Necrophobia 4 Read online

  “You fucking asshole! Let me loose! Let me goddamn loose!”

  I fought and strained and got red in the face but it all did me little good. I wasn’t going anywhere and I wasn’t going to do anything. Not until Dr. Cripps decided otherwise.

  “Where’s Sabelia?”

  “She’s upstairs living a peaceful, productive life with the others in the bunker. When KIA-9 finishes its appointed task, I’ll let you go up and live with her. In fact, in the new Baneberry you and she will live together as man and wife.”

  “We have lives outside of here.”

  “You have nothing until I say otherwise.”

  God, how I wanted to beat his priggish, self-satisfied face to a bloody pulp. The satisfaction it would have brought me. But I wasn’t going to be doing anything like that in the foreseeable future. I was a rat in a trap. I was a convict in a cage. I was an inmate in an insane asylum and I could fight and rage all I wanted but it would get me nowhere. I had to think. I didn’t know exactly how he had accomplished turning us into killing machines. It had something to do with Agent 17 and other psychotropic drugs, behavior modification and post-hypnotic suggestion. Probably other techniques as well. All of them evil and inhumane. It was one thing to torture the body, but to scar the mind…the only true place of privacy that any of us really have. That was unforgivable.

  He had a syringe in his hand. He drew some clear fluid from a tiny bottle. “Nearly time to go back to work,” he said. “But have no fear, you’re nearly done.”

  From what I understood of brainwashing and the like, which was very little, such things required a trigger to activate them. Once Cripps brought us out of our drugged-up fugues, he probably said some word to us, some trigger phrase, that would activate our programming. But I thought I had read somewhere that American POWs that underwent rigid political indoctrination and drug-induced brainwashing techniques at the hands of the North Koreans and Chinese had created something like a counter-trigger. This was just a word or phrase that when you encountered it, recognized it, and said it aloud, it would bring you back to reality and make you remember who you really were or at least question everything you were doing, seeing, and believing. It created a disassociation with reality, self-critical thinking. It was one of the few ways to undermine conditioning.

  “You’re going to go to sleep again,” Cripps said as he wiped an alcohol swab on my arm. “When you wake, you’ll go to work.”

  Think, think, think! I told myself.

  A counter-trigger. I needed a counter-trigger. I knew it had to be specific. Not floor or wall or tree. It had to be very specific. Once I had it, I would keep repeating it to myself, creating a neural pathway and once I saw the object when I was out with KIA-9, it would confuse me. It would begin to erode the conditioning. It might make me remember or it might just scare me or panic me.

  I thought of Ricki.

  I thought of her beautiful blue eyes.

  That was it.

  Beautiful blue eyes, beautiful blue eyes, beautiful blue eyes. Remember! Remember! Beautiful blue eyes. When you see them, you have to run. When you see them you have to escape. Beautiful blue eyes, beautiful blue eyes…

  The needle went in and I began to feel loose and limp right away. I could barely keep my eyes open.

  “I’m going to count back from ten,” Cripps said. “When I reach four, you’ll be gone…”

  Beautiful blue eyes.

  “…eight, seven, six…”

  Beautiful blue eyes.

  “…five…four…”

  I slipped away into the darkness, beautiful blue eyes watching over me.

  BAIT

  We were out in the streets again playing our games and having our fun. KIA-9 was actually KIA-6 now that Smitty was MIA and probably dead and Big Bird and Little Gun were most assuredly dead. Doc Feelgood said as far as he knew, there would be no replacements for them. Not in the near future anyway.

  “So who gives us our orders?” Zulu said.

  We all just looked at her. We were shocked and nearly confused by what she said. It was practically a revelation. So who gives us our orders? It had never occurred to me and I don’t think it had ever occurred to the others either. Who did give us our orders? Funny, but when we marched out of the bunker it seemed like we’d already been given our orders and there was no question about what we had to do.

  Doc swallowed, his eyes glazed. “We just…we just get them. What kind of question is that anyhow?”

