Necrophobia 4 Page 14

  “Mother ain’t seeing no bullet holes on the bones,” she said. “Not so much as a scrape or cut. Skulls are intact. Can’t be zombies somebody mowed down.”

  By then, we were both on our knees in front of the pile, sorting through it. I don’t know why it interested me so much, but it did. I had another of those déjà vu moments. Bones. Bones scattered in a street. I associated the image with terror. Then, like the other one, it was just…gone. We pulled our NVGs back and examined the ossuary in the beams of our tac lights. It was stupid. Real stupid. If a shooter came through the door, they would have capped both of us.

  But we didn’t seem to care.

  I started seeing things about the bones I didn’t like. “Teeth marks,” I said, examining the indentations in a femur, then on another ribcage. “All adults, too. Those are human teeth marks…at least, I think they are.”

  But I wasn’t sure.

  I’d seen lots of bones by that point that zombies had been at. The spacing of human teeth and the blunt trauma they left on bone was characteristic. Once you saw it, it was easy to identify again. But these teeth…there was something off about them. The indentations and gnawing were not blunt, but looked more like the work of dogs, creatures with pronounced—and sharp—canines.

  I shared this with Zulu.

  She stared at me with huge dark eyes, licking her lips. “Funny…maybe zombies got ‘em. Maybe dogs chewed on what was left.”

  “Yeah, I bet you’re right.”

  But I didn’t believe that and I didn’t think she did either. It was like we were trying to fit the most rational explanation to something that didn’t seem rational to us at all. The sound in the closet is not the boogeyman, dear. It’s just the pipes in the walls. That scraping outside your window at night is not claws but a tree branch. That cold patch in the attic is not a ghost but a draft from the eaves. Those weird lights in the sky are not invaders from another world come to snatch you out of your bed by moonlight, they’re just satellites or meteors or planes. That was how we adults rationalized things. It made our children sleep better and it made us sleep better. The tone of my voice and that of Zulu’s carried that same sort of desperate rationalization.

  “We got work to do,” she finally said.

  Agreed.

  As we stood up, there was sporadic gunfire coming from below. Big Bird and Little Gun must have made contact. As we rushed out into the hallway, Big Bird came over the Icom and told us to cool it, as if he knew we were going to crash his party.

  “Wasted a couple shitheads…throwaways. They were hiding behind the furnace down here,” he said. “Funny, though. They got some shit growing on their faces…looks like that stuff that grows on trees in rings…what do you call it?”

  “Fungi?” Doc suggested.

  “Sure. Something like that. Weird shit…hey, wait…” There was silence for another thirty, forty seconds in which we all got pretty tense. “You ain’t gonna believe this…got more of that shit growing up the walls…and bodies. Yeah, gotta be ten or twelve of ‘em, all covered with the shit.”

  The idea of some weird fungus growing on walls and on corpses made déjà vu light up in my head yet again. I was like some A-head tripping out on LSD flashbacks. Whatever it was, it was very brief.

  “You’re not in there for fungi,” Doc told us. “Clear that place out.”

  He was right and we knew it.

  Zulu and I took a doorway at the other end of the room and it led into a sort of back lobby. There was a set of stairs leading up. The back stairway, I suppose. We called it in and started up.

  “Be real careful,” Mongol said over the Icom. “I’ve found three tripwires now. This place is hot. Somebody don’t want to get taken by surprise.”

  “You hear that?” Doc said. “Watch yourselves.”

  But we didn’t need much prompting by that point. We climbed the stairs, Zulu in the lead. She examined the door above carefully in her tac light but saw no wires or anything suspicious. Carefully, she opened it and started shooting right away. When I got to her, I saw a couple of dead throwaways on the floor. They weren’t armed. Whether they were trying to get the drop on her or just trying to escape was anyone’s guess.

  When I was certain our section of the hallway was secure, I went back over to the bodies which had bled out over the floor.

  “Mother just saw ‘em and opened up,” Zulu said, as if I thought it was her fault.

