Zombie Pulp (34 page)

There was a scraping sound now…like something sharp dragged over the hood of a car.

He smelled a sweet and high odor like rotting hay. It grew stronger by the moment. He brushed sweat from his face, licked his paper-dry lips. The world around him was painted gray by the mist. Tree limbs creaked together in the breeze. He looked around, peering through blankets of fog, terrified at what he might see coming at him.

The stink was overpowering now.

He turned, ready to run, ready to give up his position by making a mad dash for the truck and then—

Someone was standing not ten feet away.

At first, Cabot was not even sure that he was looking at a man. Dressed in a black coat that was feathered with moss, his back twisted and body contorted, he looked like a dead, gnarled tree growing up from the weedy soil, his skeletal hands reaching twigs, his face corded like pine bark. “Please, friend,” he said in a rasping tone. “I am so hungry, so very hungry…”

Wormboy.

Cabot just waited there, the shotgun in his fists. “Get the fuck away from me,” he said.

The Wormboy dragged himself forward, grinning happily. His face split open with it, tissues tearing and tendons popping like dry roots. His eyes were blank and white, rimmed with red, his mouth hanging open to reveal pitted gums and black teeth. A dark slime oozed from his lips like running sap.

Cabot shot him.

He caught him in the belly and nearly tore him in half. But what was left, like stringy pink and gray meat, kept crawling in his direction.

Cabot ran.

Off into the shadows, trying to find that little park but what he found were shapes, long-armed shapes, dozens of them moving at him out of the mist. They were coming from every direction. He was in a nest of them. Grinning faces bloated with putrescence swam out of the fog. Spidery fingers clawed out for him. Gurgling voices called out. They were ringing him in, gliding forward like swarming insects.

Cabot turned and fired, ran to the left, fired, to the right and fired again. Fingers tore at his jacket and he swung the shotgun like a club, felt it smash into something soft and pulpy. More were coming and he needed to reload, but there just wasn’t time.

He dove through a knot of Wormboys, hammered his way clear. He leaped over a hedge, crawled on his hands and knees through the grass. On his feet again, across a yard, around a house, down an alley. Behind him, they were coming, screaming and squealing, the stench of their numbers gaseous and revolting.

He cut through another yard, paused and fumbled shells into the shotgun.

And then a voice said: “Hey, mister! Over here!”

Cabot felt his heart gallop to a stop, lurch painfully, then start beating again. He turned and there was a little girl standing there in what looked like a white dress that had gone dark with filth. It hung in rags. Her face was as pale as the mist, her eyes huge and black and glistening with wetness. She held a finger like a skeleton key to her lips, said, “Sshhh!”

She began backing away between two ruined houses, arching a finger at him to follow. His breath lancing his throat, Cabot listened to the Wormboys gathering out there, sniffing out his trail. The girl could have been one of them and then, maybe not.

“Hurry! Or they’ll get you!” she said.

He followed her, some electric instinct telling him to run, that this was a trap, a trap, but he was too scared to listen.

He followed.

The girl kept backing away, through the grass, around bushes and trees. Without even turning, she vaulted a heap of dead leaves. Cabot went after her, praying under his breath. He stumbled through the leaf pile and there was a sudden, unbelievable explosion of white agony in his ankle.

He went down, screaming, fighting, the shotgun going one way and he going the other.

The girl turned away, made a high whistling sound like a wind blown through catacombs. And as she did so, Cabot saw in his pain that the back of her head was mostly gone. Strands of dirty hair fell over a gaping, rotten chasm that boiled with meat flies.

She whistled again.

Dear God, she’s signaling the others, calling out to them…

Cabot thrashed, trying to break free.

The pain tossed his mind into darkness and then yanked it back out again. His eyes irised open, blinking away tears, and he saw the girl. Just standing there, giggling softly, looking very pleased. Her eyes were larger than ever, oily and moist, filled with a raw-toothed hunger. A fly ran over her threadbare lips and she caught it with a gray tongue, sucked it into her mouth. Then she ate it, gums shriveled away from teeth that were black and overlapping, filed sharp.

As her insane laughter echoed into the night, Cabot reached down to his ankle to see what held it. The pain made white specks flash before his eyes.

A trap, oh yes, a trap.

A bear trap. The spikes were buried in his ankle, buried deep like the jaws of a tiger. He tried to force them apart and he nearly went out cold from the pain. His hands came away dark and dripping.

Two more figures came out of the darkness.

They stank like tombs.

Cabot screamed, but a pulpy, moist hand squeezed his mouth shut. Somewhere during the process, he fainted.

*

He woke later to the sound of humming.

Humming.

A woman’s voice, but cracked and dry-sounding like her throat was packed with dirt and dead leaves. His eyes opened, shut, opened again. He was in a room that stank of old blood and rancid meat, a shocking rank odor. Candles were flickering on a mantle throwing greasy, wavering shadows in every direction.

The humming went on and on.

Beneath it was the near steady drone of flies.

Something crawled over his face but he dared not move.

He tried to remember, to make sense of it. There were only fleeting, maroon-tinged images of the fog, the things hunting in it. Then that evil little girl. The bear trap. Then…Jesus, just some distorted nightmare of him being dragged through the mist, dragged by the trap that snared his ankle, the agony throwing him into darkness.

You’re in their lair,
he thought then.
They’ve got you good.

His leg was numb from the knee down and he didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. But he knew the trap was gone. Without moving, without daring to give indication that he was even alive, he peered around. It looked like he was in a living room…or what had once been a living room. Stainless steel traps hung from chains on the walls. Old blood was spattered everywhere in loops and whorls. It looked black in the dirty light.

What the hell is this?

But by degrees, he began to understand.

