Zombie Pulp

12

We marched the six out exactly one hour after dark that night.

Sonny, Conroy, Ape, and me. We were all armed with pump shotguns and. 9mm sidearms. Ape had an Army-issue flamethrower strapped to his back that he had looted from an armory. We were ready to defend ourselves if need be, but it wouldn’t come to that. The lottery didn’t work that way. We were the meat-bringers, so to speak, and you don’t kill the steward that sets your table.

Ape and Sonny led the way out to the killing fields, Conroy and me in the back, the chosen ones sandwiched in-between. Maria was there, of course. Mrs. Pearson, a young woman named Sylvia whose husband was in the shelter. Three men-Johnson, Hill, and Keeson. They all had the same dead-eyed look of manic desperation in their eyes and to look into them was to know the depths of hell and how hot it burned.

I wasn’t naive.

I knew that Doc did not trust me anymore than I really trusted him or any of the others. That’s why Conroy was stationed behind me. If I caused trouble, I wouldn’t be coming back.

The killing fields are an easy city block out past the shelter and the parking lot. Like the name implies, just a field. Nothing but grass and a number of wooden poles speared into the ground. I’m not sure what their use was back in the good old days of the weather station, but now they had been put to an extremely dark purpose. As we walked into the grass, a ghost of moon began to rise. And as it did, there came a rumbling, a pounding, a rhythmic hammering from somewhere out in the hills that surrounded us. It was a jarring, discordant sound that echoed around inside your skull. It was like those voodoo drums in old movies, but much more primitive.

“Hell’s that?” I said.

“Wormboys,” Sonny said. “Tonight’s the night and they know it. They’re getting excited. They’re celebrating and beating their drums.”

They weren’t drums, of course. The Wormboys were pounding on garbage cans and twenty-five gallon drums, crates and barrels, anything handy. Just the sound of it made my guts crawl up the back of my throat.

“Doesn’t it ever stop?” I said.

“Sure…later,” he told me. “Keep walking.”

Ten minutes later, we were at the killing fields. The shadows had grown long and we had to use our flashlights to do what had to be done. The poles sat atop a low hill, splintered and cracked, leaning this way and that. There were eight of them, but we only needed the six. I couldn’t get the image out of my head that this was like some kind of pagan sacrificial altar or sacred Druidic grove for secret offerings to primordial, hungry gods. Maybe that’s what it was.

When we got the chosen up there, Mrs. Pearson fell to the ground and began crying and wailing, begging for her life. Anything, anything, she said. She would give us anything if we would only spare her. Sonny tried to explain to her that it wasn’t us, but them, the Wormboys. I’ve never seen anything so pathetic, so pitiful in my life, as that poor woman on her hands and knees in the pale moonlight. I was already angry, but this cinched it.

“Chain ‘em up,” Conroy said.

I chained up Johnson like a good little Nazi and that seemed to relax Conroy a bit. The others, at this final moment, began to fight and Ape and Sonny and Conroy had their hands full trying to chain them up. I led Maria over to the farthest pole while the others fought and cried out.

“Get her chained!” Conroy called to me over his shoulder. “Fuck you waiting for?”

Maria looked at me with such serenity it squeezed tears from my eyes. She did not fight. She waited for me, the guy who loved her, to murder her. Because that’s what I was doing and nobody could tell me different. Oh, she had talked herself into some half-assed Christian martyrdom like some fool saint dying for the good of all. But what she failed to realize is that her god had died with civilization.

“Chain’s broke,” I said.

“Dammit,” Ape said.

Maria looked at me, shook her head, but I lashed out and shoved her to the ground. “You’re not going anywhere,” I told her like I meant it. Sonny came over, having finally gotten Keeson secured. All I could hear were those makeshift drums pounding in the distance and the rattling of those chains like something from a medieval dungeon. Conroy and Ape were still having a hell of a time with Sylvia and Hill who fought with everything they had and Mrs. Pearson who’d gone limp as a rag.

I heard Sonny’s boots crunching through the summer straw grass. The night had come and it seemed impossibly clean and cool, the moon brooding above ghostly white like the eye of a corpse, frosting everything in wan phosphorescence. I heard crickets chirping, nightbirds screeching in the sky. It was a surreal scene. My throat was dry as wood shavings, my eyes wide, an electric sort of alertness thrumming in my veins. I felt something rise in me, something dark and ancient and unbelievably certain of itself. It filled my brain with reaching shadows, eclipsed things like reason and morality.

“What’s the problem?” Sonny wanted to know.

“Right here,” I said and brought my. 9mm up and stuck it right in his face. His eyes rolled in their sockets, stark and mad. I squeezed the trigger and popped three rounds right into him. He jerked back like he had been kicked and landed in the grass, blood that was almost black bubbling from the ruin of his face.

“Tommy!” Maria shouted and I knocked her clear.

Conroy brought up his shotgun and I fell to the ground and popped off a couple wild rounds that weren’t so wild because one of them shattered his left kneecap and he folded up like a lawn chair, dropping his shotgun and screaming in pain. Ape brought up his flamethrower, but maybe seeing how close I was to Sonny, he didn’t use it. He was a big man, but extremely fast and extremely lethal. He had a bead on me, it seemed, before I could even aim in his direction. He yelled at me and would have torched me, but Sylvia rushed him, hit him like a train. She couldn’t have been more than 110 pounds, but she hit him hard. Hard enough to throw him off balance. He squeezed the trigger and a gout of flame lit up the field.

He missed.

I didn’t.

