Husk

by Corey Redekop

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Dixon muttered. He appeared to be regretting his decision to enter sans mask. He stomach released a mighty urp that ballooned in his throat and forced everything it could up and out. Dixon no longer had the ability to consume solid food, but judging from the grimace, whatever was brought up didn’t taste good.

  Even I recoiled at the reek.

  After Simon had sliced free the tape and released my arms, my revenge-fueled pipe dreams took root and I flexed my abdominal muscles to lunge forward and take down Simon for a quick nosh. With my body cupboard bare, it was all I could do to flop my upper half forward and let gravity carry me on. I succeeded only in shifting my weight enough to slide my mass ungracefully off the chair and plant my face onto the concrete. The rotten cartilage that kept my nose erect gave way and shoots of skeletal shrapnel plunged up into the great gray meat of my forebrain.

  Simon laughed and let me flap about while the two soldiers pushed an un-ergonomic monstrosity of a chair out of the dark. Small wheels had been affixed to its legs for mobility. After unlocking my legs, the two gathered me off the floor and shoved me down into the seat, ignoring my wails and unperturbed as my teeth sought flaws in their body armor. They held me down while Simon unleashed his inner Bob Vila on my skeleton. My legs and waist were locked into place with steel cuffs. Simon kept me upright in the seat by fitting two metal clamps around my lower and upper spine and driving rivets directly through my skin and into the back of the chair. My torso trench was left open, my stomach drooping, the gaping end of my diminished intestines coiled in my lap. Satisfied, Simon took hold of the backrest and wheeled me out of the warehouse and down a lengthy hallway, the two soldiers taking point, Lambertus speeding his merry way along behind us.

  We snaked our way through hallway after hallway, passing workers, soldiers, scientists, all halting their labors to take a gander at the galloping gay golem. After scraping our way through miles of corridors we arrived at a waiting freight elevator. Simon allowed Dixon to speed in ahead and then shoved me inside, mashing the top button with his massive index finger. The numbers descended down the ladder, from one to thirty-five, and we were all the way at the bottom.

  It took fully five minutes for the lift to arrive at floor 1, during which we took turns not looking or speaking to one another.

  The doors opened to a bustle of activity, people frittering about in what looked to be the emergency ward of a hospital. Gurneys lined the walls that stretched out before us, each makeshift bed holding a strapped-down inhabitant who plainly did not want to be there, each hooked through electrodes and tubes to the finest in computerized medical devices, each attended to by studious doctor types from central casting. Boops, pings, and buzzes filled the air, but from the patients themselves there emitted not a sound, their manic struggles against their bindings mute save for the clacking of teeth, muffled slightly by mouth gags.

  Ghouls.

  Twenty-five, maybe thirty. None smart enough to exercise their lungs. Each nothing but cannibalistic appetite clad in fetid flesh that sloughed off their bones.

  “Confused yet?” Dixon spat in my good ear. “I can see it in your eyes, boy, even past all that damnable white. You’re doing the math. You’re asking yourself, how in blazes is this possible? Who are all these people?” I kept my face impassive, cursing his smug enjoyment of my bewilderment while figures churned in my head. Even if all my victims had somehow survived their mealtime encounters, it wouldn’t account for even a quarter of what I was seeing.

  “You are hardly an only child.” Dixon clapped me on the arm, almost tenderly. “Your brothers and sisters, Sheldon. All of them. Siblings in death. I just thought you should know.”

  “This is the Chapel?” I ventured.

  “Almost,” Dixon replied, and guided his wheelchair between the beds, pointedly ignoring the kowtowing nods of doctors. Simon grunted and pulled me slowly along behind him, tugging me backward through the room, giving me ample opportunity to inspect the convalescents. Each was in a state of fleshly disrobing; epidermis peeled away in whole swatches, various limbs hacked off, crowns of skulls exposed, juicy segments of brain removed and placed jiggling in metal bowls. I saw Rhodes standing next to one bed, inserting thin rods of steel deep within the open cerebrum of his subject. He looked up as I rolled past, fear streaking over his face. He forced a weak, quivering smile and gave me an apologetic wave. I roared loudly and Rhodes explosively vomited over the head of his patient, who didn’t seem to mind. The entire room was promptly saturated with sick. Quite a few medicos fainted, drooping over open orifices and slimy muscle. I giggled and guffawed as Simon pulled me quickly the rest of the way, hearing Lambertus curse his staff for forgetting to wear their mandatory hearing guards. As he heaved me into the hallway beyond, I saw those doctors smart enough to wear aural protection rushing to help the unconscious, pulling them away from piranhic jaws.

