Zombie Bitches From Hell (9 page)

Peeping in as slyly as we can, we see a man,
a woman, obviously his wife and two younger girls sitting around a
table—looks like they’re playing a board game or cards. Doesn’t
take a rocket scientist to see that the GaGa has not hit here.
Frankly, in hindsight, it should’ve been obvious. This place is in
the middle of nowhere. People that would have used that parking lot
had to come from other places and my guess is they were—most of
them—infected and then eaten. These guys got away with it through
either good luck or good sense. The fact that the mother and kids
are not making their way through the dude’s intestine is a
testament to the smarts as far as I’m concerned. This will never be
known as “the time of the Lucky.” The GaGa makes no allowance for
luck. It is the end all be-all of a major Earth-Fuck.

“Check it out,” Tim whispers. “He’s got an
arsenal on the wall.”

I’m seeing at least ten rifles or shotguns
and a bunch of pistols laid out on a sideboard and a mountain of
ammo that looks like the Cheops pyramid.

“Should we knock?” I say like a total
dumbass.

“Are you a total dumbass or what?” replies
Tim. At least I know where I stand, I think to myself.

“Well, we’re on their side—we’re guys and we
must be okay?”

“Yeah, right, like those guys back in Kansas.
We make a peep and one of us is gonna have a hole as big as the
Holland Tunnel in his head. Listen. Back up into the undergrowth.
I’ll stand to the side of the door. Shout a greeting in your
friendliest voice. If he comes out firing, I’ll shoot his ass. If
he comes out with a question on his lips, we’ll try to make peace.
Either way, we’re getting provisions.”

“When did you become chief of this
operation?” I ask.

“I’m not. You can lead, friend, but I got to
voice my opinion if I think you’re going to get me killed for no
good reason. Comprende?”

“I’ll get in the bushes; signal me when
you’re ready.”

I get out behind a tree and say loudly, “Er,
excuse me, sir…I’m out here and I mean no harm. I’m a friend not a
foe. Hello? Hello?”

Two shots in quick succession hit the tree
I’m standing behind. Chips of bark fly off. I can see the flash
points from inside the house. He’s shooting at me through a
partially opened window.

“Sir…are you fucking nuts?” I shout. “I’m a
newsman trying to get east…”

Three more bullets hit that tree. I’m
thinking this prick is going to saw this tree down with a
rifle.

Tim has sidled up to the window, crouches
down just below and grabs the barrel.

“Didn’t you hear him, you stupid dickwad?” he
shouts. “We’re just passing through. Cut us a break. All we need is
water.”

“Got any females with you?” he asks.

“Fuck no,” I answer. “We’re clean. Been on
the road for two weeks.” I am not going to mention the balloon.

The guy waits, sizes us up. “There’s a shower
stall out back. Strip down, shower and scrub and cover up with
towels. I got duds in here I can give you. I’ve got my wife and two
daughters in here too and I don’t want them contaminated. Go clean
up. I’ll explain later. And I got more than this rifle here and so
does my wife. Check your bullshit at the door and you’re
welcome.”

“Deal,” I say. “Thank you.”

We shower in ice cold water but without even
realizing it, we haven’t washed in over two weeks. No wonder MG
sleeps most of the time as far away from us as he can. I guess we
smell pretty ripe. I guess again that we’re used to it.

An hour later we’re past the introductions
and sitting down to a duck dinner while MG rests in the leaves
outside the door. He’s got a few bits of duck meat he’s wolfing
down as well.

“I catch them on the lake. It’s easy and
makes no noise. Use a capture net. Ducks are pretty stupid. Dig in,
fellas.”

They’re stupid? I think. They ain’t being
chased by a bunch of cannibal zombie bitches.

Turns out his name is Doctor Paul Walters.
His wife is Agnes. He’s got a twelve- year-old named Samantha and a
ten-year-old named Hadley. We make some small talk but we know the
spirit of the GaGa is in the room only no one wants to talk about
it.

“Listen, guys,” Doc says. “I’m in charge of
an operation at the hospital in town. We’re doing government
research on the disease. Finster Teachers College is about ten
miles north of town…mostly women students and they got infected
when some books arrived from back east. That’s the theory anyway.
They killed and ate most of the male faculty and…”

“Paul…the children Must we talk about this
over dinner?” his wife says.

