Zombie Pulp

by Curran, Tim

  Claws laid his knees open as he smashed the butt of the gun into a baboon face that was threaded with a filigree of mildew.

  Then one of them bit into his ankle.

  Another vaulted forward and bit into his left hand.

  Crying out, he dropped the rifle, pulling the Smith .45 with his good hand.

  A big baboon with a reddish-brown pelt and a pronounced white mane charged in at him, scattering the others. It had no eyes. The flesh was eaten away from its face revealing a cadaverous simian skull, jaws yawned wide to expose gleaming yellow upper and lower canines, each long and sharp enough to lay an artery open.

  But what Gus noticed mostly was that its belly and chest had been completely shaven, a Y-shaped incision running from crotch to shoulders.

  Autopsied. This thing had been autopsied.

  Bleeding and hurting, Gus faced off with it while the others formed a tight and cohesive circle around them.

  “EMMA!” he shouted. “GODDAMMIT, EMMA!”

  The beast kept snapping its teeth at him, making a shrill staccato whooping noise.

  Gus put three bullets into it and all that did was piss it off.

  It charged and so did the others. The baboons hit him from every side and he felt himself go down under a sea of maggoty hides.

  *

  Emma, of course, saw Gus charge out of the house with his rifle, heard him call to her, but she was otherwise occupied.

  The baboon in the tree above her was amused.

  It was making that weird chittering sound that was chitinous and strident.

  Staring up at it, Emma knew instinctively it was a female as were the others in the higher branches. She knew this just as she knew the males had gone after Gus.

  Wiping slop from her face, she did not dare move.

  The baboon stared at her with glassy, fixed eyes, grinning that toothy clownlike grin that made it look very much like some deranged pygmy looking for meat to skewer. There was some morbid growth like a grave fungus that consumed most of the left quadrant of if its face and was creeping in on the right. It seemed to be moving.

  Emma heard Gus cry out.

  She felt his voice slide through her heart like a needle.

  He was shooting.

  The baboon in the tree showed its teeth, letting out a piercing reverberating cry that was chilling and deranged and sounded very much like wild hysterical laughter.

  It threw something at her that splatted on the walk. Meat. Greening meat threaded with corpse worms. It made that laughing sound again when it saw or sensed the revulsion coming from her. Then it slid its black leathery fingers into a gaping bloodless wound at its belly and pulled out more rotten tissue and threw it at her.

  Emma ducked away.

  The baboon laughed.

  Her heart thumping in her chest, she stared at the horror with its greasy, nappy fur and yellow fangs and carrion eyes. Her terror pleased it, made it grin with an idiotic bestial splendor. And this more than anything not only disgusted her, it offended her.

  It pissed her off.

  It made Emma get to her feet, the ancestral apex predator within rising for battle.

  The baboon in the tree stopped cackling now, it made a threatening almost territorial barking that got all the other females worked up. They all started screeching and baring their fangs, beating and scratching at themselves, pulling out clods of fur and necrotic tissue, throwing it like monkeys throwing shit.

  Emma was pelted with the stuff.

  She heard shooting, fighting, the constant screeching of the baboons.

  “GUS!”

  She backed away from the tree, made to turn and go to Gus and a baboon leaped through the air and tackled her, knocking her into the grass where she rolled to a stop, coming up not ten feet from the razorwire enclosure and its perimeter mines.

  The baboon that attacked her came forward on all fours.

  Its face was a mass of scar tissue and suturing that was bursting open from internal pressure, oyster-gray pus and pink jelly pushing its way through. The skin around its mouth had been surgically incised in an oval patch, leaving its speckled gums and fearsome teeth on display.

  Emma knew she was no match physically for the beast, living or undead.

  There was only one thing she could do.

  As the beast roared and leaped on her, she waited it for it. And when it landed, planning on sinking its fangs in her throat, she kicked out and caught it in the chest, flipping it end over end through the air. It hit the ground on its rump, bounced, and came down inches from the razorwire.

  There was a resounding explosion as it triggered a mine.

  The creature was vaporized into a rain of blood and meat.

  Clots of it fell over Emma and she madly pawed it free, stringy pink meat caught in her hair.

  She started to scream.

  *

  When the baboons hit him from all sides, Gus lost his .45.

  He hit the ground and they converged on him.

  He never even had time to pull his knife before dozens of sets of teeth bit into him, tearing out chunks of meat and severing arteries and splintering bone.

  He screamed.

  He thrashed.

  But it was no good.

  There were too many ravenous baboons seizing him by then and he was laid open in too many places.

  A large male went right for his soft white throat and found it, seizing it and tearing it open. Gus’s scream became a moist gagging sound as those teeth sank into his neck, sank in deep.

  The baboon shook him by the throat like a terrier with a rat, blood spraying in every direction, its muzzle stained red right up to the eyes.

  The sound of Gus’s vertebrae snapping was loud as a pistol shot and still the beast kept at it, driven mad by the blood and the taste of meat and maybe something more.

  When it finally dropped him, Gus’s throat was torn out, nothing but a ragged bloody mass of sheared muscle and ligament in its place, a few fingers of shattered white vertebrae showing through.

