Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (39 page)

There was no soap. The water ran in rivulets away from the oil in her skin. She was at least able to poke the little bits of dirt out of the corners of her eyes.

She left the bathroom, her breathing more labored.

He waited in the room where he, Varnov, and Jensen had surprised the Americans and Czechs.

He sat on a wooden chair in the middle of the room and mimed “Just You Just Me” on the tenor saxophone he’d bought after leaving the replication unit. He’d retained enough money from the sale of the organs to cover the cost of the instrument, possibly the only one on sale in Belgrade.

He lacked only one thing now: that which Barton would give him—breath to sound the notes.

He could almost hear “Now’s the Time” as he worked it out on the keys. What he didn’t hear was the door opening. She was suddenly there, on the threshold, panting and wheezing with obvious pain. Behind her a smal form lingered.

Hašek rose to his feet, placing his saxophone on the chair.

“Hel a…” he said flatly. “Is it asthma?” He was incapable of expressing concern he didn’t feel.

“Yes,” she wheezed. “But how can you talk?”

“Just using the air that gets into the body. It’s enough for speech but not enough for what I want to do… Your asthma is bad.”

“Yes. It’s al … the shit in the air and… and finding him… here in Belgrade…” Whereupon, she brought out from behind her a young boy, whose eyes stared dul y. His face looked tight and bluish gray, suggesting death by asphyxiation. Hašek and the boy looked at each other, neither face registering anything.

Hašek spoke: “Hel a, come here. You know what I want.”

“No, I can’t,” she said.

“Hel a. You don’t have to worry. I just want to breathe again. You wil go freely and I wil never seek you out. My oath.”

“I believe you, Hašek… but it changes nothing… I can’t… The boy…”

“But I asked you to come. You came. Please. One minute. Then you can go.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I want to breathe,” he shouted. “I want to play music. Breathe into me. Kiss me!”

“No.” She shook her head, as her chest continued to heave for gulps of air. “The boy, Hašek…

Look at him… He’s ours.”

Hašek looked, saw nothing. He needed the woman’s breath. Music mattered. Nothing else was important, until he actual y blew a note.

“I’ve spent the whole day… agonizing… But if my asthma wil al ow me… to resurrect anyone… it must be Alex, our son.”

A car drew up outside the building and doors slammed.

“I’m sorry, Hašek,” she said, kneeling down to eye-level with the boy and taking his head in her hands. She placed her mouth over his passive lips, pinched his nostrils together, took a deep breath, and blew. Steps echoed hol owly on the stairs. She repeated the process and almost lost consciousness, so acute was her own breathing difficulty. She gave a final push and at the same time the doorway yielded two intruders, Varnov and Jensen.

Whether they’d come back for him or for fresh bodies to plunder, Hašek didn’t know.

Barton looked up, startled then horrified. The boy fel from her grasp. Before she could reach him again, Varnov’s club struck her jaw, smashing it and embedding her lower teeth into her upper gums, firmly scotching any hopes of further resuscitation.

Over by the wal , the boy twitched.

Jensen swung a spiked, macelike weapon and advanced on Hašek. The Czech searched his person for a weapon; he found a smal knife, which he stuck out in front of him like a straw before a tornado. The mace crunched into the hand that held the knife and its swing severed the weakened wrist, carrying the hand away on its spikes like a trophy.

One instinct defeated the other, and Hašek grabbed the saxophone with his remaining hand. He mastered the awkward balance and brandished the instrument. Jensen made a pass and missed as Hašek ducked and swung low, scoring a hit and shattering the woman’s tibia, but losing his improvised weapon in the process. The saxophone spun on the floor and Jensen kicked it away as she fel .

Hašek reached for the saxophone, but Jensen, no less formidable an opponent on the ground, had swung her mace and caught his elbow, snapping the joint and thrusting bone up through the skin.

Virtual y defenseless now, Hašek glanced around, saw Barton desperately trying to fend off Varnov’s kil ing blow. He saw also, in the instant before Jensen’s spikes relieved him of that facility, the boy who was apparently his son, slipping otherwise unnoticed through the open doorway.

On the Far Side of the

Cadil ac Desert

with Dead Folks

BY JOE R. LANSDALE

(
For David Schow, a story of The Bad Guys and The Bad Guys
)

[1]

After a month’s chase, Wayne caught up with Calhoun one night at a little honky-tonk cal ed Rosalita’s. It wasn’t that Calhoun had final y gotten careless, it was just that he wasn’t worried.

