Zombie Bitches From Hell Read online

  We’re rising fast when I see the red and white striped shirt. It’s Alan and he’s firing point blank into some bitches who are getting ready to smother him. He’s moving back and I can see he’s moving too much in a panic. Trips over a dead guy’s arm. The bitches are on him, chewing his face, reaching into his mouth for his tongue—maybe it’s too far down to tell, but then his pants are ripped off and the tearing starts. He screams as he looks up at me as if to say, “Save me, kiddo, please.” But I can’t do anything; his mouth is wide and blood gushes as his empty pleas drift away in an updraft.

  A thermal picks us up and carries us out over the Henderson Gorge to the east. The “fortress” is no longer visible. The echoing hollow sounds of the desert have returned. An eagle’s shrill cry is the only scream. Turkey vultures like something out of the Jurassic period, huge, glide effortlessly by us in smooth sweeping circles drawn to the smell of blood and death. Cicadas begin to clack in the heat of the full sun. The valley below is full of boulders as big as elephants but from this height they look like gravel. The clouds are huddled below the horizon and we raise our hands to make a brim against the merciless sun from the east, a dismal salute to our fallen comrades. I’m thinking even God must be hiding his face.

  Rick does his captain thing better than I could have hoped. He’s teaching Tim the nuances and showing us the use of the GPS, the radio and the gauges, particularly the altimeter. By one in the afternoon, we’ve heard all we can stand from Rick and we use MG’s excessive salivating as a hint to take a break and eat something.

  “That dog looks starved,” Tim says, looking at me with that secret code look. It’s the first thing Tim has said in ages and I want to ask why but all I get out is:

  “Me too.”

  “Let’s break out the rations,” says Rick like somehow he is charge. Frankly, I don’t give a monkey’s balls who’s in charge. I just want to do the “Up, Up and Away in my beautiful balloon” thing and get to Jennifer. I start humming that tune, the Up, Up and Away song that made the Fifth Dimension a few mil back in the day. If you’re thinking Superman, think again. The bitches would crack his testicles like walnuts.

  “You know, pal, that if we make it and end up being some kind of heroes, that song may be the new national anthem. Wouldn’t that be cool?” Tim says with a chuckle.

  “Don’t disrespect our country, dude,” says Rick. “The rockets’ red glare is good enough for me and it’s good enough for you, right?”

  Before Tim answers, I tear open a foil wrapped Q-Bar, the newest in earth-muffin technology. Nuts, seeds, molasses and enough calories to power Toledo, Ohio for a week. Taking a big chomp, I say, “Hey, guys, dig in. It’s like Christmas dinner and Thanksgiving all rolled into one six ounce lump of rabbit food.”

  The stare-down between my two roomies is disrupted. I give a biscuit to MG.

  “You’re on a diet, too, my overfed man’s best friend.”

  “That dog of yours may come in handy one day,” says Rick. “Looks like he’s got a good twenty five pounds of protein on him.”

  “Rick, sir, if you think anyone is going to eat this here canine eighth wonder of the modern fucking world, you can go fuck yourself. I’ll eat you, you dumb fuck, before I’ll let you touch one hair on…”

  “Relax, relax…” he responds. “Can’t you take a joke?”

  “Not really. You may be joking, but I’m not. Remember I paid for this piece of shit contraption, whether you designed it, invented it or squeezed it out of your ass, I don’t care. This is my trip in my rig. Like Aldous Huxley once said, ‘All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.’ I’m the more equal one on this tub. Ain’t that so?”

  Rick nods his head side to the side and lowers his eyes. I made my point, but the discomfort level on board the Good Ship Lollipop just got ratcheted up sixteen degrees. We’re making the most of it by looking out the gondola at the scenery—ragged mountains unfurling beneath us, high thin clouds above, white cotton candy against the pale blue of high altitude sky. Little veins below are the only signs that humans ever existed here: veins that are the highways and small clusters of houses—capillaries. No cars are moving.

  “Can’t we bring this thing down a bit lower? I’d like to see what’s going on,” I say.

  “Is that an order?” says Rick, with a pissy tone that reminds me of my first girlfriend, Sandy Grunski. Gruntin’ Grunski everyone called her. Everyone but me. It is true that she could grunt like nobody’s business when I was fucking her but I would have visited the Ninth Circle of Hell once a week for a year for one of her blowjobs. I guess listening to her opinions on pop music and sitcoms was the trade off. Now I’m thinking that the trip to hell might have been better.

