What are Little Zombies Made of? (Cities of the Dead)

What are Little Zombies Made of?

  By William Young

  Copyright 2011 by William Young

  Enterprise, Alabama - Day 596

  Trace Brewer squinted at the three runners as they skip-hopped toward him, a weird gallop he’d never quite gotten used to. Why they just didn’t outright run made no sense to him, but, then, neither did the fact that they were living corpses. These wretches had been alive humans at some point, capable of actual running, but death had transformed that aspect of them, too. He took a few steps back, spat out some tobacco juice in a nice, looping arc, and felt the reassurance of the stock of his Mossberg 500 shotgun against his shoulder.

  Trace retreated a few more steps as the undead closed on him. He brought his shotgun up, sighted down it and picked off the middle-aged black lunch-lady-looking woman with a blast to the skull from fifteen yards, her head shattering into a thousand pieces of flesh and bone. He dropped to a knee, swiveled to the other side of the zombie group and pumped a round into the chamber. He raised the shotgun and put the sight on the teen-age skate-rat’s mid-section and blew a hole through him, collapsing him in a heap. And then he chambered another round and watched down the length of the barrel at the fifty-ish fat dude still hop-skipping toward him. Trace waited for the zombie to take three more steps and fall through the camouflaged net that hid the tiger pit, spat out a dollop of tobacco juice and stood up.

  A moment later, the weights-and-pulleys attached to the ropes connected to the net yanked the undead man out of the pit and up into the air, where he bobbed and moaned beneath a street lamp pole while Trace turned circles nearby, waiting for stragglers. There were always straggler zombies with the runners, and a moment later two thirty-something brunettes covered in blood and mucus pushed through some hedges and stared at him. He popped each in the head without giving it much thought, sucked hard on the tobacco in his mouth, and spit onto the ground.

  “Fucking zombies are so stupid.”

  The fat man in the net above him moaned what almost sounded like “brains,” and Trace shook his head: zombies didn’t have any, so maybe that’s why they always sounded like they were moaning about them. He drove his red Ford F-150 pick-up from its hidey-hole nearby, positioned the bed under the net, and lowered the fat man into the truck, banging the undead man’s head on the metal floor and causing it - him? - to snarl for a few moments.

  There was a groan from beside the tiger pit, and Trace walked over and looked down on the teenage skateboarder, a hole blown through his stomach, his backbone broken. His body was little more than a sack of undead flesh, now, but he wasn’t dead in any normal sense of the word. He scraped at the ground with his arms, trying to drag himself somewhere, his legs useless behind him. Trace spat a bullet of tobacco juice onto the zombie’s face: it would live like this for weeks, slowly drying out on the inside and mummifying. Trace had no idea if that killed it or just put the zombie in some sort of suspended animation.

  He drove through downtown Enterprise, zig-zagging around the car crashes and ignoring the destroyed business district. The buildings on the west side of Main Street between College and Adams were burnt to their foundations, an attempt the previous year to burn the zombies to death en masse. The zombies had largely left downtown after that incident, but there were still plenty around, and Trace made it his job to find them. He turned onto Highway 27 and headed north out of the town and pulled off into a driveway near Lake Charles. He got out of the truck, opened the gate to pull the truck through, then closed the gate behind him. He had raided a fence supply company several months ago and hauled away a couple thousand feet chain link fence - he had been truly surprised to find the store completely stocked and untouched: every other place of business he’d seen had been looted to the shelving. But, then, you couldn’t eat fence.

  Holly and Charles were idling on the front porch to the house and watched with dispassionate interest as he closed in on them. They had been part of the group harvesting the year’s peanut crops from the surrounding farms, and the yard was full of sacks of green peanuts, ready to be roasted or boiled. The farmers wouldn’t mind as they were either dead, fled or zombified.

  “What’d jaget?” Charles said after Trace had popped out of the truck.

  “Fat white dude. Probably a banker or a teacher before,” Trace said. “Dag still around?”

