Zombie Pulp

by Curran, Tim

  Varga sat up and just stared at his house, slowly shaking his head. “You sonofabitch,” he said, sounding like he needed to cry. “You dirty sonofabitch.”

  I started laughing and couldn’t stop. “It’s all over, asshole. All of it.”

  But then I wasn’t so sure. A huge figure stumbled out of the burning wreckage, lit up like Roman candle. He made it a few feet and fell into a blazing heap. You could’ve roasted wieners off him.

  I figured it was Big Tony.

  A few minutes later the fire department arrived along with dozens of nosy neighbors. There wasn’t much to do but watch it burn to ashes. They asked me and Varga questions, but we had no answers.

  Finally, Tommy arrived. “Jesus H. Christ, Vince,” he said. “What in hell’s name did you do this time?”

  He dragged me away to his car after warning the mob boss not to move. He gave me a belt of bourbon from his pocket flask, stuck a cigarette in my mouth, and waited. Just waited. It was going to be good and he knew it.

  “Well?” he said. “You wanna tell me about it?”

  “Depends,” I said, blowing smoke.

  “On what?”

  “On whether you like horror stories or not.” I took another drag. “Because if you do, Tommy, boy, have I got a beaut for you.”

  MORTUARY

  Weston said his people were ready to kick ass and take names and Silva knew the moment had come. A lot was riding on what he did in the new few minutes. The decisions he made now—or didn’t make—could haunt him for years.

  “We’re going to do this right, understand?” he said to Weston. “This operation is not going to become another Waco or Ruby Ridge. I’m not about to become the subject of a Senate investigation.”

  And now that it was time to break the standoff between the FBI and the religious crazies down in the compound, Silva was wondering for the first time in his career if he was the right man for the job.

  Using a nightscope, he was looking across that open stretch of field, thinking the complex looked like something from an old prison movie. A sprawling, flat-roofed collection of rectangular buildings quarried from a dirty gray stone. The windows were tall and narrow, set with iron bars. The grounds were barren, the perimeter wrapped up in a high chain-link fence topped with coiled barbwire. A very utilitarian sort of place. About as cozy as a Victorian madhouse.

  A helicopter buzzed overhead, a mounted searchlight scanning over the darkened, interconnected buildings.

  Silva didn’t like it. Didn’t like the feeling twisting in his belly.

  And he liked even less what was going to happen within the next ten minutes or so.

  Things went well and nobody got hurt…well, careers were going to be made here tonight. But, if on the other hand, the whole thing went south…somebody’s ass was going to get hung out to dry. And Silva pretty much figured whose ass it would be.

  Silva was an FBI Assistant Director for the Critical Incident Response Team, the CIRT. He was in direct charge of the Bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team. The HRT was a Tactical Support Branch of the CIRT, a highly-trained paramilitary force used in every delicate situation from hostage rescue and high-risk arrests to mobile assaults and the search for WMDs.

  One of their specialties were raids against barricaded subjects.

  Something they were going to be practicing real soon now.

  Down in the compound were members of the Divine Church of the Resurrection, a shadowy cult led by a psychotic messiah name of Paul Henry Dade. Dade’s specialty was kidnapping new recruits, brainwashing them and putting them to work in his domestic terror network which he funded with everything from narcotics trafficking to the sale of illegal arms.

  This guy was so fucked-up, Charles Manson had openly called him a fanatic in a taped interview two months before.

  And for once, old Charlie was right.

  Night had fallen now and the immediate area around the police blockade was a hive of bustling activity. Hostage negotiators on loudspeakers were trying to get Dade’s people to give themselves up. Floodlights were sweeping the compound. Armored trucks and support units were pulled up at the ready, ambulances and fire engines behind them. And to the immediate rear, the county sheriff and his people keeping the press and the curious at bay.

  Jesus, it was like a circus, Silva thought.

  He got on his walkie-talkie: “All right, Weston,” he said, his voice oddly shrill, “tell your teams to prepare to stage.”

