The Cocaine Chronicles Page 24
“Some local talent built a club down here, inspired by Donna Summer, Studio 54, you know, all that,” Corso said.
Holmes stopped pacing. “There used to be a disco here?”
“Yeah. It was called, and this would prove to be ironic, the Disco Inferno. From what I understand, it was a popular place from 1976, when it started, to the night it burned down.”
“The Bicentennial till the death of disco,” Holmes gasped. Not a religious sort, he nonetheless sent a prayer up that the sky would rain gas and the Lord would then add a few lightning bolts to set the zombies ablaze.
Fernandez said, “You must have been a kid then.”
“She was old enough,” Holmes grinned wanly, grabbing some foliage to light with the recovered Zippo. He had to save his score.
“I’d already run off, wound up in L.A. Got involved with a creep that strung me out and pimped me out to this porn fuck. Even better that I was underage.” Despite the humidity, she wrapped her arms around herself. “That’s when I met Spree. The man in the white Charger—with a four on the floor.”
Holmes gazed at her through the small fire he’d started with his crummy torch. “It was your ass that mesmerized me.” With that, he ran into the thatch of zombies, but they were fevered and ignored his pathetic flame as they tore and ate into each other. He found McMillan on the ground, shivering.
“Aghhh,” he grimaced when Holmes tugged on him. “Fucking freaks broke my arm.” He got up, staring. “We’re fucked.”
The zombie in the thigh-high boots had jumped on the back of another who wore a torn gold-lamé cape. The cape man had gotten ahold of one of the bricks, or what had been the brick. He dipped his face into the powder, snorting madly like Pacino in Scarface. Thigh-high ripped the top of his head off and bit into his pulsing brain. She gobbled up pieces of the matter. The two stumbled about in stoned nirvana.
Holmes’s flame petered out. “This ain’t right,” he lamented. “We gotta save our shit.”
“Forget it, Spree,” Corso advised, joining him. “These monsters will tear you apart if you get between them and their coke.”
“It’s not theirs!” he cried.
“It is now,” Corso declared.
“’Fraid she’s right,” McMillan agreed, holding his busted arm. “Crider’s spell or mojo or whatever the hell it was has us whupped good.”
One of the zombies teetered on its feet, snow powdering its decomposed face. It ran into a tree and started to bang its head against the trunk so fiercely that it broke its face open. It continued hitting its head against the tree, smearing gore over the bark.
“Shit,” Holmes swore. “Shit.” He stomped about in frustration.
The zombies fought and scratched and snorted and mutilated each other until body parts were littered among the overgrown grass. Even legless zombies crawled their torsos over to any patch of flake on the ground to snort. The moon shone pregnant and brilliantly yellow against the warm night air.
Watching this, the four were soon witness to the actions of the last two zombies left standing. One was the creature with the nasty Afro and the other the ghastly one in the miniskirt. They each pulled on the end of a piece of plastic—a clump of the white stuff clung to the material. They stood among the battered and deformed heads, smashed eyeballs, torn-out tongues, broken teeth, severed fingers, cracked mood rings, ankh and cross ornaments, and knit caps of the walking disco dead.
Several of the disconnected heads mumbled, “Coke, coke,” over and over again, as a few of the mutilated hands crept across the ground in search of any fine white crystals left.
Meanwhile, miniskirt had an arm around Afro zombie’s neck and was gnawing on his ear as he ignored her and snorted his treasure of blow. He then turned and bit into her face and the two bearhugged each other and rolled down the opposite side of the hill to a tributary of the river. Their bodies broke against a cropping of rocks, yet they continued to claw and rend each other.
Holmes wanted to cry. Corso consoled him as the four trudged back to the house. Each step along the way, all except Holmes grew slowly elated and pumped, having survived a vicious zombie attack.
“Come on, baby,” Corso told a brooding Holmes back at the house. “I got something that will make you forget all about those funky zombies.” And they made loud, rough love that left them both satisfied and weak, as was the same for McMillan and Fernandez. Fortunately for McMillan, his arm was merely wrenched, and he was able to use both hands to further explore the woman’s body.
In the morning they ate well and Holmes and McMillan talked over other sources for some blow, given they still had their cash. Corso had declined any money.
“I’ll call you.”
“Liar.”
“No,” Holmes said, as they stood outside her house in the morning. “We connected again.”
She kissed him.
Holmes and McMillan had started for their car when they spotted Wild Willie shambling from around a corner of the house. That he was dead was obvious from the hyperextended eyes, gray flesh, and festering leg with flies buzzing around it.
He sprayed bullets from his AK, all the while grunting, “Coke, coke, give me my coke back,” as the Tramps could be heard singing, “Burn that mutha down,” from their song, “Disco Inferno.”
GARY PHILLIPS is the editor of the best-selling Orange County Noir; and coeditor of Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail. He has published two crime graphic novels, Angeltown: The Nate Hollis Investigations and Cowboys. He smokes cigars now and then, contemplating the strangeness of it all. For more information, visit www.gdphillips.com.
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copyright © 2005, 2011 by Gary Phillips & Jervey Tervalon
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