Masters of Horror (5 page)

“
You don’t be smoking at all around here. I go off on you, I catch you. Don’t smoke at work.” But he was thinking about something else.

“
We use up this batch, then maybe we switch to Black Flag for the bonding agent in the stuff—who’s making it up?”

“
The base? Ramon.”

“
He get sick?”

“
Hard to tell with Ramon.”

“
Okay, we get rid of the Bug Deth now, but we use up this batch of the cooking. That’s forty, fifty thousand dollars, Raiders.”

Raiders looked like he was about to argue when Ramon and Buzzy came running in, yelling, and Ramon was missing half his face.

10:18 P.M.

Jim stared at Dwayne. Jim wasn’t sure how he was going to do this. Or what exactly he was going to do. Should he really do it, go ahead and kill him? Or maybe just kneecap him? Bust his knees open with a bullet. Fucking change his life for him. Ruin
his
transportation.

“
How much you get for that shit you took off my car, Dwayne? More’n four hundred bucks? Probably less. Pretty pathetic, asshole.”

Dwayne just stared back at him. “You got me confused with somebody, man.” Maybe if he kept saying it, the guy’d buy it. Just keep saying it, make him doubt himself.

“
No.
Uh-uh
. I was fucked up but I remember you vividly, Dwayne, and Joleen. I found her. See, I figured she wasn’t in on it, so I didn’t shoot her, and she told me you’d be here eventually.”

They were standing in the thick shadows by the dark green bushes, standing amidst dog crap in the balding front yard at an angle where nobody could see them but they could see most everybody. Jim White Guy had picked the spot carefully.

Inside the house. Ramon on his knees clutching his face, blood running down his arm, and twining through the links of the gold chain on his chest. Sobbing.

Samson trying to get a coherent story from him.

“
The bodies in the dumpster
what
?”

And then the naked, filthy guys came stinking and stumbling into the piperoom and when Ramon saw them he screamed and scurried away on his hands and knees. Samson thought they were some kind of homeless lunatics until he saw that one of them was dragging his guts behind him on the floor.

Outside, Dwayne saying, “You mixed up, man, you piped up or something, got me mixed up wid somebody. It dark out here, too. Let’s go in the light, over there, you see if it really me. Come on, put your gun in your pocket.” All of this was halfhearted. Dwayne realized he was hoping Jim White Guy would shoot him. Put a hole in the hole.

“
You lying sack of shit,” Jim Diggins said.

Dwayne took a step back, into the streetlight shine. Jim took a step toward him. Aimed the gun.

Then they heard the screaming from the house, and the gunshots. Three seconds of Dwayne and Jim gaping at the house. Another thirty seconds of uncertainty, staring at one another. Dwayne saying, “We better get the fuck—”

That’s when the naked, coughing man with brains on his fingers came staggering out of the darkness by the bushes, coming from the back door.

Coming at them.

Dwayne knew it was brains on the naked man’s fingers, because of the head the dude was carrying under his arm. It was a handsome head with a lot of hair that waved like a jacket fringe as the naked guy moved. A big gouge taken out of the skull. It was Samson’s head.

“
Oh fuck,” Dwayne said. Recognizing Samson’s still-twitching face on the severed head. Seeing that the naked motherfucker lunatic had one nasty, filth-caked hand in the hole in Samson’s head, was scooping out the brains, eating them, using his fingers like a kid eating the frosting left over in a bowl…

Jim and Dwayne stared at the naked guy. A white guy with a bloated stomach and snaggly brown teeth. The naked guy was staring back without blinking, his milky eyes not moving. Standing there, swaying like he might fall over any second.

Jim was making a choking sound down in his throat.

The naked guy dropped Samson’s head.
Thump
. It rolled a little, in the grass.

The naked dude thrust his head out a little on his neck, like a cat, and sniffed at them. Sniff. Sniff again. Then he made a croaking sound, his mouth exuding a stink that made Dwayne want to puke. He took a step toward Dwayne. Sniffing. Made another sound. A word this time.

“
Base.”

He reached his hands up toward Dwayne’s head.

Dwayne backed away and fell over. The guy dropped to his knees beside Dwayne and gnashed his teeth at him, reached for his head and…

Dwayne yelled hoarsely: “Jim, help me, man!” This wasn’t the way to die. Not
this
way. Uh-uh, no.

Jim hesitated. Then he fired the .45 at the naked guy.
Blam
. The flash strobe lighting up the yard for a tenth of a second, a flame licking out, the dead man staggering—

Oh yes, Dwayne knew it was a dead man.

Staggering, turning toward Jim, all his movements like flinches. The dead man with a hole right through its heart.

Jim felt unreal, looking at the walking dead man. Like he should lean back in his chair and reach for the popcorn and just let things happen on a screen. He fought the feeling, thinking:
this is happening to me.
Aiming the gun this time as the corpse came at him, aiming at the dead man’s head.
Blam
, flash, right between the eyes. It went down like a puppet with its strings cut.

Then it started thrashing, kind of floppy-sideways on the ground, like a landed fish. Making sputtering sounds, shit and blood running down its leg from its butt. One of its eyes swelling up, popping out with yellow and red fluid, as it began to crawl with one arm, pulling itself toward them.

“
Base,” it rasped. “Crack. Rock. Silver top. Base.”

