by Curran, Tim
“They did it out of fear,” I said. “Fear that you’d throw them out to the living dead if they didn’t.”
“We have to have rules or we have no society.”
“This isn’t a society,” I said, “it’s a fucking zoo.”
Doc just smiled patiently at me. “No, it’s a community, Tommy. We survive by working towards a common goal and thinking as one. When we lose that, it’s all over. Now…this isn’t a prison or a cult. If you’re unhappy, feel free to leave. We’ll give you a rifle, food, you can even take one of the vehicles out there.” Then he leaned in close so I could see that beyond the fatherly warmth in his eyes there was something fierce and steel-gray as a gathering storm. “But if you walk out of here, Tommy, don’t ever think you can come back. You won’t be welcome.”
I just sat there, filled with too many emotions.
“Well?”
I stayed.
7
It was about eight that night when I heard a high trebly scream cut through the compound. I was in bed with Maria and I jumped up and nearly threw her to the floor. All I could hear was that pitiful cry and then I was pulling on my pants and shirt and boots and stumbling down the corridor, my heart pounding in my throat.
I heard the scream again and then I saw Earl stumbling in my direction, near the main entrance, and Ape was backing away from him like he had the plague.
Earl let loose with another shriek of pitiful wailing and I saw he was clasping his stomach and that his hands were red and glistening. “Help me…I’m cut…oh god…I’m fucking cut…”
He went down to his knees, moaning and sobbing, the entire front of his shirt like a blossom of blood. By then, dozens of feet were running in our direction, people shouting out to know what was happening, if the Wormboys had breeched the shelter.
It was about then that Murph came vaulting towards us, loping out of the shadows like a big monkey. His face was huge and shiny like a new moon, his teeth gleaming ice. He had a knife in his hand and there was blood right up to his elbow.
Ape watched him run by.
He had a shotgun in his hands, but he’d apparently forgotten how to use it as Murph threw the locks on the door and pulled it open, frantic and enraged and filled with the need to flee like an animal fresh from a cage. “FREEDOM!” he cried into the darkness out there. “FREEDOM! AH-HA-HA-HA-HA! FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST!”
He dashed out into the night, fading into the shadows while we all stood around gape-jawed and wide-eyed with our thumbs most surely shoved up our asses. I don’t know how far he got, but I heard a grunting sound out there and something splatter over the pavement and then the hysterical, screeching of the undead as they began to feed with sucking and chewing sounds.
“CLOSE THAT DOOR!” Doc cried out, stumbling up the corridor. “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD—”
You would have thought it would be our first reaction, but it wasn’t. We were still wired in place with shock and bewilderment and surprise. I was one of the first to even attempt it and as I moved towards that rectangle of darkness and those positively hideous sounds of slobbering mouths beyond, I caught sight of Maria’s face. It was twitching with horror.
I heard a sound like the buzzing of malarial larvae and felt a dank envelope of rot come blowing in from outside. When I turned, she was standing there; one of the Wormgirls was in the doorway bringing the cool, putrescent stink of the night in with her.
Somebody screamed.
Earl made a gurgling sound as his mouth filled with blood.
Just about everyone made a quick and hasty retreat but Maria, myself, Doc and Ape. And Earl, of course, because he wasn’t going anywhere that didn’t feature harps and pearly gates.
The Wormgirl took two lumbering steps in my direction and her feet made slow, oozing, squishing noises like sponges saturated with syrup. She was a large woman, distended with gas to the point that it looked like she was nine months along. Her face was crawling green pulp and there were so many flies on her you could see very little else beyond one glistening red suckered hole for an eye. I think what we all saw—and wished to God we hadn’t—was that her genitals were swollen blue with decay, the labia puffed out and drooping like the udders of a cow. She reached out a hand towards me. It wasn’t a violent seizing motion like most of them would do…it was almost gentle and caressing and maybe I might even have accepted it as such if her hand wasn’t a writhing larval mass, massive nodules and blisters popping with yellow gas.
