Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology Read online

  1. Blossom By Chan Mcconnell

  “Each of us has a moment,” Quinn told her. “The moment when we shine; that instant when we are at our absolute best. Just as each of us has an aberration, a hidden secret. Some might cal it a perversion, though that’s rather a rough word. Crude. Nonspecific. Is it a perversion to do that thing you’re best at, to enjoy your individual moment?”

  Amelia nodded vaguely, watching the older man through her glass of Sauvignon Blanc. He was going to answer his own obtuse question, and the answer he had already decided upon was no.

  It was the puffery that preceded the crunch—was she going to fuck him tonight, or not? She was positive he had already answered that one in his head as wel . Dinner had run to ninety-five bucks, not counting the wine or the tip. Dessert had been high-priced, higher-caloric, chocolate, elegant. Cabs had been taken and token gifts dispensed.

  She had worked in loan approvals at Columbia Savings for nine months, riding the receptionist’s desk. Older men frequently asked her out. When Quinn invited her to dinner, a weekend date, she had pul ed his file, consulted his figures, and said yes. Al the girls in the office did it. He drove a Jaguar XJS and was into condo development.

  The dinner part had been completed two hours ago. Now it was his place. When your income hit the high six figures there was no such animal as date rape. Amelia had herpes. It was inactive tonight. Best to stay mum; it was like compensation. To her certain knowledge she had never bedded bisexuals or intravenous drug users, and in truth she feared contracting AIDS in the same unfocused way she feared getting flattened in a crosswalk by a bus. It could happen. But probably not. There was no way in the world either of them could fit a condom over their mouths, so it was academic. Right?

  Quinn’s watery gray eyes glinted as he rattled on about aberrations and special moments.

  Probably the wine. It had gotten to Amelia half an hour ago, a fuzzy vino cloud that put her afloat and permitted her to tune out Quinn’s voice while staring past him, to nod and generate tiny noises of acknowledgment on a schedule that al owed him to believe she was actual y listening. She had disconnected, and felt just fine. She took a deep, languorous breath, keeping him on the far side of her wine glass, and stifled the giggle that wel ed within her. Oh my yes, she felt nice, adrift on a cumulus pil ow of gasified brain cel s. She would look past him, through him, in just this way when he was on top of her, grunting and sweating and believing he had seduced her… just as he now believed she was paying attention.

  She rewound back to the last utterance she cared to remember and acted upon it. “I have an aberration,” she said. She added a glowing smile and toyed with a long curl of her copper hair.

  Just adorable.

  His interest came ful blast, too eager. “Yes? Yes?” He replaced his wineglass on the clear acrylic tabletop and leaned forward to entreat her elucidation.

  She played him like a catfish on a hook. “No. It’s sil y, real y.” Look at my legs, she commanded.

  Through the tabletop he watched her legs recross. The whisper of her stockings flushed his face with blood. His brain was giddy, already jumping forward in time, to the clinch. “Please,” he said.

  His voice was so cultured, his tone so paternal. He was losing control and she could smel it.

  She kept a childlike kil er smile precisely targeted. “Wel . Okay.” She rose, a slim and gracile woman of thirty-four, one who fought hard to keep what she had and had nothing to show for her effort except a stupid airhead bimbo job at Columbia Savings. So much bitterness, there beneath the manner and cosmetics.

  There was a tal vase of irises on an antique end table near the fireplace. Firelight mel owed al the glass and Scandinavian chrome in the room, and danced in the floor-to-ceiling wraparound windows of Quinn’s eighth-floor eyrie. He kept his gaze on her. The fire was in his eyes as wel .

  Every inch the coquette, Amelia bit off the delicate chiffon of the iris. Chewed. Swal owed. And smiled.

  Quinn’s face grew robust with pleasure. His old man’s eyes cleared.

  “Ever since I was a little girl,” she said. “Perhaps because I saw my cat, Sterling, eating grass. I like the flavor. I don’t know. I used to think the flower’s life added to mine.”

