Necrophobia - 02 Read online

  She looked up at me with eyes like black glass.

  She was grinning, her teeth stained pink, her lips scarlet red and that was the only color in her bleached face.

  I saw all of this within a few seconds of turning on the light and my reaction was instantaneous: I let out a cry and squirmed away from her, kicking out at her and catching her in the throat when she came after me. She let out an enraged, cheated hissing and came right back at me.

  “The blood,” she said, licking it off her lips. “You must share the blood…I need the blood…I have to fill myself with the blood.”

  Gripped by frantic fear and superstitious terror, I brought up the M-14 and pulled the trigger. The round went in right through her forehead and she flopped over, twitching but dead.

  A vampire.

  A fucking vampire.

  Maybe not your garden-variety, late show vampire which slept in a coffin and spoke with a Slavic accent, but close enough. Close enough to leave me sitting there with her corpse in the ruins of that building in that graveyard city, just shaking, still feeling her cold lips at my arm. I tore off the bandages, grabbed the remains of the flannel shirt and cut some new ones. I dumped more alcohol on the wound because if what that woman had was catchy, I didn’t want it. After enduring the pain of that for the second time that night, I wrapped fresh bandages around it.

  Then I just sat there, smoking, staring at the vampire corpse.

  I didn’t believe for a moment that this vampire-woman was unrelated to everything else going on. No, she was not a zombie, yet somehow what had infected her—turning her ghastly white and making her hair fall out—was related. I was remembering those bodies Tuck, Sabelia, and I had found in the barracks at the armory outside White Plains. They had been drained of blood and Sabelia had mentioned the word vampire to Tuck’s instant derision. Was this one of the…creatures that had performed that little atrocity?

  As usual, I had more questions than answers.

  But staring at her, a river of red gore running down her face from the bullet hole, I started wondering what else might be happening out there, what kind of horrors were even now breeding, waiting their time to prey on the remains of the human race.

  Although my instinct—and imagination—told me to get the hell out of there, I stayed. My instinct was to just run, and my imagination was worried the dead woman would wake up to snack on my throat. But I saw no reason to leave. A corpse was hardly unique in the new world and although I didn’t care much to be around them, I could think of worse company.

  Besides, I was relatively safe as long as I kept awake and vigilant.

  To keep the nicotine stoked, I smoked cigarette after cigarette and I thought about how Ricki would have disapproved—she always rode me about smoking until I finally quit. No matter. I tried not to think about her or hear her voice because she was dead along with the rest of the world I had known and loved. Now it was survival. Now it was keeping alive and finding a way to hook back up with the others. I planned on being vicious with anyone or anything that got in my way.

  Not twenty minutes after I had seen the first rays of the rising sun, I heard a helicopter pass overhead and the roar of vehicles—many of them—passing by, just a few streets over, I thought. I went over to the doorway and surveyed the street. It was quiet in my neighborhood. I didn’t see so much as a scavenging rat. The real action was happening west of me and I heard machine guns clattering, explosions, and small arms fire. It was coming from roughly the direction of Manhattan College. I hoped like hell Tuck got everyone back to Yonkers.

  I waited until the action died down.

  About thirty minutes later, it was quiet, so I started again, making my way down West 226th Street for Tibbet Ave. All I had to do was follow the stink, which was horrendous…the smell of death on a massive scale.

  Maybe I should have gone the other way, but I couldn’t. I had to see. I had to know that the Stryker was not there amongst it, everything inside it melted and slopping out the hatches in a river of molten human grease. So I went up Tibbet. God help me, but I did.

  Apparently, the armored cavalry had moved on in search of new killing fields and the Apache was done making its gun runs. As I got nearer to the college, I saw destruction. Not old destruction, but new. The first thing I saw was a Greyhound bus flipped over on its side. It was nearly torn in half, the outer metal shell blackened and the insides still burning. Target practice? I couldn’t be sure. There was a single jawless, charred human skull nearby that looked like it might have been expelled from the bus itself. Smoke was still issuing from the orbits.

  I should have taken that as a warning.

