Zombie Pulp (30 page)

“EMMA!” he called out. “EMMA! RUN!”

Two more baboons dropped from the trees, then a third and a fourth. There had to be a dozen more up in the branches. They were shrieking and growling, absolutely enraged.

Gus heard a scratching, scrambling sound and turned. Two more were up on the roof. They were leaping from the trees onto the top of the house.

He dropped one that was five feet from him, pivoted, and knocked another off the roof that had only one arm.

He could hear Emma screaming.

The baboons were coming at him from every direction.

They looked like the remains of test animals that had been slit and bisected, poked and peeled and drained: grave-waste. He saw one lacking legs that swung its torso forward with its arms and others that seemed to be missing sections of flesh as if they’d been biopsied.

They all had huge holes eaten through them, bones jutting from their maggoty hides, meatflies rising from them in clouds. Baboon faces were skinned to pink meat or gray muscle, some were chewed to the bone by carrion beetles.

He dropped two more and then there was no room to shoot as they nipped at him, raking his legs with sharp skeletal fingers. He used his rifle like a club, swinging it, bashing in heads and smashing snarling faces to pulp until he was sprayed with rancid gouts of brown and red fluids.

The baboons circled him, gnashing their teeth.

He waited, the M-14 encrusted with gore and dripping a foul corpse slime.

He knew Emma was out there, but he didn’t dare look for her. He couldn’t even hear her now over the wailing and yipping sounds of the baboons.

Claws laid his knees open as he smashed the butt of the gun into a baboon face that was threaded with a filigree of mildew.

Then one of them bit into his ankle.

Another vaulted forward and bit into his left hand.

Crying out, he dropped the rifle, pulling the Smith .45 with his good hand.

A big baboon with a reddish-brown pelt and a pronounced white mane charged in at him, scattering the others. It had no eyes. The flesh was eaten away from its face revealing a cadaverous simian skull, jaws yawned wide to expose gleaming yellow upper and lower canines, each long and sharp enough to lay an artery open.

But what Gus noticed mostly was that its belly and chest had been completely shaven, a Y-shaped incision running from crotch to shoulders.

Autopsied. This thing had been autopsied.

Bleeding and hurting, Gus faced off with it while the others formed a tight and cohesive circle around them.

“EMMA!” he shouted. “GODDAMMIT, EMMA!”

The beast kept snapping its teeth at him, making a shrill staccato whooping noise.

Gus put three bullets into it and all that did was piss it off.

It charged and so did the others. The baboons hit him from every side and he felt himself go down under a sea of maggoty hides.

*

Emma, of course, saw Gus charge out of the house with his rifle, heard him call to her, but she was otherwise occupied.

The baboon in the tree above her was amused.

It was making that weird chittering sound that was chitinous and strident.

Staring up at it, Emma knew instinctively it was a female as were the others in the higher branches. She knew this just as she knew the males had gone after Gus.

Wiping slop from her face, she did not dare move.

The baboon stared at her with glassy, fixed eyes, grinning that toothy clownlike grin that made it look very much like some deranged pygmy looking for meat to skewer. There was some morbid growth like a grave fungus that consumed most of the left quadrant of if its face and was creeping in on the right. It seemed to be moving.

Emma heard Gus cry out.

She felt his voice slide through her heart like a needle.

He was shooting.

The baboon in the tree showed its teeth, letting out a piercing reverberating cry that was chilling and deranged and sounded very much like wild hysterical laughter.

It threw something at her that splatted on the walk. Meat. Greening meat threaded with corpse worms. It made that laughing sound again when it saw or
sensed
the revulsion coming from her. Then it slid its black leathery fingers into a gaping bloodless wound at its belly and pulled out more rotten tissue and threw it at her.

Emma ducked away.

The baboon laughed.

Her heart thumping in her chest, she stared at the horror with its greasy, nappy fur and yellow fangs and carrion eyes. Her terror pleased it, made it grin with an idiotic bestial splendor. And this more than anything not only disgusted her, it offended her.

It pissed her off.

It made Emma get to her feet, the ancestral apex predator within rising for battle.

The baboon in the tree stopped cackling now, it made a threatening almost territorial barking that got all the other females worked up. They all started screeching and baring their fangs, beating and scratching at themselves, pulling out clods of fur and necrotic tissue, throwing it like monkeys throwing shit.

Emma was pelted with the stuff.

She heard shooting, fighting, the constant screeching of the baboons.

“GUS!”

She backed away from the tree, made to turn and go to Gus and a baboon leaped through the air and tackled her, knocking her into the grass where she rolled to a stop, coming up not ten feet from the razorwire enclosure and its perimeter mines.

The baboon that attacked her came forward on all fours.

Its face was a mass of scar tissue and suturing that was bursting open from internal pressure, oyster-gray pus and pink jelly pushing its way through. The skin around its mouth had been surgically incised in an oval patch, leaving its speckled gums and fearsome teeth on display.

Emma knew she was no match physically for the beast, living or undead.

There was only one thing she could do.

As the beast roared and leaped on her, she waited it for it. And when it landed, planning on sinking its fangs in her throat, she kicked out and caught it in the chest, flipping it end over end through the air. It hit the ground on its rump, bounced, and came down inches from the razorwire.

There was a resounding explosion as it triggered a mine.

The creature was vaporized into a rain of blood and meat.

