Zombie Pulp Page 9

  “What did you do?” she said to Emily. “What did you do?”

  “I went outside,” Emily said.

  Mother locked the doors as fists pounded on them, wanting to be let in. There was a lot of shouting and yelling as night came.

  “We have to get out of here,” Mother said. “We have to go somewhere safe.”

  “The cemetery,” Emily said.

  “Yes, that’s where we’ll go.”

  But then there was more pounding at the door and finally something kept ramming it until it came off its hinges. Then the police came charging in and Mother ran right at them, screaming and fighting.

  “Run, Emily!” she called out. “Run!”

  So Emily did.

  She ran out the back way and almost made it to the vacant lot when she heard the barking of big dogs. Men were running through the neighborhood with flashlights. Emily went into the vacant lot and hid in the grass. She dug up Mrs. Lee’s baby where she had hidden it in the dirt under the big rock, brushed the crawly things off it. Then the men came and put flashlights on her, blinding her.

  “Dear God in heaven,” one of the policemen said.

  Emily shook her headless baby at them and hissed, showing her long teeth.

  The dogs that were with them were howling and baying and snapping at their handlers. The men let them go. The dogs came right at Emily, sinking their teeth into her, tearing open her dress-up clothes and biting free flaps of flesh and crunching bones. Lots of people cried out, but they didn’t come any closer. The dogs chewed and rent and split Emily, yanking off her limbs which kicked and clawed in the grass, fingers looking for something to grab. The dogs did not stop. They were mad and frothing and snapping and biting.

  Emily kept screaming until there was nothing left to scream with.

  Then there was just silence and the growling of dogs and people whimpering.

  So fifteen days after Emily came out of her grave, what was left of her was shoveled back in there again.

  DIS-JOINTED

  It was raining when they murdered Pauly Zaber.

  And it was coming down in buckets and pails when they dragged his corpse from the trunk of Specks’ Buick. Zaber had been a big man and he made a big corpse. Wrapped in sackcloth, a lot of it, he was roped up like a steer. Getting him in the trunk was tough business and getting him out was something else again.

  “Just grab hold,” Specks said. “He’s dead for godsake, he won’t bite you.”

  But maybe Weams and Lyon didn’t quite believe that. Sure, they’d helped Specks murder Zaber and their hands were just as red as his, but now handling the body after it had been cooling an hour…there was just something obscene about that.

  Lyon reached in there, taking hold of the ropes, started yanking along with Specks, drawing the dead man up. “I’m doing my bit,” he said, raindrops beading on his face. “Tell Weams to do his.”

  Weams was going to tell him to go to hell, maybe tell both of them that, but instead he reached into the blackness of the trunk, started pulling, feeling that awful weight shifting under the tarp. He kept his lips pressed in a white line and he wasn’t sure if that was because of what he might say or to keep himself from screaming.

  Because that was a real possibility.

  “On the count of three, girls,” Specks said. “Up…and…out…”

  It was nasty work.

  The rain hammering down, the ground gone to sluicing gray mud. The trees rising up around them black and gnarled, ribboned with crawling shadows that were viscid and horribly alive.

  Weams kept imagining that maybe Zaber was still alive, that three rounds from a 9mm hadn’t been enough to put that pig down dead. That under the tarp, maybe he was awake. Maybe he was thinking things.

  Zaber made a big corpse, all right. A huge, porcine man whose idea of eating light had been a porterhouse smothered in clam linguine. He tipped the scales at 400 pounds. A big, meaty fellow with eyes just as black as coal dust and a vicious temper. People said he once ate a guy that didn’t pay up on a loan…but you couldn’t believe everything you heard. There was only one thing for sure about Pauly Zaber: he was a loanshark and if you didn’t make your payments, he would hurt you.

  But now he was dead, cold, had eaten three slugs from a 9mm and that’s all she wrote.

  Specks, Weams, and Lyon were grunting and puffing, swearing and groaning, but finally they got their sackcloth package up onto the lip of the trunk, balanced precariously. And that’s when one of Zaber’s huge arms slipped out of the canvas, his hand landing on Lyon’s own with a wet slapping sound.

