by Ed Kurtz
DEAD TRASH
A Zombie Exploitation Quadruple Feature
Ed Kurtz
Evil Jester Press
New York
Dead Trash
Copyright © 2013 by Ed Zimmerman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.
This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Edited by Shannon Michaels
Cover art and design by Billy Sagulo
Internal formatting and design by Peter Giglio
First Digital Edition: October 2013
ISBN: 978-0615903286
Acknowledgements
This little book is my love letter to the exploitation and drive-in movies of the 1970s that I adore above most things in this life. I might be remiss if I neglected to name the countless maniacs who made the films which inspired Dead Trash, but that would amount to a book in itself. Perhaps it would be sufficient to thank the late maestro Lucio Fulci, whose grindhouse classic Zombi 2 introduced me to the glorious insanity of Italian pop cinema in its heyday, and thereby became the gateway drug that turned me into an exploitation addict forevermore.
Tremendous thanks to Peter Giglio, who asked to see this book over beer and cigarillos during a terribly cold and ill-fated journey to Lincoln, Nebraska, and to Shannon Michaels, whose fine editorial acumen saved me from looking as goofy as I might otherwise have done. Excellent humans, both. There are still some.
PART ONE
CAGED ANGELS
—One—
Women Behind Bars
Irma Hendrix stood under the tepid trickle that passed for a shower in the Northfork Women’s Penitentiary, Cell Block D. The rusty water drooled out of the showerhead, spattering her soapy red hair, while she slathered up and tried to keep one eye open. General wisdom held that closed eyes were a bad bet in the showers, even when a girl had a lookout on her side, which Irma did. Her name was Arkansas, a statuesque convict who stood six foot one unless you counted her Afro, which put her at six-eight. Arkansas stood gleaming wet beside Irma, waiting her turn to get into the suds while keeping a close watch on the rest of the women all around them. For the most part they minded their own damn business, scrubbing their bodies quickly and keeping their gazes cast on the swirling drains at their feet. Those who made others their business included Sandy, the enormous guard filling the doorway between the showers and the changing room, and two beetle-browed bitches in the far corner who whispered conspiratorially and chuckled into one another’s ear. Arkansas scowled at them just to let them know she was watching. The shorter of the pair stuck her tongue out and gave Arkansas the finger. In reply, Arkansas grabbed hold of her tits and waggled them tauntingly. Sandy cracked her nightstick against the doorframe and bellowed, “That’s enough, girls!”
“Pam started that shit,” Arkansas muttered under her breath.
Irma said, “She always does.”
“That bitch is just mean.”
Irma rinsed the rest of the soap out of her hair and off her face as best she could under the circumstances and stepped aside for Arkansas to take her turn. Now, Irma stood guard, never trusting Sandy to do her job, and like Arkansas, she directed most of her attention toward Pam and her toady, Big Lou. Louisa Alvarez was short and squat, with shoulders like a linebacker’s, and Pam almost never went anywhere without her. The two of them were inseparable, and although that had something to do with the obvious dearth of available men in the prison, Pam also counted strongly on Big Lou’s penchant for violence whenever her anger was aroused, which was often.
Lou leered at Irma, a snake-like grin playing at her thin lips. She whipped her wet, raven-black hair out of her face and snarled, “Hope you washed good between them legs, Hendrix—I’m five cells over and I could still smell your nasty twat all night.”
“That’s the limit,” Irma growled. She lunged forward, her bare feet slapping the wet tiles. Arkansas spun around to grab her, wrapped her long arms around Irma’s midriff, but Irma easily slid free of the soapy grasp.
Arkansas rasped, “Irma, no!”
But Irma was already across the shower, pulling her right hook back for the first strike. Someone squealed, “Fight!” and the next thing Irma knew, Big Lou stuck her foot out and kicked Irma’s left leg out from under her. Irma dropped to the wet, sudsy floor with a loud splat and groaned half in rage and half in agony. Her tailbone throbbed angrily and from where she landed she had a clear line of sight to Sandy, who remained in the doorway shaking with laughter.
