Zombie Pulp

by Curran, Tim

Hopelessly, Emma tried firing it again.

  Then the Mandrill was on her.

  It took hold of her with great strength, pushing her down and bouncing her head off the floor to take the fight out of her. Then it grabbed her by the hair and swung her like a Barbie doll, smashing her into cupboards, the kitchen table, a green metal cartridge box.

  By then she was barely conscious.

  The Mandrill seemed pleased.

  For alive or dead, it liked its females submissive.

  Emma looked up with bleary eyes.

  She saw the Mandrill’s bright red penis squirt cold urine into her face, marking her. It gushed over her cheeks, burning her eyes, bringing an acidic, nauseating taste to her lips.

  The stench more than anything made her pass out.

  The Mandrill, grunting happily, dragged her from the room.

  *

  When Emma came to she was in the cellar.

  She was sore, threaded with pain, but the worst part—

  What the hell?

  She was face-down and something was humping her from behind. Her first instinct was to fight, to scramble free. But she was still dressed so it wasn’t like she was being penetrated.

  Wait.

  There were several baboons gathered around, but keeping a respectful distance and that was because the Mandrill had her. Mandrills were not baboons, she knew, just close relatives, the largest species of monkey in the world and this one was the alpha male of a pack of baboons.

  It was humping her to show its dominance.

  It screeched.

  The baboons yelped and barked.

  The females were busy picking maggots from each other’s hides and eating them.

  Emma knew she could not panic.

  A lot depended on what she did now.

  She cast an eye around. There was the woodstove, the carefully stacked kindling. The axe. Double-bladed, kept very sharp by Gus. You could slit paper with it.

  The Mandrill leaped off her.

  The baboons growled at him and he snarled and shrieked, driving them off and up the stairs. He sat back on his haunches. There were insects crawling in his fur. He studied the females.

  His harem.

  And Emma was now one of them.

  She gathered her strength. It was now or never. She had to reach that axe and if she couldn’t, that would be it.

  The Mandrill was turned away from her.

  Now!

  Emma dove to her knees, ignoring the pain it brought. She scrambled over to the woodpile. The females made baying sounds. The Mandrill roared and came after her.

  Emma grabbed the axe in both hands and swung it with everything she had.

  The Mandrill came at her with jaws wide.

  The axe came down.

  It cleaved the beast’s exposed brain, slicing deep into the cerebral fissure separating the right and left hemispheres. The Mandrill hopped this way and that, clutching at the axe buried in its head. It shook. It convulsed. It vomited out a bubbling black jelly and then it pitched forward, dead once again.

  Two of the females ran.

  A third turned to fight.

  It dove at Emma.

  She never had time to get the axe free from the Mandrill. The female knocked her down and then they were fighting and scratching. The female was powerful, but Emma fought with a manic frenzy. She clambered onto the female’s back and did the only thing she could do to win.

  She bit into its throat.

  Bit deep until blood that was black and tarry filled her mouth.

  The female squealed and shook, but finally went down under Emma’s weight.

  Covered in baboon blood and drainage, she pulled the axe free and chopped off the female’s head.

  Then she sank to her knees and vomited.

  *

  When she came upstairs, she braced for battle.

  Her shirt and pants were blackened with baboon discharges, blood encrusted over her face and neck. Tissue caught in her nails.

  The other baboons did not attack.

  They kept well away from her.

  They grunted and yelped and whined when she passed them.

  Emma stank of decay and corpse slime and baboon piss. Maybe they smelled the Mandrill on her and the blood of their own kind.

  Outside, there was a rumbling.

  Gunfire.

  The Army had returned.

  Thank God.

  Emma moved past the cowering zombie baboons and to the door, still clutching the gore-streaked axe in one hand. She was limping, beaten, scratched, bitten and bruised, but still standing.

  You’re not a survivor type and you know it.

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

  The hell I don’t, she thought as she stepped out onto the porch and saw the dead baboons laying everywhere, several dangling from tree limbs.

  She waved the axe to the soldiers in the APC.

