The Undead (Zombie Anthology) Read online

  The Undead (Zombie Anthology)

  The Undead (Zombie Anthology)

  Midpoint

  The Undead

  Edited by D.L. Snell

  Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

  This anthology © 2005 by Permuted Press.

  “Chuy and the Fish” © 2004 by David Wellington.

  “Pale Moonlight” © 2004 by D.L. Snell.

  “Hotline” © 2004 by Russell Calhoun.

  “Home” © 2004 by David Moody.

  “Reapers at the Door” © 2004 by Eric S. Brown.

  “The Diabolical Plan” © 2004 by Derek Gunn.

  “Dead World” © 2004 by Meghan Jurado.

  “Two Confessions” © 2004 by E.W. Norton.

  “13 Ways of Looking at the Living Dead” © 2004 by Eric Pape.

  “Grinning Samuel” © 2004 by David Dunwoody.

  “Ann at Twilight” © 2001 by Brent Zirnheld.

  “The Last Living Man” © 2004 by Kevin L. Donihe.

  “Only Begotten” © 2004 by Rebecca Lloyd.

  “Undead Prometheus” © 2004 by Rob Morganbesser.

  “Hell and Back” © 2004 by Vince Churchill.

  “The Dead Life” © 2001 by Mike Watt.

  “Donovan’s Leg” © 2004 by Eric Shapiro.

  “Cold As He Wishes” © 2004 by C.M. Shevlin.

  “Death Row” © 2004 by James Reilly.

  “Existence” © 2004 by John Hubbard.

  “Graveyard Slot” © 2004 by Cavan Scott.

  “The Project” © 2003 by Pasquale J. Morrone.

  “Like Chicken for Deadfucks” © 2004 by Andre Duza.

  “Afterword” © 2005 by Brian Keene.

  www.PermutedPress.com

  Cover art by Alejandro Shelley Bergen.

  Chuy and the Fish

  David Wellington

  Rain came down so hard it was tough to tell the difference between the water and the air. It scoured the esplanade, a million soft explosions a second, and it battered the weeds that pushed up through the cracks in the parking lot asphalt. Chuy couldn’t see five feet in front of him. He was on guard against dead people who might crawl up out of the channel and onto Governor’s Island. But hell, man, not even the dead wanted to be out on a night like this. He stayed where it was safe and dry like a smart guy, under the covered doorway of an old officer’s barracks. He wished he had a cigarette. Too bad there weren’t anymore, not since the end of the world and all. His wife—she was gone now, and his little babies, too—she had always wanted him to quit. Hell of a way for her to get her wish, he thought, as the curl of her mouth swam up through his memory, the soft, soft hairs at the edges of her eyebrows—

  Sound rolled up over him from the water. Sounds were coming up from the harbor all the time, but this one was different. A noise like something slapping metal. Like something hitting the railing. Chuy stared out into the murk. Nothing.

  Chingadre, he thought. He needed to check this out. One time a dead guy had actually come up over the railing. His body was all bloated with gases, and he had floated across from NYC. They had lost three people that night before they even knew what was going on. When they finally shot the dead guy, he had lit up like a gas main going off and had knocked down one of the houses in Nolan Park. It had been bad, real bad, and Marisol, the mayor of Governors Island, didn’t want it happening again. Nothing for it.

  Chuy stepped out into the rain and was instantly soaked.

  He ran up the road a ways, water pouring down into his eyes so he had to blink it away. He scanned the street that ran around the edge of the island, studying the iron railing that kept foolish people from falling into the water. Nothing—just some garbage that had washed up against the railing. It looked like a white plastic bag, the kind you got at the grocery. Except there weren’t any more groceries.

  Not thinking much about it, he stepped closer for a better look. Maybe some garbage that had blown over in the wind from the city. The dead owned NYC now and they didn’t do much cleaning. He squatted down and thought about getting dry again, sitting by a fire and maybe drinking some coffee. He had half a jar of instant hid away; he could afford to brew a cup if he was careful, sure.

  It wasn’t a bag. What it was, he didn’t know. “Hey, hey, Harry,” he called out. “Yo, big guy, come over here!”

