Zombie Pulp (13 page)

Weams looked down on that legless, headless torso and felt a clawing madness in the back of his skull. Zaber was now an immense, fish-white blobby thing with arms still in place, head sheared to a stump, legs gone where they entered the hip. He could see the grizzled meat in there, marbled and red like fresh beef, the sawed knobs of bone trailing streamers of white ligament.

It was too much, just too much.

“Lyon,” Specks said, enjoying himself, “take off his arms. Me and Weams will go dump this trash in the river.”

Lyon was shaking. “No, no, no…Jesus, you can’t…you can’t leave me alone with that thing…”

Specks started laughing. “All right, Weams you stay. You each do an arm. Start cutting in the armpit, it’s soft there. I’ll take this stuff down to the river, fill the bags with rocks and sink them. By the time the bags rot through, won’t be enough left to float.”

“C’mon, Specks,” Weams said. “Let’s just dump him in the hole as is.”

“No. Arms are hooked to hands and hands to fingers. Fingers have fingerprints. If anybody finds the torso, I don’t want them matching fingerprints to it. And Zaber has a record. He did time. So cut him up.”

He told them to put the torso in the big hole they’d dug and to bag the arms, bury them off in the woods. Before he left, he said, “And don’t let me down, boys.”

He tossed Zaber’s legs over his left shoulder and even bagged in that green plastic, they could see that the undersides of his knees were resting atop Specks’ shoulders.

“Man,” he said. “These legs gotta weight eighty a piece.”

He picked up the bag with the head in it and off he went.

Which left Weams and Lyon alone with the torso, watching it, not wanting to look, but unable to stop. There was a grim magnetism to the thing. So they watched and waited—maybe for it to move.

“I don’t like this,” Lyon said. “I don’t like any of it.”

“It doesn’t seem to bother Specks,” Weams said.

“That’s because he’s a fucking animal.” Lyon went to the door, peered out, then closed it again, making sure Specks wasn’t out there eavesdropping. “I mean, c’mon, whose idea was it to kill fucking Pauly?”

“Specks’. But we went along with it.”

“Sure we did. And whose idea was it to slice the body up? Specks’. He’s too easy with all this, man. He’s done this shit before.”

Weams had been thinking that, too. Specks did the shooting. He’d known exactly how to bag up the remains and he seemed to know exactly how to cut them up. “Specks has been around. He’s a bad boy. But he got us out of some ugly shit with Zaber. I mean, shit, I was into the guy for almost twenty G’s.”

Lyon sighed. “Me, too. But still…we should have thought about this. Killing a guy…Christ, that makes us no better than Specks. He’s done time before, but we haven’t. I don’t think I could take it.”

Weams didn’t say so, but standing there with that massive legless, headless corpse spread at their feet, he was thinking that prison was the least of their worries.

“Okay, we’re part of this now. No going back. But I’m not going any farther,” Lyon announced. “I won’t butcher a…a corpse.”

“Me either,” Weams sighed.

They pushed it into the hole with their boots and it landed with a flopping, rubbery sound that made them both gasp. Then they buried it, smoothed out the soil. They dug a dummy hole out in the woods, buried it back up. It would convince Specks…unless he wanted to paw around in there.

When he returned, they were fitting the floorboards back in place, nailing them tight.

“How was it, girls?” he asked, rain dripping from his hair. “Messy?”

“Let’s not talk about it, okay?” Weams said.

“Sure, sure, whatever you say. The arms?”

“Out in the woods,” Lyon said.

Specks seemed satisfied. “Well,” he said, “I guess that’s the last we’ll see of Pauly Zaber.”

But Weams had to wonder.

*

Later, the night thick as soup beyond the windows of the old house, Weams was watching Lila mix him a vodka martini. Just watching her, you knew she had been a bartender once. Too smooth, too easy with it.

Just like Specks with a dead body.

Lila was all dolled-up in a short skirt and sequined top, a gold chain teasing her ample cleavage. That was Lila: all dressed-up and nowhere to go. And she knew damn well why there was nowhere to go: no money, no nothing. Just that old creaking house and Weams, her husband.

Lila handed him his drink. “Let me guess,” she said, her eyes frigid and brittle like black ice, “you were out with Lyon and Specks? Stop me here if I’m wrong. Out playing the ponies, working the slots, dropping a few hands of blackjack. Am I close on this?”

Weams sipped his drink, heard his wife, but only saw a blubbery white thing falling into a grave. “I guess. Maybe…what did you say?”

“How much this time?”

“How much what?”

“How much money did you drop?” she wanted to know, those eyes not black ice now, but something colder, maybe absolute zero where even oxygen freezes. “And, better yet, how much did you borrow from that loanshark, from—”

“Change the record,” Weams snapped, sweat beading his brow.

“You have a problem,” his wife said. “You’re an addict. You need help.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you? You know what I heard? Lyon’s wife is leaving him and he’s about to lose his house. Does that little bell ring familiar?”

Weams’ hands were shaking and it took both of them to get his drink to his mouth. “Leave Lyon out of it.”

“How about Specks…how is Specks doing?”

Weams slammed his drink down on the coffee table. “Why the hell are you always asking about Specks? Do you like the guy? You got something going on with him?”

“That’d be the day,” she said. “He’s a creep and we both know it. An ex-con. How can you associate with a guy like him?”

“He’s okay.”

And Weams almost started laughing.
Sure, he’s okay. And Pauly Zaber? He was okay, too. Salt of the earth. Just normal, hard-working guys.

Lila laughed. “Me and Specks. Don’t be ridiculous.”

But Weams didn’t think he was being ridiculous. He just stared at his wife, his complexion pasty, his eyes red-rimmed and fixed. “Sometimes I wonder about the two of you.”

