Stephen Jones (ed)

by The Mammoth Book of Zombies (mobi)

  Patricia off-switched. It was twenty to nineteen. Chord would be here soon. She put her uniform on. Black spiderweb tights, black lace singlet, black arm length talon glove, black butterfly tie. She shrugged into the white shoulder holster, and pulled a comfortable heavy white Burberry over her shoulders. She perched a black beret on her Veronica Lake bob. She white fixed her face, and blacked her lips and eyelids. Neat.

  She palmed her desk-top, and the safety cabinet unsealed. She took out the roscoe and disassembled it. There had been some question about the foresight, but it seemed okay to her eye. She replaced the lubricant cartridge and snapped the machine back together. She shoved a new clip of slugs into the grip, and holstered the roscoe.

  It could manage up to one hundred and seventy rounds per second. At that rate, the slugs left the eleven-inch barrel as molten chips. At Sixth Form College, the Firm's instructor had given a demonstration. She had turned a cow carcass into a piece of abstract expressionism, a study in red and intestine. Patricia didn't like to use her roscoe as a hosepipe, and usually kept the rate adjusted to a comfortable twenty-five r.p.s.

  Outside, the car called to her. Patricia sealed her flat, negotiated the checkpoint in the foyer, and stepped onto the steaming pavement. If she stood still for a few minutes, the yellow ground mist would eat holes in her unprotected shins. Harry Chord, at ease in his reinforced chauffeur's puttees and Lone Ranger mask, held the Old's door open for her. She slid onto the sofa-sized back seat. The Olds purred. Chord took the console.

  The sturdy, box-like, black car had only recently been converted. Chord had done the job himself, and was quietly pleased with it. When they stopped at the Gordon's station to tank up, he pointed out the minute scars on the hood and running boards. Otherwise, it was impossible to tell from the exterior that the cash-wasting petrol engine had been replaced with the latest model booze-burner.

  Patricia was tense, impatient. As always before a hit. She had been to the lavatory twice since Colin's call, but there was still a tingle in her lower abdomen. Some of the other girls pill-popped, but she needed, and wanted, the cold-rush of unfiltered sensations.

  Of course, there had been less popping since Rachel. The girl had taken too many zippers, waltzed into her mark's office singing 'Paper Moon', and shot the man through the brain. By the time the termination officers arrived, she had switched to 'Stardust'. The firm had lost its 100 percent efficiency rating.

  Patricia had heard Chord, and several of the other back-up personnel, refer to Rachel's humpty dumpty hit, "… all the king's horses, and all the king's men…" The flippancy irritated her. Killing people might seem like a fun job, but you had to take it seriously. If nothing else, Rachel had proved that.

  The Dearborn Estate was out in the Green Belt. They were well ahead of schedule, so she had Chord program a route that would avoid the disemployment centre. Shit City, the claimants called it. Nissen huts covered in ghastly, mock-cheerful murals. The dope dole. The Ghetto Blaster gangs. There had recently been a rash of documentaries, but, having spent six years in Shit City, Patricia couldn't get off on poverty porn.

  Evidently, Dearborn's wife was in on the hit. At the estate entrance, a cobra terminal snaked into the Olds and hovered over Patricia's lap. HELLO! IDENTIFICATION? She palm-printed the slab, and keyed in the Firm's trademark. PURPOSE OF VISIT? She had typed MURDER before noticing that the need for a reply had been countered on the print of Gillian Dearborn. HAVE A PLEASANT VISIT.

  The crackling electrodes in the gravel drive went briefly dead as the Olds rolled over them. There were other cars, low and streamlined, ranked in front of the house. Over the roof landing floated a small dirigible, shifting gently on its mooring. The house, Victorian but remodelled in early Carolian, was lit by banks of old-mode disco lamps.

  Dearborn was having a birthday party, with live music. Patricia recognised the popular song "Throw Yourself Off a Bridge". The ballad was being performed by a small swing combo; an unfamiliar, somehow inapt, arrangement. A girl sinatra was trying to croon to the up-tempo,

  When I get too depressed,

  Crawling along in a ditch,

  I get right up,

  Walk on down,

  And throw myself off a bridge…

  Patricia left Chord with the Olds, and walked unconcerned across the lawn. A few stray guests, in designer rags, noticed her. She hated Depression Chic. The bulk of the party was behind the house between the L of its two wings and the skimming pool. She tried to move easily among the rich.

