I’m suddenly aware that good old Rick is confessing to murder. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, I’m worrying. I’m not skinny but I’m not a fatty either. Just sorta middlin’. Never had a weight problem either way but should I be worrying about this now with what I’m certain is the end of the world going on below us a few thousand feet. I’m going to let him keep talking. Maybe he’s just having some sort of schizoid reality break. Maybe an LSD flashback. Who wouldn’t? People are eating people alive. That would be enough to make anyone a tad batty.
He looks at me to make sure I haven’t dozed at the wheel. “A chubby guy in a white, short-sleeved shirt gave me a lift from New Orleans to Biloxi. He had a tie that said, ‘No. 1 Dad.’ His shirt had yellowish armpits that matched his eyebrows and the whites of his eyes that were not white at all. He was very friendly but the air conditioning in his car did not work so the wind, moist and putrid from the south swirled in the car like we were in a sleeping bag together. I could smell the lynched Black people ever so faintly. The odor of the dead, they say, never entirely leaves but rises and falls with the humidity like cat piss on the rug. It is always humid in the South.
“The driver was from the South. He sold repossessed printing equipment and he talked about this on and on until I went nearly crazy. Then he put his hand on my knee and kneaded it real gentle and told me he was lonely, so lonely, even though he was married and had children, so he said, and that he would pay me a few dollars, he did not have much. He said he would let me stay with him in the Motel Six just over the next state border. I said that would be nice because I had not been in a bed in nearly three weeks and I was tired of washing up in gas station men’s rooms. A hot shower would be nice. He rubbed my thigh and I got relaxed. He was chubby like a guy that sits and watched TV all the time and eats jellybeans and Raisonettes. He said he would wash my back. My mother and my father did that. I said, OK, that sounds nice. It did.”
“I wouldn’t mind a bath myself right now,” I say. Rick looks at me and then he looks at Tim who is still sound asleep. I’m sending telepathic waves to Tim, telling him to wake up! We got a situation here! But Tim does not stir.
“Somewhere in Mississippi, on a long stretch of mossy-treed highway I asked him to stop by the roadside; I had to urinate. He said he did, too. We walked a ways into the woods. The trees were forlorn having had so many Black people hung on them the last century. The clouds were embarrassed to be over Mississippi. The shadows were deep and blue, lovely dark and deep, the gray moss like Father Time’s beard hanging everywhere. He watched me urinate. On the way back to the car, I saw that he had three large sweat stains on his shirt and two small ones. That number five was his number. My blade went into his neck quite quickly, crunching in a way that reminded me of the sound of eating a potato chip in church. I left him there under the mossy trees. They were his mourners, more than he would have at a real funeral, I guess.
“Thinking all these things sometimes gets me confused but it doesn’t matter. Maybe the skinny girl drove me to Biloxi and the chubby guy took me to San Angelo and so on and so forth. I never liked geography. My geography teacher was really fat and I paid her no mind, none at all but only day-dreamed of what she would look like with those maps on the wall and her with no skin but only yellow globs of fat and all the other kids in the class laughing at her instead of at me.
“I drove myself to San Angelo, Texas where I parked the car in a bowling alley parking lot. I went in and bowled a game and half even though the lanes and gutters had crickets crawling or hopping or dead all over them. The skinny guy behind the counter near the cubby holes filled with old smelly bowling shoes told me that that every now and then the town gets a plague of crickets. It doesn’t last long and then they just up and leave. So I had in my travels seen a flood and a plague and I’m beginning to think biblical. But I am no Bible boy. I’m not. I killed two people who were trying to convince me to spare them by reciting something out of the Bible. It didn’t work for Jesus on the cross who started reciting scripture. It didn’t work for these people either. When my mind is made up, it is made up. I guess that’s the way God is. He makes up His mind, it’s made up. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Or else. I’m now believing that the GaGa is the Else.”
Something is making me agree with him. Something is wishing I had never met this degenerate creep. Something is saying “Any port in a storm.”
He goes on, “The trucker with the twelve pimples and seven hairs picked me up in San Angelo on the road to El Paso. He told me he was tired of seeing so many Mexicans hitching rides, he called them ‘wetbacks,’ and befouling the highways with their squat looks and greasiness. He actually used the word, ‘befouling’ so I was pretty certain he was a regular church-goer, like my father, fat like him, as well. I slept a lot of the way, the oily sun blasting in through the bug-smeared windshield as the day wore on. It felt like lying down in a tanning bed the size of a barn with the dial turned up to ‘Extra High.’ He turned the radio on and it was country music, Tammy Somebody and Billy Rae Whoever and Jim Bob Watchamacallit and so on and so forth. That racket bored its way into my brain like a cable guy’s drill, the kind with the auger big enough to go through a wall. You know the kind of bit I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“Sure. Those cable guys have great tools,” I say, thinking I am the biggest idiot whoever drew breath.
