Oh, just buckets of it sprayed and smeared and splashed around like a pig had been gutted and drained in there. Bits of meat and tissue and hair were stuck in it. It had dried now to a sticky film like a membrane of cooling molasses, but the stink of it was all-too recent: raw and savage and coppery.
Strand was breathing very hard and it took everything he had to continue on.
The trail of gore led to the cellar door.
It was standing open, bloody handprints all over its panels like some kid had gotten into the red paint. The steps leading down into that hot, seething charnel darkness were stained with more blood and scraps of flesh. A few white, gleaming bones that might have been from fingers. In the orange, flickering glow of the lamp, Bolan saw a single, fine hand laying on the fifth step down. The light gleamed off of Eileen Strand’s wedding band.
“Listen,” Bolan said.
Yes, he was hearing something now. A wet, tearing sound and maybe it was just in his head, but he did not think so. It was the sound of a bear gnawing on a meaty bone in the darkness of a cave. A nibbling and sucking sound.
When they got to the bottom of the steps, they saw the wreckage of Strand’s wife. The scattered bones carefully suctioned of meat. The husk of her trunk emptied of its dripping goodies. Her head smashed open, brains licked out, eyes plucked free like candied cherries. Her bowels were looped around the uprights of the stair handrail, chewed and slit and then carefully, expertly woven through those posts like Christmas garland.
“Show yourself,” Bolan said.
And then she did.
Or something did.
Mama Lucille was a wraith. A wraith that had bathed in blood, swam in rivers of it. She was filthy and ragged and rotting, her burial dress and her gray flesh hanging in tatters and strips so it was hard to say where one began and the other ended. As she lumbered forward, you could see the rungs of her ribs jutting forth. Her face was gray and puckered and infested with worms-they boiled in her left eye socket and squirmed from the innumerable holes in her face and fell from her mouth. Flies buzzed in her hair and from deep inside her belly. Her teeth chattered and her stick-like fingers sought meat to pull from bones, that one good eye gleaming a wet, translucent yellow.
Strand screamed…screamed and lost his mind.
He dropped the lamp and went right to her.
Bolan said something he wasn’t even aware of and grabbed up the lamp, just in time to see Strand get taken into his mother’s arms. Those worm-eaten cerements engulfed him, those fleshless fingers pulled flaps of skin from his shoulders, and that black yawning mouth went to his throat, blood spraying out over her ruined face. She was a sea of carrion that flooded over him and pulled him down, drowning him in a dark sepulchral sweetness.
Bolan did not hesitate.
He shot right through Strand to get at her. Strand went down right away and then Mama Lucille, bleeding graveworms and soil and diseased bile from her wounds, turned on him. Those split, discolored lips pulled back from blackened and narrow teeth that snapped and chattered, ropes of tissue and gore hanging from them. She exhaled a cloud of fat meatflies. That eye found him and held him, yellow and reptilian, a dead-end noxious universe of ravening, insane appetite. And Bolan knew she would gut him like a salmon and bathe in his blood, tear his viscera out in hot, bleeding handfuls and suck the salty marrow from his bones…if he let her.
“Lay down, Lucille,” he told her. “Just lay down.”
But she came on, noisome and malign, a carcass peppered with insects and riven with maggots.
Bolan sighted in on that eyeball and pulled the trigger twice. The punch of a. 44 at close-range is devastating. The first round blew that eye and the skull that housed it to fragments and the second round split her face right down the middle. She hissed and screeched and fell straight over like a plank.
And then lay still after a few shudders swept through her.
Laying there in a contorted, shattered heap, it did not seem possible that she had walked. She was just putrescent and blackened, a dirty and fleshy heap of bones and rags boiling with worms. A cloud of blowflies lifted off her like a vapor of swamp gas and that was it.
Bolan made it upstairs and then tossed the coal-oil lamp against the wall and let that mausoleum burn. He sat on his horse and watched the flames consume that ramshackle old farmhouse, knowing there was purity in fire.
As he rode off, he knew there would be another burning that night and he wondered how quickly straw would catch.
MONKEY HOUSE
In late March the army swept through the city putting the living dead back in their graves for a final time. They came with heavy machine guns and. 50 caliber sniper rifles, flamethrowers and 7.62mm miniguns mounted on armored personnel carriers which cut the dead down in waves. Mop-up units followed, eliminating the stragglers, and searching house to house for those infected by the Necros-3 virus. The infected were put down; the uninfected were given injections of the experimental antiviral Tetrolysine-B, which inhibited the replication of the virus within the host body.
Necros-3 had put two-thirds of the world’s population into the graveyard within seven weeks and nearly all of the dead had returned searching for flesh to eat.
Tetrolysine-B, which had been developed for use against HIV, proved to be the magic bullet. The pestilence was stopped dead in its tracks, but by that time the cities of men were cemeteries.
*
Emma Gillis was ready to leave.
She’d watched her neighbors sicken, die, then return to feed. No one would ever know how many people they slaughtered and Emma tried not to think about it. Gus had fortified their house, turned it into a bunker with gunports, a generator, and a razorwire perimeter that was carefully mined.
The dead had never breached it.
But now the war was over and Emma had had her fill. For the past three months she’d been stuck inside their trim crackerbox house cum-bunker and she was ready to leave.
“It’s just time, Gus,” she told her husband who watched the streets through one of the gunports, hungry for enemy activity. “Time to move on.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said.
Good God. He was still in the Marines. He was living some prepubescent G.I. Joe fantasy. The zombies had been vanquished. There was no reason to hole up like this any longer.
When the Army came-and Gus, of course, had warned them off until they trained antitank guns on the house-they said that out at Fort Kendrix there were hundreds of people-men, women, children, all rebuilding their lives. They had fresh meat, fresh fruit and vegetables. Water that didn’t taste like metal. And medical care. Real medical care. And the guy in charge, Captain McFree-handsome, dashing really, with his black commando beret and pencil-thin Errol Flynn mustache-said they had electricity and a DVD library.
“Gus, be realistic. It’s time to go.”
He looked around, pale and paunchy and unshaven, camouflage pants worn and dingy. “I’m not leaving all this. I’m not leaving my home.”
Emma sighed. “Home? This isn’t a home, Gus, it’s a barracks.”
There were cases of MREs fighting for space amongst iron crates of ammo and jugs of purified water, the guns and first aid supplies. A survivalist’s wet dream, but hardly a home. The walls were tacked with maps, the windows boarded over and criss-crossed by duct tape so they would not shatter. The brass coat tree by the front door was hanging with gas masks and waterproof ponchos and web belts.
Home?
Sure, Good Housekeeping as seen by Soldier of Fortune.
Emma didn’t bother arguing. She packed up what she could in a suitcase and a nylon duffel and dumped them before the front door. “I’m going now, Gus. The war is over. Time to put away our guns and pick up shovels and saws and rebuild.”
