Dead Trash: A Zombie Exploitation Quadruple Feature Page 8

  “Come on, Ethel, let’s get inside before these turkeys regroup.”

  Turner led the way, holding the door open for the women and taking a moment to weave a heavy chain back through the handles, which he fixed in place with a large padlock. A yellow shirt was draped over the battered row of mailboxes; he whipped it down and shrugged his massive shoulders into it without bothering to button it up. Neither Arkansas nor Irma minded.

  “Ladies,” he said, his voice deep and loud. “Welcome to Bucktown.”

  “Jim,” Arkansas said, gesturing to Irma. “This is Irma. I couldn’t have ever made it here without her.”

  “Thanks for keeping an eye on this pretty lady, Irma,” Jim said. “I guess it wasn’t easy to get here.”

  “It’s been an interesting few days, to say the least,” Irma agreed.

  “Well, the elevator don’t work and the super just doesn’t seem to be around lately,” Jim announced, a sly grin on his face. “So, we gotta take the stairs. I’m only on the fourth floor, though. I ‘spect we got plenty to talk about—like why I haven’t heard a peep out of you for the last couple of years, girl.”

  “I was inside and you was out,” Arkansas said plainly as they climbed the steps in the dark, musty stairwell. “It gets hard hearing from folks, like you can smell the freedom you ain’t got no more.”

  “Don’t got to tell me, woman,” Jim said with a bitter laugh. “Don’t forget I was a POW back in ’68.”

  A one-man army and a ‘Nam vet who was a prisoner of war—Irma raised her eyebrows, wondering what she might learn next about this mysterious man’s never-ending well of toughness.

  They reached the landing of the fourth floor with both women huffing, though Jim was none the worse for wear. He paused at the steel door there and knocked three times. A voice from the other side hollered, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Jim, man—let me in.”

  A scraping rattle shook the door, which opened to reveal a thin black man holding the chain he’d just unlocked in one hand. His face was sunken and grim, his eyes worked the women over with detached interest.

  “Shit, brother,” he said, “I thought you said it was cops down there.”

  “Just a couple of fugitives in a cop’s ride, man. This is my old friend Ethel—”

  “Please, they call me Arkansas, now.”

  Jim looked stricken, but then he laughed.

  “Arkansas! Don’t that beat all…”

  She stepped forward and shook the man’s hand. He said, “I’m Bruce.”

  “Bruce Leland Jackson,” Jim said. “Baddest hand-to-hand fighter I ever met. When this shit went down, this mother kicked one of them things’ head clean off.”

  “I’m Irma,” the other woman spoke up, offering her hand. Something nearly approaching a smile played at Bruce’s lips.

  “Glad to know you,” he said, his voice gentler than before.

  “So you saw the cruiser from up here?” Arkansas asked.

  “One of my scouts did,” Jim replied.

  “Most of the brothers didn’t want him to go down there,” Bruce put in. “Not for no cops.”

  “Good thing I did.”

  “Damn right,” Arkansas said, shaking her head at the possibility that he wouldn’t have.

  “Come on,” Jim said as he wrapped a well-muscled arm around Arkansas’s waist, guiding her into the hallway. “Let’s get you girls something to eat and you can meet my boys.”

  The lights that lined the wall flickered incessantly when they worked at all. For the most part it was very dim. As they moved down the hall, doors cracked open and people peeked through at the strangers in their midst. One of them, a woman, opened her door a little wider to reveal her overweight form dressed in a housecoat, her hair in curlers. She snarled, “Who they, Mean Jim?”

  “My guests, Carla—go back inside.”

  Carla scoffed. “You ain’t the boss o’ me,” she grumbled as her door slammed shut and the lock latched.

  “Nosy old bitch,” Jim said low. Arkansas tittered.

  Soon they reached the second to last door on the left, apartment 4G, on which someone had scratched NO THING CAN HELP US NOW in the peeling crimson paint. Below that, less imposing, someone had scrawled in permanent marker, RAMON IS THE BEST!

  “Been meaning to sand that off,” Jim said as he thrust a key in the lock and opened the door.