Irma knitted her brow and twisted on the floor to face Lou, who also cackled nastily. All of the women in the shower chanted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Irma blocked them out, aimed her heel at Big Lou’s knee, and kicked it so hard it bent the wrong way. Lou screeched horribly, her face twisted with pain, and crumpled to the wet floor beside Irma.
Irma scooted back as Arkansas’ slender fingers reached down to help her up. She grasped her cellmate’s hand and was pulled to her feet, where she found herself immediately locked in a stare-off with Pam.
“Not so tough without your girlfriend, are you?” Irma jeered.
“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you,” Pam hissed.
Arkansas slid between them, blocking Irma with her body, her arms outstretched. Neither of them could make much sense out of why Pam was reaching between her legs, groping at her crotch, but Arkansas ignored it and said, “No more, all right? It’s done.”
“The hell’s she doing?” Irma said, leaning around Arkansas for a better look.
At first she thought the woman was removing a tampon, but seconds later the “tampon” gleamed in the light of the bulbs dangling from the ceiling and Irma realized too late that Pam was opening a switchblade.
“Shit, look out!”
Irma seized Arkansas by the shoulders and pulled her back, but the glinting blade shot forth and slashed across the taller woman’s chest. Arkansas cried out and Irma yanked her to the side, sent her spinning into trio of bloodthirsty onlookers. As the four of them crashed to the floor in a twisted heap of shiny arms and legs, Irma found herself facing Pam and her blood-edged blade.
“What else you keeping up there?” Irma goaded her. “I’ll bet you got a hell of a stash, big as that thing’s gotta be…”
Pam shrieked and lunged with the switchblade. Irma leapt to one side, barely missing the tip of the knife, and landed a closed fist hard on the crown of Pam’s skull. Pam let out a long, low oomf and dropped like a stone. The knife fell from her hand and skidded across the floor, coming to a rest at a pair of spit-shined boots.
Sandy bent over with some difficulty and picked the switch up, closing it with one hand. She slid it into her pocket and glared at Irma for a full minute. Every woman present was dead silent; nothing could be heard apart from Irma’s harsh breath and the sputtering spray of twelve barely functioning showerheads.
“Pretty good, Hendrix,” the huge guard drawled. “You’re supple for a curvy broad.”
“I do all right,” Irma huffed between gasping breaths.
“Have to watch your back now, of course.”
“I’m not scared of her.”
Sandy grinned, stepped closer, and smacked her hand against the small of Irma’s bare back. Irma winced.
“Come on, then” Sandy said. “Let’s go see Warden Steele.”
Irma tossed her head back and groaned.
“What about them?” she complained, jabbing a thumb at Pam and Big Lou.
&nbs
p; Sandy snorted. “One’s out cold and the other’s gotta go the infirmary. That leaves you, killer.”
With a heavy sigh, Irma made for the doorway, catching a concerned glance from Arkansas, who was still tangled up with the three other girls in the middle of the floor. One of them mumbled from somewhere within Arkansas’ tremendous Afro. Sandy delivered a sharp open-handed slap to Irma’s backside, eliciting a yelp.
“I’m going!” she grumbled.
Irma vanished into the dressing room with Sandy hot on her heels.
—Two—
Ilsa, The Wicked Warden
The moment Sandy knocked on the solid oak door that read WARDEN I. STEELE, a commanding voice bellowed, “Come!”
Sandy opened the door and shoved Irma forward. Cigarette smoke hung thick in the air. The gray carpet was riddled with cigarette burns, as was the surface of the massive mahogany desk. Behind the desk sat the stone-faced warden of Northfork Women’s Penitentiary, Ilsa Steele.
Steele drew a deep drag from the end of a brown cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs while she silently regarded the inmate before her. Her dark brown hair was pinned up in a tight bun at the back of her head, her severe features unmoving on her paper white face. At long last she expelled two blue-white streams of smoke through her nostrils and shot a steely, pale blue glance at Sandy.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Hendrix, Irma. Inmate nine-double-O-forty-six. Life for aggravated murder.”
