Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (34 page)

He wipes palms on jeans and grips the pistol firmly. On the sand he waits as the figure stumbles onto the beach, recovers, and gropes toward him.
Carnitrope
. What the fuck was
that
supposed to mean? Plant’s
photo
tropic, Bil explained. Turn toward sunlight. Biochemical reaction.

Stimulus/response.
Ding!
—slobber.
Carni
= meat.

Fuck.

He raises the pistol and thumbs back the trigger—

Carnitrope his goddamn ass. They can cal it that if it makes ’em feel better, but his momma didn’t raise no fools.

—sights down the long barrel—

“
The only thing working is their hindbrains—the reptilian complex
,” Marly had lectured. “
They’re
like snakes that wait in one place al day for something to come along. The R-complex lets the
carnitropes move, and the only reason they move is to get live meat
.” Chink bitch. He may be just a glorified fucking janitor, but where did she come off—

—fires.

The figure staggers back and drops the leg onto the sand. It comes forward again.

“
Cut off the R-complex—decapitation, massive neural destruction
,” Marly had continued, “
and
the tropism is removed
.” In memory Bil smiles. “
In other words
,” he elaborated, “
if you blow
their brains out they have a motivation problem
.”

“Blow your fuckin’ brains out,” breathes Deke. He cocks the hammer and fires again.

A sudden furrow glistens above the creature’s left eye. The creature takes two more steps.

Stops. Reaches up an inquiring hand. Fingers sink to knuckles. Hand lowers. Another step. Front knee buckles, and it pirouettes to the sand.

Deke holds the gun on it for a few more seconds, then straightens and nears it cautiously. Yep.

Dead for good.

Writing on its wet T-shirt. LIFE’S A BITCH, THEN YOU DIE. Di ferent lettering beneath: THEN YOU

COME BACK. Nipples beneath the wet fabric. Peekaboo.

Deke looks out over the little ocean. A little log, propel ed by the eternal north wind, drifts toward the sandbar.

Crack!
More gunfire. Rifle, this time. He better—

—searingblindwhiteness. Jesus
fucking
—

He sinks to his knees. His bel y is turning warm. Somebody pushed a hot soldering iron through his chest. He looks down at his knees. Grit-ringed wet spots in the denim.
I hate that. Fuckin’

cold spots when I walk
—

You never hear the one that gets you. Goddamn lie. Heard that one just fine. Oh, shit
. He tries to rise, but something shudders to a halt inside.

[14]

Sailor lowers his nine-mil imeter Ingram submachine gun. The man he has just shot arches his back and spasms once. God, he hates that. Like al the nerves are screaming at once. Gives him the fuckin’ wil ies.

He turns away from the beach. Invisible in his black jeans and sweatshirt, he works rapidly but quietly from tree to tree, heading uphil from the palms on the beach to the dense foliage of the rain forest. At the north end vegetation meets slanting glass panes. He pul s a box from his nylon backpack, wedges it between two aluminum struts, and turns a Radio Shack wireless intercom to

“receive.” He hurries toward the west wal , where he places another box and attaches another intercom.

He pauses at the screen door to the access corridor that leads back to the agriculture wing, where he broke in ten minutes ago. Floodlights are on outside the staff quarters, il uminating neat rectangles of crops. Getting in there isn’t going to be easy.

* * *

Bil looks from the carnitrope lying in tattered Grace to the missing panes at the end of the orchard. “Al right, now, let’s not jump to any conclusions,” he says. “It could be that one just got in here and went for the pigs, and Grace found it.”

“Right,” says Leonard. “It ruh-ruh-
rented
a Ryder truck and d-d-
drove
on up here to see if it could buh, buy a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.” He wipes a shaking hand across his mouth.

Bil narrows his eyes.

“It was eating her,” Bonnie says flatly. She looks strangely calm, as if Grace’s death at the teeth of a reanimated corpse is yet another factor to account for in the many trivial events that accrue during the normal operation of the Ecosphere. Yes, Grace is dead; now work schedules wil have to be adjusted, and the sudden one-eighth surplus of food and water wil have to be noted, and of course a new person wil have to be appointed to moderate the weekly gripe sessions, not to mention someone else having to slop the remaining pigs.

