“GUS!”
She backed away from the tree, made to turn and go to Gus and a baboon leaped through the air and tackled her, knocking her into the grass where she rolled to a stop, coming up not ten feet from the razorwire enclosure and its perimeter mines.
The baboon that attacked her came forward on all fours.
Its face was a mass of scar tissue and suturing that was bursting open from internal pressure, oyster-gray pus and pink jelly pushing its way through. The skin around its mouth had been surgically incised in an oval patch, leaving its speckled gums and fearsome teeth on display.
Emma knew she was no match physically for the beast, living or undead.
There was only one thing she could do.
As the beast roared and leaped on her, she waited it for it. And when it landed, planning on sinking its fangs in her throat, she kicked out and caught it in the chest, flipping it end over end through the air. It hit the ground on its rump, bounced, and came down inches from the razorwire.
There was a resounding explosion as it triggered a mine.
The creature was vaporized into a rain of blood and meat.
Clots of it fell over Emma and she madly pawed it free, stringy pink meat caught in her hair.
She started to scream.
*
When the baboons hit him from all sides, Gus lost his. 45.
He hit the ground and they converged on him.
He never even had time to pull his knife before dozens of sets of teeth bit into him, tearing out chunks of meat and severing arteries and splintering bone.
He screamed.
He thrashed.
But it was no good.
There were too many ravenous baboons seizing him by then and he was laid open in too many places.
A large male went right for his soft white throat and found it, seizing it and tearing it open. Gus’s scream became a moist gagging sound as those teeth sank into his neck, sank in deep.
The baboon shook him by the throat like a terrier with a rat, blood spraying in every direction, its muzzle stained red right up to the eyes.
The sound of Gus’s vertebrae snapping was loud as a pistol shot and still the beast kept at it, driven mad by the blood and the taste of meat and maybe something more.
When it finally dropped him, Gus’s throat was torn out, nothing but a ragged bloody mass of sheared muscle and ligament in its place, a few fingers of shattered white vertebrae showing through.
The others kept biting into him.
Chewing on him.
Pulling strips of skin free, tearing out quilts of muscle and sinewy tendon. A set of teeth pulped his genitals, two sets of blood-dripping jaws yanked out his bowels and pulled them in opposite directions, fighting and snapping over them as others ripped out organs in meaty masses and hopped off with their prizes.
As Gus lost consciousness, he could feel them pulling him apart and gnawing on his internals.
The male that had torn out his throat, sank its long ensanguined fangs into his skull, piercing it, impaling his brain.
It kept at it, applying pressure, until his skull was crushed and its mouth was filled with gushing blood and tissue.
*
Still pawing rancid bits of baboon from her, Emma crawled off.
She got to her feet, stumbling.
As she got clear of the tree, a male baboon came loping in her direction on all fours. It had a silver-gray mane and trailing beard that was fouled with dried blood and curdled marrow.
The females screeched with excitement.
Emma stared at the dead thing coming at her.
The fur and flesh at its back had been peeled to pink muscle, as had the flesh of its face. Jutting from the surrounding orbits, its eyes were like eggs translucent with fresh blood.
It snarled at her.
Emma tensed.
It attacked.
She aimed kicks at it, trying to keep it off her so she could at least make the door. Her defense worked at first-her boots struck it in the mouth, alongside the head, driving it back. The baboon was enraged, spinning in circles, growling and barking while froths of pink saliva rained from its mouth like vomit.
Emma knew how powerful the creature must be, resurrected or not. If it got hold of her, she’d never escape its iron embrace or those gleaming fangs.
She had to keep it off her as she backed towards Gus and the door.
Several females had dropped from the trees and were yipping with delight. They went down on their bellies and offered their hairless, callused, maggot-infested asses to the male.
Emma kept kicking at the baboon.
But it began to second-guess her, began to anticipate her moves. It ducked away from a flurry of kicks and came right in, seizing her right calf in its bloody jaws and putting her down.
Emma was screaming and fighting, kicking out with her left leg while pain threaded through her right in white-hot waves. The baboon wasn’t just biting her…it was chewing, tearing, rending. Her pantleg was shredded, her calf muscle punctured…as those teeth came down again and again and again.
Screaming, crying, Emma engaged in one last act of defiance.
Instead of trying to kick out, she brought her leg closer to her body, dragging the baboon in with it by its teeth. And by that point it had worked a great flap of meat from her calf and it dangled from the baboon’s jaws like a bloody cutlet.
Her mind erupting with blades of white-hot pain, Emma took hold of the animal by the ears and yanked down with everything she had, snapping its head sideways. The agony of its teeth being ripped so crudely from her leg was enough to make black dots parade before her eyes, but something in her-some primal, instinctive barbarism-fought on.
Acting instinctively, she jammed her thumb into its eye.
She buried it right to the second knuckle and the eye went to a soft mush like a rotten grape.
The baboon went wild.
It whimpered and howled, contorting and thrashing, tossing her onto her back and then jumping up on top of her, growling and snapping its jaws.
An inky fluid dripped from the ruined eye and the stench was like rotting fish.
It held her down and she could feel its blunt, stubby penis pressing against her thigh.
On the ground as she was with the beast hovering above her, she could see beneath its shaggy beard. There was a perfectly symmetrical bald patch circling its throat. She could see the gray flesh beneath and it had been sutured…as if the creature’s head had been removed, then sewn back on.
With a scream she grabbed hold of its shaggy head mainly to keep those teeth from her. The baboon was extremely powerful, but she held on. Beneath the dirty fur, the flesh of its skull was spongy and soft. Emma dug her fingers in and they slid through meat and tissue soft with putrid decay.
The baboon cried out.
It trembled spasmodically.
She dug her fingers in deeper, a black sap running down her arms. Her fingertips scraped along the inside of its skull and she squeezed gray matter to mush in her fists, yanking out clods of brain that spurted between her fingers like oatmeal. Gouts of black blood fell into her face.
The baboon dropped away, whining and hissing, the top of its cranium crushed to a globby slush. It crawled in gyrating circles on the ground, leaving a slime trail of mucus behind it, its entire body contorting madly as if every neuron was misfiring.
Emma pulled herself away, wet and stinking.
The females hopped and shrieked and beat the ground with their skeletal fists. One of them had no eyes. In fact, the sockets had been stitched closed.
What the hell is this about?
Bloody, agonized, bile spewing from her mouth, Emma dragged herself towards the doorway. Blood, oh so much blood everywhere. In the grass. On the concrete. Sprayed in loops up the siding.
She looked for Gus.
But he was gone.
Piecemeal, he had been dragged off.
*
Emma crab-crawled up the steps onto the porch, trying to work the doorknob with blood-greased fingers.