When the screams started in the next room, they paid no attention. They went on with their fucking and didn’t finish until the police sirens screamed up outside.
7
Killing Pedro
Pima County Sheriff Pedro Delgado wasn’t going down easy. The Baddest Sheriff in America sure as hell was not going down without a wangdangdoodle of a gunfight. Funny thing was, Pedro didn’t much give a rip if the three chollos killed him or if he killed them or they all killed each other.
Pedro was old. Sixty-six. Way he saw it, it was better to die by gunfire with his Old Gringo boots on than to die pissing himself in some reeking retirement home. The handcrafted boots were Tattoo Eagles, the style he’d made famous—so much so that the good folks at Old Gringo sent him a new pair free of charge whenever he wanted them. He didn’t reckon he’d be needing another. Seeing as how he was likely to die here on this lonely stretch of desert road unless these chollos were as stupid as they looked—which hardly seemed possible. Nah, he figured they knew their business and business was pretty damn good, what with things going red hot along the border these days and politicians shooting off at the mouth, playing one group of folks against another, and with what some folks called The Machete War off some dumb-ass propaganda movie seemed about to break out for real between Mexico and the States, Machete being this Christ-like warrior avenger bent on taking it to white folks for being the white wicked spawn of Satan or something.
Lord knew Pedro had no shortage of enemies. When a lawman actually does his job, he makes plenty of enemies. The reason he was hated with so much venom was because his political enemies couldn’t get away with calling him racist. Pedro Delgado was a third-generation Mexican-American. They couldn’t very well accuse him of being racist for locking up illegals from Mexico. And that pissed them off so bad they couldn’t shit straight. He was a stickler for enforcing the law and they couldn’t tolerate that because it queered their deal, wrecked their grand agendas. They were desperate to knock his dick in the dirt but couldn’t figure how to do it so it would stick. So they’d sent these three shooters with gang tattoos and blue bandana do-rags to gun down the Baddest Sheriff in America. Tres amigos.
“Bring it on, amigos,” he said, hunkered down in an arroyo with his gun out and ready. “Let’s get this hooraw over with. I ain’t getting’ any younger. And you boys ain’t likely to get any older.”
He should’ve seen this coming but when their pickup had barreled up behind his cruiser with lights flashing and horn honking, Sheriff Delgado had cut speed and pulled over to see what the trouble was.
Quick enough he saw trouble aplenty. That was when the three chollos jumped out of their truck with guns drawn, one of them waving a machete with his left hand. Pedro thanked the good Lord his reaction time was still pretty swift for a man of his age as he slid across the seat and ducked out through the passenger door and the assassins threw a hail of hot lead into the Pima County cruiser. One round knocked his hat off and a fragment of another clipped his earlobe and stung something fierce. Pedro drew and returned fire just to keep the boys honest, not to actually hit them because he had no clear shot.
The punk wearing a straw cowboy hat over his do-rag yelled “La raza!” and winged another shot at Pedro’s hatless head. The shot punched a hole in the passenger-door window, missing his head by a good three inches. And that was when he decided to low-tail it for the arroyo just off the side of the road without trying to grab the cruiser’s scattergun. He reckoned the 12-gauge would be of little use to a dead man. Then the chollo in the hat demonstrated that he wasn’t as dumb as he looked when he reached into the cruiser for the scattergun. Pedro aimed his pistol and snapped off a shot at the man’s head.
Missed.
He blamed the miss on the darkness, though the moon was plenty bright and there was good light from the pickup’s headlights and the cruiser’s too.
Pedro pulled his rosary from his shirt pocket and began to worry the wooden beads as he kept the pistol pointed toward the road and in the general direction of the three asshole hombres determined to kill him. His late wife had given him the beads years ago and made him promise to always keep them near his heart when he was on the job. He wasn’t a devout Christian but hunkered in this arroyo he was no atheist in a foxhole either.
“Lord,” he said, “I hope you can forgive me for having to kill these men. Or if it goes the other way, I hope you don’t find my sins too offensive. Lord knows I most always tried to do the right thing. Forgive my failures if you can. Amen.”
