by Lee Pletzers
Jim hesitated. Then he fired the .45 at the naked guy. Blam. The flash strobe lighting up the yard for a tenth of a second, a flame licking out, the dead man staggering—
Oh yes, Dwayne knew it was a dead man.
Staggering, turning toward Jim, all his movements like flinches. The dead man with a hole right through its heart.
Jim felt unreal, looking at the walking dead man. Like he should lean back in his chair and reach for the popcorn and just let things happen on a screen. He fought the feeling, thinking: this is happening to me. Aiming the gun this time as the corpse came at him, aiming at the dead man’s head. Blam, flash, right between the eyes. It went down like a puppet with its strings cut.
Then it started thrashing, kind of floppy-sideways on the ground, like a landed fish. Making sputtering sounds, shit and blood running down its leg from its butt. One of its eyes swelling up, popping out with yellow and red fluid, as it began to crawl with one arm, pulling itself toward them.
“Base,” it rasped. “Crack. Rock. Silver top. Base.”
There were three more coming around the other corner of the house. Two more on the street, coming down the sidewalk. Mostly naked. One of them didn’t have any eyes, and it had a rusty piece of metal through its middle, its head moving hurky-jerky. All of them coming toward Jim and Dwayne.
One of them was carrying Joleen’s head. Her head raggedly torn off at the neck. Holding her head up to its face, biting into Joleen’s forehead. The naked men coming at them sniffing, snuffling…
Dwayne and Jim ran up the stairs, into the house.
Both of them yelling the same thing so much in synch it sounded rehearsed: “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUCK!”
10:35 P.M.
They found two freshly killed women in the front hall, one with her head missing, the other one with her head only half attached. The top gone from that head. Scooped out. Part of the brain. Just part of it. They only wanted…
Jim threw up in the pipe room. Samson’s body was curled up in one corner, a puddle still spreading out from it, Ramon dead beside it, face down. The back of his head gone. One of the naked guys was clawing feebly at a closet door. Strings of entrails had dragged behind it, leaving a rancid trail on the floor, the top of its head shot off. It was scraping like a cat at the closet door, and they could hear someone sobbing in there, someone hiding in the dark closet.
The naked bulb lit the room brightly, every corner of it. Stark and sharp.
Jim straightened up, feeling like he was going to hyperventilate, and walked over to the crawling thing at the closet door (thinking about what it was, with quiet amazement: a human being gone literally rotten, dead meat dragged around by hunger like an empty cart dragged by a rabid horse. It was entropy that could feel hunger; scraping at the door in a tape loop of robotic stupidity, a thing that had once been a person, someone whose picture had appeared in some high school year book…) and shot it twice in the back of the head, near the spine. It twitched and slumped, then started moving again—but weak now, like a dying roach. Probably have to incinerate the son of a bitch to really kill him, Jim thought.
Feeling numb, Jim dragged it away by the ankle and shoved it in the bathroom, crammed a board under the doorknob to lock the thing in. It made faint scrabbling sounds behind the door.
Jim went back to the closet. It was a long way across the little room. “Come on out, man, I shot the fucking thing,” Jim said to the guy in the closet. He wanted living people around him.
Dwayne was pushing bodies up against the door to the hall. Samson’s headless body, Ramon’s body. Dwayne was crying without tears, his face contorted like a little kid’s. Jim looked at him and thought: He’s no more criminal than I am. Just another guy on a street corner. Used to be a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons.
Dragging mattresses up against the door, dumping them on the bodies, now. That wouldn’t work for long. Those things could pull people’s heads off. They were strong.
Jim opened the closet door. A black dude in a grimy jogging outfit was crouched in there, hugging his knees, shaking. An Oakland Raiders medallion on a heavy gold chain around his neck. There was a little snub-nosed gun on the floor between his feet. Probably used up all the rounds in it.
“Raiders, tha’s Raiders,” Dwayne said.
“There a phone here?” Jim asked Raiders, tasting vomit in his mouth.
“They gone?”
“No. They’re outside,” Jim said. Fighting panic. Fighting the urge to shove the guy out of the closet and get in it himself. “I said, ‘Is there a phone here?’”Don’t lose it don’t lose it don’t lose it…
“In the office.”
“Where’s that?”
“Behind the steel door, down the hall. Give me that fucking gun.”
“No way.” Jim turned his back on Raiders. Stepped over the corpse. The dead thing made a movement with its whole body like a worm on a hot sidewalk, and then lay still again.
Jim stopped in the middle of the room, his gun in his hand, wanting to scream but not having the energy, still sick to his stomach, thinking that all this should feel dreamlike, but it didn’t now, not anymore.
That was because there was a smooth and ordinary continuity between being strung out, crashing on crack, perceiving himself as human vermin…and being here, with the dying and the dead who moved around.
It all felt like one, seamless thing, to him. Like the fall of a pebble into a mine shaft was part of the pebble’s splashing into slime and mud. It had all led right here.
