Tim shook his head and went into the house. He’d come back out for her later – after he scoped out the house to see if it was safe.
In the living room, it appeared as if an epic struggle had taken place. Chairs were toppled over, lamps lay smashed on the floor and the carpet was a riot of every bodily juice imaginable tossed together with bits of clothes, books, broken glass and a tanker’s worth of dried blood and smallish, dried-out body parts.
It seemed clear there had only been Team 1 and 2 Zees that’d worked this site. The Team 3s and 4s would’ve taken care of everything else here but the stains — and at some point he was sure they wouldn’t scruple to suck on the carpet or the throw pillows. Too bad everything looked to be at least several days dried, otherwise Marilyn could’ve had a field day. She was all about the fresh and juicy, and he doubted that desiccated spine would hold her interest for long.
Similar scenes greeted Tim in the kitchen and the first-floor bedroom. Nothing was moving, but there had obviously been an extraordinary amount of activity here not long ago: maybe half a dozen squealers in a death battle against dozens of zombies. Again, a director’s wet dream, but Tim had given up on his theory that he was in a Truman Show-style zombie flick. Even the most elaborate production budget in the world couldn’t have accounted for the scope of the Zee outbreak and the level of personnel involved.
This really is hell, then. Rather liked the idea that it was only a movie; only a dream. Something you could exit from at some point. Something temporary.
There was a short stairway to the home’s second level, and Tim bumped his way up it. The climbing-stairs thing had apparently been a short-term lapse in memory and motor skill; he was able to negotiate this particular set with no difficulty. Walking up the stairs in a deserted home recently ransacked by zombies might give one pause, but Tim reflected on the fact that he felt no fear. Even if there were flesh-eating ghouls up there doing all manner of creepy, horrible stuff, it wouldn’t faze him; Zees don’t faze. It was oddly comforting to know he could deal with a tableau like that with some modicum of aplomb. He was actually more concerned with the fact that he’d just started thinking in words like a 19th century novelist. A modicum of aplomb? Just more flotsam from the past, he figured. It’ll pass.
There wasn’t anything upstairs — no blood, guts, errant limbs or signs of struggle. Whatever had gone on had been contained to the yard and the downstairs, and Tim stood in the doorway of a room painted all in pink with a four-poster bed and elegant sheets and felt like he was looking into another world — like a museum diorama. Fuzzy stuffed animals lined a shelf that ran around the entire room, and there was perfect order to the many other girlish possessions arranged on chairs, on several bookshelves and on the bed itself.
The bed: How long had it been since he’d lain in one — or even contemplated such? Slowly, suddenly feeling very much the intruder in this shrine to girlhood, Tim moved toward the bed much as a living person in a vampire flick might approach a corpse he was afraid might suddenly pop awake. He let his hand brush against the ruffled comforter but gained no insight: Still made as of concrete, his hands had very little feeling left in them.
I could lie down on this thing and take a rest.
The thought of seeking and possibly even acquiring something resembling “comfort” hit him like an epiphany. When you’re a Zee, you’re not often thinking of the finer things. A creature you are, but not one of comforts. He stood and looked fixedly at the bed, thinking back on all the patches of cold ground he’d rested upon in the past few weeks. You didn’t sleep as a Zee, of course; you were more like a fish. Rest a little, but the horrid living nightmare is one you experience awake, 24/7.
Stiff and awkward as he was, Tim could think of no graceful way to “climb into bed,” and so he simply let himself tip over, landing on his side with his legs dangling off the bed and his cheek pressed against a stuffed purple rabbit.
He imagined it felt quite good, even though his Zee body could register little in the way of what might be considered a positive sensation. The most obvious tactile thing happening for him was the synthetic hairs of the bunny starting to tickle his nose.
Tickle. What the hell?
He lasted only a few moments in that position before he started to feel something else creeping into his deadened brain. It was something not quite right, something suggesting to him that his behavior was in some way wrong; that he should get up and out of there. But why? He was his own zombie, was he not? Free to stalk the countryside and do as he would, not beholden to the laws of man and to be stopped only with a well-placed bullet to the head (or immolation or decapitation or, apparently, a good freezing).
