Undead War (Dead Guns Press)

by Thompson, John

  In fact, we didn’t pay much attention when her screams stopped and his began. After all, some people back at the base might have had an issue with what we were doing, so there just wasn’t any point in having any enemy survivors. They’d only gum up the works for us, and things were hard enough already. The old man’s guts were strewn out for about five feet anyway. He would’ve gotten back up and noshed on his granddaughter and we’d have had to kill him anyway.

  And hey, it was just this once.

  Most of the time, we keep ourselves going with C-fluid. That’s “cerebral fluid,” of course. The Guard “harvests” it for us, packages it, and feeds it to us on a regular basis. It’s part of the whole deal. But we can get it ourselves, and we’re way stronger than Ferals are. We’re stronger than the living, frankly. Civs can actually bite through a human skull. Don’t try that in the cemetery, kids.

  Speaking of which, we’d forgotten all about Mendez in all the excitement. Our live observer would never have approved of us doing our own “harvesting.” But that’s okay. She’d already staggered to her feet and was whimpering loudly, trying to get over to the shot-up HoJo’s so she could chow down on fresh flesh. Tara just walked up and bopped in her skull with her ball peen hammer. Mendez got heaped onto the Hummer – unlike the dead enemy, we wouldn’t just throw her onto a field pyre and burn her there.

  Mike and Laurie were better for the garden-fresh C-fluid, but we’d need to bring them back to base and have their bodies jimmied back together by the creeps back there. I didn’t envy them one bit. Not too many morticians had survived the first nights of the living dead. There weren’t a lot of people left who knew how to make you look like you were “just asleep” anymore.

  C-fluid. It does your body good. But we have to ration it and take it easy as we go. It takes a lot of brains to keep me going, and I’m just one guy. There’s at least a hundred more of us I know about. We need that cerebral fluid all the time, to keep the pain away. But I don’t need to grab anybody and wrestle their skull open for braaaaaaaains. You guys do that for me.

  So who’s the monster, huh?

  ***

  We’d been working for what was jokingly called National Guard Military Police Authority for about four months, and at least in our county, the Ferals were getting kind of thin on the ground. So to speak. When they’d first started up Operation: Fight Fire With Fire, things were looking pretty bleak for the walking, talking, breathing, warm-blooded crowd. No matter how many Ferals they killed, they couldn’t contain the outbreak — because there was no outbreak. It was a universal fact of life, and dead people got up and ate live people everywhere. It didn’t matter how you died; being bitten by a Feral just sped the process up. (That’s another key difference: Unless I bite you somewhere that kills you, you won’t die from my bite. And anyway, you need the chemical compound to come back like me. No compound, no Civ.)

  I’m telling you, at first not a day went by that you didn’t have columns of black smoke going up and gentle snowfalls of human ash coming down. All right, call it Feral ash if you want to. Presto change-o, we call it something new and it becomes palatable. Like beef isn’t a cow and fertilizer isn’t dung.

  It wasn’t until they rolled out the barrels and made us Civs that you really started seeing the tide turn. I don’t know who was the genius behind shipping out the compound and deploying it, but Operation: Fight Fire With Fire has been a big ol’ success.

  In just half a year, they’re talking about plans for repopulating and rebuilding. Half a year earlier, there was some serious doubt about not enough people being left alive for there to be a viable gene pool to continue the species. The whole “if you die, you return as a flesh-eating corpse” thing is still an issue, but I’m sure they’ll figure out a solution. Don’t they always?

  Meantime, we Civs had patrol to do. So we went.

  We drove around a lot. The highways were quiet as always, particularly at night. One thing we have in common with the Ferals is that we don’t need to sleep, and I’m pretty sure even resting is just a psychosomatic thing for us, too. People used to joke about the Ferals, “Look, the zombies are coming to get us! We’d better walk a little faster.”

  Yeah, good luck “walking a little faster” 24 hours a day, seven days a week, sick or wounded or weighed down, ace. You’re gonna need it. Mr. Feral and his friends never, ever stop. Slow, clumsy, yeah, but they just keep going and going and going and going.

