Necrophobia 4 Read online

  Sabelia kept telling them to shut up in English and directed a series of pretty unflattering remarks at them in Spanish.

  I could feel her behind me, I could feel her strength.

  “Be careful,” she said as we cut down B Corridor, following the signs to where it connected with C.

  Towards the end of B, the dead were waiting.

  They had been feeding on a couple of corpses and now they turned to face us. I heard a few of the bunker people call out that they knew them. It didn’t matter. Maybe they’d known them before, but they didn’t know them now. There were three deadheads and I pasted them without a second thought, spraying their brains against the walls.

  Another zombie showed.

  I heard a guy scream that it was his wife.

  It was a woman and she carried a severed human arm in one hand that she’d been gnawing on like a chicken bone. She was pale and white-eyed, her mouth smeared with gore. As I brought up my weapon to put her out of her misery, the guy who’d screamed out knocked me aside and went over to the zombie woman.

  “Get away from her!” I called out to him.

  “Yeah, seu cazao!” Sabelia said.

  But the guy, like many of the bunker people, just could not be certain whether I was to be trusted or despised at that point. He held up his hands so I would not shoot and said, “You just can’t keep killing people! You can’t go around acting like that!”

  It had to be one of the most idiotic things I’d ever heard. It was like telling a doctor he couldn’t go around exterminating disease germs with antibiotics.

  “What do you want him to do?” Sabelia said. “Have a fucking tea party with that brain-eater?” She shook her head, looking at me. “Fudeu caralho!”

  Meanwhile, of course, as our stalwart young hero tried to protect his wife, she took complete advantage of the situation, getting in close and taking hold of him. “No, no, no, Carolyn, don’t!” he said, but she did and we all saw it. She sank her teeth right into his throat and yanked out a strip of meat while he screamed and blood ran down his shirt. He went down and Carolyn went down with him, tearing into him ravenously.

  “STOP IT!” one of the bunker people cried. “SOMEBODY STOP IT!”

  I shot Carolyn and then I shot her husband.

  By then, nobody interfered and nobody said a word.

  In about ten minutes, we made it to C Corridor. I was shown where the isolation wards were and we found a new batch of people. Among them were Diane and Robin, Ginny and Carrie. I was so glad to see them after so long. We brought them around and it was going to be some time before they came out of it, but the way I was seeing it, I was making great gains.

  Still…where the hell was Tuck?

  I handed my Beretta 9mm to Sabelia and said, “Keep them safe until I get back.”

  “And where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m going to find a friend,” I told her.

  She locked the door behind me and out I went. I searched all the rooms in C Corridor, but there was no sign of Tuck. I found a few more crazies and I put them down. It seemed that’s all I was anymore, just a man with a gun, a killer that seemed to know nothing else. I was starting to wonder just who I was in the first place.

  But I had to keep my mind focused.

  I didn’t have time for shit like that.

  I had to find Tuck. I had already lost Jimmy and the idea of losing another friend was unthinkable. I followed the signs to D Corridor and searched over there, but I couldn’t find him. When I got back, I went over it all with Sabelia and Jeggs. I told them everywhere I had looked and, as far as they knew, there was nowhere else.

  Nowhere, save the locked rooms in A Corridor.

  That’s where I went next. The first of those rooms had a square pane of security glass set up at eye-level. Using the tac light of my M4, I shined it around in there, but I couldn’t see much. There had to be a better way to target my search. I went over to the security station and keyed up the monitors. The room I had been looking in was apparently something of a file room. It no doubt held highly classified stuff that these days was absolutely worthless. The next room, I saw on the monitor, was another ward of sorts.

  I sat there, smoking, thinking, just staring at the green night vision field, clicking on the mouse and panning the camera back and forth. After about ten minutes of that, I was certain I’d seen something move in there.

  I went over there and blew the keypad off the door and inserted a grenade in its place as I had before. Again, it did the trick. After the smoke cleared and my nerves stopped jangling, I moved towards the door, absolutely terrified of what I might find in there.

  Go back, go back, a voice kept telling me and, God knows, I wanted to obey. Get out of here before you see something you might never forget.

  My gut feeling was that Tuck was dead.

  I might as well admit that flat out. Knowing who he was and what he was, he would have been the perfect candidate for one of the KIA teams. It was very possible he had died in combat. Maybe, down deep, part of me was hoping for that. I wanted him to die with honor, with glory. I wanted him to go down with blood in his mouth and smoking pistols in his hands like some old time desperado. He deserved that.

  Drawing in a slow breath, I went in the room carefully, feeling around for a light switch and finding nothing. There were switches somewhere, but I didn’t have time to search for them. Once again, I brought up my M4 and clicked on my tac light. Yes, it was sort of a ward like the others, but it was more of a research room with steel tables and lab stations, computers and electronic equipment of the sort I had never seen before. There were cabinets of drugs and corpses strapped down on tables.

  Some of them were moving.

  As I put my light on them, they craned their heads in my direction, their jaws opening and closing.

  But I wasn’t interested in them.

  They weren’t going anywhere.

