by Jason Beech
“It’s been fun, chuckles,” Captain Meth-Mouth said. “You’ve enhanced my life. Just so you know.”
Kelly’s surprise. Dwight felt it heavy in his pocket. If ever there was a time for it, it was now. His right hand, feeble from loss of oxygen, managed to get into his pocket and pull out the pineapple grenade they’d found in Atlanta among the possessions of a drug dealer who fancied himself to be Scarface. No one knew if the thing still worked. He hoped it would as he somehow found the strength to pull the pin and lift it up.
Captain Meth-Mouth felt pressure at his neck and laughed, surprised at this kid’s tenacity. Even though he knew he was doomed, the kid still fought with everything he had left. But then, Dwight’s hand went higher and pressed against Captain Meth-Mouth’s chin. Only then did he see the object Dwight held.
Grinning, Dwight pushed the grenade against his enemy’s mouth, and just as Captain Meth-Mouth tried to pull back, an explosion rocked the decks of the S.S. Stevenson. Dwight felt a surge of pain, followed by a bright flash, and then darkness.
The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was Kelly. She sat by his side, reading a book. He couldn’t focus on the title, but he didn’t think he’d seen it on the ship before. He tried to sit up.
“Oh! You’re awake!” Kelly gently touched his chest. “Don’t. Just stay down. Do you remember..?”
Yes. He held up his right arm, not very surprised to see that it ended in a bandage. No hand. Part of him wanted to freak out, but he just couldn’t muster the energy.
“How am I still alive?”
“Your hand absorbed most of the explosion.” Lt. West. He stood on crutches at the foot of the bed, grinning at his captain. “You have no idea how lucky you are. That was the ballsiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Dwight tried to look at the rest of himself. “How bad is the damage?”
“You got off light,” West said. “Aside from the hand, that is. You got a nasty cut on your cheek, but you’ll probably wind up with a kick-ass scar. There are some burns on your face. You caught some shrapnel in your belly. But all things considered, you should be dead.”
“Then . . . we won?”
“Kind of,” Kelly said.
“We agreed to disagree,” West said. “As soon as you blew Captain Meth-Mouth’s head off, his men lost the will to fight. His first mate Claudio almost seemed relieved. I think he’s wanted the top spot for a while but was too scared to go for it. Anyway, he’s in charge now. He let us set anchor up north—-safely away from him—-so we could repair the ship. We bartered for some supplies. We even got a doctor for you.”
“How about you?” Dwight asked. “I saw your foot was pretty bad.”
West glanced down at his plaster-encased foot. “Separated at the bone. The doc fixed me up, though. I’ll probably have a limp, and I’ll be able to predict rainstorms, but I’ll still have my foot.”
“Where are we now?”
“Claudio wanted us gone, so we’re headed for Green Bay, like we talked about before.”
“Good.” Dwight eased himself up, ignoring Kelly’s look of disapproval. He staggered over to his mirror and looked upon his ruined face. He’d been moderately attractive before, but now he looked tough and raw. He reached up to touch the puckered stitches on his face, forgetting that he no longer had a right hand. How the hell was he going to survive the zombie apocalypse minus one hand? He’d always favored that one.
Why couldn’t it have been his left?
“By the way, I have a present for you, Cap.” West approached, holding up a hook with a long leather rig attached to it. “It’s something Ellis has been working on.”
“For what?” Dwight asked.
“For your hand. Ellis says a pirate with only one hand should have a hook for his stump.”
Dwight nodded, but he couldn’t find the words to tell West that he didn’t want to be a pirate anymore. It had been fun in Miami, and even when he’d been fighting zombies, it was still kind of fun. But then he started fighting the living. His friends started dying.
And now, this.
Still, he took the offered gift and cupped it to his stump, strapping it up to his elbow and shoulder.
It looked cool, real cool, and he had chosen this path, after all.
