Death Row Apocalypse (9 page)

The nearest cameraman couldn’t take it anymore and began to beg the old woman, “Please, please stop. I can’t take any more!” He pulled out a handkerchief to wipe at his eyes.

The old woman spun around, amazingly fast for one so old, and poked at the man’s chest. “Sit your ass back down, or I’ll whoop you good an’ hard, sonny.”

In the execution room, all but Eddie noticed the commotion in the gallery. Everyone, save the aforementioned Eddie, watched in fascination as Violet began banging on the window. The cameramen were seemingly out of control, and Violet, who displayed a persona not dissimilar from that Judge Judy portrays in her TV show, then turned to assault a cameraman, who was clearly two feet taller and half her age.

The green fluid in the IV was
With
d with a clear liquid, which then quickly turned black. No one present for the event had seen the change in color. Only the executioner, rolling cameras, and about half the state were catching the events that marked the end of a man’s life. Perhaps for Eddie this was a fitting end. He had become in that moment unimportant and held no interest even to the audience that had come to see him die or had tuned in for the show. Eddie lay there, quite still, all except for his slow breathing.

As the guards, Med-Tech, and gallery audience one by one brought their attention back to Eddie, they all returned to a much more professional and perhaps respectful attitude. From time to time someone would check their watch or look to the clock on the wall. Most of the time their focus was on the IV tubing, as one could tell when a new chemical was being administered. The first sign would be that the current content’s color would become clear; then the next sign would be a change to a new color. This happened nine distinct times, with the final two colors being bright yellow. Eddie’s chest was barely moving now as the last of the nine-piece cocktail was administered. As soon as it flowed down the tubing, everyone in the room unconsciously held their breath. They had all been counting the color changes and now finally watched Eddie’s chest gently rise and fall. His last breath left his body and his chest fell until his lungs were empty. His chest would never again rise to draw breath.

Eddie’s audience let their breath go in relief and were happy now that the bizarre events were finally over with, and they all visibly relaxed. Only the formalities remained. The Med-Tech would check the vitals, and the white hearse would arrive to collect the deceased, and finally the guards would remove Eddie’s restraints and wheel the corpse out of the chamber. They all watched with interest as Sandra tried to measure Eddie’s pulse and found none. She then lent forward and drew a small penlight from her watch pocket, and, raising one eyelid at a time, she checked for a pupil dilation response using the white beam from the penlight. There was none, but she was confused and looked to the nearest guard with concern. The guard had an unfortunate scar running from his left nostril to halfway across his cheek, fashioning him with a continuous sneering look.

“What’s up?” he sneered.

“Um, it’s just kinda weird,” she said.

“What’s weird?”

Sandra cleared her throat. “Well, his eyes are kinda weird. There’s no color in them. I mean, his irises have gone white!”

He was losing his patience. He’d had enough of this execution and wanted to get home and push it all behind a solid six-pack.

“Girl, is . . . he . . . dead, or isn’t he?”

He said this slowly, as if talking to a moron, and Sandra turned a little red with embarrassment.

“Yes, he’s dead. I was just remarking that it’s unusual,” she said.

“Look, I’ve seen all kinds of weird shit in these executions. You never can tell how someone is gonna die. Just forget it. We’re almost done here and you can go home.”

He walked to the entrance and unlocked and opened the execution chamber’s heavy door. Latching it in place with a small hook that was attached to the wall, he then turned back toward the gurney. The second guard walked over to the white plastic wall-mounted phone, lifted the receiver, and dialed. He placed the earpiece against his ear.

“Hi, George. Yeah . . . we got you another root inspector. He’s ready for collection,” he said, smirking.

“Root inspector” was a term he loved to coin when talking about the freshly deceased.

“See you in five,” he said finally, then placed the receiver back in its cradle.

“Let’s get this piece of shit ready,” he said to the other guard.

Sandra made a move toward the door, but before she’d taken two steps, the same guard had obviously noticed her covert attempt at leaving.

