Asylum Read online

  The drag queen leaned over the bar. “What was that, honey?”

  “We need to call the police!”

  She just frowned and shook her head. Turning, she yelled toward the upstairs area, her voice a deep bellow, “Devon, I need you to turn the goddamn music off.”

  Abruptly, silence filled the club. It was such a shock to the system that it was like going deaf. The couple on the dance floor continued gyrating for a moment more, but when they realized they’d lost their accompaniment, they groaned and one of them called out, “What’s the deal, Madam?”

  “Sorry, honey,” the drag queen said, turning back to Curtis. “Now what’s got you all in a tizzy?”

  “We need to call the police and barricade ourselves inside the club until they get here.”

  This got the bartender’s attention. He fixed his steely gaze on Curtis and said, “What the fuck you talking about, boy?”

  Curtis glanced back at the door. Now that the music was off, the pounding could be heard as the door rattled in its frame. Jimmy was still huddled on the floor, fingers stuck in each ear in a childish gesture, while he rocked back and forth and continued to mutter unintelligibly.

  “What’s going on?” the drag queen said with an edge of concern in her voice. “What kind of trouble you boys in?”

  “We’re all in trouble. There are these—”

  zombies

  “—crazy people outside. They killed a guy and attacked me and my friend. Someone needs to call the police right away, and we need to make sure they can’t get in here.”

  The other patrons in the bar—the couple from the dance floor, the man and his fag hag, the stripper—were gathering around. An older man with a receding hairline and a thick, bushy mustache straight out of a 70s porno came walking down the stairs; undoubtedly the Devon who had shut down the music.

  The bartender pushed past the drag queen, planting his beefy hands on the bar and looking at Curtis as if he could chew him up and spit him out. “Boy, if this is some kind of joke, I’m gonna pound your ass into the ground.”

  “This is no joke. A man is dead out in your parking lot, and we need to get the police out here as soon as possible.”

  The bartender reached down under the bar and came up with an aluminum baseball bat. “Let’s just see what the fuck is going on out there.”

  “Mister, are you crazy? Didn’t you just hear what I said? There are like two dozen crazy people out there, someone has already been murdered. You can’t handle that mob on your own.”

  “I can take care of myself, boy.”

  The drag queen reached out and put a hand on the bartender’s arm as she cast an uneasy eye toward the door. The pounding was getting louder, punctuated by scratching and keening wails. “Gil, maybe you shouldn’t.”

  The bartender shrugged off the drag queen’s hand and came out from behind the bar, the bat propped on his shoulder. He was large, made more of muscle than of flab, and he walked briskly toward the door. “I ain’t gonna be scared off by no bunch of asshole Neanderthals who think us faggots won’t fight back.”

  Curtis watched the man go, wanting to stop him, to tell him what was waiting on the other side of that door, but he found his vocal chords frozen. He couldn’t bring himself to say the word—zombies—and he knew he wouldn’t be believed even if he did manage to get it out.

  The drag queen turned toward Devon and said, “Hurry back upstairs and call the police.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just do it, Devon. And hurry.”

  Devon disappeared back up the stairs as Gil reached the door. He grabbed the doorknob but then Jimmy suddenly attacked the man. He snatched him by the ponytail and pulled hard, yanking the man’s head back and causing him to curse and drop the bat. “NO!” Jimmy yelled, getting the bartender in a headlock and trying to drag him away from the door. “Don’t let those things in here! They’ll kill us all! Don’t let them in!”

  The couple from the dance floor huddled close, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists. The fag and his hag backed away from Curtis, as if he carried some communicable disease. The stripper stayed on his stool, his face unreadable in the darkness of the club. The drag queen looked on with her mouth agape, watching Jimmy jump on Gil’s back and ride him like a bronco.

  “Get the fuck off me, kid,” Gil said and then shrugged Jimmy away as simply as he might have brushed off a half-hearted insult. Jimmy landed on one of the tabletops and slid off onto the floor, one of the chairs clattering on top of him. Gil retrieved his bat and stared down at Jimmy for a moment as if he wanted to bash his skull in.