  I saw no people around, no zombies, nothing but burning buildings and houses blown to rubble that were still smoldering, lots of cars that had been torn apart by .50 cal fire. The façade of a three-story building had taken some sort of hit and collapsed. It looked as if somebody had taken a very large knife and peeled the face of it off. I could see inside the apartments like the compartments of a dollhouse. And inside each, beds blazing and curtains smoking.

  The smoke got very thick in the air the farther I went up Tibbet.

  The stink was not only worse, but thicker and condensed, the concentrated stench of burning hair, seared human flesh, and boiled human fat. It left a gray-yellow haze in the air and an oily residue on my skin. I figured that’s what it must have smelled like in Germany during the witch trials of the 17th century.

  Everything seemed to be burnt or blasted, cars and houses, and even trees were burning. Rubble and ruins were everywhere; structures collapsed down into their basements or spread out across the avenue. There were huge impact craters in the street and one of them was very large. It had actually thrown sections of pavement up into the trees. It was about then I saw my first body. Well, actually two of them. Two human torsos burning like candles, greasy plumes of smoke rising from them as they continued to snap and pop.

  Sickening as that was, it was pedestrian in comparison to what I saw next: corpses and parts of them in the street, blown up into trees, hanging from shattered windows. Scorched human entrails were dangling from street signs, limbs scattered like scythed wheat. I stepped amongst the anatomy, sweating from the heat and nauseous from the smell, and came upon what looked to be hundreds of corpses incinerated in the street in a thick, gelatinous soup of blood and organs and clotted marrow boiled from bones. I could barely squeeze around the trailing limbs and cremated faces.

  I kept going, needing to be free of that absolute slaughterhouse.

  I started jogging until I got away from it, finally going down on my knees and shaking with dry heaves. I saw flocks of birds circling high overhead and wild dogs sniffing about. I didn’t know if those bodies belonged to zombies or ARM troopers or ordinary people.

  I pulled myself very uneasily to my feet.

  I was absolutely filthy from snoozing in bombed-out ruins and being splashed with gore and tissue and rancid blood. Now to add insult to injury, I had been slow-smoked over a corpse-fire to complete the picture. My hands were scraped and grubby, stained with blood. I passed an unbroken plate glass window and my reflection looked like some tattered zombie. Dirty, fatigues ragged, clean white trails cut into the filth of my face from sweating, my eyes huge, blank, and staring.

  But I had little time to consider prettying myself up because one of the undead stepped out of a doorway and came in my direction. He was a big guy wearing, of all things, a pair of SpongeBob Squarepants boxer shorts. He had been split from throat to crotch, his intestines spilling out. They swung side-to-side as he walked; a heap of them bunched up in his hands. I thought he was coming for me, but he passed right by and went across the street. Up against the porch of a little house peppered by bullet holes, there was a woman laying there on her back, spread-eagled. She was split open like him and a three-inch jagged staff of shrapnel stuck out of one eye socket. What was inside her had been blown away, her thoracic cavity one great hollow filled with blood. The man
went over to her and I just kept going.

  I didn’t have the stomach to watch what he was going to do next.

  I think I wandered in a daze, stumbling across West 238th to the parking lot of Manhattan College. There were about two dozens cars in the lot and most were untouched, though a few had been stripped of their tires no doubt to burn. But I saw no Stryker. It was a big lot and I wandered around looking for any sign that my friends had been there and saw nothing. I scanned the lot across the avenue and it was the same.

  That allowed me to relax and take a deep breath.

  As grisly as it had been back there, I was somewhat glad the cavalry had swept through there, because if those had been zombies I would have been in some real trouble. I found a tree-shaded green in the center of the lot and collapsed in the grass. I had another cigarette and stared up into a blue sky that was perfect and cloudless. How could it still be the same up there, but so radically—and horribly—different down here?

