Zombie Pulp

1

Doc told us to kill the electric lights because he didn’t want us running the generators anymore than necessary, so we were sitting around in the shelter by candlelight, drinking and playing cards, listening to the wind howling out in the blackness. That’s when Earl and Sonny came in. They’d been out sweeping the perimeter and they’d found something that turned their faces the color of old cheese, made their eyes swim in their sockets.

“What is it?” I said.

Sonny swallowed maybe three or four times, said, “It’s time. It’s time again.”

For a second there, I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about or maybe I was just pretending that I didn’t. Earl had a sheet of paper in his hand. It had been tacked up to the back door of the shelter like a political flyer. In a scraggly, almost childish scrawl was written:

“What the hell is that? A joke?” Shipman asked.

The rest of us looked at each other, our eyes hooded and blank. It was no joke and we knew it. What would come to pass now would be dark and ugly.

“Who’s this D-person?” Shipman asked.

“Dragna,” Sonny said, but would say no more.

Shipman just didn’t get it. He was one of the newbies, came in that beat-up shitheap Jesus bus out of Scranton with his ragtag bunch of survivors the week before. He seemed like an all right guy. Lonely. Scared. Just like the rest of us. Just glad to have made contact with other human beings. But Murph, of course, started feeding the poor bastard from his private stash of Jim Beam. Some people can handle the sauce and some can’t. The more Shipman drank, the louder he got. He went from this mild-mannered wallflower in a bad suit to a two-fisted drinker looking for a good fight. He started telling dirty jokes, claiming that him and liquor were old friends. Said he didn’t have a drinking problem—he drank, he got drunk, he threw up on himself. No problem. Murph thought that was funny. So funny he decided Shipman was all right, his kind of people. He even stopped calling him “Shitman” and referred to him by the infinitely more chummy “Shippy.”

And now this. Now this.

“This ain’t funny,” Shipman said. “Which one of you fuckheads think this is funny?”

“Settle down,” I told him.

“Fuck you,” he said, just plain as day. A couple hours before the guy had to work up the nerve to ask where the can was and now he was ready to punch my head off my shoulders. His eyes were bulging, pupils glassy and black like those a mad dog. He had bared his teeth and there was a foam of white saliva on his lower lip. “You better just shut the hell up, friend, and tell me what the fuck this is about.”

“Easy,” Murph told him. “What you need is a taste of the Jimmy.”

“The thirteenth is the day after tomorrow,” Maria said, her huge dark eyes mirroring the vast abyss where her soul had once been.

Maria and Shacks looked at me and I looked at Sonny. “You better get Doc,” I said.

Sonny took off down the corridor like he was simply glad to get away. I suppose he was. But Shipman was far from being pacified, Jimmy or no Jimmy. “Who the hell is this Dragna?” he demanded.

“He’s the Devil,” Shacks said.

2

In the air, the tension held. Heavy. Electric.

Shipman kept looking at us in turn, wanting answers but our throats were so dry we could have spit sand. Even Murph wasn’t saying anything. No off-color jokes or pessimistic remarks. No wild, gamy tales about waking up in a cellar in Wichita with a half-dozen flyblown Girl Scouts dry humping him.

Shipman slammed his drink down and spilled it all over himself. “Hell is going on here? Somebody better tell me! Somebody better tell me right now!”

Murph lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. “Every now and again Wormboys demand fresh stuff. We give it to ’em, they leave us alone. That’s all there is to it.”

“Fresh stuff?”

“Yeah,” Shacks said. “That’s what they eat.”

Shipman was shaking his head from side to side. “But they eat people, they goddamn well eat people.”

Murph blew out a cloud of smoke and smiled at him with yellow teeth. “That’s right. We offer up six of ’em. Now it’s just a matter of deciding who stays and who goes.”

Shipman looked horrified. The way, I suppose, we all looked when we first learned about Doc’s rules of survival and what we had to pay Dragna and his army of the living dead so they’d leave us alone.

“Lottery,” Earl said. “We play a lottery. All of us.”

Shacks nodded. “It’s the only fair way.”

I shivered, thinking about the Wormboys out there trolling for meat.

My guts were knotting themselves into figure eights. Just the idea of what would come next made my blood run cold and the sap of my soul run lukewarm and rancid. Lottery. The idea of sacrificing our own to those things out there made me feel less than human, something that should’ve crawled through the slime on its belly.

We were all so wrapped up in ourselves and the possibility of “winning” the lottery, that we weren’t paying attention to Shipman. I should have seen it coming. I was in the Army once… I’d seen guys crack plenty of times towards the end. But I, like the others, had been too busy feeling sorry for myself. So nobody noticed that the blood had ran out of Shipman, left him white as ivory, that the muscles of his face were constricted and corded like a man who was on the verge of a massive coronary. And nobody noticed that mad-dog gleam or how he was pumping his fists until they were red as juicy tomatoes.

“Lottery,” he said under his breath. “Lottery, my ass.”

Then he moved.

And for a guy that was pissed-up and sassy and soft in the middle, he moved damned fast. He jumped up, knee catching the table and spilling drinks and cards and overturning the ashtray. Shacks made a grab for him. So did Maria. I hooked his arm and got a fist to the jaw for my trouble. Murph just started laughing. Earl didn’t even flinch. Shipman bolted from the room, jogged down the corridor and threw the locks on the main door and out he went.

Into the night.

And whatever waited out there.

I went after him. God knows why I did it. I pulled my ass off the floor where he had knocked me, found my feet and sprinted after him without so much as a jack knife in my pocket to defend myself with. As I made the door, I heard Murph laughing out loud. “Two for dinner,” he said.

Outside.

The parking lot was hung with shadows, they flowed and flapped like sheets on a line. The wind was blowing, hot and moist, the stillborn breath of August dog-days. It smelled like it had blown up out of a drainage ditch filled with green, rotting things. I looked this way, then that. Then I caught sight of Shipman. He was making for the Jesus bus he’d stolen from a Baptist school in Scranton. Silly bastard. Drunk, confused, still bitching and moaning under his breath about the lottery. I was younger than him, in better shape. I knew that if I turned on the juice, I could catch him before he made the bus.

That’s when the lights came on.

I was about twenty feet from him and somebody, probably Maria or Earl, threw the breakers and flooded the lot with light. It was like being simultaneously slapped in the face and kicked in the ass. Just that blackness in an unbroken weave, then the light razoring it open. I couldn’t see for a moment. I stumbled, dizzy, went down on one knee. When I got up, the flesh was crawling at the back of my neck because I was smelling something dirty, low, and mean. The stink of walking carrion.

A shadow stepped out of a pocket of blackness hugging the shelter itself.

A girl. A girl of maybe seven or eight in a white burial dress gone gray and ragged. She smiled at me with a flat, inhuman evil. Rats or maybe dogs had chewed the meat away from the left side of her face. There was nothing there now but sculpted gray muscle and ligament shrouding gleaming white bone. The wind blew her hair around in a wild halo. She looked up at me with a single eye that was yellow and glossy like an unfertilized egg. “Hey, mister,” she said in a scraping voice. “You wanna fuck?” Then she lifted her dress, exposing a hairless corpse-white vulva of ghost-flesh that was puckering with maggots.

I think I might have screamed.

Or maybe it was Shipman doing the screaming. The Wormboys and Wormgirls had found him, ringed him like starving dogs. They came from every direction and out there in the parking lot, Shippy looked like a lone swimmer in a moonlit choppy sea surrounded by sharks. He started this way, then that, finally fell to his knees and started praying in a high, whining voice.

The dead.

It wasn’t enough to wander the gutted landscape anymore searching for meat. In the two years since they’d started rising, they’d gotten clever, imaginative, and tribal. Their faces were scarred from ritualistic cutting and carving so they resembled fetish masks. Noses had rotted into hollows or been sliced clean, flesh gouged in half-moons or jagged triangles, tongues slit so they were forked, lips peeled free so gums and teeth jutted obscenely. Many had shaved heads, some peeled right down to the raw bone beneath, and others wore dangling scalp-locks greased with human fat and braided with the tiny bones of children.

Every Wormboy tribe had its own look, you might say.

The little girl was ready to leap at me and I can’t say that I would’ve gotten clear of her. Luckily, Earl stepped out with his sawed-off twelve-gauge pump. “Smile for the camera, honey,” he said.

The girl bared her teeth like a wolf moving in for the kill.

Saliva hung from her shriveled graying lips.

