Dead Trash: A Zombie Exploitation Quadruple Feature Read online

  “Hell’s Belles,” Bigfoot laughed as he came up beside them, grinning crazily at the foul remains of what had once been a human head. “You gals is gonna do just fine!”

  * * * * *

  They made camp quickly and, for the most part, silently; there were a few musty pup tents erected, but most of the Deadbreakers preferred to sleep under the stars. A couple of hours into the pitch black night, Norse and his buddies got plenty drunk by the campfire while Irma stole away to find Bigfoot standing several yards away, smoking one of his cigarillos and starting at the sky.

  “Penny for your thoughts, big man?”

  He slowly turned his large head to glance kindly down at her. The red ember at the tip of his smoke illumined his hairy, weather-worn face and Irma thought he looked like someone’s father. She wondered if he was, but didn’t ask.

  “I was just thinkin’ about you and your friend back there,” he said low. “Wonderin’ what a coupla nice gals like you two did to end up in the hoosegow.”

  Somewhere distant a high scream cut through the night. Irma tensed up.

  “Don’t you worry ‘bout that,” Bigfoot assured her. “That ‘un’s a long ways off.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Sometimes I am,” he said with a soft laugh. “Enough to make a difference, I guess.”

  Irma laughed too, and without asking pinched a cigarillo from the big man’s vest pocket. He struck a match with his thumbnail and lit it for her. She couldn’t hear the screaming anymore.

  “I never asked Arkansas much about what landed her in the pen,” she said after a long drag. “Far as I can tell, she was hooking, up in the city, and got nicked tryin’ to pick up a plainclothes cop.”

  “Don’t sound like much for a long sentence to me.”

  “Well, when the bastard flashed his badge she raked her nails down his face. Ruined his right eye, half-blinded the sucker.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Least that’s what I heard. Might be bullshit, ya never know.”

  “Okay,” Bigfoot said, his eyes crinkled in a smile and his shaggy eyebrows raised high on his brow. “How ‘bout you, mama? Wait, don’t tell me—I bet you robbed Fort Knox.”

  “Nope, not me.”

  “Damn, I figured that was one of them times when I was right.”

  “I shot my old man in the head,” she abruptly blurted, eager to get it out and over with.

  Bigfoot’s eyebrows remained raised but his eyes lost their smile.

  “No shit?”

  “Murder one, baby. But I haven’t told you the funny part yet.”

  “There’s a funny part?”

  “Hell yes, there is. See, the son of a bitch ain’t dead. I went in the cooler for killin’ him, but he’s just as alive as you and me. Now how’s that strike ya?”

  “Funny,” Bigfoot said gravely.

  “See? A regular goddamn laugh riot.”

  He finished off his smoke and ground it out beneath his Frankenstein-sized boot.

  “Reckon you’ll kill him, then?”

  “Yeah,” Irma said matter-of-factly. “I reckon so.”

  He nodded soberly and then turned to peer back at the now hallooing crew of Deadbreakers around the fire.

  “They’re gonna attract the dead, they keep that up. Better go tell ‘em to shut their fucking pieholes.”

  “Right,” Irma answered awkwardly.

  Bigfoot clomped a few yards toward the camp, but then stopped mid-stride.

  “He wail on you? The guy you was s’posed to’ve killed?”

  “Yeah, he wailed on me. Broke my jaw, my arm, and three fingers. Not all the same time, mind…”

  “Good.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That you’re gonna kill him. That’s good. Sounds like he needs killin’.”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah.”

  “Well,” he said with more volume than before as he resumed his stomping gait. “G’night, Irma.”

  “Goodnight, Bigfoot.”

  “Heh,” he laughed. “It’s Dan. To you, sugar, it’s Dan.”

  She stood where he left her, watching the enormous man rejoin his crew, and finished off the cigarillo she’d swiped from his vest. And while she smoked, she listened to the song of the crickets in the tall, yellow grass and decided that she liked Dan.

  She liked him quite a lot.

