The Curse of the Zombie (The Cursed Book 4)

by Ray Cluley

  Johnny broke away from the group and hurried to the man, spurring the others to shout with renewed urgency. He didn’t need to know Tamashek to know they wanted him to stop. Pete yelled too.

  “He just needs a fucking drink!” Johnny yelled back.

  Johnny knelt near the man. He found one of the other cups still filled and pressed it to the man’s nearest hand. There were stumps of bone where his fingertips used to be. They scraped against the metal of the cup.

  “Shit!”

  Johnny let the cup go and it tumbled, spilling tea over his hand before he could recoil. It scolded him.

  “Fuck!”

  The eyeless thing grabbed Johnny around the wrist with its bony fingers and yanked his hand close to its mouth. Johnny saw the full horror of the creature’s face then. Sharp cheek bones protruded from skin that had been sand-scoured into leather where the turban cloth no longer protected it. The lips were a ragged absence, and the teeth... The thing’s teeth were brown, blackened fragments. They poked from shrivelled gums. Many were missing. When it tilted its head to Johnny’s hand, sand spilled from the sockets of its eyes before a dry tongue emerged from between its teeth to rasp its withered meat across Johnny’s palm. He had a preposterous thought – was this how they said hello out here? – and then the mouth clamped down upon his skin.

  Johnny made a fist and yanked his arm away, so surprised at getting free that he fell back. Then Pete was there, dragging him away as the thing groped air and sand.

  “Did it bite you?”

  “No.”

  Johnny realised they were both using ‘it’ instead of ‘he’.

  “No, it just-”

  The ragged man crawled at them. It was fast, scampering spider-like on all fours.

  Someone fired again and this time it was no warning shot. A tiny cloud of dust burst from the thing’s shoulder instead of blood but the force knocked it down. It recovered quickly. Crawling. Reaching. It passed its hand through the campfire without pausing and a tangled length of turban caught light. Flames travelled fast up to the thing’s head and still it opened and closed its hands, reaching even as it burned.

  A heavy ‘TUNK!’ and the overlapping sound of another rifle shot told them the water butt had been hit. Following that, the drumming sound of water pouring onto the ground. It arced from the container on two sides.

  The burning man crawled right to it.

  “The Toyota!” Bachir called. “The Toyota! We go now!”

  They piled into the open back of the vehicle. Bachir started it up and made a quick two point turn. Johnny braced himself, holding tight as the vehicle lurched and accelerated. He looked back.

  The thing in the sand was cupping its hands to its mouth while its head burned. It drank, and it drank again, wasting no water on the flames that consumed it. Soon it was only the light of that fire, and then even that was gone, quenched by the desert’s darkness as they sped away into the night.

  “How’s your meal?” Johnny asks.

  She offers him her plate but he makes no move to accept any food. “Want some?”

  It’s the national dish, couscous with lamb and vegetables, something so common that the Arabic name for it - ta’am - simply translates as ‘food’. She also has a bourek, an Algiers speciality of mincemeat with onions and fried eggs, rolled together and fried in batter. It’s delicious, but she’s only picking at it.

  “No, thank you.” He smiles. She looks to where Dean is enjoying his spicy arechorba soup but he doesn’t see her. He’s scrolling through something on his phone, the seat he’d been saving for her taken by someone else.

  “We ate from a communal bowl with the Tuareg,” Johnny says, “but the first few times we didn’t realise each man ate an equal portion. We just kept scooping it up, thinking that when one or another lay down his spoon he was simply full.” He shakes his head. “We were greedy.”

  Louisa can’t think of a more apt analogy for the Algerian situation than a bowl of food shared this way. The rest of the world scooping holes out of the country, helping themselves to its resources.

  She realises she’s missed something Johnny has said. “What was that?”

  He rubs his mouth.

  “You said something.”

  “Tenere den tossamat lat medden eha sahat.” He picks up his drink. “Means, I’m thirsty.” His hand trembles, but not enough to spill anything.