“Hang on, girl. You got to wait and sign your boyfriend over to the coroner. Won’t be long, five minutes top,” he said, chuckling at his smart joke.

“He weren’t my boyfriend, you dumb redneck,” she spat.

“Well, he sure as shit likes the looks of you!” the guard countered. “Seriously, just hold your horses one tick. We ain’t finished yet.”

She looked back in disappointment. Then, leaning on the wall, she folded her arms and watched the guards untie Eddie’s feet and arm straps.

“Hey! Nursey,” the scarred guard sang. “Don’t forget to pull these needles. Ain’t my job!” He then added, “Might have Aids or some kinda shit!”

“Don’t worry, girl. He won’t bite!” the second guard tried to reassure her. He then chuckled to himself.

Turning his head away from Sandra back to finishing off untying the last strap, the guard came face-to-face with Eddie. Not Eddie the deceased but Eddie reincarnate! The guard almost lost control of his bowels there and then as he stared into the singularities that were Eddie’s pupils. The pupils were surrounded by the whites of his irises and corneas. Sandra was right: this was totally weird.

Eddie’s eyes looked back at the guard with indifference as he lunged forward with one hand and a full set of pearly white teeth. From Eddie’s mouth a mixture of saliva, blood, and something green poured out and over his lower jaw as he bit into the guard’s face, severing his nose. As Eddie ripped the nose away from the guard, the aforementioned guard dug deep and emitted a very female bloodcurdling scream. The guard’s hands went to his face, searching for his nose, and tried in vain to stop the torrent of blood that now gushed forth, covering his hands, face, and shirt. He stumbled backwards, then turned, and, with his vision obscured by a mixture of blood and tears, he ran straight into the wall beside a screaming Sandra. Sandra had finally flipped at the sight of a dead man attacking the guard and who had seemingly ripped part of his face off and was now busy chewing noisily on the nasal morsel. She screamed at the top of her lungs, then ran out of the chamber as fast as her legs could carry her.

The second guard reacted fast but not quite fast enough. He grabbed Eddie’s wrist and tried to tie it down again. But his efforts were too little and too late. Eddie, now with his right hand free, grabbed the guard by the hair on the back of his head and pulled him forwards with such force that the guard’s scalp began to tear away from his skull. The guard began screaming as a four-inch-wide strip of skin and hair tore forwards from the base of his skull up and over toward his forehead, resembling perhaps a waxing gone terribly wrong. The major difference being that this strip was made of skin dripping with scarlet blood and not tape with hot wax.

Eddie pulled harder still and continued to tear a six-inch-wide strip that now pulled away the skin from the guard’s face. Then he peeled away and down over his nose and mouth, finally ending at his chin. The strip had pulled away the guard’s eyelids and lips, resulting in an emotionless and unblinking expressionless face. The guard finally lost control of his bladder and bowels and, screaming like a banshee, he stood there shaking, bleeding, and wishing he was dead.

Eddie, not satisfied with a hairy flap of skin, leapt from the gurney snapping the remaining leather strap and rushed the guard, slamming into him and knocking him to the floor. Eddie sank his teeth into the guard’s neck and began ripping the soft tissue away while continuously chewing. He finally ripped into the guard’s jugular, causing a fountain of blood to spray right into his face, drenching it completely. The flailing guard ceased his screaming within moments. His agony was now at an end as he lost consciousness and succumbed to the death he had prayed for.

The nose-less guard was no longer screaming or bleeding. His eyes had turned white, all except for his pupils. He no longer felt pain; he didn’t even think. What he did have was hunger, and he had a lot of it. A hunger to not only eat but to devour, to immerse himself in tearing the life from his prey, a prey that stank of life, of vitality, of human blood.

His nostrils were flooded with the scent of his prey, and the frenzy took hold of him at his core. He looked over to where Eddie fed and scrambled forwards, dropping to his hands and knees to join in with the feeding frenzy before the guard’s last morsels of life evaporated forever. A thick mixture of saliva, blood, and greenish fluid poured from his gaping mouth, splashing onto the chamber floor as he joined his zombie brother. As both zombies ripped into the unconscious guard, blood pooled around them, almost covering the entire floor. Finally the guard died. Only his muscles held on to life, with their random nerve twitches, and with the apparent frenzy over, the two zombies gradually stopped their feeding.