  Us Civs? Nobody ever made that joke about us. We run like we’re in the Super Bowl. Why not? No breathing, no heartbeat and it already hurts like a bitch to be dead, so no amount of running is ever going to wear us out or make us suffer any worse. If our bodies hold together enough and the terrain’s good enough, we can just run like the wind until we catch you.

  Or we can just go get a car or a helicopter or something…

  Like I was saying, we were patrolling a lot, but not finding much. At that point, just about everybody who was still alive had either gone to one of the major compounds or was so well holed up and organized that we called on them for help sometimes, and vice versa. Most of the Ferals we were finding had wandered off into remote or difficult places. We’d find them in the sewers and storm drains, drainage culverts, woods and gullies, all over the place. There was rarely more than a handful in a bunch now. Just a while ago, Ferals lurched around in mobs the size of armies in this area. Hundreds of ‘em. It was like seeing a herd of buffalo or something.

  Almost brings a tear to my eye, thinking of it; it was kind of beautiful in a way…

  We stopped the Hummer on a back road. Morgan had the proverbial “unerring instinct” when it came to Feral sign – I think he used to do some hunting when he was breathing, or maybe he was just a really good paintball player – and he told us to stop and have a look. It wasn’t the most promising location for a patrol, but we’d cleared out all the truck stops, rest stops, horse ranches and whatever else sometime back. The country was fairly open, with just clumps of brush and copses of trees, low hills here and there, and an old quarry pit.

  We split up to cover more terrain faster. Bet you didn’t know the monsters did that too, did you? Hide and seek is a good teacher for Life In These Postapocalyptic Times. Rasul and Tara went for the trees and a smoke, while Morgan and I clambered down into the quarry.

  We were reasonably careful on our descent, too. Civs are unbelievably tough in a lot of ways, but we don’t heal up… ever. You don’t want to break a leg and have to have it “repaired.” Ouch.

  When we reached the bottom, it wasn’t much to see. Big rocks, little rocks, dust. Whoop-dee-doo. But you never knew, huh? We did our usual “quiet like a zombie” routine and started to search.

  Before very long, we found them: Three Ferals lying around like random corpses in the quarry. What did I tell you? Morgan always knows. They started to get up, groaning and grunting, two males and a female. The males had died teenaged, one black and one white, and were dressed to go out skateboarding. The black kid looked like he’d had gangrene from a gunshot wound in the arm. The white kid looked like another Feral had chewed on his shoulder. All three of them looked at us with the usual stupid bewilderment, then shuffled half-heartedly toward us.

  People were optimistic about rebuilding, but there still weren’t any ammo factories running and despite what you may think, America doesn’t have a limitless stockpile. We had full clips handy, but standing orders still stood: Spike ‘em. We have plenty of spikes.

  “Let’s take care of the black kid first,” Morgan said.

  “Why?”

  “In a horror movie, it always works that way.”

  “Right. Okay, come on, kid. This won’t hurt.”

  We slung our weapons and marched over to the dead black kid. His friend tried to stop us, slapping at us in this really imbecilic fashion, and the woman started to wander off. No matter, we’d catch her. Morgan irritably held the black kid in place, punctuating his words by repeatedly kicking the flailing white bo
y away: “Your turn’s next, get away, we’re going to spike you both, get away, don’t worry it’s just a railroad spike through your head, get away, all the cool kids are doing it, get away…”

  The black kid’s eyes focused on the spike when I placed it over his forehead and for a second I think he understood what was about to happen. His mouth opened and closed, rank with rot, and I slammed the hammer down onto the spike. He flopped, truly dead. “Okay, let’s give the other guy his piercing.”

  The white one stopped smacking at us when we’d spiked the black one. He just stared down, maggots squirming – I am not making this up – in the liquid inside his right eyeball. I have no idea how that’s possible, but I think whenever I tell this story again, I’m going to call him Aquarium Eye. Anyway, all the fight was out of him. He just tugged away a little, then we had the spike through his head and he was ready to be hauled up out of the quarry for the burning pile back at base.