Earl gave her a round that splashed what was left of her face off the skull beneath. Brains, meat, and bloody mucilage splattered against the wall of the shelter and she went down in loose-limbed heap.

“C’mon!” he called to me.

The Wormboys had Shipman and he was howling like an animal being put to death. They weren’t eating him or even chopping him into shanks with their machetes, they were just biting him. One after the other, biting and nipping, sinking in their teeth and making him suffer.

A dead woman stepped out and smiled at me.

At least, I think she was smiling.

Her face was a writhing mass of larval action, worms roiling in her eye sockets. She was naked except for a purse that she carried for some reason, and her skin was throbbing and undulant from what was feeding upon it. She held a hand out to me that was knotty and scabrous, the nails black and thorny like those of a beast. She would have gutted me cleanly with them, gutted me and stuffed herself with my entrails while I was still alive if Earl hadn’t put her down.

“How’s about you and me and baby makes three?” she said in a hollow voice.

The dead often say such nonsensical things, re-spooled, replayed bits of their lives, I suppose. I once had a Wormgirl dressed in the filthy cerements of a Burger King uniform ask me if I wanted cheese on my Whopper right before she tried to take my head off with an axe.

Earl killed the woman, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the shelter. I was shaking. I was nauseous. I was disappointed in myself because I’d frozen up out there. Mostly, I suppose, I was in shock. I stumbled blindly back to the table and Murph giggled as Maria poured bourbon into me and Shacks put a cigarette in my mouth even though I hadn’t smoked in years.

“Nice going, soldier boy,” Murph said.

I ignored him. It was easy. “Thanks,” I said to Earl.

He grunted. “Need you for the lottery, don’t we?”

Then Doc was standing there, smiling thinly down at me and shaking his head with the quiet, patient shame a man feels for a son who has brought disgrace upon him once again. “Now that wasn’t a very good idea, was it, Tommy?” he said.

“I… I tried to stop him. I tried to save him.”

“Fucking moron,” Murph tittered.

“Shut the hell up!” Maria shouted at him. Maria came from Puerto Rico when she was a child and when her Latin temper got boiling, one look from those smoldering dark eyes of hers could peel paint from a door.

“Mr. Shipman was a loose cannon,” Doc said. “He simply couldn’t adapt. I was expecting him to do something like this. But I was expecting better from you, Tommy. You were a soldier. You know better than to go out alone and unarmed at night.”

And he was right: I did.

The Wormboys were active day or night, true, but at night they were just a little deadlier, a little more insidious. They became crafty, wicked, using the shadows as camouflage. I’m not sure if they were technically nocturnal, but they were nasty by daylight and absolute hell after dark. I remember a guy once told me that when they reanimated, most retained a rudimentary intellect while some were unnaturally cunning, but all were driven by predatory instinctual drives. And like any beast of prey, they made the darkness their own.

I sat there wilting under Doc’s gaze, but I wasn’t going to give in. Maybe my tactics weren’t so good, but my heart was in the right place. “I couldn’t let him just… I mean, I couldn’t let those things slaughter him.”

Doc shook his head. “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. You haven’t been with us long enough. It takes time. Sacrifice is simply a way of life here.”

“The lottery,” I said.

“Yes, that’s part of it.”

I had been in the shelter for two months. I had never played the lottery before or marched the “winners” out into the killing fields to be trussed up for sacrifice. The idea of that sickened me.

“You can’t do it, Doc. You can’t hand your own people over to those fucking monsters.”

“I have to.”

I slammed a hand on the table. “It’s sick! It’s cold blooded! You can’t do it! You just can’t do it!”

“It has to be done, Tommy.”

Maria was holding my hand and Shacks was patting my back, making me part of them, I guess. But I didn’t want to be part of… of that. “Goddammit, Doc. We can fight. We have guns. We can fight.”

“Thirty-seven of us against thousands of them?” He shook his head again. “No, it would be a massacre. It would be the Little Big Horn all over again. We must survive by any means necessary. At whatever cost. It is our only reason for existing now.”

Thousands of them. I didn’t doubt that… but how could an offering of six every so many months keep thousands full and happy? I put that to Doc.

“It’s a symbolic offering, Tommy. That’s all. Dragna lets us live as long as we choose who dies. It’s simple as that.”

“Dragna’s a fucking monster,” was all I could say. “And so are you.”

Doc just smiled and left the room, calmly as ever, and I sat there, something running hot inside me. “He’s a fucking animal,” I said, not really meaning it, but meaning it all the same. “How can he do it? How can he?”

“He does what he has to do,” Shacks said.

Murph chuckled. “That’s life in the big city, Tommy. Get used to it. Get used to watching your friends die.”

I just shook my head, trying to clear the stink of that Wormgirl from my mind. “But Doc… he’s so… so cold about it.”

“Do you think so?” Maria said. “Well, he doesn’t ask anything of us he doesn’t ask of himself.”

“Really?” I said, the sarcasm so thick in my voice you could have caulked a window with it.

She nodded. “Yes. Tomorrow it might be you or me, Tommy, but last year, last year before you arrived… it was his wife. She won the lottery.”

“And he marched her out?”

“Damn straight he did,” Shacks said, his eyes shiny and wet. “I was there. I saw it. He marched her out and tied her to the post. And when they came to take her, he pretended he couldn’t hear her screaming.”

3

It was Doc who set up the shelter.

And like scattered metal filings drawn to a magnet, we came from every direction and he took us in like a crazy old lady collecting stray cats. See, Doc was an extremely practical man. He’d worked for the CDC years before the world shit its pants and the dead started rising. He knew sooner or later one of those nasty bugs the CDC field teams were always studying in remote places like Ghana and Zaire was going metastasize and become an infectious plague of biblical proportions.

So he took precautions.

He bought up an abandoned Air Guard weather station in Carbon County, PA. It dated from the Cold War and had a control center made out of reinforced concrete and steel with a bomb shelter below that could hold sixty people. Using his own money and financial support from a few wealthy friends with like minds, he updated the structure, put in dorms and a dining hall, generators, an air filtration system and a water purification plant. He supplied it with freeze-dried foods and military MREs, medical equipment, survival gear, you name it.

And then it happened.

A mutant virus appeared out of nowhere and mimicked the symptomology of pneumonic plague. Spread by a variety of vectors including the wind, the water, insect bites, and human contact, it ravaged the world. Within sixteen weeks, the world population was reduced nearly two-thirds by all estimates and then with the resulting collapse of the ruling political, industrial, and military infrastructure, there was only chaos. People got sick, they died, the world fell apart… and then the most incredible thing happened: the dead came out of their graves.

And they were hungry.

Nobody knew where the virus came from, not really, but there were lots of theories. Most claimed it had more than a little to do with the BIOCOM-13 satellite which had been sampling the upper atmosphere for alien microbes, was cored by a meteorite, and crashed outside Clovis, New Mexico. Clovis was the first city in the world to become a graveyard. But after that, they all went.

As it turned out, a great many people were immune to the virus. And one by one they began showing up in Carbon County. Doc and his boys gathered up as many as they could. Maria came from Pittsburgh and Shacks from Philly; Sonny came from Newark and Murph drifted in from Delaware. Earl had been one of the first and he was still there. Me, I barely escaped Buffalo. And they kept coming: New England, the Midwest, even the deep South. Some died, some were killed, some went by disease, and others were taken by the Wormboys. And still others won the lottery and were culled. But more always came. Always.

There were nearly forty people in the shelter now… what was six to save the lot?

What was six?

Yeah, that Doc was really something.

He gathered his flock, he tended them, fed and fattened them, kept them safe and sound. Then somewhere along the way he made a deal with the Devil and the Devil’s name was Dragna. Nobody seemed to know shit about Dragna other than the fact that he or it had wielded together dozens and dozens of zombie tribes into a single cohesive unit that was about as close to an army as you were going to get this side of the global holocaust. He was to the Wormboys and Wormgirls what Dracula was to bloodsuckers, more or less.

Somehow, someway, Doc had struck a bargain of sorts with this monster.

So every few months, Dragna demanded his payment, his protection money, like a good little extortionist from hell. And as long as Doc and his people played ball, there was safety. But the day we didn’t, Dragna would send his troops in by the thousands.

Yeah, Doc. Good old Doc. Father, therapist, priest, general, saint and prophet to those of us in the shelter. He was essentially good, essentially kind. He took care of everything from keeping his people busy to feeding and clothing them and delivering their babies and even presiding over makeshift weddings now and again. Everyone looked up to him. Everyone loved him. Everyone respected him. They did what he said and obeyed his rules and he kept them alive and somewhat sane.

