Death, Be Not Proud

by Jonathan Maberry

  Kent sighed. This attitude ran amok as most had trouble believing laws really applied any more after the pass of the comet and the recent dead arising…and still rising if not disposed of properly.

  Scott pointed at the screen. “Is she really dead?”

  Randy half smiled. “Looks like it.”

  Kent grabbed Randy’s lapels. “This isn’t funny, asshole. Murder is murder. All of the zombies are gone, ya copy?”

  Randy nodded furiously. “I know, I know.”

  “So it’s all bullshit?” Kent demanded. “All blue makeup on that gal?”

  “Yeah, what else?” Randy said, sweat rolling off his forehead.

  Scott chimed in, “If you killed someone, even a crack-head, knocked out her teeth and made her the star of this shit, your ass will be new mown grass in the fucking Cook County Jail.”

  “It’s all on the up and up,” Randy swore. “Honest, she’s Dawn Sundown, um, Sandy Conner for real. I can give you her last address.”

  As Kent released him and Scott neared the screen, the balding cop said, “She doesn’t look to be breathing.”

  Randy nodded. “She’s acting. It’s all an act, but I can set you fellas hip to a real bad scam.”

  Kent glanced at Scott. “Rats survived the apocalypse, like the bugs. Go on.”

  “There are dudes making films, like snuff films, where the gal or guy dies during the act, turning into a zombie. No foolin’ I can tell you where they make them.”

  “Terrific,” Scott mumbled as Randy rambled out addresses, names and times. Kent texted the info. When he fell silent Scott asked, “Why in the hell would you make this shit?”

  Kent waved off his partner. “Scott, forget it, man.”

  Scott persisted. “Maybe this crap works in some sort of forgotten zombie cyber punk literature, but not in mainstream porno.”

  Randy shrugged. “It isn’t mainstream porn, more specialty.”

  “Granted, its right up there with quality stuff like Japanese vomit porn and tranny midgets, but just because one can download this crap doesn’t mean it isn’t shit.”

  “Freedom of speech…”

  Kent said, “We lost alotta freedoms in this undead thing, and our culture is still screwed up.” He paused and thought, many cling to something normal to get by but the survivors aren’t all filling up the shells of churches…maybe zombie porn is more comforting.

  Scott reminded Randy, “The law is still the law, even if there are fewer to adhere to it.”

  “People are animals. They don’t want to be entertained they want to be fed.”

  Hands to his hips, Kent declared, “How profound.”

  Scott said, “But its crap.”

  Randy looked back at the screen. “Maybe they need to eat crap.”

  Kent turned away. “Maybe it’s all they deserve.”

  Scott wouldn’t let it go. “But it isn’t art, avant-garde or whatever the fuck ya wanna call it. It isn’t a college film or even a dickhead posing as a porn producer to dupe co-eds. Nobody wants to see a blue faced zombie taking a money shot, well, okay maybe somebody, but that’s a sick bunch.”

  Once he’d motioned for Randy to stand up, Kent pondered that a list of folks wanting to see things like that might be good to have for future reference.

  Scott pushed Randy toward the door and reached for the remote to turn off the DVD. “You want a maggot infested snatch? Go down to West 47th Street near Ashland and Washington. The whore population is up again. They ain’t Julia Roberts, but they are Pretty Skanky Women for sure.”

  Hands becoming fists but staying at his sides, Randy snapped back, “What the fuck is this good cop, fat cop?”

  Unaffected, Scott continued. “All pieces of shit, skanky crack-whores, even after all this.”

  Kent led them out of the lounge just off Randy’s office. “After World War Two the Universal Studios monsters weren’t scary anymore. Once millions die in gas chambers and three times that on battle fields, how scary is a guy in a rubber suit?”

  Randy giggled. “I remember the Abbot and Costello film where Lon Chaney says every night he turns into a wolf and the one guy says back, ‘Yeah, you and every other guy, fella’. Ha!”

  As they left, Kent understood how the desire for zombie porn existed: The world was number than ever before.

  Kent liked riding with the SWAT team crew. He’d always been a good cop in the days before the uprising of the dead, and the subsequent hunting parties in Chicago and the suburbs made him more ruthless. He watched a member of his current team, a younger man rubbing himself all over, positively randy at the idea of slaying more undead or anyone else that got in his way. Kent understood he’d changed but hoped not to the degree of that kid.