I fell away from her and Maria pulled me back.
There was a moist smacking sound and a hole opened in her face that must have been a mouth, strings of tissue webbing the lips together. Her tongue was a bloated flap of maggots. When she spoke it sounded like her mouth was full of warm gruel. But as bad as that was, what she said was somehow worse: “Going…to the chapel…and I’m…going to get…marrrieeeeed.” And that barely even left her mouth in her slopping, regurgitive voice when Ape opened up on her with his twelve-gauge pump, firing not only out of fear but pure, unreasoning disgust.
He blew holes in her big enough to pass your arm through. Flesh that had the consistency of gelatin blew off her, revealing rungs of rib, a pelvic wing, a ladder of spinal vertebrae. He kept pumping and shooting and she made a sort of globby, mewling sound as she came apart in a cyclone of meat and black blood, gray ooze and suppurating tissue like rice pudding, leaking piss and shit and yolky egg-like masses of tangled red graveworms. Before she went down into a seething mass of carrion and plumes of corpse-gas, something fell from between her legs and splashed to the floor.
I saw it.
We all did.
A rubbery doll-like form…a cross between a human infant and a bloated white coffin-worm. It squirmed free of the slime and ichor. It looked up at me with a face like a glistening grub, reaching out with yellow-green gelid fingers.
That’s what I saw right before Ape blew it in half and then in thirds and then I could not be certain I wasn’t looking at a colony of undulant maggots.
The woman hit the floor in a splattering of meat and fluid and a flyblown, acrid stink that nearly reamed my nose out.
But we were hardly done.
The above nightmare probably only lasted a minute or two, but the entire time the door was open to the night and what waited out there. They were crowded outside the door by then: graying, gibbering ghost faces—dozens of them—that looked less like dead humans than the carven ritualistic masks of Chinese festival demons. Another sect of the undead with their own look: I saw bald, mottled heads, viscid yellow-silver eyes sitting in carved, up-tilted pits, noses fallen into skullish hollows, faces elaborately cut and scarified into braided, convoluting patterns, the corners of mouths slit up to cheekbones…all of it creating the gruesome effect of grinning death fetishes.
These were Wormgirl’s boyfriends, her suitors and lovers, maybe.
Then Ape kicked the door shut and without even thinking, I was throwing locks and muttering nonsensical prayers under my breath.
Then we stood around in the remains of Wormgirl and her progeny, seeped to the skin in a noisome membrane of rot. We had averted disaster…but just barely.
8
Once we had shoveled out the remains of our visitor and incinerated them, scrubbed down the entry with caustic antiseptics, and disposed of Earl’s corpse, we were faced with a new problem. Murph had been number six in the lottery and that meant we had to play again. We had to go through that insanity again scarcely a day later. Usually, there was a month and sometimes three, I was told, but here we were again, gearing up to play Doc’s sadistic little game and learn all about the creepy-crawly things that lived inside each other’s heads.
There was nothing quite like the lottery to bring them slithering out.
Maria and Shacks were probably the only two that were on my side, ready to mount an armed insurrection at my say so. But I wasn’t saying so. What I didn’t want here was some violent purge that would not only destroy Doc’s half-assed utopian
society but leave a trail of bodies. These people had to simply refuse to play. I was pretty sure that Ape and Sonny and Conroy, Doc’s would-be goons, would stand with us if it came to that. They were not evil men any more than the rest of us. They were scared, is all. They were following Doc because Doc had a plan and they had spent their lives as good little soldiers doing what they were told. None of them were particularly well-practiced in the smarts department.
But like I said, I didn’t want bloodshed.
And if I swung them my way…what then? I had no plan other than a half-baked possibly suicidal idea of us loading up in the trucks and buses outside and making a run up for Canada. I had a feeling the Wormboys and Wormgirls and all the wriggling, drooling Wormkids wouldn’t do real well in sub-zero temperatures when their limbs started locking up.
I was your basic anarchist in that I wanted to destroy the government but once everything lay in ruin I had no idea what to do next.
