom—God, it was so damned hot—to where she kept her pads. She pulled off her shoes, noticing the congealing pile of her own crap in them, and thinking it was going to be a gusher all right. There were no pads, though all the way in the back of the drawer lay one of Letty’s tampons. After fiddling with it a while, she finally slid it out of the applicator and into place. The smell of her discharge was foul. That cheating bitch, Letty, must have brought home something. Should’ve never trusted those bi bitches. They always go back, the fucking lipsticks that they are.
“Damn it, Letty! What the hell is this?”
Helen rushed out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, panties in hand.
“Letty, what the hell did you give me?”
“What?” She sat at the table in a shelf-bra and a small pair of pink boxers. Letty wouldn’t make eye contact. “What?” she asked the air to Helen’s right.
“This.” Helen thrust the underwear at Letty the way a person might shove a dog’s nose in its piss.
Letty backed away, looking at Helen’s bloody, inflamed crotch instead of the panties. She bumped into the china cabinet behind her and two platters threatened to topple. “You need to go see a doctor.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Helen’s mood turned murderous.
“What else is there to say? I don’t have anything, so it must be you.”
“You bitch! You know what this is. It’s all over the news—the outbreak isn’t contained anymore. People are dying everywhere. How could you get Super-Syph?”
Letty flinched. She leaned over and picked up her coffee. One of her e
spresso tipped breasts slid out of her bra, and she covered it with her other hand as if she were suddenly embarrassed to be naked in front of Helen.
In two steps, Helen was in her face and breathing hard. She backhanded Letty. It was a solid hit.
Letty put a hand to her split and swelling mouth. “I never slept with any girls. I’d never…” her voice trailed off and Helen knew that she didn’t sleep with them, but she was there when someone else did. Maybe even helped.
“It was that guy, Nick, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it! And you helped him. What’d you do, hold them down?”
“It wasn’t like that.” But again Letty wouldn’t meet Helen’s gaze.
Letty’s refusal to take responsibility infuriated her. She ran at her lover, missed, and crashed into the wall. A framed Chagall print fell to the floor with a loud crash. Her collarbone and shoulder crunched on impact, and her numbed arm hung limply at her side for a minute. With her good arm she threw a pot filled with Letty’s mini-roses. It sailed into the living room, upturning on the love seat.
“Letty! Letty! You knew those brothels used kids! You knew it!” she screamed. A man answered her.
“Mrs. Loftiss? Mrs. Loftiss?”
She didn’t move except to make a shushing gesture at Letty.
“Your groceries, Mrs. Loftiss.” He rapped his knuckles on the kitchen window. His shadow seemed enormous on the white tile floor.
He kept screaming at her, he was saying something. Then the whistle started and Letty was trying to get away from her by confusing her with a vanilla candle.
