Extreme Zombies, page 30
Paddy squatted on a boulder eating a double box of Twinkies and drinking warm Upper Canada Lager from the big tins. Two Deadies lumbered after Rewind, one of the last living dogs left. The collie belonged to the Woods, who used to run the video shop. As the three got closer, Paddy saw it was the formerly living Mr. and Mrs. Woods lunging at their golden-haired pooch. Rewind bounded like he was having fun. So did the Deadie Woods. To Paddy’s camera eye, they made a nice nuclear family.
Man, she thought, life is incompletely unfair. All the two dimensionals get everything and people like me who are the truly brilliant and can satellite dish every movie channel are relegated to minor sitcoms. How’d they like to be inside out for a living? Life always tunes you out. It’s depressing as hell. She swallowed a couple of Tylenol to the third power she’d found in Mrs. Soles’ medicine cabinet. At least they had codeine in them and that was better than nothing, almost.
She chucked a pill-shaped stone at the stinky mold-gray water and it skipped the surface. One. Two. Three. Three was the right button. She clicked on a Dolly Parton song, turning up the volume on the old tape player so she could masturbate in peace. The Deadies didn’t notice. Mr. Woods had caught Rewind and they were biting each other, which was fun to watch, until Mrs. Woods joined in and blocked Paddy’s view.
As Rewind howled, Dolly wailed about never gettin’ what you need when you need it. Yeah, don’t I know it, Paddy thought. Her body spasmed. Like killing yourself’s easy. She wiped sticky fingers on her filthy shirttail and shoved another Twinkie all the way into her mouth. Everybody thinks it is but that just shows you what they know. If it was easy, everybody would have been dead before she was born and Paddy’d have managed it by now too.
Shit! She kicked dirt at Fat Eddie the Deadie as he passed. He ignored her, just like he always had. She wanted to be part of the Deadies more than she’d ever wanted anything. Maybe, when Marilyn came for her next visit, she could figure some way for Paddy to get in with them, to make them see Paddy’s dead potential. Dolly sang about possibilities. If only Paddy could be a Deadie, she just knew she’d be happy forever like Miss Dolly Parton. She closed her eyes.
“Take three hundred and twelve: Norma Jean to the Rescue!” Marilyn appeared half naked and boxed Paddy’s ears good until she was bored. Finally the sex goddess grabbed the last Twinkie and admitted, “I’ve been working on a plan.”
“It’s about time,” Paddy said, wiping blood from her ear lobe.
Marilyn tilted backwards and hiked up her full white skirt until her pink lips grinned at the camera. She shoved the Twinkie up inside herself and crooned, “Happy Birthday to You.”
Paddy opened her eyes. Rewind, or what was left of him, lay in the background of the shot, a golden prop, much of Mr. Woods’ forearm sticking out of his mouth. Suddenly this movie came into sharp focus.
Paddy’s daddy wandered home every night by instinct, just the way he used to before he became a Deadie. Not that he needed rest. He never had; he was no different now.
Paddy boarded up the windows. Marilyn nailed a two by four tornado warning across the door.
Daddy stared, eyes hungry, same as always. Finally Paddy picked up his mottled hand and hauled him down to the root cellar, the way he’d done with her all her life.
She lit the hurricane lamp. Bushel baskets of rotting potatoes and carrots and cabbage lined the shelves and the floor was littered with broken jars with pickled foods she’d put away she didn’t know when. The place stank, but no worse than Daddy.
She positioned him on a Peaches and Cream Corn crate. His glazed, half-rotted eyeballs wandered the room aimlessly, like he didn’t recognize anything. Paddy was used to that. All the Deadies resided in Bliss, a drive-in theater she hoped to visit real soon.
Marilyn stood in a corner, legs spread, hands on knees, cleavage scrumptious, waiting for the wind to whistle up her skirt on cue. Paddy nodded. Daddy’s head kept bobbing like an antenna in a storm because his neck had snapped so she held it steady and made him look in her direction, but she couldn’t get his eyes to stay put. Black mixed media belched from his lips; his digestive juices were working; he must be watching the screen.
