The Mammoth Book of Zombies

by Stephen Jones

  Further sounds behind him made Russell spin around, gasping. A curtain was being drawn aside from another bed, the hand that grasped it straining the hooks to breaking point.

  The naked man who stepped into view trailed plastic tubing, held in place by plasters on his chest and arms. They dangled limply as if they were atrophied appendages sutured into his flesh by the vivisectionists who worked here. Blood ran sluggishly down the patient's belly, staining his pubic hair red. The face above the body tried to smile, but failed. But the expression was familiar. Russell had smiled and nodded to the man each day as he passed his bed on his way to his mother's, a gesture of support. He was the desperate coronary case who should, this very second, have been on a life-support unit.

  Russell slipped suddenly, landing on his behind. His palm slid in something wet and sticky on the floor tiles which he was too scared to look at. From this new angle he could see that the man had left someone behind him, lying on the floor by his bed. It took only a second to realize it was the senior anaesthetist, his torso twitching from some severe shock or unseen wound.

  Backing away, Russell dared himself to turn, wondering whether baby William had crawled near to him. He might trip over the child as he stood up, but he was no longer worried about hurting it.

  He moved rapidly to his left, realizing now that his mother's bed was tucked away in the corner. He was thinking that maybe they hadn't reached her yet, the experimenters had perhaps overlooked her. Hadn't they had enough with the baby and the man?

  Russell now knew for certain that it was the drugs that were causing the patients to rise up. There was too much unsupervised testing, too much willingness to inject and cut and excise. The painkillers and the narcotics were inside his mother, diluting her consciousness. No one would believe him, but he knew that, as with all the others, they had been slowly drawing off all her body fluids, in order to replace them with the secret substances which would animate her flesh once she was dead.

  His mother's bed was raised high, and he felt like a small boy as he approached the mattress. There was a high-pitched whine in his head. The monitor on its adjustable arm was stretched over the bed and displayed itself towards him. On its surface, there were now six steady lines with no oscillation to impair their symmetry or the message they conveyed without words. The squeal that he imagined was emitted from the monitor should have been loud enough to summon a nurse, except that it was coming from his own throat.

  The thin hollow of the bed sheet was empty, as if the occupant had been sucked from between it and the mattress. At the bottom the protective cage still hunched beneath the cover, inviting examination.

  Russell drove the knuckles of his hands into his temples, a roar starting low in his throat, deep down, so deep it hurt; so deep that it wouldn't come out, his larynx strangling him.

  He heard more shuffling sounds and turned. The baby and the man were moving towards him, along with other patients who had also fared for the worse. They moved with a slow synchronous grace that was none the less menacing for its lack of speed. Quickly, he looked back at the space where his mother should have been.

  The gap under the leg-cage loomed as he lifted the sheet from it. Two shrivelled, black fleshy objects lay side by side as if desperately in need of further medical treatment.

  Moving to one side, he dodged around the advancing figures, wrenching curtains as he went in a furious bid to find what remained of his mother. Behind one screen he discovered the bulk of the medical staff, some with hypodermics unremoved from the limbs and torsos where they had been implanted. It was plain that the experiments had taken their revenge.

  "1 wanted them to let me go," a voice spoke in Russell's head as he found her at last. The accusation was as barbed and venomous as the stainless instruments and the pharmacopoeia that had been used upon her.

  Russell's mother was trying to stand up and it seemed likely she'd been mutely attempting the same procedure for some time. Her hospital nightgown was hanging off her withered shoulders, and purple blood smeared the floor next to the stumps of her ankles.

  "Come on, mother," Russell said tenderly. "It's time to go home." He knew that he'd allowed her to remain in hospital far too long, but perhaps there was still time to help. He lifted her surprisingly light body in his arms and shouldered angrily past the RTA victim in his stained bandages, too fast to be cornered now.

