Zombie Bitches From Hell (8 page)

She motions to two of the nuns to untie him
from the pack and he is stripped naked. It is then that the bitches
howl because they have seen the guy that we tried to help. He’s in
the other room but we hear the ruckus. He is dragged in and laid
out next to the new guy. The signal is given and he is devoured
from the balls up through his gut. His face is stripped of flesh
and his nose is crunched in the jaws of a zombie bitch like a
walnut in a nutcracker. She pulls it away with her teeth and what
little blood the fucker still has in him pools around the floor
where one of the bitches is lapping at it as it leaves a huge stain
on the fancy Oriental rug. Nothing goes to waste and he is stripped
bare to the bones, which are dragged out of the room and out of our
line of sight.

Two nun bitches bring the empty cross that he
had formerly occupied into the room and the new guy is nailed in
place of the old one. He wakes up in the middle and screams through
his duct tape gag until a reddish foam seeps out of his nostrils.
I’m thinking that whatever this guy did that landed him in the
hoosegow, I hope it was worth it. Then I think that if more of
these fuckers knew that this might happen to them, people could
throw their locks away, women could walk naked down the street and
kids would never need to be afraid of strangers because no one, I
mean no one, would want this as a punishment. Justice has a way of
finding you, I think. It sure found these bastards. Tim looks at me
like he knows what I’m thinking and gives me a thumbs up. That guy
has got to have ESP or something, but then I realize that I can
hear someone on the stairs coming up toward us and he’s giving me
the high sign to maybe get the fuck out of there. But to where?

We each slip into one of the cells. I can
hear Tim slide under a cot. I do the same. We hold our breaths. A
nun bitch ambles along the corridor. She enters one of the rooms
and shuffles around. She comes into my room. I can see her face
smeared with blood from the feast downstairs. She smells the air,
raising her face like a hound on a scent. But the blood is masking
my smell and she has some guts stuck near her nostrils. She leaves.
I assume she does the same thing throughout the rooms, finding
nothing. I hear her shuffling down the corridor, mumbling and
gnashing her teeth until the sounds of her returning downstairs die
away.

Tim opens the door to my room and says, “That
was fun.”

I climb out from under the cot. He signals to
me to return to the grate with one hand, the other with his finger
on his lips. Like I need to be reminded to be quiet, the dumb
fuck.

The convict has been nailed to the cross and
one of the bitches has jammed barbed wire onto his head like the
crown of thorns. They drag the cross to the corner of the room and
heave ho it up into the corner, the convict moaning and groaning, a
puddle of urine on the floor where he was. The others have been
pushed and shoved down the cellar steps and I can hear them
grumbling and pleading through their gags with an occasional yelp
that indicates the biting is still going on to keep control. The
cellar door slams and the two nun bitches who got the convicts into
the cellar join the rest around the current crucifixion.

The mother superior raises her arms and
begins to chant some shit that sounds like Latin. I look at Tim and
he shrugs as if to say, “This is the wackiest shit ever.” Which it
is. I can’t make out a word but I see her take a large curved
carving knife from under her robe and as she raises it, she speaks,
actual fucking words, even if they’re a guttural scraping from
decaying vocal cords, “Take……eat…for it is my body.” Least that
what I make of it. And she slices a slab off his calf as the other
bitches kneel. The convict screams and moans and bleeds. The mother
superior takes a bite of the meat and passes it around to the
others who each take a slurpy chomp.

One of the nuns rises to her feet, goes into
the kitchen and comes back with a water glass. She goes to the
convict and catches the blood seeping from his wounded leg and
catches it. In the glass, there is some milk probably left over
from who knows where and the blood and milk mix like a strawberry
malt.

The mother superior takes the glass and
mumbles and moans, and through the guttural tones and scratchy
nonsense I can decipher the words: “Drink this for it is my blood
which is a covenant with you.” She takes a big gulp and I can feel
weeks of rations rise from my stomach into my mouth.

She passes the glass around and they each
take a sip. Just when the last decomposing nun has drunk her fill,
I let go with a barf the size of Cleveland and it drops through the
grate and lands on a nun bitch’s head kneeling there like Mother
Teresa from Hell.

“We’re fucked, good buddy,” says Tim. I think
he’s right.

