4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (5 page)

The dude’s dick made squishing sounds against her exposed brain. “Fucking your brains out, cunt,” he said and laughed between ugly grunts of piggish passion.

Piggy smiled, or thought she did, it was hard to tell because she was pretty much numb all over, physical sensations dulled by death—or whatever this was. It was certainly some variation of death because you sure as shit couldn’t call this living. But smile she did, or tried to. She’d always wanted her brains fucked out. Not necessarily by a stinking hobo but beggars and dead girls couldn’t be choosers. She would let the guy get his nut and then she would have his nuts and his cock too, as appetizers. After that she would make a feast of his choicest parts before he died. The bum with the shitty britches was not on her menu. And for the moment Suck was busy wrestling with Sick, trying to keep him on the ground and wrapped in the blanket. Suck was apparently so dense that he didn’t know, as Piggy did, that Sick was like her—some kind of dead.

Sop was on his knees with his loins bridging the back of Piggy’s head and his hands resting on the ground as he made short thrusts into her head, the tip of his prick hammering her brain as he worked the narrow fissure in her skull. He made nastier grunting noises and occasionally snorted like a rooting pig as he got closer to getting his nut.

The way Piggy Poop was positioned, she had a good view of Suck and Sick going at each other, shitty Suck having the upper hand because Sick was half swaddled in the blanket and couldn’t get clear enough to win the advantage and do what Piggy knew he so wanted to do to his opponent with the beating heart and tantalizing living flesh.

“I don’t know why you ain’t dead, bitch,” the brain-fucker sweet talked her, “but this is the best brain I ever had, haw hee haw.”

Getting into the spirit of the crazy-ass moment, Piggy said, “Fuck me dead,” or tried to. What came out as a whisper was more like “Uck ee edd.”

“I wouldn’t touch your skanky pussy,” he said, “with Sambo’s dick but your skull hole is sweet. Damn!”

“Fuck me dead, cocksucker.” Which of course hissed out as “Uck ee edd, ock ucka.”

“Here it comes, you retard whore. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaa …”

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell
delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged
every man according to their works.
—Revelation 20:13

Nadif Awad was a long way from Somaliland. It was a strange and winding path that brought him from his African homeland to the border of the United States, land of infidels and corrupt kingdom of the Great Satan. It was not until he came to understand that the stoning death of his betrothed Aziza was the will of Allah that Nadif was ready to join the Grand Jihad and to take the attack to America. Now whenever he relived in nightmares the stoning of his beloved Aziza, he turned his resulting anger on all enemies of Islam and blamed them, however indirectly, for her death. Such anger was useful to a warrior.

She was buried up to her neck in the ground and killed by the hurled rocks that turned her beautiful face into a bloody abomination because she had been gang-raped by godless thugs. Nadif didn’t precisely see the justice in her punishment, nor understand how it was that she deserved to die for having been raped, but who was he to argue with an imam whose devotion to the laws of sharia was unimpeachable?

Had Aziza not died, Nadif would not have joined Harakat al-Shabaab Mujahideen, Movement of Warrior Youth. Her death had left him ripe for recruitment.

Had Aziza not been stoned to death by the villagers, then Nadif would not be carrying the seeds of Great Satan’s destruction in his backpack across the border. He would not have learned to speak flawless Spanish in order to pass himself off as an illegal immigrant from Nicaragua.

Now when he saw Aziza in his mind’s eye, he saw her with one eyeball hanging over her cheek by a stem from a ruined socket, hanging like a broken flower. Nadif’s rock hadn’t knocked her eye out of her head, that much he was sure of. The stone he threw at his beloved’s head had struck the delicate bridge of her nose. He hadn’t wanted to participate in the stoning but it would have been wrong to go against the dictates of sharia law as well as against the will of the other villagers. Nadif had a responsibility as one of them. So he had mustered enough anger at Aziza, anger for getting herself raped by thugs, to propel the stone with enough brutal force to break her nose.

The image of her once lovely eye hanging like a broken flower over her bloodied cheek would not leave him. And try as he might, he could not absolve himself of the guilt he felt for having had a hand in killing her. He told himself he had no reason to feel guilty but he felt it nonetheless.

