I felt sick as I realized that could have been me, but I had no time to think. Footsteps! Something small and sprightly leaped on my back and I figured I'd found Mr Jenkins daughter. Her breathe stunk of death and I vomited on both of us, willing myself not to fall down. Who knew what other tricks lay on that damn stair case.
I fell back against the wall, choosing a bruised spine rather than a fall. The girl howled as something cracked in her lower back and she released me.
"Debbie!" Someone cried as a door opened, and as prophesied, a hole appeared in the ceiling over my head. Shaking attic asbestos insulation out my ears, I heard shotgun shells tinkle to the floor. Jenkins was reloading.
"Who’s out there!" Jenkins yelled, and gained the attention of his daughter. Like a Lion, she sprang at him, clawing and spitting dark mucus in his face. Offended, he let her live so long in his home - rent free - only for her to vent her rage at him. He beat her round the head hard enough to break the butt of his gun, wisps of white hair billowed out behind him in the ferocity of his blows.
He was skinny, a Scrooge in every sense of the word. In matters of money and his frame which believed that too much food was a waste of money. I wondered if he shared his wife and daughters diet.
Apparently, his daughter hadn't been fed that night, she occupied him enough to drop the gun so he could get a better hold of her. I picked it up like a miser on a penny and ended both of their miserable existences.
I was wrong about the bodies in the cellar. The fools that came before, crushed by weights in the ceiling were stored in the master bedroom, de-fleshed for his families pleasure.
A long search produced no jewels, and I was ready to burn the house to the ground when some kicking of Jenkins corpse to relieve my frustration knocked aside his robes. Like stones by moonlight, the great gold chain round his neck glittered.
I was rich! Unbelievably, God liked me. Then it struck me, why should I waste half of this chain by buying a place of my own? By then, I knew the location of all traps and an orphan knows how to use and re-use all that comes his way. It would be cheaper to get builders in to redecorate the place, rather than start all over again.
Stories must have reached town that this house had gotten some life back, as twice now, I've found thieves scuttling about in the dark. But this is my home now, and I have my own little traps. It whiles away the hours, watching them dart from one room to another like frightened children, avoiding the trip wires and blades.
None of them have made it out, and free food is good food. Old man Jenkins had some bright ideas how to make it in the world. Never give up anything that's handed to you for nothing! Let it be free accommodation, or a free meal.
Mom said that zombies were the bad guys, but of what I saw of them, at least they never starved. And I will never do so again.
Playing Alive
Richard A. Becker
“The last goddamn thing in the world we need is more of you puss-bags!”
The sergeant looked like he was about to pop a blood vessel in his brain, and believe me, that made me more hungry than angry. Still, you can’t let something like that just slide. So I looked at my fingernails for a moment, then addressed him boldly and directly.
“Then you’re ready to let the Ferals take over, sarge? They’ve got you warm folks outnumbered worse every day. Hundred to one now… probably more like a thousand to one by the end of the month.”
The red balloon of his face deflated as cold dread replaced hot disgust. He started to say something, then checked himself. I pictured the wheels going in his head, and that made me hungry, too.
“We… we’ll see. Not too many volunteers anymore.”
I grinned. It was a death’s head grin, cliché or not, because that’s what you’d have to call it. A spade’s a spade, you know.
“I didn’t volunteer.”
“…yeah.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “You’ve got at least six drums of ‘the stuff’ out back,” I reassured him. “You could turn the whole city like me and my team, if you wanted. You could even join us.” I felt the shudder. “But you do what you think is necessary. And so will we.” I started to walk out of the prefab command post. “Oh, and I prefer ‘Mister Puss-bag,’ just so you know.”
Outside the rigid tent-like structure, the night was full of the smell of gasoline, gunpowder, smoke and brains.
***
Not too far away, I caught up with Morgan and Tara. She was having a smoke, and he was sketching a monster head. He was a pretty good artist, actually. “Hey,” said Tara. I greeted her and Morgan in return, and sat down with them. None of us bothered much with cleaning the blood and crud off our fatigues any more unless we got some serious downtime, and they didn’t give us Civilized much of that. On the other hand, nobody else was getting a lot of free time, either.