  A balding agent named Runyon came running up, leaping from the back of a tactical support van. He wore a midnight blue windbreaker like Silva with the letters FBI stenciled on the back in day-glo yellow.

  “Sir,” he said, “thermal imaging still isn’t picking up a goddamn thing down there.”

  “Dammit,” Silva said. “I knew we should have kicked the door in two days ago.”

  But it wasn’t his decision. The timing of the raid was his, but the actual decision came down from the Attorney General. The standoff had been going on for nearly a week now and the administration was in no hurry to get anymore bureaucratic egg on their faces. So they’d held back. Until tonight. And that was just plain bullshit because thermal imaging had told them the worst possible thing since early that morning: no infrared signatures.

  Meaning, if there was anything alive in the complex, it must have been hiding pretty damn deep.

  Silva thumbed his walkie-talkie. “Weston. Deploy your teams. Repeat: It’s a go. Take it down…”

  *

  There were three HRT tactical teams: Red Team, Blue Team, and Green Team. Each had four operatives. Blue Team came in from the rear, cutting its way through the chain link fence and blowing the backdoor with a shaped charge of C-4. Green Team was helicoptered to the roof, put on standby. Red Team blew their way through the front entrance.

  And waltzed right into the mouth of hell itself.

  *

  TAC unit Red Team was led by Weston himself, an ex-Delta Force commando. When the door was blown in, he charged through, LeClere, Becker, and Hookley right behind him. All the HRT TAC teams were dressed in black coveralls and Kevlar vests. They wore ballistic helmets with headsets and NV goggles, carried Colt M4 tactical carbines, assault shotguns, and H & K MP5 machine pistols.

  They were loaded for bear.

  The compound was blacker than the inside of a body bag, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms and staircases leading up and down. Dead-ends and cul-de-sacs and storage closets. The place had originally been a U.S. Army military complex in World Wars I and II, then a government warehouse, and now?

  Now it was a trap waiting to be sprung.

  No electricity, no water. No nothing. Just the unknown waiting in the damp darkness.

  “Keep your eyes open,” Weston told them over his headset, studying the corridor ahead through the green field of his NV goggles. “Not seeing any movement…not a damn thing…”

  Becker said, “Not picking up shit on infrared.”

  They probed farther, weapons held out at the ready. The corridor angled off to the left and Weston came around the corner fast, ducking down low in a firing stance. Immediately he scanned for unfriendlies. Found absolutely nothing.

  “Clear,” he said.

  The others came around the corner.

  There were four doorways ahead, every one of them closed. The TAC unit took them down one by one. They were all vacant, nothing inside but some old packing crates, a few empty twenty-five gallon drums. Red Team moved to the end of the corridor. There was a heavy iron door blocking their progress and it was locked.

  Becker slapped a charge on it, set it, and the TAC unit stepped back.

  The charge went with a peal of thunder, nearly stripping the door from its hinges. Red Team moved in, taking up firing positions. It was a big room, dank and chill, about forty-feet in length, thirty in width. The air was rancid with a pall of moist bacterial decay.

  And there was a very good reason for that.

  Infrared told them there wa
s nothing alive inside and, God, how true that was. The place was like a slaughterhouse. But instead of carcasses of beef, human bodies were hung from meat hooks chained to the ceiling, dozens and dozens of them. Naked and stark, they’d been skinned, disemboweled, carved and plucked. Men, women, children. Some had no limbs, others were lacking heads. They twisted in the air with a slow, dreadful motion, a dance macabre.

  Their body cavities had been quite neatly hollowed out.

  The TAC unit just stood there, the stink of death rubbed in their faces. All those sightless, staring eyes and empty sockets glaring down at them with an almost primal hunger.

  “Jesus Christ,” LeClere finally said. “It’s like a morgue in here.”

  “All right,” Weston managed. “It’s bad…but we’ve got work to do here.”

  Red Team slid their NV goggles back up onto their helmets, slipped protective goggles over their eyes and clicked on the tactical flashlights bracketed to their weapons. They played the lights around, gigantic shadows jumping over the walls.