  Having grown accustomed to Bucktown’s crumbling, drab, heavily grafittied environment from the courtyard clear up to the fourth floor hallway, both Irma and Arkansas sucked in sharp breaths at the luxuriant décor of Mean Jim Turner’s apartment. The carpet was lime shag, there was a matching chaise longue caddycorner to the kitchenette, and a bright orange armchair with a handle on the side to make it lean back complete with footrest. The walls were adorned with velvet paintings of black, white, and Asian women in various stages of undress and repose, and there was incense burning somewhere, the first pleasant scent to tickle either woman’s nose in some time. On the chaise sat a heavy man with a thick beard and a shaved head, smoking a cigarette. He was bobbing his head to the Curtis Mayfield track playing on the hi-fi. When Jim entered the room he stood up sharply and said, “Hey, Jim baby—who’re the broads?”

  “Arkansas Jones and Irma…I didn’t get your last name.”

  “Hendrix,” she said. “Irma Hendrix.”

  “Good god, man, you go down to save some jive cops and come back up with two fine-lookin’ chicks? No wonder you the cock of the walk, my brother!”

  He jabbed his palm at Jim, who chuckled and slapped it down with his own. Arkansas pursed her lips and raised a single eyebrow.

  “Aw shit, he don’t mean anything,” Jim said sheepishly.

  “So what’s the deal, then,” she said, changing the subject to his immense relief. “You turn Bucktown into a fortress?”

  “That’s right,” he said, settling into his orange chair. The bald man sat back down on the chaise and the women remained standing. Bruce had returned to his post in the hall. “Before all this shit went down, Bucktown was the one place in the hood where no women were getting pimped, no kids jacked up on junk, and no street gangs was allowed. It was a far cry from paradise, but for folks in Wilson Arms it was as close as they could get. The other towers only got worse, but the dealers and peddlers and dope fiends knew to stay the hell away from Bucktown and anyone who lives here. It took me and my boys a long time to make that work, but that’s the way it was.”

  “Until every dead motherfucker in town decided to get up and kill everybody, anyway,” the bald man said with a deep frown.

  “Mac’s wife got killed that first night; I guess you gals were still in the joint. Even ‘round here most folks are in bed at three in the morning, and that’s about when they started in, filling up the buildings and tearing people up. And whoever they didn’t tear up too bad got up and joined ‘em.”

  “Yeah, we seen that,” Arkansas said.

  “Any idea why it started?” Irma asked. “What could have caused it?”

  “Nobody knows. And the way things are going, no one really cares anymore. Now it’s just about making it through to another day.”

  “I heard that,” Mac said, nodding.

  “So what are you gonna do?” Arkansas said as she sat down on the arm of Jim’s chair. “Just hole up here ‘til there’s nothing left?”

  “Nothing else I can do, baby. No police come around anymore. Haven’t seen anything looks like the Army or anybody else for that matter. You two are the first people to come into Bucktown since the night this bullshit began. Far as I know, there’s no one left alive outside of this tower.”

  “The other three, then?”

  “Completely overrun. A handful of people got out, came here to safety…”

  “Yeah, like Little Tee,” Mac groused.

  Jim groaned.

  Irma asked, “Who’s Little Tee?”

  “My main man’s number one nemesis,” Mac said. “This is the cat who ran shit
in the other towers—drugs, prostitution, porno loops—you name it, L.T. had his nasty little fingers in it. This motherfucker’s probably responsible for more deaths than any one of them hollerin’ ghouls out there.”

  “And you just let him in?” Irma said, astonished.

  “I ain’t no killer, Irma. I couldn’t leave him, not with them things right on his ass.”

  “See, that’s where me and Mean Jim agree to disagree,” Mac said, shifting his gargantuan backside on the chaise. “L.T. wasn’t in Bucktown a week before he took over the whole top floor, and in times like these you can bet your ass his business is thrivin’.”

  Arkansas clicked her tongue against her teeth. “You mean he’s right back to all the same shit he was doing before?”

  “He’s set himself up like the king of the PJs up there,” Jim said sadly. “Money don’t mean shit to anyone anymore, so anybody wants a fix, or a lay, or somebody killed—”

  “Killed?” Arkansas couldn’t believe her ears.

