Zombie Pulp

by Curran, Tim

  A womb. No more, no less.

  The centerpiece of that congested laboratory.

  West had yet again cultivated a seething mass of reptilian embryonic tissue. It was steaming and fluid and pulsing. A terrible hissing came from it as it “cooked” in its own vile secretions. There was a steel lid keeping it in absolute darkness. West kept it at 100% humidity and at a stifling temperature of 102º. Mimicking some offensive tropical spawning ground, the vat was but a revolting noxious womb of wriggling fetal life. As I stood there, trembling, he dropped the corpses of six rats in there, a jar of carrion and something else he would not let me see.

  “Soon enough,” he said, ducking under the tubing and piping and ductwork. “Soon enough.”

  I did not inquire further though my scientific curiosity was nearly insuppressible with a desire to know. West showed me something that snarled in the corner, a thrashing nearly impossible thing that bayed like a hound in its reinforced cage. I dare not describe that fanged doglike horror, its jaws dripping foul-smelling saliva.

  I was glad when we stepped away around tanks and heaped stacks of books.

  What West wanted me to see was lying on a slab in the center of the room. He pulled the sheet back and I saw the body of youngish woman. She was pale, certainly, but in no way decomposed. She had the “freshness” that West always sought in his subjects and which we both knew from our experiments was the key to successful reanimation.

  I found her disturbing.

  Just another corpse one might say and I should have been quite used to such things by that point…but the sight of her unnerved me. She was like Death personified: emaciated to a frightening degree, her ribs protruding and her pelvic wings seeming to nearly thrust from the flesh, legs and arms like broomsticks. Her grinning skull was horribly pronounced, lips shriveled back from dirty teeth and discolored gums. She was a skeleton stretched with tight yellow-white flesh that was shiny and ill-fitting. I was reminded, and unpleasantly so, of the female from Grunewald’s The Dead Lovers.

  “A prostitute,” West said, holding up one sutured wrist. “The poor thing tired of life. But, you and I, we’ll give her the chance that her maker never would.”

  The idea that this wraith could stand and walk was unthinkable. The very notion made cold chills run up my spine like spiders, a feverish sweat break out on my face.

  As I lifted her head up, West made a tiny incision at the base of her skull with a scalpel, then taking up his hypodermic of reagent, carefully slid the needle into the medulla oblongata at the sight of the inferior peduncle which was just below the cerebellum. There was no guesswork with West; when you had dissected as many bodies as he had and put them back together again, there was no such thing as chance. Once the needle was seated properly, he injected 8 cc’s into the selected site.

  Then I lowered the woman back to the slab and the waiting began. Perspiring, trying to ignore certain nameless oddities squealing and slithering in that anatomical sideshow, I timed it with my stopwatch. West claimed that this latest reagent—which now contained a certain abominable glandular secretion from the reptilian tissue that hissed in the vat—would give us, he believed, a near-perfect reanimation. I was skeptical, of course, remembering quite well the absolute horrors we had resurrected in the past. The very idea of them made something inside me clench tight.

  There was nothing to do but wait. Sometimes reanimation was achieved within minutes, sometimes not for hours.

  I wrote my observations in West’s voluminous leather-bound notebook while he examined the body: “10:27 PM,” he said. “Six minutes, twenty-three seconds since injection. No discernable reaction as yet. No evidence of rigor. Limbs are supple, flexible. Pallor mortis unchanged. Algor mortis has flatlined…temperature rising steadily now.” He checked the stopwatch. “At seven minutes, forty seconds, body temperature shows a noticeable spike. Sixty-one degrees…now sixty-two.”

  West continued his examination while I wrote feverishly by lamplight, the shadows sliding around me. Above the infernal noise of the creatures in that room, I could hear the wind whipping outside, hear the creaking of a tree, the scrape of branches at the roof.

  “Temperature up two degrees,” West said.