  Lyon screamed.

  You could say it was shock or superstitious terror, but all that mattered was that Lyon screamed like a little girl with a high, shrill wailing sound. He let go of Zaber and the sudden weight of the corpse overwhelmed the other two and it fell to their feet, slopping in the mud…both arms out now.

  “He touched me!” Lyon stammered, rubbing his hands on his wet pants. “Jesus, he touched me, he touched me!”

  Specks took hold of him and shook him. “He’s dead, you idiot, he can’t hurt you now! He’s no more dangerous than a side of beef.”

  “But cold…damn, he’s so cold…”

  Weams wasn’t hearing any of it. He was just looking down at that lolling, grisly bundle, thinking how with those flabby white arms hanging out of the sackcloth Zaber looked like something being born, trying to pull itself free of a placenta.

  “Lend a hand,” Specks said.

  They took hold of Zaber’s legs under the canvas and dragged him through the muck down the trail. The undergrowth was wet and dripping, the trees tall and skeletal. The night was damp and cool and ominous. When they made the shack, Specks unlocked it and they dragged Zaber inside and deposited their burden on the plank flooring.

  Specks found a lantern on a hook, lit it.

  “Nobody uses this place,” he told them, the shadows crawling over his face in the flickering yellow illumination. “It’s perfect.”

  And maybe it was. Just a desolate tumbledown shack far from the city nestled in a desolate stand of woods like a pea in a poke. The sort of place that stood for fifty winters and might stand for fifty more, or just fall to jackstraw ruin next month.

  Specks said, “I’ll be back in a minute with the goodies. If he moves…just scream good and loud.” He thought that was funny. “But not loud enough to wake the dead.”

  Then he went back to the Buick to get the tools, leaving Weams and Lyon alone with Big Pauly Zaber, the former syndicate shylock that had made all their lives hell. But he wasn’t going to be doing much of anything now.

  “I think,” Lyon said, “I think we screwed up big here, I’m sure of it.”

  Weams chuckled low in his throat. “Do you really think so?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Zaber’s corpse shifted in the sackcloth, one hand sliding free, knuckles rapping on the floor.

  Lyon sucked in a sharp breath and did not seem to be able to exhale. Weams just stood there, filled with a gaping terror that was oddly blank and dreamlike. He couldn’t seem to get his mouth to close.

  “Gravity,” Lyon said, like maybe he was trying to convince himself.

  The shack smelled of moistness and age, black earth and mildewed leaves. It was a heavy, vaporous odor that got thicker by the moment. Both men just looked at each other, then away, their faces gaunt and chiseled by stress, their eyes jutting from their skulls, glassy and unblinking.

  Then Specks was back.

  He handed out crowbars and hammers from his sack of tools, left the shovels leaning up in the corner. By the shifting lantern light, they yanked up the rotting planks one by one until the clotted black earth below was revealed and a fetid, loamy stink filled the shack.

  “Okay, girls,” Specks said, stripping down to his undershirt—a tank top, of course, to show off all his gleaming muscles—and grinning like a skull in a basket. “You know what happens now.”

  But Lyon shook hi
s head. “I just don’t know if I can.”

  “Oh, you will,” Specks told him. “By God, you will. We’re in this together and together we’ll do what has to be done.”

  Specks told them to start digging while he unwrapped their package. He used a knife, cutting the ropes free from the sackcloth, exposing Pauly Zaber’s huge, naked corpse like a grim surprise under a Christmas tree. Zaber had gone white as lace, distended and obese, a thickset rage of chins and pendulous tits, an immense belly like some fleshy beach ball inflated to the point of bursting. And everywhere, just bleached and rolling. The only color on him was the tattoo of an eagle on his chest…and that looked like something hit by a truck now, a mangled crow at best. The artwork had been shattered by blackened bullet holes, streaks of gore that oozed and dried.

  He hadn’t bled very much and Specks was quick to point out that was because one of the bullets had shattered his heart. When it stopped pumping, he said, Zaber stopped bleeding.

