The Hungry Dead (14 page)

Victoria looked beautiful, Tiffany thought, as they sped along a country road in their father's vintage Pontiac, a black 1967 Grand Prix. She was proud of her fifteen-year-old sister, who had the stunningly voluptuous good looks of someone three or four years older. She could definitely be an outstanding seductress. She should have no trouble taking blood from any man or woman she chose. By working together, Tiffany thought, she and her sister could seed the world with subservient creatures under their own control, or with vastly superior ones who might share their own attributes.

Now that Victoria had fully recovered from porphyria, she was angelically gorgeous. All of her oozing purple blisters had disappeared, much as a pimply teenager magically outgrows the embarrassing acne that overrides her natural beauty and emerges in the full blossom of her sexuality and her femininity.

“I'm hungry,” Victoria said, not at all whiningly, but as a straight-forward statement of fact.

“I understand, dear,” Tiffany responded warmly. “We'll have to get you fed. It's a vital priority.”

The fact of the matter was that once a pubescent female recovered fully from that ugly disease, she would always become ravenously hungry, and this inordinate hunger would last ten days or more. It demanded to be fed. And its need was not ordinary food, but human blood.

That's why the two sisters were driving on a country road instead of an interstate. They were looking for an isolated victim. Someone they could feed off and then kill.

Someone whose body might not be found for a long time after they were gone. Someone whose body might not ever be found if they could take the time to hide it or dispose of it well.

With the power out to the roadhouse's neon sign and interior lights, it would have been pitch-black were it not for the full moon in the night sky. Zombies milled about in the parking lot, breathing huskily and hungrily.

Some of them hovered in the shadows, back by the Dumpster or among the trees, making munching or bone-cracking sounds. They were consuming parts of the old man, Smokey, who had been killed by them in the early part of the day.

They looked up from their feasting when they heard heavy footsteps on gravel, as if they were afraid of a superior force that might come to steal their meal from them.

They started and cowered when they saw the huge zombie named Barney coming slowly, ploddingly toward them from someplace beyond the shed.

Other zombies followed behind Barney as if somehow he had become their leader. The pack of followers included the zombified serial killer, Chub Harris, who looked the worse for wear now that he had been undead for about twenty-four hours. His eyes were yellowish and his skin was a putrid gray. The quoits in his earlobes had been ripped out, and the loose flaps of ear skin hung down like ropy strings of dead flesh.

Chub and his companions had found their way here from the Brinkmans' farm, and now they were in search of another food supply.

The one called Barney, perhaps because of exploratory treatments he had received while under the care of Dr. Melrose, seemed to possess a bit more of a functioning brain than did some of his followers. He was also better fortified, thanks to the regular “meals” he had consumed over the years while he was in the doc's care.

He stopped and stared at the roadhouse, the shed, and the Dumpster, moving his big head slowly and stiffly, taking it all in. Then he picked up one of the whitewashed stones that bordered the gravel parking lot.

“Hey, you wenches gonna bring us more burgers or not?” Bearcat demanded from out in the bar area.

“Yeah!” Slam shouted. “We want 'em today, not next week!”

“Hold your pants on!” Honeybear yelled from the kitchen, where she and Sally were cooking more food for the rapacious skinheads.

“I'll beat the pants off
you
if you get smart with me!” Bearcat roared back at her.

Sally said to Honeybear, “Well, I guess these ones are brown enough. Here, bring the platter over. I don't want those two beasts to start pounding on you.”

“I hope they get trichinosis,” Honeybear muttered.

Sally worked a well-done patty onto the spatula, and Honeybear reached toward it with the platter.

A loud crash of glass shattering.

Sally and Honeybear both gasped and jumped back, and Honeybear dropped the glass platter, which broke into sharp shards when it hit the floor.

More shattering glass.

The whitewashed stone picked up by Barney was doing the smashing and shattering, wielded in his big, partially decayed hands. He succeeded in smashing a hole through one of the boarded-up kitchen windows, then pounded what was left of it to bits. Then his zombie hands poked through.

