Zombie Pulp by Tim Curran Read Free Book Online Page A

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