She snapped. She made guttural sounds in the back of her throat, even as he exerted still more pressure, trying to crush her throat, trying to return her to the everyday realm of the dead.
But she would not give up the fight to remain here in the half-life of living death. Jamie—if it was still Jamie inside this ferocious corpse—fought with as much strength as she’d had in life. Maybe more. And now Thomas was having a harder time fending her off because his skin was so slippery with blood. His blood. He was losing too much of it and was rapidly growing weaker.
The phone. He had to call for medical help or he wasn’t going to survive.
He tried to drag himself (and his zombie attachment) across the carpet with one hand while keeping the other arm on Jamie’s throat. But his arm kept slipping off her and she kept biting his forearm, her teeth digging in like big-gauge needles. And the more she bit, the more he bled, the more his arm slipped, the more she bit, the more he bled …
(Was that his phone in his hand? His thick thumb tapping 9-1-1?)
It occurred to him that this was hell. God wasn’t waiting for him to die to send him to hell. Hell was right here, right now.
Apparently, hell was a porno zombie movie. And Thomas was damned to play out his part. For the moment Zombie Jamie was mostly chewing scenery but if he passed out from losing too much blood, she would freely feast upon his flesh until he was nothing but gnawed bone—or until she exploded like an overfed tick.
Will I be like her when I die? No RIP for Zombie Tommy. Tommy Zombie. Tomby. Zero, none, nada. Not for Zommy.
Mommy?
Such were his last living thoughts as his bloody arm slipped, slid and slithered off Jamie and he collapsed face-first on the carpet.
At the end (if the end it was), her teeth didn’t hurt him anymore. They only tickled a little.
13
Postmortem Pedro
Head’s in a hatbox.
Stinking to high heaven.
Ranker than a cat box.
This cat with no hat.
Pedro passed his time in the box making bad rhyme, influenced by his love for Dr. Seuss. How his grandkids Juanita and Jorge had loved having him read those stories! But this, this was not a tale for kids.
He had never been sure he could believe in God or trust that there would be an afterlife but he sure as the devil hadn’t expected anything like this. His head in a hatbox, his body back there on the prairie by the side of the road, doing God-knows-what?
This was some kind of bad joke. Unless he was dreaming, which he didn’t think he was. He wasn’t capable of dreaming up anything this wild and crazy. No way. Not bullheaded Pedro, no.
Pedro the Undead Head, maybe.
An hombre could go loco in such close confines.
The worst was this thirst. Or hunger, whichever it was. Thirst, yes. For blood. That he could recognize it for what it was, was some sort of miracle in itself. It was the heart of the curse of being an undying corpse. The Baddest Sheriff in America was no novice at deduction. That this was a curse rather than a gift was a logical conclusion.
He’d also deduced that he was riding in the front seat of the truck, in the hatbox his killers had dropped him into, now resting between the two killers who were arguing over what they should do with his decapitated head. The pickup’s radio was on an all-talk station and some nitwit scientist was laying out his theory that the big eye in the sky was there because of global warming (which he used interchangeably with “manmade climate change of the catastrophic kind”).
“Put his fucking head on a spike at the border, as a greeting to all crossers,” the driver said.
“No, we stick to the plan,” said the other guy, “and deliver it to his daughter. That way it hits the media big time. And that’s the whole point.”
Pedro wanted with all his heart (not the one still in his headless body back there on the side of the road, but the metaphorical one) to break out of this box and chew these two pendejas to death. Trouble was, he couldn’t move. All he could do was work his broken jaws. And his good eye. He couldn’t blink or jaw his way out of the box or jump out and attack anybody. He couldn’t talk or yell without working vocal chords in a voice box and lungs full of air. He’d already tried. All he could do was mouth silent curses at his killers.
Yeah, this was hell all right. No doubt about it.
And Pedro was in it for the duration. Didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that. He wasn’t sure what he might’ve done to deserve such torment but like they said, God works in mysterious ways. And the Big Guy couldn’t get much more mysterious than this hellish horseshit.
The driver said, “I don’t care what we do with it as long as we get rid of it quick. Fucking head’s haunted, man.”
“I told you, that was reflex action,” the passenger said. “Like when you cut off a snapping turtle’s head, it can still bite the shit out of you. I got the scar to prove that shit.”
“No, man, did you see his eye? It was still looking at us. Seeing us, man.”
Pedro’s heart (not the unbeating one) sank at the thought of his daughter Maria opening up the hatbox and seeing her father’s hideous dead head. That he would have to see her seeing him filled him with horror. And murderous rage.
He wanted to tear into these assholes so bad he could almost taste it. Taste them. Not their assholes, their throats, where rich blood ran in tasty arteries, blood that would pump into his mouth in thick spurts if only he could sink his teeth into their tender flesh.
Ay yi yi!
Pedro wasn’t sure, but he thought his mouth maybe watered a little.
14
Cruz Control
Bobby Cruz couldn’t remember how he got here. Didn’t really know where here was. Wasn’t sure it mattered very much, if at all. Here, there, everywhere. Nowhere.