  Zulu shrugged. “Seems like when you’re in the army or something, somebody has to give you orders. Maybe that person would know if we’re getting replacements.”

  “They didn’t tell me,” Doc said.

  “Who are they?” Scales asked.

  Doc looked like a cornered animal. I thought he would bare his teeth and start slavering at any moment. He didn’t, of course, but he was riled and we could all see that. “You don’t have to worry about that. Those aren’t questions you can ask.”

  “But you’re in charge,” Zulu said. “When we have questions, we’re supposed to ask you.”

  We all nodded. Even Mad Mike who never said a word moved in a little closer, grunting in agreement.

  Doc was shaking. “You better watch what you’re doing,” he said to Zulu, his hand slipping down to the 9mm Beretta in its holster. “You can’t ask these things. It’s dangerous. If you’re a threat, then you have to go.”

  Zulu brought up her M4. “I’m not going.”

  Doc’s hand shook. “Lower that weapon.”

  “Get your hand away from that gun,” she told him. “If I go, I don’t go alone.”

  His hand moved away from it. We learned at that moment the power of asking questions, of putting those in power on the spot. It confused us thinking that way, but I know it not only excited me but thrilled me. I think the others felt the same way. Here was a new kick. Something to beat back the boredom of constant fighting and killing that no longer were the sort of high they had once been. But the more the idea of asking questions occurred to me the more one of those headaches began to blossom in the back of my skull.

  Doc didn’t like the idea of us all turning on him.

  What he liked even less was Zulu standing up to him.

  Maybe Dr. Cripps had not programmed him on how to deal with open defiance and subversion. Maybe there were limits to his control. Of course, none of that occurred to me at the time. If it had, my conditioning and that of the others would have broken right open.

  Diversion.

  Doc Feelgood decided that’s what we needed. Some good old diversion. Some fun and games to straighten our thinking out and blow off some of our steam.

  Mongol and Scales grabbed a man, some throwaway who was wandering about with a paper bag of odds and ends. He kept saying, “Mut-mut-mut-mut-mut.” No doubt he’d been emotionally disturbed long before Necrophage made the rounds. He was bound and gagged and shoved before us until Mongol, out on point, found a couple zombies out walking around.

  We took the man and tied him to a STOP sign. As the rest us found a good place to watch the festivities from—the top of a bus that was nearly torn in half from machinegun fire—Mongol went and led the zombies in. The walking dead will follow you easier than a stray dog. He just showed himself to them and right away he had three new friends. He led them on in and then disappeared. The man tied to the STOP sign, his gag off, kept going, “Mut-mut-mut-mut-mut.” That drew the zombies in and we sat there watching them as they approached our living bait pile.

  There were three of them, two women and a man. One of the women was middle-aged and wore fuzzy bunny slippers and nothing else. Gaping black ulcers were eaten through her purple-green skin. A couple stray curlers bounced in her hair. Her nose was gone, decayed down into a grisly hollow, her eyes blank white. The other woman was younger, college-age maybe, wearing skinny jeans and a gore-encrusted red-and-black flannel shirt that was torn open to the waist. One pert, greening breast poked out. The man, naked and fat, had
a section of his belly missing. He looked like stout, bulbous mushroom somebody had taken a bite out of.

  “Mut-mut-mut-mut-mut,” the throwaway said, unconcerned about the zombies. More interested at something in the sky the rest of us simply could not see.

  The woman in the skinny jeans got there first.

  She wasted no time. Presentation mattered little to her. Probably no more than taste did…and the throwaway couldn’t have tasted so good. It looked like he hadn’t had a bath in years. But it didn’t bother her. She bit into his throat and blood squirted into her face. The throwaway made a high, keening sound like a locust as she chewed a flap free and stepped back, trying to shove the entire mass of meat into her mouth. She was a petite little thing, probably quite pretty and desirable in life. The sort of lady who probably ate a lot of salads, fruit, nuts, and tuna fish, hit the gym four times a week. She would have been a petite eater as well, little nibbles and bites, never enough to make a mess or get crumbs on her lap. A very precise little thing. Which made it all that much more amusing to watch her trying to shove all that meat in her mouth at once.

