Necrophobia #3 Page 9

  There were twenty guys, give or take, in the cage with me. The floor was dirt. There was a foul-smelling pot in the corner that I assumed was our bathroom facilities. Like a pisspot in a medieval prison. Nice. The three guys with me introduced themselves and I returned the favor. The thin old guy was Lester and he’d been a farmer. The heavyset guy was called Frenchie and he’d been an auto mechanic once upon a time. The other guy, Jiggs, had escaped from Dannemora Prison upstate. He made no excuses for the fact that he was a thief and stealing was the only thing he liked.

  “I stole everything, man,” he said, as if he was proud of his accomplishments and I got the feeling he was. “I stole cars, jewelry, drugs, cash, furs…I hijacked trucks and robbed liquor stores. I didn’t care about the swag or the money I got for it. I just liked the stealing.”

  He and three other guys, associates of a New York crime family, had robbed a police armory in Queens and made off with automatic rifles, submachine guns, explosives, you name. That had landed him a 30-year stretch at Greenhaven. While he was there, he stole from other inmates, guards, and had broken into the warden’s safe. They sent him to Dannemora with the other animals that were considered beyond rehabilitation. His first day there, he watched an Irish contract killer named Jimmy Clover murder a drug dealer with a homemade knife because he’d cheated at cards.

  “That’s the kind of clientele you get at Dannemora.” He shrugged. “Then The Awakening hit. Fewer guards every day. We weren’t being fed. Some of the cons took the place, opened all the cells.”

  Most of them were shot down by police in the next few days, others were eaten by the zombies. Jiggs said he did the only thing he could think of: he stole a truck and was driving back to New York City when ARM found him. Now he was here.

  “There’s another seven or eight cages not counting the womens’ cages,” he explained.

  They had another cage they called “the corral” with fifty or sixty zombies in it. When a prisoner got out of hand, they were fed to them. That didn’t happen often, though, because, as one of the ARM pukes had said, they liked to “keep ‘em hungry.”

  Frenchie had cigarettes and he shared them. The four of us smoked and watched the other groups in the cage. There were three other distinctive enclaves, I noticed. Most of them stayed to their own sections of the cage. They didn’t seem to mix much. I imagined it was the kind of thing that Jiggs was used to. Just like prison.

  “They use sound waves to control them, don’t they?”

  “Yeah,” Frenchie said. “Some kind of frequency that’s beyond the human ear…somehow, the dead pick it up. Who knows how? Regardless, they can direct the dead with them. They can’t totally control them, all they can do is blast ‘em with sound and direct them away from themselves, herd them. They got it down pretty good.”

  It was what I figured after what I had seen at the baseball field. ARM was a very large, well-coordinated force for the most part. And with the zombies, they were pretty much unbeatable. I couldn’t see how any groups of survivors could stand against them long. And that made me wonder about my son, about Tuck, about all the others…were they even alive? Had they been taken to a place like this?

  “There’s worse things than zombies,” Lester said.

  “This is a Blood Farm?” I asked.

  Frenchy nodded. “Yeah. There’s maybe a hundred ARM troopers here, the zombies in the corral, then…well, those other things.”

  That’s what I wanted to know about. “What are these other things?”

  Lester looked away. Frenchie and Jiggs looked at each other, then at the ground.

  “Well?” I said.

  Frenchie pulled off his cigarette. “Bloodlords, man. That’s what they call ‘em. We’re here to be tapped. We’re here for our blood.”

  “Vampires?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Of a sort. I don’t know if they’re mutations or not, but they want the blood. They need it to live. That’s all I know.”

  As Robin said, the Death Angels and ARM units collected up people, healthy, uninfected people to be tapped, he explained. It was vile and disgusting, but that was situation. There were camps like this spread out all over New York state.

  “New England and the Midwest, too,” Jiggs said. “That’s what I hear.”

  “Vampires,” I said again.

