Extreme Zombies, page 41
Trapped in a transition period between death and rebirth they retained different levels of intelligence but were limited by overwhelming instincts. Instinctively, they knew enough to stay out of the sun. It was a simple matter of self-preservation, for the tropical sun could speed their decay. The instinct to devour the living was strong in them as well, but only when they were exposed to temptation. Nathan was sure of that after his experiences with Buck and the pilot. He was also certain that as long as temptation was absent up to the very point that the feeding frenzy took control, the dead of Grimes Island could still function at a level that separated them from the gut-buckets. Oh, they functioned at different sub-levels as he’d seen with Kara North, the pilot, and Buck, but in some cases, they functioned just as well as the living.
Perhaps something in human flesh, once devoured, triggered the change in behavior. Maybe something in the blood. Or perhaps it was the very act of cannibalism. Nathan didn’t know the cause, didn’t much care.
His wounded shoulder was scarlet-purple and swollen. Five days had passed since Buck had attacked him, and he couldn’t decide if the bite was worse or better. Just to be safe, he’d injected himself with antibiotics, but he didn’t know if his first aid made the slightest difference.
He didn’t know if he was alive, or dead, or somewhere in between.
To clarify his thoughts, he noted his symptoms on the legal pad he’d hidden in his desk after the plane crash. Many were perplexing. He wished that he could consult with a scientist or a doctor, but his first attempt at stateside communications had proved fruitless, and soon he was afraid to communicate with anyone. He didn’t relish the idea of ending up as a science project in some lab, and he didn’t want an extermination squad invading Grimes Island, either.
The thing that bothered him most was that his heart was still beating. He couldn’t understand how that was possible until he remembered that Buck’s heart had been beating when he’d shot him—Nathan had felt it pounding against his own chest as they wrestled on the floor—and he was certain that Buck had been dead. Looking at his wounded shoulder, remembering the fire in Buck’s eyes when he’d attacked, Nathan was positive of that. There were other symptoms, as well.
He couldn’t eat. Every evening he cooked some fried chicken, even though the smell made him gag and the oily feel of it made him shiver. Last night he’d forced himself to eat two breasts and a thigh, and he’d spent the next five hours coiled in a cramped ball on the kitchen floor before finally surrendering to the urge to vomit. And he couldn’t keep down Pepsi or Jose Cuervo either. The Cuervo Gold was especially bad; it burned his throat and made him miserable for hours. He did suck ice cubes, but only to keep his throat comfortable. And he’d started snorting the cocaine that Ronnie’s mule had brought in, but only because he was afraid to sleep.
Cocaine. Maybe that was the problem. They said that cocaine killed the appetite, didn’t they? And he’d started using the stuff at about the same time that he’d stopped eating. But five days without food . . . God, that was a long time. So it had to be more than just the cocaine. Didn’t it?
He closed his eyes and thought about hunger, about food. He tried to picture the most appetizing banquet imaginable.
Nothing came to him for the longest time. Then he saw Kara North’s mangled hand. The pilot’s severed arm. Buck’s ruined head.
His gut roiled.
He opened his eyes.
The facts seemed irrefutable, but somehow Nathan couldn’t bring himself to leave the compound or, conversely, let the Grimesgirls enter. They were on the beach every night, enjoying themselves, tempting him. Miss November and Miss February sang love songs, serenading Nathan from the wrong side of the glass-encrusted walls. He watched them, smiling his wry smile on the outside, inside despising his cowardice.
He was bored, but he didn’t risk watching television, either. If the networks had returned to the airwaves, he would certainly find himself looking straight into the eyes of living, breathing people, and while he seriously doubted that such a stimulus could trigger the feeding frenzy, he didn’t want to expose himself, just to be on the safe side.
He didn’t want to lose what he had.
So he snorted cocaine and wrote during the day. At night, he watched them. They all came to the beach now, even Teddy Ching. He had no legs; that’s why he’d taken so long to cross the island. But Teddy didn’t let that stop him. He dragged himself along, eagerly pursuing the Grimesgirls, his exposed spine wiggling as happily and uncontrollably as a puppy’s tail. Three cameras were strung around his neck, and he often propped himself against the base of a manchineel tree and photographed the girls as they frolicked on the beach below.
