Book of the Dead (37 page)

Something tears loose inside her. The ringing grows, her heartbeat slows. Red lace webs her vision. Pain spreads up her arm as she is drawn into a cold embrace, is held like a lover, is kissed with great passion, is consumed, while around her the water grows warm.

Deke rises from the beach at the sound of gunfire.
Pop. Pop-pop!
Pistol, sounds like. He brushes sand from his butt and turns toward the agricultural wing. He opens his mouth to improve his hearing, but there is nothing further to hear. He does not see the hand rise from the water behind him, wave a frantic goodbye, and sink again.

He picks up his jeans, shakes them out, and begins pulling them on. “Haiffa,” he calls. “Haiffa!”

He peers forward, straining to see in the darkness. The Olympic-sized ocean is placid.

Been under an awful long time now. Prob’ly swam out past the sandbar, but she oughta be able to hear him call. Should check out that gunfire. Better make sure Haiffa’s okay first.

He walks to the end of the beach and skirts the ocean to the west, where the savanna begins.

“Haiffa?”

Probably somebody finally had enough of ol’ Billy-boy and did it to him. More than likely idjit did it to himself, way he handles a gun. Damn fool could screw up a two-car funeral on a one-way street. Three shots, though.

“Haiffa!”

Well, it’d probably take him three shots to find a brain in that head to blow out anyway, the stupid son of—

Something in the water there? Not big enough to be Haiffa, though. But what the hell
could
it be? Gator? Shee-it. Something else appearing beside it, something smaller.
Oh, forgot to tell you, man
. Dieter’s voice in his head.
Put a little tiger shark in the ocean. Full stock, right? Scavengers of the deep, y’know?

Splashing as something rises from the water. Dripping as it emerges.

“Haiffa…”

Reaches the smaller object in the water, grabs it, picks it up. Brings it toward itself. Heading toward him. Taking shape from the darkness. Wet figure. Woman. Not Haiffa. Pulls the object away from its head, dangles it by its side. In silhouette he sees the object is a leg from ragged-ended knee to foot. Pulled in again. Piece ripped away.

Deke sprints toward the beach. Fucking pistol on the towel. He splashes through the muddy ground, hits soft, wet sand, heads to the dark square of towel. Yep, pistol’s there. Smith and Wesson beats four aces, his daddy used to say. Take that to the bank. Bill had wanted the guns back. “Sure you can have it back,” he’d replied, and repeats it now. “You take it from me, it’s yours.”

He wipes palms on jeans and grips the pistol firmly. On the sand he waits as the figure stumbles onto the beach, recovers, and gropes toward him.
Carnitrope
. What the fuck was
that
supposed to mean? Plant’s
photo
tropic, Bill explained. Turn toward sunlight. Biochemical reaction. Stimulus/response.
Ding!
—slobber.
Carni
= meat.

Fuck.

He raises the pistol and thumbs back the trigger—

Carnitrope his goddamn ass. They can call it that if it makes ’em feel better, but his momma didn’t raise no fools.

—sights down the long barrel—

“
The only thing working is their hindbrains—the reptilian complex
,” Marly had lectured. “
They’re like snakes that wait in one place all day for something to come along. The R-complex lets the carnitropes move, and the only reason they move is to get live meat
.” Chink bitch. He may be just a glorified fucking janitor, but where did she come off—

—fires.

The figure staggers back and drops the leg onto the sand. It comes forward again.

“
Cut off the R-complex—decapitation, massive neural destruction
,” Marly had continued, “
and the tropism is removed
.” In memory Bill smiles. “
In other words
,” he elaborated, “
if you blow their brains out they have a motivation problem
.”

“Blow your fuckin’ brains out,” breathes Deke. He cocks the hammer and fires again.

A sudden furrow glistens above the creature’s left eye. The creature takes two more steps. Stops. Reaches up an inquiring hand. Fingers sink to knuckles. Hand lowers. Another step. Front knee buckles, and it pirouettes to the sand.

Deke holds the gun on it for a few more seconds, then straightens and nears it cautiously. Yep. Dead for good.

Writing on its wet T-shirt.
LIFE’S A BITCH, THEN YOU DIE
. Diiferent lettering beneath:
THEN YOU COME BACK
. Nipples beneath the wet fabric. Peekaboo.

