Читать книгу Allied Zombies for Peace - Craig Nybo - Страница 24

Chapter 17

Kirkwell, Arlo Fitzgerald’s aid, shouted three words that spread throughout the AZP ranks like a brush fire: “He’s been shot.”

The great leader of the Allied Zombies for Peace, a war hero of the Civil War Confederate army, author of the important civil rights book, The Peace Doctor, negotiator of zombie civil rights with American presidents dating back to Andrew Johnson, champion to all American undead, was shot. A momentary silence settled over the AZP marchers. They stood like discarded bones, some lay in light piles, their scrawny bodies twisted and stinking. Others paced back and forth, trying to reason out why anyone would want to execute one of the few bastions of peace in an otherwise tumultuous world.

Someone broke the silence. A red headed zombie who had died in an industrial accident while working metal to make ships during World War II, her peroxide-bleached hair done up into a Veronica Lake do, raised one bony finger and pointed towards the white sheeted Klansmen who stood gathered like clouds, wondering themselves who had fired the shot and why. With a scrawny voice, nothing more than a choked out husk, the redheaded zombie woman shouted: “it was the KKK that did it.”

Almost as if choreographed, the overwhelming majority of AZP marchers swiveled around to face the KKK demonstrators. Stern, monstrous expressions twisted onto their gray, dead features. Dark, soulless eyes, some sightless, some colorless, some missing, stabbed viscous stares like ice pick pinpoints into the Klansmen.

Kirkwell stood up from Fitzgerald’s limp body and straightened his narrow, black tie. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and cracked the vertebrae in his neck with a quick flicking motion of his head. He glanced around at the other aids. There was Farlow Diever with his briefcase, fedora, and missing left hand, Patsie Channing with her knitted snood that covered the scar tissue crown of her head, Grayson Diller with his swivel-kneed walk and skinless right cheek bone. They stood together, a bank of solidarity, eyes perched in flinching sockets, fixed on the men that had done the abominable thing: fixed on the KKK marchers.

“I want a company front, now,” Anton Griffin, the grand Cyclopes of the KKK, dressed in red regalia, ordered. KKK spooks formed a rough line straight across High Street. In all, there were about sixty Klansmen. They were outnumbered by at least two-to-one by zombies. But Griffin felt confident that any single Klansman could best more than three of those undead scum. He fished for the compact megaphone he kept strapped to his belt. He raised it to his lips and clicked the amp on. “Now you listen to me, you undead, so-called marchers for peace. We came here today to exercise our constitutional right to assemble, not to start trouble.”

Kirkwell shouted back at Griffin: “You sons of bitches.”

“Now calm down,” Griffin bleated through the megaphone.

“You Nazi sons of Hitler’s whores,” someone else shouted from the zombie ranks.

“We are not responsible for the demise of your leader.”

“The hell you’re not,” Kirkwell gritted the words out. He paused to glance across the faces of his brothers and sisters, his fellow members of the AZP. He saw steel, iron, and fire in their eyes. Fitzgerald’s hoard of undead stood cocked and ready to discharge at the slightest flinch. Kirkwell looked down at Fitzgerald, splayed out on the tarmac, his eyes blank. He nodded once, resolute, and pushed the long sleeves of his white dress shirt up to his elbows. “Let’s take ‘em now,” he shouted and ran, full tilt, towards the KKK company front. Most of the AZP marchers followed. Those who could ran; those who couldn’t crawled or dragged themselves on wheeled carts, sleds, and wagons.

“What’s happening?” Margy said, taking a frightened step back.

Ozwald, who at first had set out with the rush of zombies towards the Klansmen, turned to face her. Her expression, terrified, caused a wave of unexpected compassion to flow into him. He stopped and shouted for Dex.

Dex reluctantly trotted back to where his friend and Margy stood. “Let’s get her out of harm’s way, then we can think about the KKK,” Ozwald said.

Dex nodded once.

“Are you going to bite them?” Margy asked, cowering back another step, her eyes locked on the beginnings of a skirmish between zombies and KKK.

“A stupid question,” Dex said.

Margy had felt the hunger for human flesh ever since she had turned; but, like all new zombies, she had been assigned a mentor—in her case, an undead female. The woman had taught her to control the hunger pangs by eating raw, red meat. When the taste for living tissue became unbearable, her mentor had taught her to find a stray cat, a rat, or a raccoon. Margy’s mentor had told her: Only the insane among us bite humans. To bite a living human means turning him into our kind. For zombies, biting is considered murder by the law.

“They’ll fight, but they’ll never bite,” Dex said to Margy. She exhaled an uneasy breath.

“Let’s get you to a safe place,” Ozwald said.

Dex and Ozwald took Margy’s hands and guided her away from the growing brawl. They scanned the street for a safe place to take her. But as the shouting and bedlam around them escalated, it seemed that safety might soon be out of reach.