The Curse of the Zombie (The Cursed Book 4)

by Ray Cluley

  Pete worked something out of one of the wounds and Johnny thought it was a stone until Pete showed it to him, flat on his palm. It was a stump of tooth, brown and decayed.

  Johnny wiped at his mouth and reached for the flask he knew wasn’t there. Just his canteen. “What the hell happened here, Pete?”

  Pete was looking at the woman. Her skin clung to her bones. “Let’s get her into one of the tents.”

  She was so horribly light. Johnny felt like he was holding broom handles instead of legs, and judging by the way Pete looked at him as he hefted her under the armpits he felt a similar distress. They took her out of the sun, laying her down on top of a table of maps, photos and printouts.

  “It’s like she’s been out here for months,” Johnny said.

  “I know.

  “I mean, her skin, and -”

  “Yeah.”

  A sharp intake of breath drew their attention to the entrance of the tent. Bachir had joined them. “She is dried up,” he said.

  Johnny unclipped his canteen and tipped it to her mouth. Her lips were gone, along with most of her tongue, but she tried to swallow what was offered. The effort made her cough and she spluttered water over herself. Johnny thought maybe he heard a bone break in her chest.

  “We must go,” Bachir said. “Now.”

  “Help us make a space for her in the truck.”

  Bachir shook his head. “They will not take this one. She is tenere medden now. That is what they think.” Bachir shook his head. “They do not know the old ways well.”

  Johnny stroked the woman’s hair from her face. It was wet now, and coarse with sand. She made more gasping noises and her hands fluttered in her lap, tiny creatures in their death throes.

  “We can’t leave her,” Johnny said.

  Pete’s agreement was in the way he stared at Bachir.

  “Come look,” said Bachir. He beckoned them back outside. “Come.”

  Pete made a gesture as if to brush the man away and turned his attention back to the woman suffering on the table. Johnny, though, saw enough in Bachir’s eyes that he nodded and followed him back out into the dying desert heat.

  The other Tuareg were on their knees. They were repeating something between them, and bowing as if in prayer, only their prayer mats were still in the truck and they turned after each bow, marking points of the compass. As well as lowering their heads to the ground as he’d seen them do before, each Tuareg struck the ground with their hands, slapping the sand with open palms. Then around they shuffled to do it again.

  “They do not know the old ways well,” Bachir said, “but they know enough.”

  “What are they doing? Praying?”

  Bachir clucked his tongue but said, “Pleading.” Then he shook his head. “Promising.” He took hold of Johnny as if he was about to shake him. “Convince your friend, it is time to go.”

  Johnny looked again at the strange actions of the Tuareg and nodded. “Okay, Bachir.”

  Bachir’s single nod was one of relief. He released Johnny. “This would have been a good place for a well,” he said, watching his fellow Tuareg in their final bow. “Many routes cross here. It is a good location for water.”

  “It wouldn’t have been that kind of well,” Johnny reminded him.

  Bachir grunted. He knew. “Your friend,” he prompted.

  Johnny returned to the tent.

  “Pete, we gotta go.”

  The Toyota’s engine growling to life punctuated his sentence. There was a long blast on the horn.

  Pete didn’t turn from the woman before him. “Not without her.” He gathered her into his arms, cradling her body against his chest. “Okay, let’s go.”

  The sky had barely begun to darken but it had cooled considerably as evening approached. Sand was rising from behind one of the dunes, tossed in a new breeze. In the fading light it was red, like rust or dried blood. Sand passed over the levelled ground of the site, too, waves of it snaking in sheets over the terrain. Sand ghosts, here and then gone.

  The Tuareg were already in the truck, even Bachir. He was standing in the back, looking to where the sand curled up from the nearest dune, ocean spray off a descending wave. A storm of sand, building. “They are coming,” he said.

  “Make some room,” Pete yelled.

  Bachir, though, only shrugged an apology. “It is not my Toyota.”