The pickup’s headlights went out. Then the cruiser’s lights went dark. The punks would be coming in for the kill now.
Pedro looked up at the sky. Whatever that thing was up there that looked like a giant eye seemed brighter than the full moon. Damndest thing. Like it was there just to witness this shootout. A worn-out Bible quote popped into his head and he said it aloud: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” He chuckled at the sudden silliness of life. At the absurdity.
The scattergun boomed and took off the left side of his face. He hardly felt the pistol shot that hit him in the neck or the one that thumped into his breast. On his back now, he raised his pistol and fired at one of his killers and the chollo went down, gut-shot.
The scattergun boomed again and Pedro’s left arm went away, taken off at the shoulder. The moon, the big eyeball, the whole world went dark. Pedro felt his heart thud to a sudden stop and then the bottom dropped out, the bottom of his life, the bottom of existence itself, and he was falling down a dark shaft, screaming, screaming all the way down. He came to a wrenching halt and realized he was back in his mangled body.
His remaining eye saw things in a different light. A harsher light. Not a new light but an old one. Ancient.
When the man with the raised machete stood over him and howled in triumph, Pedro recognized that the powerful craving he suddenly felt was ferocious hunger.
Hunger for living flesh. He ached to sink his teeth into the machete man’s inviting throat.
Then the machete’s blade came down and hacked hacked hacked his head off his neck.
And still he was hungry, snapping his ruined teeth and broken jaw at the man who lifted his head by his sparse hair and held it up to the moon.
8
Dead But Not Gone
Piggy Poop walked the tracks. Not thinking. Just walking. Walking. One foot dragging. Step. Drag. Step. Walking.
Until she saw the fire. Then thoughts formed, flickered, flared against dancing memories. She veered off the tracks and headed toward the firelight, her gait gawky and halting because of the injuries sustained in the fall, the leap and impact. A hitch in her get-along.
A thought leapt into her mind: hobo fire. Then: campfire … cookfire … food! She was achingly hungry. Hunger kept her going now. Where the impulse toward death had been a driving force in her life, now it was a raw visceral hunger that drove her.
She knew she was something other than alive. She could feel herself swinging like a wobbly pendulum between the poles of Dead and Alive. You didn’t do a flip off a bridge like she did and live. No way. Impossible to walk away from that. Yet she had. And was. Walking. Dead. Walking. And oh so hungry. Hungry with a deep carnal lust. Carnivore lust. Stronger than sex. Stronger than death. She wanted, needed bloody meat. Extremely rare. Make that raw. And while you’re at it, make it living. I want blood pumping through my dinner. Blood. Lots of blood. To sate the terrible thirst on the underbelly of this infernal hunger.
She left the rail bed and shambled up a short weed-choked slope. She saw two men huddled round the fire. What used to be called hobos, bums. Sitting there like they were waiting for her. An existential invitation to dine. Meat on the hoof. She heard the blood pulsing through their veins. She knew the taste would be intoxicating. Even orgasmic. Yes.
One of them was wiping the bottom of a bowl clean of bean juice with a crust of bread and the other was turning up a pint of dark port. A third man lay curled in an army b
lanket, shivering and groaning.
“Be cold as a bitch tit ’for this night is through,” said the bean eater.
“Old Sambo’s shivering his ass off already and the bitch ain’t even here yet,” the other man said between sucks on his bottle.
“I could use me some warm titties ’bout now. Piece of pussy wouldn’t hurt none neither. ’Bout as likely as winning a billion-dollar lotto.”
“Wouldn’t do it no how with that God’s Eye up there watching ya.”
Then the wine drinker saw Piggy Poop step into the firelight and said, “Jesus God girl!”
“What in hell happened to you?!” Bean Sop said.
“Damn me but what she ain’t got a big hole in her head,” Wine Suck said.
Piggy Poop said, “Mumph mee” as she stagger-stepped over to the bum in the blanket.
“What’d she say?” Sop asked his bud.
