Zombie Kong - Anthology (10 page)

“Then I’ll go alone,” I said. “I’ll check out the ship. I’ll try to keep them from shooting at this place, and I’ll try to send word back if it really is a rescue.”

Bets said, “Oh, Tom!”

I took her by the shoulders. “Listen, Bets, please. Two hours ago I swore I was getting out of this town, and my only regret was leaving you behind. Now I’ve got you. I can’t stay here and live like a rat underground any longer. But I can’t be happy without you. Please, Bets. Please come with me.”

She bit her lip. I worried she was going to cry.

“Oh, all right!” she said at last. “Damn you, Tom Findley. I can’t stand this hole any longer, either. I’ll come with you. Because it’s you. But you’d better not leave me again, now or ever. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said. “I hear you. I’m so glad to hear you again.”

She kissed me. It almost made the whole terrible situation worthwhile.

* * *

The Macy’s bunker lent me a hardhat; the man in charge said it might bring me luck, and hoped I’d try hard to return it. He said it as a sort of joke. Bets gathered her own things and a helmet for herself. It only made her look more adorable.

Hand in hand, we crept through the ruined streets. We steered clear of any loud noises, whether gunfire or the shrieks of a giant zombie gorilla. The girl lookout had been right about the fog and the smoke. We could tell we were headed toward the docks, but only just. At one point, Bets grabbed my arm and jerked me behind a building.

“One of them,” she mouthed to me. I craned my neck around the corner. One of the giant zombie gorillas strolled past. I swallowed and felt weak.

Bets nodded gravely. We set off again.

The streets were not so devastated that we couldn’t pick a path through them, though it was neither fun nor easy. For every building that stood, another was strewn across its neighbors. I had not been out scavenging for some time, and it made me ache to see the valuables––what had once been valuables––tossed among the bricks and debris. I stopped to scoop up a small, flat food tin with the label burnt off. It’s never prudent to leave food behind.

“There,” said Bets, in a low tone, just at the edge of my ear. “There they are.”

We had reached the docks. Not far out over the fog-riddled water, we could make out billowing sails.

“Sails?” I murmured. “Where did they––”

“It doesn’t matter,” she murmured back. “I won’t be happy until we’re on board. Please, let’s go.”

Sailing ships! I couldn’t imagine anything that old could still float. But as we crept closer, I could just see the black ends of cannons extending from the side of the ship. They burst with a roar of cannon fire.
Perhaps,
I thought, my spirit rising,
perhaps the giant zombie gorillas have knocked our civilization back hundreds of years, but mankind was fairly dangerous back then, as well…

“I see a lifeboat!” I said, as we crested the last mound of rubble. I held out a hand to help her. “We can row out! Bets––we’re going to make it!”

The earth heaved. As I tumbled down, I saw that we had been climbing not a pile of rubble, but a giant zombie gorilla, nestled deep in the fruits of its own destruction! I rolled down his knee and across his vile foot. Bets skipped back, eyes as wide as plates. The giant zombie gorilla stood. His left arm ended in a bony, green, gangrenous stump at the shoulder.

“Tubbo!” I gasped.

Bets and I clung to one another, ducking behind his great heel. The monster rolled to his knuckles and paced toward the shore, sniffing deep. Just then, a cannonball came roaring through the thick mist: it passed not a hundred yards from Tubbo, and sank into the side of an abandoned factory.

Tubbo reared. He loomed above us. His good arm pounded his chest in a sluggish arrhythmia, and the scream from his torn throat was an ungodly rasp of dead flesh and broken teeth. I recognized his behavior at once. He was posturing––not at us, but at the
ship
, the floating thing twice his size spitting boulders at him. He challenged it as he would a living thing. He would attack it like one, too.

I clutched Bets. “He’s going to tear that ship plank from plank!” I hissed in her ear. “We must stop him.”

She looked at me with dull, sad eyes. “Okay, Tom,” she said. She put a hand in her bag. “You’d better run.”

“I won’t run!” I said.

She drew a pistol and aimed high. It lurched hard in her hand.