  Pete ran at them, holding the woman close to his body, and Johnny followed, but one of the men in the back of the Toyota – Moussa – stood and raised his weapon. He fired a single shot. Blood burst from Pete’s thigh and he collapsed with a cry, pitching the wounded woman into the dirt. Johnny ran to block them, his hands up waving stop, yelling “No!”, but another man stood and raised his weapon and he fired, too. Johnny’s right hand went instantly numb and he snatched it back, clutching it to his chest. Warm blood soaked his shirt.

  Bachir smacked the roof of the truck. It lurched and then it was speeding away, a brief fantail of dust rising in its wake before being torn apart by the rising wind.

  “They shot me,” Pete said. “They fucking shot me.” He was clutching his leg and looking at Johnny.

  Johnny had his hand under his armpit, holding it there with as much pressure as he could manage, but he took a look to assess the damage. The hole in his palm was dark with blood and gritty with sand. He could see through it.

  “You as well,” Pete said. “Fuck. Why’d they do that, man?” watching as the truck became a distant plume of sand.

  Johnny was looking at the peak of the nearest dune. A line of men were standing in silhouette along the top of the sand. One of them was leading a camel. Sand was carried in clouds around them, ruffling their robes and tossing lengths of turban about in ragged snakes of fabric.

  “Pete…”

  “Yeah?” He was tightening a belt around his thigh and hadn’t seen.

  “Pete.”

  He looked up at Johnny then followed his gaze to the summit of the sand dune. The men he saw there began to descend. “Maybe they can help us,” he said. “Hey! Hey!”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  Johnny put his uninjured hand on Pete’s shoulder and repeated the phrase Bachir had used. “The desert is jealous and its men are strong.” When Pete said nothing in reply he added, “Tenere medden. Desert men. Like at camp. The fucking drawing, Pete.”

  And yes, as they came closer, both men could see these ones were missing their eyes. One had lost his turban, his head a withered husk of skin and bone. The camel that walked with them was a rangy fleshless things, a furred skeleton with a long toothy skull and eye sockets filled with sand. A humpless, deflated creature, its back almost flat except for where folds of skin had gathered. Its long throat hung thin and shrivelled, flesh toughened into sand-blasted leather where tan fur had fallen away. Its descent down the slope of the dune was no less clumsy than that of the men, sand shifting beneath its feet. Their approach was all the more menacing for its silence.

  Johnny looked over at the remaining truck. He fell to his knees and began patting at the clothes of the nearest body. “Keys,” he said. “Keys.”

  “Yes,” said Pete. He hobbled towards the woman he’d been forced to drop.

  Johnny searched the body, “Come on, come on, come on.” It hurt his hand so he tried emptying the pockets with just his left. He found nothing. He looked down into the pit where another corpse lay, then back at the approaching group. There were about a dozen of them, plus the camel. He didn’t know how dangerous the camel would be but then they seemed to have stumbled into the fucking Twilight Zone so who could tell?

  “Get in the truck, Pete. Lock the doors.”

  As soon as Johnny spoke the group tilted their heads to his voice. They adjusted their course.

  “Shit.”

  He dropped down into the blasted grave and began turning the pockets of the dead geologist there.

  The keys were in the first pocket he checked but in his joy at fi
nding them he forgot about his injury and braced both hands on the edge of the pit to climb out. He cried out in new pain and fell back into the hole. He dropped the keys to cradle his wound then had to sweep around in the sand for them.

  “Johnny!”

  “I’ve got them!”

  “Johnny!”

  He clambered out of the ground to see Pete was facing the whole shambling group. They were making great speed towards him. He had the woman under the arms and was trying to drag her with him, but even as light as she was it was difficult with his injury.

  “Look out, Pete!”

  The camel was hurtling towards him. Its run was erratic, legs too thin to support it properly, but when Pete looked up he had only a moment to move out of its way. He threw himself aside and it stamped past. It trod upon the woman. She let out a wordless wail that drew the others. The camel stumbled and tried to turn a sharp circle. It fell in the sand.

  Johnny hauled himself up, careful of his injured hand this time, and rolled out of the pit.

  “Get away from her!” Pete yelled. “Fuck off!”