  When I finished the cigarette, I climbed to my feet and made for Tibbets, where I could cut east on 240th and make it to the Chrysler dealership down there and the other used car lots. When a shot rang out, I had just gotten to my feet. It clattered against a metal garbage can not four feet from me. Another punched into a tree trunk and still another kicked up dirt at my feet. I ran and ducked behind another tree and more rounds came whipping, chewing up the grass all around me. The thing was, I couldn’t tell where they were coming from.

  That’s when I heard the roar of engines and a Humvee whipped through the lot and a Bradley Fighting Vehicle cut off any retreat I was thinking of making. There was a mounted M240 Bravo machine gun on the Humvee and it was directed at me, as was the 25mm chain gun on the Bradley.

  A voice came over the bullhorn: “Okay, soldier! The war’s over! Drop your weapon and step out with your hands above your head!”

  It wasn’t much of a choice, but the idea of surrendering to these guys didn’t set on me well. I didn’t think they were ARM or any of the other ragtag militias, but just who they were and what they wanted was what bothered me.

  The M240 on the Humvee opened up, a barrage of slugs tearing bark off the trees and kicking dirt and clods of grass six feet in the air.

  “C’mon, soldier! We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way!” the voice said over the bullhorn.

  Sighing, I dropped the M-14 and walked toward the Humvee slowly with my hands up. I must have looked quite a sight and why they didn’t just put me down then and there I’ll never know.

  When I got out into the lot, I heard the ramp on the Bradley drop and three soldiers in BDUs came over to me, stripped away my bag, and tossed my knife to the ground. They did the same with my empty 9 mil. When I was thus emasculated and made harmless, a guy came out of the Humvee. He stood about five feet from me. He wore the insignia of a captain, but beyond that, there was nothing telling about his BDUs.

  “Well, what’s your story?” he said. He had a calm, quiet voice, very non-threatening. But he looked hard—his eyes flat gray, his mouth a flat line that looked incapable of smiling. “Go ahead, speak.”

  “I’m just staying alive,” I told him. “I was with some friends. We were scavenging. We were ambushed by a militia. That was yesterday. I’ve been trying to fight my way out of the city ever since.”

  “Easy to get in, not so easy to get out?” he said.

  “That’s it.”

  One of the soldiers handed him my pack while the other two kept their carbines on me. “I tell you,” he said. “You’re dressed like your militia. You stink to high hog heaven. You look like you been dipped in shit and squeezed dry. I should just shoot you now and get this over with…yet, I almost buy your story.”

  “It’s true enough,” I said. “Are you real Army?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You’re not ARM?”

  He scowled at me. “Easy with the insults.” He tossed my pack to the soldier. “Where are your friends?”

  “Dead. They’re all dead.”

  He nodded. “You have fighting experience?”

  “I was with a Stryker Brigade in Iraq.”

  “You’ll do then. We been looking for volunteers and you’ll do just fine.”

  “Wait a minute now…”

  But they didn’t wait. They hit me from behind I fell forward. They beat me down and then pulled me to my feet, dragging me over to the Bradley.

  I had just been drafted.

  Bradley Fighting Vehicle

  Type: ArmoredVehicle

  Weight: 22 tons

  Length: 21 feet

  Operational Range: 298 miles

  Armor: 32 mm

  PRISONER OF WAR

  I slept.

  In the back of the Bradley, cramped and twisted, shoved between two ammo crates, I slept like a fucking baby. The three soldiers with me hated me. I saw that much before I drifted off. It didn’t have anything to do with who I was, but more with what I was: just some stinking, filthy sewer-rat that they had to share their compartment with. A captured rat.

  Captured, drafted, it’s all the same, I thought as I zonked out.

  I don’t even remember reaching the base—if you can call a lumber yard just off 2nd Avenue on 37th Street in Lower East Side Manhattan a base—and the next thing I knew the ramp on the Bradley dropped. I was dragged out into a compound that was enclosed by high chain-link fences topped with barbwire. I saw armored vehicles lined up in rows, very efficiently, orderly, and military. There were Bradleys, Humvees, Guardians ASVs, Desert Warriors, and even a couple Strykers. There were several sheet metal Quonset-shaped buildings, what looked to be a huge warehouse, and lots of soldiers coming and going. Troopers with THOR TR-15 carbines and a Bravo 240 machine gun emplacement guarded the front gate. A rampart of sandbags chest-high was stacked just inside the fence.

