Undead War (Dead Guns Press)

by Thompson, John

  The kid looked up, and even from a distance, I heard the scare in his voice. “Holy fuck,” he yelled. “It’s got teeth. It’s got fucking teeth.”

  And then Chuckie was on him.

  And then all the gimps was on all of them, and the screaming and shrieking started for real. I shivered to hear it. It was just like the old days. Just like the war.

  The girl watched too, only she didn’t seem to have much to say. She gasped and sputtered a few times as her face went white, and the gun drooped in her hand. I saw my chance, stepped forward, grabbed the gun and smacked her down hard. She fell into the dirt. Misha and Ivana pinned her while Yuri and Vlad ran for the house.

  I stepped up over her.

  “They... they have teeth?” she asked.

  “Tried to warn you,” I said. “Some of us smaller operations, we can’t afford no declawing and tooth removal, nor all them government fees and regulations. So we find our own way.”

  She turned toward the field. The shrieks and screams was starting to fade into whimpers and moans. They’d been so surprised that not a single protestor had gotten away. That was gonna make things easier.

  Yuri and Vlad came back with rope, guns, and torches. We tied the girl up, left Misha to keep an eye on her, then went into the field and took stock.

  Of the twenty-two protestors, nine had only suffered superficial wounds, arm and face bites. They was all in shock, but their bodies were still young and strong and mostly undamaged.

  We drove the zombies off these, then Yuri and his kids rounded them up at gun point and herded them to the barn. They’d stay locked in the stalls until they’d turned and we could start ‘em training.

  The rest of them kids was too far gone to be much use to anyone, so we just let the gimps have their meal. That was good too, we’d save maybe a week's feed.

  Which left the girl, still tied up over by the bus, struggling and fussing.

  We picked her up. She yelled and screamed, tried to kick, begged and pleaded, cussed us out in the worst language I ever heard, but we ignored it all and carried her over to where Chuckie and a few other gimps was gnawing on the fat kid’s bones.

  We threw the girl, still screaming and crying, at their feet. They turned to her the second they smelled fresh meat.

  But we didn’t let them eat, just let them bite. I didn’t want her dead.

  I wanted that bitch in the fields.

  Out of Juice

  Cindy Rosmus

  Nine days without power. Or is it nine years?

  And nobody knows why.

  Outside, neighbors scream. “I can’t take it!” someone screeches. That nut upstairs, with the wild eyes. Freezers stuffed with rotting meat. Melted ice cream and slime drip onto kitchen floors.

  Outside, garbage piles up. Always, you smell it. Why hasn’t it been picked up? No answers, just rumors: the gas shortage, runaway garbage trucks, sanitation workers are dead.

  Today, on your way out to charge your cell, the stench is the worst. It follows you to U Bust It, I Fix It, that new computer store.

  A lotta good, you think, technology does now.

  Still, this place is the new town center. Between the generator, and hot dogs sizzling on the grill outside, this place is your only hope. Dozens of neighbors, chilly in just hoodies, wait impatiently for their laptops and smartphones to charge. Power strip after power strip is added, each connected to the ones before, all hooked up to the “Big G.”

  And, for what? No answers to the Big Question. Just crazy theories, fears of Amageddon.

  “Thank you!” you mouth to Daniel, the young owner, whose smile seems to hold ancient secrets.

  “Any idea?” someone asks, nervously. “when the power’s coming back on?”

  It gets quiet. All eyes are on Daniel, as he turns a fresh batch of dogs. Finally, he shrugs. “Maybe never.”

  Above the franks, the stench of garbage wins out.

  ***

  It’s outside U Bust It, I Fix It that you find Rudy.

  “ ‘Einstein,’ ” he says, like it’s the good ol’ days.

  Despite the sad, gray sky, he wears his shades. Something wrong with his eyes, always the palest blue. Dark curls receding. How long has it been? Since he just . . . vanished?

  He goes home with you. Sex hot as ever, even on ice-cold sheets. His shades keep you from reading him: Where did you go? you wonder, as he rams you. Will the power ever come back on? He cums, hard.

  Upstairs, that nutjob paces back and forth. Her “Can’t . . . take it . . . anymore!” sounds muffled.