Another crash!

Bloody, greenish hands started poking through the other window, clawing and grasping, not caring if any of the dead skin was torn or gashed.

Then a heavy thud against the door! And more thuds!

The zombies were clubbing and pounding at the front and back doors!

“Omigod!” Honeybear cried. “They smell the food cooking!”

Sally contradicted her. “No, they smell
us
!”

Henry, who was closest to the kitchen, came running in, followed by Bearcat and Slam. Slam had his pistol drawn.

Bearcat's pistol was still in his belt. He was carrying the black-powder musket, and even as he ran into the kitchen he was using the ramrod to jam home a lead ball and wadding.

The two skinheads each manned a window. They grabbed kitchen knives and whacked at the hands poking through till the zombies backed off. Then Slam poked the barrel of his pistol through and fired.

“Shit! Missed her!” he said. “I'm too goddamn drunk! Got her in the chest though!”

The zombie he had shot, a gray-haired old woman, had a gaping hole in her chest, and she was staggering from the impact, but it hadn't felled her.

Slam fired again, hitting her between the eyes, and her dead breath whooshed out of her and she went down.

Bearcat took careful aim with his old-fashioned musket, squeezed the trigger, and blew a male zombie's head off.

“Whoa!” he cried exuberantly. “This thing is somethin' else, man! Blew his head clean off! Nothin' left but the neck! I oughta load up again!”

Slam said, “Too goddamn much time, Bearcat! We need rapid fire, man!”

Bearcat leaned the musket in a corner and drew his pistol, but he held his fire when he returned to one of the windows. Through the glass-shattered spaces between the nailed-up boards, he and Slam could see that the zombies outside were just milling around, as if with a degree of uncertainty.

The one called Barney (although the people inside the roadhouse had no way of knowing his name) had backed off, due to a rudimentary sense of self-preservation. The noisy, dangerous bullets and flaming muzzles had scared him somewhat, giving him pause, and the other zombies around him instinctively followed suit.

The pounding and thudding at the steel doors, both front and back, was still continuing, but for the time being the doors seemed to be holding.

Bearcat said, “We gotta get outta here. We can't afford to diddle around. Gotta get to that shed and grab the generator and cable.” To Sally, he said, “You're goin' with us, babe, whether you like it or not.”

It was the last thing Sally wanted, and the mere thought of it spiked her fear to the breaking point. “No!” she said. “Don't you see? They don't seem to be able to get in here! This might be the safest place we could possibly be!”

“I agree,” Henry said, backing up his daughter and not wanting her to be alone and in the clutches of the desperadoes. “We're staying put. Whoever wants to can go.”

Bearcat and Slam snickered uproariously.

“Nice try, dude!” Slam said mockingly.

“You crack me up, Mista Henry,” Bearcat intoned in his phony southern drawl. “No way're we leavin' you 'n purty leetle Sally to rat on us when the pigs show up.”

He grabbed Henry by the throat and put the barrel of his pistol right up under Henry's chin.

“Leave him alone!” Sally cried. “He won't tell on you! Neither will I! We don't even have much to tell—all you did was save us from those zombies out there. We'll say you were heroes.”

Slam stepped up to her and prodded his pistol hard into her ribs, saying, “You're comin' with us, gal, so relax and enjoy it!”

Meanwhile the pounding on the doors was getting louder and louder.

Bearcat threatened Henry more menacingly. “Gimme yer car keys and shed keys pronto, dude! Be nice now, if you don't want us to waste you and your daughter!”

Grimacing from the pain of the gun barrel pushed up against the soft underside of his chin, Henry fumbled in his pocket for a ring of keys and handed it over.

Slam said, “Gotta make torches to hold 'em off before we wheel our bikes out there.”

Honeybear grinned slyly as she said, “Torches would be good, but I know what'd be even better.”

Realizing what she was driving at, Bearcat's and Slam's eyes immediately lit up with sadistic glee, and Slam said, “Zombie feed!”