Bil , Dieter, and Leonard regard her stonily. It is as if her casualness toward Grace’s death is more repulsive than the fact and manner of Grace’s death. There is something alien about it. If only she would go into hysterics, they would understand. That’s what a woman is
supposed
to do when this sort of thing happens; they’re
conditioned
by society. They can’t help it. So why doesn’t Bonnie just have a screaming fit and get it over with?

“I guess we shouldn’t assume there aren’t any more of them,” Dieter says.

Bil nods. “Someone let them in here deliberately. An infiltration.”

“Huh-who?” asks Leonard.

Dieter cradles his arms and rocks them, humming “Rock-a-bye Baby.”

Bil frowns. He inclines his head, slowly. “We have to stay together,” he says. “I don’t want—”

Pop
.

Their heads jerk.

Pop
.

“Beach,” says Leonard.

“Deke and Haiffa,” says Dieter.

Bil brandishes his pistol. “Leonard, you come with me. Dieter, stay with Bonnie.”

Bil trots away without waiting for Leonard, pistol in the lead.

Crack!
Different sound from the beach. Bil stops. He glances back. “Leonard?”

Leonard swal ows and cuh-cuh-catches up to Bil , his rifle held before him like a shield he doesn’t trust.

[15]

Marly in the southern access corridor, trying to decide what to do. First three shots from near the agriculture wing to the northwest, and now three more from the vicinity of the beach. Which way should she go?

Wel … assuming it’s the same people shooting, she ought to head in the direction of the most recent shots.

She firms her grip on the carbine and turns back.

“I don’t want to wait here.”

Dieter looks at Bonnie as if suddenly remembering she is there. “We have to wait til they find out what’s going on.”

“I
don’t
want to wait here.” She glances toward the pen at the bodies of the two pigs, the carnitrope, and Grace. The other pigs snuffle and make nervous sounds, run into one another, trample the bodies, sometimes stop to nuzzle the freshly dead, and raise their piggy heads with piggy noses freshly red.

Dieter goes to the pen and bangs the low wal to calm the pigs, but they only bleat louder. “I’m gonna let ’em out,” he decides. Bonnie says nothing, and Dieter opens the little wooden gate.

The pigs do not bolt, so Dieter enters the pen and drives them out.

“I’m going inside,” says Bonnie. “I’m going to my room. Until this is over.”

“Hey, you can’t do that. You heard what the man said.”

“He’s got no authority over me. There’s no rank here. I wouldn’t have volunteered if there was.

Fuck that supremist bul shit.”

“I mean about the zom—the carnitropes.” He walks from the pen, and they head toward the front of the staff quarters. “There are probably others in here,” he continues. “And
someone
let them in. You don’t even have a gun.”

“I despise the things. They’re
male
weapons. Extensions of the male sexuality. If you can’t rape something, you exterminate it.”

Dieter gives a moment’s thought to exterminating Bon-nie, but none to raping her.

“I’m going to my room,” Bonnie continues, “and locking the door. No one wil bother me there.

I’m not going to be a party to you people acting out your primal hunting instincts. I am civilized, and I refuse to col aborate.”

“You are one fucked-up asshole,” says Dieter. “You know that? I use the word asshole because it is nonchauvinistic. Everyone has one, y’know?”

Bonnie opens the front door to the staff quarters and goes inside. Dieter shakes his head. He levels the 30.06 extension of his male sexuality and surveys the floodlighted area. He wishes he had a cigarette, the first such craving he has felt in a while. Or a joint. They had to give up cigarettes when they entered the Ecosphere, and bringing in marijuana seeds was out of the question, even though Marly claimed they’d grow fine in the tropics.

He stands stiffly and swiveling, trying to make his face hard. Dieter the Martian colonist standing sentry duty within the lone glass island, the only thing between safety and the living-dead invaders who threaten their very—

Something pokes his back. “Don’t move.” The voice is tight, as if the throat that produced it is constricted.

He begins to move anyway, then stops.

“Drop the gun. Now.”

He lowers the rifle. Holds it at arm’s length. Lets go.

Loud thud of a large-caliber handgun from somewhere near the ocean.

Someone shoves his shoulder. “That way. Inside.”

Dieter attempts to walk normal y. If he passes an opened door, a corner to scuttle around—

“Keep your hands up. I have a submachine gun, and you wouldn’t get five feet without looking like an outtake from
Bonnie and Clyde
. Got it?”

