Zombie Pulp

by Curran, Tim

  The straw-witch pulled off her ash pipe, grinning like a stuffed ape. “It’s not what I set into motion, Sheriff. It was that fool there! He’s the one! His mind and his hands and his heart! I was not the fire that burned down his house and damned his soul!”

  “But you struck the match, you old witch,” Bolan told her, trying desperately to keep his hands from his guns.

  Strand was beyond fear now, beyond retribution. He was just pale and small and lifeless. “She were not human, Missy Crow. She killed my wife…she et her…”

  The straw-witch laughed with a booming, unpleasant sound like thudding from inside a buried box. “Ye gave her the salt? Ye gave her the meat? I cain’t help ye now, boy, ye brought this on yerself! She were a dead, mindless thing before, but now she’s something else! There’s things out there, boy, hungry and evil things that were never meant to be born…but now ye have birthed one and it’s in yer mama, hear? A scratching, hungry pestilence! Ye have to bury her deep in a chained box! Let her go back to death, let her feed on herself, starve until there’s nothing left but bones!”

  Bolan had pulled one of his .44s now. “I should put you down right now, you goddamn hag.”

  “Yes, maybe ye should, Sheriff. But ye won’t. No sir, ye won’t. It’s not in ye to kill an old woman even if she be the devil’s own.” Missy Crow leaned forward in her rocker, her eyes blazing and sulfurous. “Hear me well, Sheriff Bolan. Ye might be thinking of mayhap riding up here with a posse tonight or tomorrow to burn me out. But ye better think on that careful. I know yer wife is with child. Didn’t know that, eh? Well, she is, boy, she certainly is. I knowed what’s growing in her now and I also knowed what could be growing in her if I make it so! Something with teeth that would bite her from inside. Now ye don’t want that, do ye?”

  Bolan was taken aback, but not for long. “Listen to me, you hag. You’ve existed in this county because I’m a tolerant man. Now I give you fair warning: get out. Get out of my county before that posse does come, you hear me?”

  Missy Crow just nodded. “I hear, Sheriff. I hear just fine.”

  *

  It was sundown by the time they reached the Strand farm.

  And just riding up there, Bolan could feel something like fingers unfurling in his belly, white and cold and clutching. If there had been doubts seeded in his brain, looking for soil to spread their roots, they were gone now. There was something spiritually defiled about the farmhouse, a palpable sense of rottenness that was not sensed with only the nose. It crawled and coiled like it was looking for a throat to wrap itself around.

  The wind rustled the corn and the branches of a dead cottonwood tree scraped together overhead like knifeblades.

  Lighting a coal-oil lamp, Strand said, “She’s in there, Sheriff.”

  “Maybe you better wait out here.”

  But Strand shook his head. “Missy Crow’s right: I am to blame. I have to see this through.”

  He was so completely calm about it all it was disturbing. Bolan wondered if there was a limit to what the human mind could suffer before the cogs of horror were worn smooth and there was only acceptance…indifferent, long-suffering acceptance.

  Stepping up onto the porch and pushing the door open with the barrel of one of his .44s, he could smell that tomblike, violated atmosphere just fine. It was not just a stink of decay and organic corruption, it was something far worse. It was the odor of black earth and mildew, of bone piles and spoiled meat and creeping vermin, but something else too. Just a fathomless black stench of darkness beyond mere darkness, the smell of buried graves and crumbling pine boxes, the oily blood of deep rank earth dripping and running and settling into the mold of ages.

  Bolan sucked in a breath, that smell repulsive to not only his belly but his brain. He wanted to vomit, then scream. Maybe both at the same time. The shadows were thick and oddly bunched, slithering and heavy and aware. The air was grainy, it seemed, hard to breathe and Bolan knew it was the air of crypts sealed for decades and centuries. The air the dead breathed, suffocating and damp.

  There was blood in the hallway.

  Oh, just buckets of it sprayed and smeared and splashed around like a pig had been gutted and drained in there. Bits of meat and tissue and hair were stuck in it. It had dried now to a sticky film like a membrane of cooling molasses, but the stink of it was all-too recent: raw and savage and coppery.

