Necrophobia - 02 Read online

  The three Hispanics were next.

  The woman was tied to the pole.

  The two men were bound and gagged, made to kneel at her feet.

  “You three were caught poaching in our territory. You stole from us. You fired at us. You killed one of my men. These are the charges against you. How does thee answer them?” he said like some kind of deranged inquisitor.

  The two men were trying talk beneath their gags, but the woman was the only one we could hear. “We only took what we had to survive. We weren’t robbing. We weren’t stealing. We were just trying to survive.” She was breathless with horror. “Please…you must believe that. We only want protection. We only want to be part of your community. Can’t you see that?”

  “Ah, yes, I see,” said Sonny Boy, leaning on his cane. “You are the meek and the mild. Bless you, for you have done His work all your days and what more can be asked of a gentle spirit?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “You lie! You blaspheme!”

  “No, no, no…”

  “Tell me the truth,” Sonny Boy said, “before I cut your heathen fucking tongue out.”

  The woman was hysterical, completely hysterical. What I was seeing was probably the sort of last act that played out when some twisted, psychotic witchfinder had found his prey. One of the soldiers handed him a sawed-off shotgun. The woman began to scream and sob.

  “Shut that snatch up,” Sonny Boy told the soldiers, “or I’ll slide the barrel of this hogleg up her yummy hole and spray the sky above with her goddamn ovaries.” He motioned toward the two men. The soldiers obediently cut their gags free. They cut the woman free, too, and she fell into the dirt. “You, Poncho, and you, Pedro, shut your whore up! I will not listen to her profanity! And if you boys think I jest, you better guess again, because I’m the meanest motherfucker in town. I am fearfully and wonderfully made, and you puppies had better believe that, as God is my witness, praise glory. Now, you tell your whore to shut her fucking beaner mouth and go lay by her dish, or I’ll kill her dead as Jesus nailed to the sumbitching cross, and when she’s cold, I’ll fuck her corpse harder than a poodle on a pant leg, amigo.”

  That’s how utterly fucking insane this guy was. The crowd just stared, wide-eyed; totally enraptured by what this maniac was doing and saying. I can’t say that it was all of them, because Pops and a few others looked totally sickened, but the rest were fascinated by the spectacle.

  “How much have you stolen from us, Sanchez?” Sonny Boy asked.

  “Just some food,” Straw Hat said.

  “Did you kill my soldier?” Sonny Boy asked the fat guy.

  “No, no, no, it wasn’t us,” Chubby said.

  “I’ll ask you again,” Sonny Boy told him, “and this time you mother-raping chilies better goddamned well answer me straight or there’s gonna be two less bean niggers in town come daybreak.”

  It was an atrocity. And what made it worse was when Straw Hat crawled forward, head bowed, whining at Sonny Boy’s feet like a whipped dog. The fat guy did the same. It was as if they were in church, begging forgiveness.

  “Fuck are you doing, Sanchez?” Sonny Boy said. “Who told you and Frito Bandito here to lick my feet and grovel?”

  “Spare us, please spare us!” the woman cried.

  “Yes, let us live! Please let us live, we only want to live, we don’t want to die,” Straw Hat said, the words tumbling out of his mouth, one right atop the other.

  “No shit? Praise Jesus, you are one dumb cunting beaner, you know that? How about after we’re done here, I make you a three-course dinner and let you fuck my mother?”

  “No. No food. Just our lives.”

  Chubby looked up real slow. “I’m not hungry, I only want to—”

  By this point, they were both out of their heads and had no idea what they were saying. I decided then and there, I wouldn’t go out like that. When the soldiers dragged me over there, I was going to go shit-wild and make them shoot me or beat me to death. It was the only way out.

  Sonny Boy glared down at his two victims. “There is death in the pot and you crazy shits are trying to be funny. You know what? I don’t think you’re funny at all. And I don’t think the good Lord above is amused in the least. But I’ll tell you what I do think would be funny. That would be to watch you two and your whore die, your brains dripping from the fence. Wouldn’t that be a real knee-slapper?”

  Sonny Boy looked like some kind of monster. All I could see was the pink weal of his mouth, those yellow teeth. And his eyes, praise Jesus, wide and black and unblinking, just completely reptilian and merciless.

