Extreme Zombies, page 1
EXTREME ZOMBIES
PAULA GURAN
Copyright © 2012 by Paula Guran.
Cover art by ItsBadBeGood.
Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.
All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission. An extension of this copyright page can be found here.
ISBN: 978-1-60701-370-9 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-60701-352-5 (trade paperback)
PRIME BOOKS
www.prime-books.com
No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.
For more information, contact Prime Books at prime@prime-books.com.
To David J. Schow, who knows everything you need to know about zombies (and practically anything else).
Contents
Introduction by Paula Guran
On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks by Joe R. Lansdale
The Traumatized Generation by Murray J. D. Leeder
Aftertaste by John Shirley
Abed by Elizabeth Massie
Chuy and the Fish by David Wellington
Dead Giveaway by Brian Hodge
Makak by Edward Lee
Tomorrow’s Precious Lambs by Monica Valentinelli
Meathouse Man by George R. R. Martin
Charlie’s Hole by Jesse Bullington
At First Only Darkness by Nancy A. Collins
Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy by David J. Schow
An Unfortunate Incident at the Slaughterhouse by Harper Hull
Captive Hearts by Brian Keene
For the Good of All by Yvonne Navarro
We Will Rebuild by Cody Goodfellow
Going Down by Nancy Kilpatrick
Home by David Moody
Provider by Tim Waggoner
Zombies for Jesus by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Viva Las Vegas by Thomas S. Roche
Romero’s Children by David A. Riley
In Beauty, Like the Night by Norman Partridge
Susan by Robin D. Laws
The Blood Kiss by Dennis Etchison
Acknowledgments
Introductory Warnings, Cautions & Alerts
Paula Guran
Want an overview of a variety of zombie literature in the twenty-first century?
This is not the book for you. I did that one a couple of years back: Zombies: The Recent Dead (ISBN: 978-1-60701-234-4, Prime Books). There’s some wonderful introductory material by David J. Schow and some additional stuff from yours truly. Book’s got some excellent zombie stories from this century and I like to think of it—we all have our little fantasies—being used as one of the textbooks for a class on the subject at some university.
This anthology?
Possession of the content in Extreme Zombies might get you kicked out of most high schools, some colleges, and many families. That’s a warning, kids! Don’t take chances with dangerous reading material. Even if your teacher loves The Walking Dead and your parents encourage you to read, there’s stuff in here that’s against the rules . . . anybody’s rules.
If you are of legal age, be careful to whom you lend this book to. Don’t leave it on the coffee table (especially anywhere near the bong). People who might otherwise see you as an acceptable person may change their minds if they read a few of the passages in these stories. Worse, it might attract really strange new “friends.”
Parents, be responsible. Keep this book out of the hands of young children.
You have been warned.
The zombie archetype, once appreciated only by horror fans, has become firmly entrenched in modern culture. The prevalent ideation is the so-called “Romero” zombie—named en hommage to George A. Romero whose 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, depicted reanimated corpses (never referred to in the first Dead film as “zombies”) attacking the living. These walking, decaying dead mindlessly shamble, forever hungering for and devouring the flesh of humans. Although never exactly spelled out in the movies, zombies evidently were the result of a mutant virus that could be passed on to the living by a bite or some bodily secretion.
Closely associated with this undead icon is the “zombie apocalypse”: societal breakdown, usually worldwide, following some type infestation or plague or alien virus or science experiment gone bad, etc. Survivors may struggle alone or band together to defend themselves, perhaps waging all-out war against the undead.
There are numerous variations of the Romero zombie and end-of-the-world scenarios; you’ll find some of them here. And, occasionally, as here, the “traditional” zombie associated with the Afro-Caribbean religion of Voudou—a dead or living person stripped of their own will and/or soul who is under the control of a sorcerer—still appears. (If you want to learn more about the evolution of zombies, again, read the introductions to Zombies: The Recent Dead.)
Just a few years ago, the zombie a still-meaningful metaphor, a horrific embodiment that replaced the outmoded monsters of the past in our collective psyche. Monsters were merely creatures that might get you; the living dead could wipe us all out; civilization, at least, was doomed.
As this book was being prepared, the Associated Press reported folks are now responding to incidents of true horror—“a naked man eating most of another man’s face . . . a college student telling police he killed a man, then ate his heart and part of his brain . . . a man stabbed himself fifty times and threw bits of his own intestines at police [who] pepper-sprayed him, but he was not easily subdued”—by comparing them to zombies.
These incidents inspire online search terms like “zombie apocalypse” to trend. Evidently, zombies still resonate with our view of the world. Creatures that start off as “us,” but become monsters with nothing more than feeding and “surviving” as a goal that continue to shamble and create even more of their emotionless, inexorable kind—with no conscience or morality to stop them.
Apocalyptic doom, we fear, will come from that which we, ourselves, have created but cannot stop. Fears of bioterrorism and new contagions are prevalent, economic depression seems to be forcing us closer to the end of our world as we know it . . . we are losing control.
