Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 41

All heads turned.

I've got it. Little snaky backbone serpent things, brand new. I discovered them so I get to name them. Yeah, that would be an accomplishment. I captured the first one. I saw others born of the smashed carca.s.ses of geeks during the battle, wriggling free of living dead afterbirth, holding blind snouts up to the moonlight. I shall call them z.a.v.s., for Zombi Armored Venomous Serpent. Vapaw and Matnaw could say that their son discovered something; might even get him into the World Book, if apaw or Mamaw or the encyclopedia existed anymore. That was the tragedy of real accomplishment: sometimes there were no other humans around to take note of it, or fuss over it, or affirm it had even happened at all.

His brain was a boardroom riot of yelling stockbrokers. The first report informed him that aerial acrobatics did not agree with his physique. The second, enumerated fractures, shutdown, concussion, and one eardrum that had popped with the explosive decompression of a pimento vacuumed from an olive. The third, confirmed the equitable distribution of slag-hot agony to every outback and tributary of his body... and the dead taste of moist dirt, back again.

Then came the surprise, bonus news flash: He had not been gourmandized down to nerve peels and half a dozen red corpuscles. Yet.

He filed a formal request to roll back his eyelids. It took about an hour to trickle down through channels. And all the while, he could hear the geeks, eating. If they were eating him, he sure could not feel it.

He finally recognized starlight, in the post-midnight sky above him. He was on his back, legs straight, arms out in a plane shape. What a funny.

Eight pairs of reanimated dead eyes appraised his worth.

Dead bang, no argument, they've got me, Wormboy thought. For more than a year they've whiffed me, and gotten smithereened, and now I've jolly well been served up as payback, airfreight, gun-less, laid out flat on my own flab. Maybe they waited just so I could savor the sensual cornucopia of being devoured alive, firsthand. Dr. Moreau time, kids. Here's the part where Uncle Wormy checks out for keeps.

He tried to wiggle his numbed fingers at them. "Yo, dudes." It was all he could think of to say. These guys didn't want a story and were uninterested in hearing about Z.A.V.S.

The zombis surrounding him in a funereal wake configuration-three up, three down, one at his feet and one at his head-rustled as though stirred by a soft breeze. They communed, in their odd way.

Now Wormboy could discern that the skull of the Right Reverend Jerry had been perched upon his chest. He could barely see it up there. The blood-dyed and tooth-scored fragments had been leaned together into a fragile sort of card ossuary. Now Wormboy could see that one of his bullets had gone in through Jerry's left eyebrow; good shot.

An uppercut of pain convulsed his insides and Wormy coughed weakly. The skull clattered apart like an inadequately-glued clay pot.

This caused more introspective commotion, among the zombis.

The Right Reverend Jerry had been sharked down to a jackstraw clutter of bones; the bones had been cracked, their marrow greedily drained. All through this feast, Wormboy had lain unconscious and available, mere feet distant, representing bigger portions for everybody, but he had gone unmolested for hours. Instead of tucking in, the zombis had gathered 'round and waited for him to wake up. They had, in fact, flipped him over and touched him without biting. They had pieced together Jerry's headbone and now seen it blown apart by a cough from the immense fat man. They had Witnessed.

The eyes that sought Wormboy did not judge him. They did not see a grotesquely obese pig who snarfed up worms and eyeb.a.l.l.s and rarely bathed. The watchers did not snicker in a Dukey Mallett drawl, or lower their heads in disappointment that way Mamaw and Papaw often had. They did not reject Wormy, or find him lacking in any social particular. They had waited for him to revive. Patiently, on purpose, they had waited... for him.

They had never sought to eat of his lard or drink of his cholesterol. The Right Reverend Jerry had taught them that there were hungers other than physical.

He considered the litter of soda cracker skull frags confined by his own teats, and felt the same rush of revelation he had experienced by examining Dukey's eyeball, back in the pre-world. So fitting now, to relish that crunchy stone-ground goodness. He tipped a flake into his mouth and chewed with b.l.o.o.d.y teeth. Not bad, kind of like a wafer. As he ate, he abruptly realized he was not breathing-just like the geeks above, who rustled and communicated in their insect, tactile way, watching him.

One of his legs felt busted, but did not pain him anymore. With effort, he found he could roll, his weight reforming like a Silly Putty lava flow until he could hike himself up onto both elbows. The zombis shuffled dutifully back to make room for him to rise, and when he could not, they helped him, wrestling him erect yet crooked, copying the dogfaces who had hoisted the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima. Wormboy realized that right now, he could order them to march into one of Valley View's crematory ovens according to height, and they would probably comply.