With the good he did it was easy to forget he also created the lottery.

And in my mind that made him flawed, less than human. He was the farmer and we were the livestock. He raised us like pigs and brought us to slaughter come season.

And because of that, I hated him as much as I loved him.

4

That night—the night before the lottery—I came out of a very thin, nightmare-haunted sleep to the sound of a crash and a blaring car horn. Two minutes later, still dragging on my clothes, my mind fuzzy with some dream of absolute darkness and absolute death, I found Sonny up in the tower watching the action out in the parking lot through the observation port. The tower rose up thirty feet above the lot and it was the only part of the shelter that still had a window—shatter-proof and bullet-proof—but still a window.

“Hell’s going on?” I said.

“See for yourself.”

Sonny had the parking lot lit but I almost wished he hadn’t bothered. Apparently, a few more had decided to make a run for the shelter. This time it looked to be four people in a little minivan. What the circumstances were, I didn’t know, but they must have panicked when they saw all the Wormboys and Wormgirls hanging around the perimeter in drooling wolf packs. That must’ve been what made them drive at the shelter itself. Unfortunately for them and very fortunately for us, Doc with his infinite foresight had had a series of concrete barriers erected around the shelter so no one could ever breach it in such a way.

That minivan slammed right into one of them and it must have been putting out some speed when it did because the front end was smashed-in, the hood crumpled into a V. I could see spiderwebbed sheets of glass and spilled fluids on the pavement. As it was, the minivan looked like a cracked open egg and what had crawled out were four people. A saw a guy with shattered legs crawling towards the shelter, leaving a trail of something dark behind him. A woman was screaming nearby, holding her face in her hands. She was reaching out towards a cluster of the walking dead as if there was mercy in those cold, reptilian brains. One of them, a woman in a pink dress, took her down. Even from the tower I could see the clouds of flies rising from her.

“We have to do something,” I said.

Sonny pulled off his cigarette. “Doc and Earl are at the front door. Any of ’em make it that far they’ll bring ’em in.”

“Yeah, but—”

“No, Tommy. Use your fucking head for once. Wormboys are everywhere. Anybody that goes out there is meat, nothing but meat.”

He was right, of course. I knew he was right but even at that point I simply was not as hard and cold as Sonny and the rest of them. God knows I should have been after some of the awful shit I had seen, but even through it all there was hope and humanity and pity still flowering in me like sweet green shoots rising from the cracked, blackened soil of a graveyard.

I ran downstairs and found Doc and Earl waiting for survivors to make the door, but none had. They just looked at me, said nothing. They knew what I was thinking and Earl had his shotgun up. If I tried to throw the deadbolts and locks he would have killed me without a second thought.

I knew it.

He knew it.

Doc knew it.

I looked out the gunport slit and I could see the action just fine. The Wormboys were coming from every direction, waxy faces like melting goat curds or rippling papier-mache. A hot steam of rot rose from them in a sickening, churning mist. Some of them were walking, but others had crawled from ditches and pockets of shadow and many of them were missing limbs. I saw headless trunks. Severed hands. What looked like a rolling head. A woman whose flesh looked like it had been boiled saw me watching her and turned, shambling over towards the door. Her eyes were slimy rotten eggs bulging from raw red sockets, her face a worm carnival. She thrust her backside at me and lifted the ragged remains of her dress. Something like a gushing stream of rice pissed out from between her legs.

I turned away, barely able to keep my stomach down.

“You don’t need to be here, Tommy,” Doc said. “Why don’t you go back to your room?”

“Those people need help.”

“Yes, they do. And if it’s at all possible, we’ll help them.”

“Mister Bleeding fucking Heart,” Earl said.

I ignored him. Out there the zombies were feeding on the injured, but one guy was still pretty spry. He must have slipped out of the van after the crash but ran off in the wrong direction. Now he was coming back. He came vaulting across the lot. Two Wormboys made a grab for him but they weren’t fast enough. He darted past another and jumped over a couple crawlers.

In my mind I was with him, pumped with excitement at the idea that he would make it. It was like the good old days, watching Earl Campbell charging into the flak, flattening defenders, jumping, spinning, ducking, whirling around, but never, ever losing his consistent forward momentum.

He was no more than twenty feet from the door when three Wormboys got in his way and he broke to the right, tripped over a crawling husk, and went down. They converged on him from every side, literally covering him in their numbers. I heard him scream with a brilliant, piercing cry of absolute defilement.

But it wasn’t him at all.

It was the woman. The Wormboys had her and they were killing her a bit at a time, tearing out handfuls of flesh, biting into her, nibbling and nipping. I saw her face before it sank away in that carrion ocean. The pain, the horror… it had driven her mad. She clawed her eyes out with bloody fingers.

I turned away and got up real close and personal with Doc. “We could have saved that guy. We could have charged out there and dropped some of them, cut him a path to the door.”

“Not without endangering our community,” Doc said.

I glared at him. “You’re a fucking asshole,” I said and then went back to my room, helpless, hopeless, desperate. I was filled with a black concrete weight that was sinking me day by day.

5

The lottery.

Doc gathered us up in the dining hall because it was the only place big enough to hold us all. Everyone was there, of course. All of us except the children. There were fourteen kids in the shelter ranging from teenagers to infants. But thank God Doc left them out of this sordid mess. This was a party for adults and you should have seen them—eyes staring, faces sweating, hands trembling. Some chain-smoking until the air fumed over in a blue haze and others mumbling prayers over and over again until you wanted to kick their teeth out. Jesus. What a scene.

Then Doc showed up, smiling that plastic smile of his that made me bleed inside. “This isn’t anything we enjoy,” he said. “But it’s something we have to do and I think we all know that.”

Nobody agreed or disagreed with that and I couldn’t even look at that prim, proper, fatherly butcher because the sight of him made my skin crawl. Maria and I sat side by side, holding hands. Shacks was with us. Sonny, too. Murph was there… only he was scared white and he couldn’t even muster a pale shiteating grin or a nasty remark.

Doc held out a cigar box. “There are twenty-three slips of paper in here, folded. One for each adult here in the shelter. Six of these papers have an ‘X’ on them and you all know what those mean. Now, one by one—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Doc,” some guy named Corey said. “We know the drill. Just get to it already. I’m about to have fucking kittens here.”

A woman next to him who’d come in with Shipman made a sound that was somewhere between laughter and sobbing, a brittle sort of sound like something had just shattered in her throat.

“Well, then,” Doc said. “Well.”

Earl and two other guys—Jerome Conroy, an ex-cop, and Ape, an ex-biker—stood by the exit with shotguns. Both of them had seen their share of violence before the dead started rising and plenty since. But neither liked the job Doc had given them: security. It was human nature to bolt and run when you were handed a death sentence and they were there to see that no one did.

Doc, smiling like a tentshow preacher, all teeth and gums, walked around with his cigar box. He took out his slip of paper first. Then one by one we all dipped into that Pandora’s Box. The paper was heavy vellum and you couldn’t see through it. Couldn’t know until you unfolded it.

Corey was the first to say, “I’m staying! You hear that? I’m fucking staying!”

He was joined by three others, including Shacks, who could make the same boast. The woman who was sitting by Corey unfolded hers and stood straight up like something hot had just been jabbed up her ass. She held out her paper and there was an X on it. She was trembling so badly she nearly fell over.

She was chosen.

Corey and the others moved away from her like she had something catchy.

Only Doc went to her, put an arm around her, said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Pearson.” She fell limp into his arms.

Then everybody was unfolding their papers and looking at them. Some, like Sonny, jumped up and danced for joy. “Knew it wouldn’t be me. Shit, yes.” Others cried out. One guy fainted dead away. And another guy shook his paper in the air, saying, “Praise the Lord, I have been chosen. Praise the lord.” Then he fell to his knees and began sobbing uncontrollably. It was a nightmare. People dancing. People hugging and kissing, others on the floor, moaning and whimpering. People came and went at the shelter and I did not know all of them that well. But I knew what all of them thought every day: if I can just get through the lottery one more time, I’ll make plans to get out. I won’t flirt with death twice. Yes, that’s what they told themselves because I told myself something very similar. If I can just get through it this one time, then I’ll get out. I won’t do it again. This was my first one. But many of them had played this sick game several times. People like Murph and Earl and Doc himself. And human optimism being as deluding as it is, they all told themselves that this would be their last time, that they would get through it and leave.

But very few of them did.

