Snopes tried hard not to shout. “Your Honor, Bascomb and I are more than ready to take care of business with a clean conscience––”
“Have him start with his wife, then, would you, Deputy? You haven’t lost anyone, so you can’t relate. The state can’t presume to write the law, but should act to preserve order and normality, until the rest of the world does likewise.”
“Right, everything’s normal.”
“Yes, if we say so, and we do. We have restored order, and we will rebuild our town. Now there’s a mob of dead illegal aliens massed somewhere around the fence. See to it.”
Snopes left; he stopped in the library to get a tripod-mounted M-60 and two extra belts. Judge Dooling was also a retired Brigadier General in the National Guard, and had the keys to the armory in Seeley. All the heavy stuff went out to blockade the 8 to the east, to stop the deadbeat armies marching out of Mexico. Nothing came back.
Snopes got blindsided by the daylight when he went outside. He slipped on his shades. Bascomb hung out the window with his arms thrown wide for the machinegun. “Okay, you can drive.”
They drove south, down the perimeter to where it swerved east to parallel the interstate. “All clear, shit!” Bascomb growled, and cracked open a blood-hot beer.
Most of the ash came from El Centro, Calexico, and Mexicali, which the Marines torched with fuel-air bombs a week after V-D Day. They boiled over like anthills doused in gas, never-ending waves of deadbeats, scorched black and ravenous. The Marines got eaten or bugged out, and that was the last they saw of any order outside their own fence.
Snopes went up the canal to where the fence picked up at the trailer park at the north end of town. He cut across the back end of Bascomb’s yard on the cul-de-sac. Bascomb waved to his wife, who drooled and banged on the bars of their bedroom window.
They followed the fence along the canal and turned north, and were almost back to the main drag when Bascomb called, “Wetbacks!”
Snopes braked on the shingled dirt road beside the abandoned Milbank ranch, which stood half-in and half-out of the perimeter. Donnie Milbank was a small-time TV minister, and when the Rapture found him still on earth, he packed up the family in the Winnebago and hauled ass for some born-again survivalist enclave in Texas.
Where the fence circled behind Milbank’s stables, he saw twenty or thirty ragged scarecrows loping across the dead brown lawn. They shambled jerkily through a gap in the razor wire, where it was trampled flat.
Snopes jerked to a stop. The nearest wetback was inside the fence, not ten feet away, flannel and denim rags caked with mud and dust and blood, greedy claws outstretched, slack jaws snapping in dumb, bottomless hunger. Bascomb jumped out, laid the M-60 across the hood and opened up.
Bascomb hosed them down like leaves off a driveway, walking the spray of lead across their midsections to slash them in half and pile them up against the wire.
Snopes stayed behind the wheel, but opened fire with the shotgun. He saw big scoops of meat lifted out of heads and chests and knew he was connecting. At this range, how could he miss?
It was hard to hear with the atomic-typewriter clatter of the machinegun, but when Bascomb finally stopped to reload, Snopes could see how a few survivors tried to run for the open desert. He could hear how they screamed and cried and prayed.
His stomach filled with nightcrawlers and battery acid. “Stop! Bascomb, Doug, Jesus Christ, stop! They’re not dead!” He hit the siren and jumped out, ran around the cruiser to knock Bascomb down, because his partner just laughed and kept shooting.
Snopes tore down the gun and shut off the siren. If any got away, he didn’t see them moving.
Bascomb got up and dusted off, punched Snopes in the shoulder. “Fuck you thinking, fucker? You wanna die?”
“Didn’t you hear that? They were fucking screaming!”
“They were screaming in Spanish! They’re fucking wetbacks, dude, and they look pretty fucking dead now. Come on, let’s clean up.”
Bascomb covered while Snopes checked for survivors. There were none, and nothing got up. The bodies lay in mounds like wet laundry in the gap, which they’d made by throwing plywood from Millbank’s stables over the wire. There were nineteen of them, as near as he could tell, what with their being blown open and running into each other like a casserole. He saw two women with babies in slings, and another who might’ve been pregnant.
