Black Leather Required

by David J. Schow

  As he neared his children, he wanted to raise his voice in the name of the Lord and tell them the famine was ended, to hoot and holler about the feast at last. He lost all sensation in his legs instead. He tumbled into the violence-rent earth of the graveyard and began to drag himself forward with his functioning hand, the one still viced around the remains of Little Paul.

  He wanted to shout, but his body had gotten real stupid real fast. What came out, in glurts of blood-flecked foam, was He ham niss ed begud!

  Just the sound of that voice made Wormboy want to blow his ballast all over again.

  Jerry clawed onward until he reached the lip of the pit. The born-agains congregated around him. His eye globbed on his face, his body jittering as the megadose of poison grabbed hold, he nevertheless raised his snake and prepared to declaim.

  Wormboy dragged his Magnum into the firing line and blew the evangelist's mushmouthed head clean off before the mouth could pollute the air with anything further.

  "That's better," he gulped, gorge pistoning.

  Then he vomited again anyway and blacked out.

  Weirder things have happened, his brain insisted right before he came to. None of it had been a dream.

  One eye was shut against the dark of dirt and his nose was squashed sideways. Over the topography of regurgitated lunch in front of his face, he watched.

  He imagined the Keystone Kops chowing down on a headless corpse. Meat strips were ripped and gulped without the benefit of mastication, each glistening shred sliding down gullets like a snake crawling into a wet red hole. One geek was busily chomping a russet ditch into a Jerry drumstick with the foot still attached. Others played tug-o-war with slick spaghetti tubes of intestine or wolfed double facefuls of the thinner, linguini strands of tendon and ligaments–all marinated in that special, extra-chunky maroon secret sauce.

  Wormboy's own tummy grumbled jealously. It was way past dinnertime. The remaining geeks would not leave, not with Wormboy uneaten. He'd have to crop 'em right now, unless he wanted to try mopping up in total darkness and maybe waiting until sunup to dine.

  He saw one of the geeks in the moat squirm free of a pungi pipe. Its flesh no longer meshed strongly enough for the barbs to hold it. It spent two seconds wobbling on its feet, then did a header onto three more spikes. Ripe plugs of rotten tissue bounced upward and acid bile burbled forth.

  Wormboy rolled toward Zombo, rising like a wrecked semi righting itself. His brain rollercoastered; his vision strained to focus; what the fuck had been wrong with lunch? He was no more graceful than a geek, himself, now. He put out one catcher's mitt hand to steady his balance against a massive headstone memorializing somebody named Eugene Roach, Loving Father. Mr. Roach had himself lurched off to consume other folks' children a long time ago.

  What happened, happened fast.

  Wormboy had to pitch his full weight against the tombstone just to keep from keeling over. When he leaned, there came a sound like hair being levered out by the roots. His eyes bugged and before he could arrest his own momentum, the headstone hinged back, disengaging from Valley View's over nourished turf. Arms windmilling, Wormy fell on top of it. His mind registered a flashbulb image of the tripwire, twanging taut to do its job.

  The mine went off with an eardrum compressing clap of bogus thunder. Two hundred pounds of granite and marble took to the air right behind nearly four hundred pounds of Wormboy, who was catapulted over the moat and right into the middle of the feeding frenzy on the far side.

  It was the first time in his life he had ever done a complete somersault.

  With movie slo-mo surreality, he watched his hunky Magnum pal drop away from him like a bomb from a zeppelin. It landed with the trigger guard snugged around one of the moat's deadly metal spear tips. The firmly impaled Deacon WC was leering down the bore when it went bang. Everything above the Adam's apple rained down to the west as goulash and flip chips.

  Wormboy heard the shot but did not witness it. Right now his overriding concern was impact.

  A geek turned and saw him, raising its arms as if in supplication, or a pathetic attempt to catch the UFO that isolated it in the center of a house-sized, ever-growing shadow.

  Eugene Roach's overpriced monument stone veered into the moat. The mushy zombie watched it right up until the second it hit. The fallout was so thick you could eat it with a fondue fork.