  “You know what’s even funnier?” he said to the crowd. “That’s watching a couple of heathen two-stepping Texican chili-niggers like these boys do one another. They act like they don’t like that sort of thing, but sweet Jesus, they do. Once they start dog-humping one another, it’s like happy hour at a Tijuana leather bar…more grunting and puffing than Valentine’s Day at a Arkansas sheep farm. Enough to make you sick, Jesus and Mary, yes. Hey, Sanchez? Would you like to perform for us?”

  Straw Hat looked at him. “Fuck you,” he said.

  I felt the flesh at the back of my neck go tight; something went to sauce in my belly. Here it comes, I thought. Here it goddamned well comes.

  “What you say?” Sonny Boy asked, those eyes black like marbles dipped in burning crude.

  “I just say, man, that it wasn’t”

  Too late, he never finished that. Sonny Boy chuckled low in his throat and shot him point blank with the sawed-off. I had never seen anyone get hit by buckshot at close range before. I don’t think I ever want to again. Straw Hat’s face seemed to disappear in a fleshy, cartoon blur. His face, his skull, even his scalp. They went to liquid and sprayed against the sandbags behind him like something a dog had hacked out after chewing on a dead woodchuck. About a split second after that, Straw Hat’s corpse fell backward in the dirt.

  “Guess I might as well kill you, too,” Sonny Boy said to Chubby who was crying and whimpering, asking God for deliverance and mercy and he made quite a sight with Straw Hat’s gore splattered across his face. But maybe bringing God into it saved his life, for Sonny Boy didn’t shoot him. Instead, he leaned over and shouted: “WHEN YOU DROPPED OUT OF YER MAMA’S ASS, YOU FILTHY BEANER, SHE SHOULD’VE FLUSHED YOU WITH THE REST OF THE TURDS! BUT SHE DIDN’T AND THAT HAS BROUGHT YOU TO TODAY, WHICH IS A BAD DAY FOR YOU, SON, A REAL SHITSTORM IN THE HIGH SUNNY COTTON…BUT JUST REMEMBER THAT TOMORROW CAN BE WORSE! YOU TOUCH ANYTHING OF MINE AGAIN AND I CAN GUARANTEE YOU IT WILL BE, AS CHRIST JESUS IS MY WITNESS!”

  He looked over at the soldiers. “Let him and his whore go.”

  They were both thanking Sonny Boy profusely as they were cut free. They just didn’t get it. They didn’t get it all. Not until they were marched to the gates at gunpoint. They screamed and begged, but it was no good. They were thrown to the zombies outside, who took them down immediately, and began to feed on them as they lay screaming and thrashing.

  It was my turn.

  Peel was standing there, smiling. He was all teeth. “That was some story you told Pops last night,” he said. “I enjoyed every minute of it. Sonny Boy liked it too, when I told him.”

  The soldiers dragged me over to Sonny Boy. They didn’t make any attempt to tie or gag me. I was waiting for that. That’s when I was going to force their hand. I figured I could get free of them long enough to get my hands on Sonny Boy. Then they would have to kill me.

  “Steve,” Sonny Boy said, sighing, wiping sweat from his face. “I’m all done in, you know that? I don’t have the energy to kill you. I’ll just ask you why you lied to me? Why you didn’t tell me that you had friends that were still alive, or a son out there.”

  “They’re dead for all I know. ARM got them.”

  “You think.”

  “Yes.”

  “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts,” he said to me. “Yes sir. Them Jews killed Christ, you know. Sure as a razor slits a belly, t
hose Jews killed the son of God. What do you think about that, Jack?”

  “I think we should stay on topic and get this done with,” I told him with foolish bravado.

  Once again, my mouth got me into the shit. It was the catalyst that he’d been looking for.