  There was only one of the Ferals left. After we put that spike through her head, we could call it a day. This was the biggest group of them we’d seen in weeks, and they hadn’t been much trouble. It didn’t take much to catch up with the female.

  That poor slimebag. She was like us, but so different. Couldn’t talk, couldn’t drive a car; I mean, the Ferals are like a bunch of infants who went to a frat party and got, like, totally wasted, bro. Way more fragile than my kind. Like I say, you could pick up a tire iron and put it splat through her brain and that would be the end for her. Me and Morgan couldn’t care less about your tire iron. We eat your brains, you don’t smash ours. Or if you do, it won’t stop us.

  It must have been Funny Eyeball Day. She had an eyeball out of her socket, but the other one rolled and stared like a panicking filly. Something in her cerebellum couldn’t grasp it. I imagined it like this: “YOU… DEAD… TOO… WHY… YOU… NOT… LIKE… ME? WHY… YOU… KILL… OTHERS…?” I bet it was something like that. Probably no words, but like that.

  I looked at Morgan, and I knew he was thinking what I was thinking.

  What the hell are we doing?

  I put down my sledge and rested my weight on it. Morgan let his machete hang loosely at his side. I didn’t think it made any difference, but I pulled my lips back in a smile for the Feral. You know, the death’s head. She gaped at me, stupidly like always, then did a slow three-point turn and looked at Morgan. He gave a little Baron Samedi bow.

  There but for the grace of the United States Army went us.

  Sometimes there’s a little vestigial intellect in a Feral. She screwed her face up, trying to have an expression. After a minute, the sludgy muscles under her skin shaped it into a puzzled frown. I spoke, knowing she didn’t get the words, but maybe she’d get the point.

  “Have a nice day, cousin.”

  It didn’t take but another few minutes for her to get it. She stumbled away to go find some nice, warm, screaming, two-legged food. It made me hungry just thinking about it, so I took a sip off my warm C-fluid — cerebral fluid — packet. It’s like a Juicy Juice for a grown-up, you know? A dead grown-up.

  We have a good system now, and it’s in everybody’s interest to keep it going. The living need to be safe from all the living dead, and us Civilized can be reasonable if you give us a chance. The Ferals have their “outbreaks,” and they need to be contained, so warm people send in the Civs. We handle it so you don’t have to. But you know, it wouldn’t be prudent to handle it all perfectly. No need to wipe out the Ferals. Sooner or later, you’d figure out that you didn’t exactly want Civs around either.

  And let’s face it; I do have to think of the long run. It’s not like I’m ever going to die again, after all.

  DEATH STREET

  Gary Murphy

  The master plan was to get from one end of the street to the other without getting eaten alive by a horde of living dead. A competition, the survivor would be awarded a month’s supply of heroin and alcohol. Ant, an alcoholic, addict and whore would have sold her soul to the Devil for a fix of any of this substance.

  Wholly in red and black latex, she was attractive, sexy and most of all she was available. Men would murder to spend a night with her and indeed had, and had they known of her weaknesses they would have realized they needn’t have tried so hard.

  The zombies shuffled for release from their minor restraints and Ant had her eye on the prize. The Greek casually observed in the distance at the opposite end of the street.

  Andreas Polovos – the Greek - carried the heroin, ensured a night of cock and the promise of a crate of Jack Daniels. Even in this era of zombie apocalypse with the pandemic at this scale the people still found time to get drunk, get high and spend time fucking into the early hours.

  Suddenly the signalling whistle sounded and she moved out. The dead were unchained and given her direction.

  Tense situations such as these rewarded her with a severe tingling in her pussy…

  With every vile termination, Ant did, indeed, climax, and the feeling was monster-good. A sensation which started as low down as her feet and ascended into her sternum…then travelled up into the rest of her in vast belly-biting torrents.

