Zombie Pulp (7 page)

I feel no guilt over what I did. But every day I miss Maria and I dream about her every night. I know she would be ashamed of my petty revenge on Doc and the others and that hurts. But, likewise, I know she would respect how I care and teach the children.

Following Dragna’s destruction, I noticed something very peculiar with the Wormboys out there. They had devolved into your average b-movie zombies. Shambling deadheads, wandering around, bumping into one another, picking at scraps. No organization whatsoever. Dragna had been their brain and without her, they were really just mindless walking corpses. Creatures of opportunity.

It gave me hope.

I started planning out how we would escape the shelter. Go somewhere and find other people. Maybe an armory or a military base somewhere. But the more I thought about it the more I began to picture us wondering the wastelands, finding empty city after empty city, nothing but the dead haunting the cemetery sprawl of the brave new world.

Soon enough, I pictured us becoming little better than animals. Maybe living in caves, huddled around fires, drawing crude pictures on the walls of Wormboys sacking civilization until we reached the point in our crowded, primitive brains where we could no longer remember what civilization was.

Hope sometimes dies a cruel death in the face of reason.

I don’t dare go out at night, but during the day—if I’m armed—I can handle the dead as long as they don’t cluster or put on a united front. The scary thing is, lately they’ve been organizing again into small bands. They’ve been watching the shelter like they used to. Just standing out there, staring, infinitely patient and infinitely frightening.

This morning I found out why.

I found a note stuck to the door. Here’s what it said:

TOMMY,

OCTOBER 13 DELIVER THE SIX

IF YOU DO NOT WE WILL COME FOR ALL

WE WILL SKIN YOUR CHILDREN AND WEAR THEIR ENTRAILS

M.

In the back of my mind I suspected something like this for a long time and I think it was the inspiration behind me wanting to gather up the kids and get out. But we’re not going anywhere. That’s the terrifying reality of it. And the most disturbing thing, of course, is the note itself. You see, I recognize the handwriting: it’s Maria’s. They’ve found their new Dragna as somehow I supposed they would.

So I’m going to gather the kids together in the dining hall tonight and this is what I’m going to say to their innocent, trusting little faces: “Kids, we’re going to play a new game. It’s called a lottery and only six of you can win…”

Or lose.

CORPS CADAVRE

Midnight.

The prison mortuary.

The building was squat and cold, cut from blocks of gray stone stacked in a grim heap like a cairn made of interlocking skulls. The windows were barred and the doors were narrow, clustered with shadows. Sullen and utilitarian, it sat well away from the other prison buildings, connected only by a ribbon of winding dirt road. It flanked the potter’s field cemetery, rising above and lording over the weedy fields of the dead—the wooden crosses riding the hills and hollows, marking the graves of the unknown, the unwanted, and the undesirable.

Inside, Johnny Walsh sat at his little desk, feet up, fingers drumming nervously against his legs. Not yet forty, Johnny had already done ten years in that hardtime joint on a double-homicide. His world before maximum security was a tight working class existence and after the murders, one of rage, anger, and oppression. A world just as dark as the skin on his face, a world where poor shanty blacks and white trash busted heads to break the boredom, where black drug gangs and the white Aryan Brotherhood shanked each other over donuts.

But that was doing life.

Johnny would taste freedom roughly about the time of the Second Coming. Breathe in, you smell the despair; breathe out, you smell your life winding out in crowded, steel silence.

Johnny was humping the night shift with the stiffs because of the riot.

Four days before, the small, seething Hispanic population decided to kill every black in the joint. They squirreled away shivs and pipes and razors. At a prearranged moment, they rose up, set on the blacks like rabid dogs. When it was over, the National Guard had been called in and seventy inmates were dead, the infirmary packed with twice that many.

And now the mortuary was full.

The freezers held more cold meat than a butcher’s display case. Full drawers, gurneys and slabs packed with rigid, white-sheeted figures. You could barely walk in there now, dead heaped like firewood.

The warden decided that someone had to keep watch over all those bodies. There being so many and all, it made the old man nervous. Word had it more than one body had turned-up missing there in the past and what with the state and their impending investigation, warden didn’t want no fuck-ups this time around.

So Johnny, who had a good record and was a trustee, pulled the duty. Pulled it mainly because he was in good with LaReau, the sergeant hack. LaReau was a big, mean intolerant prick the cons called “Ironhead” because he enjoyed head-butting anyone that gave him shit and when he did, he piledrived convict-ass big and small right to the mat.

But Johnny was okay with him—yes boss, no boss, how was your day, boss, and can I wash your car come Wednesday, boss? Make the peckerwood feel like he was something special and he would be easy on you.

So the mortuary wasn’t a bad gig, all things considered.

Johnny kept the doors locked—warden’s orders—and did a lot of reading, but mostly a lot of shivering. Because it was cold in there. Johnny had a little woodstove in the corner, but it didn’t help much. The mortuary had held so many corpses in its belly through the years that the stone had sucked in all that tomb cold, let it out at night, exhaling the breath of graves.

The clock on the wall was ticking and Johnny kept hearing little sounds—poppings and crackings—but it was just the old building settling and he would not let himself think it was anything else.

Lighting a cigarette, Johnny went to the window over the little sink, started a bit at his reflection in the glass, smiled, and stared out through those rusting black bars.

A moonless, black night.

The world was caught in-between chill autumn and the promise of bitter winter, pelted by blowing leaves and a freezing, relentless rain. It turned the roads to slop and the fields to mud, sluicing and oozing and pooling in black puddles that were frosted with a scum of ice. December or not, it was miserable by the standards of northeastern Louisiana, just a stone’s throw from the borders of Arkansas and Mississippi.

