Necrophobia 4 Page 12

  “The fuck I am.”

  He grinned again and his eyes almost seemed to glow like those of a cougar seen by night, shining and huge. But it wasn’t their physical appearance, I knew, but what was behind them. The power Agent 17 gave him. The power to make and break people as he saw fit, to play with them like toys. To cherish them if they performed correctly and crush them if they did not.

  “Oh, you will, Mr. Niles,” he said. “Be most assured that you will do everything I say and you’ll do it happily.”

  I started to tell him what I thought of him and his ideas for this pristine, sterile, and bloodless new republic of his, but all that got me was a syringe in the arm. Then I was sinking away into the darkness and I could hear his voice speaking to me. I liked the sound of it and I wanted to do whatever it told me.

  THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLES

  Make no mistake: Cripps was a monster. Maybe he had lofty plans for creating a peaceful brotherhood of man where hand-in-hand we all walk into the sunlight, but his methods were unthinkable and sinister.

  Everything he said was either true, absolute bullshit, or a clever concoction of both, a seamless scarf that he could wrap around your throat so easily you wouldn’t know it was there until you were bug-eyed and green-faced, your lungs sucking dust.

  But one thing was true: with Agent 17 he could do just about anything. He could make minds better, fill them with purity or drag them through the blackest anti-human reaches of subconscious nightmare. Given at full dose, injected intravenously, Agent 17 could strip your mind in minutes, completely debilitating you with fear, reducing you to a screaming, rubbery mass of terror as every nightmare you’d ever had and every phobia you’d ever known clothed itself in flesh and claimed you for its own. Given at half-strength in diluted aerosol form and delivered with, say, a gas grenade, it created panic, confusion, hysteria, and utter disorientation. You either became a mindless zombie wallowing in its own shit, head filled with dead snakes, or you lost all inhibitions and danced naked in the falling rain or laughed hysterically at kitschy sayings on rolling pins right before you fucked like an animal in heat. And at its lowest dosage, delivered orally through food and water, you became like the residents of the bunker—blank-eyed, complacent, Wal-Mart smiley-faced, your head filled with warm gray putty waiting to be kneaded. You became an extra wandering the streets of Mayberry R.F.D. and glorifying in the banality of Norman Rockwell and Thelma Lou’s cooking down at the diner. Yes sir, no sir, two bags full sir. You looked out through your eyes, but like glass balls they did not really see. And like an empty box, your brain did not really think other than reminding you when to piss, when to shit, when to eat and when to sleep. And very often it told your mouth to say, Thank God for the Doctor, which you did almost constantly…which was like buying the guy who raped you a drink or letting the monster that sucked out your brains marry your daughter.

  Enough said.

  My memories after that point range from being almost hallucinogenically vivid to blurry and indistinct. But let me lay it all out for you the best I can.

  The area of Baneberry where Sabelia and I and the others first came in was a relatively peaceful place, give or take. The zombie situation was not out of control. There were berserkers, but not too many. Very few survivalists were fighting it out.

  Downtown in the heart of the city it was a whole ‘nother story.

  The Main Street area comprised something like eight square blocks and was the hardest hit sector in the city. It belonged to no one and anyone. Sections of it were bombed out and there was rubble and debris everywhere, burned-out cars and trucks, bones in the gutters and rats in the alleys. All the heavy fighting had turned it into a no-man’s land of corpses and wreckage, a maze of deserted buildings and garbage-strewn byways patrolled by survivalists and militias, the living dead and the insane, religious cults, cut-throats, psychopaths, and wild dogs. At night, the berserkers came out and snipers capped rounds from rooftops and fanatics sacrificed people on street corners to the rising moon.

  If it was insane, inhuman, deranged, unbalanced, or just plain freaky, it hid out in the Main Street sector.

  An afternoon out there was enough to make you feel like a Jonah, and fill your belly with creeping dread. A night would strip your gears entirely. Anything that moved was prey and anything or anybody that didn’t walk at your side was the enemy. This was my hunting ground and I stalked it with blank eyes, bent nerves, hatred and resignation, terror and a kill-happy death lust that wired me together into one piece.