  The others kept biting into him.

  Chewing on him.

  Pulling strips of skin free, tearing out quilts of muscle and sinewy tendon. A set of teeth pulped his genitals, two sets of blood-dripping jaws yanked out his bowels and pulled them in opposite directions, fighting and snapping over them as others ripped out organs in meaty masses and hopped off with their prizes.

  As Gus lost consciousness, he could feel them pulling him apart and gnawing on his internals.

  The male that had torn out his throat, sank its long ensanguined fangs into his skull, piercing it, impaling his brain.

  It kept at it, applying pressure, until his skull was crushed and its mouth was filled with gushing blood and tissue.

  *

  Still pawing rancid bits of baboon from her, Emma crawled off.

  She got to her feet, stumbling.

  As she got clear of the tree, a male baboon came loping in her direction on all fours. It had a silver-gray mane and trailing beard that was fouled with dried blood and curdled marrow.

  The females screeched with excitement.

  Emma stared at the dead thing coming at her.

  The fur and flesh at its back had been peeled to pink muscle, as had the flesh of its face. Jutting from the surrounding orbits, its eyes were like eggs translucent with fresh blood.

  It snarled at her.

  Emma tensed.

  It attacked.

  She aimed kicks at it, trying to keep it off her so she could at least make the door. Her defense worked at first—her boots struck it in the mouth, alongside the head, driving it back. The baboon was enraged, spinning in circles, growling and barking while froths of pink saliva rained from its mouth like vomit.

  Emma knew how powerful the creature must be, resurrected or not. If it got hold of her, she’d never escape its iron embrace or those gleaming fangs.

  She had to keep it off her as she backed towards Gus and the door.

  Several fema
les had dropped from the trees and were yipping with delight. They went down on their bellies and offered their hairless, callused, maggot-infested asses to the male.

  Emma kept kicking at the baboon.

  But it began to second-guess her, began to anticipate her moves. It ducked away from a flurry of kicks and came right in, seizing her right calf in its bloody jaws and putting her down.

  Emma was screaming and fighting, kicking out with her left leg while pain threaded through her right in white-hot waves. The baboon wasn’t just biting her…it was chewing, tearing, rending. Her pantleg was shredded, her calf muscle punctured…as those teeth came down again and again and again.

  Screaming, crying, Emma engaged in one last act of defiance.

  Instead of trying to kick out, she brought her leg closer to her body, dragging the baboon in with it by its teeth. And by that point it had worked a great flap of meat from her calf and it dangled from the baboon’s jaws like a bloody cutlet.

  Her mind erupting with blades of white-hot pain, Emma took hold of the animal by the ears and yanked down with everything she had, snapping its head sideways. The agony of its teeth being ripped so crudely from her leg was enough to make black dots parade before her eyes, but something in her—some primal, instinctive barbarism—fought on.

  Acting instinctively, she jammed her thumb into its eye.

  She buried it right to the second knuckle and the eye went to a soft mush like a rotten grape.

  The baboon went wild.

  It whimpered and howled, contorting and thrashing, tossing her onto her back and then jumping up on top of her, growling and snapping its jaws.

  An inky fluid dripped from the ruined eye and the stench was like rotting fish.

  It held her down and she could feel its blunt, stubby penis pressing against her thigh.

  On the ground as she was with the beast hovering above her, she could see beneath its shaggy beard. There was a perfectly symmetrical bald patch circling its throat. She could see the gray flesh beneath and it had been sutured…as if the creature’s head had been removed, then sewn back on.

  With a scream she grabbed hold of its shaggy head mainly to keep those teeth from her. The baboon was extremely powerful, but she held on. Beneath the dirty fur, the flesh of its skull was spongy and soft. Emma dug her fingers in and they slid through meat and tissue soft with putrid decay.

  The baboon cried out.

  It trembled spasmodically.

  She dug her fingers in deeper, a black sap running down her arms. Her fingertips scraped along the inside of its skull and she squeezed gray matter to mush in her fists, yanking out clods of brain that spurted between her fingers like oatmeal. Gouts of black blood fell into her face.

  The baboon dropped away, whining and hissing, the top of its cranium crushed to a globby slush. It crawled in gyrating circles on the ground, leaving a slime trail of mucus behind it, its entire body contorting madly as if every neuron was misfiring.

  Emma pulled herself away, wet and stinking.

  The females hopped and shrieked and beat the ground with their skeletal fists. One of them had no eyes. In fact, the sockets had been stitched closed.

  What the hell is this about?

  Bloody, agonized, bile spewing from her mouth, Emma dragged herself towards the doorway. Blood, oh so much blood everywhere. In the grass. On the concrete. Sprayed in loops up the siding.

  She looked for Gus.

  But he was gone.

  Piecemeal, he had been dragged off.

  *

  Emma crab-crawled up the steps onto the porch, trying to work the doorknob with blood-greased fingers.

  The Primate Research Center, that’s what this was about.

  It stood just outside the city. Animal rights activists were always protesting there. In the chaos of Necros-3, it had been forgotten. But the virus must have jumped species and reanimated these…things.