Two of the nuns start lapping at the vomit on
the one’s head. The rest begin their howling and start for the
stairs. We head for the window.

It’s locked and we can hear the shrieking,
howling bullshit and the clunking of the undead feet on the stairs,
the Mother Superior shouting in some hideous garbled language.

Tim picks up the small nightstand and jams it
through the window, knocking the glass, the mullions and the frame
out like it was hit with dynamite.

“It’s a long drop,” I say.

Tim climbs out but I see him standing there
beckoning me out. There’s a ledge he’s standing on. I climb out and
we side walk our way along the ledge and rain gutter to a huge
copper downspout. It’s like a firepole. Tim shimmies down as I see
the bitches climbing out after us. I fire a round from my pistol
but the damn thing bucks and I blast a hole through the shingles
above. Fuck it, I can’t shoot well while trying to play Spider-Man.
I follow Tim and we’re on the ground as the first nun bitch reaches
the downspout and goes flying down it like a sack of shit wrapped
in white and black gift paper. Tim is in the station wagon and it
looks like he’s going to take off without me, but instead he turns
the key and rams the nun bitch between the bumper and the side of
the building and her eyes pop out of her head and hang there by the
threads which ooze that tar-like black shit. He puts it in reverse
and she collapses, then puts it in gear again and floors it,
hitting her so hard while she’s crumbled that her ribs pop out
through her habit and the downspout, which is what he was aiming at
to begin with, comes down but with the Mother Superior hanging on
to it. The others are on the ledge but start heading back through
the window, which means they’ll be pouring through the door in a
few seconds.

“Time to go, buddy,” I yell. But the Mother
Superior bitch is on the hood of the car now and beating her head
against the windshield to try to break it to get to Tim. He moves
forward by flooring it again and jams on the brakes. She slides off
but as she goes over the hood ornament, it slashes open her face,
pulling some stringy arteries, veins and nerves along with it. She
drops off the end of the hood but leaps upper faster than you can
say, “Hail Mary” and she’s on the attack again.

Tim jumps out of the car and I figure he’s
going to run for it, but, no, he’s on the offensive. I slide in to
the driver’s side while he pulls the bitch off the hood. She’s
snapping like a mad dog in fast motion, the grinding clacking teeth
going a mile a second. He wrestles her off but she clamps down on
the window of the open car door and crunches the safety glass into
a billion little jewels. He punches her in the face where the gash
is and her eye gets pushed back into her head.

“Get ready,” Tim yells. But I’m seeing
bitches staggering out of the door as if the condition of the
Mother Superior has made them loopy. They’re actually groping and
bumbling around, arms outstretched like in a grade B movie.

“Better hurry,” I yell.

He drags the Mother Superior to the ground
while she kicks and screams and pieces of glass fly out of her
mouth like popcorn in a popper and holds her head under the wheel
of the car.

“Back it up slow,” he shouts. I do and I can
feel the crunch of something under the wheel which is, of course,
her fucking head.

“Go, dude, go,” he says. I gun it and I can
feel the squash of skull and brains.

Tim runs around and jumps in the back as the
first nun bitches stumble over to us. We fly out of there and stop
a hundred feet away. The undead nuns are gathered around the body
of Mother Superior and trying to put the brain back in the head and
one of them is holding the jaw and kissing it as she tries to fit
it to where the bitch’s mouth used to be.

“Man, look at that shit,” Tim says.

As I’m about to drive away, I see the cellar
window and there’s a dude looking out with duct tape on his mouth
and a please-don’t-leave-us-here expression.

“Tim. Those prisoners. Whatdya think?,” I
say. It was his idea to look for any living men inside.

“Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the
time,” says Tim as he puts his foot on top of mine and jams the gas
pedal to the floor, crashing us through the fence toward the
balloon. “Appeal denied.”

CHAPTER 11

The wind had finally tapered off and the
moon’s silver face shone through the clouds which scudded across
the sky like rats following the Pied Piper of Hamlin. Tim was
staring at the GPS and MG was asleep, curled up against the side of
the basket out of our way, a position he learned worked best for
his lazy self.

“It says we’re in northern Ohio, near the
border,” said Tim.

“Shit. I guess we’re lucky it’s not worse.
The fuel looks okay but we need to stop for water.”