There were three more coming around the other corner of the house. Two more on the street, coming down the sidewalk. Mostly naked. One of them didn’t have any eyes, and it had a rusty piece of metal through its middle, its head moving hurky-jerky. All of them coming toward Jim and Dwayne.

One of them was carrying Joleen’s head. Her head raggedly torn off at the neck. Holding her head up to its face, biting into Joleen’s forehead. The naked men coming at them sniffing, snuffling…

Dwayne and Jim ran up the stairs, into the house.

Both of them yelling the same thing so much in synch it sounded rehearsed: “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUCK!”

10:35 P.M.

They found two freshly killed women in the front hall, one with her head missing, the other one with her head only half attached. The top gone from that head. Scooped out. Part of the brain. Just part of it. They only wanted…

Jim threw up in the pipe room. Samson’s body was curled up in one corner, a puddle still spreading out from it, Ramon dead beside it, face down. The back of his head gone. One of the naked guys was clawing feebly at a closet door. Strings of entrails had dragged behind it, leaving a rancid trail on the floor, the top of its head shot off. It was scraping like a cat at the closet door, and they could hear someone sobbing in there, someone hiding in the dark closet.

The naked bulb lit the room brightly, every corner of it. Stark and sharp.

Jim straightened up, feeling like he was going to hyperventilate, and walked over to the crawling thing at the closet door (thinking about what it was, with quiet amazement: a human being gone literally rotten, dead meat dragged around by hunger like an empty cart dragged by a rabid horse. It was entropy that could feel hunger; scraping at the door in a tape loop of robotic stupidity, a thing that had once been a person, someone whose picture had appeared in some high school year book…) and shot it twice in the back of the head, near the spine. It twitched and slumped, then started moving again—but weak now, like a dying roach.
Probably have to incinerate the son of a bitch to really kill him
, Jim thought.

Feeling numb, Jim dragged it away by the ankle and shoved it in the bathroom, crammed a board under the doorknob to lock the thing in. It made faint scrabbling sounds behind the door.

Jim went back to the closet. It was a long way across the little room. “Come on out, man, I shot the fucking thing,” Jim said to the guy in the closet. He wanted living people around him.

Dwayne was pushing bodies up against the door to the hall. Samson’s headless body, Ramon’s body. Dwayne was crying without tears, his face contorted like a little kid’s. Jim looked at him and thought:
He’s no more criminal than I am. Just another guy on a street corner. Used to be a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Dragging mattresses up against the door, dumping them on the bodies, now. That wouldn’t work for long. Those things could pull people’s heads off. They were strong.

Jim opened the closet door. A black dude in a grimy jogging outfit was crouched in there, hugging his knees, shaking. An Oakland Raiders medallion on a heavy gold chain around his neck. There was a little snub-nosed gun on the floor between his feet. Probably used up all the rounds in it.

“
Raiders, tha’s Raiders,” Dwayne said.

“
There a phone here?” Jim asked Raiders, tasting vomit in his mouth.

“
They gone?”

“
No. They’re outside,” Jim said. Fighting panic. Fighting the urge to shove the guy out of the closet and get in it himself. “I said, ‘Is there a phone here?’”
Don’t lose it don’t lose it don’t lose it…

“
In the office.”

“
Where’s that?”

“
Behind the steel door, down the hall. Give me that fucking gun.”

“
No way.” Jim turned his back on Raiders. Stepped over the corpse. The dead thing made a movement with its whole body like a worm on a hot sidewalk, and then lay still again.

Jim stopped in the middle of the room, his gun in his hand, wanting to scream but not having the energy, still sick to his stomach, thinking that all this should feel dreamlike, but it didn’t now, not anymore.

That was because there was a smooth and ordinary continuity between being strung out, crashing on crack, perceiving himself as human vermin…and being here, with the dying and the dead who moved around.

It all felt like one, seamless thing, to him. Like the fall of a pebble into a mine shaft was part of the pebble’s splashing into slime and mud. It had all led right here.

The hall door heaved inward, cracking down the middle. A black woman’s face with milky eyes in the break.
Big
black woman wearing bloodstained designer jeans, but naked above the waist. She had one enormous pendulous breast, the other mostly chewed away. Somehow he knew she’d chewed it away herself. One of her eyes was missing. Her upper lip raggedly absent so that her teeth showed in permanent feral baring. She was pushing through the blocked doorway, pressing the broken wood aside, moving slow as lava over the dead bodies and the mattress blocking her way.

Fumbling, but inexorable, like the motion of a big maggot feeling its way along, as she shoved through the broken door.

Climbing over the dead. The dead climbing over the dead.

“
Base,” she said, in a croak. “Crack. Rock. Silver top. Base.”

“
Some kind of poison in the base,” Dwayne whispered to himself. He was standing with his back to the wall opposite the door, just looking at her. “Kills them and the dark wave brings them back.”

“
The dark what?” Jim asked.

“
Garland…Uncle Garland said—” He shook his head. “It’s just too much greed, he said one time. Spills over and changes things…”

Dwayne and Jim stared at the woman, and then at the two dead men coming in behind her. They weren’t cooperating with her consciously, but shoving in beside her like impatient commuters forcing their way onto a BART train. Two walking dead men, one white, an aging punk rocker, and the other black. Their faces peeling away, one of them missing his eyes.