  Weams said, “Look…look at his face…”

  It was a white, greasy mass, thick-lipped, one eye open and staring, the other retreating into a pouch of fat. Maybe it was rigor mortis or something, but his mouth was drawn into a lurid, toothy grin. There was something vile and perverse about that.

  Specks had a hacksaw out. “Who wants to go first?”

  Lyon made a whimpering sound and almost lost his lunch when Specks laid the teeth of the saw against Zaber’s pudgy gullet and began to draw it back and forth, back and forth. Weams had to take him outside. And when they were both there, the night closing in and the rain on their faces, they both got sick, the nausea boiling up and out of them in tangled, gagging tides. But it was more than just what Specks was doing in there, but the sound of it. That shearing, meaty sound like a crosscut saw ripping into a ball of suet. And when Specks struck bone…Jesus.

  Weams and Lyon had a smoke out there, pulled from Specks’ flask of whiskey, and wondered to high heaven how they would ever purge this night from their minds. When they went back in, Zaber’s legs and head were missing. Specks had cut them off and bagged them in green Hefty garbage bags. There was blood soaking into the soil, blood smeared right up to Specks’ elbows.

  Weams looked down on that legless, headless torso and felt a clawing madness in the back of his skull. Zaber was now an immense, fish-white blobby thing with arms still in place, head sheared to a stump, legs gone where they entered the hip. He could see the grizzled meat in there, marbled and red like fresh beef, the sawed knobs of bone trailing streamers of white ligament.

  It was too much, just too much.

  “Lyon,” Specks said, enjoying himself, “take off his arms. Me and Weams will go dump this trash in the river.”

  Lyon was shaking. “No, no, no…Jesus, you can’t…you can’t leave me alone with that thing…”

  Specks started laughing. “All right, Weams you stay. You each do an arm. Start cutting in the armpit, it’s soft there. I’ll take this stuff down to the river, fill the bags with rocks and sink them. By the time the bags rot through, won’t be enough left to float.”

  “C’mon, Specks,” Weams said. “Let’s just dump him in the hole as is.”

  “No. Arms are hooked to hands and hands to fingers. Fingers have fingerprints. If anybody finds the torso, I don’t want them matching fingerprints to it. And Zaber has a record. He did time. So cut him up.”

  He told them to put the torso in the big hole they’d dug and to bag the arms, bury them off in the woods. Before he left, he said, “And don’t let me down, boys.”

  He tossed Zaber’s legs over his left shoulder and even bagged in that green plastic, they could see that the undersides of his knees were resting atop Specks’ shoulders.

  “Man,” he said. “These legs gotta weight eighty a piece.”

  He picked up the bag with the head in it and off he went.

  Which left Weams and Lyon alone with the torso, watching it, not wanting to look, but unable to stop. There was a grim magnetism to the thing. So they watched and waited—maybe for it to move.

  “I don’t like this,” Lyon said. “I don’t like any of it.”

  “It doesn’t seem to bother Specks,” Weams said.

  “That’s because he’s a fucking animal.” Lyon went to the door, peered out, then closed it again, making sure Specks wasn’t out there eavesdropping. “I mean, c’mon, whose idea was it to kill fucking Pauly?”

  “Specks’. But we went along with it.”

  “Sure we did. And whose idea was it to slice the body up? Specks’. He’s too easy with all this, man. He’s done this shit before.”

  Weams had been thinking that, too. Specks did the shooting. He’d known exactly how to bag up the remains and he seemed to know exactly how to cut them up. “Specks has been around. He’s a bad boy. But he got us out of some ugly shit with Zaber. I mean, shit, I was into the guy for almost twenty G’s.”

  Lyon sighed. “Me, too. But still…we should have thought about this. Killing a guy…Christ, that makes us no better than Specks. He’s done time before, but we haven’t. I don’t think I could take it.”

  Weams didn’t say so, but standing there with that massive legless, headless corpse spread at their feet, he was thinking that prison was the least of their worries.

  “Okay, we’re part of this now. No going back. But I’m not going any farther,” Lyon announced. “I won’t butcher a…a corpse.”