  “It is,” I say. If he wants a master and commander, I’m it.

  ***

  In a few hours we see Interstate 54 like a bright ribbon twisting here and there through cactus and mesquite and mugho pines. No cars, no busses, no trucks.

  “Let’s follow the road for a while. Maybe we can see if anything’s happening. It goes through some small towns. Gas stations. Truck stops. It can’t all be gone. Can it?” I say.

  “It sure can,” says Rick. Turning to Tim, he says, “So what’s with you, pal?”

  “Tim ain’t talking much this trip,” I interject.

  “Cat got his tongue?” Rick smirks.

  “He’s had some trouble, is all. How about watching where you’re going, OK?”

  “Aye, aye,” he responds. “I’m going to take her down. There’s an Exxon station up ahead. We can fill the propane tank and pick up some water. Maybe some chips and other good healthy shit.”

  “OK,” I say. “Just be sure there’s nothing around. I mean no bitches or anything.”

  Rick turns the gas jet off and we start cruising down. But at this altitude the wind does funny things. As I’m thinking this and about to tell Rick to bring it up a bit, a downdraft hits us like a giant’s fist and we go freefall for I don’t know how long. I’m holding on for dear life, MG is bounced on his ass while Rick grabs the burner control and yanks it too hard. We all bounce and Tim gets knocked over the gondola railing. As he goes over, I see one hand white-knuckled on the rail. I crawl over and, as the balloon steadies, I get up and reach over. Tim is wide-eyed and about to let go. He’s kicking, trying to get his feet up and over but the wind is twisting him and the balloon. I grab his arm and reach over.

  “Grab my hand” I shout. “Come on, Tim, grab it goddamn it!”

  He reaches up and gets hold of my forearm while I grab his. But he starts slipping out of my grip.

  “Man, don’t let go,” Tim shouts.

  “I won’t. Just steady yourself. And stop kicking. When I say three, I’m pulling you in. Three!” I yank on his arms as hard as I can and drop back, his stomach bent over the rail.

  “Now get your feet over. I ain’t lettin’ go!”

  “He topples into the gondola, sweating like he spent four hours in a sauna.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  “Good to see you again,” I say.

  “I guess the cat let go of his tongue,” says Rick. “Or is it pussy.”

  I can see that Rick is not going to make this trip any better, the asshole.

  CHAPTER 7

  It’s late in the afternoon and as we descend the sun prematurely fades because we’re in the shadows of the Rockies. At about a thousand feet, we see a bus making its way slowly through a winding local road that snakes gently through a section of foothills.

  “That’s a good sign,” Tim says matter-of-factly. “There’s still normalcy somewhere. Maybe it’s been limited to a few urban areas. Who knows, maybe even they’ve stamped it out.”

  “A cure?” says Rick with a smirky tone. “They couldn’t cure anything like this in so short a time. No way.”

  “I think he’s right, Tim,” I say. “But there’s always hope. That bus is heading somewhere. And for a reason.”

  “Yeah, goi
n’ west, right where we came from. They don’t have a clue.”

  We watch the bus in a hover when Rick points to a rocky area about a quarter mile past where the bus is.

  “Check it out,” he says.

  We pick out in the shadows a group of about twenty-five people in army green fatigues lying in ambush.

  “Should we fire a warning shot?” asks Tim.

  “We don’t know who the good guys are. That bus could be crawling with bitches. Those could be bitches hiding up ahead. Looks like men but who can tell from up here?” says Rick. “Let it play out.”

  “Bring it down lower,” I say. Rick looks at me as if he’s finally had enough.

  “Look,” he says. “I don’t mind your Horatio Hornblower, Captain Kirk bullshit when it’s not dangerous. But we can’t go lower than this and be safe. We need to go up. If those assholes on the ground feel like firing at us, it’ll be a turkey shoot. We’re lucky they’re pre-occupied.” As he says this and I’m about to agree, the bus makes its final curve into the ambush zone. We see boulders rolling down the hillsides from both directions. A few tumble across the road in front of the bus which seems to be careening all over the place, kicking up clouds of dust. But a few smash into the side and knock the thing for a loop. It hits a guard rail, jumps it, and the whole thing goes over the edge and slides down like a small steel avalanche, rocks, gravel, dirt and dust billowing behind it.

  “They’re fucked,” says Tim. The balloon lifts gently up as Rick turns on the juice. We see a couple of the army ambushers look up as the roar of the propane echoes through the canyon. Small flashes of light pop out from behind boulders.