Tubbo reared forward. Bullets were not enough to fell his type, but this one lodged in his skull, and he noticed it. He made a huge swooping turn. His knuckles pounded down yards from us. Bets took my hand and began to back away. Her mouth quivered. “I’m sorry, Tom,” she whispered––or maybe she couldn’t quite get the words out. I knew what she meant.

“It’s all right,” I said. I knew this was my last chance. I had to make it count. “I’m glad I’m with you. Bets… I love––”

I finished the sentence in a howl as Tubbo swiped his giant hand toward us, took hold of me like a child holds a crayon, and swept me into the sky.

I would have been sick if I’d eaten anything that day. I faintly heard Bets calling from below, but the whoosh of wind in my ear covered it. In seconds, I was face to face with the beast. His vast eyes were as large as my head and white as wool. His breath reeked of the death he had eaten and the death he had become.

I became suddenly very calm.
Just avoid the teeth, Tom,
I told myself.
They’re barely held together, they’re decaying flesh. Some people have clawed their way out of the gullet and lived. Only be sure to avoid the teeth. And take a deep breath.

I took a deep breath.

Tubbo roared again––that rasping scream, that insane alarm that heralded our demise and broke down our city. I cringed between his fingers. I forced myself to straighten, to go down aware, alert, like a man. I could see so far from here. The city stretched out to my left: not quite lifeless. The sea stretched out to my right. I saw the ship clearly now. It was not one, but many. A dull, far-off
boom
. And then, to my terror, I realized that what I had taken for cannons emerging from below deck were, in fact, cannonballs––and they were getting bigger––I heard them whizz through the air, all around me––one struck Tubbo’s ear and burst out the other side with a massive spray of white bone and black flesh.

And then I was falling.

And then I was not.

Darkness and stars warred in my vision. I thought I heard Bets calling my name, although I must have been addled from the fall, because it sounded like there were three or four of her. My head reeled. I rolled to my elbows and crawled across the spongy black palm toward the pad near the thumb. I thought I saw someone coming toward me, but my vision made multiples of him. He reached me––got me under my arm––one on each side––could it be that I was not so addled? Were there many, after all?

“Got you, old boy.” It was Bradbury, on my left. “Nice adventure you had, didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t nice at all,” said Bets, on my right. “Can you walk, Tom? They have a lifeboat.”

My vision cleared. I saw Jenny and Lillian before me, and Bets and Bradbury at my sides, supporting me. “I can walk,” I croaked. I wasn’t sure right then that I could, to be honest. But I had the desire to be useful.

“They’re warships!” said Jenny, as we went, as quick as we could, to the docks. “They’re going to shuttle us north where there aren’t so many of the you-know-whats. We’ve been taking people back and forth. There are more survivors than you can imagine, Tom! This city isn’t as dead as we thought.”

Bets helped me into the lifeboat. She stroked my cheek. “And neither are you.”

I thanked my Maker it was true. As we rowed away from shore, I realized it didn’t matter where the giant zombie gorillas had come from––or even where the rescue ships came from, although I certainly intended to ask. All I had to know was that they
did
exist, and that I had done everything I could. As I held Bets in my arms, gazing out at man’s last army fighting nature’s most hideous one, I realized that I had everything I needed right here: my girl, my health, my friends.

Giant zombie gorillas or not, it wasn’t such a bad life after all.

MARK ONSPAUGH

Dear Fay Wray, We Need Your Help…

It came chittering and moaning from farm country in Iowa.

Easily fifty feet tall, its vast size made it visually incomprehensible, an enigma the mind simply refused to reconcile. Even films of the creature could only resolve that it was a massive primate, and that what had been thought to be mange was instead decomposition.

The thing was rotting as it traveled toward the east.

Farmers and hunters in the area, the sons and daughters of pioneers, shot at it with rifles and shotguns, pistols and hunting bows.

Nothing slowed the creature as it shoveled vast quantities of livestock and people into its gaping, fanged maw, chewing them into a bloody mass of muscle and fur, skin and bone, its copious, foul-smelling drool leaving small, toxic ponds in its wake.

