Extreme Zombies, page 7
Another spotlight suddenly cut through the darkness, spotlighting the black drape at the other opposite of the arena. Out stumbled a putrescent walking corpse, flailing its arms and awkwardly making its way forward. Its jaw was slack, its tongue lolling out in anticipation of its next meal. A collective sigh filled the arena.
“Look at it,” Simonds said. “I bet this is the first zombie most of you kids have ever seen. That says something about how far we’ve come. It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when zombies even walked the streets of Calgary. But thanks to the vaccine developed right here in Canada, none of us will ever be zombies. Remember that: kill a zombie, and that’s one closer to killing them all.
“That disgusting creature you’re looking at was somebody’s brother or father or son once. I’m not going to lie at you about that. But he isn’t no more; in fact, he’s not a ‘he’ at all, but an ‘it’!”
The colonel pulled his service pistol from its holster and carefully aimed at the brightly lit target, before firing. It sounded little more potent than a cap gun, but Paul twitched in his seat anyway. The bullet struck the zombie’s shoulder, and it barely even noticed as it kept shambling forward.
“Ah, I didn’t quite get him, did I?” Simonds said. “I’ve seen zombies lose all their limbs and keep on going. Their brain and their hunger drives them forward. They want to eat our flesh. That’s all they want. And they never hesitate before they strike.”
The zombie lurched steadily forward, having made it almost halfway to the podium. Many children clenched their teeth with the tension, but Land knew that it would take a minor miracle for that zombie to actually reach the colonel.
“Now,” said Simonds, “there are some who say that because this thing was once our loved ones, that means we shouldn’t be able to kill it. We all know people like this. These zombie-lovers say that zombies are trainable, that maybe we can toss them the odd steak to keep them happy and teach them to fetch our slippers. But I challenge anyone to look in the eyes of the dead and see anything worth saving. Fellas, can we focus in on that?”
The Jumbotron zoomed in until the zombie’s twisted, drooling face filled the screen.
“No life. No intelligence. In humans we see some kind of spark of life; I don’t know what it is, but it’s always there. You don’t see that in zombies. That’s what zombies are: humans minus a certain spark, and that’s what makes them a perversion in the face of God. There’s only one thing to do to them!”
Simonds fired again. This time it struck the zombie square in the head, a perfect killshot. There was a splash of bright red blood, and the creature fell. The Saddledome erupted with cheers and shrill whistles.
The house lights came up. “Pretty cool, eh?” whispered Sgt. Hazelwood to Paul.
“Now before I bring out a very special friend of mine,” Simonds said, “we should all rise for the singing of our national anthem.” An organ started up with “O Canada,” and, as they stood, Land extended his arm behind Paul’s back and nudged Hazelwood.
“Sergeant,” he whispered. “We need to share a word outside.”
“But Mr. Land, it’s disrespectful . . . ”
“Now,” he said, just a little too loud, and he started away from the arena. She placed her drink at her feet and stomped after him. He led her right outside onto the Saddledome’s front steps, and there she began to snap at him.
“Who do you think you are that you can—”
“Who do you think you are to mess with my student like that?” Land shouted back at her. “God, a military pick-up, you hanging over his shoulder . . . Do you think this isn’t hard enough for him anyway? The other kids will never let him hear the end of this.”
“Good,” Hazelwood said. “I don’t want him to forget today. I want him to be traumatized as hell. He’ll thank us for it later.”
“When? When will he thank us?”
“When he’s been dropped in some hellhole and told to kill.” There was an absolute conviction in her voice.
“He’ll be a man then, and better equipped to handle it than these kids are,” Land argued. “Listen to them: they’re whistling and cheering! It’s just a show for them. That’s just how you want them. They don’t consider things. They don’t think about things. The military doesn’t want them to. I don’t know who’s more braindead, zombies or soldiers.”
“How dare you!” Hazelwood cried, her throat hoarsening. “This isn’t our world any more! It’s theirs! We let our guard down, and they tear our throats out! Society must be prepared, prepared in every way, for war! It is the only way!”