  She could hear the yelping and barking of the baboons.

  They were coming for her.

  Her fingers kept slipping on the knob. She pulled herself to her knees, her damaged calf sending fingers of agony right up into her chest.

  She got the door open.

  She pushed herself through, leaving a trail of blood behind her that marked her progress from the yard to the porch.

  The baboons yammered hungrily behind her.

  A gun. There were many and she had to get one.

  She slammed the door shut behind her, throwing her weight against it and the baboons hit it from the other side, one after the other. She jerked with each impact, her back against the door, trying to keep it closed with all her strength as her fingers reached shaking for the lock.

  The door burst in and she went down.

  She scrambled across the floor, nearly blacking out from the pain. She could smell the hot green wave of putrefaction the zombie baboons pushed before them. It was moist and heady and repulsive.

  Gnarled fingers scraped against her ankle.

  The sound of them squealing and piping was cacophonous echoing through the house.

  One of them grabbed her ankle and she kicked back, freeing herself.

  More fingers raked her leg.

  She grabbed wildly at the rifles in the case and they fell over like dominoes from her searching fingers, a .12 gauge pump coming free, bouncing off her head, and then she had it just as the baboons seized her and began to drag her back to their voracious waiting mouths.

  She swung around, the shotgun in her hands.

  There were three baboons gripping her legs.

  One of them was missing the top of its head, just a gleaming dome of exposed skull that was punctured with holes as if from primitive trepanning. Another’s face was pitted from probes and cutting.

  They opened their mouths, howling, diving in for the attack and Emma fired, pumped, and fired again.

  The faces of two of the baboons splashed off the skulls beneath, the third riddled with blazing holes that lit its fur on fire. It hobbled away, smoldering.

  Emma cut another in half and blew the head off yet another.

  The one that was cut in half did not die.

  It pulled itself forward, its legs and lower torso forgotten, dragging ribbons of flesh behind it. It made a sharp hissing sound in its throat, its eyes lit with a crimson blaze, mouth open and ready to bite.

  “C’mon,” Emma panted, tears running down her face. “COME AND GET IT! C’MON, YOU MOTHERFUCKER! LET ME SEE WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF!”

  The baboon, of course, needed no prompting.

  It slithered forward and Emma blew its head to confetti. That stopped the others. With all that meat sprayed around, they lost interest in her. They began to feed on the remains of the others, slurping up blood and nibbling on brains and gnawing on bloody bones.

  They were occupied.

  Now was the time.

  She looked down at her torn calf, the blood pooling around her leg. God, she needed to do something with it before she got woozy from the loss of blood.

  The baboons were ignoring her.

  Very slowly, she moved towards the first aid kit near the gun rack. Calmly, she took hold of the plastic box, opened it. With shaking fingers she wrapped her calf and then taped it up.

  Now and again, a baboon would look up at her with a blood-stained muzzle and snarl, but that was about it.

  Next, she had to get out of there.

  But Gus, oh Jesus, what about Gus?

  No time for that. She shut her mind down. Went cold. Emotionless. This was survival now, it was war to the teeth. The easiest way out would be through the dining room and into the kitchen. If she could make that, then she could slip out the back door and hobble to the garage. The keys to it and the Jeep inside were in her pocket. Then a quick spin out to Fort Kendrix.

  Swallowing, she began to move towards the archway that led into the dining room.

  She scooted herself along on her ass.

  The baboons still ignored her.

&nbs
p; She got to the archway, took one long last look at them to satisfy herself that they had no interest in her. They didn’t. There was plenty to eat and that seemed to be the primary motivating force: hunger.

  The shortwave radio was in the dining room.

  But she didn’t dare send a message.

  That would mean speaking at full volume.

  She pushed herself into the kitchen. Almost there, by God, almost there.

  Into the kitchen.

  More of a warehouse now with stacked crates of MREs and purified water and flares and radio parts and—

  Emma heard a scuttling noise.

  A ragged breathing.

  She swung around on her ass and an especially large ape was waiting there, puffing out its chest.

  A Mandrill.

  It was a large shaggy baboon-like beast with an olive pelt, its nose a brilliant bright red, vivid blue spokes fanning out over the cheeks. Emma found herself staring into its eyes. They were a cool, watery scarlet. The top of its head had been cut away, its brain exposed.

  She did not want to think about what they had been doing to this animal just like she did not want to think about what it could do to her.

  It stepped forward on all fours with an almost swaggering, arrogant stride.

  It bared its teeth, yawned its mouth wide and let loose with a high-pitched scream that was instantly answered by a dozen other screeching voices.

  Emma licked her lips.

  There was a gaping hole in the beast’s midsection and she could see right through it, nothing but bones in there. It couldn’t possibly be moving, but it was.

  She brought up the shotgun.

  The Mandrill charged.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  She worked the pump, pulled the trigger again, and in the back of her mind a small voice counted off the five rounds she had already fired.

  Five.

  Here’s what you need to remember about the Mossberg 500, she could hear Gus saying to her. It has a five-round magazine so if you’re going to use it, carry a back-up. It’s a devastating weapon, Emma, but not if you run out of shells.

  Shit.