The feeling, as it turned out upon further reflection, was guilt. Here he was in a relatively warm house, cozying up to a purple bunny on this delightful bed while poor Marilyn was outside in the cold, probably gnawing on some poor fucker’s scapula. But it was a very soft, cushy bed, and the longer he lay there, the deeper he seemed to fall into the embrace of the bedding and mattress. He wasn’t even sure he could get up if he wanted to, and strictly speaking, if it was time to just finally die conclusively, this wouldn’t be a bad place to do it. But how would it go and how long would it take? He guessed if he continued to lie in the bed he would eventually starve to … death. But would his mad zombie brain allow him to do so? Or would it force him up and out the door to find more man-flesh? And anyway, what about Marilyn? Had he not made a commitment of sorts to her — a promise to lead her in the direction they needed to go? And what about the drive to head south – what was that about?
The bunny hairs were still tickling his nose, and now he felt them on his lips. Just checking to see if he had any sensation on his tongue, he stuck it out and tried to taste the bunny. Nothing much, but …
Maybe if I gave it a good lick …
It was then that she hissed.
Tim struggled to a sitting position and there was Marilyn, standing there all zombie-mean, bloody face from her recent feed and looking, if this was at all possible, more unhappy than he’d ever seen her. All she needed to complete the picture of angry spouse was a rolling pin in one hand.
Tim patted the covers next to him, an invitation Marilyn scorned as she shuffled out of view with another hiss and back down the stairs. Tim started to get up out of the bed, then fell back into the covers, face once again pressed into the purple bunny.
I’m a zombie, but surely I can be a dick as well as any human guy.
Chapter 7. Company
Tim lay in the girl’s bed for what seemed a very long time. Occasionally, the notion of getting up and going downstairs to somehow placate Marilyn flitted through his mind, but it was fleeting. And it wasn’t that he wasn’t concerned about her. But what he was seeing lying there looking at the blue ceiling of the room — a blue ceiling painted with clouds, in fact — made him rather preoccupied. Mostly he kept his eyes closed, opening them from time to time to reiterate in his mind the clouds-on-blue tableau hovering above him. It was in this position that he was able to conjure shards of what had been before … his life. There were several people far over the horizon, discernible only as blurs, suggestions. But they were there. One was a woman, and there was a child, or maybe two, along with some other adults who figured in that life somewhere. They were trying to tell him something, many things, in fact. But he couldn’t hear them; it was an indistinct sort of mumbling, like many voices tumbling over one another, none of them making any sense. He opened his eyes, blinked at the painted clouds, then closed them again trying to make the people come closer, to talk more clearly. At one point, the woman got close enough to reach out with her hand, as if to touch Tim’s face. He felt his whole body relax as it hadn’t done in a long time, anticipating the touch that never quite came.
And then Marilyn was suddenly there, standing above him with what could charitably be described as an expectant look. She was holding out her hand, and Tim, surprised, took it as she helped him up. Tim realized
now there were noises all around them, downstairs and out in the yard. With Marilyn, still holding her hand, they walked to a window and looked out at two squealers running toward the house. Zees had appeared all around, but none of them could match the pace of the man and woman sprinting ahead of them. From their vantage point at the window, Tim and Marilyn saw the pair disappear, then heard them enter the house and slam the front door shut. Before they could secure the rest of the house, though, Zees were already entering through the back door and the smashed windows, and the squealer couple had no recourse but to run upstairs, right into the exquisite girl’s room.
Since Tim and Marilyn were on the far side of the room and partially hidden by the lush drapes around the window, the fresh couple didn’t see them until it was too late. The door was closed and a mob of Zees was streaming up the stairs, making escape the way they came impossible. With another hideous pair of zombies blocking the only window, they did what came naturally: They started throwing shit at Tim and Marilyn.