  One of them put the minigun on her.

  “Wait…” Emma started to say.

  The minigun could lay down something like six thousand rounds per minute and in the scant few seconds between when Emma was first hit to when she pitched over dead, some two hundreds chewed through her, pulverizing her.

  What hit the ground were fragments.

  Emma was gone.

  “Never seen a zombie with an axe before,” the soldier on the minigun said.

  Captain McFree laughed. “You see it all in this business, son.”

  The APC rolled up the streets as the mop-up continued.

  THE MATTAWAN MEAT WAGON

  The kid’s name was Blaine. He had heart, but his head was no good. Naïve as all hell and Cabot took every opportunity he could find to remind him about that. About how things worked and his place in the larger scheme of things and how he better not fuck up because too much was riding on it.

  “I don’t get it, though,” the kid said. “Why me? Why do I pull something like this? Did I piss somebody off? I mean, shit.”

  Leaning up outside the warehouse door while the meat was loaded in the back of the truck, Cabot lit a cigarette and sighed. “Everybody gets a shot, kid. It’s nothing personal. But in Hullville we all pull our share. You, me, everyone. I make this trip once a month.”

  “Yeah, but in the back of the truck—”

  “You don’t worry about what’s in the back of the truck.”

  Cabot knew the kid wasn’t liking it, knew he thought maybe it was a little barbaric and maybe more than a little uncivilized. But those words had lost their meaning here in the brave new world. Ever since Biocom started sweeping people into the grave and waking ‘em back up again, things had changed. Morality, ethics, humanity…abstract concepts. The country was a cemetery now.

  No, he wasn’t going to beat that drum.

  The kid wasn’t real bright, but he wasn’t that stupid. Cabot wasn’t going to remind him what his life had been like before a patrol found him out there in the Deadlands and brought his sorry ass into Hullville. How the town had patched him, smoothed out his rough edges, put food in his belly, a pillow under his head and a roof over him. They did it because they needed him and he needed them and he seemed like an all right kid.

  The Council did right by him.

  And now, favor for favor, it was time to earn his keep.

  Chum came out of the warehouse, his overalls grimy, his eyes looking like open wounds that wanted to bleed. “Okay, Cab. You’re loaded. Take it easy.”

  “That’s my way,” Cabot sad, grinding out his cigarette and watching the fog coming in off the lake.

  Chum hooked his elbow, said, “I mean it, Cab. Watch the kid. Watch him.”

  “Sure.”

  Then Chum was gone and Cabot was standing there feeling a little weak in the knee. He cleared his throat of fuzz. “Okay, kid. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Blaine kept trying to swallow but it just wasn’t happening. He froze up and Cabot took him by the arm and led him over to the steel-reinforced cab of the big
Freightliner.

  “Relax, kid,” he said. “Just pretend you’re delivering beef to the butcher’s. Because that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

  *

  It was funny, Cabot got to thinking as he drove. Just five years ago the world was full of cities with people in them and now there were just a lot of graveyards and ghost towns out there swarming with the walking dead. A few far-flung burgs like Hullville and Moxton, walled-up medieval towns protecting themselves against a coming siege. Once humanity ruled the Earth, now they hid in ratholes and crossed their fingers, made offerings to the Wormboys to keep them happy.

  After the gates were closed behind them, Hullville faded into the fog and there was desolation. Ruined little towns and collapsing farmhouses, overgrown fields and wrecked cars, overturned trucks. Day-glo skull-and-crossbone signs set out, warning the unwary away from the Deadlands. Not much else. Just the fog and the night and whatever waited in it.

  “How far?” Blaine wanted to know.

  “To the drop-off?” Cabot shrugged. “Twenty miles. We gotta go slow in this soup. Be a real pisser if we crashed into an old wreck and had to hoof it. That would be a real hoot.”

  “It got a name? This place?”

  “Not anymore. Just a ghost town now.”