He was dumped on the floor, resting in a pool of blood gone sticky and cold. All around him were hunched shapes, silent, stinking, netted with flies. Gutted torsos, gnawed limbs, sightless faces peeled to the bone. He was in a litter pile of human remains. He felt something inside him run wet and warm as he realized it. Not just the mantraps on the walls, but tables gleaming with cutlery, saws and axes. Candlelight was reflected off puddles of dried blood clotted with tissue and hair. Flies filled the air in clouds, rising and descending to feed. They investigated his lips, his nostrils, dozens of them crawling over his wounded ankle. A maggoty head was at his left elbow, a cleaver sank in its skull.

A slaughterhouse.

He would have screamed, but what was the point? He had never been alone in his life as he was now. That humming. He craned his head precious inches. He saw a woman in the guttering light. Her hair was long and colorless, matted with tallow and dried blood. Her face was an obscenity. There was a skullish hollow where her nose had been, some cancerous ulceration chewing it away and spreading, leaving a gaping fleshless pit in the center of her face. A black chasm in which carrion beetles spawned. Her eyes were dark and glossy, her teeth jutting from a lipless maw.

She was humming.

Working on something.

Cabot craned his head a bit more and saw. She was kneeling before a cadaver, working it with a knife like a woman preparing a chicken for Sunday dinner. Sawing, cutting. She yanked out moist loops of bowel and glistening lumps of organ, separating them, threw a snakelike ribbon of entrails over her shoulder. Flies covered her, covered what she was working on. She hummed happily. Now she was reaching into cloth bags, sprinkling things into the hollowed belly. Seasoning it. Now stitching the gut closed with needle and thread.

Dear God.

Cabot was trembling. He couldn’t help it. Then through the door came a man in the same shapeless, shroud-like rags the woman wore. His face was white and pulpy, threaded with segmented green worms. They didn’t seem to bother him. He looped a rope around the cadaver’s ankles, threw the other end over a roughhewn beam overhead. Together, they pulled and pulled until the body was dangling in the air, fingertips just brushing the floor.

They tied the rope off.

And that’s when Cabot saw its face: Blaine.

It was the kid. Stupid, dumbass fucking kid. This is how it ended for him in this cannibal’s lair, as meat. The knowledge of this made things unwind in Cabot until he felt hopeless, calm, senseless. The kid was just livestock to be slaughtered, dressed out and seasoned, aged for the dinner table.

Cabot knew he would be next.

The girl that had trapped him came hopping through the door on all fours. She went right over to him, pressing her vile flyblown face into his own. She licked his cheek with a scabrous tongue. Nibbled at his throat, his exposed belly, then downwards towards his ankle.

Oh not that, don’t wake that ankle up.

The woman turned, putting red gleaming eyes on the girl. “Nah! Nah!” she cried out in a rasping voice that was full of grave dirt. “Not et one! The finding of the meat! The getting of the meat! Must be aged, must be soft!” She threw something towards the far wall. It might have been a heart. The girl scampered after it, began chewing and sucking on it.

So this is what it had come to? This was the malignant, loathsome sort of evolution that had been going on in graveyard towns like Mattawan. The dead were not just shambling in the streets and hiding in the shadows or hunting in packs…they had formed familial bonds of a sort, basal tribe-like hunting units. This is what had been going on in the shadows, the mortuaries, cellars and ruined houses. Breeding and evolving like crawly, slimy things beneath rotten logs.

Evolving.

Cabot did not move. He had not moved when the girl tasted him and he would not move now. They thought he was dead, so he would be dead. They were letting him cool before they dressed him out.

The man stumbled away and the woman followed him, muttering about the finding of meat, the stocking of meat, and the tasting and filling of meat. The girl tagged behind, crawling on all fours like an animal. Cabot heard stairs creaking as they went up to the second floor.

He waited.

Flies covered him, biting him, laying their eggs. Beetles crawled over his face.

He did not move.

*

Later, when Cabot opened his eyes, there was only silence.

The zombie family was gone.

He listened for a long time and only heard the flies, the rats that came out to feed upon the dead. He sat up, a brilliant thunderclap of pain in his leg. He dragged himself away from the corpses, through sticky pools of blood. Using a table, he pulled himself up. He could not put weight on his leg. He found a shovel in the corner.

A shovel?
Yes, of course a shovel. They’ve probably opened every grave in the county. When the truck comes from Hullville they probably get their share and bury it until it’s soft and wormy the way they like it.

He knew it couldn’t be this easy.

He couldn’t simply walk out of there without them knowing. But he did. He hobbled out of the room and through a door that was hanging from its hinges. The night air was damp and sour-smelling, but fresh compared to the house. His breath did not want to come, his ankle was throbbing, his body knotted with aches and pains, but he kept going. Even with the shovel as a crutch, he was every quiet. Through yards, across streets, down alleys. Moving by instinctive sense alone, he found the park.

The dead were not there.

He looked for them, but the mist was empty. Just decaying houses, collapsing fences, leaning and splintered telephone poles whose lines hung limp as spaghetti. The truck would not be far. He would find it, get in it, get away. Yes. He would pull the lever that opened the doors to release his cargo. The Wormboys would take care of the rest. Then he would go back, make up a story. Maybe crash the truck and call for a pick-up on the radio, say the dead had attacked, he’d released the cargo to draw them away.

Yes, yes.

Through the mist, the latticing of shadows.

The truck would be just ahead.

He stopped, suddenly roped tight with fear. He could hear…yes, grunting sounds, sucking sounds, chewing sounds. The stink of blood in the air was violent and overwhelming. He crept through the fog, knowing he had to see and then, hidden behind a bush, he did.