Zombies: The Recent Dead Read online

  “Take it, you daft cow!” hissed the Minister, for he had grown up a Briton and was prone to slipping into the vernacular of his youth in times of crisis. “Breathe it in.”

  She went limp, which made it easier for us to drag her away from the pursuing zombies and the eerily silent patient tread they always fell into when following prey. I fell back, waving the glue around to confuse the trail and hoped that would lose them. The dead are dull-witted but canny predators, like some form of flesh-eating math teacher, but once they’re agitated and activated by potential food, they’ll go for anything in the vicinity whether it’s medicated or not.

  You’re either good and fucked up or a danger to everyone, nothing in between. The Minister was furious. We dropped her, swooning and puking, back at the camp and wordlessly took up our weapons—a crowbar and tire-iron between the two of us—to go clean up her mess. The zombies were disoriented and had lost the trail, but they were still meandering around. Once activated, they’d keep stumbling through the area for a while, and there was always the chance they’d be agitated enough to go for movement if they found any. It was easy enough to sneak up on them and club their heads to slurry for safety’s sake, but an unpleasant task indeed. All the more so for its unnecessary nature.

  What the hell had she been thinking?

  Her rifle and pistol were empty, meaning she’d caught my attention firing the last of her wad. Paranoia and bad-craziness curled through me, as if tiny people were sneaking up on me over my own skin. Who was this woman? Shooting zombies was a mug’s game. However many there were, more would follow the noise, as they followed any atypical stimuli.

  Why would she be here by herself, intent on riling up zombies near where the Minister and I planned to sleep?

  Who had sent her, and what did she know?

  I remember turning from my dark thoughts to see the Minister caught in what I initially took to be his own paranoid spiral, but then I realized his rage had shifted on him again. He was contemplating the unconscious woman and vaguely fingering a small bag he’d carried for years, filled with what the vendor had sworn was genuine Spanish fly.

  Then he saw me watching him. An avalanche of expressions crossed his face as he thrust the bag away, out of sight.

  “Didn’t! Wasn’t! Never would!” the Minister cried sharply, before subsiding with a muttered, “Can’t be helped.”

  There was a moment of peace, and then his hand flashed to the fractal-blade he kept on a thong around his neck with a shriek of “Don’t you judge me!”

  My eyes locked on the intricate blade, glittering in the dying firelight. It was serrated all the way down, and considering the sickly radioactive gleam in the Minister’s eyes, more than capable of making me much less pretty. He’d been carrying the damnable knife ever since his sister had used one to cut herself free from a trapped inverted canoe, although he didn’t share an interest in that sport or any other.

  You must understand that I’d known Minister Dogwood for many years, since high school in fact, and so I had a firm awareness of just how untrustworthy a fiend I was dealing with.

  I pointed the woman’s pistol at him, hoping he hadn’t seen me check it earlier.

  “Back off, you unhinged bastard! I wield indiscriminate justice!”

  Dogwood’s gleaming eyes narrowed, the knifepoint tracing unsteady Moebius strips in the air. Desperate now, I cried, “Go to sleep! What would your mother think?”

  A moment of stasis then, before fat tears filled his eyes. He nodded to me once, then climbed sniffling into his sleeping-bag and curled into a ball. I waited for a moment and went for a walk to calm the screaming in my blood, treading on the fallen meaty petals of whatever those poor doomed fantastic things had been.

  Something crunched underfoot and I found the shattered remains of the Minister’s Lamentable Hat, where it must have been crushed as he wrestled the mysterious woman. I took the loss of the horrible artifact as a good sign for our journey—thankful that the Minister hadn’t noticed—and then went to bed myself, suddenly aware of how cold it was and had been for some time.

  Morning was a dangerous time for us, full of disorientation and spikes of crystalline suffering into the brain. I felt restrained and lashed out, eventually struggling free of the sleeping bag as from a warmly padded womb. I then made an attempt to remember where I was.

  The presence of the woman was very confusing to me.

  Who was she?

  Had we done something?