  It was happening and I could feel it as I had so many other times. How to explain it? It was as if something in the atmosphere of the room had subtly shifted, as if the very ether around us was being charged with some unseen malefic energy. I swear to you that I could feel it crawling over my arms and up the back of my neck like a rising static charge. The shadows thrown by the lamps seemed thicker…oily, serpentine shapes that cavorted about us. Those abominations in their cages seemed to sense it and they began what can only be deemed a whining/shrilling/baying/screeching chorus of bestial wrath and fury that was part fear and part near-human hysteria. The profane head of that primeval-looking ape began to move in its jar of serum, suckering flabby lips to the glass like a snail. And in those bubbling vessels of vital fluid, the various limbs began a mad, hellish dance, thumping and bumping, hands wiggling their fingers and swimming around like waterlogged spiders. And in that vat of pestilential tissue, that seething firmament of fungous, godless creation, there was movement and hissing, weird slopping sounds. The metal lid began to rattle as if what was inside desperately needed to get out.

  And then—

  Through that bacchanalian cacophony of fleshy monstrosities, I heard a tapping. A single finger on the woman’s left hand trembled. It was tapping against the slab as if impatient. Then her body jerked stiffly, her back arching, bones straining beneath that thin veneer of skin, and a low mournful moaning came from deep in her throat. “Aaaaaaa,” she said. “Gaaaaahhhh.” It was a dry and scratching sound like claws on concrete, like the rustling of ancient wrappings in a violated tomb.

  “Nine minutes, thirty-two seconds,” West said above the din. “Reanimation achieved…”

  I was terrified to come into contact with her, for my fingers to brush against that shining, near-phosphorescently pallid flesh. And I say to you now, she sensed my unease, filled herself with my anxiety and tremor. For the eyes peeled open in that skullish face and they were glossy pink orbs, translucent like egg yolks, set with tiny pinprick pupils. She looked right at me, titling her head slightly and offering me a charnel grin of yellow, narrow teeth and blackened gums. It was a mirthless, sardonic grin of sheer malevolence that made me take a step back.

  “You must not get up,” West told her as if she were any patient that had just undergone a difficult procedure.

  Licking my lips, fear-sweat running down my spine, I said, “Tell us…where have you been?”

  She began to shudder, limbs contorting, fingers gripping the edge of the slab out of sheer unbridled terror. Her mouth opened into a wide oval and she screamed, screamed with a tortured voice that echoed up from the bleak cellars of hell: “YAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!” It rose the hackles on both West and I. She looked around frantically like a caged animal. “I saw it…I…saw…IT…” she finally managed.

  “What?” I said, my heart pumping in my throat. “What did you see…”

  “….IT…IIIIIIIT!” she cried out. “IT! IT! IT! The jagged face…it was coming for me, it filled time…it filled space…EYAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

  I had no idea what she was speaking of, but my mind cavorted with the most dreadful imagery. She had seen something. Something that terrified her and no doubt had shattered her mind. I could not know what. We all wonder what lies beyond the grim edges of death. We all hope it to be our savior, our deceased loved ones, the ultimate good…but what if it is something else? Some forbidding evil anti-human essence of malign corruption?

  A mad terror took hold of me as she climbed from the slab, hugging herself with those stick-thin arms. I trembled so badly I thought I might swoon. And it was because she said my name. Looking at me with those eyes like suppurating pink ova, she said my name clearly, but with the mocking flat tone of a parrot. Her grinning mouth like that of a hooked fish…d
ead, blank.

  Stumbling along with a pronounced stiff-legged gait, a foamy red-tinged saliva running down her chin, she descended on West who suddenly looked frightened. As she moved, snaking ribbons of saliva swung back and forth at her chin, her face a distorted, seamed fright mask made of white gossamer flesh like spider’s silk. Her eyes were sunken, pustular pits of wrath. She reached out to him with white-skinned, blue-veined hands that were like reaching, gnarled twigs.

  Though an icy fear gripped me, squeezing my heart with cold fingers, I knew I must do something as she moved at my friend with her jerking, mechanical walk. I came up behind her and took her by the bare, bony shoulders and her flesh felt like thawing meat beneath my fingers.

