Zombie Bitches From Hell (27 page)

“In a balloon,” I say quickly. Doesn’t make a
difference anymore. “It’s buried back at the lighthouse. Won’t do
anybody any good anymore.”

“Now that is a story,” says Ryan. “Maybe I’m
believing the whole thing. Like Dorothy and the Wizard. You’re
right about P-Town. It’s all gay now for sure. We had our problems
with a bunch of local dykes and some turista broads. A lot of
bloodletting, if the truth be known. But about twenty seminary
students from Boston showed up one day in a motor boat; they had
just made it out of Bean Town before it was overrun by the horde
and they arrived in the nick of time to save our ungodly
asses.”

“You mean a bunch of Catholic priests made it
in a boat?” Tim asks.

“Not priests exactly. But on their way to
being priests. Seminary of St. Jude. Nice bunch of guys. And don’t
start in about child molesting and all that shit. We’re what’s left
in this part of the globe and, like it or not, we’re the survivors.
The only hope of mankind,” says Ryan.

“God works in mysterious ways, my friends,”
says Tim. “Greg, what’s your story?”

I look out the window of the Jeep at the
dunes and saw grass, the shifting sands that have covered most of
the road since there is no longer a highway department to clean up
after Mother Nature’s mischief. There are gray-shingled cottages
with sand piled up against their sides as if trying to hide from
the weather and the world. Abandoned cars, toppled lawn furniture,
a deserted produce stand, tattered remnants of American and
nautical flags on weathered flagpoles, the halyards clanking in the
wind. Greg’s voice breaks the reverie:

“I was a school teacher at P-Town Elementary.
I’ll never forget it, Mary, never, if I live to be a hundred—not
that I would want to unless they can do something about wrinkles
and age spots—no, honey, not me. Anyway, I’m teaching the little
cuties about squares and circles and triangles and I’ve got their
full attention, which is not easy, I might add. And I hear a shout
from outside in the hallway. Help, Help! Someone is yelling and
then screams. Well, I am thinking this is Columbine but for tots.
And, no, it couldn’t be; that was in Colorado which is full of
bigot rednecks with pick-up trucks and gun racks. No this is P-Town
the land of the free and the home of the homo. I don’t even think
the police have guns. Anyway, I look out in the hall in a very
cautious fashion and, sure enough, Miss Watling, the assistant
principal who is at least 350 pounds on a dry day, is purple and
gushier than usual and she has Mr. Boyle on his back on the floor
eating his—well, his private parts--and two male teachers, Mr.
Conroy, the cutest math teacher you ever saw and Mr. DaBrama, a
hunky Italian from Boston are pulling on her fat shoulders and
shouting for someone to call 911 and then some new teacher named
Mrs. Haversham looking like it was Halloween in May comes running
down the hall with a man’s arm in her mouth, jacket sleeve and all,
and I nearly passed out and kept thinking of my old fucked up
Christian grandma telling me about the end of days and the Crapture
and all that Jesus-with-his-terrible-swift-sword bullshit and I say
to myself, ‘Honey, that old dried-up bitch was right! It
is
the end of the world and where am I going to be sentenced to?’ Why
just two nights before, I had a dildo up my ass the size of a
Louisville slugger and Jimmy—he’s my hunka-hunka burnin’ love dish
of the week—

