Zombie Bitches From Hell Read online

  She has made me a believer in the innate superiority of one who threatens and can act on the threat. I e-mail Jen and ask her for some background stuff on the research. I promise her name won’t be brought up, but, and I really fucking said this in that e-mail, “the public has a right to know.” Now, I must tell you that I personally think that the American public has the right to know jack-shit. But Mrs. Fark’s words are rattling around in my brain and that off-handed comment on the rent has struck home, no pun intended. I know I call her Mrs. Fark. I cannot help it. You meet Hitler, you’re gonna say “How’s it hangin’ Adolf?” I don’t think so.

  Like a true trooper, Jen FedExs a packet to me at the office. She told me before she sent it that it was copies of her material, notes and testing results right from the lab but the information and calculations were so complicated that she doubted anyone could make sense of it (especially at a TV station), but she was glad to help out with Miss Thing Bitch if she could. “Love, Jen.” She had a way of telling me how she loved me in the most off-handed unrehearsed and natural way possible. Her nearly perfect body, her straight teeth and the smell of her would have been enough for most. Her ass and the way she wiggled it when she delivered head would be enough for everyone else to know she was the real deal. I was already convinced, as much as a self-absorbed twenty-something dickhead could be. But I will confess that thinking she really loved ME, me, made my world, brother. It made my world. And I have no reason to bullshit thee.

  The minute the FedEx guy drops the package on my desk, I rush to Mrs. Fark’s office. She’s on the phone yelling at someone and I’m thinking, I’m next. Shit.

  “Oh, Kent. Good, come in. I was hoping you’d pull through. You know the AP is running this AIDS vaccine story and the White House has gotten involved and...they’re putting a gag order on the media. If we so much as say anything about this GaGa thing, our license is pulled. I was just on the phone with Ted Armstrong. He’s the…well, of course you know who he is. He signs your check.”

  I’m relieved and not at the same time. A gag order on a free press is something I never heard of.

  “This came in from my fiancée just a minute ago. It’s supposed to be some important information that might explain…”

  “Well, dearie, hand it over and let’s have a look. Maybe there’s something in here we can use when the order is lifted. That fucking President must think she got elected Empress or something. I think CNN and Fox News are in court right now looking for a restraining order. How’s that for two total assholes suddenly deciding they might be on the same side of an issue. I never knew Fox to be anything but asswipes.”

  As she’s talking, she uses her Tiffany silver sharp-as-a-razor letter opener on the packet, holds it up by a corner and jiggles it. About ten pages of stuff plop on her desk.

  “Well, what have we here…?”

  She starts reading and I come around to her side of the desk getting closer than I think prudent but very anxious to see what my Jen has sent. Fark is reading and I suddenly see that the hand she is holding the pages with is shriveling from the finger tips up her fingers, past her hand to her arm and she starts inhaling like she’s snorting coke. Quick deep snorts. I jump back just as she collapses.

  “Mrs. Fark, Mrs. Fark? Are you all right? Hannah,” I yell to her secretary. “Quick call 911!”

  Hannah says, “Is everything OK?”

  “Stay the fuck out of here. Call 911, I think she’s got…”

  Fark starts writhing on the floor like some kind of half woman-half octopus. Her saggy skin with the tell-tale purple blotches is splitting at the wrists and the folds at her neck. She opens her eyes and lunges up at me with her mouth open and her black tongue aimed right at my goddamned face. Her hand grabs my crotch but before she grips my balls, my expensive suit pants block her hand because I’m crouching and the seam is pulled taut. Mama always said to buy the best clothes I could afford because clothes make the man. And to always wear clean underwear because you never know when…

  “Fuck me!” I yell as I leap up and grab her fancy chrome designer desk lamp and smash her face in, because I’ve seen this all before and I know where it’s going. Her face caves like a giant prune, teeth drop like Chiclets to the floor and the deep dark ooze starts.