END
JAMES A. NEWMAN has sold Pulp Fiction stories and novels to publications all over the proverbial shop, most recently FREEDOM FICTION and BIG PULP. The co-founder of Spanking Pulp Press he is most well-known for his Joe Dylan detective series the latest of which caused a stir in the crime Noir charts and has attracted the attention of many of his peers. The film option for the third in the series THE WHITE FLAMINGO was sold in 2014 and Newman is currently writing the screenplay along with the fifth Dylan book. Newman’s work mixes the bizarre world of Interzone with the gritty realism of Charles Bukowski’s LA and the gritty street observations of the early pulp detective writers. Newman also writes science fiction from which he claims to gather all his material from vivid nightmares. He is known to on occasion mash up writing principles and ignore rules of conventional story-telling mumbling something about “art” much to the dismay of his editors.
UNDEAD CARGO
ONE
JOHNNY CLOSED his netbook shut.
Back in the days when he pretended to go to college he worked the night shift at the Riverhead morgue. It was there where he first struck gold.
Zombie gold.
Get so close to the dead they start to take on a life of their own. He and his buddies would take the stiffs out of the caskets and set them up around a large oak table. The stiffs were dressed in their best suits and ties and the women in their favourite summer dresses. Real classy, you understand.
His best buddy a nervous dork named Sheepdog had an idea and a handy-cam. The idea was to make a short ten minute movie down in the morgue. Well, it was the natural thing to do.
Johnny had heard somewhere that taking photographs of the dead was a popular Victorian gentleman’s hobby. It was his duty to bring this tradition up to date and into the twenty-first century.
They shot the ten minute masterpiece of funeral parlour noir and called it.
THE ZOMBIE DINNER PARTY.
It went viral on youtube and made a splash in cult underground necromantic circles. Forums sprang up, global cyber clubs drummed on their keyboards speculating to the clips authenticity. The world was obsessed with the Dinner Party. Poor imitations of the short movie sprang up. Some kids in Iowa were arrested for grave robbing. The tomb raider’s lawyer pointed the finger at Johnny and the Dinner Party, claiming the act of graveyard vandalism was the result of a copycat ritual brought about by the success of The Dinner Party. The wheels of fame and fortune kept spinning. There was even talk of a slot at Sundance after Johnny had written the script for a whole feature of the Dinner Party that a pot-head film-maker had bought while tripping on sacred mushrooms in Arkansas. One scene really rocked the boat. A male stiffs hits rigor mortis, you get the picture, just at the critical moment. Springs up from the table…. Wham! And here’s the clincher, it actually speaks, or at least appears to speak. Johnny later came to understand that corpses after a few days release gasses that come out like whispers and groans and this one time the stiff sprang up and said to the stiff opposite “wannafuck?”
They caught it on video camera.
Sure.
Real art.
The money shot, if you will.
Well, that stiff would have been a star if stiffs could be stars.
And dead stars need not paying.
The Dinner Party wound up in court, dismissed on a technicality.
How do you slander the unknown dead?
From there it was downhill for Johnny and the Dinner Party. Having been shunned by the undertaking world and having overstayed his welcome on the underground film circuit he decided to hit the road. He flew to India, worked in Bollywood as a film extra for several months before jetting East to Thailand, Burma, Laos and now...
> Port Klang, Malaysia.
Since leaving LA, and the Dinner Party, Johnny Coca-Cola had written short stories but they had no guts, no real direction. He was washed out. A has been. The bar in the Malaysian port town meant nothing to him other than a place to get away from the place he wanted to get away from. Traveling from somewhere to somewhere else was like juggling air. Some said the joy was in the traveling and not the destination. Well, the destination would suit Johnny fine as long as it were a small dark hotel room looking over a busy street, desk by the window and an approaching deadline. Europe? Hamburg? The novel was a joke. He couldn’t write one. Why did he try? For five years he had been trying and he had come up with squat. Nothing, zero.
Zip.
What was he doing here? Six tables, a fridge that rumbled in the corner. A dog with three legs and none of them good legs. Its belly worn away with canine dermatitis.
He felt a hand on his shoulder.