Marilyn hiked her skirt and turned. Paddy, skirt lifted, waved her backside at Daddy’s oscillating face, the way he always liked. Nothing.
Marilyn peeked over her shoulder and pouted her lips into an ‘O’. Paddy planted a movie smooch on Daddy’s crisp lips. His rotted nose mashed against her cheek and a chunk with crusty stuff inside broke off. A blowfly with eyes like Daddy’s emerged. “Thanks ever so!” the fly said. Paddy yelled at Marilyn, “Cut!” MM tossed back her platinum hair, thrust out her tits and giggled.
Paddy glanced down at her nearly flat chest and felt lousy. Daddy had always hungered for her before and now he didn’t and now she was truly alone on this set. She plunked down onto the dirt floor and cried, something she hadn’t done since way before she started taking the meds she’d run out of. The leak created micro mud puddles between her legs. The fly dived into one and bathed. He smiled up at her with Technicolor eyes in all his clear iridescent holiness and winked. Paddy found enlightenment. She saw the solution to all her troubles.
“It’s a wrap,” she said, but MM refused to vacate the studio. Instead, she straddled a Mason jar of pickled banana peppers and mumbled on and on about misfits and how some of them like it hot. Paddy fast forwarded.
She crawled to Daddy and peeled rotting fabric from his groin. His penis, always so big and full, dangled like a thick black connecting cable with green eyes. The eyes leaked puss-yellow tears that white life forms swam in. Those baby bugs are joining heads to tails! Paddy realized, astonished. The word LOVE flashed onto the screen and a ball bounced along the letters. Wasn’t this what Dolly Parton always sang about, and what Marilyn always got? Now Paddy knew exactly what everybody meant.
She closed her eyes and opened her mouth.
And bit.
Daddy didn’t complain. He didn’t seem to miss his cock.
Paddy sat back on her haunches and munched.
Marilyn skipped over with a rotting banana pepper dangling from her wet lips. “When it’s hot like this, I store my undies in the ice box.”
Made sense to Paddy. She swallowed the last bits of her Daddy, the bits that meant anything to her. He tasted like all the buttered popcorn they ever ate watching movies together.
As his head bobbed her way, he grinned like he used to, and Paddy felt proud. At last she’d landed a part in The Deadie Movie. She would play Daddy’s Little Deadie Girl and the movie would run forever, or at least until the reel ran out of film.
Award-winning author and editor Nancy Kilpatrick has published eighteen novels, two hundred short stories, one non-fiction book, and has edited a number of anthologies including Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead (2010) and Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (2011). Upcoming books include a graphic novel Nancy Kilpatrick’s Vampyre Theater (Brainstorm Comics); a new collection of her short fiction and novellas Vampyric Variations; and as editor, the anthology Danse Macabre: Close Encounters With the Reaper (both from Edge SF&F Publishing). She is currently editing her thirteenth anthology, Expiry Date, and writing seven novels at once, because insanity runs in her family! Check her website for details (www.nancykilpatrick.com) and she invites you to join her on Facebook.
What had happened was inexplicable and its scale incomprehensible. In the space of just a few minutes something—a germ, virus, or biological attack perhaps—had destroyed his world.
Home
David Moody
Steninger is less than two hours away from home. He hasn’t been this close for almost a month. He hasn’t been this close since it happened. Twenty-three days ago millions of people died as the world fell apart around him.
I’ve been here hundreds of times before but it’s never looked like this. Georgie and I used to drive up here at weekends to walk the dog over the hills. We’d let him off the lead and then walk and talk and watch him play for hours. That was long before the events which have since kept us apart. It all feels like a lifetime ago now. Today the green, rolling landscape I remember is washed out and gray and everything is cold, lifeless and dead. I am alone and the world is decaying around me. It’s early in the morning, perhaps an hour before sunrise, and there’s a layer of light mist clinging to the ground. I can see them moving all around me. They’re everywhere. Shuffling. Staggering. Hundreds of the fucking things.
