Strand screamed…screamed and lost his mind.
He dropped the lamp and went right to her.
Bolan said something he wasn’t even aware of and grabbed up the lamp, just in time to see Strand get taken into his mother’s arms. Those worm-eaten cerements engulfed him, those fleshless fingers pulled flaps of skin from his shoulders, and that black yawning mouth went to his throat, blood spraying out over her ruined face. She was a sea of carrion that flooded over him and pulled him down, drowning him in a dark sepulchral sweetness.
Bolan did not hesitate.
He shot right through Strand to get at her. Strand went down right away and then Mama Lucille, bleeding graveworms and soil and diseased bile from her wounds, turned on him. Those split, discolored lips pulled back from blackened and narrow teeth that snapped and chattered, ropes of tissue and gore hanging from them. She exhaled a cloud of fat meatflies. That eye found him and held him, yellow and reptilian, a dead-end noxious universe of ravening, insane appetite. And Bolan knew she would gut him like a salmon and bathe in his blood, tear his viscera out in hot, bleeding handfuls and suck the salty marrow from his bones…if he let her.
“Lay down, Lucille,” he told her. “Just lay down.”
But she came on, noisome and malign, a carcass peppered with insects and riven with maggots.
Bolan sighted in on that eyeball and pulled the trigger twice. The punch of a. 44 at close-range is devastating. The first round blew that eye and the skull that housed it to fragments and the second round split her face right down the middle. She hissed and screeched and fell straight over like a plank.
And then lay still after a few shudders swept through her.
Laying there in a contorted, shattered heap, it did not seem possible that she had walked. She was just putrescent and blackened, a dirty and fleshy heap of bones and rags boiling with worms. A cloud of blowflies lifted off her like a vapor of swamp gas and that was it.
Bolan made it upstairs and then tossed the coal-oil lamp against the wall and let that mausoleum burn. He sat on his horse and watched the flames consume that ramshackle old farmhouse, knowing there was purity in fire.
As he rode off, he knew there would be another burning that night and he wondered how quickly straw would catch.
MONKEY HOUSE
In late March the army swept through the city putting the living dead back in their graves for a final time. They came with heavy machine guns and. 50 caliber sniper rifles, flamethrowers and 7.62mm miniguns mounted on armored personnel carriers which cut the dead down in waves. Mop-up units followed, eliminating the stragglers, and searching house to house for those infected by the Necros-3 virus. The infected were put down; the uninfected were given injections of the experimental antiviral Tetrolysine-B, which inhibited the replication of the virus within the host body.
Necros-3 had put two-thirds of the world’s population into the graveyard within seven weeks and nearly all of the dead had returned searching for flesh to eat.
Tetrolysine-B, which had been developed for use against HIV, proved to be the magic bullet. The pestilence was stopped dead in its tracks, but by that time the cities of men were cemeteries.
*
Emma Gillis was ready to leave.
She’d watched her neighbors sicken, die, then return to feed. No one would ever know how many people they slaughtered and Emma tried not to think about it. Gus had fortified their house, turned it into a bunker with gunports, a generator, and a razorwire perimeter that was carefully mined.
The dead had never breached it.
But now the war was over and Emma had had her fill. For the past three months she’d been stuck inside their trim crackerbox house cum-bunker and she was ready to leave.
“It’s just time, Gus,” she told her husband who watched the streets through one of the gunports, hungry for enemy activity. “Time to move on.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said.
Good God. He was still in the Marines. He was living some prepubescent G.I. Joe fantasy. The zombies had been vanquished. There was no reason to hole up like this any longer.
When the Army came-and Gus, of course, had warned them off until they trained antitank guns on the house-they said that out at Fort Kendrix there were hundreds of people-men, women, children, all rebuilding their lives. They had fresh meat, fresh fruit and vegetables. Water that didn’t taste like metal. And medical care. Real medical care. And the guy in charge, Captain McFree-handsome, dashing really, with his black commando beret and pencil-thin Errol Flynn mustache-said they had electricity and a DVD library.
“Gus, be realistic. It’s time to go.”
He looked around, pale and paunchy and unshaven, camouflage pants worn and dingy. “I’m not leaving all this. I’m not leaving my home.”
Emma sighed. “Home? This isn’t a home, Gus, it’s a barracks.”
There were cases of MREs fighting for space amongst iron crates of ammo and jugs of purified water, the guns and first aid supplies. A survivalist’s wet dream, but hardly a home. The walls were tacked with maps, the windows boarded over and criss-crossed by duct tape so they would not shatter. The brass coat tree by the front door was hanging with gas masks and waterproof ponchos and web belts.
Home?
Sure, Good Housekeeping as seen by Soldier of Fortune.
Emma didn’t bother arguing. She packed up what she could in a suitcase and a nylon duffel and dumped them before the front door. “I’m going now, Gus. The war is over. Time to put away our guns and pick up shovels and saws and rebuild.”
“Fuck that,” he said.
Emma felt sad. She had watched a good man degenerate into this paranoid wreck. And as he degenerated, so had her love and respect for him.
She threw the bolts on the door and stepped out onto the porch. Gus slammed it immediately behind her, fumbling locks into place.
“You’ll come back,” he said.
No, I won’t.
“You’re making a big mistake, Emma,” he told her through the mail slot, using that calm and authoritative voice of his that had been so effective in the past for everything from getting money to getting into her pants. “You won’t make it out there. You’ll be dead before you reach the Army base. You’re not a survivor type and you know it.”
She didn’t argue with that. “The survivalist thing is you, Gus, it’s not me.”
“You just don’t have what it takes, Emma.”
“You’re right,” she said, leaving the bunker.
If surviving means becoming a rat afraid to leave its den, then I’ll be a victim, Gus, and be happier for it.
It was wonderful to be outside again.
The clean-up crews had hauled away the bodies and remains and for the first time in weeks and months the breeze did not smell like it had been blown from a morgue drawer. It was coming from the south and she could smell sweet odors of spring growth, lilacs and honeysuckle. The sun on her pale face was warm, inviting.
She moved down the walk and stopped beneath one of the big oaks out there.
Thank God, thank God, thank G The wind shifted direction and soured right away, bringing with it a vile odor of bacterial decay and corpse gas. It was not old, but recent, very moist and organic like rotten meat shoved in her face.
Emma froze up.
She dropped first one bag, then another.