Zombie Pulp by Tim Curran Read Free Book Online

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