  “Yeah, it’s happened. And all you gotta do is give King L.T. whatever he wants. Maybe he wants your color TV, and maybe he’s got eyes for your fourteen year old daughter. Who knows?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Arkansas moaned. “Leave it to the human race to take a bad situation and make it worse.”

  “That’s no shit, neither,” Mac said, shaking his head and tamping his cigarette out in a huge crystal ashtray.

  “Before, it was all about black folks making fools of other black folks,” Jim said, standing up. He was starting to get worked up. “Now, I don’t even know. Even if L.T. wasn’t here, I just don’t know about keeping this place up. The building’s in worse shape than ever and hardly anybody knows how to fix all the things wrong with it. Half the lights don’t work, the water only runs half the time and then it’s brown…”

  “Then you need to get out,” Irma said. “Get everybody together and get the hell out. I saw you out there—you took on a hundred of them by yourself!”

  “Sure, and go where? I got more than two hundred people still living in this goddamn tower. I’ve done a lot for these people, and I want to do more, but I ain’t Moses, sister.”

  His chest rose and fell with quick breaths and no one said a word. On the hi-fi Curtis Mayfield was singing that if there was hell below, they were all going to go. Irma stared at her shoes and wondered if she’d ever set foot outside of Bucktown again, and worse yet if it mattered whether she did or not.

  Zeke, something from deep in her mind seemed to call out.

  Yeah, it mattered.

  The silence apart from the music could have gone on forever, but the sudden banging on the front door startled everyone in the room into jumping up and muttering. Mac produced a long-barreled pistol from between the chaise lounge’s cushions and he and Jim exchanged meaningful glances. Irma stood her ground, clueless but ready for a fight if it came to that.

  “Who’s there?” Jim roared, his voice like it had a built-in amplifier.

  “Jim, open the door, baby! We got trouble!”

  Mac said, “That’s Lester.”

  Jim gave him a sharp nod. Mac went for the door, unlocked it, and opened it. Into the apartment tumbled a small man with a huge Afro, a girl slightly larger than him in his arms and covered head to toe with blood. The man, Lester, was also painted with the blood, though there was so much of it no one could tell whose it was. Mac ushered him in and shut the door quickly. Jim rushed over to help Lester.

  “On the lounge, come on.”

  “All the blood, man,” Lester worried.

  “Don’t matter— here, set her down.”

  In seconds the lime green lounge was awash in red, big broad smears of it down the back and all over the cushions. Lester panicked.

  “Oh shit oh shit oh shit—”

  “Calm down, Lester, calm down…” Jim pulled him up and held tight to his shoulders. To Mac he said, “Get him a drink, would you?”

  Mac wobbled into the kitchenette and started clinking glasses around while Mean Jim stared hard into little Lester’s eyes.

  “Tell me what happened, man. I need to know what happened.”

  Arkansas was already on the floor beside the girl, holding her hand and checking for a pulse. “She’s alive, but hardly.”

  Irma gasped and stammered, “H…her face…”

  Arkansas sprung up for a better look and gasped, too. The whole left side of the poor girl’s face was ripped off—bitten off. Her cheek was gone, leaving only ragged, seeping flesh around a large hole that showed her blood-stained teeth.

  “Fuck!” Jim yelled. “Are they in? Goddamn, Lester, listen to me!” He shook the smaller man violently and slapped him across the face. “Are those motherfuckers in Bucktown?”

  “Yes, yes! Yes!” Lester mewled, tears spilling down his bloody cheeks. “Little Tee let ‘em in, Jim. L.T. let ‘em in to kill all of us, man!”

  —Three—

  Trouble Man

  The girl did not make it. Toward the end, she began to hyperventilate, her eyes wide but empty. Then a fountain of blood gushed from her nose and, mere seconds later, she fell still and silent. Lester said her name was Tisha.