Irma smirked. She had, of course, met the warden on numerous occasions and was relatively certain the woman knew damn well who she was. But this was an ego-cracking maneuver; Steele was demonstrating how little the individual identities of her convicts mattered to her.
“Lifer, is she?” Steele purred. “Not much concerned about consequences then, is she?”
“Hendrix instigated a fight in the showers this morning, ma’am,” Sandy explained in an out-of-character monotone voice. “Some words were exchanged, and Hendrix acted as the first aggressor. One inmate is unconscious, the other may have a broken knee. Both are in the infirmary.”
“Lovely,” Steele said, stabbing her cigarette out in a large crystal ashtray. The desk was littered with ashes all around it. “You see, Sandy, lifers like this one here have a tendency to think it doesn’t matter what they do inside, since no matter how well they behave they shall never see the outside. Thus it falls to me to divest them of this entirely false delusion.”
She turned her unknowable eyes on Irma and curled her lip up on one side.
“Because it most assuredly does matter, Miss Hendrix. As you shall soon learn.”
“I can’t wait,” Irma said.
“You won’t have to for much longer. Sandy, leave the convict to me. I’ll call for you when I’ve finished with her.”
Sandy raised one eyebrow and released Irma’s arm, which she had been tightly gripping the entire time. Irma shot the guard a furious glare and rubbed the bruise she’d caused. Taking heed of her dismissal, Sandy waddled through the door and closed it behind her, leaving Irma alone with the warden.
“Have a seat, Hendrix,” the warden said, stabbing another cigarette between her lipsticked lips. She lit it with a crystal lighter that matched the ashtray, then shook the pack at Irma. “Smoke?”
“Don’t you know those things shorten your life?” Irma replied with a grin. “I wouldn’t want to cheat the state out of my full sentence, would I?”
“Cute,” Steele said. “You are rather the humorist, I gather.”
“Sure, I’m a regular Lenny Bruce.”
“I see,” the warden said, nodding, though it was clear to Irma that she didn’t see at all. Steele exhaled a pillar of smoke and clicked her cherry-red fingernails on the top of her desk. “Aggravated murder,” she said, “is a serious conviction. Whom did you murder, Miss Hendrix?”
“I’m sure you got a file somewhere in here with all the gory details.”
“I’m asking you,” Steele said pointedly. “And when I ask a convict a question, I expect an answer.”
“My boyfriend,” Irma answered without hesitation or emotion. “I shot him in the heart with his own .38.”
“How very nasty,” the warden commented.
“Not nearly as nasty as Zeke was to me,” Irma said coolly.
“Oh? And just what—”
Before Steele could finish her thought, the black telephone on her desk jangled abrasively. The warden frowned at it, laced her fingers, and waited until it stopped after the fifth ring.
“Damned nuisance, telephones,” she groused. “Anyway, I was asking—”
Again, the phone cut her off, ringing desperately. Steele pounded her fist against the desk, startling Irma, and snatched the handset from its hooks.
“What is it?” she shouted into the receiver.
Irma leaned back in the stiff, wooden chair and waited while Steele listened to whoever called her. For a brief instant, the warden’s eyes bulged and what little color she had in her face seemed to drain away. She recovered quickly, however, and set her jaw tight as she furrowed her brow once more.
“Ridiculous,” she roared. “You of all people should know better than to bother me with garbage like that.” She paused, her hand trembling slightly. “Idiot.”
And with that, she slammed the handset back down and bared her teeth like a rabid dog. She breathed in and out for a minute, composing herself, and then said, “Most people simply aren’t worth the air they breathe, do you know that, Miss Hendrix?”
Irma said, “Um.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Steele went on, standing up, practically interrupting herself. She moved stiffly around the desk and Irma, pausing just behind her. Irma felt the warden’s warm breath on the nape of her neck before realizing how close she was. A white, deeply veined hand appeared over her shoulder, its fingers curling around Irma’s right breast. Irma squirmed. Steele said, “You are going to spend the next week of your sentence in the hole.”
