Zombie Bitches From Hell (16 page)

Dick, breathing heavily, made his way back
to the entrance of the barn. As he pushed the head of the dead girl
off of the rake with his thick-soled shoe, I could see she had
something jammed in her mouth – it was Chaz’s still erect penis,
but I guess he no longer had to “seek medical attention for an
erection lasting more than four hours.”

Jerry opened the door and stepped out to let
the big man back in, when suddenly one of the women Dick thought he
had killed, her back ravaged and spine exposed by the rake, clawed
her way forward, and bit Jerry on the calf. He howled as I thrust
my shovel down, severing her head at the neck like a guillotine.
Dick dove inside the barn carrying the screaming Jerry along with
him.

“
Put him down here, quick, quick.”It was
Artie. Jerry was screaming. Blood from his leg was mingling with
the hay on the barn floor making a thick trail behind him. “You,”
Artie turned to Tim. “Over there by my bunk, there’s a first aid
kit. Bring it here, hurry, now!
”
Tim obeyed. Artie
tore open a few 4x4 gauze pads and put them immediately over the
gaping wound on the back of Jerry’s calf.

“
Here” he said to me, “Keep pressure
here,” and he had me squeeze tightly over the gauze, which was
rapidly becoming soaked in blood. With his mouth, Artie tore open a
roll of tape and started taping around the gauze. Jerry was still
screaming and crying in agony. Artie took a small metal flask out
of one of the pockets of his vest. “Here, old buddy, drink some of
this.” Jerry gulped down the booze.

“
Holy Shit!” said Tim. “Did you see that,
did you see all that!” Jerry’s screams had died down to whimpers
now, as he continued to take long draughts from of Artie’s flask. I
felt like I could use one myself. Eventually, Jerry drifted off
into unconsciousness.

“
Is he going to be all right?” I said to
Artie.

“
Well I’ve got the blood flow staunched,”
he said taking a long swig from the flask himself now, before
returning it to his breast pocket, the deep red stains of Jerry’s
blood now commingled with the others of his ridiculous long
underwear. “The thing is I don’t know anything about that bite. At
the very least, it could get infected, gangrenous – Jerry’s a
diabetic after all, at the worst...”

Dick interrupted, “At the worst – go ahead
and say it, man, we all know what you are thinking. He’s infected
with whatever this shit is that’s making them all go crazy – and if
he is he can’t stay in here, you got to get rid of him.”

“
Wait a minute, you don’t know that,” said
Artie, “Besides only ones I ever saw get nuts like that are
women.”

“
Yeah, but just cause we never saw anyone
but women affected by The Plague, that doesn’t mean it only affects
women,” countered Dick, “And Jerry practically was a woman”

“
All right that’s enough!” said Artie
–“another crack like that, smartass, and it’s you I’ll be getting
rid of. Now me and Jerry go way back” – he lifted his bow, arrow
cocked and pointed it at Dick – “so you just back off and shut
up.”

Dick stepped forward, pulling himself up to
his full height. “Okay, Artie, settle down.” He put his big hand on
the bow and gently made Artie lower it down. In the corner Jerry
started to thrash about still unconscious, he was sweating
profusely. Artie went to him. “He’s burning up,” he said.

“
Look at his leg,” I said. At the wound,
just above the bandage, black lines like tendrils were reaching
out, up Jerry’s leg, already almost past his knee.

“
You!” Artie shouted at me, “Give me your
belt.” I did, and he took it and strapped it tight around Jerry’s
thigh just above his knee.

“
You think that will stop it?”

“
I can’t be sure,” said Artie, “I’m no
doctor.”

Dick’s large shadow slowly passed over
Jerry and the two of us kneeled beside him. In his deep baritone he
said, “There is only one way to
be
sure.” And that
was when I noticed the machete in his hand.