Deke looks out over the little ocean. A little log, propelled by the eternal north wind, drifts toward the sandbar.

Crack!
More gunfire. Rifle, this time. He better—

—searingblindwhiteness. Jesus
fucking
—

He sinks to his knees. His belly is turning warm. Somebody pushed a hot soldering iron through his chest. He looks down at his knees. Grit-ringed wet spots in the denim.
I hate that. Fuckin’ cold spots when I walk
—

You never hear the one that gets you. Goddamn lie. Heard that one just fine. Oh, shit
. He tries to rise, but something shudders to a halt inside.

[14]

Sailor lowers his nine-millimeter Ingram submachine gun. The man he has just shot arches his back and spasms once. God, he hates that. Like all the nerves are screaming at once. Gives him the fuckin’ willies.

He turns away from the beach. Invisible in his black jeans and sweatshirt, he works rapidly but quietly from tree to tree, heading uphill from the palms on the beach to the dense foliage of the rain forest. At the north end vegetation meets slanting glass panes. He pulls a box from his nylon backpack, wedges it between two aluminum struts, and turns a Radio Shack wireless intercom to “receive.” He hurries toward the west wall, where he places another box and attaches another intercom.

He pauses at the screen door to the access corridor that leads back to the agriculture wing, where he broke in ten minutes ago. Floodlights are on outside the staff quarters, illuminating neat rectangles of crops. Getting in there isn’t going to be easy.

*  *  *

Bill looks from the carnitrope lying in tattered Grace to the missing panes at the end of the orchard. “All right, now, let’s not jump to any conclusions,” he says. “It could be that one just got in here and went for the pigs, and Grace found it.”

“Right,” says Leonard. “It ruh-ruh-
rented
a Ryder truck and d-d-
drove
on up here to see if it could buh, buy a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.” He wipes a shaking hand across his mouth.

Bill narrows his eyes.

“It was eating her,” Bonnie says flatly. She looks strangely calm, as if Grace’s death at the teeth of a reanimated corpse is yet another factor to account for in the many trivial events that accrue during the normal operation of the Ecosphere. Yes, Grace is dead; now work schedules will have to be adjusted, and the sudden one-eighth surplus of food and water will have to be noted, and of course a new person will have to be appointed to moderate the weekly gripe sessions, not to mention someone else having to slop the remaining pigs.

Bill, Dieter, and Leonard regard her stonily. It is as if her casualness toward Grace’s death is more repulsive than the fact and manner of Grace’s death. There is something alien about it. If only she would go into hysterics, they would understand. That’s what a woman is
supposed
to do when this sort of thing happens; they’re
conditioned
by society. They can’t help it. So why doesn’t Bonnie just have a screaming fit and get it over with?

“I guess we shouldn’t assume there aren’t any more of them,” Dieter says.

Bill nods. “Someone let them in here deliberately. An infiltration.”

“Huh-who?” asks Leonard.

Dieter cradles his arms and rocks them, humming “Rock-a-bye Baby.”

Bill frowns. He inclines his head, slowly. “We have to stay together,” he says. “I don’t want—”

Pop
.

Their heads jerk.

Pop
.

“Beach,” says Leonard.

“Deke and Haiffa,” says Dieter.

Bill brandishes his pistol. “Leonard, you come with me. Dieter, stay with Bonnie.”

Bill trots away without waiting for Leonard, pistol in the lead.

Crack!
Different sound from the beach. Bill stops. He glances back. “Leonard?”

Leonard swallows and cuh-cuh-catches up to Bill, his rifle held before him like a shield he doesn’t trust.

[15]

Marly in the southern access corridor, trying to decide what to do. First three shots from near the agriculture wing to the northwest, and now three more from the vicinity of the beach. Which way should she go?

Well… assuming it’s the same people shooting, she ought to head in the direction of the most recent shots.

She firms her grip on the carbine and turns back.

“I don’t want to wait here.”

Dieter looks at Bonnie as if suddenly remembering she is there. “We have to wait till they find out what’s going on.”