  A black slime running from her mouth, she turned and fixed with me with those eyes that had seen Death. I trembled in the cold lamplight of her gaze.

  I used the only weapon I had: “Where have you been?” I asked her.

  She backed away, clutching hands to the side of her head, greasy strands of hair hanging over her face which was frozen in a silent, wasting scream. “IT,” she said with that grinding, subhuman tone. “IT…IT…COMES…”

  With that, she whirled away from me, running from the room, knocking a table of glassware to the floor, her entire body jumping with wild spasms and contractions as if every neuron in her brain were misfiring. We heard the door open above the shrieking animals and heard the night, heard the woman crying out as she found the darkness of oblivion and it found her.

  And it was at that moment, as she fled, that we both felt something in that room, a presence, a force, a darkness beyond death, moving around us with the whisper of casket satin, the flutter of shrouds. I think it was IT: the Angel of Death. It was there, so palpable that it flooded the room with an unspeakable despair and darkness…then it was gone as if it never were.

  West, the master of understatement as always, said simply, “Why, I think she was out of her mind.”

  And yes, she truly had been out of her mind until we called her back. Out of her mind in some unknown place, but with WHAT?

  I came as close that night as I have ever been to full blown lunacy. And it was only West’s quick thinking and his good whiskey that saved me before it was too late. But even now I can feel that place, those things clawing in their cages, smell the chemicals and putrefaction, that steaming miasma in the vat, and, above all, I can hear that doglike thing in the corner.

  Why wouldn’t it be quiet?

  Why did it have to keep screaming?

  10

  The Graveyard

  The moon that rose over the battlefields of Flanders was a luminous, disapproving eye and the darkness was a cracked egg breaking over the land, spilling a creeping black yolk of shadows that filled trenches and shell-holes, rain-dripping dugouts and the cemetery of No-Man’s Land. Like the ever-present rain of Flanders, it flooded the countryside and sank it in a perfect stygian blackness disrupted only by the frosted moonlight gleaming on spent shells and polished white bone.

  Creel watched the moon come up and the darkness settle in, thinking, remembering, and shivering white inside as he tried to make sense of what he’d seen out at the devastated listening post.

  You can’t be sure what you saw, he told himself. You saw something…something that looked like a boy…a boy who’d laid in a grave moldering for a week, rats chewing the good red meat and pink skin from his face. But, surely, it was a trick of the light, the refraction of the same through the mist. But not…not what you thought.

  You’re too damn old to believe in ghosts, aren’t you?

  But he didn’t know, he just didn’t know.

  Not after the burial party…those tracks, those damn footprints.

  Die toten…die toten dieser spaziergang.

  Yes, it haunted his every waking moment and turned his nightmares into ugly, black affairs.

  His cynicism, his pragmatism…even they could not save him this time. He had been skeptical, of course, because he was skeptical about everything. One war zone after another, year after godawful year of poking his nose into the grim machinery of death, it had turned something inside of him, chased away light and filled those hollows with darkness.

  All those fine young men.

  Battlefield after battlefield, the politics might change, but the faces were always the same: boys of eighteen and nineteen living with fear and horror day by day until it scrubbed the color from their faces, trading young flesh for old, lips gone rigid and bloodless, eyes leeched of youth and replaced with a wizened desperation. All of them aged, worn, shattered, old before their time, used up before they saw twenty. Creel had seen them again and again, war after war, the survivors returning from the latest action, ears still ringing with shellfire and the screams of the wounded, limping along, shoulders slouched, backs bent…like old men, old broken men.

  That was war.

  Some months back, following the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, after a particularly fierce bombardment by German heavy guns, Creel had watched as burial parties came in carting the dead in stretchers, laying them out on the cracked pink clay of the ground…a dozen, then two dozen, then three times that many. The bearers looked at him with a boiling hate in their eyes only it wasn’t for him, but for the war and the wreckage it produced. He stood there for a long time, unable to turn away, unable to pull his gaze from those tormented, gored faces. Their eyes were open, staring right at him, and he’d felt a cutting guilt open inside him.