jerking off by my side. I’m hoping that Saint
Agnes or the Holy Moly Mother of God or St. Peter, Paul and Almond
Joy were not watching me in the privacy of my own home. After all,
even queers have some constitutional rights, right? And I start
praying out loud, ‘Dear Jesus, I never sucked a dick or had one in
my ass and I’ll never do it again! I promise on the grave of my old
fucking whore Bible thumpin’ grandma, may she rot, I mean live, in
heaven with you and those eye candy angels. Anyway, I slam the door
shut and lock it and I turn to see all the little girls have
collapsed on the floor and the little boys are standing there, some
crying, some just dumbfounded and then, of course, there is fat
little Jerry Koonders laughing and pointing at Emily Boyd’s little
panties full of scorch marks and I yell, ‘All right, boys, back up
to the black board. Give them some air,’ but the little rascals all
come running over to me because, of course, they are scared out of
their little wits. And then the little girls get up and I figure
that it must have been mass hysteria and I can hear police sirens
outside and I am glad for the first time in my life that the cops
are on the way and it’s not to arrest me for public drunkenness
which only happened once when I was in New York City at a club
called Furnace and I did more ecstasy than was prudent, if you get
my meaning, and the next thing I know this fat guy named Jeffrey is
breathing on me while I’m passed out and saying, ‘She’s not dead, I
think. Let her sit here for a while. She’ll come to. I hope.’ Well,
I did but the place got raided and I got taken to a hospital and I
would bet a thousand dollars that the ambulance guy had taken my
shoes off and was smelling my feet and whacking off, but I couldn’t
swear to it because, well I was e’d out of my mind and I wouldn’t
have minded anyway; I love a man in a uniform. I was put in a room
with this drag queen who was so ugly she reminded me of my dear old
grandma who was dead and rotting in her grave. Well, back to the
school, the tyke bitches get up and they do not look healthy and
happy like little American girls should look, all sugar and spice
and everything tuna. No, my friends, they are tottering tots from
the land of the undead, oozing black shit from their mouths and
like little monster wind-up American Girl dolls, they start
attacking the little boys en masse and biting and tearing and it’s
not even lunch period yet, the little bitches. One of them goes for
my balls, but I punch her on the top of her head and collapse her
skull in because I’m scared outta my panties. I remember seeing
those pigtails with the pink ribbons go straight up in the air
covered in her brain matter. She collapses and I smashed her face
in with my Prada boots which were never the same since, damn her. I
know I’m not going to run into the hall, so I go to the window and
try to lift some of the boys through. I get three or four out and
tell them to run wee, wee, wee all the way home but I don’t get a
good feeling about that especially when that dyke gym teacher comes
staggering out of the gymnasium and grabs one of them and tears his
arms off and eats him, jeans and Ed Hardy t-shirt included. Just
his little high tops were left. I climb out and the bitch starts
chasing me, but I make it to the bike rack and jump on one of the
bikes and pedal my ass off, tears in my eyes and racing through
that parking lot like Glinda the Good Witch of the South going to
save Dorothy but, fuck her, I got to save myself. It wasn’t long
before I found this bunch of queens hiding out in Pete’s Peter, the
gay bar that used to be a jail, and we are all safe. I think
someday I’ll write my life story. But I don’t think there are many
publishers left. Do you?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I answer. I’m out of
breath just listening to this queen. But I can sense the terrified
desperation behind the glib humor and the thick make-up. In not too
long a time we make it to a barricade across the road. There are
cars, buses, garbage dumpsters and miscellaneous vehicular detritus
not only blocking the roadway but extending to and over the dunes
in both directions from sea to shining sea. The blockade seals off
the small tip of the Cape at its narrowest point. There are
makeshift guard towers every fifty feet but they appear unoccupied.
There are, however, four guys in military fatigues with Uzis. We’re
stopped at the entrance and two muzzles are pointed at us.

“It’s us,” says Ryan. “We lost one and found
two.”

“Get out of the car, all of you,” barks one
of the guards.

Greg says, “That’s what used to be a
seminarian. What a bitch. It’s protocol. Don’t worry, guys, it’s
okay.”

The last time I heard that, it was most
definitely not okay. We all get out. The car is looked over and
under.

“Welcome back, Ryan. What happened to the
other two you left with?” asks a guard.

“Helen had an accident. She’s dead. Darlene
is back at the Nauset Light collecting provisions. Send Anthony and
Chuck out with a van. She’s waiting.”

“Sure,” he responds. He raises his arm and
gestures and a school bus that is part of the barricade backs out
of the way and the road ahead is clear, a small street that leads
to a cluster of perfect New England Victorian houses and cottages
in various shades of white, yellow, gray, sea green and pink.

“How cheery and gay,” says Tim.

“How unoriginal,” says Greg. “Welcome to
P-Town.”

***

We sit down to a meal in a former restaurant
that overlooks the water. The breeze is light, the sun strong for
this time of year and gulls walk on sand with plovers and other
small birds. There are rocks out about a hundred yards offshore
with seals on them.

“This place really is beautiful,” I say.

“Yeah. Used to be worth almost a thousand
dollars a square foot for a house out here. Lots of Boston peeps
and New Yorkers. A lot of queers have money. No kids to spend it on
or save it for and almost every household with two earners. Those
were good times. Not that we still don’t throw a bash now and
then,” says Ryan. “There are about two hundred of us at ‘Fort
P-Town’ now. Every now and then a few leave. A lot of guys want to
find their parents or brothers and sisters or even old loves. It’s
not an easy adjustment. It’s great here, don’t get me wrong,
considering I mean, but it’s still a prison even if the bars are
sand, surf and a pile of junk blocking the town line at the
peninsula neck. Occasionally, a guy or two just vanish without so
much as a ‘see ya later’ but I figure everyone has to deal with
farewells in their own way.”

