Zombie Bitches From Hell (3 page)

CHAPTER 3

A month ago my phone rings and it’s Jen.

“Jen. My God. Are you all right?

“Kent, I am, I am. I’m not sure how but I am.
I’m so glad you answered. I don’t think the phones will be working
much longer.”

“Yeah, it came over the wire yesterday. Most
of D.C. has the GaGa and the men are all dead or mostly but I think
there’s a bunch of military high honchos holed up in the Pentagon
bomb shelter. They can last there for years but I don’t know if
that will—”

“Fuck them, Kent. Listen. Let me tell you
what this fucking GaGa disease is all about. You need to prepare so
you can come get me. You will, won’t you?”

“Uh, yeah, of course. Sure. Where are
you?”

“I’m in the basement in a house on the ass
end of Cape Cod. In Provincetown. This place is mostly populated
with gay men and so a bunch of them are in hiding and doing okay.
But they’re killing any women they find and so I’ve got no one. I’m
alone here and living on peanut butter and tuna and bottled
water.”

“That is fucked up.”

“Tell me about it, honey. But listen. This is
the straight story on the GaGa. We were working on an AIDS vaccine
and using a genome switch-on to trigger a natural immunity to the
HIV virus. Everyone has an X chromosome and women have two. So the
idea was to have one of the chromosome d-types on the X gene mutate
to provide an immune response to the HIV bug. Are you with me?”

“Yepper. I think so.”

“Only the gene mutated differently than it
was supposed to. The mutated gene starts a chain reaction whenever
there is more than one X chromosome which means only females get
it. To the best of our knowledge, males do not.”

“Wow. Now I see it.”

“The mutated gene is in every cell in the
victim’s body. Every cell. But it travels in the skin cells from
person to person. So you know we humans slough off hundreds of
thousands of skin cells every day. Right?

“Yeah…”

“And those cells float around indefinitely.
They’re the primary component in house dust. You know how quickly
dust settles on every surface at home, right?”

“Of course.”

“If just one dust particle touches a female’s
skin, the transfer occurs. Remember that YouTube vid we saw where
some geek put four thousand mousetraps in a room and threw a ball
in the room?

“Yeah…”

“Well that’s how the chain reaction works
inside the victim’s body. It takes less than a minute for the
infected mutated skin cell to transmit the cellular information to
every other cell. This immediately kills the female that is
infected.”

Now I know how Fark died. Some female skin
dust must have made its way onto Jen’s notes and into the FedEx.
Shit, Jen killed Mrs. Fark. But how could Jen still be alive?

“Jen, remember those notes you sent me for
Mrs. Fark? Remember I told you she died right when she opened
it?”

“Yeah.”

“How did it not kill you?”

“I didn’t send those docs. Jerry Mackwell
did. I haven’t been to the lab since I got back. Director Faggione
called and told me to stay home. Now I know why. He saved my life.
God, he saved my life.” I could hear her crying softly and did not
want to go there.

“So, if an infected female is dead, how does
she keep moving and killing?”

“We don’t have that answer, but it seems that
in the mutation process, the cells want to regenerate, like stem
cells. So, this is the hard part.”

“Go on, hon.”

“The women who get infected are dead but
still moving—ambulatory is the word and because their cells are
reproducing so wildly they crave a huge amount of fresh protein
nutrition.”

“As in ‘guys’?”

“That’s it.”

There was a silence louder than a cannon
shot.

“Two more things,” she says.

“What?”

“I love you.”

Shit, I say to myself. I’m not going to
answer this. It never worked and will never work. Once I say it,
especially if I mean it which I fucking do, I am major
Nobel-Prize-winning fucked.

“And I think I have the formula for a
vaccine. It hasn’t been tested, exactly, in ideal conditions
but…”

Click.

“Hello? Hello?...Jen?” Gone. Dead air. I try
again, but nothing. I text her. “Me too. C U when there. MayB 2
weeks, 3. I’ll find U.” Don’t know if she’ll get it. Don’t care.
I’m outta here.

