“Mark told me about your little problem and I’ve been thinking about it all week, you piece of shit. Sometimes I used to think your dick was the only thing about you I liked, and to think of it in here hard as a rock all the time with your hands all tied … I’ve been faithful to you all these months, Tim, and don’t think for a second every swinging dick in that safe house wasn’t after me. Actually, that whole place was on fire with sex, everyone who could was fucking each other day and night, no matter about marriages or age differences or whatever. It was like everyone figured they would die soon and somehow this was a way to forget. Or maybe it was some biological imperative to maintain the human race in the face of our extermination. I don’t know. But I never gave up the idea that you were alive, so I was the nun in there, Tim, listening to the sound of fucking all day and all night from the cells up and down that green painted hallway all the fucking time …”
Then she came, quietly, in several waves, which finally shut her up. She hung on for another round and, without waiting for Tim to come, she slid off, threw on her robe and left after tossing the sheet back over his straining poll with a little laugh and a malevolent grin. A few seconds later she reappeared, tore the duct tape off his mouth and left again — after promising to be back the next morning.
Lying around a prison cell all tied up is working well for my sex life, Tim thought. What other horny female might pop by for a ride on his amazing stick? Funny thing was, he still couldn’t decide whether he was enjoying sex or not. The not coming didn’t really even bother him much, and the act itself, while pleasant enough, didn’t mean nearly as much as he remembered it used to. What was all the fuss about, in the old world, he wondered? Certainly the biological imperative to reproduce had a lot to do with it, and perhaps that was what was missing from his own scenario. Of course, Janet knew he’d had a vasectomy, so she was hardly in the hunt for another kid. She hadn’t bothered with a condom, he’d noticed, which, strictly speaking, was a careless error on her part. When she appeared again the next morning, he blurted out “Wear a condom!” before she taped his mouth shut again and repeated, to the orgasm, her actions of the previous day.
“I don’t need a condom, Tim. I don’t care if I catch your disease, or anything else. We’re all as good as dead. This place is surrounded by Zees now, everyone’s freaking out. They think they have it all sealed up, but they’ll find a way. They always find a way.”
She paused for an orgasm and continued talking and fucking.
“Even if Mark finds a cure, no one’s getting out of here alive. I’m dead anyway, I’ve been dead since that day. And look at me, fucking a zombie as the only way to feel just a little bit alive. How pathetic.”
With his eyes, Tim tried to say “I’m only a little bit zombie!” But mostly he watched, amused, as her tits bounced up and down and her hips gyrated against his. He closed his eyes and willed himself to come, focusing with all his energy on his dick, imagining it shooting plumes of jism into his wife’s — his wife’s! — vagina.
But it was not to be. Once again she slid off and left him hanging, stiff and unsatisfied, and she repeated her conjugal visit day after day, never once making the mistake of forgetting the tape or releasing his arms.
These carnal mornings aside, the remainder of Tim’s days were filled with exactly nothing. There was no television, of course, nothing to read, no one to talk to, not so much as a painting on the wall to look at. He slept as much as he could, but mostly he just lay there and, in between trying not to think and make his mind blank, thinking about the past, the present and the future. His past pretty much started on the day he came to outside that farmhouse. Halloween it was, or the day after. His life before that, his childhood, college, getting married, having kids and all that, it was like trying to remember being 5 years old. Fuzzy images and a few select, partial memories were about all he could muster, and it was bizarre to be around Janet, who remembered it all. During their sessions (Tim couldn’t bring himself to call it “lovemaking” or even “sex,” really — it was more like masturbation for Janet, with Tim in the role of the dildo), Janet found it amusing to relate selected memories to him. Whether it enhanced her pleasure to remember him as a real person or whether she thought it might help him climb back out of the abyss of ambivalence he didn’t know. But there she was, sitting atop him one morning after completing her own series of orgasms, telling him about their wedding day.
“It rained, you know, and it was supposed to be an outside wedding at Meadow Creek Park. And there was a room in case that happened, but it sucked, it wasn’t the same. And you and me, we were like ‘whatever,’ just happy to be there with all our friends and our families, but my mom was freaking out. Wouldn’t stop crying. Fucked up the whole day for me.”
Janet moved her hips and took a last few slow thrusts with him inside her, then pulled off of him and slipped into her robe.
“And you were great. For the first few years of our time together, up until Madison was born, really, you were Mr. Romantic. We had sex every day, Tim.” She laughed. “Like now, only you were there. And I wasn’t always on top. You loved fucking me from behind, more than anything.”
She pulled off his duct tape, a little more gently than usual.
“Happy to do that again for you, Janet.”
She laughed again.
“Not a chance.”
She put her hands on her breasts and gave them a little heft.
“So long as I’m alive, I want my girls to stay attached to my chest.”
“Understandable,” he said. “They do look quite yummy, and I don’t know if I could resist.”
“That’s just creepy, Tim. And so not funny.”
