4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (7 page)

If idle hands were the Devil’s playthings then surely the feet of the walking dead were something much worse.

Clutching the rosary’s crucifix in both hands, she silently uttered another prayer the nuns had taught her: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell and lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. Amen.”

She avoided looking at the evil eye in the night sky. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate her thoughts on the Savior but she was finding it more and more difficult to hold thoughts long in her head. Death was eating away at her thought processes.

Fear seized her in its crushing grip. She was all at once terrified by the notion that her soul was doomed to wither with her body.

An explosion of light burned through her eyelids. She gasped, or would have if there had been anything other than dead air in her deflated lungs.

She opened her eyes.

An elongated sphere of blindingly bright white light towered over her. The air hummed with anticipation. Deep blue blossomed in the midst of the white light. The blue of a long, shimmering gown.

“Do not be afraid, little one,” the light said.

Magda mouthed the words “¿Madre santa?”
Holy Mother
.

She could just make out the apparition’s elegant face in the center of the light as a feeling of peace washed over her like a warm and gentle wave from a holy ocean.

—
Have you come to take me to Heaven?
Magda asked in her mind.

“No, little one,” said the Lady of Light, “I have come to tell you to show others the way.”

—
But I died. I can’t walk. I can’t even talk. Except to you. What way?

“The way to the Kingdom of Heaven. But don’t fret, Magdalena, you will move through this land of death in your risen body, immaculate and uninjured. You will be in this world but not of it.”

—
Like … an illegal?

The Holy Mother smiled. “More like this,” she said and extended a white hand from the blue folds of her gown and held it inches above Magda’s head. She did this without having to bend over and it wasn’t till then that Magda realized that she was floating in the air. The holy apparition had made her levitate.

An incredible instant later, everything changed.

Border Patrol Agent Betty Davis Wolfe knew they were not alone in the tunnel. Something or someone was directly behind her, watching them. She could feel its presence just as surely as if it had reached out and tickled the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. Her partner was on his hands and knees three feet ahead of her, following his flashlight’s beam deeper into the inky black tunnel.

Crawling along with her rear end raised and vulnerable was not a position a woman wanted to be in, especially in such a cramped and confining space as this tunnel under Nogales. Especially when she felt such a palpable presence at her back.

She told herself it was her imagination, sparked by her extreme dislike of cramped spaces. A cigarette would calm her wired nerves. She hadn’t had one in more than four hours. She had been about to light one up but then they found the trapdoor in the floor of the empty warehouse, opened it up and now here they were, checking out the secret tunnel running from the other side of the fence in Mexico, smack-dab straight into Nogales, Arizona. Underground USA. There were many miners in Mexico, which meant a lot of guys had the know-how to engineer a tunnel like this one, shored up with wooden beams and even air-conditioned by a long plastic tube that resembled a fat green snake. It would’ve cost a drug cartel a pretty penny to have this tunnel dug but the profits from the product they could run through here would have earned them
prettier
pennies—a hell of a lot of them.

That was, if Border Patrol Agent Betty Davis Wolfe and her partner Alejandro Bravo hadn’t found it and already called it in. Betty had wanted to wait for the team to get here before they went down but Bravo Macho (as Betty called him when she wanted to needle the cocky little guy) couldn’t wait, so here they were, just the two of them, with backup a long way away.

God but she was dying for a smoke.

Then she smelled it. Whatever the hell was behind her
was
behind her. There was no doubt now. This was not imagination. She smelled the stinking son of a bitch.

She reached back to her right hip and unholstered her Heckler & Koch P 2000 .40 caliber automatic. The only way to turn around to face the rear was to sit and turn. There would be a few seconds of darkness before she would have time to draw and thumb on her flashlight with her left hand. But first she had to alert her partner.

“Hold up, Bravo, I’ve got somebody on my tail,” she said and then turned as fast as she could and shot the flashlight beam into the darkness.

Nothing there. The light played on the wooden beams at the tunnel’s ceiling. The beams made her think of the ribs of some giant serpentine beast, as seen from inside the monster. Jonah in the whale. Or was it Pinocchio?

