Necrophobia - 02 Read online

  Sure, that’s it. Nothing but garbage. Nothing but human trash. Human trash that was bloated purple and oozing corpse-slime and gouts of black drainage that spilled onto your boots whenever you pulled them free of the pavement with that sticky sound that went right up your spine and coiled low in your guts. When you tossed the bags of human trash up onto the garbage heap, sometimes they’d burst and things would run out of them in gray, putrescent rivers, blowing hot plumes of corpse gas right in your face. The rats loved the trash. They fed on it, nested in it, swarmed in it and defended it when you got too close. You’d drag a swollen bag of trash away and sometimes there would be half a dozen fat gray rats hanging from it by their teeth. The trash got full of worms, too. When you grabbed a human sack, they would come boiling out in writhing masses like white rice and stringy white spaghetti. They would get up your sleeves and inside your gloves and after awhile, you stopped noticing. Just like you didn’t notice the ravaged, well-chewed faces or the bird-pecked husks and empty eye sockets. You got so hard after awhile that you didn’t even notice when those flesh-bags split their seams in your hands and spilled all over you or when squirming fetal rats dropped out of split bellies or red worms slid out from between green-speckled ass cheeks.

  By three, we had the garbage piled up neat and high as Little John liked it. We had a few more bags to throw up there, but we had most of it done. Pops was way too old for grueling physical work like that, especially the kind that made your belly flip and flop. It was wearing on him, breaking him down; aging him the way I think it aged us all.

  We sat on a bench at the border of the lot, Doreen and Pops and I. We smoked. We all smoked. Even people who didn’t smoke learned how to smoke when you handled the cold cuts. It was the only thing that got the stink out of your mouth and nose. Even a dirty ashtray smells like honey and roses compared to what we were digging in.

  “Amazing,” Pops said. “Utterly and completely amazing. No life, no life anywhere. Nothing but the walking dead and rabid dogs and corpse-rats, scavengers like us, and buzzards circling in the sky. Amazing, just amazing. A green world. A green planet bountiful with life. Now, just because of some dying star ten million years ago vomited out some radiation from the furnace of its guts and this world just happened to be in the wrong orbital path at the wrong time—death. Death and nothing but death. A dead world. A graveyard world. A black tomb orbiting the sun! Ha! Think of it! Think of it!”

  “Just take it easy,” I told him.

  “Take it easy? Take it easy?” He started laughing, sputtering and spitting, a froth of white foam on his lips. “How can I possibly take it easy? Think of it! For ten thousand years, we had civilization, our forbears abandoning their tribal lifestyles and farming, cultivating, banding together and hacking a better world from the seething primeval forest! They build hamlets, then villages, towns and finally great gleaming cities like New fucking York that reach to the very clouds themselves! These same aggressive, territorial apes that preyed upon one another, hunting countless species to extinction and nearly each other, joining to craft something called civilization! Instead of grubbing roots and wearing animal skins, they forge civilization! They build cities! They fly like birds! They swim in the depths like whales! They design computers and microchips so tiny they aren’t much bigger than human cells! They send rockets into space, cure diseases, thwart nature, and become like gods and then…and then a burst of energy from deepest space mutates a sleeping carrion-eating bacteria and the world is a cemetery! A cemetery and the walking dead are the natural denizens and we’re nothing but relics, a bunch of freaks who didn’t have the good God-given sense to know when we were beat, to lie down and die!”

  “C’mon, Pops. You gotta keep it together, man,” Doreen told him.

  I led him back to the lot where the last of the corpses needed to be rounded up for the burning.

  “What’s his problem?” Peel wanted to know.

  “He’s having trouble with all this.”

  “Is he? That’s too bad, too bad.” Peel was talking to me, but looking at Doreen like she was something he wanted to put on a stick and lick. “You been working hard, old man. You’re tired. Fall out for a while. Your friends’ll cover you. Won’t you, friends?”

  I was relieved momentarily that Peel was showing Pops some sympathy, even if it was not only uncharacteristic but absolutely alien to someone like him. As Doc walked over by the trucks, I should have seen that look in Peel’s eyes, how big his grin had become. Pops made it maybe ten feet before Peel brought up his TR-15 and put three rounds into him.