On her way out, she bumped into Mark, who gave her a stern look. He said nothing, only his eyebrows asking the question: “Am I mistaken or is Janet sporting that freshly fucked look?”
“What can I tell you, Mark? The ladies dig the recovering Zees. Maybe it’s the helpless thing, or the potential danger. I don’t know.”
Off Mark’s sour look he added: “She duct-tapes my mouth shut, Mark. And she doesn’t take off these fucking restraints. And, you know, she is my wife.”
“Well, that aside, I have news. Good and bad, in fact.”
“Give me the bad first,” Tim said.
“Zees are getting into the prison, we can’t figure out how. So far Craig and his men have been able to keep on top of it, but there’s more every day.”
“Weird,” Tim said. “But they do have a way of insinuating themselves into any situation. What’s the good?”
“I think we found something, something that’s working.”
“Do tell.”
“On the 14th, about a week ago, I noticed this one subject responding with reduced aggression, near-normal pupil dilation and reduced heart rate, among other things.”
“That’s great,” Tim said, wondering why Mark hadn’t mentioned it before. “Which one was it?”
They talked for a few moments about the various configurations of the anti-viral they’d been experimenting with, until Mark stopped and gave Tim a pointed look.
“There’s something else too, which you should know. When I first saw the results in 314, the rat, I was encouraged to try it on a human subject, and so … I gave it to Marilyn. I figured she was a lot further gone than you, and if it killed her, well, I still had you.”
“OK,” Tim said. “A little impetuous for you, Mark, but this isn’t exactly a normal time to be practicing procedurally precise medical science. Which one was it?”
He meant which version of the anti-viral attempts. They were up over the 200 mark.
“ZAV-237. The one with the added Glycyrrhizin. The licorice root, of all things.”
“ZAV” was Mark’s cute acronym for the cure versions. It simply meant “zombie anti-viral.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, it worked. She’s on her way back. Sitting up, starting to eat regular food, saying a few words, not lu
nging for my neck.”
Tim took a moment to let this sink in. Marilyn … talking? Marilyn as a human? He’d never truly thought he’d see the day. And she would be the first, at least that they knew of — the first full Zee to come back from the dead. Or whatever they were. Tim figured he didn’t really count since he’d never been full Zee in the first place. But Marilyn? She was deep in it, a full-on, flesh-eating zombie-movie ghoul of the first order.
“Wow,” he said finally. “She’s talking? What does she say?”
“Not much, yet,” Mark said. “Her speech skills are, I don’t know, the equivalent of an autistic 8 year old or thereabouts. But she’s progressing quickly. I mean, two days ago all she could do was grunt. Now she says things like ‘water’ or ‘home.’ We still have her restraints on, but I think she’s not a threat anymore. She’s out of the woods.”
“Give it to me, Mark.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“Of course I’d fucking say that, Mark. Give it to me. I want it. Now.”
“Two more days. Just give me two more days to observe Marilyn and make sure there aren’t any bad reactions. It could still go south on her, Tim, you know that.”
No amount of reasoned begging would make him change his mind, leading Tim to finally ask:
“Why do you care, Mark? What happens to me? You’ve got the cure, you know I’m dead as soon as that asshole Craig gets the word from you. Just give me a little time to be completely human before … whatever.”
“I don’t know that I have the cure yet, Tim. Christ, you should know you can’t go off a week’s worth of observation. There’s still plenty of opportunity for this thing to mutate again, get worse, who knows?”
“Why do you care?”
“I care because if it doesn’t work on Marilyn, then I need you to try new strains on — once they pass muster on the rats. And to be honest, I don’t want to be the one to kill you. I don’t hold you responsible for Linda’s death, I really don’t. I’m in there trying to cure Marilyn — whose real name is Marta, by the way — and god knows how many people she’s murdered. Marta is not Marilyn. She probably doesn’t even remember any of her Zee days.”
Marta? What the fuck kind of name was that?
His thoughts were interrupted by a shout and several gunshots. Mark ran to the door and looked.
“Hell! Two more!”
He left, and Tim could hear him talking to the guards — them telling him the prison was completely surrounded. That was bad news, since the guards needed to hunt for deer, rabbit and squirrel to keep Meridian in fresh meat. For Tim, it didn’t matter so much as long as the supply of goat blood was OK.
Mark reappeared.
“More bad news. Your goats — they’re gone.”
“Those fuckers. Why can’t they just stick to yummy people?”
“They didn’t eat them, they just broke into their pen and let them escape. So there’s your food supply. Now, there’s a couple of pints in storage, that’s it. And we need it for Marta as well. She’s eating real food, but she still needs the hemoglobin from the goat blood to keep from getting jaundiced.”
“Yeah, we wouldn’t want that.”
“Anyway, we may need to accelerate things. Craig is of the opinion we’ll have to abandon Meridian, perhaps as soon as next week. It’s overrun. We can keep out the bulk of them, but if we can’t get out for hunting and other foraging, we’re doomed here.”
