Necrophobia - 02 Page 17

  Pops thought it was possible.

  I liked Pops. He was okay. Unlike the other monkeys at the encampment, I truly liked him and trusted him. Trust was not an easy thing to come by in those days, let me tell you. Survival, like war, brings out the absolute best in people and the absolute worst, but I trusted Pops. He told me all about his life before The Awakening and I sat there in the tower, smoking, and listening to every word as he sketched it out and became more than just a guy I knew from the pit but a real human being. I suppose that’s why I started admitting things to him. I knew it was dangerous, telling him about the others, but I did it anyway. I told him about my wife and my son, the girls from the ARM encampment, Diane and Jimmy and the tough time we’d had of it staying alive and staying one step ahead of ARM and the zombies. It felt good to talk about my friends. It made them seem not like ghosts in my head but flesh-and-blood people and my heart ached for them. One thing I didn’t mention was where they were going. I said nothing about the Catskills, and with what came later, I was glad for that.

  We heard someone coming up the stairs.

  It was Peel.

  Peel was the guy who kept bouncing water bottles off my head when I was in the pit. There was tension between us. He kept trying to intimidate me, I suppose, to establish his place in the pecking order that was far above mine. I wasn’t going for it. I didn’t know about the pecking order, I only knew that Peel was a pecker. So, just like in tenth grade, he glared at me and I glared back. He sneered at me, I sneered back. He puffed up his chest, so I puffed mine up bigger. We were like a couple apes snorting over territory.

  And here he was again.

  “Why didn’t you fools tell somebody we had LDPs massing out there?” he said. “You both thick in the fucking head or what?”

  LDPs was Brightwater Brigade-speak for Living Dead Persons. Maybe the Army as such no longer existed, but military acronyms for everything from zombies to toilets lived on.

  I gave him a limp-wristed salute. “Sergeant Peel. There are ELL-DEE-PEEs outside the wire.”

  “Shut the fuck up, smart-ass. I see that. I know it.”

  “So what’s your problem?”

  “My problem is you, Niles. You’re a mouthy shithead and I don’t like mouthy shitheads with no respect for authority.”

  “Respect is earned,” I told him. “You haven’t earned it.”

  He glared at me. “Just what have you assholes been doing?”

  “Talking about your mother. Wondering if she had any kids that lived.”

  Peel seemed to swell in his BDUs like a puff adder. You…motherfucker,” he snarled at me, pulling the Gerber knife from his web belt.

  I thumbed my TR-15 off safety with the selector switch. “Well, come on,” I told him. “Come and get some. Be a shame, though, if I had to shoot you while I was on sentry duty. But if you were trying to escape…”

  De-nutted, he put his knife away and backed down the ladder. “You just wait until Sonny Boy hears this.”

  “You won’t tell him, and if you do, he’s going to be pissed when I tell him you were sleeping and couldn’t be bothered. Why, I’ll bet he makes a spectacle out of your black ass.”

  Peel wasn’t about to report this to Sonny Boy and I knew it. He was terrified of Sonny Boy (and with good reason). Sonny Boy was, as I said, a sadist and his main entertainment were the spectacles he put on where he gathered the whole Brigade, publicly humiliating, and punishing transgressors. That could be anything from poor performance in combat to trying to escape the encampment to stealing a slice of bread or not tying your boots to military specifications.

  “We’ll see, Niles,” I heard him say. “We’ll see.”

  “He’s going to kill you, Steve,” Pops said when he was gone.

  I shrugged. “Maybe…then again, I just got this feeling it’s not going to work out in his favor at all.”

  Maybe I would have thought different if I had been aware of the fact that Peel had not just arrived. He had been at the base of the ladder in the dark, listening to everything we said.

  THE SPECTACLE

  When I woke up the next day, I should have known I was deep in the shit. My TR-15 was missing and every soldier in the barracks slept with his weapon, ammo, and full battle kit at the side of his cot so he could be ready to fight at a moment’s notice.