  Strand was breathing very hard and it took everything he had to continue on.

  The trail of gore led to the cellar door.

  It was standing open, bloody handprints all over its panels like some kid had gotten into the red paint. The steps leading down into that hot, seething charnel darkness were stained with more blood and scraps of flesh. A few white, gleaming bones that might have been from fingers. In the orange, flickering glow of the lamp, Bolan saw a single, fine hand laying on the fifth step down. The light gleamed off of Eileen Strand’s wedding band.

  “Listen,” Bolan said.

  Yes, he was hearing something now. A wet, tearing sound and maybe it was just in his head, but he did not think so. It was the sound of a bear gnawing on a meaty bone in the darkness of a cave. A nibbling and sucking sound.

  When they got to the bottom of the steps, they saw the wreckage of Strand’s wife. The scattered bones carefully suctioned of meat. The husk of her trunk emptied of its dripping goodies. Her head smashed open, brains licked out, eyes plucked free like candied cherries. Her bowels were looped around the uprights of the stair handrail, chewed and slit and then carefully, expertly woven through those posts like Christmas garland.

  “Show yourself,” Bolan said.

  And then she did.

  Or something did.

  Mama Lucille was a wraith. A wraith that had bathed in blood, swam in rivers of it. She was filthy and ragged and rotting, her burial dress and her gray flesh hanging in tatters and strips so it was hard to say where one began and the other ended. As she lumbered forward, you could see the rungs of her ribs jutting forth. Her face was gray and puckered and infested with worms—they boiled in her left eye socket and squirmed from the innumerable holes in her face and fell from her mouth. Flies buzzed in her hair and from deep inside her belly. Her teeth chattered and her stick-like fingers sought meat to pull from bones, that one good eye gleaming a wet, translucent yellow.

  Strand screamed…screamed and lost his mind.

  He dropped the lamp and went right to her.

  Bolan said something he wasn’t even aware of and grabbed up the lamp, just in time to see Strand get taken into his mother’s arms. Those worm-eaten cerements engulfed him, those fleshless fingers pulled flaps of skin from his shoulders, and that black yawning mouth went to his throat, blood spraying out over her ruined face. She was a sea of carrion that flooded over him and pulled him down, drowning him in a dark sepulchral sweetness.

  Bolan did not hesitate.

  He shot right through Strand to get at her. Strand went down right away and then Mama Lucille, bleeding graveworms and soil and diseased bile from her wounds, turned on him. Those split, discolored lips pulled back from blackened and narrow teeth that snapped and chattered, ropes of tissue and gore hanging from them. She exhaled a cloud of fat meatflies. That eye found him and held him, yellow and reptilian, a dead-end noxious universe of ravening, insane appetite. And Bolan knew she would gut him like a salmon and bathe in his blood, tear his viscera out in hot, bleeding handfuls and suck the salty marrow from his bones…if he let her.

  “Lay down, Lucille,” he told her. “Just lay down.”

  But she came on, noisome and malign, a carcass peppered with insects and riven with maggots.

  Bolan sighted in on that eyeball and pulled the trigger twice. The punch of a .44 at close-range is devastating. The first round blew that eye and the skull that housed it to fragments and the second round split her face right down the middle. She hissed and screeched and fell straight over like a plank.

  And then lay still after a few shudders swept through
her.

  Laying there in a contorted, shattered heap, it did not seem possible that she had walked. She was just putrescent and blackened, a dirty and fleshy heap of bones and rags boiling with worms. A cloud of blowflies lifted off her like a vapor of swamp gas and that was it.

  Bolan made it upstairs and then tossed the coal-oil lamp against the wall and let that mausoleum burn. He sat on his horse and watched the flames consume that ramshackle old farmhouse, knowing there was purity in fire.

  As he rode off, he knew there would be another burning that night and he wondered how quickly straw would catch.