So lacking a cohesive plan we went about business as usual.
We played the lottery.
9
Again, the same scene: a group of shifty-eyed, borderline neurotic people packed into the dining hall, whispering, praying, chain-smoking, or just staring into space with a steely silence that spoke volumes. You could smell the stale sweat, the feverish anxiety, a fear that was bright and hot coming off every one of them and I had to wonder if that’s what it smelled like in those packed cattle cars bound for places like Treblinka and Sobibor during World War II. There was very little talking. Now and then a peal of almost hysterical laughter that was sharp as a pin would break out amongst the condemned.
Because we were condemned, you know.
Each and every one of us who stayed and played that awful fucking game were most definitely condemned. It was only a matter of when sentence would be passed.
Before we filed in there, Shacks pulled me aside and said, “I keep thinking about the things you’re saying, Tommy…I mean, really thinking about them. Maybe I never did before. Maybe I never wanted to. But…but to be tied up out there, alive, while those things feed on you…Jesus.”
And that’s exactly what needed to happen: every one these goddamn scared rabbits in Doc’s personal warren needed to do some thinking. Some real thinking. They just couldn’t go on like this, hiding behind a crumbling wall of denial that it would never happen to them while their odds dwindled and dwindled.
I sat by Maria and stared at Doc. “Well, let’s get going, Doc. Let’s find out whose ass is raw meat.”
“Tommy—”
“Why don’t you shut up?” Sonny said.
“You think they start with your throat or your balls?” I asked him. “Which do they bite into first?”
Ape glared at me with full menace and I smiled at him. “You better cold-cock me, asshole, because I won’t shut up. But don’t damage me…Dragna likes his cold cuts fresh and chewy.”
An elderly woman named Peggy began to sob and her husband made a low wailing sound that put chills up everyone’s spine: it was the sound of bitter, broken finality, of life accepting death and it was eerie.
“Please everyone,” Doc said. He cast me a look that tried unbelievably hard to be tolerant and sage, but it was wearing thin and Doc was getting very fucking sick of me and my mouth. I think as far as he was concerned, I was guilty of treason and sedition. He was probably hoping that I’d draw the X and he’d be rid of me.
The cigar box made the rounds.
People either tore them open with a mad, suicidal glee or held them out in trembling fingers like they were poisonous spiders.
“Hallelujah!” Sonny cried out in the giddy voice of a nine year old on Christmas morning, born again on the spot. “It’s not me! It’s not me!”
“Me either!”
“My skin is saved! Ha! I’m staying!”
I can’t say that they were all as piggish, crude, and insensitive. Many just took the verdict quietly and calmly with a modicum of self-respect. But others jumped for joy, pigs wallowing in the full glory of their filth.
One by one by one, people held out empty pieces of paper. There were only two that had not had been checked and those belonged to Maria and I. The knowledge of that nearly suffocated me. I felt sweat break open on my face, the neurons of my brain ready to overload and burn out.
All eyes were on us…there was pity in them and guilt. But in some there was a twisted, vicious euphoria. It wasn’t them so now it was a game to see who went on the spit, high drama and nail-biting suspense.
Maria and I looked at each other and the others pressed in, all of them now, eyes wide and shining, licking their lips, some of them nearly drooling. They were eager for it, I tell you. Hungry for it. Like crazed villagers filled with manic glee at the idea of burning one of their own as a witch. I saw the innate brutality and bestiality of the human race at that moment.
And I hated.
God, how I hated.
I swore to myself then and there that I would kill each and everyone of them if I got the chance. I prayed it would be me. I really did. But even before I opened my slip I knew it would be blank. And it was. Maria opened hers, smiled thinly, held up her slip with the X on it. “It’s me,” she said quite calmly. “I’m the one. I’m chosen.”
Everyone sighed…that unbroken circuit of tension died.
They were all safe and the fun was over.
But, without knowing it, they had just signed their own death warrants.