  I heard a chopper wing overhead. A Blackhawk. It passed over the buildings and touched down somewhere just beyond them.

  “Just like home,” I said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” one of the soldiers said and jabbed me in the back with the muzzle of his weapon.

  Well, the first thing that happened was that I was thrown into the pit.

  I don’t know what else to call it. Filthy, bruised, blood-stained, and generally beaten on all fronts, I was dragged into one of the Quonsets. A wooden trapdoor was opened and I was tossed down into the darkness. Here, I thought being drafted, I would get a shower and fresh set of fatigues, but I got this instead. The floor was dirt and there was not enough room to stand up without hitting your head. And it was dark, by God it was black as midnight down there. Like any caged animal, I went after the trapdoor but it was locked and secured. I couldn’t even get my fingers into the seam around it. At first, I yelled and pounded at it, then I scratched at it until my fingers bled.

  No good.

  I wasn’t getting out.

  Thinking on it later, I wondered if I hadn’t picked up some kind of bug. Maybe from that girl who had been licking my open wound. She wasn’t strictly normal, now was she? Who knows what she had been carrying? Regardless, I crawled around down there on all fours, sweating and shaking and shivering. My face was hot to the touch and the sweat that boiled out of my pores was just rank smelling. I don’t know honestly how long I was down there but I figured it was days and days.

  I remember scratching around in the dirt and screaming, crying and whimpering. I was absolutely irrational. I thought about Paul and Sabelia, Tuck and Diane, Jimmy and Phil, Maria and Dorothy and the other girls. I slept a lot and woke trembling from weird fever dreams. I remember having conversations with people who weren’t there. I remember Ricki telling me that it would pass, that the worst always passes sooner or later. I think I argued with her. I’m not sure. Once a day, they tossed a water bottle down to me so I wouldn’t dehydrate. But with all the sweating, I was dehydrated anyway.

  I slept in the dirt.

  I pissed in the dirt.

  I rolled in the dir
t.

  I woke several times half-buried in it. I kept trying to dig a hole to hide in. I had no memory of doing so, only that I would wake up covered in damp earth, my fingers aching from digging. I had dreams which I wasn’t really sure were dreams at all. Can you dream with your eyes wide open? I’d come out of these nightmares, sometimes waking myself with a scream—which is a simply awful way to wake up—and my eyes would be open and I’d know they had been open for some time.

  What I kept seeing in these dreams was Ricki. Not the Ricki I knew and loved, but Ricki the living dead. I was always escaping through the mean streets of the Bronx and she was always following me. I had to run and run and run. But you know how it is in dreams when you try to run…your legs are like rubber and it feels like your boots are filled with cement. It was like that. Every time I would stop to rest, to breathe, she would be closing in on me. She was a withered thing, dressed in grave cerements like a vampire in an old Hammer movie, only unlike those movies where the vampire ladies were hot with their boobs pushing out of low-cut gowns, Ricki was a walking corpse…pale, bloodless, grave-mold growing up from the valley between her cleavage. Her eyes were glassy and dark like those of a stuffed elk and she was chattering her teeth. I’d run and run, sometimes crawling over wrecked cars that clogged streets, and sometimes crawling over mountains of corpses that were alive and squirming.

  It ended one day when I heard my voice say, “Crazy, crazy, crazy, you’re absolutely fucking crazy.”

  And that was it. Whatever had gripped me for days simply passed like the flick of a switch. The fever and sickness, torment and horror, just passed and I was myself again. Oh, I was in terrible shape. My throat was raw from screaming. My limbs ached. I was sore and stinking, my ragged fatigues crusty with not only the assorted gore of my battles in the streets above, but with my own vomit, piss and shit. My face and hands were thick with grime and dirt. I had no idea what I looked like but I was glad there was no light to see by and no mirror to look in, just living inside my own skin was bad enough.