We moved Jerry up onto a table the oldsters
had been using to play bridge, we laid him right on top of the
cards. “Okay, okay,” Artie said to me,” you hold him down at the
shoulders, keep him from squirming too much, here pour some more of
this down his throat.” He passed me the flask, Jerry coughed as I
did as Artie asked. “Now, do it right here, just above where the
belt is serving as a tourniquet. Try to make it one quick blow,” he
said to Dick, who was poised above Tim brandishing the machete. Tim
was holding a makeshift torch made from some old rags we found
around the barn, which he’d lit with a Zippo lighter lying on the
table. He handed it to me and I pocketed it. Black, acrid smoke
from it swirled toward the ceiling in a macabre dance. A bucket of
water was at his feet. “Now, Tim, very important, as soon as I pull
the leg clear, you have to press that torch quickly and firmly
against the stump to cauterize the wound. And then douse it
immediately in that water – if you drop it, or ignite any of this
hay around here, it won’t matter if this works or not.”

“
Okay, let’s go.” I took a deep breath,
and said a little prayer as Dick raised the machete over Jerry’s
leg. Jerry groaned and let out a little whimper as I pressed down
harder on his shoulders, but he remained barely conscious. The
Machete came down with a sickening thunk, passing through Jerry’s
leg and into the table below as easily as Abe Lincoln splitting a
rail. Jerry began screaming, but I shoved a “bite stick” from the
First Aid kit between his teeth, forced his jaw shut, and held it
fast.

“
Tim, the torch, now!” shouted Artie. Tim,
did what he was told, and the cloying smell of roasting flesh
filled the air. I could feel Jerry slip back into unconsciousness
as I heard the hiss of Tim’s torch being extinguished in the water.
That was followed by the clatter of the machete hitting the barn
floor, Dick’s broad back turned to me in disgust as he walked away
in silence. “I need some air.” I knew he shouldn’t go outside, but
I was not going to argue with the big man.

Artie took Jerry’s amputated leg, wrapped it
in some rags, and carried it over to the latrine hole in the floor,
and let it drop through, it landed in the lye pile with a soft
ploomf and puff of white powdery smoke.

Dick had been gone about fifteen minutes
when I heard a strange sound.

“
You hear that?” There was drone that was
soon recognizable as a car engine, growing louder and louder. We
all ran to the opening of the hayloft, just in time to see a black
sedan barreling toward the farmhouse, running over and through the
creatures – tossing them aside like rag dolls, beating out a
concerto of bone cracking thumps. Then, the car took off like a
rocket, hit an old tree stump, rolled over and over, finally coming
to a stop just feet before the entrance to the barn. I could see
the driver was still alive inside. He was trying to crawl out,
toward the entrance, but was held by his seatbelt “Cover me,” I
shouted to Artie, as I grabbed the machete and charged through the
entrance and out into the madness just in time to bury it deep in
the face of the first creature that was about to pounce on the
drivers back. The machete came free with a slurp, and she slumped
to the floor. I barely heard Artie’s arrow whiz by my cheek as it
took down the second squarely between the eyes. Another came
scrambling over the bottom of the overturned car, leaping, only to
find herself impaled on my machete; it protruded out of her back, a
limp and deflated silicon implant dangling from the tip. With a
twist I removed the long blade, which slid back out through her
once ample chest, covered in gore. I used the machete to cut the
seatbelt that held the driver in the car, and dragged him back
inside the barn, just as Artie got the barn doors shut.

“
Are you crazy!” shouted Tim. “You could
have been killed. If those things got in here we all could have
been killed!” Whatever Tim was going to say next, it was cut off by
a high-pitched blood-curdling scream. Jerry had picked that moment
to regain consciousness, and was screaming, having noticed his
missing leg. “My leg, what did you to my leg, my beautiful legs!”
Artie went to kneel down next to him.

“
It’s okay, it’s okay Jerry, you are going
to be alright,” and he cradled Jerry’s head in his arms. Jerry’s
screams slowly subsided, but he continued to cry and whimper. He
was muttering something about now he’ll never dance with Liza
Minnelli, as Artie passed him the metal flask from which he
continued to drink deeply.

Tim, on the other hand, was really losing it
– I had never seen him like this. His eyes darted from me, to
Jerry, to Artie, back to the door.

“
This is crazy, Man. Captain Viagra gets
torn apart, the queen is screaming, the big guy’s nowhere to be
found, and there are more and more of those things trying to claw
their way in here now, and you go and open the doors just to let
another poor bastard in here.”