  During the battle, the trenches had been packed with Tommies, four-deep, firing rifles and machine-guns and trench mortars, trying to repel the German assault. The Hun poured in, wave after wave, and the guns roared and the shells erupted, and the bodies piled up, hundreds caught in the barbwire entanglements or sinking in the mud as high velocity rounds sought them out. The Germans had gotten so close that you could hear their individual screams of agony, see the fright and torment etched into their young faces…and afterwards, dear God, the bodies. They lay there for days, nesting with flies and maggots, worried by rats, a white and red patchwork of corpses that seemed fused into a greater whole of festering carrion gone green and gray and black. During the night you could hear the buttons popping off their tunics as they swelled with gas. The stink was unimaginable and it was more than the stench of death but the sharp, sour smell of an entire generation exterminated for no good reason.

  There had been a fast, fleet-footed runner named Collins. Nice kid, naïve as hell, always giggling and sure of himself, untouchable as all the young Tommies thought they were untouchable, completely possessed by the idea of playing soldier, content with his speed which was impressive. After the battle he returned from the rear in time to see the killing fields. Ten minutes of it and his young skin was mottled, his eyes nearly rolled up white, the entire left side of his face hitched up like he’d just suffered a stroke. He started screaming and nobody could get him to stop.

  Later, they got the kid calmed down and Creel looked in on him. His eyes were black starshot. “Ghosts,” he said, “oh dear Christ, all them…ghosts…out there…”

  Yes, ghosts. And the older Creel got and the more of it he saw, the more certain he was that they were there, sliding around him, shadowing him…pitying him, hating him, jealous of the life he had that he wasted in the graveyards of combat.

  Sometimes he wondered if that’s why he kept taking pictures of the dead—some fanatic, vague hope that he’d catch one of them on film. Some hollow-eyed ghost slipping away from the corpse that had housed it.

  And why not? he thought as he waited in the stinking mud of the forward trench. Why the hell not? Who has a better right to see ghosts? Who has spent more time with them than me?

  In the pale moonlight, he could see out beyond No-Man’s Land, into a stripped forest that lay far beyond. The same one they’d passed through on their way to the listening post. Not dozens of trees, but maybe hundreds or even thousands, all of them de-limbed, de-barked, and soot-blackened from shellfire. They stoo
d up straight or leaned over or collapsed into one another in great pillar-like deadfalls. Creel had been through them, had stood amongst them one bright day when the Germans had been pushed back and there had not been a single green shoot or leaf or so much as a solitary songbird. A dead place. The trees were like a thousand-thousand battle-worn skeletons climbing up out of that blasted inky-black soil that was rank and burnt smelling, so thick in your nose and throat it was like breathing ash. Ten minutes into it he’d began to suffocate, the good air sucked away and replaced with that gritty, powdery crematory ash that blew and blew and filled his lungs with sand.

  Yes, death everywhere and would it be that insane to believe that here in the netherworld of the battlefield where life was extinguished so casually and ghosts roamed so freely that maybe death had turned back upon itself? That the dead were eating spilled life, filling themselves with it, so they might walk again?

  Dead children that walk and feed on corpses? Are you willing to accept that?

  The rain started coming down again, pooling, sluicing, filling the trenches with yellow-gray slime as the sky above scudded with black clouds that split open. In the dying moonlight, the rain was like falling crystals, billions of falling crystals: shiny, reflective. It drenched him, ran down his face and lips, dripping off his steel helmet. But it did not smell fresh, it only stirred up the rot and muck and filthy drainage bringing a rotten wet-dog smell to Flanders that sickened him to his core.

  The rain subsided and there was silence for a time.

  Listen.

  Listen.

  He was hearing it now, hearing it perfectly well: gnawing sounds. The sounds of teeth sinking into meat and scraping over bone. Too loud to be rats. He did not believe it was dogs. Things out there feeding, filling themselves, glutting obscene appetites.