Ride the Serpentine (Year of the Zombie Book 7)

by Andre Duza

  Movement on one of the monitors...

  It pulls my attention away from the intellectual bullshit falling out of Holly’s mouth. I look and see Gramps taking long strides across the East lawn like a hound-dog locked on a scent. He’s plugging deadfucks like it’s an afterthought, letting them get dangerously close before pulling the trigger, and doing so without even looking. He’s armed with a Glock 19. That’s fifteen rounds versus three times as many deadfucks. At least.

  Holly throws attitude my way on his way out the room, ‘Happy now?’

  Video

  Floodlight Security Camera (East Yard)

  An overhead view of a 1-acre field boxed in by Spartan Juniper trees and gaudy Romanesque sculptures atop faux Corinthian columns. The tatters of a volley ball net hangs sadly between rusted steel posts. A gazebo meant to resemble ancient ruins. Floodlights on tall posts impaled in the dirt. Three on each side of the yard, spaced 10-feet apart.

  Upright corpses materialize from the spaces between junipers. More pour in from around the front of the estate. They converge in the middle, a sedated stampede, hive-minded, hungry-eyed and salivating at the source of their heightened aggression.

  Graeme Gunz moves with purpose toward a gap in the Juniper wall. A trailed of bodies laid out in his wake. An unruly crowd hot on his trail. An ambitious young corpse lunges from the side. Graeme caps it without missing a step. His focus, on the stone pathway winding off into the woods, locked in and unwavering. A headless bust stationed on either side of the pathway. Darkness beyond the trees…

  Jules and Hollister explode from the East doors armed with M16s. A canvas satchel strapped across Jules’ torso. They run out into the yard and immediately take aim…

  Hollister: GRAEME!

  Jules (to Graeme): What the hell’re you doing, man!

  They work to thin the herd of undead, starting with the ones closest to Graeme. They move toward Graeme’s position, firing away. A misty cloud-canopy of exploded cerebral residue rains down, painting heads and shoulders red. The herd marches forward like some tribe of stiff-jointed, lead-limbed berserkers worked into a frenzy and covered in war paint. They are unfazed by the bodies dropping all around them and by the obstacles those bodies present. The idea of warm flesh is just too intoxicating. A small faction of undead changes direction, like a deformed tentacle extending away from a larger body and reaching for the two armed men standing on the sideline of the stampede.

  Graeme is standing at the mouth of the stone pathway now. His arms hanging by his sides. Shoulders slack. His right hand wrapped around the handle of his gun. Just beyond the junipers, a shadowy figure moves toward the relative light. Seconds later a dead man in blood-stained medical scrubs and a face-mask of third-degree burns steps through the gap. His pace quickens, he reaches out to Graeme, fingers flexing and curling into claws.

  Graeme stands there, posture on Mesmer. His body language suggests that he has every intention of allowing the undead man in scrubs to approach him.

  Hollister turns his weapon on the approaching undead. He takes out a few before his gun clicks empty.

  Hollister (to Jules): I’m out!

  Jules reaches into his satchel and tosses a clip to Hollister. He grabs another clip from the satchel. As he reloads his gun…

  Jules: GRAAAAAEEEEME!!! (to Hollister) What’s he doin’?

  Hollister shakes his head, ‘I dunno…’

  Graeme doesn’t respond. Instead, he opens his arms to the undead man in scrubs and third degree burns. The man staggers closer all gums and gnashed teeth shining through an oblong ball of charred meat that used to be a face.

  Scrubs is just about on Graeme when Jules takes a shot and then, in one motion, he returns to clearing the herd. Scrubs’ head jerks violently to the right. Blood. Graeme whips his face away from the hard, wet kiss of airborne brain matter. Scrubs crumbles to the ground, leaking moist chunks from the jagged hole in the top left side of his head.

  Graeme (re Scrubs): Noooooo!