  Cabot drove on, feeling the Freightliner purring beneath him. She was solid and steady with a 220 Cummins under her hood. Medium-duty, she was small compared to some of the rigs he’d handled, but she’d do in a pinch. The cab had been reinforced with riveted steel plating and the side windows weren’t much more than gunport slits now, the windshield only slightly larger, all of it shatter-resistant and impact-resistant plexiglass. The cab was armored like a tank and with where they were going that was a good thing.

  The fog grew thicker, tangling and twisting, flying past them in fuming pockets and sheets. Got so they couldn’t see much out there in the headlights but the jagged contours of gnarled black trees, a few rusting cars on the side of the road. Nothing else but that mist, enclosing and enveloping, blowing out at them like steam from a pot. Now and again, Cabot spied shapes and shadows moving through it but he didn’t dare mention it. Kid was getting nervous. Starting to shift a lot in his seat, looked like he was about to have a litter of puppies.

  “Why do you do it, though?” Blaine asked him.

  “This? Because I was a truck driver before and that’s what I’m good at. You need a load run through hard country, I’m the guy for the job. I ain’t worth a shit at anything else.” Cabot told him how it was in the old days, running freezer trucks of Texas beef up from Kansas City, flatbeds of harvesters into Boise, tankers of hi-test down to Little Rock. “Been everywhere and hauled everything, kid. This ain’t so different. Not really.”

  Blaine studied the rack of pump shotguns. “Oh, it’s different, I think.”

  Cabot shrugged. Maybe the kid wasn’t so dumb after all.

  He drove on, cutting through the fog, keeping the truck in creeper gear all the way. Just too damn much wreckage and debris on the roads. They’d used a big loader a few years back to sweep all the wrecks into the ditch or onto the shoulder, but now and again some fool tried to cross the Deadlands or skirt them and he plowed his pick-up into a rotting hulk and created yet another driving hazard.

  Blaine sat up straight, looked out his window port, tried to catch something in his rearview. He stared at Cabot. “You see that?”

  “What?”

  Kid swallowed. “I don’t know…I thought I saw some woman standing there by that wrecked van. Looked like she was holding a kid.”

  “Out here?” Cabot stepped on the accelerator, got them moving a bit quicker. “Ain’t no women or kids out here.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Maybe you saw something, but it sure as hell wasn’t a woman and what she was holding was no kid. You know better than that.”

  “But she didn’t look…bad.”

  “Some of ‘em don’t, not until you get up close and see their eyes, smell the stink coming off ‘em.”

  There he went being fucking naïve again. Jesus. Kid knew the score, all right. He’d gotten his ass into a bind out in the Deadlands when he and some other survivors tried to slip through in a van. They’d blown a tire outside Carp River of all places. That town was just as infested with Wormboys as a dead dog was with maggots. And, yeah, the comparison was appropriate. The kid got away, but the others were butchered out there. He hid out by night, ran by day for over a week. That’s when a patrol from Hullville out mopping-up stragglers came across him and brought him back—

  Cabot jerked the wheel to the right to avoid a smashed minivan and nearly put them right into an overturned Greyhound bus rising from the ditch like a missile from a silo. He jockeyed the truck a bit, jerked the wheel this way and that, got her under control. Just as he did, a blurred form appeared out of the fog. They both saw it for maybe a split second before it thudded off the Freightliner’s grill and was gone.

  “Christ!” Blaine said. “You’re gonna kill us!”

  Cabot laughed. “Don’t worry kid. I could thread a fucking needle with this baby. Relax.”

  But the kid was past relaxing and Cabot saw it.

  He couldn’t seem to sit still like his shorts were full of ants. He was tapping his fingers rapidly on his knees, shifting around, peering out the port of his window. Cabot could hear him breathing real fast like he was ready to hyperventilate. There was a sheen of sweat on his face.

  The radio crackled and the kid jumped.

  There was static, then: “Seven? You alive out there? Talk to me.”

  Cabot grabbed the mic. “Hey, Chum. We’re about ten minutes out.”

  “How’s that fog?”

  “Like soup.”

  “Anything to report?”

