Asylum

By Mark Allan Gunnells

A Zombie Novella

From TZF Books

Visit us at
http://thezombiefeed.biz

Published by Smashwords

This novella is
a work of fiction. All the characters and events

portrayed in
this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

Asylum

Copyright ©
2010 by Mark Allan Gunnells

Cover Design by
Justin Stewart

All rights
reserved, including the right to reproduce the book,

or portions
thereof, in any form.

The Zombie Feed
Books is an imprint of

Apex
Publications, LLC

PO Box
24323

Lexington, KY
40524

www.apexbookcompany.com

thezombiefeed.biz

First Edition,
December, 2010

To Melissa Hatchell, who has been there from
the beginning.

When the dead arose, Jimmy was going down on
the balding accountant.

Curtis was standing several yards away from
the accountant’s car, by the corner of the club, the neon sign
above him shedding a harsh blue light over his body. Asylum was the
name of the place, but the ‘s’ and ‘u’ were burned out and no one
had bothered to replace them, so the sign currently read ‘A yl m’.
Curtis shivered, pulled his light jacket tighter around himself,
and checked his watch. Half past four in the morning. He wanted to
go back to the dorms, but Jimmy was his ride. Curtis also had to
urinate something awful, but there was no way he was going to the
restroom in the club. He’d made the mistake of trying that earlier
in the night and walked in on some kind of orgy.

So much that had happened tonight had been a
shock for Curtis. This was his first trip to a gay club, and seeing
so many homosexuals gathered in one place was a revelation. Growing
up in a small southern town, Curtis had always felt alienated,
alone, a freak among the multitudes. But at Asylum, the freaks
were
the multitude. Men dancing together and kissing right
out in the open, no fear or shame evident. Curtis had initially
resisted when Jimmy had offered to take him to the club, but Curtis
was glad he’d finally agreed.

Of course, there was enough small-town in
Curtis for him to be appalled by the easy sexuality on display at
Asylum. The bathroom orgy, Jimmy’s random hookup with the
accountant, the stripper with the dreadlocks and the sculpted
chest—these things had the power to make Curtis uncomfortable.
Still a virgin at age twenty, Curtis had yet to even kiss a man. He
certainly couldn’t imagine hopping into some stranger’s car and
giving him a blowjob.

Curtis sometimes wondered why he and Jimmy
were friends, they were so different. Where Curtis was shy and
awkward in social situations, Jimmy was a blaze of self-confidence
and gregarious charm. On the surface they had nothing in common
other than being gay, but in some ways Curtis thought it was their
differences that drew them to one another. Curtis admired Jimmy’s
openness about his sexuality, his refusal to be anyone other than
who he was. Conversely, Curtis suspected that Jimmy saw him as a
project, a naïve, inexperience little gay boy that he could mold
and teach in the ways of gaydom.

And lesson number one had been fashion.
Curtis had always dressed conservatively, favoring khaki slacks and
button-up shirts, but Jimmy—whose own fashion sense included things
like bright orange felt pants and women’s blouses—had been trying
to change that. Curtis resisted the most wild articles Jimmy tried
to push on him, but he
had
started moving toward a more
casual look.

Lesson number two had been hair. Not one for
product, Curtis had never used gel or mousse in his hair, but Jimmy
had taught him to style it in a spiky way that Curtis actually
thought was rather flattering. Jimmy had tried talking Curtis into
bleaching his brown locks, but all Curtis would agree to were a few
blonde highlights.

Lesson number three had been Asylum. Feeling
uncharacteristically daring, Curtis had allowed Jimmy to dress him
in a pair of tight leather pants that were uncomfortable in the
crotch region and a hot-pink T-shirt with the logo “I LUV BOIS”
emblazoned across the chest. Jimmy had balked when Curtis had
insisted on wearing a jacket over the shirt, arguing that it ruined
the effect, but the late-autumn night was chilly. Jimmy himself had
worn a pair of red vinyl pants that looked painted on and an actual
fur coat—rabbit fur, he said—under which he wore no shirt, his bare
chest and pierced nipples on display. The odd thing about Jimmy—and
one of the things Curtis admired about him—was that he seemed
perfectly at home in such an outrageous outfit. In contrast,
Curtis—his own outfit much tamer by comparison—felt like he was
wearing a Halloween costume.

Curtis had spent most of the night by the
bar, nursing a succession of watery sodas, while Jimmy had danced
with a succession of attractive men. If such displays could be
called dancing. To Curtis’s eyes, it had looked more like
dry-humping to music. A couple of times Curtis had lost track of
Jimmy, and he suspected that the accountant wasn’t his friend’s
first hookup of the night. A few men had approached Curtis, and he
had made an honest effort to flirt, but he wasn’t very practiced in
the art of courtship and it came out as spastic and clumsy. When
one man had asked him to dance, Curtis had answered, “I have two
right feet,” and only after the man gave him a puzzled look and
wandered away did Curtis realized he’d meant to say he had two
left
feet.

And now Curtis was shivering in the cold,
his bladder becoming more and more insistent, while waiting for
Jimmy to finish sucking off some guy whose name he probably didn’t
even know. Curtis scanned the parking lot; the night was winding
down, and the lot was empty except for eight cars. The windows of
the accountant’s Mustang were steamed over, but Curtis could just
make out the ghostly shapes of the accountant and Jimmy’s bobbing
head. Other than the three of them, the parking lot was deserted.
Curtis turned and headed for the corner of the building. With one
final peek over his shoulder, he darted around the corner and
unzipped, freeing his dick from the sweaty confines of the leather
pants and relieving himself again the side of the club. He threw
his head back and sighed, his breath puffing out like smoke.

He was tucking himself back in when the
screaming began.