He glances back despite himself. “
Bonnie and Clyde?
”

Poke in the kidneys. “Move, asshole.”

“Where are we going?”

“Power room. Battery room. Whatever the fuck you people cal it.”

“I don’t know how—”

“I don’t care what you don’t know. You take me to it. Fuck with me and I’l kil you. And I’l put the bul et in your heart so you come back, like my friends out there.”

Dieter imagines himself an automaton: stumbling, agape, hands outstretched, eyes needy, drawn to living flesh. Turning left toward the power room, he finds himself wondering just how different it would real y be.

[16]

“It’s Deke.”

“It got him? The, the carnitrope, it got him?”

Bil toes Deke’s face-down body, which yields joint-lessly. There is a smal , nearly bloodless hole between the shoulder blades. Bil bends and turns the body over. The torso rol s, but the legs stay knee-down, body twisted at the waist.

That’s how you know someone’s dead, Leonard thinks. Because they don’t care what position they’re in.

Bil rol s the lower half of Deke’s body as wel . Out of some sense of decorum? Whatever; he squats before the big man’s chest. A larger, more ragged exit hole exactly at the solar plexus.

“Someone shot him in the back,” Bil says.

Leonard glances around the beach. They’re pretty exposed here. Something floats against the sandbar in the water. A sniper there, prone in the water? Too far, too dark, to tel . “Shouldn’t we take cuh, cuh,
cover
?” he asks.

“Whoever shot him wouldn’t remain in one position.” Bil stands and goes to the corpse of the carnitrope. “They’d sweep the terrain, continue mobile. Tactical maneuvering. Offensive advantage. Search and destroy. Divide and conquer.”

Leonard comes up beside him. “Took one with him,” Bil observes.

They do not see Deke’s body stir behind them.

“Lot of guh-good it did him,” Leonard replies.

They do not hear it regain its feet and begin to slouch toward them.

Leonard maintains a respectful distance from the morbid X of the carnitrope. “So… w-what should we duh-do now?”

Bil never answers, because Leonard’s shoulder is grabbed. He turns and finds himself face to face with Deke. At first he is relieved: They made a mistake and Deke is not duh-duh-dead after al . But realization floods in: Deke is wal -eyed and slack-faced. Thickened blood stains his chin.

Sand clings to the right side of his face, to his eyelashes—Leonard can even see grains in his eye.

But Deke does not blink. He does not breathe. He does not have any light of life in his eyes. His cold fingers curl on Leonard’s shoulder, and pul . What do you want to say, Deke? What are you trying to tel me? Nuh-nuh-nothing. His mouth opens. Bil is shouting something, but Leonard is so fascinated by the sight of Deke back from the dead like some redneck Jesus that he doesn’t real y hear Bil . Deke the Resurrected pul s him nearer, and Leonard knows he ought to do something, but al he can do is stare. The rifle is a piece of wood in his hand.
Flesh of my flesh,
good buddy
. That’s what Deke would say if the front part of his brain was stil working.
You
gonna be baptised now! You gonna get the faith! The Holy Spirit gonna enter you!

Whosogoddamnever believeth in me shal not perish, but shal dwel in the House of the Bored
forever
.

But Deke the Saviour stops. He stares at Leonard in a kind of open-mouthed sorrow, a wistfulness like a child denied a sugary cereal on a trip to the grocery store with Mom. The hand stil holds his shoulder, but no longer clutches with need, no longer pul s imploringly. A dog-like, questioning look enters the dul eyes. Leonard feels a kind of stupid disappointment. He feels a sudden compulsion to reason with Deke, dead or no, to ask him just what the heck is going on here, good buddy, you gonna eat me or what? But the enormously long, black barrel of a pistol enters the scene and taps Deke on the temple. Leonard sees the hand curled around the handle, bite-nailed index finger curved over the trigger, hammer cocked. Bil to the rescue. Bil who nightly yearns for rabid dogs, broken-legged horses, mortal y wounded soldiers in a platoon pursued by enemy soldiers. It is the proof of your grit to shoot your own dog; it is the token of your humanity to put a thing out of its misery. Bil has wanted to put something out of its misery for as long as he can remember. An unnatural and unsanctified reanimation stands between Deke and his heavenly reward; Bil as God’s agent shal liberate his spirit.