Free 4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas by Cheryl Mullenax Page A

be passed on to these two ignorant devils and carried back into their homes and environs, thence to spread as if on fiery desert winds. The onset of symptoms would be unnaturally rapid and cruelly devastating. Best of all, the organism would remain insidiously virulent as it spread through the population.
    Nadif’s soul shouted:
God is great!
    Allahu Akbar
.
22
Joe the Dead
    Dude was the Devil. Bobby Cruz had a nose for news and his news nose told him so:
    This dude in the red hoodie is the honest-to-God Devil.
    And unlike most people in the news business, Bobby believed deeply in the Devil, and had done so since he was old enough to grasp the concept of Ultimate Evil Personified. Six, as he recalled. That was how old he was when he actually saw in his mind’s eye Satan rising from the ground to grab him and take him down to hell. A childish image now. But was it really? If the dead could rise, then why couldn’t the Devil come up from hell? He could. The question now was: Why? And what did the Devil want with Bobby Cruz?
    “Go on,” said the bartender. “Ask him. If you got the balls. But first you gotta see Joe. I call him Joe the Dead after a character in a book a customer left on the bar one time. By William Burroughs? You heard of him? Faggot addict, dead now. Boy, did he come up with some crazy faggy shit. Anyway, here’s Joe.”
    The bartender threw open the Ladies Room door and the smell of death and deodorizer hit Bobby full force in the face, kicked open his sinuses and blew them out like a teargas bomb. His eyes ran with tears. Runny eyes, runny nose-for-news.
    The body was on the floor by the first stall. Its head was completely separated from the hideous blackened stump of its neck. From the looks of things, the bartender had blown the head off with several close-range blasts. The eyes in the head were intact and looked up at Cruz and the bartender with worried puzzlement, as if Joe the Dead were wondering if they were going to play football with his head.
    His arms and legs had likewise been blown off and lay twitching several feet from their stumps. One bloody hand was trying to drag itself across the wet tile with its fingers, like a wounded rat seeking to hide in a dark corner.
    “See and remember,” the bartender said. “I think that’s what the man in red wants you to do. Like some sort of reporter for the end of the world. Like the red dude’s disciple.”
    “He told you this?”
    “Well, not in so many words. Not in words at all. Guy never speaks. He puts thoughts in your head. Slips em right in there somefucking-how. That’s why I gave you a whack on the head when you sat at my bar. He made me do it, I think, just to knock you off balance, sort of like a master smacking sense into his apprentice. Him being the master, not me. Call me crazy, but I think he’s an angel. Not the airy-fairy type. More like the ones God sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.”
    “Let’s get out of here,” said Cruz, wiping his eyes. “I’ve seen and smelled enough of Joe.”
    “Yeah. Rest in pieces, Joe.” The bartender chortled at his own trite joke.
23
Beelzebub
    They left the Ladies Room and returned to the bar. The Red Hoodie Devil remained in the booth, his face—if he had one—remained hidden in suggestive shadow.
    Bobby wondered what would happen if he took the bartender’s shotgun and pumped some slugs into the red-hooded son of a bitch.
    The Devil laughed inside Bobby’s head. Laughed so hard it rattled Bobby’s eyeballs and gave him a splitting headache.
    “Okay, okay, I get it,” he said, pressing both hands to his head as if to keep it from splitting apart. “So what do you want with me?”
    The Devil plopped a leatherbound book on the table in front of him.
    Bobby warily approached the booth.
    The air changed. It was as if the Devil had brought a little of hell’s atmosphere with him. It fairly crackled. It smelled not of brimstone but of cloves and cinnamon and something long dead