  No, I hadn’t expected that.

  And what he didn’t expect was my reaction.

  I launched myself at him. His TR-15 went one way and he went the other and I was right on top of him, pounding his face with a series of quick jabs before he could get his hands on me. We wrestled and rolled across the ground and Peel threw me off him by catching me in the side with his knee. It was sheer pandemonium and nobody intervened. The other soldiers just cheered us on. Peel and I were on our feet, squaring off like a couple heavyweights, throwing punches, hitting each other mercilessly, kicking and grappling, both of us refusing to go down.

  Peel tripped me and kicked me in the side before I could get up, but it only enraged me more. When he tried to stomp me again, I grabbed his boot and twisted his leg until he yelped and I kicked up between his legs and that took the fight out of him.

  Then I was on my feet and he tried to pull his knife. I punched him in the face, then trapped his arm in a wristlock and twisted it until something almost broke in there. Peel tried to get an elbow in my face, but I ducked and kneed him in the belly, followed it through with a couple more quick shots to the face. Then I head butted him and put him down. He was bleeding from the mouth and the nose and a great purple bruise was rising around one eye like a corona. I wasn’t about to let it end there, though. When he got unsteadily to his knees and tried to crawl away, I kicked him in the ass and put him back down. Then I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and I drove him right into the corpse pile.

  He shrieked and fought, but I pushed him in there.

  Then I took his face and pressed it into a belly swollen with gas until it popped and Peel gagged. I pushed his face into the maggoty depths, mashing it in there, giving him a good taste of what we had been dealing with.

  “Knock it off,” Little John said, putting his rifle on me. “I’ve had enough of this shit! Let him up!”

  I pulled away and Peel slid from the pile. He took two steps and went down to his knees, vomiting. His face was smeared with slime and gore, bits of rancid tissue hanging from it. Somebody tossed him a rag and he wiped the mess free, still gagging, shaking and gasping.

  Two soldiers helped him up and steadied him, Little John keeping between us. Peel and I just glared at one another. I had just kicked his ass and now he knew I was just as violent as he was. So we just stared and hated. A couple of snakes wondering whose venom was more toxic.

  “I’ll kill you,” he panted. “I’ll kill you for this.”

  “You killed Pops. You murdered him,” I said. “I’m gonna snap your neck. I’m going twist your fucking head right off.”

  Little John stayed in-between us, making sure we were good little boys. I got over shit like that fast. As far as I was concerned, it was finished. At least, between Peel and I. Sonny Boy would want to make a spectacle of me again. I knew that. But as far as I was concerned, it was done. But Peel thought otherwise. He was simmering with hatred. I had kicked his ass and he had lost face with the other soldiers. Just as Sonny Boy had made a spectacle of me, I had now made a spectacle of Peel. He was humiliated and degraded. He would want payback.

  “Gonna cost you,” he told me. He looked over at Doreen. “Gonna cost you bad. Gonna cost you your woman.”

  That’s when Doreen lost it.

  She was amped up on pure adrenaline, walking tall and bulletproof and just plain lethal. I had seen her pissed
before, but I’d never seen her like that…claws out, teeth barred. She screamed out something at Peel, and just went livid and crazy. He was that gang that had raped her. He was every man with every snide Neanderthal remark and hungry eyes. She flew right at him and he was in no shape to defend himself. Those green eyes smoldered like fuel rods yanked from a reactor and then she was airborne. Like a leopard coming in for the kill, she came right at Peel to tear out his throat and gnaw on his bones. She knocked Little John aside and literally pounced on Peel. Before the soldiers could get a hold of her, she had set her ragged nails into Peel’s face, painting up his cheeks with bleeding red stripes and stomping him on his kneecaps and balls and belly. Little John dragged her off him.

  Did I offer to help?

  What do you think? He had it coming.

  They finally got Doreen away and calmed her down. While they talked her down, being careful not to be touching her, I watched Peel. He was pissed-off and crazy, a blazing dementia in his eyes. First me pounding on him, then Doreen. If he had been carrying, we’d have both been on the ground, smoking holes opened up in us.

  He kept staring at me, wiping more blood away.

