by Ed Kurtz
He drew a gnarled cigarillo from a pocket in his vest and stabbed it between his grinning lips. The match lit between his fingers before either Irma or Arkansas saw him get one, and he puffed hungrily at the smoke while he got it going.
“Hoo-eee, wouldja lookit ‘em all!” someone hollered outside the cabin. Startled, Irma whipped around to look through the front window. Bigfoot chortled as she watched a long, heavy chain tear through the night and wind around a dead man’s neck. The chain went taut and in an instant the corpse’s head separated from its body, dropping to the ground like an overripe fruit. Several cheers erupted and the cheerers themselves—all leather-clad, long-haired men like Bigfoot, though none so huge—rushed into the fray.
There had to have been at least two screaming corpses for every biker, but the bikers came equipped with chains, knives, clubs, and a couple of pistols. A shot rang out and Irma jumped; gun smoke drifted silvery in the moonlight and a corpse dropped even as another biker—this one completely bald—slashed savagely with an enormous blade that rent a dead man’s neck like it was butter.
Now even Arkansas stared at the carnage, watching with equal parts horror and fascination as a gray-skinned woman with fire-blackened flesh swayed violently toward a biker with his back to her.
Arkansas shouted, “Look out!” and the bald man lunged at the gray woman, driving the tip of his knife into the her throat and out the back of her neck. The guy who had nearly been attacked turned and laughed as the bald guy curled his left arm around the jabbering corpse and sawed her head completely off. Once he was finished, he tossed the leathery head at his bald friend, who caught it and immediately drop-kicked it into the woods. Meanwhile the man who severed the head in the first place waggled the now decapitated corpse’s arms, giggling and dancing with the remains.
“Shee-it,” Arkansas drawled.
“Don’t even think about feelin’ bad for them things,” Bigfoot laughed as he clomped heavily to the middle of the room. “They ain’t human no more, none of ‘em. They’d just as soon tear your goddamn heart out as look atcha.”
“Who are you guys?” Irma said, shifting her eyes back and forth from Bigfoot’s huge, hairy face to the butchery outside.
“Usta be the Iron Reapers, MC,” he boomed and turned to show his back to them. A large patched was sewed into the leather of his vest that did indeed read IRON REAPERS MC, though the words appeared to have been crossed out with blood. Underneath, also spelled out in what looked terribly like blood, was the single word DEADBREAKERS.
“Now we’re the Deadbreakers, chicas.”
He turned back to them and drew a deep drag from the cigarillo, eventually exhaling the dense gray smoke from his nostrils.
“This your cabin?” Arkansas asked.
“Hell, no. We just follow the screams, man. Follow the motherfuckin’ screams.”
Irma narrowed one eye and cocked her head to the side. “What the hell for?”
“’Cause Johnny goddamn Law ain’t exactly clearing these fuckers out, is he? We don’t know what they are or where the fuck they came from, but since everybody else is hip to just runnin’ away from ‘em, the Deadbreakers will take care of business, you dig?”
Irma scoffed. “What, you think you’ll wipe ‘em all out?”
“If we can.”
“Fat chance, Jack.”
He furrowed his substantially furry brow.
“Bigfoot,” he growled.
“Look,” Irma went on, undeterred, “before we found this shithole, we saw a body back in them woods. Brother, it looked like a pack of wolves had gotten to it—no insides left in it at all. Not long after, that same damn body came walkin’ out of the woods, man. You hear what I’m tellin’ you, Bigfoot?” She held out her right hand and started counting off on the fingers. “No heart, no lungs, no stomach, no guts at all—and that son of a bitch walked out of the woods.”
“Yeah, I dig,” Bigfoot said indifferently. “I seen that, too.”
“Then you know they’re dead, man!”
“Of course they’re dead. I ain’t as dumb as I look, chick.”
“Which means the ones walkin’ around right now ain’t all there is. When you die, you’re gonna get back up again. When she dies—” She gestured at Arkansas. “—she’ll get back up again. When I die…”
“Maybe, maybe not. You ain’t bit, are ya?”
“Bit?”
A man with skin the color of concrete smashed against the window and shrieked. Irma cried out and stumbled back, eyeballing the quivering, howling face as its hands scratched feebly at the glass.