  My unit was known as Kilo India Alfa-9 or, KIA-9. A little joke on us, I guess. “9” because there were nine of us. There were four other KIA units out there, but we never came in contact with them. If we had, we would have killed them or them us. That’s how it worked in Death City, as we called our sector.

  KIA-9’s main objective was finding the enemy and whether that enemy was living or dead it did not matter. We were sort of an advanced scout unit that looked for the enemy and killed them when possible, set-up booby traps and ambushes, and called in the heavies when we were outnumbered or came across a sizeable force. The heavies were mech infantry units with Guardians and LAV-25s and close air support from Kiowa choppers. KIA-9 was made up of me, Smitty and Scales, Mongol and Loony, Mad Mike and Doc Feelgood, Big Bird and Little Gun. I was known as “Dog.” What anyone’s real name was, I never found out anymore than I found out where they came from.

  In KIA-9 there was only the here and now.

  That was something we practiced with zeal.

  We were quite a crew. Saints, sinners, psychopaths, homicidal maniacs, pathological murderers, take your pick. We did what we did when war came to town and our programming was foolproof. Our balls and brains had traded places and our souls were burned black. We were push button killers manipulated by an egomaniacal hand and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.

  THE KILLER ELITE

  One morning after some serious close-in fighting with a survivalist group known as the Omega Clan, Scales said to me, “When you come down to it, you better know it’s about the grease—who gets it and who don’t. At the end of the day, you don’t think about who you put down, who you greased, you just walk away.” He had a habit of saying things like that and I never knew if he was talking to me or to himself or maybe both of us.

  There were about thirty corpses out in the street, in whole and in part, along with a few wild dogs we’d capped just for kicks. Smitty, who was nuts and just liked to blow things up or make them burn, had wired the bodies with a couple bricks of C-4 and we were hiding in the shell of a building down the way, waiting for the dead to show. Waiting for the boom!

  As we waited, Doc Feelgood cleaned his fingernails with the tip of his K-Bar and Mongol used a machete—which he kept razor sharp—to peel off some beard stubble under his chin. I sat there smoking with Scales, both of us listening to Smitty going on about the fact that since he could not remember his past it was highly likely that he had been abducted by aliens and reprogrammed…which in its own way was precariously close to the truth.

  “Who’s to say we’re still on Earth, man?” he asked us as he stroked his detonator. “Maybe we were sucked up in a force ray or something and taken away to Arcturus or Altair Four. Maybe that’s where we are now and this is just a stage and we’re just performing here to keep our masters amused.”

  Big Bird and Little Gun were tense. They wanted to fight. They wanted to get out there and take lives. Nothing else satisfied them. Zulu waited patiently with her chainsaw and Mad Mike scanned the streets with dead eyes. He was a gigantic bulk of a man, battle-scarred and grim. Holding the SAW in his hands, bandoliers of ammo criss-crossed over his shoulders, he looked like Sgt. Rock.

  “We got a nibble,” Zulu said and all eyes were on the corpse pile.

  She was right: a couple of deadheads had smelled the goodies and wandered in for a snack. I couldn’t tell if they had been men or women in life. They were just ragged-looking things, their
scalps sloughed away, dead-white eyes puckering in black sockets, teeth chattering as they contemplated the offering. They wasted no time, dropping to their knees and digging into open bellies for soft, chewy goodies. Being the animalistic, stupid things they were, they fought over the same body, playing a grisly game of tug-of-war with the same blood-greased hose of entrails, pulling back and forth on it. If it hadn’t been so fucking sick, it might have been funny.

  “Don’t give you much faith in the future of zombiedom,” Zulu said and I giggled. She looked over at me and winked.

  Big Bird and Little Gun were just beside themselves. Here was something that moved that should not move and they could take care of that with a few squeezes of their triggers but Doc Feelgood wouldn’t have it and they knew it. I watched them. They were both shaking. Have you ever watched a cat stalk a pigeon? They creep forward silently, every muscle quaking with the primal call of the hunt. That’s how Big Bird and Little Gun were.