More than anything, Nathan wished that he could develop those pictures. His Grimesgirls were still beautiful. Miss July, her stomach so firm, so empty above a perfect heart-shaped trim. Miss May, her skinless forehead camouflaged with a wreath of bougainvillea and orchids. The rounded breasts of Miss April, sunset bruised and shadowed, the nipples so swollen. The sunken yellow hollows beneath Miss August’s eyes, hot dry circles, twin suns peering from her face with all the power of that wonderful month.
Twin suns in the middle of the night.
She walks in beauty, like the night . . . in beauty, like the night . . . of cloudless climes and . . . starry skies and all that’s best of dark and bright . . .
And all that’s best of dark and bright . . .
Nathan couldn’t remember the rest of it. He wrote the words on his yellow pad, over and over, but he couldn’t remember. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them the sea was hard with the flat light of morning.
He hurried inside long before the sunshine kissed the balcony.
The beach was deserted.
Norman Partridge’s fiction includes horror, suspense, and the fantastic—“sometimes all in one story” according to Joe Lansdale. Partridge’s novel Dark Harvest was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best one hundred books of 2006, and two short-story collections were published in 2010—Lesser Demons from Subterranean Press and Johnny Halloween from Cemetery Dance. Other work includes the Jack Baddalach mysteries Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta, plus The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was adapted for film. His work has received multiple Bram Stoker awards. He can be found on the web at NormanPartridge.com and americanfrankenstein.blogspot.com.
He thought he’d learned you could get used to anything, but then he encountered Susan . . .
Susan
Robin D. Laws
It had taken him until his fifth trip to the loading dock of the old sugar refinery before it finally came to him what the smell reminded him of: alligators. Saint Augustine’s Alligator Farm in St. Augustine, Florida. His parents had taken him there when he was a little kid. And, in turn, he’d taken Maggie and the kids during their own trip down there, just three years before The Rising. How could he have forgotten that smell? Thick, damp, loamy. Thousands of alligators lolling around, packed together in mossy water, shitting and pissing and screwing and fighting over chicken carcasses. Grinning up at you as their reek rose into the humid air. Like they knew their stink was going to stay on your skin and hair, root its way into the fabric of your polo shirts and your cut-off jeans and stay there for as long as it could. They might be penned up and put on display, those alligators, but they could still fuck with you. A little last gesture of impotent reptilian malice.
Well, this place smelled like that. It hit you as soon as the guy opened the big corrugated metal door. Forster was glad to have finally pegged the thing that had been nagging at him all this time.
Forster reached for his wallet to pay the guy but Tim, who’d come in behind him, put a restraining hand on his shoulder. The guy waved the two of them through with no payment exchanged. This was a new arrangement. Tim had paid the hundred bucks for Forster last time, but now he seemed to have some kind of comp privileges. It did not surprise Forster that Tim might be providing some kind of quid pro quo service for them. Even if he’d been able to rouse himself to curiosity over this minor detail, he knew better than to ask. If it was interesting enough to come up in idle conversation, Tim might drop a mention of it. Forster had established himself as worthy of trust.
They headed towards the steps that led up to the top level of risers. Tim liked to survey things from on high. Observe the bettors as well as, maybe even more, than the competitors. The first couple of times, Forster had preferred to get his face closer to the action. Now it was fine by him to sit beside Tim. On the way up the stairs, Forster stopped his hand just short of getting a big splinter from the railing. It, like the rest of the bleacher structure, was chunked together from raw, unfinished lumber. The first time it was all fresh and new, like it had been put up the previous day. Now it was starting to get grimy.
“Watch out for splinters,” he said to Tim.
“Thanks,” said Tim.
They were hardly at the top of the stairs when one of Tim’s regulars was on them, panting like a big old sheep dog. Large, wide, bald face distinguished mostly by his big comb-over and silver-framed aviator glasses. He wore a cheap, brown suit, the polyester fabric pilling up at the knees. Matching brown tie, lighter brown shirt. Forster had him down for a government employee of some sort.
