by Dalton Wolf
The girl pulled back making the face of one who’d just eaten horseradish sauce when expecting mayo. “Sorry honey. You’re hot, but maybe you need to sober up and learn a little respect. That’s something your mommy should teach you before you play with the big girls. Give me a call when you grow up,” she slammed the proverbial door in his face, turned sharply and sauntered off to her friends, leaving him to stare at her shapely ass as she sashayed away like a pro.
Brick’s fragile ego couldn’t handle challenge of any kind, but being twenty-six and the girl barely twenty, he would not stand for rejection from some kid.
“Bitch!” he spat, flipping her off. “I’m the best man you’ll ever find, you fucking dike!” he shouted after her.
“Hey, easy man.” Boomer cautioned him quietly, dark eyes darting around.
“Sorry, he’s had a rough couple of years,” he explained to the girl and her friends, who were eying Brick as if he had a disease.
“The fuck is wrong with you, man?” he grabbed the taller but slighter man and slammed him against the wall of a low brick building, completely missing the irony. “I told you not to talk to women like that. You want me to kick your ass again?”
“Fuck you, man. She was a bitch.”
“You were being an asshole. Of course she’s gonna be a bitch when you get crude like that. Women want romance, and from a gentleman.”
“Tell that to the thirty million women who read that Shades of Gray crap.”
“Hey, I don’t know if it’s crap or not ‘cause I never read it. But that still don’t mean they’re looking for some dude to tie them up and beat them and shit like you’re always on about. It’s all just fantasy. In reality, they want to be treated like a person, unless you’re rich and then they might not give a damn how you treat them, as long as you treat them. But last time I checked, you ain’t rich.”
“I could have been,” Brick muttered bitterly. “I just graduated. I should already have been collecting my paycheck from the draft.”
“Well that plan has been sidelined for a while, man.”
“Pffft,” Brick spat. “You mean it’s been suspended, forever.”
“You don’t know that. You still got a chance now that the last surgery is done. It’s all rehab now, man. And six teams told you they’d give you a look when you’re ready.”
“I missed my college tryout, Boom. No one’s gonna take a quarterback who never started in college.”
“Hey, you were the top prospect in the nation and heir apparent at your school before that wreck. And you been throwing every day with a dead leg and bum off-arm and looking good. They’re gonna be watching for you now that you’re good to go.”
“I don’t know…” Brick hung his head. “Maybe I’m just drunk.”
“You’re definitely that, man. Why you gotta get so blasted for every occasion?”
“Because they always want to talk to me about the leg, and—what the fuck?” he repeated his earlier expletive-based phrase.
Gunshots from less than a block away pulled their attention, followed by spine-chilling screaming from multiple sources that matched the pipes of any horror movie vixen. In the next heartbeat reality, normality, perhaps even sanity all hopped in a cab and took a vacation. The girl who had shut Brick down so hard dashed at the pair of athletes without her top, screaming, crimson blood pouring down her side as a large, fat, slobbering white man wearing an #87 Chiefs jersey close on her heals clutching her shredded half-top and bra in his grasping hands.
Brick pointed and laughed. “Serves you right, bitch.”
“Hey, back off, man,” Boomer shouted, kicking the man in the teeth as he closed on them. The man dropped in a heap, but jumped back up with surprising quickness and lunged at the girl again. In a surreal moment of horror, Boomer realized the man wasn’t trying to feel her up as his bloody teeth sunk into her side, rending another chunk.
“What the fuck!” the two footballers yelled as one.
Boomer raised one leg and extended with every ounce of energy into the man’s midsection, straightened and with a maniacal scream sent three punches to his head, but the man seemed unaware of his presence and took another healthy bite. The young woman begged for help, fighting to break free from the psycho’s firm grasp. Tears welled up in Boomer’s eyes as the girl pleaded for his help. In desperation, he reached around behind the man and pulled with all his might, ripping his grip from the screaming girl. She fell to the ground, and with a heavy grunt of effort, he lifted the attacker bodily and slammed him onto the sidewalk beside her. Bones audibly snapped, but he made no sound, and lay there for a few seconds before he wiggled and rolled over trying to rise again. The man’s left arm was clearly broken, forcing him to roll to the other side and push up with his right and that’s when Boomer noticed the pale face with its eyes seemingly two sizes too big and thin lips pulled tight into a perpetual snarl. A huge chunk of flesh had been torn from the psycho’s neck and the wound oozed a dark substance, soaking his crimson and gold jersey.