  Wormboy clamped shut his eyes, screamed, and bellied in headfirst. Bones snapped when he landed. Only the yellows of the geek's eyes were visible at the end. It liquefied with a poosh and became a wet stain at the bottom of the furrow dug by Wormboy's tombstone.

  All heads turned.

  His brain was like a boardroom choked with yelling stockbrokers. The first report informed him that aerial acrobatics did not agree with his physique. The second enumerated fractures, shutdown, concussion, an eardrum that had popped with the explosive decompression of a pimento being vacuumed from an olive, the equitable distribution of slag-hot agony to every outback and tributary of his vast body. . .and the dead taste of moist dirt.

  The third was a surprise news flash: He had not been gormandized down to nerve peels and half a dozen red corpuscles. Yet.

  He filed a formal request to roll back his eyelids and it took about an hour to go through channels.

  He saw stars, but they were in the post-midnight sky above him. He lay on his back, legs straight, arms out in a plane shape. What a funny. Eight pairs of reanimated dead eyes appraised him.

  They've got me, dead bang, he thought. For more than a year they've whiffed me and gotten smithereened . . .and now I've jolly well been served up to them airfreight, gunless, laid out flat on my flab. Maybe they waited just so I could savor the sensual cornucopia of being devoured alive firsthand. Dr. Moreau time, kids. Time for Uncle Wormy to check out for keeps.

  He tried to wiggle numb fingers at them. "Yo, dudes." It was all he could think of to do.

  The zombies surrounding him–three up, three down, one at his feet and one at his head–rustled as though stirred by a soft breeze. They communed.

  The skull of the Right Reverend Jerry had been perched on his chest. He could barely see it up there. The blood-dyed and tooth-scored fragments had been leaned together into a fragile sort of card ossuary. He could see that his bullet had gone in through Jerry's left eyebrow. Good shot.

  His insides convulsed and he issued a weak cough. The skull clattered apart like an inadequately glued clay pot.

  More commotion, among the zombies.

  The Right Reverend Jerry had been gnawed down to a jackstraw clutter of bones; the bones had been cracked, their marrow greedily drained. All through the feast, there he had been mere feet distant, representing bigger portions for everybody. He had gone unmolested for hours. Instead of tucking in, they had gathered 'round and waited for him to wake up. They had flipped him over, touched him without biting. They had pieced together Jerry's headbone and seen it blown apart by a cough. They had Witnessed, all right.

  He considered the soda cracker fragments of skull and felt the same rush of revelation he had experienced with Duke Mallett's eyeball. So fitting, now, to savor that crunchy stone-ground goodness.

  The eyes that sought him did not judge. They did not see a grotesquely obese man who snarfed up worms and eyeballs and never bathed. The watchers did not snicker in a Duke Mallett drawl, or reject him, or find him lacking in any social particular. They had waited for him to revive. Patiently, on purpose, they had waited. For him.

  They had never sought to eat of his lard or drink of his cholesterol. The Right Reverend Jerry had taught them that there were hungers other than physical.

  One of his legs felt busted, but with effort he found himself capable of hiking up onto both elbows. The zombies shuffled dutifully back to make room for him to rise, and when he did not, they helped him, wrestling him erect like dogfaces hoisting the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. He realized that if he cared to order them to march into one of Valley View's crematory ovens acco
rding to height, they'd gladly comply. He had, at last, gained the devoted approval of a peer group.

  And any second now, some asshole would try to whore up this resurrection for posterity in a big, bad, black book . . . and get it all wrong. He decided that anybody who tried would have a quick but meaningful confab with Zombo.

  I win again. He had thought this many times before, in reference to those he once dubbed geeks. Warmth flooded him. He was not a geek . . . therefore they were not.

  What he finally spake unto them was something like: "Aww . . . shit, you guys, I guess we oughta go hustle up some potluck, huh?"

  He began by passing out the puzzle pieces of the Right Reverend Jerry's skull. As one, they all took and ate without breathing.

