by Ed Kurtz
“What do you mean, done?”
“Lester’s dead. We couldn’t hold ‘em off. They swarmed the fourth floor, I don’t think anybody made it out but me. The whole goddamn tower’s full of ‘em now, man. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Veins stood out like cords on either side of Mean Jim’s neck. His eyes teared up and he twisted around, punching at the air.
“Goddamnit!” he roared.
His outburst was met by a low, whistling moan, followed by the appearance of a shirtless man with missing fingers and glistening red patches where his ears used to be, reeling drunkenly from one of the apartments. Jim saw the dead man and let loose a terrifying yell as he tackled him to the floor. The corpse snapped its teeth at Jim, but Jim avoided them and seized the man on either side of the head with his huge hands. Then he twisted, and he kept on twisting as the vertebrae snapped apart and the skin around the neck split and spurted. When he’d gotten the dead man’s head turned all the way around so that it was facing the wrong way, Jim grabbed a handful of hair and commenced smashing the man’s face against the floor, over and over again.
“GoddamnmotherfucksonofabitchkillyoufuckingKILLYOU!”
The corpse’s face flattened and bloody bits of shattered teeth and fleshy cartilage shot out from the repeated impact. Bruce hollered, “Jim, stop it, man!”
But Jim ignored him, speeding up the measured pounding until the face was reduced to a crimson pulp and the top of the skull started to crack open.
Bruce grabbed the back of Jim’s shirt and had to rear back when Jim swung a blood-drenched fist at him.
“Whoa, man—you got to knock that shit off!”
“I’m sick of it!” Jim shouted. “I’m just so sick of these jive motherfuckers!”
“I know, man, I know,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “You always said things could be worse in this damn place. You were right, huh?”
Jim rose from the floor, and the face-down body at his feet juddered violently. Jim sneered and brought the heel of his boot down on the back of the trembling corpse’s head. The skull exploded like there had been a bomb in it and the corpse moved no more.
He paused for a moment to regain his composure, and then Jim went back to Arkansas and Irma with Bruce at his side.
“I checked those apartments,” Arkansas said sullenly. “That was the last of those things.”
“Then it’s just us and him,” Jim said, turning his eyes to Little Tee’s door.
“I guess it’s probably lock—” Irma started to say when Mean Jim Turner kicked it in. The door folded in on itself as it fell into the apartment. As it crashed to the floor, a gun went off and Jim’s chest bloomed red.
—Five—
The Black Godfather
Jim dropped back, stiff as a board, and the two women fell behind to catch him. They both groaned from the man’s immense weight, and they now had a clear view into the ratty pad where Little Tee stood triumphantly between the two bikinied women, each of whom held sawed-off shotguns in their thin hands.
“Now you see,” L.T. jeered, “when you shoot one o’ them ghouls in the chest, them motherfuckers ain’t even worried ‘bout it. But a regular man like Mean Jim here? Shee-it—I just fucked yo’ ass, baby.” He grinned leeringly at Irma and added, “Nice titties, bitch.”
Arkansas’s face scrunched up into a raging grimace. “You low-down son of a bitch…”
“Easy, bitch,” L.T. said, grinning. “You might hurt my fuckin’ feelings, and my bitches are real defensive about my fuckin’ feelings.”
The girls looked equally indifferent, but they maintained their aim just the same.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Irma snarled. “The whole damn world is coming down all around you, damnit! Jim saved your life, for Christ’s sake!”
L.T. grinned. “I told him to stay the fuck off my floor. Up here, Little Tee is the Godfather, you dig?”
“You ain’t shit,” Arkansas said, her face twisted with anger and her eyes leaking tears. “You ain’t got no gang no more, you ain’t got nothin’. All you got is two strung out bitches and a falling down ghetto building full of dead cannibals. Some fuckin’ godfather.”
Jim coughed weakly; his lips were spattered with red droplets for the trouble. At the end of the hallway, the steel door suddenly banged dully. From behind it, in the stairwell, came a mournful howl.
“They’re coming,” Irma said to no one in particular.