“Sorry, dear. Pass the salt will you,
Tom?”

“It’s Tim. Here’s the salt.”

Later, we sit around a small fire in the
fireplace and things even seem slightly normal. Of course, they are
most definitely not. Doc says he’ll tell us more tomorrow. A
picture is worth a thousand words and all that horse shit. But I’m
not minding the peace and quiet and I can see Tim is looking
chilled out and the way he might have been before all this started.
I remember him then, but I never knew him. Funny, that’s the way it
is. You meet people, work with them, even, but you don’t bother
knowing them. You store them away in some file cabinet in your head
and then don’t ever bother adding anything or even remembering to
check back. Then the shit hits the fan and all you’ve got in the
world is a stranger you thought you knew. Now you need him to live.
It and mostly everything else is fucked up. Isn’t it?

CHAPTER 13

The hospital sits low and squat on a hillside
just off of Main Street. It’s got a walled-in parking lot, a great
thing to have in place when your building is going to be used as a
fort. At 40 foot intervals, soldiers with rifles are posted. A
makeshift watch tower has been erected with a giant Klieg light and
there’s a row of sandbags as an inner barricade fifty feet beyond
the fence. Very Afghanistan, I’m thinking.

Doc Walters pulls up to the gate.

“Hey, Jim,” he says lowering the window.
“I’ve got some recruits with me. Open up.”

“Sure thing, Doc. Frank has been asking about
you.”

“Good. I like to keep him guessing.”

“Say what?” the guard asks.

“Nothin’. Thanks for the heads up.”

Of course the Doc has a special “reserved”
space but it looks like there are not many other vehicles. But rank
has its privileges. Just as we pull in, a large United Van Lines 18
wheeler pulls in and goes past where we’re parking to an area at
the back of the building. We get out and go over, led by the Doc
who’s very animated like he just won the lottery or something.

On signal a bunch of orderlies and guards
come running out and they’re holding cattle prods and steel rods
with what looks like a large pin cushion on the end.

“Ready,” yells one of the attending white
coats. The driver opens the rear door, pulls the ramp out and runs
for cover.

The GaGas start pouring out the back, stiff
and disoriented, slow-moving and mostly naked. Many of them are
wearing Denver U. t-shirts or hoodies.

“A wonderful batch, Carl. Wonderful. I knew
those dorms would have a supply,” says the Doc like its Christmas
Eve under the tree.

There are about forty of these co-eds, all
pale and pink, the white eyes blank as ice cubes. They immediately
attempt to attack the men but these guys know what to expect and
the bitches are prodded and poked and eventually led into the
double back door of the hospital just to the right of the old
Emergency Room entrance.

“Carl,” says the Doc. “That blonde with no
shirt and the warm up pants,” he gestures. “Put her aside in the
special room.”

“Anything you say, Doc,” and good old Carl
throws a net over the blonde who sets up to howling and snarling
trying to bite Carl and his helper as she’s led into the E.R.

“Move it, you fucking whore,” yells Carl. He
stabs at her ass with the prod. “Get the fuck in there.”

She screams, but obeys. Like a beef cow
entering a slaughterhouse.

“We’ve been scouring the area for supplies of
reproductively young victims for the important work we’re doing
here. It seems like an easy task, but Carl and I pour over
municipal maps for hours thinking, ‘where would we congregate if we
were infected.’ You see, they’re a good deal like animals out of
their natural habitat. Remember that scene in
King Kong
where the guy is trying to figure out where in New York City this
giant ape will go. You see he’s not in the jungle anymore. So Jack,
I think his name is, sees the World Trade Center—obviously it was
there when the movie was made—that was a tragedy, wasn’t it, and
notes that it resembles the two promontories that the ape called
home back on his island. I think it was called ‘Skull Island.’ I
love a good movie, you know. Miss them terribly. Now it’s just me
and the wife and the kids hitting the Parchesi board. It’s not
much, but it’s all we’ve got. Oh, I’m boring you. Sorry. Yes, we
try to figure out, as I was saying, where the bitches would
congregate. You’ll love this. We found almost a hundred of them in
the designer section of Saks Fifth Avenue downtown. Now, mind you,
they were not doing anything there other than eating the male sales
help that had the misfortune of hiding in a department store. But
no, they were simply milling about. Perhaps they thought it was
familiarly comforting or something. I really have not devoted much
time to the mindset of these creatures. Once I get past the
physiological changes, I’ll focus on their minds, such as they have
minds.”