“Sarge is trying to get us some more people,” I said.
Morgan didn’t look up from his art. “To eat?”
“What’s the matter, isn’t this stuff good enough for you?” I laughed, holding up my packet of C-fluid.
“It’s not the same,” he said.
“The Navy gets the gravy and the Army gets the beans.”
“We get the grave,” Tara smiled.
I smiled back, but business was at hand. “We’re due back on patrol in 30 minutes, just so you know.” I stretched theatrically. Everybody knew it was impossible for us to really experience fatigue anymore, though we did slow down a little now and then. “So smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”
“Don’t have to tell me,” Tara said. “I got these off one of the Ferals we killed this afternoon.”
“Smoking kills,” Morgan muttered.
“I’m so scared,” Tara said.
“When the Surgeon General tells you in person, you will be.”
“I keep picturing this guy in surgical scrubs with a general’s hat on, covered in medals and blood.”
“Aw, man,” I said. She was making us all hungry. It was time to change the subject. “Anything good on the radio or TV while I was talking with sarge?”
“No, just the world coming to an end, like always.”
“Yeah, they were saying that before all this started.”
“They were always saying that.”
***
Our patrol is called the 1-2-3. It’s an inside joke. No, I can’t explain it.
Anyway, we have no ranks, and if you don’t count Rasul (who refuses to get embalmed like the rest of us), we’re not even all that rank. Embalming hurts like hell when you have it done, but it takes the edge off being dead to a pretty great degree. We figure that it must be the constant decay that causes the pain – and believe me, you’ve never felt pain like this! – and even though we’re still rotting, us embalmed Civs need a lot less c-fluid than the ones who don’t stay “au naturel,” so to speak.
Rasul just says it’s against his religion and sucks it up. The pain and his c-fluid, that is. Some of us think he’s eating the grey stuff raw as nature intended, on the side, but nobody’s ever caught him at it yet. So it’s cool.
We were out on patrol one night when the radio in the Hummer picked up voices. By that point, that wasn’t very common anymore when you tuned away from military channels. But we’d decided to flip through the CB band and see if there were any truckers out there still, good buddy, and lo and behold we heard somebody.
“Hello…? Hello…? Is there anybody out there…? Please, is there anybody out there still alive….?”
We all looked at each other. Well, not quite alive, but we’re out here. Rasul picked up the mic: “’Sup, man, you got the boys and girls of the fighting 1-2-3 on the horn, what’s your 20?”
I thought the guy on the radio was going to cry. “We’re running out of food and water, and those things are still out there. We need help. We’re at 15050 Parthenia Street.”
Rasul smiled. No, really, he was smiling in a good way, not like he was hungry or something. Man, we can’t catch a b
reak, can we?
“We’re on our way.”
In case you’re wondering, the movies are all exactly right. When we’re really, really hungry, we can’t help it: We say, “BRAAAAAAINS.” That’s me and my kind. The Ferals don’t say anything you could understand. They’d be more like “Wuuuuhhhhhhhhh.” See, that’s why they’re Feral and we’re Civilized. And for the record, I don’t know what “Wuuuuuuuuhhhhh” means, either.
They’ve never been very specific about the military chemical agent that created me and the others, but my theory is that the government was trying to recreate whatever it is that makes the Ferals happen. Catchy name, “Operation: Fight Fire With Fire.”
Whatever it is, it gives us a constant need for C-fluid, which comes in shiny plastic packets. We sip it a little bit now and then, to take the edge off. It’s part of the deal, in fact, it’s the heart of the deal: No C-fluid and all bets are off.
But there was a cooler of C-fluid in the Hummer, and Mr. We Need Help and his family had no need to fear. The heroic zombies of the fighting 1-2-3 were on their way.
