Wiry Bravo hit at his attacker with his flashlight, clocked him a good one on top of the head but the guy didn't let go. His thick, hairy arms were wrapped firmly around Bravo's torso, holding him fast.

It was then that Betty saw that the attacker was totally naked. This was almost as shocking as the fact that he was eating her partner's throat. Why should the man's nudity be so deeply disturbing?

She drew a bead on the naked man's head and shouted: "Let him go or I'll shoot you!"

He didn't let go. Didn't acknowledge her at all.

"Hey! I'm not f.u.c.king around! I WILL SHOOT YOU."

The naked biter was unimpressed. Or bats.h.i.t crazy.

"Shoot 'im," Bravo said in a wet, strangled voice.

She reaimed and fired. The slug hit him squarely in the center of the top of his head and he fell backward, taking Bravo back with him.

Betty heard a sc.r.a.ping noise to her rear. She spun back around to see a disfigured man in b.l.o.o.d.y clothes crawling toward her. The raw-meat stench told her that this was the one she'd smelled earlier.

"Stop!" she yelled. "Alto!"

He didn't.

She shot him. His right eyeball disappeared in a splash of blood.

But he did not stop. He merely paused long enough to wipe at his empty eye socket with the back of a filthy hand, then he came on with one crazy eye shining in the light beam.

Betty fired again. And again.

Her weapon held 13 rounds but she wasn't going to get a chance to fire them all. The man was on her as she fired the fifth round.

The sixth ricocheted off the tunnel wall with a whistling whine.

The seventh shot was pointblank to the belly as he fell on top of her, teeth tearing into her throat.

The eighth blew off the tip of Betty's left breast.

There was no ninth.

Betty Davis Wolfe died slowly.

There were no dead relatives waiting to welcome her, no light shining at the end of a tunnel, just her failing flashlight in this drug-runner's tunnel.

She died wishing she'd had a last cigarette.

When she woke to the afterdeath, what she desired was not a smoke.

17.

Mystery Train

Piggy was too p.o.o.ped to pop. She was like the hobo campfire, flamed out and burnt down to dying embers. Lethargic, gorged on hobo blood and meat to the point where she didn't want to move. Warm liquid seeped out of her a.n.u.s. She reckoned it was the blood she'd imbibed from that silly skull-f.u.c.ker Sop. Hadn't he been shocked when she chomped his drippy little d.i.c.k off! One fell snap of the teeth and his limp sausage was in her mouth and he was screaming his a.s.s off, but not for long. By the time she'd chewed the blood out of his c.o.c.k and spit the thing on the ground, he was flat on his back, pa.s.sing out. And that was when Piggy made a pig of herself. She took the stump of his d.i.c.k in her mouth and sucked and sucked and sucked the blood out of him. Couldn't call it c.o.c.ksucking because his c.o.c.k was mostly gone. But that was some sweet nub-sucking, right? She drained him nice and slow and didn't stop until his heart did. When she was finally done, she rolled over and saw that Sick had bested Suck by chewing his throat out like a fast-food junkie. Piggy preferred dining at a more leisurely pace and figured that made her a more refined diner than hobo Sick, who must've wandered off to find another snack. Suck was just now stirring to life (or non-life) and would likewise be about the business of finding food with a heartbeat.

Piggy thought this was some weird s.h.i.t, all right.

Weirder still was how quickly it became second nature to her, this new way of life, or undeath, or whatever the devil you called it. What wasn't so weird was that her suicidal impulse had survived her death. Doing away with herself now was a bigger challenge. A harder row to hoe for any ho. But she knew she could do it. And now that her gut was so full of blood that it was leaking out her a.s.s, it seemed the ideal time to end this nasty-a.s.s excuse of an afterlife. And she knew just how to do it.

She rose from the earth. Like a slow shadow, Sop the d.i.c.kless Dead rose a moment after her. He looked at her, his blanched face shrivel-wrinkled in death, then he shambled away in shame. Or maybe just to find warm-blooded victuals.

Piggy heard the distant train whistle and hobbled as fast as she could toward the tracks. She slipped and slid down the embankment to the rail bed and then slipped on the gravel thereabouts, but she beat the train to the tracks and stood there with her arms outstretched in a kaput parody of crucifixion.

She looked up at the fabled rosy-fingered dawn, renamed it b.l.o.o.d.y-fingered dawn of the dead, and then looked at the Cyclopean beam of light shining from the mighty engine that would (with any luck at all) turn her already mangled body into mincemeat, and she said (without sound), "I'm not Piggy p.o.o.p. I'm Peg Pope and I quit this world of my own free will. G.o.d d.a.m.n it all to h.e.l.l!"

She couldn't know for certain where this mystery train might take her. But if it wasn't the Oblivion Express, she was going to be appallingly p.i.s.sed.

18.

Paradise Denied

Nadif didn't know how to be dead. Dead in the way the two Mexicans who killed him were. Dead but still going. Going about the business of killing. And eating. Human flesh. Once he was dead, or at least without breath and a heartbeat, the murderous dead left him alone. They-and now he-wanted only living flesh and streaming blood. How could this be?

What must Allah be thinking to allow such a thing? But no, this was not Allah's doing. This was Satan's. Allah was simply sitting back and letting it happen as punishment for this crazy-quilt continent of infidels. Was this not right? Nadif didn't know. Could only guess and his guesses were not so good now that his brain was dead and his consciousness was running unknown ethereal circuits, plagued with power surges and brownouts, the brownouts characterized by mindless walking and virtually no mental activity. And beneath it all, the constant craving for warm blood-in-the-flesh.