  A man with a plumed mohawk, an epitome of the New Conservatism, reached inside her Burberry. She sliced his forehead with a soporific talon. He fell onto a trestle table, between the swan cutlets and the cocaine blancmange. He would be able to tell the other Young Rotarians he had won second prize in a duel.

  I could put myself through a mangle,

  I could drink the water in Spain,

  From a home-made noose I could dangle,

  It's the end to all my pain…

  Dearborn was an easy mark. He was holding a helium balloon with BIRTHDAY BOY on it, he was squiffed, but standing. A plump, dapper man, and an elegant woman with fashionable facial mutilations were propping Dearborn up. Wragge and Gillian? They saw her coming and confirmed their identities by rapidly moving out of her line.

  Abandoned, the mark lurched forward into a personal spotlight. No hole-in-the-head innocent bystanders in the way. Terrific.

  If I feel like cracking up

  And locking myself in the fridge,

  I get on out

  And take a high jump,

  To throw myself off a bridge…

  Patricia reached with her bare hand for the roscoe. The Burberry slid from her shoulders. There were a few werewolf whistles. She shimmied across the lawn, getting in close to compensate for the possibly dodgy foresight. She did a few elementary gold-digger steps, and adopted the Eastwood position; legs apart, weight evenly distributed, left hand on right wrist, elbows slightly bent to absorb the kickback.

  The bandleader, surprised but adaptable, had his instruments segue into "Happy Birthday to You". The sinatra picked it up immediately, and led the less out-of-it guests in the chorus.

  The mark was looking around, gasping. "… Phil? You…" The balloon went up.

  She took out his left kneecap. He staggered sideways, tripping into an abandoned urn but not falling. She upped the r.p.s. and sprayed Dearborn's flailing right arm. His hand came off at the wrist. Most of the guests had to laugh. She closed in, and fired a final, free-ranging burst into his torso. She had a glimpse of churning innards. He did an awkward piroutte and, with a satisfying splash, fell into the pool. The purple scum rippled. There were cheers. Patricia took a bow.

  By the time she had retrieved her coat, the resurrection men were there. The kildare was passing a vivicorder over the corpse. A nurse Patricia knew ticked off the necessary repairs. Most of the vat-bred organs and ossiplex bones would be in the Firm's ambulance. The front man was assuring Gillian Dearborn that her husband would be on his feet by morning, and preparing the legal and medical waivers for her palm.

  "Good job, lassie," Wragge hugged and kissed her. Even for a regular customer, he was overdoing it. "When Jay sees himself on the playback, he'll die all over again.

  He stuffed a thousand note down her cleavage. Not a bad gratuity. He also gave her a hundred in Sainsbury's Redeemable for Chord. She was invited to the resurrection party, but cried off.

  Tired, she gave Chord authority to get back to town by the quickest route. As she drove through Shit City, she cleaned the roscoe. She remembered her own deaths, and wondered whether the DHSS still had a budgetary allocation for resurrecting the underemployed.

  She hadn't had the kind of luxury treatment Dearborn was getting. There had been problems with her anglepoise vertebrae throughout her middle teens. She had not had the funds for a proper rebuild until she started working for Killergrams.

  That first time, the other children had dragged her o
ut of the house and hanged her from a swan-neck lamp-post. Her party dress was torn, and her legs were badly bitten by midges. Dangling in the late afternoon, the last thing that had crossed her mind was that this was supposed to be funny.

  26 - Joe R. Lansdale On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks

  I

  After a month's chase, Wayne caught up with Calhoun one night at a little honky-tonk called Rosalita's. It wasn't that Calhoun had finally gotten careless, it was just that he wasn't worried. He'd killed four bounty hunters so far, and Wayne knew a fifth didn't concern him.