What took place in that room during the next fifteen minutes was more horrible than anything I had ever witnessed up to that point and I’d seen plenty. For the zombies are monsters, ghouls, predatory things like starving dogs that will use every ounce of instinct, subterfuge, and animal cunning to get the flesh they need to fill their empty bellies. They have an excuse for their savagery. We, however, did not. We were normal, uninfected, rational human beings and yet we were willing to play that perverse game, to sacrifice our own, anything to get a few more weeks of life.

The lottery was the greatest evil I had ever known.

Five sacrifices had been chosen.

One more.

Sighing, I unfolded my paper and as I did so some fatalistic urge within me hoped there would be an X on it so this nightmare would end and I wouldn’t have to live with myself, with the guilt that would come unfettered and sharp-toothed when I knew I had lived at the expense of others. Because it would come for me. There was no doubt of that. Like an unquiet ghost it would visit me in the dead of night, wrap its icy hands around my throat and throttle me awake, sweating and shaking, and there in the darkness I would have to face myself: all the evils I had done coming home to brood in my soul there in the midnight hour.

My slip of paper was blank.

I didn’t jump for joy. I felt… neutral, not happy and not sad, just… nothing. I felt like an empty can, to tell you the truth. A vessel, I guess, that every drop had been poured from. There was nothing left in me.

At that moment, as I tried to get a grip on what I was feeling, Murph rose up from his seat like he had suddenly been inflated. He did not stand up, he rose like a column of hot air. We all turned and looked at him and we all knew, of course. “I got picked,” he said in a flat voice. “You hear me, you assholes? I got picked. Me.”

He fumbled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tearing at the cellophane with clawing, fumbling, apelike fingers. He dropped two cigarettes, then a third, got the fourth between his lips and lit it. His face was oval like a moon, speckled in sweat, his eyes darting wildly in their sockets. He started laughing and he couldn’t seem to stop. Smoke drifted from his mouth and nostrils in a halo that enveloped his perspiring, bright red face and made him look like a cartoon devil.

“AHH-HA-HA-HA,” he went at the top of his voice. “AH-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAH!”

“Murph,” Doc said, coming over to him, wanting to smother him in empathy and goodwill, give him the speech about sacrificing for the good of all. He even reached out his arms right before Murph—not laughing now, his face hooked in a snarl of animal hate—bunched his fist into a ball and gave old Doc a shot right in the belly that folded him up to the floor.

Doc’s goons, Sonny and Earl and Conroy and that monkey-grinning slab of shit Ape, charged in and beat Murph to the ground and he took it. He did not even try to fend off the blows that came for him. He accepted them like they were his inheritance. He lay there on the floor, sobbing and trembling, curled up in the fetal position. The goons had to drag him out the door and by then nobody was saying a goddamn thing. You should have seen the self-satisfied, greedy fuck-you-I got-mine looks in their eyes like fat-bellied rats that had found another crumb to gnaw on that would keep them safe one more day.

This is what it had come to.

The germ had taken the good people and many of them were wandering around outside the shelter looking for food. What remained behind were the people in that room—writhing human worms squirming in the smelly dungball of the world.

They made me sick.

And the sad part was, I was one of them.

6

Doc’s sacrifices—his selections of juicy pink meat for the Wormboys—were set to be marched out the next night. They were separated from the general population… put in isolation, as Doc called it. Why? I don’t know. Did they pose a threat to us? Did we pose a threat to them? Or was Doc just afraid that if we had to look on them and see what was in their eyes, that depthless pain and desperation, that we might start acting like human beings again? That we might feel some intrusive, obstructive things like pity and remorse and remember that culture, true culture, was built upon morality, ethics, and compassion?

In order for civilization to function, you see, people must act civilized.

Doc was nothing if not a student of human psychology by that point. He was probably worried that the whole cloth of his little disenfranchised community might start to unravel thread by thread once we stopped worrying about our own skins and realized exactly what we were doing to those poor people.

I had it out with him as he knew I would, being the bleeding heart goody two-shoes that I am. Basically, I argued that if we were condemning those people to a horrible death, the least we could do is let them be human beings with all that entails for the last day or so of their lives.

“Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” he said, as if he were addressing a particularly stupid child. “Do you have any idea the trouble that would cause?”

“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

He smiled thinly at that: paternal, patient, a just and loving god. “Tommy, these people need to face this together. I feel as you do for them, but misguided pity at this point will only make it harder on them and us. Nobody forced them to play the lottery. They did it of their own free will.”

“They did it out of fear,” I said. “Fear that you’d throw them out to the living dead if they didn’t.”

“We have to have rules or we have no society.”

“This isn’t a society,” I said, “it’s a fucking zoo.”

Doc just smiled patiently at me. “No, it’s a community, Tommy. We survive by working towards a common goal and thinking as one. When we lose that, it’s all over. Now… this isn’t a prison or a cult. If you’re unhappy, feel free to leave. We’ll give you a rifle, food, you can even take one of the vehicles out there.” Then he leaned in close so I could see that beyond the fatherly warmth in his eyes there was something fierce and steel-gray as a gathering storm. “But if you walk out of here, Tommy, don’t ever think you can come back. You won’t be welcome.”

I just sat there, filled with too many emotions.

“Well?”

I stayed.

7

It was about eight that night when I heard a high trebly scream cut through the compound. I was in bed with Maria and I jumped up and nearly threw her to the floor. All I could hear was that pitiful cry and then I was pulling on my pants and shirt and boots and stumbling down the corridor, my heart pounding in my throat.

I heard the scream again and then I saw Earl stumbling in my direction, near the main entrance, and Ape was backing away from him like he had the plague.

Earl let loose with another shriek of pitiful wailing and I saw he was clasping his stomach and that his hands were red and glistening. “Help me… I’m cut… oh god… I’m fucking cut…”

He went down to his knees, moaning and sobbing, the entire front of his shirt like a blossom of blood. By then, dozens of feet were running in our direction, people shouting out to know what was happening, if the Wormboys had breeched the shelter.

It was about then that Murph came vaulting towards us, loping out of the shadows like a big monkey. His face was huge and shiny like a new moon, his teeth gleaming ice. He had a knife in his hand and there was blood right up to his elbow.

Ape watched him run by.

He had a shotgun in his hands, but he’d apparently forgotten how to use it as Murph threw the locks on the door and pulled it open, frantic and enraged and filled with the need to flee like an animal fresh from a cage. “FREEDOM!” he cried into the darkness out there. “FREEDOM! AH-HA-HA-HA-HA! FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST!”

He dashed out into the night, fading into the shadows while we all stood around gape-jawed and wide-eyed with our thumbs most surely shoved up our asses. I don’t know how far he got, but I heard a grunting sound out there and something splatter over the pavement and then the hysterical, screeching of the undead as they began to feed with sucking and chewing sounds.

“CLOSE THAT DOOR!” Doc cried out, stumbling up the corridor. “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD—”

You would have thought it would be our first reaction, but it wasn’t. We were still wired in place with shock and bewilderment and surprise. I was one of the first to even attempt it and as I moved towards that rectangle of darkness and those positively hideous sounds of slobbering mouths beyond, I caught sight of Maria’s face. It was twitching with horror.

I heard a sound like the buzzing of malarial larvae and felt a dank envelope of rot come blowing in from outside. When I turned, she was standing there; one of the Wormgirls was in the doorway bringing the cool, putrescent stink of the night in with her.

Somebody screamed.

Earl made a gurgling sound as his mouth filled with blood.

Just about everyone made a quick and hasty retreat but Maria, myself, Doc and Ape. And Earl, of course, because he wasn’t going anywhere that didn’t feature harps and pearly gates.

The Wormgirl took two lumbering steps in my direction and her feet made slow, oozing, squishing noises like sponges saturated with syrup. She was a large woman, distended with gas to the point that it looked like she was nine months along. Her face was crawling green pulp and there were so many flies on her you could see very little else beyond one glistening red suckered hole for an eye. I think what we all saw—and wished to God we hadn’t—was that her genitals were swollen blue with decay, the labia puffed out and drooping like the udders of a cow. She reached out a hand towards me. It wasn’t a violent seizing motion like most of them would do… it was almost gentle and caressing and maybe I might even have accepted it as such if her hand wasn’t a writhing larval mass, massive nodules and blisters popping with yellow gas.

I fell away from her and Maria pulled me back.

