The creature was busy licking out the inside of Walker’s chest-cavity when it heard the click of a Banana clip being jammed into the Mac-10. It turned to look directly into Jerry’s eyes with its mouth still encrusted with blood and bits of flesh and gore. Its tremendous head reminded Jerry of some combination of a saber-toothed tiger and an ox. Except its eyes, which burned with a dark and terrible intelligence. Its arms and hands looked almost human, just as Walker’s had before this thing had eaten them. Jerry’s mouth dropped as the creature’s features began to shift and reform.
As Jerry cocked his weapon, the creature shed its grotesque form in favor of something softer, and more delicate. A woman. Naked. Gorgeous. Black as half past midnight. Standing in Jerry’s living room still chewing on the remains of his boyhood friend.
“Praise Allah.” She said wiping the gore from her chin.
“What the hell are you?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you. We don’t hunt humans, only werewolves. Arrogant bastards. They actually believe that every creature on this planet has a natural predator except them. That’s what makes them so easy to hunt.”
“You’re one of those Isawiyya huh?”
She nodded.
“You eat werewolves? That’s how you’re able to turn into that big ass monster?”
She nodded again.
“So that’s why you were chasing Walker? So you could eat him.”
She looked down at Walker’s gutted corpse and hunger gleamed in her eyes. She turned back toward Jerry and nodded again.
Jerry stared at the thing/woman and felt a pang of sorrow go through him at the loss of his friend. He’d known Walker since kindergarten. At least he thought he’d known him. The woman smiled and started to reach down for another piece of Walker. Jerry pulled the trigger. He unloaded an entire clip into the thing, loaded another clip, and emptied that one too. The woman tried to transform as the swarm of full metal jackets ripped through her. She danced on the end of the stream of gunfire as it ripped her to shreds, tearing her skull apart and gouging huge avulsions in her chest and stomach. What remained of her body dropped in a heap at Jerry’s feet.
He stared at both her corpse and Walker’s. Then he looked over toward the gaping hole where his front door had been and out into the night. It somehow seemed darker out there now; more forbidding and mysterious. There were terrible, powerful things out there, a myriad of life forms in bizarre shapes that he could scarcely imagine. They were out there, hunting, killing, fighting battles that had gone on for countless aeons. Jerry smiled and ejected the last round from the Mac-10.
He had witnessed monstrous acts all of his life and committed a fair share of them himself. It made sense to him that these monsters should wind up on his doorstep. Trouble had always sought him out and he had welcomed it. He had made tragedy, death, and destruction a part of him. It was almost comforting to know that he was not the only monster out there. These creatures had raised the bar. They represented a challenge. Whoever wanted to own the night had to be more ruthless than a werewolf, a vampire, and whatever the hell that other thing was.
He walked over to where the two creatures’s vandalized corpses lay bleeding and knelt down to search the pockets of Walker’s tattered clothing, hoping to find drugs or money. His eyes roamed the ruination the machine gun had made of the woman and spotted one flawless, untouched breast. He reached out and softly caressed it then he gripped the nipple between his fingers and gave it a sharp pinch. He felt a peculiar arousal ripple through his loins. He started to drool with a hunger very different from what this dead creature had felt or even what Walker must have known. His was more carnal, more perverse. He stood up and walked into the kitchen where the young girl still lay on the linoleum floor, bound and helpless, nearly beyond panic after witnessing the carnage that had taken place in the living room.
Jerry removed a knife from the sink and knelt down to satiate his hunger on her quivering flesh. As he made the first cut, thinly slicing through the smooth dark skin of her buttocks, he wondered what appetites drove monsters like Walker. He wondered what allure the taste of human flesh held. He decided to find out. He cut himself a particularly appetizing morsel and sat down to feed. Then he looked back at Walker and the Isawiyya remembering what Walker had said about them eating werewolves to acquire their power. He began slicing off pieces of them as well.