  It all made a crazy, morbid kind of sense. At an armory outside White Plains, we’d found bodies strung-up like cattle in a slaughterhouse. They’d been drained of blood, and in the Bronx, as I hid out from some paramilitary assholes, I’d woken to find a woman sucking blood from my wounded arm. I remembered how she looked: bald, her skin clown-white, her eyes black like the eyes of a shark. I shot her through the head and killed her. Was she one of those things?

  I told them about it all.

  “Yeah, she was one,” Frenchie said. “I heard that’s what they look like.”

  That’s all they knew. There were stories that they came out only at night and there seemed to be something to it because they only took the prisoners to them after sundown. It sounded like something from a creaky old vampire movie, but it was very real. I didn’t know what they were, mutants of some sort, I guessed, but I didn’t imagine they were much like Bela Lugosi with his cape.

  “Now and again, they drag somebody off to be tapped,” he said. “When they come back…they’re like those guys over there.”

  He indicated a cluster of glassy-eyed, pale men laying on the ground. They looked weak, sick, beaten. I didn’t know what they had seen or experienced, not really, but it must have been horrendous.

  “They don’t take enough to kill you, but with the starvation rations were on around here, most guys don’t come back from it real good.”

  Lester had been in the cage longer than most. He told me that compounds like this were collection points. When they had enough people, they herded them into trucks. Where they went nobody knew and the guards weren’t saying.

  So that was the situation.

  While I was digesting all this, some guy walked over to the fence and clung to it. “I want to see Georgie!” he cried out. “You fuckers know where he is! I want to see him! You hear me? I WANT TO FUCKING SEE GEORGIE!”

  Good God, it was Wild Bill.

  Well, apparently, ARM had sorted out Wild Bill’s little army. Now he was a prisoner, too. We had a crazy man in our cage of “donors”.

  “Shut the hell up!” one of the ARM guys said, smashing his rifle butt into the fence.

  Wild Bill was driven back. He walked in tight little circles, mumbling and moaning to himself.

  “He’s a headcase,” Jiggs said. “Keep away from him.”

  I noticed that everyone ignored him and avoided him. From what I knew of Wild Bill and his Georgie obsession, I figured that was probably a good thing. I stared around at our cage, the wheels in my brain spinning. I was thinking of a way out. There had to be a way out of this. I hadn’t come this far to be a menu item for these Bloodlords, whatever form they took. But from what I was seeing, the prospects didn’t look real promising. There was no way to get over that fence without serious risk to life and limb. Which left rushing the gate when the ARM pukes opened it to drag out victims. But that was suicidal. They were carrying M-16s and a couple of them had H&K machine pistols, the kind counterterrorist commandos carry. The sort that are meant to lay down serious firepower in order to clear a room real fast.

  Nope, the way I was seeing things, we were most certainly fucked.

  I noticed that all the ARM troopers also carried gas masks in addition to their weapons. Unlike their surplus Russian-issue fatigues, these were M40, US-issue masks. I’d been trained to use them during the war. The Army taught me that they, when used properly, could protect you from a whole gamut of nerve and blister agents, even a few biological weapons. I was thankful that I’d never had to actually use mine back then. Very thankful. There had been nothing scarier in the war than the idea of chemical warfare and weaponized plagues.

  Bu
t why the hell were ARM wearing them?

  I thought it was odd. “What up with the trench masks?” I said.

  None of them knew, though. They’d gotten so used to seeing them that they just accepted them as part of ARM battle gear. I wasn’t convinced. There was a reason. There had to be a reason and I figured it would be an ugly one.

  “Who runs this place?” I asked Jiggs.

  “Guy they call Spider. He’s a Bloodlord. I don’t know what kind of rank he has or if these assholes even have rank, but he’s the guy. I never seen him. I don’t think anybody ever has. Pretty sure I never want to. If you do, it means your getting tapped.” Jiggs shrugged. “I’ll tell you one thing, though, the guards are terrified of him. A couple weeks back we had a pretty decent guy watching us, an ARM soldier named Louis DeCree. He was from Staten Island. He was okay. He joined ARM to stay alive. He was bringing us extra food, blankets, water…anything we needed. Then something happened. Somebody dimed him. He was taken before Spider. We all heard him screaming. That’s all I know.”

  A couple weeks back.