  Her guns and the zombie remnants brought it all back before self-accusation cut too deep, but also raised more questions than were answered. As I considered her, she stirred and woke, clearly with a splitting headache. I sympathized. Our Emergency Glue was not a fun ride, but it did the job.

  I poured some water from our rations and set it down where she could get it before drinking some myself. She eyed me warily.

  “There were zombies,” she said eventually, in an even tone. “Then that maniac attacked me.”

  “Course they followed you. You sobered up, and were pulling them in from all over.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Nonsensical. Perhaps speaking of bad damage. I played along, as patiently as I could.

  “They follow you unless you’re ripped. Can’t shoot them or you attract more. Easy.”

  I dragged out the breakfast amyls and offered her one. She recoiled.

  “What’s that?”

  “Amyl nitrite. Good for you. Got vitamins.”

  Nothing in her expression suggested comprehension. I sighed, pondering how a pharmacological virgin could have survived this long. Perhaps she was some Unabomber nutcase only now out of bullets. Since she seemed to be a newbie I took pity and opened one of the bags.

  “You’re going to have to take something, or the Minister over there is going to wake up and make you take something, maybe the glue again, and the glue is a harsh and caustic mistress.”

  She blinked in silence. I continued.

  “We have amyls . . . Mescaline . . . Some weed, but that’s recreational rather than safety related . . . The last of the Green Shrieker . . . Some skinpatches with Mayhem Tweed and Strict Blue . . . Some meth, which will sort you out properly but rots your head and your teeth . . . A decent amount of acid and shrooms . . . Hard liquor and speed—”

  “—Booze will save you from zombies?”

  Incredulous hostility came from her in waves. It gave me a headache, and even more in need of my own dosage.

  “Are you from the past?” I yelled, grabbing some gear from the supply bags and leaning over the Minister, punching him on the shoulder a few times. “Hang on,” I said to her, before returning to Dogwood. “Come on, Minister, breakfast dosage!”

  He mumbled something unhelpful; I cracked an amyl under his nose and held it there.

  “Come on, breathe deep . . . Good man.”

  He went limp, which is always more comfortable when you’re already lying down. I grabbed one myself and turned back to her.

  “Anything that’ll fuck you up properly will work,” I said, aiming for patience. “Booze will do, but you need a lot of it. You’d need to be utterly wasted.”

  She chewed over the idea, then defaulted to the familiar: “I guess I’ll go with the booze.”

  Handing over a bottle of tequila, I cautioned, “You’re going to need to be dedicated with this, and if they come after you again it’s back to the glue.”

  Gamely enough she took a big swig and grimaced. Hardly surprising; it wasn’t very good tequila. I cracked my own amyl and breathed deep, carried away by the biting chemical scent and a delightful tide of dizziness. Purple haze hung in my vision, suspended in a timeless silence in which the world turned around me.

  The main wave passed, leaving me with ongoing light-headedness and a sudden awareness of hunger. Food! Yes! I craved sugar and fat, perhaps caffeine. During a visit to the Minister’s sprawling family in the U.K. before the dead rose, I had encountered the deep-fried Mars bar: molten dele
ctable battered money-shots from some chubby god of cardiac arrest. Couple of them, some speed or ecstasy and perhaps a pint or two, and I’d be fuelled for another ten hours of experimental hooliganism.

  The Minister maintained the same effect could be achieved with just the speed—with beer to flavor—but the man lacks an artists’ soul, any respect for the culinary arts, and a basic knowledge of nutrition.

  Alas the issue was moot: there was no access to the pinnacle of Western civilization that was deep-fried chocolate bars. Not without the underlying substrate of Western civilization. That ship had long since sailed, carried away by a rising tide of the walking, hungry dead.

  The woman took another swig from the bottle and woke me from my reverie. “If it’s just us against the zombies, I’m going to need to know what to call you. I’m Chantal.”

  “He’s the Horse,” interjected Dogwood, putting the lie to his apparent coma.

  I jerked a thumb at him. “The man who is full of lies is Dogwood, my Minister for Lateral Problem-Solving, long term companion and sidekick.”