  Some of the men had fallen to their knees beside him and were dragging the woman away despite his efforts. She was stretched out in a bizarre tug of war. One of the desert men, black bearded, turbaned in rags, groped her face briefly then bent his head to the exposed flesh low on her abdomen. Pete tried to push the thing away but another hooked its arms around him and pulled him down under its weight. Pete thrashed with his elbows and twisted, kicked with his good leg, but another fell upon him. It found Pete’s injury and squeezed, putting its mouth to the wound. Pete screamed.

  “Pete!”

  Another drew a knife from its robes.

  “Pete!”

  Pete had no chance to react or even see the danger, there were just too many on him. The blade was plunged into his stomach. He howled. More of them found where he struggled in the sand. They lowered their heads to him like he was a human trough.

  Johnny dodged the flailing camel as it tried to kick itself up from the ground. The meat had been carved from its bones in long strips to expose the ribs. The cavity beneath was empty of organs, and yet still it moved and struggled. It gnashed its teeth and scraped at the sand with its jaw as it kicked but only managed to turn itself in dusty circles. Johnny leapt over its legs and threw himself at one of Pete’s attackers. The two of them fell and rolled, Johnny sitting up as soon as he was able to hold the other beneath him. Most of its turban had been lost, making the narrow fleshlessness of his head all the more prominent, a leathered skull opening and closing its mouth at Johnny. Johnny held it down with his forearm across its throat. It gasped with a puckered mouth, teeth yellowed fragments in gums that had receded down to bone. Johnny felt something break, crumble, in its throat but the thing still strained forward. The eye sockets were caves of dried skin yet it seemed to know where to aim its mouth, its clawing hands. Johnny drew away from the teeth. He struck at the bony hands grabbing at him, managing to secure one in the grip of his free hand. He yanked it back. There was a sharp crackle and a shard of broken bone poked from a new bloodless wound. The hand flapped limp but that jagged splinter of bone stabbed at Johnny as the thing struggled.

  During his panicked dodges, Johnny caught several glimpses of Pete. The man was almost buried beneath a mound of grappling bodies, but a couple of them were patting around the sand in the direction of Johnny’s fight.

  The sharp edge of exposed bone scraped across Johnny’s face and his cheek opened right down to his chin. The stinging pain was immediate, followed by the warmth of blood. It ran in a line down his jaw and dripped onto the face below him which spurred a jolt of new energy and the thing thrashed under Johnny’s weight. Its gaping mouth no longer tried to fix on Johnny’s face but instead fidgeted to catch the falling drops of blood. It bucked and writhed and twisted: Johnny fumbled at his belt for his canteen. It was half empty but solid enough when he brought it down on the thing’s head. There was a muffled crunch. Part of the skull sank. Johnny let go of the thing’s throat to use both hands, bringing the container down in a fierce double-fisted grip. Once, twice, three times, and the face fell into itself. He didn’t stop until he’d crushed the head flat and finally it was still.

  There was no time to celebrate the victory, though. Brown hands, thin but strong, pulled him by the shirt, the shoulders, his neck, and he was drawn down into the laps of two new foes. One found Johnny’s injured hand and he felt the probing of a withered tongue in the wound. He yelled, but the other fixed its mouth at the deep laceration on his face. He pushed it away with the strength of revulsion only for it to return and clamp its broken-toothed hole over his right eye. There was an instant tightening pressure as it sucked and Johnny screamed. He tried to grab at the head but couldn’t pull his hand away from the other’s mouth. He was being smothered by scrambling bodies and could only push and hit with one fist but this was taken into the bony hands of something else – there were so many of them! – and then there was a mouth at the flesh of his bicep. He felt teeth push loose at the eagerness of the bite and then there was more sucking.

  Johnny’s eyeball popped. He felt it burst and wailed in agony as the fluid was lapped from the socket. Sharp fingers clawed at the new cavity as he screamed, scooping out wet jelly and wiping it into a slack gaping mouth.

  Johnny brought his knees up hard. He knocked one of the things aside. Another tried to take its place but Johnny shoved at it with the arm it had been trying to feed from. His whole body turned in the sand as he struggled. Unspooled turbans and folds of torn cloth tangled him. Arms and legs fought to hold him down, scratching his arms, his legs, gouging his scalp. Only when a wild kick knocked his dropped canteen, the container sloshing as it tumbled across the ground, was he able to escape, abandoned in favour of this new sound.