  Dixon whispered an order to Simon. He re-entered the room, emerging moments later with the good doctor in tow, dabbing at the vomit that coated his chin. Complaining, Rhodes fished around in his pockets until he found his plugs and shoved them deep into his ears.

  “We need you, Doctor,” said Dixon. “I want you along for this part.” We continued on, Rhodes bringing up the rear, well out of biting range. I bared my teeth at him anyway.

  The next doorway led to an open hangar bay, vacant except for a few jeeps and cars, a small jet, and two technicians looking it over. They both saluted as Dixon trundled past. The hangar entrance was open; beyond, blurred even with the glasses, I glimpsed sunlight, azure skies, a mountain range of majestic heights. From down the paved road (a runway, I realized), a breeze wafted in and caressed my ravaged body, my few near-exhausted nerve endings perking up at the chill, and I allowed myself pleasure in the sensation, conceivably the last such I’d ever experience.

  “Here we are!” Dixon announced, wheeling up to a nondescript set of double doors and thumping the automatic door opener with his fist.

  “The Chapel!”

  The aroma smacked into me, ruffling my few remaining hairs, and I knew what it was, but I couldn’t comprehend the how of it. It was redolent of fast-food restaurant dumpsters, of happy maggots full to bursting, of overflowing diapers and cheese gone sickly-sweet. Simon and the others hastily fumbled for gasmasks hanging next to the doors, holding their breath until each had slipped one over his head and secured the rubber seal about his face. Behind us, I heard the plane techs gagging, complaining about the lack of warning. Dixon sped inside, sniffing, coughing with mirth. Simon rushed me in the few remaining feet, swearing at the exertion but plainly considering haste a virtue. He planted me next to a waist-high barrier, giving me an unobstructed view of my family tree.

  Dixon belched as he leered, a gastrointestinal rebellion against the aroma of living dead, thick yellow drool escaping through the gaps in his grin, holding his own for several moments until he capitulated to the noxious miasma that filled his lungs and motioned for a gasmask. Simon speedily grabbed another and fit it snugly about Dixon’s head, overwhelming his tiny skull, transforming him into a rubberized aardvark.

  “Behold, Sheldon,” Dixon’s voice echoed through the exhalation valve. “Your heritage.”

  It was a living death pit. An animated charnel house.

  We sat on a walkway suspended a few meters above a sunken rectangular storage chamber fully 200 feet long and half as wide. Access to the floor was only possible through open lifts controlled from the walkway. Down in the bay, beneath the squirming, I discerned workout equipment, weight bars, a leg press. Doubtless the room was once a recreation and exercise area for the many soldiers who would inhabit the structure should the end times approach.

  The current dwellers had no such need for physical fitness.

  I estimated five hundred, likely more, of every subset of humanity, a true melting pot, a multi-cultural glory of undead savagery. Mal
es, females, whites, blacks, Arabs, Asians. All were clad in whatever garb they had died in; business suits mixed with turbans, yarmulkes and dashikis wandered beside boxer shorts and bikinis. Their flesh was black with putrescence, gray with mold. They shuffled and bumped into each other, turning around and performing the same action with another, and then back again, caught in an eternal loop.

  Goldfish in a bowl, always forgetting where they’d been.

  They trod over the bodies of fallen comrades, elder ghouls that had surrendered to rot and fallen to pieces. Beneath their feet I watched limbless torsos flop, brains still toiling, driven by perpetual starvation to seek sustenance. The ones nearest us diverted themselves from their routines, raising arms toward us and groaning, actually groaning. Some had figured out the rudimentary task of oxygen exchange, rewarded for their genius with the gift of song. They clambered at the wall beneath our feet, eyes scored pale, some altogether absent, with gaping hollows stringed with mucus, drawn to our voices, or Dixon’s scent. The concrete walls were crusted with gore, inches thick. One of the guards fired a few rounds into the horde, chortling as bullets sliced through skulls. Simon cuffed him on the back of the head.