  Scales elbowed me, grinning, directing my attention to them but it was already there. They looked like they were going to explode. It was not easy to hold back the Kill! Kill! Kill! imperative that juiced through them. It was like willing your heart not to beat. They kept looking back at Doc Feelgood, KIA-9’s leader, hoping he’d turn them loose, but he just sat there impassively, cleaning his nails. About the third or fourth time they looked back like anxious hounds wanting to run, Mad Mike spit a stream of tobacco juice into Big Bird’s face and Big Bird nearly opened up with his weapon. Only a look from Doc kept him from doing so. I think Mad Mike wanted him to try. He would have cut both of them in half with his SAW.

  Mad Mike was hard to figure.

  Sure, Sgt. Rock in the flesh…if Sgt. Rock was not only battle-worn, crusty, and pissed-off, but a fucking maniac to boot that loved killing simply for killing’s sake. He would have turned the SAW on us had Doc suggested it. He had no allegiance to anyone or anything. He never spoke. He never smiled or frowned. His eyes were always dark and simmering with hate. Just one big killing machine. Beyond that, he was hard to figure.

  Two or three other zombies showed up now.

  It was no surprise; there were hundreds and hundreds of them in the Main Street sector. We dropped a lot of them, but they just kept coming and coming, meatflies attracted to the smelly garbage can of Main Street, Baneberry, US of A. I don’t know what senses still worked in them. Some of them seemed to be able to see real good, others were nearly blind, still others had no eyes at all. But they could hear pretty good and I’m guessing they could smell carrion like sharks smell blood.

  Mongol was grinning as the zombies began to swarm.

  He was probably crazier than the rest of us, which was really saying something. He was dressed like we were in camo BDU pants, desert boots, and a tactical vest fitted with spare M4 magazines, frag, incendiary, and smoke genades, the works, but in twin sheaths at his back were two double-edged machetes. All he had to do was reach back with both hands and clutch their handles and slide them free and he had serious killing power ready to be used. And make no mistake, he liked to use them. He had a long, thin drooping mustache that hung down to his jawline, a sharp little beard, and his head was bald and shiny save the warrior scalp lock he sported. That look, combined with his Asian ancestry, made him look like a badass from a kung fu movie.

  He looked over at me, eyes like black glass. “Confucius say: When zombies go boom, wise men bow heads in thanks.” He laughed at that with a low growling sort of sound.

  As the zombies pressed in, I started to get anxious myself. I wanted to charge out there and do some serious killing. The need to kill, to destroy our targets was hardwired into us and when it was denied, I would get a sort of hungry feeling in my belly. I was like a starving man being denied food.

  Doc Feelgood was doing a mental count of how many heads we had out there. “We got forty-three maggot-eaters,” he said. “That should be good.”

  Smitty was shaking with excitement. Sweat ran down his face. He wanted to fire the detonator. At that moment, it was his entire world and until he did, it was like being denied a building orgasm. He kept gnashing his teeth and licking the salt off his lips. He had enough C-4 wired out there to bring down a house and he wanted to get it done.

  “All right,” Doc said, “everyone get down. Smitty…do your thing.”

  Smitty held up the detonator and pressed the firing button.

  There were a few milliseconds when nothing at all happened—then WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP! The C-4 went off. None of us had our heads down, of course. We all wanted to see and see we did. The explosion was blinding, the noise like rolling thunder, and for the zombies out there it was like sitting on the spout of an active volcano. They were vaporized in a resounding eruption of force, flames, and flying debris. We were down the road a piece from them, but it didn’t protect us. What goes up must come down, as they say.

  And it came down, all right.

  Blood and gore and flaming guts dropped from the sky and rained down into the street and we were pulverized with it. It lasted but a few seconds, but when it was over, we were busy wiping blood from our faces and picking bits of tissue from our equipment and clothes. Smitty found an eyeball in his hair. Zulu was nearly cold-cocked by a severed arm. There were legs and feet and hands around us, a flaming skull not two feet from me. Scales was bitching while he disengaged a smoldering set of entrails from himself and Doc Feelgood was using a tweezers from his medical bag to pluck shrapnel from Mad Mike’s arms which turned out to be human teeth.