  The figure at the end of the room was another case entirely. It was hunched over one of the tables, tearing at what was there, chewing and slurping.

  I waved flies away, swallowing, ignoring the putrid stink that was like a charnel mist in the air.

  The shadowy figure was unconcerned with me.

  It was feeding and that was all it cared about. It was a man, a large man. He was naked, bent somewhat at the waist, his flesh shiny and yellow-tinged. I could see purple patches of lividity where his blood had settled after death. His head was bald and he was making a snorting, guttural sort of sound like a wild boar or a hog tearing into its slop.

  Oh Jesus, I thought, not like this, please…not like this…

  I had watched Jimmy die infected with Necrophage. I didn’t need to see another friend done in by it, reduced to some primeval horror that crawled through the slime of graves.

  I moved closer and closer, the living dead on the tables getting very excited at my proximity. I was breathing hard. My hands were shaking on the M4. I thought of Ricki, my dead wife, and hoped she was not out there, turned into something like this.

  When I was twenty feet away, daring not to get any closer, the hulking shape turned towards me. It turned with a stiff, shuffling sort of gait. In the glaring illumination of my tac light, it looked degenerate and subhuman, a grinning simian nightmare. Its head cocked, it showed me its loose yellow visage, the lips chewed away from blackened gums, the seams of mold like branching lightning up its cheeks and chin, the juicy white eyes that reminded me of the swollen backs of grubs pushing from garden soil.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ…”

  It was Tuck.

  I knew somehow that it must be, but the realization was like every ounce of blood had been drained from me. My head with was filled with a noise like static. I felt tears run from my eyes. My lips quivered. I tried to contain the whimpering in my throat.

  All I could think was that Dr. Cripps had done this to him. Maybe I wanted to believe that because he was Dr. Frankenstein in my book, the
architect of nightmares and pain. There was always the possibility that Tuck just picked up the bug like so many others…but I just couldn’t accept that.

  Tuck, I believed, had been purposely infected.

  Infected and turned loose where we would find him sooner later.

  Cripps, you motherfucker.

  He was gone from the bunker, but I would see him again. I knew it. And when that happened I would make his death an ugly business.

  Tuck came for me, reaching out gnarled hands.

  I brought up the M4.

  I heard a broken sobbing coming from my own throat.

  I thought of how he had kept us all alive. How our survival was his absolute obsession and everything else was secondary to it. He was like a father and a brother to me. I’d never be on the receiving end of his intolerant, salty humor or hear him play his fiddle again. And, worst of all, I’d never feel his strong, sure hand on my shoulder guiding me ever forward in times of trouble.

  “Oh, Sixty-Five,” I sobbed. “Please forgive me.”

  The M4 shook in my hands as I aimed it at his head. He made a growling sound as if something from the tortured core of his being was telling me to do the right thing, to get it over with already, to put him out of his misery if I was truly the friend I claimed to be.

  When he was five feet away I squeezed the trigger and ended it for him. I heard him hit the floor and I turned away, shutting the door behind me. I made it about ten feet down the corridor and I folded right up. I went to my knees, my face wet with tears. I clutched my rifle and held tightly to it for dear strength.

  “You be good to him, God,” I said under my breath, “or you’ll fucking answer to me.”

  I leaned against the wall for a long time. I smoked and I remembered, I cried and I laughed and finally, I accepted. And as I did so, everything within and without became gray and meaningless. I didn’t think I’d ever be the same again.

  After a time, I heard footsteps and I saw Sabelia standing there with my Beretta. “We were worried,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “No, I’m very far from being all right.”

  She blinked a couple times and I could see she was close to becoming herself again. She kneeled down by me. “Did you find your friend?”

  “Yes. I found him. Then I killed him.”

  She understood without me saying anymore. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  COMING DOWN

  It was another twenty-four hours or so until everyone came to their senses and when they did, they started pelting me and each other with questions. I had very few answers. The hardest part was when Sabelia and then Diane came out of their drug fugue, followed by Robin, Ginny, and Carrie. Each time it was pretty much the same. They were happy to see me, then confused and angry and disoriented when I told them exactly what had happened…or what I guessed had happened. Eventually, they all wanted to know where Tuck was and I had to tell them.

  I had questions, too.

  Lots of them.

  Diane said that Tuck refused to pull out of Baneberry until he knew whether I was alive or dead. Eventually, Pratt made contact with them. He seemed very friendly, very helpful. Tuck didn’t trust him, of course, and that made me smile slightly. They went back to the bunker with him and, after that, things got blurry. Their food was no doubt drugged like everyone else’s. It stood to reason. What had come of Tuck after that, only the dead and Dr. Cripps knew. And, some day, when I found him, he was going to tell me before I killed him.

  Here’s what it comes down to.

  The bunker and everyone there were part of a feasibility study, an experimental drug trial. That’s what it was all about. Yes, I blamed Cripps for it all, but I also blamed myself. If I hadn’t gone out in search of Sandy that night, then none of this would have happened and Tuck would still be alive.

  Was I playing hero that night?

  Partly, I suppose. And in war—and we were definitely at war—there’s very little difference between a fool and a hero.