On the other hand—if you have one—we are also responding to zombies (or maybe our fears) and referencing them with humor.
Is the zombie still really an effective horror icon when it is being spoofed in television commercials to sell cars, snack food, candy, cereal, drinks, and, yes, Microsoft’s Windows 7? Will zombies soon be passé as terror? The vampire was tamed into Count Chocula, Muppetized to teach toddlers to count, and romanticized into a young girl’s dream beau. Are zombies on their way to similar domestication?
There have already been zombie musicals and attempts at zombie romance. You’ll now find more zombie fiction published for kids of all ages—including babies—than can be easily listed. Much of it is either cute or entertainingly edifying. Zombie disguises are popular with young trick-or-treaters. I guess you can’t really take the $12.99 Dismember-Me Plush Zombie, a “scary (but cute) zombie plush” that “begs to be torn limb from limb. After all he is a decaying re-animated corpse turned into irresistible cuddly plush . . . ” as really designed for kids, but the Doctor Dreadful Zombie Lab ($24.99) is: children seven and older can “concoct a variety of disturbingly delicious experiments . . . brew bubbly brains or zombie skins, and eat them too. . . . Watch in horror as the zombie jaw rips open and he pukes his brains out.”
Can whole-grain Zombie Skin Flakes with yummy multi-colored marshmallow bits (pink hearts, purple brains, green guts, yellow toes, blue fingers . . . ) be far behind?
The stories in Extreme Zombies are, one way or another, not for the children. No marshmallows or safe-to-eat bubbly brains. That doesn’t mean they simply “go for the gross-out” or are just prose equivalents of shoot-the-zombie games. None of these stories are bereft of meaning. They were not written merely to induce regurgitation or to exercise your virtual trigger finger. Sure, there’s gore and grue and depravity and all that cool stuff, but they also reflect the real word, provoke thought, and comment on just how utterly fucked up mundane humanity is. They can also occasionally provide a glimmer of hope we aren’t as screwed up and doomed as we think we are
Maybe that’s not your cup of brains. If so, we hope that big red word EXTREME (or possibly this introduction) has scared you away. Our menu is not intended for the faint-hearted or squeamish. In fact, we at Prime Books suggest those who are easily offended avoid chomping down on this collective brainburger. Go crochet a pastel zombie. We think that’s keen, too, we just aren’t providing the patterns with this anthology. This time, we’re unraveling yarn-like festering intestines and jabbing eyeballs with crochet hooks.
Extremity can be many things; don’t make the mistake of equating “extreme” solely with grossness and violence—although I won’t deny that disturbing description can be, and often is, part of the equation and graphic violence a given. Sex is often used as an extreme element—carnal relations seem to be eternally shocking, especially to Americans—and so is religion. Emotions—especially love—are part of the mix. If the world belongs not to the living, but to the dead, what is perverse? What happens to faith? What can one still feel?
Some of the stories in Extreme Zombies us
Among the tales collected here are some classics of zombie fiction—they’ve withstood the test of time and cultural absorption and are still way out there . . . often farther out there than more contemporary samples . . . and their razor-sharp edges still slice to the marrow. If you are an aficionado of zom-fic, you may be familiar with them, but when compiling an anthology that dares to be dubbed Extreme Zombies—respect is respect and classics are classics because they can be savored time and again. Plus, there are always new mouths to feed and untouched minds to subvert.
Not that we overlook the fresher fictional meat. There’s also plenty of that quivering on the platter: previously published but not widely distributed to the slavering masses on zombie connoisseurs.
In other words, we offer a veritable smorgasbord of extreme zombie fiction for you to gnaw on. Nibble at bits and pieces or devour it all without benefit of mastication.
To quote a story contained herein: BONE appétit!
Paula Guran
April 2012
As they drove between the Cadillacs, the sky fading like a bad bulb, Wayne looked at the cars and tried to imagine what the Chevy-Cadillac Wars had been like, and why they had been fought in this miserable desert . . .
On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks
Joe R. Lansdale
1
After a month’s chase, Wayne caught up with Calhoun one night at a little honky-tonk called Rosalita’s. It wasn’t that Calhoun had finally gotten careless, it was just that he wasn’t worried. He’d killed four bounty hunters so far, and Wayne knew a fifth didn’t concern him.
The last bounty hunter had been the famous Pink Lady McGuire–one mean mama–three hundred pounds of rolling, ugly meat that carried a twelve-gauge Remington pump and a bad attitude. Story was, Calhoun jumped her from behind, cut her throat, and as a joke, fucked her before she bled to death. This not only proved to Wayne that Calhoun was a dangerous sonofabitch, it also proved he had bad taste.
Wayne stepped out of his ’57 Chevy reproduction, pushed his hat back on his forehead, opened the trunk, and got the sawed-off double barrel and some shells out of there. He already had a .38 revolver in the holster at his side and a bowie knife in each boot, but when you went into a place like Rosalita’s it was best to have plenty of backup.