  For the few moments he contemplates it the only sound is Louisa’s cutlery scraping against her plate. “What does it really mean?” she asks.

  He sighs, and puts the drink back down without tasting it. “It means, the desert is jealous and its men are strong.”

  Having spent a tense and uncomfortable night in the vehicle, they returned at first light to retrieve their equipment and found a corpse laying next to the empty water container, bone-tipped fingers resting on plastic that had melted into a sunken contorted shape. The body looked much the same, a charred bent shape that had folded into itself. The head and one shoulder had burned to blackened bone. The skull and scapula poked from what little flesh remained on its back.

  “Bachir? What the hell was it?”

  Bachir acknowledged Johnny’s question with a nod but said nothing.

  “Bachir?”

  He nodded again and said, “Tenere medden.”

  “What?”

  “Desert men. Ones who have lost their way.”

  “Lost his way. Right. Okay.”

  “We have a proverb-”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Johnny…” Pete shook his head.

  “It is a simple proverb,” Bachir continued. “‘Water is life’. What you see did not have this.”

  “Water?” Pete asked.

  Bachir clucked his tongue but also shook his head.

  “The school picture,” Johnny said. He held his arms out to his sides like the chalkboard skeleton man.

  “Yes. So others will know and stay away. Tenere den tossamat lat medden eha sahat. The desert is jealous and its men are strong. They are dangerous. Like mines, scattered in the desert.”

  Pete pointed at the other Tuareg, bickering at the truck. “Is this why they’re arguing?”

  Bachir sighed. “There is always disagreement among the Tuareg.”

  “Can’t you just order them to take us?” said Pete. “I mean, this isn’t a democracy.”

  Bachir shook his head. “It is not my Toyota.”

  Johnny laughed without humour.

  “There are people out here who might need our help,” Pete said.

  Bachir indicated the body on the ground. “There might be more.”

  “Dangerous, like mines, yeah? So we need to warn our friends.”

  Johnny took out his cell phone. No signal of course, but he wanted to take a picture of the body. When he raised it to capture the image, though, Bachir slapped the phone away. He hissed something sharp in Tamashek then kicked at the burnt remains of the body. Johnny and Pete stepped back, surprised by the man’s outburst. They were surprised, too, by how quickly and completely the body crumbled. The remains of the shoulder clouded to ash and scattered. The body shifted and the head toppled free, collapsed in upon itself, and dispersed with the wind-blown sand.

  “No,” Bachir said. “Nothing to see.”

  “What the fuck, man?”

  Pete put his hand on Johnny’s shoulder but spoke to Bachir. “Just take us to the site.”

  Bachir stared at them. Johnny couldn’t tell if this was the man’s reply, a physical demonstration of refusal, or whether the man was simply reconsidering the request. Never mind that it had been agreed already. Never mind that it was the reason they were out here in the first place.

  Pete withdrew his wallet and emptied it of money. He offered the crumpled notes and said again, “Take us.”

  Bachir looked at the offered hand. Eventually he took the money and returned to the truck.

  “So you didn’t get a picture?”

  “No.”


  “That’s a shame.”

  Johnny nods. “You’re a ‘seeing is believing’ type.”

  “Journalist.”

  “Won’t take anything on faith?”

  Louisa wonders if he’s going to talk religion now. She looks over to Dean who raises his wrist and taps at his watch. She nods.

  “I believe in things,” she tells Johnny. “It’s just I need proof of something to believe in it.”

  Johnny nods. “A picture paints a thousand words. Okay. But they can lie too, you know. I used to see that a lot in the oil business. A chart or a photo or a certain rock formation and someone would think, yes, oil, but find nothing. Or they’d see something they’d rather not see, a problem downplayed for the investors, something to bury in a presentation until given the go ahead. They see it, but they deny it for as long as they can.”

  “All right,” Louisa admits, “but -”

  “Or sometimes,” he says, “there’s something you didn’t see. It was there all along, but you just didn’t see it. Not until it was too late.”