  “Phones ain’t working,” Devon said, hurrying back down the stairs. “The line’s dead.”

  “I’ll use my cell,” the stocky redhead said, pulling out a compact phone and punching in 911, turning away from the group.

  Gil started back for the door but Curtis jumped in front of him, holding his hands out. “Please, Mister, I’m not joking. There is some bad shit going on out there. Some crazy shit. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so you’re just going to have to trust me. You do not want to go out there.”

  The bartender stood motionless for a moment, his eyes squinted at Curtis. Then he turned his eyes back to the door. The pounding continued unabated, and the doorknob was twisting back and forth as someone tried to open the door. Curtis found himself saying a silent prayer that the lock was sturdy enough to keep out a horde of—

  zombies

  “Something weird is going on,” the redhead said, snapping his cell shut. “The 911 operator said to sit tight but she couldn’t guarantee getting a unit out here anytime soon.”

  “’Course not,” the bartender said with a sneer. “Why should the authorities give a shit that a bunch of fags are being attacked?”

  “Uhm, no, she said that they were being inundated with calls from all over the city of people being attacked by mobs. She said she’s even had calls claiming the attackers are cannibalizing their victims.”

  Without a word, Gil turned away from Curtis and started walking down the bar, heading toward the dance floor. “Gil, where are you going?” the drag queen asked, a hand clutched to some fairly authentic looking cleavage.

  “I’m just gonna go out on the back patio and look over the wall, see what I can see.”

  At one point during the night, Curtis had fought his way through the dance floor and gone out on the patio. It was a small area with a few picnic tables and ashtrays for the smokers, enclosed by a seven-foot high brick wall, open to the stars above. Curtis had found it as cramped as the dance floor and had stayed only a moment.

  “Be careful,” the drag queen called out, but Gil ignored her, not even glancing back as he opened the door and stepped outside. The door swung shut and latched behind him.

  “Does that door lock automatically when it’s closed?” Curtis asked, walking over to Jimmy and helping his friend to his feet.

  The drag queen shook her head.

  “Is there a way to lock it?”

  “Yeah, I have a key for it. Is there really a dead man out there?”

  Curtis righted the chair that had toppled over and helped Jimmy into it. His friend’s eyes were still vacant, staring off into an unfathomable distance. “Yes, they ripped his guts out.”

  The hag groaned and covered her face with her hands.

  The tall blonde from the dance floor stepped forward and said, “Did you know him?”

  “No, not exactly. He was…well, an acquaintance, I guess you’d say, of my friend here. They pulled him right out of his car and killed him.”

  “Oh, you poor dears,” the drag queen said, coming out from around the bar and placing a beer in front of Jimmy. “Here, I think you could use this.”

  Jimmy didn’t say anything, and his eyes didn’t regain their focus, but he did take the bottle and drain it.

  “I’m the owner of this club,” the drag queen said, holding out a rather large hand to Curtis. “They called me Madam Diva.
”

  “I’m Curtis, and my friend is Jimmy.”

  “I’m Clive,” the blonde said, and his lover said, “Toby.”

  The middle-aged fag and his hag introduced themselves as Lance and Autumn, and Devon threw his name in for good measure. The stripper was the last to speak.

  “I’m Jarvis,” he said with a lilting British accent. Curtis couldn’t help but notice that the man’s nipples were erect.

  “I wonder what’s keeping Gil,” Madam Diva said, but she made no move to go toward the door through which the bartender had exited.

  “How many of them are they?” Autumn asked. “I mean, there are quite a few of us. Maybe we can make it to our cars and get the hell out of here.”

  Curtis shrugged. “I don’t know, I didn’t exactly take the time to count, but I think there were at least twenty of them that I saw.”

  “Sounds like it’s the same all over,” Toby said. “At least according to what the 911 operator told me. Diva, do you have a radio in here anywhere?”

  She shook her head.