Boomer had worked on his uncle’s farm one summer. When they’d done a count on the cow herd they’d come up one short and had to search the nearby hills for the missing heifer. Boomer had been unlucky enough to happen upon the animal’s remains in a little valley trapped between three boulders. The poor creature had clearly been there several days and the scavengers had been at it. And the smell…the putrid, rancid stink of decaying flesh and festering innards had burned his nostrils and emblazoned itself into his memory forever. Unable to eat for three days, he would never forget that wholly unpleasant stink…and though to a lesser degree, now that same stench rose from the man before him as it cackled and drooled a thick, reddish saliva onto the sidewalk.
Ice gripped Boomer’s heart as he put it all together in one chilling instant. “Brick, get something hard. Find a pole or anything. We gotta bash its head in.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” Brick shouted back, still standing in exactly the same spot. “Did you see that shit?” he stared at nothing before him.
“It’s a zombie! It’s a fucking Zombie, dude!” Boomer shouted.
“Are you fucking crazy? There ain’t no such thing as zombies, Dumbass.”
“You gotta help me, man.”
“No way. I ain’t going near that thing.”
Boomer kicked the slobbering, growling man down to the pavement again, looking around desperately and spying some orange cones nearly twenty feet away, blocking off a section of the alleyway. With a silent prayer, he turned his back on the creature and darted for the cones.
“He’s coming after you!” Brick shouted, making no move to help either the fallen girl or his friend, instead continuing to lean the full weight of a good drunk up against the wall Boomer had pushed him up against, dazedly gazing around in horror at the carnage their world had suddenly become.
Six men in various KC team jerseys futilely pounded an incredibly obese man wearing a #68 jersey into the ground and stomped on his back and head while he gnawed on the leg of a petite middle-aged blonde the spitting image of that lead character in Clueless—pink dress, cute purse, puppy and all. Brick couldn’t remember her name, but her older doppelganger ignored the fat man behind her and beat a white-eyed, sunken-jawed man on the head with her purse while he, in turn, munched on her forearm as if it was a juicy Popeye’s drumstick and the dog yapped angrily at everything that moved. Ten feet away a pale, wide-eyed little black girl hung on the bare leg of a girl in a cheerleader outfit taking chunk after chunk out of the screaming teenage girl’s leg, gulping each hunk of warm flesh as a fish out of water gulps the air. Apologizing to those around, the little girl’s mother tugged on her arm while the teenager’s friends screamed and beat on the brat with their pom-pommed fists.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into her, today!” the girl’s mother screamed. “Letititia, c’mon girl, quit it now! Mal! Malcom Littlehorse! Get yo ass over here and get your daughter under control!”
“Get your little demon off my daughter you stupid bitch!” the pristine mother of the teen screamed slapping at the little black demon.
“Malcom! Get over here and stop this trashy ho from hitting your little princess!”
Brick’s numb brain directed his vision to where the woman had yelled. A large Native American man he assumed was the aforementioned Littlehorse fought alongside two black men of average height and one short white guy, all four wearing Chiefs red with the names Alt, Grunhard, Szott and Shields. Dazed as he was, he would have laughed at the irony, except this impenetrable line was completely unable to keep one petite, pony-tailed blonde teen girl in a blue and red cheerleader outfit from gnawing half of an old lady’s face off as if puling he cheese from a slice of pizza, swallowing the flap of skin whole before digging into a shoulder.
