Book of the Dead (50 page)

“Whoa ho ho ho, what luck!” Monty roared; the best he could tell, Fang was grinning. “Another big winner! What have we got for him?”

“They’re young! They’re nubile! They’re fresh from Hollywood! And they’re all yours, Fang! The entire female cast of last spring’s drive-in theater epic,
Cheerleader Party Massacre
!”

Door Number Three was up by now, and behind it sat a cage filled with aspiring starlets in identical red-and-white suits. What a shame, to have spent years hoping and dreaming for the big break, that shot on prime-time TV… and to miss it due to Thorazine. It had kicked in hard and heavy, leaving them about as excited as a basket of vegetables. Except for…

The audience was in, for them, a frenzy of excitement. Some were standing, arms waving like stalks of wheat in a summer breeze. Others stomped their feet to no apparent rhythm. Deadhead started some new music, angry guitars and shrieking vocals. Old Blue Eyes it wasn’t. The Dead Kennedys, maybe?

Except for
…

Fang was in a frenzy of his own, twitching in time with the music like a spastic during a seizure. His head bristled like a mace. Several of the earlier contestants wandered back onstage for the party atmosphere of the closing credits. Cynthia, with a good deal of Flight 901 smeared across her face. Shawn and his cooler of heads. Millicent, modeling her new arm. Fang twitched and slammed himself into Cynthia; an ear went sailing across the soundstage like a crinkled little Frisbee.

And yet Monty found himself unable to tear his eyes away from the girl he’d spoken to before the show. She clung to the front of the cage, swimming upstream against the current of a Thorazine haze while the rest of the starlets slumped in catatonic heaps. Her knuckles showed white against the steel bars.

She’s not supposed to do that! She’s supposed to be out of it!

She looked thin, painfully so, and no doubt it had been a good long while since her hair had been washed. Her lips trembled, and her eyes loomed huge against the pale of her face. Eyes that fixed, eyes that accused.

Eyes that started rearranging those internal switches. Off went the smile, off went the juice.

“Help me, please,” she said, though over the racket on the stage he couldn’t hear her, could only read her lips. “Everybody’s got a price, what’s yours? Is it this?”

And then, in a pathetic attempt at seduction, the girl fumbled with one side of her sweater and tugged it down. Ragged fingernails left red streaks on her skin. And there she stayed, holding the bar in one hand and her sweater in the other. Gauging his price.

Monty suddenly wanted to be sick. Not entirely from the prospect of her inevitable fate… but from the quick glimpse at just what it was that he was made of.

Everybody’s got a price, what’s yours
…

In the absurd simplicity of her offer, she’d somehow managed to show him a truth that had always eluded him before: Greed is the one thing death can’t conquer. Love can succumb before it, and loyalty. Friendship and honor. Morality and dignity and even humanity. But not greed, oh no. Greed has an indefinite lifespan all its own, and thrives in the stony soil that can kill the rest.

He gave her the first genuine smile he’d given in years.

Monty reached beneath his jacket to finger the grip of the .38.
At least it’d be the merciful way out. And then a bullet for me, maybe?

He pulled the gun out, letting his arm hang by his side. The girl saw, and understood. And in pulling her sweater back up, accepted. Her glazed eyes shut and her face tilted slightly toward an unseen sky.
Make it quick
, she seemed to be saying.

And then a bullet for me? No, I can’t do that, can’t do that at all. Because Heaven help me, I need this stage more
.

Make it quick? Okay, that much he could do.

Except that by the time he got the gun halfway up, it was plucked cleanly from his hand.

Monty hadn’t noticed that Brad Bernerd had sidled over beside him. But now they stood face to rotten face. Bernerd was smarter than he looked, Monty knew that. Apparently he was stronger and quicker, as well.

Before Monty could move, Bernerd pointed the revolver’s muzzle at his lower thigh and pulled the trigger.

The thunderclap of gunpowder aside, the effect was much like getting clubbed with a concrete block. Monty felt his leg suddenly swatted out from beneath him, and the next thing he knew he was on his side on the floor, tasting dust.