  Harry was patrolling a couple of blocks down. He had been a teacher up at CUNY before and knew a lot of things. Maybe he would recognize this. It looked kind of like a big, fleshy leaf, twice as long as his hand. It was all pulpy and shit, like the inside of a bad melon and it smelled like ass. Like cat piss, kind of, only a whole lot stronger. Dead-fish bad, but not the same, only kind of similar. Harry came splashing through the puddles and Chuy bent closer for a better look. It was attached to something, something long and thin that trailed down into the water.

  He took the gun out of his belt—Desert Eagle, boy, all nickel-plated and deadly, nice one—and gently poked the thing with the end of the barrel. He didn’t want to get that stink on his fingers. The flesh yielded okay. Bubbles squelched up when he applied real pressure. He frowned and turned around to look for Harry.

  The fleshy thing moved on its rope—he saw it in his peripheral vision. It lifted up and slapped against his thigh. Chuy grunted in disgust, and then in pain. The underside of the thing was covered in tiny hooks that dug deep into him, tearing at him. “Hells no!” he shouted just when the thing yanked at him hard, pulling him by his leg, slamming him up against the railing.

  “Harry! Harry!” he screamed. With a strength he couldn’t understand, it tugged at him, trying to drag him down into the water. He wrapped his arms and his free leg around the railing, holding tight against the power that wanted to tear him loose. “Fucking bastard! Harry, get over here!”

  Harry Cho slid to a stop a couple feet away and just stood there with his mouth open. His glasses were silvered with rain and his black hair was plastered down across his forehead. He was a short, skinny guy and he wasn’t very strong. Dropping to the asphalt he grabbed Chuy around the waist and tried to pull him off the railing. “I don’t want to tear it loose,” Harry grunted. “It’s stuck in there pretty well.”

  “Fuck that!” Chuy screamed. “Shoot this thing!” He could feel his skin peeling away underneath his pants. The ropy thing had twisted around his ankle and the bones there felt like they might pop. “Shoot it in the head!”

  Harry unslung his M4 rifle and leaned over the railing. He shook his head, peering down into the choppy water. “I don’t see any . . . I mean there’s no . . .”

  A second pulpy white thing, a twin to the first, batted at the railing a couple of times and made it ring. “Is that a tentacle?” Harry asked, but Chuy didn’t care enough to answer. The club-end of the tentacle stroked the asphalt and then coiled around the railing and pulled. The whole island seemed to shudder as the thing on the other end of the tentacles strained and squeezed and dragged itself up out of the channel, great sheets of silver water sloshing off its back.

  Eight thicker arms reared up to grab at the railing. The iron bent and squealed as the main body heaved upwards and into view. Chuy saw diaphanous fins, tattered with rot. He saw its long red and white body thick and heavy with muscles. He saw its beak, like a parrot’s, only about ten times bigger. He saw an eye, the size of a manhole cover maybe, clouded with decay, and the eye saw him.

  “Orale, tu pinche pendejo! Enough fucking playing!” Chuy screamed and he brought the Desert Eagle up to point right at that motherfucking yellow eye. He was no cholo gangsta (not good old funny guy Chuy; no, he had been a doorman in NYC), but at this range he thought he could score. He hit the safety with his thumb and then he blasted the drip
ping asshole, absolutely blasted it with three tight shots right in the pupil. The eye exploded, spraying him with a mess of jelly and stinking water. He spluttered—some of that shit went right in his mouth.

  “An undead squid! Architeuthis?” Harry asked. He looked dazed. “Or is it—it couldn’t be a Colossal. . . .” The ex-teacher brought his rifle around and fired a quick burst into its main body. Bullet holes appeared in a line down its back, big fist-sized holes that didn’t bother the fucker at all. You could shoot a dead thing all day and it didn’t feel it, not unless you got the head. Harry fired another burst at its head where all the tentacles attached: same result.

  Rings of fire bit into Chuy’s calf muscle, little round buzzsaws of pain. He bit the inside of his cheek as a wave of nausea and agony jittered through him. His hand twitched, but he couldn’t let go of his pistol. No, that would be suicide. “Harry—Christ! Get some fucking backup!”

