Zombie Bitches From Hell Read online

  Copyright 2010 by Grand Mal Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address grandmalpress.com

  Published by: Grand Mal Press Forestdale, MA www.grandmalpress.com

  Copyright 2010, Grand Mal Press

  ISBN 13 digit: 978-0982945902

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grand Mal Press/ Zoot Campbell

  p. cm

  Cover art by Michael Lindsey

  Zombie Bitches from Hell

  by

  Zoot Campbell

  CHAPTER 1

  I’m keeping this journal in long hand since all the power has gone off—yesterday in this area, anyway. Heard the shutdowns started back East and spread like a wave toward the West. Took three weeks at least but nothing could be done to stop it. Just too many dead men at the switches.

  I’m Kent Zimmer, anchor newsman for KWAK out of Denver, Colorado. Whatever I may have recorded into my camcorder may never be accessible again. Frankly, this handwriting may never be accessible again. But maybe I should begin at the beginning or at least at the beginning of the end. It sounds cheesy—is cheesy –but it’s the goddamn cheesy truth.

  ***

  We were all real proud eight months ago when Charlotte Smith became the first woman president of these United States. I suppose it was going to be a foregone conclusion that women would win a majority in both houses of Congress, too. Women from both parties and one or two that no one ever heard of until a year or so ago won big. Guess it was long overdue. But it was the year of the woman. And why not? They couldn’t even vote a hundred years ago. Not in this country anyway. And now they not only got the vote but everything that goes along with it, I guess. I remember broadcasting the network tallies just after the polls closed on the West Coast. Actually, I bet Jennifer that George Fulbright would win. It just seemed more natural and he was as natural a TV generation candidate could be. Jen is my fiancée and while she lives on Cape Cod, we met at a medical convention she was attending here in Denver. I was covering it for the station and she was a medical researcher talking about a new anti-viral concoction that was developed in NYC along with her team at Harvard Medical. It was a breakthrough, alright. Based on human genome transference or some such process that was too complicated for me to understand when she told me about it, let alone my trying to remember it now three years later.

  If you’re hoping I’m going to tell you what Jen looked like and smelled like and talked like and fucked like, think again. You’re not going to wack off with visions of Jen in your head. I know that self-abuse has become the national pastime since the “GaGa,” but you’ll have to remember somebody else or conjure up some vision of a chick before she began to rot. This is no easy trick. Once you’ve seen one of them up close and personal, it’s hard to go back.

  Maybe you’re a lucky one and your wife or daughter or mom is still near you and you’re waiting for the GaGa to hit her hoping it won’t happen. I’m thinking Jen is one of the lucky ones and I’m going to bet my life on it because it isn’t life anymore without her. I’m going to get to her no matter what or how long it takes.

  I’ve got this idea; it’s more than an idea. It’s my only hope and I think the best shot at getting across this country. I’ll be using the prevailing winds, west to east. Taking a hot air balloon. Not just any balloon, either. I ran one of my feature stories, not long ago, on a man that used a mylar-oleate bonding process to create a high altitude balloon that was impervious to the weather and held the heat in longer than anything previously known. There is not much of a chance to get across with one tank of propane, but I am going to try. With luck and a shove from the El Niňo transfer, it could work. Food’s another matter. I’ll have to land at some point for provisions. But anything worth having is worth …well, maybe your life.

  I need to travel light. I got a pistol but I’m not much of a marksman. I also got MG my mutt with me; he’s too good a pal and has helped me get through some tough times. I can’t leave him behind and I can’t kill him. No way. He’s 50 pounds of muscle and grit with a heart bigger than a Volkswagen. Jen and me picked him up at the pound. She said she thought he had a face like Mel Gibson, the geezer version not the young dude chasing wackos in Mad Max. So I named him MG—and not for that old Brit car you sometimes see riding around with bailing wire holding it together, so if you don’t know what that is, you won’t get confused anyway in case you’re a dumbass reading this and maybe all the books have been eaten up too. But no matter. He’s coming with me.