  She gobbled and chomped and slobbered.

  We laughed.

  This was great comedy for us.

  The man got to the throwaway next who was bleeding out pretty quickly. Skinny Jeans must have bitten out his carotid. Just as he was moving in for a little taste, the other woman—Bunny Slippers—shoved him out of the way. When she tried to go in for a bite, he clubbed her on the back of the head with one big fist and drove her to her knees. He was second after all. But as he tore a chunk of flesh from the throwaway’s shoulder, Bunny Slippers bit his leg. He just kicked her aside. He was hungry and he was taking no shit.

  Now Skinny Jeans came in.

  She didn’t bother fighting with the other two. As the throwaway stopped muttering and went limp, she ripped his shirt open and buried her teeth in his belly. Now Bunny Slippers wanted some of that, too. Instead of fighting Skinny Jeans, she worked in tandem with her as they chewed on his belly, ripping out great shanks of bloody meat. Then they tore him open. From our vantage point, it looked like they unzipped him. His bowels fell from his abdomen and they greedily went after them which attracted the fat guy—Mushroom Man—and the three of them had a real feast. The sound of them chewing and slobbering was enough to make your guts roll over.

  Skinny Jeans got bored, though.

  She ripped the guys pants open and filled her mouth with what was between his legs, tearing it out by the roots.

  “Damn,” Scales said. “That’s gonna leave a mark.”

  It was rare that we sat around and watched the festivities like that. Usually, we just blew the deadheads away, but this time we got to see it all in graphic, clinical detail and I’m pretty sure that as hard and ruthless as we were, none of us were craving any lunch by the time it was over.

  And it took time.

  The zombies were absolutely gluttonous. They ate and ate and ate, tearing and clawing and biting. They couldn’t shove meat in their mouths fast enough. They were such mindless slobs that half of what they chewed on fell out, but there was always more, plenty more. I think by the time they tore the throwaway’s arms and legs off we were getting kind of bored with it all. The remains of their meal were scattered all over the ground and all over them. They kept at it until there was nothing but a set of bloody bones tied to the STOP sign.

  “I’m gonna have some fun,” Mongol said.

  Before Doc could say anything, he climbed off the bus and went tearing after the zombies. Gore dropped from their blood-smeared mouths when they saw him coming. Mushroom Man shambled in his direction and Mongol whipped out his two machetes. As Mushroom Man reached for him, Mongol did some of his famous chop sockey moves and sliced one of the guy’s arms off with an overhand arc of a blade. Mushroom Man was inconvenienced by the loss of his limb, but he was hardly done in.

  “’Tis but a scratch,” Scales said and we all laughed.

  Mushroom man went after Mongol with a vengeance and Mongol barely got out of his way. He ducked under his clutching hand, nearly tripped over his own feet, and when Mushroom Man reached for him, he chopped his other arm off. The move was nice. We all had to admit that. Taking an arm off with a single blow takes practice.

  Mongol kept circling around Mushroom Man to keep him off balance. Without arms, the zombie’s bite was the only real danger.

  “Shit, man,” Scales said. “Ain’t nothing but a flesh wound.”

  We laughed again.

  Mongol wasted no more time. He slashed open Mushroom Man’s belly and his guts seemed to explode from the wound, slopping to his feet in green and black loops of rot. At the same moment, he projectile vomited out a gushing stream of gore that struck Mongol right in the chest. We couldn’t help laughing at that.

  Mongol was pissed, pawing stringy bits of tissue from his tac vest. “YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” he cried out and went at Mushroom Man full steam, chopping and slashing him until he hit the ground. Even then, Mongol kept hacking until there was nothing but a lot of blood and meat and bones scattered about.

  “Guess we’re gonna have to call this a draw,” Scales said.

  By then, the other two were bearing down on Mongol. He took off the head of Bunny Slippers with one devastating arc of the blade in his right hand and split Skinny Jeans’ noggin right down to the chin with an overhand chop. So much for that. They both hit the ground, flopping a bit but going still eventually.