  Cabot peered out into the soup. “Not much. We got a wrecked bus that’s a hazard. Seen a couple stragglers, no numbers, though. Sweet and clean.”

  There was silence for a moment. “How’s your guest doing? How’s Blaine?”

  Blaine sighed and shook his head.

  “He’s not liking it much, Chum,” Cabot said, winking at the kid in the dim cab. “Sitting over there with a sour look on his puss like he’s got about seven inches of cruel loving up his ass and he can’t shake it loose.”

  Chum giggled over that. “Okay, don’t be a stranger, Cab. Out.”

  “Why’d you have to say that?” Blaine asked Cabot. “It sounds gay.”

  But Cabot never answered him because in the back of the truck there was a sudden thudding sound, a thumping. Then something which might have been a hand slapping against the rear door, a low moaning like someone was in pain.

  Blaine had balled his hands into fists now. He was shaking.

  “Just our cargo, kid,” Cabot told him, grinning. “They must be waking up back there. Dope must’ve worn off. It does that. We better push it, get our piggies to market.”

  *

  It began with a microbe in Clovis, New Mexico.

  A robotic satellite called BIOCOM-13 was sampling the upper atmosphere for microorganisms of possible extraterrestrial origin. Somewhere during the process, it found the microbe, analyzed it, sealed it in a vacuum jar, then proceeded to get cored by a rogue meteorite. Long before a maintenance crew could get up there, BIOCOM-13 fell into a rapidly decaying orbit and plunged to Earth.

  It crashed outside Clovis, its sample jars bursting upon impact. Several were bacterium of terrestrial origin, a few exotic mold spores, and a virus. The virus would come to be known as Biocom after the satellite. The virus, it was later learned, was not from Earth. It had drifted here, scientists theorized, perhaps stuck to a rock or a speck of cosmic dust, on a trip through deepest space that might have lasted ten-thousand years or ten million.

  It probably would never have made it down if the satellite hadn’t grabbed it.

  NASA exobiologists had long said that the possibility of pathogenesis resulting from contact with an alien microbe was minimal.
That extraterrestrial agents such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and multicellular parasites evolved differently and would share no common biochemical or cellular traits with terrestrial types. Ergo, it was more conceivable for a human being to get infected with Dutch Elm Disease or wheat rust than an alien microbial agent. But Biocom was a virus. And NASA had left viral agents out of the loop. Viruses have no cellular machinery of their own; they convert that of the host organism to reproduce themselves. So a virus is a virus is a virus, regardless of where it comes from. It adapts to any chemistry.

  And nobody knew where Biocom came from.

  First contact was in Clovis and from there it spread in every conceivable direction, mimicking pneumonic plague and putting two thirds of the world’s population into the grave within six months. But they didn’t stay there.

  They started rising.

  They got out of their graves, feeding on the dead and the living and spreading the virus like the common cold. If you got bit, you died. And if you died, you came back with a whole fresh slate of culinary impulses.

  Of course, nobody believed it at first.

  Zombies? The dead rising? Utter bullshit. File it away with those aliens on ice at Roswell and Bigfoot shitting in the Oregon woods. But the stories did not go away: they proliferated. From Florida to Maine, Michigan to Texas, the dead were rising. And it wasn’t long before videos of the same showed up all over the internet. One in particular was posted to YouTube. It got so many hits it crashed the server.

  What it showed was Clovis, New Mexico.

  At first glance, the grainy video taken with a night-vision device looked almost comical, like something from a Gary Larson cartoon about the living dead: men in bathrobes and fuzzy slippers, women in fluffy nightgowns with curlers in their hair, all wandering the streets in the dead of night. Then some daylight footage was added and things got spooky. Men, women, children. Some stark naked and some dressed in burial clothes, pallid, decaying, infested with vermin. They were rising from cemeteries and crawling free of mortuary slabs and morgue drawers. Their faces were gray and seamed, their eyes flat dead white or lit a lurid red and filled with a cunning, evil intelligence, narrow teeth jutting from shriveled black gums, chattering and gnashing, looking for something to bite.