  The last bounty hunter had been the famous Pink Lady McGuire - one mean mama - three hundred pounds of rolling, ugly meat that carried a twelve gauge Remington pump and a bad attitude. Story was, Calhoun jumped her from behind, cut her throat, and as a joke, fucked her before she bled to death. This not only proved to Wayne that Calhoun was a dangerous sonofabitch, it also proved he had bad taste.

  Wayne stepped out of his '57 Chevy reproduction, pushed his hat back on his forehead, opened the trunk, and got the sawed-off double barrel and some shells out of there. He already had a.38 revolver in the holster at his side and a bowie knife in each boot, but when you went into a place like Rosalita's it was best to have plenty of backup.

  Wayne put a handful of shotgun shells in his shirt pocket, snapped the flap over them, looked up at the red-and-blue neon sign that flashed ROSALITA'S: COLD BEER AND DEAD DANCING, found his centre, as they say in Zen, and went on in.

  He held the shotgun against his leg, and as it was dark in there and folks were busy with talk or drinks or dancing, no one noticed him or his artillery right off.

  He spotted Calhoun's stocky, black-hatted self immediately. He was inside the dance cage with a dead buck-naked Mexican girl of about twelve. He was holding her tight around the waist with one hand and massaging her rubbery ass with the other like it was a pillow he was trying to shape. The dead girl's handless arms flailed on either side of Calhoun, and her little tits pressed to his thick chest. Her wire muzzled face knocked repeatedly at his shoulder and drool whipped out of her mouth in thick spermy ropes, stuck to his shirt, faded and left a patch of wetness.

  For all Wayne knew, the girl was Calhoun's sister or daughter. It was that kind of place. The kind that had sprung up immediately after that stuff had gotten out of a lab upstate and filled the air with bacterium that brought dead humans back to life, made their basic motor functions work and made them hungry for human flesh; made it so if a man's wife, daughter, sister, or mother went belly up and he wanted to turn a few bucks, he might think: "Damn, that's tough about ole Betty Sue, but she's dead as hoot-owl shit and ain't gonna be needing nothing from here on out, and with them germs working around in her, she's just gonna pull herself out of the ground and cause me a problem. And the ground out back of the house is harder to dig than a calculus problem is to work, so I'll just toss her cold ass in the back of the pickup next to the chain saw and the barbed-wire roll, haul her across the border and sell her to the Meat Boys to sell to the tonks for dancing.

  "It's a sad thing to sell one of your own, but shit, them's the breaks. I'll just stay out of the tonks until all the meat rots off her bones and they have to throw her away. That way I won't go in some place for a drink and see her up there shaking her dead tits and end up going sentimental and dewy-eyed in front of one of my buddies or some ole two-dollar gal."

  This kind of thinking supplied the dancers. In other parts of the country, the dancers might be men or children, but here it was mostly women. Men were used for hunting and target practice.

  The Meat Boys took the bodies, cut off the hands so they couldn't grab, ran screws through their jaws to fasten on wire muzzles so they couldn't bite, sold them to the honky-tonks about the time the germ started stirring.

  Tonk owners put them inside wire enclosures up front of their joints, started music, and men paid five dollars to get in there and grab them and make like they were dancing when all the women wanted to do was grab and bite, which, muzzled and handless they could not do.

  If a man liked his partner enough, he could pay more money and have her tied to a cot in the bag and he could get on her and do some business. Didn't have to hear no arguments or buy presents to make promises or make them come. Just fuck and hike.

  As long as the establishment sprayed the dead for maggots and kept them perfumed and didn't keep them so long hunks of meat came off on a fellow dick, the customers were happy as flies on shit.

  Wayne looked to see who might give him trouble, and figured everyone was a potential customer. The six foot two, two-hundred fifty pound bouncer being the most immediate concern.

  But, there wasn't anything to do but to get on with things and handle problems when they came up. He went into the cage where Calhoun was dancing, shouldered through the other dancers and went for him.

  Calhoun had his back to Wayne, and as the music was loud, Wayne didn't worry about going quietly. But Calhoun sensed him and turned with his hand full of a little.38.

  Wayne clubbed Calhoun's arm with the barrel of the shotgun. The little gun flew out of Calhoun's hand and went skidding across the floor and clanked against the metal cage.