10
Doc decided to soften the rules.
Maybe after the Murph thing he saw that he had to and I guess I looked on him a little more compassionately because he did so. He did not cull Maria off. He did not lock her in a cell or put her into isolation. He let her and the other five have twenty-four hours in which to come to terms with themselves and their maker. Nobody guarded the doors during that time. If you were chosen and you decided to run, take your chances with the hordes of Wormboys, nobody would stop you. Dragna would have his six either way. But the most amazing and frightening thing of all was how many didn’t. How many just accepted it and walked willingly out into the killing fields.
I guess that says something about the human condition I don’t even want to contemplate.
Later, I was alone with Maria in her room. I don’t think she was ever lovelier than that night…her long black hair, her big dark eyes, her smooth olive skin. I told her we would run together. We would fight our way out and make a life for ourselves somewhere, somehow.
But she simply shook her head. “No, Tommy. What is done is done.”
I wanted to slap her, to beat her unconscious and steal away with her while there was still time. But mostly I wanted to hold her and never let go. The tears came. I hadn’t cried in a long time, but I did then.
Maria looked at me and owned me with her eyes. “You can do one thing for me, Tommy,” she said, as strong and persevering as only those of Latin blood can possibly be.
“Anything,” I said, still trying hard not to sob and failing miserably.
She touched my cheek, tracing the track of a tear from my eye to the corner of my lips with one long finger. “You can spend the night with me. You can make me feel like a real woman one last time, like a human being.”
She fell into my arms and I melted into her as quick.
11
The next morning I found Doc in his little office. He looked surprised to see me. He knew I had something to say and he kept quiet, waited until I worked it out and laid it at his feet.
“I want to be part of it,” I said.
“Part of what, Tommy?”
“You know. The lottery.”
“You were.”
I shook my head. “You don’t understand. I want to go with Sonny and Conroy and Ape when they march them out tonight. I want to be part of that.”
“Tommy—”
“No, listen, Doc. Maria is my friend. I love her. I think she loves me. I don’t want her going out there alone without a friend. She
needs me to be there. To…to see her off. She needs it. So do I. I don’t think I can ever be part of this unless you let me.”
He sighed. “Tommy, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Before he spent twenty minutes trying to steer me around to his way of thinking, I said, “I know I’ve been a pain in the ass, Doc. I know I’ve been nothing but trouble…but this isn’t easy. You gotta understand how hard all this is for me. For all of us. Just let me do this. This is something I need.”
Doc just stared at me for a time like he was trying to read what was in my mind, but I had it locked up tight as a vault. He was not getting in there. I emoted sincerity mixed with pain and confusion, grief and loss. But certainly nothing rebellious.
Doc started to shake his head, then he just sighed. “Are you sure, Tommy? Are you sure this is what you want?”
I nodded. “More than anything.”
Poor Doc. He was such a fucking fool. Always in charge. Always having to deal with it all. I almost felt sorry for him at that moment. “Okay, Tommy. If it’s what you want. Go ahead.”
“Thanks, Doc. This means a lot to me.”
He smiled and patted my hand like a favored uncle and I left his office. In the corridor I started grinning. None of them knew it, but I was about to bring hell down on each and every one of them.
12
We marched the six out exactly one hour after dark that night.
Sonny, Conroy, Ape, and me. We were all armed with pump shotguns and .9mm sidearms. Ape had an Army-issue flamethrower strapped to his back that he had looted from an armory. We were ready to defend ourselves if need be, but it wouldn’t come to that. The lottery didn’t work that way. We were the meat-bringers, so to speak, and you don’t kill the steward that sets your table.
Ape and Sonny led the way out to the killing fields, Conroy and me in the back, the chosen ones sandwiched in-between. Maria was there, of course. Mrs. Pearson, a young woman named Sylvia whose husband was in the shelter. Three men—Johnson, Hill, and Keeson. They all had the same dead-eyed look of manic desperation in their eyes and to look into them was to know the depths of hell and how hot it burned.