  “Me either,” Weams sighed.

  They pushed it into the hole with their boots and it landed with a flopping, rubbery sound that made them both gasp. Then they buried it, smoothed out the soil. They dug a dummy hole out in the woods, buried it back up. It would convince Specks…unless he wanted to paw around in there.

  When he returned, they were fitting the floorboards back in place, nailing them tight.

  “How was it, girls?” he asked, rain dripping from his hair. “Messy?”

  “Let’s not talk about it, okay?” Weams said.

  “Sure, sure, whatever you say. The arms?”

  “Out in the woods,” Lyon said.

  Specks seemed satisfied. “Well,” he said, “I guess that’s the last we’ll see of Pauly Zaber.”

  But Weams had to wonder.

  *

  Later, the night thick as soup beyond the windows of the old house, Weams was watching Lila mix him a vodka martini. Just watching her, you knew she had been a bartender once. Too smooth, too easy with it.

  Just like Specks with a dead body.

  Lila was all dolled-up in a short skirt and sequined top, a gold chain teasing her ample cleavage. That was Lila: all dressed-up and nowhere to go. And she knew damn well why there was nowhere to go: no money, no nothing. Just that old creaking house and Weams, her husband.

  Lila handed him his drink. “Let me guess,” she said, her eyes frigid and brittle like black ice, “you were out with Lyon and Specks? Stop me here if I’m wrong. Out playing the ponies, working the slots, dropping a few hands of blackjack. Am I close on this?”

  Weams sipped his drink, heard his wife, but only saw a blubbery white thing falling into a grave. “I guess. Maybe…what did you say?”

  “How much this time?”

  “How much what?”

  “How much money did you drop?” she wanted to know, those eyes not black ice now, but something colder, maybe absolute zero where even oxygen freezes. “And, better yet, how much did you borrow from that loanshark, from—”

  “Change the record,” Weams snapped, sweat beading his brow.

  “You have a problem,” his wife said. “You’re an addict. You need help.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you? You know what I heard? Lyon’s wife is leaving him and he’s about to lose his house. Does that little bell ring familiar?”

  Weams’ hands were shaking and it took both of them to get his drink to his mouth. “Leave Lyon out of it.”

  “How about Specks…how is Specks doing?”

  Weams slammed his d
rink down on the coffee table. “Why the hell are you always asking about Specks? Do you like the guy? You got something going on with him?”

  “That’d be the day,” she said. “He’s a creep and we both know it. An ex-con. How can you associate with a guy like him?”

  “He’s okay.”

  And Weams almost started laughing. Sure, he’s okay. And Pauly Zaber? He was okay, too. Salt of the earth. Just normal, hard-working guys.

  Lila laughed. “Me and Specks. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  But Weams didn’t think he was being ridiculous. He just stared at his wife, his complexion pasty, his eyes red-rimmed and fixed. “Sometimes I wonder about the two of you.”

  “You don’t look good,” Lila said, crossing to the picture window and looking out across the darkened yard, the trees blowing in the wind, the gate creaking open and shut on the fence. “You look sick. Maybe you should tell me about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About what happened tonight? Did you sign away the house? The car? Is it that fat loanshark? What’s his name? Zab—”

  “I’m fine, dammit!” Weams told her, brushing perspiration from his face. “I’m perfectly fine! Can’t you see that? Can’t you see how fine I am?”

  *

  When the phone rang just after midnight two days later, Weams came awake with a scream on his lips. He held it in check, shivering and sweating, trying hard not to remember what he’d been dreaming about. Lila was gone. Out God-knows-where with God-knows-who.

  He stumbled over to the phone. “Yes? Hello?”

  “Listen, Weams, you got to get over here.” It was Lyon and he sounded funny. Drunk? Crazy? Maybe both. But there was something in his voice, a sharp-edged dread that was positively frightening in its urgency.

  “C’mon, Lyon…do you know what time it is?”

  But Lyon didn’t seem to care. “You have to get over here. I mean it. Something’s happening and, God, Weams, you gotta help me…”