  Now I’m standing there pissed off, annoyed, scared. I never liked her much anyway but knowing she literally wanted to kill me has me huffing mad, my adrenaline chugging like a train engine. “And it’s fiancée, not fuck buddy, you goddamn bitch from hell,” I yell as I give her another whack with the same lamp right into her chest. The ribs split open under those purple wounds and her lung flops out like a sack of raisins. Her heart is shriveled and dead, a dark musky brown. But she’s still flopping around between her desk and the wall, grabbing at my ankles. I stomp her arms and crack them into pulp. Hannah is screaming in the background and Buddy, the copy boy comes running and grabs me, pulls me out the door and slams it shut. Hannah has passed out on top of her desk, her blouse buttons have popped and one very curious nipple is peeking out of her twisted bra.

  Two security guys come running up. Too little, too late. But I’m OK even if Fark is floundering around on the floor oozing black crap like a giant slug on acid and knocking everything over; we’re all watching through the plate glass panel. Speechless. Her bronze art nouveau coat tree topples down on her and two of the hooks penetrate her abdomen just below the navel. It’s the coup de grace, as some French asshole would say. She is quite dead, I’m believing. Hoping.

  “Everyone stay out of that office. That’s an order,” says Patrick the security guard as he closes and locks the door. I know his name because he has a plastic tag on his Dacron shirt right near his tin badge. I guess he’s in charge now. Good, I think. Let me tend to poor Hannah here.

  I lean over being sure not to button anything up. I want to make sure she can breathe and gently slap her pale cheek.

  “Hannah…Hannah wake up. It’s Okay,” I say. Yeah, Okay like it’s Okay to picnic on a nuclear waste dump. I am covered in Fark’s blood or whatever it is that used to be her blood. A drop gets on Hannah’s ever so pert chin.

  “Everybody back, everybody back,” shouts one of the cops running down the hall toward us. We move to the walls as they get there, one of the cops smirking as he sees poor Hannah. I’m still leaning over her when her eyes flutter and glaze over to a milky white. From the spot on her chin, the creeping GaGa has started, sucking every drop of moisture as it works its way up her face and down her neck.

  “What the fuck?” says Officer Krupke. I’m already across the room.

  “What did you do to her, you little twerp?” says the sergeant turning to me like I was Jack the Ripper. “John, arrest that guy,” he says pointing at me.

  “He didn’t do anything,” says Buddy. I’m thinking Buddy is a well-chosen name for that kid. But it wouldn’t have made a difference. Hannah has leaped up on to the sergeant’s back and has gnawed through his hat into his skull. He’s screaming about the Virgin Mary or his mother or somebody when she spits out a piece of bone and scalp and digs into his brain with both jaws chomping like a wood chipper. He’s trying to run but topples over. The other cop fires right into the back of Hannah’s head and one of her eyeballs flies out onto the rug. But she’s still squirming and biting, eating her way through the sergeant’s head like it was full of toasty-nut oatmeal. He fires two more shots into her chest, but she’s still at it.

  “Motherfucker,” he mumbles taking point blank range at the back of her head again.

  “Shoot her in the gut,” I yell. “In the gut…right at the base of her back!”

  He does and the chomping stops. Buddy vomits. I help him wash up in Fark’s private bathroom as two guys with body bags haul her and Hannah off. I’m thinking she probably won’t mind. Mrs. Fark, that is. About us using her private bathroom, I mean.

  CHAPTER 3

  A month ago my phone rings and it’s Jen.

  “Jen. My God. Are you all r
ight?

  “Kent, I am, I am. I’m not sure how but I am. I’m so glad you answered. I don’t think the phones will be working much longer.”

  “Yeah, it came over the wire yesterday. Most of D.C. has the GaGa and the men are all dead or mostly but I think there’s a bunch of military high honchos holed up in the Pentagon bomb shelter. They can last there for years but I don’t know if that will—”

  “Fuck them, Kent. Listen. Let me tell you what this fucking GaGa disease is all about. You need to prepare so you can come get me. You will, won’t you?”