Clots of it fell over Emma and she madly pawed it free, stringy pink meat caught in her hair.

She started to scream.

*

When the baboons hit him from all sides, Gus lost his .45.

He hit the ground and they converged on him.

He never even had time to pull his knife before dozens of sets of teeth bit into him, tearing out chunks of meat and severing arteries and splintering bone.

He screamed.

He thrashed.

But it was no good.

There were too many ravenous baboons seizing him by then and he was laid open in too many places.

A large male went right for his soft white throat and found it, seizing it and tearing it open. Gus’s scream became a moist gagging sound as those teeth sank into his neck, sank in deep.

The baboon shook him by the throat like a terrier with a rat, blood spraying in every direction, its muzzle stained red right up to the eyes.

The sound of Gus’s vertebrae snapping was loud as a pistol shot and still the beast kept at it, driven mad by the blood and the taste of meat and maybe something more.

When it finally dropped him, Gus’s throat was torn out, nothing but a ragged bloody mass of sheared muscle and ligament in its place, a few fingers of shattered white vertebrae showing through.

The others kept biting into him.

Chewing on him.

Pulling strips of skin free, tearing out quilts of muscle and sinewy tendon. A set of teeth pulped his genitals, two sets of blood-dripping jaws yanked out his bowels and pulled them in opposite directions, fighting and snapping over them as others ripped out organs in meaty masses and hopped off with their prizes.

As Gus lost consciousness, he could feel them pulling him apart and gnawing on his internals.

The male that had torn out his throat, sank its long ensanguined fangs into his skull, piercing it, impaling his brain.

It kept at it, applying pressure, until his skull was crushed and its mouth was filled with gushing blood and tissue.

*

Still pawing rancid bits of baboon from her, Emma crawled off.

She got to her feet, stumbling.

As she got clear of the tree, a male baboon came loping in her direction on all fours. It had a silver-gray mane and trailing beard that was fouled with dried blood and curdled marrow.

The females screeched with excitement.

Emma stared at the dead thing coming at her.

The fur and flesh at its back had been peeled to pink muscle, as had the flesh of its face. Jutting from the surrounding orbits, its eyes were like eggs translucent with fresh blood.

It snarled at her.

Emma tensed.

It attacked.

She aimed kicks at it, trying to keep it off her so she could at least make the door. Her defense worked at first—her boots struck it in the mouth, alongside the head, driving it back. The baboon was enraged, spinning in circles, growling and barking while froths of pink saliva rained from its mouth like vomit.

Emma knew how powerful the creature must be, resurrected or not. If it got hold of her, she’d never escape its iron embrace or those gleaming fangs.

She had to keep it off her as she backed towards Gus and the door.

Several females had dropped from the trees and were yipping with delight. They went down on their bellies and offered their hairless, callused, maggot-infested asses to the male.

Emma kept kicking at the baboon.

But it began to second-guess her, began to anticipate her moves. It ducked away from a flurry of kicks and came right in, seizing her right calf in its bloody jaws and putting her down.

Emma was screaming and fighting, kicking out with her left leg while pain threaded through her right in white-hot waves. The baboon wasn’t just biting her…it was
chewing,
tearing, rending. Her pantleg was shredded, her calf muscle punctured…as those teeth came down again and again and again.

Screaming, crying, Emma engaged in one last act of defiance.

Instead of trying to kick out, she brought her leg closer to her body, dragging the baboon in with it by its teeth. And by that point it had worked a great flap of meat from her calf and it dangled from the baboon’s jaws like a bloody cutlet.

Her mind erupting with blades of white-hot pain, Emma took hold of the animal by the ears and yanked down with everything she had, snapping its head sideways. The agony of its teeth being ripped so crudely from her leg was enough to make black dots parade before her eyes, but something in her—some primal, instinctive barbarism—fought on.

Acting instinctively, she jammed her thumb into its eye.

She buried it right to the second knuckle and the eye went to a soft mush like a rotten grape.

The baboon went wild.

It whimpered and howled, contorting and thrashing, tossing her onto her back and then jumping up on top of her, growling and snapping its jaws.

An inky fluid dripped from the ruined eye and the stench was like rotting fish.

It held her down and she could feel its blunt, stubby penis pressing against her thigh.

On the ground as she was with the beast hovering above her, she could see beneath its shaggy beard. There was a perfectly symmetrical bald patch circling its throat. She could see the gray flesh beneath and it had been sutured…as if the creature’s head had been removed, then sewn back on.

With a scream she grabbed hold of its shaggy head mainly to keep those teeth from her. The baboon was extremely powerful, but she held on. Beneath the dirty fur, the flesh of its skull was spongy and soft. Emma dug her fingers in and they slid through meat and tissue soft with putrid decay.

The baboon cried out.

It trembled spasmodically.

She dug her fingers in deeper, a black sap running down her arms. Her fingertips scraped along the inside of its skull and she squeezed gray matter to mush in her fists, yanking out clods of brain that spurted between her fingers like oatmeal. Gouts of black blood fell into her face.

The baboon dropped away, whining and hissing, the top of its cranium crushed to a globby slush. It crawled in gyrating circles on the ground, leaving a slime trail of mucus behind it, its entire body contorting madly as if every neuron was misfiring.

Emma pulled herself away, wet and stinking.

The females hopped and shrieked and beat the ground with their skeletal fists. One of them had no eyes. In fact, the sockets had been stitched closed.