  Then our fun was at an end and Doc ordered us down off the bus. Break time was over. He broke us up into two-person teams—me and Zulu, himself and Mad Mike, Scales and Mongol. We went up the street and started going house to house looking for someone to kill. We saw few zombies and those we did see we put down right away.

  We came to an ordinary little two-story house. There was nothing special about it. Nothing special at all. But as we started looking around on the main floor, we found empty cans of food—pork-and-beans, Franco-American spaghetti—on the kitchen counter.

  “Somebody’s been living here,” Zulu said. “Mother thinks we better find out who.”

  “Agreed.”

  We checked out all the rooms down there. We found a bedroom at the back that looked like it had been occupied recently. There was a sleeping bag unzipped on the bed and some clothes on the dresser. We found nothing in the closet, so up the stairs we went. Maybe we should have been more careful, but we had been through so much action by that point and came away again and again with nothing but a few cuts and bruises, that we were cocky. Maybe not even cocky so much as complacent.

  Zulu started up the stairs and I was right behind her.

  I don’t think either of us expected anything. So when she got to the landing and turned a right into the hallway up there, nobody was as surprised as we were when two rounds hit her point-blank. The Kevlar of her vest stopped one, but the second went right through her throat and she made a sort of gasping sound and hit the floor, blood pooling around her.

  I dashed up there, diving low because I knew the shooter was waiting for me.

  I heard the gun crack off a few more rounds that chewed into the wall above me. I squeezed the trigger of my M4 before I had even hit the floor, drilling some teenage kid with a three-round burst that threw him off his feet like he’d been kicked. By the time I got to him and kicked the .30-06 away from him, he was already dead. One of the slugs must have clipped his heart.

  I went back to Zulu.

  She was dead, too. I saw that right away. The round that went through her throat had taken out her jugular. The .30-06 is a good weapon at long range, but close in like that it’s devastating. Most of Zulu’s neck was blasted away and sprayed against the wall. The slug went right through her without even slowing down, it seemed. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do for her. I kissed her bloody lips, knowing, if nothing else, that she had not suffered. My guess is she had maybe lived a few seconds after she hit the floor, but certainly no more than that.

&
nbsp; I crouched there by her, lighting a cigarette and thinking about her. I liked her. If I’d had a friend in KIA-9 it was probably her. My emotions fought with themselves. I think I needed to cry over a fallen comrade, but at the same time I was unable to. My programming wouldn’t allow it. So I smoked and looked down at her beautiful ebony face and huge dark eyes and was unable to feel anything but confusion.

  Doc called in over the Icom, but I ignored him.

  Fuck him.

  Fuck them all.

  And, most assuredly, fuck us.

  I finished my cigarette and crushed it out on the floor. It was then that I had the feeling that I was not alone. I don’t recall hearing anything. It was just a feeling, a stirring of that vague sixth sense we all feel now and again. Someone was up there with me. I looked down at Zulu and I knew that whoever was there was going to die. Only I wasn’t going to use my rifle. I was going to use my knife on them.

  I pulled my K-Bar and death was all over me.

  It owned me.

  I wanted to kill like I had never wanted to kill before. I checked the bathroom, one of the bedrooms. Nothing. I was tense, frustrated, angry. If whoever was hiding up there had slipped away from me, then I was never going to forgive myself. There was one more bedroom at the end of the hall and I went there, breathing hard with rage, the knife in my hand. I kicked open the door and I don’t think even a hail of bullets could have stopped me.

  There was no one in there.

  Then I yanked open the closet door and there was a girl hiding in there. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. She cried out and I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her out into the light coming in through the window. She squealed and fought and I slapped her across the face. I jerked her head back by the hair and brought my knife in to slit her throat.

  Her face was wet with tears, snot coming from her nose.

  She looked up at me with big, crystal blue eyes.

  Lovely eyes.

  And something in my head snapped.

  The blue eyes.

  Beautiful blue eyes.