The gunshot brought everything to a halt… the announcer’s closing voice-over, Fang’s slam-dancing, Millicent’s preening. Even Deadhead killed the music. Everything stopped except the silent scrolling of the credits on the monitors. Once again, Monty was the center of undivided attention. At the bottom of a sea of staring eyes.

He propped himself up on one elbow, grunting, chilly sweat trickling from his scalp. The lights didn’t feel quite so warm anymore. He gazed up into Bernerd’s runny eyes.

“It would’ve happened anyway,” Bernerd said. He slowly cocked his dented head toward Door Number Three. “She didn’t matter.”

Monty’s mouth gaped. He figured that his eyes were as blank and his brain as empty as everyone else’s around him. “Then why?” was all he could say.

“The ratings,” Bernerd said. “Time for a change. Your ratings are slipping.”

And as Monty pondered this great imponderable, Bernerd simply turned and walked away. The credits rolled on, and the rest of them began to move again, closing in as surely as the cameras. They mounted the stage from the amphitheater… by themselves, in pairs, as entire families. Converging on him with unblinking, hungry eyes.

My ratings? Slipping? SLIPPING?
The thought was too great, and it snapped his already fragile mind in two with pencil-thin ease.

He felt the first insistent tug at the bullet wound in his thigh, saw the cameras leering in.

But the eyes of the world are on me now!
he thought.
And its hands… and quite a few teeth
…

Audience participation at its finest.

BY DAVID J. SCHOW

Eating ’em was more fun than blowing their gnarly green heads off. But why dicker when you could do both?

The fresher ones were blue. That was important if you wanted to avoid cramps, salmonella. Eat a green one and you’d be yodeling down the big porcelain megaphone in no time.

Wormboy used wire cutters to snip the nose off the last bullet in the foam block. He snugged the truncated cartridge into the cylinder of his short-barrel .44. When fired, the flattened slugs pancaked on impact and would disintegrate any geek’s head into hash. The green guys weren’t really zombies, because no voodoo had played a part. They were all geeks, all slow as syrup and stupid as hell, and Wormboy loved it that way. It meant he would not starve in this cowardly new world. He was eating; millions weren’t.

Wormboy’s burden was great.

It hung from his Butthole Surfers T-shirt. He had scavenged dozens of such shirts from a burned-out rock shop, all Extra Extra Large, all screaming about bands he had never heard of—Dayglo Abortions, Rudimentary Penii, Shower of Smegma, Fat & Fucked Up. Wormboy’s big personal in-joke was one that championed a long-gone album titled
Giving Head to the Living Dead
.

The gravid flab of his teats distorted the logo, and his surplus flesh quivered and swam, shoving around his clothing as though some subcutaneous revolution was aboil. Pasty and pocked, his belly depended earthward, a vast sandbag held at bay by a wide weight lifter’s belt, notched low. The faintest motion caused his hectares of skin to bobble like mercury.

Wormboy was more than fat. He was a crowd of fat people. A single mirror was insufficient to the task of containing his image.

The explosion buzzed the floor beneath his hitops. Vibrations slithered from one thick stratum of dermis to the next, bringing him the news.

The sound of a Bouncing Betty’s boom-boom always worked like a Pavlovian dinner gong. It could smear a smile across his jowls and start his tummy to percolating. He snatched up binoculars and stampeded out into the graveyard.

Valley View Memorial Park was a classic cemetery, of a venerable lineage far preceding the ordinances that required flat monument stones to note the dearly departed. The granite and marble jutting from its acreage was the most ostentatious and artfully hewn this side of a Universal Studios monster movie boneyard. Stone-cold angels reached toward heaven. Stilted verse, deathlessly chiseled, eulogized the departees—vanity plates in a suburbia for the lifeless. It cloyed.

Most of the graves were unoccupied. They had prevailed without the fertilization of human decay and were now choked with loam and healthy green grass. The tenants had clawed out and waltzed off several seasons back.