  Outside, in the corridor, he recalled what he'd almost forgotten in his haste. He must retrieve those other parts of his mother, before they began to move by themselves. Before they started to shuffle with involuntarily life to the subcutaneous beat of the drugs.

  18 - Les Daniels - They're Coming for You

  Mr Bliss came home from work early one Monday afternoon. It was a big mistake.

  He'd had a headache, and his secretary, after offering him various patent medicines, complete with their manufacturer's slogans, had said "Why don't you take the rest of the day off, Mr Bliss?"

  Everyone called him Mr Bliss. The others in the office were Dave or Dan or Charlie, but he was Mr Bliss. He liked it that way. Sometimes he thought that even his wife should call him Mr Bliss.

  Instead, she was calling on God.

  Her voice came from on high. From upstairs. In the bedroom. She didn't seem to be in pain, but Mr Bliss could remedy that.

  She wasn't alone; someone was grunting in harmony with her cries to the creator. Mr Bliss was bitter about this.

  Without even waiting to hang up his overcoat, he tiptoed into the kitchen, and plucked from its magnetic rack one of the Japanese knives his wife had ordered after watching a television commercial. They were designed for cutting things into small pieces, and they were guaranteed for life, however long that happened to be. Mr Bliss would see to it that his wife had no cause for complaint. He turned away from the rack, paused for a sigh, then went back and selected another knife. The first was for the one who wanted to meet God, and the second for the one who was making those animal noises.

  After a moment's reflection, he decided to use the back stairs. They were more secretive, somehow, and Mr Bliss intended to have a big secret just as soon as he could get organized.

  He had an erection for the first time in weeks, and his headache was gone.

  He moved as quickly and carefully as he could, sliding across the checkerboard linoleum and taking the back stairs two at a time in slow, painful, thigh-straining stretches. He knew there was a step which creaked, couldn't recall which one it was, and knew he would step on it anyway.

  That hardly mattered. The groans and wails were reaching a crescendo, and Mr Bliss suspected that not even a brass band behind him could have distracted the people above him from their business. They were about to achieve something, and he wanted very much to be there before they did.

  The bedroom took up the entire top floor of the house. It had been a whim of his to flatter his young bride with as spacious a spawning ground as his salary would allow; the tastefully carpeted stairs led up to it in front as inexorably as the shabby wooden stairs crept up the back.

  Mr Bliss creaked at the appointed spot, cursed quietly and opened the door.

  His wife's eyes, rolled back in her head, were like wet marble. Her lips fluttered as she blew damp hair from her face. The beautiful breasts that had persuaded him to marry her were covered with sweat, and not all of it was hers.

  Mr Bliss didn't even recognize the man; he was nobody. The milkman? A census taker? He was plump, and he needed a haircut.

  It was all very discouraging. Cuckolding by an Adonis would at least have been understandable, but this was a personal affront.

  Mr Bliss dropped one knife to the floor, grasped the other in both hands, and slammed its point into the pudgy interloper at the spot where spine meets skull.

  It worked at once. The man gave one more grunt and toppled over backwards, blade grinding against bone as head and handle hit the floor.

  Mrs Bliss was there, baffled and bedraggled, spreadeagled naked against
sopping sheets.

  Mr Bliss picked up the other knife.

  He pulled her up by the hair and stabbed her in the face. She blubbered blood. Madly but methodically, he shoved the sharp steel into every place where he thought she'd like it least.

  Most of his experiments were successful.

  She died unhappily.

  The last expression she was able to muster was a mixture of pain, reproach, and resignation that thrilled him more than anything she'd shown him since their wedding night.

  He wasn't done with her yet. She had never been so submissive.

  It was late that night before he put down the knife and put on his clothes.

  Mr Bliss had made a terrible mess. Cleaning up was always a chore, as she had so frequently reminded him, but he was equal to the task. The worst part was that he had stabbed the water bed, but at least the flood had diluted some of the blood.

  He buried them in separate sections of the flower garden and showed up late for work. This was an unprecedented event. The quizzical eyebrows of his colleagues got on his nerves.

