Zombies: The Recent Dead (5 page)

Our rationing was forcing me towards Accidental Soiling, and the Minister jouncing us at high speed across the dusty hills towards the yellowing bowl of Lake Michigan didn’t help.

Dogwood elbowed me then—distracting me from a passing cramp—and pointed out to a ditch ahead of us. It was surrounded by clouds of flies over corpses, like the foaming head on some sun-warmed simmering flesh-beer.

Not a good place to stop, no.

Dogwood pawed one-handed at one of our satchels of Supplies as we crested a cracked rise above the sprawling incline of the desert bowl: “I need amyl nitrite. Popper. Just the one. Keep me focused.”

“Our resolve must be strong, Minister,” I said, thrusting forward a heroic chin.

“Screw resolve! Gimme!”

I understood the battery situation, and the Minister understood the drug situation. Then again, he’d also insisted on calling me “Horse,” since he’d learned we intended to cross the desert, and did nothing but giggle when I demanded explanations. I pulled the bag out of his reach as our car picked up speed and caught sight of movement behind us in the wing-mirror. A zombie clambered out of the flesh-beer like a whale breaching in a thick sea of meat and tried to follow us down the slope. I winced and shook myself—truly, this was a bad scene. I then settled back into my seat just in time for the Minister to guide our descent into an old drier, half-sunk in crusted Michigan mud, the impact smashing us briefly airborne.

“You did that on purpose!” I cried stridently.

“An amyl would help me drive.”

I remember bickering as the corpse behind us fell away in the dust, following our movement since it couldn’t smell us. Dogwood eventually had his amyl, I made vile assertions about his mother, and peace was restored.

I remember that our mission happened the same year as the infamous Presidential debate between Ozzy Osbourne and Tommy Lee, or would have done if either of them had turned up. Perhaps nobody told them, but it had been a great party nonetheless.

Our essential problem was that our home town of Bad Axe was not a key pharmacopeia to greater Michigan, and as such the supply of drugs available to we survivors was becoming thin. The Minister and I had realized this and begun to spread the word.

It had been a clear morning when we saw Smiley Fletcher staggering down the street, haggard and horrified through the pains of withdrawal. When some of the ubiquitous zombies turned toward him in one movement and began to close in, it had all became clear. The Minister crash-tackled Smiley to the ground and held him down while I squirted wood glue—nice and toxic—into a supermarket fruit-bag, hands thick and nerveless with my own drug song. I handed it to Dogwood, who covered Smiley’s face and roared, “You
reckless bastard!
” as Smiley sucked down the fumes and went limp.

I remember waving vaguely—I was deep in a Green Shrieker spiral, beatific, wise and spiritually well-hung as Christ on a stump—and declaiming, “Forgive him, Minister, he knows not what he do. Does . . . ? Whatever.”

The Minister had ignored me, but we each took an end of the man and hustled him away from the zombies activated by his sobriety. I took the time to waft glue fumes around to further mask the scent, and we got him to safety. There is, however, a central problem with the Emergency Glue, or Emergency Drugs as a wider class: it is very difficult to interrogate someone high as a kite.

So we’d given up.

Indeed. Ours is an interesting society.

In the days that followed, the scope of the problem became clear. Drugs, however communal, were running low in Bad Axe. All but the cheapest, nastiest grunge was gone, and it is a truly sad state of affairs when a liberated society dependant on illicit pharmaceuticals for its very survival
isn’t having fun
. So the Minister and I had scrounged up our supplies along with what anyone else could be persuaded to part with, taking it upon ourselves to quest forth for the common good.

Dogwood was along as Minister for Lateral Problem-Solving due to his greater experience in escaping lock-up situations. The man kept a spare Zippo in one boot for the express purpose of starting distraction fires, and his inclusion seemed a good idea at the time. I, sterner of vision and focus, was the noble leader.

As we careened down Lake Michigan I remember noting that the Minister’s horrible hat was still on his greasy head, despite my demands he throw it away. A graying and cracked nacho cowboy hat, serrated at the rim with flaked chips, which the Minister had sprayed with lacquer weeks before as a preservative. The bell of the hat, originally filled with plastic petrochemical cheese, was crusted with dead flies and cigarette ash beneath layers of road dust.

