Ride the Serpentine (Year of the Zombie Book 7) Read online

  Sounds funny in retrospect.

  Zamora’s reaction was delayed. Like he had overheard one stranger calling out to another across a crowded room and was mildly curious to put faces to the voices. His eyes eventually found us. They were clouded over and bugged out of his head in way that seemed to suggest life. For a split second I wondered. ‘Is he…?’

  Then Gramps gets all Captain Obvious and lays it out CSI-style. ‘Looks like the weight gain put so much stress on his heart that he couldn’t handle his usual drug cocktail,’ he goes.

  Zamora’s eyes light up. ‘Food!’ I didn’t think they could get any bigger.

  If wood could scream it would sound something like the noise the throne made when he leaned toward Gramps, who was closest to him, and tried to grab him with his big sausage arms and hands that literally looked like over-inflated surgical gloves.

  Holly walks up and plants a screwdriver right in his skull. Bye bye deadfuck-Zamora. We shared a quiet moment as you often do when it’s someone you know… er knew. Something I forgot to mention earlier.

  A fire lights under Holly’s ass. He looks up, goes, ‘The others!’ And we all have the same thought.

  Did he eat them?

  Nah… I think I actually said it out loud.

  Me and Holly head for the door to check for the others when Gramps yells, ‘Wait!’

  He’s got the TV remote in his hand. He points it at the screen and pushes ‘play.’

  There they were; what was left of the group, duct-taped to chairs in the screening room. Cinderella. A sister-wife. The stunt cock and an associate. They were seated side-by-side. Clearly deadfucked. A movie played on a loop on the screen. Scenes from Zamora’s latest, and probably his worst.

  ‘Sick son of a bitch,’ Holly goes.

  Zamora would have these ‘movie nights.’ It started off as a good thing. We’d watch mostly upbeat flicks to escape from reality. Zamora would slip in some unused stuff from his archives and then pester you for your opinion afterward. The smart move was to lie. As time went on ‘movie nights’ turned into the Alex Zamora film festival. Attendance mandatory.

  Graeme rewinds the footage.

  Jules (V.O.): Holly goes, ‘I’m not sure I wanna see this.’ But he doesn’t look away when Gramps pushes ‘play.’

  Video

  The Screening Room (No Sound)

  A small screening room. Movie theatre-style seating. A screen spans the entire length and width of the front wall.

  An obese, pyjama-clad Zamora leads Cinderella, a sister-wife, the stunt-cock, and an associate into the room at gunpoint and instructs them to sit next to each other. They look weak, malnourished. The men appear to have been beaten. Their heads hang low. Shoulders slack. No fight left in them. The stunt-cock appears to have received the worst of it. He can barely stand and has to be helped into his seat.

  Zamora puts the gun to Cinderella’s head. She shrinks, face tightened, eyes squeezed shut. Tears stream down her face as she anticipates her demise. ‘Will it hurt? Will it be quick?’ Zamora savors the moment, and then yells something to the group. They flinch at the sound of his raised voice. He continues to yell and gesture toward the screen. Afterward, he leans closer to Cinderella and mouths something in her ear. He points to a plastic bag on the floor. Several rolls of duct tape inside. The girl grabs a roll and moves reluctantly to tape the others to their chairs. Zamora scrutinizes her technique along the way and threatens her several times for moving too slowly. She is trembling, weeping heavily. Afterward, he tapes the girl to the aisle seat using the same technique. He makes a point to do it twice as quickly as she had done. He makes a speech punctuated with big, sweeping arm movements, and then leaves the room.

  Cinderella and the sister-wife struggle against their restraints and attempt to rally the others, but the stunt-cock is barely conscious and the associate is paralyzed by fear. He sits there, staring straight ahead and babbling something to himself. The sister-wife eventually yells at him to, ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’

  The group looks toward the ceiling, reacting to the dimming lights. Nightvision kicks in and colours the view a putrid green. The movie-screen comes alive and startles the group. The Zamora Films logo fades to a shot of Zamora seated in a director’s chair dressed like some relic from Hollywood’s golden age. He makes a high-minded speech and then unleashes a haphazard montage of extreme sexual acts on the audience.

  Cinderella and the sister-wife curse at the screen and continue to struggle. Some of their own scenes appear in the montage. The associate has awakened from his fear-coma and is talking to the stunt-cock, who doesn’t respond, but just sits there, motionless. Head sagging. Hang-jawed. Drool.

  Cinderella and the sister-wife join in. Before long they are yelling at the barely conscious stunt cock to ‘HOLD ON! WAKE UP! STAY ALIVE!’ No response. No movement. The associate leans in trying to get a look at the young man’s face. The stunt-cock flinches, startling the associate. His head bounces. He looks up slowly, dead, but alive.

  Undead stunt-cock drunkenly pivots his head from side-to-side as if to ascertain his surroundings. His eyes widen at the sight of food. He lunges toward the associate, and then the sister-wife, teeth snapping shut inches away from them. They panic, screaming, and fighting the restraints with more vigor. The undead stunt-cock thrashes against his restraints as if angered by them. He lunges at the sister-wife without warning. She leans away, but not fast enough, and he bites her on the shoulder. She cries out in pain as Undead stunt-cock snatches his head away from her, his mouth attached by elastic strands of flesh. Blood everywhere.