“Give me a hand, asshole,” Snopes said. He turned and vomited into the dust, wrapped a bandana over his face. They rolled out some tarp and got them ready for the chow wagon.
The bodies were pitifully light, skeletal, blistered skin flaking away, but they had walked out of Mexico alive. “We gotta get this shit in the chipper before lunchtime,” Bascomb said. “Stiffs’ll think it’s Thanksgiving.”
“Your wife’ll be so happy,” Snopes said, “she might even let you get some.”
“Fuck you, Mark. Least I got something to come home to…”
They lifted one by the hands and feet, and were trying to sling it over on the tarp without spilling its innards, when Chet Bamberger came limping across the yard, with his chain and a chunk of drywall dragging behind him.
“Oh fuck,” Snopes cried, and let go of the corpse’s feet.
Bascomb let go a hair too late, and blundered into the piles of razor wire. He shrieked, “Eeeeyagh!” and jerked up, but the curling steel teeth snagged his uniform and flabby back and dragged him back into the thickest of it.
Like all Ocotillo’s registered dead citizens, Chet wore a chain and a leather muzzle with a bike lock on the back, and only a tiny hole for eating. They were fed slurry and carrion from the chow wagon, but said supply had petered out as even the dead stopped coming down the road.
Chet wasn’t wearing his muzzle.
Snopes’s left hand went out to pull Bascomb free, while his right tried to draw his gun. Neither effort met with much success.
Chet ignored them. He ambled over to the pile of bodies and squatted over one, lifted a neatly bisected hemisphere of a woman’s skull and slurped at it like a slice of cantaloupe. Snopes smashed Bamberger’s grill in when he put on the muzzle, so the slobbering hole he chewed his food with had no teeth in it.
Somehow, this only made him more repulsive, more threatening. His crumbling gray hide was pocked with burns and brands and carved words. A Camel Filter butt jutted out of his left ear, and his right ear was melted off. With no TV and no Indian casinos down the road, Connie had been forced to take up a new hobby, but nobody had filed a complaint, so who was he to judge?
The jingling music of the approaching chow wagon echoed through the streets. “Music Box Dancer” today, thank God. Snopes didn’t know why, but if he heard “Do You Know The Way To San Jose” one more time, he was going to eat somebody’s brains.
Chet’s eyes were pointed at Snopes, but they were as vital as soft-boiled eggs, and was there any remorse in them, any horror, at what he’d become? Was there any spark of anything worth saving, in the rancid mayonnaise behind those dead eyes? Had there ever been?
Snopes drew his gun and shot Chet Bamberger through the left eye, and then, because it wouldn’t close, through the right.
The chow wagon pulled up in a cloud of dust. Something about the old ice cream truck always creeped Snopes out, even when it still sold ice cream. Now, with racks of chainsaws, baling hooks, flamethrowers, a wood-chipper in tow, and all the Rocket Pop and Dove Bar stickers slathered in sun-baked blood and a mist of ecstatic flies, the chow wagon only brought relief: somebody else to clean up the mess.
“Murderer! Fucking murderer!” Fists drummed on Snopes’s back. They were ineffectual against his bulletproof vest, but knocked him off-balance when he tried to help Bascomb get free.
Connie Bamberger kicked Snopes in the crotch. He tripped and fell on the body pile. His hand snagged in a body cavity and half a baby spilled down the back of his neck.
“Murderer! Arrest him, Doug! I want justice!”
* * *
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They grabbed him when he came into the courtroom. It was dark, but he recognized the deep-fried roadkill smell of Torres, who ran the Indian Skillet across the street, and Sturtevant’s livestock stink, McBride by the whiskey on his breath. Bascomb unsnapped his holster and took his gun.
Connie Bamberger sobbed uncontrollably on the witness stand. Judge Dooling sat at the edge of the lamp glow with his hand on the revolver. “Now, Mrs. Bamberger has given her testimony, and her complaint has been reviewed.”