One last push and I’ll be home. I’m beginning to feel scared now. For days I’ve struggled to get back here but, now I’m this close, I don’t know if I can go through with it. Seeing what’s left of Georgie and our home will hurt. It’s been so long and so much has happened since we were last together. I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to walk through the front door. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stand the pain of remembering everything that’s gone and all that I’ve lost.
I’m as nervous and scared now as I was when this nightmare began. I remember it as if it was only hours ago, not weeks. I was in a breakfast meeting with my lawyer and one of his staff when it started. Jarvis, the solicitor, was explaining some legal jargon to me when he stopped speaking mid-sentence. He suddenly screwed up his face with pain. I asked him what was wrong but he couldn’t answer. His breathing became shallow and short and he started to rasp and cough and splutter. He was choking but I couldn’t see why and I was concentrating so hard on what was happening to him that I didn’t notice it had got the other man too. As Jarvis’ face paled and he began to scratch and claw at his throat his colleague lurched forward and tried to grab hold of me. Eyes bulging, he retched and showered me with blood and spittle. I recoiled and pushed my chair back away from the table. Too scared to move, I stood with my back pressed against the wall and watched the two men as they choked to death. It was over and the room was silent in less than a couple of minutes.
When I eventually plucked up the courage to get out and get help I found the receptionist who had greeted me less than an hour earlier face down on her desk in a pool of sticky red-brown blood. The security man on the door was dead too, as was everyone else I could see. It was the same when I finally dared step out into the open—an endless layer of twisted human remains covered the ground in every direction I looked. What had happened was inexplicable and its scale incomprehensible. In the space of just a few minutes something—a germ, virus or biological attack perhaps—had destroyed my world. Nothing moved. The silence was deafening.
My first instinct had been to stay where I was, to keep my head down and wait for something—anything—to happen. I slowly walked back to the hotel as it was the only nearby place I knew well, picking my way through the bodies which carpeted the streets, staring at each of them in turn and looking deep into their grotesque, twisted faces. Each face was frozen in an expression of sudden, searing agony and gut-wrenching fear.
When I got back the hotel was as silent and cold as everywhere else. I locked myself in my room and waited there for hours until the solitude finally became too much to stand. I needed explanations but there was no one else left alive to ask for help. The television was useless, as was the radio, and the telephone went unanswered. Desperate, I packed my few belongings, took a car from the car park, and made a break for home. But I soon found that the hushed roads were impassable, blocked by the tangled wreckage of incalculable numbers of crashed vehicles and the mangled, bloody remains of their dead drivers and passengers. With my wife and my home still more than eighty miles away I stopped the car and gave up.
It was early on the first Thursday, the third day, when the situation deteriorated again to the point where I began to question my sanity. I had been resting in the front bedroom of an empty terraced house when I looked out of the window and saw the first one of them staggering down the road. All the fear and nervousness I had previously felt instantly disappeared and was forgotten as I watched the lone figure walk awkwardly down the street. It was another survivor, I thought, it had to be. At last, someone else who might be able to tell me what had happened and who could answer some of the thousands of impossible questions I desperately needed to ask. I yelled out to the figure and banged on the window but it didn’t respond. I sprinted out of the house and ran down the road after it. I grabbed hold of its arm and turned it round to face me. As unbelievable as it seemed, I knew instantly that the thing in front of me was dead. Its eyes were clouded, covered with a milky-white film, and its skin was pockmarked and bloodied. And it was cold to the touch . . . I held its left wrist in my hand and felt for a pulse but found nothing. The creature’s skin felt unnaturally clammy and leathery and I let it go in disgust. The moment I released my grip the damn thing shuffled slowly away, this time moving back in the direction from which it had just come. It couldn’t see me. It didn’t even seem to know I was there.
Out of the corner of my eye I became aware of more movement. I turned and saw another body, then another and then another. I walked to the end of the road and stared in disbelief at what was happening all around me. The dead were rising. Many were already staggering around on clumsy, unsteady feet whilst still more were slowly dragging themselves up from where they’d fallen and died days earlier.