  “And this is your…” Quinn had to clear his throat. “Aberration. Ah.” He left his chair to close up the distance between them. It became evident that his erection was making him blunder.

  Amelia’s eyes dipped to notice, bemused, and she ate another flower. She had made a point of tel ing Quinn she liked lots of flowers, and he and his Gold Card had come through in rainbow colors. Al over the penthouse were long-stemmed roses, carnation bouquets, spring bunches, mums, more.

  Quinn found the sight of Amelia chewing the flowers throat-closingly erotic. His voice grew husky and repeated her name. It was time for him to lunge. “Let me show you my specialty. Dear Amelia. My aberration.”

  She had been tied up before. So far, no big deal. Quinn used silk scarves to secure her wrists and ankles to the mahogany poles of the four-poster bed. With a long, curved, ebony-handled knife he halved the front of her dress. Into the vanil a highlands of her breasts he mumbled promises of more expensive replacement garments. His hands lost their sophistication and became thick-fingered, in a big masculine hurry, shredding her hose to the knees and groping to see if she was as moist as his fantasies. Then he was thrusting. Amelia rocked and pretended to orgasm. This would be done in a hurry. No big deal.

  He withdrew, stil hard, saying, “Don’t be afraid.” She had been fal ing asleep.

  She expected him to go for the knife again, to stroke her nipples with its razor edge or tease her nerve endings with mock danger. Instead, he reached into a headboard compartment and brought out a rubber mask festooned with sewn leather and buckles and shiny gold zippers. It almost made her laugh. She protested. The contraption engulfed her head like a thick, too-tight glove. She thought of getting stuck in a pul over sweater, only this material was definitely nonporous. Her lungs felt brief panic until the thing was ful y seated and she could gulp air through the nose and mouth slits.

  Then Quinn resumed pushing himself into her, his prodding more urgent now. He broke rhythm only to zip the holes in the mask shut.

  Fear blossomed loud in her chest, becoming a firebal . She pul ed in a final huge draught of air before he zipped the nose shut, and wasted breath making incomprehensible muling noises against the already-sealed mouth hole. She could not tel him now of her congenital lung problems, that respiration was sometimes a chore. When the weather was wrong, she had to resort to prescription medication just to breathe. It had never come up, al through dinner. They had been too busy with aberrations and prime moments and eating flowers…

  Al she could feel now was a slow explosion in her chest and the steady pounding down below, in and out. She began to buck and heave, thrashing. Quinn loved every second of it, battering her lustily despite her abrupt lack of lubrication. The friction vanished when he came inside her.

  Panting, he lumbered immediately to the bathroom. When he returned, Amelia had not changed position, and he final y noticed she was no longer breathing.

  Sometimes it went down this way, he thought. The price of true passion, however aberrant. But she was stil moist and poised at the ready, so he opted to have one more go.

  He huffed with surprise when she began to squirm beneath him again. He went aahhh and started stroking rigid and slippery in a fast tempo. That was it—she had fainted. Sometimes it went down that way as wel —orgasm put them in the Zone for a while. She would awaken on high-burn and come her teeny secretary brains right out.

  Her jaw wrenched around at a ridiculous angle and bit into the leather muzzle of the mask from within, shredding a hole. A drop of Quinn’s sweat flew to mix with the blood staining her teeth and the vomit clogging her throat, and before Quinn could make sense out of what he thought he saw, Amelia bit his nose off.

  In the brief second before the pain hit, Quinn thought of that crazy shit on the news. Cannibal attacks on the eastern seaboard. Some whackpot scientist had claimed that dead people were reviving and eating live people. It was al Big Apple ratshit. Yet it flashed through Quinn’s mind right now because Amelia had bitten his nose off and was chewing it up and swal owing the pieces.

  His throat flooded with the foaming pink backwash of inhaled blood. He made a liquid gargling noise as he tried to recoil, to back out of her, to get the hel away from this fucking lunatic, but she had a deathgrip on him below-decks, as wel .