“What is this shit?” Snopes shouted. “Get off me, it was self defense.”
“Witnesses say otherwise. Mr. Bamberger was not aggressive, and the illegal aliens’ refuse was going to be processed for feed, in any event. You took a citizen’s life in cold blood, Deputy. You broke the law, and it is very clear.”
“That’s not the real goddamned law! It’s not murder! Chet was already dead!” Snopes struggled in the arms of the other men, but Bascomb jabbed him in the back with his own gun. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw the gloomy courtroom was packed with people, half the surviving town gathered to watch.
“All of us are equal before the law, Mark. I can’t sentence you to death, but you’ve shown that you cannot be trusted to wield force in our defense. We’ll have to ask for your badge.”
Someone ripped it off his uniform. “Fine, take it and fuck you all.”
“Excellent. And now, Doctor, tie off his arms.”
Snopes bucked backwards, throwing Sturtevant into Torres, and driving Bascomb back into the door. His gun went off into the ceiling. Snopes jumped for the door, but Bascomb was quicker, and smashed him across the back of the head. The lamplight turned into a golden lava lamp glow as he collapsed on a plastic tarp.
Dr. McBride was a veterinarian and a drunk, but he was Ocotillo’s only medical authority, so he tied Snopes off at the elbows and pumped him with a syringe that made the trippy light into a pointillist cloudscape.
“Son, I’m sorry as hell,” McBride whispered in his ear. “We all know why you did it, but there’s gotta be law, and the law’s gotta be blind. My son, he’s dead, but he’s walking, so who’s to say he won’t get better? If we let you go on like you done––”
Judge Dooling banged his gavel. “Don’t badger the prisoner, Walter. Deputy Bascomb, proceed.”
Bascomb still bled from divots the razorwire gouged out of his neck, scalp and arms, but he did not hesitate to drag his partner’s right arm out across the floor and step on the wrist, heft the axe and slam it into the inside of Snopes’s elbow.
From head to toe, he was bathed in lightning. Screaming blood and vomit and streaming tears––Snopes tried to fight, but he couldn’t even get the breath to scream for mercy when they tugged the other one away from his chest and chopped it off, as well.
A little blood oozed out of the tourniquets, but Dr. McBride cauterized the stumps with a blowtorch and pronounced him sound.
The gavel banged again.
“Court is adjourned. Deputy, leave the defendant where he is. I’d like a word. No, touch nothing––”
Snopes lay there, watching the silhouettes of the people he’d sworn to protect and serve file past the tarp. The sight of his severed arms, splayed out in front of him like spare parts from a model kit was very unsettling, but he couldn’t remember why until he reached out to touch them.
He still couldn’t scream, but he found it very easy to cry.
When the courtroom was empty, Judge Dooling rose from the bench, shuffled over to Snopes, and knelt beside him.
“I know you think this is very cruel and unusual, Mark, but we all have to learn to submit to something bigger than ourselves.”
Snopes’ response was garbled, even to himself.
The judge sighed, touched his shoulder. “You think this is insane, but you are fortunate not to be able to understand. You probably won’t remember this, but I wish you would, so you could see how wrong you were, as time goes by, about the risen population of Ocotillo.
“The dead are not wholly incapable of recovery, Mr. Snopes.”
Dooling brought his face down closer to the deputy and picked up his severed left forearm. He stroked Snopes’s face with his own fingers, then took a bite out of the meaty belly of the exposed muscle, just above the clean cut at the elbow.
“We are getting better,” His Honor said around a mouthful of flesh. “Order has been restored. We will rebuild our town, and it will be better than it ever was, with equal liberty and justice for all its citizens.”
Snopes had all but blacked out. His last clear memory was of the Judge: wiping his blood-slick lips, taking the scorched stumps of his arms in his hands, and licking them with his gray, ulcerated tongue, just like a stamp.
But he heard him get up and call for Bascomb. “You’re free to go.”
