Book of the Dead (17 page)

Martha bolted. She was not quick enough to elude Shine’s grasp. She struggled, trying to knee him, bite him, crush his instep— Miguel slugged her across the back of the neck and she sagged toward the floor.

She heard Bertie say, “Let’s see some pussy.”

She felt hands ripping her brown waitress dress down its buttoned front. Rough fingers hooked her pantyhose and rolled them down off her hips, along her legs, clear to her feet.

Martha opened her eyes and glared at Bertie. He had taken off his pants and briefs and stood there in his long-tailed blue work shirt and socks. She suddenly noticed that his socks were slightly mismatched—black and dark blue. “Bertie—” she said. “Don’t do it.”

He smiled almost cheerfully as he loomed over her, fingering his balls. His penis jutted out and up like a construction crane. Apparently all the alcohol he’d drunk hadn’t done a thing to his erection.

“Martha,” he said, sounding almost gentle. “I’ve
got
to.” He spat into his hand and slicked up the head of his penis. “You know what’s going on out there. This may be our only chance.”

She didn’t know how to answer him in a way that would mean anything.

Bertie smiled. “Oh,” he said, “don’t worry about a last-minute rescue by good ol’ Bobby Mack Quintana.”

She finally confronted what she suspected. What she didn’t even want to
think
. As calmly as she could, she said, “What did you do to him?”

“It’s not what
I
did to him,” Bertie said, walking forward to stand between her spread legs. “It’s what the Jergensons’ Dobie did to him. I just put him out of his misery. It was a favor.” Bertie laughed in a way that was almost a giggle. “Woulda done the same for a dog.”

Martha felt the tears, willed them back. No time. Suddenly the radio came through, as though the sound were piped directly to her ears. KHIP was playing “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.”

Bullshit!
She arched her back, suddenly whipping her right leg up into Bertie’s crotch.

Bertie twisted surprisingly fast, turning the blow on his thigh. He put one socked foot on her left ankle. Shine took her right.

Miguel snickered from up beside her head. “Make a wish.”

“No gratitude in this pussy,” said Bertie conversationally. “I expect there will be.” He started to kneel down between her legs.

—as Bobby Mack Quintana came through the front door.

He didn’t open it. He just came through it in a crash and chaos of shattered glass and yells from the men along the counter.

“What the fuck?” said Bertie, springing to his feet and lunging for the magnum on the table.

Men cursed and someone screamed, and everyone scattered to get out of Bobby Mack’s path. He stood there for a moment and Martha could see he was not alive. He wore his uniform, but no hat. His khaki shirt was soaked with crusted blood that had obviously cascaded down much earlier from the shredded ruin where his throat had been. There were three black holes across his chest where large-caliber bullets had punched in. A fourth bullet had creased his face, laying open one cheek and setting his nose askew. Corruption had already set in. The flesh around his mouth seemed to be rotting. Fluids oozing from tatters in his face gleamed in the glow of the fluorescents.

“Christ, Bobby Mack,” said Bertie, holding his pistol out in two shaking hands. “How many times I got to kill you?” The fire and noise reached out, slamming Bobby Mack backward, staggering his body but not felling him.

The zombie turned slightly to look at Martha still on the floor. Its mouth opened, and somehow sounds gurgled up through the torn throat. “Mar-thhha…”

Bobby Mack turned back toward Bertie, striding forward before the man could pull the trigger. The dead deputy reached down and grasped Bertie’s penis, fingers wrapping around the thick base and the scrotum. With one powerful yank, he pulled back and up, the flesh giving way, tearing like rotten fabric.

The zombie’s arm came up and Bertie’s abdomen and stomach opened like someone had jerked the seam on a full Ziploc bag of lasagna. Viscera spewed across the dining room. If Bertie screamed, it was drowned out by the sounds of all the other men either frantically grabbing for their weapons or diving for a door.

Bertie’s arms windmilled, spasming. Blood sprayed across the overheads and the light suddenly filtered red.

