Zombie Bitches From Hell (29 page)

“Jen, it’s me. I didn’t do anything,” I
plead. Another explosion rocks the place and I can see search beams
glistening through newly opened chinks in the walls and
ceiling.

“I didn’t do anything. I don’t know what’s
going on. I swear,” I say.

“You brought them here, you fucker. You
brought them here.”

“Believe me, I didn’t.”

She reaches for a piece of pipe that has
fallen from the ceiling but I’m too fast. I leap for the hatch door
that got me here and I’m running down the drain pipe as fast as I
can crouched over. There are bitches ahead of me running in the
same direction. A light is focused on the end of the drain; I can
see it ahead. Bitches are running out and being mowed down by rapid
arms fire. Fuck, I’m thinking. I turn around and Jen and two
bitches are chasing me. If I run out, I’m dead. If I stay, I’m
dead. Another explosion rocks the pipe and sand sifts through the
seams like small waterfalls. I can hear distant gunfire, shouts,
screams, the grunting of the killing zombie bitches, me calling to
each other and the repetitive sounds of explosions.

I stop at the mouth of the drain pipe and
turn around to face Jen.

“You gotta believe me,” I yell at her. “I
love you.”

“Fuck you,” she yells and runs at me faster
than I’ve ever seen a zombie run. She has the pipe in her hand
coming at me like a knight on a horse with a lance. Instead of
backing away or running, which would take me into the fire storm
outside, I crouch low as she takes a plunge at me and trip her up.
The other bitches stop in their tracks as they see their queen go
down. I get on top of her and pin her shoulders to the floor of the
drain pipe.

“Fuck you and your kind to hell,” she
screams, spitting the black ooze onto my face and almost blinding
me.

I look in her yes, remember who she was, the
times we had, wanting so much to kiss her and hold her, but knowing
in my heart this is not that Jen. This thing is something using
Jen’s body and brain, but it sure as shit isn’t my girl. “Sorry,
you fucking zombie bitch from hell,” I say as I yank the pipe from
her hand, place it under her jaw. I guess you’re just not into me
anymore.” I jam the pipe up through her lower jaw, teeth stuck in
the black ooze seeping from her mouth. “It coulda been real nice.”
I press my knee against the bottom of the pipe and knee kick it as
hard as I can. Her brain pops out the top of her head along with
shards of her skull, her eyeballs getting sucked inwards as they
are dragged out with her brain at the point of the pipe.

I suddenly feel the two bitches on my back,
both biting into my shoulders going for my neck. With all my might,
I leap out of the culvert into the glare of the search light.

“Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot!” It’s Tim barking
orders. “Kent, get out of the way.”

I have no idea what he means but I just
crouch down as the bitches have begun gnashing their teeth into my
shoulder blades.

“Get these fuckers off me, for Christ’s
sake,” I yell.

Before the words are even out, I can feel the
thuds of clubs crushing the bitches’ skulls, ooze and brain matter
running down my face and neck. They are yanked off of me and
riddled with machine gun fire. I look up and see Ryan and Tim
standing together with Uzis smoking. “Welcome aboard, Captain,”
says Tim.

Bitches are leaping out of windows, through
doors and out the drain pipe like cockroaches. There must be two
hundred of them. Some guys armed only with baseball bats are jumped
and have their throats torn out but instead of being eaten, they
are left to die. Gunfire sputters incessantly, bitches heads being
blown off in every direction. One of the guys has a girl on the
ground and while his pal holds her down with a well-planted boot on
her chest, smashing her face in, he puts the barrel of his shotgun
in her crotch and explodes her from the inside out, covering his
friend in zombie gore.

“Good shot, you crazy fucker,” he says.

“Don’t worry, it washes off.” They both laugh
and move on to more killing.

The bitches seem to outnumber the men and
there are clearly some of them in charge. An old gray-haired hag
screams something that I can’t make out and six bitches charge at
me where I lie on the ground. Tim and Ryan open fire and the
zombies drop where they’re hit, but one lands on top of me oozing
stink and black blood, biting at me through my shirt.

“Oh fuck!” I yell. Tim pulls her off by the
hair but not before she has latched on to my left nipple with her
teeth and it comes away with her head and she’s standing there
chewing it like its bubble gum.

I grab my chest which is bleeding and lean
forward.

“You didn’t need that anyway, honey,” says
Ryan as he smashes the bitch in the face with the butt of his gun
and caves her nose in like a rotten Halloween pumpkin.

In a half hour, maybe less, the bitches lay
dead and dying everywhere. We only lost about ten guys but I use
the term “only” without fully realizing the tragedy of us losing
anyone.

One of the guys is patching me up with a
first aid kit. Ryan sits by me.