Tears sprang unbidden to Brick’s eyes, his vision fogged over as thoroughly as his sanity, his conscious mind receding deeper into his skull the longer this strange scene played out. On the other side of the street someone had set a float on fire and several parade-goers worked together to throw a red-haired, ashen-faced psycho cheerleader onto the fire. The girl quickly caught fire, which should not have happened. Brick knew it took a whole lot more fuel and heat than that to burn a body. Ignoring the caustic black smoke billowing up from the colorful sea-horses, crabs and other sea creatures, the young girl twisted and rolled over the edge of the platform and onto the street, all the while burning like a walking matchstick. She lumbered slowly after the group that had thrown her onto the burning float, noticeably slowing, her flaming limbs stiffening. The stench wafted over to where Brick stood lifelessly watching. Like Frankenstein’s monster the girl extended her arms, lumbering at the unarmed men, several of whom crossed themselves and retreated until their backs pressed against the red bricks of buildings along the street.
Twenty feet from the men, flames covering every inch of the girl didn’t bring out the slightest whimper of pain. At ten feet, the men realized they were trapped, blocked by clusters of fights to either side of the inset section of the building. Flames racing up the girl, flesh boiling away like rolled newspaper peeling in a fireplace, yet onward she stumbled. Injured far beyond the capacity for any Human to withstand, she should have long since passed out from the pain. Only five feet from her awaiting feast the young woman’s head finally exploded from the heat, the flaming body dropping to the pavement to lay motionless before the group of terrified men.
The trousers of two of the men showed dark stains extending down from their groin area and the distinctive, fragrant scent of urine joined the putrid stench of burning flesh, spilled alcohol and vomit. The potency of the vomit aroma drew Brick’s vision to the ground where fresh globs of reddish vomit coated his dirty white tennis shoes. A desperate wail forced its way between his chapped lips as he realized he had thrown up all over himself in public again. Sinking to the ground and burying his head between his beige khaki-clad knees, the well-build athlete began blubbering like a three year old.
Twenty feet away Boomer leaped a barricade blocking the construction area, the dead guy chasing him had fallen back, now shuffling half-way between he and his friend. Kicking over a pallet, the young African-American revealed several slightly rusty scraps of black rebar stacked neatly in rows on the wooden platform. He reached down and grabbed one bar firmly in each sinewy hand. A shadow on the pavement warned him to move. Leaping aside and rolling along the dusty concrete he jumped up and turned on the fat-guy-thing as it stumbled over the pallet to lay prone, laughably trying to upright itself again, yellowed teeth gnashing from his gaunt, gray face, milky dead eyes tracking Boomer without emotion. Something told him in no uncertain terms that the thing wanted to taste his flesh. Boomer never gave it a chance.
“Stay dead you flesh-eating freak!” he let forth a tribalistic scream his uncle had taught him and jumped onto the wriggling corpse, jamming his left hand down until the rod exited the back of the ex-man’s skull. Just to make sure, he kicked the thing over and jammed the other rod through its spine, then reached down next to the spilled pallet and selected a larger piece of rod iron, commencing to beat the man for at least another full minute. When there was so little left of the man-thing that he was sure no actor, director or writer in the history of Hollywood could bring it back to life, he doubled over and puked his lunch all over the bloody corpse.
“Fuck!” he shouted, when he finally stopped heaving. Wiping the tears from his eyes, he then started to wipe his mouth on the long sleeve of his crimson jersey but stopped at a distressing sight. “Aw man! My new jersey is stained. Shit!”
Although crimson, the blood of the dead man was much darker and droplets peppered the sleeves of both arms. As a side-note he realized the BBQ sauce from his earlier meal was definitely going to stain the white numbers. Another part of his mind told him he had more important things to think about. Eyes aware and darting about once again, he searched for witnesses to attest to the man being out of his mind. Hopefully some white people had seen the whole thing. Everyone knew that a black man killing a white dude with rebar was a death sentence unless there were some credible witnesses, preferably white, who had seen the entire thing, or better yet, recorded it. His former reputation would mean exactly shit in a hate crime, especially when the victim had been brutally beaten until its head was splattered all over the sidewalk like spilled Kung Pao.