“Well, friend, that caterwauling music and his index finger tapping on the steering well thirty-nine times made me tense up like when you think your pal, if you have one, may be hiding around the next corner to jump out and startle the Bejesus out of you. I don’t usually blaspheme or take the Lord’s name in vain but I tensed up real tight, real tight and I could feel the handle of my knife creeping out of my pocket toward my hand. What is this I see before me, a dagger with its handle toward my hand? That driver, fat as he was, saw me and asked me if I was all right. I said yes, I was, but he turned the radio off and commenced to telling me he was a father of twin boys and the sole support of his two elderly parents, one of them blind, like it would make a difference to me, which it would not. He saw a truck stop up ahead and pulled right in with barely enough roadway to slow down like he was relieved. He told me this was the end of the line and I needed to get out, which I did and thanked him. He was lucky, real lucky and real fat. Don’t you agree? Don’t you?”
“Well, sure. It’s not easy hitchhiking and all. Sometimes you can spend all day…”
“Who gives a shit about your hitchhiking days, Kent?”
“I just thought you were asking, is all.”
“I usually never have to stand by the roadside for more than an hour or so. My thumb is magic and charming and has never let me down. I’m hoping a nice girl will give me a lift, neither fat nor skinny, someone pleasant, someone understanding, someone my own age, someone that will not have parents, someone that will say nice things about me at my funeral because they are true and not because I am dead, someone who will carve a perfect epitaph for me on a granite headstone that might say, ‘He was a good man, neither fat nor skinny, who tried to do right. He will be missed.’ And she will remember to bury me with my knife in case I’m not really dead but in some sort of coma and I can dig my way out, get back on the road and try to continue to do right. Is that asking too much? And do I deserve to be stuck up here with you and…”
A shot rang out and hit Rick right between the eyes. It made a little hole like those Hindu ladies have only theirs is make-up, not a real hole at all. Rick’s eyes focus for a millisecond on Tim who was not sleeping at all but had stealthily aimed his rifle right at Rick while he was blabbing his sick confession. Rick toppled to the floor like a way full laundry bag; collapsed more than fell.
“Fuck me,” I yell. “Holy shit! Why’d you shoot him? Holy shit.”
“Holy has nothing to do with it,” says Tim. “That motherfucker is a serial killer who just confessed to you. Did you want to be next?”
“Well, shit, Tim…”
CHAPTER 9
“Hey, chief, check it out,” says Tim pointing out and down.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Check it out.”
I get up from where I’m sitting, every joint in my body feeling like someone super-glued them while I was resting. Stiff as pipe. I get up slowly, like an old dude. The sun is glinting off the balloon coloring it a morning orange. I look out over the brim of the gondola and as far as I can see is green, billowing waving, stippled green—yellow spots like a million stars.
“It’s corn, man, more corn than I think I could ever see. Fucking look at it,” says Tim.
I am speechless. What’s to say? It’s an ocean of corn spreading to the horizon. We’re down to about a hundred feet.
“Why so low?” I ask. “Is it safe?”
“Safe? Fuck no, it’s not safe but we need to scout out some grub.”
“You’re not thinking corn on the cob for the next twenty meals are you?” I ask.
“No. But look yonder,” he says, pointing eastward into the rising sun. The clouds have all run away, like thieves in the night.
A half mile directly in front of us is the white steeple of a church, the sun catching the glint off of its honest to God bell, not one of those megaphone pre-recorded jobbers like you see nowadays. It’s a real bell in a real steeple. Something out of Norman Rockwell. And don’t ask me who that is. All I know, he paints cheese-ball paintings of happy people doing happy American shit like from the thirties and forties. You know, happy shit like eating dinner and talking at a town meeting and praying at a church that looks just like the one we’re homing in on.
“Fuck, Tim. We’re going to clear it, right?
“Yepper, Cap’n. Hard to up,” he says as he fires the burner with a loud blast and sends us up another hundred feet. “I think we need to land near here. See that outbuilding near the church. It’s the parson’s house or some such thing. Might be good people holed up there. Look around. There’s nothing for miles.”
He’s right. There is not a town anywhere as far as I can see and this flat field must go a good fifty miles in any direction. Could be the town is in a river valley and the low sun and waving corn is playing tricks with our eyes. The GPS says that Iowa state road 142 runs north and south about a mile ahead. So there is some civilization somewhere.
“Let’s bring her down a few hundred yards past the church,” I say, noticing at the same time that there is a full plank fence all the way around, making the church the center of a compound. I can make out what looks like a well house and, as the sun is no longer in our eyes, the skeleton frame of a windmill, spinning slowly in the morning breeze, the same breeze following us.
Tim steers the balloon like he’s at the state fair, swinging wide around the steeple and dropping low, a sort of swoop that he has a way of doing that brings the gondola up and over and then down in a sort of hover outside the church, away from the yard where some asshole can’t easily jump in it. Just before we land we see a sign, ST. TERESA OF ALBICORN CONVENT with a pretty gold cross surrounded by a halo or some might say a wreath of corn still in the husk.