  It was quite a scene.

  Smitty couldn’t stop giggling, red streaks running down his face like tears. Little Gun and Big Bird were busy cleaning each other of debris like monkeys plucking nits from one another. There was something funny and disturbing about that.

  I reached in my vest pocket for a cigarette and pulled out a yellowed human finger. I tossed it aside.

  Zulu was spitting something out. “It even got in my fucking mouth,” she said.

  Mongol was smiling about it all. “Confucius say: April showers bring May flowers,” he said to us. He tossed a hand to me. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

  I caught it and was amazed that it was a woman’s hand, wedding ring still in place. I found that hilarious. I bet when her husband slid the ring on her long finger, he never imagined where it would end up.

  TROPHIES

  One day Scales told me, “For awhile there, it was getting like fucking Vietnam or something. We had little kids coming at us, Omega kids, with bombs strapped to ‘em. We had this dude named Rafe with us before you got here—don’t get me going on him, I saw him fucking a corpse once, funniest thing I ever seen—and he got blown away by one of those kids. I wasn’t too far from him and after I picked my ass up, I saw that pieces of Rafe were all over the place. My hair was red with his blood. Hard to believe a man has that much blood in him. So, the next time we come on a kid, living one I mean, Mongol grabs her and says he’s going to skin her. He says he knows how to tan skin, any skin, into the softest leather, only he don’t remember where he learned it. So he ties the girl down and starts peeling her…and shit, did she scream. Doc comes over. Fuck you doing? He says. Mongol says, I’m skinning her. And Doc says, Well, use my knife, it’s sharper.”

  We laughed at that story.

  It’s hard to believe, but we did. It was pure comedy to us. Now and again when I’d hear something like that, something inside me would hesitate for a second as if to say, man, that’s not funny, it’s sick, but then I’d laugh anyway.

  In a normal, sane world we would have been charged with war crimes and strung up for the things we did. But our world was hardly sane and we sure as hell were not. Dr. Cripps was Dr. Frankenstein and we were his monsters set loose to ravage the world. And ravage it we did. It wasn’t just the zombies we put down, but anything we could find. Sometimes we’d hang people up and sit around watching zombies disembowel them. We’d throw people off roofs, bet on the width of splatter patter
ns, then run down to the streets below to see who won. We lit people on fire, we tied them up, cut them open and let the dogs and rats have them. We played soccer with a woman’s head in the streets until it finally fell apart.

  We liked taking what Zulu called “mementoes.”

  These were usually ears which we strung on wire around our throats and when we were bored we’d trade them back and forth. Mongol slit the breasts off a dead woman one time, wired them together and wore them on his chest until they turned black and drew too many flies. There were always sick, brutal, and very unfunny things like that going on that we got our kicks from. For several days, I remember, Mongol wore the death mask of a woman he had killed. He peeled it off her, scalp and all. He looked like something from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Finally, Doc told him to get rid of it.

  Smitty carried a digital camera around with him. He told everyone that it was his job to document what we saw and what we did and who we did it to. I don’t know if it was his idea or not. I suspect it was one of those little jewels that Dr. Cripps had programmed into him. Regardless, he went around taking pictures—after-action photos, he called them—like some kind of combat photographer. Doc Feelgood wouldn’t allow him to take any while we were fighting, but when it was done and the corpses were sprawled in the warm sunlight, that’s when Smitty would get right down to it. He would take shot after shot of dismembered bodies, zombies blown to fragments, even throwaways that we lined up against walls and executed. Throwaways, were what we called the transients and squatters who weren’t insurgents or part of any militia or survivalist group.

  Smitty and his camera, oh yes.

  If he had only taken photos of the dead it would have been one thing, but there were worse things than that. Mongol, for instance, liked to pose with what he had killed like some great white hunter. Sometimes it was relatively inoffensive (at least to our mindset) like him holding up a couple dead ones by the hair or him sitting there with his arms around a couple gored deadheads like they were old pals…but it got much worse than that. Mongol sticking his dick into the mouth of a dead woman. Mongol with a naked and very dead girl on his lap. Mongol pissing on burning bodies as if he was trying to put them out.