Zombie Bitches From Hell (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

I was watching TV a few days after that the
North American Music Awards show live from Boston, and Lady GaGa
comes on. She’s singing her hit song, “Take Me to the Heights.”
She’s using a stand-up mic and dressed liked a 1940s radio star.
It’s total crap but I’m waiting for the Rod Riders to come on.
She’s caterwauling away and I’m thinking, “Man, this is crap.” Jen
comes out of the kitchen.

“She is so cool, don’t’cha think?”

“Yeah, well no. I mean, yeah, she’s
different.”

“Kent, you have no taste in music. She is
what it is all about.”

I take a quick toke and think, Okay, I mean
she’s rich and tight-bodied. That’s cool.

“Yeah, hon, you’re right, sometimes I think
only one-sided.” I’m hoping this will get her off my back. It
does.

We’re watching, when all the fracas starts
and neither of us is saying anything although I mutter, “what the
fuck?”

In the middle of her hit song, the phrase,
“Take me to the heights and put your tongue where….” she collapses.
The staff, all with headsets on and make-up people and security and
her back-up dancers, rush to her. The camera cannot pick up her
image because she is swarmed, understandably because she is this
mega-star of fabulosity, right?

Then, like a bomb goes off, everyone pulls
back and her hand and arm show up over the heads and shoulders in
the foreground. It’s the purply, black and blue, drained arm of the
dead ones. There’s a collective inhale. But that arm has grabbed
the neck of a techie and is squeezing so tight he cannot scream
although his mouth is wide open and his eyes look like moony
hubcaps from a VW Van. She rises next to him and her eyes have the
dry, bloodshot glazy look that we now know is one of the first
signs of the disease; but we all thought out in TV land that this
was a part of her usually fucked up act.

“She is sooooo original,” says Jen. Then the
techie’s throat collapses and blood starts pouring out like water
from a fire hydrant in Harlem when the mercury hits 110. One of the
security guys picks up the mic from the floor and smashes her head
in. The brain is exposed and looks like a black cauliflower. She
doesn’t collapse, but stands there, oozing this purply stuff and
her teeth are chittering and then she speaks and says, “Take me to
the heights,” but her voice is like two pieces of sandpaper being
rubbed against each other. My reefer has dropped from my hand and
landed on MG’s back where it has burned a hole through the fur. He
leaps up and both of us scream like girls, which is all right for
Jen to do, but not so great for me. The TV goes off and a
commercial for Tylenol comes on.

On the evening news, the talking heads tell
us that Lady GaGa is dead from a disease of unknown origin and that
it is likely not contagious. Jen says, “They got that wrong. Way
wrong. Let me call the lab.” Which she does. The next day, everyone
is calling it the GaGa disease and that name has stuck, although
subsequent investigations reveal that she was not patient zero but
about third or fourth in a line of lesbian friends with whom she
has worked and done other things that I won’t bore you with. It’s
in my camcorder report if you ever get to see it.

Jennifer left the next day. I tried to avoid
the boohoos at the airport but tryin’ ain’t doin’, as they say. She
grabbed a Mid Coast flight nonstop into Boston. Little did I know
that I might never see her again. People at the airport had that
I’m-scared-shitless look on their faces. CNN was running that GaGa
tape over and over and we led off with it until one day the station
manager calls me in. Her name is Rhonda Fark and she is one of
those tough-as-nails bitches that would deflate a boner on King
Kong. She’s married so I’m thinking somebody’s getting her—Mr.
Fark, right?—but I’m also thinking like most dumbasses that if she
got laid real good, she’d be a whole lot nicer. Of course, I never
thought that about Old Man Greenblatt, the former station manager
who was the worst sonafabitch anybody could have as a boss. He got
laid all the time. Got caught fucking the most fittest weather lady
ever behind the green screen one day and that was the end of his
job and the weather lady got a low seven figure sexual harassment
award and married a fullback on the Broncos. I can tell you that
weather bitch hounded Greenblatt—Harvey was his name—and if she was
sexually harassed, I’m a fairy princess—which I am definitely
not.

Anyway, Mrs. Fark calls me in and says we
need a new angle on this GaGa thing, that the station science
reporter can’t seem to get any information. Maybe I could get
something from Jen. “After all, Kent, she’s been involved with that
new AIDS vaccine, right? Right, Kent?”