  Rudy lights the gas burners, to cook: beefaroni, minute rice, spam. Steam makes the windows fog up. But outside, what is there to see, anyway? Rats crawling up piles of trash.

  On the window, he writes his legacy: RUDY LVS EINSTEIN.

  But you left, you think. Why?

  Outside your window is a grate. Something huge thumps against it on its way down. Screams say the nutjob checked out.

  You wipe the window, to see better.

  Across the street, another neighbor jumps to his death. More screams. “Did you hear?” a female voice wails. “Why the power’s gone? They say . . .”

  It’s gone forever.

  Trucks trudge along, with megaphones blasting unspeakable news. Soon, you’ll all be one with that stinking trash heap.

  Still, inside here, it’s dreamy. Steam curls like from a witch’s love potion.

  In your bed, Rudy drowses, shades still on. Very slightly, his thin chest heaves.

  You edge closer.

  As you reach for his shades, images haunt you: scarred tissue, empty eye sockets.

  You, he once said, watch too many zombie flicks.

  From behind one lens, a worm crawls. But you smile, as it encircles your finger.

  00:00

  Selene MacLeod

  Seated back-to-front, Jael leaned back into Sarah's embrace, their bodies smooth puzzle pieces against one another. Sarah smelled the clean scent of Jael's hair, nuzzled her face against the side of Jael's neck, felt the pulse there like a fluttering bird.

  Sarah traced the smooth muscle of Jael's back, the knobs of her spine. Jael was a competitive swimmer, from a time when there was such a thing--all lean limbs, glossy hair and big teeth, like a show horse. She kissed the nape of Jael's neck and leaned forward. Her hands slipped across Jael's shoulder blades, around the ridges of her ribcage, and found the firm, fleshy mounds of her breasts.

  “Use your mouth,” Jael whispered.

  Sarah rested her head against Jael's neck, and breathed in her scent for long, sweet seconds. Jael pulled herself across Sarah's legs and lay flat beside her.

  Sarah knelt at the foot of the mattress and looked over Jael's trim, toned figure. Her friend's dark hair, normally drawn back into a casual ponytail, fanned loose. The pillowcase's psychedelic daisy pattern didn't match the brown and orange striped sheet on the bed. It had been their first apartment together, Sarah remembered through the haze of years, the great love that started out as college experimentation―LUGs, they called them then, Lesbians Until Graduation. Such a nitwit term for such an intense and beautiful chapter of her life.

  Sarah smiled down at her friend and lover. She could smell the vanilla candle scent and jasmine incense that hung like a haze even when nothing was burning, and underneath, the warm and living scent of Jael's skin. She bent and kissed the insides of Jael's thighs.

  Jael had gotten the piercings on a whim after she read about them in some horror novel; she loved the idea of being unlaced, even if it meant no sex for a long, barren two months while they healed. Sarah had delighted in walking around naked in front of her, saying “Just think how grand it will be when you heal up,” and laughing. Jael cornered her in the Student's Union building washroom, not even bothering to lock the door; Sarah sat her up on the sink and unlaced her, both of them giggling.

  No matter how many times she did it, the sight of the gold rings, four through each of Jael's pretty lips, with their fle
sh-coloured leather string done up cross-wise and tied in a prim, ridiculous bow, excited Sarah in some crazy way she couldn't explain. She eagerly untied the bow and pulled the lace through the rings with a flourish.

  “Ta da,” she whispered, and dangled the leather so it brushed the inside of first Jael's right thigh, then her left. Jael raised her head and smiled at Sarah; Sarah felt Jael's hand lightly brush the short hair at the top of her head.

  Sarah bent to her delicious task, her tongue gently flicking in rhythm, riding the wave of Jael's moans. When she felt Jael's hips bear down and the muscles in her thighs tighten, Sarah knew she was getting close. She used her thumbs and went in as far as she could and still breathe, when she felt something foreign slip into her mouth, something small and chewy. Sarah rolled it between her lips, then spit it out and pulled her head up slightly, her mouth at Jael's vaginal opening and thumbs still resting on Jael's inner thighs.

  A tiny white maggot squirmed in Jael's pubic hair.