  I called it in and slid my NVGs up again, turning on my light. Again, there was something real weird going on here. The throwaways were a young couple, man and woman, and the crazy thing was that they were tethered together. Their wrists were bound with wire and connected. Fuck was that about?

  “What do you make of it?” I said.

  But Zulu just shook her head.

  We heard some shooting and Scales said they’d found some deadheads, but took care of them. We had no more than turned from the bodies when a door was thrown open and a throwaway came charging in our direction. I shot him down without thinking. He took three rounds in the chest and hit the floor face-first. He was dead when I got to him. I rolled him over with my boot. I judged him to be about thirty. The disturbing part was that the top of his head straight back to the nape of his neck was raw. Somebody had peeled him.

  “Scalped,” Zulu said. “Mother thinks we got some hardcore players here.”

  Again, we called it in. There was never any thought on our part to conceal anything from Doc and the others. This was a military operation, a tactical situation, and everyone needed all the intelligence they could get.

  I led the way to the room he had come out of.

  It was an apartment of sorts. A small living room. A bathroom. A kitchen. A bedroom. Nothing much…except that the stink of death was so strong in there it stirred my guts. I had to swallow to keep the bile down in my stomach where it belonged. In the bathroom, we found a butchered corpse in the tub. It was nothing recent, but a man that had been hacked and sliced maybe four or five days before. The white porcelain of the tub itself was dyed red and pink. He had been eviscerated, all his guts yanked out. His ribs were caved-in and, in my light, I saw no sign of a heart. The top of his head was open, his brain gone…as were his eyes and genitals and all the flesh from his legs and belly and throat.

  “No deadheads did that,” Zulu said.

  I rubbed a finger along the opening of his cranium. It was rough. “They used a saw,” I said.

  “Cannibals,” she said, looking worried. “Maybe nightcrawlers.”

  That was the name we had given the berserkers, particularly the ones that were degenerated into something not exactly human. The zombies were one thing. We understood them and their simple drives. But when humans…even head cases like the berserkers…started eating other people, it was scary. Even as drugged-up and brainwashed as we were and as sick and violent as we sometimes got, even we understood that there were certain taboos you didn’t violate. Cannibalism was one of them.

  “Come on,” I said.

  Carefully, silently, we checked out the rest of the apartment.

  The bedroom was interesting. There were ropes at all four bedposts. What remained of them were bloody. It looked to me as if they had been gnawed through. I started making associations at that point like you probably are right at this moment. The blood on the ropes was still fresh and wet. Not all of it, of course. Much of it was old. Just stains. My guess was that the guy I had just shot down had been imprisoned in here, tied to the bed and he had chewed his way free.

  It was horrible.

  Even to my twisted, sadistic mind, it was horrible.

  We went into the kitchen next. By this point, we weren’t using our NVGs because we needed to really see what we were looking at. Well, the first thing we saw in the kitchen were bones. Human bones. It wasn’t exactly an image from Better Homes and Gardens or fucking Architectural Digest. This place, much like the rest of the apartment, was a real sty. The tile floor was dark with bloodstains. The tab
le was hacked and cut, bits of meat and tissue stuck to it, flies buzzing in the air and maggots feasting on the carrion. The countertops were much the same, but piled with bones that were all stained red. There was more carrion on them and more maggots. The sink had about three or four inches of congealed blood in it. The window above it was black with flies. I saw what looked like a human heart pegged to a corkboard with a steak knife. Even the walls were stained with whorls of blood and bits of blackened meat.

  It looked like a cannibal’s kitchen, all right. And the slaughtering that went on there was neither neat nor practiced, but manic and savage.

  Zulu checked a pantry in the back.

  There was no one in there, but there was a sort of little door at the back. It looked about big enough for a kid to crawl through. There were bloody handprints all over it. Sucking in a sharp, uneasy breath, I pushed it open with the barrel of my M4. I was expecting some deranged monster to come leaping out at me, red teeth bared…but there was nothing. The door led into a little room with a sloping ceiling. To one side was a narrow passage that led right between the walls.

  I panned it with my light. I could smell a hot stink of putrefaction blowing out at me. I looked at Zulu and she looked at me.