He looked up at the unholy eye glowing in the night sky and he shuddered. That unnatural eye terrified him. Others among his party of border crossers speculated that it was the eye of their Christian god come to either judge them or watch over them but Nadif feared that it was the very eye of Great Satan looking down on his cursed continent.

Looking down on him.

Seeing into his heart and reading his murderous intentions.

Allah protect me
, he silently prayed.
Give me the courage and strength to unleash this plague upon the infidels of this godless country
.

All he had to do was follow the plan mapped out for him by his al-Shabaab handlers. The Mexican “coyote” had been well-paid to see that Nadif got across with no untoward difficulty. He called himself El Lobo and was in effect Nadif’s guide and bodyguard. He was a filthy man of slovenly habits and Nadif disliked and distrusted him. But he would follow the plan. As instructed. As he had trained to do. Once across the border, Nadif would rendezvous with a Shabaab brother already in Arizona and would be driven to Los Angeles, California, where he would deliver the canisters of the weaponized plague virus to those brothers who would set it loose upon Great Satan’s left coast. They would provide further instructions for him. Nadif was prepared to give his life if necessary. He was ready to earn his place in paradise.

El Lobo spoke harshly to the others in their party, barking hoarsely at them to step lively, to stop dragging, to stop talking, but he said nothing to Nadif. Nadif suspected this was because the man had been very well paid to deliver him to his Shabaab brothers.

But perhaps it was something more as well. Perhaps the coyote was afraid of Nadif. Afraid of what he carried. As well he should be. Yes. It was good to command such respect. Nadif was sure that El Lobo could not know what was in Nadif’s backpack but he sensed that something of terrible power was secreted within it.

One of the women stumbled and fell to her knees. El Lobo cursed her and kicked her on the rump to urge her on. Nadif had to bite his tongue until he tasted blood so that he would not rebuke the filthy man. It was not easy to see in the dark, not even with the bright moonlight on the land but Nadif knew the woman had stumbled because she had been keeping her own wary eye on the wicked eye above, looking down on them with searing malevolence.

El Lobo coughed, fitfully at first, then with increasing regularity until he had to bend at the waist in a veritable fit of non-stop coughing. He retched. He cursed. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Coughed some more.

The party of sixteen souls had to halt to wait for El Lobo to recover from his coughing attack. When Nadif saw that the coyote was coughing up blood, he feared that one of the canisters had leaked and that El Lobo was merely the first among them to succumb to the virus. But no, the former Soviet scientists who had genetically manipulated and weaponized the virus would not have been so careless as to improperly seal the air-tight containers.

Nadif warily approached El Lobo, who was now on his knees and still coughing. “Are you all right?” he asked.

El Lobo growled at him and waved him away with a blood-speckled paw. “¡Estancia lejos!” Stay away!

Nadif was going to stand his ground and remind the man that he had been paid handsomely to take him where he needed to go, but then El Lobo fell face-down on the ground and didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Nadif reluctantly checked the man’s pulse. He didn’t have one.

“Él es muerto,” he said. Dead. Just that quick. Unnaturally quick, Nadif thought. He glanced up at the fearsome eye above. Then at his traveling companions. Now what? Did anyone else know the way they were supposed to go? A stout man in a baseball cap and dirty overalls said he could get them to the outskirts of Tucson.

The woman who had stumbled and had been punished for it by El Lobo was suddenly seized by a fit of coughing.

Nadif pulled the stout man aside and told him he would pay him two hundred dollars to get him to Tucson. The money was stashed in his sock. He showed it to the man and told him he would pay him upon reaching their destination. The man nodded.

The coughing woman begged them to wait for her to catch her breath, promising that she would be able to keep up with them once she stopped coughing and could catch her breath. Nadif said she would not stop and that she was going to end up like El Lobo. Make peace with your god, he told her. You are already dead.

He swatted a fly buzzing near his face.

She coughed. She pleaded for them not to abandon her.

Some of them said they thought they should give her a chance. Wait awhile.