Land shrunk back at the force of her argument. “Do you remember,” he said, his voice cracking, “when they used to say that watching violent movies was desensitizing, and that was a bad thing?”
For a long time there was silence, and then Hazelwood said, “You’ve been wondering why all this special treatment for this one kid? What makes him so important?”
Land nodded.
“That was my idea. When I heard about Paul from your school’s liaison office, I thought about the way I was before the zombies. A quiet, rural life. No TV. I’d never even witnessed violence. Then I watched while a zombie tore my father’s head off while he was working the fields. You know what I did? I didn’t run, I didn’t scream—I just shut off. The shock almost killed me. But that made me who I am.”
Hazelwood was trembling slightly, and clenched her fists where she stood to steady herself. “Maybe you’re a zombie-lover too, but you earned that right by fighting for your country up in Alaska. Mr. and Mrs. March never served, but their son will have to. Maybe it was noble once to be a conscientious objector, but now it’s lunacy. The more they shelter Paul, the more they try to protect him, the more harm they do.
“I know you have stories like mine. We all do. We are the traumatized generation. A bit older and maybe we could have been better prepared for what was happening. A bit younger and we’d never have known a world without the zombies. If we are to spare the new generation what we went through, they must grow up impervious to trauma. Understand me. I value innocence. That’s what Paul is. But in this world of ours, innocence kills.” There were tears in her eyes. “It seems wrong, I know. Sometimes I spend whole nights crying into my pillow. But it’s the only way. Let them cheer when zombies die. Better they cheer than they scream.”
Land turned away from Hazelwood and gazed at the skyscrapers of downtown Calgary, built so many decades ago and standing there like silent memorials to a dead world. “I wasn’t made for these times,” he said.
“None of us were,” she answered.
Land wiped his eyes and turned back to face her. “They’ve probably brought out Zombie Bob by now. We should get back to Paul.”
“Yes,” Hazelwood agreed. “He needs our support.”
Inside, the Saddledome pulsed with rock music. Land recognized the Doors’ “Peace Frog,” which, thanks to the tastes of a certain general, became something of a military anthem. To its steady beat Zombie Bob, dressed in full western garb with a white Stetson, wove his way between ten or so zombies, a roaring chainsaw in his hand.
It was part of Zombie Bob’s appeal that it seemed like he could die at any moment.
Colonel Simonds was still on the platform, now protected by a half-dozen guards with submachine guns, offering commentary as Bob played the clown, always making it look like the zombies were just about to get him, before getting them instead.
“Careful Bob, there’s a another deadhead behind you,” said Simonds. Bob did a cartoon double-take and slid the saw around to his back. Then he slid backwards on the dirt, driving the saw through the hapless zombie’s midsection. Bob did a pirouette, slicing the zombie mostly in two before slamming his weapon right through its neck. A thick plume of blood shot out.
Land winced at the display. No one he had known in Alaska would attempt anything remotely like Zombie Bob’s antics. He and Hazelwood slid back into their seats on either side of Paul, and Land asked the boy, “How are you doing?”
Paul March sat there in wide-eyed, stunned silence. “I . . . uh . . . ” was the best answer he could manage.
“Remember,” Hazelwood whispered, “there’s glass between you and the zombies. They can’t get you.”
Zombie Bob’s opponents seemed selected for maximum diversity; an old granny, a slender college girl, a middle-aged Chinese man, and so on. All that was missing was a child zombie. The media always shied clear of those.
“Wow, look at that, kids,” Simonds said. “Remember, you can see Zombie Bob’s adventures every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. on CBC.”
“Peace Frog” ended and the music switched gears to a whimsical country waltz. Bob took a while to forget the zombies and offer a few dance steps, tipping the white hat now splattered with blood. Bob pulled away from zombies for a moment to wave to the crowd, eliciting laughter as the zombies lurched up on him from behind. Then he sprang into motion, running circles around the zombies, causing them to bump into each other, trip over each other, fall down. The crowd roared with laughter.
Paul made fist of his hands and squeezed until his knuckles were white. He was trembling hard, unstoppably. Land put a hand on his shoulder to try and steady him, and he felt the reverberations through to his bones.