My Very Own
I’d been alone my entire life. That’s why I started the “experiments.” I wanted someone who would never leave me, never say cruel or hurtful things, never die. Someone I could love forever. That’s how it started anyway. I was just tired of the loneliness.
I don’t really remember my father. I remember my mother screaming when he used to beat her. I remember a few of the beatings he gave me. I can remember the brown leather belt he used to crack across my thighs and back, better than I can my own father’s face. He left before I was five years old. After that my mother left me every night.
Sometimes she came back with strange men who made her scream and moan behind her locked bedroom door. I didn’t know what they were doing but it scared me. Mom called it “paying the rent” and she always seemed to have money once the moaning and grunting was over, but sometimes she had cuts and bruises too. Just like when Dad used to make her scream. I would sit up in my bed crying and yelling for them to stop. If I yelled too loudly Mom would come in and slap me around. Sometimes the men would hit me too. But sometimes they would leave, and for awhile it would be just Mom and I, then she would go back out to find another man.
Sometimes, she didn’t come back for days. One day, she didn’t come back at all. I waited for her for weeks in the dark, musty, old, apartment. I wasn’t allowed to leave. Mom never let me leave the apartment. Not to play with other kids, not to go to school, not even to go with her to the store and help her carry groceries. It was like I was her little secret that she kept from the rest of the world. It made me feel special, but it increased my loneliness when she wasn’t around. The apartment would start to contract and expand. Sometimes it was the size of a cathedral, filled with creaks, and moans, and phantom footsteps; dark shadows that crept stealthily through the gloom. At other times it was no bigger than a casket, closing in around me, dark as a tomb, burying me alive. Those were the times when I cried the most, when the fear would suffocate me, crushing down upon me from all sides; each breath feeling like it was just barely squeezing out of my cramped lungs.
I rationed out the meager amount of food Mom had left in the refrigerator, making it last a whole week. I ate one slice of bologna, a spoonful of peanut butter, and one slice of bread with butter, or ketchup, or mustard on it, everyday ‘til it ran out. The second week I ate cat food. The third week I ate the cat. It was starving to death anyway and I didn’t want to have to compete with it for the rats. If Mom didn’t come home soon, they would’ve been next.
On the fourth week the police came to get me. They’d finally identified my mother’s body and called my grandmother who told them about me. I was almost starved to death when they found me. The hunger had nearly driven me insane. I think I tried to bite the first cop who approached me. Then they told me about Mom and I fell into one of the police officer’s arms, my body racked with tears.
Mom, or rather parts of her, had been found in an empty lot by Sandhill and Pecos Streets. There was evidence of torture and she had been dismembered. Only her head and torso had been found and they were in pretty bad shape. The rats had left her unrecognizable. She had been dead for nearly three weeks. The cops took me to live with Grandma. I spent nights awake wondering where Mom had been that first week; why she had left me.
Grandma was a very strict and religious woman. We went to church everyday, said prayers at every meal, and again at night. She put me into school for the first time and tutored me at home to help me catch up. There was always food in the refrigerator, and Grandma cooked dinner every night, and breakfast every morning. Most importantly she was alway
s there. She never left; never brought men home, and only beat me when I really deserved it. I loved Grandma, even if I hated church.
Grandma was very sick. All that praying it was no wonder God was so eager to take her to heaven with him. Mom had never prayed. She said it was just asking for trouble. She used to say that the trick was to keep very quiet, especially when you passed a church, try to escape God’s notice. Maybe, if you were lucky, he’d forget all about you and you could live forever. She should have told Grandma that. It seemed like Grandma was constantly going to the doctor’s office, and she had an entire pharmacy of pills that she used to combat a plethora of illnesses. God was eager to bring her home to him. When I was seventeen he finally did.
Somehow she’d managed to hold on for all those years, pumping herself full of medications, always seeming just on the brink of death. I think she held on so long just to raise me; just ‘til she was sure I could take care of myself. But then, I guess she decided that I was big enough to look after myself, and that God needed her more, so she let him take her. I was all alone then. That’s when the experiments started.