  The series of converted UPS trucks stopped outside the boarded up bookstore in Naperville. Kent sat near the back of one and obeyed the Lock & Load order barked from Commander Tyler Thayer. Kent winked at Scott, also clad in a flack jacket and helmet, saying, “Doesn’t Thayer realize he isn’t Patton?”

  They climbed out and Scott whispered, “Are you implying Thayer isn’t General Patton?”

  True to his hero, Thayer barked orders and the SWAT team kicked in the boarded up main windows. Kent noted in the alley to their left the police informant who confirmed the disused bookstore as a spot for porn films. The short man, wearing a filthy gray polo shirt, waved at them as they charged forward. The little guy stayed out of it, probably for the best.

  The night vision visor he deployed showed Kent a brighter reality inside. He paused, but was pushed on by the men. He tried to stop, fascinated by the clipboard on the wall sported the words DEAD FUCK in magic marker.

  Though various scenes had been constructed in the store with beds, kitchens or bars for the flick, nothing really appeared amiss on this set than from another exploitation sex film…Kent guessed. Lots of lights, video cameras, regular film cameras and digital devices, a shower area, bathroom, lounge chairs, actors and actresses in varied states of undress…but the long line of active zombies, writhing in dog kennels unset the sleazy calm.

  Eyes on the dog kennels and those straining to be free inside, Kent pondered who they were. Nothing made them appear distinct. All ages, sizes, sexes and clothes styles, Kent understood them as similar in regard. They were survivors. They’d braved the end of the world, something so terrible a hundred books or Kindle readers couldn’t contain the real horror. They’d all seen death in family, friends, pets, and now, became a part of it. Bile rose in Kent’s throat as he thought that they lived through it all, emotionally scarred, broken or hardened, only to be slain for these perverts profit scheme.

  So, Kent felt no pity on shooting the members of the cast and crew.

  Kent only had a moment to see what was going on before the bullets started flying. A rather corpulent woman got it from behind from a man slowly stopping his motions, his skin turning blue. He wore a muzzle and seemed confused at his new state of life and what he was doing upon arrival as a zombie. Near them lay a woman in fishnet stockings, tied up with bed sheets to a pool table, various men tossing off as they readied for the money shots. The woman, blue skinned and fighting, snapped at their members, but reached none.

  At first, only the zombies took the bullets. Thayer himself leveled his automatic pistol and sent the muzzled zombie thruster’s brains spewing into the woman’s teased hair. The brains seemed to upset her more than having a zombie drilling her, Kent thought, amused. The SWAT team fired selective shots, killing as many were zombies, as they saw. Soon, a few crewmen drew snub-nosed pistols and Thayer waved.

  “Kill ‘em all.” As the hail of bullets cut down the crew, actors actresses and zombies, Thayer added, “They’ll get up again once they die. Wait and finish them good.”

  Kent only shot one, a bald man with his Megadeth T shirt tucked in as the zombie arose to gape at him, hungry. He kept count back in the beginning, but Kent stopped after the first two hundred. His mind never could blot out the memories of loadin
g up the dead on the elevated trains to be shipped out to a factory for cremation.

  One of the younger SWAT team officers exhausted his clip and pulled a personal tote out. These items were usually guns found in the aftermath of the end of the world, and no one gave anyone else crap about sporting one. The kid drew a sawed off shotgun and blasted one of the lighting crew that held a light reflector as if it’d stop bullets. The spray of the shotgun blast tore the left side of the man’s face and head off, and he fell to the ground. Kent saw the kid turn his back on the fallen crewman, but also saw that the cop overlooked killing his target a second time. The crewman raised again, half of his head gone, but a good half of his brain exposed. The brain pulsed, alive and the skin of the crewman quickly flushed blue.

  “Down, kid,” Kent yelled as the man took a few tentative steps, his one eye adjusting to the world.

  The young officer turned, saw the mutilated zombie, brain exposed, and froze.

