Masters of Horror (6 page)

The light flickered. Jim thought the bulb was going to go out and they’d be in here, in the dark with these things sniffing after them. The light flickered again, but didn’t quite go out. The shadows fluttered and shifted, distorting the way things looked. Like the faces on those two living dead men in the hall. Jim thought, in the flickering light, that their faces had changed. Their faces become Dwayne’s face, Jim Diggins’ face. Mouthing, “Base, Rock. Silver Top. Base.”

Jim nodded. Looking at himself dead, face blue, skin peeling away, bone in his throat exposed like the broomstick in a scarecrow. Flies crawling in and out of his nostrils.

And the truly-dead, those that the two living-dead men were crawling over, were Patty and some black woman Jim had never seen, but knew somehow was Dwayne’s aunt.

Dead Dwayne and dead Jim clambering over Patty and the black woman, crawling toward the living Dwayne and Jim; the dead, reaching out for a hit, a dose, a blast: of life.

The light flickered again, and then the men crawling through the doorway were no longer Dwayne and Jim, they were once more men with the faces of strangers, and they were coming on through, stumbling toward them, sniffing, snuffling. Toward Dwayne’s head and Jim’s head. Going for the cocaine they smelled in their living brains. Some particular combination of drug residue and brain chemistry. Some semblance of life. In some sense mutated by crack to hunger for crack-rancid brain…living brain.

Jim raised his gun—

Raiders stepped up from behind, clouted Jim on the side of the head with the empty snubnose. Jim went to his knees, skull tolling like a cracked bell, and Raiders yanked the gun from Jim’s hand, ran at the big dead black woman shrieking “FUCKING FREAK BITCH CUNT!” Firing the gun into her face. She threw her arms around him like a loving mother, then fell backwards, pulling him onto her. The two hungry dead men behind her lunged onto him, biting down on his head. Sharing it, biting into Raiders’ skull from both sides. Jim could hear the sound of it, of their teeth in the bone of Raiders’ cranium. A squeaking grating sound that seemed somehow louder than Raiders’ scream.

Then Raiders was quiet, and there were wet, crunching noises. Dwayne said, “Fuck this,” and was dragging a mattress up, holding it like a shield. Jim got up, got behind the mattress with him, and helped him shove it onto the mass of feeding dead blocking the doorway, using the mattress to keep the dead down so Jim and Dwayne could scramble over it and out into the hall. Two more of the dead were swaying in the front door. Dwayne and Jim dodged to the right, down the hall. The office. Through the open steel door.

A kitchen. An AK-47, without a magazine in it, lay on an old, ornate wooden kitchen table. Next to it was a freezer bag full of base crystal, half spilled onto the table top. On a sink to the back was a big, five gallon steel pot crusted with crack cocaine residue. A gallon can of something called BUG DETH:
All New! Industrial Strength for Big Jobs!
stood on the counter next to the sink. The bonding agent. There was a dead Hispanic boy in the corner, eating something. He had been about twelve. He was eating raw crack from another freezer bag, a sack with blood and brains dripped into it; chewing bloody crack cocaine up like a mouth full of rock candy.

There was a dead man on the floor; missing his head, too. Near the dead man, also on the floor, was a phone off the hook with a mechanical voice coming out of it, small and foolish, saying, “
If you are not going to make a call, please hang up the telephone.”

Jim almost dove for the phone. Crouched in blood, by the stump of a neck, with an effort of will he made his hands work the touchtone buttons. His heart going off like one of those obnoxious car alarms.

The dead were coming down the hall. Scuffling. Making sniffing sounds. Dwayne scooped up a handful of the base fallen on the table, a big handful of crystals, couple thousand dollars worth. Stared at it hungrily. Jim watched the boy in the corner eating bloody rock cocaine, while he told 911 that there were murders happening here. Not trying to explain more than that. (Thinking, in some twitchy corner of his mind, that it would be easy to get a handful or two of the rock for himself, hide it somewhere, come back after the cops and the things were gone, fuck it, it wasn’t like anything mattered anymore – and then he had a flash vision of himself chewing a hole in his own kid’s head.) Jim told Dwayne, as he hung up the phone, “The shit’s poisonous, Dwayne, even more than usual.”

Dwayne looked at the double handful of rock cocaine. Then bent over, dipped the base in a puddle of blood and brains and tossed the whole double-handful through the door, into the hall. Scrabbling, clawing sounds as the dead went for it.

Jim Diggins carried the phone across the small room, and smashed the head of the dead boy eating the cocaine, twice, crushed his skull, very thoroughly, with a corner of the phone, each blow making the phone ring a little.

The boy slumped, twitching, bloody cocaine dribbling from his mouth…not dead, you couldn’t kill them that easy.

11:30 P.M.

A lot of cops milling around.