  I noticed that the woman had made a healthy dent in the tequila and was looking rather green. Heavy booze on an empty stomach. I saluted her enthusiasm, but she was going to geyser.

  “Whoa!” said I. “Slow down or you’re going to lose it all!”

  It was hard to say whether she heard me. Wordlessly Dogwood began loading our gear into the car and started the long road to actually getting the engine running.

  “Why are you two out here?” she asked, clearly bilious. “Where are you going?”

  “The Minister and I are on a quest for more Safety Drugs for our community of Bad Axe.”

  “We’re heroes,” Dogwood said sagely, fiddling vaguely with the car.

  “We head west, seeking population centers which might have a pharmacological bounty for us. But not into central Chicago itself. No, that might be a little too exciting. We seek the outlying regions.”

  Dogwood added, “Detroit would have been way too exciting.”

  I saw in that moment that she understood, but in retrospect it was probably somewhere between my experience with the amyl, and hers with rising bile. She took another swig and shuddered.

  “So that’s your plan? Survivors just taking drugs forever?”

  The Minister and I exchanged a glance and started to laugh. It was not an unreasonable question. Hell, I’m the first to admit that we had not hit upon an ideal long-term solution. Kids, for example. Kids could not be expected to be as Resilient as the Minister or myself, and yet the situation remained. Any given babies had the choice of being pulled apart like some struggling, gut-filled jelly-donuts, or growing into dribbling addicts with skulls full of bad cheese.

  I’m not saying we had the answers then, but this was a bridge to cross another day. However, Chantal had inadvertently stumbled onto the larger path that the Minister and I walked, a noble plan to which our current holy mission was but one small part.

  “Nah,” Dogwood said. “We’re going to get Twisted.”

  It was a simple statement, perhaps too simple by the blankness in Chantal’s eyes, and as Dogwood said it he popped the engine cover. At the time I wasn’t paying attention, but in hindsight the signs of the car’s doom were all there. But leaving that aside, the Minister was absolutely right. Our larger quest was to get Twisted, like those noble leaders of men, Presidents Ozzy and Tommy Lee. I believe myself to have been more attached to the notion and disciplined in its pursuit than Minister Dogwood, even then.

  “Twisted,” I said sagely, “is when you take enough different drugs over enough time that you—you—”

  “Smell different than people,” called Dogwood, from somewhere inside the car.

  “—Thank you, Minister—enough that your body-chemistry changes. Then they never find you, even if you’re straight.”

  Dogwood straightened up and mused, “Sounds useful, but I don’t see the point of that bit.”

  As I say, the Minister lacks true vision.

  I remember waxing lyrical, but can’t remember precise details. To be Twisted is to be truly free in this new benighted world of ours, untouched by the dead. Transcending natural human body-chemistry to become divine acid-casualties walking the world at will, spreading the word. Why do you think Ozzy and Tommy Lee are probably President? Nobody wants a Commander-in-Chief who might get eaten. It’s just sense.

  I was about to go into my theories about why cocaine doesn’t seem to work when the Minister proclaimed, “Car’s buggered.”

  He was right. Upon investigation, the battery reeked of sulfur.

  I’m sure that to someone who knows anything about cars, that’d mean something important. As it was, we were instantly reduced to moving by foot.

  “Everything out of the car, Minister,” I said, knowing he was already working on it. “This will not slow us down, for we are Resilient.”

  “True,” he said, “unless you mean in overland speed.”

  Manfully, I ignored him, for we did actually have a plan. I went for our supply bags. Moving by foot was going to expose us to more zombies, so we needed something good and nasty, with fundamental endurance of effect. I went for the acid; the Minister went for a skinpatch of the Mayhem Tweed. He slapped the patch onto a forearm, giving himself a temporary tattoo like a piece of living couch or librarian’s jacket which sank slowly beneath his skin. Dogwood’s face flushed and paled in rapid succession while his irises bloomed darkness.