It was an undying affront to gods and men alike. How could he possibly not know the hideousness of the lamentable hat? Perhaps it had been only to spite me, and had I not mentioned my Hate for the thing it would have slipped the Minister’s mind and been forgotten. And yet here we were.

I refused to fill our journey with the baboon squeals and high gibbering which would follow a defense of the Hat, so bore its company in silence, hoping it would shake itself apart as Dogwood drove.

Our immediate mission was but part of a larger path that I had been traveling at the time, Minister Dogwood at my side. We were used to each other, and this helped explain what I was doing stuck in a convertible beside a man wearing a scrofulous nacho hat and filthy ski-goggles. We plummeted on bad suspension towards the damp flats of Lake Michigan, with its treacherous patches of sucking mud and sundered machine hulks like the rising rusted fists of days gone by.

Night found us on the far side of Lake Michigan in a scrubby wooded area, dying trees around a fire that was objectively dangerous in the dry conditions. As the Minister had said, “Screw it, it’s cold.”

And it was cold, night in this new pupating desert. Over-irrigation had salted the earth, which had been survivable till the Feds drained our water-table and routed it to wealthier drought-stricken parts of our fair feral nation. Once they had, the salts settled out and nothing new would grow, leaving us with a savage new landform on our doorstep, waiting to be born.

I had always wondered what it had been like for the Feds when the dead rose. All those DEA guys figuring out that their stockpiles of confiscated drugs could be the key to survival. You’d have straight-laced preppy swine taking precise, measured doses of whatever they had nearby to stave off the hungry dead. Which would have worked great, right until Cookie Monster lunged for them from the dark foot-well of their desk, shrieking in unhallowed tongues.

That’s the thing, you see. The levels of drugs required for safety aren’t the kinds of demons you can dance with and expect to get away unscathed. They’re going to ride you, scar you, write their initials in your skin . . . and occasionally one is going to climb into your skull, grab the wheel and take you for a ride.

The Minister, myself, and those like us have enough experience to respect the demons and know that expecting to keep control is folly, leading only to Bad Craziness. Roll with the punches, embrace the demons and surrender.

The Suits? How they’d have handled it? I wish I could have seen.

Had a friend called Shanks once whose theory was that the zombies tracked brain activity, and so drugs messed you up enough that they couldn’t find you.

Then again, this is from a guy who became so monstrously drunk with the technician of his local black-market Augmentation chop-shop that he wound up with a Mister Stun implant where a Mister Stud implant should go, the poor bastard. Heard he found a girl who likes that recently, though. Calls him “Tickler.”

But that’s beside the point.

What you need will not play nice, will not play fair, but it means you can sleep without being surrounded by groaning fiends come morning. That was how they got you. Sooner or later you have to sleep. The central benefit of our lifestyle was that when I saw the fetid corpse of my first crush reaching out to tear off my face, I could be
practically certain
it wasn’t real. It made for an interesting transition period, but after a while the wandering dead fell away into background irrelevance, like parking wardens and homeless people before the world changed.

Such peace was not always two-way. I remember that our evening’s ration carried the Minister away on a tide of energy and impulse-control problems. We were still clad in our road clothes, the Minister in the Lamentable Hat and a blue Hawaiian shirt decorated in dirty playing cards, with unclean jeans and army boots. Dust and silt ground into his face except for patches left by the goggles, like some demented reverse-raccoon with mania shining in bright eyes. He’d found three or so zombies lurking nearby our fire-pit, and was gleefully diving and swooping around the lumbering beasts, seeking opportunities to tie their shoelaces together and watch them shuffle and stumble about. I can’t recall what I wore myself, just that it was cold so I sought my sleeping-bag early.

In retrospect this was probably for the best. Soon after that, I worked through the lag you get with decent mescaline and suddenly everything mattered less. I was still aware of the Minister gallumphing around in his untied army boots, but was rapidly distracted by drifts of red, juicy butterflies hanging from tree branches like ripe fruit. What were these things, I remember thinking? Thick, fleshy wings, like ham steaks, flaps of foreskin or perhaps thickly sliced tomato, with no bodies to speak of. In a resonant conundrum, perhaps they were all of these
at the same time
. This needed more thought, I decided.