“
Hey, Tim – think! Use your head. If Artie
there didn’t open up and let us in here, we’d already be Purina
Zombie Chow!”

“
Better all calm down” It was the guy we
just brought in. He was seated against the back wall, his head
bowed between his knees.

“
What?” said Artie. He still cradled
Jerry’s head in his lap, who had mercifully fallen back into
unconsciousness.

The stranger in the corner lifted his head
slowly; “I said you all have to take it down a notch.”

“
Hey, Mister, you just got here – you have
no idea what we been through,” said Tim

“
And you have no idea what all your anger,
aggression and macho bullshit is going to do to those things out
there. You guys keep going at it, lose control, get the adrenaline
pumping, and the testosterone flowing and those things are going to
be drawn to this place like a pack of hungry dogs to a butcher
shop.”

“
They must know we’re in here now,” I
said.

Artie was hopeful. Poor guy. “Maybe they
didn’t see. We’ve been up here for a while without much
incident.”

“
You’re wrong,” the stranger said.

“
How do you know that?” said
Artie.

“
Because that’s what it was
designed
to do. I’m David Keilar, and I am, or was Chief
Science Officer of Vivax Pharmaceuticals. You ever heard of
Oxytocin?”

Tim said, “You mean the painkillers that
Rush Limbaugh was addicted to?”

“
No, you idiot,” said Artie, “that was
Oxycontin,
Oxytocin is some kind of ‘love hormone’ isn’t
it? Supposed to be a human pheromone.”

Keilar and the rest of us looked at Artie
in surprise. He gave a look back that said,
“Told you I’m
not just a stupid old drunk.”

Keilar nodded and said, “Yeah, but the stuff
we came up with was hundreds of times stronger. We were trying to
develop something that would make men,” and he looked right at Tim,
“any man, incredibly attractive, irresistible not only to women,
but to everyone around him. Call it a kind of charisma in a bottle,
but no matter what you called it, it would spell power to the user.
But something went wrong. Horribly wrong, a few women in the
trials…they died, but that wasn’t the worst of it. They didn’t stay
dead, they came back as those things out there. Strong, fast,
aggressive, you’ve all seen that, but they also seem to actually
feed on testosterone, need it to survive like a mosquito needs
blood. They can ‘smell’ it, and it whips them into a feeding
frenzy, the results of which you’ve all seen. Then somehow which we
still don’t understand, it started to spread to people that never
even took the drug.”

“
Wait a minute, are you telling me you’re
the bastard that caused this mess? Tim’s voice rose, becoming
shriller. “I mean, I thought, who knows maybe The Plague was just
nature getting back at us, an Act of God, weird mutant virus like
AIDS, or whatever. I should have known some suits were behind it.”
Tim started pacing, and circling like a rabid dog. “Shit, my
girlfriend Christina became one of those things, and I watched her
tear apart my little brother right in front of me.” Tears were
welling up in Tim’s eyes, and something else; he picked up a bloody
shovel off of the floor. “You God damn bastards, you knew, you all
fuckin’ knew...”

“
Wait!” Keilar shouted. I could see the
fear in his eyes, the veins pumping in his neck, his body entering
fight or flight mode. “We didn’t mean for this to happen, we didn’t
know. How could we?”

Tim started screaming at the top of his
lungs. “Yeah, that’s how it always is with you types. ‘We didn’t
know there was melamine in the milk, Mad Cow in the meat, lead in
the fucking toys’. You don’t give a shit about people, man.” And he
raised the shovel over his head. I was the first to grab him. Then
Artie. Tim was swinging the shovel around wildly, we spun and spun
trying to get it away from him, he just kept shouting crazily, and
he knocked me to the floor. Artie was still on him. Keilar had
curled up into a ball in the corner.

“
They did it man, they fucking did it –
they went and killed us all.”

Somehow Artie, with a strength that belied
his slight frame, slipped his arms up and around Tim like an aging
python, and he got him in a kind of a headlock.

“
Tim, please,” he said between panting
breaths and through gritted yellow teeth. “You heard what the guy
said. Please, settle down! You’re gonna get us all killed!”

But Tim kept screaming and straining against
Artie’s grip. He still grasped the shovel and was swinging wildly.
I couldn’t get near to help.