CHAPTER 4

A week later I negotiated the sale of the
balloon with its owner, Rick Calle. He was an intense sort, nothing
like the complete nerd you’d think would spend time and money on
the most impractical form of transportation ever devised by the
walnut-sized mind of man. Until very recently, you went up in the
fucking thing standing in a wicker basket—wicker as in straw. A
huge propane tank fed a blazing flame six feet high that filled a
silk balloon with hot air and then you trusted Mother Nature to
push you along on her sweet air currents. Wherever she decided to
blow you—and not the fun kind of blowing, either—you went. Where
she stops, nobody knows. All I know is that having the balloon
means avoiding traffic jams and being on the ground with those
things. And not a lot of worry about plane or helicopter engine
problems.

Rick had made some improvements; not many,
but enough to reduce the chance factor of winds pushing you where
you do not want to go. Actually with the help of little tanks of
compressed air, you could sort of steer the thing away from hazards
like high tension wires, mountain tops, etc. You were still stuck
with the prevailing winds but you could nudge the craft along on a
roughly predictable route. It was insulated, covered and had a
2-way radio and a GPS system along with enough room for
supplies.

The story I covered for KWAK was Calle flying
the thing from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Madrid, Spain. He
actually made it, sort of. Landed the thing about twenty miles
north of where he needed to land but no harm done. Not exactly
Lucky Lindy, but good enough. The catch with my using the thing was
that he was going along. So for my life savings which was not very
much, I got the contraption and him to fly it. His wife was one of
the early victims of the GaGa and he had only escaped being chow by
locking her in their twenty room mansion in DC. He drove to his
hangar where the balloon was stored in a moving van along with his
other treasured crap and he headed west. Got attacked just outside
of Denver, got saved by some state troopers on patrol and ended up
here—with his only acquaintance in the area, me. It had been a year
since the interview, but it made him world famous for the requisite
15 minutes and he was grateful for it.

I suppose it’s my good luck that Tim can also
fly the balloon. These days good luck is in short supply. We’ve
hauled the thing onto the grounds of the radio tower and are
getting it ready for the relatively easy-seeming flight from here
to Massachusetts. I know Jen will wait for me. I mean really, what
choice does she have?

We still get signals from all over the
country and we’ve heard from the Pentagon that Europe and Asia are
in worse shape that we are. Mostly that’s because they are more
tightly packed. A lot of families headed out for Siberia. How is
that for a mind-fuck? For generations that place was the hell on
earth. Like one person per fifty square miles. Now, it’s that same
isolation that makes it the safest place. Get your women to
Siberia, blow up the bridges behind you, wreck the rail lines. Mine
the two or three roads into the place and you might all survive.
The Kremlin types, a bunch of Russian mafia and some Eastern
European big-wigs all got out. They are smart. Spread out and even
if the infection starts, it’s easy to contain.

Look, I really don’t give a rat’s ass about
the rest of the world. I can’t do anything about it. Right? And if
I could…ah, fuck them all. There’s a voice in my head that tells me
Jen is one of the ones responsible for this mess. Scientists. It’s
always those fuckers messing with this and fucking with that.
Opening doors that should stay shut. Who the fuck knows? I mean, it
could have saved lives, I guess.

Anybody tells me they love me, I say nothing.
This way nothing is hanging out there waiting to be shot down.
Sometimes you got to accept the status quo. Why get involved? You
fuck with things, they’re gonna blow up in your face. Like telling
some chick you love her. Maybe you get lucky one time and something
good comes of it. But you know in the end that every time science
comes up with something new and nifty, some motherfucker turns it
into a weapon. It’s what we do. Sounds crazy but it’s true if you
think about it. But I stopped thinking about it. Yeah, Jen was one
of the ones who brought the world to its knees. Just a little while
ago she was on her knees giving me a blow job. Who’da thought? And
if I did, would I do anything about it? I think not. Maybe I
should’ve knocked her brains out or pushed her out a window or
backed my Jeep over her. But I didn’t. So we’re all fucked.