  He also said that she’d been given to Little Tee in exchange for food and guns by her own uncle, and that when she refused to go to bed with one of L.T.’s paying customers, he’d had her dragged kicking and screaming to the front doors on the ground floor, where she was handcuffed to the maintenance room door. Heavy duty bolt cutters were then used on the chains, and the front doors were left wide open. Lester lived in the maintenance room where he could keep an eye on the front of the building for Mean Jim, and he did his best to get Tisha out of there as fast as he could. Unfortunately for her, his fastest wasn’t fast enough.

  “They came in like a tidal wave, man,” he explained through his tears, unable to look anyone in the eye. “I don’t got no bolt cutters, I had to saw through the cuffs, and it just took too long. It was another kid that done it, too—a little boy, he just fell on her like he’d tripped or something, and next thing I knew Tisha’s face…her face…oh, Jesus!”

  Irma gently rubbed Lester’s back and whispered, “It’s okay, you did all you could.”

  “We have to get rid of the body.”

  Everybody in the room went quiet and looked to Arkansas, who had said it without inflection or remorse. Lester sniffed and wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

  “I know it sounds cruel, but you gotta understand that she’s gonna come back. As long as her head’s in more or less one piece, she’s gonna come back just like all them out there.”

  “For Chrissakes,” Lester moaned, “what d’ya want us to do, throw her out the window?”

  “You can wait if you want,” Arkansas said, swallowing hard. “But she’ll get up, and when she does, she’s gonna be a monster. And then you’ll have to deal with it, won’t you?”

  “This is fucked, this is really fucked.”

  Mean Jim had been pacing the apartment this whole time, sometimes muttering to himself and occasionally pausing to glance out the window, down at the never-ending river of crying corpses in the courtyard below. Now he stopped pacing, took a moment to light a cigar with a wooden match, and spoke up at last.

  “What we got here is a war,” he announced. “And there’s two fronts to fight: the things downstairs, and L.T. upstairs. For now we’re pretty well defended on this floor, but there’s no sense in waiting for the fight to come to us. Arkansas, you and Irma can hole up in my bedroom. I’ll arm you just in case, but this ain’t yours to die for.”

  “Bullshit,” Arkansas said, looking to Irma for confirmation.

  She nodded and said, “We came here to ask you for help, Jim.”

  “That right?”

  “There’s a man we’re after,” Arkansas explained. “Irma ended up in stir for killing this fool, only he ain’t dead.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Irma added.

  “Right on,” Jim said, grinning like he did. “Then
you gals help us win back Bucktown, and Mean Jim Turner will help you find your man. Dig?”

  “I can dig that, baby,” Arkansas said with a hearty handshake between them.

  Irma joined her hand to the union, but the moment was broken by an ear-splitting report, a mist of smoke, and a shrill yelp. Lester, his red eyes swollen and wet, held a snub-nosed .38 in his trembling hands. On the chaise lounge across the room, Tisha’s body slumped to the floor, an oozing black-red hole in her forehead.

  “Sh—she o—opened her eyes,” he stuttered, his lips quivering with horror and sorrow.

  “Lord above,” Mac said, lowering his head.

  Jim reached for Lester, took the gun away with one hand and squeezed his shoulder hard with the other.

  “You did what you had to do,” he assured him. Then, to the rest of the small assembly, he said, “We got work to do.”

  * * * * *

  Lester and Mac joined Bruce at the mouth of the hallway to plan an attack on the screaming rotters in the stairwell while Irma, Arkansas, and Mean Jim tended to the unpleasant business of disposing of Tisha’s body. They did not, as Lester feared, throw her out the window; rather, Jim wrapped the corpse in a blanket and with the women’s help, he deposited it in the garbage chute at the opposite end of the hall from Bruce’s position. As far as he knew, there were not yet any dead in the cellar where the chute let out, and though it was an undignified burial, he murmured a short prayer before the girl slid down the rickety tunnel to the bin five floors below.

  On their way back to apartment 4G, Jim asked the men at the end of the hall how they were faring.

  “We can’t burn ‘em out,” Mac replied, rubbing his bald head. “We’d end up burning the whole damn building down.”

  “And we don’t want to waste ammunition shooting them all, either,” Bruce added.

  A mad yowl sounded from just behind the door, quickly followed by a slow, rhythmic banging.