Bearcat said, “Right on! You're elected, Henry. Betcha you feel too honored for words.”

Sheriff Paul Harkness became aware of the fact that some of Melrose's zombies were loose in Willard County when Father Ed Hastings, pastor of Saint Willard's Catholic Church, made it out to a two-lane road and flagged down a patrol car. At first the two cops who picked the priest up didn't want to believe his story. But finally they called it in to the sheriff, who ordered them to bring Father Hastings to his office, then proceed to the church and school, where they would meet up with backup patrols, ambulances, and paramedics—precautionary measures in case the children and adults left at the school were still in any danger.

By the time all this got underway, it was around nine o'clock in the evening, on the same day of the raid on the Melrose Medical Center. Power lines and cell towers were still out of commission in that part of the county, and the full depth of the crisis was largely unknown to the sheriff and other authorities.

Under questioning, Father Hastings said that he had left Sister Hillary, Janice Kimble, little Annie Kimble, and the rest of the kids barricaded inside his one-room school, while he had hiked through the woods till he got onto the road and flagged down the patrol car. “I came across a lineman's vehicle—a Jeep,” he said. “Its windows were smashed out, and I think I saw part of the lineman's remains out there in the weeds. It was sickening. The creatures who attacked him must've been some of the same ones who caught us all alone and unsuspecting.”

“You're lucky you made it,” Sheriff Harkness said. “How did you get through?”

Father Hastings then described how he and his flock had been rescued by two armed men who appeared out of nowhere and gunned down and torched a bunch of the zombies. “Never saw them before in my life,” he said dolefully. “They must've been sent by a guardian angel. Whoever they were, they were the answer to our prayers.”

“I wonder . . .” Bruce Barnes said musingly. During most of the sheriff's questioning, he had been sitting to one side of Harkness's desk, saying next to nothing.

“What?” the sheriff asked him.

“I was going to say something, but I better not,” Bruce said. “I just wonder who those two saviors might've been.”

“You don't think?” the sheriff said, catching the drift suddenly.

“Maybe they had some good in them,” Bruce said, shaking his head at the notion.

“We may never know,” said the sheriff. “But we can't waste our time wondering. We've got to get a posse together and see exactly what is going on out there. It's gonna take helicopters, paramedics, civilian volunteers, the whole works. Just like last time.”

“Just like sixteen years ago,” said Bruce. “I'd better phone my daughter, tell her I won't be home till God knows when.”

“It's definitely happening all over again,” said Father Hastings. “I'll hope and pray for you. And for the poor innocents I left back at the church and school. If I'm the only one who survives this tragedy, I'll never forgive myself.”

For a long while, some of the zombies kept pounding on the steel doors of the roadhouse, while others just milled around. But most of them had rather short, brain-damaged attention spans. So they started to lose interest eventually and began to back off. Their incessant pounding dwindled down to a few bangs and thuds, weakened, and finally stopped. But the most persistent of the zombies still hovered close to the doors.

The big long-dead one named Barney took up a watchful position at the edge of the gravel lot.

Suddenly the front door banged open, knocking two zombies back, and out came Bearcat with a pistol in his right hand and his big left hand dragging Henry Brinkman by his rope-tied wrists. Slam followed them out with a gun and a torch, menacing the closest zombies to him, making them step back. One of the dead creatures caught fire and backed off, flailing at his burning clothes.

Bearcat shot a young male zombie in the face. Henry stumbled and almost fell down because his ankles were hobbled with a short length of rope. Bearcat yanked him by his wrist ropes to keep him on his feet.

Slam covered Bearcat with gun and torch as Bearcat dragged Henry farther out into the gravel lot. Now they were on the side of the lot opposite Henry's pickup, Smokey's car, and Henry's shed.

Honeybear watched all this through a slightly ajar front door, her eyes agleam with anticipation of Henry's fate at the hands of the hungry zombies. Behind her, Sally was already tied and gagged, slumped on the floor by the fireplace, helpless.