  He dragged himself away, panting for breaths they didn’t take, one hand over where his eye used to be, the other grabbing at the ground as his feet pushed behind him. He wormed his way like this across the desert floor. When he realised the crawl was taking him towards the heap of bodies swarming Pete, he stopped and rolled instead. This new course took him to where the ground had been opened for a grave. He grabbed for its edge, pulled, and let himself topple inside.

  Louisa is looking at Johnny but he only stares at the drink on the bar before him. He’s given up swatting at the flies and they busy themselves on his trembling hand. One walks the pale road of a scar up his arm before buzzing into the air.

  “I still hear them,” Johnny says. “When I try to sleep. I remember lying there, hiding, one eye gone to their hunger, their thirst, the other closed against what I’d see if I dared look out from the pit. I heard them, though. Not them, they barely made a sound. Heard what they were doing. The suckling. The soft wet sounds. Like kissing. The violent fumbling. The crack -” and here Johnny’s voice does the same “- of Peter’s bones. The sucking of the marrow. Before cowering away from the sight, I’d seen them fighting over handfuls of intestine. My friend’s guts strung out between grabbing hands, stretched and torn apart and fed to dead mouths, sucked flat and thrown away like… like candy wrappers.”

  The bar lights flutter on, fluorescents brightening a room that has become dark. Louisa winces briefly against the sudden glare. The reflected swimming pool disappears from the mirror behind the bar in the new light. She sees the room reflected in its place and realises how empty the place has become. She checks her watch again. Shitshitshit.

  “Blood looks black in the fading light of dusk. It’s dark. Like oil. I watched it spread from Pete in a widening pool but the hot sand sucked it from him as eagerly as the… things that fed on him, the things that drank from his body. They dragged their faces across the stained ground. They brushed wet sand into their gaping mouths and they put their mouths to each other for any trace they could find. They broke Pete’s head open…” Johnny pauses. He swallows. “They broke Pete’s head open for handfuls of brain… fuck, man, his brain…and I jus
t hid in a hole in the ground.”

  Louisa searches Johnny’s face for an expression to show he’s joking or lying, performing. Something to show her his madness. But he only has the hollowed gauntness of a man tortured by grief and personal trauma. She clears her throat but she has nothing to say afterwards. It sounds like she’s expressing disbelief.

  Johnny sighs. “You don’t believe me.” But he uses the same hand motion he’d used when she refused a drink: no big deal, I won’t bother you.

  “It’s just, it’s all a bit X-Files,” she says. And then, because he’d used the reference himself, “A bit Twilight Zone.”

  Johnny looks down to take off his sunglasses. “Nothing speaks louder than somebody’s eyes,” he says, and then he turns to face her.

  Louisa thinks she’ll see the joke at last, or at least the bloodshot lines of alcoholism. But one of his eyes is gone, skin scarred and sunken in the socket where it used to be, and the other is cloudy, a milk-white sheen making the eye look like a pale blister. She can’t look away.

  “Eighty percent water, ain’t that what they say?” Johnny asks. “Each of us is eighty percent water? Blood. Belly acid. All our piss and shit and sweat.” He turns away from her to put his sunglasses back on. “Our eyes.”

  “Johnny -”

  “Our bones are forever wet, you ever think about that? Bones are only dry when we die.”

  “How did you survive?”

  “By hiding. They were gone before dawn. Maybe they don’t like the sun, you know? Like vampires. Though they were more like zombies really. Dead men, cursed with eternal thirst. Dried up corpses wandering the desert.”

  “Vampires,” Louisa repeats. “Zombies.”

  If he hears her tone he chooses to ignore it. Or maybe he’s trying to offer more proof when he says, “In 2010 a team of geophysicists went missing. In 2011 a National Geographic group. Aid workers in 2011, 2012, and 2015. These are just the ones I’ve heard about, just the foreigners. Each time it’s easier to blame Islamic extremists, or drug runners, or good old misadventure. People aren’t looking close enough.”