  And I think my cameraman Tim will be going along for the ride. Known him since I started out at the station as a features reporter. You know, the idiot that interviews those skinny assholes that just ran the Denver Marathon. Or some knucklehead that grew the world’s largest tomato in his bathtub by pissing on it three times a day. Or a woman who got hauled off for having 127 cats in her house. You should have seen her after she caught the disease. No, maybe you shouldn’t have. You’d be losing sleep for a month the same way I did.

  Now Tim, he’s got a story but I’m going to have to tell it. He barely talks much these days, and definitely not about that, not after his wife ate their newborn son. He’s kind of a hippy, or he was, but he’s still good with a camera and as good a shot with a 30.06 as you’ll ever meet. And he knows how to fly the balloon. Used to work one at the County Fair before he got his break into show biz. Some break. His dad taught him everything he knows. One of those survivalist types that we used to laugh at. Nobody’s laughing anymore. They’re the men that are mostly still alive—in outposts and caves and shit. Tim’s dad was teaching him some new skills to meet the new reality, like to reload his shell casings with materials on hand like fat from a dead animal, at least until Tim’s mother ate most of the man’s face off while he was sleeping. And even worse, but I’m not going to get into that yet. Don’t like dwelling on the negative. Ha! That’s a laugh. Anyway, that’s the way the disease works, it seems. You fuck them one time and the next thing you know, you’re the blue plate special.

  ***

  There’s twelve of us holed up at the transmission station perched near the top of one of the Rocky Mountain foothills surrounding Denver. We started out with just four guys from the station, but a few days later, eight National Guardsmen showed up. With supplies and ammo. It was a blessing in a time when blessings are in short supply. The station has a gigantic tower, a concrete block electronics and works building and a few solid-built sheds, one of which houses a generator and sits with a 2000 gallon diesel oil tank to feed it. The compound is surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. On a good day last year, the place looked like a prison for the terminally radio-obsessed. Today, it’s heaven on Earth.

  When reports started hitting the news desk about this new “disease” that was affecting women—and women only, we all thought that mostly it was a joke or some frigging blip on Mother Nature’s radar. I mean, no one could believe that some strippers at a Boston club named Hot Foxes had attacked the patrons and killed and eaten most of them. One of the unlucky bastards had the smarts to pull the fire alarm. When the fire department got there they found his hand still attached to the pull box. That was all that was left of him. They found the ribcage and some bones in a heap by the back door along with the same bits from all the other patrons. And this was the pisser, the ever-loving pisser to end all pissers: mixed in with the bones and the intestines, the cops found nine plastic bags full of a gelatinous substance—actually turned out they were breast implants. Together with the vomit from the firem
en, it was not a pretty scene. No, indeed. It was not a pretty scene. The strippers were gone and there was obviously no fire. The cops showed up and watched the security tapes. At the station, we got the full tape over the wire.

  The lighting wasn’t great. The club was just the way you might imagine it. Small tables in the dark perimeter, a wide bar that surrounded a u-shaped stage (stools at the bar), two shiny poles going from the stage up past the stage lighting into the ceiling. Two guys are sweeping, polishing the bar. A half hour later the stage lights go through their setting patterns. A dj and a few thick types (obviously the bouncers) mill around. A guy in a suit and tie comes in and hangs one of those chintzy “Happy Birthday Pete” signs between the two stripper poles. Another half hour and about twenty guys in suits and ties show up—I guess for Pete’s party. They order a round and sit around ordering drinks and talking while the stage lights do slow fade-ins and outs. Another fifteen minutes and the jackets come off—now we got a whole bunch of guys in shirtsleeves, ties dangling loose from open-collared shirts. They’re yakking, then the birthday boy shows up—I can tell because they all give him the cheers and all that usual back-slapping, hand-shaking bullshit. Two girls sashay up on stage and start a slow strip dance, popping out their butts and shaking their tits. Look, I know this is nothing to write home about, but I’m not writing home and you got to understand the mood.

