by Brian Hodge
"Onward!" Jerry frothed his passion to scalding and dealt his nearest disciple a fatherly shove in the direction of the enemy. The sinner. The monster. "Onward!"
The flat of Jerry's palm met all the resistance of stale oatmeal. A fresh cow patty had more tensile strength and left less mess. He ripped his hand free with a yelp and gooey webs followed it backward.
The born-again gawped hollowly at the tunnel where its left tit used to be, then stumped off, sniffing fresh Wormboy meat.
The explosions became deafening, slamming one into the next, thunderclaps that mocked God. In the interstices, Jerry heard a low, vicious chuddering–not a heavenly sound, but an evil noise unto the Lord that was making the faithful go to pieces faster than frogs with cherry bombs inside.
He tried to snap off the maggot-ridden brown jelly caking his hand and accidentally boffed Deacon Moe in the face. The zombie's nose tore halfway off and dangled. Moe felt no pain. He had obediently brought the pet caddy, whose occupants writhed and waxed wroth.
Zombo hammered out another gunpowder benediction and Jerry flung himself down to kiss God's good earth. Hot tracers ate pavement and jump-stitched through Deacon Moe in a jagged line. The pet carryall took two big hits and fell apart. Moe did likewise. His ventilated carcass did a juice dump and the Right Reverend Jerry found himself awash in gallons of zombie puree plus four extremely aggravated rattlesnakes.
He never found out who was the first to betray him. The first bite pegged him right on the balls, and he howled.
Deacon Moe, his work on this world finished, keeled over with a splat. It was like watching a hot cherry pie hit a concrete sidewalk.
Wormboy rubbed his eyes. Zombo had missed. It wasn't just the salt sting of sweat that had spoiled his aim. His vision was bollixed. The oily drops standing out on his pate were ice cold.
It was probably someone's something he ate.
Zombo grew too heavy, too frying-pan hot to hold. Zombo's beak kept dipping, pissing away good ammo to spang off the metal spikes crowding the moat. Wormboy gritted his teeth, clamped his clammy trigger finger down hard and seesawed the muzzle upward with a bowel-clenching grunt. He felt himself herniate below his weightlifter's belt. Zombo spoke. Geeks blocked tracers, caught fire and sprang apart at the seams. Those in front were buffaloed into the moat by those behind. They seated permanently onto the pungi pipes with spongy noises of penetration, to wriggle and gush bloodpus and reach impotently toward Wormboy.
Zombo demanded a virgin belt of slugs.
Womboy's appetite had churned into a world class acid bath of indigestion. This night would belong to Maalox.
It took no time for the air to clog with the tang of blackened geek beef. One whiff was all it took to make Wormboy ralph long and strenuously into the moat. Steaming puke pasted a geek who lay skewered through the back, facing the sky, mouth agape. It spasmed and twisted on the barbs, trying to lap up as much fresh hot barf as it could collect.
Zombo tagged out. Wormboy unholstered his .44 and sent a pancaking round into BarfEater's brain pan. Its limbs stiffened straight as the hydrostatic pressure blew its head apart into watermelon glop. Then it came undone altogether, collapsing into a pool of diarrhetic putrescence that bubbled and flowed amidst the pipework.
Now everything looked like vomit. Wormy's ravaged stomach said heave-ho to that, too, and constricted to expel what was no longer vomitable. This time he got blood, shooting up like soda pop to fizz from both nostrils. He spat and gagged, crashing to his knees. His free hand vanished into the fat cushion of his stomach, totally inadequate to the task of clutching it.
The Right Reverend Jerry saw the sinner genuflect. God was still in Jerry's corner, whacking away, world without end, hallelujah, amen.
Jerry's left eye was smeared down his cheek like a lanced condom. Little Paul's fang had put it out. Must have offended him. Jerry seized Little Paul and dashed his snaky brains out against the nearest headstone. Then he began his trek up the hill, through the valley of death, toting the limp, dead snake as a scourge. Consorting with serpents had won him a double share of bites, and he knew the value of immunization. He stung all over and was wobbly on his feet…but so far, he was still chugging.
This must be Hell, he thought dazedly when he saw most of his congregation sliced, diced, and garnishing Valley View's real estate. Tendrils of smoke curled heavenward from the craters gouged rudely in the soil. Dismembered limbs hung, spasming. A few born-agains had stampeded over the fallen and made it all the way to the moat.
Jerry could feel his heart thudding, pushing God knew how much snakebite nectar through his veins. He could feel the power working inside him. Blood began to drip freely from his gums, slathering his lips. His left hand snapped shut into a spastic claw and stayed that way. His good eye tried to blink and could not; it was frozen open. The horizon tilted wildly. Down below his muscles surrendered and shit and piss came express delivery.
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, dise
ngaging 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 according 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.