Johnny turned away, didn’t like the night and certainly didn’t like that face and those eyes and what they were saying to him. Because, yes sir, he’d made mistakes and now it was all done and he was all used-up. No more fresh air and freedom, no more t-bones and certainly no more pussy. You could get both if you had the money, guards would bring in anything for a price. But for poor trash like Johnny Walsh his days of pussy were history, for guys like him there were only the queens and Johnny preferred to do without. In fact, he—

Thump
.

Johnny heard it. Felt something wither and die in his guts, curl-up and tremble. That sound. Couldn’t be no sound like that here, not here. His heart pounding, that cigarette welded to his lower lip, Johnny just stood there as cold as shrimp in an ice bucket.

Thump, thump.

Johnny’s heart almost blew out of his chest on that one.

He looked around, saw his reflection again. Saw the sink and the desk and the file cabinets. Saw the waste paper basket, the girly calendar on the wall showing him a fine set of Asian tits…but right then his business was shriveled-up like a breakfast link.

Licking his lips, he made himself walk first this way, then that.

The gray cement-block walls were sweating an icy moisture. He saw those walls and figured suddenly that this was no easy bit, it was the worst cage of all. There were two doors in that room. One led into an entry and out into the world, the other led into a corridor that led to the freezers and the garage where all the cheap pine caskets were stored.

Thump.

Johnny knew then that the sound was coming from the corridor…or, and more precisely, from one of the rooms back there. A wild, freezing terror flooded through him and he could feel it right down to the balls of his feet. Insane. That’s what. Because, because there could
not
be sounds back there. Sounds meant something was alive or at least in motion and nothing back there was capable of either.

He thought: Don’t go on like this, don’t mean nothing, just the foundation contracting or some such shit, it don’t mean…it don’t mean that—

Thump, thump, thump.

Johnny let out a little involuntary cry, pressing himself up against that concrete wall that was just as cold as graveyard marble. His fingers were pressed flat, drawn taut like the rest of his body, some hot blue electricity arcing through his bones now. His eyes were wide and refused to blink.

Something in his brain reminded him of those bodies that had disappeared at the mortuary. It couldn’t be, it wasn’t possible what he was thinking. The dead were dead and nobody since Lazarus had ever gotten up and walked afterwards.

But those sounds, Jesus, what was making those sounds?

*

The guy who ran the mortuary was named Riker.

He was a large, heavy man with arms like railroad ties all painted-up with jailhouse tattoos. His neck was thick as a pine stump and the head it supported looked like something you hammered iron on. He’d already put in twenty-five years of a lifetime sentence and before this joint, he’d done six years at Angola for armed robbery. He was a rough customer, but years of permanent confinement with no hope for parole had sanded off the rough edges, planed him just as smooth and even as a caged violent offender can be.

He was a trustee like Johnny, but he was the senior man in the trustee system and could have had any job he wanted in the prison industries. He could’ve stamped plates and gears in the metal shop or pushed a book cart in the library or even supervised the road gangs, but he liked the mortuary.

“The dead ones are okay with me,” he often said. “You never have to push ‘em on account they never push you.”

When he found out that LaReau was putting a con on the night shift, he didn’t like it much. He started swearing and spitting, saying the dead don’t need no watching, it was the living ones you had to keep an eye on. But the warden wanted it that way, so that’s how it was going to be.

When he got a look at Johnny, he just grimaced, shook his head, mumbled something. But then Johnny—using that brain his mama said was never worth a shit—offered Riker a cigarette and that warmed the old guy fine.

Riker took a drag and smiled thinly. “You up to this, boy?”

And Johnny didn’t like being called “boy”, but he got used to it. Riker was a Southerner and they called everybody “boy”. You couldn’t take offense to it like you might on the streets. And besides, even though Riker was pushing seventy, those fists still looked very capable of breaking skulls.

“I can do it fine,” Johnny said.

“Just saying, boy, ya’ll don’t look real comfortable around them dead ones. Like maybe they make you uncomfortable or some such.”

But Johnny gave him the line, telling him he liked the stiffs just fine, they were okay with him. You didn’t have to watch your back with stiffs and that was something, all right. In this place, that was really something.

“What you in for, boy?” Riker finally asked him.

“Stupidity, boss, plain and simple,” Johnny told him, none too proudly. Pride, like hope, died a quick death behind those walls. “Let me tell you about it. There I was working me a job at the foundry, sweating and straining and a-busting my ass, but pulling down a living. And feeling good, you know? Good like you can only feel after putting in your shift, working for a living. Anyhow, had me a cute little lady name of Tamara, was crazy about her. She’d been a runner up in that Miss Louisiana thing and was just as pretty as they come. So I’m working at the foundry stamping out manhole covers and she got herself a receptionist job for this white cat owned hisself an insurance company—”

“I can see where this is going, boy.”

Johnny just nodded, dragged off his cigarette. “Surely. I come home one night, twisted my ankle and had to take a few days off, and what do I see? Right there in my bedroom? Just that white ass planted in Tamara’s saddle, humping and pounding and slamming away and Tamara moaning and squealing and saying, gimme it, gimme it, oh you fucking me fine. Bitch never did nothing but lay there for me. Shit and shit. So I stabbed old whitey forty times, they said, and Tamara…something like thirty, give or take.” Johnny started laughing then, seeing his wasted life play out in his mind like some sort of cheap, unpleasant situation comedy. “Yes sir, you can just go on ahead and forget that business about going black and not going back, because—at the trial—well, I found out my Tamara was going back again and again, setting the cause back a hundred years.”