  Thayer bellowed, “Out of my way,” and threw a shoulder block into the kid. The officer stumbled away, and dropped his shotgun. Thayer didn’t hesitate in using his personal arm, a huge Ruger 357 Magnum. Thayer aimed and squeezed, sending the brains of the crewman flying. The body fell and Thayer looked down at the young officer. The kid wept. Thayer held his gun at his side and then stuck it back into his belt holster. He held out his hand to the kid and said softly, “C’mon. It’s nearly over.”

  Kent stepped over several bodies, one twitched but Scott shot the body in the head. Kent observed it was an average looking girl with auburn hair, wearing a t-shirt that said, “I’m a fluffer at my other job, too.”

  Once outside, Kent pulled his helmet off and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. He saw the young officer over by the truck, puking. No one gave the kid grief. Fate was a bitch and they’d just got a reminder of theirs, no matter what. Kent looked into the afternoon sky and couldn’t see the streams everyone in this hemisphere could at night: The long strains of the comet that bathed the Earth. Many thought this is why the dead rose up, but Kent never totally believed it. He thought about ancient culture blaming acts in the sky for their fates and this rang no different.

  Scott removed his helmet and took several breaths. “Cleaned out more, always a good thing.”

  “Yeah,” Kent agreed, looking at the vacant street. “I can’t get over how quiet it is in the city.”

  “I can,” Scott replied. “Always was too loud for me. I like the quiet.”

  “I guess the end did get rid of the over-population thing, huh?”

  Head never rising, Scott muttered, “Was that a bad thing? Commies used to call the dregs of society useless eaters. Funny now, huh?”

  “A fuckin’ riot.”

  “I can’t ride the L-trains no more.”

  Kent shot him a look for the confession. “Me neither.”

  “Every wonder where the bodies went?”

  “I heard industrial spurs got rid of them, the old arsenal down south by Joliet.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Yeah?”

  Scott nodded. “Chicago has its own problems.”

  Kent looked at the old bookstore used as a porn set. “Naperville isn’t Chicago.”

  “The entire fucking world is Chicago, isn’t it?”

  “God I wish I still drank.”

  Scott smiled, watching the kid wipe vomit from his chin. “It’s never too late to start again.”

  A few weeks passed and they were at the central station, late. Scott walked over and stopped a yard from Kent’s cubicle. He waved a silver disk marred only with magic marker printing. “Here, enjoy.” He side armed the disk and struck Kent in the chest. The big man made no attempt to catch it.

  With a quizzical look, Kent turned over the disk. “What’s this?”

  “Slap it in. Never say I never gave you anything.”

  Kent waved it like a fan and turned toward his computer stack. “More bad porno?”

  “The worst, but don’t ever say karma ain’t a bitch.”

  “Oh, I know it is.”

  Scott turned and said, “Cheers,” before exiting the floor.

  Kent pushed in the disk and slumped back in his chair. He glanced at pictures his daughter painted of rainbows over Navy Pier, replete with green army men machine-gunning blue figures near Lake Michigan. The screen lit up and a cartoon logo with an ass-crack splitting introduced Bum-Rush Productions.

  “I liked the government advisories and safe sex warnings back in the day,” Kent remarked to no one as more words popped up. The title of the flick, 300 ZOMBIES: TAKING IT TO THE GREEKS made him smirk for a moment. What made his smile fade were the previews, snippets detailing that this porn video indeed dwelt in the land of zombie-porn. The 300, led by undead Leonidas rose up and vanquished the rear guard of the Assyrian army, then turned their, uh, blades toward the Greeks. Kent recognized one of the actors. “Randy Johnson, what are you doing in one of your own flicks?”

  After he’d advanced through a few scenes, Kent stopped on one where porn producer Randy Johnson, dressed in a Greco-Roman robe (not of the period but who would bitch?) was gang raped by a bunch of blue-skinned Spartans. The soundtrack music, copped from 80s hair bands, played on while sub-titles showed Johnson begging for mercy. His words, not Greek, were some obscure dialect, but Kent read few words on his lips.

  “Stop, I’ll tell you the password to my Hedge Funds if you don’t sodomize me!”

  “A fitting epitaph for the human race. Huh.” As the strains of a heavy metal version of I Left My Heart in San Francisco began, Kent turned off the DVD, not waiting to see if Randy lived through it.