  MONKEY HOUSE

  In late March the army swept through the city putting the living dead back in their graves for a final time. They came with heavy machine guns and .50 caliber sniper rifles, flamethrowers and 7.62mm miniguns mounted on armored personnel carriers which cut the dead down in waves. Mop-up units followed, eliminating the stragglers, and searching house to house for those infected by the Necros-3 virus. The infected were put down; the uninfected were given injections of the experimental antiviral Tetrolysine-B, which inhibited the replication of the virus within the host body.

  Necros-3 had put two-thirds of the world’s population into the graveyard within seven weeks and nearly all of the dead had returned searching for flesh to eat.

  Tetrolysine-B, which had been developed for use against HIV, proved to be the magic bullet. The pestilence was stopped dead in its tracks, but by that time the cities of men were cemeteries.

  *

  Emma Gillis was ready to leave.

  She’d watched her neighbors sicken, die, then return to feed. No one would ever know how many people they slaughtered and Emma tried not to think about it. Gus had fortified their house, turned it into a bunker with gunports, a generator, and a razorwire perimeter that was carefully mined.

  The dead had never breached it.

  But now the war was over and Emma had had her fill. For the past three months she’d been stuck inside their trim crackerbox house cum-bunker and she was ready to leave.

  “It’s just time, Gus,” she told her husband who watched the streets through one of the gunports, hungry for enemy activity. “Time to move on.”

  “I’m not leaving,” he said.

  Good God. He was still in the Marines. He was living some prepubescent G.I. Joe fantasy. The zombies had been vanquished. There was no reason to hole up like this any longer.

  When the Army came—and Gus, of course, had warned them off until they trained antitank guns on the house—they said that out at Fort Kendrix there were hundreds of people—men, women, children, all rebuilding their lives. They had fresh meat, fresh fruit and vegetables. Water that didn’t taste like metal. And medical care. Real medical care. And the guy in charge, Captain McFree—handsome, dashing really, with his black commando beret and pencil-thin Errol Flynn mustache—said they had electricity and a DVD library.

  “Gus, be realistic. It’s time to go.”

  He looked around, pale and paunchy and unshaven, camouflage pants worn and dingy. “I’m not leaving all this. I’m not leaving my home.”

  Emma sighed. “Home? This isn’t a home, Gus, it’s a barracks.”

  There were cases of MREs fighting for space amongst iron crates of ammo and jugs of purified water, the guns and first aid supplies. A survivalist’s wet dream, but hardly a home. The walls were tacked with maps, the windows boarded over and criss-crossed by duct tape so they would not shatter. The brass coat tree by the front door was hanging with gas masks and waterproof ponchos and web belts.

  Home?

  Sure, Good Housekeeping as seen by Soldier of Fortune.

  Emma didn’t bother arguing. She packed up what she could in a suitcase and a nylon duffel and dumped them before the front door. “I’m going now, Gus. The war is over. Time to put away our guns and pick up shovels and saws and rebuild.”

  “Fuck that,” he said.

  Emma felt sad. She had watched a good man degenerate into this paranoid wreck. And as he degenerated, so had her love and respect for him.

  She threw the bolts on the door and stepped out onto the porch. Gus slammed it immediately behind her, fumbling locks into place.

  “You’ll come back,” he said.

  No, I won’t.

  “You’re making a big mistake, Emma,” he told her through the mail slot, using that calm and authoritative voice of his that had been so effective in the past for everything from getting money to getting into her pants. “You won’t make it out there. You’ll be dead before you reach the Army base. You’re not a survivor type and you know it.”

  She didn’t argue with that. “The survivalist thing is you, Gus, it’s not me.”

  “You just don’t have what it takes, Emma.”

  “You’re right,” she said, leaving the bunker.

  If surviving means becoming a rat afraid to leave its den, then I’ll be a victim, Gus, and be happier for it.

  It was wonderful to be outside again.

  The clean-up crews had hauled away the bodies and remains and for the first time in weeks and months the breeze did not smell like it had been blown from a morgue drawer. It was coming from the south and she could smell sweet odors of spring growth, lilacs and honeysuckle. The sun on her pale face was warm, inviting.

  She moved down the walk and stopped beneath one of the big oaks out there.