  Calhoun wasn't outdone. He spun the dead girl in front of him and pulled a big pigsticker out of his boot and held it under the girl's armpit in a threatening manner, which with a knife that big was no feat.

  Wayne shot the dead girl's left kneecap out from under her and she went down. Her armpit trapped Calhoun's knife. The other men deserted their partners and went over the wire netting like squirrels.

  Before Calhoun could shake the girl loose, Wayne stepped in and hit him over the head with the barrel of the shotgun. Calhoun crumpled and the girl began to crawl about on the floor as if looking for lost contacts.

  The bouncer came in behind Wayne, grabbed him under the arms and tried to slip a full nelson on him.

  Wayne kicked back on the bouncer's shin and raked his boot down the man's instep and stomped his foot. The bouncer let go. Wayne turned and kicked him in the balls and hit him across the face with the shotgun.

  The bouncer went down and didn't even look like he wanted up.

  Wayne couldn't help but note he liked the music that was playing. When he turned he had someone to dance with.

  Calhoun.

  Calhoun charged him, hit Wayne in the belly with his head, knocked him over the bouncer. They tumbled to the floor and the shotgun went out of Wayne's hands and scraped across the floor and hit the crawling girl in the head. She didn't even notice, just kept snaking in circles, dragging her blasted leg behind her like a skin she was trying to shed.

  The other women, partnerless, wandered about the cage. The music changed. Wayne didn't like this tune as well. Too slow. He bit Calhoun's earlobe off.

  Calhoun screamed and they grappled around on the floor. Calhoun got his arm around Wayne's throat and tried to choke him to death.

  Wayne coughed out the earlobe, lifted his leg and took the knife out of his boot. He brought it around and back and hit Calhoun in the temple with the hilt.

  Calhoun let go of Wayne and rocked on his knees, then collapsed on top of him.

  Wayne got out from under him and got up and kicked him in the head a few times. When he was finished, he put the bowie in its place, got Calhoun's.38 and the shotgun. To hell with the pig sticker.

  A dead woman tried to grab him, and he shoved her away with a thrust of his palm. He got Calhoun by the collar, started pulling him toward the gate.

  Faces were pressed against the wire, watching. It had been quite a show. A friendly cowboy type opened the gate for Wayne and the crowd parted as he pulled Calhoun by. One man felt helpful and chased after them and said, "Here's his hat, Mister," and dropped it on Calhoun's face and it stayed there.

  Outside, a professional drunk was standing between two cars taking a leak on the ground. As Wayne pulled Calhoun past, the drunk said, "Your buddy don't look so good."

  "Loo
k worse than that when I get him to Law Town," Wayne said.

  Wayne stopped by the '57, emptied Calhoun's pistol and tossed it as far as he could, then took a few minutes to kick Calhoun in the ribs and ass. Calhoun grunted and farted, but didn't come to.

  When Wayne's leg got tired, he put Calhoun in the passenger seat and handcuffed him to the door.

  He went over to Calhoun's '62 Impala replica with the plastic bull horns mounted on the hood - which was how he had located him in the first place, by his well known car - and kicked the glass out of the window on the driver's side and used the shotgun to shoot the bull horns off. He took out his pistol and shot all the tires flat, pissed on the driver's door, and kicked a dent in it.

  By then he was too tired to shit in the back seat, so he took some deep breaths and went back to the '57 and climbed in behind the wheel.

  Reaching across Calhoun, he opened the glove box and got out one of his thin, black cigars and put it in his mouth. He pushed the lighter in, and while he waited for it to heat up, he took the shotgun out of his lap and reloaded it.

  A couple of men poked their heads outside of the tonk's door, and Wayne stuck the shotgun out the window and fired above their heads. They disappeared inside so fast they might have been an optical illusion.

  Wayne put the lighter to his cigar, picked up the wanted poster he had on the seat, and set fire to it. He thought about putting it in Calhoun's lap as a joke, but didn't. He tossed the flaming poster out the window.

  He drove over close to the tonk and used the remaining shotgun load to shoot at the neon ROSALITA'S sign. Glass tinkled onto the tonk's roof and onto the gravel drive.

  Now if he only had a dog to kick.