Dredging up the Dead
J. W. SCHNARR
October 25. Days at sea: 9
Another accident on the tow today. The Frenchman we picked up in Halifax this time. Robert Denis (ROBE AIR if you ask him). Not paying attention, as usual. Honestly I don’t know why he spends so much time talking when he’s the only one on the crew who understands his accent. Anyway, he busted a couple of his fingers on the trawling line because he wasn’t watching where his hands were. I wonder how pissed he’ll be when he finds out. I’m putting him on gaff and knife for now, I guess…if he can hold a blade. Let him bleed cod for a few days. That’ll teach him to watch what he’s doing maybe. Jesus, we’re not equipped to handle this kind of stupidity.
The sea was calm. We had a good haul today, low by-catch. I miss you Maggie.
October 27. Days at sea: 11
No trawl today. A storm came up last night, and we were in the middle of bad swells all day. Normally I’d make the boys work through it, but it was raining and the deck gets like a slide when the boat is rocking. Gotta be extra careful, with my ‘problem’ I can’t afford any injuries at all. There may be some hell to pay with Denis as it is, he complained loudly that he couldn’t even handle the knife yesterday, and the flopping cod tails were making things worse. If I’d known what a baby he was I would have left him in bloody Halifax.
OH and to top it all off, somebody on the ship has been smoking pot. I can smell it in the cabin but nobody is confessing. I swear to Christ if one of them falls off the deck and drowns because they’re stoned, I won’t be held responsible. Idiots, in the finest sense of the word.
The sea was choppy. No haul, so I’m heading north early. I miss you Maggie.
October 28. Days at sea: 11
Picked up something weird in the nets today. Two yellow barrels of ... something. We couldn’t tell what it was. They had Russian words all over them, and a poison symbol, so that’s a double strike in my book. Thing is, it was in the middle of a decent haul of cod. We dropped the net and these two barrels came clunking out of there. One of them had been ripped open by the trawling door. It was leaking black shit all over the fish. All over the trawl line too. Smelled like car exhaust a little. Probably nuclear waste. It had this really filmy texture like dish soap. If the Russians DID do a wholesale dump of some chemical shit around here, the entire area could be contaminated. Cod are like sponges when it comes to that stuff. I can’t come back to port with a hold full of contaminated fish. Not now.
Fuckin’ dumpers. It’s like the old man always said: “The ocean is big enough to hide any man’s mistakes.”
I ordered the boys to hose the deck, and we pitched the barrels back where we found em (after we got a sample, of course, I’m not a total bastard). I marked the spot we picked em up, and I relayed it to the coast guard. Not that they’re much use out here, but maybe they’ll send the Canadian Navy out to take a look at it. Either way, it’s their problem now, not mine.
The sea was calm today. Good haul. Count two barrels as by-catch. I was thinking of your blue and white dress today Maggie, and the last time I saw you wear it. Church. Never had much use for God before that day.
> October 29. Days at sea: 12
The hold is definitely contaminated.
October 30. Days at sea: 13
Okay, I’m writing this down because it’s just a little too fucked up for me to keep in my head. I can’t talk about it with the men because they’re already freaked out. Did we all touch that shit? I can’t remember now for sure. I know I did.
The hold is definitely contaminated. We’re sitting on half a ton of gaffed and bled cod, and I’m probably going to have to dump the whole lot of it. Some of that Russian toxic waste got in there, and it ... caused a reaction when it came in contact with the fish. I don’t know how, but the haul we put in there yesterday is still alive the cargo has had their nervous systems affected by the substance from the drums. They dance and flop like they’re alive. We brought some out because at first we thought they were missed bleeds, and that can make your hold stink to high hell. They WERE bled though. I double-checked the cuts myself.
Denis went off in mostly French about how we were all contaminated, and I swear I almost threw him off the ship. Last thing I need right now is some jackass going off half-cocked and freaking everyone out. I DID wash my hands again though, just to be sure.
Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (Volume 1, 2 & 3) Page 50