  He turns and charges at Jules, a madman covered in the undead blood. Jules catches wind at the last minute…

  Jules (re: Graeme): Hey! What the fu—

  …and moves to defend himself against the lanky, pretty-boy juggernaut. The two men tussle.

  Graeme: Why’d you have to kill her?

  Hollister hurries over and divides his time between separating Jules and Graeme and keeping the herd momentarily at bay. He manages to get between them, wraps his arms around a thrashing Graeme and walks him backward, away from Jules.

  As Graeme continues to thrash…

  Graeme: Why’d you fucking kill her?! She was trying to communicate with me you stupid fuck.

  Jules nonchalantly picks of a few undead between gestures of disbelief.

  Jules: Well, excuse me for saving your skinny ass!

  Graeme: I had it under control. She wasn’t going to hurt me.

  Hollister fires a few rounds with equal disregard and then leans into Graeme’s line of sight.

  Hollister: Whaddayou mean, she? She, who?

  Graeme points to Scrubs’ expired corpse lying facedown in the dirt.

  Graeme: The girl. Our “fan.”

  Jules fires without looking. A few more drop.

  Jules (to Graeme): Tha fuck are you talking about?

  Graeme eyes Jules with suspicion.

  Graeme: Waaait a minute, now. I thought we all agreed that she was real.

  Hollister calmly drops a few more undead and then grabs Graeme by the shoulders and points him in the direction of Scrubs’ body.

  Hollister: We did. But that ain’t her.

  End Video

  Interior of van/scenery outside windows.

  Jules (V.O.): There were so many deadfucks. The damn things were coming out of the woodwork faster than we could plug ‘em. We couldn’t chance having them follow us inside, so we led them away from the estate and ducked into a house down the road where we settled for the night and waited for them to lose interest. Turned out the place used to belong to that basketball player who was outed as a furry by one of the gossip rags. Damn near killed his career. Wouldn’t you know he had a photo of himself with Zamora in his den. Figures.

  The place had been thoroughly ransacked and looted to shit, but the doors and windows were mostly intact. We found a stash of liquor hidden in a heap of boxes in the basement. Medicine for the night. Gramps snagged the Patron. Holly took the Jack Daniels and I was packin’ a fancy-schmacy bottle of Absolute Citron.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Gramps goes once the Tequila kicked in and washed away the shock trance he’d been under, ‘But I’m not slipping. I’m fine.’

  ‘Nobody thinks you’re slipping,’ Holly says.

  ‘I would if I was in you guys’ shoes.’

  ‘We all saw the girl on the monitor,’ I go.

  ‘I’m not talking about the monitor. She was there in the east yard, too. Standing right in front of me. Not more than 10-feet away. I threatened to put a bullet between her eyes unless she came clean. She just gives me this look, same as before. Then she takes off her clothes and starts walking toward me. I knew what was happening was fucked, but it was like I couldn’t move. When you plugged her… It felt like… like being jarred awake from a deep sleep.’

  We must’ve sat there for an hour, taking long swigs and not knowing what to say. With everything we knew about this girl, we had no reason not to believe Gramps’ story. But what did it mean? Holly was the first one to offer up a theory.

  ‘What if she’s a ghost?’ he says like he expected us to laugh in his face. No one did.

  Gramps nods like he’s on the same page and has been there for some time.

  ‘Why not a ghost, right?’ Holly continues, enlivened by Gramps’ nodding endorsement and half a bottle of Jack. ‘We live in a world where dead people come back to life and eat living people. How fucked is that? So why the fuck not? Why not Chupacabres, too? And fairies. And Leprechauns. And fucking… Bigfoot sitting on a
goddamn unicorn, surfing a UFO across the Bermuda fucking triangle?’

  I raise my bottle in support. ‘Why the fuck not!’ I take a drink then add, ‘Maybe not Leprechauns, though.’

  ‘What does she want?’ Gramps steps all over my comic timing like not knowing causes him great pain.