It seemed that at long last, he had gained the devoted approval of a peer group.

His back was broken. He indicated a ropy Z.A.V.S. coiled near his ha.s.sock feet. It was delivered unto him and with little effort he found he could guide it beneath his flesh, where it aligned according to instinct and quickly firmed up his carriage. It was miraculous.

Soon enough, some a.s.shole would come along and try to wh.o.r.e up this resurrection for posterity in a big, bad black notebook... and get it all wrong. Wormboy decided on the spot that anybody who tried would have a quick but meaningful one-way interview with Zombo.

I win again. This, he had thought and said countless times before, in reference to those he had once dubbed geeks. Bacterial warmth flooded through him. He was dead, and not a geek, therefore they were not, either.

When he at last Spake unto them, he said something like, "Awww... s.h.i.+t, you guys, I guess we oughta go hustle up some potluck, huh?"

He began by pa.s.sing out the puzzle pieces of the Eight Reverend Jerry's skull. As one, they all took and ate without breathing.

And they saw that it was Good.

20/ Robert R. Mccammon Eat Me.

A QUESTION GNAWED, DAY AND NIGHT, at Jim Crisp. He pondered it as he walked the streets, while a dark rain fell and rats chattered at his feet; he mulled over it as he sat in his apartment, staring at the static on the television screen hour after hour. The question haunted him as he sat in the cemetery on Fourteenth Street, surrounded by empty graves. And this burning question was: when did love die?

Thinking took effort. It made his brain hurt, but it seemed to Jim that thinking was his last link with life. He used to be an accountant, a long time ago. He'd worked with a firm downtown for over twenty years, had never been married, hadn't dated much either. Numbers, logic, the rituals of mathematics had been the center of his life; now logic itself had gone insane, and no one kept records anymore. He had a terrible sensation of not belonging in this world, of being suspended in a nightmare that would stretch to the boundaries of eternity. He had no need for sleep any longer; something inside him had burst a while back, and he'd lost the ten or twelve pounds of fat that had gathered around his middle over the years. His body was lean now, so light sometimes a strong wind knocked him off his feet. The smell came and went, but Jim had a caseload of English Leather in his apartment and he took baths in the stuff.

The open maw of time frightened him. Days without number lay ahead. What was there to do, when there was nothing to be done? No one called the roll, no one punched the time-clock, no one set the deadlines. This warped freedom gave a sense of power to others; to Jim it was the most confining of prisons, because all the symbols of order-stoplights, calendars, clocks-were still there, still working, yet they had no purpose or sense, and they reminded him too much of what had been before.

As he walked, aimlessly, through the city's streets he saw others moving past, some as peaceful as sleepwalkers, some raging in the grip of private tortures. Jim came to a corner and stopped, instinctively obeying the DON'T WALK sign; a high squealing noise caught his attention, and he looked to his left.

Rats were scurrying wildly over one of the lowest forms of humanity, a half-decayed corpse that had recently awakened and pulled itself from the grave. The thing crawled on the wet pavement, struggling on one thin arm and two sticklike legs. The rats were chewing it to pieces, and as the thing reached Jim, its skeletal face lifted and the single dim coal of an eye found him. From its mouth came a rattling noise, stifled when several rats squeezed themselves between the gray lips in search of softer flesh. Jim hurried on, not waiting for the light to change. He thought the thing had said "Whhhyyy?" and for that question he had no answer.

He felt shame in the coil of his entrails. When did love die? Had it perished at the same time as this living death of human flesh had begun, or had it already died and decayed long before? He went on, through the somber streets where the buildings brooded like tombstones, and he felt crushed beneath the weight of loneliness.

Jim remembered beauty: a yellow flower, the scent of a woman's perfume, the warm sheen of a woman's hair. Remembering was another bar in the prison of bones; the power of memory taunted him unmercifully. He remembered walking on his lunch hour, sighting a pretty girl and following her for a block or two, enraptured by fantasies. He had always been searching for love, for someone to be joined with, and had never realized it so vitally before now, when the gray city was full of rats and the restless dead.

Someone with a cavity where its face had been stumbled past, arms waving blindly. What once had been a child ran by him, and left the scent of rot in its wake. Jim lowered his head, and when a gust of hot wind hit him he lost his balance and would have slammed into a concrete wall if he hadn't grabbed hold of a bolted-down mailbox. He kept going, deeper into the city, on pavement he'd never walked when he was alive.