  “That’s good Tweed,” he breathed. I eyed him sidelong while peeling a decent chunk of blotter free. Under Tweed, he was going to need watching, but that was hardly new. After the amount of acid I was intent on taking, I wasn’t going to be up for sainthood myself.

  Chantal hid behind her tequila bottle when I offered her the bag, drinking more before vomiting copiously into the bushes. With the wad of blotter tucked into one cheek, I began sizing up westward angles to take—it’s always easier to take downhill trends on acid—when she spoke up and wiped her lips.

  “You’re looking for drugs, right?”

  The Minister and I exchanged a glance.

  “Why?”

  “Jackson. Lots of drugs in Jackson.” She straightened up and took another pull from the bottle. “Police station lockup is full of stuff. I just came from there.”

  Dogwood snorted. “Bollocks you did, not on foot. That’s way the hell back east and—”

  “—You have a better idea?”

  He deflated with a shrug and looked at me.

  “She raises a compelling point.”

  So without a better idea of destination, and a limited timeframe to decide before polysyllabic demons got a vote, Jackson it was.

  Retracing the path towards Jackson wasn’t hard. The trail of patient zombie steps and sporadic corpses was pretty clear, but six hours of blisters later and the Minister was on the verge of mutiny. A rising column of anger seethed from him and stained the sky above the bleeding footsteps left in his wake.

  The Tweed had taken him to a dark place without words or otherwise numbed his tongue. He stalked in silence over the dusty ground while the world throbbed and hummed nameless tunes around us. Chantal obliviously clutched her bottle like a savage cactus-based teddy-bear. She was a metronome vomit-fountain, staining the dust with stinking neon horrors that ate into the ground and sang of vague malevolence.

  Me? I just felt kind of mellow.

  The air was filled with the scent of dust and dry vegetation, along with crushed parsley and burning insulation rising in waves from the Minister’s every bleeding footstep.

  It was when the ground stood up and started yelling that I thought I was really freaking out. I can’t explain the terror I felt when vaguely humanoid figures the color of dirt were suddenly there, shedding dust and trailing vines, reeking of anger and the cruelty man poured into the very soil.

  Several things happened in rapid succession.

  The Minister collapsed into a paralyzed crouch, a high keening i
n his throat, his eyes glistening white with fear as the compost beasts came for us.

  I screamed in what I was later assured was an appropriately masculine manner.

  Chantal dropped her bottle, raised her hands and said, “They’re harmless, sir! Phillips reporting!”

  One of the creatures spoke, each word a hideous Darth Vader rasp of Inescapable Doom. It was at that point I believe I dropped to the dirt and began to grovel, but in a clearer mind I remember it said, “Christ, Phillips. You go for bullets and find mouths.”

  “Civilian drug-fiends, sir. They saved me . . .”

  The conversation was ongoing, but I stopped paying attention when I noticed the monsters encircling the Minister as he wailed wordlessly against their dusty existence. The outrage pulled me to my feet.

  “You can’t have him!” I roared. “He’s mine!”

  Chantal and the dirt-beast looked around.

  “Mother of—” it said, pausing before making a cutting motion. “Fine. We’ll sort these two out. You smell of puke.”

  “They think intoxication keeps them safe, and weren’t happy unless I played along . . . I drank enough that I kept throwing up most of it.”

  Treachery!

  The thought thrilled electrically through me, but by now I was already making efforts to dodge the monsters coming after me like they were herding a rabbit. The wrongness of their presence made me shrill and dizzy, but I am no rabbit.

  Some fiend threw a sack over my head, the fabric membranous and alive, softly mewling. I crashed to the ground and hauled part of it off in time to see one monster touch the Minister.

  The physical contact told him whatever he was seeing was tangible. In an instant he went from paralyzed silence to a gargling howl. One hand flashed to the fractal-blade at his throat and then he waded into the offending monster’s leg like a kid into red-spurting birthday cake.

  Shouts, then. Noise and bad confusion.

  Next thing I remember is finding myself in restraints on a gurney.

  A relief. This had happened before.