4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas Read online

  “Tommy …”

  He pulled the sheet up to his waist so he wouldn’t have to see his sex-slick penis.

  “Let me tell you something,” Jamie said. “Don’t fuck with me. Or I’ll fuck with you and you’ll lose. Only one of us is going to be the real sex slave here and believe me, buddy, it ain’t me. You’re the one with a holier-than-thou wife and a whole lot to lose. Not me. I can ruin your life. I’ll stand up in your church in front of your whole congregation and testify, brother. Give me what I want or by God I’ll do it.”

  He stared at the TV screen. He punched up the volume.

  “Are you listening to me?” Sitting up now, Jamie slapped his shoulder. “You’re going anal. You just don’t know it yet. You’re well on your fucking way.”

  “Shut up. I want to hear this.” He cranked the volume still louder.

  Onscreen was what appeared to be a brilliant bit of CGI, an eye so big it filled the sky. It looked as if it had been painted on the clouds. Or somehow sculpted out of clouds. And yet it looked so real, so lifelike that it might be the actual eye of an immense angel.

  “What the fuck?” Jamie said.

  As if in answer, the cable news anchorwoman said: “It appeared overhead this afternoon and it hasn’t moved since. Not only is it visible across all of America, it’s reportedly visible over half the planet. No one at this point knows exactly what it is or how it came to be there. No one has claimed responsibility. Already there is talk of miracles and of the Apocalypse. If this isn’t a natural phenomenon, then it must be supernatural in origin, so the speculation goes. All we know for certain at this point in time is that the big eye in the sky does not show up on Doppler radar, which means it isn’t moving at all and might even mean it’s there only in the sense of an optical illusion. It’s apparently higher than aircraft can fly. Higher than clouds are supposed to be. And as we just reported to you, our contacts at the Defense Department tell us that the military has detected absolutely nothing to indicate that the thing in the sky poses any sort of threat or is anything other than benign. The only real problems so far have been the traffic jams and accidents its sudden appearance has caused.

  I think it’s accurate to say that thus far there is no physical evidence that the eye is there at all. For now, the phenomenon is entirely visual. Perhaps it will turn out to be nothing more than a fantastic optical illusion. There are nevertheless intriguing, perhaps even disturbing reports that the big eye actually appeared to blink at one point.”

  The anchorwoman paused, touched her earpiece, and then said, “My producer is telling me that we are in the process of getting cell-phone video from multiple sources that show the eye actually blinking. We will be showing you these momentarily. What this may mean is anybody’s guess.”

  “My God,” Jamie said, anal sex for the moment forgotten. “I’ve got goose bumps.”

  “Get dressed,” Thomas said. “We have to go outside and see it before it gets too dark.”

  He climbed out of the big bed and into his pants.

  “Screw the dark. You can bet your ass that freaking peeper can see in the dark. Probably sees right through ceilings and walls too. Been watching us the whole time, the whole fucking show.”

  4

  Rape Tree

  Magda Menendez was going to die here by the rape tree. It was more bush than tree. And she was already more dead than alive. This was the only taste of life in America she would ever get. The bitter taste of forced sex. A beating so severe that she didn’t think she could even drag herself away from this shameful tree hung with the underpants of the girls the coyotes had raped in recent weeks, or months. The men did it to mark their territory, to prove their manhood, to mock the gringos on land they said had been stolen long ago from Mexico. They worked for one of the drug cartels, so who would stop them? Nobody. The cartels were too powerful and the Mexican police and government were too corrupt.

  Her faded blue panties were there on the end of a spindly twig of a limb, a sad tribute to her dream of a better life. It was a painful point of shame that Magda’s panties were the shabbiest ones on the tree. The elastic waistband was frayed and there were two little holes in the crotch where the seam had split.

  She reached a hand to the lips of her sex and verified that the bleeding had stopped. She closed her eyes against the glaring Arizona sky and asked God to forgive her sins, minor though they were. She crossed herself. Father. Son. Holy Ghost.