Was this a test? A test of his will to fulfill his mission? The canisters of Black Death remained in his backpack but he was far afield from his jihadi job, and his feet seemed to be going their own way. His feet cared nothing for the Grand Jihad. Was his spirit strong enough to prevail? He wanted to face Mecca, drop to his knees and pray for strength but his feet kept walking the cursed land, in search of the only thing that would satisfy his infernal craving.

The irony was not entirely lost on him that he had been prepared to die hideously of the Black Death, so long as Paradise waited to welcome him on the other side of death, but now here he was stranded in a h.e.l.lish realm where death itself was a permanent state of being. This was too diabolical for words. This was- Something slapped his arm.

A moment later came the echoing pop of distant gunfire. Someone was shooting at him.

Up ahead a cl.u.s.ter of three or four other dead walkers also drew fire. The tallest one's head exploded and he went down like a marionette whose strings have been all at once severed.

Another slug slapped into Nadif, this time striking him squarely in the chest and knocking him backward to the ground. As he got slowly to his feet, Nadif's memory lazily looped back to his combat training at various camps in the Horn of Africa and he recalled his abbreviated training with a high-powered Russian sniper rifle. By the time he was standing again his sluggish mind had worked out that right now there were at least two shooters taking pot-shots at him and his ... kind. Zombies. Zionist zombies?

There would be a big exit wound in his back. One of the backpack canisters containing weaponized plague had most likely been breached. The virus would be wasted here in this wasteland.

He thought he should remove the backpack and note the damage but as soon as the thought came into his head, it evaporated and he walked on into the dawn, thinking single-mindedly of finding b.l.o.o.d.y sustenance.

Nadif paid little mind to the sniper's slugs snapping past and sometimes slamming into him. They were hardly more annoying than aggressive insects, hungry horseflies or fat mosquitoes.

19.

Man Walks Into A Bar

Cruz came to with a shotgun muzzle pressed hard against his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.

"What'll it be?" the shotgun-wielding bartender asked.

"Uh, shot of tequila," Cruz said. "Make it a double and uh, hold the buckshot."

The bartender pulled the shotgun away. Cruz raised his head off the bar and rubbed the throbbing knot over his left ear. The last thing he remembered was sitting down at the bar and then the bartender swinging a shotgun at his head in the manner of a batter going for a bunt.

"Can't be too careful," the bartender said, "what with all the wild s.h.i.t coming down."

"Right," Cruz said. Who was he to argue with a psycho strapped with a shotgun?

The bartender set the shotgun down and poured Cruz a shot. "Now that the world's turned into a f.u.c.king Romero movie, a guy can't be too careful, ya know?"

"Right."

"Could've just gone ahead and shot you, you know. But I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Little love tap to see if you woke up dead or not. Sometimes you can't tell right off the bat. If a dude's dead or zombied out or normal. One thing that ain't like the movies, a headshot don't put the deaders down. I can prove that s.h.i.t. You wanna see?" "Uh, no, that's all right," Cruz said after he downed the shot.

"C'mon, what's it gonna hurt? Ain't like you got something else to do. What with the world gone to s.h.i.t and dead. h.e.l.l, I would've closed up hours ago but I don't wanna have to go home to shoot the wife, you know? Ain't got the heart. It's all over the news. They don't come right out and say all the dead are walking but a little reading between the lines tells the tale. Me, I've seen it for my own d.a.m.n self. Hadda blow away two dead c.o.c.ksuckers. One a good customer too. Come on, pal, it ain't gonna kill you. Come meet Joe the Dead."

Cruz didn't move. He said, "How about another shot of tequila?"

"Sure, sure. After you see Joe. Joe the Dead. Ain't got no head but he keeps going and going like that f.u.c.king battery-hyped bunny beating a ba.s.s drum. He's locked in the ladies room. C'mon, he can't hurt you. He's so shot to s.h.i.t he just lies there twitching."

"No thanks," Cruz said. "I don't have the stomach for it right now."

The bartender scowled, leaned close and lowered his voice: "You better find it real quick, buddy. Dude in the booth over there's got plans for you. And he don't strike me as somebody you wanna rub the wrong way."

Cruz turned his head as casually as he could to get a look at the dude in the booth.

Blink-click: mental snapshot: man in a red hoodie, hood up to conceal his face. The same guy.

Bad juju coming off him in waves.

Baad juju.

"What're you talking about?" Cruz asked as quietly as he could. "What plans?"

"f.u.c.k should I know? Ask him. He's the mystery man on the news. Where he shows up, the s.h.i.t goes down. They been showing cell-phone pictures of him. They think he's some kinda terrorist but he's something a d.a.m.n site worse than that."

Cruz stole another glance. It looked like the guy had no face.

Bartender whispered, "Get off your a.s.s and come with me. I don't want on this guy's bad side. Let's go. Joe ain't getting no fresher."

"Right," Cruz said, sliding off the stool. "Tell me, what city is this?"

"Jesus Christ. Phoenix. Where the f.u.c.k ya think?"

Cruz shrugged. "I have no idea how I got here."

"Yeah, well, that could be the least of your problems, pal."

20.

Shoot & Loot