  Fast Forward...

  …the sister-wife’s body is slouched in her seat, her head slumped toward the stunt-cock who devours the left side of her face, biting, and whipping his head, and snatching it away from the chewed visage. Cinderella weeps in her seat. The associate thrashes against his restraints.

  Fast Forward…

  …A frantic Cinderella leans away from Undead sister-wife’s half-headed snarl and snapping teeth. Her face twisted in palpable terror. The stunt-cock similarly pursues the associate.

  Fast Forward…

  An audience of four seated side-by-side, seemingly content with each other and with the rapid-fire montage of depravity on the screen. They stare with slack-jawed wonder, mesmerized by the colourstorm and the noise or maybe by the sight of warm, edible meat blown up to giant proportions. Cinderella and the associate are no longer interested in fighting. Their wounds tell the story of their demise – Cinderella with her left ear missing and her left arm dangling by sinewy strands from her shoulder. The associate with his entire face eaten away.

  End video

  Interior of van. Jules seated in back thumbing through a magazine. Acoustic guitar in his lap. Hollister and Graeme in the driver and passenger-seats respectively. Graeme has the window down. His arm rests on the frame.

  Jules (V.O.): We got the codes to the entire place by watching footage of Zamora skulking around while everyone slept. Gramps’ idea. We spent a whole day disposing of Zamora’s body, which we had to freeze first, and then cut into pieces. Another day on the rest of the group. We drew straws to see who would have to… de-deadfuckify them, shall we say. And who would have to cut up Zamora. The honors went to Gramps and Holly, respectively. In the end, we did it together. No way I was gonna let them have all the fun. Goooo teamwork!

  We piled the bodies out back and burned them. The fire pushed the deadfucks back to the treeline that bordered Zamora’s estate. Fired off a few rounds in the air to remind the hard-headed ones who’s boss. If they had half-a-brain they realized that they had us outnumbered. The fuckers had been creeping since we returned, circling the fringes of the estate like sharks on ketamine. ‘Looks like we’re gonna have to do some cleaning,’ I go.

  ‘I could use the target practice,’ says Holly.

  We all could.

  We said a little prayer for the group as the fire raged on. None of us are even remotely religious, but it felt
like the right thing to do. We’re doin’ the whole ‘moment of silence’ thing, when Graeme goes, ‘Please tell me you can see that?’

  Me and Holly look up, unsure which one of us he’s talking to. He’s looking toward the tree line. So we look, too.

  ‘Over there,’ he goes. ‘The tree lying on its side...’

  But I had already spotted her; our number one fan. The area had been hit with a monster storm a few days before we arrived. An old tree trunk, hollowed out from rot, lay on its side, victim of the wind. The dead girl was standing on top of it like some kinda lookout for the deadfuck army meandering in the woods around her. And, as usual, she was looking in our direction. They all were, in fact. But there was a difference in the way she stared. The others seemed more interested in the flames than the scruffy-looking Rock ‘n’ Roll dinosaurs standing in front of it. But not her.

  You could literally feel her eyes on you. It still gives me the chills. Don’t know if you’ve had the privilege of sharing your living space with cockroaches, and I’m talking the big German kind. Just the sight of one haunts you for hours. Especially if it gets away. You know it’s there, but you can’t see it. Meanwhile it sits there, patiently waiting for an opportunity to crawl up your pant leg or across your plate or onto the bed while you’re sleeping. That kind thing.

  ‘So I wasn’t seeing things.’ Holly goes as if a weight had suddenly lifted off his shoulders. I was thinking the same thing, to be honest.

  It took us three more days to get the Grotto back to livable condition. Zamora had put a pretty good dent in the food, but there was a few months’ worth of canned vegetables, Ramen noodles, and oatmeal to go with our supply of potatoes and Spaghettios. Yum!

  We gave up on Zamora’s room after several attempts to get rid of the smell, and sealed it off from the rest of the bunker.

  During that time we shared stories about our number one fan. Each of us had seen her since that day six months ago when we bolted from the Grotto. Come to find out, Gramps had even attempted to communicate with the girl at one point.

  ‘It was back at Somerset,’ he goes. ‘Behind the old church, just outside the perimeter of the compound. The one by the lake.’

  ‘Tha Hell were you doing way out there?’ I say.

  ‘The black chick,’ Holly says as if I should’ve known.

  He’s right. I should’ve known. Her and Gramps’ quickie behind the church was the reason we were ‘asked’ to leave the place. Turned out the girl was spoken for. By whom was the question. There were two people laying stake to that claim. Three if you count the leader’s wife. I often wonder how that ended. Probably not good.

  ‘Her name was Siobhan,’ Gramps says like he had real feelings for her or something.

  Holly throws his hands up in surrender, makes a face. ‘Excuuuse ME.’