When the accountant gasped out a strained
“Oh God,” Jimmy assumed he was nearing orgasm so he tightened his
lips around the warm flesh and swallowed deep, but the dick went
flaccid in his mouth even as the driver’s side window shattered.
Glass rained down on Jimmy’s head, a shard nicking him in the back
of the neck.

“
What the fuck?” Jimmy
yelled even as he heard the accountant scream. Jimmy threw himself
back into the passenger’s seat, trying to make sense of what he was
seeing. Arms reached into the car and were dragging the accountant
out through the broken window. The man struggled and beat at the
hands that had ensnared him, but his upper torso disappeared
through the window. His pants and underwear were still around his
knees, and Jimmy saw that the glass from the window was digging
into his bare ass, drawing blood that seemed much too bright to be
real.

As the accountant was pulled the rest of the
way out of the car, he kicked out and one foot struck Jimmy in the
side of the head, dislodging the stunned fog that shrouded his
brain. He reached for the accountant’s legs, but it was too late.
He heard the heavy thud as the man landed in the gravel outside the
car. It was dark, and there were no lights in this part of the lot,
so Jimmy couldn’t make out who had grabbed the accountant, but he
was sure he knew the type. Bigoted, redneck assholes who thought a
little gay bashing made for a fun night on the town.

Jimmy opened the passenger’s door and
started around the car. He had never been one to back down from a
fight, and he had personally taught his fair share of bullies that
he was no stereotypical pussy who would cower before them. He knew
how to use his fists, and he would show these fuckers—

When Jimmy got a good look at the attackers,
he skidded to a halt by the rear bumper of the car. There were
three of them, two men and a woman. One man was dressed in a dark
black suit caked with dirt; one man was wearing nothing but pajama
bottoms; the woman had on a simple purple dress and high heels,
although the heel of the left shoe was broken. And yet it wasn’t
the way the trio was dressed that froze Jimmy’s blood and made his
testicles shrivel against his body.

The man in the suit was missing an eye; the
man in the pajamas had his throat torn out, ragged and bloody; the
woman’s skin had rotted away in places, revealing the skeletal
frame underneath. They did not seem to notice Jimmy, their
attention focused solely on the screaming accountant who was trying
to drag himself away from the three with his elbows.

The man in the suit stomped a foot down on
the accountant’s stomach, instantly cutting off his screams. The
woman knelt down between the accountant’s legs, licking her lips as
she lowered herself toward his dick. Jimmy thought for a moment she
was going to give him a blowjob, just as Jimmy had been doing when
they were interrupted, but instead she bit down on the man’s
scrotum. The accountant found his voice again, a high-pitch wail
aimed at the heavens, as the woman snapped her head back, her teeth
rending flesh.

That was when Jimmy started to scream as
well.

Curtis hurried back around to the front of
the club. He saw Jimmy standing at the rear of the accountant’s
car, staring at something on the ground and screaming. Someone else
screamed, creating a discordant, chilling symphony of fear. From
where he stood, the car was blocking his view of whatever it was
that was inspiring Jimmy’s terror. Curtis ran toward him.

“
Jimmy, what’s going on
over—”

Curtis’s words cut off abruptly when he
rounded the car and saw the accountant lying on the ground, blood
pooling around his waist. A woman in a purple dress, her nose eaten
away that left a gaping hole in the center of her face, was next to
him. She had her hands
inside
the man. It looked as if she’d
clawed into his stomach, and she was pulling out his intestines
like slimy ropes. Most horrifying was that the accountant was still
conscious, screaming as he watched his own disembowelment. The air
was thick with the stench of excrement and blood.

The woman was not alone. Two men, both in
various stages of decay, were crouched on the ground near the
accountant, but their attention was focused on Jimmy. And now
Curtis. They started crawling forward, tongues lolling out of their
mouths like dead slugs, nightmare visions made flesh.

Curtis didn’t have time to fully process
what he was seeing, but he knew enough to realize that he and Jimmy
needed to get out of there quickly. He grabbed Jimmy by the arm,
but his friend shrieked and pulled away, flailing out at Curtis.
Jimmy’s eyes were glassy and vacant.

“
Jimmy, it’s me,” Curtis
said, continuing to tug on Jimmy’s arm. When Jimmy still did not
move, Curtis resorted to what he’d always seen in the movies and
slapped Jimmy across the face.

For once, the movies had it right. Jimmy’s
eyes focused on Curtis, and he placed a hand over his cheek, bright
red with the print of Curtis’s hand. “What’s going on?” he said,
his voice whisper-thin.

“
We’re leaving, that’s
what’s going on.”

The men on the ground were getting to their
feet now, and the woman, a length of the accountant’s intestines
wrapped around her neck like some grotesque scarf, had turned her
attention to Curtis and Jimmy as well. Curtis jerked Jimmy toward
him and turned in the direction they had parked Jimmy’s Honda
earlier that night. Curtis’s cell phone was in the glove
compartment. They could hit the road and call the police while
putting some miles between themselves and Asylum.

The only problem was that there was a group
of people gathered around the Honda. People that should be dead.
They moved with the stilted, awkward gait of infants just learning
to walk, and their skin was the color of old paper. Curtis saw
wounds—slit throats, missing limbs, skulls bashed open, heads
twisted at impossible angles—wounds that looked mortal, and yet
they walked, advancing toward the club, blocking Curtis and Jimmy’s
way to the car, their escape.

“
This isn’t real,” Jimmy
said, covering his eyes with his hands like a child frightened by a
scary movie. He was shaking his head, as if in denial of the
reality of the situation, all the time repeating the three words
like a mantra until they started to blend together into a single
word. “This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real, this
isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real…”