  And they saw that it was good.

  Author's Note:

  I can't figure out whether "Jerry's Kids" is famous or infamous. It's one of my most-reprinted stories (after "Red Light") but this is its premiere appearance in a collection. How to set it up? It takes place during the zombie apocalypse of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead films, as extrapolated through three volumes of Book of the Dead, edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector. Perhaps the best way to cue the clip is to quote from Karl Edward Wagner's intro for it, from The Year's Best Horror Stories, Vol. XVIIL "It seems that the world has been overrun by flesh-eating zombies, see–and then. . ."

  Breaking and Entering,

  or:

  You may like

  what you find

  behind certain doors

  Life Partner

  The dirty gray light told JJ the sun was still waking up. Next to her, Walter continued the cadenced respiration of his own sleep. She hated him for the sleep he could achieve when she had to fight for every Z.

  JJ was on her back, only her right calf brushing Walter, who was also on his back. He did not snore. Walter never snored. Snoring was for less cultured beings. He told her that she, in fact, did snore–lightly, delicately, "daintily" was how he put it. The telling did its insidious damage and became just one more thing to push her awake when she most sought sleep's oblivion.

  What had jolted her back early to the real world this morning was a weird dream about Walter. Sort of.

  In the dream, JJ was ten years older, and Walter was there, which meant they were still together. It was less a commitment or a sentence than simple inertia; after awhile you compensate for your private losses by taking petty agonies out on your mate of record. She stood before a mirror in the dream, having lost a decade. Her eyes looked lost and haunted. Walter appeared behind her. They were both naked. He embraced her, reaching around to cup and collect her. He told her they both still had each other. She could feel his erection prodding her butt. They still had each other. His palms brushed her nipples and brought them up; he knew her body too well. And she was warming . . . the old reliable process, and soon Walter would be inside of her, and they still had each other. . .

  . . . but JJ no longer had herself.

  Bang–awake. So to speak.

  JJ awoke feeling so lost that her reach to Walter was on the instinctual level, flesh seeking the comfort of flesh. She ran her hand from his navel to his nipples, then all the way down.

  Pause. One more breath. She did not hear a husky inhalation; that sleepy-warm precoital sound that certifies and bonds what follows. Walter slept on, limp as a juvenile offender's alibi, as unconcerned as a snake's prey in mid-swallow. He breathed onward, regularly, and slept.

  Maybe his dream was better than hers.

  The moment ebbed. JJ gave up. A little reciprocity, for cryin' out loud. A touch of tactile reassurance. Did she ask so much? Had she taken so much from him?

  She released a long breath as a sigh. No way she'd get back to sleep now.

  To hell with Walter. She could do herself, and if he finally decided to wake up, so much the better. Maybe the rigorous wiggle of the bed would do it.

  It took time, but JJ lost herself for a few moments of the new day, inside another kind of dream.

  JJ dozed. It was a thin, greasy kind of sleep, like passing out with gas heat clogging the room. When she awoke she found semen drying on the bottom sheet of the queen size, and silently cursed Walter as a deep-sleeping son of a bitch.

  Awake, he'd never admit to her that he preferred the dream.

  He lay exactly as before, respirating exactly as before.

  JJ stared blankly at the ceiling. She survived that horrible moment when your body enables the getting-up process.

  She sat up, her sinuses cracking and shifting. Coffee.

  "Walter?"

  Nothing. No change. No acknowledgment of her. He usually rose way ahead of her.

  She wondered perversely if he were feigning sleep, monitoring her through slitted eyes when she was not looking. Cataloging the moves she made while she thought herself unobserved. You could learn things about people by watching them when they believed they were alone and unaccountable.

  "Walter." She nudged him. Firmly enough. She counted off five more of his regularly-spaced, undisturbed breaths. Intake. Outflow. The neutral expression on his sleeping face was so serene she wanted to rearrange it with a razor, make the look garish and unhappy, like a mutilated clown face.

  "Fine," she said to herself, as closure.