“You don’t look good,” Lila said, crossing to the picture window and looking out across the darkened yard, the trees blowing in the wind, the gate creaking open and shut on the fence. “You look sick. Maybe you should tell me about it.”

“About what?”

“About what happened tonight? Did you sign away the house? The car? Is it that fat loanshark? What’s his name? Zab—”

“I’m fine, dammit!” Weams told her, brushing perspiration from his face. “I’m perfectly fine! Can’t you see that? Can’t you see how fine I am?”

*

When the phone rang just after midnight two days later, Weams came awake with a scream on his lips. He held it in check, shivering and sweating, trying hard not to remember what he’d been dreaming about. Lila was gone. Out God-knows-where with God-knows-who.

He stumbled over to the phone. “Yes? Hello?”

“Listen, Weams, you got to get over here.” It was Lyon and he sounded funny. Drunk? Crazy? Maybe both. But there was something in his voice, a sharp-edged dread that was positively frightening in its urgency.

“C’mon, Lyon…do you know what time it is?”

But Lyon didn’t seem to care. “You have to get over here. I mean it. Something’s happening and, God, Weams, you gotta help me…”

“Calm down, will ya? Just take it easy. Tell me about it.”

Weams could imagine him over there, clutching the phone in a sweaty hand, alone in that house now that his wife had left and just white with terror…but terror of
what?

Lyon’s voice went down to a whisper, a gritty rough sort of whisper like he was afraid somebody was listening. “It…it started about midnight, no eleven-thirty…I’m not sure, but that’s when I first heard it.”

“Heard what?”

“Something scratching at my door.”

Weams’ belly felt loose. “Scratching? Like what? A dog? A cat?”

“No, nothing like that…just a scratching like…like maybe nails being drawn over the outside of the door.” He paused there, as if he was listening again. “It kept on and on and, God help me, I was scared for some reason…I didn’t dare look out there…”

“But you did?”

Lyon swallowed. “Yes.” Swallow. “Yes, I did. I…I crept up to the bathroom window and looked out on the porch—”

“And?”

All he could hear was Lyon breathing, licking his lips. “Out there…I wasn’t sure…something fat and white like a body, Weams…something that didn’t have a head and didn’t have legs…it was scratching the door with its fingernails…”

Weams just stood there, sweat running down his spine. He wanted desperately to fall over like a post. He was dizzy and nauseous and his throat had constricted down to a pinhole. His breath came in short, wheezing gasps. “Lyon…you’re losing it…do you know what you’re saying to me?”

But then the phone was dropped and there were sounds over there. The sound of shattering glass. The sound of something thumping and crashing around, something wet and heavy.

And, of course, there was also the sound of Lyon screaming.

*

An hour later the police were all over Lyon’s house, snapping pictures and taking measurements, asking questions and getting few answers. But mostly just pulling their peaked caps off and rubbing their eyes, trying to get the sight of what they’d seen out of their heads.

Specks pushed past the big cop at the door and Weams followed right behind him, right into the slaughterhouse. It was bad. It was more than bad. Besides the shattered glass on the floor and the ragged curtains billowing in, there was a lot of blood. Looked like someone had butchered a steer in there. But what both Specks and Weams saw was the form on the couch with the bloody sheet thrown over it. The sheet had slipped off Lyon’s face and it was marble-white, eyes staring up at something nobody else could see.

The bad thing was the sheet ended right where Lyon’s legs should have been.

“Where…where are they?” Specks said in an empty voice.

“Can’t find ‘em,” one of the detectives admitted.

Specks looked around—through the debris and drying pools of blood, the clods of black earth on the floor—like maybe he might catch a glimpse of them. Shoved under the couch or tucked behind a chair.

The cops started hammering them with questions and Specks said he was just a friend, didn’t know anything more about it. Weams told them about the phone call. About Lyon saying something was scratching outside the door. But that’s all he said. He wasn’t about to go farther. Not then. Not yet.

The cops seemed to believe them, but they studied the two men, gave them some funny looks. Maybe they saw how pale they were, how they shook, the way they fumbled their words and started at the slightest sound like they were expecting something. But Specks and Weams had just lost a friend and that’s all it was, that’s all it could be.

Outside, Weams had to fight not to get sick. That metallic, sour stench of blood was all over him, he couldn’t seem to get it out of his head.

“You know, you know what this means—”

“Shut up,” Specks warned him. “Just shut the hell up.”

The coroner’s people were examining the broken window in depth by flashlight. With forceps, they were pulling strands of something from the shards of glass still in the frame. Looked like strands of tissue.

An old lady was standing under a tree with a cop. She was a slight thing with a wrinkle for every year. Looked like a good wind would send her sailing over rooftops and trees like a sheet blown from a line.

“I saw something,” she was saying. “I don’t know how you’d exactly describe it.”

“Do your best,” the cop said.

“A big white monkey,” she said.

The cop just looked at her. “Ma’am?”

“
Yes, sir. That’s what I thought. It was hopping down the walk like a monkey, like one of those apes in a circus, you see? Using its hands to push it along, swinging its body and slapping along with its hands…but it was white…funny…”

“How so?” the cop said and you could see he thought it was all a waste of time. Christ, pink elephants next.

She hugged herself against the night breeze. “Well, sir, it didn’t seem to have a head nor legs, just those long arms and a big, fat body.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, I believe it had a tattoo on its chest.”

*

On the way out to the shack in Specks’ Buick, Weams spilled it, said those words, hated the taste of them on his tongue: “We didn’t do it, Lyon and me. We didn’t cut Zaber’s arms off, we just threw him in the pit. That’s what we did. That’s exactly what we did.”

“Should’ve known better than to trust you idiots.”

“Yes,” Weams agreed, “you should’ve.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”