Necrophobia - 02 Read online

  “I’m Sergeant Major Boydson and this is Sergeant Arruto,” Sonny Boy said, a Texas twang to his words. “I run this place and Little John…that is, Sergeant Arruto…is the platoon sergeant of the biocon unit you’ll be attached to. The point is to go out and kill as many zombies as you can, to fuck-up ARM and any other survivalist militias that get in your way.”

  “Or even if they don’t get in your way,” Little John said, smiling at me. “You’ll do your duty or you’ll be shot. If you try to escape, you’ll be in a world of hurt. If you play by the rules, you can have it pretty good. I take care of my boys and I make sure they have the best. But if you fuck with me or disgrace me, I will fuck you up in ways you cannot imagine.”

  “So tell us your sad story, boy. Tell us all about it,” Sonny Boy said.

  So I did, giving them a highly truncated version of things that was not remotely specific in any way. I knew the position I was in and I knew the kind of animals I was dealing with, so I made absolutely no mention of my son, of Diane or Tuck or the others. As far as Sonny Boy and Little John knew the last of my friends that I had survived The Awakening with were now dead or lost. I wasn’t about to let them know about the others, our strengths and weaknesses, location or plans. The Strykers were ours and these dipshits weren’t about to lay their hands on them. And they weren’t about to lay their hands on my people either. I particularly made no mention of Paul, because that would just be something they would use against me.

  I was alone as far as they knew. I was glad I had hooked up with them, I told the Sergeant-Major and his adjutant. I was at my wit’s end and was glad to be part of something again.

  When I was finished, Sonny Boy lit a cigarette. He had a little pocket knife and he began to scrape the blade against the inside of his fingers. “Let me give you the lay of the land, so to speak, my friend. Now Sergeant Arruto here is as fine and randy of a man as you could hope to meet. If you mess with him or us, I guarantee he will dance a jig on your face and it will be no graceful pirouette. Lord above, he is a man of violence. For it is always the boot with our dear Little John. Yes, the sword and the boot and the cool redemption of a leather fist against the meek and the mild. And that’s how he keeps the ducks in orderly rows. And being that you are one of my ducks now, I thought it best to inform you of the man you will serve under. God bless him.”

  “What the Sergeant-Major means is that I give no quarter and no mercy. We have a real war out there and I plan on winning it.”

  Sonny Boy pulled off his cigarette. “It’s as you say, brother. You bear the stigmata of the victor; praise Jesus. For winning is the holy way.”

  Little John shook with laughter, popping peanuts in his mouth in-between the guffaws.

  They were quite a pair. There was nothing very funny about the things Sonny Boy said, not even about the way that he said them. There was something spooky about the guy and his flowery talk, the religious references. Underneath it, I sensed there was something burning and evil that would boil the skin off you if you got too close.

  “There is a chain of command here, Steve,” Sonny Boy said, setting aside his cigarette and running the blade of his knife against his fingers again. “We have few officers, but what we do have is Colonel Brightwater. And to him we owe undying allegiance. We are his servants. As the Lord is my witness, never let it be said I did not recognize my master whence I saw him nor bowed my head in humility at his presence. Shit, yes. I recommend you do the same.”

  “If you fight good,” Little John said, “The colonel will see that you are rewarded. The best fighters, the hardest chargers, get the best of everything: the best food, their pick of women, liquor, you name it. But it all has to be earned.”

  “Beware the sins of the flesh for they are multitudinous,” Sonny Boy said.

  “We’ve been making a lot of advances and clearing a lot of neighborhoods of the dead,” Little John went on. “We plan to clear the Bronx, then Manhattan. That should keep us busy for some time to come.”

  I got on the bandwagon. “Do you ever deal with ARM? They’re the ones that killed my friends.”

  Sonny Boy smiled. “Ah, the American Resistance Movement. They are troublesome, and as it so happens, I have a story to relate concerning them. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, feigning interest.

  “It’s a good story,” Little John jumped in. “See, we captured a few of their leaders and we brought ‘em back here.”

