Zombie Zoology: An Unnatural History Read online

  ZOMBIE ZOOLOGY

  Severed Press

  Contents

  MONKEY HOUSE Tim Curran

  YULE CAT Ted Wenskus

  LUCY Eric Dimbleby

  LOSS OF VECTOR William Wood

  ONE MAN AND HIS DOG Wayne Goodchild

  WHY THE WILD THINGS ARE Carl Barker

  TWO DAYS BEFORE THE END Ryan C Thomas 1

  GIFT HORSE J Gilliam Martin

  THE ROO Anthony Wedd

  DEAD DOG TIRED Anthony Giangregorio

  THE RISING Hayden Williams

  SWAT Bryan Pinkerton

  MONKEY HOUSE

  Tim Curran

  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.

  The sun was behind her.

  Her shadow was cast over the walk as was that of the oak. She could see its twisting limbs and threading branches…and in them, hunched-over shadows like gargoyles.

  Something hit her in the back of the head.

  She heard a high chittering sound.

  She turned and something hit her in the face.

  Something wet and crawling and stinking.

  She clawed it away with her fingers…bloody meat that crawled with bloated white grave maggots. Gagging, she tossed it away, the stink of putrescence putting her down to her knees.

  With a gore-streaked face she stared up into tree.

  She saw a grinning, demonic visage staring down at her. It snapped its teeth at her.

  Emma screamed.

  ***

  Through the gunport slit in the living room wall, Gus watched his wife walk away. She was making a big mistake and he was angry that she did not know it. Angry that a bright woman like that did not realize the fix they were in.

  And after all he had done for her.

  Betrayal.

  He didn’t need the Army.

  He didn’t need Fort Kendrix.

  Everything he needed was here in the shelter where he was master and commander.

  He lit a cigarette. It was stale but he didn’t even notice anymore. He blew smoke out through his nose and scratched at the beard stubble at his chin. Automatically, obsessively, his hands roamed his body making a quick inventory: .45 Smith in the holster—check; K-Bar fighting knife in its sheath—check; extra magazine for the—

  What the hell is she doing?

  Emma had stopped on the walk. She had dropped her bags. She made a gagging sound, digging something from the back of her head that was tangled in her hair.

  Gus grabbed his M-14 sniper rifle and ran to the door.

  He threw the bolts and was outside in seconds.

  Emma was sitting there on her ass as something dr
opped out of the tree not five feet from her.

  The thing saw him, hissed, and charged in his direction.

  Gus just stood there, shocked at what he was seeing.

  A baboon.

  A baboon of all crazy fucked-up things: thick-bodied, compact, covered in a down of shaggy brown fur. Its eyes were shining a tarnished silver like dirty nickels, huge jaws wide open, fangs bared. It left a trail of slime in its wake.

  There were huge ulcers eaten through its skin.

  You could see its bones.

  Zombie.

  When it was ten feet away, Gus automatically shouldered the M-14 and fired just as he’d been taught at Parris Island so many years before. He popped the ape in the left eye socket with a .308 round that blew its skull apart in a spray of gray-pink mucilage and sent its corpse tumbling through the grass. A jelly of worms bubbled from its ruined head.

  “EMMA!” he called out. “EMMA! RUN!”

  Two more baboons dropped from the trees, then a third and a fourth. There had to be a dozen more up in the branches. They were shrieking and growling, absolutely enraged.

  Gus heard a scratching, scrambling sound and turned. Two more were up on the roof. They were leaping from the trees onto the top of the house.

  He dropped one that was five feet from him, pivoted, and knocked another off the roof that had only one arm.

  He could hear Emma screaming.

  The baboons were coming at him from every direction.

  They looked like the remains of test animals that had been slit and bisected, poked and peeled and drained: grave-waste. He saw one lacking legs that swung its torso forward with its arms and others that seemed to be missing sections of flesh as if they’d been biopsied.