“We knew there were bitches hiding somewhere
in town. We’ve actually searched that theater two or three times.
Didn’t know it had a ‘speak-easy’ room downstairs. Fred tells me
that’s what he thinks it was. Left over from prohibition days when
a girl couldn’t get a drink in a decent establishment. Guess the
Brookstone family knew what they were doing. No wonder they bought
up half the town back in the day.”

“But what made you find it tonight,” I say
aware of the more-than-coincidence timing of the attack.

“You did,” Ryan says. “I didn’t believe your
story about wandering across this whole fucked-up country to hang
out in Provincetown with a bunch of sissies. You were after
someone, likely a girl. That hangdog look I’ve seen when I was in
the army. Every swinging dick with a girl back home had that same
sappy look even in the middle of the action. We knew zombies were
stealing guys here and there; that they were not just strolling off
into the night. To what? The world gone mad? I don’t think so. They
were kidnapped and brought here. Some for food, some for milking.
Can’t believe they outsmarted us this long.”

An explosion lights up the sky. The dinner
theater has been doused with gasoline at the foundation and set
ablaze, its weathered old siding like dried up kindling
flash-firing, thick orange smoking billowing into the night air. We
can hear screams inside.

“There were men in there,” I say.

“We got them out. The screams are the
pregnant bitches. If any of our guys were going to be daddys, it
wasn’t going to be like this.”

***

Ryan heads over to a thirty-five-foot sail
boat, docked at the only remaining dock in P-Town. The mast glows
white against the darkening sky of evening but orange beams from
the setting sun make the boat glow as it rocks slowly on the still
sea. As we get closer, I see the name of the boat: “MG.”

“The guy that owned this beauty collected
antique sports cars,” says Ryan. “He loved MGs. Had a red MG-TD. I
think it was a 1952. Beautiful convertible with a black rag top and
wire wheels. He owned the dinner theater. Left here when the
disease first started. Think he had family in Boston. Haven’t heard
a word since, of course.”

Steve, a man I’d only seen briefly at the
restaurant, arrived with a few of the guys in a dune buggy. He had
packed his bag and had sea charts rolled up in a leather strap.

“Seeing as Kent is the Captain, Father Steve,
I guess you’ll be the navigator,” says Tim.

“Look, let’s get this straight. I’m not a
priest. I didn’t even finish the first year of seminary. So please,
do not call me ‘Father’ unless I am your father and if I am, your
mother was my right palm and named Melanie after this girl I knew
who waited tables at a diner near my house in Parsippany, New
Jersey. Your mother named Melanie?”

“No, Father,” says Tim. “I mean Steve. You’re
not planning on preaching to us are you?’

“You think you need it?” Steve says.

“Probably, but it wouldn’t do any good,”
answers Tim.

“I didn’t think so. So, no, I’ll just stick
to navigating, if that’s all right with you,” says Steve a broad
smile on his face.

“I never got your last name, Steve,” I
say.

“Hadley, Stephen Hadley,” he responds.

***

Most of the night we stock the boat with provisions,
re-check our water supply and batteries.

The next morning the three of us board the MG and a
few of the guys, mostly seminarians, are on the dock to say
farewell. Ryan comes over to me and shakes my hand.

“Are you sure you want to leave us. This place is as
safe as any, you know. And you’re welcome here,” he says.

“Like I said last night, Jen told me there are
islands out there with guys on them. I gotta see if there is some
way we can communicate with each other. At some point, the bitches
will come for you guys. You’re not going to stand a chance. I think
you know that and don’t take it personal.”

“I don’t,” he says looking out at the horizon as if
truth was rising instead of the sun.

“We’ll radio back every day. It’s a slim hope, I
know, but there has to be some point in our surviving and the only
way we can do it, is to join forces with any men out there who have
not already fallen off the deep end and try to end this thing for
good. We’ll sail down the coast and check out the barrier islands,
then make our way to Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Caymans.”

“Sounds like fun, Kent,” he says. “Maybe God really
is a guy and he’ll keep an eye on you.”

I look at him like I don’t know what he means. But I
do.

“Red sky at morning, sailor take warning; red sky at
evening, sailor take warning,” says Tim. Everyone looks at him.

“Say what?” asks Ryan.

“He’s okay,” I say. “Not the brightest bulb on the
Rockefeller Center tree, but a good buddy.”

***

The moon is a fingernail in the sky, the
stars mute witnesses to our voyage. The wind has made us her sons
and we are soaring through the sky reflected in the Atlantic,
deeply black, glistening, vibrant. Beneath us, the sea teems with
life; I imagine dolphins and Wright whales following us through
schools of fish so huge they run to the horizon, dense enough to
lift us out of the water and carry us on their backs. Tim is at the
helm. Steve is reading his charts in the cabin, the soft glow of
the desk lamp reflecting up onto his focused face. The wind slaps
the sail and I see the North Star behind us, ducking under a stray
cloud but ever present.

###

Zoot Campbell lives in Massachusetts with
his wife and two children. He is busy working on the next volume
of
Zombie Bitches From Hell
.

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