  Lance ran a hand over his balding scalp and sighed. “What could it be? Gangs?”

  Devon snorted a laugh. “This isn’t New York, for crying out loud. This area isn’t exactly a hotbed of gang activity.”

  “Well, then what the hell do you think it is?” Autumn snapped, coming to her fag’s defense like a devoted hag.

  Devon opened his mouth to respond but then the back door banged open and Gil burst in, slamming the door behind him. He’d lost his bat, as well as half his shirt. It had been ripped down the front, and what looked like claw marks ran down his chest, blood pooling in his gray chest hair. His hair had come loose from the ponytail, and he was panting like an asthmatic.

  “Gil, what’s wrong?” Diva said, hurrying to the bartender.

  “Get this door locked.”

  “But what happened? What did you see?”

  “Get this door locked NOW!” Gil shouted. Diva didn’t ask anymore questions. She reached down into her cleavage and pulled out a key dangling from a chain around her neck. She quickly locked the door and followed Gil back to the group across the club.

  The bartender ignored the questions being thrown at him and went straight to the bar. He poured two shots of Tequila, downed them, seemed to consider it for a moment then poured himself a third. The alcohol appeared to calm him, his tremors gradually subsiding. He rubbed absently at the scratches on his on his chest, his hand coming away bloodied.

  “Gil,” Jarvis said, reaching out and placing a hand on the bartender’s shoulder, “what happened out there?”

  “I climbed up on one of the picnic tables and looked over the wall, but I couldn’t see anything. I could hear a lot of commotion around the front of the club, but I couldn’t see anyone. So I climbed over.”

  Gil had dropped to the ground, his knees protesting as they absorbed most of the impact. The bartender was nearing sixty; he’d been alive for both the Stonewall Riots and Woodstock. He’d marched on Washington and endured bigotry in every form it could take. He had stood behind the bar at Asylum and watched all these young gay men parade by, spoiled and disrespectful, content with their cushy place in the world, the new rights they had in society, unappreciative of all that men like Gil had done to make those rights possible.

  Not that the world had been rid of prejudice and discrimination. There were still hurdles to be jumped, obstacles to be overcome, and the occasional violent bastards out to shed some blood. Gil had assumed that was what he was up against tonight, a group of bigoted rednecks staging some Assault on Precinct 13 attack on the club. The kind of people who brought “GOD HATES FAGS” signs to funerals. He had dealt with their kind before.

  When Gil had rounded the corner, his first thought was that the kid’s estimate had been conservative. The parking lot was teeming with people. Some wandered the lot aimlessly, as if they were lost, but most had bottlenecked in the hallway of the club, packed in there and pushing forward. The ones up front by the entrance had to have been getting crushed. Gil was surprised that the sheer weight of their numbers hadn’t busted down the door. For that matter, he would have expected that by now someone would have found the toggle switch and unlocked the door.

  Gil was preparing to head back to the patio—there were far too many for Gil and his trusty bat to handle alone—when he glanced out at the lot and saw the body. It was lying by a Mustang, intestines trailing from a gaping wound in the stomach, its head split open like a coconut. So the kid hadn’t been lying, these sons-of-bitches really had killed someone. Gil felt rage burning inside him and his grip on the bat tightened. He remembered his days as a member of the organization ACT UP, their slogan being, “Gays Bash Back.” Here it was the twenty-first century, and gays were still facing discrimination and violence.

  Gil blinked when he thought he saw the body’s fingers twitch. He squinted through the darkness, sure he must have imagined it. His eyes—like the rest of him—weren’t as young as they used to be, and they sometimes played tricks on him like a couple of rambunctious five-year-olds. He had almost convinced himself that he hadn’t seen what he thought he’d seen when it happened again. The fingers on the right hand were definitely moving, wagging back and forth as if waving at someone. Could the poor bastard still be alive? Even with his skull cracked open and his insides scattered around like discarded party favors the day after New Years’ Eve?