  She was not too sure about this situation ahead, though. Her style and panache at dispensing with these Undead had slipped recently as a direct result of her massive drug and alcohol consumption. It fuelled her, that was true, but it also blurred her judgement. It was like some downward spiral, for she needed heroin desperately, and in partaking she had clouded her goals for the future, sacrificed the company of family and friends…all for the needle.

  There were so many people she had betrayed.

  She wished dearly she could resist, and not succumb, but that grip it had on her was a concrete block, a tightening vice. The poisonous passions and the thrill-ride when confronted by zombies lasted long into the night before and after her priorities, which consisted a diet of drink, drugs and bizarre sex. Not necessarily in that order.

  In the cold light of day they were a terrifying, horrific threat in standing, as corpses shuffled without direction towards a fresh food source. It seemed they zoomed in on young Ant, and made their way towards her slowly.

  ‘Fuck,’ said the raven-haired vixen. ‘You motherfuckers can eat my pussy!’

  She was 27-years-old and a young woman with a documented history of schizophrenia. Following her self-discharge from an intensive care unit at a psychiatric institution yesterday she had made her way out of the hospital grounds and attacked a number of members of the staff and the general public. Nobody knew what disturbed her most, but she was believed to have possessed a lot of mental ‘demons’…whatever they might have been. But Ant dealt with them admirably…much to the nurses’ chagrin. The ones who ‘cared’ for her…

  Out of hospital and now on Death Street. The first one approached, dragging its intestine. The horror of these plague victims were making her physically ill. Thinking about them, dispatching them…she felt a mind-wrenching nausea.

  It had a paralysing effect sometimes.

  Ant grabbed her weapon from her jacket’s lining – a hammer. It was the set rule.

  The zombie was close now. It dragged itself before her for its seemingly military presentation of sorts as Ant let loose and bashed its head. It fell in a crumpled heap and she kept hitting it as it twitched, splitting the bone until the body became quiet and still. Even then she kept battering it.

  ‘You are what you eat,’ she laughed. ‘And right now you’re shit.’

  Zombies were not fussy eaters.

  As Ant groaned, a shadow materialized out of the shade of the row of buildings, side-lit by the flickering sunlight. Smoke drifted into the sky from a recently smashed car as the nearby zombie moved closer, intending to chew her head off. The grizzled, unshaven face leered towards her now, sending a shiver through Ant suddenly as she realized she had met the person before.

  ‘…Roger?’

  Civilians hid in tunnels now and they needed rescue more than those who had barrica
ded themselves up high, on rooftops and in the high-rises. Zombies didn’t climb stairs – just something they didn’t do. They just wandered or stumbled or crawled around until they got a whiff of the living and they went after them.

  These stiffs couldn’t run!

  Some of them on Death Street were bustled up in small corpse gangs, but given the fact living flesh was nearby they were scrambling for it the best they could. There was one thing using its face to try and drag itself along the pavement.

  ‘…Roger, is that you?’ she asked.

  An ex-boyfriend/dealer/pimp/sugar-daddy she had gotten a fix from only yesterday after leaving hospital. She’d actually gone straight to his home…they had spoken, had a laugh…fucked…then gotten high as kites on crack cocaine…and now sad unfortunate fella was a walking corpse.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and abruptly rapped him dead-centre in the face with the hammer. ‘But we had a good time, yeah?’

  She hit Roger again with the hammer, caving his skull.

  Curiously the Greek and the Fat Man stood there and observed her efforts to reach them and reach them whilst fully intact. Money men, the drugs men, each having a vested interest in Ant’s journey through danger…the Fat Man bet she’d never make it.

  She paused to breathe…cool, scented air swept over her face with the tender breeze, taking away for the moment at least the burning-rubber-like stench of raw and charred meat and zombie blood. She swayed, almost losing balance, as if the air was a little too rich for her liking.

  She ran her tongue over her teeth and spat the last of the vomit from her mouth.

  ‘…Better!’ she hissed.

  Presently she was dosed up on pain-killers which she had snorted quietly before coming here this afternoon, and black coffee.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with this stupid fucking hammer?’ she hollered at the men.