Why wouldn’t the world just leave him alone? Why wouldn’t hands leave him alone? Everyone wanted a piece of him.
Hands.
“‘What do you want?” Johnny said before turning around. Didn’t these people have any sense of jurisdiction? Everyone wanted something, and what they wanted often conflicted with what they actually needed. Yeah, Johnny read the Dharma, ate organic toast.
A voice.
“I’m just a wanting to know when the next boat leaves this forsaken town.”
Scottish, the hand was Scottish, female.
Not to be messed with.
“Sit down,” Johnny said to her. She sat down. She was young with an athletic build. Her hair was long and dark and dreadlocked and her eyes were surprisingly blue and playful. Fingernails painted blue to match, nice touch. He spoke: “I’m shifting out on a cargo vessel bound for Hamburg. Strangers make me nervous. Sit. Before I know if you can embark on this vessel I need to drink some of the filthy rum they have in this town, and my brokerage fee for your passage is for you to buy me one of these darn bottles. The ones that taste like the urine of a thousand drunken plague-ridden black rats. That’s all. That is all I ask of you for breaking my concentration.”
“Sure,” she sat down. “What is it youse do? And why are you speaking like a pirate?”
“I’m a writer. I write stories. I sell the stories to the highest bidder. How about you, sweetheart? I’m just killing myself wanting to know.”
“You’ll not be wanting to know that in any hurry. Trust me. How did you get intae it? Writing the books?”
Johnny lit a cigarette sucked at it real hard and breathed out a cloud of purple smoke across the table. He took it out of his mouth and looked at it. “My English teacher was a middle-aged lesbian alcoholic intellectual who lived with a woman who she called sister in a house called Crow Farm. Sister my left kidney, the wench was Liz to the bone. Her names were many but the one she called herself was Mrs Proudfoot. Proud. Foot. Never skipped a beat. She hated me as I didn’t stand for the same ideals as Charlotte Brown (pigtails, violin lessons), who sat near the front of class and had a cross-stich to die for… I tried my hardest to piss her off, Proudfoot that was… It was an easy thing to do. I succeeded when I sold my first story, still at high-school. Something to be, proud of, eh?”
“But the dyke thought different.” She smiled. “What was the story about?”
“Something about a kid who sleeps with his mom and then shoots his student guidance counsellor with a flare gun. It was kinda edgy. She read the story and died right there in the teacher’s room. Glass of port half full and a player’s cigarette smouldering in the ashtray. Heart attack they said, and I’d like to agree.”
The Scottish woman got up and spoke to a girl behind the counter. She returned with a half bottle of rum and two dirty glasses. “What did you do after that?”
“I made a low budget ten minute movie that went viral. We called it The Zombie Dinner Party.”
“That was youse?”
“You saw it?”
“Everybody saw it. I mean, it was awesome.”
“Thanks.”
“My name is Beth.”
“Perfect. I’m Johnny. I was hoping they called you Sue.”
“That’s my sister’s name.”
“Of course it is.”
“Tell me did you really shoot that zombie movie?”
TWO
Port Colombo
Sri Lanka
THE LAB had been closed in preparation for the transit. The corpses were decomposing to different degrees of monkey mush having travelled by truck overland from Kandy to the port capital city. There were several gibbons, chimpanzees, one gorilla and two human subjects, one female and one male. The skin had a greenish tint to it and the bodies were beginning to smell like an open meat market in the tropics; the smell of death.
The lady scientist walked along the slabs pointing at this one and then the next with the remote coolness of a meat trader. She spoke in a voice alarmingly loud for a woman of her petite size.
“Given the right conditions it is possible, ya? But we have failed. Under funding and lack of faith and a life’s work down ze crapper, is it not? The regeneration of genetic matter was my dream, all of our dreams. With the right funding it can be done. We ‘ave failed. Right now we must be moving ze samples. I don’t want a trace of evidence ever leading to our, ah facility. You are understanding, no?” The scientist, Sri Lankan in origin, dark skinned, well-shaped. Conner had been given some of her background. Educated in Hamburg, she still held contacts with the research community in Europe. She was the reluctant owner of a nervous tick that was cute, in a neurotic, nerdy kind of way. She lived by herself in a house with grounds surrounding it and a guard at the gate. The threat of Tamil Tigers etched in her mind.