“Well, yes. She is,” I respond like a wimp.
“But I don’t know if there’s a link and besides…”

“Of course there’s a link! You know it damn
well and if you don’t get me the inside scoop from your fuck-buddy
or cunt-friend or whatever you call each other nowadays, you’ll be
on unemployment. Try paying your rent on that fancy stud-muffin pad
of yours in the Rocky House on that check. And if you think anyone,
and I mean anyone, thinks you’re a ‘reporter’ so you can get
another job somewhere lickety-split, let me tell you that anyone in
the news business knows that TV reporters are air-headed assholes
that couldn’t sniff out a story if it jumped up and bit them on the
ass. Which, I might add, is where this GaGa thing is going. So, Mr.
Reporter,” she says this with her hand on her hip and her eyes
drilling a hole into my now very much softened brain, “So Mr.
Reporter, do some reporting and get me some material on this
goddamned GaGa disease. Now get out of here and you better have
something on my desk within 48 hours. It’s Pulitzer time for me,
honey, and while I am not working with any prizes, I intend to get
one. Now go!”

She has made me a believer in the innate
superiority of one who threatens and can act on the threat. I
e-mail Jen and ask her for some background stuff on the research. I
promise her name won’t be brought up, but, and I really fucking
said this in that e-mail, “the public has a right to know.” Now, I
must tell you that I personally think that the American public has
the right to know jack-shit. But Mrs. Fark’s words are rattling
around in my brain and that off-handed comment on the rent has
struck home, no pun intended. I know I call her Mrs. Fark. I cannot
help it. You meet Hitler, you’re gonna say “How’s it hangin’
Adolf?” I don’t think so.

Like a true trooper, Jen FedExs a packet to
me at the office. She told me before she sent it that it was copies
of her material, notes and testing results right from the lab but
the information and calculations were so complicated that she
doubted anyone could make sense of it (especially at a TV station),
but she was glad to help out with Miss Thing Bitch if she could.
“Love, Jen.” She had a way of telling me how she loved me in the
most off-handed unrehearsed and natural way possible. Her nearly
perfect body, her straight teeth and the smell of her would have
been enough for most. Her ass and the way she wiggled it when she
delivered head would be enough for everyone else to know she was
the real deal. I was already convinced, as much as a self-absorbed
twenty-something dickhead could be. But I will confess that
thinking she really loved ME, me, made my world, brother. It made
my world. And I have no reason to bullshit thee.

The minute the FedEx guy drops the package on
my desk, I rush to Mrs. Fark’s office. She’s on the phone yelling
at someone and I’m thinking, I’m next. Shit.

“Oh, Kent. Good, come in. I was hoping you’d
pull through. You know the AP is running this AIDS vaccine story
and the White House has gotten involved and...they’re putting a gag
order on the media. If we so much as say anything about this GaGa
thing, our license is pulled. I was just on the phone with Ted
Armstrong. He’s the…well, of course you know who he is. He signs
your check.”

I’m relieved and not at the same time. A gag
order on a free press is something I never heard of.

“This came in from my fiancée just a minute
ago. It’s supposed to be some important information that might
explain…”

“Well, dearie, hand it over and let’s have a
look. Maybe there’s something in here we can use when the order is
lifted. That fucking President must think she got elected Empress
or something. I think CNN and Fox News are in court right now
looking for a restraining order. How’s that for two total assholes
suddenly deciding they might be on the same side of an issue. I
never knew Fox to be anything but asswipes.”

As she’s talking, she uses her Tiffany silver
sharp-as-a-razor letter opener on the packet, holds it up by a
corner and jiggles it. About ten pages of stuff plop on her
desk.

“Well, what have we here…?”

She starts reading and I come around to her
side of the desk getting closer than I think prudent but very
anxious to see what my Jen has sent. Fark is reading and I suddenly
see that the hand she is holding the pages with is shriveling from
the finger tips up her fingers, past her hand to her arm and she
starts inhaling like she’s snorting coke. Quick deep snorts. I jump
back just as she collapses.

“Mrs. Fark, Mrs. Fark? Are you all right?
Hannah,” I yell to her secretary. “Quick call 911!”

Hannah says, “Is everything OK?”