L.T. chuckled cruelly and stepped back to the window, which he heaved open. The warm air brought in the fetid stench of the dead outside as well as the distant, hollow din of their miserable screams. He threw a leg over to the fire escape and said, “Kill these motherfuckers.”
The tweaked-out girls focused hazily on Irma and Arkansas, who both dropped Jim and leapt out of the way as twin blasts blew the door frame apart in a rain of spraying pellets and splinters. Jim landed flat on his back and grunted, but none of the shot seemed to have hit him. Irma furrowed her brow and wrapped herself around the ruined edge of the doorjamb, her pistol out, and squeezed off two quick shots. The taller of the girls spun awkwardly around before slamming into a table and dropping to the floor. The other girl took a bullet to the shoulder, dropped her shotgun, and staggered back with a confused look on her face.
Taking advantage of the cover, Little Tee clambered out to the fire escape and scampered up the rickety metal ladder. Irma rushed into the apartment, but Arkansas and Bruce paused by Jim, whose unfocused eyes quivered in their sockets.
“Forget about me,” he said almost too quietly to hear. “Go get that son of a bitch.”
“I’m not leaving you, Jim,” Arkansas sobbed.
“Baby, you’re going to do just fine,” he said with a small smile. He coughed again, resulting in the broad wet place in his chest seeping anew with a fresh gush of blood. Arkansas closed her eyes against it. “B—Bruce…take care of this woman, man. Will you do that?”
“Yeah, brother, I’ll do that,” Bruce whispered.
“Her and Irma, they’re looking for a man—what’s his name, baby?”
“Zeke,” Arkansas answered, opening her eyes.
“Zeke?” Bruce repeated, surprised.
“Help ‘em find this cat, Bruce. Do it for ol’ Mean Jim.”
“You know I will, baby,” the man said, choking with emotion.
The surviving girl in the apartment moaned and dragged herself toward the shotgun she’d dropped. Irma took quick aim and fired a round into the top of her head, which burst open in a grisly haze as she dropped dead to the carpet.
“G—go,” Jim wheezed. “You gotta go!”
Arkansas grabbed his enormous hand and squeezed it tight. Jim squeezed back, but his grip relaxed soon thereafter and his face went slack.
He was gone.
Bruce said, “Damn.”
Arkansas covered her eyes with her hand as she got back to her feet and went slowly into the apartment. She felt Bruce’s arm wrap around her and heard his voice say softly into her ear, “He’s right, we got to go.”
She sniffed, straightened up. Irma stood by the window, and Arkansas nodded to her. All three of them made for the fire escape.
* * * * *
To their surprise, when Irma, Arkansas, and Bruce reached the roof of Bucktown they found themselves looking over a crowded tent city. Thirty or more tents leaned up against one another, most of them made of no more than broken sticks of furniture and blankets or rugs. To Arkansas it looked like a refugee camp, and she said so. But, there was no sign of life—or death.
“Who d’you suppose lives up here?” Irma asked.
“No one now,” Bruce said, shrugging out of his shirt and handing it over to her. “But my guess is L.T. planned on flooding the lower levels with the dead from the start, and I’ll bet you anything he charged a premium to live like this.”
“How can anyone be so horrible?” Irma wanted to know. She shook her head solemnly while pulling the shirt down over her boobs.
Arkansas laughed bitterly and crooked her mouth to one side.
“You really need to ask that after everything you’ve seen, girl?”
“No,” Irma replied sadly. “No, I guess not.”
“I think we ought to spread out,” Bruce offered. “But listen, Irma—” He looked at her significantly, seriously. “Mean Jim said you was looking for a cat called Zeke, is that right?”
“Yeah,” she said, her sadness rapidly giving way to stoic anger. “Zeke McRae. I’m going to kill him.”
Bruce raised his eyebrows, astonished by her candor.
“Well,” he said, “I’m pretty sure I know where he is—at least where he was a few weeks ago. Jim told to me take care of you gals…”
“We don’t need taking care of,” Arkansas interjected.
“I know you don’t,” he said, “but I aim to take you to that dude, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want,” Irma said.
“Then you best make it through this,” he said with a half-smile.
Arkansas stepped up and said, “Irma, you wind around the right there, and Bruce, you go left. I’m gonna cross straight through the middle. And keep your damn eyes open.”