  ‘I bummed a cigarette from her and stayed out there and smoked it after she went back inside. That’s when I saw the girl. She was standing at the edge of the lake looking up the hill at me. This was maybe the third time I had seen her since we left the Grotto. I thought it was all in my head. You know? I was afraid to say anything and have you guys start looking at me sideways.’

  We had each arrived at a similar conclusion from our individual encounters with the dead girl in the soaking wet groupie digs and the ‘Ride the Serpentine’ Concert Tee. No use mentioning it to the others and raising concern about your mental state and/or risk losing the trust of the only people in the world that you trust. These days trust is about as rare as deodorant or fresh breath.

  ‘It was a real secluded spot me and Siobhan had picked,’ Gramps goes. ‘No other deadfucks in sight. So I’m like, “I need to deal with this.” For the sake of my sanity, at least. Right? So I walk closer to the chick. She doesn’t move. I ask her; “Can you hear me? Who are you? What do you want from us?” She looks at me like she wants to tell me something…’

  ‘Yeah. Come over here pretty-boy and let me eat your lanky ass,’ I say to lighten the mood.

  But Gramps was lost in the memory. He talks right over me. The sound of my voice was just background noise at this point.

  ‘I walk closer,’ he continues. ‘I get within 10-feet of the chick and she starts walking toward me. The look on her face changes. Almost like she’s happy. But happy like a cult-member about to drink the Kool Aid. She’s like… smiling through a peaceful expression. I can see that her eye makeup is smeared from crying. When’s the last time you saw a deadfuck cry? Right? She opens her mouth like she’s about to say something, but it just kinda hangs open.’

  Then the son of a bitch trails off with me and Holly sittin’ firmly on the edges of our seats.

  ‘Then what?’ We say it almost simultaneously.

  ‘Then I ran is what I fucking did!’

  ‘Weren’t you packin?’ I go.

  ‘I had the Glock 19.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just plug her then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something about her. I can’t put my finger on it. I just had to get outta there.’

  Remember what I said about cockroaches? Imagine being bitch-slapped by the physical manifestation of that vibe.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I must’ve lay there for hours with the lights on scrolling through the same three questions over and over in my head.

  Who the hell is this girl?

  How the fuck does she keep finding us?

  How is it that she always looks the same?

  Six months is a lifetime in deadfuck years. If they even survived that long, you’d expect a certain degree of rot or some gaping, oozing memento of his or her death or of some encounter with the living.

  Lights-out in the Grotto was a special kind of dark. Sensory deprivation dark. You want to wait until you’re dead tired before turning in. If you weren’t asleep within the first few minutes then you were liable to be taken places you’d rather not explore. Absolute darkness and absolute silence provides the perfect platform for a fractured psyche to run free. I made the mistake of turning in on half-a-tank. But I was determined to will myself to sleep and NOT to dream. Short of death, it’s the only escape from this Hell.

  I was on the waking end of a nod-off cycle when I heard a noise like a faint tapping in the distance. I thought – I hoped – it was one of the boys up for a late-night piss, but there were no residual sounds to support that scenario.

  I hear the sound again. I lay there and listen. Was it coming from the main entrance of the Grotto? Maybe someone knocking on the main door? My heart sank. That someone would have to know exactly where to look to find the entrance. Then they’d have to remove the fake fireplace display and lift the panel of steel flooring underneath it to reach the door, which resembled the hatch on a submarine.

  Holly appears at my doorway and scares the shit outta me. He’s wriggling into his shirt as he says, ‘Someone’s at the main entrance.’

  My brain spits out a stupid question, ‘Who?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know. A friend of Zamora’s?’

  ‘That’s just what we fucking need.’

  ‘Come on.’

  He calls out to Gramps as he heads off toward the control room. I jump out of bed and into my clothes. Something on the monitors has Holly and Gramps’ undivided attention when I reach the control room. I shove my way between them and have a look.

  It’s her. Our number one fan. She’s down on one knee by the fireplace. A puddle of water on the floor beneath her knee. The fake display is spread across the living room. The steel flooring lifted onto one side exposing the main entrance door. She knocks again.

  Tap! Tap! Tap!

  And then she waits. We stand there in silence trying to process what we were seeing.

  ‘I vote we put her creepy ass down before she attracts more of ‘em,’ I go. We had yet to clean up the area and it was getting thick with the deadfucks. That’s when they’re the most dangerous.

  ‘How do we know this isn’t some trick just to get us to come outside?’ Holly sa
ys.

  ‘A trick?’ I go. ‘Are you fucking kidding me? Orchestrated by who? Rod-fucking-Serling?’

  The girl knocks and waits again. Meanwhile me and Holly bicker like a married couple. Afterward she stands up, turns, and looks directly at the camera.

  It was like somebody let all the air out of the room. The camera in the living room, which is about the size of an AA battery, is hidden in a vent. There was no way she could’ve known that.

  She stands there for a good minute, and then she turns and walks out through the sliding doors on the east side of the house. Holly turns on the exterior floodlights and switches to the cameras mounted high up on the light posts. We watch the girl wander out into the east yard.

  Now the argument between me and Holly becomes about whether or not we should go after her and put a period on this whole thing. We hadn’t even noticed that Gramps had left the room until…