  “Uh, yeah, of course. Sure. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the basement in a house on the ass end of Cape Cod. In Provincetown. This place is mostly populated with gay men and so a bunch of them are in hiding and doing okay. But they’re killing any women they find and so I’ve got no one. I’m alone here and living on peanut butter and tuna and bottled water.”

  “That is fucked up.”

  “Tell me about it, honey. But listen. This is the straight story on the GaGa. We were working on an AIDS vaccine and using a genome switch-on to trigger a natural immunity to the HIV virus. Everyone has an X chromosome and women have two. So the idea was to have one of the chromosome d-types on the X gene mutate to provide an immune response to the HIV bug. Are you with me?”

  “Yepper. I think so.”

  “Only the gene mutated differently than it was supposed to. The mutated gene starts a chain reaction whenever there is more than one X chromosome which means only females get it. To the best of our knowledge, males do not.”

  “Wow. Now I see it.”

  “The mutated gene is in every cell in the victim’s body. Every cell. But it travels in the skin cells from person to person. So you know we humans slough off hundreds of thousands of skin cells every day. Right?

  “Yeah…”

  “And those cells float around indefinitely. They’re the primary component in house dust. You know how quickly dust settles on every surface at home, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “If just one dust particle touches a female’s skin, the transfer occurs. Remember that YouTube vid we saw where some geek put four thousand mousetraps in a room and threw a ball in the room?

  “Yeah…”

  “Well that’s how the chain reaction works inside the victim’s body. It takes less than a minute for the infected mutated skin cell to transmit the cellular information to every other cell. This immediately kills the female that is infected.”

  Now I know how Fark died. Some female skin dust must have made its way onto Jen’s notes and into the FedEx. Shit, Jen killed Mrs. Fark. But how could Jen still be alive?

  “Jen, remember those notes you sent me for Mrs. Fark? Remember I told you she died right when she opened it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did it not kill you?”

  “I didn’t send those docs. Jerry Mackwell did. I haven’t been to the lab since I got back. Director Faggione called and told me to stay home. Now I know why. He saved my life. God, he saved my life.” I could hear her crying softly and did not want to go there.

  “So, if an infected female is dead, how does she keep moving and killing?”

  “We don’t have that answer, but it seems that in the mutation process, the cells want to regenerate, like stem cells. So, this is the hard part.”

  “Go on, hon.”

  “The women who get infected are dead but still moving—ambulatory is the word and because their cells are reproducing so wildly they crave a huge amount of fresh protein nutrition.”

  “As in ‘guys’?”

  “That’s it.”

  There was a silence louder than a cannon shot.

  “Two more things,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  Shit, I say to myself. I’m not going to answer this. It never worked and will never work. Once I say it, especially if I mean it which I fucking do, I am major Nobel-Prize-winning fucked.

  “And I think I have the formula for a vaccine. It hasn’t been tested, exactly, in ideal conditions but…”

  Click.

  “Hello? Hello?...Jen?” Gone. Dead air. I try again, but nothing. I text her. “Me too. C U when there. MayB 2 weeks, 3. I’ll find U.” Don’t know if she’ll get it. Don’t care. I’m outta here.

  CHAPTER 4

  A week later I negotiated the sale of the balloon with its owner, Rick Calle. He was an intense sort, nothing like the complete nerd you’d think would spend time and money on the most impractical form of transportation ever devised by the walnut-sized mind of man. Until very recently, you went up in the fucking thing standing in a wicker basket—wicker as in straw. A huge propane tank fed a blazing flame six feet high that filled a silk balloon with hot air and then you trusted Mother Nature to push you along on her sweet air currents. Wherever she decided to blow you—and not the fun kind of blowing, either—you went. Where she stops, nobody knows. All I know is that having the balloon means avoiding traffic jams and being on the ground with those things. And not a lot of worry about plane or helicopter engine problems.