  —Four—

  Chrome and Hot Leather

  Arkansas awoke to a fight, though she was surprised it had not happened sooner with this group of outlaws. She had fallen asleep deep into the night close to the dying fire between Irma and Speed and slept restlessly, her mind filled with visions of angry, rotting people crowding city streets. The dream had plenty of screaming, so when the shouts erupted nearby she did not immediately realize it was happening for real. She fluttered her eyes open and peered blearily at the black-vested forms a few yards away from her, scuffling in the early dawn light. Above the cursing and the raw meat sounds of fists on flesh, she distinctly heard Irma’s voice rise above the fray.

  “Stop it! Stop it—they’re coming!”

  Arkansas blinked the sleep away and stumbled to her feet, knitting her brow and glancing around the shaggy field behind the filling station for a sign of who—or what—it was that was coming. It did not take long for her to find out: ten or twelve thin, ragged people moved awkwardly through the high grass from the far side of the field, only a few hundred feet away. The closest of them, a tall black man with gleaming pink spots where his scalp had been torn away, tossed his head back and screamed horribly.

  “Jesus,” Arkansas gasped. She focused back on the scuffle, just in time to observe Norseman produce a long, broad knife from his boot which he brandished at a grave-faced Bigfoot.

  Running around the periphery of the battleground, Arkansas sidled up to Irma and asked in stammering words what was happening.

  “One of Norse’s buddies was…Christ…he was raping one of them…”

  There were tears in Irma’s eyes, which were fixed on the two bikers circling each other.

  “One of who?”

  “Them,” Irma specified, pointing at the approaching dead.

  “What?”

  Irma simply nodded, but her eyes drifted off to the side. Arkansas followed them with her own until at last she understood—

  On the grass beside the still, silent motorcycles laid a ravaged, sallow woman. She was entirely nude and her leathery skin was riddled with what looked like sores, but which Arkansas realized were bullet holes. Her ankles were twisted and broken beyond repair, her feet blackened with rot. She was not moving at all; Arkansas attributed that to the hilt protruding from her left eye. Someone had punched a knife right into her brain.

  “Norse and another guy were holding her down, keeping her mouth away from him,” Irma went on, her voice eerily monotone. “She started to scream—y’know, the way they all do—but Norse punched her in the throat until she couldn’t.”

  Arkansas felt dizzy, a little sick. Irma finally turned to look her in the eyes.

  “I found BF and he put a stop to it, thank god. Pulled the guy off of her and walloped him. Then he finished her off with his knife.”

  “Holy shit,” Arkansas squeaked. “Why…I mean, why…”

  “Because they’re animals,” Irma answered plainly. “They’re no better than them things over there. They’re worse, maybe.”

  Norseman swiped at Bigfoot with the knife, but the bigger man sidestepped it and missed getting cut by inches. The men fell into a jerky rotation, circling one another like wild animals, jumping at the slightest movement. Just behind them, less than fifty feet away now, the screaming throng advanced.

  “But Bigfoot,” Arkansas said, her heart beginning to thump so hard she could hear it, “he’s the boss, right?”

  “Looks like Norse is trying to challenge that.”

  The lead corpse juddered violently and clawed at the air as he neared. Speed appeared then, walked up calmly to the shrieki
ng thing and slammed a big, flat rock against its forehead. Blood and gore spilled down the front of the dead man’s face, blanketing it in red and brown fluid, and he went down.

  Arkansas cried out, “Speed! Can’t you stop this?”

  Speed shrugged.

  “Not my fight, man.”

  Norse jabbed at Bigfoot’s gut and let out a savage growl. Bigfoot reached out, grabbed Norseman by the wrist, and twisted hard. The crack of the bones was loud enough to hear despite the screaming corpses in the field. The knife fell into the grass and Bigfoot landed a crushing blow to the smaller man’s jaw. Another shattering crack, and Norseman was out for the count.

  Irma gasped and put a hand to her brow. She smiled and sighed, but then one of Norseman’s boys sprinted up with a snub-nosed revolver jutting from his fist, which he stabbed forward like a dagger as he pulled the trigger. There was a loud report and a blast of cordite, and before Irma could scream Bigfoot grasped clumsily at the bloody spot on his chest and said, “Fuck.”

  “No!” Irma cried. She lunged for the stunned, shot man, but Arkansas seized her and pulled her back.