The Detective in charge was named Johnson, a tall, mild-eyed black guy, a uniformed lieutenant with a college cadence to his talk. Jim had ditched the .45. Didn’t tell the cops the background to the story. Johnson listened to the story, as Jim told it, then went to his cruiser, his face flashing in and out of red with the cherry-top light. He spoke into a microphone, something about cocaine-overdose hallucinations and mass murder and hysteria, as the paramedics carted the truly-dead away. Paramedics that shook their heads in weary amazement.

Carrying the
dead
dead. The others, the ambulatory dead, had crawled out back, when the cops had come. Hid themselves. Still functioning, instinctively, to protect themselves. Still out there, in the city, somewhere, sniffing around. Settling for any kind of living flesh they could find, now, Jim supposed.

But then again, it wouldn’t take them long to find more crackheads.

Dwayne and Jim stood to one side. They’d been told to wait, put on the back burner for the moment. Johnson was convinced they were bystanders, not the killers. Jim said, “Shit like this doesn’t happen by accident, Dwayne. Something’s talking to us. All of us.”

Dwayne said nothing. He stared at light on the cop car. The headless bodies being hoisted into the ambulance.

Jim said, “What your Uncle said about a sickness in the air, the dark wave thing…Well, shit. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if there’s a God, man, but I think we ought to act as if there is one, you know?”

Dwayne still said nothing.

“
Dwayne?”

Dwayne said, softly, “I gettin’ the fuck out of here.”

“
Where you going to go?”

“
Way different neighborhood.”

“
Is that right? Hey, Lieutenant Johnson!”

The cop said something more into the mike, then walked over to them. “Yeah?”

“
This man here stole my car. A few days ago. I went to talk to him about it when all this happened. . .”

Dwayne said, “He’s full of shit…”

Jim said, “They dusted the car for prints. I insisted on it. They got your prints, Dwayne. They got evidence of that. Not of anything
else
.” Meaning: no evidence that Jim had been buying drugs.

Dwayne looked at Jim like he was going to bite through Jim’s skull himself. “You pale motherfucker.”

“
Just what I need,” Johnson was saying, wearily putting cuffs on Dwayne. “As if I don’t have enough to deal with. You have the right to remain silent…” He went through the whole thing.

“
You don’t know what I do for a living, Dwayne,” Jim said, later, talking through the half-open window of the car; Johnson had put Dwayne in the back of a cruiser. “I’m a lawyer. I’ve gotta lot of connections. I can get you remanded to my custody, set you up in drug rehab. Both of us in drug rehab.”

“
Fuck you, you pale bullshit motherfucker.”

“
You better hold onto that attitude, you’re gonna need it sometime, Dwayne. I’m doing this to help, man. Because I had a choice and you didn’t.”

“
You think you on a mission?
Fuck
you, you kneejerk liberal cocksucker!” Dwayne shouted out the car window as Johnson started the cruiser and drove off.

Jim was taken to the precinct in another cop car. After awhile all the rest of the police cars drove off into the night, vanishing into the darkness where the hungry dead were shuffling, sniffing the air.

Liked that story? Check out John’s latest title:

Wetbones

The new e-Reads edition, for download or print, re-edited by the author and with a SEQUEL included...

What truths underlie horror? Find out in...

WETBONES...

Into a Southern California rife with the machinations of Hollywood, the lure of drugs, and the slick sheen of sex, comes a nameless ancient evil, a destroyer that completely ravages its victims body and soul, leaving behind only...

WETBONES

“
In
Wetbones
John Shirley serves up the bloody heart of a sick and rotting society with the aplomb of an Aztec surgeon on dexadrine...” ─ALA Booklist

The brand new AUTHORIZED EDITION – Now at Amazon.com, or eReads.com!

Back to TOC

Food, Glorious FOOD! How do we love thee? (Really, how can we NOT, since every little innocent Oreo cookie has 14 various ‘appetite inducers’.)

Let the legendary F. Paul Wilson’s “Topsy” count the ways…

Topsy

By F. Paul Wilson

I’m inna middle a chewin on dis giant lasagne noodle when Nurse Delores appears.

“
Morning, Topsy!” she says as she marches inta da room in her white uniform.

Dey call me Topsy.

Don’t ax why dey call me dat. My name’s Bruno. But evybody here calls me Topsy.

“
Oh, no!” she says. “You’ve been eating your sheets again!”

I look down an see she’s right. My sheets is all chewed up. I guess dat weren’t no giant lasagne noodle after all.

God I’m hungry.

“
Ready for breakfast?” she says all bright an cheery.

Course
I’m ready for breakfast—I’m
dyin
for breakfast—but I don’t say nuttin. Cause what dey call breakfast here ain’t. Ain’t lunch or dinner neither. Just liquid. Not even a shake. I amember when I useta eat diet shakes. Useta drink ten a dem fa breakfast. An anotha ten fa coffee break. Dey’re junk. I neva lost weight on dem. Not once.

But no shakes round here. Just dis clear glop. An here she comes wit a whole glass of it.

“
Here, Topsy. Open your mouth and drink this,” she says, all Mary Sunshine poikiness.