At the intersection of two unfamiliar streets he thought he heard music: the crackle of a guitar, the low grunting of a drumbeat. He turned against the wind, fighting the gusts that threatened to hurl him into the air, and followed the sound. Two blocks ahead a strobe light flashed in a cavernous entrance. A sign that read THE COURTYARD had been broken out, and across the front of the building was scrawled BONEYARD in black spray paint. Figures moved within the entrance: dancers, gyrating in the flash of the strobes.

The thunder of the music repulsed him-the soft grace of Brahms remained his lullaby, not the raucous crudity of Grave Rock-but the activity, the movement, the heat of energy drew him closer. He scratched a maddening itch on the dry flesh at the back of his neck and stood on the threshold while the music and the glare blew around him. The Courtyard, he thought, glancing at the old sign. It was the name of a place that might once have served white wine and polite jazz music-a singles bar, maybe, where the lonely went to meet the lonely. The Boneyard it was now, all right: a realm of dancing skeletons. This was not his kind of place, but still... the noise, lights, and gyrations spoke of another kind of loneliness. It was a singles bar for the living dead, and it beckoned him in.

Jim crossed the threshold, and with one desiccated hand he smoothed down his remaining bits of black hair.

And now he knew what h.e.l.l must be like: a smoky, rot-smelling pandemonium. Some of the things writhing on the dance floor were missing arms and legs, and one thin figure in the midst of a whirl lost its hand; the withered flesh skidded across the linoleum, was crushed underfoot as its owner scrabbled after it, and then its owner was likewise pummeled down into a twitching ma.s.s. On the bandstand were two guitar players, a drummer, and a legless thing hammering at an electric organ. Jim avoided the dance floor, moving through the crowd toward the blue-neon bar. The drum's pounding offended him, in an obscene way; it reminded him too much of how his heartbeat used to feel before it clenched and ceased.

This was a place his mother-G.o.d rest her soul-would have warned him to avoid. He had never been one for nightlife, and looking into the decayed faces of some of these people was a preview of torments that lay ahead-but he didn't want to leave. The drumbeat was so loud it destroyed all thinking, and for a while he could pretend it was indeed his own heart returned to scarlet life; and that, he realized, was why the Boneyard was full from wall to wall. This was a mockery of life, yes, but it was the best to be had.

The bar's neon lit up the rotting faces like blue-shadowed Halloween masks. One of them, down to shreds of flesh clinging to yellow bone, shouted something unintelligible and drank from a bottle of beer; the liquid streamed through the fissure in his throat and down over his violet s.h.i.+rt and gold chains. Flies swarmed around the bar, drawn to the reek, and Jim watched as the customers pressed forward. They reached into their pockets and changepurses and offered freshly-killed rats, roaches, spiders, and centipedes to the bartender, who placed the objects in a large gla.s.s jar that had replaced the cash register. Such was the currency of the Dead World, and a particular juicy rat bought two bottles of Miller Lite. Other people were laughing and hollering-gasping, brittle sounds that held no semblance of humanity. A fight broke out near the dance floor, and a twisted arm thunked to the linoleum to the delighted roar of the onlookers.

"I know you!" A woman's face thrust forward into Jim's. She had tatters of gray hair, and she wore heavy makeup over sunken cheeks, her forehead swollen and cracked by some horrible inner pressure. Her glittery dress danced with light, but smelled of gravedirt. "Buy me a drink!" she said, grasping his arm. A flap of flesh at her throat fluttered, and Jim realized her throat had been slashed. "Buy me a drink!" she insisted.

"No," Jim said, trying to break free. "No, I'm sorry."

"You're the one who killed me!" she screamed. Her grip tightened, about to snap Jim's forearm. "Yes you are! You killed me, didn't you?" And she picked up an empty beer bottle off the bar, her face contorted with rage, and started to smash it against his skull.

But before the blow could fall a man lifted her off her feet and pulled her away from Jim; her fingernails flayed to the bones of Jim's arm. She was still screaming, fighting to pull away, and the man, who wore a T-s.h.i.+rt with Bone-yard painted across it, said, "She's a fresh one. Sorry, mac," before he hauled her toward the entrance. The woman's scream got shriller, and Jim saw her forehead burst open and ooze like a stomped snail. He shuddered, backing into a dark corner-and there he b.u.mped into another body.

"Excuse me," he said. Started to move away. Glanced at whom he'd collided with.

And saw her.

She was trembling, her skinny arms wrapped around her chest. She still had most of her long brown hair, but in places it had diminished to the texture of spiderwebs and her scalp showed. Still, it was lovely hair. It looked almost healthy. Her pale blue eyes were liquid and terrified, and her face might have been pretty once. She had lost most of her nose, and gray-rimmed craters pitted her right cheek. She was wearing sensible clothes: a skirt and blouse and a sweater b.u.t.toned to the throat. Her clothes were dirty, but they matched. She looked like a librarian, he decided. She didn't belong in the Boneyard-but, then, where did anyone belong anymore?