“Tim,” I whisper. “This is a goddamned convent…a nunnery, dude. Bitches and nothing but.”
“Now what?” he asks.
“How the fuck do I know. Maybe they’re gone. Maybe they’re holed up. Get the guns and don’t fire till you see the pink of their nipples,” I say, more a fool today than I was yesterday, less a fool than I’ll be tomorrow. Tim jumps over the side of the gondola and does the tether thing, dimming the flame to an idle.
“I hope they have some butter and salt and a goddamned popper, because I’m not leaving until the show is over,” he says as he starts walking toward the convent. “Forgive me Father, because I might have to sin. But I sure hope not.”
I hate to do it, but I tie MG loosely to the inside of the balloon. It’s hard enough for him to jump in and out and right now I don’t want to have to carry him.
We approach cautiously and notice that the fancy wrought-iron gate in the middle of a ten foot high brick wall is not locked. I’m thinking this is like one of those lobster traps like where you put a piece of lobster food in the back of a cage and leave the door open. The stupid lobster thinks someone forgot his lunch and the next thing he knows he’s bright red, covered with butter and deader than Abe Lincoln.
“I don’t think this is safe,” I say to Rick.
“Sure, boss, but what are we going to do about supplies? I think that MacDonalds is only serving breakfast and I’m hankering for some chicken Maccrappits.”
“Well, let’s be careful.”
“Sounds like a plan, chief,” says Tim. “Careful is one of my middle names. The other is ‘Stupid.’”
The big oak door of the convent is locked tight and looks like it’s been that way for a few centuries. A sign near the door says, DELIVERIES IN REAR. I wait for some inane comment from Tim, but he’s looking more serious now.
We circle the building, crouching every time we go by a window. Around the back is an orchard and apples and are all over the place, stinking like mad and covered with a bazillion yellow jackets. The last window is slightly open and I hear a moan from inside.
“Tim…shhhhh,” I whisper. “Someone’s inside.”
Tim circles a huge rose bush and gets low to the sill and peeks over. I do the same. The room is dark except for some shafts of light streaming through a stained glass window about ten feet up. There are wooden chairs in neat rows and a crucifix against the wall. We watch for a while and see or hear nothing. Then, another groan.
I shade my eyes with my hand and scan the room. Nothing. Then I see the crucifix move and figure it’s a trick of the light. We circle the building carefully crouching beneath each window. There is no one there, but there is a crucifix in every room. We circle again and still the same. There is moaning from one of the rooms. We look inside carefully and now realize that the crucifix has a live dude on it. It’s just too dark and shadowy to see exactly what is going on.
“Let’s go in,” says Tim.
“What for?”
“He’s alive.”
“He’s two minutes from death and even if he farts a prayer up to Heaven and manages to live we can’t carry around a burden like that.”
“Then let’s get some supplies. And maybe there are other guys in here.”
“What are you going to do with guys?”
“Save ’em. Just because the bitches are animals doesn’t make us animals. Right?”
I just look at him and think that maybe the sun has baked his brain. I follow him to the back door and sneak in behind him as it creaks open. Flies are buzzing and it smells like garbage that hasn’t been taken out in six weeks.
The kitchen is huge but nothing is used. It’s as if everybody up and left in a hurry. There’s a little cross over the door leading to the rest of the convent and a stitched sampler with the Lord’s Prayer done in real neat threads and pictures of little girls and boys kneeling in prayer while an angel hovers over their heads.
We walk under the small cross into the dining hall. It’s huge with a table that could seat maybe twenty people. It’s neat and tidy with a pewter bowl at each seat; no knives or forks. On the wall between the windows so that the glare from outside blurs our vision is a life-sized cross. There is a statue of Jesus lying on the floor next to it.
“Guess he thought it would be better to leave and didn’t quite make it to his chariot,” says Tim.
“But who the fuck is on the cross?” I ask.
“Help meeeee,” a voice says. “For the love of God, help me.” There is the man, naked, nailed to the cross in the place of the fake Jesus.
“Jesus,” I say more like a dumbass than usual.
Tim heads over. “You okay?”
“Fuck no, man, do I look okay? The bitches have crucified me. Get me down before they come back. Please!”
“Before who comes back?” I ask.
“The nuns.”
“Nuns?” I say.
“Yeah, they’re zombies, man. Get me down.”
“How?” asks Tim.
“There’s tools in the drawer over there. In that chest of drawers. Get something to pull the nails out.” Tim goes over and opens the draw pulling out a claw hammer. I stand next to the guy and see that he has ropes tied around both legs.
“Hurry. Please!” he says.
Tim pulls a chair over and stands on it and starts working the nail that’s through the guy’s wrists. Then I see that his feet are gone. And most of the flesh on his calves.
“Man, what did they do?” I ask.
“They cut my fucking feet off. To eat them. Drink the blood. Stop me from bleeding to death by tying tourniquets around the legs. There’s more of us in here. Every room.”
Zombie Bitches From Hell Page 5