A modest road formed a spiral ascent path up the hill and terminated in a cul-de-sac fronting Wormboy’s current living quarters. Midway up, it was interrupted by a trench ten feet across. Wormboy had excavated this “moat” using the cemetery’s scoop-loader, and seeded it with lengths of two-inch pipe sawn at angles to form funnel-knife style pungi sticks. Tripwires knotted gate struts to tombstones to booby traps, and three hundred antipersonnel mines lived in the earth. Every longitude and latitude of Valley View had been lovingly nurtured into a Gordian knot of killpower that Wormboy had christened his spiderweb.

The Bouncing Bettys had been a godsend. Anything that wandered in unbidden would get its legs blown off or become immovably gaffed in the moat.

Not long after the geeks woke up, shucked dirt, and ambled off with their yaps drooping open, Wormboy had claimed Valley View for his very own. He knew the dead tended to “home” toward places that had been important to them back when they weren’t green. Ergo, never would they come trotting home to a graveyard.

Wormboy’s previous hideout had been a National Guard armory. Too much traffic in walking dead weekend warriors, there. Blowing them into unwalking lasagna cost too much time and powder. After seven Land-Rover-loads of military rock and roll, Wormy’s redecoration of Valley View was complete. The graveyard was one big mechanized ambush. The reception building and nondenomina-tional chapel were ideally suited to his needs… and breadth. Outfitting the prep room was more stainless steel than a French kitchen in Beverly Hills; where stiffs were once dressed for interment, Wormboy now dressed them out for din-din. There was even a refrigerated morgue locker. Independent generators chugged out wattage. His only real lament was that there never seemed to be enough videotapes to keep him jolly. On the nonfiction front he favored Julia Child.

The binocs were overpriced army jobs with an illuminated reticle. Wormboy thumbed up his bottle-bottom fish-eye specs, focused, and swept the base of the hill. Smoke was still rising from the breach point. Fewer geeks blundered in these days, but now and again he could still snag one.

That was peculiar. As far as Wormboy could reckon, geeks functioned on the level of pure motor response with a single directive—seek food—and legs that made their appetites mobile. Past year one the locals began to shun Valley View altogether, almost as though the geek grapevine had warned them the place was poison. Could be that Valley View’s primo kill rate had made it the crucible of the first bona fide zombie superstition.

God only knew what they were munching in the cities by now. As the legions of ambulatory expirees had swelled, their preferred food—live citizens—had gone underground. Survivors of what Wormboy called Zombie Apocalypse had gotten canny or gotten eaten. Geek society itself was like a gator pit; he’d seen them get pissed off and chomp hunks out of one another. Though their irradiated brains kept their limbs supple and greased with oxygenated blood, they were still dead… and dead people still rotted. Their structural integrity (not to mention their freshness) was less than a sure bet past the second or third Halloween. Most geeks Wormy spotted nowadays were minus a major limb. They digested, but did not seem to eliminate. Sometimes the older ones simply exploded. They clogged up with gas and decaying food until they hit critical mass, then
kerblooey
—steaming gobbets of brown crap all over the perimeter. It was enough to put you off your dinner.

Life was so weird. Wormboy felt like the only normal person left.

This movable feast, this walking smorgasbord, could last another year or two at max, and Wormboy knew it. His fortifications insured that he would be ready for whatever followed, when the world changed again. For now, it was a matchless chow-down, and grand sport.

The ATV groaned and squeaked its usual protests when he settled into its saddle. A rack welded to the chassis secured geek tools—pinch bar, fire ax, scattergun sheaths, and a Louisville Slugger with a lot of chips, nicks, and dried blood. The all-terrain bike’s balloon tires did not burst. Wormboy kick-started and puttered down to meet his catch of the day.

Geeks could sniff human meat from a fair distance. Some had actually gotten around to elementary tool use. But their maze sense was zero-zero. They always tried to proceed in straight lines. Even for a nongeek it took a load of deductive logic just to pick a path toward Valley View’s chapel without getting divorced from your vitals, and much more time than generally elapsed between Wormboy’s feedings. Up on this hilltop, his security was assured.