In this confusion Bob rushed forward with his chainsaw swinging at chest level. He caught two zombies right next to each other and forced the saw through bone and flesh, slicing through both of them. Their legs collapsed, useless, but their upper torsos were not dead and pulled themselves across the dirt with their strong arms. Bob pulled away, ignoring them for the time.
“Two at once, Bob!” Simonds declared. “You’ve outclassed yourself this time. I don’t see how you can top that.”
The crowd went mad, screaming, whistling, stomping their feet, sounds echoing through the Saddledome’s steel rafters. For a moment Land felt like he was a kid again, listening to a crowd cheering for a wrestling match or a fight in a hockey game. Paul started making noises like little yelps. Land and Hazelwood looked at each other.
“Are you all right, Paul?” Land asked, looking into the boy’s eyes. They were beginning to look glassy. Paul grasped hard onto his forearm and squeezed. Land cried out.
Zombie Bob slipped among his remaining foes, so that they lurched at him from every side. Most weeks on his show, he performed some variant of this, positioning himself directly in the densest collection of zombies and fighting his way out. It was a crowd-pleaser with any weapon, and the chainsaw was best of all. He swung it at the zombie in front of him, smoothly slitting it through the middle. On the Jumbotron they could see smoke billowing out of the chainsaw. As he retrieved, it seemed to sputter and die.
The camera caught the expression on Bob’s face. It was real panic. This was not that unusual; the TV cameras often found Zombie Bob running for his life.
“Uh-oh,” said Colonel Simonds. “Looks like ol’ Bob’s got himself in trouble again.”
Somebody cut out the music just in time for everyone to hear Bob release a stream of profanity. He threw the dead chainsaw in the face of the closest zombie and dove past it, his Stetson tumbling off his bald head in the process. He kicked up dust as he raced away from the remaining zombies, but had the misfortune of tripped over something, landing face-first in the dirt. Before he could run, a strong zombie hand clamped down on one of his legs. He looked back to see a half-zombie, one of those he’d sliced in two earlier, its entrails dragging through the dirt behind it. It squeezed tighter on his leg, shattering bone and pulling away a handful of flesh. Bob’s scream hit the steel roof and resonated through the Saddledome’s every corner.
“Fuck!” shouted Simonds into his microphone. There was no doubt now—this was not part of the show.
The smell of fresh blood spurred the other zombies on to greater speed. Zombie Bob tried to pull himself to his feet, but they were on him in no time, ripping, tearing at his clothes and his flesh. The entire Saddledome could hear his screams. Piece by piece they devoured him, stuffing human meat by the handful into their mouths. So here it was at last, the death of Robert Smith Harding. Everyone knew he’d die violently, himself most of all. But nobody expected that it would be witnessed by ten thousand schoolchildren.
This would be remembered as the great trauma of a generation. They weren’t screaming in excitement now. They were screaming in terror.
Land felt Paul’s hand go limp on his arm.
“Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!” Colonel Simonds shouted the command like a mantra, and his bodyguards loosed a hail of bullets into the mass of zombies. Many of the bullets struck their targets, but those that didn’t impacted the bulletproof glass, ricocheting through the arena and off into the crowd. One of these stray bullets caught Simonds in the chest and he collapsed on stage, barely noticed amid all the pandemonium.
Children and adults alike crawled over each other, fueled by the most primal surge of adrenalin, frantically seeking to escape the danger. Bodies swamped the exits and fell from balconies. Land grabbed Paul, ready to carry him out of the Saddledome, but found him limp and cold. He reached for Paul’s jugular but felt no pulse.
He has a weak heart, Mrs. March had told him. She must have meant it. This shock must been too much for poor sensitive Paul, and his little heart gave out. Hazelwood looked at him open-jawed, and amid all this chaos noise and chaos everything suddenly seemed so still and calm.
Then Paul’s eyes jumped open.
Thank God I was wrong, Land thought first, but then he saw his eyes. He could never explain this to anyone who hadn’t seen it for themselves, but the eyes of the dead were different. Simonds was right; they lacked spark, life. This was true even of the freshest zombies.