First came all the ornate plates off the wall, followed by a collection of porcelain horses, zoo animals and unicorns. Marilyn hissed as they broke around her face and neck, but she didn’t move; nor did Tim. It was obvious enough that dinner had been delivered, and it was unarmed save the girlish missiles. By the time the squealers had resorted to throwing the stuffed animals and doll furniture at them, Tim was almost ready to feel sorry for them.
They’d come a long way, it was clear. They were scraped and bloodied but not, apparently, zombie-bit. They looked cold; neither had a coat and, in fact, they were dressed only in their underwear. The man was in plain blue boxers, button fly, with a tremendous beer belly hanging over them. The woman had an emerald green thong-and-bra set stretched to capacity. Her double-D breasts alone were dinner for two, her ass would feed an army, and Tim guessed the chunky duo would provide sustenance for many weeks.
It was, he couldn’t help thinking, an odd way to size up company. But he brushed the thought away as he dimly tried to formulate a plan for turning the plate-throwing fatties into dinner. They had to be subdued, but it was two on two; not the usually swarm of Zees on one unfortunate victim. True, they couldn’t go out the door — the Zees from the outside were already pounding on it, wanting in — but it wasn’t a long drop to the ground from the window if they could get to it. He could see them eyeing the window as their means of escape.
Marilyn had no such hesitation, now that the hard objects had all been thrown. With a really excellent hissing kind of screech, she lunged at the man and jumped up onto him, circling her legs around his back and sinking her teeth into his neck before he had a chance to even react. The two of them fell backward, the man’s head hitting the edge of a white chest of drawers. Marilyn ripped a great piece of flesh from the now-unconscious man’s throat, and a geyser of arterial blood hit the wall.
Tim was impressed. Here he thought Marilyn was only a Type 4 scavenger zombie, not an able hunter. He felt a twitch of something resembling pride as she continued mauling the man’s neck, and he took his eyes off Emerald Thong long enough for her to run past him and get halfway out the window before Tim could grab her from behind.
He had her by the bra strap as he pulled her backwards and threw her onto the bed. Her massive breasts broke free as the strap broke, and she came after him with a lamp made to look like a carousel. She whipped him across the face with the lamp, then stabbed at him with what was left.
Tim fell back and almost went out the window himself as the woman stood panting, looking back and forth between the zombie in front of her and the other one having her mate for dinner. Tim couldn’t help staring at her tits, which featured not only great heft and accompanying stretch marks but wide, dark areolae and grape-sized nipples that were hard and erect — as if she were sexually aroused.
Thong saw Tim looking at her tits and let out a Portuguese yell, coming at him again with the lamp. But then here was Marilyn, flying in from the side and hitting Thong in the sweet spot on her neck with her gnashing incisors. Blood sprayed all over the beautiful bedspread, and Thong gave a last tremor before falling still. With a look Tim interpreted as “there you go, you stupid bastard — do I have to do everything around here?” Marilyn hopped off the bed and resumed her work on the Belly. Tim watched fascinated as she deftly pulled the boxers down and slipped the man’s penis into her mouth. For a moment, it looked like she was going to give the guy a blowjob, and she let her eyes find Tim’s as she sucked the guy’s dick all the way in while cradling his balls. He thought he could discern an almost a mischievous light in her eyes, but it quickly disappeared as she bit down and pulled away with her prize with a triumphant grunt.
Tim gave her a weak “thumbs-up” and turned to Thong. His hunger was past the ravenous stage, and the freshly killed, almost naked woman lying on the bed right before him was the Zee equivalent of having the Thanksgiving bird set down on the table. Scooting over her so he could still see Marilyn at work, he took a giant titty in his mouth and bit off the nipple.