I cored him twice in the belly and when he went down, Sylvia and Hill and Mrs. Pearson went at him like animals. As pumped and blood-maddened as I was, it even made me take a step back. Gut-shot and pissing blood into the grass and in considerable agony, Ape couldn’t fight back and they rushed in, kicking and kicking him. Maria cried out for them to stop but they did not stop. There was only the grunting, growling sounds they made and the sound of their boots thudding into him.

When they backed away, I went over and stripped the flamethrower from him. He was unconscious, probably brain-damaged from the way they’d been booting his head around.

That’s when Maria screamed.

The dead had arrived.

They came rushing out of the shadows, skeletal things like ghastly marionettes with carved faces, rotting faces, faces hanging off the bone like rags, hair matted and teeth sharp in the moonlight. They screeched and squealed and howled like mad dogs as they came gliding forward, saliva hanging from their puckered mouths in ribbons. They came on their feet, on their hands and knees, creeping and crawling and shambling en masse like insects on the march.

They took Maria.

I saw it happen. One minute she was rushing to my side and the next she went down, dropped like a tree, and there were a dozen on her feeding, chewing and tearing, burying their teeth in her throat, her belly, between her legs. I killed three with my shotgun, but there were too many. As I ran frantically through grass glistening with gore, I could hear them chewing on entrails and sucking marrow from bones. Conroy let out one long and pitiful wail before a woman jumped on him and tore his tongue out by the roots with her teeth.

Then I was running dead out, stumbling, trying to get away…but every direction I started in the dead were coming, massing in ranks, swarming through the grass like locusts. I remembered when we’d gotten the note from Dragna, how I suggested we fight and Doc said it would be a massacre. Oh, how right he’d been. You can’t possibly imagine what thousands of zombies look like until they’re pressing in on you and your stomach pulls up into your chest, already feeling the blackened teeth that will bite into it.

Good God.

In the moonlight…out across the fields and hills…it looked like an outdoor festival in Hell…as far as I could see, nothing but Wormboys and Wormgirls and Wormkids. This was the tide of the undead that Dragna kept at bay via six sacrifices.

They moved in for the kill slowly because they had all the time in the world and knew it. They carried machetes and pipes, axes and bones and hammers and knives. Their faces were carved fright masks like the Wormboys the night before, but more elaborately decorated. They had pounded nails into their skulls in intricate patterns, replaced their fingernails with shards of glass, their teeth with surgical needles, slid shiny silver pins through their lips and braided fine chains and filigrees of copper electrical wire through them. Moonlight found all that metal and glass, made it blaze with a cold reflective fire.

I fired every round in my shotgun and roasted dozens with the flamethrower, but still they kept coming. Sylvia was at my side shooting, as was Hill…at least until they took him down. I saw what they did to him in the glow cast from burning corpses. He screamed and then as I turned, a scarlet mist of blood broke against my face and I had to blink it away. Six or seven Wormboys and one solitary Wormkid were on him, biting into him, killing him slowly and making it last and milking every last drop of agony from the poor guy. Sylvia and I shot through them, but it did little good by that point there were so many.

Hill looked like he had been fed into a wood chipper.

The zombies went after him in a frantic, starving feeding frenzy like piranhas in a meat tank, reducing him to a grisly gore storm: Gouts of blood fountaining in the air as arteries were laid open, bones sucked dry like candy straws and mashed to a fine meal, tissue and gut and organ reduced to a fragmented flying spew of human debris. He was opened, emptied, gnawed down to his basal anatomy then bisected, trisected, halved and quartered and ultimately ground down to a great, globby, wet stain on the earth as the Wormboys and Wormgirls and hollow-cheeked Wormkid waifs fought over the scraps, the stronger ones engaging in darkly comic tugs-of-war with the cherry-red hoses of his entrails.

I burned them.

I burned them all down.

I saw what they did to Hill and I fucking torched them. About thirty of them, I’m figuring. I lit them up like Fourth of July sparklers and Guy Fawkes dummies and true to the latter, they stumbled about blazing like hay-stuffed scarecrows, burning pieces and sections falling off them. One by one, they hit the yellow, straw-arid grass and lit it up and before long that whole goddamn summer-dry field was burning. Dozens of them were caught out in it as the flames came at them from every direction, encircling them, then claiming them and roasting them down to blackened, twitching, crumbling things.

But by then we were on the run, Sylvia and I.

My empty shotgun had been used to split the skull of an inquisitive Wormboy. Sylvia had a few rounds left in her. 9mm. Mine was gone. We had fire…we had the will to survive…we had hot terror leaping in our bellies…but that’s all we had. The dead kept coming like we were some wondrous new tourist attraction they had heard of and they just had to get a peek…or a stray nibble.

I cooked about a dozen more of them, trying to cut us a path to the front door but it was no go. Maybe the walking dead will never understand quantum physics or write a truly great sonnet, but they are not entirely stupid. They knew we’d be making for that door and there had to be hundreds crowded in the parking lot waiting for us.

It was hopeless.

Taking Sylvia by the hand, we circled around back, clinging to the shadows thrown by the outbuildings, the generating station, and the water tanks. The action was lighter back there. We found a shadowy crevice between a couple tanks and we waited.

“ There’s too many of them,” Sylvia whispered in my ear. “We can’t make it.”

“ You got a better idea?”

But she didn’t.

I had this crazy idea that if we could wait until daylight, we might have a chance. The Wormboys were more sluggish in direct sunlight.

That was my plan, anyway.