  She kicked out of bed, gearing up to do the bathroom thing. As she passed the hall mirror she avoided the sight of herself.

  Two hours later Walter had not stirred, nor shifted position. JJ had to lean close to ascertain he was breathing at all, and for the first time that day she felt ill and frightened. This was not funny. This was like being told your best friend is considering suicide.

  She shook him. Cajoled and demanded. Walter did not move, except as she moved him.

  "Fine. Fine. I give! I don't have time for this crap. I don't care what I did. You're being an asshole, and I have a real walloper of a headache, thank you, and I have a full day to deal with, so I am out of here. Goodbye."

  She stalked out. He did not react. He gave her no satisfaction.

  "Fine." She closed the bathroom door and got on with her errands.

  By dinnertime Walter still had not budged.

  Bags in hand, JJ had pushed open her front door and discovered the living room smelled the same as it had when she'd locked up, hours ear-her. It was an actual scent of sameness, the olfactory presence of air undisturbed since her last passage through it.

  That had struck her as odd, until she remembered Walter. And there he slept on. She didn't try so hard to wake him up this time.

  Spitefully, she prepared dinner–for one and pounded down three goblets of very good Beaujolais while cooking. She left most of the food untouched, but by the time the alcohol was in mid-metabolic burn she felt quite randy and forgiving.

  It had become an amusing little game, a divertissement.

  Topless, stockings and skirt still on, nipples stroking his shins, she went down on him. He stayed erect until she finished him off. The meter of his breathing did not alter. She got mad, a match head flaring aflame, and spat his own semen onto his bare chest. Then she stomped off to pour another glass of wine, to rinse her mouth, and watch TV, to rinse her mind.

  She fell asleep on the sofa, always a refuge of comfort for her. She forgot about Walter until morning.

  One of the things that separated them, these days, was talk. Not communication–yammering. It was Walter's habit to begin deluging her the moment she opened her eyes, and Walter did not converse so much as lecture.

  Twelve topics, all waiting in ambush for her, JJ, before she even got the sleepy seeds out of her eyes, while the coffeepot was still yards distant.

  No, not communication. JJ had learned there was safety in pretend sleep. Perhaps if she was the one who faked it, she might observe some truth about Walter otherwise obscured.

  JJ woke up with this thought hot in her mind. Her semiconscious occasionally provided tidbits of insight just like this. She made an effort to hold the thought in focus,
to transport this intellectual cargo from the fuzzworld of half-sleep to the stuffy comfort of the sofa, in the real, the right now.

  No yammering.

  JJ had been able to hold her thought because, upon waking, Walter had not been there, unloading as usual.

  It was pleasant, this silence.

  She sat up on the sofa, her clothing wretched from the night's twists and turns and the humidity of her own body. Alone. On the sofa. She padded to the bedroom to see if Walter was. . .

  JJ had thought that if bogus sleep might provide a fly-on-the-wall insight regarding Walter, then perhaps Walter had figured this out himself and was making her pay, big time. Walter forever needed to prove how he could go harder, longer, faster, better. If Walter thought JJ was playing him, he'd play back, double-force, and show her good. If Walter was . . .

  . . . yeah. He was.

  But he had not twitched a muscle, flicked a finger, blinked or changed position for more than twenty-four hours. No bathroom runs. No food. No prints on his water glass. A quarter-inch of water had evaporated since yesterday.

  Yesterday, thought JJ, a knuckle between her teeth. He's still breathing, but he hasn't moved since yesterday.

  If he was still breathing. She checked. In. Out. Slow.

  She knew she should hurry to the living room, phone an ambulance, help him out of whatever he was in. He did not seem to be in any sort of distress, and this stayed her. If she did summon paramedics and EMTs, they might revive Walter on the spot, and god, would he be pissed when she told her story.

  Her really lame story.

  JJ caught a breath. She had thought of phoning an ambulance from the living room when there was a telephone less than two feet away, on the nightstand, on Walter's side of the bed. If she had called from the living room, there was less risk of waking Walter up.