Zombie Pulp (3 page)

In my mind I was with him, pumped with excitement at the idea that he would make it. It was like the good old days, watching Earl Campbell charging into the flak, flattening defenders, jumping, spinning, ducking, whirling around, but never, ever losing his consistent forward momentum.

He was no more than twenty feet from the door when three Wormboys got in his way and he broke to the right, tripped over a crawling husk, and went down. They converged on him from every side, literally covering him in their numbers. I heard him scream with a brilliant, piercing cry of absolute defilement.

But it wasn’t him at all.

It was the woman. The Wormboys had her and they were killing her a bit at a time, tearing out handfuls of flesh, biting into her, nibbling and nipping. I saw her face before it sank away in that carrion ocean. The pain, the horror…it had driven her mad. She clawed her eyes out with bloody fingers.

I turned away and got up real close and personal with Doc. “We could have saved that guy. We could have charged out there and dropped some of them, cut him a path to the door.”

“Not without endangering our community,” Doc said.

I glared at him. “You’re a fucking asshole,” I said and then went back to my room, helpless, hopeless, desperate. I was filled with a black concrete weight that was sinking me day by day.

5

The lottery.

Doc gathered us up in the dining hall because it was the only place big enough to hold us all. Everyone was there, of course. All of us except the children. There were fourteen kids in the shelter ranging from teenagers to infants. But thank God Doc left them out of this sordid mess. This was a party for adults and you should have seen them—eyes staring, faces sweating, hands trembling. Some chain-smoking until the air fumed over in a blue haze and others mumbling prayers over and over again until you wanted to kick their teeth out. Jesus. What a scene.

Then Doc showed up, smiling that plastic smile of his that made me bleed inside. “This isn’t anything we enjoy,” he said. “But it’s something we have to do and I think we all know that.”

Nobody agreed or disagreed with that and I couldn’t even look at that prim, proper, fatherly butcher because the sight of him made my skin crawl. Maria and I sat side by side, holding hands. Shacks was with us. Sonny, too. Murph was there…only he was scared white and he couldn’t even muster a pale shiteating grin or a nasty remark.

Doc held out a cigar box. “There are twenty-three slips of paper in here, folded. One for each adult here in the shelter. Six of these papers have an ‘X’ on them and you all know what those mean. Now, one by one—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Doc,” some guy named Corey said. “We know the drill. Just get to it already. I’m about to have fucking kittens here.”

A woman next to him who’d come in with Shipman made a sound that was somewhere between laughter and sobbing, a brittle sort of sound like something had just shattered in her throat.

“Well, then,” Doc said. “Well.”

Earl and two other guys—Jerome Conroy, an ex-cop, and Ape, an ex-biker—stood by the exit with shotguns. Both of them had seen their share of violence before the dead started rising and plenty since. But neither liked the job Doc had given them: security. It was human nature to bolt and run when you were handed a death sentence and they were there to see that no one did.

Doc, smiling like a tentshow preacher, all teeth and gums, walked around with his cigar box. He took out his slip of paper first. Then one by one we all dipped into that Pandora’s Box. The paper was heavy vellum and you couldn’t see through it. Couldn’t know until you unfolded it.

Corey was the first to say, “I’m staying! You hear that? I’m fucking staying!”

He was joined by three others, including Shacks, who could make the same boast. The woman who was sitting by Corey unfolded hers and stood straight up like something hot had just been jabbed up her ass. She held out her paper and there was an X on it. She was trembling so badly she nearly fell over.

She was chosen.

Corey and the others moved away from her like she had something catchy.

Only Doc went to her, put an arm around her, said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Pearson.” She fell limp into his arms.

Then everybody was unfolding their papers and looking at them. Some, like Sonny, jumped up and danced for joy. “Knew it wouldn’t be me. Shit, yes.” Others cried out. One guy fainted dead away. And another guy shook his paper in the air, saying, “Praise the Lord, I have been chosen. Praise the lord.” Then he fell to his knees and began sobbing uncontrollably. It was a nightmare. People dancing. People hugging and kissing, others on the floor, moaning and whimpering. People came and went at the shelter and I did not know all of them that well. But I knew what all of them thought every day:
if I can just get through the lottery one more time, I’ll make plans to get out. I won’t flirt with death twice.
Yes, that’s what they told themselves because I told myself something very similar. If I can just get through it this one time, then I’ll get out. I won’t do it again. This was my first one. But many of them had played this sick game several times. People like Murph and Earl and Doc himself. And human optimism being as deluding as it is, they all told themselves that this would be their last time, that they would get through it and leave.

But very few of them did.

What took place in that room during the next fifteen minutes was more horrible than anything I had ever witnessed up to that point and I’d seen plenty. For the zombies are monsters, ghouls, predatory things like starving dogs that will use every ounce of instinct, subterfuge, and animal cunning to get the flesh they need to fill their empty bellies. They have an excuse for their savagery. We, however, did not. We were normal, uninfected, rational human beings and yet we were willing to play that perverse game, to sacrifice our own, anything to get a few more weeks of life.

The lottery was the greatest evil I had ever known.

Five sacrifices had been chosen.

One more.

Sighing, I unfolded my paper and as I did so some fatalistic urge within me hoped there would be an X on it so this nightmare would end and I wouldn’t have to live with myself, with the guilt that would come unfettered and sharp-toothed when I knew I had lived at the expense of others. Because it
would
come for me. There was no doubt of that. Like an unquiet ghost it would visit me in the dead of night, wrap its icy hands around my throat and throttle me awake, sweating and shaking, and there in the darkness I would have to face myself: all the evils I had done coming home to brood in my soul there in the midnight hour.

