by Brian Hodge
He would remember this. By now he'd learned well that the world sometimes refuses to accommodate even your most thoughtfully prepared itineraries for living.
Burying Darianne for real took an hour of blood-letting toil. By the time Russell was finished it was too dark for him to see the filth caking his own hands.
Dad never manifested again. That would be family pride.
12.
"You're still here."
"Of course, kiddo. Where the hell else?" Grandpa took a deep, soul-fumigating drag on a half-smoked Kool. "Jeezus H., Russ, you look like you just crawled out of a grave."
He was dirty, stinky, wobbling and wild-eyed. By comparison, Grandpa, as dog-eared and moldy as he was, came off better. Maybe all the coffee had rejuvenated him.
He tapped a few granules of sugar into a fresh cup while Russell slid in opposite. That was another of Grandpa's signature habits–to use less sugar the more coffee he drank.
Russell found his jacket awaiting him. A new waitress–night shift, now–hesitated before serving him. Grandpa's nod told her this guy was okay, never mind how he looks.
"Whadda piece, huh? Bought me cigareets j ust'cos I asked nice. She's a sweetie."
Russell scrubbed his face with a paper napkin. It came away black with a smear of blood. He finger-combed and a stray cottonwood leaf spiraled down from his hair.
"Git some business done today?"
Russell nodded. His reflection nodded too, there in the fresh dark coffee.
"Dad never showed."
"You have to give him that, I think, given his circumstances and all." Adamant about such things, had been Dad. No way death could disrupt his entrenched mindset. Nor could resurrection.
At every family gathering there's always a stubborn one.
Grandpa harrumphed. "As the … er, elder fella here, I think I can speak for your Daddy, Russell. He was surprised you made the effort to come back here every year, doing the thing with the flowers and all. No, wait. Change that. He wasn't surprised a particle. He needed to have that attitude of surprise, but deep inside he already knew you'd do something like that. And he's proud, and he's happy. You proved he could leave the world with no regrets about you, no apprehensions about your ability. And maybe that's why I'm here–to speak for your Daddy. Because some things never get said father-to-son, no matter how momentous they are, not even if you're gifted with a second chance."
"So you said."
"Believe me, I know from experience."
"You said there was stuff you'd never gotten around to telling Dad."
"I did, didn't I?" Grandpa laughed. "Know what? I may never get around to it. I'm dead, after all." He sipped full choke and puffed too voluminously, as though mindful that his window for earthly vices was contracting. "Gotta go get horizontal meself, before midnight tonight."
"Or you turn into a meatloaf, right?" Such a fairytale rule seemed laughable in the midst of all Russell had experienced. Suitably frivolous.
"I don't know what happens after that."
Russell had been about to ask what happened next. He watched Grandpa dip his head, sad at his prospects, and felt foolish and outgunned. He reached across the table for the first time.
They talked, the old man and his grandson, until very late that night. "If I come back next year," said Russell, "does this happen all over again? Because if it does, I'm booking my butt to the Bahamas."
A one-second nightmare: The Pitts, all deceased, cruising the beach, looking for him. Yelling his name and attracting attention. Smelling bad.
"I'd bet against that," Grandpa said. "What went on today took a lot of energy. Love. Whatever. Repetition is boring. Maybe something else'll happen. Maybe, some day, your Daddy will see fit to say what he has to."
"I doubt it."
"Me, too. But who knows? It could happen."
It was carrot enough to ensure Russell's punctual return.
13.
Mister Mort watches the old man and the young man say their farewells in the middle of graveyard, in the middle of the night. They embrace as though this good-bye must last. The sight evokes a peculiar and powerful feeling, an infusion of strength that sizzles from Mister Mort's upstretched fingertip to the stone toes of his sandaled feet.
Mister Mort wonders where such potent force came from. What he feels is new yet comfortable, scary yet pleasant.
The old man steps down into the grave he has occupied for the last seventeen years. His tombstone is starting to show rain wear, and blackening, from the air.
The young man stands for a wordless moment, hands in pockets. He distributes the flowers he has brought, as he has annually for some time now.