  “Those cocksuckers are shooting at us,” I yell.

  Tim has shouldered the 30.06 and is firing at the men in green who are also chasing down the hill after the bus. A bunch of civilian types get out of the bus and are helping one another when the first group of men reach them.

  CHAPTER 8

  We had drifted all night following the arrow on the GPS uncertain as to whether or not it was accurate.

  “Do these things need people on the ground to keep them up?” asked Tim.

  “Geez, I don’t know. Technology was never my thing. I’m thinking it’s a satellite, right? And it spins along with the Earth, always at the same spot in the sky. Moving along because it’s always technically falling but it falls at the same rate as the curvature of the Earth so it never crashes.”

  “Shit, man. I thought you said you’re not a techie type. Was that a load of bullshit you just slung or is it true?”

  “True. But I don’t know if people are required. Probably after awhile. Who the fuck knows?”

  “Good answer. Let’s catch some shut-eye. No point in worrying.”

  Rick is standing there at the helm saying nothing. As they used to say just before the Indians attacked, “It’s quiet, too quiet.” He’s definitely a too-quiet type. But who can read him? And who gives a pig in a poke anymore. I know he’s got money, tons of it and he’s a genius, if you consider inventor types to be geniuses. My own opinion is that there is barely a fine line between a genius and a complete asshole. But this asshole’s balloon has saved my life. So, for now, he’s a genius.

  We are drifting smoothly at about three thousand feet. It’s cold but our Mylar wraps do what they are supposed to do. It’s a three dog night, but all I have is MG snuggled up close as he can and smelling as bad as he can. Someone once compared the smell of a dog to buttered toast. Some puppy-loving bitch who couldn’t deal with a real man, I’m thinking. Then I realize how stupid I am. How stupid the whole world has turned. Three jerk-offs in a balloon cruising over this huge stupid country, pockets of dudes hiding from marauding undead bitches. Maybe stupid is putting it mildly. Maybe stupid would be good. I’m staring up at charcoal grey clouds, thicker than wool, heavy with the night, the weak glimmer of a weak moon trying to reflect some of the sun’s rays through the thickness. Jen’s face floats in the clouds and I drift off to sleep, hearing Tim’s snoring, reassured that I’m not alone and confident, if that’s the right word, that Rick will keep us on the right trajectory—his word, not mine.

  ***

  At around 2 A.M., Rick wakes me up.

  “I’m getting sleepy,” he says. “Why don’t you take over for a while? I’ve got the auto-pilot doing most of the work and the wind is co-operating. It’s always easier at night, anyway. No thermals”

  “OK,” I answer. I mean what am I going to say. Fuck no, I want to sleep; you do it. This is a team thing, right? And I want everyone to do whatever he can. My turn.

  I get up and Rick tells me how to operate things, how to keep my eye on the altimeter and the GPS and to be aware that we’re in the Rocky Mountains and some of these peaks are high and come up real fast, sometimes faster than the altimeter can convey the information. We’re not hooked in to radar like planes and it’s sort of like a barometer which tells you the weather you are having, not going to have. In other words. keep your eyes open. “Will do,” I say.

  Rick leans up against the side of the gondola and tries to doze.

  “I got a story for you,” he says.

  “That’s okay, Rick,” I answer. “Just go to sleep. Don’t worry. I’m wide awake.” You would be too, believe me.

  “No, I gotta tell you this,” he says.

  I figure if he wants to talk, let him.

  “I’m about nineteen and I just got kicked out of Duke for doing unauthorized work in their chem lab. I was hitchhiking, figuring I needed to put some distance between me and my old man. He lives in Atlanta with his third wife. I noticed that the asphalt is not black. It is a mucous gray, unyielding, lacking in sympathy. The road went out as far as I could see, rolling over the hip-like hills of West Texas. Noon or close to it, the spiteful sun was high, below loose gravel on the faded yellow lines at my feet. I kick the stones toward the sage and scrag weed, dry, clackety covering the landscape like hairy tumors on the back of a fat man. I despise fat men. That fat truck driver just dropped me off. He was fat, real fat and real lucky. Told me he had to drop me at that truck stop a hundred yards back. I was too slow to act, to edgy in my seat. Too much planning doth make failures of us all. Such plans. He kept looking at me out of the side of his eyes like that black cat wall clock, googly, humorous for idiots. Kent, I can tell you that that driver was really fat.”