  “We’ve been kept very busy,” Dixon’s voice echoed through his mask. “No lack of subjects for the good sawbones here. We keep the room ventilated, which helps reduce the fly population, but as you can plainly tell, it’s impossible to dampen the smell.”

  “How . . .” I could not finish the thought. It was beyond comprehension.

  “You vere hardly zee firzt zombie vee’ve found, Sheldon.” Doctor Rhodes took a position beside me. “Vee haff been working on ziz for much longer zan you realize.”

  Dixon looked out over his undead preserve. “I have been scanning the whole of this planet for the better part of a century, looking for the key. I would hear tales, stories of friends thought dead walking through backyards. Buried fathers digging themselves free. Cancer-riddled children rising from deathbeds. All reported as myths, or foolish superstitions, or paranoid delusions, but I followed every lead. It was simply a question of having the money and the willpower to go beyond the story and find the truth. And I had so much money, and so much will.

  “I traveled the length and breadth of this world a hundred times. I bribed officials in every country. I walked through swamps, I hiked up mountains, I slept in teepees and igloos. When I grew too old, I paid men to do it for me. It got so that I didn’t even need the stories, I could simply sense when one of you was about. Something in the air, you could say.

  “And in many cases — not all, but more than I ever anticipated — I found what I sought. And very soon, I had myself a menagerie.”

  He spread his arms out. “This is my life’s work, Sheldon. Where some collect stamps, I collect zombies. We have studied every one you see here, and thousands more besides, trying to find the key. There is no single element in common with any of these resurrections, except that they exist. Some are survivors of attacks, but others just rise of their own accord. There is no religious factor common to them all, no physical commonalities, no environmental, no viral, fungal, bacteriological, ecological, geographical, socio-economical, or other. My scientists assure me that their existence is rooted in the physical, my roster of theologians insist only the supernatural explains them.

  “I could have them destroyed, of course, but I find myself with little desire to. I come here to contemplate mortality. Seeing them gives me hope. They cheated death, so can I, but on my terms.” He started pointing out individuals. “Why should Sally there, the one in the polka-dot dress, why should she, mother of four that she was, unhappily wasting her life away in an Alabama suburb, why should she receive this gift?” He swung his finger farther left, singling out a dark-skinned ghoul, the remains of a turban still clinging to its skull. “Why should a raghead Taliban be bestowed an eternity of existence and not me? Or next to him, that marine, why him? Why that African tribesman over there? That Eskimo? That Hassidic Jew, that Amish daughter, that Polish waitress?”

  “I guess death isn’t fair,” I managed.

  “Well put. But I mean to fix that.” Dixon lifted his mask slightly and took a sniff. “Do you smell that, Sheldon? That’s the smell of eternity.”

  “And my mother?” I asked.

  “Oh, she was here. As soon as I discovered you through Miss O’Shea, I had a team extract her. I was truly excited to see her; we so rarely get one so fresh. It’s a miracle she hadn’t bitten anyone, even without her teeth, but then the care she was receiving was hardly first-rate. You couldn’t have put her in a better establishment, the woman who birthed you? Shameful. Alas, she was like the others, useless, so we threw her in here until I got word that you wanted to see her. We dug her out, flew her to Phoenix, made up some nonsense that you bought wholeheartedly, and let you kill your own mother.”

  “Cold,” Simon muttered behind you. “Stone cold killer, that’s what you are.”

  “Fuck you,” I shot back weakly.

  My mother, part of that throng of appetite. I thought I had spared her some indignity.

  “But for as long as I have been searching,” Dixon continued, “I have never found one like you. The one who talks. There were always rumors. Men who walked and talked with full awareness after being crated up and buried six feet under. I believe most if not all of our religious ideologies evolved from such examples. Was Jesus a zombie? Was Odin, or Shiva, or Wawalag? I believe so. And so I knew, if it happened before, it can happen again. All I needed was to live long enough to find one of you and crack open your secret.