  The body suddenly sat upright, like a puppet on a string, eliciting a quiet gasp from Gil. Even in the darkness and from this distance, Gil could see the man’s brains peeking out from the gash in the back of his head, and as he stood, more of his intestines hit the ground with a wet sound that made Gil want to gag. The man started shuffling toward the group that was trying to cram itself into the club, his feet sliding along in the gravel. As he walked, he reached into the cavity of his stomach, pulled out something that might have been his diaphragm, and started absently chewing on it.

  Gil—who had seen a lot in his time, including some truly inhuman atrocities witness during his stint in Vietnam—turned away and vomited on his shoes. A warm gush of undigested food and stomach acid poured from his mouth to splatter on the ground. It seemed to go on for a long time, as if he were throwing up everything he’d eaten in the past fifty-nine years. Even when he was done, he continued to retch and dry-heave. It was like he thought he could vomit up the memory of what he’d seen, somehow expunge it from his mind via his mouth. He reached out and placed a hand on the wall of the club to steady himself, gasping for his breath.

  He was so distracted that he didn’t hear them approaching until it was almost too late.

  “How’d you get away?” Curtis asked.

  “Had to fight my way out. I bashed at them with the bat until one of ‘em got lucky and snatched it out of my hands. The one guy clawed at my chest, like he was trying to dig right through the skin to get to the heart or something. I thought they had me at the wall, but I managed to get back over and inside just in time.”

  Curtis could hear them beating at the back door now as well as the front. Bombarded on both sides. Apparently while the undead couldn’t figure out to unlock a door, they had no trouble climbing over the walls of the patio.

  “What did they look like?” Toby asked.

  Curtis and Gil exchanged a glance, and Curtis could see the doubt in the older man’s eyes. Silently, Curtis tried to convey with his expression that Gil wasn’t crazy, that he really had seen what he thought he’d seen. It was important that it be said, but Curtis didn’t want to have to be the one to say it.

  “They’re dead,” Gil said, his voice low but firm.

  “You killed some of them?” Autumn asked. “Are you sure?”

  “No, I didn’t kill them, but they’re dead. All of ‘em.”

  Lance laughed, the sound uneasy but also with a mean edge. “Well, they certainly don’t sound dead.”

  Lance looked as if he was going to say more, but Gil silenced him with a look. �
�I know what I saw, and those things out there are not living. Hell, half of ‘em are decomposing on their feet.”

  “Gil, honey,” Diva said in the falsely soothing tones of a mother humoring her child, “you’re all shook up, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “No, he’s right.” Curtis was surprised to hear his own voice sounding so loud and full of conviction. Everyone turned to stare at him, and he felt himself withering under the scrutiny. Forcing himself not to cower before their gazes, he took a deep breath and said, “I know it sounds insane, but I think we’re dealing with a bunch of…”

  “Zombies!” Jimmy blurted, following the exclamation with a wild cackling laugh. There was madness in the sound, and it didn’t help Curtis’s cause.

  “That’s fucking nuts,” Devon said. “There are no such things as zombies. This isn’t a George Romero film; this is real life.”

  Gil turned on the man. “I know what I know. And if you don’t believe me, feel free to take a step outside and judge for yourself.”

  Clive turned toward Jarvis and asked the stripper, “Is such a thing possible?”

  “Why the hell are you asking me?”

  “Oh, well, I just thought that…”

  “What? That because I’m black and have dreads, I must know all about voodoo and the like?”

  Clive blushed so deeply that his face looked like a plum. He mumbled an apology and averted his eyes from the stripper.

  “Are there any other ways into this club?” Curtis asked. The pounding on both doors was so constant that it was starting to become background noise.

  Diva reached up and scratched her head, and Curtis noticed that the wig of curly red locks tilted slightly, revealing her true hairline underneath. “Well, there are some windows in the restrooms, but I don’t think anyone could fit through them.”

  Curtis nodded. He remembered from his ill-fated visit to the restroom earlier that there were a few long, skinny windows laid out horizontally high up on the wall near the ceiling. Diva was right, it would take someone without any bones in their body to fit through those things.