Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (47 page)

“It would’ve happened anyway,” Bernerd said. He slowly cocked his dented head toward Door Number Three. “She didn’t matter.”

Monty’s mouth gaped. He figured that his eyes were as blank and his brain as empty as everyone else’s around him. “Then why?” was al he could say.

“The ratings,” Bernerd said. “Time for a change. Your ratings are slipping.”

And as Monty pondered this great imponderable, Bernerd simply turned and walked away. The credits rol ed on, and the rest of them began to move again, closing in as surely as the cameras.

They mounted the stage from the amphitheater… by themselves, in pairs, as entire families.

Converging on him with unblinking, hungry eyes.

My ratings? Slipping? SLIPPING?
The thought was too great, and it snapped his already fragile mind in two with pencil-thin ease.

He felt the first insistent tug at the bul et wound in his thigh, saw the cameras leering in.

But the eyes of the world are on me now!
he thought.
And its hands… and quite a few teeth
…

Audience participation at its finest.

1. Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy BY DAVID J. SCHOW

Eating ’em was more fun than blowing their gnarly green heads off. But why dicker when you could do both?

The fresher ones were blue. That was important if you wanted to avoid cramps, salmonel a. Eat a green one and you’d be yodeling down the big porcelain megaphone in no time.

Wormboy used wire cutters to snip the nose off the last bul et in the foam block. He snugged the truncated cartridge into the cylinder of his short-barrel .44. When fired, the flattened slugs pancaked on impact and would disintegrate any geek’s head into hash. The green guys weren’t real y zombies, because no voodoo had played a part. They were al geeks, al slow as syrup and stupid as hel , and Wormboy loved it that way. It meant he would not starve in this cowardly new world. He was eating; mil ions weren’t.

Wormboy’s burden was great.

It hung from his Butthole Surfers T-shirt. He had scavenged dozens of such shirts from a burned-out rock shop, al Extra Extra Large, al screaming about bands he had never heard of—Dayglo Abortions, Rudimentary Peni , Shower of Smegma, Fat & Fucked Up. Wormboy’s big personal in-joke was one that championed a long-gone album titled
Giving Head to the Living Dead
.

The gravid flab of his teats distorted the logo, and his surplus flesh quivered and swam, shoving around his clothing as though some subcutaneous revolution was aboil. Pasty and pocked, his bel y depended earthward, a vast sandbag held at bay by a wide weight lifter’s belt, notched low. The faintest motion caused his hectares of skin to bobble like mercury.

Wormboy was more than fat. He was a crowd of fat people. A single mirror was insufficient to the task of containing his image.

The explosion buzzed the floor beneath his hitops. Vibrations slithered from one thick stratum of dermis to the next, bringing him the news.

The sound of a Bouncing Betty’s boom-boom always worked like a Pavlovian dinner gong. It could smear a smile across his jowls and start his tummy to percolating. He snatched up binoculars and stampeded out into the graveyard.

Val ey View Memorial Park was a classic cemetery, of a venerable lineage far preceding the ordinances that required flat monument stones to note the dearly departed. The granite and marble jutting from its acreage was the most ostentatious and artful y hewn this side of a Universal Studios monster movie boneyard. Stone-cold angels reached toward heaven. Stilted verse, deathlessly chiseled, eulogized the departees—vanity plates in a suburbia for the lifeless.

It cloyed.

Most of the graves were unoccupied. They had prevailed without the fertilization of human decay and were now choked with loam and healthy green grass. The tenants had clawed out and waltzed off several seasons back.

A modest road formed a spiral ascent path up the hil and terminated in a cul-de-sac fronting Wormboy’s current living quarters. Midway up, it was interrupted by a trench ten feet across.

Wormboy had excavated this “moat” using the cemetery’s scoop-loader, and seeded it with lengths of two-inch pipe sawn at angles to form funnel-knife style pungi sticks. Tripwires knotted gate struts to tombstones to booby traps, and three hundred antipersonnel mines lived in the earth. Every longitude and latitude of Val ey View had been lovingly nurtured into a Gordian knot of kil power that Wormboy had christened his spiderweb.

The Bouncing Bettys had been a godsend. Anything that wandered in unbidden would get its legs blown off or become immovably gaffed in the moat.

Not long after the geeks woke up, shucked dirt, and ambled off with their yaps drooping open, Wormboy had claimed Val ey View for his very own. He knew the dead tended to “home”

toward places that had been important to them back when they weren’t green. Ergo, never would they come trotting home to a graveyard.