  “Yeah, guess he was,” I say.

  “I watched him shift the big rig with his pudgy hand. His watch, too tight, too small and the fat on his wrist, he had no real wrist, he was so fat, the fat on his wrist rose up around the watch strap as if he was made of melted butter under his pink blotchy skin. I counted twelve small pimples on the side of his fat face, seven hairs that were long and brown on the same side of his fat face that he missed with his razor. I try not to count this stuff anymore. I used to do it all the time, counting, counting, counting, looking for special numbers but in the end, the number was always special. It was always up.”

  “I know what you mean,” I say, thinking uh-oh. But I’m watching for mountain tops or crags or some shit thing that will tear a hole in this balloon.

  “So he picked me up in San Angelo, Texas, a crap-hole of a town with no excuse to exist. I told him I was going to El Paso, which I was, but the lucky fat man let me out 300 miles shy. Go west young man, go west.

  “Anyway, I’m thinking I’ll just stand here in the white light, the alum white of noon and watch the blue morning sky putrefy into milk. I have my uniform on: a Duke University sky-blue t-shirt with milk-white letters, neat jeans, not the artificial ragged ones, white tennis shoes. They used to call them sneakers, but I guess no one likes to be thought of as a sneaker. I once saw a tennis match on TV. A tall lanky blond girl with a ridiculous Rusky name was grunting every time she hit the ball. Swing, grunt, bounce. Swing, grunt, bounce. Her hair glistened like the fillings in a cadaver.”

  “Yeah, I knew a guy who used to wack off to tennis players—I’m pretty sure they were girls. No
w that I think about it, maybe not,” I say, feeling edgier than I thought I should feel.

  “I watched and watched, hypnotized by the stupid pointless game, reflexively squeezing my knife handle every time she grunted. Squeeze, grunt. Squeeze, grunt. I’m digressing, Kent, but it is regret that keeps me going now and even then, more so maybe. I mean my father was a real…anyway, I’m on the road, not like that drunk and sloppy Kerouac, but as cute, as clean-cut, as naïve, as collegian, as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as I can be, which is very. It is the key to my success. I could make an info-mercial on my art; tell you to dial 1-800-slash, 1-800-bleed, 1-800-pity me for I have sinned. Free shipping and handling. My operator is standing by. He is always standing by.”

  Where is this going? I’m thinking.

  “I made it from Duke in only two weeks. I arrived in a Volkswagen driven by a skinny girl. Girl? She was at least twenty-five. I despise skinny people. They show their bones to the world like a badge of honor. What honor is there in not eating or in having a too high metabolic rate that burns everything you feed it through a skinny mouth so fast that it does no good? It reminds me of an old Indian movie I saw while sitting on Dad’s fat lap when the Indians mock the white men for building a fire that is too large. The fire of skinny people is too large, too wasteful. They need their “Off” buttons pressed hard, real hard. This girl, I could see her ribs hiding under her tight t-shirt. Her little dried up skinny breasts, milkless, useless, useless, useless, “like two fried eggs on a bread board,” my mother used to say. My mother was fat.”

  “Yeah, I guess moms can get that way,” I say trying to have something to agree with him about.

  “I’m in New Orleans; it is gloriously in ruins. Drunken sots on every corner, whores, fags, dopey college kids, half the houses in spectacular decay, the smell of Katrina’s blood everywhere, the smell of mold and mildew, the perfume of beautiful destruction. To have witnessed it, aye, there is a sight to behold. That smell of slime overhanging the city, the Big Mindless Easy, the smell of the mud of the Holy Ghost with wings out-stretched hovering over the aroma of humans’ waste, of wasted humans. All cities should meet such ends, like New Orleans, in their own arrogance and idiocy, fighting against Mother Nature, her huge breasts the size of mountains, her feet bigger than Ohio, her farts the tornadoes that rip through cyclone alley and flatten everything, shred it, defile it. I adore dying New Orleans. I had no trouble burying the body of that skinny girl right in the front mud lawn of a rotting church, algae and moss eating it from the ground up. The mud is clever, very clever, that mud in the church lawn in the Bayou section of town. Good bye, Bayou, good-bye. I left the skinny girl’s jaw in the open guitar case of a blind minstrel singing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” This way I could make sure her skinny metabolism would slow down in Heaven so she would not need to eat more clouds than her fair share. My mother and particularly my father ate more than their fair share. They were fat.”