Necrophobia - 02 Page 13

  “What’s that?” he said.

  I looked around. I hadn’t heard a thing.

  “Listen now,” he said.

  Then I heard it. Someone was rapping on the fence. They did it again with sort of a repeated one-two-three sort of cadence.

  “Hey Boz?” a voice called. “You home?”

  “That you Danny?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, come on in then.”

  There was a scrambling and some guy pulled himself up and over the fence. A white guy with long scraggly hair and sores on his face, very few teeth in his mouth. He looked like some kind of crazy hillbilly with the hair and bad complexion, the fur cap on his head.

  “Who’s dat?” he said, stabbing a knobby finger at me.

  “You don’t need to worry none, Danny.”

  “You ain’t sharing our grub with him, is you?”

  At that moment, I saw my friend—Boz?—go into what looked like some kind of crazy fit. His eyes rolled back and his lips slid back from his teeth. He began to shake and shiver, balling his hands into fists. “THAT MY FOOD, NOT YOUR FOOD!” he screamed at the new guy. “WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU HERE AND WHO INVITED YOU, DANNY?”

  “Shut up, you crusty old piece of shit,” Danny told him.

  “FUCK YOU SAY! FUCK YOU TALKING ABOUT! FUCKING HELL I WON’T HEAR THAT TALK NOT NOW OR NEVER!”

  Then they both went wild and I wondered if this was a regular thing with these two. Boz stood up, pumping his arms and breathing very fast and heavy. Danny needed no more urging; he ran at him. He hit him like a bullet, knocking Boz down. Boz got up and they started swinging at each other, clawing and biting and tearing. This was the point where you separate them and say, okay, you guys, this won’t solve anything. Bullshit. I wasn’t about to get in the middle of them. They were like mad dogs fighting over a piece of meat.

  And it only escalated.

  “YOU FUCK!” Danny cried out. “YOU ROTTEN FUCK!”

  They were circling each other like animals now, both bleeding from cuts and blows to the face, both just mad with rage. In the flickering orange light of the fire, they looked very much like primitive men with their ragged clothes and unkempt appearances. They were both mainlining on hatred. It practically ran from their eyeballs like tears.

  “Hey, Boz! Hey, Boz! Heeeeeyyyy, Bozzzzz!” Danny taunted. “Hoo, hoo, hoo, am I closer or farther? Am I near? Am I real? Or am I just in your head?”

  “SHUT UP, DANNY! DON”T YOU SAY THINGS LIKE THAT!”

  “Bozzzzzzzzz…”

  I cleared my throat. “Maybe you guys should—”

  Danny looked over at me. I had a rifle lying across my lap that could have blown his skull right off his shoulders, but that didn’t stop him from waving his knife. “Stay out, nigger, stay out or I’ll cut you! Cut ya! Cut ya!”

  He put the knife away and they resumed circling each other, then Boz let forth a little cry and they came at each other, ready to swing. Only neither was as graceful as they might have thought. Boz tripped and Danny saw it as an offensive move and head-butted him. Boz went to his knees, blood pouring from his nose which I distinctly heard crack.

  Then Boz rose up, decades of fighting in dirty alleys and rat-infested tunnels coming to the fore. He jumped up and seized Danny by the balls and Danny screamed. But Boz wouldn’t let go. He had something in his fist, yanking on it and twisting it, and Danny kept screaming. Then Boz did let go and Danny hit him like three times real fast, and then they were grappling and shouting in each other’s face, kicking and swinging, biting and scratching each other. They pulled back, both bleeding and hurt and it was like one of those Bum Fight videos they have out on YouTube.

  Then, much faster than I would have believed, Danny whipped out his knife and stabbed Boz in the throat two or three times and Boz went over into the dirt, bleeding out and making a gulping sound.

  I was on my feet by then.

  Danny was just mad dog crazy. He came at me with the bloody knife, his eyes shiny and savage. I didn’t wait for him. I jerked the trigger on the M-14 when he was ten feet from me. The slug caught him in the chest and knocked him back into the fire. Whining and shrieking, he pulled himself free. His hair was burning and face was black with hot soot. He curled up in the dirt, his dirty and matted hair burned away from half of his head, his eyes like rolling balls in their sockets.

  There was nothing I could do for either one. Boz was already dead and Danny was dying. I didn’t have any choice but to shoot him. I wasn’t about to get into some punch-up with a crazy who liked to use his knife. Both of them were disturbed. Maybe I should have tried to separate them when it started, but I have a feeling that if I had I would have been on the ground bleeding out instead of them. And that was the nature of the new world and life in the mean streets: survive at any cost.

  THE HUNTED

  Although it was dangerous out there, I knew I didn’t want to hang around by the fire and stare at those two corpses all night. Maybe part of that was guilt in that I hadn’t stopped what they did to each other and maybe another part was that I feared that if I had to live on the streets for any length of time I might become like them.

  So I climbed back over the fence.

  I still wanted to go west, though I pretty much accepted by that point that Tuck had long rolled out. He was loyal to me, I knew, and he would have fought to the death to save me, but even he knew a lost cause when he saw it. Despite the protests of Sabelia, he would have rolled back to Yonkers. I wasn’t the only fish in the barrel and he had to think about keeping the others safe. Besides, as far as he knew, I was a dead. I had a walkie-talkie (he thought) and I hadn’t made contact in like eight hours. No, by that point, I figured I was on my own. If I could get a car within a reasonable amount of time, I could still hook up with them in Yonkers. But if it took me too long, they’d pull out for the Catskills.

  Yeah, I was in a real fix anyway you looked at it.

  Just me in the graveyard of the Bronx along with the rats, zombies, and crazies.

  But I couldn’t allow myself to get discouraged.

  I couldn’t afford such pessimism.

  First things first, I had to get off the streets into somewhere safe and defensible. I had to wait out the night and catch a few hours worth of sleep, if that was even possible. In the daylight, it would be easier to move. I knew if I hiked north and cut back to Broadway at 240th I would find some car dealerships. They would be my best bet. Any old ride would do. If I couldn’t find one, it would mean I had to walk the four miles or so to reach the truck garage where everyone was hiding out. My guess was that Tuck would probably wait at least a day or two before giving up on me. That was my window. If I couldn’t hook up with them by then…well, I was really on my own then and I’d have to get up to the Catskills somehow.

  First things first, the night.

  I decided I wanted to get up to Tibbet Avenue if possible and cut up by the college on the off-chance Tuck might still be waiting there. That wasn’t too far during the day, but at night it was a different story. I stayed out practically in the middle of 236th because the last thing I had to worry about was traffic. I didn’t like the idea of getting up near any of the buildings because there were too many dark places in-between: parking lots and alleys and cul-de-sacs where I could be overtaken too easy. If someone or something came for me, I wanted to see them first.

  I moved ever forward slowly, easily, no panicking and no running. I had to keep my wits about me. I passed through the graveyard of Kingsbridge, the buildings around me like rising tombstones, the streets crowded with abandoned vehicles burned down to their frames, the corpses of buses and trucks smashed right into plate glass windows. By moonlight, it was a haunted and desolate place. The shadows seemed to bunch, to move, to press in on me. More than once, I nearly fired at something that was not there. That’s what exhaustion will do to you. I remembered watching the wire at night when I was in Iraq. When you’re tired like that, you can’t make reasonable decis
ions. Every rock and scrub bush is an attacker coming in to toss a grenade at you.

  As I edged closer to Tibbet, I saw a group of zombies coming down the street. I got behind a wrecked car and waited it out. They came within feet of me but never saw me. They just kept moving down the street, walking and walking, endlessly seeking something they never seemed to find.

  When they passed, I continued my journey.

  I hadn’t gone too far when one of the dead challenged me. He came striding out of the shadows, a tall thin guy still wearing his glasses. He wore a white dress shirt that was dark and crusty in the front with old bloodstains. There looked to be bullet holes in the shirt, contact burns. I figured he had died violently but Necrophage had woken him back up. I heard his feet slapping the pavement and I turned. He was almost on me. I wondered if he had been lying in wait. He came at me with his mouth open to feed.

  I had no choice: I shot him in the head and he fell backwards, overturning a garbage can that clattered and made enough noise to wake the dead (even though I particularly hate that saying). So much for my attempts at stealth. Whether it was the noise of the shooting or the falling can, I don’t know, but they started coming out of the shadows.

  I saw a busty black girl with eyes like runny egg yolks.

  A big white guy whose flesh was gray and pocked like that of a statue degraded from acid rains.

  Another one, too, whose race was indistinguishable because his complexion was like raw, pink meat. He had a mouth and eyes, other than that he was not even remotely human. He looked like he had been peeled.

  I didn’t want to be doing any more shooting, but I had no choice. I dropped the girl and the acid-faced guy. When I turned, meat-face was closing in fast. I panicked. In the moonlight, he was an absolute monster with that gruesome face and leering eyes, his mouth open and hungry, fingers raised like claws. I pumped two rounds into him. One caught him in the chest and the other went through his throat and despite the velocity and punch of the M-14, it didn’t even slow him down. It knocked big holes in him but he still came at me.

  I fell back and landed on my ass.

  He reached down for me and I jabbed the muzzle of my rifle into his face and fired. The slug drilled him point-black, splitting his face open and disgorging some black fluid that slopped down his chest and hit the pavement like rainwater. He wavered there unsteadily, and then pitched right over on top me, staining me with that goo that came out of his face. I knocked his dead weight aside, my fatigues sucking up more disgusting drainage and smells.

  I got to my feet and two more zombies came at me. One of them was an elderly man who looked like he had been kind and inoffensive in life, the sort of old guy that might sell hot bagels on a street corner.

  I had no time to shoot.

  I gave him the butt of the M-14 in the face, driving him back and away, as the other zombie—an Asian teenager—lurched forward and slashed at me with a knife. It caught me across the forearm, drawing blood, and he made a hissing sound at the sight of it. I cracked him across the face with the rifle butt and he went over, striking the pavement. When the old man tried to get up, I kicked him away and turned my rage on the teenager. He was finding his feet and I kicked him in the side with such force that I felt his ribs go beneath the tip of my combat boot. He made no sound but a grunting, and I kicked him again and again. And when he was down, I stomped his head with my boot repeatedly until his skull cracked open and spilled gray matter onto the pavement.

  By then, the old man was reaching for me and I gave him another shot with the rifle butt to the face. I heard his teeth scatter on the street. I jogged off, looking back once and saw he was on all fours like a dog, nibbling at the brains that had been ejected from the kid’s skull.

  I stumbled along.

  My arm was bleeding pretty badly. My whole body was aching. I needed to rest…but where? Every shadow seemed to be slinking with zombies. I kept running, pouring on more speed until I reached Tibbet, cutting north. Finally, I came to a stop, panting, my head whirling with dizziness, my throat feeling like it had been sanded. I saw no zombies. Nothing but a couple dogs that ran off at my approach. I saw lots of little shops, everything from video stores to jewelry huts and used record joints. I found an archery shop. The door was open. The building next door to it had been hit by artillery or an airstrike and fallen over. Inside the archery shop, the wall abutting the demolished building had collapsed into rubble.

  I was trapped if a lot of the dead poured in through the front door, because there were no windows. Other than that, it looked okay. I found a rack of outdoor clothing that was still standing. Turning on the flashlight, I opened the olive drab canvas bag I’d taken off the old man. There was a plastic bag of medical items. Band-aids, rubbing alcohol, tweezers, aspirin. That was about it. I poured some alcohol on my arm and it burned like hell, but I had no idea where that knife that had cut me had been, what it had been stuck in before me. There were no bandages in the bag large enough for my cut, so I slit strips of material from a flannel shirt and bandaged my arm the best I could. Then I sat down with my back against the counter and the M-14 in my lap. Behind the counter, the shop was collapsed. There was no way anything could get at me, except through the front door, but I would be ready for that.

  Or so I thought.

  I opened the olive drab bag and pulled off the water bottle, draining it. I toyed with the idea of opening one of the cans of food, but I just didn’t have the strength. I took out the flashlight so it was in easy reaching distance and lit a cigarette to wake myself up. I smoked it slowly, thinking about my son, my dead wife, Tuck and Jimmy. And especially Sabelia who was always at the edge of my thoughts.