  My crusty eyes had barely registered this before Little John came in with a couple soldiers and they dragged me out of bed and out into the yard, across the compound to a windowless shack about the size of a small garage. It was out at the far side of the compound where the helicopters were parked and maintained. I noticed they had an Apache and two Blackhawks. I kept asking Little John what the hell it was all about, but he just told me to shut the fuck up. He was mad, real mad.

  When the door of the shack was open, he stabbed a finger in my face. “I trust you and you do this,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You lie to us. You fucking well lie to us.”

  Then, I was thrown into the shack, and the door slammed shut. It was locked and bolted from the other side and I heard Little John and his thugs walking away. Well, what had I done this time? I searched my mind but I couldn’t come up with a thing. He said I lied…lied about what?

  As I mused over these things, I noticed I wasn’t alone.

  There were two tough-looking Hispanic guys glaring at me. There was a woman with them. Up against the other wall, I saw a slim black dude who I knew for a fact was one of the Brigade soldiers. I had seen him around and he looked all right. I thought his name his name was Maurice.

  I went over to him and offered him a cigarette from my pack.

  “No thanks, man,” he said. “I got too much on my mind to enjoy the taste of ‘em anymore.”

  “What the hell is this all about?”

  The Hispanic guys laughed.

  The woman tittered with a stark, bitter sort of sound.

  Maurice sighed. “We’re victims. We’re transgressors. Or, in the words of that lunatic Sonny Boy, we’re heretics. We’ve fucked up and now they’re going to punish us. They’re going to make a spectacle of us. Need I say more?”

  I felt my heart drop into my stomach.

  Pops had told me enough about Sonny Boy’s spectacles to make me white with fear inside. The spectacles involved beatings, torture, and often death and dismemberment. Maurice seemed to read my mind and said, “If one or more of us make it out of this alive and with all our parts intact, it’ll be a miracle. An absolute heaven-sent miracle.”

  I still was trying to figure out what I had lied about.

  The two Hispanic guys looked like bad news. They kept staring at me as if they wanted to hurt me. They probably did. The woman just sat there, a heavy girl with tits like overripe honeydew melons, just staring at me with this totally bovine expression. She looked completely vacant, as if maybe somebody had forgotten to wind her up. One of her boyfriends was a muscular dude with a straw cowboy hat; the other was a shirtless guy who was pretty fat, pretty oily-looking. Had a sheen to his face like he’d rubbed it down with bear grease. His breasts were only incrementally smaller than the woman’s were. I got the feeling that Straw Hat worked for him.

  As I smoked there with Maurice, he told me that he had pulled a knife on Little John and he was pretty much fucked. This came right on the heels of stealing a carton of cigarettes from another guy in his squad. “He stole ‘em from me first, but him and Little John served together so anything I said was bullshit. Now I’m gonna die. Fuck of a thing, ain’t it, Steve? To survive this whole mess and then be murdered by Sonny Boy for entertainment. Shit. My whole life has been one mess after the other, one lost opportunity upon another, one bad choice followed by three more.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Maurice craned his head over and looked at me like it was none of my goddamn business. Then he shrugged and started.

  “My old man was just rotten. He hadn’t been much before my mother left us, but after that he
just got worse. He became some sort of…of…of human malignance. Maybe it was because his wife ran off and left him with me and Beth. Maybe that was it. Maybe he hated us both because we reminded him of her. Maybe that’s why he knocked us around when he was drunk, maybe that’s why he did worse things to Beth. Maybe he thought he could pay his wife back by tormenting her children. Is that fucked-up or what? That giving us pain would somehow make her suffer. Hell if I know. It’s something I thought about a lot and I’ve never come to any reasonable conclusion.

  “My mom left when I was twelve. And that was the catalyst for a lot of things. My old man started to drink and something in him went black. And me? I guess I went bad, too. I stuck an awl in a kid’s arm in seventh grade. I was busted for selling weed in ninth, grand theft auto when I was fourteen and a year of juvenile detention. I never knew why I had done those things at the time. Now I do, more or less. But not then. I went bad, and my old man became some kind of beast. Only Beth was unchanged by it all. She was sad that our mother ditched us, of course, but not to the point where she indulged in any, you know, reckless, self-destructive behavior like drugs and shit. She was still Beth. Worrying about the old man and me.