“Where?” Bravo asked. From the sound of his voice behind her, she knew he had also turned around. Which meant he could also see that there was no one there. His beam joined hers and the tunnel looked more like a tunnel and less like the inside of a dragon or giant serpent.

“I smelled it,” she said.

“Smelled what?” He didn’t disguise his disgust for her rookie-like jumpiness.

“I don’t know. Shit.”

“You smelled shit?”

“No. I mean, maybe. I don’t—”

Bravo Macho screamed. It was a very unmacho scream.

Betty spun on her ass and put her light on a dark-skinned man burying his face in the side of Bravo’s neck. And on the blood spilling onto the shoulder of his uniform. Was the guy actually going vampire on Bravo?

Wiry Bravo hit at his attacker with his flashlight, clocked him a good one on top of the head but the guy didn’t let go. His thick, hairy arms were wrapped firmly around Bravo’s torso, holding him fast.

It was then that Betty saw that the attacker was totally naked. This was almost as shocking as the fact that he was eating her partner’s throat. Why should the man’s nudity be so deeply disturbing?

She drew a bead on the naked man’s head and shouted: “Let him go or I’ll shoot you!”

He didn’t let go. Didn’t acknowledge her at all.

“Hey! I’m not fucking around! I WILL SHOOT YOU.”

The naked biter was unimpressed. Or batshit crazy.

“Shoot ’im,” Bravo said in a wet, strangled voice.

She reaimed and fired. The slug hit him squarely in the center of the top of his head and he fell backward, taking Bravo back with him.

Betty heard a scraping noise to her rear. She spun back around to see a disfigured man in bloody clothes crawling toward her. The raw-meat stench told her that this was the one she’d smelled earlier.

“Stop!” she yelled. “
Alto!
”

He didn’t.

She shot him. His right eyeball disappeared in a splash of blood.

But he did not stop. He merely paused long enough to wipe at his empty eye socket with the back of a filthy hand, then he came on with one crazy eye shining in the light beam.

Betty fired again. And again.

Her weapon held 13 rounds but she wasn’t going to get a chance to fire them all. The man was on her as she fired the fifth round.

The sixth ricocheted off the tunnel wall with a whistling whine.

The seventh shot was pointblank to the belly as he fell on top of her, teeth tearing into her throat.

The eighth blew off the tip of Betty’s left breast.

There was no ninth.

Betty Davis Wolfe died slowly.

There were no dead relatives waiting to welcome her, no light shining at the end of a tunnel, just her failing flashlight in this drug-runner’s tunnel.

She died wishing she’d had a last cigarette.

When she woke to the afterdeath, what she desired was not a smoke.

Piggy was too pooped to pop. She was like the hobo campfire, flamed out and burnt down to dying embers. Lethargic, gorged on hobo blood and meat to the point where she didn’t want to move. Warm liquid seeped out of her anus. She reckoned it was the blood she’d imbibed from that silly skull-fucker Sop. Hadn’t he been shocked when she chomped his drippy little dick off! One fell snap of the teeth and his limp sausage was in her mouth and he was screaming his ass off, but not for long. By the time she’d chewed the blood out of his cock and spit the thing on the ground, he was flat on his back, passing out. And that was when Piggy made a pig of herself. She took the stump of his dick in her mouth and sucked and sucked and sucked the blood out of him. Couldn’t call it cocksucking because his cock was mostly gone. But that was some sweet nub-sucking, right? She drained him nice and slow and didn’t stop until his heart did. When she was finally done, she rolled over and saw that Sick had bested Suck by chewing his throat out like a fast-food junkie. Piggy preferred dining at a more leisurely pace and figured that made her a more refined diner than hobo Sick, who must’ve wandered off to find another snack. Suck was just now stirring to life (or non-life) and would likewise be about the business of finding food with a heartbeat.

Piggy thought this was some weird shit, all right.