  ‘I think it’s obvious what would’ve happened if Jules hadn’t taken the shot,’ Holly says.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘That’s the million dollar question, kid.’

  Holly goes on to theorize that we only seem to see her in the presence of deadfucks, like she somehow uses them to travel around. Sounds kinda cool if it wasn’t so goddamn unsettling.

  I take a long swig and grunt away the burning aftertaste. Afterward I whip my head toward an imaginary camera somewhere between Holly and Gramps and go into my best Clint Eastwood. ‘Looks like we got some cleaning up to do,’ I say.

  Nobody laughs.

  Tough crowd.

  Video

  Spring Cleaning

  Weapons room

  Antiseptic lighting. Several long weapons (assault rifles, shotguns, rpgs) mounted vertically on the wall. Another wall for handguns. Another for miscellaneous gear (holsters, slings, vests, shell bags). A cabinet full of ammo.

  Quick cuts of Graeme and Hollister reaching into the frame and snatching weapons from the walls.

  Garage roof (Floodlight Cam)

  A six car-garage the size of a modest house. A wide driveway down in front extends to the edge of the frame and beyond. An overgrown field borders the other sides of the garage. A wooden deck on top. Expensive patio furniture shoved aside. Jules standing in the middle of the deck dowsed in sunlight. A guitar strapped to his chest. A wire snakes from the butt down to a mid-sized amp on the deck. A large speaker in the corner. Chirping chords waft from the guitar as Jules tunes the strings. A loose contingent of undead stumble into the frame from all sides and make their way toward the noise, the slow-lurch parade seemingly in accord with the fragmented rhythm.

  Jules (V.O.): I hurt my knee in the tussle with Gramps, so the boys thought I should hang back while they cleaned up. Holly came up with what you see here when I pitched a fit about Plan A. The speaker and amp were compliments of Zamora’s rock star pipe dream. The idea was that I act as a decoy to lure the deadfucks out into the open and help round ‘em up into one location. Then Gramps and Holly would come in and cut ‘em down. It gave me the opportunity to shred, which I had been complaining about not having had in a while.

  Weapons room

  Graeme and Hollister clad in tactical gear. They strap weapons across their torsos. Slide handguns into their holsters.

  Garage roof (Floodlight Cam)

  The chirping chords become more succinct as Jules finds his perfect pitch. His fingers dance translating kinetic energy into sound. Slow, seductive chords like foreplay for some monumental sexual event. Jules sinks in the groove. The chords manifest in swaying movement and a rhythmic head nod, scraggy red hair hanging in front of his face. A crowd forms at the foot of the raised stage, growing exponentially through a series of scene dissolves...

  Soon the garage is surrounded by a pulsating, undulating skirt of undead, their intent splayed across their rotten faces as they reach upward and claw and bite at air, laying hands on the garage walls as if to find purchase and climb up.

  Jules is locked in a symbiotic link with his guitar, seemingly unconcerned with the crowd beneath him. His eyes squeezed shut. Head nodding. Hips grinding air. Fingers doing a dexterous dance on the strings while the bridge squeals to his slow-hand caress.

  Shots ring out off-frame. A shift in the undead crowd as bodies begin to drop. The phenomenon spreads out from the rear of the garage, around to the sides…

  Graeme and Hollister enter the frame from rear-left and right. They are nearly unrecognizable wrapped in battle gear and brandishing machine guns—an AR 15 and an MK 17 respectively. Several more guns on their person. A designer golf-club (a driver) dangles upside-down from Graeme’s belt. The wrapped handle of an aluminum tee-ball bat protrudes from a long carrying case strapped to Hollister’s back. Bandanas around their necks. Goggles.

  The two men press forward, their torsos on pivot like an automatic sprinkler, spraying the crowd with bullets. It becomes evident that they are targeting the lower extremities. A follow up headshot as the bodies drop—if possible. Graeme moves left, Hollister right. They travel at an arc, around the sides, to the front of the garage, and come together in the middle of the driveway.

