But Dirty Mary wasn’t done.
She fought under Slaughter with teeth and nails, burning hot and turned on from the blood and action, so he shoved her aside. She came right back for more so he gave her what she wanted right there under the table and when she came she bit into his shoulder and drew blood.
So that was their first date—dark, sleazy, and smarmy, like a five-dollar peep show.
When the soldiers started dragging their club brothers off, Slaughter told her, “My scoot’s outside. Be on it.”
“Fuck I will,” she said.
But five minutes later they were choppering down the highway and Dirty Mary was holding onto him tight and pressing her breasts into him and he knew he had an old lady.
The first night together they spent in an abandoned motel just outside Sun Prairie. There were people—real, living people—in the town itself, but that’s not what Slaughter wanted. He tolerated zombies only slightly less than he tolerated citizens with their rules and laws and hang-ups. The deserted motel was fine. They had a suite with a fireplace and plenty of logs to feed it. After they killed a bottle of wine and got it on proper, they lay there in bed watching the firelight reflected on the walls.
“So tell me about it,” Slaughter said. “Lay it all on me.”
“Jibb,” she said. “You mean Jibb? My old man?”
“Sure. If that’s what you want.”
“He was a mean dude.”
“I bet.”
“He was. He was sergeant-at-arms and he broke a lot of heads and kicked a lot of ass.” Dirty Mary let that lay like it was the best epitaph she could come up with or the only one that Jibb might have appreciated. “He was tough and he was smart. Then he got funny.”
“Yeah?”
“He started getting religious. He’d been through so many scraps and wars and hardtime lock-ups and never came out of any of it with much more than a scratch. He started thinking he was God’s chosen son.”
Slaughter laughed and Dirty Mary swung on him. He had to fight her back down and tell her he didn’t mean anything by it. In the firelight, her big breasts were all he could see besides her shining snake eyes. He wanted her again right then but he figured he’d better listen to what she had to say.
So he smoked and tried to keep his mouth shut.
“He really did,” Dirty Mary said. “He thought he was God’s chosen son. And once he started believing that, there was no talking sense to him. He was crazier than before. Meaner. He thought he was ten-feet tall and bulletproof, man. You know?”
“Yeah.”
“That was about the time of the Outbreak. People were dying, and a lot of ‘em were rising back up. Jibb decided it was his personal mission to kill zombies being that he was God’s chosen and they were things from hell. So he killed them. All day long he killed them. Day after day.”
“And then?”
She sighed and he could see the tears glistening in her eyes. “Then, one night, he got caught in a worm rain. He could have made it to cover. That’s what Stumpy, his club brother, told me. But Jibb didn’t believe the worms could touch him. Well, he was fucking wrong, wasn’t he?”
Slaughter could see it playing out in his mind. Jibb, all messed-up with a fucking messiah complex, thinking he was invincible when he was only just crazy and deluded. Lot of ‘em got like that, though. People would stand out in the worm rains laughing. Christian fundamentalist congregations would do the same, acting like it was some kind of baptismal or putting the might of their god against the one that made the worms. In the end, it was always the same—they came out of their graves looking for something to chew on, usually their friends and neighbors. He figured it was probably the same with Jibb.
“I was there when he came back,” Dirty Mary said, lancing a sore of memory and letting the bad blood run. “It was three days after the funeral. The man was saying all bodies had to be burned… remember that? But they didn’t enforce it. Not then. Not at the beginning. Not like they did later when the dudes in the white bio-suits came with guns and took the dead.”
She said that for the first two nights, Stumpy and some of the other Warlocks and their old ladies stayed with her in case something happened and they had to sort out Jibb. But after a few days and he didn’t come back, they figured it was cool. Then the first night she was alone, he was at the door.
“It was the middle of the night, man, the dead of night,” she told Slaughter. “It was a weird night. Kind of warm with a hot wind blowing, dogs were barking. I heard the front door jiggle and I thought, oh, it’s gotta be one of the Warlocks, probably Stumpy had a load on and needed somewhere to crash. Maybe he was looking for a piece of ass. You know how the brothers get sometimes…”
She said she went to the door and was about to call out to whoever was out there when she felt something go right up her spine. The knob was turning. She’d forgotten to lock it. It wasn’t the first time, but when your old man was sergeant-at-arms of a 1%er club, you didn’t worry much about locked doors. But Jibb was dead and somebody was coming in and she had a pretty good idea of who it might be.
The door opened and Jibb was standing there. “Daddy’s home,” he said.
“I backed away. I screamed. All I remember is the clump-clump-clump of his motorcycle boots. We buried him in his rags, his colors, and they just hung on him… Jibb was a big guy and by then he was only a big corpse, like a skeleton wearing skin. His face was white and blotchy, and there were maggots in his hair and beard. His eyes were all red like they were filled with blood or maybe something worse. I got this real perverse idea, man, that he hadn’t come home just to put his teeth in me but to get me in bed, to do things like we used to do.” She broke off for a moment, breathing really hard. “He said he was going to eat me. He said he was going to start with my pussy and work his way up. There was green slime coming out of his mouth and cockroaches—I think they were cockroaches—coming out of holes in his face. He smelled like death, man. Like roadkill. Dirt fell from him as he walked, and he was grinning like a sewer grate. I did the only thing I could do, and took up his .44 Magnum from the kitchen drawer and I shot him. I shot him right in the chest and that fucking .44 almost broke my wrist with the recoil. Jibb made a growling sound and came at me so I shot him in the head the way Stumpy had told me to. Jibb shook and squirmed, the top of his head gone… then he dropped to his knees and vomited out this black bile that looked like crude oil. Then he fell over and he was dead again. He was still grinning, man.”
Slaughter held her tight and she trembled. She had opened her soul to him and that night he really loved her. It didn’t last, of course, but that night he really loved her because she was open and vulnerable and no woman had ever needed him so much. He held her as she shook, listening to the wind howling out in the deserted lot, the rain speckling the windows. After a time she calmed and she wanted him again or maybe she needed him, needed something physical and exhausting that would wipe the slate of her mind clean the way only good sex or good drugs could.
Later, she said, “Tell me now if you’re like that.”
“Like what, baby?”
“Like Jibb. Crazy.”
“I’m crazy, all right. I don’t have a lick of sense, but I know I’m not God’s chosen. I’m a Devil’s Disciple, man. Does that mean God hates me and the Devil loves me? No, it just means that neither have any use for biker trash like me. But one thing you can be sure of: I don’t stand out in worm rains. I’m scared shitless of them and that’s the truth.”