  They all had huge holes eaten through them, bones jutting from their maggoty hides, meatflies rising from them in clouds. Baboon faces were skinned to pink meat or gray muscle, some were chewed to the bone by carrion beetles.

  He dropped two more and then there was no room to shoot as they nipped at him, raking his legs with sharp skeletal fingers. He used his rifle like a club, swinging it, bashing in heads and smashing snarling faces to pulp until he was sprayed with rancid gouts of brown and red fluids.

  The baboons circled him, gnashing their teeth.

  He waited, the M-14 encrusted with gore and dripping a foul corpse slime.

  He knew Emma was out there, but he didn’t dare look for her. He couldn’t even hear her now over the wailing and yipping sounds of the baboons.

  Claws laid his knees open as he smashed the butt of the gun into a baboon face that was threaded with a filigree of mildew.

  Then one of them bit into his ankle.

  Another vaulted forward and bit into his left hand.

  Crying out, he dropped the rifle, pulling the Smith .45 with his good hand.

  A big baboon with a reddish-brown pelt and a pronounced white mane charged in at him, scattering the others. It had no eyes and the blind black beetles swarming in the sockets did not count. The flesh was eaten away from its face revealing a cadaverous simian skull, jaws yawned wide to expose gleaming yellow upper and lower canines, each long and sharp enough to lay an artery open.

  But what Gus noticed mostly was that its belly and chest had been completely shaven, a Y-shaped incision running from crotch to shoulders.

  Autopsied. This thing had been autopsied.

  Bleeding and hurting, Gus faced off with it while the others formed a tight and cohesive circle around them.

  “EMMA!” he shouted. “GODDAMMIT, EMMA!”

  The beast kept snapping its teeth at him, making a shrill staccato whooping noise.

  Gus put three bullets into it and all that did was piss it off.

  It charged and so did the others. The baboons hit him from every side and he felt himself go down under a sea of maggoty hides.

  ***

  Emma, of course, saw Gus charge out of the house with his rifle, heard him call to her, but she was otherwise occupied.

  The baboon in the tree above her was amused.

  It was making that weird chittering sound that was chitinous and strident.

  Staring up at it, Emma knew instinctively it was a female as were the others in the higher branches. She knew this just as she knew the males had gone after Gus.

  Wiping slop from her face, she did not dare move.

  The baboon stared at her with glassy, fixed eyes, grinning that toothy clownlike grin that made it look very much like some deranged little pygmy looking for meat to skewer. There was some morbid growth like a grave fungus that consumed most of the left quadrant of if its face and was creeping in on the right. It seemed to be moving.

  Emma heard Gus cry out.

  She felt his voice slide through her heart like a needle.

  He was shooting.

  The baboon in the tree showed its teeth, letting out a piercing reverberating cry that was chilling and deranged and sounded very much like wild hysterical laughter.

  It threw something at her that splatted on the walk. Meat. Greening meat threaded with corpse worms. It made that laughing sound again when it saw or sensed the revulsion coming from Emma. Then it slid its black leathery fingers into a gaping bloodless wound at its belly and pulled out more rotten tissue and threw it at her.

  Emma ducked away.

  The baboon laughed.

  Her heart thumping in her chest, she stared at the horror with its greasy, nappy fur and yellow fangs and carrion eyes. Her terror pleased it, made it grin with an idiotic bestial splendor. And this more than anything not only disgusted her, it offended her.

  It pissed her off.

  It made Emma get to her feet, the ancestral apex predator within rising for battle.

  The baboon in the tree stopped cackling now, it made a threatening almost territorial barking that got all the other females worked up. They all started screeching and baring their fangs, beating and scratching at themselves, pulling out clods of fur and clots of necrotic tissue, throwing it like monkeys throwing shit.

  Emma was pelted with the stuff.

  She heard shooting, fighting, the constant screeching of the baboons.

  “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, seiz
ing 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 literally torn right 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.