  The site was a vast open expanse of sand and rock different only to the rest of the desert in that a large tent had been put up and the perimeter boarded, an attempt to keep drifting sand from the reasonably levelled ground. Johnny was taken aback by the vastness of the desert around them. The signs of settlement, as minor as they were, seemed to emphasise it as a wilderness of Biblical proportions, an emptiness that threatened to make you a part of it, waiting for you to fade into dust so it could add you to its coarse grains. The sky was somehow thin, a sheer and fragile blue that was strangely heavy at the same time thanks to its heat. It pressed down on Johnny like a sedimentary layer, the sun a blazing white hole that offered no escape. On the horizon, heat shimmered as a mirage of water. A thirsty man’s beckoning ghost.

  “Hello?” Pete called again. He’d tried twice already.

  “Where is everybody?” Johnny said. “I mean, their vehicle’s still here.”

  It was another Toyota. There were crates in the flatbed but otherwise it appeared empty.

  Pete shaded his eyes, looking around. He pointed. “I see blasts. And there. Look.”

  “Is that a reserve pit?”

  Johnny jumped down from the truck with Pete and they headed for the tent. It was a marquee-sized affair, grubby with wind-blown dirt. Together they ducked into the coolness of the shadows inside.

  “Nobody’s home,” Pete said.

  There were two small stacks of crates, some folding beds, and some canvas chairs arranged around a table. Spread on the table were a number of aerial shots and maps of the landscape. Some were clipped in place at the table edges. Areas had been circled and crossed.

  “Looks like they found what they were looking for,” Pete said. He picked up a photograph to show Johnny.

  “People still use Polaroids?”

  It showed people smiling, their arms around each other except for the one reaching out to take the selfie. Each wore a white t-shirt with a comedy caption. Geology rocks. Stoner forever. One wore a comment about making your bedrock. Some of them held champagne flutes, raising them high, while another drank from the bottle with a straw.

  Johnny glanced around the room but saw no sign of their celebrations. Assuming they had been celebrating. Maybe they were just a bunch of alcoholics.

  “Cute. Look at this.” Pete showed Johnny another photo. This time people posed around a hole in the ground and on the reverse a biro scrawl noted a series of names. Jeffrey ‘boulder-holder’ Sims, Marie ‘gravel-pit’ Maynard, Fred ‘Flintstone’ Kane. Paul ‘rock-it’ O’Regan.

  “Okay,” Johnny said. “So where are they?”

  Pete shifted a tangle of geophones, wired spikes that would read acoustic energy in the ground, but found nothing beneath that would indicate the whereabouts of the missing team. “They might -”

  There was a cry from outside.

  Pete and Johnny exchanged the briefest of glances and rushed back out into the desert heat.

  The Tuareg were looking at something on the ground. Bachir spoke and in response one of them said something and threw his hands to the air. Another looked at Johnny and Pete before marching back to the truck with a few more angry words in Tamashek.

  “Better check it out,” Johnny said.

  On the way over they noticed more blast marks on the ground that had scattered sand and opened rock but were too shallow for any kind of survey or drilling process. Johnny walked from one to the other.

  “Oh shit, Pete.”

  There was a severed hand, brown-skinned, fingers curled like it was an insect that had died. The wrist was a burnt stump, the skin of the palm flaking with charred skin.

  “There’s another piece here. A leg.”

  Leg was a bit generous. It was part of a shin and a small chunk of calf muscle.

  Pete grimaced. “There’s more.”

  It took them closer to where the Tuareg had gathered. They were standing around the excavation they’d seen from the back of the truck. Johnny had suggested it was a reserve pit, a hole for rock cuttings and waste, but-

  “It’s not a reserve pit,” Johnny said.

  Pete asked, “What is it?” though it was clear he knew the answer already. He slowed his approached, not with caution but reluctance.

  Johnny reached for a flask he no longer had and settled for the canteen of water instead. He took a long pull, wiped his mouth, and sighed.

  “It’s a grave.”

