circles, growling and barking while froths of pink saliva rained from its mouth like vomit.
Emma knew how powerful the creature must be, resurrected or not. If it got hold of her, she’d never escape its iron embrace or those gleaming fangs.
She had to keep it off her as she backed towards Gus and the door.
Several females had dropped from the trees and were yipping with delight. They went down on their bellies and offered their hairless, callused, maggot-infested asses to the male.
Emma kept kicking at the baboon.
But it began to second-guess her, began to anticipate her moves. It ducked away from a flurry of kicks and came right in, seizing her right calf in its bloody jaws and putting her down.
Emma was screaming and fighting, kicking out with her left leg while pain threaded through her right in white-hot waves. The baboon wasn’t just biting her…it was chewing, tearing, rending. Her pantleg was shredded, her calf muscle punctured…as those teeth came down again and again and again.
Screaming, crying, Emma engaged in one last act of defiance.
Instead of trying to kick out, she brought her leg closer to her body, dragging the baboon in with it by its teeth. And by that point it had worked a great flap of meat from her calf and it dangled from the baboon’s jaws like a bloody cutlet.
Her mind erupting with blades of white-hot pain, Emma took hold of the animal by the ears and yanked down with everything she had, snapping its head sideways. The agony of its teeth being ripped so crudely from her leg was enough to make black dots parade before her eyes, but something in her-some primal, instinctive barbarism- fought on.
Acting instinctively, she jammed her thumb into its eye.
She buried it right to the second knuckle and the eye went to a soft mush like a rotten grape.
The baboon went wild.
It whimpered and howled, contorting and thrashing, tossing her onto her back and then jumping up on top of her, growling and snapping its jaws.
An inky fluid dripped from the ruined eye and the stench was like rotting fish.
It held her down and she could feel its blunt, stubby penis pressing against her thigh.
On the ground as she was with the beast hovering above her, she could see beneath its shaggy beard. There was a perfectly symmetrical bald patch circling its throat. She could see the gray flesh beneath and it had been sutured…as if the creature’s head had been removed, then sewn back on.
With a scream she grabbed hold of its shaggy head mainly to keep those teeth from her. The baboon was extremely powerful, but she held on. Beneath the dirty fur, the flesh of its skull was spongy and soft. Emma dug her fingers in and they slid through meat and tissue soft with putrid decay.
The baboon cried out.
It trembled spasmodically.
She dug her fingers in deeper, a black sap running down her arms. Her fingertips scraped along the inside of its skull and she squeezed gray matter to mush in her fists, yanking out clods of brain that spurted between her fingers like oatmeal. Gouts of black blood fell into her face.
The baboon dropped away, whining and hissing, the top of its cranium crushed to a globby slush. It crawled in gyrating circles on the ground, leaving a slime trail of mucus behind it, its entire body contorting madly as if every neuron was misfiring.
Emma pulled herself away, wet and stinking.
The females hopped and shrieked and beat the ground with their skeletal fists. One of them had no eyes. In fact, the sockets had been stitched closed.
What the hell is this about?
Bloody, agonized, bile spewing from her mouth, Emma dragged herself towards the doorway. Blood, oh so much blood everywhere. In the grass. On the concrete. Sprayed in loops up the siding.
She looked for Gus.
But he was gone.
Piecemeal, he had been dragged off.
*
Emma crab-crawled up the steps onto the porch, trying to work the doorknob with blood-greased fingers.
The Primate Research Center, that’s what this was about.
It stood just outside the city. Animal rights activists were always protesting there. In the chaos of Necros-3, it had been forgotten. But the virus must have jumped species and reanimated these… things.
She could hear the yelping and barking of the baboons.
They were coming for her.
Her fingers kept slipping on the knob. She pulled herself to her knees, her damaged calf sending fingers of agony right up into her chest.
She got the door open.
She pushed herself through, leaving a trail of blood behind her that marked her progress from the yard to the porch.
The baboons yammered hungrily behind her.
A gun. There were many and she had to get one.
She slammed the door shut behind her, throwing her weight against it and the baboons hit it from the other side, one after the other. She jerked with each impact, her back against the door, trying to keep it closed with all her strength as her fingers reached shaking for the lock.
The door burst in and she went down.
She scrambled across the floor, nearly blacking out from the pain. She could smell the hot green wave of putrefaction the zombie baboons pushed before them. It was moist and heady and repulsive.
Gnarled fingers scraped against her ankle.
The sound of them squealing and piping was cacophonous echoing through the house.
One of them grabbed her ankle and she kicked back, freeing herself.
More fingers raked her leg.
She grabbed wildly at the rifles in the case and they fell over like dominoes from her searching fingers, a. 12 gauge pump coming free, bouncing off her head, and then she had it just as the baboons seized her and began to drag her back to their voracious waiting mouths.
She swung around, the shotgun in her hands.
There were three baboons gripping her legs.
One of them was missing the top of its head, just a gleaming dome of exposed skull that was punctured with holes as if from primitive trepanning. Another’s face was pitted from probes and cutting.
They opened their mouths, howling, diving in for the attack and Emma fired, pumped, and fired again.
The faces of two of the baboons splashed off the skulls beneath, the third riddled with blazing holes that lit its fur on fire. It hobbled away, smoldering.
Emma cut another in half and blew the head off yet another.
The one that was cut in half did not die.
It pulled itself forward, its legs and lower torso forgotten, dragging ribbons of flesh behind it. It made a sharp hissing sound in its throat, its eyes lit with a crimson blaze, mouth open and ready to bite.
“C’mon,” Emma panted, tears running down her face. “COME AND GET IT! C’MON, YOU MOTHERFUCKER! LET ME SEE WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF!”
The baboon, of course, needed no prompting.
It slithered forward and Emma blew its head to confetti. That stopped the others. With all that meat sprayed around, they lost interest in her. They began to feed on the remains of the others, slurping up blood and nibbling on brains and gnawing on bloody bones.
They were occupied.
Now was the time.
She looked down at her torn calf, the blood pooling around her leg. God, she needed to do something with it before she got woozy from the loss of blood.