The Army joined in the fray, as well as members of law enforcement and local gangs, each bringing high-tech weaponry and sheer bravado to the fight.

They were crushed underfoot or swept into the crushing jaws of the thing, while bits of corrupted, furred flesh the size of Persian rugs dropped into the streets, one such loathsome cast-off smothering a mother and her newborn.

The President called in fighter jets, perhaps thinking back to a movie his grandparents had told him about. Following that line of reasoning, he tried to contact Fay Wray, only to find out she was dead, and her estate refused to have her exhumed.

As if getting into the spirit of things, the oversized simian clambered up the side of a skyscraper with the practiced ease of all primates, evacuating its bowels and bladder as it climbed, claiming another ninety lives in that awful tide.

The press, having little to offer in the way of weapons beyond the metaphorical, gave it names like Prince Primate, Astounding Ape, and The Mighty Monkey.

Scientists were called in as it began to lay waste to Illinois.

Probes were shot into the thing, dislodging huge parasites, fleas the size of corgis and ticks the size of schnauzers. These fed upon hapless grad students and pets, adding dozens to the death toll.

The probes revealed that the creature had no life signs beyond locomotion, vocalization, and feeding.

No heart beat, no respiration, no cellular activity of any kind.

Clearly this was impossible. After all, this wasn’t a world of wizards and witches.

Probes were recalibrated and relaunched, and more grad students were sucked to withered husks by oversized vermin.

The new probes confirmed the impossible.

The thing was dead. The rotting flesh was consistent with death, although a more rapid rate of putrefaction would have been expected.

The stench of the thing became so great that its coming was known from several miles away, and some people succumbed to the foul odor. One old woman left a suicide note under a plaster bust of Lincoln: ‘I would rather be dead than smell that
(expletive deleted)
critter anymore.’

The press tried names like ‘Stinkosaurus Rex’ and ‘Stenchzilla’, but the public wouldn’t accept them. The reporters went back to their
Zim’s Zoo Book
and thesauri for new ideas.

At the White House, nuclear options were discussed and discarded.

Pheromones as bait were considered, but what was the gender of the beast, and would it even be attracted to the opposite sex? And where would we find another creature––preferably undead?

Meanwhile, in Addison, Iowa, Doctor Emily Grange made a remarkable find.

Under an enormous red tent trimmed in gold, she found the remains of a carnival, and a barrel of toxic waste labeled An-775.

The toxic waste had gone inert by that time, which was a small blessing. It was traced to a small Iowan trucking company, and from there, to a shell corporation called Goosie Juice. This proved to be a front for a black ops, off the grid, unofficial and unsanctioned research arm of Medusa––the team first commissioned by FDR to fight Nazi zombies in World War II.

Further digging by journalists and Iowan Senator Ken Farley revealed that An-775 was called ‘Anubis gas’, and had been developed by Doctor Helmut Waschbär to fight undead Nazis with good old American zombies (plus some Brits and maybe a few Aussies).

An-775 did reanimate the dead. It also turned live things un-live.

Unfortunately, An-775 also had problematic side effect: it enlarged the organism twenty-five times its original size.

While an army of one-hundred-and-fifty-foot undead Yanks might seem like a real advantage in a fight with puny six-foot Aryan zombies, there were the questions of control, feeding, and transport.

Project Anubis was scrubbed, and Dr. Waschbär went on to the highly successful Red Rover Program, turning Russian soldiers into werewolves.

In the time it took to track down the potential source of the ravaging zombie primate, it had reached the Appalachian mountain range. Here, brave hill people fought with a tenacity and ferocity still celebrated in songs like, “Monkey on the Mountain”, “Critter Ruined My Still and Ate My Grandpappy”, and “Stinks to High Heaven”.

Thanks to a flaming barrier of old tires, strip mine leavings, and moonshine, the creature was held at bay for two days, giving the President, his top advisers, and key members of the populace––senators, doctors, scientists, entertainers, and sports figures––time to evacuate to a secret underground bunker codenamed ‘Bedford Falls’. From there the President could coordinate attacks against the Behemoth Baboon in safety, along with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Sammy Alcala, the MVP of the recent World Series.