The trio separated and moved like a trident with Irma and Bruce taking the perimeter of the roof and Arkansas advancing amongst the scrubby tents. She used the barrel of her shotgun to push back flaps and peer into the tents. The first two she investigated were vacant apart from some filthy blankets and food wrappers, but the third housed a dead child whose skin was already coal black from rot. She wrinkled her nose at the stench of the small corpse and waited for a terrible moment to see if it would rise. When it remained still, she moved on.
Irma too checked the tents she came across, and to her horror she also discovered a few quiet bodies, their heads sporting various wounds that indicated their having been put down before they could turn into one of those flesh-eating creatures—or perhaps just after. The air hung heavy and humid, locking the reek of decay damply in place. She did her best to ignore it and went along the edge of the roof, occasionally catching glimpses of Arkansas’s hair bobbing over the tops of the tents and the ancient A/C units that were unevenly dispersed over the tar-splattered roof.
At one point she paused to stare out over the still, gray city. Countless columns of slate-colored or jet black smoke spewed up from fires that burned for miles. She saw hundreds of cars, many of them cracked up against each other or smashed into the sides of buildings, but none of them were moving. The only signs of motion she spied from thirty stories above, were clutches of stumbling corpses moving clumsily through the streets. As she scanned the wretched scene, her eyes lighted on a rooftop several blocks away where a dozen bodies lay in two ordered rows of six. Had they been arranged that way, or was it some kind of mass suicide where they all got into position and waited for death? She shuddered at either thought. This was a city of the dead, a writhing, rotting, cannibalistic necropolis. There must have been glimmers of hope and happiness here, even for the poor and destitute, before the world ended, but there sure as shit wasn’t anything of the kind now.
When Bruce reached the far corner of her side of the roof, he saw Irma appear from behind a clutter of collapsing tents across from him. He shrugged at Irma, and Irma shrugged back. Neither of them had seen hide nor hair of Little Tee. They each paused, waiting for Arkansas to emerge from the middle. Then a radio crackled on somewhere within the tent city, and the high guitar whine of Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead” pierced the erstwhile silence. Both Irma and Bruce stiffened, raised their respective guns. And from the direction they did not expect, behind them on the opposite fire escape, a shriek pitched even higher than Mayfield’s falsetto rose up.
“Well, that’s fucking great,” Irma grumped as she and Bruce turned in tandem to see a head with patches of bare skull coming up from the edge of the roof. She took aim and fired off a shot; the skull cracked like a chalkboard and the head ducked out of sight. Almost as soon as she’d done it, she realized that was her last shot.
And more were coming.
“I’m out!” she cried as a corpse climbed up the ladder and flopped down on the roof. Bruce shot it in the cheek as another one came up after it. He shot again, and another one fell screaming down to the ground far below. The next time he squeezed the trigger, his gun clicked. The next corpse, a man with no eyes and only a ragged flap of gray skin where his nose should have been, awkwardly pushed the still corpses out of his way as he came up. Irma made to move toward it, but she was frozen in place by the high-pitched war cry that erupted from Bruce’s throat as he sped toward the rising corpse and leapt into the air to deliver a spinning kick to the dead man’s solar plexus. The corpse spun around and toppled over the edge, shrieking the whole way down.
Bruce landed gracefully on his feet, catlike. Irma gawped.
“The hell was that?”
“Kung fu, baby,” Bruce said with a grin. “I’ll explain later.”
“Wow.”
Footsteps smacked the rooftop behind them, and though she knew her gun was useless Irma swung it around all the same. Arkansas emerged from the midst of the tents, saw the gun in Irma’s hand, and hollered, “Hey, now!”
“Sorry.”
“I heard screaming,” Arkansas said, scanning the area.
“We’re okay,” Irma assured her. “Bruce is—” She glanced over at him, blushed. “He’s like a goddamn kung fu master or some shit.”
Bruce grinned and shrugged. “I get by,” he said.
Irma met his grin with one of her own, but it vanished instantly at the crack of a gunshot close by. Bruce grunted, knitted his brow. Red bloomed on the fabric of his shirt at the shoulder, but he didn’t so much as step back.