  Weston reported what they found to AD Silva as the TAC unit moved through the carnage, their faces pale and corded. The bodies were hung in neat rows, the sweeping beams of the flashlights making them seem to move and creep, duck away and dart forward. Shadows crawled over those bloodless death masks, making them grin and leer with a macabre life.

  Together, the troopers moved down the rows of bodies and saw there were not just bodies, but arms hanging from those chains as well. Hooks inserted at the meat of their elbows, they were colorless things spattered with dark spirals of old blood.

  Nobody was saying anything now.

  Only hard-edged discipline, unit integrity, and months of tough training kept the men from bolting out of there. Weston would not have blamed them if they had. Not really. Because he was examining the bodies much closer than they were and he knew what those gashed punctures he was seeing were.

  Teeth marks.

  These bodies had been gnawed on. Faces and wrists, legs and necks. Something had been at them. And from the arrangement of the bites, Weston had a pretty good idea it hadn’t been animals.

  As they moved down the rows, Becker bumped into the corpse of a woman and she bumped into another who bumped into yet another, until that entire row was swinging and twisting and gyrating. It was a horrible thing to see. The shadows pooling and jumping, those bodies filled with a hideous animation, looking as if they were trying to pull themselves free.

  The men could barely take it.

  Weston had not expected anything like this. He could feel the horror and revulsion coming off his men in raw, sickening waves.

  There was another door beyond the dancing cadavers which led into another room much like the first. Instead of a meat locker, this one looked more like a warehouse. Deep shelves ran from floor to ceiling on either wall. But the shelves were heaped with things.

  And Weston wanted to know what, despite himself. He just had to know. And not out of morbid curiosity, but because it was his job.

  The shelves were stacked with bodies. Dozens and dozens of corpses wrapped in plastic sheeting or stained shrouds. Men, women, children. Cultists and kidnapped victims. Some newly dead and others severely decomposed…maybe dead for weeks, if not months, faces boiled right down to muscle and ligament and knobs of bone. Some were zipped in bags and others…what there were of them…secreted in buckets.

  As they went about their grim business, pawing through the remains, making one grisly discovery after another, the TAC unit found worse things. Not just cadavers, but parts of them…hands and heads and torsos.

  This place, the entire place, not just a mortuary, but something worse. A dissection room. An anatomical theater…only Weston knew it was far worse than that. For there was a rhyme and reason to this carnage, a secret truth that he feared was so awful it would lick his sanity straight into the void if he had to look it in the face.

  And he was not a man who frightened easily.

  But something was happening here and it was leagues beyond dead cultists. For he could feel it building in the air around him like a scream, a heavy and electric sense of…activity. The air had gone thin as ether and the shadows were slithering around them like fat-bodied vipers coming out of a snake pit.

  Gripping his weapon tightly, he said, “Stand ready…”

  *

  About the time Red Team announced they had found bodies, AD Silva was on the radio with Blue Team who’d come in the back way. Clark was in command of Blue.

  “We got something here,” he was saying over his headset.

  “What?” Silva wanted to know. “What’re you seeing in there?”

  Clark was slow to respond.

  Silva could hear him chatting with Platz, Tuchman, and Seaver. Their voices had an unpleasant, almost frantic edge to them.

  “What the hell’s going on in there, mister?” Silva demanded.

  Clark said, “We…we’re in a large room here, sir, looks…yeah, looks like some kind of old hospital ward or something…I’m not sure. Beds are lined up against either wall, bodies on most of ‘em, covered in sheets.”

  Standing there in the command van, Silva felt his throat constrict tight like a snake. “Bodies?”

  “Yeah,” Clark said, his voice oddly thick. “Yeah…gotta be thirty beds here…most of ‘em have bodies on ‘em. Men and women…some kids, too.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah…yes sir, AD, all dead.” He paused. “I got…shit…I’m seeing bullet wounds, entry wounds to the chest, the vitals. All their throats, they’ve been slit ear to ear. Mother of Christ. Some of them, they’ve been dead for weeks, maybe months I’m thinking. Damn, that stink…”

  “Any sign of Dade?”