Wayne put a handful of shotgun shells in his shirt pocket, snapped the flap over them, looked up at the red-and-blue neon sign that flashed ROSALITA’S: COLD BEER AND DEAD DANCING, found his center, as they say in Zen, and went on in.
He held the shotgun against his leg, and as it was dark in there and folks were busy with talk or drinks or dancing, no one noticed him or his artillery right off.
He spotted Calhoun’s stocky, black-hatted self immediately. He was inside the dance cage with a dead buck-naked Mexican girl of about twelve. He was holding her tight around the waist with one hand and massaging her rubbery ass with the other like it was a pillow he was trying to shape. The dead girl’s handless arms flailed on either side of Calhoun, and her little tits pressed to his thick chest. Her wire-muzzled face knocked repeatedly at his shoulder and drool whipped out of her mouth in thick spermy ropes, stuck to his shin, faded and left a patch of wetness.
For all Wayne knew, the girl was Calhoun’s sister or daughter. It was that kind of place. The kind that had sprung up immediately after that stuff had gotten out of a lab upstate and filled the air with bacterium that brought dead humans back to life, made their basic motor functions work and made them hungry for human flesh; made it so if a man’s wife, daughter, sister, or mother went belly up and he wanted to turn a few bucks, he might think: “Damn, that’s tough about ole Betty Sue, but she’s dead as hoot-owl shit and ain’t gonna be needing nothing from here on out, and with them germs working around in her, she’s just gonna pull herself out of the ground and cause me a problem. And the ground out back of the house is harder to dig than a calculus problem is to work, so I’ll just toss her cold ass in the back of the pickup next to the chainsaw and the barbed-wire roll, haul her across the border to sell her to the Meat Boys to sell to the tonics for dancing.
“It’s a sad thing to sell one of your own, but shit, them’s the breaks. I’ll just stay out of the tonics until all the meat rots off her bones and they have to throw her away. That way I won’t go in some place for a drink and see her up there shaking her dead tits and end up going sentimental and dewy-eyed in front of one of my buddies or some ole two-dollar gal.”
This kind of thinking supplied the dancers. In other parts of the country, the dancers might be men or children, but here it was mostly women. Men were used for hunting and target practice.
The Meat Boys took the bodies, cut off the hands so they couldn’t grab, ran screws through their jaws to fasten on wire muzzles so they couldn’t bite, sold them to the honky-tonks about the time the germ started stirring.
Bar owners put them inside wire enclosures up front of their joints, staffed music, and men paid five dollars to got in there and grab them and make like they were dancing when all the women wanted to do was grab and bite, which, muzzled and handless, they could not do.
If a man liked his partner enough, he could pay more money and have her tied to a cot in the back and he could get on her and at some business. Didn’t have to hear no arguments or buy presents or make promises or make them come. Just fuck and hike.
As long as the establishment sprayed the dead fur maggots and kept them perfumed and didn’t keep them so long hunks of meat came off on a man’s dick, the customers were happy as flies on shit.
Wayne looked to see who might give him trouble, and figured everyone was a potential customer. The six-foot-two, two-hundred-fifty pound bouncer being the most immediate concern.
But, there wasn’t anything to do but to get on with things and handle problems when they came up. He went into the cage where Calhoun was dancing, shouldered through the other dancers and went for him.
Calhoun had his back to Wayne, and as the music was loud, Wayne didn’t worry about going quietly. But Calhoun sensed him and turned with his hand full of a little .38.
Wayne clubbed Calhoun’s arm with the barrel of the shotgun. The little gun flew out of Calhoun’s hand and went skidding across the floor and clanked against the metal cage.
Calhoun wasn’t outdone. He spun the dead girl in front of him and pulled a big pigsticker out of his boot and held it under the girl’s armpit in a threatening manner, which with a knife that big was no feat.
Wayne shot the dead girl’s left kneecap out from under her and she went down. Her armpit trapped Calhoun’s knife. The other men deserted their partners and went over the wire netting like squirrels.
Before Calhoun could shake the girl loose, Wayne stepped in and hit him over the head with the barrel of the shotgun. Calhoun crumpled and the girl began to crawl about on the floor as if looking for lost contacts.
The bouncer came in behind Wayne, grabbed him under the arms and tried to slip a full nelson on him.
Wayne kicked back on the bouncer’s shin and raked his boot down the man’s instep and stomped his foot. The bouncer let go. Wayne turned and kicked him in the balls and hit him across the face with the shotgun.
The bouncer went down and didn’t even look like he wanted up.
Wayne couldn’t help but note he liked the music that was playing. When he turned he had someone to dance with.
Calhoun.
Calhoun charged him, hit Wayne in the belly with his head, knocked him over the bouncer. They tumbled to the floor and the shotgun went out of Wayne’s hands and scraped across the floor and hit the crawling girl in the head. She didn’t even notice, just kept snaking in circles, dragging her blasted leg behind her like a skin she was trying to shed.
The other women, partnerless, wandered about the cage. The music changed. Wayne didn’t like this tune as well. Too slow. He bit Calhoun’s earlobe off.