A frantic search for food and water and somewhere safe to shelter led me back deeper into town. Avoiding the clumsy, mannequin-like bodies that roamed the streets I barricaded myself in a large pub which stood proudly on the corner of two once busy roads. I cleared eight corpses out of the building (I herded them all into the bar before forcing them out the front door) and then locked myself in an upstairs function room where I started to drink. Although it didn’t make me drunk like it used to, the alcohol made me feel warm and took the very slightest edge off my fear.
I thought constantly about Georgie and home but I was too afraid to move. I knew that I should try to get to her but for days I just sat there and waited like a useless, chickenshit coward. Every morning I tried to force myself to leave but the thought of going back out into what remained of the world was unbearable. I didn’t know what I’d find out there and instead I sat in booze-fueled isolation and watched the world decay.
As the days passed the bodies themselves changed. Initially stiff, awkward and staccato, their movements slowly became more purposeful and controlled. After four days I observed that their senses were beginning to return. They were starting to respond to what was happening around them. Late one afternoon in a fit of frightened frustration, I hurled an empty beer bottle across the room. I missed the wall and smashed a window. Out of curiosity I looked down into the street below and saw that huge numbers of the corpses had turned in response to the sudden noise and were beginning to walk towards the pub. Attracted by the clattering sound (which seemed louder than it actually was in the otherwise all-consuming silence) they began to shuffle relentlessly closer and closer. During the hours that followed I tried to keep quiet and out of sight but my every movement seemed to make more of them aware of my presence. From every direction they came and all that I could do was watch as a crowd of hundreds of the fucking things surrounded me. They followed each other like animals and soon their lumbering, decomposing shapes filled the streets for as far as I could see.
A week went by, and the ferocity of the creatures outside increased. They began to fight with each other and they fought to get to me. They clawed and banged at the doors but didn’t yet have the strength to get inside. My options were hopelessly limited but I knew that I had to do something. I could stay where I was and hope that I could drink enough so that I didn’t care when the bodies eventually broke through, or I could make a break for freedom and take my chances outside. I had nothing to lose. I thought about home and I thought about Georgie and I knew that I had to try and get back to her.
It wasn’t much of a plan but it was all that I had. I packed all the meager supplies and provisions I found lying around the pub into a rucksack and got myself ready to leave. I made crates of crude bombs from the liquor bottles I found behind the bar and down in the cellar and storeroom. As the light began to fade at the end of the tenth day I leant out of the broken window at the front of the building, lit the booze-soaked rag fuses which I had stuffed down the necks of the bottles, and then began to hurl them down into the rotting crowds below me. In minutes I’d created more devastation and confusion than I ever would have imagined possible. There had been little rain for days. Tinder dry and packed tightly together, the repugnant bodies caught light almost instantly. Oblivious to the flames which quickly consumed them, the damn things continued to move about for as long as they were physically able, their every staggering step spreading the fire still further and destroying more and more of them. And the dancing orange light of the sudden inferno and the crackling and popping of burning flesh drew even more of the desperate cadavers closer to the scene.
I crept downstairs and waited by the back door. The building itself was soon alight. Doubled-up with hunger pains (the world outside had suddenly become filled with the smell of roast meat) I crouched down in the darkness and waited until the rising temperature in the building had become too much to stand. When the flames began to lick at the final door separating me from the rest of the pub I pushed my way out into the night and ran through the bodies. Their reactions were dull and slow and my speed and strength and the surprise of my sudden appearance meant that they offered virtually no resistance. In the silent, monochrome world, the confusion that I’d generated provided enough of a distraction to camouflage my movements and render me temporarily invisible.
Since I’ve been on the move I’ve learned to live like a shadow. My difficult journey home has been painfully long and slow. I move only at night under cover of darkness. If the bodies see or hear me they will come for me and, as I’ve found to my cost on more than one occasion, once one of them has my scent then countless others will follow. I have avoided them as much as possible but their numbers are vast and some contact has been inevitable. I’m getting better at dealing with them. The initial disgust and trepidation I felt has now given way to hate and anger. Through necessity I have become a cold and effective killer, although I’m not sure whether that’s an accurate description of my new found skill. I have to keep reminding myself that these bloody aberrations are already dead.