  “No fucking way,” she said.

  I agreed. Neither of us were going in there. We were tough and merciless, but the very idea of what we might see in there even frightened us. It led somewhere and I didn’t want to know where.

  We got back out in the corridor where the air was a little better. We shared a cigarette and called in the gist of what we had just seen. I had the feeling that Doc did not believe us, not completely.

  “Hey, Dog,” Zulu said. “You forgot to close that little door in the pantry.”

  “Well, I ain’t going back to do it now.”

  She was just ribbing me, but I don’t think either of us found the idea of going back in there particularly funny. When we were done fortifying ourselves with nicotine, we checked the next room and it was another apartment. The window looking out of the bedroom had been smashed out, but beyond that there was nothing of interest except a big knife stuck in the wall. From the stains on the handle, we decided it was nothing we wanted. The only thing odd in there was a smell of human shit. From the stains on the wall, it looked like somebody had taken a dump and then tried to write their name with it.

  The next door led into yet another apartment.

  The stench in there was like the cannibal apartment, though nowhere near as strong. We didn’t find much until we got to the bedroom where we saw stains on the mattress…blood and what might have been piss and shit.

  But that was hardly the worst of it.

  “Look,” Zulu said.

  She had her light on the bedposts and there were chains hanging from them. The one on the left had a human hand hanging from it. The wrist was a bloody stump, a knob of bone protruding from it. The bone was broken, the wrist mangled.

  “Somebody chewed themselves free,” Zulu said.

  I just stared at it. I had seen some wicked things, some seriously fucked-up things…but this? Was it possible for someone to chew off their own hand? Wouldn’t they bleed to death? Judging from the bloodstains everywhere, maybe they had. But the idea of a mind that broken, that desperate, that twisted…it was shocking. I mean, we’ve all heard of animals doing it, leaving a paw in a trap…but a human being?

  We stumbled out of there and after we’d caught our breath, we checked another doorway. Zulu went over there, not really expecting to find anything. Nothing alive, anyway. It was secured with a padlock. She blew the lock off with her M4, then kicked it in.

  And it was at that moment that the zombies came out.

  THE HOUSE OF HORRORS, PART 2

  Zulu stumbled over her own feet trying to get away as the dead poured out through the doorway. I grabbed hold of her and we ran back down the corridor. I don’t know how many zombies there were. In our panic and seen by the jumping lights of our rifles, it seemed like there were dozens and dozens.

  There was little to do in the heat of the moment but fight.

  “WE GOT CONTACT UP HERE!” I shouted over the Icom. “WE GOT DEADHEADS EVERYWHERE! WE NEED BACKUP! WE NEED FUCKING BACKUP!”

  A sane person would have run and lived to fight another day, but we weren’t exactly sane. So we stood there, Zulu and I, shoulder to shoulder, and started blasting away, dropping the dead as they moved in our direction. We aimed high and blew heads apart. Shell casings flew and magazines were emptied. Zombie heads were drilled with slugs and exploded in gouts of gore. Blood and brain matter were splashed against the walls and dripped from the ceiling. The corpses piled up and the dead surged ever forward.

  Finally, we pulled back towards the stairs and both tossed frag grenades at the massing hungry zombies. We hit the floor and the explosions down the hallway were so damn loud in that enclosed space that it nearly punctured our eardrums. The beams of our tac lights cut like white swords through the murk of dust and smoke and mists of blood. I saw gutted corpses everywhere, limbs and punctured torsos and heads split open like melons. The floor down there was a sea of blood and rot set with islands of gangrenous tissue. Zombie anatomy was splattered against the walls and draped from the ruptured ceiling tiles in strings of glistening meat.

  But the dead were far from done.

  More poured forth and it occurred to me that they must have been forced into that room or rooms, whatever space was behind that door, and locked in there by someone, possibly militia members or shitheads. They were kept there in the event the building was raided by us. Then they would be released to cause panic and confusion.

  That was my guess, anyway.