  Rick had made some improvements; not many, but enough to reduce the chance factor of winds pushing you where you do not want to go. Actually with the help of little tanks of compressed air, you could sort of steer the thing away from hazards like high tension wires, mountain tops, etc. You were still stuck with the prevailing winds but you could nudge the craft along on a roughly predictable route. It was insulated, covered and had a 2-way radio and a GPS system along with enough room for supplies.

  The story I covered for KWAK was Calle flying the thing from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Madrid, Spain. He actually made it, sort of. Landed the thing about twenty miles north of where he needed to land but no harm done. Not exactly Lucky Lindy, but good enough. The catch with my using the thing was that he was going along. So for my life savings which was not very much, I got the contraption and him to fly it. His wife was one of the early victims of the GaGa and he had only escaped being chow by locking her in their twenty room mansion in DC. He drove to his hangar where the balloon was stored in a moving van along with his other treasured crap and he headed west. Got attacked just outside of Denver, got saved by some state troopers on patrol and ended up here—with his only acquaintance in the area, me. It had been a year since the interview, but it made him world famous for the requisite 15 minutes and he was grateful for it.

  I suppose it’s my good luck that Tim can also fly the balloon. These days good luck is in short supply. We’ve hauled the thing onto the grounds of the radio tower and are getting it ready for the relatively easy-seeming flight from here to Massachusetts. I know Jen will wait for me. I mean really, what choice does she have?

  We still get signals from all over the country and we’ve heard from the Pentagon that Europe and Asia are in worse shape that we are. Mostly that’s because they are more tightly packed. A lot of families headed out for Siberia. How is that for a mind-fuck? For generations that place was the hell on earth. Like one person per fifty square miles. Now, it’s that same isolation that makes it the safest place. Get your women to Siberia, blow up the bridges behind you, wreck the rail lines. Mine the two or three roads into the place and you might all survive. The Kremlin types, a bunch of Russian mafia and some Eastern European big-wigs all got out. They are smart. Spread out and even if the infection starts, it’s easy to contain.

  Look, I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the rest of the world. I can’t do anything about it. Right? And if I could…ah, fuck them all. There’s a voice in my head that tells me Jen is one of the ones responsible for this mess. Scientists. It’s always those fuckers messing with this and fucking with that. Opening doors that should stay shut. Who the fuck knows? I mean, it could have saved lives, I guess.

  Anybody tells me they love me, I say nothing. This way nothing is hanging out there waiting to be shot down. Sometimes you got to accept the status quo. Why get involved? You f
uck with things, they’re gonna blow up in your face. Like telling some chick you love her. Maybe you get lucky one time and something good comes of it. But you know in the end that every time science comes up with something new and nifty, some motherfucker turns it into a weapon. It’s what we do. Sounds crazy but it’s true if you think about it. But I stopped thinking about it. Yeah, Jen was one of the ones who brought the world to its knees. Just a little while ago she was on her knees giving me a blow job. Who’da thought? And if I did, would I do anything about it? I think not. Maybe I should’ve knocked her brains out or pushed her out a window or backed my Jeep over her. But I didn’t. So we’re all fucked.

  The day before we’re scheduled to leave, another vid comes over the national security wire. We are told to broadcast it as soon as possible. This is what we see in the control room editing station:

  It’s the feast of Ramadan, which is the Muslim holy month. You may know it as a time when all the faithful crowd to Mecca in Saudi Arabia and they walk around this humongous black cube that looks like a special effect from War of the Worlds. I don’t pretend to know why they are marching in a circle over and over but I know it’s only men and they are in the thousands. Apparently, women are not allowed and personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass whether they are allowed or not. I only know these bastards were rooting for the cocksuckers that knocked over the Trade Center and I’m thinking, fuck ’em all. Usually wishin’ ain’t getting’—another of Mom’s enigmatic precepts which is truer than anything you’ll find in the Bible. But I digress.