“I
don’t
want to wait here.” She glances toward the pen at the bodies of the two pigs, the carnitrope, and Grace. The other pigs snuffle and make nervous sounds, run into one another, trample the bodies, sometimes stop to nuzzle the freshly dead, and raise their piggy heads with piggy noses freshly red.

Dieter goes to the pen and bangs the low wall to calm the pigs, but they only bleat louder. “I’m gonna let ’em out,” he decides. Bonnie says nothing, and Dieter opens the little wooden gate. The pigs do not bolt, so Dieter enters the pen and drives them out.

“I’m going inside,” says Bonnie. “I’m going to my room. Until this is over.”

“Hey, you can’t do that. You heard what the man said.”

“He’s got no authority over me. There’s no rank here. I wouldn’t have volunteered if there was. Fuck that supremist bullshit.”

“I mean about the zom—the carnitropes.” He walks from the pen, and they head toward the front of the staff quarters. “There are probably others in here,” he continues. “And
someone
let them in. You don’t even have a gun.”

“I despise the things. They’re
male
weapons. Extensions of the male sexuality. If you can’t rape something, you exterminate it.”

Dieter gives a moment’s thought to exterminating Bonnie, but none to raping her.

“I’m going to my room,” Bonnie continues, “and locking the door. No one will bother me there. I’m not going to be a party to you people acting out your primal hunting instincts. I am civilized, and I refuse to collaborate.”

“You are one fucked-up asshole,” says Dieter. “You know that? I use the word asshole because it is nonchauvinistic. Everyone has one, y’know?”

Bonnie opens the front door to the staff quarters and goes inside. Dieter shakes his head. He levels the 30.06 extension of his male sexuality and surveys the floodlighted area. He wishes he had a cigarette, the first such craving he has felt in a while. Or a joint. They had to give up cigarettes when they entered the Ecosphere, and bringing in marijuana seeds was out of the question, even though Marly claimed they’d grow fine in the tropics.

He stands stiffly and swiveling, trying to make his face hard. Dieter the Martian colonist standing sentry duty within the lone glass island, the only thing between safety and the living-dead invaders who threaten their very—

Something pokes his back. “Don’t move.” The voice is tight, as if the throat that produced it is constricted.

He begins to move anyway, then stops.

“Drop the gun. Now.”

He lowers the rifle. Holds it at arm’s length. Lets go.

Loud thud of a large-caliber handgun from somewhere near the ocean.

Someone shoves his shoulder. “That way. Inside.”

Dieter attempts to walk normally. If he passes an opened door, a corner to scuttle around—

“Keep your hands up. I have a submachine gun, and you wouldn’t get five feet without looking like an outtake from
Bonnie and Clyde
. Got it?”

He glances back despite himself. “
Bonnie and Clyde?
”

Poke in the kidneys. “Move, asshole.”

“Where are we going?”

“Power room. Battery room. Whatever the fuck you people call it.”

“I don’t know how—”

“I don’t care what you don’t know. You take me to it. Fuck with me and I’ll kill you. And I’ll put the bullet in your heart so you come back, like my friends out there.”

Dieter imagines himself an automaton: stumbling, agape, hands outstretched, eyes needy, drawn to living flesh. Turning left toward the power room, he finds himself wondering just how different it would really be.

[16]

“It’s Deke.”

“It got him? The, the carnitrope, it got him?”

Bill toes Deke’s face-down body, which yields jointlessly. There is a small, nearly bloodless hole between the shoulder blades. Bill bends and turns the body over. The torso rolls, but the legs stay knee-down, body twisted at the waist.

That’s how you know someone’s dead, Leonard thinks. Because they don’t care what position they’re in.

Bill rolls the lower half of Deke’s body as well. Out of some sense of decorum? Whatever; he squats before the big man’s chest. A larger, more ragged exit hole exactly at the solar plexus. “Someone shot him in the back,” Bill says.

Leonard glances around the beach. They’re pretty exposed here. Something floats against the sandbar in the water. A sniper there, prone in the water? Too far, too dark, to tell. “Shouldn’t we take cuh, cuh,
cover
?” he asks.

“Whoever shot him wouldn’t remain in one position.” Bill stands and goes to the corpse of the carnitrope. “They’d sweep the terrain, continue mobile. Tactical maneuvering. Offensive advantage. Search and destroy. Divide and conquer.”