“Fuck if I know,” said Suck. “Damned if I didn’t just shit myself. Shit.”
Piggy went awkwardly to her knees beside the man in the blanket, who had for the moment stopped shivering and groaning.
“Hey,” shouted Sop, “he’s took sick. Leave him be, little lady.”
She bent over and took a big bite out of Sick’s face.
Sop shouted.
Suck doubled over and shat himself some more.
Piggy spat and sputtered, sickened a little herself by the mouthful of cooling meat. Just that quick the sick man had died. And dead meat was not at all what she craved. Flesh drizzled with pumping blood was the only thing that would fill the bill.
She craned her head slowly, looking for a bite to eat. Just as her eyes fell on Suck, Sop cracked her across the side of the head with a piece of firewood. The blow dropped her. Her face hit the dirt by the edge of the fire.
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” Suck said, agawk and fanning his own foul fumes, “I can’t take no more of this crazy shit.”
Piggy Poop opened her eyes. She thought she could feel her lips forming a smile. Crazy shit had always been her thing. Her forte, her raison d’être. (Funny she could remember a French phrase but couldn’t remember being anybody other than Piggy Poop. Though she was sure she’d had another name. A real name. Oh well. Piggy Poop would do as her nom de guerre. Huh? Merde! There was another one. Maybe she was French?)
Before she could get up, the guy with the log-turned-cudgel said, “I’m gonna fuck this gimpy bitch sideways” and walloped her again.
Then the dead man in the blanket sat up and eyeballed his former companions with gimlet eyes and a crooked mouth. The gaping wound in his cheek looked like a second mouth, toothless, raw gums shining wetly in the moonlight.
9
Incident At Mo’ Tail Motel
“… also said they are looking for a very tall man in a red hooded sweatshirt. Officials would neither confirm nor deny the possibility of related terrorist acts, saying only that the hooded man is at this time a ‘person of interest’ in some of these incidents.”
“Turn that down, dammit,” said Jamie, standing naked at the window and peeping through the curtains as she smoked a Virginia Slim. “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”
“Don’t let them see you naked,” Thomas cautioned her as he decreased the volume with the remote.
“Why would they give a shit? I’m not breaking any law here. They don’t arrest people for adultery. Hell, they’d probably appreciate a peek at my goodies. I do look pretty damn good, ya know.”
The only light in the room flickered from the TV screen. Outside, flashing blue light from two cop cruisers lapped at the room’s windows as if it wanted in.
“According to the news, weird things are happening all across the border and on into the interior,” he said from the bed. “Reports of the rapid spread of an unknown disease, unexplained outbreaks of violence. A health official said the disease appears to mimic death, in some cases.”
“You heard all that while I was in the bathroom? Jeez.” She reached back and swiped her fingers between her ass cheeks. “And I’ve still got your spunk leaking out of my bum.”
“What are they doing out there?”
“Why don’t you come look?”
“I don’t want anybody to recognize me.”
“Don’t worry, you’re not that famous, Reverend.”
“Just tell me.”
She exhaled a smoky sigh. “Two cops are talking to the night manager and the other two are still in the room. I could hear them talking through the wall before you turned the TV up so damn loud. Oh goody, here comes the ambulance. Now maybe we’ll get a look at what they roll out.”
A scream came through the wall from the room next door. A muffled shout, then two loud gunshots.
“Holy shit!” Jamie said. Then she doubled over, clutching her belly.
Thomas jumped out of bed. “What? Are you shot?”
She shook her head. Gasped: “Cramps. Bad ones.”
As if a switch had been flipped, she started shivering. Her teeth chattered. Thomas wrapped his arms around her and pressed his nakedness against hers to warm her. “Back to bed and cover up. Whatever you’re coming down with, it sure came on fast. It couldn’t be any sort of toxic shock, could it? From what we did? The anal thing?”
“No, you idiot,” she chattered. “I’ll be fine. You watch at the window. See what the hell’s happening.”
“We should get out of here. A bullet could come through the wall.”
“I can’t, not yet. After these shakes stop maybe. Aspirin. In my bag. Glass of water.”