“Hecuba’s gonna freakin’ kick freakin’ righteous ass tonight,” the regular said. He put extra emphasis on the word ass. “I can feel it. It’s gonna be her biggest night yet.”
Tim leaned his long body casually up against the railing and reached for the cigarette he’d tucked behind his ear. He didn’t light it or anything: just played with it, tapping it against his left palm.
“Think so?”
“Know so.”
“That kind of certainty . . . I don’t know. What kind of odds we want to talk?”
Forster sidled past them towards the usual spot on the third-last bench up. The odds-making process was of little interest to him. He wasn’t here to bet. He’d burned out on gambling a long time ago.
He lowered himself onto the hard bench and looked down at the other people. Immediately below him, a white-haired man spoke in a high, flutey voice to a broad-shouldered guy in a plaid flannel shirt. At least a generation separated them and something about the ease with which they sat together said to Forster that they were father and son. Directly over, a very obese young woman with stringy hair and a big white sweatshirt with a picture of Border collie puppies on it unrolled a paper bag and took out a rattling package of cheese doodles. Down front was a row of Tamil guys, all of them in ski vests. The Portuguese, Chinese, and gangbanger delegations were also present in force. They waved fistfuls of hundreds at each other. Forster saw Tim’s leather cowboy hat down there among them; he was weaving between the groups, making notes with his stylus on his knock-off Palm Pilot.
The place was fuller than it had ever been before. Word was really getting out. Forster was surprised that the organizers were willing to let so many in. Too many people knew now for this to go on for much longer. The cops would get tipped off and come in the middle of the night with the heavy-duty Gauzner sprayers. They wouldn’t bust in during an event, with the bleachers full. Too big a chance of things getting out of hand. As much as they’d like to track down each and every spectator and see them slapped with ten-to-fifteen for criminal facilitation, illicit custody of PMAs, first degree.
Forster closed his eyes. The insides of his eyelids burned. He needed more sleep. He wished he could close his nostrils, too. Identifying the smell had done nothing to make it more tolerable; just the opposite.
He must have nodded off because he started when Tim leaned on his shoulder sitting down next to him.
“Good action?” Forster asked, by way of conversation. Tim nodded. Forster thought maybe there might be a hint of a grin on him somewhere, but with Tim you couldn’t always tell.
The P.A. made itself known with a squeal of feedback. Tim shuddered, but Forster did not. Every freaking time they had the mike pointed into the speakers. He’d come to expect it.
The voice at the mike did not trouble itself to rouse any extra anticipation or excitement in the crowd. It was an unconfident teenager’s voice, occasionally cracking and inevitably rising towards the end of each sentence. “Everybody get ready for tonight’s bout,” it said. “Tonight we have the new challenger, Orkon the Eviscerator.” The crowd greeted this news with a ritual booing. Orkon was here as meat, just like all his predecessors.
Heavy blue drapes parted down on the left side of the pit, and out came two men in big padded suits, like for attack dog training. Riot helmets made them look like they had bug heads Riot helmets made them look like they had bug heads. They wheeled in Orkon on an industrial-size upright dolly. Six wide leather belts, each with a huge rusty buckle, secured the zombo to it. They had a big fake Viking helmet with tinfoil-covered horns plunked on his head. Orkon looked like he had some fight in him; he hissed and snapped his half-missing teeth at the ring men as they wheeled him to his corner. He wriggled and strained at the belts but there was no give in them. It would be good to start the match when he was still pissed, so they left him in place and hustled it across the ring and through the drapes on the other side.
Forster could see a wave of doubt ripple through the guys nosed up to the Plexi-shielding in the front row. Maybe this one was ready for Hecuba. Some bills changed hands. But then the voice announced the arrival of the previous all-time champion, and the small crowd surged to its feet and was stamping and whistling. They began to chant “He-cu-ba, He-cu-ba, He-cu-ba.” Forster half-heartedly chanted along at first, but then left off, not sure who he actually meant to root for.
The ring men came back with the second dolly, this one bearing the shorter, stouter corpse of a woman. Forster had spent a certain amount of time thinking about her, wondering who she’d been before she got bit. There was something about her pear-shaped figure, her wide thighs and the vestiges of sandy, permed hair on the top of her head that, to Forster, said supermarket checkout clerk. Possibly a Wal-Mart greeter. Definitely someone from the lower echelons, like that. Well, she’d found a distinction now she’d never had when she was breathing. More money had changed hands on her in the course of a couple of matches than she’d probably earned in her whole living existence.