He was about to move away when he noticed something else that caught a glint of frenzied light.

Around her neck, just peeking over the collar of her sweater, was a silver chain, and on that chain hung a tiny cloisonne heart.

It was a fragile thing, like a bit of bone china, but it held the power to freeze Jim before he took another step.

"That's... that's very pretty," he said. He nodded at the heart.

Instantly her hand covered it. Parts of her fingers had rotted off, like his own.

He looked into her eyes; she stared-or at least pretended to-right past him. She shook like a frightened deer. Jim paused, waiting for a break in the thunder, nervously casting his gaze to the floor. He caught a whiff of decay, and whether it was from himself or her he didn't know; what did it matter? He s.h.i.+vered too, not knowing what else to say but wanting to say something, anything, to make a connection. He sensed that at any moment the girl- whose age might be anywhere from twenty to forty, since Death both tightened and wrinkled at the same time-might bolt past him and be lost in the crowd. He thrust his hands into his pockets, not wanting her to see the exposed fingerbones. "This is the first time I've been here," he said. "I don't go out much."

She didn't answer. Maybe her tongue is gone, he thought. Or her throat. Maybe she was insane, which could be a real possibility. She pressed back against the wall, and Jim saw how very thin she was, skin stretched over frail bones. Dried up on the inside, he thought. Just like me.

"My name is Jim," he told her. "What's yours?"

Again, no reply. I'm no good at this! he agonized. Singles bars had never been his "scene," as the saying went. No, his world had always been his books, his job, his cla.s.sical records, his cramped little apartment that now seemed like a four-walled crypt. There was no use in standing here, trying to make conversation with a dead girl. He had dared to eat the peach, as Eliot's Prufroc lamented, and found it rotten.

"Brenda," she said, so suddenly it almost startled him. She kept her hand over the heart, her other arm across her sagging b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her head was lowered, her hair hanging over the cratered cheek.

"Brenda," Jim repeated; he heard his voice tremble. "That's a nice name."

She shrugged, still pressed into the corner as if trying to squeeze through a c.h.i.n.k in the bricks.

Another moment of decision presented itself. It was moment in which Jim could turn and walk three paces away, into the howling ma.s.s at the bar, and release Brenda from her corner; or a moment in which Brenda could tell him to go away, or curse him to his face, or scream with haunted dementia and that would be the end of it. The moment pa.s.sed, and none of those things happened. There was just the drumbeat, pounding across the club, pounding like a counterfeit heart, and the roaches ran their race on the bar and the dancers continued to fling bits of flesh off their bodies like autumn leaves.

He felt he had to say something. "I was just walking. I didn't mean to come here." Maybe she nodded. Maybe; he couldn't tell for sure, and the light played tricks. "I didn't have anywhere else to go," he added.

She spoke, in a whispery voice that he had to strain to hear: "Me neither."

Jim s.h.i.+fted his weight-what weight he had left. "Would you... like to dance?" he asked, for want of anything better.

"Oh, no!" She looked up quickly. "No, I can't dance! I mean... I used to dance, sometimes, but... I can't dance anymore."

Jim understood what she meant; her bones were brittle, just as his own were. They were both as fragile as husks, and to get out on that dance floor would tear them both to pieces. "Good," he said. "I can't dance either."

She nodded, with an expression of relief. There was an instant in which Jim saw how pretty she must have been before all this happened-not pretty in a flashy way, but pretty as homespun lace-and it made his brain ache. "This is a loud place," he said. "Too loud."

"I've... never been here before." Brenda removed her hand from the necklace, and again both arms protected her chest. "I knew this place was here, but..." She shrugged her thin shoulders. "I don't know."

"You're..." lonely, he almost said. As lonely as I am."... alone?" he asked.

"I have friends," she answered, too fast.

"I don't," he said, and her gaze lingered on his face for a few seconds before she looked away. "I mean, not in this place," he amended. "I don't know anybody here, except you." He paused, and then he had to ask the question: "Why did you come here tonight?"

She almost spoke, but she closed her mouth before the words got out. I know why, Jim thought. Because you're searching, just like I am. You went out walking, and maybe you came in here because you couldn't stand to be alone another second. I can look at you, and hear you screaming. "Would you like to go out?" he asked. "Walking, I mean. Right now, so we can talk?"

"I don't know you," she said, uneasily.

"I don't know you, either. But I'd like to."

"I'm..." Her hand fluttered up to the cavity where her nose had been. "Ugly," she finished.