Nadif shook his head, steeled himself, then pulled his knife, grabbed a handful of her hair and slit her throat. He looked at the others and said, “Vayamos.”

The woman died noisily. Blood gurgled in her throat and bubbled and foamed in the raw gash which made Nadif think of female sex organs and how unclean they were. He realized that he was still holding a handful of her hair. He let it go and her head thumped to the ground. She writhed. She clutched at her slit throat, eyes wide with panic and fear. The others silently watched her die, terror engraved in their moonlit faces.

“Vayamos,” Nadif repeated.
Let’s go
.

As if responding to Nadif’s command, El Lobo rose up from the ground.

Rose from the dead
. Stood there unmoving for a long moment, and then lurched forward, reaching for Nadif.

Nadif’s knife-hand shot out to stab the dead man’s throat even as his mind whispered to itself that there was no way El Lobo could be up and walking because the dead did not walk. He jerked the blade out and jabbed it back in.

Out, in. Out, in. Jab. Jab Jab.

And still the man stood, still reaching out so that finally Nadif had to take steps backward to avoid the dead man’s grasp and the feel of his cold fingers.

“But he was dead,” Nadif said. But he said it in his native tongue, not in Spanish. Not that these Mexicans would know Somali when they heard it, but it was a sign that he was losing control.

How could he maintain control when the world no longer made sense? When the dead walk. When repeated stabs to the throat have

no power to stop a dead man’s walking.

Nadif tripped over a rock and stumbled backward to the ground.

As he struggled to get up before El Lobo could set upon him, he saw another impossible sight. The woman whose throat he’d only moments ago cut was on her feet and was bearing down on him as well.

Just before he jumped up and started slashing at the ghouls with his knife, Nadif glimpsed the evil eye of Satan gazing down on him and he realized that this was hell on earth and he was already damned.

Allah was not at all pleased.

An abyss of terror opened inside him and threatened to swallow him up.

Thomas drifted in darkness. This was one of those I’m Dreaming moments when he knew he was dreaming strange pathways through sleep and had arrived at a crossroads—he could go toward the muted light and wake up all the way or he could plumb the depths down dreaming’s darker path.

Two things brought him slowly to the light. The cold remoteness of his lover’s body and the intimate tones of TV voices. First (
In the beginning was the word
), he focused on the soft and slightly sultry voice of the female newscaster: “… because emergency responders are stretched so thin. In related news, the statewide demonstrations and counter demonstrations set for tomorrow will go on as planned, according to spokesmen for both sides of the illegal immigration issue. The embattled Arizona governor says she won’t hesitate to call out the National Guard if necessary, in the event the demonstrations turn violent.”

Then he realized, much to his horror, that Jamie was cold and lifeless. Her chest did not rise and fall against his. Her skin was clammy and as cold as a cut of meat on a butcher’s block. Her eyes were half open, hooded with swollen lids, glazed and death-clouded.

He tried to push himself off her but they were joined at the loins. Stuck! His painful erection refused to come out of her. The cold walls of her vagina held him fast.

“No, no, this can’t be,” he said, whether to himself or to his deceased lover he couldn’t have said.

He tried again to free himself.

No go.

“Please, Jamie, you have to let me go,” he said, not caring how crazy it was to say such a thing to a corpse.

He fought the impulse to pummel her to escape the claustrophobic closeness, told himself not to panic. Stay calm. Be rational. He knew he could roll over onto his back, stand up and carry her across the room to get his cell phone from his pants. He could call for an ambulance and hope the paramedics could get him unstuck here in the motel room without having to haul him into the emergency room like
this
.
In flagrante delicto
. That was the
worst
that could happen. And that was if he couldn’t get his penis out of her by his own efforts. He’d never heard of this happening to humans. He’d seen dogs stuck together in intercourse and he’d had a good laugh at their doggy dilemma but this was different. Being stuck to a dead woman was not only not funny, it made him an accidental necrophiliac. Having sex with a corpse was against the law. He couldn’t prove she was alive when he entered her. Medical personnel could report him to the police. He could go to jail! And even if he wasn’t arrested, there would be whispers and rumors and wicked gossip.