Grandma was my first attempt to revive the dead. I pumped her full of nearly every medication in both medicine cabinets but nothing worked. I gave it a week before I notified anyone of her death. By the end of the week I still hadn’t succeeded in reviving her, and she was starting to smell, so I let them take her. Since I was almost eighteen, they decided not to ship me off to Michigan to live with an Aunt and Uncle, whom I’d never met, and who seemed hesitant to take on a tragic charity case they knew nothing about. So I stayed in Grandma’s house alone and got a job at the Pharmacy down the street, where Grandma used to go to get her prescriptions filled. They felt sorry for me and were eager to help me out. I just wanted easy access to the chemicals. I had already decided what I needed to do. I had to make a friend who wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t hurt me, and wouldn’t die.
I read about how Jeffrey Dahmer had tried to make a zombie, and thought that maybe I could do it. I stopped praying and started going out every night, getting drunk, and picking up women for the experiments.
It was easy to pick up prostitutes. They are everywhere in Vegas. I would walk all the way from Twain and Sandhill where I lived, to the old derelict end of the strip where the whores were. I would offer them money and then catch a cab with them back to my house. They looked like zombies anyway. I thought it would be easy to turn one of them into an undead. But it was hard and frustrating.
First, I tried the Dahmer approach. I found a drugged out, emaciated, crack whore, on a side street, right around the corner from one of the “classy” strip joints, and offered her fifty dollars to come back to my house. I don’t think she heard anything but the dollar amount. I probably could have told her everything and she would have still come, as long as I was willing to pay in advance. I drilled a hole in her head and poured “Liquid Drano” inside. It worked for awhile, and then she started screaming and died writhing in agony. Again, I spent a week trying to revive her, before I buried her in the same lot where they’d found Mom. I buried her deep, so that the rats wouldn’t get to her.
The next girl I found was a bit healthier. I was hoping that that would increase her survival chances. She was tall, with long muscular legs, and pornographically large silicone breasts. Her hair was some chemical combination of blonde and red. She had a healthy glow to her skin, even though she still had a vacant look in her eyes, which may have come from either drug use or just the normal rigors of her profession. Her eyes never truly focused on me, but seemed to be looking through me at some horror from her past. She dragged the corners of her lips up into a smile, as she quoted her prices, along with some pre-rehearsed seductions. Every once in a while, her eyes would manage to focus on me, the pupils narrowing to capture my image, before her irises swam off again, going blank. It could have been shock.
Her name was Candy, or so she said. She agreed to go home with me, but it would cost me one hundred dollars. She said that, that would only pay for oral sex, or intercourse, but not both. I said I’d wait ‘til we got to the house to decide which one I wanted.
When we got back to my house, she fought like a tiger while I struggled to clamp the chloroform soaked rag over her face. I had bruises and scratches on my face, arms, and hands, when she finally succumbed.
I used my new Black and Decker power drill, with the hammer drill setting, to drill through her skull. This time I poured formaldehyde I’d ordered over the Internet at work, into the hole; filling up her brain cavity until it started to pour back out. I figured the formaldehyde would preserve her and make her last forever. She screamed even louder than the girl who I’d injected with Drano had. Her body convulsed violently, arching and bucking like a crazed bull trying to toss off a cowboy. Her limbs were spasmodically contorting; joints twisting painfully, threatening to snap. The extreme pain reflected in her eyes was horrible as the formaldehyde ate away at her brain. Who would have thought the stuff was corrosive.
A red sludge began oozing from her ears, nostrils, and the neat little hole I’d drilled in her skull, along with the horrible stench of formaldehyde and liquefied flesh. It took her quite a while to finally die. I opened all the windows to let out the noxious odors escaping from her vandalized corpse. That one freaked me out. It was almost a month before I tried again. The house still smelled like formaldehyde, no matter how much Lysol I sprayed.