“Well, fuck a duck,” Bigfoot said amusedly as he withdrew a .38 revolver from the waistband of his blue jeans. “I’ll be damned if that ‘un don’t look just like my brother Stevie.”
He squeezed one eye shut, took aim, and blasted the moaning cadaver back from the shattering window panes. Grinning, he jammed the gun back where he got it and winked at Arkansas.
“Stevie’s a piece of shit,” he said.
“I guess so,” Arkansas said, one eyebrow perked high on her forehead.
Bigfoot raised the corner of his upper lip like Elvis and turned back to the door he’d kicked in. Arkansas noticed the stars and bars worked into the ex-Iron Reaper’s patch and winced.
“Hey, Speed!” he bellowed to the world at large. “Get your ass in here, we got company.”
Irma didn’t much like the sound of that, but she kept her mouth shut. Another shot cracked and she pinched her eyes shut rather than jump again. The dead were getting quieter as the bikers grew louder. It sure as hell sounded like they were winning the fight out there.
Presently the man with the cleanly shaven skull came tramping into the cabin, the white undershirt he wore beneath his vest spattered with blood and something vaguely brown and viscous.
“What’s the hap—oh, hey. Ladies.”
Speed grinned and ran a palm over his smooth, sweaty scalp.
“Yeah,” Bigfoot agreed. He regarded them warily for the first time and sucked deep at his cigarillo. “I’m gonna need you keep eyes in the back o’ your head, you dig?”
Speed’s big eyes went from his leader to the women and then back again. He nodded, understanding something Irma and Arkansas did not.
“Sure, right,” Speed said as Bigfoot clasped a massive hand on his shoulder, nearly knocking him down on his knees. “I got it.”
Bigfoot then leaned over to whisper something more—Irma thought it sounded like Horseman. She dismissed it when both men returned their attention to her and Arkansas.
“You any good with that thing?” Bigfoot asked, pointing at the rifle.
“She’s damn good,” Arkansas answered for her.
“Where you headed?” he asked.
Irma’s face darkened. She could practically feel the loose leaves of notepad paper on the floor staring hatefully up at her.
“The city,” she said bluntly.
“Wait a minute,” Arkansas said, walking up to her. “What city? We haven’t talked about this…”
“Jacksonville,” Irma interrupted. She flashed an icy look at her former cellmate and said, “He’s alive, doll. I never killed nobody.”
“Who? Who’s alive?”
“Zeke. The letter you gave me, that’s what it said. That no good ratfink motherfucker’s still got air in his lungs.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” Bigfoot cut in, rolling his huge head around like he was working out a kink. “The Deadbreakers are city-bound, too. Word is it’s the mouth o’ hell up there. Sound like our kinda scene.”
“You mean there’s more of them there?” Arkansas asked, sneering.
Speed laughed glumly. “Oh, yeah. Like, thousands more.”
Arkansas’s face fell and she sighed heavily.
“Irma…”
“Goddamnit, Arkansas—you can stay here in this lousy cabin if you want to, but I’ve got something I left unfinished and I aim to finish it, yo
u get that? Maybe the world’s over, I don’t know, but if Zeke’s really out there someplace…”
“You’re crazy…”
“Maybe I am,” Irma seethed, “but I did five years for that piece of shit, and I’m gonna make ‘em count if I die trying.”
“Damn,” Bigfoot chuckled. “You got a fire in you, Red.”
Irma tipped the rifle back over her shoulder and stepped close to the enormous Deadbreakers leader.
“You got room for one more, man?”
“Two more,” Arkansas corrected her.
Bigfoot flashed a toothy grin and said, “Shit, yeah.”
Outside, despite the substantial damage done to them by Bigfoot’s boys, the dead continued to scream.
—Three—
Hell’s Belles
The Deadbreakers camped around the cabin, laughing and drinking by a fire they made, and left the women alone inside by Bigfoot’s decree. At dawn, Irma and Arkansas were awakened by the MC leader’s roaring voice:
“Straddle your hogs and ride, men!”