When we arrived, we found a barricaded suburban house besieged by maybe two dozen dead suburban zombie neighbors. The off-white stucco walls had been repainted in blood and rot; I’d guess the local zeds had been hammering their fists on the place non-stop for maybe three or four weeks. Give ‘em this: They’re persistent, even if they are too stupid to use tools for the most part. Maybe if somebody trained them they could, I don’t know.
It took a little while, and the right tools (like Rasul’s baseball bat, my sledge and Morgan’s machete) to shut the gurgling horde up for good and prep ‘em for the bonfire. But when we called inside to tell them that help was here and they could come with us to the Guard base, I felt like I should have a tattered sheet around my shoulders as a cape. Have no fear, CAPTAIN ZOMBIE IS HERE! I’ll save you, ma’am!
Of course, when they came to their barricade and saw what we actually looked like, it took several minutes and a radio call from our live superiors to convince them to actually come out of their hiding place. We are zombies, after all. Just really well put together zombies.
But mom, dad, two boys, a girl and Aunt RJ all got in the Hummer with us and had a nice safe trip back to HQ. Hooray for the Nice Zombies!
***
I was under a dog pile of maybe eight Ferals, laughing my ass off despite their stench, and carefully twisting one guy’s head from his shoulders. I couldn’t use my sledgehammer in such close quarters, and it really wasn’t very hard work, given the advanced state of my target’s decomposition. It kind of reminded me of working a drumstick off a turkey, from back when I used to eat food.
Me and my buddy Morgan had been point men for the patrol and were going down an alley when we got swarmed. The movement and slight noise must have made the Ferals react, and they did their little speed-rush thing they do. They’re usually slow, but when they get desperate they can really do a little sprint. It’s kind of cute.
And there they were: Buzzing with flies, bloodstains all over them (especially the mouth and hands, gee, I wonder why?), tattered clothing, wild eyes, the works. If I hadn’t already been dead when they jumped me, I would’ve probably had a heart attack right about then.
We still get excited in a dangerous situation, just like you hot lunches do. You know: Scared, anxious, angry, whatever. We actually do feel pain from injuries, for one thing. But on the other hand, us Civs are even tougher than Ferals, so it’s puzzling why we’d still get that reaction. I mean, I feel like my adrenaline’s going sometimes, and I don’t even have blood pressure anymore.
It took a while for Morgan to dig me out, and by then I’d taken care of almost half of my opponents. Ferals don’t have much ability to fight, actually. A few of them think to pick up a board or a rock or something, but mostly they grab and punch at you, and if you’re alive they’ll try to bite you. If you’re Civilized, they don’t even do that.
The Ferals are always puzzled by us. Us Civilized don’t trigger their hunger reaction at all, since we’re also dead and some of us don’t look too good (another reminder to my Civ brothers and sisters: Embalming is your friend!). They can’t figure us out. We’re not part of the big happy family of shambling corpses they know and love, we move like we’re alive, we talk, we use tools, we think, and yet we’re not alive and we don’t smell like food.
That must be one confusing way to go to your final rest. I imagine it’s kind of like going to an all-you-can-eat place and finding out that random food is going to jump up and kill you. Whatever. The alley was a filthy mess when we were done, and it was a miserable job dragging all those dead Ferals out to get them burned.
But hey, it was a living, so to speak.
***
“ZOMBIES!”
That was the shout from the Howard Johnson’s on the Interstate just before the shooting started. There we were, shouldering the Dead Man’s Burden for Uncle Breather, and some silly son of a bitch thought we were Ferals. And you know what happens once The Panic sets in: They all start shooting.
These were not particularly good marksmen, I have to admit, but there must have been about eight of them in there and they had rifles and pistols. Shotguns would have been worse, but those babies are like gold nowadays.
I think it was the new guy, Teddy Quinn, and his bum hip that made them think of us as juddering, awful, decaying corpses come to rip their steaming guts out and feast on them in the dying sunlight. The poor guy had been hit by a car during the first evacuations and spent six hours bleeding out at a roadside before they’d picked him up and dosed him up to become a Civ. When he rose up from death, he couldn’t quite walk right – it was a kind of step-stagger-step gait he had, and it must have crept out the live ones who saw him. And to think he’d always used Cover Girl makeup to try and look alive, too.