  Christ, how long had some of these guys—Jiggs included—been in the cage? I got the feeling that Jiggs had made it as long as he did because he and Louis DeCree had developed some sort of relationship.

  But now he was fair game as we all were. We were trapped in the spider’s web, just waiting to be drained dry.

  And how long before my number came up?

  BAD DREAMS

  The next couple days passed slowly. Living like an animal in a cage with a bunch of other animals, I guess I couldn’t expect it to go very quickly. The nights were getting chilly and we had only a few blankets. We had to share what we had. We kept warm mainly by lumping ourselves together in a big stinky pile. During the day, they gave us some water, some bread, a thin soup. We were pretty much on concentration camp rations. A lot of the guys in the cage were desperately thin and Jiggs admitted he’d dropped a lot of weight since he was captured. When he had escaped from prison, he went on a binge eating everything he could get his hands on. The things he’d missed in-stir—convenience foods mostly, things like mac-‘n’-cheese, Chef Boyardee canned pasta, Hostess cakes—he absolutely glutted himself on, putting on a lot of weight.

  “Now I’m glad I did,” he admitted.

  Frenchie had been in the cage for five days now. He was a big guy and it didn’t look like, even with the crash of society, that he had missed many meals. Lester had a pretty bad cough and the chill damp of night in the cage wasn’t doing him much good at all. It seemed to be getting worse by the day.

  I kept worrying about Robin. I wondered if she was all right. I hoped she had survived the crash and was in one of the women’s cages. I hadn’t known her long at all, but I felt very protective of her. I could see her fitting in with my friends, our little community…that was, if they were even alive.

  I had awful thoughts.

  I pictured my friends being dead, killed by Arm or some other militia. They made some valiant last stand, but in the end, they were overcome, gunned down, maybe taken prisoner and dying a slow, horrifying death in a cage like the one I was in. I pictured Necrophage taking them one by one, dragging them down into the grave and then waking them back up as the living dead.

  This is the one I couldn’t stop thinking about.

  It even invaded my dreams.

  I saw my son as a walking cadaver, feeding on the living and the dead. The light in his eyes replaced by a dull, predatory darkness. A blasphemous thing that would walk until he was put down or the flesh rotted from his bones.

  I also had dreams about us in the cage, something getting inside with us, tearing us apart for our blood…not a zombie, but maybe one of the Bloodlords. An absolute monster, a horror from the shadows with a puckering mouth and an unquenchable thirst. The zombies were bad, driven by that voracious hunger, but they took no pleasure in killing. They took no real pleasure in anything. Like a spider sucking the juice out of a fly or an owl eating a rabbit, they just followed natural/unnatural patterns of hunger. They weren’t cognizant enough to enjoy any of it.

  I wondered about the Bloodlords. I had a weird feeling that they enjoyed it.

  I dreamed of Spider, too.

  I knew nothing about him other than the rumors I was told. Whether they were true or not, it seemed that the men in the cage were afraid of him most of all. They had shaped him into some kind of boogeyman, some eternal and deathless blood-sucking thing that lived to torment, torture, and eat souls alive and squirming. These are subjective impressions of mine, of course. None of them really came out and painted Spider as some creeping devil in the dark, but then they didn’t have to. I picked up their vibes just fine. If the guards were afraid of him and the prisoners would only speak of him in low whispers and in the most abstract of ways, there had to be something there. Something particularly nasty.

  In my dreams, I saw him standing outside the cage, a dark form whose face was luminously white, a grin like the cut of a hatchet taking the place of his mouth. He had terrible, terrible eyes that were not glaring horror movie red, but a pale metallic blue like the carapaces of beetles. He was not a corpse himself, he was the creator of corpses, if that makes any sense. Something that slaked its thirst with human blood and walked amongst the dead, stepping over corpses and around the slavering packs of zombies, to stand before our cage and drive men mad, drive them to suicide…because that was the only alternative to those eyes of his staring deep inside you and filling your mind with running pus.

  I came awake from that one and Jiggs was shaking me. “Easy,” he said. “You’re having nightmares.”

  “Was I talking?”