  They both seemed excited over this, so I fed their excitement. I fired a few questions at them about the strengths and location of ARM. They were only too happy to answer, thinking I was some idiot wronged by ARM—I was—and was only too happy to learn from their expertise—I wasn’t. Whereas Sonny Boy was glib and inflated as he answered, Little John spoke in clipped sentences, referring to things only in the most generic terms.

  “Originally we had no problem with those people over there. We had and they wanted, so they started taking and we started hitting ‘em. They hit back. So we started crushing ‘em.”

  Sonny Boy went on with the story he wanted me to hear, saying that during one of their raids, just last week, they had killed an even dozen ARM pukes and taken two of their officers prisoner. The officers were literally caught with their pants down, as they were in the process of raping a teenage Puerto Rican girl.

  “Praise the Lord, but this is a tale worth the re-telling. Now let me lay this out in an orderly manner for you, Steve,” Sonny Boy said, fixing me with his dead eyes. “See, here’s how this delicious clusterfuck came about. Let me speak of the flavors and smells, the sounds and sensations that, praise Jesus, were many. Up the stairs, boys, up the stairs with you, those we seek are in the room at the top. Makes my old heart weak, sir, I say to you that it does with what I saw up there. Shit, yes. Glory to God in the highest, but our ARM officers are an evil sort. The girl is strapped to a bed and they are taking their turns with her. Well, one of them tries to find his weapon and we deliver him into the hands of the Lord. Deftly and quickly, the other two are taken prisoner.

  “Well, right away we bring them back and to the exalted office of Colonel Brightwater, who will observe the festivities. The senior officer—and I use that term lightly, of course—is named Shelling, and he has falsehoods pouring from his mouth in a veritable torrent of shit. But myself and Little John? Though our hearts are heavy and saddened at his predicament, we hold firm. Mr. Shelling, says I, we would like to know the locations of your forces in the city, their numbers and armaments. You have taken from us, you have ambushed our valiant warriors and now we seek vengeance. Mr. Shelling again makes with his lies to which Little John shakes his head and I can only ask for help from the dear Lord above. Why, kind Mr. Shelling, says I, either you give up said information or, forgive me, I shall extract it. Pray that it is not so, sir, pray that you do not piss me off today. But Mr. Shelling remains firm in his denials and, though it pained me deeply and withered my soul, I found myself striking Mr. Shelling with my fist. May God forgive poor old me. But Mr. Shelling, as pained as he was, contended that he was not part of ARM, but only the leader of a small-time militia which had no discernable title. So, though God is merciful, I certainly am not. Still maintaining his innocence, I become just plain fucking angry. Much to the abject horror of Little John and our cold-hearted colonel, I take a ball peen hammer and smash it down quite forcefully upon Mr. Shelling’s right hand, breaking only one finger. Oh, such a row! See pitiable Mr. Shelling now, my friend, goddamn and hallelujah, as he whimpers and moans, that finger of his snapping like a dry twig. Whereupon, as unbelievable as it may seem, Mr. Shelling is still not moved to truthfully answer my questions, so Little John holds him fast while I break two more fingers with my trusty hammer. Though quite out of his senses with pain after I shattered both of his kneecaps, Mr. Shelling begins crying out and saying all manner of nonsense to make it stop. This only enraged me further, so with a heavy heart I used this knife on him and peeled him quite slowly. I
let him suffer for a time, but then, being a Christian, I put him out of his misery.

  “But the matter was hardly at an end. Having watched his superior put to the knife like that, our other prisoner was advised to be cooperative. We threw him in the hole, where we wished him only the best. I told him in parting that we would return for him in due time and wreak a terrible motherfucking vengeance upon his flesh and soul if he did not have the answers I sought. And I got them, Steve, I certainly did. May he rest safely in the bosom of the Lord.”

  The point of this grisly story, of course, was to emphasize the sort of sadistic assholes these two were. It did not need emphasizing. I had no doubts of that from the beginning. I was going to get free from this menagerie one way or another, but I was going to be careful and I was only going to play my hand when the time was right.