Since we were supposed to be the good guys and the Guard had started sending us out with just one live observer now, we hadn’t bothered to be particularly tactical. Not too surprising when you’re a zombie, you’ve had about one day of basic training, and you’re supposed to be out there hunting other zombies. So we were silhouetted nicely against the setting sun, lined up on the highway like a bunch of idiots watching the two tow trucks clearing abandoned cars, and not even thinking about things like, “Hey, what if some dickweed decides to start shooting at us?”
Mike, the other patrol leader, took a couple of light rounds to the head, smashing out his left cheekbone and part of his brain. “OOOOWWWWW YOU BASTARDS!” he screamed, throwing himself to the ground and hustling his weapon at the ready. At the same time, Laurie the Cat Lady took a shotgun blast in the leg and toppled over, cursing fluently and popping off about four shots into the HoJo with her sidearm.
Before you knew it, we were all shooting back, and the air was filled with red-hot steel-jacketed nastiness. The exception to participating in this firefight was our live observer, Corporal Mendez, who had caught a lovely bullet just below the collarbone. Unlike Mike, who didn’t need any part of his anatomy to continue existing – none of us Civs really do, organs and stuff don’t do anything for us anymore – Mendez was down on her back, convulsing and bleeding bright pink, going rapidly into shock.
They don’t give us explosives to go into the field. I have to assume that it’s either because fireworks are scarce or because they don’t trust us with them. The latter is probably smart, because I don’t trust us with them, either. One day of basic training, remember?
But they do give one grenade to each live patrol observer. I have no idea what the point of one grenade is, either, unless it’s to give them one last “screw you” attack in case they get overrun. Something like that, probably. Point is, Mendez had a charming anti-personnel fragmentation grenade on her person, and she wasn’t likely to be using it anytime soon. None of us wanted to end up like Mike or Laurie, with holes punched through our bodies and waiting to be patched up later like immortal Pinocchios, so we needed to end this quick.
Aw hell, who am I kidding? The guys in the HoJo had pissed us off. We wanted to kill them and go home.
I grabbed the grenade off Mendez’s belt, ignoring the big shiny stare of her eyes and the way her lips were foaming while she gibbered incoherently in her dying minute. There was no way I was going to play Rambo and run straight into the enemy fire, but I hunkered low and ran to the right while the two patrol teams continued to exchange fire with the survivors in the HoJo.
When I was two thirds of the way to the building, I could just barely make out Morgan yelling over the din of the firefight. “STOP SHOOTING, YOU MORONS! WE’RE ON YOUR SIDE! CEASE FIRE! CEASE FIRE!!”
If I could barely hear him, there was no way the live guys inside the Howard Johnson’s could. And anyway, I was ready to just dole out some hurt.
It didn’t take long to sneak up to the nearest window of the diner/motel, keeping my head low and hugging the wall. I popped the ring off the grenade and chucked it in. The suckers inside didn’t see it or hear it, I guess, because they just kept on shooting until it went off three seconds later.
I’m not going to glamorize my injury by saying it wasn’t my own fault. But seriously, I think the grenade bounced off a table or something and didn’t go far enough into the room. Regardless, a piece of shrapnel from the grenade whizzed out through an air vent behind me nicked me right over the left hip. That really, really sucked.
But that brought the gun battle to an end. Mike and Laurie were suffering, and we’re an ecologically minded bunch, so we didn’t want to leave anything to waste. When we broke into the Howard Johnson’s, we found our enemies had been eight survivors – five male, three female, a whole variety pack – out of which there were six dead, one dying and one hurt. That’s eight brains, right there.
The dead ones were still a few minutes away from turning Feral, and Mike and Laurie were in need. So Morgan lopped off six heads with his trusty machete and we carried them out to our wounded so they could eat the brains and feel better. We ignored the screams of the injured survivor, huddled over the dying man she called her grandpa.
Undead War (Dead Guns Press) Page 22