  “Naw, he’n Mark went out a coupla hours ago to look for salt,” Charles said.

  The fat white zombie in the bed of the truck began rustling in the net. Charles walked over to the side of the truck and looked at the living corpse. It stank of death.

  “Whatcha gonna do with this one?”

  Trace smiled. “Gonna bleed it out and see what happens. C’mon, help me get it out to the barn.”

  The barn wasn’t a real barn, but a large garage that was painted red and had a black shingle roof. Someone’s idea of an aesthetic joke; probably the rich couple that had lived in the house alongside the over-sized pond called Lake Charles. Molly and Wallace Cheever had fled or died last year like everyone else in the Wiregrass region of Alabama, leaving behind a richly-appointed McMansion that Trace and Dag had turned into a squatters hellhole before saving Holly and Charles from a group of zombies in the spring. Those two had taken to keeping the home in decent order, which would’ve struck Trace as odd for teenager behavior had he ever bothered to think about it. He hadn’t noticed that the house had been falling into squalor nor that it had become neat and tidy on a daily basis since their arrival.

  “Alright, now, le’s be careful when I open the net, this one’s a fastie, so he might spring up right quick and try to bite you,” Trace said as he tilted the wheelbarrow onto the concrete floor and the zombie rolled onto it with a thud. It snarled and wriggled inside the net.

  Trace grabbed the noose pole from a hook on the wall and readied it for action while Charles slipped his hands into some thick canvas gloves that came well up his forearms to just short of his elbows. Holly hefted the shotgun and made sure a round was chambered and the three of them all quickly looked between each other to ensure they were ready. Charles undid the fastening at the top of the net, pulling it down quickly and creating a large opening, exposing the fat zombie’s head and shoulders. The creature writhed more quickly sensing its freedom was at hand, but it came to naught as Trace quickly slipped the noose down around its neck and tightened it, maneuvering the pole while Charles continued to undo the net.

  “Now get the other pole on it right quick afore it gets all stood up,” Trace said.

  A moment later, the man and teenager had the fat zombie double-noosed and were fighting him back toward a barbershop chair Trace and Dag had removed from Atkins Barber Shop three days earlier and bolted to the floor of the garage. The zombie was strong and struggled against them. That was the only advantage Trace had yet figured zombies had - they were incredibly strong. And durable. If you didn’t take the head off in some manner, they were also more-or-less indestructible.

  They were almost to the chair when the zombie stopped fighting against both of them and inexplicably set all its weight and momentum against Charles, pulling Trace off-balance and adding his weight to the maneuver, as if the zombie remembered some Judo training from its life of being alive. Charles had been a skinny kid before the zombie apocalypse, and his diet since then had only made him leaner and weaker, a disadvantage the zombie was now exploiting. Trace could see the fright in Charles’ grimace as he watched the zombie claw the air between them.

  “Hold calm, Charles, he can’t get at you even if he pushes you up against the wall. You’ve got five feet of stiff ash pole between you and him
, so jes keep ahold of yer end and ya’ll be jes fine,” Trace said.

  Trace yanked back on his pole and the zombie stumbled, and within a few moments, the two had pushed the zombie into the chair and were pushing him against the seat back. Trace nodded to Holly and she rushed up behind the zombie and whipped a nylon tie-down strap around its chest and biceps, ratcheting the strap tighter until the zombie was cinched to the chair. She then strapped a rubber ball gag into its mouth while it was looking at the strap across its chest. Within a minute, the trio had the zombie completely immobilized.

  Trace hauled out a white five-gallon plastic bucket and a length of rubber tubing with a needle attached to one end. He slipped a folding knife from a sheath on his belt and cut open the zombie’s left pant leg, ripping a long cut in it and pulling the sides apart to expose the thigh. The zombie wriggled in the chair.

  “Sit tight, you’re about to become a famous part of zombie lore,” Trace said, checking the rubber tubing’s attachment to the bucket was secure. “Today we find out if your kind can live without blood in your body.”

  Holly walked over and tapped the bucket with her toe.