They shivered delicately with every muffled roar or clatter Dogwood produced, the motion echoing in my nervous system like they were under my skin. I understood instantly that his noise offended them, and terror that they might flee thrilled through me. I was considering how best to calm the Minister—couldn’t he see how he frightened these poor things?—when a succession of sharp popping cracks, each one electricity flaring down my skull and out my limbs, filled the air and startled the hamforeskintomatoflies. Then someone screamed.

I was already on my feet before I consciously thought,
Christ, what’s the Minister doing now?
And found myself heading towards the source of the noise. I located Dogwood, stripped to the waist but still wearing the Hat, wrestling with a dark woman in combat fatigues. Fallen zombies littered the ground around them, all shot in the head, but more silhouettes were grumbling towards us through the trees.

“Glue, Horse!” the Minister roared.

I hiccupped and ran back to the camp on uneven feet as bruised flesh-petals fell in slow flurries, the delicate crimson creatures in the trees coming apart from the stressful vibrations humming all around us. The wood-glue leapt into the plastic bag like an oddly warm, fat voluptuous slug, making me squeal.

How had this happened, I wondered? Confusing beauty swirled into malevolent slugs and screams in the night, leaving me bewildered and undone.

The Minister was hustling the woman towards me through the dry and dying trees in a near headlock, one arm twisted behind her back. I held the gruesome pulsating slug-bag to her face, prompting muffled screams and sharp movements as she tried to get away.

“Take it, you daft cow!” hissed the Minister, for he had grown up a Briton and was prone to slipping into the vernacular of his youth in times of crisis. “Breathe it in.”

She went limp, which made it easier for us to drag her away from the pursuing zombies and the eerily silent patient tread they always fell into when following prey. I fell back, waving the glue around to confuse the trail and hoped that would lose them. The dead are dull-witted but canny predators, like some form of flesh-eating math teacher, but once they’re agitated and activated by potential food, they’ll go for anything in the vicinity whether it’s medicated or not.

You’re either good and fucked up or a danger to everyone, nothing in between. The Minister was furious. We dropped her, swooning and puking, back at the camp and wordlessly took up our weapons—a crowbar and tire-iron between the two of us—to go clean up her mess. The zombies were disoriented and had lost the trail, but they were still meandering around. Once activated, they’d keep stumbling through the area for a while, and there was always the chance they’d be agitated enough to go for movement if they found any. It was easy enough to sneak up on them and club their heads to slurry for safety’s sake, but an unpleasant task indeed. All the more so for its unnecessary nature.

What the hell had she been thinking?

Her rifle and pistol were empty, meaning she’d caught my attention firing the last of her wad. Paranoia and bad-craziness curled through me, as if tiny people were sneaking up on me over my own skin. Who was this woman? Shooting zombies was a mug’s game. However many there were, more would follow the noise, as they followed any atypical stimuli.

Why would she be here by herself, intent on riling up zombies near where the Minister and I planned to sleep?

Who had sent her, and what did she
know?

I remember turning from my dark thoughts to see the Minister caught in what I initially took to be his own paranoid spiral, but then I realized his rage had shifted on him again. He was contemplating the unconscious woman and vaguely fingering a small bag he’d carried for years, filled with what the vendor had sworn was genuine Spanish fly.

Then he saw me watching him. An avalanche of expressions crossed his face as he thrust the bag away, out of sight.

“Didn’t! Wasn’t! Never would!” the Minister cried sharply, before subsiding with a muttered, “Can’t be helped.”

There was a moment of peace, and then his hand flashed to the fractal-blade he kept on a thong around his neck with a shriek of “Don’t you judge me!”

My eyes locked on the intricate blade, glittering in the dying firelight. It was serrated all the way down, and considering the sickly radioactive gleam in the Minister’s eyes, more than capable of making me much less pretty. He’d been carrying the damnable knife ever since his sister had used one to cut herself free from a trapped inverted canoe, although he didn’t share an interest in that sport or any other.