  “What?”

  “Talking in my sleep?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know what about so don’t ask me. Even if I did know, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  There it was again: that fear of Spider. I had indeed been talking and Jiggs had heard what I said and it scared him. This big, tough ex-con was scared of what I said in my dreams. Wasn’t that something? I was certain he had waked me not because I was being loud or even to chase away my nightmares, but because he was afraid. Afraid of what had been in my dreams as if it had been in his, too.

  I started thinking a lot about Spider then, and my thoughts were not exactly reassuring.

  EVENTS IN THE CAGE

  My third day there, they took three guys.

  It capped off a bad day all around. Lester’s cough was getting worse and he was pretty weak. He wasn’t the only one. More than half of the guys in there were getting sick from the cold nights and sleeping in the dirt, the lack of decent food, and the lack of good red blood in their veins. Many of them just lay there all day long, only waking briefly. One of them kept calling out for his mother in his sleep and annoying the rest of us. I began to wonder how long it would be until I was like them—weak from starvation and crazy with dementia. That Jiggs had kept it together as long as he had was testament to his strength, but probably also testament to the fact that he was no stranger to living in cages with no hope.

  Something had to be done and I had come up with an idea.

  I hadn’t sprung it on the others yet, but I figured they would go for it. Anything had to be better than existing like that. Our food came around noon and the guards filled our metal cups with water and dumped some bread on our metal plates. We were not given knives or forks, of course, or anything else we could make into weapons. After I ate my meager portion and drank my tepid water, I went over to the piss bucket and relieved myself. I should have figured trouble was coming, because Wild Bill was eyeballing me. I had done everything I could to avoid him and ignore him. Even when he went on his rants about Georgie, I suppressed the need to tell him to shut the fuck up already.

  I finished pissing and a voice said, “You pissed on the floor.”

  It was Wild Bill.

  “No, I pissed in the bucket.”

  “You pissed on the floor! You pig! You goddamn animal!” he cr
ied, bunching his fists at his side. “Clean it up! You got to clean it up!”

  Which was the most ludicrous thing to say, of course, since the floor was just dirt. How was I supposed to clean piss out of the dirt? I tried to ignore him. I brushed past him and he grabbed me by the arm.

  “Clean it up!” he demanded.

  I pulled my arm free. “Fuck off,” I told him.

  That’s when he hit me.

  I made the cardinal sin of turning my back on him and he hit me in the back of the head. It was a good shot. I saw stars. I hit the ground and when I tried to get up, he hit me again. He was not only a tough old sonofabitch, but he was absolutely loopy. I was on the floor by the piss bucket. I scrambled to my knees and he was coming right for me so I did the only thing I could do, which was to pick up the piss bucket and splash its contents into his face.

  “YAAAAAAAWWWWW!” he screamed, wiping piss from his face. “DIRTY! I’M ALL FUCKING DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY!”

  When he launched himself at me, I was already on my feet. I cracked him in the face with the empty bucket. It made a clanging sound, driving him to one knee. When he came at me again, I caught him in the face with two roundhouse punches, my right then my left. I hit him good. Real good. Enough to jar him and make blood spill from his nose. He came right back for more, seizing me in a bear hug and driving me up against the fence. Even battered, he was strong. He pressed up against me with everything he had. The fence behind me was not giving and neither was he. I was caught between, the wind squeezed right out of me.

  By then, the other prisoners—those that were conscious—had ringed around us, some of them cheering on Wild Bill and some cheering on me. The guards had gathered outside the fence, grinning and calling out to us. This was their entertainment, watching their animals fight.

  I couldn’t draw a breath.

  Wild Bill was crushing me slowly.

  I did the only thing I could do: I jabbed my thumbs into his eyes and twisted them. He shrieked and fell away. I dropped to my knees, gasping. But I didn’t gasp long; I couldn’t afford to. While Wild Bill rubbed his eyes, probably trying to get the sight back into them, I went at him with everything I had. I hit him three or four times until he dropped to his knees. And when he did, I kicked him in the head. He went out cold. I gave him a good kick in the ribs so he’d remember me.