Time, the greed of it, the caprice, or lack of it, do not perturb Mister Mort.
The young man completes his ritual and shoulders his jacket. There is still enough time for him to catch a cab to the airport, or to his hotel for a bout of dreamless sleep.
Once the young man is gone, Mister Mort decides to discover things, and his granite feet embed deep prints in Valley View's rich soil.
It is nice to be off the pedestal for a change.
Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy
Eating 'em was more fun than blowing their gnarly green heads off. But why dicker when you could do both?
The fresher ones were blue. That was important if you wanted to avoid cramps, salmonella. Eat a green one and you'd be yodeling down the big porcelain megaphone in no time.
Wormboy used wire cutters to snip the nose off the last bullet in the foam block. He snugged the truncated cartridge into the cylinder of his short-barrel .44. When fired, the flattened slugs pancaked on impact and would disintegrate any geek's head into hash. The green guys weren't really "zombies," because no voodoo had played a part. They were all geeks, all slow as syrup and stupid as hell and Wormboy loved it that way. It meant he would not starve in this cowardly new world. He was eating; millions weren't.
Wormboy's burden was great.
It hung from his Butthole Surfers T-shirt. He had scavenged dozens of such shirts from a burned-out rockshop, all Extra Extra Large, all screaming about bands he had never heard of–Day-Glo Abortions, Rudimentary Penii, Shower of Smegma, Fat & Fucked Up. Wormboy's big personal in-joke was one that championed a long-gone album titled GIVING HEAD TO THE LIVING DEAD.
The gravid flab of his teats distorted the logo, and his surplus flesh quivered and swam, shoving around his clothing as though some subcutaneous revolution was aboil. Pasty and pocked, his belly depended earthward, a vast sandbag held at bay by a wide weightlifter's belt, notched low. The faintest motion caused his hectares of skin to bobble like mercury.
Wormboy was more than fat. He was a crowd of fat people. A single mirror was insufficient to the task of containing his image.
The explosion buzzed the floor beneath his high-tops. Vibrations slithered from one thick stratum of dermis to the next, bringing him the news.
The sound of a Bouncing Betty's boom-boom always worked like a Pavlovian dinner gong. It could smear a smile across his jowls and start his tummy to percolating. He snatched up binoculars and stampeded out into the graveyard.
Valley View Memorial Park was a classic cemetery, of a venerable lineage far preceding the ordinances that required flat monument stones to note the dearly departed. The granite and marble jutting from its acreage was the most ostentatious and artfully hewn this side of a Universal Studios monster movie boneyard. Stone cold angels reached toward heaven. Stilted verse, deathlessly chiseled, eulogized the departees–vanity plates in a suburbia for the lifeless. It cloyed.
Most of the graves were unoccupied. They had prevailed without the fertilization of human decay and were now choked with loam and healthy green grass. Most of the tenants had clawed out and waltzed off several seasons back.
A modest road formed a spiral ascent path up the hill and terminated in a cul-de-sac fronting Wormboy's current living quarters. Midway up it was interrupted by a trench ten feet across. Wormboy had excavate
d this "moat" using the cemetery's scoop-loader, and seeded it with lengths of two-inch pipe sawn at angles to form funnel-knife style pungi sticks. Tripwires knotted gate struts to tombstones to booby traps, and three hundred antipersonnel mines lived in the earth. Every longitude and latitude of Valley View had been lovingly nurtured into a Gordian Knot of kill power which Wormboy had christened his "spider-web."
The Bouncing Bettys had been a godsend. Anything that wandered in unbidden would get its legs blown off or become immovably gaffed in the moat.
Not long after the geeks woke up, shucked dirt, and ambled off with their yaps drooping open, Wormboy had claimed Valley View for his very own. He knew the dead tended to "home" toward places that had been important to them back when they weren't green. Ergo, never would they come trotting home to a graveyard.