  “Well, you sure showed them, sir,” I said.

  “I did at that, yes I did. The Lord doth work in mysterious ways and I maintain that I do as well. Hell, yes.”

  Now, Sonny Boy turned to me, grinning. And it was some kind of grin, I’ll tell you. His face was long and narrow, eyes just dark as slate and that grin was thin as a razor cut. Perverse, demented. I’m willing to bet he grinned like that when he skinned Shelling.

  He tapped the sharp edge of his knife against his fingertips. “Now tell me, Steve, are you a man of faith? Is God at your left as well as your right?”

  I nodded. “I’ve always believed so.”

  Little John giggled.

  Sonny Boy kept grinning.

  Now, I don’t have anything against God or people that believe in him. Sometimes, I believe in a higher power and sometimes I’m just an agnostic. I can never make up my mind and particularly since The Awakening. However, from what I understand of what it’s all about, Sonny Boy didn’t exactly strike me as a good choirboy. I figured he and Jesus went together like dog turds and coffee.

  I think Pops had summed it up to me down in the pit very succinctly:

  He’s a sadist and a psychopath who believes he is the sole instrument of God’s will on Earth. You’ll want to stay on his good side. Even if you’re not religious, my friend, pretend that you are.

  Sonny Boy just studied me. “How many Jews can you fit in a Volkswagen, Steve?” he asked me.

  I looked for the gag, but he was dead serious. “I…I don’t know.”

  He gave me that reptilian grin again. “Five in the front seat, five in the back, and five-thousand in the ashtray.”

  It was a sick joke and I think he was waiting to see if I got offended. I didn’t. Hell, I was a blue-collar guy. I heard a lot worse shit than that on construction sites when I was laying brick. Regardless, he watched me closely. I played the game. He laughed, I laughed.

  “I think you’ll do just fine with us,” Sonny Boy said.

  Little John led me out of his office. Outside, we paused. He gave me a cigarette, and had one himself, while he studied me very intently.

  “What, Sarge?” I finally said.

  He smiled. “You are a championship-caliber bullshit artist, Steve. Yes, you certainly are.” When I made to disagree, he held his hand up. “That’s all right, that’s all right. We all are. Keeping Sonny Boy happy will prolong your life and you caught onto that right away. He ain’t right in the head, Steve. Not in the least. I knew him before The Awakening and he wasn’t like this. He was weird and religious, but he wasn’t the man you saw in there. Just keep playing the bullshit card and you’ll do all right.”

  That was my introduction to “Army” life and Sonny Boy in particular. Little John wasn’t as stupid as he looked and I got the feeling that Sonny Boy terrified him which was okay because that meant that Little John was still a human being and not a monster like his boss.

  “What about Colonel Brightwater?”

  “You’ll meet him later.”

  I was led to the makeshift bunkhouse where I would be living when I wasn’t out fighting Brightwater’s war. It was all going to be interesting and I knew it. My heart was aching, because I missed the others so much. I couldn’t stop thinking about my son and the awful grief he must have been going through. I knew Tuck would keep them safe if it was humanly possible, and Diane would care for Paul like her own. That night I dreamed, not of Ricki and my guilt, but of Sabelia. I wished I had held her in my arms while I still had the chance.

  Because I didn’t think it would come again.

  DEAD BUT DREAMING

  A few days after I became one of Brightwater’s “soldiers”—and understand I use the term very loosely—Pops was released from the pit and we stood up in one of the makeshift guard towers just inside the wire and watched the night. The moon was bright and the dry heat of day was bleeding from the city. We watched the zombies in the streets, because when there was no work to be done, and you tired of playing cards or reading paperback books about worlds that no longer existed, there was always the zombies.

  That night they did something interesting.

  Something I had never seen before.