  Most of the bunker people wanted to stay where they were because everything they needed to survive was there. After Sabelia and the others had a good rest, we packed up what we could and got ready for our trip to the Silo. I was going to get there this time. That was my first and primary responsibility. My second would come later when I tracked down Dr. Cripps.

  But for now, getting to the Silo was enough.

  When everyone was ready to go, Sabelia found me outside the door of Tuck’s tomb, smoking and brooding.

  “They’re ready, Steve.” She put an arm around me and kissed my cheek. Her lips were very warm. “Are you?”

  I nodded, holding her hand and walking away from the door. “Yeah, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  —The End—

  Read on for a free sample of Trip: A Zombie Novel

  1

  I remember the first time I told her that I loved her. Early morning. Before the sun got too high, before the day got sticky and hot. She was barefoot, in a white cotton dress with a pale blue pattern washed almost grey. She was standing on top of a derelict car, feet firmly planted on the rust and chrome. The car was a metallic silvery colour with busted out windows and empty liquor bottles rolling around the seats. The breeze caught her dress, the fluid ripple of the fabric in contrast to the hard lines of her body. Her head was cocked to one side, holding the heavy pistol out in front of her with both hands.

  The car stood near the far edge of the compound, chained fence behind chained fence, like a prison. Everyone knew it. It was where the kids went to fool around, to have a drink and forget themselves in a giddy world of flesh and hormones. My heart had sunk when I’d asked where she was and had been pointed out in this direction, nausea rising like Archimedes sinking into his tub. Worried that she’d found someone else and was already bored with my company.

  I’d walked out there slowly, not knowing what I’d find, not knowing what I’d want to find. But there she was, beautiful in the morning light.

  Taking pot shots at the dead through the layers of fence, I should have known that the early morning gunfire was her. It’s funny how you can become used to things so quickly.

  I stood by the driver’s door, behind her. I didn’t say much, just looked up as the hem of her dress flirted with her legs.

  “Hey,” she’d said. Eyes forward. Pistol forward. “Pick one.”

  I squinted through the wire, struggled to make one out. Eventually, I found one, tall and dressed in what must have once been an expensive suit. “The suit,” I said.

  She nodded slightly, lifted her head to find him, and settled back down into her stance, pistol raised. The suit must have just been in the range of the gun. It couldn’t have been an easy shot by anyone’s standards.

  Keep breathing. In. Out. Squeeze the trigger. The gun jumped in her hand. The crack of the shot rolled out around us and towards the mountains.

  The suit dropped.

  “Most people practice on cans,” I said.

  “When was the last time you saw a can just lying around?” She looked down into my grinning face, then back out towards the fence line. Her shots had started to attract them, shambling dead like scarecrows on the empty plots outside the camp.

  “One more,” she said.

  I squinted out into the fences again, and picked another one out. Shorter this time, no shirt, shorts.

  “Festival guy,” I said. She smiled slightly and nodded.

  The gun jumped. Festival guy dropped as the noise faded like thunder.

  That’s when I knew. I looked up, applauding politely. “I love you,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Can I help you down?”

  “Yes please. This car is getting fucking hot.”

  Her bare feet hit the dirt by the car and she wrapped her arms around me, the evil weight of the gun resting at the nape of my neck. We kissed as the long low moans of the damned rose up from the wasteland beyond us.

 
2

  We walked back through the camp, hand in hand. A slight breeze had picked up, the smell of flesh rotting in the summer sun carrying through the pre-fab barracks. It used to be that the smell would put you off your food, make you retch.

  Now it’s everywhere; in your clothes, in your hair. You barely register it, like the smell of your own home. Like the smell of a lover. I hoped I would never get used to her smell, would keep that sense of excitement and thrill that came from being close to her.

  I rubbed my thumb on the back of her hand, and caught her eye. She smiled at her hand in mine, just a slight lift of the lips, and I sent a silent prayer that we could keep this forever. Selfish, sure, but it was something real, something tangible. It kept the nightmares outside the camp better than those fences ever could. So the longer I could hang onto it, the longer this world would just hold the two of us. I know it’s naïve, but some days, it was the difference between getting out of bed or reaching for a gun. There are things you hang onto as an article of faith, like the rising of the sun.

  Our first stop was the armoury, returning the gun she’d snuck out earlier this morning. She was caught putting it back. I was supposed to be lookout, unobtrusive, and off to one side.

  The guard came from inside the armoury, holding his morning coffee. He wasn’t much older than we were, and wearing a makeshift uniform scavenged from dead soldiers. He seemed more comfortable in it than I would have, but everyone deals with things in their own way.

  Taking firearms is usually a pretty big deal – ammunition is scarce, and there’s always the risk of suicide, or worse. In a camp like this, where community is all there is to make you feel safe, the worst thing that can happen is that someone cracks, or acts out. Firearms have a tendency to multiply the damage.

  You hear stories from other camps sometimes. Murder. Rape. Camps usually have their own rules on how to deal with crimes, from theft and minor fights through to other transgressions, but those two. Those are the big two. Most camps are pretty hard on anyone committing those two and the punishments are usually the same.