Zombies: They didn’t really worry Tim. He felt he had an edge when it came to avoiding them, and now that he’d killed one himself, he felt ready to live out there. Maybe it’d only be a week, or maybe he’d make it to the new world, where the plague was completely gone. It didn’t matter. ‘Doom’ was a relative term. We’re all doomed, it was just a matter of timing. And, he supposed, the degree of unpleasantness that accompanied the end. Maybe that’s why zombies were so unpopular. But, then, was that so bad compare to languishing on life support in some hospital for six months or more?
“Let me see Marta, when she can walk. Send her over.”
“Want to go over old times, huh?”
“Yeah Mark, we had some good kills together. I wouldn’t want her to forget anything.”
“She’s pretty sensitive right now, emotionally — I mean, she’s a wreck. Just imagine waking up from that all of the sudden. You did it more gradually.”
Mark stepped outside the cell and slid the door shut.
“I’ll tell her you’re here, OK? If she even remembers you …”
Chapter 23. Tim & Janet’s 10th Anniversary
Janet didn’t come by the next two mornings, leaving Tim and his woody all by their lonesome. Other than the poor orderly who came in to change his bedpan, Tim saw no one for three days. They were busy out there, the guards. He heard Zee incursions several times a day in his wing of the prison. The yells, the Zee screeches, followed by the gun shots and the murmuring as they cleaned up afterwards.
On the afternoon of the third day, after just such an episode was winding down, a woman appeared at the door of his cell and looked in at him. Tim had never seen her before but assumed she was some general staffer at Meridian since she didn’t have on a lab coat or scrubs.
“Hello,” he said. “Come to look at the scary zombie in his cage?”
“Sumding lob dat,” she said, pulling the cell door open. They were all on electronic locking system that no longer worked, so when they slammed his cell door shut on their way out, it was really just an act.
Short and slight, pale as flour and appearing extremely weak, the woman slowly padded into the cell and stood by his side. It was Marilyn, of course, which caused Tim to feel a series of emotions all at once — something he hadn’t experienced since before the plague. Relief at seeing her alive was coupled with something approaching joy. There was dread as well, as he parsed this slip of a woman with the fierce predator he’d known in the Wasteland. Mixed in with all that was lust: Women coming into his cell had turned out to be a good deal for him in the past few weeks.
“Marilyn,” Tim said. “I’m sorry — Marta. It’s you. Look at you, all human and everything.”
How much did she remember? Mark had said she didn’t remember anything. But then why was she here?
Marta put her hand on his and squeezed it. And answered his unstated question.
“Ah rememba you.”
“That’s good, Marta,” he said, looking into her eyes. They were blue — no longer the dead-shark gray of a Zee. Marta was a pretty woman — or at least would be once she got her weight and strength back. With her clipped brown hair, sharp little nose and rather pointy chin, she was elfin to the extreme, which made Tim wonder why she’d chosen Marilyn Monroe as a Halloween costume. He remembered her chewed-up ass and wondered how she felt about that.
He squeezed her hand back, looked into her eyes and felt himself go almost misty.
“Damn, it’s good to see you … like this. Cured, wow. I never thought I’d get to see you, you know, talking and all like this. How do you feel?”
Marta looked at him with a puzzled expression and took a moment to think.
“O-gay, ah guess. Confoosed, a libble scared. Tired all ba time. Supa weak.”
Tim nodded.
“And how much do you remember of, of our time together?”
Again the puzzled look, which Tim attributed to her latent brain functions still coming back to life. It couldn’t be easy to go from Zee to a human capable of carrying on a conversation.
“All a-bit.”
“Wow, really?”
“Sowy ah bit you.”
“That’s OK,” Tim said, realizing how ridiculous that sounded. “That was Marilyn, not you. Not Marta.”
Noises in the hallway indicated a patrol approaching.
“Ah’ll be bock,” she said.
She skimmed out of the cell like a ghost, leaving the door open behind her.
“Holy shit” said Tim, quietly to his ceiling as the enormity of Marta’s
presence here washed over him. “Holy fucking shit.”
The patrol was led by Craig, who Tim hadn’t seen since the day they found Marilyn. He popped his head into Tim’s cell.
“Hey asshole,” said Craig.
“What is it, asshole?” said Tim.
“I’m fucking your wife.”
“Good. Whatever.”
Craig laughed and gestured at the pistol in his hand.
“And soon, you’re getting’ a divorce. An’ don’t worry about the paperwork or lawyers or nothin’.”
He laughed, and he was joined by the other guys in the patrol as they walked away.
If Tim hadn’t been tied down, he’d have kicked himself for that terrible comeback. “Good, whatever?” That sucked, and he lay there the rest of the day coming up with much better ones. At one point, it occurred to him that, as the cuckold, he should be angry and planning revenge, but he really didn’t care about Janet — especially now that Marta was here. And who could blame her for aligning herself with a heavily armed soldier, what with zombies at the gates? Tim certainly wasn’t in any position to protect her, and no doubt Janet guessed that, even if he could, he may well choose not to in order to save his own skin.
Zombie Road Trip Page 15