"You're not ugly. Anyway, I'm no handsome prince," He smiled, which stretched the flesh on his face. Brenda might have smiled, a little bit; again, it was hard to tell. "I'm not a crazy," Jim rea.s.sured her. "I'm not on drugs, and I'm not looking for somebody to hurt. I just thought... you might like to have some company."

Brenda didn't answer for a moment. Her fingers played with the cloisonne heart. "All right," she said finally. "But not too far. Just around the block."

"Just around the block," he agreed, trying to keep his excitement from showing too much. He took her arm-she didn't seem to mind his fleshless fingers-and carefully guided her through the crowd. She felt light, like a dry-rotted stick, and he thought that even he, with his shrunken muscles, might be able to lift her over his head.

Outside, they walked away from the blast of the Boneyard yard. The wind was getting stronger, and they soon were holding to each other to keep from being swept away. "A storm's coming," Brenda said, and Jim nodded. The storms were fast and ferocious, and their winds made the buildings shake. But Jim and Brenda kept walking, first around the block and then, at Brenda's direction, southward. Their bodies were bent like question marks; overhead, clouds masked the moon and blue streaks of electricity began to lance across the sky.

Brenda was not a talker, but she was a good listener. Jim told her about himself, about the job he used to have, about how he'd always dreamed that someday he'd have his own firm. He told her about a trip he once took, as a young man, to Lake Michigan, and how cold he recalled the water to be. He told her about a park he visited once, and how he remembered the sound of happy laughter and the smell of flowers. "I miss how it used to be," he said, before he could stop himself, because in the Dead World voicing such regrets was a punishable crime. "I miss beauty," he went on. "I miss... love."

She took his hand, bone against bone, and said, "This is where I live."

It was a plain brownstone building, many of the windows broken out by the windstorms. Jim didn't ask to go to Brenda's apartment; he expected to be turned away on the front steps. But Brenda still had hold of his hand, and now she was leading him up those steps and through the gla.s.sless door.

Her apartment, on the fourth floor, was even smaller than Jim's. The walls were a somber gray, but the lights revealed a treasure-pots of flowers set around the room and out on the fire escape. "They're silk," Brenda explained, before he could ask. "But they look real, don't they?"

"They look... wonderful." He saw a stereo and speakers on a table, and near the equipment was a collection of records. He bent down, his knees creaking, and began to examine her taste in music. Another shock greeted him: Beethoven... Chopin... Mozart... Vivaldi... Strauss. And, yes, even Brahms. "Oh!" he said, and that was all he could say.

"I found most of those," she said. "Would you like to listen to them?"

"Yes. Please."

She put on the Chopin, and as the piano chords swelled, so did the wind, whistling in the hall and making the windows tremble.

And then she began to talk about herself: She had been a secretary, in a refrigeration plant across the river. Had never married, though she'd been engaged once. Her hobby was making silk flowers, when she could find the material. She missed ice cream most of all, she said. And summer-what had happened to summer, like it used to be? All the days and nights seemed to bleed together now, and nothing made any of them different. Except the storms, of course, and those could be dangerous.

By the end of the third record, they were sitting side by side on her sofa. The wind had gotten very strong outside; the rain came and went, but the wind and lightning remained.

"I like talking to you," she told him. "I feel like... I've known you for a long, long time."

"I do, too. I'm glad I came into that place tonight." He watched the storm and heard the wind shriek. "I don't know how I'm going to get home."

"You... don't have to go," Brenda said, very quietly; "I'd like for you to stay."

He stared at her, unbelieving. The back of his neck itched fiercely, and the itch was spreading to his shoulders and arms, but he couldn't move.

"I don't want to be alone," she continued. "I'm always alone. It's just that... I miss touching. Is that wrong, to miss touching?"

"No. I don't think so."

She leaned forward, her lips almost brus.h.i.+ng his, her eyes almost pleading. "Eat me," she whispered.

Jim sat very still. Eat me: the only way left to feel pleasure in the Dead World. He wanted it, too; he needed it, so badly. "Eat me," he whispered back to her, and he began to unb.u.t.ton her sweater.

Her nude body was riddled with craters, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s sunken into her chest. His own was sallow and emaciated, and between his thighs his p.e.n.i.s was a gray, useless piece of flesh. She reached for him, he knelt beside her body, and as she urged "Eat me, eat me," his tongue played circles on her cold skin; then his teeth went to work, and he bit away the first chunk. She moaned and s.h.i.+vered, lifted her head and tongued his arm. Her teeth took a piece of flesh from him, and the ecstasy arrowed along his spinal cord like an electric shock.