He put her to bed and gave her two aspirin tablets. She gulped them with water out of a plastic cup from the bathroom. Thomas slipped into his boxers and stationed himself at the window.
“See anything?” Jamie asked, huddled and shuddering hard beneath the covers.
“No, just the police cars and ambulance. Whoa, wait. They’re bringing out the stretcher. Body’s covered up, purple blanket. Head covered too. That means deceased. Guess they had to shoot him, whoever it was.”
Jamie grunted. Her teeth kept up their chattering racket.
Thomas suddenly stiffened his spine. “Good Lord! What in the name of … ? Unbelievable. The guy under the blanket isn’t dead. He’s trying to get up off the stretcher. He’s … his face. No way he could be alive.”
Jamie said, “Come. Hold me. I need a warm body. I’m so c-c-c-cold.”
“Whoa. They’re buckling him down with extra straps. Sweet Jesus, half his face is missing.”
“Tommy …”
“Yeah, just a sec.”
“Cold.”
“Oh! A cop just clubbed him. A good one upside the head. Damn!”
“Tommy …”
“Now they’ll get him in the ambulance. They subdued the shit out of him. So much for being dead. It must be the mystery disease they were talking about on TV. Said it mimicked death. I hope to God that’s not what you have.”
“Just a bug. Hold me. I can’t seem to get warm.”
He stepped out of his shorts and slipped under the covers. He held her tightly and vigorously rubbed her everywhere his hands could reach. “Better?”
“Maybe a little. Don’t stop.”
“Uh-oh, I’m getting another erection. Sorry. It’s just—”
“Fu-fu-fu-fuck me. I feel so empty. I ne-ne-need you inside me.”
“You sure you’re up to it? Maybe that’s not such a good idea.”
“Fuck me, d-d-damn you.”
He gave her a crooked grin. “Yes ma’am. You’re the boss.”
He rolled on top of her and she took him in both hands and pushed him inside.
“I think you need a little lubricant this time,” he said.
“No. Stay there. Fuck me. Fuck me hard so I can feel it. I want it rough. Are you still in? I can’t feel you.”
“Yes, I’m in. Don’t belittle Mr. Willy. He’s sensitive to that kind of thing.” His chuckle rang hollow.
“God,” she said, her inflection inchi
ng closer to the realm of hysteria, “I’m going numb all over. What’s happening?”
“Shush. It’s all right. You’ll be fine.”
“No I won’t be fine. What’s happening to me? Tommy?”
“I’m right here. Take it easy. Just rest.”
Her shudders became more violent, and then finally subsided. She shut her eyes and drifted toward sleep. He did not shrink inside her. His erection sustained itself through the magic of modern chemistry. He shut his eyes and listened to the low-volume voice on the cable news channel. The anchorman said, “Joining us by phone is Reverend Barry Grayson. Reverend Grayson, I understand you have a different take on the extraordinary events unfolding as we speak. You believe there may be a link between the mysterious outbreak along the southwest border and the unexplained spectacle of the so-called eye in the sky.”
Grayson said, “That’s right, Bret, I do. In fact, I think it’s obvious that what we’re witnessing is the beginning of End Times. Nonbelievers in the secular world will mock me for saying so and pooh-pooh it on reflex, but I believe with all my heart and soul that the End of Days is upon us. As prophesied in the Abrahamic religions, the doomsday scenario is about to play itself out on the world’s stage. Whether Christian, Muslim or Jew, you can’t look up at that magnificent eye in the sky and deny that it is the very eye of God. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. The message couldn’t be clearer, Bret. As it is written in scripture, Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. God’s judgment is at hand. Fall on your knees and pray for forgiveness. I don’t believe we have much time.”
Thomas whispered, “Amen, brother.”
His penis remained stubbornly erect inside his unconscious lover.
He remembered that a possible sideffect of Cialis was priapism, an erection that would not go away for hours.
Was the little yellow caplet (Jamie had jokingly called it his “hamburger helper”) putting too much lead in his pencil, he wondered.
4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas Page 3