The hall door heaved inward, cracking down the middle. A black woman’s face with milky eyes in the break. Big black woman wearing bloodstained designer jeans, but naked above the waist. She had one enormous pendulous breast, the other mostly chewed away. Somehow he knew she’d chewed it away herself. One of her eyes was missing. Her upper lip raggedly absent so that her teeth showed in permanent feral baring. She was pushing through the blocked doorway, pressing the broken wood aside, moving slow as lava over the dead bodies and the mattress blocking her way.
Fumbling, but inexorable, like the motion of a big maggot feeling its way along, as she shoved through the broken door.
Climbing over the dead. The dead climbing over the dead.
“Base,” she said, in a croak. “Crack. Rock. Silver top. Base.”
“Some kind of poison in the base,” Dwayne whispered to himself. He was standing with his back to the wall opposite the door, just looking at her. “Kills them and the dark wave brings them back.”
“The dark what?” Jim asked.
“Garland…Uncle Garland said—” He shook his head. “It’s just too much greed, he said one time. Spills over and changes things…”
Dwayne and Jim stared at the woman, and then at the two dead men coming in behind her. They weren’t cooperating with her consciously, but shoving in beside her like impatient commuters forcing their way onto a BART train. Two walking dead men, one white, an aging punk rocker, and the other black. Their faces peeling away, one of them missing his eyes.
The light flickered. Jim thought the bulb was going to go out and they’d be in here, in the dark with these things sniffing after them. The light flickered again, but didn’t quite go out. The shadows fluttered and shifted, distorting the way things looked. Like the faces on those two living dead men in the hall. Jim thought, in the flickering light, that their faces had changed. Their faces become Dwayne’s face, Jim Diggins’ face. Mouthing, “Base, Rock. Silver Top. Base.”
Jim nodded. Looking at himself dead, face blue, skin peeling away, bone in his throat exposed like the broomstick in a scarecrow. Flies crawling in and out of his nostrils.
And the truly-dead, those that the two living-dead men were crawling over, were Patty and some black woman Jim had never seen, but knew somehow was Dwayne’s aunt.
Dead Dwayne and dead Jim clambering over Patty and the black woman, crawling toward the living Dwayne and Jim; the dead, reaching out for a hit, a dose, a blast: of life.
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The light flickered again, and then the men crawling through the doorway were no longer Dwayne and Jim, they were once more men with the faces of strangers, and they were coming on through, stumbling toward them, sniffing, snuffling. Toward Dwayne’s head and Jim’s head. Going for the cocaine they smelled in their living brains. Some particular combination of drug residue and brain chemistry. Some semblance of life. In some sense mutated by crack to hunger for crack-rancid brain…living brain.
Jim raised his gun—
Raiders stepped up from behind, clouted Jim on the side of the head with the empty snubnose. Jim went to his knees, skull tolling like a cracked bell, and Raiders yanked the gun from Jim’s hand, ran at the big dead black woman shrieking “FUCKING FREAK BITCH CUNT!” Firing the gun into her face. She threw her arms around him like a loving mother, then fell backwards, pulling him onto her. The two hungry dead men behind her lunged onto him, biting down on his head. Sharing it, biting into Raiders’ skull from both sides. Jim could hear the sound of it, of their teeth in the bone of Raiders’ cranium. A squeaking grating sound that seemed somehow louder than Raiders’ scream.
Then Raiders was quiet, and there were wet, crunching noises. Dwayne said, “Fuck this,” and was dragging a mattress up, holding it like a shield. Jim got up, got behind the mattress with him, and helped him shove it onto the mass of feeding dead blocking the doorway, using the mattress to keep the dead down so Jim and Dwayne could scramble over it and out into the hall. Two more of the dead were swaying in the front door. Dwayne and Jim dodged to the right, down the hall. The office. Through the open steel door.
A kitchen. An AK-47, without a magazine in it, lay on an old, ornate wooden kitchen table. Next to it was a freezer bag full of base crystal, half spilled onto the table top. On a sink to the back was a big, five gallon steel pot crusted with crack cocaine residue. A gallon can of something called BUG DETH: All New! Industrial Strength for Big Jobs! stood on the counter next to the sink. The bonding agent. There was a dead Hispanic boy in the corner, eating something. He had been about twelve. He was eating raw crack from another freezer bag, a sack with blood and brains dripped into it; chewing bloody crack cocaine up like a mouth full of rock candy.
There was a dead man on the floor; missing his head, too. Near the dead man, also on the floor, was a phone off the hook with a mechanical voice coming out of it, small and foolish, saying, “If you are not going to make a call, please hang up the telephone.”
Jim almost dove for the phone. Crouched in blood, by the stump of a neck, with an effort of will he made his hands work the touchtone buttons. His heart going off like one of those obnoxious car alarms.