  “But when I came back from juvie hall, something had changed. I knew it right away. Man, I could feel it in the air of that house. Beth was pale and thin and her eyes were haunted. It didn’t take me long to figure it out…he was using her. I didn’t want to believe it, but I didn’t have a choice. No choice at all. I got livid over it and accosted the old man, demanded some answers. Really, I guess, what I wanted was for him to tell me I was wrong. But he wouldn’t tell me that. And he didn’t have to because I could see the truth in his boozy eyes. We got into a fight and I took the worst of it. Week after week, I confronted him and each time, he kicked my ass. But I was getting bigger and I was getting stronger. I was fifteen and wasn’t long before I kicked the shit out of him. I think I beat his ass three or four times before he threw in the towel. That last time I’d kicked him in the head so hard I thought I’d killed him. After that, I think he was afraid of me and it stopped him from touching Beth.

  “At least for awhile. I guess I didn’t mind him beating me when he was drunk. He’d gotten pretty good at it before I went to reform school. Beatings never bothered me. I’d taken them at school and I’d taken them at home. All they ever did was clear my head so I could see the sort of animals the world was populated by.” He laughed and shook his head. “I could live with it. Every time somebody knocked me around, I just came back that much meaner. But Beth…no, what he was doing to her was just too much. It made me sick. Beth was sweet, decent, and pure. She was like everything to me. The only bright spot in my fucked-up life. And when I found out what he’d been doing to her, I just kept going at him until I stomped him.

  “I thought I’d stopped it all. At least, I hoped so. Then, just after my sixteenth birthday, I came home from school. The house was quiet. The old man was downstairs in his workroom working on a hangover. And Beth? That’s what I was worried about, man. By then, you know, after all she’d been through, she wasn’t real outgoing. She was quiet and withdrawn. So the silence in the house wasn’t that surprising, I guess. But something about that silence was bothering me. I remember going down the hall and peering into her room. She was sitting on the bed. She stared off into space, her eyes all dead. She was thirteen, but she could’ve passed for forty. ‘Beth?’ I said quietly. ‘Beth?’ She heard my voice and cringed like a beaten dog. She crawled up to the headboard and shivered, whimpered. It broke my heart and by then it was pretty much in pieces anyway. But I knew. I knew exactly what had happened.

  “The old man had been at her again. Molesting her. I lost my mind then, and I don’t know if I ever got it back. I just went out of my head and ran downstairs, down to the basement where my father was doing what he did; drinking. He was half in the bag when I got down there. He saw the look in my eyes and he knew he was in for a thrashing that would leave him hospitalized. So he grabbed a monkey wrench off the pegboard and swung it at me. Not just to knock me cold, but to break open my skull. Well, he was drunk and his aim was a little off. He came around in an arc with the thing, missed me, and managed to shatter a few jars of nails. Then it happened. Then it just happened.”

  “What?” I asked him.

  “I killed him. I grabbed that scrawny motherfucker by the neck, and I didn’t stop squeezing until his eyes rolled back white and his face went purple. I murdered my own father. That was the only decent thing I ever, ever did.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t bother.

  After all the suffering this guy had gone through, here was his fucking reward; a plaything for Sonny Boy. No, it wasn’t right, but then again not much was.

  Having confessed his life’s anguish, Maurice fell silent and wouldn’t answer to anything I said. By then the others against the other wall had lost interest in staring me down. They sat there, smoked, and jabbered away in what sounded like Portuguese. I didn’t bother asking who they were or why they were there. Pops had told me one of the Biocon Units had taken some prisoners on a raid and I guessed these were three of them. They looked real desperate so I left them alone.

  I sat with my back against the wall. I must have dozed. When I woke later, Maurice was smoking one of my cigarettes. He looked over at me, smiling. I heard the grunting and puffing from the other side of the shack and there was a good reason for it: the fat guy was screwing the woman. He had her on her hands and knees and he was behind her, ramming into her while she made squeaking sounds like a mouse. Straw Hat watched Maurice and me closely, as if daring us to interfere.