  He stood, fumbled in his pocket for his keys, and then looked at his three-drawer file cabinet. A few moments passed before Kent unlocked the bottom drawer, shoved files out of the way and pulled a half empty bottle of whiskey out. He held the base and patted the neck on his chest, recalling how much he’d drank before the uprising of the dead, and how surprisingly little during the entire war.

  “You survived, didn’t you?” he said to the bottle. “Cockroaches, porn and old whiskey.” Kent uncapped the bottle and took a tentative sip. His mind elsewhere, he soon chased this with a longer draw, contemplating that he, too survived it all, but resembled the bottle more than he wanted to admit.

  * * *

  Steven L. Shrewsbury lives, works and writes in Central Illinois. He enjoys football, books about history, guns, politics, mystery shows and good fiction. 365 of his short stories have been published in print or digital media. His novels STRONGER THAN DEATH, HAWG, TORMENTOR, and GODFORSAKEN run from horror to historical fantasy. His collaboration with Nate Southard BAD MAGICK was his first hardback release from Bloodletting’s Cargo Cult line. THRALL an epic fantasy, was released in hardback, trade pb and kindle versions in 2010. His collab novel with Peter Welmerink BEDLAM UNLEASHED was just accepted by Belfire Press for a 2011 release. His horror novels HELL BILLY and LAST MAN SCREAMING will be published by Bad Moon Books in 2012. He still searches for brightness wherever it may hide.

  NUKE LOVE!

  Scott Christian Carr

  The sun is hot in the sky, just like a giant spotlight… The people follow the signs, And synchronize in time… It’s a joke nobody knows: They’ve got a ticket to the show!

  —Lenka

  The Bus, man, it cuts a swath through the desert, careening from side to sandy side of the empty heat-puddled highway. Headed for the Heartland—Burning Man, just a neon memory in the rearview.

  Fizzy is fiddling with the radio, twisting the ancient knob between sunburned, mud-caked fingers, smoke-stained beard.

  “Anything?” Howdy calls out from the smoke and tie-dyes. Burno, he just takes another long pull on his joint.

  “Debbie, man! Look for Debbie—you KNOW she’s on…” Gregg smirks. “Go on, bro. Tune in and turn on your girlfriend!”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Fizzy roars. Turns from his seat, hands off the wheel. She’s—”

 
; “Eyes on the road, man!” Burno sputters a lungful of blue smoke.

  Fizzy yanks the wheel. The bus, it swerves—narrowly avoiding a jaws-of-life epilog with a rusty minivan barreling down the otherwise empty interstate. In the rearview, the peeling bumper sticker:

  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME!

  “Whoa…!” Burno laughs. “They were close enough to smell the crap in my pants!”

  “This shit can’t be happening,” Howdy is chewing on his knuckles.

  “It’s not,” says Burno. “Fizzy missed ‘em.”

  “Not them. I mean THIS SHIT, it can’t be happening, right?”

  “It ain’t,” Fizzy calls from the driver’s seat, eyes locked on the road. Still fiddling with the radio.

  “But your girlfriend said—”

  “She’s not my girlfriend!” Fizzy’s denial is contradicted by a blasting voice of clarity from the radio—

  —and, we’re back. This is everybody’s favorite girl, Diamond Debbie. And we’re in Day Three of what the authorities are calling The Catastrophe, but what we here at Satellite Underground like to call, The Big Shit. That’s right, folks, grab your tickets and pop your popcorn, ‘cause this is no joke. Looks like the dead are still walking the Earth…

  “Dude, I can’t believe you fucked her…,” snorts Burno.

  “Yeah, I did!” Fizzy smirks. Fingers tapping the wheel.

  …and this next one goes out to my favorite booty call, who was lucky enough to be at Burning Man when The Shit hit the fan for the rest of the world. And for all we know, he’s still out there, burning away…

  “No fucking way!” The bus erupts into raucous applause.

  “No fucking way,” Howdy’s tone, more somber. Gazing out the window. “What the fuck is that?”

  Behind the amorphous, hulking shapes that for three days have floated lazily across the skies—like dark clouds, but solid. Almost organic, and heavy despite their airless drift—something new: