Necrophobia 4 Read online

  But it wasn’t just Mongol.

  There were gruesome, sickening shots of Zulu cutting a guy in half with her chainsaw. Militia members running around on fire. Mad Mike carving his initials into the forehead of a dead woman. A half-dozen survivalists strung up from an overpass. Corpses arranged like they were having sex. In one shot, there had to have been at least twenty of them in some bizarre post mortem orgy.

  It went on and on.

  Maybe there were even pictures of me doing things I’d rather not recall. It wouldn’t have surprised me. We were disconnected from morality of any sort. We did not think beyond the killing and maiming. There was nothing else and we didn’t even know really who we were. And whenever the subject of somebody’s past came up, the others would just politely turn away. For them it was like trying to decipher the nature of God. Some things could not be known and you had to be content with that. There were lots of zombies out there, but the members of KIA-9 were the real walking dead, sleepers who could not wake from their nightmares, killers and sociopaths and sleepwalkers. That’s what we were. There was nothing else. We were Dr. Cripps’ wind-up soldiers, his terrible toys and demonic play things, and we did what we were conditioned to do in the way that he wanted it.

  STREET FIGHTERS

  We went in heavy with a LAV-25 rolling in behind us, chain guns and .50-cal machine gun awaiting our orders. If we got ourselves into a fix—and we did quite often—the LAV would fix it. There was a certain amount of comfort in that, a confidence that could not be taken away from us.

  “Mother’s got this feeling we just stuck our cocks up the wrong hole,” Zulu said, adjusting her equipment load. “Stuck ‘em up there real, real deep.”

  With her bald head and perfect bone structure, she looked like some Amazon warrior on the prowl, fearless and bloodthirsty, an M4 in one hand and a combat knife in the other, a Stihl chainsaw at her back in a sling. At 6’3, lithe and long-limbed, she cut an imposing shape in the light of the setting sun which painted her smooth black face amber and golden.

  She impressed me.

  Hell, they all impressed me but not always for the right reasons. Natural-born killers, I would always think as I saw our shadows creeping along the bullet-scarred face of a building. But there was nothing natural about any of us. We were synthetic things.

  “What do you think, Dog?” she asked me.

  “I think mother is right.”

  Dog was the nickname they gave me because everyone had to have one. I’d seen it in Iraq and I’d heard of it in Tuck’s tales of Vietnam, that need for a handle. As if when you went into combat you were like Batman putting on his cape, donning your alter-ego, role-playing. You were an actor that created a character that would do terrible, inhuman things, but when you went home, you’d dispense with it and just be yourself. Thereby, the guilt would be on your alter-ego’s soul and not yours.

  Doc Feelgood told us to hold our position and we waited there on the deadly street, all of us anxious to kill because we honestly didn’t know anything else.

  Doc was chatting over the Icom with the LAV crew. I pulled my earpiece out so I didn’t have to listen. He held his fist up in the air which meant we had to be quiet. He was KIA-9’s leader and we always did what he said. There was never a thought in our little reptilian brains of doing anything else. Doc was a real cool, easy sort of cat. But his mellow nature was disarming—if you fucked-up, he’d simply smile and put a bullet through your head. He did it my first day with KIA-9 (it was 10 then). A dude named Motorhead couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. He found a cute little throwaway and raped her on the sidewalk while a trio of shitheads (insurgents, guerrillas) ran our flank and tried to send us to the happy hunting ground. If Motorhead would have kept his eye on his zone it wouldn’t have happened.

  No biggie, I thought. Mad Mike read the gap and sprayed down the three stooges with his SAW. No harm done. But that’s not how Doc saw it. He waited until Motorhead was done—six last jackhammer thrusts to the girl that made her cry out—and had zipped up, shouldering his weapon.

  Doc said, “Nice work. Now drop your weapon.”

  “Why?” Motorhead asked.

  “Because dead men don’t carry guns,” Doc told him, pulling his Beretta 9mm sidearm and shooting him through the left eye.

  That’s how Doc was.

  He never got mad. He never raised his voice. He never even swore. He was calm as could be when he dropped Motorhead. When he saw Big Bird and Little Gun watching the raped girl crawl off, he was still calm. Calm as you please as he took her by the hair and slit her throat so no one else would get any dumb ideas.

  “Nothing like free pussy for the taking to cause trouble,” he said. “Ain’t that right, Zulu?”

  “Mother believes it to be so,” she said. “Sometimes Mother gets this awful fire down below, but she don’t pay it no mind. No mind at all. She always feels better when she pulls the trigger.”

  Anyway, that’s why you did what Doc Feelgood said, because he had a way of striking fast and unseen like a rattlesnake in the dark.

  While he chatted away with the crew of the LAV, probably making us stand out there in the open to draw fire, I had a cigarette with Scales and Smitty. Three men on a match. Shit. Mad Mike and Mongol scanned ahead for trouble while Zulu held her ground and Little Gun and Big Bird were crouched down in firing positions just aching to make contact. They looked like hounds on a leash that just wanted to run.

  “Funny how those two are,” Scales said, blowing smoke out of his nostrils. “Like Siamese twins, cut but still connected. Both fucking wired. You go up behind ‘em and snap your fingers, they’ll start capping.”

  Smitty considered that. He got that deep, faraway look in his eyes as he often did because he was so stoned all the time. It looked like he was contemplating the deeper meaning of it all, but it was probably just the drugs. If he was thinking of anything it was probably just blowing something up.

  “Sometimes I wonder where they even came from,” he finally said.

  “Sometimes I wonder where any of us came from,” Scales put in.

  But none of us knew. Who we were or where we came from or what we were about was a big mystery. It seemed like we’d always been doing what we were doing and there had never been anything else. I saw faces in my mind sometimes but when I thought too hard about who they were or what they meant to me I’d get a real bad headache. So I tried not to think because it only brought me pain.

  “Okay,” Doc Feelgood said. “Cut down that alley. We got movement on the next street. Big Bird? Little Gun? Lead us in.”

  He gave us a hand motion and we moved out.

  The LAV lumbered behind us at a distance. I loved the sound of its purr. It made me feel easy and sure. Mad Mike and Mongol hung back as we edged into the gap, ready to provide us with covering fire if we needed it. We moved quickly before anyone could draw a bead on us, over crevices in the pavement, bomb craters, and the debris of half-demolished buildings.

  “Contact!” Big Bird called out over the Icom.

  He and Little Gun gave us the signal to hang back and wait it out. Contact was half a dozen deadheads that had been walking around too long and were beginning to fall apart. Their faces were like raw meat, eyes sunken white marbles in flesh morasses. A woman closing from the left―wearing granny underwear and nothing else―looked like she had a confetti poncho on but it was just her own sloughing skin. It had cracked open and split from the bones beneath like dried-out bamboo.

  Big Bird and Little Gun opened up with three-round bursts.

  Zombie heads started breaking apart like soft gourds, skull fragments and brain matter ejecting in red-black cascades of rot. They dropped the six and a dozen more came dragging themselves in.

  Zulu and I went into the breach next, jumping in and opening fire. I dropped three, putting out rounds on full auto, and they tripped on their own entrails and hit the pavement. Zulu took the head off a big bald guy whose face was like a flap of mildew and drilled
a seemingly unstoppable pregnant woman with six or seven rounds who came apart like her seams were burst. What she’d been carrying in her belly—whether living, dead, or undead—hit the ground before she did, the birth sac opening like a bag of meat and discharging a fetid pink and green mass that hit the pavement and exploded in a gushing slop of seedy, stringy pulp like the guts of a pumpkin.

  I think it actually moved for a few seconds, one baleful yellow eye appraising us with hate.

  As the dead pushed in, we took them out, our weapons smoking in our hot little hands. The more we killed, the better we got at it. At first, when they came at you, you just started popping rounds, anything to drive them back. But that was fear and the heat of the moment. After that, you calmed and aimed strictly for the heads.

  When the dead were scattered on the ground, Mongol came in with his flamethrower and lit them up. There was pure joy on his face as he did that, as the flames rose higher and plumes of dirty smoke twisted in the air. The stench was gagging.

  Doc Feelgood called out that our objective was the row of battle-scarred houses across the way. Already I could see zombies swarming around them, others pouring from doorways like worms from warm, spoiled pork. We grouped and prepared to charge, but a hail of bullets stopped us. They ripped up the street in front of us, the shooters marching their rounds closer and closer to us.

  We were taking fire from a crumbling three-story building on a hilltop just above us. We ran from rubble pile to rubble pile, keeping low as bullets flew all around us. We shot back, doing little but punching more holes into the brick façade of the building, hoping to drive the shooters back and give us some time.

  “Quit wasting ammo,” Doc Feelgood told us over the Icom. “Grab cover and scope it out.”

  It was easy enough to scope: our shooters were in at least three different windows up there. They had little accuracy, just throwing a lot of rounds in our general direction and keeping us bottled up. Maybe that was their intention. As I pulled off a cigarette, crouched with the others behind the remains of a well-blasted wall, Zulu and Mongol fired an occasional burst up towards the windows. They were trying to draw the shooters out so Mad Mike could paste them with his SAW. But they weren’t having any of that. Two of them were on the second story, the other on the third. They would each individually dart to their respective windows and fire quickly down at us, taking turns but never with the same pattern. By the time we returned fire, they were always gone.

  “Fuck is Doc waiting for?” Scales wondered out loud. “Bring that fucking LAV in and hit the building.”

  But I knew Doc.

  He was careful. LAVs certainly didn’t grow on trees and he was very protective of ours. He wasn’t about to let it get drawn into an IED trap or a RPG nest. We had all seen things like that before. And without the LAV, we were just infantry grunts crawling through the rubble like rats, fighting and dying for every inch of ground we took.

  But something had to happen.

  Across the road, the zombies were getting a little randy over by the houses. They knew where we were and several were already headed in our direction. That’s how it would start. First a few sniffing us out like recon scouts and then the main force would plow in at us, an open buffet too tempting to refuse.

  Doc came running from the alley with Smitty and joined us at the wall. He had a LAW—Light Anti-tank Weapon—in his hands. He had an idea. He told Zulu and Mongol to keep engaging the enemy, but not to waste too many rounds. They fired intermittently on semi-auto whenever the shooters appeared. Doc said that they weren’t changing their tactics and the zombies were coming our way, so it was time to shit or get off the pot. The two shooters on the second floor were either at the opposite ends of a large room or were next door to one another.

  “Fuck this shit,” Scales said, when rounds chewed into our wall.

  They had us sighted perfectly and could keep us boxed in all day as long as their ammo held out or we didn’t get a lucky hit. Doc pulled the pin on the LAW and it expanded to its full length. He aimed the green tube up at the second story window. When the shooters started firing again, he didn’t even flinch or seek cover. He pulled the trigger and the rocket with its 66mm HEAT warhead zoomed right at the window. Not only zoomed at it, but right through it. There was a resounding explosion of smoke and fire as the room behind the window went up, debris shooting out into the air along with a funnel of black smoke. Several sections of brick broke free and dropped into the street below.

  “All right,” Doc said seconds after the detonation. “Get in there…let’s go.”

  We dashed over to the building and waited there as Doc and Smitty joined us. The LAV-25 waited in the alley. Doc got on the Icom and told the crew to neutralize the zombies marching in our direction. The LAV rolled out of the alley and it had barely stopped moving when its 25mm chain gun opened up. The rounds—armor-piercing and incendiary—flew at the zombies, leaving bright green tracer trails in the dusk. They hit the zombies with one resounding explosion after another, lighting up the streets. The walking dead seemed to disintegrate as we watched, vaporizing in clouds of blood and meat. Flames erupted in rising white-hot clouds, smoke filling the air. The LAV crew didn’t fuck around. The chain gun had barely stopped firing when they swept the area with their .50-cal machinegun.

  The entire thing lasted maybe a minute and probably a lot less.

  The smoke cleared some and we could see nothing was moving over there. In fact, one of the houses was burning. Another had collapsed.

  “Night-night, maggotheads,” Zulu said.

  “All right,” Doc told us. “I want this fucking place cleaned out, room by room by room. Maybe we got a couple of them with the LAW and maybe we didn’t. Now we’re going to find out.

  This is what it always came down to.

  No matter how much firepower you had, no matter how many helicopter gunships or fighter-bombers, armored vehicles or artillery, it still came down to soldiers doing what soldiers did: taking the ground inch by inch and mopping up, fighting the stragglers in the ruins.

  “Let’s do this,” Doc said.

  Big Bird kicked in the front door and he and Little Gun marched in. The rest of us followed, save Doc and Mad Mike who watched the streets. We marched into the mouth of hell.

  THE HOUSE OF HORRORS

  I’d been through it so many times by then I did it by rote, as did the others. We got inside and slipped our NVGs on so we could see what the hell we were doing in the gathering gloom. The place looked, as far as I could tell, like some sort of apartment building and we were in its lobby. There wasn’t much in there. I imagine most everything was scavenged unless maybe the place had been condemned even before the Necrophage outbreak.

  No matter.

  Corridors led to the left, to the right, and another we discovered behind a door led towards the back of the building. We broke up into teams. Scales and Smitty took the left corridor, and I went with Zulu down the one leading towards the back. Mongol took the right passage. He had always been a lone, effective hunter and nobody argued with him even though we all knew things might get hairy. Little Gun and Big Bird found a door leading to the basement. They were shaking with excitement as they went down there.

  Zulu and I checked it out room by room in a very orderly military fashion, calling out “clear” as each room was checked. We saw very little of interest. Several of the rooms were empty and smelled like cat piss. I found some rats that disappeared into a hole in the wall as I entered. They had been feeding on the corpse of some throwaway, an old dude whose face was chewed off but still sported a very luxurious Santa Claus beard. As far as corpses went, it was nothing exceptional. I checked the next room and found a dead woman in bed. She was little more than a mummy with a seamed face and long dark hair. Judging from the cobwebs, she’d been there a long time. Something about her intrigued me and I just wasn’t sure why.

  I clicked on the tactical light on my M4 and slid my NVGs up. I studied her. I pulled the coverlet
away from her and it came free with a tearing sound. I suppose whatever had been growing on her had grown right into the coverlet, too. She was little but a rack of bones with a crucifix around her throat that was tangled in ancient webs.

  But her hair…

  As I studied it in the light, I was amazed by it. It was very black and shiny, the highlights sort of an indigo blue. The color of it reminded me of something I could not remember. Had I known a woman with shiny dark, dark hair like that before? A muddled image of a woman with such hair passed through my mind. She was beautiful, olive-skinned with a very sensual mouth and high cheekbones.

  I felt a sudden pang of fear and loss…then it was gone.

  One of those déjà vu sort of things I got all the time that were gone before I could properly analyze them. I stood there, trying to recapture it. But I started to get a headache, so I let it go.

  “Dog,” Zulu called out in the hallway. “Down here.”

  I clicked off my light and slid my NVGs back on. The world was green-hued and surreal again like I was playing a video game.

  Zulu stood down at the end of the corridor. “Check it out,” she said.

  About that time, Doc came over the Icom and we all had to call out about our status. That dispensed with, I followed Zulu into a big room at the back that was long and carpeted. It reminded me of a meeting room or a boardroom. Something like that. There were even some watercolor prints on the walls. There was no table or furniture in there. Not a damn thing except for a dozen or so skeletons tangled up on the floor, all of them disarticulated. I couldn’t see how they all could have died together like that unless it had been a mass suicide or something and scavengers had scattered the bones about.