He’d kil ed four bounty hunters so far, and Wayne knew a fifth didn’t concern him.

The last bounty hunter had been the famous Pink Lady McGuire—one mean, mama—three hundred pounds of rol ing, ugly meat that carried a twelve-gauge Remington pump and a bad attitude. Story was, Calhoun jumped her from behind, cut her throat, and as a joke, fucked her before she bled to death. This not only proved to Wayne that Calhoun was a dangerous sonofabitch, it also proved he had bad taste.

Wayne stepped out of his ’57 Chevy reproduction, pushed his hat back on his forehead, opened the trunk, and got the sawed-off double barrel and some shel s out of there. He already had a

.38 revolver in the holster at his side and a bowie knife in each boot, but when you went into a place like Rosalita’s it was best to have plenty of backup.

Wayne put a handful of shotgun shel s in his shirt pocket, snapped the flap over them, looked up at the red-and-blue neon sign that flashed ROSALITA’S: COLD BEER AND DEAD DANCING, found his center, as they say in Zen, and went on in.

He held the shotgun against his leg, and as it was dark in there and folks were busy with talk or drinks or dancing, no one noticed him or his artil ery right off.

He spotted Calhoun’s stocky, black-hatted self immediately. He was inside the dance cage with a dead buck-naked Mexican girl of about twelve. He was holding her tight around the waist with one hand and massaging her rubbery ass with the other like it was a pil ow he was trying to shape. The dead girl’s handless arms flailed on either side of Calhoun, and her little tits pressed to his thick chest. Her wire-muzzled face knocked repeatedly at his shoulder and drool whipped out of her mouth in thick spermy ropes, stuck to his shirt, faded and left a patch of wetness.

For al Wayne knew, the girl was Calhoun’s sister or daughter. It was that kind of place. The kind that had sprung up immediately after that stuff had gotten out of a lab upstate and fil ed the air with bacterium that brought dead humans back to life, made their basic motor functions work and made them hungry for human flesh; made it so if a man’s wife, daughter, sister, or mother went bel y up and he wanted to turn a few bucks, he might think: “Damn, that’s tough about ole Betty Sue, but she’s dead as hoot-owl shit and ain’t gonna be needing nothing from here on out, and with them germs working around in her, she’s just gonna pul herself out of the ground and cause me a problem. And the ground out back of the house is harder to dig than a calculus problem is to work, so I’l just toss her cold ass in the back of the pickup next to the chain saw and the barbed-wire rol haul her across the border and sel her to the Meat Boys to sel to the tonks for dancing.

“It’s a sad thing to sel one of your own, but shit, them’s the breaks. I’l just stay out of the tonks until al the meat rots off her bones and they have to throw her away. That way I won’t go in some place for a drink and see her up there shaking her dead tits and end up going sentimental and dewey-eyed in front of one of my buddies or some ole two-dol ar gal.”

This kind of thinking supplied the dancers. In other parts of the country, the dancers might be men or children, but here it was mostly women. Men were used for hunting and target practice.

The Meat Boys took the bodies, cut off the hands so they couldn’t grab, ran screws threw their jaws to fasten on wire muzzles so they couldn’t bite, sold them to the honky-tonks about the time the germ started stirring.

Tonk owners put them inside wire enclosures up front of their joints, started music, and men paid five dol ars to get in there and grab them and make like they were dancing when al the women wanted to do was grab and bite, which muzzled and handless, they could not do.

If a man liked his partner enough, he could pay more money and have her tied to a cot in the back and he could get on her and do some business. Didn’t have to hear no arguments or buy presents or make promises or make them come. Just fuck and hike.

As long as the establishment sprayed the dead for maggots and kept them perfumed and didn’t keep them so long hunks of meat came off on a fel a’s dick, the customers were happy as flies on shit.

Wayne looked to see who might give him trouble, and figured everyone was a potential customer. The six foot two, two-hundred fifty pound bouncer being the most immediate concern.

But, there wasn’t anything to do but to get on with things and handle problems when they came up. He went into the cage where Calhoun was dancing, shouldered through the other dancers and went for him.