  Harry nodded and let his rifle fall back on its strap. He twisted open a flare and tossed it high up into the air. Chuy looked up over at the towers on the ferry dock and saw the lights there flicker in acknowledgement. If he could just hold on—if he could just stay cool—help was on the way.

  The railing groaned and the bolts that held it to the esplanade began to squeal.

  “Where’s its fucking brain?” Marisol demanded. “It’s undead, right? You shoot it in the fucking brain and it fucking dies. Where’s its brain?” She had a shotgun against her shoulder as she bent to stroke Chuy’s hair. He was in a bad way. He’d lost a lot of blood and he could barely hold onto the railing. It had been maybe twenty-five minutes since the squid got hold of him. Gathered around him, the crowd had put dozens of rounds of ammunition into the asshole thing, but it only fought harder. It hadn’t come up any farther onto land—it lacked the energy, looked like, to come crawling up any more—but it wouldn’t let go, either. Its tentacle—one of the two big feeding tentacles, Harry called them—had wrapped around his leg so many times Chuy couldn’t see his foot or his shin.

  “That’s what I’m telling you! It doesn’t have one! It has long axons but they’re spread out through the body. There’s no central nervous system at all. Nothing to target.” Harry looked away. “It has three hearts, if you care.”

  “I don’t.” Marisol knelt down next to Chuy. “We’ll cut you loose, I promise.”

  Chuy nodded. They’d already tried that, with fire axes. The tentacle was so rubbery that the axes just bounced off. Marisol had sent somebody to look for a hacksaw.

  The squid snapped its beak at Chuy’s foot. It couldn’t quite reach. It pulled again and he felt his skin coming loose. The pain was bright and hot and white, and it seared him. He screamed and Marisol clutched his head. Somebody came forward and tied a rope around him, anchoring him to the railing.

  Nobody talked about chopping off his leg to get him free. There weren’t any surgical tools on the island. Worse, there was no penicillin. People didn’t survive that kind of injury any more. The tentacle had to go, or Chuy would.

  He turned his face up to the sky and let rain collect in his mouth.

  Someone set off a white flare and held it over his head. The sputtering light woke Chuy with a start, and his body shivered. He looked down and saw the fucking fish all lit up. It was as big as a school bus and it looked like chopped meat: they had done so much damage to it with their guns, but it wouldn’t just die. “How long,” he said, his throat dry and cracking.

  Down on the rocks, Harry stepped close to the thing, keeping his head down, his hands out for balance. He had a hacksaw in one hand. He moved so slow, so quiet. He was coming up on the squid’s blind side, on the side where Chuy had popped its eye. Maybe he thought the fish wouldn’t notice when he started sawing through its arm.

  “How long was I out?” Chuy croaked.

  Somebody behind him—he couldn’t see who—answered, “About an hour. Sleep if you can, guy. Ain’t nothing for you to do right now.”

  “No jodas.” Chuy tried to clear his throat but the phlegm wouldn’t come. Down on the rocks, Harry stepped a little closer. He touched the hacksaw blade to the tentacle as if he was trying to brush off a speck of lint.

  The squid’s enormous body convulsed and the air filled with the stink of ammonia and dead flesh. Foul black fluid spurted from the holes in its back. Gallons more of it slapped Harry across the face, choking him, sending him flying on his back into the water. Ink—the fucker was squirting ink, Chuy realized. Harry thrashed in the water, the rain washing his glasses clean, but he couldn’t seem to get his mouth clear. His arms windmilled and his legs kicked, but he couldn’t get back to the rocks. Marisol leaned over the railing and threw him a bright orange life preserver. He grasped it in one hand and slowly got control of himself.

  The squid rolled over, yanking Chuy savagely against the bars of the railing. He screeched like a dog, like one of those little dogs the white women used to carry in their purses in NYC.

  Down in the water, Harry slid up onto a rock covered in green hairy seaweed. He couldn’t quite get a grip. He was still trying when the squid’s beak cut right into his ribcage. Harry didn’t scream at all. He didn’t have time.

