Zombie Bitches From Hell

Copyright 2010 by Grand Mal Press. All rights
reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this
book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
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grandmalpress.com

Published by: Grand Mal Press Forestdale, MA
www.grandmalpress.com

Copyright 2010, Grand Mal Press

ISBN 13 digit: 978-0-9829459-0-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data Grand Mal Press/ Zoot Campbell

p. cm

Cover art by Michael Lindsey

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by

Zoot Campbell

CHAPTER 1

I’m keeping this journal in long hand since
all the power has gone off—yesterday in this area, anyway. Heard
the shutdowns started back East and spread like a wave toward the
West. Took three weeks at least but nothing could be done to stop
it. Just too many dead men at the switches.

I’m Kent Zimmer, anchor newsman for KWAK out
of Denver, Colorado. Whatever I may have recorded into my camcorder
may never be accessible again. Frankly, this handwriting may never
be accessible again. But maybe I should begin at the beginning or
at least at the beginning of the end. It sounds cheesy—is cheesy
–but it’s the goddamn cheesy truth.

***

We were all real proud eight months ago when
Charlotte Smith became the first woman president of these United
States. I suppose it was going to be a foregone conclusion that
women would win a majority in both houses of Congress, too. Women
from both parties and one or two that no one ever heard of until a
year or so ago won big. Guess it was long overdue. But it was the
year of the woman. And why not? They couldn’t even vote a hundred
years ago. Not in this country anyway. And now they not only got
the vote but everything that goes along with it, I guess. I
remember broadcasting the network tallies just after the polls
closed on the West Coast. Actually, I bet Jennifer that George
Fulbright would win. It just seemed more natural and he was as
natural a TV generation candidate could be. Jen is my fiancée and
while she lives on Cape Cod, we met at a medical convention she was
attending here in Denver. I was covering it for the station and she
was a medical researcher talking about a new anti-viral concoction
that was developed in NYC along with her team at Harvard Medical.
It was a breakthrough, alright. Based on human genome transference
or some such process that was too complicated for me to understand
when she told me about it, let alone my trying to remember it now
three years later.

If you’re hoping I’m going to tell you what
Jen looked like and smelled like and talked like and fucked like,
think again. You’re not going to wack off with visions of Jen in
your head. I know that self-abuse has become the national pastime
since the “GaGa,” but you’ll have to remember somebody else or
conjure up some vision of a chick before she began to rot. This is
no easy trick. Once you’ve seen one of them up close and personal,
it’s hard to go back.

Maybe you’re a lucky one and your wife or
daughter or mom is still near you and you’re waiting for the GaGa
to hit her hoping it won’t happen. I’m thinking Jen is one of the
lucky ones and I’m going to bet my life on it because it isn’t life
anymore without her. I’m going to get to her no matter what or how
long it takes.

I’ve got this idea; it’s more than an idea.
It’s my only hope and I think the best shot at getting across this
country. I’ll be using the prevailing winds, west to east. Taking a
hot air balloon. Not just any balloon, either. I ran one of my
feature stories, not long ago, on a man that used a mylar-oleate
bonding process to create a high altitude balloon that was
impervious to the weather and held the heat in longer than anything
previously known. There is not much of a chance to get across with
one tank of propane, but I am going to try. With luck and a shove
from the El Niňo transfer, it could work. Food’s another matter.
I’ll have to land at some point for provisions. But anything worth
having is worth …well, maybe your life.

I need to travel light. I got a pistol but
I’m not much of a marksman. I also got MG my mutt with me; he’s too
good a pal and has helped me get through some tough times. I can’t
leave him behind and I can’t kill him. No way. He’s 50 pounds of
muscle and grit with a heart bigger than a Volkswagen. Jen and me
picked him up at the pound. She said she thought he had a face like
Mel Gibson, the geezer version not the young dude chasing wackos in
Mad Max. So I named him MG—and not for that old Brit car you
sometimes see riding around with bailing wire holding it together,
so if you don’t know what that is, you won’t get confused anyway in
case you’re a dumbass reading this and maybe all the books have
been eaten up too. But no matter. He’s coming with me.

And I think my cameraman Tim will be going
along for the ride. Known him since I started out at the station as
a features reporter. You know, the idiot that interviews those
skinny assholes that just ran the Denver Marathon. Or some
knucklehead that grew the world’s largest tomato in his bathtub by
pissing on it three times a day. Or a woman who got hauled off for
having 127 cats in her house. You should have seen her after she
caught the disease. No, maybe you shouldn’t have. You’d be losing
sleep for a month the same way I did.

Now Tim, he’s got a story but I’m going to
have to tell it. He barely talks much these days, and definitely
not about that, not after his wife ate their newborn son. He’s kind
of a hippy, or he was, but he’s still good with a camera and as
good a shot with a 30.06 as you’ll ever meet. And he knows how to
fly the balloon. Used to work one at the County Fair before he got
his break into show biz. Some break. His dad taught him everything
he knows. One of those survivalist types that we used to laugh at.
Nobody’s laughing anymore. They’re the men that are mostly still
alive—in outposts and caves and shit. Tim’s dad was teaching him
some new skills to meet the new reality, like to reload his shell
casings with materials on hand like fat from a dead animal, at
least until Tim’s mother ate most of the man’s face off while he
was sleeping. And even worse, but I’m not going to get into that
yet. Don’t like dwelling on the negative. Ha! That’s a laugh.
Anyway, that’s the way the disease works, it seems. You fuck them
one time and the next thing you know, you’re the blue plate
special.