  There had been three of them. After the two younger men were done with her, the older one with the evil eyes and the big scar on his face hurt her the most, showing the younger men how to handle a woman. For the scarred man, beating a woman was part of the sex act. Magda didn’t think he meant to kill her or leave her for dead but he had been too rough with her when he picked her up and slammed her to the ground while he was still inside her. The small of her back had struck a sharp rock and everything below her waist went numb. And now she couldn’t even wiggle her toes. She was already half dead, lifeless from the waist down. Naked down there.

  Left for dead at the edge of the desert.

  Feeling as helpless as an abandoned infant, Magda cried herself to sleep.

  When she woke up the sky had opened its secret eye and looked down on her with no pity. A priest had once told her that heavenly angels could “translate” themselves into any shape or size, so it was no surprise to her that an angel’s eye could fill the sky. But then she began to shiver violently and she came to fear that this eye might be the eye of great evil, perhaps of the Evil One himself.

  “Diablo,” she whispered.

  Magda asked the Holy Mother to help her. As soon as she had spoken the words: “La madre santa del dios, me ayuda,” a shrill voice said: “Si esto está infierno, después somos ya muertos.” If this is hell, then we’re already dead.

  Then they were upon her, a band of bloody men and women wearing backpacks and looking for all the world as if they indeed were on a desperate trek through hell. The dozen of them halted when they saw her. She felt as if she should say something, perhaps apologize for her pathetic appearance and for being left to die under the rape tree, herself the ultimate trophy, but no words would come. She only looked at them with her sad eyes. Several of them swatted at big black flies that seemed to be tenaciously dogging them.

  A man knelt beside her and asked if she could walk. She said she could not. She told him tearfully that she thought her back was broken. He frowned, then shrugged and stood. He glanced nervously at the sky’s eye, then walked away.

  Flies found her. They landed on her face and arms but most of them alighted on the sticky gumbo of blood, dirt and semen between her legs. Their bites stung her face and neck but she couldn’t feel them at all below her waist, which she supposed was a small blessing.

  One of the women said, “For God’s sake, cover her.” But no one did. The night would be cold out here and nobody was willing to give up an article of clothing. “Where are your pants?” the woman asked. Magda said she didn’t know. The woman pointed to the tree and asked which panties were hers. Magda pointed them out and the woman retrieved them from the rape tree and was kind enough to slip them on, raising Magda’s hips for her since she couldn’t do it herself. She buttoned her blouse over her exposed breasts.

  An older woman with bad skin and wearing a scarf on her head as if she were on her way to church said she was sick and didn’t think she could go on. Then she threw up on the shoes of the man standing closest to her. He cursed her and shoved her away. She lost her balance and fell. She moaned. She did not get up. “Puta,” the man with vomit on his shoes said to the fallen woman.

  A man with a pistol on his hip appeared. A mule runner for the cartel. He took the sick woman’s backpack and put it on his own back. Then he looked at Magda and at the retching woman on the ground a few feet from her and said they could keep each other company while waiting for the angel. “El ángel de la muerte.” The angel of death.

  Then Magda and the fallen wo
man were alone. Left behind to die.

  The sick woman’s breathing became labored. She rasped, “Es las moscas. Son matanza yo.” Magda thought the woman was delirious. Why else would she say the flies were killing her? Poor woman. Poor me. Then she gave thanks that the flies had departed with the human mule train.

  The sun set. The moon rose big and red. The eye above was luminous with sinister light.

  Magda wanted water. She wondered if she would die of thirst or exposure. Not that it really mattered.

  Suddenly the sick woman’s rasping breath ceased. Magda stared hard at the woman’s chest and saw that she had indeed stopped breathing. “Vaya con el dios,” Magda said to the deceased woman.

  She watched the giant eye watching the moon rise. Or was it watching Magda? No, of course not. She was too insignificant to warrant attention of the great evil eye of the Devil. She had to trust that God’s angels would watch over her and come to her when it was time to transport her soul to Jesus.

  She was feeling sick now. As if she might throw up. She shivered against the cold. I don’t have long, she thought.

  Something all at once blocked out the moon.

  Magda’s breath caught in her throat. The dead woman was standing over her, her eyes shining red in the moonlight.