“Stay the fuck out of here. Call 911, I think
she’s got…”

Fark starts writhing on the floor like some
kind of half woman-half octopus. Her saggy skin with the tell-tale
purple blotches is splitting at the wrists and the folds at her
neck. She opens her eyes and lunges up at me with her mouth open
and her black tongue aimed right at my goddamned face. Her hand
grabs my crotch but before she grips my balls, my expensive suit
pants block her hand because I’m crouching and the seam is pulled
taut. Mama always said to buy the best clothes I could afford
because clothes make the man. And to always wear clean underwear
because you never know when…

“Fuck me!” I yell as I leap up and grab her
fancy chrome designer desk lamp and smash her face in, because I’ve
seen this all before and I know where it’s going. Her face caves
like a giant prune, teeth drop like Chiclets to the floor and the
deep dark ooze starts.

Now I’m standing there pissed off, annoyed,
scared. I never liked her much anyway but knowing she literally
wanted to kill me has me huffing mad, my adrenaline chugging like a
train engine. “And it’s fiancée, not fuck buddy, you goddamn bitch
from hell,” I yell as I give her another whack with the same lamp
right into her chest. The ribs split open under those purple wounds
and her lung flops out like a sack of raisins. Her heart is
shriveled and dead, a dark musky brown. But she’s still flopping
around between her desk and the wall, grabbing at my ankles. I
stomp her arms and crack them into pulp. Hannah is screaming in the
background and Buddy, the copy boy comes running and grabs me,
pulls me out the door and slams it shut. Hannah has passed out on
top of her desk, her blouse buttons have popped and one very
curious nipple is peeking out of her twisted bra.

Two security guys come running up. Too
little, too late. But I’m OK even if Fark is floundering around on
the floor oozing black crap like a giant slug on acid and knocking
everything over; we’re all watching through the plate glass panel.
Speechless. Her bronze art nouveau coat tree topples down on her
and two of the hooks penetrate her abdomen just below the navel.
It’s the coup de grace, as some French asshole would say. She is
quite dead, I’m believing. Hoping.

“Everyone stay out of that office. That’s an
order,” says Patrick the security guard as he closes and locks the
door. I know his name because he has a plastic tag on his Dacron
shirt right near his tin badge. I guess he’s in charge now. Good, I
think. Let me tend to poor Hannah here.

I lean over being sure not to button anything
up. I want to make sure she can breathe and gently slap her pale
cheek.

“Hannah…Hannah wake up. It’s Okay,” I say.
Yeah, Okay like it’s Okay to picnic on a nuclear waste dump. I am
covered in Fark’s blood or whatever it is that used to be her
blood. A drop gets on Hannah’s ever so pert chin.

“Everybody back, everybody back,” shouts one
of the cops running down the hall toward us. We move to the walls
as they get there, one of the cops smirking as he sees poor Hannah.
I’m still leaning over her when her eyes flutter and glaze over to
a milky white. From the spot on her chin, the creeping GaGa has
started, sucking every drop of moisture as it works its way up her
face and down her neck.

“What the fuck?” says Officer Krupke. I’m
already across the room.

“What did you do to her, you little twerp?”
says the sergeant turning to me like I was Jack the Ripper. “John,
arrest that guy,” he says pointing at me.

“He didn’t do anything,” says Buddy. I’m
thinking Buddy is a well-chosen name for that kid. But it wouldn’t
have made a difference. Hannah has leaped up on to the sergeant’s
back and has gnawed through his hat into his skull. He’s screaming
about the Virgin Mary or his mother or somebody when she spits out
a piece of bone and scalp and digs into his brain with both jaws
chomping like a wood chipper. He’s trying to run but topples over.
The other cop fires right into the back of Hannah’s head and one of
her eyeballs flies out onto the rug. But she’s still squirming and
biting, eating her way through the sergeant’s head like it was full
of toasty-nut oatmeal. He fires two more shots into her chest, but
she’s still at it.

“Motherfucker,” he mumbles taking point blank
range at the back of her head again.

“Shoot her in the gut,” I yell. “In the
gut…right at the base of her back!”

He does and the chomping stops. Buddy vomits.
I help him wash up in Fark’s private bathroom as two guys with body
bags haul her and Hannah off. I’m thinking she probably won’t mind.
Mrs. Fark, that is. About us using her private bathroom, I
mean.