There was a moist smacking sound and a hole opened in her face that must have been a mouth, strings of tissue webbing the lips together. Her tongue was a bloated flap of maggots. When she spoke it sounded like her mouth was full of warm gruel. But as bad as that was, what she said was somehow worse: “Going… to the chapel… and I’m… going to get… marrrieeeeed.” And that barely even left her mouth in her slopping, regurgitive voice when Ape opened up on her with his twelve-gauge pump, firing not only out of fear but pure, unreasoning disgust.

He blew holes in her big enough to pass your arm through. Flesh that had the consistency of gelatin blew off her, revealing rungs of rib, a pelvic wing, a ladder of spinal vertebrae. He kept pumping and shooting and she made a sort of globby, mewling sound as she came apart in a cyclone of meat and black blood, gray ooze and suppurating tissue like rice pudding, leaking piss and shit and yolky egg-like masses of tangled red graveworms. Before she went down into a seething mass of carrion and plumes of corpse-gas, something fell from between her legs and splashed to the floor.

I saw it.

We all did.

A rubbery doll-like form… a cross between a human infant and a bloated white coffin-worm. It squirmed free of the slime and ichor. It looked up at me with a face like a glistening grub, reaching out with yellow-green gelid fingers.

That’s what I saw right before Ape blew it in half and then in thirds and then I could not be certain I wasn’t looking at a colony of undulant maggots.

The woman hit the floor in a splattering of meat and fluid and a flyblown, acrid stink that nearly reamed my nose out.

But we were hardly done.

The above nightmare probably only lasted a minute or two, but the entire time the door was open to the night and what waited out there. They were crowded outside the door by then: graying, gibbering ghost faces—dozens of them—that looked less like dead humans than the carven ritualistic masks of Chinese festival demons. Another sect of the undead with their own look: I saw bald, mottled heads, viscid yellow-silver eyes sitting in carved, up-tilted pits, noses fallen into skullish hollows, faces elaborately cut and scarified into braided, convoluting patterns, the corners of mouths slit up to cheekbones… all of it creating the gruesome effect of grinning death fetishes.

These were Wormgirl’s boyfriends, her suitors and lovers, maybe.

Then Ape kicked the door shut and without even thinking, I was throwing locks and muttering nonsensical prayers under my breath.

Then we stood around in the remains of Wormgirl and her progeny, seeped to the skin in a noisome membrane of rot. We had averted disaster… but just barely.

8

Once we had shoveled out the remains of our visitor and incinerated them, scrubbed down the entry with caustic antiseptics, and disposed of Earl’s corpse, we were faced with a new problem. Murph had been number six in the lottery and that meant we had to play again. We had to go through that insanity again scarcely a day later. Usually, there was a month and sometimes three, I was told, but here we were again, gearing up to play Doc’s sadistic little game and learn all about the creepy-crawly things that lived inside each other’s heads.

There was nothing quite like the lottery to bring them slithering out.

Maria and Shacks were probably the only two that were on my side, ready to mount an armed insurrection at my say so. But I wasn’t saying so. What I didn’t want here was some violent purge that would not only destroy Doc’s half-assed utopian society but leave a trail of bodies. These people had to simply refuse to play. I was pretty sure that Ape and Sonny and Conroy, Doc’s would-be goons, would stand with us if it came to that. They were not evil men any more than the rest of us. They were scared, is all. They were following Doc because Doc had a plan and they had spent their lives as good little soldiers doing what they were told. None of them were particularly well-practiced in the smarts department.

But like I said, I didn’t want bloodshed.

And if I swung them my way… what then? I had no plan other than a half-baked possibly suicidal idea of us loading up in the trucks and buses outside and making a run up for Canada. I had a feeling the Wormboys and Wormgirls and all the wriggling, drooling Wormkids wouldn’t do real well in sub-zero temperatures when their limbs started locking up.

I was your basic anarchist in that I wanted to destroy the government but once everything lay in ruin I had no idea what to do next.

So lacking a cohesive plan we went about business as usual.

We played the lottery.

9

Again, the same scene: a group of shifty-eyed, borderline neurotic people packed into the dining hall, whispering, praying, chain-smoking, or just staring into space with a steely silence that spoke volumes. You could smell the stale sweat, the feverish anxiety, a fear that was bright and hot coming off every one of them and I had to wonder if that’s what it smelled like in those packed cattle cars bound for places like Treblinka and Sobibor during World War II. There was very little talking. Now and then a peal of almost hysterical laughter that was sharp as a pin would break out amongst the condemned.

Because we were condemned, you know.

Each and every one of us who stayed and played that awful fucking game were most definitely condemned. It was only a matter of when sentence would be passed.

Before we filed in there, Shacks pulled me aside and said, “I keep thinking about the things you’re saying, Tommy… I mean, really thinking about them. Maybe I never did before. Maybe I never wanted to. But… but to be tied up out there, alive, while those things feed on you… Jesus.”

And that’s exactly what needed to happen: every one these goddamn scared rabbits in Doc’s personal warren needed to do some thinking. Some real thinking. They just couldn’t go on like this, hiding behind a crumbling wall of denial that it would never happen to them while their odds dwindled and dwindled.

I sat by Maria and stared at Doc. “Well, let’s get going, Doc. Let’s find out whose ass is raw meat.”

“Tommy—”

“Why don’t you shut up?” Sonny said.

“You think they start with your throat or your balls?” I asked him. “Which do they bite into first?”

Ape glared at me with full menace and I smiled at him. “You better cold-cock me, asshole, because I won’t shut up. But don’t damage me… Dragna likes his cold cuts fresh and chewy.”

An elderly woman named Peggy began to sob and her husband made a low wailing sound that put chills up everyone’s spine: it was the sound of bitter, broken finality, of life accepting death and it was eerie.

“Please everyone,” Doc said. He cast me a look that tried unbelievably hard to be tolerant and sage, but it was wearing thin and Doc was getting very fucking sick of me and my mouth. I think as far as he was concerned, I was guilty of treason and sedition. He was probably hoping that I’d draw the X and he’d be rid of me.

The cigar box made the rounds.

People either tore them open with a mad, suicidal glee or held them out in trembling fingers like they were poisonous spiders.

“Hallelujah!” Sonny cried out in the giddy voice of a nine year old on Christmas morning, born again on the spot. “It’s not me! It’s not me!”

“Me either!”

“My skin is saved! Ha! I’m staying!”

I can’t say that they were all as piggish, crude, and insensitive. Many just took the verdict quietly and calmly with a modicum of self-respect. But others jumped for joy, pigs wallowing in the full glory of their filth.

One by one by one, people held out empty pieces of paper. There were only two that had not had been checked and those belonged to Maria and I. The knowledge of that nearly suffocated me. I felt sweat break open on my face, the neurons of my brain ready to overload and burn out.

All eyes were on us… there was pity in them and guilt. But in some there was a twisted, vicious euphoria. It wasn’t them so now it was a game to see who went on the spit, high drama and nail-biting suspense.

Maria and I looked at each other and the others pressed in, all of them now, eyes wide and shining, licking their lips, some of them nearly drooling. They were eager for it, I tell you. Hungry for it. Like crazed villagers filled with manic glee at the idea of burning one of their own as a witch. I saw the innate brutality and bestiality of the human race at that moment.

And I hated.

God, how I hated.

I swore to myself then and there that I would kill each and everyone of them if I got the chance. I prayed it would be me. I really did. But even before I opened my slip I knew it would be blank. And it was. Maria opened hers, smiled thinly, held up her slip with the X on it. “It’s me,” she said quite calmly. “I’m the one. I’m chosen.”

Everyone sighed… that unbroken circuit of tension died.

They were all safe and the fun was over.

But, without knowing it, they had just signed their own death warrants.

10

Doc decided to soften the rules.

Maybe after the Murph thing he saw that he had to and I guess I looked on him a little more compassionately because he did so. He did not cull Maria off. He did not lock her in a cell or put her into isolation. He let her and the other five have twenty-four hours in which to come to terms with themselves and their maker. Nobody guarded the doors during that time. If you were chosen and you decided to run, take your chances with the hordes of Wormboys, nobody would stop you. Dragna would have his six either way. But the most amazing and frightening thing of all was how many didn’t. How many just accepted it and walked willingly out into the killing fields.

I guess that says something about the human condition I don’t even want to contemplate.

Later, I was alone with Maria in her room. I don’t think she was ever lovelier than that night… her long black hair, her big dark eyes, her smooth olive skin. I told her we would run together. We would fight our way out and make a life for ourselves somewhere, somehow.

But she simply shook her head. “No, Tommy. What is done is done.”

I wanted to slap her, to beat her unconscious and steal away with her while there was still time. But mostly I wanted to hold her and never let go. The tears came. I hadn’t cried in a long time, but I did then.