  The change that came over him was not only hot and volcanic, but also instantaneous. In the old movies, when the mad doctor drank the potion it took a few moments for him to become a monster, but not Sonny Boy. He went feral, spitting and slavering. “I take you into my community and this is how you repay me, you goddamn piece of shit! You motherfucking dirtball cunting sonofabitch! You lie to me! You keep things from me! You insult me!” he bellowed at me, foaming at the mouth like a mad hound. “But there will be a payback, God yes, there will be a fucking payback for this you slimy dirtbag cocksucking sister-fucking SONOFAWHORE”

  Well, Sonny Boy went nuts and started beating me with his cane like some mangy dog. And I mean, beating me. For a guy with a bad leg, he was really something. He was fast and strong, hitting out at me like lightning striking. That fast, that furious, that devastating. He caught me twice in the head. In the belly. In both arms. Whenever I tried to block him, he hit me somewhere else. I could feel that cane landing like an iron boom, a Billy club, seeming to come from every conceivable direction at the same time with a whistling drone like a cloud of pissed off killer bees buzzing in for the kill.

  Whistle. SMACK.

  Whistle. SMACK.

  I could feel that cane glancing off my back, my shoulders, and my head. Hammering into my arms as I covered my face, all the time I was screaming, “STOP IT, GODDAMN YOU, STOP IT!”

  But Sonny Boy didn’t hear.

  Or didn’t want to.

  And the cane kept coming and my skin was pounded raw and I couldn’t take it anymore and then I saw red, blood red. Sonny Boy swung that cane and I caught it in midair and pulled it right out of his hands, maybe his arm right out of socket with it, too, because he let out this high, keening squeal. The sudden and devastating nature of his attack had kicked the beast in me down into the cellar, but the pain yanked its leash, and it came clawing back up, snapping its teeth.

  I almost got him.

  Sonny Boy flopped over in the dirt and I raised the cane to strike just as a rifle butt caught me in the back of the head, pitching me senseless into the dirt. I was barely conscious. I thought Sonny Boy would kill me on the spot. But he didn’t. His moods were 100% unpredictable. He was helped to his feet and he jabbed me with his cane.

  “What spunk! What guile! What killer instinct!” He laughed and the crowd laughed, too. “I think, praise Jesus, we have found ourselves one mad dog and one real soldier at last!” He laughed again. The crowd laughed again. “Now, if you would be so kind, get this foul wreckage out of my sight.”

  I was dragged off by my feet, face-first through the dirt.

  When I came to, I was in my bunk and Pops was cleaning my face, wiping away dirt and blood and salving my numerous contusions. “You are lucky to be alive,” he said. “I think you shocked him. Nobody ever goes after him like that. I think you scared the shit out of him and the only way he could save face was by treating it like a joke only the two of you were in on.”

  Some joke.

  Some goddamn joke.

  My whole body hurt as if I’d gone ten rounds with George Foreman.

  BURN CREW

  If you’ve ever seen any of those awful video clips of Mauthausen or Bergen-Belsen that show huge heaps of corpses being plowed into common graves by bulldozers or tossed up into the back of dump trucks like sheaves of wheat, then you’ll have a feel for what I did for the next week. My punishment was not at an end, you see. I “joined” the burn crew. Sonny Boy, being the Christian saint that he was, gave me a couple days to knit up and work out the kinks in my body…then it was off to work.

  From Murray Hill to Hell’s Kitchen to Chelsea, it was the same every day: Little John would come into the punishment barracks just before first light, screaming his head off. “C’mon! C’mon! Get out of those fucking racks! Let’s go! Let’s go!” If we didn’t move fast enough, he’d cap a few rounds off from the silverplate Glock 9 he wore in a low slung holster like he was channeling Patton. We would pull ourselves into our dirty, stinking white biocon suits, relieve ourselves at the port-a-shitter and make for the mess Quonset, where we chowed powdered eggs, hardtack biscuits, and lots of coffee. They kept the coffee in huge military-style pots. What was left from the day before was just re-heated for the burn crew until the stuff was so strong it would curl your toes.

  The burn crew was a punishment detail, so you weren’t allowed to shave and by that point, after many weeks without a razor, I was sporting a good growth of black fur on my face. Little John would give us maybe fifteen minutes to shove food in our faces, then we’d pile into trucks with Bradley escorts and make for the corpse piles. It was autumn by then and the mornings were cold. You could watch the sun rise yellow and tired over the dead city, your breath coming out in white clouds.