A gasp escaped Irma’s mouth and she sat up rigidly. Steele squeezed Irma’s breast until it hurt.
“I trust you know what I mean by that; solitary confinement, naturally. I am told it gets quite hot in there, so you won’t need your uniform. I think seven days of sweat and thirst ought to be sufficient to rearrange your thinking about the expected behavior of my convicts, including lifers.”
“Look,” Irma said, panic evident in her voice, “I didn’t start that shi—that incident. It was Big Lou, and Pam…they were the ones who started it! Pam had a goddamn switchblade, for Chrissakes!”
“Two weeks!” Warden Steele bellowed, releasing her painful grip on Irma’s breast. “That’s for your tone and your language, Hendrix. Care to try for three?”
Irma’s jaw twitched as she ground her teeth. Her eyes welled up but she fought back the tears. Warden Steele chortled and made her way back to her position behind the desk, her gaze fixed on Irma’s tortured expression. Irma was wary of appearing weak in front of this woman, her tormentor, her enemy. So, Irma rose from the chair, planted her hands on the edge of the desk, and hissed, “Go fuck yourself, you cunt.”
A cruel smile spread like a disease across Steele’s face. She made a steeple with her forefingers and tapped them against her prominent chin.
“Hendrix,” she said softly, “get on your knees.”
“What?”
“I said, get on your knees. On the floor. And beg me to forgive you. Do that, and you might get out of the hole in a month.”
“A month!”
“Refuse, and you’ll get out when I decide you can get out, whenever that might be. That is, if I don’t forget all about you.”
Irma swallowed hard. The warden continued to smile, to stare. Finally, Irma bent at the knees and began to lower herself to the floor. Steele’s lips parted and her tongue darted out to lick them.
“There’s a good girl,” she oozed.
But Irma’s knee never touched the carpet. For a few seconds
that felt like hours, the years of injustice and humiliation—from Zeke, from the police, the D.A.’s office, the court and the judge, and, ultimately, finally, from the Northfork Women’s Penitentiary and Ilsa goddamn Steele herself—washed over Irma like a wave of boiling water that burned her flesh and shocked her to action. She shot back up, ramrod straight, and launched herself over the desk, her face halting mere inches from the warden’s.
“Go…fuck…yourself,” Irma seethed.
Steele pushed back in her chair to get away from Irma’s reddening face and shouted, “That does it! That does it! A month in the hole! Sandy! A month in the hole for you, you degenerate bitch!”
Warden Steele reached for the phone but Irma pushed it off the desk. It crashed to the floor with a clatter.
“Sandy! Sandy, damn you!”
“Go fuck yourself!” Irma screeched, the veins around her temples pushing angrily against the skin.
The door burst open and Sandy exploded into the office with another guard, nearly as wide as she was, right behind her. Irma still spat curses at the warden as the two huge women yanked her away from the desk, threw her to the ground, and roughly pinned her arms behind her back. She tried for one last volley, but only got as far as “Go fu—” before Sandy punched her so hard in the neck that the warden’s office went dark.
Somewhere in the darkness, in the instant before it consumed her completely, Irma heard the distant, hollow sound of the telephone ringing again.
—Three—
The Hot Box
Once more, Irma Hendrix felt a tepid trickle spattering her face, the water rusty-tasting at her lips. Her eyelids fluttered, and with no small effort, she turned her head to keep the water out of her eyes. The concrete floor beneath her was wet; the place smelled of sewage. She groaned, narrowing her eyes in the near-darkness, glancing around until she saw a small, square hole at the top of one wall, sickly yellow shafts of light bleeding through between the bars. Above her, in the ceiling, she saw a steel door with a rickety ladder leading down to the floor. The floor was uneven and pools of smelly, stagnant water rippled at its lowest points. She thought she heard something scratching in the shadows of the corner opposite her. She was completely naked.