Maria looked at me and owned me with her eyes. “You can do one thing for me, Tommy,” she said, as strong and persevering as only those of Latin blood can possibly be.

“Anything,” I said, still trying hard not to sob and failing miserably.

She touched my cheek, tracing the track of a tear from my eye to the corner of my lips with one long finger. “You can spend the night with me. You can make me feel like a real woman one last time, like a human being.”

She fell into my arms and I melted into her as quick.

11

The next morning I found Doc in his little office. He looked surprised to see me. He knew I had something to say and he kept quiet, waited until I worked it out and laid it at his feet.

“I want to be part of it,” I said.

“Part of what, Tommy?”

“You know. The lottery.”

“You were.”

I shook my head. “You don’t understand. I want to go with Sonny and Conroy and Ape when they march them out tonight. I want to be part of that.”

“Tommy—”

“No, listen, Doc. Maria is my friend. I love her. I think she loves me. I don’t want her going out there alone without a friend. She needs me to be there. To… to see her off. She needs it. So do I. I don’t think I can ever be part of this unless you let me.”

He sighed. “Tommy, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Before he spent twenty minutes trying to steer me around to his way of thinking, I said, “I know I’ve been a pain in the ass, Doc. I know I’ve been nothing but trouble… but this isn’t easy. You gotta understand how hard all this is for me. For all of us. Just let me do this. This is something I need.”

Doc just stared at me for a time like he was trying to read what was in my mind, but I had it locked up tight as a vault. He was not getting in there. I emoted sincerity mixed with pain and confusion, grief and loss. But certainly nothing rebellious.

Doc started to shake his head, then he just sighed. “Are you sure, Tommy? Are you sure this is what you want?”

I nodded. “More than anything.”

Poor Doc. He was such a fucking fool. Always in charge. Always having to deal with it all. I almost felt sorry for him at that moment. “Okay, Tommy. If it’s what you want. Go ahead.”

“Thanks, Doc. This means a lot to me.”

He smiled and patted my hand like a favored uncle and I left his office. In the corridor I started grinning. None of them knew it, but I was about to bring hell down on each and every one of them.

12

We marched the six out exactly one hour after dark that night.

Sonny, Conroy, Ape, and me. We were all armed with pump shotguns and .9mm sidearms. Ape had an Army-issue flamethrower strapped to his back that he had looted from an armory. We were ready to defend ourselves if need be, but it wouldn’t come to that. The lottery didn’t work that way. We were the meat-bringers, so to speak, and you don’t kill the steward that sets your table.

Ape and Sonny led the way out to the killing fields, Conroy and me in the back, the chosen ones sandwiched in-between. Maria was there, of course. Mrs. Pearson, a young woman named Sylvia whose husband was in the shelter. Three men—Johnson, Hill, and Keeson. They all had the same dead-eyed look of manic desperation in their eyes and to look into them was to know the depths of hell and how hot it burned.

I wasn’t naïve.

I knew that Doc did not trust me anymore than I really trusted him or any of the others. That’s why Conroy was stationed behind me. If I caused trouble, I wouldn’t be coming back.

The killing fields are an easy city block out past the shelter and the parking lot. Like the name implies, just a field. Nothing but grass and a number of wooden poles speared into the ground. I’m not sure what their use was back in the good old days of the weather station, but now they had been put to an extremely dark purpose. As we walked into the grass, a ghost of moon began to rise. And as it did, there came a rumbling, a pounding, a rhythmic hammering from somewhere out in the hills that surrounded us. It was a jarring, discordant sound that echoed around inside your skull. It was like those voodoo drums in old movies, but much more primitive.

“Hell’s that?” I said.

“Wormboys,” Sonny said. “Tonight’s the night and they know it. They’re getting excited. They’re celebrating and beating their drums.”

They weren’t drums, of course. The Wormboys were pounding on garbage cans and twenty-five gallon drums, crates and barrels, anything handy. Just the sound of it made my guts crawl up the back of my throat.

“Doesn’t it ever stop?” I said.

“Sure… later,” he told me. “Keep walking.”

Ten minutes later, we were at the killing fields. The shadows had grown long and we had to use our flashlights to do what had to be done. The poles sat atop a low hill, splintered and cracked, leaning this way and that. There were eight of them, but we only needed the six. I couldn’t get the image out of my head that this was like some kind of pagan sacrificial altar or sacred Druidic grove for secret offerings to primordial, hungry gods. Maybe that’s what it was.

When we got the chosen up there, Mrs. Pearson fell to the ground and began crying and wailing, begging for her life. Anything, anything, she said. She would give us anything if we would only spare her. Sonny tried to explain to her that it wasn’t us, but them, the Wormboys. I’ve never seen anything so pathetic, so pitiful in my life, as that poor woman on her hands and knees in the pale moonlight. I was already angry, but this cinched it.

“Chain ’em up,” Conroy said.

I chained up Johnson like a good little Nazi and that seemed to relax Conroy a bit. The others, at this final moment, began to fight and Ape and Sonny and Conroy had their hands full trying to chain them up. I led Maria over to the farthest pole while the others fought and cried out.

“Get her chained!” Conroy called to me over his shoulder. “Fuck you waiting for?”

Maria looked at me with such serenity it squeezed tears from my eyes. She did not fight. She waited for me, the guy who loved her, to murder her. Because that’s what I was doing and nobody could tell me different. Oh, she had talked herself into some half-assed Christian martyrdom like some fool saint dying for the good of all. But what she failed to realize is that her god had died with civilization.

“Chain’s broke,” I said.

“Dammit,” Ape said.

Maria looked at me, shook her head, but I lashed out and shoved her to the ground. “You’re not going anywhere,” I told her like I meant it. Sonny came over, having finally gotten Keeson secured. All I could hear were those makeshift drums pounding in the distance and the rattling of those chains like something from a medieval dungeon. Conroy and Ape were still having a hell of a time with Sylvia and Hill who fought with everything they had and Mrs. Pearson who’d gone limp as a rag.

I heard Sonny’s boots crunching through the summer straw grass. The night had come and it seemed impossibly clean and cool, the moon brooding above ghostly white like the eye of a corpse, frosting everything in wan phosphorescence. I heard crickets chirping, nightbirds screeching in the sky. It was a surreal scene. My throat was dry as wood shavings, my eyes wide, an electric sort of alertness thrumming in my veins. I felt something rise in me, something dark and ancient and unbelievably certain of itself. It filled my brain with reaching shadows, eclipsed things like reason and morality.

“What’s the problem?” Sonny wanted to know.

“Right here,” I said and brought my .9mm up and stuck it right in his face. His eyes rolled in their sockets, stark and mad. I squeezed the trigger and popped three rounds right into him. He jerked back like he had been kicked and landed in the grass, blood that was almost black bubbling from the ruin of his face.

“Tommy!” Maria shouted and I knocked her clear.

Conroy brought up his shotgun and I fell to the ground and popped off a couple wild rounds that weren’t so wild because one of them shattered his left kneecap and he folded up like a lawn chair, dropping his shotgun and screaming in pain. Ape brought up his flamethrower, but maybe seeing how close I was to Sonny, he didn’t use it. He was a big man, but extremely fast and extremely lethal. He had a bead on me, it seemed, before I could even aim in his direction. He yelled at me and would have torched me, but Sylvia rushed him, hit him like a train. She couldn’t have been more than 110 pounds, but she hit him hard. Hard enough to throw him off balance. He squeezed the trigger and a gout of flame lit up the field.

He missed.

I didn’t.

I cored him twice in the belly and when he went down, Sylvia and Hill and Mrs. Pearson went at him like animals. As pumped and blood-maddened as I was, it even made me take a step back. Gut-shot and pissing blood into the grass and in considerable agony, Ape couldn’t fight back and they rushed in, kicking and kicking him. Maria cried out for them to stop but they did not stop. There was only the grunting, growling sounds they made and the sound of their boots thudding into him.

When they backed away, I went over and stripped the flamethrower from him. He was unconscious, probably brain-damaged from the way they’d been booting his head around.

That’s when Maria screamed.

The dead had arrived.

They came rushing out of the shadows, skeletal things like ghastly marionettes with carved faces, rotting faces, faces hanging off the bone like rags, hair matted and teeth sharp in the moonlight. They screeched and squealed and howled like mad dogs as they came gliding forward, saliva hanging from their puckered mouths in ribbons. They came on their feet, on their hands and knees, creeping and crawling and shambling en masse like insects on the march.