  For some reason he didn't feel like going home that night. He went to a motel instead. He watched television. He saw a movie about someone killing several other people, but it didn't amuse him as much as he'd hoped. He felt that it was in bad taste.

  He left the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the doorknob of his room each day; he did not wish to be disturbed. Still, the unmade bed to which he returned each night began to bother him. It reminded him of home.

  After a few days, Mr Bliss was ashamed to go to the office. He was still wearing the same clothes he'd left home in, and he was convinced that his colleagues could smell him. No one had ever longed for the weekend as passionately as he did.

  Then he had two days of peace in his motel room, huddling under the covers in the dark and watching people kill each other in a phosphorescent glow, but on Sunday night he looked at his socks and knew he would have to go back to the house.

  He wasn't happy about this.

  When he opened the front door, it reminded him of his last entrance. He felt that the stage was set. Still, all he had to do was go upstairs and get some clothes. He could be gone in a matter of minutes. He knew where everything was.

  He used the front stairs. The carpeting made them quieter, and somehow he felt the need for stealth. Anyway, he didn't like the ones in the back anymore.

  Halfway up the stairs, he noticed two paintings of roses that his wife had put there. He took them down. This was his house now, and the pictures had always vaguely annoyed him. Unfortunately, the blank spaces he left on the wall bothered him too.

  He didn't know what to do with the paintings, so he carried them up into the bedroom. There seemed to be no way to get rid of them. He was afraid this might be an omen, and for a second considered the idea of burying them in the garden. This made him laugh, but he didn't like the sound of it. He decided not to do it again.

  Mr Bliss stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked around it critically. He'd made quite a neat job of it. He was just opening a dresser drawer when he heard a thump from below. He stared at his underwear.

  A scrape followed the thump, and then the sound of something bumping up the back stairs.

  He didn't wonder what it was, not even for an instant. He closed his underwear drawer and turned around. His left eyelid twitched; he could feel it. He was walking without thinking toward the front stairs when he heard the door below them open. Just a little sound, a bolt slipping a latch. Suddenly, the inside of his head felt as big as the bedroom.

  He knew they were coming for him, one from each side. What could he do? He ran around the room, slamming into each wall and finding it solid. Then he took up a post beside the bed and put a hand over his mouth. A giggle spilled between his fingers, and it made him angry, for this was a proud moment.

  They were coming for him.

  Whatever became of him (no more job, no more television), he had inspired a miracle. The dead had come back to life to punish him. How many men could say as much? Come clump, come thump, come slithering sounds! This was a triumph.

  He stepped back against the wall to get a better view. As both doors opened his eyes flicked back and forth. His tongue followed, licking his lips. He experienced an ecstasy of terror.

  The stranger, of course, had used the back stairs.

  He had tried to forget what a mess he had made of them, especially his wife. And now they were even worse.

  And yet, as she dragged herself across the floor, there was something in her pale flesh, spotted with purple where the blood had settled, and striped with rust where the blood had spilled, that called to him as it rarely had before. Her skin was clumped with rich brown earth. She needs a bath, he thought, and he began to snort with laughter that would soon be uncontrollable.

  Her lover, approaching from the other side, was hardly marked. There had been no wish to punish him, only to make him stop. Still, the single blow of the TV knife had severed his spine, and his head lurched unpleasantly. The odd disappointment Mr Bliss had felt in the man's flabbiness intensified. After six days in the ground, what crawled toward him was positively puffy.

  Mr Bliss tried to choke back his chuckles till his eyes watered and snot shot from his nose. Even as his end approached, he saw their impossible lust for vengeance as his ultimate vindication.

  Yet his feet were not as willing to die as he was; they backed over the carpet toward the closet door.

  His wife looked up at him, as well as she could. The eyes in her sockets seemed shrivelled, like inquisitive prunes. A part of her where he had cut too deeply and too often dropped quietly to the floor.