Doc turned abruptly about and said, “Now,
boys, follow me.” Which we did. Tim nudged me and said, “This guy
has more loose screws than a hardware store.” The Doc smiled as in
a world of his own. Don’t know if he heard the remark or not. Don’t
care.

We’re led up the main building steps. There’s
a statue of some dude in a toga holding an implement.

“Must be the God of Medicine,” Tim says
pointing. “That motherfucker is spinning in his grave.”

We follow the Doc down a long corridor
through three sets of double doors until we reach a place called
“Outpatient Clinic.” Doc calls it the “ward.”

The ward was a large rectangular room with
green tiles and milky white walls. Dead TV screens with their thick
black cables stuck through the walls still watched blankly, their
glassy reflections twisting the scene in kaleidoscope style. There
were twenty beds, two rows of ten in the middle of the room. Along
the periphery, rolling metal tables loaded with blipping beeping
monitors and wires like the head of Medusa. The patients lay in the
beds, all young women, all the victims of GaGa. The Doc was right.
They looked almost normal. The third stage of the disease
rejuvenating their bodies. They were flushed pink, maybe a little
too pink, more like large babies than college co-eds. Their faces
were blank and chalky but the beeping monitors clearly showed these
were not dead people and they were not undead either. They were
re-born dead people, revitalized dead people. We’d have plenty of
time I hoped to come up with a fitting term that we could use to
tell future generations what was born by our generation. Words
would escape the most talkative morons who saw this.

The girls’ eyes were milk white, the irises,
just as the doc had said, were pure white, the pupil a tiny black
hole, empty like a shark’s eye. Many of them moaned, some made that
rasping sound that became their signature voices. It was all a deep
base sound like the sound of trucks passing over an elevated
highway very far off. Rumblings, sputterings and an occasional
minute squeal—was it a truck braking? No, it was the signal of pain
as one of the orderlies changed an IV.

They were being fed through clear plastic
tubes inserted into their tracheas—intubation I think they called
it. The bottles that fed the tubes held a hideous concoction of
what was clearly flesh and blood although from what animal, I would
not find out.

“Fuck, Kent, they’re feeding them ground-up
people. These fuckers are crazy, man, crazy,” Tim said under his
breath. I could see his hands shaking.

“Listen, bear with it. It’ll be okay. They’re
on our side, right?”

“Who the fuck knows.”

The girls’ arms and legs were tied down with
thin leather straps and they were all uniformly spread eagle, a
thin sheet covering them from toe to neck. From each bed, next to
the traditional clipboard, hung a tube of KY jelly.

Doc Walters finally came over to us after
checking some charts and conferring with a few of the
orderlies.

“You see, we’ve discovered that roughly
fourteen hours after the second phase begins, what we call the
morbid phase, regeneration begins and the rapidly putrefying flesh
of the dead victims of the GaGa re-invigorates. The heart and lungs
resume their function and the rest follow, not unlike the newborn
brought forth from his mother’s womb on the delivery table. We call
this third phase, ‘regenerative’ and the victims are called
ReGens.”

“Interesting,” I say, sounding every bit the
total moron I think I am.

“I think you’ll find this more interesting,”
he continues. “We’ve failed miserably with artificial insemination.
We don’t know why it didn’t work but it didn’t. If we’re going to
turn the less than zero population growth problem around and follow
the initiative from the Pentagon, this process has to succeed with
at least a fifty percent success rate. Seems we’re on the right
track.”

I looked at him and knew Tim was glued to the
floor.

“These girls are all at the most fertile
point of their cycles. We monitor them very carefully. It’s just a
matter of…”

A door opened and a trooper walked in with an
AK-47. He sat in what looked like a sawed-down version of a
life-guard bench, the kind you see with the “Lifeguard on Duty”
sign attached to it on almost every beach. Doc Walters signaled to
one of the long white-coated orderlies who left and came back
through the door with six soldiers, the same National Guard types
that were out front and manning the perimeter and monitoring the
halls. They were in their boxers and T’s.