They took Maria.

I saw it happen. One minute she was rushing to my side and the next she went down, dropped like a tree, and there were a dozen on her feeding, chewing and tearing, burying their teeth in her throat, her belly, between her legs. I killed three with my shotgun, but there were too many. As I ran frantically through grass glistening with gore, I could hear them chewing on entrails and sucking marrow from bones. Conroy let out one long and pitiful wail before a woman jumped on him and tore his tongue out by the roots with her teeth.

Then I was running dead out, stumbling, trying to get away… but every direction I started in the dead were coming, massing in ranks, swarming through the grass like locusts. I remembered when we’d gotten the note from Dragna, how I suggested we fight and Doc said it would be a massacre. Oh, how right he’d been. You can’t possibly imagine what thousands of zombies look like until they’re pressing in on you and your stomach pulls up into your chest, already feeling the blackened teeth that will bite into it.

Good God.

In the moonlight… out across the fields and hills… it looked like an outdoor festival in Hell… as far as I could see, nothing but Wormboys and Wormgirls and Wormkids. This was the tide of the undead that Dragna kept at bay via six sacrifices.

They moved in for the kill slowly because they had all the time in the world and knew it. They carried machetes and pipes, axes and bones and hammers and knives. Their faces were carved fright masks like the Wormboys the night before, but more elaborately decorated. They had pounded nails into their skulls in intricate patterns, replaced their fingernails with shards of glass, their teeth with surgical needles, slid shiny silver pins through their lips and braided fine chains and filigrees of copper electrical wire through them. Moonlight found all that metal and glass, made it blaze with a cold reflective fire.

I fired every round in my shotgun and roasted dozens with the flamethrower, but still they kept coming. Sylvia was at my side shooting, as was Hill… at least until they took him down. I saw what they did to him in the glow cast from burning corpses. He screamed and then as I turned, a scarlet mist of blood broke against my face and I had to blink it away. Six or seven Wormboys and one solitary Wormkid were on him, biting into him, killing him slowly and making it last and milking every last drop of agony from the poor guy. Sylvia and I shot through them, but it did little good by that point there were so many.

Hill looked like he had been fed into a wood chipper.

The zombies went after him in a frantic, starving feeding frenzy like piranhas in a meat tank, reducing him to a grisly gore storm: Gouts of blood fountaining in the air as arteries were laid open, bones sucked dry like candy straws and mashed to a fine meal, tissue and gut and organ reduced to a fragmented flying spew of human debris. He was opened, emptied, gnawed down to his basal anatomy then bisected, trisected, halved and quartered and ultimately ground down to a great, globby, wet stain on the earth as the Wormboys and Wormgirls and hollow-cheeked Wormkid waifs fought over the scraps, the stronger ones engaging in darkly comic tugs-of-war with the cherry-red hoses of his entrails.

I burned them.

I burned them all down.

I saw what they did to Hill and I fucking torched them. About thirty of them, I’m figuring. I lit them up like Fourth of July sparklers and Guy Fawkes dummies and true to the latter, they stumbled about blazing like hay-stuffed scarecrows, burning pieces and sections falling off them. One by one, they hit the yellow, straw-arid grass and lit it up and before long that whole goddamn summer-dry field was burning. Dozens of them were caught out in it as the flames came at them from every direction, encircling them, then claiming them and roasting them down to blackened, twitching, crumbling things.

But by then we were on the run, Sylvia and I.

My empty shotgun had been used to split the skull of an inquisitive Wormboy. Sylvia had a few rounds left in her .9mm. Mine was gone. We had fire… we had the will to survive… we had hot terror leaping in our bellies… but that’s all we had. The dead kept coming like we were some wondrous new tourist attraction they had heard of and they just had to get a peek… or a stray nibble.

I cooked about a dozen more of them, trying to cut us a path to the front door but it was no go. Maybe the walking dead will never understand quantum physics or write a truly great sonnet, but they are not entirely stupid. They knew we’d be making for that door and there had to be hundreds crowded in the parking lot waiting for us.

It was hopeless.

Taking Sylvia by the hand, we circled around back, clinging to the shadows thrown by the outbuildings, the generating station, and the water tanks. The action was lighter back there. We found a shadowy crevice between a couple tanks and we waited.

“There’s too many of them,” Sylvia whispered in my ear. “We can’t make it.”

“You got a better idea?”

But she didn’t.

I had this crazy idea that if we could wait until daylight, we might have a chance. The Wormboys were more sluggish in direct sunlight.

That was my plan, anyway.

13

I don’t know if they could see in the dark or just smell prey, but about five of them showed within minutes and they knew right where we were like they were being guided by some unseen intelligence. I had no choice but to toast them. And in the light of those shambling human corpse-fat candles, I saw there were at least a dozen others closing the gap. I saw a face that was infested with crawling red beetles. They skittered out of holes and tunnels in the cheeks and forehead, nipping and chewing, carrying bits of tissue back into their nests in the skull like cartoon ants stealing away with picnic goodies.

More faces came into the field of light.

Many of them were clustered with feeding insects, but many others had no eyes. They’d been sewn shut and these ones were hunting by sound alone. Sylvia pressed her .9mm into my hand without me asking for it. It was so greasy from her sweaty palm that I nearly dropped it.

The lead Wormboy—I don’t know what else to call him—was this massive naked man who’d apparently lost his own skin at some point because he was wearing what at first looked like a rippling pale poncho but soon revealed itself to be a patchwork of human skins sewed into a single garment and then tacked to the muscle and tissue beneath. It fluttered in the wind. I saw a section that was tattooed joined to another with a single flaccid breast which itself was stitched to another with a puckering navel. His face was a creeping mass of fungal rot, green and dripping, moving with slow, greasy undulations over the jutting skull beneath.

I shot him point blank in the face and then put another through the side of his head and he crashed drunkenly to the ground, his hastily-sewn garment/pelt/skin bursting open. The others fell on him right away, stripping him like carrion birds. He was torn open, his wormy guts ripped free, rib bones snapped off and gnawed, skull crushed and the gray slime within sucked up by anxious mouths.

Then I saw something that turned even my stomach.

By that point, I assumed it impossible to be sickened.

But I was wrong. The zombies that were busy feeding on him suddenly reared away, stumbling, crawling, tearing at their throats and making hissing/gobbling sounds and then I watched as they began to regurgitate what they had just eaten in clotty globs of worms, inky fluid, and rancid meat.

Maybe there was something after all they couldn’t abide.

Sylvia and I ran. I don’t know where we thought we were going, but we were determined to get there. Then something smashed into us… a couple big Wormboys and I heard Sylvia scream as she was pulled away into the night. A Wormgirl came at me and I forgot the gun tucked in my pants and went at her with absolute rage. I don’t think she was prepared for it. I launched myself at her, breaking her face open with my fists, then clawing her skull clean of flesh until she fell to her knees and I cleaved her head open with one good punt.

I was alone.

But they were coming for me.

ill

14

I ran for the parking lot, thinking that if I couldn’t make the front door there always the vehicles parked just off the tarmac. If worse came to worse, I’d find one with keys in it and take off into the night, circle around until dawn. But to my surprise, the parking lot was nearly deserted. I used up the last of the fuel in the flamethrower to toast a few stragglers and then I was beating my fists against the flaking green steel door, screaming for help.

Doc opened the door for me and said, “What in God’s name have you done?”

I whipped out Sylvia’s .9mm and put the last round through his left eye socket. Then I threw him outside to the wolves. And as I did so, I saw thousands of the dead massing for a concerted attack.

I slammed the door, locked it, then the siege began.

The shelter was not intended to withstand the barrage it took.

The doors did not come off their hinges, they blew off them. The children were all locked down in the bomb shelter beneath, but everyone else was on the main floor. There was no time to set up any defenses. There was no time for anything.

The dead rushed in.

Wormboys and Wormgirls came in with axes and machetes and knives and cleavers and sharpened broomsticks. They brandished decapitated heads on poles, chewed and worried things spattered with old blood. Some were naked, others dressed in shrouds and rags and shapeless ponchos that looked to be sewn together out of tanned human hides. Naked bodies were painted with arcane symbols. Some were bald, others without scalps, still others had their hair greased into mohawks and scalp locks with corpse fat. They were adorned in necklaces of human scalps and loops of dried entrails. Some wore death masks. Most had the carved, slit, and beaded faces of warriors. A few had gotten truly creative and inserted needles into their faces, spikes, shards of broken glass. They had removed hands and replaced them with blades and cleavers.