No one was holding onto Martha now, and she tried to scramble to her feet. Bobby Mack had turned to Shine and Miguel, digging fingers into the former’s face and shoving the latter back into the glass shards protruding from the doorframe. The zombie tossed Shine’s face away as though it were a discarded Halloween mask and lurched toward Billy Gaspar.

“I didn’t do it!” Billy screamed. “It was them. It was
them
—” Bobby Mack pulled off Billy’s left arm and then pulped his head with the hard-muscled limb.

It suddenly seemed very quiet in the Diner. It was inhabited only by the dead and the dying. And Martha. She crouched back by the counter as Bobby Mack turned and came to her. They confronted each other and she stared sickly at his mutilated face.

He reached out jerkily, but his fingers were gentle as they touched her hair. He tried to say something, but the destroyed throat wouldn’t let him.

“You too,” Martha said, tears finally coming now. “I love you too.”

Then she heard the screaming from outside.

Men were dying in the parking lot. In the glow from
EAT—EAT—EAT
, Martha could see the survivors of the Diner being torn apart by shadowy knots of zombies.

She turned toward Bobby Mack and took his hand. The skin felt as loose as an oversized cotton work glove. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “Come on.”

He didn’t move. Bobby Mack stared behind her. Slowly, unwillingly, she looked too.

Martha recognized most of the faces.

Some had recently fed—strings of meat hung slack and bloody from the corners of pursed-lip mouths. They were all there. Her nightmares: Carl Crump, Sr., dead eyes alight behind the smashed lenses of a pair of precariously balanced tortoise-shell glasses. Pastor Beecham, his clerical collar and black jacket streaked with gore that looked just as black, except that it glistened wetly in the light. Mrs. Beecham’s red bouffant was in disarray, sodden ringlets hanging around her ears. Her gray A-line dress hung in tatters off one shoulder. Father Sierra’s head was turned askew on the stalk of his neck by about forty-five degrees. He looked like an owl staring at its prey.

Carl Crump, Jr., reached out toward Martha, and Bobby Mack batted the blood-clotted nails away from her. The younger Crump wore a Maui shirt and ridiculous tropical flower-print jams.

He must be freezing, thought Martha irrelevantly. She realized she couldn’t count all the zombies that were crowding into the Diner. Teachers, the night clerk from the 7-Eleven, some of the volunteer firefighters, the county librarian, her doctor. It looked like half the population of Fort Durham.

Carl Crump, Jr., groaned out something Martha couldn’t understand. His father stirred beside him. Both zombies put their hands to their crotches like an obscene joke version of the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil monkeys.

She realized they both had enormous erections.

“No!” she said, huddling close to Bobby Mack. The dead deputy gurgled something and put one arm around her.

And then the zombies went for them.

There simply wasn’t much maneuvering room, and so the mob surge did little good until the tidal force of corpses swung toward the Diner’s front window and the glass exploded outward into the parking area.

Martha found herself on her back, both hands around Mrs. Beecham’s neck, attempting to keep the snapping, pit-bull teeth from her own throat. Then a kick from Bobby Mack’s boot caught Mrs. Beecham under the collarbone and the zombie twisted away.

Carl Crump, Sr.’s, fist slammed into Bobby Mack’s mouth, crumbling teeth and disappearing up to the wrist.

“Bobby—!” Martha screamed.

The elder Crump’s hand reappeared, the fingers dripping with blood, nails squeezing cartilage and gray matter. Bobby Mack’s body began to spasm, arms jerking away at bizarre angles. Crump licked his own nails.

The crush of dead, writhing bodies bore Martha down into the freezing gravel. A clawing hand snatched away her bra and part of her right breast. At first she felt no pain—just the cold air on her nipples.