If she was a reluctant beauty then Conner was the wanton beast. He had a scar on his left cheek from a knife fight in Calcutta. His greasy grey hair fell over a pair of Irish blue eyes. He splashed into the American pool three generations back. Approached by the CIA for the ease with which he tended to fit into any place or scene like a piece of furniture, or a drunk Irishman in a bar. There was a Conner in every town in every country propping up bars from Cairo to Kandy to Kathmandu. He was slim and agile with a liking of women, bad boys, booze and violence. Conner had spent the best part of the afternoon propped up against a harbour bar in his off-white safari suit smoking cigars and drinking like a sailor waiting for a ship that would never arrive. Alcohol did something to his mind, hormones raced, blind and restless.
He looked at the scientist, his mind removing the white lab-coat revealing only a pair of dark blue stockings and suspenders, crutch-less, no bra…Fine film of hair on the nipples… Shaven rose… Maybe a tattoo? Something vaguely spiritual perhaps, a symbol, just above the naval… She’d probably come on all coy at first and then break out into those spasms of uncontrolled abandon common to those in the medical profession… Bucking, swaying, gripping onto that fragile thread that separates the living from the dead. These slips of the imagination were coming on more often. Perhaps, Conner thought for a panic-ridded second he had some god awful tropical disease like Beriberi. He snapped back into the room, the lab, the job. Conner knew how she operated. How the lab was fronted by a fake non-government organization supposedly researching a preventative remedy for malaria. Maybe he had malaria? Conner had known an agent in Cambodia who didn’t eat for two weeks and disappeared with a fever into the bush. They found him several days later in the jungle conversing with a carnivorous pitcher plant and muttering something about demons and familiars… His temperature rose from boiling to freezing, died before they found the nearest hospital.
One had to take care in the bush.
Doctor Frankenstein was a dangerous piece of work, make no mistake. And she probably wore granny panties to conceal a nationally protected forest, a delicate eco-system, crumbling upon a rambler’s touch.
Conner gave it to her: “This is how it works, lady. I have rented a cargo container flying a
South Korean flag. We go to the docks, early tomorrow morning and we load the container. Nobody sees and nobody checks. Piece of cake, Honey.”
She looked at him as if discovering a new virus under a microscope: “Don’t call me, Honey. What about the port authority? Say they decide to do a routine check and they are discovering, my, my, specimens?” The scientist waved a hand across the room. “If they find this? I am finished!”
Conner smiled. “I have the fix in, lady. Don’t you worry ‘bout it for a single second. I have it all under control. Tell me lady, how did you make these things alive again?”
“Nice try. Our operation here is strictly confidential. Your orders are simple. You will pick up the cargo tonight.”
“Yes, Mam,” Conner looked around the laboratory, noticed a heavy file on a table. The scientist glanced at a specimen. He picked up the file and slipped it into his messenger bag.
“Say, what do you do for fun in this town doctor?”
“Fun?”
“Yeah, that thing you do when you not playing with dead monkeys and reading up on bio-genetics.”
She looked at him directly. “I am not a tour guide, Mr. Conner. This is a serious matter. I suggest you have an early night and get some sleep. It smells like you have already discovered the city’s bars. We need you alert.”
“Okay, I get it already. I pick up the cargo at 3am.”
“Good. Now I have to be attending to work.”
THREE
ON THE bridge the captain looked the pair of them over. The captain was a tall German. A wisp of grey hair, a long nose, and lines across his face like the battered mariner’s maps studied before the advent of GPS. A tall man with spiky hair, late twenties and a woman, dreadlocked hair, pale skin, wearing a green tank top, leggings and Doctor Martins boots.