  Her lover shuffled forward on hands and knees, leaving some sort of a trail behind him.

  Mr Bliss pulled the gleaming brass bed around to make a barricade. He stepped back into the closet. The smell of her perfume and of her sex enveloped him. He was enveloped in her gowns.

  His wife reached the bed first, and grasped the fresh linen with the few fingers she had left. She hauled herself up. Stains smeared the sheets. This was certainly the time to slam the closet door, but he wanted to watch. He was positively fascinated.

  She squirmed on the pillows, arms flailing, then collapsed on her back. There were gurgles. Could she be really dead at last?

  No.

  It didn't really matter. Her lover crawled over the counterpane. Mr Bliss wanted to go to the bathroom, but the way was blocked.

  He cringed when his wife's lover (who was this creeping corpse, anyway?) stretched out fat fingers, but instead of clawing for revenge they fell on what had been the breasts of the body beneath him. They began to move gently.

  Mr Bliss blushed as the ritual began. He heard sounds that had embarrassed him even when the meat was live: liquid lurchings, ghastly groans, and supernatural screams.

  He shut himself in the closet. What was at work on the bed did not even deign to notice him. He was buried in silk and polyester.

  It was worse than he had feared. It was unbearable.

  They hadn't come for him at all.

  They had come for each other.

  19 - Hugh B. Cave - Mission to Margal

  I

  "Oh-oh." Kay Gilbert jabbed her foot at the jeep's brake pedal. "Now what have we got, ti-fi?" She spoke in Creole, the language of the Haitian peasant.

  In the middle of the road stood a man with his arms outthrust to stop them. Beyond him, at the road's edge, was one of the big, gaudy buses the Haitians called camions. Crudely painted orange and red and resembling an outsized roller-coaster car, it was pointed north in the direction they were going. Disembarked passengers stood watching two men at work under it.

  The man who had stopped them strode forward as the jeep came to a halt. He was huge. "Bon soir, madame," he said with a slight bow. "May I ask if you going to Cap Hai'tien?"

  "Well…" The hesitation was caused by his ugliness. And, being responsible for the child, she must be extra careful.

&nb
sp; "I beg you a lift," the fellow said, one heavy hand gripping the edge of the windshield as though by sheer force he would prevent her from driving on without him. "I absolutely must get to Le Cap today!"

  She was afraid to say no. "Well… all right. Get in."

  Stepping to the rear, he climbed in over the tailgate and turned to the metal bench-seat on her side of the vehicle. "May I move this, madame?" He held up a brown leather shoulder-bag that she had put there.

  "Give it to me!" Turning quickly, Kay snatched it from his hand and placed it on the floor in front, at little Tina's feet.

  "Merci, madame." The man sat down.

  When the jeep had finished descending through hairpin turns to the Plaisance River valley, Kay was able to relax a little. Presently she heard their passenger saying, "And what is your name, little girl?"

  Evidently the child did not find him intimidating. Without hesitation she replied brightly, "My name is Tina, m'sieu."

  "Tina what, if I may ask?"

  "Anglade."

  A stretch of rough road demanded Kay's full attention again. When that ended, the child at her side was saying, "So you see, I have been at the hospital a long time because I couldn't remember anything. Not my name or where I lived or anything. But I'm all right now, so Miss Kay is taking me home."

  "I am glad for you, ti-fi."

  "Now tell me your name and where you live."

  "Well, little one, my name is Emile Polinard and I live in Cap Haitien, where I have a shop and make furniture. I was on my way back from Port-au-Prince when the camion broke down. And I'm certainly grateful to le Bon Dieu for causing you to come along when you did."

  Darkness had fallen. Kay cut her speed again so as not to be booby-trapped by potholes. Lamps began to glow in scattered peasant cailles. Now and then they passed a pedestrian holding a lantern or a bottle-torch to light his way. As the jeep entered the north coast city of Cap Haitien, rain began to fall.