  Bigfoot looked more surprised than anything, his eyes wide and mouth a broad O. He looked confusedly at the bleeding knot in the center of his chest and then back up to the man who had shot him. He too looked surprised, though he was the one who had done it.

  Presently Speed appeared at the shooter’s elbow and effortlessly wrestled the gun from the man’s hand. The guy looked scared, backing away and muttering incomprehensibly. Speed just looked hard. He jacked the hammer back, smashed the barrel against the man’s cheek, and fired. There was another deafening snap and the man’s face burst in a mist of blood and smoke. Close by a shambling corpse shrieked. Speed spun around, his expression unchanged, and fired three times in rapid succession—just as quickly, three of the coming horde dropped where they stood.

  “Dan…,” Irma murmured wetly, her cheeks gleaming with tears. “Dan!”

  Arkansas squeezed her tight, assuming that Dan was Bigfoot’s real name and thinking that it must have meant something for him to tell her that. It meant nothing now. Bigfoot Dan was dead.

  Except then he wasn’t.

  Speed didn’t see it—he was now engaged with the remaining member of Norseman’s mini-crew, pointing the revolver at him and staring hate into his eyes—but Bigfoot was starting to quiver. His eyes glared blankly where he lay and his lips worked like he wanted to say something. When at last he managed to shape his mouth to speak, he said, “Huhhhrrrnn.”

  Someone said, “Hey, BF—you ain’t dead, man!”

  Irma watched, frozen in horror, as a mop-topped Deadbreaker knelt down by his fallen leader and placed a hand on the giant’s shoulder. Bigfoot’s creamy eyes shot up to him and his lips retracted into a rictus grin. Though he had always moved slowly in life, in death Bigfoot reacted with lightning speed, lurching at the concerned biker and clamping his substantial jaws around the shocked man’s hairy jaw. The man cried out for help, but the gawping crowd was too terrified, too shocked to move. Bigfoot jerked his head back and took a mouthful of bone, skin, muscle, and hair with him. There was now a half-moon of ragged, spurting flesh where the left side of the guy’s jaw had been, and he threw his hands up to the bloody mess, keening miserably as he touched it and confirmed the worst.

  “Shoot him!” a rotund Deadbreaker with a handlebar mustache bellowed at Speed. “C’mon, man—shoot him!”

  But Speed remained still, his lips wobbling and eyes shaking with fear. Arkansas let go of Irma and made a bee-line for him. She wrenched the gun from the stricken man’s hand just as he had done to the now dead murderer of Bigfoot, and she twisted around to take aim with at the gigantic corpse. Bigfoot was getting to his feet, his eyes rolling around stupidly in their sockets and his mouth chomping hungrily at the chunk of jaw he’d taken from the shrieking man beneath him. Arkansas stepped forward, pointed the revolver at the bridge of Bigfoot’s nose, and pulled the trigger.

  It went click.

  Arkansas said, “Oh for the love of fucking shit Christ damn.”

  A nasty chuckle sounded behind her. She ignored it, but had to see what was happening when Speed grunted in response and dropped to the ground between her and Bigfoot. A yellow screwdriver handle jutted out of the side of Speed’s neck, blood welling up thickly around the base. He did not try to pull it out; instead, he just lay there, gurgling and looking sleepy.

  Having swallowed his meal, Bigfoot smacked his mouth and screamed as though the meat and bone were tearing his dead stomach to shreds. His scream was answered by a half dozen more—a nightmare monster symphony that signaled the imminent arrival of the other dead at the camp.

  This didn’t have to happen, Irma thought desperately. None of this had to fucking happen.

  The killer looming over Speed’s now lifeless body ran back to the motorcycles and came back seconds later with a gun in each hand. He pushed past the stunned and decimated crew and began firing wildly at the corpses. Most of his shots went wild, pinging off trees in the distance or harmlessly entering the dead people’s limbs or torsos. He bellowed curses at them, his face a twisted mask of lost sanity, and though he finally managed to take two of the corpses down with headshots, those he missed were closing in fast.

  Irma watched from what was no longer much of a distance, and she felt nothing particularly strong either way when three of the shuffling corpses popped their eyes open wide and screeched as they fell upon the man. They pulled him apart like a cooked chicken. Irma finally looked away.