  His face was all red and puffy and awful looking like he’d just shared a jungle tent with 20,000 mosquitoes. Through it all, though, those eyes found me and held me, impaled me. He was telling me that I was a dead man and Doreen would be planted in the same hole with me.

  “Get that asshole out of here,” Little John said, indicating me, I thought.

  But no. He was pointing at Peel.

  The blood was so bad between us by then it was fucking poison.

  With Peel tucked safely away in one truck, Doreen and I in the other, they tossed Pops’ corpse on the heap. The fuel truck backed up and Little John sprayed the bodies down with a gushing stream of fuel oil. When he was done, we got out of range and one of the soldiers fired a road flare and tossed it onto the heap. There was a roaring eruption of flame, a blast of heat hitting us even in the back of the truck. A cloud of sparks and greasy black smoke rose up into the sky. The stench was awful, but no worse, really, than it had been before.

  We drove back to Murray Hill and the encampment.

  I was pretty sure that the spectacle this time around would be my death. I was even prepared for it. I stripped out of my filthy suit and was allowed to take a shower. Then I was brought to Sonny Boy.

  When he saw me, he just laughed. “If I make my bed in hell, Steve, behold, thou art there.”

  I just stared at him. “So what is it this time? Another spectacle?”

  “No, no, no. I don’t see that as necessary. I figured this was coming and so it has passed. You are just a natural born killer as I long suspected.”

  “He murdered Pops.”

  “Yes. He smite him down in cold blood.”

  “He should be punished.”

  Sonny Boy grinned his serpent’s grin. “Maybe. But not this day. We have a big push coming up and I need every gun I can get. Besides, have mercy upon the vanquished, friend Steve. The better man has prevailed.”

  “He’s a piece of shit.”

  “We’re all turds, Steve. All floating in the same bowl. But which floats to the top and which has the richer smell?”

  This was his way of telling me I had advanced in his organization.

  “I’ll have a word with Peel. He’ll be no more trouble to you. The woman is yours. You have won that right. No one can touch her now, but you.”

  I didn’t bother telling him that I didn’t want her, or that Doreen would not be too happy about being sold off. I just let it slide. If no one was going to touch her, then all for the better. Let them think we were getting it on.

  He stabbed a finger at me. “But be warned, Steve. She is a woman with a woman’s guile and cunning and treachery. And woman is the Mother of Betrayers.”

  That was it. Just some demented fatherly advice about Doreen being a woman and corruption coming natural to her, that the wellspring of sin and avarice was what was between her legs. Nothing more. I was off the burn crew. I was a soldier again.

  Two days later, I went to war.

  The worst thing they ever did was put a weapon in my hot little hands.

  THOR TR-15 Carbine

  Type: 5.56mm Full-Auto

  Kill Range: 300 yards

  Magazine: 30 rounds

  BLOOD SPORT

  After an easy morning of wasting zombies that was like a fucking turkey shoot in Bedford Park, we really got into the shit late in the afternoon and it was a fight for survival from beginning to end. We were going house-to-house like Marines in Hue City or soldiers in Fallujah, cleaning them out one after the other, rooting out the zombies, the survivalists, the crazies. We had no doubt we had the upper hand and maybe we got cocky about it. Well…maybe not us, but maybe our command structure (such as it was) which consisted of Sonny Boy calling the shots from the safety of a Desert Warrior armored vehicle and his platoon sergeants—guys like Little John—seeing that their Biocon Units, BUs, carried them out.

  I wasn’t in Little John’s BU. At the last moment, I got shifted to Sgt. Panacek’s. It was all the same to me: one dipshit was the same as another. The soldiers were fighting hard to impress their sergeants who were running them hard to impress Sonny Boy who was riding them hard to keep on the good side of Colonel Brightwater, who circled high above in his Blackhawk, the eye in the sky.

  We were tricked out like any combat soldiers. We were issued desert camo BDUs, gloves, body armor vests, Gerber fighting knifes, ammo racks and grenades, Camelbaks of water and pouches of MREs, side arms and Icom radios, CVC helmets and NODs, Night Observation Devices. We were given THOR TR-15 carbines, which were really just modified M4s, but more ergonomic and easier to handle.