Wormboy's previous hideout had been a National Guard armory. Too much traffic in walking dead weekend warriors, there. Blowing them into un-walking lasagna cost too much time and powder. After seven Land Rover-loads of military rock and roll, Wormy's redecoration of Valley View was complete. The graveyard was one big mechanized ambush. The reception building and nondenominational chapel were ideally suited to his needs …and breadth. Outfitting the prep room was more stainless steel than a French kitchen in Beverly Hills; where stiffs were once dressed for interment, Wormboy now dressed them out for din-din. There was even a refrigerated morgue locker. Independent generators chugged out wattage. His only real lament was that there never seemed to be enough videotapes to keep him jolly. On the nonfiction front he favored Julia Child.
The binocs were overpriced army jobs with an illuminated reticule. Wormboy thumbed up his bottle-bottom fisheye specs, focused and swept the base of the hill. Smoke was still rising from the breach point. Fewer geeks blundered in these days, but now and again he could still snag one.
That was peculiar. As far as Wormboy could reckon, geeks functioned on the level of pure motor response with a single directive seek food–and legs that made their appetites mobile. Past Year One the locals began to shun Valley View altogether, almost as though the geek grapevine had warned them the place was poison. Could be that Valley View's primo kill rate had made it the crucible of the first bona fide zombie superstition.
God only knew what they were munching in the cities by now. As the legions of ambulatory expirees had swelled, their preferred food–live citizens–had gone underground. Survivors of what Wormboy called Zombie Apocalypse had gotten canny or gotten eaten. Geek society itself was like a gator pit; he'd seen them get pissed off and chomp hunks out of one another. Though their irradiated brains kept their limbs supple and greased with oxygenated blood, they were still dead…and dead people still rotted. Their structural integrity (not to mention their freshness) was less than a sure bet past the second or third Halloween. Most geeks Wormy spotted nowadays were minus a major limb. They digested, but did not seem to eliminate. Sometimes the older ones simply exploded. They clogged up with gas and decaying food until they hit critical mass, then kerblooey–steaming gobbets of brown crap all over the perimeter. It was enough to put you off your dinner.
Life was so weird. Wormboy felt like the only normal person left.
This movable feast, this walking smorgasbord, could last another year or two at max, and Wormboy knew it. His fortifications insured that he would be ready for whatever followed, when the world changed again. For now, it was a matchless chow-down, and grand sport.
The ATV groaned and squeaked its usual protests when he settled into its saddle. A rack welded to the chassis secured geek tools–pinch bar, fire axe, scattergun sheaths and a Louisville Slugger with a lot of chips, nicks, and dried blood. The all-terrain bike's balloon tires did not burst. Wormboy kick-started and puttered down to meet his catch of the day.
Geeks could sniff human meat from a fair distance. Some had actually gotten around to elementary tool use. But their maze sense was zero-zero. They always tried to proceed in straight lines. Even for a non-geek it took a load of deductive logic just to pick a path toward Valley View's chapel without getting divorced from your vitals, and much more time than generally elapsed between Wormboy's feedings. Up on this hilltop, his security was assured.
He piloted the ATV down his special escape path, twisting and turning, pausing at several junctures to gingerly reconnect tripwires behind him. He dropped his folding metal Army fording bridge over the moat and tootled across.
Some of the meat hung up in the heat flash of the explosion was still sizzling on the ground in charred clumps. Dragging itself doggedly up the slope was half a geek, still aimed at the chapel and the repast that was Wormboy. Everything from its navel down had been blown off.
Wormboy un-racked the pinch bar. One end had been modified to take a ten-pound harpoon head of machined steel. A swath of newly-muddied earth quickly became a trail of strewn organs resembling smashed fruit. The geek's brand new prone carriage had permitted it to evade some of the Bouncing Betty trips. Wormboy frowned. His announcement was pointed–and piqued–enough to arrest the geek's uphill crawl.
"Welcome to Hell, dork breath."
It humped around on its palms with all the grace of a beached haddock. Broken rib struts punched through at jigsaw angles and mangled innards swung from the mostly-empty chest cavity like pendent jewels. One ear had been sheared off; the side of its head was caked in thick blood, dirt and pulverized tissue that reminded Wormboy of a scoop of dog food. It sought Wormboy with bleary drunkard's eyes, virulently jaundiced and discharging gluey fluid like those of a sick animal.
It was wearing a besmirched Red Cross armband.