“Let’s ride at three hundred feet and keep
your eyes sharp for someplace we can get some…and land safe.”

The balloon glided on a smooth breeze that
followed us, the tops of tall pines aimed up like arrows in a huge
quiver. The forest we were over spread in every direction and after
an hour or so of moving slowly we saw the shimmer of a huge lake
below, its silver edges like the scales of a fish.

“Lake Minooka,” said Tim.

“Water, water fucking everywhere but not a
drop to drink,” I said. “We can’t land anywhere.”

“Where there’s a lake there are lake houses.
Where there are lake houses, there are roads and all we need is a
two- lane with a straight stretch and we’ll be all right. Keep
looking for a roof or a dock or something that says, ‘This is my
fancy fucking cabin on this fancy fucking lake.’”

Staring down at the lake, I could see the
lapping of small waves, edging white in the full moonlight as they
lapped at a long dock stuck out into the water.

“There’s one…a boat dock. Look…I can see the
shine on the metal roof.”

Tim peered over the edge of the basket right
next to me with his arm extended down as he guided the balloon
lower and lower, his finger pointing like a divining rod,
mind-reading his way to a driveway, then a road. Like a flare, at
least to me, I saw the glint of a double yellow line between the
trees.

“There’s a road. Check the GPS.”

“Nothing here,” said Tim. “The fucking thing
is telling us we’re ‘off-road.’”

“Let’s just follow the goddamned yellow line.
There’s got to be a break in these trees somewhere,” I said. MG
grunted in his sleep.

Within minutes, we were close enough to the
tops of the pines to reach out and touch them.

“Take it easy, Timmy me boy. We don’t want to
get skewered on these things.” There below us, the trees parted and
a parking lot almost as big as a football field unrolled beneath
us, its criss-cross grid of parking spaces illuminated by the
moon.

“Damn. Finally. Bring ’er down…lean
right…lean right…lean…” The basket bottom dragged on the loose
gravel and ground the macadam, making us lurch forward where we
came to a sudden stop, one of our lines wrapped around a “Parking
By Permit Only” sign.

“Remind me to get a permit before we come
here again,” I said. MG had jumped up startled by the tipping of
the basket. “It’s okay, boy.” I patted his grizzled head. Tim had
his rifle out and I snapped the release on my holster. I never
thought I’d be the type to find the handle of a pistol so
comforting and so sub-consciously re-assuring. Tim powered down the
jets.

“Let’s sit a spell. Make sure no one spotted
us,” said Tim.

I let five minutes pass on my watch. No sound
but the gentle breeze rustling the pines. Sounded like the beach, a
distant surf breaking far away.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Looks fine.”

MG was the first out by way of my hands on
his hairy dog ass, nimbler than anyone would imagine. I climbed out
carefully, holding the three gallon milk containers which had
already saved our asses.

“Let’s head back toward that house.”

Tim had a worried look on his face. “You
think that’s a good idea?”

“Sure,” I said. “There’s nobody going to be
up here.”

“Dude, I think you’re wrong. Look, it’s only
just turned September. There could be a whole family in that house
that was here for summer vacation and they’re holed up. Why not?
That’s what I’d be doing.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s circle it and case
the joint. If it looks clear, we’ll use the tap to refill and take
whatever food we can carry. They might even have guns and ammo. I’m
not big on drinking lake water and getting the runs at a thousand
feet up.” Tim looked at me as if to say, “Man, you are some pussy,”
but he thought better of it and just answered, “Come on. Let’s do
it.”

CHAPTER 12

We followed the double yellow-lined road back
toward the west, keeping to the trees that fringed it. It was no
more than a mile back that we saw the hulking silhouette of the
house which was actually a log cabin—not one like Lincoln lived in,
but one of those fancy, machine made types with a metal roof and a
wrap-around porch. There were four Adirondack chairs sitting on
that porch empty and aimed at the lake. At this angle, the surface
looked like it was covered with about a million silver dollars
floating in the light of the moon. A few clouds passed by, covered
the moon and threw everything into a dark so dark it was like the
air had turned to ink. It was then that we saw a small flicker of
light through one of the windows. It was a kerosene lamp. MG just
settled into a bed of pine needles—these things were everywhere—and
Tim and I did the Indian thing and crept over for a better
look.