With his prey dead, Tim didn’t feel the normal zombie mania to rip and tear with abandon. He tore away another piece of the woman’s breast and chewed it contemplatively, again trying to compare the taste of human flesh to that of anything else. It wasn’t a fair comparison in the first place, since he’d never really eaten raw chicken, pork, beef or lamb. He’d had sushi, of course, and could say with some certainty that this woman — or at least her boob — didn’t taste like fish. The other thing was that his taste buds weren’t in the best of shape, which was probably just as well. As he chewed and swallowed, he had to acknowledge that he really couldn’t taste much of anything. Mostly, it was that hit of blood salt and minerals that seemed to appeal to his zombie palate – not so much a flavor as it was a presence, and a strong one at that. In fact, it was that property that alerted Zees to the presence of squealers — they couldn’t hide it, their inherent freshness. As he took a drink from the woman’s still-pulsing neck, he could feel that same thrill he had back at the farmhouse, almost like drinking liquid adrenalin. It was tough to beat.
He finished Thong’s right breast, scraping rib with his incisors, and sat back against the wall feeling utterly sated. Marilyn was in the same position against the dresser, blood and gore dripping from her mouth and a look on her face that said “Woo! I’m stuffed!” Before her were the partially eaten remains of the unfortunate man, who’d been relieved of his sexual organs, both eyes, his man-boobs and his cheeks, nose and lips. His intestines had poured out of an exploratory gash in his belly made by Marilyn, but it looked like she hadn’t gotten started on them yet. Could be she wasn’t an intestine kinda gal — they weren’t for everyone.
Outside the door they could hear more of their Zee brethren, scratching and shuffling, occasionally pounding and wiggling the door knob. The Squealers had locked it on their way in, and in Tim’s experience, there wasn’t a Zee on earth that could work a locked door — even if he had the key. Even so, there wasn’t much doubt they wouldn’t be alone too much longer; they should eat while they could. Tim leaned over and tore an earlobe off Thong. He spit out an earring, gave a couple of chews and swallowed. He gestured to Marilyn to do the same.
Keep eatin’, baby. I don’t know how many more of these fuckers are left out there.
Tim was contemplating going after the other breast or moving south for some of that special brand of zombie cunnilingus when a skinny male Zee crashed through the window and, after a frantic survey of the room’s bounty, made a beeline for the pile of intestines. Marilyn hissed and tried to push him away, but the skinny Zee ignored her as he grabbed up handfuls of entrails and started stuffing them in his mouth.
Another Zee followed, this one jumping on Thong, pulling off her last vestige of clothing and ripping into her thighs and labia with frenetic glee. As the room started to fill up with even more Zees from the window, Tim looked over at Marilyn and some kind of communication passed between them. With a last, wistful glance at the r
emaining breast, Tim made his way to the window with Marilyn, where a chain of Zees were crawling over each other trying to get in. Tim and Marilyn were able to wriggle between the ones at the window, then use the rest of them as a sort of slide to the ground. It was now raining, hard, and the slippery Zee-bodies path to the ground among all the groping, groaning Zees was almost fun. When an arm was flung into his face, Tim on a whim grabbed it and ripped out a bite of putrefied flesh.
The offended Zee hissed and whacked Tim over the head with his other arm, but he then turned right back to the mission at hand: scrabbling up the heap and through the window to whatever was left of the good stuff. Tim, for his part, was simply trying to answer a question he had: Why don’t Zees eat one another?
As he and Marilyn walked through the downpour away from the crowd, he chewed on the bit of Zee forearm thoughtfully. Yes, it was certainly not fresh – it tasted like lunch meat a few weeks past its expiration date. It was also both rubbery and falling apart. With a couple of chews, it turned into a mass of pulpy gristle that had none of the bloody, chewy richness of fresh.
He spat it out on the ground, eliciting a sharp look from Marilyn.
What, I shouldn’t waste food? These motherfuckers are everywhere!
As they walked away, Tim turned back to look at the little house with that sanctuary of a room he’d enjoyed, however briefly. A hundred or so yards away, they found a tree under which to take cover, and Marilyn stood with him as they watched the Zees storm the place. It looked like ants on a candy bar.
Zombie Road Trip Page 4
