Part 12 (1/2)

”Satannnuh has come to play tricks with your mind,” the crazy preacher wailed. ”Do not listen to him. He is the devil incarnate!”

The corpses wandered in circles and converged. A steady buzz arose as the dead congregation spoke to one another in a language of their own, then they began to move toward the pulpit.

The wooden carving of Christ moved. One hand tore free of the cross, trailing bits of shredded flesh and dripping blood in its wake. The second hand came away next, sliding right off the nail, then the feet came free, and Christ rose behind the wild-eyed preacher.

The dead paris.h.i.+oners formed a wide circle around the front of the pulpit. The preacher commanded them to retreat or face the wrath of Christ, but before he could continue his diatribe, Christ lifted him off the ground and held him so the congregation could feast.

The preacher screamed as bony hands groped him, tearing and ripping and chewing until his flesh was gone. The zombie congregation fought over brains and intestines, devoured his liver and his heart, and licked blood from their lips and rotting fingers. . . .

Gil bolted for the door. He was reaching for the handle when someone screamed. He turned to see the preacher running down the aisle toward him, now missing one arm and half his face. The preacher's stomach was an open cavity. He was trying to hold what remained of his body organs in with the one arm he had left.

Gil jerked the door open.

Larry's car was disappearing in the distance.

Silence fell around him.

Gil turned around, still expecting to see the crazed preacher and the long-dead congregation. The church was dark except for the dusty strips of sunlight falling across the floor.

The pulpit was empty.

Christ hung in silent suffering upon his cross.

Gil retrieved his briefcase and tape recorder, then he got into his car and started the engine. He took one final look at the church and drove off.

The Little White Church became a best-selling novel. In fact, it became the biggest selling book of Gil's career. He'd considered making it a nonfiction masterpiece, but he wasn't sure the public would believe it.

Larry sure as h.e.l.l hadn't believed a word of it, and as the days went by, Gil wasn't sure he believed it either.

Scoring Too.

It was sort of freaky the day the dead started to walk again. I was nineteen years old at the time, and into experimenting with all sorts of drugs and weird s.e.x s.h.i.+t. My life was one big party. I didn't think about the future at all. I always a.s.sumed there'd be plenty of time for that later. How the f.u.c.k was I supposed to know dead things were going rise from their graves?

When they first came back, almost everybody got away from the city. My landlord was one of the first to split, so me and a few of my radical friends turned my apartment building into a fortress and hung around. It made good sense to us. Why wander the countryside when we could stay somewhere we already felt comfortable?

It was me, Bingo, Porky, and Stella. We worked together to make our building immune to the dead. Bingo and Porky went on foraging missions daily, while Stella and I held down the fort. It was the perfect setup for a while, and then everything went to h.e.l.l.

We were all still smoking weed, but everybody except Bingo had given up on the hallucinogens. The way we saw it, with all the corpses walking around and s.h.i.+t, anything stronger than weed was not only unnecessary, it was downright stupid.

Bingo didn't see it that way. He said he'd stop when his supply ran dry, but we all knew Bingo's supply would never dry up. The man knew where to get his stuff, even in a world turned upside down by some freaky plague.

One night Bingo got so crazy he went outside and stood in the middle of the street, screaming at the top of his lungs. A bunch of the dead things came out of the woodwork and climbed all over him. They tore him apart and fought over his intestines.

Well, Stella freaked out and ran outside, and then Porky went after her because he wanted to f.u.c.k her someday, which meant he couldn't let her die, and that's how they all ended up zombie food right along with Bingo.

That left me alone, and believe me, I learned how to survive. I spent a lot of time inside at first, but then I started going out. I mean, the world was what it was, and I knew I couldn't stay inside forever, right?

The dead seemed to be migrating away from the city. I saw less and less of them as weeks went by. There came a time when I could walk the streets for hours without seeing one walking corpse. I hadn't seen a live human for more than two months, and once the dead started coming around less often, I actually started missing their company.

s.e.x was the thing I missed most. I m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed a lot after Bingo and Stella and Porky went over the edge, and before that, I fooled around with Stella mostly, and sometimes even Bingo and Porky.

I liked Stella best, though, not so much because I'm into women, but because Bingo and Porky weren't all that great, if you know what I mean. Porky was, like, two hundred and fifty pounds with a really tiny d.i.c.k, and Bingo was thin as a rail and greasy.

Stella was something else. She had long, beautiful blonde hair, nice b.r.e.a.s.t.s with big pink nipples, and a tongue that could work wonders on my p.u.s.s.y. Sometimes she'd eat me for hours at a time. She was into that s.h.i.+t more than I was, but you never heard me complain.

It was tough adjusting to solo s.e.x. I like masturbating and all, but for real, how many times can you play with yourself without getting bored? I had to find a new outlet for my s.e.xual needs, and that's when I remembered a conversation I'd had with Stella, Bingo, and Porky one night.

Bingo was going on about a game called Scoring. He said it was something he'd heard about right after the death plague hit. Everybody was doing it. It was so popular that it had become a worldwide sporting event. There was even an entire underground that supported Scoring events.

Scoring involves having s.e.x with as many zombies as you can without getting yourself killed. It sounded sort of gross to me when Bingo was talking about it, but like I said, a girl can only f.u.c.k herself with her fingers so many times before it starts to get old.

Bingo told us he did it one time with a dead hooker he found wandering around. He used raw meat to distract her while he screwed her doggy style. He said that was the trick, you had to use a distraction. Raw meat was best, because all they really care about is eating, and as long as you distract them with something b.l.o.o.d.y, you can f.u.c.k them all night. There was a butcher shop a couple of blocks over from my building. I found a freezer in back, full of all sorts of spoiled meat, which I figured would make good bait.

Another thing Bingo said was that you had to be quick. The quicker the better. I wore a skirt and no panties when I went out. I figured the less clothes I had to fumble around with, the better off I'd be.

My first score happened outside the library. I found this dead guy wandering aimlessly. He looked like he was still in pretty good shape, except for the way his jaw was sort of just hanging there.

He was a little skittish when I approached him. I had some raw meat in a bag. I offered a piece of it to him. When he came at me, I got freaked out and threw it on the ground. He looked at me for a few seconds, like he was maybe considering eating me instead, then he got down on his knees and started going at the rotten meat.

I had his attention, but there was a problem. There was no way I could get to his d.i.c.k while he was on his knees like that.

”Hey, you, come here,” I said, offering more rotten meat.

The dead guy looked back at me, sort of in a daze, then he lumbered over, reaching out with both hands. It was scary. He took the meat from me and crammed it in his mouth. He chewed with no manners at all, letting pieces of b.l.o.o.d.y meat fall out of his mouth so it dangled from his chin.

My hand shook as I groped for his zipper. He fixed his dead eyes on me the whole time he was chewing the meat, but he didn't make any attempt to stop me from what I was about to do.

I reached into his pants and grabbed hold of his d.i.c.k. It was cold and rubbery. I jerked him off. I wasn't sure a zombie could get a hard-on, but I was determined to find out. I kept feeding him raw meat as I pumped him. It took a while, but eventually his c.o.c.k twitched and the f.u.c.king thing actually started to grow.