  We got our junior execs whistling and tossing their one dollar bills at the broads, the lights are doing their thing and the music is pumping. Four more stripper types are working the guys, lap dances and feely-feelies and some not so pretty types are scooting around with trays loaded with long necks and mugs. The two on stage are down to g-strings and tits out, tits that barely move because they are faker than grandma’s front teeth. These chiquitas are gyrating and slithering all over those poles and the stage and the bar. They’re tight bodied and way fit considering they’re just a bunch of whores trying to milk it for what it’s worth. Ole Pete is getting a lap dance from a girl with tits bigger than volleyballs—a good time is being had by all. And why not? I think. This is a great country, ain’t it? We got a broad for president. Let the tits and ass begin!

  Then the two girls on stage collapse and it can’t be but a minute until the girls working the crowd and the waitresses drop where they stand or sit, as the case may be. The bouncers run in and start shouting and gesturing and pushing and shoving the shirt and tie guys and Ole Pete gets knocked off his chair right on top of the lap dance special. The lighting is terrible so I’m not sure what I’m seeing next is real. But it is real, my reader of the future. Too real.

  The girls on stage sort of deflate, like the juice has gone out of them, like a pumpkin left on a Halloween porch until December filmed in time lapse. Excepting those fake tits of course. They stay full and flouncy in the name of modern medical cosmetic science. The girls’ skin turns a grayish purply, black and blue fucked up mess like they each did ten rounds with a pissed off Mike Tyson. Me and the station crew watching this shit all think it’s some, “Surprise, Pete! Happy fucking birthday!” But this is not part of any act. Each and every one of those girls turned into…we could not say. Even as I’m writing this, I cannot believe my own fucking eyes saw this go down.

  While the bouncers are pushing, shoving and the shirts are fighting back, the girls get up! They are standing there looking like death warmed over, only it isn’t death warmed over, turns out it is death period. And it isn’t warm, turns out it’s as cold as ice. I would have said colder than a witch’s a tit, but if there were any witches in that room, they would’ve jumped on their goddamn broomsticks and got out of there, because those stripper bitches went nuts and eighteen light years beyond nuts. The one on the floor near Pete yanks his pants down to his ankles, grabs his junk and yanks it out by the root and then bites it off and eats it. Pete’s screaming like a banshee and then she goes for his neck, bites so hard that his head, in mid-scream, flops back like he was a puppet whose puppeteer took his hand out before the show was over. One of the bouncers grabs the bitch and her tit comes away in his hand and the implant slides out and hits the floor. He’s looking at his hand full of what used to be a glorious I’ll-do-anything-to lick-your-nipple/tit and freezes in shock. Two of the girls pounce on him and go for his dick and balls and one, with a nut sack hanging from her teeth, goes for his face. In no time, the whole bunch of those guys are reduced to shirts, ties, pants and bones. It takes maybe a half hour. That was nearly a year ago. Seems like a century.

  CHAPTER 2

  I was watching TV a few days after that the North American Music Awards show live from Boston, and Lady GaGa comes on. She’s singing her hit song, “Take Me to the Heights.” She’s using a stand-up mic and dressed liked a 1940s radio star. It’s total crap but I’m waiting for the Rod Riders to come on. She’s caterwauling away and I’m thinking, “Man, this is crap.” Jen comes out of the kitchen.

  “She is so cool, don’t’cha think?”

  “Yeah, well no. I mean, yeah, she’s different.”

  “Kent, you have no taste in music. She is what it is all about.”

  I take a quick toke and think, Okay, I mean she’s rich and tight-bodied. That’s cool.

  “Yeah, hon, you’re right, sometimes I think only one-sided.” I’m hoping this will get her off my back. It does.

  We’re watching, when all the fracas starts and neither of us is saying anything although I mutter, “what the fuck?”

  In the middle of her hit song, the phrase, “Take me to the heights and put your tongue where….” she collapses. The staff, all with headsets on and make-up people and security and her back-up dancers, rush to her. The camera cannot pick up her image because she is swarmed, understandably because she is this mega-star of fabulosity, right?