She saw the wild tangle of henna-red hair descend toward her crotch, felt the cold lips and icy tongue violate her vagina, tried to draw back against the unforgiving gravel as rotting teeth ground into her flesh. Mrs. Beecham’s face, slick with Martha’s blood, lunged against her repeatedly, until her husband shoved his wife aside.

Pastor Beecham mounted her as Martha raked at the vacant eyes. Other arms grabbed at her and she felt her left shoulder twist and separate. Her right arm flailed, fingers searching for any purchase at all among her attackers.

The clergyman’s penis slid deep into her like a rod of absolute-zero ice. Then Carl Crump, Jr., was at her, rolling her on her side and shoving his erection up into her anus. Martha felt the tissues tear. This time there was no merciful shock. This
hurt
and she screamed.

As Carl, Jr., pushed at her from behind, the movement seemed to excite Reverend Beecham. He shoved back, bubbles of saliva and stale air grunting from his blue lips. Martha could see Carl’s father and the others waiting like patient customers in a post office queue.

The pain was a grinding, broken-glass agony that drew out the cells of her brain, sucking them into infinity. “Damn you!” Martha cried. “Damn you
all
!”

The intrusions of the others within her inexorably pounded toward some sort of vanishing dead climax. At first Martha watched, increasingly distant. A frozen calm began to narcotize her. Then she realized how close Bobby Mack’s mercifully inert body lay, twisted into the complex lovers’ knot her body composed with the thrashing ministrations of Beecham and Carl Crump, Jr.

She could reach his holster flap with her right hand. Her fingertips touched the cold, still-bright leather. Surely one live round must remain in the cylinder of his .38 Police Positive.
Please
.

Carl Crump, Sr., squatted down above her face, run-neled fingers moving back and forth along the purpling length of his erection.

Martha’s numbed fingers twitched at the holster flap, tugged, pushed at the snap. The catch clicked free. She could feel the knurled walnut butt of the pistol.
Thank you, Bobby Mack
.

The zombies inside her grunted and heaved. Martha sensed others, many more, crowding around her. Dead eyes looked at her, but none of them
saw
. They never had. Her vision grayed.

The zombies kept coming—

—and coming—

Just one bullet
, Martha thought.

There was.

BY STEVE RASNIC TEM

In the hospital window the boy’s head shook no no no. Elaine stopped on her way up the front steps, fascinated.

The boy’s chest was rigid, his upper arms stiff. He seemed to be using something below the window to hold himself back, with all his strength, so that his upper body shook from the exertion.

She thought of television screens and their disembodied heads, ever so slightly out of focus, the individual dots of the transmitted heads moving apart with increasing randomness so that feature blended into feature and face into face until eventually the heads all looked the same: pinkish clouds of media flesh.

His head moved no no no. As if denying what was happening to him. He had been the first and was now the most advanced case of something they still had no name for. Given what had been going on in the rest of the country, the Denver Department of Health and Hospitals had naturally been quite concerned. An already Alert status had become a Crisis and doctors from all over—including a few with vague, unspecified governmental connections—had descended on the hospital.

Although it was officially discouraged, now and then in the hospital’s corridors she had overheard the whispered word
zombie
.

“Jesus, will you look at him!”

Elaine turned. Mark planted a quick kiss on her lips. “Mark… somebody will see…” But she made no attempt to move away from him.

“I think they already know.” He nibbled down her jaw-line. Elaine thought to pull away, but could not. His touch on her body, his attention, had always made her feel beautiful. It was, in fact, the only time she ever felt beautiful.

“You didn’t want anyone to know just yet, remember?” She gasped involuntarily as he moved to the base of her throat. “Christ, Mark.” She took a deep breath and pushed herself away from him. “Remember what you said about young doctors and hospital nurses? Especially young doctors with administrative aspirations?”

He looked at her. “Did I sound all that cold-blooded? I’m sorry.”

She looked back up at the boy, Tom, in the window. Hopelessly out of control. No no no. “No—you weren’t that bad. But I’m beginning to feel a little like somebody’s mistress.”