Paul sank his teeth into Sgt. Hazelwood’s forearm, biting down hard. Her legs kicked involuntarily, knocking against the seat in front of her. Her mouth opened to scream, but no noise came out as her eyes glassed over and she sank back into her chair, growing increasingly inert as Paul gnawed through to raw bone. Land grabbed Paul by the hair and yanked back, but even a child zombie possessed inhuman strength, and Paul wouldn’t release his grasp on his prize.
The Marches, Land thought. They live outside of the city. The inoculation drives must have missed them somehow.
Damned zombie-lovers—they didn’t even inoculate their own kid against becoming one of them! How irresponsible can they be?
Land slid his hand down Hazelwood’s thigh to her holster. He pulled out her service pistol, drove it into Paul’s chin, and squeezed the trigger.
Murray Leeder is the author of the novels Son of Thunder and Plague of Ice for Wizards of the Coast, as well as more than twenty short stories. He also holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University and has published academic articles in such journals as Early Popular Visual Culture, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, the Journal of Popular Culture, Clues: A Journal of Detection, Popular Music and Society, and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies.
“It’s the dark wave that sweeps over things, son, changing the world, readying for the end times. People, they do evil to each other and it opens the door for more evil. Evil deeds call up evil spirit and its hunger enters the dead, it’s a sickness on the land . . . ”
Aftertaste
John Shirley
8:45 p.m., Saturday Night, West Oakland, California
Dwayne was sick of hearing Uncle Garland talk. The old man would talk about Essy and he would talk about the dope and he would talk about grindin’, about everything but his own goddamn drinking. Sitting in that busted wheelchair at the kitchen table, talking and sipping that Early Times. Talking shit about his angeldreams, too. One more word about the dope . . .
But Dwayne tolerated more than just one more word, because he needed Uncle Garland. He needed a place to stay and some place to run to. So he just sat and listened while he waited for Essy to get up, waited for Essy to get them started again. Essy in the next room, had to crash for a while, been two hours already. Fuck it. Dwayne could taste rock at the back of his tongue; smell it high in his nostrils. All in the imagination.
The TV was on, with the sound turned off. A rerun of a show with that guy used to be in Taxi. Tony something.
“You listening to me, Dwayne?” Uncle Garland demanded, scratching his bald pate with yellowed fingers. His rheumy eyes looking at Dwayne and not seeing him. Moving with less life than the TV screen. Blind. The old man was blind, but that was easy to forget, somehow.
“Can’t hardly not listen, you talking all the time,” Dwayne said.
“The dope killing this town, it be killing our people,” Garland was saying. “Killing the black man. I’m fixin’ to go the Next World, and I’m glad to be goin’, Praise Jesus, with the devil eating this world like a pie . . . ” Didn’t pause to take a breath.
Uncle Garland’s place was an apartment in the Projects, in the shadow of the freeway that collapsed in the ’89 earthquake. Used to be you heard the freeway booming and rushing all night. Now it was eerie quiet. Or quiet as it ever got in the Projects.
“Tell you some true now,” Uncle Garland said, using the expression that always prefaced a long, long lecture. “These are the end times, that the Lord’s truth. In my angel dreams, they come to me and tell me it’s so. And it’s on the news, about the dead people rising. It’s in the Bible, son, when the dead rise it’s a Sign that the Lord is coming for Judgment—”
“You see that shit in the Weekly World News?”
“Radio news, I heard it. A disease in the air, they said, a radiation. The dead rising and hungry for the flesh of the living, Lord, and they—”
“That’s complete shit,” Dwayne snorted. Why didn’t fucking Essy get up? Maybe he wouldn’t help him, get him started on the rock today. Cousin Essy think he’s a big Grinder now, selling dope, stylin’ like a B Boy, but he got nothing to show for it. Not like he paying the rent here. Some grinders they put their family in a nice house, buy them cars. Essy don’t give the old man shit, so don’t tell me you’re the big Fly. Of course, the old man wouldn’t accept the money, he’d know it was dope money . . .