The dead were coming down the hall. Scuffling. Making sniffing sounds. Dwayne scooped up a handful of the base fallen on the table, a big handful of crystals, couple thousand dollars worth. Stared at it hungrily. Jim watched the boy in the corner eating bloody rock cocaine, while he told 911 that there were murders happening here. Not trying to explain more than that. (Thinking, in some twitchy corner of his mind, that it would be easy to get a handful or two of the rock for himself, hide it somewhere, come back after the cops and the things were gone, fuck it, it wasn’t like anything mattered anymore – and then he had a flash vision of himself chewing a hole in his own kid’s head.) Jim told Dwayne, as he hung up the phone, “The shit’s poisonous, Dwayne, even more than usual.”
Dwayne looked at the double handful of rock cocaine. Then bent over, dipped the base in a puddle of blood and brains and tossed the whole double-handful through the door, into the hall. Scrabbling, clawing sounds as the dead went for it.
Jim Diggins carried the phone across the small room, and smashed the head of the dead boy eating the cocaine, twice, crushed his skull, very thoroughly, with a corner of the phone, each blow making the phone ring a little.
The boy slumped, twitching, bloody cocaine dribbling from his mouth…not dead, you couldn’t kill them that easy.
11:30 P.M.
A lot of cops milling around.
The Detective in charge was named Johnson, a tall, mild-eyed black guy, a uniformed lieutenant with a college cadence to his talk. Jim had ditched the .45. Didn’t tell the cops the background to the story. Johnson listened to the story, as Jim told it, then went to his cruiser, his face flashing in and out of red with the cherry-top light. He spoke into a microphone, something about cocaine-overdose hallucinations and mass murder and hysteria, as the paramedics carted the truly-dead away. Paramedics that shook their heads in weary amazement.
Carrying the dead dead. The others, the ambulatory dead, had crawled out back, when the cops had come. Hid themselves. Still functioning, instinctively, to protect themselves. Still out there, in the city, somewhere, sniffing around. Settling for any kind of living flesh they could find, now, Jim supposed.
But then again, it wouldn’t take them long to find more crackheads.
Dwayne and Jim stood to one side. They’d been told to wait, put on the back burner for the moment. Johnson was convinced they were bystanders, not the killers. Jim said, “Shit like this doesn’t happen by accident, Dwayne. Something’s talking to us. All of us.”
Dwayne said nothing. He stared at light on the cop car. The headless bodies being hoisted into the ambulance.
Jim said, “What your Uncle said about a sickness in the air, the dark wave thing…Well, shit. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if there’s a God, man, but I think we ought to act as if there is one, you know?”
Dwayne still said nothing.
“Dwayne?”
Dwayne said, softly, “I gettin’ the fuck out of here.”
“Where you going to go?”
“Way different neighborhood.”
“Is that right? Hey, Lieutenant Johnson!”
The cop said something more into the mike, then walked over to them. “Yeah?”
“This man here stole my car. A few days ago. I went to talk to him about it when all this happened. . .”
Dwayne said, “He’s full of shit…”
Jim said, “They dusted the car for prints. I insisted on it. They got your prints, Dwayne. They got evidence of that. Not of anything else.” Meaning: no evidence that Jim had been buying drugs.
Dwayne looked at Jim like he was going to bite through Jim’s skull himself. “You pale motherfucker.”
“Just what I need,” Johnson was saying, wearily putting cuffs on Dwayne. “As if I don’t have enough to deal with. You have the right to remain silent…” He went through the whole thing.
“You don’t know what I do for a living, Dwayne,” Jim said, later, talking through the half-open window of the car; Johnson had put Dwayne in the back of a cruiser. “I’m a lawyer. I’ve gotta lot of connections. I can get you remanded to my custody, set you up in drug rehab. Both of us in drug rehab.”
“Fuck you, you pale bullshit motherfucker.”
“You better hold onto that attitude, you’re gonna need it sometime, Dwayne. I’m doing this to help, man. Because I had a choice and you didn’t.”
“You think you on a mission? Fuck you, you kneejerk liberal cocksucker!” Dwayne shouted out the car window as Johnson started the cruiser and drove off.
Jim was taken to the precinct in another cop car. After awhile all the rest of the police cars drove off into the night, vanishing into the darkness where the hungry dead were shuffling, sniffing the air.
Liked that story? Check out John’s latest title:
Wetbones
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Into a Southern California rife with the machinations of Hollywood, the lure of drugs, and the slick sheen of sex, comes a nameless ancient evil, a destroyer that completely ravages its victims body and soul, leaving behind only...
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Back to TOC
Food, Glorious FOOD! How do we love thee? (Really, how can we NOT, since every little innocent Oreo cookie has 14 various ‘appetite inducers’.)
Let the legendary F. Paul Wilson’s “Topsy” count the ways…
Topsy
By F. Paul Wilson
I’m inna middle a chewin on dis giant lasagne noodle when Nurse Delores appears.