  Jules continues to play as the bodies fall and lie splayed out, writhing like dying petals on some giant, fleshy flower. Down below Graeme and Hollister have stopped firing to inspect the damage. A few dozen undead remain among the moist, slushy carrion moat at the base of the garage, unable to stand, yet still determined to nab the nearest bite of warm flesh.

  Graeme and Hollister strap their primary weapons across their torsos. Graeme yanks the driver from his waist and flips it right-side up. Hollister slides the bat from the carrying case against his back. They pull the bandanas up over their mouths and noses and communicate via nods before wading into the moat. They swing their weapons like bludgeons at the heads of any surviving undead, high-stepping so as not to slip on the soft, squishy chunks that moved strangely underfoot or to become entangled in the intestinal lattice.

  End Video

  Interior of van/scenery outside windows.

  Jules (V.O.): Gramps and Holly both reported seeing our fan during the bitch of a clean-up. Some random deadfuck Holly was dragging to the pile to burn. One of the few that had managed to survive the bullet spray and the blunt object beatdown.

  ‘This one appeared to be paralyzed from the neck down,’ Holly goes. ‘Just some average-looking fuck dressed like he was dead long before he was walking around jonesing for live meat. I was holding him by the legs. His arms were up over his head, which was turned to the side facing Gramps who was dragging a body next to me.’

  Then Gramps chimes in.

  ‘I look over and there she was staring at me while Holly dragged her,’ he goes.

  I glance at Holly who nods, goes, ‘Same shirt. Same ripped jeans. Same boots. All soaking wet. Hair clinging to her face. The whole shebang. It was seriously fucked. I dropped the bitch like a hot potato. Had to ask myself if I had somehow mistaken the average fuck for this chick back at the garage, but I knew there was no way. Meanwhile Gramps goes apeshit and starts stomping the chick’s face and head until there’s nothing left. I had to pull him offa her. When we looked again it was the average fuck laying there with his face bashed in. Seriously fucked, man.’

  That was the last we saw of our fan for a long time. We settled on a plan-of-action should we see her again, which was essentially the same set of guidelines for dealing with deadfucks.

  Keep your distance.

  Aim for the head.

  Avoid eye contact

  Within a week, she had fallen to the bottom of the list of daily concerns. Within two weeks, she was a haunted memory. We had settled into a routine. Morning stretch/workout. Breakfast with the Stone Show. Jam sessions. Movie night. Long discussions about the meaning of life and lack thereof—we each did time as Debbie Downer and Captain Optimism. We had become the poster children for the Post-9/6 American Family: Rockstar Edition.

  Gramps got on this filmmaking kick and starting filming everything. He would spend hours in the editing suite learning how to use the equipment. The ‘Spring Cleaning’ clip is the result of his editorial tinkering. The rest of the time he’d walk around with a camera stuck to his eye. Gramps had an addictive personality. So when he was into something – or someone – he was all in. His face would light up in a way that made his enthusiasm infectious. Like when he would really connect with lyrics I wrote. So you were instantly drawn into whatever he was into at the moment. And his latest addiction was filmmaking.

  Within a month we had an album’s worth of new music. I’m talkin’ the best shit we’d eve
r written. We didn’t even realize what we had until we watched the footage from the jam sessions. Rock ‘n’ Roll was our therapy. It allowed us to work through all the bullshit.

  The new stuff was a culmination of everything we had gone through since the world turned upside down put to music. We avoided using our number one fan as inspiration out of fear that we might somehow conjure her up. I wrote a little something for her in secret, though. Just a few lines. My intention was to explore the person she was in life, but I was working with very little info.

  We were listening to the Stone Show the morning the Brand Compound came under attack. We grieved when the show went dark. I would equate the feeling with withdrawal. We tuned in to the wannabees and the whack jobs to ease the pain. The general consensus was that the Brand was an inside job. How else could a fortress like that have been overrun so quickly? The dead ain’t exactly known for their organizational skills.