  It took a second for Sarah to comprehend the disgusting creature. Before Sarah's revulsion could pull her back, Jael's vagina split wide and squirted out a viscous tube of some dank, rotted liquid that reeked of the grave, of rat droppings and years-old decay.

  Sarah opened her mouth to scream and vomited a torrent of sewage over her dead lover's waxy thighs.

  * * *

  Sarah snapped awake, retching, a heavy saltbile taste in the back of her throat. She leaned into the van's doorwell and dry-heaved. She could hear the sound of the road humming beneath the van's tires and Deedee's ragged breathing.

  Sarah cursed herself for falling asleep when she was supposed to be keeping watch over the woman. She fumbled behind her for a bottle of water, drank, then poured some in her hand and splashed it over her forehead. The water trickled into her hair, cool in the August humidity, and she felt a little more alert. She fanned herself with the bottom of her sweaty T-shirt.

  “You all right back there, darlin'?” Taz's drawl crept to her over the driver's seat. It was too dark to see his face, but he sounded every bit the grizzled, middle aged truck driver that he was.

  Sarah nodded, then realizing he couldn't see her in the dark, said “I'll be fine.”

  “Bad dream?”

  “What did you hear?”

  Taz chuckled. “Some moanin'. Actually, it sounded pretty good at first.”

  Sarah cringed.

  “Then you were kind of gaspin' like, and you yelled. I wondered if I should pull over and shake you or somethin' but then you were awake.”

  “Hm.”

  Sarah looked at the centre of the windshield, where the rearview should be visible. It was too dark to see anything in the mirror but a lone set of headlights, far behind them on the road. It wasn't that long ago that the stars were invisible behind a screen of smog and light pollution; the 401 would be backed up even at three or four in the morning, incandescents glowing yellow on the asphalt. Now all the lights were out, and nothing moved or made a sound.

  “Do you know what time it is?” The dashboard clock flashed 00:00.

  “Does it really matter?” Taz said. “I think most of the clocks have wound down. It's night, that's all.”

  Sarah nodded again, more to herself than Taz. “I guess I can't get used to that,” she said.

  “Heh. I saw this movie once, this guy was testing those, what do you call it, Acadian rhythms,” Taz said.

  “Circadian,” Sarah corrected him, before she could stop herself.

  “Yeah, that's it. And he went into this hole underground with like, a treadmill and some food and an EGG machine.”

  EEG, Sarah thought, electroencephalograph, but didn't interrupt a second time.

  “He wired himself up and basically just et when he was hungry and slep' when he was tired. Turns out the body, or at least his body is on about a twenty-five hour schedule of some kind.”

  “Guess the Romans had it right,” Sarah said.

  “What’s that?”

  “When they invented the clocks. Well, sundials back then. And the calendars, based on each day being twenty-four hours.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Sometimes, especially late at night when the road was clear of abandoned vehicles and he could drive a straight stretch, Taz liked to talk, and talk. Sarah wondered if it was just to hear the sound of his own voice.

  “Not many of those left, either,” Sarah said out loud. Sometimes she just wanted to hear her voice, to be sure she wasn't cracking up. If it came out smooth it was fine.

  She'd been a volunteer programmer at a community radio station, in addition to her answering service job. She'd been shoved out of the studio at gunpoint when the first Emergency Broadcast System signal started to buzz―local police weren't taking any chances, and their orders came from much higher up. By then it was too late. The story was on the Internet and the military couldn't contain the spread of information―correct or not--any more than they could contain the virus that caused the whole damn mess.

  Funny how she already thought of it as “the old days,” when not much time had passed between then and now. It felt like a lifetime.

  “What, clocks?”

  “Yeah.” That wasn't what she meant.

  Tired of talking, Sarah checked on Deedee. She felt the woman's cheek―clammy, but cool. Not a good sign. With a sigh, she dug in her pack for a cloth, poured a little water from her bottle onto it, and pressed it to Deedee's forehead. She didn't think it would do any good, but she couldn't think of anything else, and that's what they always did in the movies. Then again, that was for fever. Home remedies didn't work. What was she going to do, spread lavender oil behind the woman's ears?

