Zombie Pulp (2 page)

Earl killed the woman, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the shelter. I was shaking. I was nauseous. I was disappointed in myself because I’d frozen up out there. Mostly, I suppose, I was in shock. I stumbled blindly back to the table and Murph giggled as Maria poured bourbon into me and Shacks put a cigarette in my mouth even though I hadn’t smoked in years.

“Nice going, soldier boy,” Murph said.

I ignored him. It was easy. “Thanks,” I said to Earl.

He grunted. “Need you for the lottery, don’t we?”

Then Doc was standing there, smiling thinly down at me and shaking his head with the quiet, patient shame a man feels for a son who has brought disgrace upon him once again. “Now that wasn’t a very good idea, was it, Tommy?” he said.

“I…I tried to stop him. I tried to save him.”

“Fucking moron,” Murph tittered.

“Shut the hell up!” Maria shouted at him. Maria came from Puerto Rico when she was a child and when her Latin temper got boiling, one look from those smoldering dark eyes of hers could peel paint from a door.

“Mr. Shipman was a loose cannon,” Doc said. “He simply couldn’t adapt. I was expecting him to do something like this. But I was expecting better from you, Tommy. You were a soldier. You know better than to go out alone and unarmed at night.”

And he was right: I did.

The Wormboys were active day or night, true, but at night they were just a little deadlier, a little more insidious. They became crafty, wicked, using the shadows as camouflage. I’m not sure if they were technically nocturnal, but they were nasty by daylight and absolute hell after dark. I remember a guy once told me that when they reanimated, most retained a rudimentary intellect while some were unnaturally cunning, but all were driven by predatory instinctual drives. And like any beast of prey, they made the darkness their own.

I sat there wilting under Doc’s gaze, but I wasn’t going to give in. Maybe my tactics weren’t so good, but my heart was in the right place. “I couldn’t let him just…I mean, I couldn’t let those things slaughter him.”

Doc shook his head. “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. You haven’t been with us long enough. It takes time. Sacrifice is simply a way of life here.”

“The lottery,” I said.

“Yes, that’s part of it.”

I had been in the shelter for two months. I had never played the lottery before or marched the “winners” out into the killing fields to be trussed up for sacrifice. The idea of that sickened me.

“You can’t do it, Doc. You can’t hand your own people over to those fucking monsters.”

“I have to.”

I slammed a hand on the table. “It’s sick! It’s cold blooded! You can’t do it! You just can’t do it!”

“It has to be done, Tommy.”

Maria was holding my hand and Shacks was patting my back, making me part of them, I guess. But I didn’t want to be part of…of
that.
“Goddammit, Doc. We can fight. We have guns. We can fight.”

“Thirty-seven of us against thousands of them?” He shook his head again. “No, it would be a massacre. It would be the Little Big Horn all over again. We must survive by any means necessary. At whatever cost. It is our only reason for existing now.”

Thousands of them.
I didn’t doubt that…but how could an offering of six every so many months keep thousands full and happy? I put that to Doc.

“It’s a symbolic offering, Tommy. That’s all. Dragna lets us live as long as we choose who dies. It’s simple as that.”

“Dragna’s a fucking monster,” was all I could say. “And so are you.”

Doc just smiled and left the room, calmly as ever, and I sat there, something running hot inside me. “He’s a fucking animal,” I said, not really meaning it, but meaning it all the same. “How can he do it? How can he?”

“He does what he has to do,” Shacks said.

Murph chuckled. “That’s life in the big city, Tommy. Get used to it. Get used to watching your friends die.”

I just shook my head, trying to clear the stink of that Wormgirl from my mind. “But Doc…he’s so…so
cold
about it.”

“Do you think so?” Maria said. “Well, he doesn’t ask anything of us he doesn’t ask of himself.”

“Really?” I said, the sarcasm so thick in my voice you could have caulked a window with it.

She nodded. “Yes. Tomorrow it might be you or me, Tommy, but last year, last year before you arrived…it was his wife. She won the lottery.”

“And he marched her out?”

“Damn straight he did,” Shacks said, his eyes shiny and wet. “I was there. I saw it. He marched her out and tied her to the post. And when they came to take her, he pretended he couldn’t hear her screaming.”

3

It was Doc who set up the shelter.

And like scattered metal filings drawn to a magnet, we came from every direction and he took us in like a crazy old lady collecting stray cats. See, Doc was an extremely practical man. He’d worked for the CDC years before the world shit its pants and the dead started rising. He knew sooner or later one of those nasty bugs the CDC field teams were always studying in remote places like Ghana and Zaire was going metastasize and become an infectious plague of biblical proportions.

So he took precautions.

He bought up an abandoned Air Guard weather station in Carbon County, PA. It dated from the Cold War and had a control center made out of reinforced concrete and steel with a bomb shelter below that could hold sixty people. Using his own money and financial support from a few wealthy friends with like minds, he updated the structure, put in dorms and a dining hall, generators, an air filtration system and a water purification plant. He supplied it with freeze-dried foods and military MREs, medical equipment, survival gear, you name it.

And then it happened.

A mutant virus appeared out of nowhere and mimicked the symptomology of pneumonic plague. Spread by a variety of vectors including the wind, the water, insect bites, and human contact, it ravaged the world. Within sixteen weeks, the world population was reduced nearly two-thirds by all estimates and then with the resulting collapse of the ruling political, industrial, and military infrastructure, there was only chaos. People got sick, they died, the world fell apart…and then the most incredible thing happened: the dead came out of their graves.

And they were hungry.

Nobody knew where the virus came from, not really, but there were lots of theories. Most claimed it had more than a little to do with the BIOCOM-13 satellite which had been sampling the upper atmosphere for alien microbes, was cored by a meteorite, and crashed outside Clovis, New Mexico. Clovis was the first city in the world to become a graveyard. But after that, they all went.