A long, grey-green rope of intestine had paid out behind the geek. It gawped with dull hunger, then did an absurd little push-up in order to bite it. Teeth crunched through geek-gut and gelid black paste evacuated with a blatting fart noise. Sploot!
Disinclined toward autocannibalism, it tacked again on Wormboy. A kidney peeled loose from a last shred of muscle and rolled out to burst apart in the weeds. The stench was unique.
Impatient, Wormy shook his head. Stupid geeks. "C'mon, fuckface, come and get it." He waggled his mighty belly, then held out the rib roast of his forearm. "You want Cheez-Whiz on it or what? C'mon. Chow time."
It seemed to catch the drift. Mouth chomping and slavering, eyes straying off in two directions, it resumed its quest, leaving hanks and clots of itself behind all the way down.
It was too goddamned slow…and wasting too many choice bits.
Hefting the pinch bar, Wormboy hustled up the slope. He slammed one of his size thirteens thunderously down within biting range and let the geek fantasize for an instant about what a crawful of Wormboy Platter would taste like. Greedy. Then he threw all his magnificent tonnage behind a downward thrust, spiking his prey between the shoulder blades and staking it to the ground with a moist crunch.
It thrashed and chewed air. Wormy waved bye-bye in its face. "Don't go 'way, now." He let the geek watch him pick his way back down to the ATV. He wanted it to see him returning with the axe. Sweat had broken freely; the exertion already had Wormboy huffing and aromatic, but he loved this part almost as much as swallowing that old time home cookin'.
The axe hissed down overhand. A bilious rainbow of decomposing crap hocked from the neck stump while the blue head pin-balled from one tombstone to the next. It thonked to rest against the left rear wheel of the ATV Wormboy lent the half-torso a disappointed inspection. Pickings were lean; this geek had been on the hoof too long. Burger night again.
He looked behind him and sure enough, the lone head was fighting like hell to redirect itself. Hair hung in its eyes, the face was caved in around the flattened nose, the whole of it now oozing and studded with cockleburrs …but by God it tipped over, embedded broken teeth into packed dirt, and tried to pull itself toward Wormy. It was that hungry.
Wormboy went down to meet it, humming. He secured the axe in its metal clip and drew the ball bat.
Busting a coconut was tougher. The
geek's eyes stayed open. They never flinched when you hit them. On the second bash, curds of blood-dappled brain jumped out to meet the air.
It ceased moving then, except to crackle and collapse. The cheesy brain-stuff was the color of fish bellies. Wormboy pulled free a mucilaginous fistful and brandished it before the open, unseeing eyes. He squeezed hard. Glistening spirals unfurled between his fingers with a greasy macaroni noise.
"I win again."
He licked the gelid residue off his trigger finger and smacked his lips. By the time he got back to the torso with a garbage bag, the Red Cross armband was smoldering. He batted it away. It caught in midair and flared, newborn fire gobbling up the swatch of cloth and the symbol emblazoned thereon, leaving Wormboy alone to scratch his head about what it might have meant.
Little Luke shot twin streamers of turbid venom into the urine specimen cup like a good Christian, providing. He did not mind being milked (not that he'd been asked); it was a necessary preamble to the ritual. He played his part and was provided for–a sterling exemplar of God's big blueprint. His needle fangs were translucent and fragile looking. Cloudy venom pooled in the cup.
Maintaining his grip just behind Little Luke's jaws, the Right Reverend Jerry thanked the Lord for this bounty, that the faithful might take communion and know His peace. He kissed Little Luke on the head and dropped all four feet of him back into the pet caddy. Little Luke's Love Gift had been generous today. Perhaps even serpents knew charity.
Jerry pondered charity, and so charitably ignored the fact that his eldest Deacon was leaking. Deacon Moe stood in the vestibule, his pants soaked and dripping, weaving back and forth. He was not breathing, and his eyes saw only the specimen cup. The odor that had accompanied him into the tiny room was that of maggoty sausage. He was a creature of wretchedness, without a doubt…but was also proof to the Right Reverend Jerry that the myth had delivered at last, and skeptics be damned.