There were lights. Streetlights. Neon signs. Few cars cruising the streets. Tires hissing over wet pavement.
Damndest thing. He felt like he was in someone else’s body. A stranger’s body. Walking around in it, taking it for a lazy spin the way punk-teen carjackers used to go joyriding on “borrowed” wheels.
But that wasn’t quite right either. There was something else going on here. A strong feeling that he was under the control of someone or something else. Something was taking him for a joyride. But that wasn’t right either, because there was no joy here, and there wouldn’t be any. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he knew that he did. No joy.
He’d been manjacked and he felt certain that he was heading for one hell of a crackup.
And somebody was watching it all happen. Watching him. He looked up at the night sky.
When he saw the eye he remembered.
He was on a story. The sacked reporter going undercover and incognito for a border-crossing exposé. Then he remembered being stuck in the back of the old U-haul truck with the monster flies attacking him and his fellow travelers.
And the weird dude in the red hoodie. Lord of Flies.
And that fucking crazy eye up there seeing everything. Maybe even making it all happen. Was seeing believing?
And that was where his memory went blank. Whatever happened after that, he had no clue.
No matter. There was a bigger story here. Much bigger than the one he’d set out to do. It didn’t take a crackerjack reporter to get that.
And Bobby Cruz felt that he had been chosen to write it. He was to be the scribe who sets it all down for posterity.
All he had to do was sniff it out.
Scare it up and write it down.
The Real Story by Bobby Cruz. Or whatever it was to be called. He would be told when the time came. He had faith in that much. Someone or something would clue him in.
A bar up on the right. Beer lights flashing in the windows.
Yeah, he could use a drink. He had a bitch of a thirst that wouldn’t quit.
And who knew? There just might be a lead to his big story waiting for him in there.
Somethi
ng told him it was.
15
Apparition
Magda Menendez was good and dead. Her flesh was meat-locker cold in this barren land’s night winds. Dead. Yet aware of everything. She didn’t understand how this could be. How she could be so intensely aware of her surroundings. How could death be such an eye-opener?
The panties on the rape tree fluttered like little pastel ghosts. A coyote yipped in the distance. A scorpion strutted by. A spider skimmed over sand.
It was true: Magda was trapped in a broken and abused body, decay already eating away at the edges of her timid existence. But somehow it did not distress her. Somehow it seemed as if it were meant to be exactly like this. If the vultures came in the morning to do their part in eating Magda out of the world, that would be fine and natural. God put bacteria and buzzards on the earth to clean up the mess death leaves behind. Life leaves behind.
There was no pain. Where in life there were aches and pains of every variety, now there was only the sluggish heaviness of gravity and an all-over numbness akin to the effect of Novocain dentists use to deaden your mouth.
It came as a surprise and a revelation that she could move the unbroken parts of her dead body. At first this horrified her. It was ghoulish. It made her an evil instrument of the Devil. But then she found the rosary she had put on like a necklace before she left home, and she lifted it off over her head, kissed the attached crucifix and mouthed her heart’s prayer: “Hail-Mary-full-of-grace-the-Lord-iswith-thee-Blessed-art-thou-among-women-and-blessed-is-the-fruitof-thy-womb-Jesus-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinnersnow-and-at-the-hour-of-our-death. Amen.” Then she amended: “Now after the hour of my death. Amen.”
She made the sign of the cross with the rosary, fingers brushing the mutilated remains of her chewed-up breasts. The woman who’d done the chewing had apparently eaten her fill and stalked off into the dark. In search of fresher meat?
Magda wondered where she herself would go if she could walk. Where was there to go? If a dead Catholic girl cannot go to Heaven, why go anywhere? No, it was just as well that she could not get up and walk. She believed with certainty that there was no decent destination for the walking dead.
If idle hands were the Devil’s playthings then surely the feet of the walking dead were something much worse.
Clutching the rosary’s crucifix in both hands, she silently uttered another prayer the nuns had taught her: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell and lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. Amen.”
She avoided looking at the evil eye in the night sky. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate her thoughts on the Savior but she was finding it more and more difficult to hold thoughts long in her head. Death was eating away at her thought processes.
Fear seized her in its crushing grip. She was all at once terrified by the notion that her soul was doomed to wither with her body.
An explosion of light burned through her eyelids. She gasped, or would have if there had been anything other than dead air in her deflated lungs.
She opened her eyes.
An elongated sphere of blindingly bright white light towered over her. The air hummed with anticipation. Deep blue blossomed in the midst of the white light. The blue of a long, shimmering gown.
“Do not be afraid, little one,” the light said.
Magda mouthed the words “¿Madre santa?” Holy Mother.
She could just make out the apparition’s elegant face in the center of the light as a feeling of peace washed over her like a warm and gentle wave from a holy ocean.
—Have you come to take me to Heaven? Magda asked in her mind.
“No, little one,” said the Lady of Light, “I have come to tell you to show others the way.”
—But I died. I can’t walk. I can’t even talk. Except to you. What way?