  As we stood there, me with a TR-15 carbine Little John had given me, and Pops with a Russian SKS, we watched the zombies come out into the street. Not just ten or twenty, but forty and fifty and sixty. They kept converging in the moonlight, but they weren’t directing themselves against the wire.

  “Maybe we ought to go tell Little John about this,” Pops suggested.

  “They’re not doing anything. At least not yet.”

  And they weren’t, at least nothing I could make sense of. They all just stood in the street and looked up into the sky as if they were expecting something. They came from every direction. They abandoned what they had been eating, which was usually the remains of each other, and formed up in ranks. They came out of buildings and houses, out of alleys and ditches and sewer mouths. Some of them carried bones or pieces of things they had been gnawing on. The living dead. Things that had once been men and women and children, brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles, next-door neighbors and grandmothers. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder and simply craned their heads so they could look up at the sky above. Maybe at the moon, but probably at something beyond the moon that I couldn’t even guess at.

  Five zombies is disconcerting, twenty is disturbing, but hundreds—and there surely were hundreds—is unimaginably scary. You know they’re out there. New York City had over eight million inhabitants, last I heard. If even half of them were zombies now, that was an unbelievable army of the walking dead. If something, some force or influence, ever wielded them together into one common army, we survivors wouldn’t stand a chance regardless of how many guns and bombs we had. I think whenever I saw them band together like this, I was afraid that it was happening.

  “What do you know about ARM?” I said to Pops.

  “I know I’ll never invite them over for tea and sympathy.”

  I smiled. “They can control the dead.”

  He looked at me. Even in the dimness of the tower, I saw how large and wet his eyes looked. “How?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve seen it again and again. They have some way of directing the zombies away from themselves at their enemies.”

  “And you think that’ll happen here?”

  “Any night now is my guess. Brightwater’s Brigade has been pounding on them pretty bad, amassing quite a body count. I don’t think they’ll put up with it forever.”

  “We could be in real trouble.”

  “We already are. Sonny Boy is out of his mind. I don’t know about Brightwater.”

  “Nobody’s even seen Brightwater in over a month. He might be dead. Sonny Boy is the only one who goes to see him, not even the few officers we have are allowed to do that. Sonny Boy even brings him his food.”

  I knew Brightwater was holed up in a two-story brick building in the center of the encampment. It was surrounded by sandbags, guards patrolling the perimeter twenty-four/seven. Pops said that one of the helicopter pilots—Jonesy—picked up Brightwater from
the roof in a Blackhawk when the Biocon Units went out on an op.

  “Maybe he’s dead,” I said.

  “That’s a distinct possibility. And all his orders are cut through Sonny Boy, so there’s a pretty good chance that we’re being led by a madman.”

  “I’d like to get in there and see.”

  “They’d shoot you if you got within thirty feet of Brightwater’s bunker, as it’s called.”

  He was right and I didn’t want to know that bad.

  I shared my fears with Pops that, sooner or later, ARM would direct thousands of zombies at the encampment. The Brigade was well armed. They had .50 cals and chain guns, mortars and grenades, flamethrowers and missiles, armored vehicles and helicopter gunships. But there was only maybe seventy troopers there tops and they couldn’t withstand thousands of zombies coming at them wave after wave. And I believed ARM knew that. I believed they would use it. I didn’t think for a moment that they would allow the Brigade to keep tormenting them.

  Payback was coming.

  “I wonder how they do it,” Pops said.

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  We stopped talking and turned our attention back to the zombies. The streets were filled with them and it had been reported from the other guard towers because I heard Little John out in the yard cracking orders, getting sleepy-eyed troopers on the machine guns while others manned the mortar pits and broke out the heavy hardware: the Javelin anti-tank missiles. Soon enough, several Bradley vehicles were in place just inside the wire, guns aimed at the fence and what was beyond it.

  But the zombies were ignoring us.

  Generally, just a little movement inside the wire was enough to bring them to the fence, but not tonight. They kept looking up into the sky and I wondered if they were, even then, bathing in some exotic radiation spewed out by an ancient gamma ray burst in the distant depths of space.