  Then Quinn was able to yel , and he did because he could feel the ring of vaginal muscle increasing pressure, locking up beyond the circumference of his cock. The more he tried to pul out, the harder he got. He’d heard of men getting stuck in wine bottles the same way. You can’t compress a liquid. Blood was a liquid. His panic erection was vised with no options. He shoved wildly against the bed, blood pumping from the cavern in his face. He began hitting her with both fists, but she was beyond feeling a thing.

  When he felt the muscle sever his penis like a wire cutter, he began to scream hoarsely. None of his neighbors would pay any mind. Weird games, aberrations, were the standard menu at Quinn’s. Suddenly freed, he sprawled backward. Blood gushed, ruining the carpet and sputtering from his crotch. He watched the stump of his stil -stiff manhood vanish into the slick red chasm between Amelia’s legs, overwhelmed by the sight of it being swal owed whole by the orifice that had bi
tten it off.

  Quinn hit the floor and kept screaming until catatonia blanketed him.

  It took Amelia about half an hour to gnaw through her bonds. She spent another hour and a half eating Quinn.

  During her meal the life left his body, and the queer radiations mentioned on the news did their alien work. By then there was not enough left of his corpse to rise, or walk, or eat anyone else.

  The pieces lol ed around on the floor, feeling the first pangs of a new hunger, unearthly and unsatisfiable.

  Her savaged dress dropped away. Swaying side-to-side she found her way into the room where they had dined when they were alive. Sparks of remembered behavior capered through her dead brain matter, evaporating for the last time. She began eating the flowers in their vases, in no hurry to begin her nightwalk. The flowers were alive, but dying every moment. Their life might become hers. When she stopped, al the bouquets had been stripped.

  Eventual y Amelia found her way to a door, and moved into the world to seek others of her newborn kind. Never again would she be as beautiful. It was her moment, just as Quinn had said.

  She blended with the shadows, a striking, cream-skinned nude with flower petals drifting down from her mouth, ochre, mauve, bright red.

  2. Mess Hall By Richard Laymon

  Jean didn’t hear footsteps. She heard only the rush of the nearby stream, her own moaning, Paul’s harsh gasps as he thrust into her. The first she heard of the man was his voice.

  “Looks to me like fornication in a public park area.”

  Her heart slammed.

  Oh God, no.

  With her left eye, she glimpsed the man’s vague shape crouching beside her in the moonlight, less than a yard away. She looked up at Paul. His eyes were wide with alarm.

  This can’t be happening, Jean told herself.

  She felt total y helpless and exposed. Not that the guy could see anything. Just Paul’s bare butt.

  He couldn’t see that Jean’s blouse was open, her bra bunched around her neck, her skirt rucked up past her waist.

  “Do you know it’s against the law?” the man asked.

  Paul took his tongue out of Jean’s mouth. He turned his head toward the man.

  Jean could feel his heart drumming, his penis shrinking inside her.

  “Not to mention poor taste,” the man added.

  “We didn’t mean any harm,” Paul said.

  And started to get up.

  Jean jammed her shoes against his buttocks, tightened her arms around his back.

  “What if some children had wandered by?” the man asked.

  “We’re sorry,” Jean told him, keeping her head straight up, not daring to look at the man again, instead staring at Paul. “We’l leave.”

  “Kiss goodbye, now.”

  Seemed like a weird request.

  But Paul obeyed. He pressed his mouth gently against Jean’s lips, and she wondered how she could manage to cover herself because it was quite obvious that, as soon as the kiss was over, Paul would have to climb off her. And there she’d be.

  Later, she knew it was a shotgun.

  She hadn’t seen a shotgun, but she’d only given the man that single, quick glance.

  Paul was giving her the goodbye kiss and she was wondering about the best way to keep the man from seeing her when suddenly it didn’t matter because the world blew up. Paul’s eyes exploded out of their sockets and dropped onto her eyes. She jerked her head sideways to get away from them. Jerked it the wrong way. Saw the clotted wetness on the moonlit trunk of a nearby tree, saw his ear cling to the bark for a moment, then fal .

  Paul’s head dropped heavily onto the side of her face. A torrent of blood blinded her.