  “Oh mi dios,” Magda said just above a whisper.

  Then the dead woman fell upon her and began to snap at her with yellowed teeth. Magda fended her off as best she could, but being paralyzed below the waist was too great a disadvantage and the dead woman quickly overcame her and tore into her throat, ripped chunks of flesh from her face and then started on Magda’s small breasts as if they were the finest delicacies. She stopped resisting and gave in to the savage assault. The pain became something else, a sensation she did not recognize, something well beyond mere physical sensation.

  Something shifted inside her, knocking her off-center. She couldn’t tell whether she was leaving her body or sinking deeper into its transient flesh.

  Just before death took her, Magda looked deep into the Devil’s eye in the night sky and knew God’s angels were not coming for her.

  At the last, she knew that Death was not taking her. Death was joining her, slipping inside her as evilly as her rapists had.

  But unlike the rapists, Death had come to stay.

  5

  Splat!

  “Shut the fuck up,” Peg said to the ghostly chorus in her head, the evil little cherubs going, Piggy Poop, you’ve been duped. Duped by Death, don’t hold your breath. Comes the hour round at last? No, says Death, you can kiss my ass. “You’re no Greek chorus. You’re a fucking Geek chorus.”

  She would’ve offed herself eons ago (back when she was evil eighteen) if she hadn’t become convinced that she was the honest-to-God antichrist in the fucking flesh.

  Eons if she was the antichrist because the antichrist could exist outside of time like Jesus and the angels (by Peggy Pope’s logic anyway), and why not a chick as antichrist? The dark female principle (as in dark hole, Hell, the pit) would make a perfect counter to the shining masculine light of Christ, right? Sure as shit, Peggy Pissy Pants. The possibility that she was the antichrist gave her a reason to keep living, to stuff the pin back in the grenade, so to speak. But then it was back to Pull the pin, Piggy Poop when she could no longer make herself believe the whole End Times schmear because she just couldn’t swallow the preposterous notion that God actually existed. It was fantasy, a ginormous fairy tale, supernatural Pablum for thumbsucking shitheads and assorted slurps of Shit World.

  The long and the short of it being that Peg Pope didn’t exist eons ago because she wasn’t the antichrist because there was no antichrist because there was no Christ because because because blah blah blah.

  But now this big eyeball was up there looking at her and the frigging thing blinked and changed everything. Now she could believe anything because anything was possible. She could go back to being the antichrist if she’d half a mind to. She laughed, the idea of having half a mind tickling like a feather in her funnybone cerebellum. Say what? Say amen, motherfuck. I’m still here.

  Still on the bridge after sundown. The geezer trying to raise Cain with his raised cane had moved on and was no doubt preaching the Word to elsewhere slurps dumb enough to hear it. When he’d got close enough to spray Peg with his spittle and to gaze into her Goth Girl whiteface, she put the fear of the Lord or Lucifer into him by saying: “Get the fuck off my bridge or I’ll throw your narrow old ass off it.” As he hobbled away tapping his cane on the sidewalk, she shouted: “I am the End Timer come to end Shit World!” A glance up at the eye in the sky put an end to that lie.

  There was of course an easy way to find out who she was and what was what. She could go ahead and jump. “It is what it is,” she said to the eye aglow in the night sky. “Or it ain’t what it is. It’s either splat! and die, or splat! and Dig that bitching eye. Wow, dude.”

  She looked off at the Santa Rita Mountains to the south. A wind blew up so strong that she thought it might smack her off the bridge. Then it came to her that it was a devil wind from no place on this earth, a wind carrying something momentous. Just as quickly as it had come, it died. Or departed. Leaving in its wake a pair of buzzing flies. Fucking flies?

  Big-ass horseflies. When the first one bit her she yelped and swatted at it in anger. Missed. Then the other one dive-bombed her and took a bite out of her throat.

  This one she smacked good. Splat! Splattered its guts. She wiped the goo off her throat and examined the foul mess on her fingertips. Blood mixed with a sickening green gunk and a pallid pus-like substance.

  It reeked.