Wanting a better view of Henry so she could watch the zombies ripping him apart, Honeybear got brave enough to step out and gawk around, but when a zombie started coming toward her, she back-stepped into the roadhouse and slammed and locked the steel door.

Leaving Henry hobbled and at the mercy of the merciless zombies, who immediately started closing in on him, Slam and Bearcat ran toward the shed. In half-panicky excitement, Slam fumbled trying to get the key in the lock, and Bearcat yelled, “Stand back, Slam!”

He aimed his pistol at the lock and blew it apart.

By this time two big, drooling male zombies were almost upon the two skinheads, but they wheeled and blasted both of the zombies down with head shots.

Then Slam stepped into the shed, waving his torch around and scoping out a lawn tractor, a stepladder, shovels, picks, and assorted junk—and a generator and cable.

“You see it, Slam?” Bearcat yelled.

“Yeah! Got it, Bearcat!”

“Let's hoof it, man!”

Henry was trying to hobble as best as he could away from some pursuing zombies, and because they were so slow-moving, he was having some temporary success. But his luck could not possibly hold out because more of them were now stirred up by the smell of live human flesh, and they were starting to come after him. Zombies were closing in on him from all sides, and he backed against the Dumpster. He reached back over his head, pulled himself up with his roped hands so he could swing his hobbled feet freely, and kicked the nearest zombie in its ugly, decayed face. It fell backward, knocking into another zombie and toppling them both.

Henry quickly turned and got a handhold on the top of the six-foot-high steel Dumpster, his legs and boots scrabbling against its slippery sides. Then, with great effort, he managed to pull himself up, swing his legs over, and land on top of the Dumpster's corrugated steel lid.

Just in time, he skedaddled out of reach of grasping zombie hands. Then he stared at the undead creatures trying to claw at him and pull him down. Frightened, sitting on his rump, he tried desperately to stay out of reach of the living dead, and he drew his legs up tight because some of the zombies were trying to grab him by the ankles. To his partial relief, they made no attempt to climb up after him. Apparently they were unable to do it—or unable to
think
to do it.

He spotted an empty wine bottle someone must have tossed on top of the Dumpster, picked it up, and smashed it. Maybe he could have used it to slash at the zombies. But instead he wedged the neck of the broken bottle between his knees, its sharp, jagged edge pointing up, and he started sawing through the rope that bound his wrists.

At the same time he could hear Bearcat yelling from the front of the roadhouse.

“Honeybear! Open up! It's us!”

The front door was opened by Honeybear while Slam stood by, facing out into the lot with his waving torch.

Honeybear asked, “Did you get the generator?”

Bearcat said, “It's in the back of the pickup already! C'mon, hurry up! We gotta wheel the bikes out!”

He pushed past Honeybear, yanked the bound and gagged Sally to her feet, and dragged her through the doorway, where Slam pulled her along then hoisted her like a sack of potatoes into the bed of the pickup with the generator and cable.

Slam and Bearcat wheeled around just in time to blast down two more zombies and set another one on fire—and the flames caused another cluster to back off. Then the two skinheads hoofed it back inside the roadhouse and wheeled out their motorcycles, with Honeybear's help. She kick-started one bike and Bearcat kick-started the other, and Slam jumped into the cab of the pickup and fired up the engine. Then they all headed out of the gravel lot.

But before Honeybear's bike got up to speed she was clotheslined by big, dead Barney, who stepped from behind a tree and yanked her down, a choke hold around her neck.

Her motorcycle crashed into a tree and burst into flames.

Bearcat glanced over his shoulder at this dismal turn of events, then gassed his bike hard and peeled out, right behind the pickup, and both vehicles zoomed down the road.

 

Henry was still trapped on top of the Dumpster with the zombies groping and grabbing at him. He finally finished sawing through his wrist ropes with the broken bottleneck, and when his hands were free of their bindings, he was able to untie the ropes hobbling his ankles.

He stood up in the center of the Dumpster, well away from the groping dead hands, and saw a cluster of zombies moving toward Honeybear, who had now become zombie feed. Henry shuddered, knowing this was the exact fate that had been intended for him.