  We didn’t.

  We just started laughing.

  It’s amazing what becomes funny after awhile, but that was definitely funny in ways I can’t even describe. There had been a time when such a thing would have offended me, people rutting like hogs in full view, but my mind had sunk so far with the indignities and misery of it all, that I would have laughed at a dancing, headless corpse.

  “Some people, man,” Maurice said. “They got no couth.”

  Maybe an hour later, Little John returned with a squad of soldiers and we were taken out into the yard. All the others, save the fence security detail, were in attendance. I saw Pop there. He met my eyes and his face was full of pain.

  It started with Maurice.

  They grabbed him and I made a fool move to interfere. That got me knocked to the ground, but nothing more. They dragged Maurice to a pole that was sticking out of the ground like something you tied a tetherball to. Maurice’s ankles were tied together as were both hands in front of him. He was roped to the pole. He did not even fight. That’s the thing I remember the most: he did not even fight. Death came for him and he accepted it.

  “Sweet God above,” Sonny Boy said, looking up at the sky, “why does it always come to this? Why is my patience put to the test? Why do they make me do the terrible things you forbid?”

  I noticed then that he walked with a cane. One of his legs was a little stiff and he had trouble getting around on it. Bracing himself, he swung his cane at Maurice’s face two, three, four times. Maurice did nothing but grunt as if pain and degradation were all par for the course and he expected no more. He was barely conscious by then, blood hanging in ribbons from his mouth, his face set with rising purple welts, one eye nearly closed. His head slumped forward.

  Sonny Boy slapped him. “Have the sense, son, to pay attention to me. As the Lord is my witness, you don’t pay strict attention and I’ll pull your fucking intestines out with my bare hands.”

  Maurice looked at him. He must have seen death.

  “You’ve broken the rules again and again. You’ve been warned, threatened, punished…but still you persist in trying me.”

  “I only took…what belonged to me in the first place.”

  Sonny Boy looked angry. “Did you now? See, I don’t believe that, sir. Rare is it that I look upon a man, a child of the Lord God
, and see utter deception, but in you I see nothing but. And as Jesus did cast forth devils, so will I, so…will…I.”

  Sonny Boy started whistling “Amazing Grace” of all goddamn things and pulled out a folding-blade Gerber knife with a serrated blade. You should have seen his eyes. They were the eyes of some primeval beast ready to take a sacrifice of virgin meat. They had gone from gunmetal gray to the black of mineshafts and sealed crypts, reflective with hellfire. There was nothing remotely human in them, just that smoldering blackness of the pit.

  Maurice said something. I don’t remember what. I think he begged God for deliverance or something.

  Sonny Boy, still whistling, seized Maurice’s right wrist and pressed the blade of his knife into the knuckle of the first finger. Maurice started screaming and writhing. Nevertheless, the ropes held him. A tiny river of blood ran from the wound and down his thumb. With a stern, slow motion, Sonny Boy drew the knife down, down, until he had peeled the skin to the meat all the way to the fingernail. A simple slice of the blade freed the flap of skin and it dropped to the ground like a shaving of whittled birch.

  Maurice slumped, almost going out cold.

  He was like something without bones.

  Sonny Boy was a slimy, demented reptile and he peeled the skin from both of Maurice’s hands, then he cut out his eyes. When Maurice went out cold, he cut out his tongue and then ended it by stabbing him in the chest about fifteen times. “Take what is yours, Lord, for we have no more need of it.”

  Maurice’s corpse was thrown over the wire. The zombies went after it right away. There weren’t as many as the night before, but still a dozen or so stragglers and they made short work of the body.

  Sonny Boy looked over at his congregation. “He shall be uplifted and reborn and delivered bodily into the house of the Lord. Amen.”

  The crowd said, “Amen.”

  It was sickening and twisted. Like something from Children of the Corn or one of those pagan sacrifice type movies. I couldn’t believe I was seeing it. But I was and my turn was coming.