  Thank God, thank God, thank G—

  The wind shifted direction and soured right away, bringing with it a vile odor of bacterial decay and corpse gas. It was not old, but recent, very moist and organic like rotten meat shoved in her face.

  Emma froze up.

  She dropped first one bag, then another.

  The sun was behind her.

  Her shadow was cast over the walk as was that of the oak. She could see its twisting limbs and threading branches…and in them, hunched-over shadows like gargoyles.

  Something hit her in the back of the head.

  She heard a high chittering sound.

  She turned and something hit her in the face.

  Something wet and crawling and stinking.

  She clawed it away with her fingers…bloody meat that crawled with bloated white grave maggots. Gagging, she tossed it away, the stink of putrescence putting her down to her knees.

  With a gore-streaked face she stared up into the tree.

  She saw a grinning, demonic visage staring down at her. It snapped its teeth at her.

  Emma screamed.

  *

  Through the gunport slit in the living room wall, Gus watched his wife walk away. She was making a big mistake and he was angry that she did not know it. Angry that a bright woman like that did not realize the fix they were in.

  And after all he had done for her.

  Betrayal.

  He didn’t need the Army.

  He didn’t need Fort Kendrix.

  Everything he needed was here in the shelter where he was master and commander.

  He lit a cigarette. It was stale but he didn’t even notice anymore. He blew smoke out through his nose and scratched at the stubble on his chin. Automatically, obsessively, his hands roamed his body making a quick inventory: .45 Smith in the holster—check; K-Bar fighting knife in its sheath—check; extra magazine for the—

  What the hell is she doing?

  Emma had stopped on the walk. She had dropped her bags. She made a gagging sound, digging something from the back of her head that was tangled in her hair.

  Gus grabbed his M-14 sniper rifle and ran to the door.

  He threw the bolts and was outside in seconds.

  Emma was sitting there on her ass as something dropped out of the tree not five feet from her.

  The thing saw him, hissed, and charged in his direction.

  Gus just stood there, shocked at what he was seeing.

  A baboon.

  A baboon of all crazy fucked-up things: thick-bodied, compact, covered in a down of shaggy brown fur. Its eyes were shining a tar
nished silver like dirty nickels, huge jaws wide open, fangs bared. It left a trail of slime in its wake.

  There were huge ulcers eaten through its skin.

  You could see its bones.

  Zombie.

  When it was ten feet away, Gus automatically shouldered the M-14 and fired just as he’d been taught at Parris Island so many years before. He popped the ape in the left eye socket with a .308 round that blew its skull apart in a spray of gray-pink mucilage and sent its corpse tumbling through the grass. A jelly of worms bubbled from its ruined head.

  “EMMA!” he called out. “EMMA! RUN!”

  Two more baboons dropped from the trees, then a third and a fourth. There had to be a dozen more up in the branches. They were shrieking and growling, absolutely enraged.

  Gus heard a scratching, scrambling sound and turned. Two more were up on the roof. They were leaping from the trees onto the top of the house.

  He dropped one that was five feet from him, pivoted, and knocked another off the roof that had only one arm.

  He could hear Emma screaming.

  The baboons were coming at him from every direction.

  They looked like the remains of test animals that had been slit and bisected, poked and peeled and drained: grave-waste. He saw one lacking legs that swung its torso forward with its arms and others that seemed to be missing sections of flesh as if they’d been biopsied.

  They all had huge holes eaten through them, bones jutting from their maggoty hides, meatflies rising from them in clouds. Baboon faces were skinned to pink meat or gray muscle, some were chewed to the bone by carrion beetles.

  He dropped two more and then there was no room to shoot as they nipped at him, raking his legs with sharp skeletal fingers. He used his rifle like a club, swinging it, bashing in heads and smashing snarling faces to pulp until he was sprayed with rancid gouts of brown and red fluids.

  The baboons circled him, gnashing their teeth.

  He waited, the M-14 encrusted with gore and dripping a foul corpse slime.

  He knew Emma was out there, but he didn’t dare look for her. He couldn’t even hear her now over the wailing and yipping sounds of the baboons.