The day before we’re scheduled to leave,
another vid comes over the national security wire. We are told to
broadcast it as soon as possible. This is what we see in the
control room editing station:

It’s the feast of Ramadan, which is the
Muslim holy month. You may know it as a time when all the faithful
crowd to Mecca in Saudi Arabia and they walk around this humongous
black cube that looks like a special effect from
War of the
Worlds
. I don’t pretend to know why they are marching in a
circle over and over but I know it’s only men and they are in the
thousands. Apparently, women are not allowed and personally, I
don’t give a rat’s ass whether they are allowed or not. I only know
these bastards were rooting for the cocksuckers that knocked over
the Trade Center and I’m thinking, fuck ’em all. Usually wishin’
ain’t getting’—another of Mom’s enigmatic precepts which is truer
than anything you’ll find in the Bible. But I digress.

So these dudes are doing their marching in a
circle routine when off-camera we can hear shouts and screams and
the signs of minor mayhem. But it is most definitely not minor.
From the left we see a swarm of about five thousand black-cloaked
broads running in to where this cube thing is. Now be sure that the
cube is blocked in all around by walls—looks like a gigantic
courtyard bigger than two football fields. In other words, getting
in may be an orderly event through a gate or something but getting
out is not going to be so simple if everybody is in a hurry. These
women are in their burkas like I said before—you know the
black-hooded bathrobe looking thing that the men force the women to
wear so other men cannot lust over these ugly fucking broads that
only a blind dude would lust over anyway. I mean, even some
computer hacker geek who wacks it five or six times a day would
still marry his palm rather than go near the pussy of one of these
stank factories. Well, maybe not every geek, but a big
majority.

We’re all thinking that the broads have had
enough and it’s probably the end of their world too like the
dumbass Christians have been bally-hooing about for maybe a
thousand years and maybe all these assholes on both sides of the
aisle finally got it right. I mean you put your bet on number ten
on the roulette wheel long enough—like a hundred years, every day,
ten times a day—it’s bound to come in, right? But we’re watching
the vid and some of the burkas have fallen off and underneath each
one is a broad with the GaGa. They all got it, as a matter of fact,
and now also keep in mind that these dudes always have guns on
them—you know every time they celebrate some stupid shit thing,
they fire a rifle in the air—even their fucked up leaders. But in
this fucking “holy” place, you got to check your gun at the door
like in Abilene when Wyatt Earp tells every dead-eye sheep-fucking
cowboy they can’t come into the saloon with a weapon; except him of
course.

These GaGa bitches are berserking in a style
we have not to this point witnessed: It is mess en masse. They are
jumping the guys and biting and tearing, rending meat from the
bones, dicks and balls being the main prize and then all the other
goodies. Some cop types eventually show up and start shooting but
everybody is covered head to toe in more black cloth than losers at
a Goth Halloween party, so it’s hard to tell male from female so
they just shoot everyone they can. Everybody knows these
cocksuckers don’t give a hoot in Muslim hell who they kill, as long
as it someone. But the GaGa bitches do not go down easily and if a
man gets shot it just makes it that much easier for the hungry ones
to chow down. In less than a half hour, mostly everyone is dead or
dying. One of the cops takes out a pistol and blows his own head
off but collapses near a bitch who is wounded and pinned under some
other bitches. She still attacks his good parts the way you’d think
grandma would eat some turkey on Thanksgiving.

Eventually, an armored troop carrier shows up
and flame-throws the whole kit and kaboodle bunch of them. I like
that about these countries. They don’t think, “Maybe they have some
constitutional rights that we need to consider.” Nope, they shoot
first and have fun later. They turn this fire hose on the bastards
that is filled with Sterno or some shit like that and there is a
barbecue the likes of which no one has ever seen. Thick black smoke
goes billowing up into the sky and a good number of the pricks
being burned are not quite dead so they are running around,
screaming and trying to get help while the bitches are still eating
even though they, too, are burning. One guy falls into a group of
about six of the burning broads and as they are eating him from the
belly up and he’s shouting, their heads are on fire and the only
thing anyone can see is the slashing white teeth glaring out from
the blackened flaming heads. It doesn’t take long for the entire
crowd to be burned worse than a side of beef at a drunken Texas
bar-b-cue.