Big old Barney was crouched over Honeybear's body, and other zombies were coming to join him in his “feast.” One of these was Chub Harris, in life a serial rapist and killer of women, and now that he was undead, his zombified brain still took a heightened, though primitively muted, delight in feeding upon a voluptuous young woman. His perverted sex drive was gone, but his urge to destroy and consume Honeybear was much more powerful than those urges in the other zombies.

Henry was seized with revulsion and a sudden burst of wild anger. “Damn you!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Damn you all to hell!”

He snatched up the broken bottleneck and, crouching, jabbed it hard into the face of the nearest zombie, who in life had been a portly middle-aged lady. The jaggedly sharp point plunged deep into her eyeball, and she reeled backward, her hands clutching at the source of her “pain,” but the sharp glass stayed embedded, and she died.

The zombies near the Dumpster shambled past the fallen one without the least concern, for their sole interest had now become the feast provided by Honeybear's young, fresh corpse. They didn't want to miss out on their share.

All of this ghastliness was revealed to Henry Brinkman in the flickering flames of the wrecked motorcycle at the outer edge of the lot. He saw that the impromptu feast had created a diversion that might benefit him, and his eyes moved from the cluster of feasting zombies toward the area of the gravel lot where Smokey's old battered car was still parked. A few zombies were between him and the car, but the area was not so infested that he could not take a chance, so he jumped down from the Dumpster and made a run for it.

His gravel-spewing run across the lot attracted the attention of quite a few zombies, and they came after him. He snatched up a heavy whitewashed bordering stone and smashed a huge zombified oaf in the face—this was Barney, in his bibbed overalls, but of course Henry did not know the oaf's name. Barney was knocked back by Henry's blow, but otherwise was unfazed, while Henry kept running, barely eluding the grasp of two other pursuing zombies and throwing a body block into a third one, who went flying over Henry's back and landed in the gravel face first.

Desperately, Henry yanked at the door of Smokey's car, and it sprung open on noisy hinges. He dived inside and managed to slam the door shut and lock it before more zombies were upon him. Luckily, the key was in the ignition. But Henry knew that the clunker did not always start.

He twisted the key.

Nothing happened.

Zombies were now surrounding the car, pounding and clawing at the windows as Henry frantically kept twisting the ignition key.

Two of the zombies picked up stones. They smashed at the windows. At first, although the glass showed cracks, it did not shatter completely. But the zombies kept on hammering, like mindless cretins. Finally the two side windows shattered and stones and shards of glass came flying through. Henry ducked and got his hands up over his face, but one of the stones glanced off his head. His forehead bleeding, he blinked his eyes groggily.

Zombie hands reached in for him. The living dead were clawing and drooling, their breathing heavy and raspy.

Henry shook his head, trying to overcome the wooziness. Slowly, painfully, he reached for the ignition key again and gave it another try.

Nothing happened.

He jumped back—because in order to fool with the key and get his foot on the gas pedal he had to put himself dangerously close to the shattered driver's side window where zombie hands could easily reach in and grab at him.

He spied a heavy metal flashlight sticking out from under the seat, and he clutched it hard and used it to smash at the nearest zombie hand. Then he jiggled and twisted the key again, in utter desperation.

Success! The engine coughed and sputtered to life.

But then it died.

Henry tried again . . . and again.

Finally the engine caught hold and kept on running, but with an ominous rattling sound. The zombies were still trying to reach in and pull Henry out of the car. And the engine must have been burning oil because there was a thick cloud of black smoke pouring from the exhaust.

Henry nevertheless put the car into gear and stepped on the gas—cautiously at first—and when the engine did not die he hit the gas pedal harder. Some of the zombies tried to hang on, their arms halfway through the holes in the shattered windows, but Henry gunned it, running over two of the undead on the far side of the lot, and by the time he humped out onto the road, the rest of the zombies dropped off.

He headed Smokey's clunker down the road, in the same direction taken by the pickup and the motorcycle driven by Bearcat and Slam.