  We were ready for war and we found it, all right.

  Anyway, right before we really got in the shit, we got our pep talk from Panacek: “There is evil out there. Some of it is living and some of it isn’t. We will clear the evil house by house, building by building. We will stand victorious. We will locate our targets and leave no one standing. We will be the hot-blooded life-takers and bullet-eating motherfuckers who will make the difference on this day. Today, we become legend. Today we become soldiers.”

  I shot a couple glances around to see if anyone was ready to start laughing but me. Man, what a speech. Pure fucking Hollywood. Pure late show war movie shit. Pure John Wayne cheese. All that speech lacked was a drum and fife, some jarheads humming the Marine Hymn in the background. Panacek was like something from a G.I. Joe comic book, only not quite so realistic.

  “All right. Go! Go! Go!” he cried then and the ramp of the Bradley dropped, and out we went to get our kicks on Route 66. The stink of warm rot and wet decay was the first thing I smelled, which either meant lots of corpses or lots of zombies or both.

  The neighborhood was quiet. Nothing moved. But many of them were like that, I found. Real peaceful right before everything went to hell.

  “Okay, Niles,” Panacek said. “You got point, lead us out. Fifer, you’re with me. Bobo, Peel…flank. Rulo, you got the back door.”

  “That’s where he likes it best,” Bobo giggled over the com.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Shitcan it,” Panacek said. “We don’t have the time. Move out.”

  They liked me to take point because, let’s face it, they didn’t trust me and they weren’t comfortable with the idea of me behind them locked and loaded with a weapon. Especially Peel. I made sure that whenever he looked in my direction, I was giving him the death-stare. It was a game. A stupid and sadistic game, but I was enjoying it. I was bitter. Angry. Forced to fight with these idiots while my heart was elsewhere. Just as Peel had selected me as a target when I was defenseless in the pit, I had now selected him. He was still burning from the ass kicking and I hated him on general principles.

  Anyway, I moved out, hip hopping my way down the street looking for the enemy and seeing not a damn thing.

 
“Take it easy, Niles,” Panacek said over the com. “You’re exposing yourself unnecessarily.”

  “He likes to expose himself,” Bobo said, never missing an opening for a preadolescent remark.

  The others were following now, staying just behind the Bradley as it crept up the street on its treads.

  A deadhead came out to meet me. I didn’t hesitate. I opened up with my TR-15 and took his head off. Another showed, a woman. She looked like she was trying to say something as black crud gurgled from her mouth. I dropped her. The others left the safety of the Brad’s silhouette and came out to help. I sensed, rather than heard, motion behind a high plank fence. Something bounced out into the street.

  Shit.

  “GRENADE!” I shouted over the com, diving for cover.

  It went off with a rocketing noise that echoed through the streets, smoke and dust rising up in clouds.

  “You okay?” Panacek called out to me.

  “Fine.”

  It was time to blitz. I jogged up to the fence as Bobo did the same, tossing one of his own grenades over the top. BOOM! More dust and smoke. Meanwhile, the Brad turned in the street and rammed the fence, knocking it down. When it pulled back, I went in. A couple bullets zinged around me. We had zombies and we had a shooter. What Panacek and Sonny Boy liked to call insurgents, which I suppose brought them back to the glory days of Iraq. The shooter opened up again and I saw the barrel of a gun poking from a second story window.

  Before I could return fire, the Bradley opened up with its 25mm chain gun and the brick face of the building was pulverized with high-explosive rounds. The second story window and the frame that held it were blasted apart.

  “Anything?” Bobo called to me.

  I was couched behind a tree. “Nothing.”

  “Let’s do it then,” Panacek said.

  It was time to blitz the building. Panacek led Fifer and Rulo toward the front steps. The door was open and they went in. I led Bobo and Peel around the side. There was a fire escape leading to the second story. It was rusted and creaking. As I climbed up it, the entire thing moved and I thought it would fall right off the side of the building. Bobo and Peel were coming up behind me. I didn’t wait for them. All that weight on the fire escape was making me nervous. There was a door with green flaking paint in front of me. I kicked it and it flew open. In fact, it nearly flew off its hinges.