  Louisa sighs, though she had known the story was heading this way. “Your geologists?”

  Johnny nods. “Three of them, anyway. We figured the fourth must’ve buried them. Or started to.”

  “Executed?”

  He shakes his head. It takes him a while to answer. “They were all dried up. Desiccated, like packet fruit, raisins or something. Skin all shrivelled tight over bone. Sunken into cavities. They all had their mouths open, like they were still screaming. Jaws right down to their chests, it looked like. Unhinged. Dislocated, probably, to get to the tongue.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The tongues were gone.”

  Louisa slumps in her seat with a sigh.

  “Yeah,” Johnny says. “Chewed or torn. Some way violent. Not pretty. Eyes gone too. Other wounds, terrible wounds, caused by blades.”

  “Who -”

  “Tenere medden. The pieces scattered around the site, near the blast marks and under the sand.”

  “They blew themselves up?”

  Johnny shakes his head. “No. Best we could guess, it was the geologists. They had explosives for the seismic survey. They’d drill into the ground and detonate a charge then interpret the returning shockwaves as they passed through different types of rock. Except it looked like they’d used the explosives to defend themselves.”

  Louisa looks over to check on Dean but he’s not there. His plates have been cleared away too, and two Arab men are sitting at the table instead.

  “Shit.”

  She looks at her watch and says it again, getting up, “Shit. Johnny, I’m sorry, I’ve got to -”

  “I’m nearly finished.”

  “I can meet you afterwards. It’s sad you found them dead but -”

  “Not the woman.”

  “What? You didn’t find the woman?”

  “No, we found her. But she wasn’t dead.”

  Louisa looks back at the table where Dean no longer sits, but takes her place again at the bar. “All right,” she says, “tell me.”

  Johnny and Pete began taking the bodies from the open grave and laying them out on the ground, examining the causes of death. The first, Jeffrey Sims, had been gutted. He’d been sliced open with a blade so that his abdomen flapped like a toothless mouth. He’d been emptied of his intestines, a few dried lengths spread across the bottom of the grave like thin flat strips of jerky. Johnny hoped the man had been dead before the disembowelling. The way his head had been bashed into fragments at the front suggested he might have be
en. His skull had been scooped empty.

  “This is fucked up.”

  Fred ‘Flintstone’ Kane had not fared much better.

  “This poor guy’s had -”

  “Fuck Christ!” Pete dropped the body he’d been about to lift and pushed himself back against the grave wall. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “She moved, man.”

  “What?”

  “She’s alive! Look, she’s breathing. Just tiny breaths, but look.”

  Her t-shirt was in shreds, her body marked with numerous stab wounds. There was little blood. Her breasts hung like deflated sacks and in such tattered ruin that it was no wonder nobody noticed her breathing: no one could bear to look for long. Her head was titled aside as if even she couldn’t bear to see her wounds. Not that she had eyes for that. Her sockets were cavities of sand staring blind at the sun, her lipless mouth agape in a yawn of ongoing horror. She was burnt too, by the sun but also blistered and blackened up one side of her body as if she’d been caught by one of the blasts. Yet despite her wounds, her viciously pronounced ribcage rose and fell. Rose and fell.

  “Give us a hand here!” Johnny called.

  The Tuareg were gathered around The Toyota and did not move, except to smoke cigarettes. They’d been that way since finding the scattered pieces. Only Bachir even glanced at Johnny. He made as if to approach but one of the others held him by the arm and said something that made him stay.

  “We must go,” Bachir said. “It is not safe.”

  “This one’s alive!”

  Bachir shook his head. “No.”

  “Jesus.”

  Johnny and Pete managed to get the woman out of the pit and up onto the sand. Marie. Marie Maynard. She made tiny gasping noises. Weak sucking breaths that barely moved her bony chest.

  “Are these bite marks?”

  Pete looked to where Johnny was pointing. There were savage circles of bites wherever she had been fleshiest, and even some discolouration. Bruises. Blotches that had faded to sickly yellow. “What are those, hickies?”