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[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living, dead, or anywhere in between, is purely a figment of your own sick, twisted imagination. You really ought to seek professional help for that. Except for the cat, of course; that skin on the cover really is t h e Dead Cat, if that’s any consolation to you.]
Ras woke up, half out of his seat belt and thrown sideways in the car, which was sitting at a crazy angle. He remembered now, with the winds shrieking and the rain funneling through the hole the rum bottle had made in the back window. Xerxes had been King of Kings after Darius the First. The guy who got butt-fucked at Thermopylae by a few thousand Greeks in a narrow pass against his army of two hundred thousand mercenaries and slaves. Everybody said it was only three hundred Spartans, but they always forgot the four thousand other Greeks who stood and died with them, and forgot the storm that had destroyed Xerxes’ fleet and was the real source of his defeat. Without that storm, Xerxes would have gone on from the minor delay of exterminating those few bothersome sheep-herders to invade the Greek mainland and conquer it utterly.
Someone, and he suspected the same pissed-off brother who had dragged him around the car by his shirt on the way down, had also hit a home run off his nose with a pinewood slugger and the blood and agony were still flowing. He coughed about half his front teeth onto his aching right arm and felt a sharp grinding in his mouth. It was as if the credits of a movie titled “Forget Not Having Dentures” scrolled before his eyes.
Someone was knocking – no, more like pawing – at the window. He turned to look, and his head spun sickeningly. The flying water hid the black features of the person from his view, but somehow he managed to hit the button for the electric window, hoping for some help. The glass whined painfully down, and Ras faced a nightmare. Stark whites of bloodshot eyes glared from a flat, black face ruined by some hideous disease. Ras clawed at the buttons on the door, trying to shut out this horror from the flying storm. The face swam closer, clawed hands reaching, the black skin deeply pitted and wrinkled, as if it were breaking up like the road in front of Vena’s. The window was six inches from closing when its edge smashed into the face and the hands. The shattered lips left some putrid slime instead of blood. The hands grabbed for him, impossibly strong. Pain ripped through Ras’ shoulder. He swept the intruding arms against the back of the window frame, battering at them with his own forearms again and again until he felt the bones of the intruding arms break. His training had taught him that most men would quit with that kind of injury, but that scabrous face still slavered at the partially open window with teeth far too long to be human. Ras whimpered like a frightened child as he tried desperately to close the gap.
Ras heard a greasy bubbling from beside him and looked down to see the forearm, twitching between the seat and the right-side door. And all the times he’d dropped a joint down there, he thought wildly, now wouldn’t that have been useful! Remembering his training, he told himself: Screaming won’t save you. Screaming won’t save you. But it would gear you up. He was hyperventilating, screaming out in deep primate roars, which clearly meant he was ready to fight or die. It was a good thing, too, because at least ten more white-eyed figures were now closing on the little Suzuki. God, they were fast. If they made any sound, it was drowned by the howling tempest. Within seconds, he knew how those Spartans must have felt. He was outnumbered, surrounded by enemies he did not understand, and had a very bad feeling that they could do far worse than just kill him.
The creatures that approached the car could easily be seen as zombies. Not slavering monsters like in the movies, but damned odd people who shared blank stares of hostility from faces that all seemed to have some awful disease. He knew perfectly well zombies didn’t exist, but that guy had ripped off his own fucking arm, for God’s sake, and he wasn’t even out of action! His teeth were too long, his face was a wreck, and he was strong. Too god-damned strong to be human. To Ras’ addled mind the idea didn’t seem all that strange. Kirk and Rita had warned him, after all. And he hadn’t listened; his mom had always said he never listened. And now he was going to die.
It occurred to him to try starting the engine, and to his surprise it dutifully cranked right up. He belatedly noticed the steep angle at which the car rested, but decided he had nothing to lose. The first of the newcomers crashed onto the roof and began pounding like a jackhammer, denting the roof with each hit. Now they pounded on every window. He knew they would get in if he stayed here.
He hit reverse and floored it, but only went back a few feet before the landslide debris stopped him. He went to first and hit the gas again, trying to break free in one shot, but even with four-wheel drive his tires began to spin. The weight of his attackers was holding him down. Rain hammered the car again, and waves of water washed the windshield clean. The creatures leapt on the bucking vehicle and slid off again, and he was running them over, hearing bones crunch as the wind, seemingly jealous of the competition, battered at all of them.
Fear energized him as he jammed the gears back and forth. The back glass exploded and one of the – fuck it, they were zombies – one of the zombies was halfway in. He heard a high screeching and realized it was himself wailing. He slipped the clutch in reverse and when he slammed into the boulder behind him the horrid creature flew backwards into the storm. He’d crushed that one, but more were scrambling to get in through the same hole. They would be on him in seconds, and he knew what would happen. “In no time,” Marfa had said, “de demons, dey eat de girl.” They would fucking eat him. He was still wailing like a lost soul. He did not want to die eaten alive, torn apart like a zebra on the plains.
A sound he remembered seemed to come from up the hill. He was sure it was his imagination; there was no way he was hearing a genuine US-made automatic rifle here in the wilds of Dominica. Definitely an M16, set for three-round bursts like the pros do. It wasn’t until a round came through the gaping back glass and took out his right rear window, as in right behind his head, that he actually believed it. Damn it, he thought of the second window gone. Now I’m gonna have to pay for that too!
The zombies were dropping around the car as the firing came nearer. Ras backed the solid little four-wheel hard against the rocks behind him, and a squishy crunch told him the body of the one who had broken the back window was still there. So it was possible to kill them, he thought, far too calmly. Then, with a shout, he stomped the gas and let the engine roar before he dumped the clutch. With nothing held back, the sweet little truck bounded out of the hole like a scared rabbit, and he spun to a stop a little downso in the field.
He heard more firing and he cut the lights, but he was sure he’d seen a small figure in a hooded jacket banging proficiently away at the flitting figures who didn’t run away. Ras turned the car left, angling up towards the road down-hill from the landslide. His wheels slipped and the Suzuki slid crazily but he horsed it up the muddy incline, working the clutch in and out. He didn’t care who was killing those fuckers or why. He was just thrilled to know they could be killed at all. His head hurt, and he was getting angry, very angry. Every dip and bump sent bolts of agony through his skull. His broken nose oozed snot and blood. He was seeing double.
When he got to the road, he couldn’t get across the concrete ditch. He had to make for the nearest dirt side-track, and hope there was no stream to stop him. There wasn’t, and he whimpered with relief. He bumped up the rise and onto the track, groaning as the vehicle rocked and bobbed. He only had to go a few hundred feet to his left, and he would be back on what passed for the main road, below the destruction from the landslide. With that tiny release of tension his eyes began to close. It should have been obvious to him he had a concussion. If he had not been drunk, stoned, traumatized, and terrified, he just might, with all his training, have known it.
| Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens |
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