  Not that I was doing much thinking or guessing by that point. Some of the zombies could not refuse the banquet of the remains of their brothers and sisters and they fell to their knees and started shoving smoking meat into their mouths, yanking on snakes of intestines, and scooping brains from cleaved skulls with grave-filthy fingers.

  But the others came on.

  And we started shooting. We dropped eight or ten of them and by then the mob was less than fifteen feet from us and we knew there was no way we could put them all down before they reached us. They would overwhelm us by sheer numbers.

  I pulled another grenade, deciding I would toss it and we’d beat a hasty retreat down the stairs where, hopefully, we’d link up with others of our team.

  Then I sensed motion behind me and I think I cried out.

  More zombies were coming up the stairs, white eyes shining, lipless mouths opening and closing, teeth gnashing.

  “FUCK!” I cried out.

  I started shooting down the stairs, dropping several before my magazine puked out on me. Zulu kept firing into the hallway as the mob surged ever forward. In the precious few seconds it took me to eject a mag and slap a new one in place, the dead were nearly on top of me. I don’t know how many there were, but it was enough to fill the stairwell and that’s enough to give you the cold sweats. I started shooting again and gore was flying in the air at such close quarters, it sprayed in my face and spattered my hands and weapon, bits of meat sticking to my tac vest.

  Zulu let out a cry that was half surprise and half terror.

  I instantly saw why.

  There were even more zombies in the hallway now. I saw her rip open the heads of three of them but a fourth and fifth closed in on her. She gave one of them the butt of her M4 in the face and cracked another in the mouth with it, driving them back, but while she did that another launched itself at her. It seized her arm with white bloated fingers and I saw its mouth driving in to bite. I stuck the muzzle of my M4 right in its wormy face and capped three rounds into it that made it jump back and fall into the others.

  They didn’t just shove this one out of the way.

  No, not by that point. The zombies were swarming and in their swarm they had become a single ravenous entity, a voracious eating machine that took down anything that fell into its
path. The headshot zombie stumbled into their clutching hands and was literally ripped into pieces in a matter of seconds. Arms were yanked from sockets, legs snapped off. Seven or eight hands gripped its head and tore it free from its shoulders with a sound like tree roots being yanked from the ground.

  Meanwhile, the zombies on the stairs were nearly on me.

  I emptied my clip and blew heads apart, splashing gore in every direction, but for everyone I dropped two more took its place. I slapped in a fresh magazine and I heard Big Bird on the Icom.

  “WE’RE CLOSING ON YOU! GET YOUR HEADS DOWN!” he cried out. “WE’RE COMING IN HOT!”

  Within seconds, I heard them shooting. He and Little Gun were coming down the opposite side of the hallway, blasting away as they came. I heard explosions right away and I knew what was happening. They both had M203 grenade launchers attached to their M4s and they were slinging rounds right into the zombies masses. Shrapnel was flying along with pieces of the dead.

  We had no choice then.

  We had to fight our way down the stairs.

  Zulu and I started blazing away with everything we had, cutting a path through the throng of the dead that reached out to snare us. We fired and kicked and smashed zombie faces with our rifles, driving them down and away until we had killed enough to open a path and then we charged down the stairs, knocking them out of our way. By the time we reached the landing below, I could hear Scales and Smitty on the Icom. They had joined Big Bird and Little Gun in putting down the zombie force.

  When we stepped down into the hallway, we gunned down three or four more maggot-heads and then made a quick escape into the room we had found the bones in.

  And that was a real bad choice.

  Because there were more deadheads in there and we were on the dinner menu.

  We fought like hell, shooting them down and knocking them out of our way and then Zulu ejected her last magazine and was clean out of shot. I had the selector switch of my M4 set for three-round burst and I fired selectively, trying to be as economical as possible with my last 30-round magazine. Zulu capped away with her 9mm sidearm, but there were just too many. She pulled her Stihl chainsaw from its harness. She primed it, set the choke, and yanked on the starter rope, cranking it into action. As the zombies pushed in from all sides at her, she went at them like some Viking warrior swinging his battleaxe. There’s simply no way to overwhelm somebody with a chainsaw, particularly when said person is fast and strong and can move the saw like a slashing sword.