  Nobody spoke but they all looked, the way New Yorkers used to slow down on the highways to look at accidents. They couldn’t turn away as the squid cut Harry into tiny pieces and swallowed them one by one, its whole mantle contracting as it sucked down the bloody chunks of meat.

  In his dream, he was with his Isabel again, and she was laid out on the bed, smiling up at him. She was wearing a kind of nightie, only like one you get from Victoria’s Secret. Her hair was pulled back in one big ponytail and was spread out across the pillows in ten thick tendrils. Those lips, man, they were like sugar. He jumped on top of her, felt her bones against his, and they smiled together. His gold cross pendant touched the skin above her breasts. It was so sweet, man, only why did she smell so bad? She smelled like something dead. He brought his mouth down and kissed her bony lips hard, so hard he could make her be alive again, like Sleeping Beauty.

  His shivering had turned into real convulsions by the time the sky turned blue, the funny blue it gets right before dawn. The sea was a uniform and dull gray. The rain had stopped hours earlier, while he was unconscious.

  “He’s not tracking,” somebody said.

  He saw Marisol’s face swimming before him. “It’s shock, probably. Jesus. I’ve never seen anybody so pale. Do we just put him out of his misery?”

  “Don’t even say that. There’s got to be a way to get him loose.”

  Marisol was used to making hard decisions. That was why they made her mayor. Chuy was pretty sure she would figure out what to do.

  He saw pink clouds over Manhattan—so beautiful, buzzing with beauty—before he slipped away again.

  Hot pain in his leg brought him up. The suckers on the feeding tentacles were rimmed with tiny hooks that tore the long muscles in his thigh. It had more of him than before. It was trying to bring him closer, to its beak. It must have gotten hungry again.

  Chuy gritted his teeth. He felt foul—slimy with old sweat.

  Something was happening.

  He struggled to focus, to look around. He saw people running, some towards him, some away. He felt his leg being straightened, felt his foot being torn loose from his ankle and the pain was enormous, it was real big, but it wasn’t like he’d felt before. Maybe he was getting used to it. He lifted his head, looked down at the squid.

  It was rising up. Pulling itself up with its eight thick arms. He saw the dripping ugly wound where its eye had been, and he thought, You serote, I did that.

  It was coming for him. The railing sighed and shook and then started to give way.

  “Everybody get back!” Marisol shrieked. A bolt let go with an explosive noise, and a section of railing lifted up in the air, twisted. The squid dragged itself an inch closer. Chuy could see the beak, huge, hard, sharp—he looked over his shoulder and saw people edging away from him. S
o this was it, huh?

  More bolts popped loose. Dust and rain shot out each time. The railing crimped back on itself. Chuy reached down and felt the knot of the rope holding him to the railing. Rain and seawater had soaked through it, made it as hard as a rock. He pushed his thumb into it, tried to wiggle it around.

  The free feeding tentacle draped around Chuy’s neck and arm. He tried to shrug it off, but it was too strong. Razor-sharp suckers sank into his back and he grimaced. He didn’t feel the pain so much, but it made his body stop, just squeal to a stop like a taxi with bad brakes. When that passed, he tried to move his thumb again.

  The knot started to come loose. “Somebody get me a grenade!” he shouted.

  He’d had time to think about this. About how they were going to remember him. He kept working at the knot.

  The squid heaved its body up onto the railing, its great big meaty mass. The iron cried out in distress. Tons it must weigh, the fucker. Whole tons. The railing broke under that weight and the squid started to slide, but it held on to his leg and his back. Its beak wallowed closer to him.

  “A grenade!” he shouted again, and instantly it was there, hard and fist-sized and round. Somebody shoved it into his free hand and somebody else—they must have seen what he was doing—reached down and cut the rope with a combat knife. The only thing holding him to the railing then was his arm.

  The squid rippled toward him. He could see its good eye now, yellow and black. Glassy. He saw the beak moving silently.

  He let go of the railing. The squid pulled him hard and he went right through as it yanked him toward its beak. In the process, it shifted its center of gravity backward, toward the water.

  It hit the foam with a splash that rushed across Chuy’s chest and face, pummeling him. It was all he could do to keep a hold of his grenade. He fought—fought hard to retain consciousness.