Unlike her opponent, Hecuba was not moving at all. Those little lizard-smart eyes of hers were darting back and forth, but that was it. “Conserving her energy for the fight,” Forster heard the white-haired dad say to his son, giving him a rib-nudge. The son must have been the newbie; Dad the old hand. Forster had listened to many of the bettors go on about Hecuba, theorizing that she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew she was competing; she had that something extra, that motivation, that made for a champion. Forster had not stirred himself to disagree but had seen nothing in her, other than the usual insensate, predatory stimuli-and-response behavior. She was just faster and meaner than the others, that’s all.
The audience was clapping rhythmically, building itself up into a big crescendo. The organizers weren’t much in the way of showmen, because they didn’t wait for it to peak or anything. The announcer did nothing to build or shape their anticipation. Forster had to admit, though, that this actually gave the thing an air of authenticity, that he would have soured on it even sooner if it had been all faked up. Maybe they knew what they were doing after all.
The ring men casually reached into a toolbox that had been sitting center-ring the whole time, and withdrew from it a pair of plastic Super Soaker squirt guns, one in bright neon green plastic, the other in pink. Both were stained red-brown. Each ring man stepped back, took aim at one of the zombos, and let loose, drenching his target.
The contents would be human blood. Zombos could not, under normal circumstances, be induced to attack each other. They could sniff out live from dead. The only way to make them go apeshit on each other was to spray them with the fresh stuff from a live victim. After his first match, Forster asked Tim where they got it, but Tim refused to speculate. Which answered the question, more or less.
The ring men retreated, and from backstage, one of them hit the remote switch that blew the micro-charges on the belts. Little plumes of smoke rose up from the dollies as the zombos staggered forth. From his struggling with the restraints just a few seconds earlier, a bettor might have put his money on Orkon being first to free himself, and to capitalize on that. But the bigger corpse staggered around, batting at the rising puffs of burnt powder, as Hecuba crouched down, hissed, and made a run at him. She tackled Orkon, knocking him off his feet, and began to claw at his eyes with her jagged, extruded fingernails. Tim leaned forward, biting his lip. One of the Portuguese guys got up on his bench and executed a little dance of exultation. Orkon bucked, squirming out from under his attacker, and flailed wildly at her head. He lunged for the side of her throat and she scrabbled backwards on the particle board flooring. He dived at her. She thrust herself upwards and back to a crouching position. Orkon rose to his feet, too.
The Viking helmet had fallen off in the melee’s first moments. As part of the whole warrior theme, the ring men had strapped a belt, scabbard, and sword to Orkon’s otherwise naked waist, and for a moment it seemed like he was going to pull the sword and go hacking at Hecuba’s head with it. But instead he just tore the belt off and tossed it aside. He threw his head back and shrieked, his gray tongue flopping past his chapped and peeling lips. Hecuba held ground, pawing the flooring with her splayed left foot. Forster noticed there were a couple more toes missing than last time. Hecuba braced for Orkon’s charge, and he came at her headlong. She back-swatted him with her hand, the force of which hardly seemed to register with him. He howled again, then thrust a punching hand deep down into her chest. Even Forster couldn’t help but wince with the sound of cracking bone. Orkon kept his hand inside her, his shoulder muscles working like he was groping around for something. Another distinct snap followed. Orkon withdrew his bile-smeared arm, holding something long and sharp-ended in his quivering fist. He’d snapped off one of Hecuba’s ribs. The room went quiet as the bigger zombo took a step back, raised up the rib like a dagger, and then stepped forward to drive it down through Hecuba’s left eyesocket. Leaping from the flooring to put all of his weight behind the blow, the challenger knocked his prey down. Hecuba’s limbs flopped like trout on the floor of a boat, then stopped. Orkon pushed his face deep into her gaping chest cavity, to feed. Moments later he leapt back, shaking his head from side to side as he spit chunks of unsatisfyingly dead meat from his jaws.