Both zombies tried to stand, taking several attempts to get to their feet as the blood and gore on the tiles created the slickest of surfaces, but as they clambered for balance, first one, then both stopped moving. Each of the zombies jerked its head up and to the left, facing the executioner’s room, and sniffed at the air. They had detected a scent. It was close, and the frenzy was upon them once more as now they both slid and fell in their eagerness to seek out the new source of food. Sniffing at the air, trying to ascertain where their prey lay, they scrambled over one another and closed the distance between themselves and the executioner’s room.

The dead guard, who had been the unwilling main course just moments before, now began to move his fingers. Then, without any intermediate stages, his whole body came back to life as he tried to rise with the same frenzy that the other two stumbling zombies now displayed. The three zombies were soon together and heading toward the executioner’s room. They slid, slipped, flopped, and knocked each other over. In many ways the zombies now resembled the Three Stooges in their clumsy advance. Where humans have a natural reflex to cushion any falling impact with their hands and arms, zombies are missing this fundamental self-preservation ability.

Zombie Eddie slipped once more, knocking the feet from under the guard sporting the most ruthless waxing anyone could imagine. Perhaps I could better describe it as an “inverted Mohican,” or a Brazilian waxing gone wild. In any case, I’m referring to the guard who had his face ripped off. He took a dive—not just a stumble or a trip but a full-on, no-holds-barred, bone-shattering crash—slamming headfirst into the floor. The impact not only broke his skull, it shattered its already-bloody forehead, sending fragments of bone into the immediate area of its brain. The zombie died instantly, and for the second time in less than fifteen minutes the guard died—this time for good.

The remaining two zombies gradually made progress toward the executioner’s room. Its lone occupant backed away from the one-way-mirrored window, from where she had watched the horrific scene play out. In the short amount of time it took for Eddie to rise and kill everyone in the chamber, she had been hypnotized at the level of violence that had transformed the execution chamber into a scene from a nightmarish abattoir. She had been frozen to the spot, not knowing what to do, and had done absolutely nothing.

Where are the other guards? This is a high-security prison. Where is the SWAT team that would—correction, that should—come to my rescue?
she thought. She looked around, not really knowing what to do. No one had told her this would or even could happen; there must be something!

It was then she noticed the alarm button. It was naturally red in color and mounted on a small one-and-a-half-inch-square box with wires that ran from it to a hole in the wall. How she could have missed it was beyond her, and somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she found the thread of a memory that she had acquired when preparing for her prison visit. She now recalled that in case of an emergency, any emergency, she should press the button. On activation of the alarm, the prison Emergency Response Team would come in force to the chamber, and they would be ready to bring under control any situation, using extreme force.

The box was mounted under the bench, which was below the observation window. A small red label was mounted to its side and had the word “Emergency” stenciled into it. She pressed the button and was rewarded with an ear-shattering wail. The two zombies were now almost at the door, and liquid fear had
With
d the blood in her veins. Her heart was thumping so hard that she felt it beating in her neck. Her knees felt weak, and she needed to pee real bad. For the past quarter of an hour, she had been witness to a scene from hell, a scene that she could still not process, and like a computer hung up at a single badly coded command, she literally did nothing.

You would be possibly mistaken if you thought that she was made of stronger stuff. Volunteering to off Necktie Eddie, the man who had murdered her parents, and get paid $150 for that pleasure really did not mean she had balls of steel. She only wanted the revenge that was promised to her by the warden. He’d promised that pushing a few ounces of poison into that murderer’s veins was a justice that belonged to her and would put to rest the need for revenge, allowing her to move on with her life. She had enjoyed the unique position of being able to murder the man legally, and she found that she liked the feeling, but she had certainly not wanted this!