Arkansas raised her gun and sneered at the emerging apparition of Little Tee as he limped out from the cover of the tents. In his trembling hands he held a mean looking rifle. His face shone with blood. The right side of his jaw line was frayed, chewed up, dripping red.
Arkansas said, “You got bit.”
“One of my own motherfuckin’ boys,” L.T. said with a pained half-grin. “You believe that shit? I pushed that jive turkey off the goddamn roof.”
“That what you gonna do to us now?”
L.T. laughed, shook his head. The frayed flesh of his jaw wobbled horribly.
“Hell, no. I’m gonna shoot you motherfuuuuuaaaaugh…”
The rifle fell from his hands and his arms shot out, stiff as boards. Arkansas jumped, startled, her eyes fixed at his twisting face. As he moaned and worked his jaw, the wound bled anew, dribbling blood and splitting more widely apart, all the way up to his ear.
“He’s got it,” Bruce said darkly. “He’s changing, now.”
Irma sidled up to Arkansas and said, “Shoot him.”
“Not yet.”
“What d’you mean, not yet? He dropped his gun—shoot him.”
“Not…yet.”
“Jesus, Arkansas, just shoot—”
Little Tee interrupted her with a pitiful howl, his voice shrill and loud. His fingers curled into claws and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. He took one awkward step forward, stumbled, stepped to the side. His head slumped to his shoulder. A thin rope of saliva spilled out of his bloody, open mouth. For a few moments L.T. shuddered and danced about, unsure of himself, as if trying to get used to the idea of being a walking corpse. At length he seemed to remember the presence of Arkansas, Irma, and Bruce. He froze in place for a second before turning his milky, matted gaze upon them.
And he shrieked furiously.
“Arkansas…”
Bruce touched her arm. “It’s done, girl. Put him down.”
Her lips peeled back into a mad smile even as tears streaked her cheeks. She slowly brought up her gun, pointed it at the dead, screaming man. L.T. shook his jowls like a rabid dog, took two more tentative steps forward. Not faltering, he took two more. He raked his claws at the air, missing Arkansas b
y a good three feet. But he was close.
“Ain’t a lot of good men left in this fucked-up world,” Arkansas breathed almost inaudibly. “But Jim sure as shit was one of ‘em.”
With that, she jammed the gun in her waistband, eliciting a surprised yelp from Irma, and lunged at L.T. The corpse did not flinch, nor did it brace itself for the coming attack. It merely maintained its gravelly scream and went down still sputtering when Arkansas planted a fist square in the damned thing’s throat. When L.T. hit the roof, Arkansas lunged again, raised her right leg like a flamingo, and brought it down hard on the dead man’s jaw. It canted to one side, snapped clean off on the other, and she kicked it twice more so that it came off completely. Now L.T.’s face ended at his upper teeth, several of which were now cracked and fragmented (and one shiny gold), a waggling pink tongue poking out from underneath.
Irma said, “For fuck’s sake.”
L.T. said, “Gnnnnnnnuh.”
“Finish him off,” Bruce groaned as a fresh spate of screeches roiled up from the ground far below.
“No,” Arkansas said brusquely. “He can’t eat nobody now. Let him starve.” She delivered one last kick, this time to the side of the corpse’s head. The impact left a bloody dent at the temple. “Let him rot.”
With a heavy, sad sigh, Bruce wrapped an arm around Irma’s shoulders.
“What now?”
“Bucktown’s done,” she said.
“Ain’t no Bucktown without Jim, anyhow,” Arkansas added, wiping her eyes.
Irma looked up at Bruce, shielded her eyes from the late afternoon sun with her hand.
“You said you knew something about Zeke. That you could take me—take us—to him.”
Nodding, he said, “If he’s still there, I can.”
“Still where?”
“The Black Sun School.”
“Black Sun?” Arkansas exclaimed. “Irma, that note…”
Irma gaped, remembering. Last thing he said to me was he gone to the black sun.
“Used to be a great school, it’s where I learned wushu. But that was before Killer Wu came to the country. Now it’s…I dunno. It’s all wrong, now.”