They didn’t waste any time.

They mowed down the survivors. The air was cacophonous with shrieking and screaming, people begging for mercy, praying to gods that would not listen… and the gnawing, tearing, and grinding sounds of the living dead as they fed. Blood sprayed the walls, pooled on the floor. Limbs were broken, chewed, tossed aside. People were disemboweled while they were still alive. Sylvia’s husband was eviscerated with a butcher knife and when he screamed, flopping on the floor, his own entrails were stuffed down his throat.

It was a slaughterhouse.

They must have got poor old Shacks, too, but I never saw it.

I fired every round from every gun I could find. I fought and killed and maimed, but it was hopeless. Entirely hopeless. The dining hall lived up to its name because that’s where everyone was ritually devoured. Everything was red and dripping, feeding sounds echoing out, bodies quartered and skinned and peeled and then quartered again.

I should have felt an awful, eating guilt knowing that I had brought it all into being, that I was the stillborn breath of life that animated the entire nightmare. But I felt no guilt. Not then. Death was coming from every direction, empty-bellied, gape-toothed, diabolical and gluttonous… higher realms of self-loathing were denied me. There was only survival or, in the case of those in the shelter, lack of it.

I fought my way free of the dining hall and dorms with only one thought in my mind: the children. They were locked away downstairs and I had to keep them safe. The blood of those self-centered, egocentric assholes who were dying in numbers—the adults—meant very little to me by that point. It was the kids I thought of. The kids I lived for. The kids I fought for.

I darted down an interconnecting series of corridors knowing I had to get to the lower level before the undead did. I had only a bloody machete in my hand that I had taken from a Wormboy. There was no one or nothing in the hallways leading to the stairway door that went below. I felt a weird exhilaration of good luck, but it did not last.

There was a sudden stench in the air that cut through the usual stink of putrescence that had now flooded the compound. This was stronger… dank like subterranean pipes clogged with ancient filth, like backed-up sewage, the gurgling ammonia odor of urine.

I turned and there was Dragna.

I had thought—I suppose we all assumed—that Dragna, the zombie master, the lord of the ravenous dead, would be a man, but it was no man. It was female… but I wouldn’t call what I saw a woman exactly. It held my eyes, made them feel varnished into sockets of flypaper, frozen, sticky with salt-tears and immobile, unable to look away from the hideous mass of corruption that was wallowing in its own juicy foulness.

At first, I thought what I saw was two naked women and then three, perhaps four that had been melted into a running, pliable human clay and then fused together under great, damaging pressure. But no… it was a single woman or something that had once been a woman… a huge, lolling slab of a woman with swollen balloon-like, blue-veined tits, seven or eight of them, bouncing against a green-gray, fungus-threaded, ulcerated flab. And not one but several enormous corpse-glutted, pendulous bellies slopping from side to side like feed bags stuffed with mush, a trickle of fluid black as ink leaking from puckered navels that looked like blow holes.

In one bloated hand she held a spear and impaled upon it, a squirming infant blown up with gas… blackened, tiny face smeared with blood, its mouth a pulsing hole ringed by sharp milk teeth.

And she was coming for me, coming to drown me in oceans of flaccid rot.

I should have screamed.

I should have ran.

But I just stood there as she came forward, filling the corridor with a black, fetid stench of corpse-gas and decomposition. From her greasy, mucid bulk I saw faces, dozens of agonized faces erupting like blood blisters, rising like bubbles of dough, each of them eyeless and the color of gray sausage, mouths opening and closing and spraying a mist of sputum. She was looking at me, not hating exactly… but almost amused beyond her voracious charnel appetites that I dared stand against her. Her face was a bulbous and liquefying clot of fleshy gruel-like white pulp riddled with graveworms and carrion beetles nesting in the hollow of her nose. Each time she exhaled out came a cloud of black, buzzing flies. Loops of greased, matted hair hung in her face and seemed to coil like flatworms.

She smiled at me with a crooked, saw-toothed pumpkin grin of gnarled teeth.

But it was her eyes that held me.

They were huge gloss-white yolks, veined with blood and oozing a clear fluid. They had no pupils… yet she was seeing me with a gyroscopic intensity, looking not just at me but into me and filling my brain with graveyard imagery… demons and corpseworms with the faces of mewling infants, babies cooked in fat-bubbling pots and oil-skinned women who offered me vaginas sluicing with steaming larvae.

She came closer, her breasts pulsating, throbbing with sloshing milk, lactating freely with a grayish bile that ran down her flab and squirted through the air.

Opening her mildew-specked thighs, she gave me a glimpse of the corkscrewing darkness between her legs that dripped with slime like a slobbering mouth, teaming with parasites… insects and hookworms and green suckering planaria.

And it was with that second mouth, I knew, that she would eat me… after she made me suckle the fleshbags of her tits.

Maybe I should have run like I said, but I was all that stood between her and the children. Such was her arrogance and appetite, she had come to feed on the children alone, to stuff herself with sweetmeats and kidflesh, selecting the most succulent cuts and rarest treats for her own discerning palate before turning her hordes loose on what was left.

She probably expected me to cry and cower and shiver, terrified and overwhelmed, struck mad by her horror as others had been… but she didn’t get that. Machete held high, I attacked with a mindless ferocity and she reached out for me, her tongue like a thorny rose stem flaking into petals… and we collided there in the corridor. All those faces began to scream and maggots began to fountain from her mouth and eyes, her breasts and cunt, the ulcers in her hide… they came out in a slimy pink flood to drown me.

And as she took hold of me, I brought down the machete again and again as I gagged on her mortuary perfume, snotty tangles of blood and foam and slime gushing from her. Carrion paste blew from her mouth and the channel of her nose as I slashed her open and beat her down. Then she fell apart… bursting into a pink river of tissue and worms and rot and sticky ova. I fell away as it flooded the corridor, rushing past me in hot rivers of decay. I saw a dozen malformed, grotesque fetuses drowning in that outpouring, crying out with mewling voices that echoed into nothingness.

The revolting waste of Dragna went to a boiling steam that was hot and suffocating. In the end, I sat there, shocked and mindless as she evaporated around me.

15

It’s been two weeks now since I destroyed her.

Two weeks since the adults of the shelter were exterminated.

Two weeks since I cleaned out the compound and burned the remains in a huge funeral pyre in the parking lot and two weeks since I gathered the children together and told them we are a family and we must look after one another and care for another and only this way can we survive. It sounded like one of Doc’s speeches and I felt an eerie sense of déjà vu while I gave them the spiel. But I believed it. And I think they did, too.

I feel no guilt over what I did. But every day I miss Maria and I dream about her every night. I know she would be ashamed of my petty revenge on Doc and the others and that hurts. But, likewise, I know she would respect how I care and teach the children.

Following Dragna’s destruction, I noticed something very peculiar with the Wormboys out there. They had devolved into your average b-movie zombies. Shambling deadheads, wandering around, bumping into one another, picking at scraps. No organization whatsoever. Dragna had been their brain and without her, they were really just mindless walking corpses. Creatures of opportunity.

It gave me hope.

I started planning out how we would escape the shelter. Go somewhere and find other people. Maybe an armory or a military base somewhere. But the more I thought about it the more I began to picture us wondering the wastelands, finding empty city after empty city, nothing but the dead haunting the cemetery sprawl of the brave new world.

Soon enough, I pictured us becoming little better than animals. Maybe living in caves, huddled around fires, drawing crude pictures on the walls of Wormboys sacking civilization until we reached the point in our crowded, primitive brains where we could no longer remember what civilization was.

Hope sometimes dies a cruel death in the face of reason.

I don’t dare go out at night, but during the day—if I’m armed—I can handle the dead as long as they don’t cluster or put on a united front. The scary thing is, lately they’ve been organizing again into small bands. They’ve been watching the shelter like they used to. Just standing out there, staring, infinitely patient and infinitely frightening.

This morning I found out why.

I found a note stuck to the door. Here’s what it said:

In the back of my mind I suspected something like this for a long time and I think it was the inspiration behind me wanting to gather up the kids and get out. But we’re not going anywhere. That’s the terrifying reality of it. And the most disturbing thing, of course, is the note itself. You see, I recognize the handwriting: it’s Maria’s. They’ve found their new Dragna as somehow I supposed they would.

So I’m going to gather the kids together in the dining hall tonight and this is what I’m going to say to their innocent, trusting little faces: “Kids, we’re going to play a new game. It’s called a lottery and only six of you can win…”

Or lose.