  She started to scream.

  Paul’s weight tumbled off. The man stomped her bel y. He scooped her up, swung her over his shoulder, and started to run. She wheezed, trying to breathe. His foot had smashed her air out and now his shoulder kept ramming into her. She felt as if she were drowning. Only a dim corner of her mind seemed to work, and she wished it would blink out.

  Better total darkness, better no awareness at al .

  The man stopped running. He bent over, and Jean flopped backward. She slammed something.

  Beside her was a windshield plated with moonlight. She’d been dumped across the hood of a car. Her legs dangled over the car’s front.

  She tried to lift her head. Couldn’t. So she lay there, struggling to suck in air.

  The man came back.

  He’d been away?

  Jean felt as if she had missed a chance to save herself.

  He leaned over, clutched both sides of her open blouse, and yanked her into a sitting position.

  He snapped a handcuff around her right wrist, passed the other bracelet beneath her knee, and cuffed her left hand. Then he lifted her off the hood. He swung her into the car’s passenger seat and slammed the door.

  Through the windshield, Jean saw him rush past the front of the car. She drove her knee up. It bumped her chin, but she managed to slip the handcuff chain down her calf and under the sole of her running shoe. She grabbed the door handle. She levered it up and threw her shoulder against the door and started to tumble out, but her head jerked back with searing pain as if the hair were being torn from her scalp. Her head twisted. Her cheekbone struck the steering wheel.

  A hand clasped the top of her head. Another clutched her chin. And he rammed the side of her face again and again on the wheel.

  When she opened her eyes, her head was on the man’s lap. She felt his hand kneading her breast. The car was moving fast. From the engine noise and the hiss of the tires on the pavement, she guessed they were on the Interstate. The highway lights cast a faint, silvery glow on the man’s face. He looked down at her and smiled.

  The police artist sketch didn’t have him quite right. It had the crewcut right, and the weird crazy eyes, but his nose was a little larger, his lips a lot thicker.

  Jean started to lift her head.

  “Lie stil ,” he warned. “Move a muscle, I’l pound your brains out.” He laughed. “How about your boyfriend’s brains? Did you see how they hit that tree?”

  Jean didn’t answer.

  He pinched her.

  She gritted her teeth.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “I saw,” she said.

  “Cool, huh?”

  “No.”

  “How about his eyes? I’ve never seen anything like that. Just goes to show what a twelve-gauge can do to a fel ow. You know, I’ve never kil ed a guy before. Just sweet young things like you.”

  Like me.

  It came as no surprise, no shock. She’d seen him murder Paul, and he planned to murder her too—the same as he’d murdered the others.

  Maybe he doesn’t kil them al , she thought. Only one body had been found. Everyone talked as if the Reaper had kil ed the other six, but real y they were only missing.

  Maybe he takes them someplace and keeps them.

  But he just now said he kil s sweet young things: Plural. He kil ed them al . But maybe not.

  Maybe he just wants to keep me and fool with me and not kil me and I’l figure a way out.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  “A nice, private place in the hil s where nobody wil hear you scream.”

  The words made a chil crawl over her.

  “Oooh, goosebumps. I like that.” His hand glided over her skin like a cold breeze. Jean was tempted to grab his hand and bite it.

  If she did that, he would hurt her again.

  There’l be a world of hurt later, she thought. He plans to make me scream.

  But that was later. Maybe she could get away from him before it came to that. The best thing, for now, was to give him no trouble. Don’t fight him. Act docile. Then maybe he’l let his guard down.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Tel me.”

  “The Reaper.”

  “Very good. And I know who you are, too.”

  He knows me? How could he? Maybe fol owed me around on campus, asked someone my name.

  “You’re Number Eight,” he said. “Just think about that. You’re going to be famous. You’l be in al the newspapers, they’l talk about you on television, you’l even end up being a chapter in a book someday. Have you read any books like that? They’l have a nice little biography of you, quotes from your parents and friends. The bittersweet story of your brief but passionate relationship with that guy. What was his name?”