***

There’s twelve of us holed up at the
transmission station perched near the top of one of the Rocky
Mountain foothills surrounding Denver. We started out with just
four guys from the station, but a few days later, eight National
Guardsmen showed up. With supplies and ammo. It was a blessing in a
time when blessings are in short supply. The station has a gigantic
tower, a concrete block electronics and works building and a few
solid-built sheds, one of which houses a generator and sits with a
2000 gallon diesel oil tank to feed it. The compound is surrounded
by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. On a good day last
year, the place looked like a prison for the terminally
radio-obsessed. Today, it’s heaven on Earth.

When reports started hitting the news desk
about this new “disease” that was affecting women—and women only,
we all thought that mostly it was a joke or some frigging blip on
Mother Nature’s radar. I mean, no one could believe that some
strippers at a Boston club named Hot Foxes had attacked the patrons
and killed and eaten most of them. One of the unlucky bastards had
the smarts to pull the fire alarm. When the fire department got
there they found his hand still attached to the pull box. That was
all that was left of him. They found the ribcage and some bones in
a heap by the back door along with the same bits from all the other
patrons. And this was the pisser, the ever-loving pisser to end all
pissers: mixed in with the bones and the intestines, the cops found
nine plastic bags full of a gelatinous substance—actually turned
out they were breast implants. Together with the vomit from the
firemen, it was not a pretty scene. No, indeed. It was not a pretty
scene. The strippers were gone and there was obviously no fire. The
cops showed up and watched the security tapes. At the station, we
got the full tape over the wire.

The lighting wasn’t great. The club was just
the way you might imagine it. Small tables in the dark perimeter, a
wide bar that surrounded a u-shaped stage (stools at the bar), two
shiny poles going from the stage up past the stage lighting into
the ceiling. Two guys are sweeping, polishing the bar. A half hour
later the stage lights go through their setting patterns. A dj and
a few thick types (obviously the bouncers) mill around. A guy in a
suit and tie comes in and hangs one of those chintzy “Happy
Birthday Pete” signs between the two stripper poles. Another half
hour and about twenty guys in suits and ties show up—I guess for
Pete’s party. They order a round and sit around ordering drinks and
talking while the stage lights do slow fade-ins and outs. Another
fifteen minutes and the jackets come off—now we got a whole bunch
of guys in shirtsleeves, ties dangling loose from open-collared
shirts. They’re yakking, then the birthday boy shows up—I can tell
because they all give him the cheers and all that usual
back-slapping, hand-shaking bullshit. Two girls sashay up on stage
and start a slow strip dance, popping out their butts and shaking
their tits. Look, I know this is nothing to write home about, but
I’m not writing home and you got to understand the mood.

We got our junior execs whistling and tossing
their one dollar bills at the broads, the lights are doing their
thing and the music is pumping. Four more stripper types are
working the guys, lap dances and feely-feelies and some not so
pretty types are scooting around with trays loaded with long necks
and mugs. The two on stage are down to g-strings and tits out, tits
that barely move because they are faker than grandma’s front teeth.
These chiquitas are gyrating and slithering all over those poles
and the stage and the bar. They’re tight bodied and way fit
considering they’re just a bunch of whores trying to milk it for
what it’s worth. Ole Pete is getting a lap dance from a girl with
tits bigger than volley balls—a good time is being had by all. And
why not? I think. This is a great country, ain’t it? We got a broad
for president. Let the tits and ass begin!

Then the two girls on stage collapse and it
can’t be but a minute until the girls working the crowd and the
waitresses drop where they stand or sit, as the case may be. The
bouncers run in and start shouting and gesturing and pushing and
shoving the shirt and tie guys and Ole Pete gets knocked off his
chair right on top of the lap dance special. The lighting is
terrible so I’m not sure what I’m seeing next is real. But it is
real, my reader of the future. Too real.

The girls on stage sort of deflate, like the
juice has gone out of them, like a pumpkin left on a Halloween
porch until December filmed in time lapse. Excepting those fake
tits of course. They stay full and flouncy in the name of modern
medical cosmetic science. The girls’ skin turns a grayish purply,
black and blue fucked up mess like they each did ten rounds with a
pissed off Mike Tyson. Me and the station crew watching this shit
all think it’s some, “Surprise, Pete! Happy fucking birthday!” But
this is not part of any act. Each and every one of those girls
turned into…we could not say. Even as I’m writing this, I cannot
believe my own fucking eyes saw this go down.

While the bouncers are pushing, shoving and
the shirts are fighting back, the girls get up! They are standing
there looking like death warmed over, only it isn’t death warmed
over, turns out it is death period. And it isn’t warm, turns out
it’s as cold as ice. I would have said colder than a witch’s a tit,
but if there were any witches in that room, they would’ve jumped on
their goddamn broomsticks and got out of there, because those
stripper bitches went nuts and eighteen light years beyond nuts.
The one on the floor near Pete yanks his pants down to his ankles,
grabs his junk and yanks it out by the root and then bites it off
and eats it. Pete’s screaming like a banshee and then she goes for
his neck, bites so hard that his head, in mid-scream, flops back
like he was a puppet whose puppeteer took his hand out before the
show was over. One of the bouncers grabs the bitch and her tit
comes away in his hand and the implant slides out and hits the
floor. He’s looking at his hand full of what used to be a glorious
I’ll-do-anything-to lick-your-nipple/tit and freezes in shock. Two
of the girls pounce on him and go for his dick and balls and one,
with a nut sack hanging from her teeth, goes for his face. In no
time, the whole bunch of those guys are reduced to shirts, ties,
pants and bones. It takes maybe a half hour. That was nearly a year
ago. Seems like a century.