  For her part, Arkansas’s grief was quickly turning to anger. These men had had a good thing going: protection, an organization cooperative in this big bad world of us versus them. But they’d fucked it up and fast, as men normally were wont to do. Give ‘em an inch and they’d cut it down to an inch, then ask for more. As far as Arkansas was concerned, the male of the species wasn’t worth much and little that she had seen during her brief time with the Deadbreakers dissuaded her from that point of view.

  “Goddamn shitheads,” she grumbled, and wrenched the screwdriver out of Speed’s neck.

  Irma said, “What are you doing?”

  In lieu of response, Arkansas wrapped both her hands around the handle and, raising it high above her head like some ancient priestess, she drove the entire length of the screwdriver’s metal shaft through the corner of Speed’s left eye and deep into his brain. The impact made a sickening squelching sound that evoked looks of disgust from both women.

  “The hell’d you do that for?” Irma cried.

  “He’d have come back, girl. Didn’t want to see that.”

  “B…but…he wasn’t, like, bitten,” Irma stammered. “They said you had to get bit…”

  “Bigfoot—Dan—wasn’t bit, was he?”

  Irma pinched her face into a wrinkled frown and shook her head. No, Dan had not been bitten. He simply had the misfortune to die in a world in which the dead would not stay dead. Her eyes burned and her stomach trembled. It seemed as though the worst possible set of circumstances she could imagine for herself had just gotten worse still. And with the best of the Deadbreakers dead and the rest of them taking to their bikes without so much as a command to ride out, she did not have the slightest idea what they were going to do.

  There was one thing, however, that pushed forcefully to the front of her mind in that troubled, uncertain moment. Zeke was still out there. She remembered Dan’s gentle, stoic assessment of her plan to kill her old man, his total agreement that there was nothing else for her to do but kill the son of a bitch. In a strange sort of way she now decided that killing Zeke wouldn’t just be revenge for her, but an action to honor the brief friendship she had enjoyed with a long-haired, bearded giant called Bigfoot.

  Her body moved toward the big man’s remains before her mind caught on to the plan. She dug a shaking hand into his jeans pocket and came back with a jangling knot of keys. The roar of departing motorcycles filled the air, as did the choking cl
ouds of exhaust, and for once the men riding them neither hooted, hollered, nor shouted out with mischievous mirth. Arkansas nodded with understanding at her and found Speed’s keys, too.

  “Are you ready to get the fuck outta here?” Irma yelled over the din of growling engines and shrieking, angry dead.

  “I know a guy in the city,” Arkansas said breathlessly as they went together to the remaining bikes. “Haven’t seen him a lot o’ years, but I think he can help us.”

  “Us? Help us what?”

  “Kill that bastard Zeke,” Arkansas said with an air command. “I’m with you all the way, baby.”

  Irma gaped, then smiled. She reached for her friend’s hand and squeezed it.

  “In that case,” Irma said, straddling Bigfoot Dan’s monstrous machine and seizing the handlebars like they’d belonged to her all her life, “let’s fuckin’ ride, sister.”

  Bigfoot and Speed’s rides roared to life and the women revved them up. All that was left of the Deadbreakers at the camp were corpses and Norseman, who was now starting to come to. Four of the dead were in the middle of the camp now, feeding on the remains of the MC’s casualties. Irma had to look away. She pointed herself at the filling station and the long road in front of it, and she gunned it.

  Arkansas glanced over at Norse, who sat up, rubbing his aching jaw and staring fearfully at the carnage that enveloped him. He saw the bodies and the moaning, crying dead people helping themselves to bloody hand- and mouthfuls of their flesh. He then craned his neck to look back at Arkansas, his face bloodless with terror.

  “Lemme ride with ya,” he said as he got to his knees, then shakily up to his feet. “C’mon, get me outta here.”

  Arkansas sneered and said, “Go to hell, trash.”

  She gunned Speed’s ride and sped off in Irma’s wake for the highway.

  Behind her, she heard Norseman shriek not in fear, but in pain. At this, Arkansas smiled.

  PART THREE