  There was only one woman on the crew, a seventeen-year old girl named Doreen, who had stormy green eyes, the leggy athletic physique of a long-distance runner, and the smooth brown skin of her Nigerian forebears. She was a pretty girl, but intense and fidgety, cruel around the mouth and hot-tempered. She carried a knife and had cut three men with it already when they made a play for her. Which was one of the reasons she was on the burn crew. Nobody tried to take the knife from her, because she went ballistic when any man invaded her personal space. She was better off left alone. A hard-worker with a clear and calculating mind, she did not like men in general. That was a little gift from growing up in Bed-Sty over in Brooklyn. On her fourteenth birthday, she had lost her virginity: she was gang-raped by no less than ten hoodlums. The same ones that had murdered her brother for standing up to them.

  She had been on the burn crew for many weeks by then, and her beautiful green eyes were simply dead. Although she didn’t like men, she warmed up to me, probably because I didn’t look at her like she was a piece of rich chocolate and I had a sweet tooth. I just looked at her as I did the others in the punishment detail, with pity. We were all wading through the same shit, breathing the same fetid reek, and handling the same flyspecked cold cuts. All we had going was each other. While we worked, shitheads like my friend Sgt. Peel would stand around with their carbines, looking for a reason to add us to the corpse pile.

  “Just pretend you’re a garbage man,” Doreen told me. “Pretend you just taking out the trash. That’s all. Don’t think no more about it. Nothing but fish-heads and kitchen waste, dirty diapers and rotten lettuce and eggshells and slimy noodles. That’s all these things are. You think that way, man, you might come out of this sane.”

  Doreen and I worked side-by-side dragging bodies and tossing them into heaps. The soldiers like Peel—especially Peel—made lewd comments because we were together a lot. But there was nothing between us other than friendship. We got close, but not in the way they thought. I think Doreen trusted me more than she trusted the others, but even if I got too close to her, she flinched. Her back went up. Her eyes narrowed. Her teeth snapped together. No, even had I been interested, she was too young for me and the trauma she was sitting on was molten and burning like lava. Touching her was like trying to pet a hungry tiger, only the foolish and suicidal attempted it.

  Wrangling cold cuts as we did, I told her about my family, and she seemed to like that I shared it with her and no other, details I did not even trust Pops with. And because I opened up to her, she opened up to me. That’s how I found out how she lost her virginity, and that’s how I found out about her brother. Hers was a typical inner city story. She had no idea who her father was. Her mother had been a heroin addict who died in the basement of a tenement with a needle hanging out of her arm. Doreen had inherited her mother’s looks and her father’s green eyes. The only thing her mother would tell her about him was that he was probably white, in that she’d had
a number of white “boyfriends” at the time, many of which were heroin traffickers.

  We were over on the Upper West Side just off Central Park on West 73rd, a stone’s throw from where that freak had gunned down John Lennon. They were hundreds of corpses in the streets, the end result of a raid by Brightwater’s Brigade. Clouds of flies rose from them thick as smoke. The air was heavy and moist with the greening stink. After we chased the dogs off, we got down to work. Whenever I didn’t move fast enough, Peel—still wearing that same shit-eating grin since Sonny Boy had caned me—would put a few rounds over my head. At first it worked because I knew he could shoot me at any time, but after awhile, five days into it, I only worked slower when he did it.

  “I’m gonna cut him,” Doreen told me, as we dragged corpses green and slimy over to the heap. “Peel’s been eyeing me and I know what he’s thinking. He’s gonna get cut.”

  “You’ll get shot. They’ll waste you.”

  She looked down at the pulpous, oozing faces at our feet. “And what’s the downside to that?”

  She had a point.

  Pops was with us. He had been with us for three days, and whether that was because he was my friend, or he’d stole a pickle or something, nobody knew and he wasn’t saying. “Don’t do it, Doreen,” he told her. “Don’t give ‘em the satisfaction of thinking they broke you.”

  She said nothing to that, but I could see frustration in her eyes.

  “These look like ARM bodies,” Pops said. “They got those funny fatigues on. What did you call them, Steve?”

  “Russian shadow camouflage. It looks like it anyway.”

  “I wonder what kind of battle went down here to create so many dead men?” Pops wondered aloud.

  “I don’t see any men,” Doreen said, trying to drag off a corpse by the ankles. It was soft like boiled chicken and the legs pulled right out of their sockets. She shrugged and dragged off what she had. “No men here. Nothing but coffee grounds and chicken bones and moldy cabbages. That’s it.”