  “I didn’t think I’d make it. But then, there you were, walking around, drawing attention to yourself. Working. I have to tell you, I have cheated death many many times, but when I discovered that you, the Grim Reaper, you were actually hitting the pavement looking for work? I almost laughed myself to death.” He chortled briefly and began to cough, pulling his mask up and horking a loogie into the horde where it splattered against the forehead of a desiccated Japanese businesszombie and crawled down into the folds of its expertly knotted tie.

  “Death is not without a sense of irony,” I said. I watched the ebb and flow of the crowd as the doctor gently thumped Dixon on the back to dislodge more sputum.

  I could hear them, faintly, as I had Mom. I had no connection to any of them, but still a dim clamor tickled my thoughts, an imbecilic moaning that shook my brain in its container.

  Across the zombie depository a door opened and a pair of soldiers strode in, each wielding a length of thick pipe. At the far end of each rod a set of thick pinchers extended forth, each clamped tight over the throat of an unhappy zombie held just outside of reach.

  “Ah,” said Dixon. “Good timing. Our newest acquisitions. Simon, move us closer.”

  The soldiers expertly maneuvered their captures onto a small platform that extended out from the track over the mob below. On a three count, they released the neck clamps and stepped back, where one attended to a set of controls attached to the railing. The platform began to slowly descend into the pit, its riders slowly turning to try and attack their handlers, already ten feet above them.

  I couldn’t quite make the arrivals out yet. But I could smell them. Simon moved me down the walkway to a better vantage point. The hazy picture came into focus. I clenched the armrests, imprinting my fingertips into the metal. The animated corpses of Duane and Samantha joined their siblings.

  Samantha looked to be little worse for wear, with only a few bullet holes and a mouth-sized gash on her throat as visual proof of death. Duane’s body was relatively untouched, but only the bottom two-thirds of his skull was intact; everything above his eyebrows had been jaggedly excised, including most of his brain. But the residue of matter he retained still flickered, and I could hear Duane’s pleas for food join the mental sea of appetite.

  “You bastards,” I said, gritting my teeth. I felt my gums give at the p
ressure, surrendering finally to the rot, and two of my incisors bent outward.

  “I though you’d be pleased!” Dixon said. “Look, there’s your lover, in most of his glory. You can thank Simon for the surprise, he thought you might be more amenable if you saw a friendly face.”

  “Half of one, anyway,” Simon said.

  “Quite. If you like, Sheldon, I can arrange a conjugal visit.”

  I held my tongue, picturing myself snacking on Dixon’s kidneys, as Duane and Sam mixed themselves into the mob, falling into the same mindless swaying.

  There was an eddy in the shuffling current below me, distracting me from thoughts of revenge. I saw a white lab coat, its wearer fighting against the aimless flow of the mob. It raised its face to me and moaned, a plaintive keening I heard in my mind rather than my ears. I knew that face intimately.

  You never forget your first, do you? Even now I can recall the taste of those few precious drops of coppery wine gamboling about on my taste buds as I made short work of his limbs.

  Craig motioned toward me. His left arm was still contained in a filthy plaster cast, but his right was free; the bone had never completed setting, and the forearm now had an extra joint. The wrist and hand hung loosely at the end of the superfluous elbow, but his fingers still twitched wildly. Unlike his brothers and sisters who had, I could now discern, focused directly on the humans who surrounded me, the nearest source of food, Craig gawked at me alone. His teeth shuttered open and shut excitedly as our eyes met, catching his tongue and severing the bulk of it. He paid it no heed as it tumbled to the gruesome carpet. In my head, I could hear his tireless mantra.

  You. You. You.

  “Well, would you look at that,” Dixon said excitedly through the carbon filters. “I think he recognizes you.” He motioned down to Craig. “Doctor, what is that?”

  “How—” I stopped myself, knowing the answer.

  “How did we find him? As soon as he was on television talking about the attack I had a team put on him. We couldn’t find you, you were too ridiculously minor a person to even exist, so we staked out his apartment. They waited for a few weeks to be sure. Depending on the bite, full infection can take anywhere from a few minutes to several months. Once they observed that he had turned over, they took him.”