  Sarah found her cell phone in her pocket and clicked it on. She held it up and stared at Deedee for a moment, bathed in the blue glow―all the cell was good for, now, charged in the van's cigarette lighter.

  The younger woman had kicked off the dirty blanket Sarah used to cover her, and she was clad only in a flowered cotton sundress. Her pregnant belly rose and fell fitfully as she slept, and the bite wound glared red-black against her collarbone. It was deep enough that Sarah could see the meat of Deedee's tendons, and she looked down at her lap, away from the bite. The cell light shut down on its own.

  “What are we gonna do, Taz?”

  “Whaddaya mean? About what?”

  “About her.”

  “I dunno, sugar. I'm hoping there's a hospital or something left once we hit the Capitol. After that...”

  They'd had this conversation when they agreed to pick up Deedee. The young woman, barely out of her teens, had been stumbling along the shoulder. Her hands were alternately grasping her wounded neck and heavy belly, and she leaned forward as if buffeted by a strong wind. Sarah was driving, and Taz had told her to pull over, they couldn't leave the woman behind, she was sick and pregnant and alone on the dark highway. It took every ounce of will for Sarah to stop the van, leery of the infected woman. Sarah and Taz had half-dragged Deedee into the back of the van, securing her wrists with a pair of bungee cords from the toolbox.

  The only time Sarah felt safe was inside a moving vehicle, with the fields and trees and rocks of Southern Ontario rolling slowly by, marking kilometers, silhouetted in the van's high beams. Between stalled traffic and makeshift roadblocks, the back roads were impassable, so they'd set out to try their luck on the 401. It hadn't been a straight stretch, more like picking their way along sections of the highway, then going through the cities for parts of the trip.

  Sarah hated the cities, with broken windows staring out at them like fleshless eyes in the heads of lunatics. Anything could be behind them. The shrieks of the infected haunted Sarah's dreams.

  It had taken them most of the first day to get past Toronto with its burned out buildings and nightmare merge-lanes. The abandoned cars had looked like dinosaurs; Sarah thought randomly, those ones in that Disney movie that crawled to the creek for a final drink, then rolled over and died.

  Sarah checked De
edee's pulse again.

  “Hey, Sar,” Taz said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I'm sorry, hon, I gotta get some shut-eye. Do you want to drive for a bit?”

  Sarah thought about it, then sighed. “No, I guess I'll try to sleep, too. We can get rolling later.”

  Taz signaled, likely out of habit because the highway was deserted, and pulled over onto the soft shoulder. Sarah could feel the change in vibration under the van as the wheels rolled off the blacktop and onto gravel. The van tilted on the passenger side. She glanced in the rearview, but the distant lights were long gone; the other travelers probably had the same idea.

  “Should you put on the hazard lights?” Sarah asked.

  “Naw,” Taz answered. “It's gonna be morning soon and I don't want to draw any attention.”

  Sarah nodded, again forgetting Taz couldn't see her in the dark. She crawled up front and into the passenger seat. She squirmed and tried to get comfortable.

  “Nighty night,” Taz muttered. He shifted his seat all the way back to stretch out his long legs, and pulled his baseball cap down over his face. He put his right hand down beside the seat and touched the shotgun that rested on the floor beside him, then crossed his hands over his beer gut. A few minutes later, he was snoring.

  Sarah opened the passenger door and stepped out on the gravel. She half-slid down the ditch at the side of the road, and found a place where the grass was high enough to shield her from view, if anyone on the road was looking. She doubted it. She unzipped her jeans and squatted, her head turned upward, listening to the sounds of the night. The buzzing and chirping of crickets accompanied her. Underneath, Sarah could hear something else, the slithery sound of something much larger, moving in the underbrush. Sarah touched the .38 that Taz made her wear on her belt. The weight took some getting used to, and Taz had had to show her how to use it, but it was a comfort in the night. She heard a coyote howl, a long way off. They'd gotten bolder since the shit went down. Well-fed on easy meat, their visible if not actual numbers were higher.

  Sarah didn't stick around to hear what made that sound. She finished her pee and stood up, buttoning her fly. It was easy to believe that she, Taz, and Deedee were the only human beings still alive, and Deedee on her way. The thought made her shudder.