  Then, like a bomb goes off, everyone pulls back and her hand and arm show up over the heads and shoulders in the foreground. It’s the purply, black and blue, drained arm of the dead ones. There’s a collective inhale. But that arm has grabbed the neck of a techie and is squeezing so tight he cannot scream although his mouth is wide open and his eyes look like moony hubcaps from a VW Van. She rises next to him and her eyes have the dry, bloodshot glazy look that we now know is one of the first signs of the disease; but we all thought out in TV land that this was a part of her usually fucked up act.

  “She is sooooo original,” says Jen. Then the techie’s throat collapses and blood starts pouring out like water from a fire hydrant in Harlem when the mercury hits 110. One of the security guys picks up the mic from the floor and smashes her head in. The brain is exposed and looks like a black cauliflower. She doesn’t collapse, but stands there, oozing this purply stuff and her teeth are chittering and then she speaks and says, “Take me to the heights,” but her voice is like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed against each other. My reefer has dropped from my hand and landed on MG’s back where it has burned a hole through the fur. He leaps up and both of us scream like girls, which is all right for Jen to do, but not so great for me. The TV goes off and a commercial for Tylenol comes on.

  On the evening news, the talking heads tell us that Lady GaGa is dead from a disease of unknown origin and that it is likely not contagious. Jen says, “They got that wrong. Way wrong. Let me call the lab.” Which she does. The next day, everyone is calling it the GaGa disease and that name has stuck, although subsequent investigations reveal that she was not patient zero but about third or fourth in a line of lesbian friends with whom she has worked and done other things that I won’t bore you with. It’s in my camcorder report if you ever get to see it.

  Jennifer left the next day. I tried to avoid the boohoos at the airport but tryin’ ain’t doin’, as they say. She grabbed a Mid Coast flight nonstop into Boston. Little did I know that I might never see her again. People at the airport had that I’m-scared-shitless look on their faces. CNN was running that GaGa tape over and over and we led off with it until one day the station manager calls me in. Her name is Rhonda
Fark and she is one of those tough-as-nails bitches that would deflate a boner on King Kong. She’s married so I’m thinking somebody’s getting her—Mr. Fark, right?—but I’m also thinking like most dumbasses that if she got laid real good, she’d be a whole lot nicer. Of course, I never thought that about Old Man Greenblatt, the former station manager who was the worst sonafabitch anybody could have as a boss. He got laid all the time. Got caught fucking the most fittest weather lady ever behind the green screen one day and that was the end of his job and the weather lady got a low seven figure sexual harassment award and married a fullback on the Broncos. I can tell you that weather bitch hounded Greenblatt—Harvey was his name—and if she was sexually harassed, I’m a fairy princess—which I am definitely not.

  Anyway, Mrs. Fark calls me in and says we need a new angle on this GaGa thing, that the station science reporter can’t seem to get any information. Maybe I could get something from Jen. “After all, Kent, she’s been involved with that new AIDS vaccine, right? Right, Kent?”

  “Well, yes. She is,” I respond like a wimp. “But I don’t know if there’s a link and besides…”

  “Of course there’s a link! You know it damn well and if you don’t get me the inside scoop from your fuck-buddy or cunt-friend or whatever you call each other nowadays, you’ll be on unemployment. Try paying your rent on that fancy stud-muffin pad of yours in the Rocky House on that check. And if you think anyone, and I mean anyone, thinks you’re a ‘reporter’ so you can get another job somewhere lickety-split, let me tell you that anyone in the news business knows that TV reporters are air-headed assholes that couldn’t sniff out a story if it jumped up and bit them on the ass. Which, I might add, is where this GaGa thing is going. So, Mr. Reporter,” she says this with her hand on her hip and her eyes drilling a hole into my now very much softened brain, “So Mr. Reporter, do some reporting and get me some material on this goddamned GaGa disease. Now get out of here and you better have something on my desk within 48 hours. It’s Pulitzer time for me, honey, and while I am not working with any prizes, I intend to get one. Now go!”