  I remember finishing the cigarette, staring out the door at the moon-washed pavement, studying my killing zone and waiting for something to step into it, but nothing did. I waited and waited and waited while my eyes grew drowsy. I was drifting off and I fought against it. I played songs in my head. I tried to think of the names of all my elementary school teachers. I kept at it until I heard their voices and smelled the chalk of their classrooms as they wrote on the blackboard. After a time I thought about running home for lunch. The pickle-and-ham sandwiches my mother would make for me. Then, I thought about my mother, remembering a home movie we had where she’s sitting in a rocking chair and I’m a baby asleep on her lap. The world only gets colder and harsh once you leave your mother’s arms; it never gets that good or that comforting again. I wondered what my mom was thinking when she looked down at me. She had no idea of the shit-world her baby boy was going to inherit one day or the awful things he would have to do to survive.

  As these thoughts came together in my head and weariness dragged me down lower and lower, I heard a voice in the back of my head say, Wake up, wake up! What do you think you’re doing? You can’t sleep here in this place. Oh, Steve, please wake up.

  I knew the voice.

  It was my wife’s.

  I closed my eyes and slept.

  The sleep wasn’t any good, though. When your brain is racked by nightmares, you get less rest than you do if you’re awake. In my dream, I saw Ricki. We were at Tuck’s farm and we were under attack. The Air Force—or whoever the hell it was, maybe the Air Guard out of ANG Pelham for all I knew—was hitting us with missiles and bombs. Everything was burning and exploding just as it had that night we made our escape. The ground was shaking and the air was hot with the stink of burning metal and fuel oil. The smoke was thick and black in the air.

  I knew what would happen in the dream because I had watched it play out that night. The zombies were everywhere. They had rushed into the compound after the first airstrikes decimated the security fence. I stood there, picking them off, trying to form a security screen so the others could get into the vehicles. I was shooting. Tuck was shooting. Still, they came on, wave after wave of the voracious dead.

  That’s when I tripped.

  There was too much going on and I wasn’t watching where I was going. I pivote
d to fire off to my left flank where they were converging and I tripped over a downed zombie corpse. Of all the stupid, unforgivable, and costly times to be clumsy.

  I went down, and by the time I found my feet, the zombies had Ricki. She screamed as they enclosed her in a cage of dead-white arms, voracious pale mouths biting into her and tearing free strings of red meat. She was towed away into the night, drowning in the sea of the restless, feasting dead. I ran at them, firing my CAR-15 until I was out of shot and then using it like a club, knocking them aside left and right, splitting zombie heads open and smashing zombie faces. Everything was desperate, manic, surreal, and completely hopeless. Despite my wrath and war-fury, she was gone. Then Tuck took hold of me, dragging me back before they engulfed me in their numbers, too, and I went wild and started swinging on him. I remember his voice saying something like, “I’m sorry, my brother, I’m so sorry,” right before he cold-cocked me and threw me in the Jeep.

  That was the dream I had lived through dozens of times since Ricki’s death and it visited me that night as I huddled up against the counter in that bombed-out archery store. I desperately needed just a few dreamless, numb hours of sleep but instead I got that. I came awake listening to my own pathetic moaning, my back stiff, my limbs like rubber.

  That and a tickling sensation.

  Tickling? I thought. What the fuck?

  That’s when the dream truly faded and my mind snapped awake like it had when I was in the war. There was something there. Something lapping at the knife wound on my arm.

  The M-14 under the fingers of my right hand, I palmed the flashlight and clicked it on. Maybe I was expecting a rat or a dog…I’m not really sure. All I know is that the tongue felt hot against my wound just as the breath felt cold.

  There was a woman there.

  Or something like a woman.

  Captured in the beam of the flashlight, she was licking at my wound. She had carefully unwrapped my makeshift bandages to get at the blood. It was all over her mouth. I saw that she was not only bald, but she didn’t have any eyebrows. A ghostly white, cadaverous looking woman that reminded me of one Charles Manson’s girlfriends when they had appeared in court, heads shaven.