He needn’t have worried. It wasn’t just the one man who had lost it. This same scene was being replayed up and down the street. Rising to his feet, arms limp at his side he witnessed a sight even his most imaginative self-punishing nightmares couldn’t have created. All around was chaos, hell on Earth. He would never know how long he stood watching, but in his mind it seemed to last for a year.
“The dead risen and come to claim His kingdom,” he muttered. “Just as grandma always tole me they’d do.”
In every direction groups of people wrestled desperately with creatures like the one he’d just killed, or at least the one he hoped was actually dead this time. Zombie science was still in the theoretical stages, although it seemed they were going to be getting some hard data from this day onward. Soon floats in both directions blazed and the vehicles pulling most of them had unhooked and fled to…somewhere. The few ex-revelers remaining were piling materials into large bonfires and tossing wriggling zombies onto the flaming pyres. The living far outnumbered the dead for now, but Boomer could see that if someone didn’t get control and start making plans soon, things were going to go real bad, real quick. Brick hadn’t moved from the wall he’d slammed him into, though he had sunk down and put his head in his hands, his body shaking from uncontrolled sobs. The girl lay beside him rolling back and forth slowly, hands covering her side and neck, trying to keep control of the blood flow where the zombie-man had fed.
“Aw hell. Brick, you gotta get up man!” he whisper-yelled without moving, unwilling to risk drawing the girl’s attention. “You gotta get outta there. She’s…that girl could become one of em!”
Brick shook his head. A gurgling sound rose from somewhere deep in her throat and she slowly rolled over and started crawling towards him, a dark line of blood oozing behind her like a slug’s slime trail.
“Brick!” Boomer shouted. “Get up, man!”
But the former star quarterback wouldn’t even look his way. Not until the claw-like hand of the girl who’d rebuffed him reached out and grabbed his ankle in a fierce, iron-clawed grip. When their eyes met, he screamed. She had the same wide, dead, milky eyes and skeleton grin they’d seen on the fat guy. Even though he was half-mad from the surreal scene before him, his remaining survival instincts forced his leg muscles into action. Jumping up and pulling back, ripping his foot from her grasp, feeling the vibration of snapping bones as the force snapped her slight wrist. Without even a whimper, the hungry girl lunged along the ground after him. She would not be denied, reaching with her one good hand, clasping and releasing like that hook in that crane game he loved t
o play. But it was no purple teddy bear as the prize; it was his flesh. Boomer was right. They were zombies. “Boomer!” he screamed.
“C’mon, man,” Boomer muttered, turning and picking up two longer rods of rebar, about two feet long, and dashing towards his friend who was holding the half-naked girl-zombie at arm’s length trying to avoid her gnashing teeth and claws.
“Boomer!” he screamed again. “Get this Zombie Bitch off me, man!”
Boomer arrived at the same time as a white guy in a SKC jersey who held a blood-covered baseball bat. Trying not to think about the irony, Boomer set up on the other side of the man and both men went to work on the zombie, the baseball bat bashing one arm, while Boomer smashed the other. They both crushed a kneecap, but although the bitch went down she still caterpillared herself towards a slowly backtracking Brick.
“The head!” Boomer shouted. “We gotta hit it in the head!”
“Right,” the new man nodded and each took one bash at the girl’s skull, turning her pretty golden locks into blood pudding, spilling brain stuff and gore all over her pretty pink outfit.
“What a waste,” the soccer jersey wearing man muttered, clearly eying the pair of bulging breasts which were still jiggling from the contact of her body on pavement. He seemed entranced despite the sickening situation. The sour scent of whiskey and cigars assaulted Boomer’s nostrils as the man continued. “I mean, I’ve never even seen a pair that perfect and now she’s gone. If this was just a horror movie scene and her tits were shaking like that, I’d be finding out who the actress was so I could add her to my spank bank. Ain’t so hot in real life.” But he poked the girl with the bat and made her breasts wiggle again. “Nope, nothin’,” he mumbled drunkenly and sighed.
White people are crazy, Boomer said to himself, shaking his head.