Arkansas jerked up from her place on the floor and twisted around to rouse Irma. She need not have done so, for right then a dozen American-made motors growled to life all around them, a thunderous noise joined by a concord of yelling, hooting, cursing voices.
Irma seized the rifle and leapt up to her feet.
“Come on,” she said on her way outside.
Most of the boys were already straddling their rides, revving the engines and spewing greasy clouds of exhaust from their tailpipes. All of them sported black vests with the same amendments made to their patches—DEADBREAKERS written out in blood.
A cluster of bikers crowded tightly around the front end of one of the hogs; they guffawed and shook with mirth. Irma met Bigfoot’s glance and he smiled with a mild shrug. When the men around the bike stepped aside, Irma let out a gasp. They had tied a raging corpse to the front of the motorcycle with rope, a corpse that had been torn in half, leaving only a twitching spine hanging like a tail from its exposed ribs. The face was sunken and colorless, its dry lips split and pulled back from snapping teeth. The men laughed harder still at the furious remains as it writhed in its bondage, wrenching its head back and forth and staring madly at them with its one good eye. The other eye was little more than ruined, yellow sludge oozing from a barely cracked eyelid.
“That’s horrible,” Irma sighed.
“You shittin’ me?” said an exasperated man wearing a Civil War style kepi cap on his greasy blonde head. “That thing’d eat your guts if it had legs and weren’t tied up like that.”
“That thing used to be somebody,” Irma said. “Some mother’s son.”
“Now he’s just a mother,” the biker said with a phlegmy laugh.
The corpse yowled in protest.
With that the kepi-capped man climbed up behind the thrashing, groaning horror and kicked the bike to life. Bigfoot whistled shrilly at Speed as Arkansas came up behind Irma, grimacing at the ruined abomination bound to the motorcycle.
“Arkansas, you ride with Speed,” Bigfoot instructed. To Irma he said, “You’re with me.”
Speed nodded and gestured with his chin to his ride. Arkansas patted Irma’s shoulder and followed him to it. Minutes later everyone was astride a sputtering, thundering machines and Bigfoot bellowed, “Let’s ride!”
* * * * *
Irma didn’t much like riding bitch, just holding onto a man the size of a grizzly and watching the woods giving way to open road with little to look at but scattered trailers and the odd grazing cow. There was no way to talk against the snarling wind and a dozen barking hogs, which seemed to suit the Deadbreakers fine, but Irma was anxious as hell.
She was finally permitted to get off and stretch her legs when the group encountered the first throng of walking corpses they’d seen since the cabin. Bigfoot motioned with a massive gloved hand and the lot of them pulled over at a derelict filling station with a greasy spoon attached. The gas-spattered parking lot was filled with stumbling, crawling, and flailing dead. A few of them might have passed for living at a distance, while others shambled straight out of a lunatic’s nightmare. The Deadbreakers wasted no time jumping from their rides and gathering up their various methods of dispatching the dead. Irma and Arkansas fell back and away from the carnage, watching from the grass as the men shot, stabbed, and chain-whipped the shrieking corpses to pieces.
One of the men, the one in the kepi, let out a wild war cry and launched himself through the air at a rail-thin woman with scraggly yellow hair who wore a shredded nightgown and one bunny slipper. She clawed feebly at him and cried in what sounded horribly like anguish as the man landed on her back and kneed her to the asphalt. Pinning her down like that, he grabbed her by the forehead and chin, careful to evade her clacking teeth, and wrenched her head all the way round until she was facing him. She screamed even more wretchedly and the man chortled at her before hawking a thick loogie right into her mouth. The dead woman gargled it through her shrieks.
Irma stared at the particularly brutal member of the MC as he took the utmost delight in further twisting and yanking at the dead woman’s head, digging his fingers into the pliant flesh of her throat and neck. He was tearing her head off with his bare hands and was having a grand time of it. Irma’s stomach roiled, and she quickly looked away before he succeeded.
“Norseman! Knock that shit off and help us out!” Bigfoot suddenly yelled.
Irma shot a glance back at the awful man, who was now getting to his feet with a fistful of stringy hair from which a roughly severed head dangled.
Norseman, Irma thought. Not Horsemen.