Weirder still was how quickly it became second nature to her, this new way of life, or undeath, or whatever the devil you called it. What wasn’t so weird was that her suicidal impulse
had
survived her death. Doing away with herself now was a bigger challenge. A harder row to hoe for any ho. But she knew she could do it. And now that her gut was so full of blood that it was leaking out her ass, it seemed the ideal time to end this nasty-ass excuse of an afterlife. And she knew just how to do it.

She rose from the earth. Like a slow shadow, Sop the Dickless Dead rose a moment after her. He looked at her, his blanched face shrivel-wrinkled in death, then he shambled away in shame. Or maybe just to find warm-blooded victuals.

Piggy heard the distant train whistle and hobbled as fast as she could toward the tracks. She slipped and slid down the embankment to the rail bed and then slipped on the gravel thereabouts, but she beat the train to the tracks and stood there with her arms outstretched in a kaput parody of crucifixion.

She looked up at the fabled rosy-fingered dawn, renamed it
bloody-fingered dawn of the dead,
and then looked at the Cyclopean beam of light shining from the mighty engine that would (with any luck at all) turn her already mangled body into mincemeat, and she said (without sound), “I’m not Piggy Poop. I’m Peg Pope and I quit this world of my own free will. God damn it all to hell!”

She couldn’t know for certain where this mystery train might take her. But if it wasn’t the Oblivion Express, she was going to be appallingly pissed.

Nadif didn’t know how to be dead. Dead in the way the two Mexicans who killed him were. Dead but still going. Going about the business of killing. And eating. Human flesh. Once he was dead, or at least without breath and a heartbeat, the murderous dead left him alone. They—and now he—wanted only living flesh and streaming blood. How could this be?

What must Allah be thinking to allow such a thing?
But no, this was not Allah’s doing. This was Satan’s. Allah was simply sitting back and letting it happen as punishment for this crazy-quilt continent of infidels. Was this not right? Nadif didn’t know. Could only guess and his guesses were not so good now that his brain was dead and his consciousness was running unknown ethereal circuits, plagued with power surges and brownouts, the brownouts characterized by mindless walking and virtually no mental activity. And beneath it all, the constant craving for warm blood-in-the-flesh.

Was this a test?
A test of his will to fulfill his mission? The canisters of Black Death remained in his backpack but he was far afield from his jihadi job, and his feet seemed to be going their own way. His feet cared nothing for the Grand Jihad. Was his spirit strong enough to prevail? He wanted to face Mecca, drop to his knees and pray for strength but his feet kept walking the cursed land, in search of the only thing that would satisfy his infernal craving.

The irony was not entirely lost on him that he had been prepared to die hideously of the Black Death, so long as Paradise waited to welcome him on the other side of death, but now here he was stranded in a hellish realm where death itself was a permanent state of being. This was too diabolical for words. This was—

Something slapped his arm.

A moment later came the echoing pop of distant gunfire. Someone was shooting at him.

Up ahead a cluster of three or four other dead walkers also drew fire. The tallest one’s head exploded and he went down like a marionette whose strings have been all at once severed.

Another slug slapped into Nadif, this time striking him squarely in the chest and knocking him backward to the ground. As he got slowly to his feet, Nadif’s memory lazily looped back to his combat training at various camps in the Horn of Africa and he recalled his abbreviated training with a high-powered Russian sniper rifle. By the time he was standing again his sluggish mind had worked out that right now there were at least two shooters taking pot-shots at him and his … kind. Zombies. Zionist zombies?

There would be a big exit wound in his back. One of the backpack canisters containing weaponized plague had most likely been breached. The virus would be wasted here in this wasteland.

He thought he should remove the backpack and note the damage but as soon as the thought came into his head, it evaporated and he walked on into the dawn, thinking single-mindedly of finding bloody sustenance.

Nadif paid little mind to the sniper’s slugs snapping past and sometimes slamming into him. They were hardly more annoying than aggressive insects, hungry horseflies or fat mosquitoes.

Cruz came to with a shotgun muzzle pressed hard against his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.

“What’ll it be?” the shotgun-wielding bartender asked.