Calhoun had his back to Wayne, and as the music was loud, Wayne didn’t worry about going quietly. But Calhoun sensed him and turned with his hand ful of a little .38.

Wayne clubbed Calhoun’s arm with the barrel of the shotgun. The little gun flew out of Calhoun’s hand and went skidding across the floor and clanked against the metal cage.

Calhoun wasn’t outdone. He spun the dead girl in front of him and pul ed a big pigsticker out of his boot and held it under the girl’s armpit in a threatening manner, which with a knife that big was no feat.

Wayne shot the dead girl’s left kneecap out from under her and she went down. Her armpit trapped Calhoun’s knife. The other men deserted their partners and went over the wire netting like squirrels.

Before Calhoun could shake the girl loose, Wayne stepped in and hit him over the head with the barrel of the shotgun. Calhoun crumpled and the girl began to crawl about on the floor as if looking for lost contacts.

The bouncer came in behind Wayne, grabbed him under the arms and tried to slip a ful nelson on him.

Wayne kicked back on the bouncer’s shin and raked his boot down the man’s instep and stomped his foot. The bouncer let go. Wayne turned and kicked him in the bal s and hit him across the face with the shotgun.

The bouncer went down and didn’t even look like he wanted up.

Wayne couldn’t help but note he liked the music that was playing. When he turned he had someone to dance with.

Calhoun.

Calhoun charged him, hit Wayne in the bel y with his head, knocked him over the bouncer. They tumbled to the floor and the shotgun went out of Wayne’s hands and scraped across the floor and hit the crawling girl in the head. She didn’t even notice, just kept snaking in circles, dragging her blasted leg behind her like a skin she was trying to shed.

The other women, partnerless, wandered about the cage. The music changed. Wayne didn’t like this tune as wel . Too slow. He bit Calhoun’s earlobe off.

Calhoun screamed and they grappled around on the floor. Calhoun got his arm around Wayne’s throat and tried to choke him to death.

Wayne coughed out the earlobe, lifted his leg and took the knife out of his boot. He brought it around and back and hit Calhoun in the temple with the hilt.

Calhoun let go of Wayne and rocked on his knees, then col apsed on top of him.

Wayne got out from under him and got up and kicked him in the head a few times. When he was finished, he put the bowie in its place, got Calhoun’s .38 and the shotgun. To hel with pig sticker.

A dead woman tried to grab him, and he shoved her away with a thrust of his palm. He got Calhoun by the col ar, started pul ing him toward the gate.

Faces were pressed against the wire, watching. It had been quite a show. A friendly cowboy type opened the gate for Wayne and the crowd parted as he pul ed Calhoun by. One man felt helpful and chased after them and said, “Here’s his hat, Mister,” and dropped it on Calhoun’s face and it stayed there.

Outside, a professional drunk was standing between two cars taking a leak on the ground. As Wayne pul ed Calhoun past, the drunk said, “Your buddy don’t look so good.”

“Look worse than that when I get him to Law Town,” Wayne said.

Wayne stopped by the ’57, emptied Calhoun’s pistol and tossed it as far as he could, then took a few minutes to kick Calhoun in the ribs and ass. Calhoun grunted and farted, but didn’t come to.

When Wayne’s leg got tired, he put Calhoun in the passenger seat and handcuffed him to the door.

He went over to Calhoun’s ’62 Impala replica with the plastic bul horns mounted on the hood—

which was how he had located him in the first place, by his wel known car—and kicked the glass out of the window on the driver’s side and used the shotgun to shoot the bul horns off. He took out his pistol and shot al the tires flat, pissed on the driver’s door, and kicked a dent in it.

By then he was too tired to shit in the backseat, so he took some deep breaths and went back to the ’57 and climbed in behind the wheel.

Reaching across Calhoun, he opened the glove box and got out one of his thin, black cigars and put it in his mouth. He pushed the lighter in, and while he waited for it to heat up, he took the shotgun out of his lap and reloaded it.

A couple of men poked their heads outside of the tonk’s door, and Wayne stuck the shotgun out the window and fired above their heads. They disappeared inside so fast they might have been an optical il usion.

Wayne put the lighter to his cigar, picked up the wanted poster he had on the seat, and set fire to it. He thought about putting it in Calhoun’s lap as a joke, but didn’t. He tossed the flaming poster out the window.