Bigfoot sauntered up to Norseman, his chest slick with blood, and groused, “Get rid of it.”
Norseman smiled like a little child and tossed the head into the grass near Irma and Arkansas, both of whom quickly jumped away from it. Arkansas flashed an angry glare at him. He winked and blew her a kiss.
“That mother’s trouble,” Arkansas said in a low voice.
“Don’t worry ‘bout Norse,” Speed said, coming up from where he had just caved in the skull of a particularly loud dead man with a crowbar. “He’s crazy, but BF keeps him in check.”
Arkansas shielded her eyes from the sunlight with the flat of her hand and said, “When did this start happening?”
“Yeah, I figured you gals was in the joint,” Speed said. They agreed by way of silence. “Wasn’t too long ago; maybe three, four weeks. We was at Rendezvous down in the Delta and didn’t hear shit about it ‘til we started back. That’s when we stopped at a truckstop in Mississippi and got crowded in by about a hundred of ‘em. Lost three boys that night—them rotters tore ‘em up like they was made of paper or something.”
“I’m sorry about your friends,” Irma offered.
“Yeah, well, we put up a hell of a fight, wiped half of ‘em out before we rolled out of there. Next mornin’ BF made the call: we was Deadbreakers now. I reckon we killed five hundred of them bastards already.”
“Is it really killing if they already dead?” Arkansas questioned him.
“As long as they go down and stay down, we count it.”
“So, what,” she continued to ask, “ya’ll just gonna ride around smashing dead folks forever?”
“Might as well start callin’ ‘em what they are, miss,” Speed advised. “Zom—”
“Now don’t get started with that shit,” she cut him off. “We ain’t at the drive-in and this ain’t no goddamn midnight movie. Them…things—” She pointed half-heartily at a pair of spasming corpses that screeched at the two bikers slashing at them with long knives. “—they’re sick, man. Something happened to make ‘em like that, right? That shit ain’t their fault, is it?”
“All due respect, lady, but maybe a mad dog got kicked around too much when it was a puppy, but that’s hardly what I’m thinking when it’s got its damn jaws at my throat.”
Arkansas made a firm line of her mouth; she had no retort.
&nb
sp; “Listen,” Irma said, “so long as ya’ll get us into the city, you can tear down as many zom—”
“Irma, come on!”
“Well, we’re with you all the way, Speed,” Irma concluded. “Just keep that Norseman away from us, if you please.”
Speed nodded and looked around the parking lot. Most of the dead were laid out and still, only a few still trundled around and the Deadbreakers were making quick work of them. Apart from the main group, Norseman conferred with a pair of rough looking dudes with earrings and gruesome tattoos of melting faces and swastikas. Speed settled his gaze on them as he fished a jay from his vest pocket and fired it up.
Keep eyes in the back o’ your head, Irma recalled Bigfoot instructing his lieutenant the night before, following the command with a low whisper about the Norseman. Speed held the smoke in his lungs and passed the jay to her. She accepted, toked, and passed it on to Arkansas. Norse and his cronies broke up their powwow and strode back to join the rest of the crew.
“We gonna ride on or what?” he yelled at the Deadbreakers.
“We camp,” Bigfoot said severely. “It’ll be dark soon. We’ll cover more road tomorrow if we don’t come across another big bunch of fuckers like this.”
“Good,” Irma said quietly to Arkansas. “I don’t think I could handle that damn thing between my legs another minute.”
Arkansas laughed and started to retort, but the feathery sensation snaking around her ankle elicited a sharp yell instead. She leapt back and stared open-mouthed at the gore-soaked head of Norseman’s victim, gazing up at her with milky eyes and clacking its teeth rapidly.
“Nuhhhh,” it moaned between loud snaps.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Arkansas hollered. Irma was already drawing a bead between the head’s vacant eyes but Arkansas beat her to it—she stomped the thing’s jaw hard with her heel once, twice, again and again until at last it shattered under the tight, papery skin. Even then the thing moaned, its eyes rolling around in their sunken sockets, so Arkansas gave a great, furious howl and resumed her stomping, this time around the temple, until she successfully smashed the skull into fragments and spread gray-black brain matter around the grass like so much spilled corn pudding.