“It’s still way better than any place else
we’ve seen. You wouldn’t believe it,” I say.

“We’ve heard some reports mostly over the
radio and sometimes we’ll catch something on a boat CB. We have a
lot of boats docked here—moored I should say—we decided to destroy
all the docks to make landing more difficult. We don’t know how
organized the zombies are.”

“My guess is that they are evolving and from
what we’ve seen crossing the country, it won’t be long before they
really organize,” I respond. I continue with a brief description of
what we’ve been through. Tim adds his comments and the table, which
now has about twenty guys listening to us, is getting updates on
the state of the union. It’s not what they want to hear but when
we’re done, we get thanked and there’s a lot of ‘boys, you got
balls’ talk. Most of them have been living some kind of delusion
about how serious it all is. The student priests especially have
been talking a great deal about God’s judgment and all that
horseshit and they even convinced a bunch of the guys to attend
church on Sundays. My own views I keep to myself but if they think
God has figured out a way to help, I can’t avoid thinking that
maybe he should not have let the plague happen to begin with. Just
me though and I guess it can’t hurt if these guys find some solace
in their prayers.

The meeting breaks up and Ryan tells a
twenty-something named Terry to show us to our quarters. Terry was
a Broadway dancer and he tells us about some of his adventures on
the great white way. He tells us there is an old boarded-up dinner
theater on the east side of town and he’d love to re-open it
someday and start putting on shows.

“Where is the place?” I ask knowing or hoping
or dreaming or wishing that that is where Jen is. How could she
still be alive? I think.

“Let’s get you two settled in and I’ll take
you over. Okay?”

Tim looks at me. “That would be fun,” he
says.

Terry waits outside while we unload our gear
in an old motel that’s in the middle of town. I would have
preferred a water view but I think it’s better to be in the middle
of things on the theory that there is safety in numbers.

“Let’s do the tour,” I tell Tim.

“I know what you’re thinking and I think I’ll
pass. I’m toured out, Captain and I think I’ll settle in, maybe
walk a little.”

“Suit yourself,” I say as Terry honks the
horn. “I won’t be long.”

Terry heads north and there are people
walking around like everything is normal, like the good old days.
No women of course, but the guys are in groups, smoking, standing
around being social. Some are on porches, sitting on porch steps,
candles, kerosene lanterns lighting the untended gardens and
overlong grasses that smother the picket fences and stream up
through cracks in the pavement. Terry pulls up to a very tall
lighthouse at the northernmost point of the Cape and turns the
lights of the Jeep off. We watch the waves roll in.

“Is the theater around here?” I ask.

“About two blocks away,” he says. “I just
want to sit a spell. I used to come here every summer. It was
great. My parents had a cottage near here but one of those
nor’easters tore the hell out of it and they ended up selling the
land it used to sit on for like ten times the amount they paid for
it. I guess they were motivated by watching me watching all the
guys. It wasn’t easy for them.”

“Were you here when the plague hit?”

“You mean the GaGa, right? When you say
plague to a queen, we usually think AIDS.”

“Yeah, the GaGa.”

“I remember the night I first heard of the
virus scare. I didn’t know quite what to do so I simply went to bed
after locking and double locking the doors. Even that was not
enough; I got up and nailed the windows shut. Almost broke a few
but I was careful. Got back into bed and thought and rethought my
life. My bedroom was dark, the ceiling the blue of dusk, the
furniture deep gray. I had my headphones on and was listening to
the love theme from
Terminator II
, my favorite part of the
film. As the music rose and fell, I could envision the scene as
clearly as if I were in the theater. Michael Biehn, the hero of the
first
Terminator
movie, was bathing in a lake in the woods,
his well-scarred body tan except for the cheeks of his rear end
which were the color of mayonnaise. There was the Arnold
Schwarzenegger Terminator hiding in the woods peeping through the
limbs of some blue spruces, his red light eyes bright as Christmas
ornaments on the Rockefeller Center tree. He watched Michael wash
himself, particularly observing how the wan sunlight caught the
peach fuzz coating on his ass, that beautiful double scoop, vanilla
ice cream ass. Terminator’s eyes narrowed and glowed fiercely
staring at the twin hemispheres of masculinity. He could take it no
longer but strode out through the trees and, as if to show his
peaceful intent, raised his hands in the air and said, ‘I come in
peace, no pun intended.’ Michael slowly turned and said, ‘I knew
you were there, big boy. What took you so long?’ Here, the violins
and oboes made a lilting crescendo as Terminator grabbed Michael
and nibbled the back of his neck.