Wormboy’s previous hideout had been a National Guard armory. Too much traffic in walking dead weekend warriors, there. Blowing them into unwalking lasagna cost too much time and powder. After seven Land-Rover-loads of military rock and rol , Wormy’s redecoration of Val ey View was complete. The graveyard was one big mechanized ambush. The reception building and nondenomina-tional chapel were ideal y suited to his needs… and breadth. Outfitting the prep room was more stainless steel than a French kitchen in Beverly Hil s; where stiffs were once dressed for interment, Wormboy now dressed them out for din-din. There was even a refrigerated morgue locker. Independent generators chugged out wattage. His only real lament was that there never seemed to be enough videotapes to keep him jol y. On the nonfiction front he favored Julia Child.

The binocs were overpriced army jobs with an il uminated reticle. Wormboy thumbed up his bottle-bottom fish-eye specs, focused, and swept the base of the hil . Smoke was stil rising from the breach point. Fewer geeks blundered in these days, but now and again he could stil snag one.

That was peculiar. As far as Wormboy could reckon, geeks functioned on the level of pure motor response with a single directive—seek food—and legs that made their appetites mobile. Past year one the locals began to shun Val ey View altogether, almost as though the geek grapevine had warned them the place was poison. Could be that Val ey View’s primo kil rate had made it the crucible of the first bona fide zombie superstition.

God only knew what they were munching in the cities by now. As the legions of ambulatory expirees had swel ed, their preferred food—live citizens—had gone underground. Survivors of what Wormboy cal ed Zombie Apocalypse had gotten canny or gotten eaten. Geek society itself was like a gator pit; he’d seen them get pissed off and chomp hunks out of one another. Though their irradiated brains kept their limbs supple and greased with oxygenated blood, they were stil dead… and dead people stil rotted. Their structural integrity (not to mention their freshness) was less than a sure bet past the second or third Hal oween. Most geeks Wormy spotted nowadays were minus a major limb. They digested, but did not seem to eliminate. Sometimes the older ones simply exploded. They clogged up with gas and decaying food until they hit critical mass, then
kerblooey
—steaming gobbets of brown crap al over the perimeter. It was enough to put you off your dinner.

Life was so weird. Wormboy felt like the only normal person left.

This movable feast, this walking smorgasbord, could last another year or two at max, and Wormboy knew it. His fortifications insured that he would be ready for whatever fol owed, when the world changed again. For now, it was a matchless chow-down, and grand sport.

The ATV groaned and squeaked its usual protests when he settled into its saddle. A rack welded to the chassis secured geek tools—pinch bar, fire ax, scattergun sheaths, and a Louisvil e Slugger with a lot of chips, nicks, and dried blood. The al -terrain bike’s bal oon tires did not burst.

Wormboy kick-started and puttered down to meet his catch of the day.

Geeks could sniff human meat from a fair distance. Some had actual y gotten around to elementary tool use. But their maze sense was zero-zero. They always tried to proceed in straight lines. Even for a nongeek it took a load of deductive logic just to pick a path toward Val ey View’s chapel without getting divorced from your vitals, and much more time than general y elapsed between Wormboy’s feedings. Up on this hil top, his security was assured.

He piloted the ATV down his special escape path, twisting and turning, pausing at several junctures to gingerly reconnect tripwires behind him. He dropped his folding metal army fording bridge over the moat and tootled across.

Some of the meat hung up in the heat flash of the explosion was stil sizzling on the ground in charred clumps. Dragging itself doggedly up the slope was half a geek, stil aimed at the chapel and the repast that was Wormboy. Everything from its navel down had been blown off.

Wormboy unracked the pinch bar. One end had been modified to take a ten-pound harpoon head of machined steel. A swath of newly muddied earth quickly became a trail of strewn organs resembling smashed fruit. The geek’s brand-new prone carriage had permitted it to evade some of the Bouncing Betty trips. Wormboy frowned. His announcement was pointed—and piqued—

enough to arrest the geek’s uphil crawl.

“Welcome to hel , dork breath.”

It humped around on its palms with al the grace of a beached haddock. Broken rib struts punched through at jigsaw angles and mangled innards swung from the mostly empty chest cavity like pendant jewels. One ear had been sheared off; the side of its head was caked in thick blood, dirt, and pulverized tissue that reminded Wormboy of a scoop of dog food. It sought Wormboy with bleary drunkard’s eyes, virulently jaundiced and discharging gluey fluid like those of a sick animal.