“The way to the Kingdom of Heaven. But don’t fret, Magdalena, you will move through this land of death in your risen body, immaculate and uninjured. You will be in this world but not of it.”
—Like … an illegal?
The Holy Mother smiled. “More like this,” she said and extended a white hand from the blue folds of her gown and held it inches above Magda’s head. She did this without having to bend over and it wasn’t till then that Magda realized that she was floating in the air. The holy apparition had made her levitate.
An incredible instant later, everything changed.
16
Underground With the Dead
Border Patrol Agent Betty Davis Wolfe knew they were not alone in the tunnel. Something or someone was directly behind her, watching them. She could feel its presence just as surely as if it had reached out and tickled the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. Her partner was on his hands and knees three feet ahead of her, following his flashlight’s beam deeper into the inky black tunnel.
Crawling along with her rear end raised and vulnerable was not a position a woman wanted to be in, especially in such a cramped and confining space as this tunnel under Nogales. Especially when she felt such a palpable presence at her back.
She told herself it was her imagination, sparked by her extreme dislike of cramped spaces. A cigarette would calm her wired nerves. She hadn’t had one in more than four hours. She had been about to light one up but then they found the trapdoor in the floor of the empty warehouse, opened it up and now here they were, checking out the secret tunnel running from the other side of the fence in Mexico, smack-dab straight into Nogales, Arizona. Underground USA. There were many miners in Mexico, which meant a lot of guys had the know-how to engineer a tunnel like this one, shored up with wooden beams and even air-conditioned by a long plastic tube that resembled a fat green snake. It would’ve cost a drug cartel a pretty penny to have this tunnel dug but the profits from the product they could run through here would have earned them prettier pennies—a hell of a lot of them.
That was, if Border Patrol Agent Betty Davis Wolfe and her partner Alejandro Bravo hadn’t found it and already called it in. Betty had wanted to wait for the team to get here before they went down but Bravo Macho (as Betty called him when she wanted to needle the cocky little guy) couldn’t wait, so here they were, just the two of them, with backup a long way away.
God but she was dying for a smoke.
Then she smelled it. Whatever the hell was behind her was behind her. There was no doubt now. This was not imagination. She smelled the stinking son of a bitch.
She reached back to her right hip and unholstered her Heckler & Koch P 2000 .40 caliber automatic. The only way to turn around to face the rear was to sit and turn. There would be a few seconds of darkness before she would have time to draw and thumb on her flashlight with her left hand. But first she had to alert her partner.
“Hold up, Bravo, I’ve got somebody on my tail,” she said and then turned as fast as she could and shot the flashlight beam into the darkness.
Nothing there. The light played on the wooden beams at the tunnel’s ceiling. The beams made her think of the ribs of some giant serpentine beast, as seen from inside the monster. Jonah in the whale. Or was it Pinocchio?
“Where?” Bravo asked. From the sound of his voice behind her, she knew he had also turned around. Which meant he could also see that there was no one there. His beam joined hers and the tunnel looked more like a tunnel and less like the inside of a dragon or giant serpent.
“I smelled it,” she said.
“Smelled what?” He didn’t disguise his disgust for her rookie-like jumpiness.
“I don’t know. Shit.”
“You smelled shit?”
“No. I mean, maybe. I don’t—”
Bravo Macho screamed. It was a very unmacho scream.
Betty spun on her ass and put her light on a dark-skinned man burying his face in the side of Bravo’s neck. And on the blood spilling onto the shoulder of his uniform. Was the guy actually going vampire on Bravo?
Wiry Bravo hit at his attacker with his fla
shlight, clocked him a good one on top of the head but the guy didn’t let go. His thick, hairy arms were wrapped firmly around Bravo’s torso, holding him fast.
It was then that Betty saw that the attacker was totally naked. This was almost as shocking as the fact that he was eating her partner’s throat. Why should the man’s nudity be so deeply disturbing?
She drew a bead on the naked man’s head and shouted: “Let him go or I’ll shoot you!”
He didn’t let go. Didn’t acknowledge her at all.
“Hey! I’m not fucking around! I WILL SHOOT YOU.”
The naked biter was unimpressed. Or batshit crazy.
“Shoot ’im,” Bravo said in a wet, strangled voice.
She reaimed and fired. The slug hit him squarely in the center of the top of his head and he fell backward, taking Bravo back with him.
Betty heard a scraping noise to her rear. She spun back around to see a disfigured man in bloody clothes crawling toward her. The raw-meat stench told her that this was the one she’d smelled earlier.
“Stop!” she yelled. “Alto!”
He didn’t.
She shot him. His right eyeball disappeared in a splash of blood.
But he did not stop. He merely paused long enough to wipe at his empty eye socket with the back of a filthy hand, then he came on with one crazy eye shining in the light beam.
Betty fired again. And again.
Her weapon held 13 rounds but she wasn’t going to get a chance to fire them all. The man was on her as she fired the fifth round.
The sixth ricocheted off the tunnel wall with a whistling whine.
The seventh shot was pointblank to the belly as he fell on top of her, teeth tearing into her throat.
4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas Page 5