As it turned out, a great many people were immune to the virus. And one by one they began showing up in Carbon County. Doc and his boys gathered up as many as they could. Maria came from Pittsburgh and Shacks from Philly; Sonny came from Newark and Murph drifted in from Delaware. Earl had been one of the first and he was still there. Me, I barely escaped Buffalo. And they kept coming: New England, the Midwest, even the deep South. Some died, some were killed, some went by disease, and others were taken by the Wormboys. And still others won the lottery and were culled. But more always came. Always.

There were nearly forty people in the shelter now…what was six to save the lot?

What was six?

Yeah, that Doc was really something.

He gathered his flock, he tended them, fed and fattened them, kept them safe and sound. Then somewhere along the way he made a deal with the Devil and the Devil’s name was Dragna. Nobody seemed to know shit about Dragna other than the fact that he or
it
had wielded together dozens and dozens of zombie tribes into a single cohesive unit that was about as close to an army as you were going to get this side of the global holocaust. He was to the Wormboys and Wormgirls what Dracula was to bloodsuckers, more or less.

Somehow, someway, Doc had struck a bargain of sorts with this monster.

So every few months, Dragna demanded his payment, his protection money, like a good little extortionist from hell. And as long as Doc and his people played ball, there was safety. But the day we didn’t, Dragna would send his troops in by the thousands.

Yeah, Doc. Good old Doc. Father, therapist, priest, general, saint and prophet to those of us in the shelter. He was essentially good, essentially kind. He took care of everything from keeping his people busy to feeding and clothing them and delivering their babies and even presiding over makeshift weddings now and again. Everyone looked up to him. Everyone loved him. Everyone respected him. They did what he said and obeyed his rules and he kept them alive and somewhat sane.

With the good he did it was easy to forget he also created the lottery.

And in my mind that made him flawed, less than human. He was the farmer and we were the livestock. He raised us like pigs and brought us to slaughter come season.

And because of that, I hated him as much as I loved him.

4

That night—the night before the lottery—I came out of a very thin, nightmare-haunted sleep to the sound of a crash and a blaring car horn. Two minutes later, still dragging on my clothes, my mind fuzzy with some dream of absolute darkness and absolute death, I found Sonny up in the tower watching the action out in the parking lot through the observation port. The tower rose up thirty feet above the lot and it was the only part of the shelter that still had a window—shatter-proof and bullet-proof—but still a window.

“Hell’s going on?” I said.

“See for yourself.”

Sonny had the parking lot lit but I almost wished he hadn’t bothered. Apparently, a few more had decided to make a run for the shelter. This time it looked to be four people in a little minivan. What the circumstances were, I didn’t know, but they must have panicked when they saw all the Wormboys and Wormgirls hanging around the perimeter in drooling wolf packs. That must’ve been what made them drive at the shelter itself. Unfortunately for them and very fortunately for us, Doc with his infinite foresight had had a series of concrete barriers erected around the shelter so no one could ever breach it in such a way.

That minivan slammed right into one of them and it must have been putting out some speed when it did because the front end was smashed-in, the hood crumpled into a V. I could see spiderwebbed sheets of glass and spilled fluids on the pavement. As it was, the minivan looked like a cracked open egg and what had crawled out were four people. A saw a guy with shattered legs crawling towards the shelter, leaving a trail of something dark behind him. A woman was screaming nearby, holding her face in her hands. She was reaching out towards a cluster of the walking dead as if there was mercy in those cold, reptilian brains. One of them, a woman in a pink dress, took her down. Even from the tower I could see the clouds of flies rising from her.

“We have to do something,” I said.

Sonny pulled off his cigarette. “Doc and Earl are at the front door. Any of ‘em make it that far they’ll bring ‘em in.”

“Yeah, but—”

“No, Tommy. Use your fucking head for once. Wormboys are everywhere. Anybody that goes out there is meat, nothing but meat.”

He was right, of course. I knew he was right but even at that point I simply was not as hard and cold as Sonny and the rest of them. God knows I should have been after some of the awful shit I had seen, but even through it all there was hope and humanity and pity still flowering in me like sweet green shoots rising from the cracked, blackened soil of a graveyard.

I ran downstairs and found Doc and Earl waiting for survivors to make the door, but none had. They just looked at me, said nothing. They knew what I was thinking and Earl had his shotgun up. If I tried to throw the deadbolts and locks he would have killed me without a second thought.

I knew it.

He knew it.

Doc knew it.

I looked out the gunport slit and I could see the action just fine. The Wormboys were coming from every direction, waxy faces like melting goat curds or rippling papier-mache. A hot steam of rot rose from them in a sickening, churning mist. Some of them were walking, but others had crawled from ditches and pockets of shadow and many of them were missing limbs. I saw headless trunks. Severed hands. What looked like a rolling head. A woman whose flesh looked like it had been boiled saw me watching her and turned, shambling over towards the door. Her eyes were slimy rotten eggs bulging from raw red sockets, her face a worm carnival. She thrust her backside at me and lifted the ragged remains of her dress. Something like a gushing stream of rice pissed out from between her legs.

I turned away, barely able to keep my stomach down.

“You don’t need to be here, Tommy,” Doc said. “Why don’t you go back to your room?”

“Those people need help.”

“Yes, they do. And if it’s at all possible, we’ll help them.”

“Mister Bleeding fucking Heart,” Earl said.

I ignored him. Out there the zombies were feeding on the injured, but one guy was still pretty spry. He must have slipped out of the van after the crash but ran off in the wrong direction. Now he was coming back. He came vaulting across the lot. Two Wormboys made a grab for him but they weren’t fast enough. He darted past another and jumped over a couple crawlers.