It was wearing a besmirched Red Cross arm band.

A long, gray-green rope of intestine had paid out behind the geek. It gawped with dul hunger, then did an absurd little push-up in order to bite it. Teeth crunched through geek-gut and gelid black paste evacuated with a blatting fart noise.
Sploot!

Disinclined toward autocannibalism, it tacked again on Wormboy. A kidney peeled loose from a last shred of muscle and rol ed out to burst apart in the weeds. The stench was unique.

Impatient, Wormy shook his head. Stupid geeks. “C’mon, fuckface, come and get it.” He waggled his mighty bel y, then held out the rib roast of his forearm. “You want Cheez Whiz on it or what?

C’mon. Chow time.”

It seemed to catch the drift. Mouth champing and slavering, eyes straying off in two directions, it resumed its quest, leaving hanks and clots of itself behind al the way down.

It was too goddamned slow… and wasting too many choice bits.

Hefting the pinch bar, Wormboy hustled up the slope. He slammed one of his size thirteens thunderously down within biting range and let the geek fantasize for an instant about what a crawful of Wormboy Platter would taste like. Greedy. Then he threw al his magnificent tonnage behind a downward thrust, spiking his prey between the shoulder blades and staking it to the ground with a moist crunch.

It thrashed and chewed air. Wormy waved bye-bye in its face. “Don’t go ’way, now.” He let the geek watch him pick his way back down to the ATV. He wanted it to see him returning with the ax. Sweat had broken freely; the exertion already had Wormboy huffing and aromatic, but he loved this part almost as much as swal owing that old-time home cookin’.

The ax hissed down overhand. A bilious rainbow of decomposing crap hocked from the neck stump while the blue head pinbal ed from one tombstone to the next. It thonked to rest against the left rear wheel of the ATV.

Wormboy lent the half torso a disappointed inspection. Pickings were lean; this geek had been on the hoof too long. Burger night again.

He looked behind him and sure enough, the lone head was fighting like hel to redirect itself.

Hair hung in its eyes, the face was caved in around the flattened nose, the whole of it now oozing and studded with cockleburs… but by God it tipped over, embedded broken teeth into packed dirt, and tried to pul itself toward Wormy. It was that hungry.

Wormboy went down to meet it, humming. He secured the ax in its metal clip and drew the bal bat.

Busting a coconut was tougher. The geek’s eyes stayed open. They never flinched when you hit them. On the second bash, curds of blood-dappled brain jumped out to meet the air.

It ceased moving then, except to crackle and col apse. The cheesy brain-stuff was the color of fishbel ies.

Wormboy pul ed free a mucilaginous fistful and brandished it before the open, unseeing eyes.

He squeezed hard. Glistening spirals unfurled between his fingers with a greasy macaroni noise.

“I win again.”

He licked the gelid residue off his trigger finger and smacked his lips. By the time he got back to the torso with a garbage bag, the Red Cross arm band was smoldering. He batted it away. It caught in midair and flared, newborn fire gobbling up the swatch of cloth and the symbol emblazoned thereon, leaving Wormboy alone to scratch his head about what it might have meant.

Little Luke shot twin streamers of turbid venom into the urine specimen cup like a good Christian, providing. He did not mind being milked (not that he’d been asked); it was a necessary preamble to the ritual. He played his part and was provided for—a sterling exemplar of God’s big blueprint. His needle fangs were translucent and fragile looking. Cloudy venom pooled in the cup.

Maintaining his grip just behind Little Luke’s jaws, the Right Reverend Jerry thanked his Lord for this bounty, that the faithful might take communion and know His peace. He kissed Little Luke on the head and dropped al four feet of him back into the pet caddy. Little Luke’s Love Gift had been generous today. Perhaps even serpents knew charity.

Jerry pondered charity, and so charitably ignored the fact that his eldest deacon was leaking.

Deacon Moe stood in the vestibule, his pants soaked and dripping, weaving back and forth. He was not breathing, and his eyes saw only the specimen cup. The odor that had accompanied him into the tiny room was that of maggoty sausage. He was a creature of wretchedness, without a doubt… but was also proof to the Right Reverend Jerry that the myth had delivered at last, and skeptics be damned.