My slip of paper was blank.

I didn’t jump for joy. I felt…neutral, not happy and not sad, just…
nothing
. I felt like an empty can, to tell you the truth. A vessel, I guess, that every drop had been poured from. There was nothing left in me.

At that moment, as I tried to get a grip on what I was feeling, Murph rose up from his seat like he had suddenly been inflated. He did not stand up, he
rose
like a column of hot air. We all turned and looked at him and we all knew, of course. “I got picked,” he said in a flat voice. “You hear me, you assholes? I got picked.
Me.”

He fumbled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tearing at the cellophane with clawing, fumbling, apelike fingers. He dropped two cigarettes, then a third, got the fourth between his lips and lit it. His face was oval like a moon, speckled in sweat, his eyes darting wildly in their sockets. He started laughing and he couldn’t seem to stop. Smoke drifted from his mouth and nostrils in a halo that enveloped his perspiring, bright red face and made him look like a cartoon devil.

“
AHH-HA-HA-HA,” he went at the top of his voice.
“AH-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAH!”

“
Murph,” Doc said, coming over to him, wanting to smother him in empathy and goodwill, give him the speech about sacrificing for the good of all. He even reached out his arms right before Murph—not laughing now, his face hooked in a snarl of animal hate—bunched his fist into a ball and gave old Doc a shot right in the belly that folded him up to the floor.

Doc’s goons, Sonny and Earl and Conroy and that monkey-grinning slab of shit Ape, charged in and beat Murph to the ground and he took it. He did not even try to fend off the blows that came for him. He accepted them like they were his inheritance. He lay there on the floor, sobbing and trembling, curled up in the fetal position. The goons had to drag him out the door and by then nobody was saying a goddamn thing. You should have seen the self-satisfied, greedy fuck-you-I got-mine looks in their eyes like fat-bellied rats that had found another crumb to gnaw on that would keep them safe one more day.

This is what it had come to.

The germ had taken the good people and many of them were wandering around outside the shelter looking for food. What remained behind were the people in that room—writhing human worms squirming in the smelly dungball of the world.

They made me sick.

And the sad part was, I was
one
of them.

6

Doc’s sacrifices—his selections of juicy pink meat for the Wormboys—were set to be marched out the next night. They were separated from the general population…
put in isolation,
as Doc called it. Why? I don’t know. Did they pose a threat to us? Did we pose a threat to them? Or was Doc just afraid that if we had to look on them and see what was in their eyes, that depthless pain and desperation, that we might start acting like human beings again? That we might feel some intrusive, obstructive things like pity and remorse and remember that culture, true culture, was built upon morality, ethics, and
compassion
?

In order for civilization to function, you see, people must act
civilized.

Doc was nothing if not a student of human psychology by that point. He was probably worried that the whole cloth of his little disenfranchised community might start to unravel thread by thread once we stopped worrying about our own skins and realized exactly what we were doing to those poor people.

I had it out with him as he knew I would, being the bleeding heart goody two-shoes that I am. Basically, I argued that if we were condemning those people to a horrible death, the least we could do is let them
be
human beings with all that entails for the last day or so of their lives.

“Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” he said, as if he were addressing a particularly stupid child. “Do you have any idea the trouble that would cause?”

“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

He smiled thinly at that: paternal, patient, a just and loving god. “Tommy, these people need to face this together. I feel as you do for them, but misguided pity at this point will only make it harder on them and us. Nobody forced them to play the lottery. They did it of their own free will.”

“They did it out of fear,” I said. “Fear that you’d throw them out to the living dead if they didn’t.”

“We have to have rules or we have no society.”

“This isn’t a society,” I said, “it’s a fucking zoo.”

Doc just smiled patiently at me. “No, it’s a community, Tommy. We survive by working towards a common goal and thinking as one. When we lose that, it’s all over. Now…this isn’t a prison or a cult. If you’re unhappy, feel free to leave. We’ll give you a rifle, food, you can even take one of the vehicles out there.” Then he leaned in close so I could see that beyond the fatherly warmth in his eyes there was something fierce and steel-gray as a gathering storm. “But if you walk out of here, Tommy, don’t ever think you can come back. You won’t be welcome.”

I just sat there, filled with too many emotions.

“Well?”

I stayed.

7

It was about eight that night when I heard a high trebly scream cut through the compound. I was in bed with Maria and I jumped up and nearly threw her to the floor. All I could hear was that pitiful cry and then I was pulling on my pants and shirt and boots and stumbling down the corridor, my heart pounding in my throat.

I heard the scream again and then I saw Earl stumbling in my direction, near the main entrance, and Ape was backing away from him like he had the plague.

Earl let loose with another shriek of pitiful wailing and I saw he was clasping his stomach and that his hands were red and glistening. “Help me…I’m cut…
oh god…I’m fucking cut…”

He went down to his knees, moaning and sobbing, the entire front of his shirt like a blossom of blood. By then, dozens of feet were running in our direction, people shouting out to know what was happening, if the Wormboys had breeched the shelter.

It was about then that Murph came vaulting towards us, loping out of the shadows like a big monkey. His face was huge and shiny like a new moon, his teeth gleaming ice. He had a knife in his hand and there was blood right up to his elbow.

Ape watched him run by.

He had a shotgun in his hands, but he’d apparently forgotten how to use it as Murph threw the locks on the door and pulled it open, frantic and enraged and filled with the need to flee like an animal fresh from a cage. “FREEDOM!” he cried into the darkness out there. “FREEDOM! AH-HA-HA-HA-HA! FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST!”