I’d heard somewhere that the street name for phencyclidine, or PCP, was embalming fluid, so I decided to try that next. I logged onto the computer at work and ordered a fairly large shipment of phencyclidine, using the doctor’s name. When it came in, I snuck it out before anyone noticed it.
Once I had the drug, I couldn’t wait to try it. The loneliness had grown unbearable since Grandma’s death, and each failure made me more desperate to have my zombie. Once again, I wandered Vegas Blvd, down by the Stratosphere Hotel, looking for whores. I walked past all the drive through wedding chapels and run down motels, to where the strip clubs and adult bookstores were. That’s where most of the affordable street prostitutes ‘plied their trade.
A bus pulled up alongside me, as I strode quickly down the Blvd. A small, frail-looking, young girl, in a T-shirt and sweatpants, stepped out of the bus carrying a backpack and glancing nervously from side to side, as she briskly walked off down the street in the direction of the strip clubs. Even through her sweatpants and baggy T-shirt, it was obvious that she had a remarkable body. Still, I would’ve never guessed her to be a stripper. Then again, why else would a girl have been down there at that hour of the night? Only strippers and prostitutes, and the men who helped them “pay the rent”, came down there at that hour. Mom had often said, that the only things open on that end of the city past midnight were legs.
The girl kept looking back over her shoulder, casting nervous glances at me, as she strode purposefully toward her destination. She looked familiar. I’d seen her down there before. Suddenly she turned, with one hand on her hip, and the other one in her backpack, which I assumed, contained either pepper-spray or a gun. She removed her hand from her hip, and wagged a long painted nail at me, sneering contemptuously.
“Are you following me mutherfucker?” The curse words came uncomfortably off her tongue. She was obviously not accustomed to having to sound tough.
“Uh . . . oh . . . no. No, I’m not following you. I’m just going to the club.” I had no idea which club I was referring to, and I hoped she wouldn’t ask. I looked down at my feet and shuffled nervously from one foot to the other. My obvious painful shyness seemed to convince her that I was harmless. She slowly took her hand out of her backpack and slung it back over her shoulder.
“I’ve seen you down here before haven’t I? I’ve never seen you at the club though.” She stared at me for a moment longer before seeming to make up her mind about something. “Look, I’m sorry I jumped on you like that, but some guy tried to attack me down here last week. You can never be too careful you kn
ow?”
“Sure.” I offered, still nervous and uncomfortable.
“If you’re going that way, then why don’t you walk with me? So I can protect you.” She laughed.
“Sure.” I repeated, giving up on finding anything wittier to say.
“You don’t have a girlfriend huh?”
“Uh . . . no.”
“Are you down here a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if you walk me to the club whenever you see me down here, I’ll give you a free lap dance whenever you come to the club. I usually get off the bus around 1:00 am. I work the morning shift. So are you up to it stallion?”
“Uh . . . sure. Okay.”
“My name is Sissy by the way.”
“Uh, um. My name is John.”
I walked her to the club, collected my lap dance, and left feeling desperately aroused and embarrassed. I picked up another prostitute on the way home, and this time I had sex with her after I chloroformed her, but before I drilled a hole in her head. The PCP had an interesting affect. I dumped enough of the stuff into her skull to get half the whores in town high.
The prostitute, who’s name was also Candy, (Imagine that. Is there any other name that prostitutes ever go by?) staggered around the apartment, babbling to herself, and bumping into things. But she was alive. Still not immortal, and not calm and compliant, but at least the drug hadn’t killed her as it had all the rest. Her eyes jiggled franticly in their sockets and her whole body jangled around spastically, like a marionette in the hands of some palsied puppeteer. I tried to have sex with her again, but she became violent . . . extremely violent! She clawed, punched, kicked, and bit me, babbling something about her father. Her eyes were wild, and spit and foam drooled from her mouth, as she tried desperately to kill me. Not exactly the companion I had hoped for. Still, she was alive. I was closer. Just not there yet. I picked up the drill and put it through her forehead.
The Book of a Thousand Sins Page 16