  A long drawn-out silence. “Yeah, he’s here with the rest—”

  *

  And he was.

  Clark was looking on that face that he’d poured over for hours and hours in photographs. It was pallid as flour, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth hooked in a contorted gruesome smile. Like maybe Dade knew the punch line to a real funny joke, but he wasn’t ready to share it, not just yet.

  “We got a live one over here,” Platz announced, pulling off his helmet and going to a woman who was sitting up.

  Clark saw her face in his flashlight beam, in the beams of the others…but she couldn’t be sitting up. Her throat was slit ear to ear. And maybe Platz didn’t seem to realize that or maybe he was realizing it now because she made a hissing sound and took hold of his arm in one gray claw, drawing him closer before he could do much more than scream. Before the others could stop her, she produced a jagged shard of glass and slid it into the side of Platz’s throat.

  And then the shit truly hit the fan.

  Platz was on the floor, making a bubbling sound as blood washed down his throat and he vomited red to the floor, slipping and sliding in it.

  Tuchman opened up on the woman with his MP5, gave her two three-round bursts to the chest. The rounds ripped holes through her, spattered the walls with her meat, but she kept coming, a toothy, demented grin on her face. The TAC unit watched in abject, stunned horror as she fell on Platz. As she pressed her fissured mouth against his own and came away, chewing on a bloody strand of tissue that had once been his lips.

  Platz never screamed; he was way beyond that.

  And then flashlight beams were flickering and bobbing, men were shouting and swearing, weapons discharging.

  Because they were all waking up.

  Sheets were sliding from ravaged faces and licking black tongues. Bloated hands reached out, teeth gnashed together.

  The TAC unit was shooting and screaming for back-up, but it was simply too late.

  A door slammed open on the far side of the room.

  Shapes, forms, figures…they came hobbling through the doorway with a putrescent grave stench. The strangers were rotting and crumbling, sporting beards of mold and cobwebbed faces. Some lacked limbs and others lacked faces, but they were united
for a single purpose and as Clark and the others watched, it all became horribly clear what that was.

  His people started screaming and shrieking, drawing guns and trying to run, shooting and shooting, and on came their killers. He saw Tuchman smash the butt of his machine pistol into one decayed face and put two rounds into another. But like swatted mosquitoes, the dead were instantly replaced by others. Tuchman fought and kept fighting until a fleshless face darted in and tore out the soft meat of his throat. And then they had him and he disappeared in a noisome sea of fungus-covered bone and chattering, ripping teeth.

  Clark could hear Silva shouting, demanding to know what was happening.

  But there was no time to tell him.

  Clark emptied his Colt carbine into a wall of deadwood faces, then fished a 9mm Steyr auto from his vest and fired on a gray and withered stickwoman who literally disintegrated as if she were made of dehydrated clay. And then skeletal fingers were on him and he was thrown to the ground. He saw Seaver—his face a drooling, demented mask—start spraying down anything that moved with his submachine gun.

  And on it went, bullets ripping through the air and mouths screaming and everywhere the stink of cordite and violated tombs. It became a nightmare shadow-show of darting figures and slashing teeth, muzzle flashes and clutching fungous fingers, atrocities captured in the strobing flashlights. Yellow-eyed faces with flesh hanging in loops and mouths vomiting froths of black putrescent slime.

  Clark fought bravely through that barrage of gnarled hands and chomping teeth, saw his men go down in bloody seas, saw them unzipped and eviscerated and divided by thrashing fingers and tearing red mouths. The dead yanked out ribbons of greasy entrails and fought like starving dogs over them, biting and chewing and sucking and slurping.

  And then something looped around Clark’s throat and snapped tight like a garrote, collapsing his windpipe as lewd mouths bit into his legs and crotch and belly. But all he was really aware of was his mind falling into a coveting blackness as that cord strangled him.