  It smelled like backed-up drainage from rotting corpses clogging a sewer line.

  It reeked.

  She retched. She held onto the concrete rail.

  Dizzy.

  Shit.

  Horseflies from hell.

  She looked one last time into the eye in the sky, wished she could spit in it but instead said, “That’s it. I take no more shit. I’m ending Shit World right fucking now.”

  And she somersaulted over the side and went splat! when she hit the tracks.

  A short while later, she got up and started walking on broken bones. Leaving behind a lot of blood and a bit of brain.

  6

  A Dark Ride

  The patio outside their Nogales motel room. Jamie chain-smoked and slapped at no-see-ums and a particularly persistent black fly. Thomas stared meditatively at the great eye overhead, occasionally shaking his head in wonder or disbelief.

  “Can we please go in now?” she asked. “These bugs are eating me up.”

  Thomas grunted.

  Jamie said, “How long can you sit and look at the goddamn thing? Let’s go in. It’s obviously not going anywhere.”

  “Um-hm.”

  She said, “I have to be home by midnight or John boy will get suspicious and once the son of a bitch catches scent he’s like a fucking bloodhound. There ain’t no quit in the man. Believe me, we don’t want him sniffing us out. He’ll kill us both. And his cop buddies will cover for him. So chop-chop. Get a move on. Hot night in Fuck City.”

  “I can’t believe you,” he said, finally taking his eyes off the eye. “Don’t you know a miracle when you see one?”

  “Jesus! We didn’t come here for miracles. It’s a no-tell motel, for Christ’s sake. We came for screwing our asses off and so far you’ve let me down big time. I could’ve saved my money and stayed home with my vibrator. Mr. Mojo ain’t afraid to go up my ass either. Unlike one ass clown I could name. Reverend.”

  “Could you be any cruder? My God …”

  “Oh, I can be a lot cruder, Jesus boy.” She flipped her cigarette into the deepening dusk surrounding the patio. “And I can make you love it.”

  A small plane with navigation lights blinking passed in front of the eye gleaming in the moonlight. Thomas looked up and said, “The thing must be outside the earth’s atmosphere. As high as the heavens. I wo
nder what the space station sees.”

  She slid out of her chair and knelt between his legs and unzipped him. He tried to push her away and stand up but she kept him pinned to his seat. Her fingers found his limp cock, brought it out into the night air and took its bulbous knob in her mouth. It began to swell and quickly became a mouthful.

  “Somebody could see us,” he protested weakly.

  “So what?” she said around his dick, sounding tongue-tied. “Nobody knows us here.”

  She sucked hard and bobbed her head until he groaned, then she pulled it out and said, “C’mon, we’re going inside so you can fuck me proper.” She yanked him out of his chair by his dick but this time he didn’t object. She led him to the sliding-glass door, opened it and pulled him into the stale, frigid air.

  She undressed in a hurry. “I’m itching like a bitch. Those little fuckers feasted on me. Didn’t you get any bites?”

  “A few, I guess. Mostly from you.”

  “Ha. So you did notice. I was beginning to think you were a fucking zombie. I’d hate for my best efforts to go unnoticed.”

  “I noticed. Why else would I let you lead me around by my … thing.”

  “Don’t play the prude. It makes you sound like a phony. And don’t kid yourself. When you whack off with your left hand your right does know what you’re doing. Now get your clothes off.”

  She poked the head of his erect penis with her fingernail and said, “You’re going to put that in my ass or I’ll start screaming bloody murder. Don’t think I won’t.”

  “Jamie, please …”

  She slathered massage oil between her legs, front and rear, and then climbed onto the bed, remained on her hands and knees and waggled her ass. “Come and get it, big boy. Climb on and pop it in the poop chute. It’s a dark ride.”

  He obeyed. He positioned himself to mount her and she reached back to guide him into forbidden territory. He went in slow, an inch at a time.

  “Oh … yeah,” she said. “How’s it feel?”

  “Um, tight. Good.”

  “Bet your ass, baby. Now all the way. Reach around and finger me while you fuck me. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ, that’s wicked good!”