“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
He put his hands on a blond rag doll, something with a sewn-on smile and buttons for eyes. It was about as close to a generic doll as existed in this display of every possible permutation of the word: the Platonic ideal of a “doll.” He wanted to rip it to shreds, to use it to smash all of its more expensive brethren, but he felt for the first time something like superstition rattle him.
He had read once that powerful warlords of old had been buried on mounds of their ancient treasure under a spell called a geas. The curse was as much associated with the dark collection of blood money as it was with the terrible greed and avarice of the person who had possessed it, greed so powerful it outlasted even life itself. Never before had Kenny believed in such nonsense, but in that moment he could have sworn he felt something like a geas lying over this carefully gathered collection. It made him pause at the thought of smashing it. It even made him put down the rag doll after a moment’s thought.
He took another step forward—and was struck down by the weight of a sandbag that smashed onto the crown of his head. He’d been fooled, not by the low cunning of a hungry corpse, but by good, old-fashioned human trickery. His senses faded to black.
***
Kenny awoke with his mouth tasting of cotton and a dull throb in his head. His eyes refused to focus.
He tried to put his hand to his head, then realized he couldn’t. His hand wouldn’t move. Suddenly panicked, he tried to move his other hand and found that one wouldn’t move, either. His eyes suddenly sharpened into focus, and he glanced down to see what was wrong with his hands.
His eyes nearly bugged out of his face as he saw that his bitchin’ duds had been replaced with what appeared to be a tablecloth, red and white checked. But no, it wasn’t a tablecloth, it was fringed with crocheted lace at the neck and arms. It was a dress. A doll’s dress.
Kenny attempted to bark out a curse, but found that his voice was muffled. The cottony taste in his mouth, unlike every hangover he had ever endured, was actual cotton. His mouth and cheeks had been packed with something the consistency of pillow stuffing. In fact, his mouth was so full he found it almost impossible to work his jaws.
He attempted to spit it out, but found his lips wouldn’t even part. His mouth was sealed shut, although he wasn’t entirely sure how, since he felt no tape or gag in place. He tried to move his hands again, found them useless, then attempted to stand up from the chair he was seated in, and found he was secured to that as well. His wrists and ankles were bound to the chair by what felt like copper wire.
“Fussy, fussy,” a voice said with all the contempt of a mother chastising her toddler.
It was a child’s voice, or, at least, a childish voice. The words had the effect of a bucket of ice water splashed on Kenny’s back. He looked up for their source.
He was sitting at a table draped with a worn, crocheted tablecloth. A woman of about thirty sat directly across from him, sipping a cup of tea. She placed the teacup down on the table, and Kenny saw that it was empty. She had simply been pretending.
The woman, although she had age lines beginning to set in under her eyes, wore her hair in pigtails and the white shirt and plaid skirt of a schoolgirl. The name “May” was embroidered on her shirt. When she spoke again, it became even more obvious that she was putting on a child’s voice, or perhaps, judging by the crazed gleam in her eyes, it wasn’t so much a put-on as a disorder.
“One mustn’t be so fussy at the table, Madam Buttercup,” she said, cocking her head in a way that suggested logic and sensibility had long since fled her. “Where did you learn your manners? Can’t you be more like your brothers?”
Kenny turned his head, first to the left, then the right. Two corpses sat with them at the impromptu tea party, unblinking eyes lolling. Despite their various grotesqueries, both men had been made up with the same care as the dolls in the foyer. The one to his right had ichor dripping from his ear, as yet unnoticed by their deranged hostess. The one to his left was missing half his face. Actually, “missing” was incorrect, since it was still attached to his shoulder. It was the frat boy.
“Troy!” Kenny blurted out, though through his cotton-packed mouth it came out more like a muted groan.
Troy or whatever his real name was (Kenny had genuinely forgotten it by this point) turned and slowly fixed his eyes on him. His jaws were moving, not in an attempt to communicate, but simply acting out his intent to gnash on Kenny’s delicate flesh. There was no animus in the dead man, which Kenny might have expected, or fear, which would also have made sense. There was something like hunger, but it lacked the primal palette of all true emotions. It was a mechanical, devoid hunger.
Troy’s lips didn’t smack, though, because they had been sewn tightly shut with a few stitches of black thread. Kenny struggled to open his mouth again. Now that he knew exactly how the mouths of the other “guests” had been sealed he could tell that it was the same string keeping his own lips together.
“I’m glad you’ve joined us, Madam Buttercup,” the crazy woman said, stirring an imaginary sugar cube into her cup with an imaginary spoon, “Otherwise the numbers would have been uneven. It must go boy-girl-boy-girl-boy-girl or it’s not a proper get-together.”
Kenny attempted to eviscerate her with a stare. She had put him in a dress because of some old 1950s Ms. Manners bullshit about alternating guests at a dinner party? He was going to enjoy breaking loose and then practicing whole new worlds of his art on Little Miss Nutso.
“Let me go, you bitch!” he tried to scream.
May stared at him, either not comprehending his words or just listening to the voices in her head. A smile finally crossed her lips.
“Who wants a bonne bouche?”
She rose and sauntered out of the room. A moment later she returned with a covered metal serving dish in one hand and a cake knife in the other.
Kenny felt himself hyperventilating. He took a few deep breaths and attempted to calm down. He slowed his speech as much as possible to clarify his words. Maybe this woman was crazy, but maybe she just didn’t realize he was alive.
“Listen,” he attempted to say, “I’m not one of them. I’m not a corpse. I’m alive.”
As plaintive as the low grunts sounded, he hoped that in their rhythm and tone he could at least make it clear that he was alive.
“It’s impolite to talk with your mouth full, Madam Buttercup,” May said, slapping the back of his hand with the flat of the cake knife.
He froze up, fearful that she might elect to do worse to chastise him. Instead, she placed the dinner tray down in the center of the table. She grabbed the heavy metal cover and, with a flourish, drew it back to reveal…nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Humming, the crazed hostess slowly and carefully divided the imaginary cake into four even and generous slices. She went through all the motions of cutting, plating, and serving the “dessert.” The whole time, Kenny continued to attempt to reason with her, hoping that she could hear in his grunts that he was not simply moaning like one of the dead, but was a person with thoughts and feelings. As the seconds ticked away his attempts to communicate grew faster and more frantic.
“Ouch,” she said, nicking her thumb in the process of her convoluted pantomime.
A few drops of blood spattered to the table. The corpses began to riot. Troy and the other ghoul grunted and panted like dogs, their usual long, low moans stifled by cotton and sewn-together lips. They both lunged desperately for the blood, but neither could get closer than bashing their heads against the edges of the table, sometimes shaking their teacups.
May, meanwhile, sucked at her thumb. As she did, Kenny finally caught her attention. He hoped his eyes were shining with fluid, his pupils obviously dilating, his whole face radiating life. The eyes, it was said, were windows to the soul, and Kenny still had one, unlike Troy and his puling friend. He had to show it to this woman, mad though she might be. All he had to do was get out of his current predicament an
d then he could easily overpower her. Then he’d make her pay for such humiliation. Oh, yes. He’d make what he’d done to the frat boy look like a breezy visit to a Piercing Pagoda at the mall.
“Care for some more tea, Madam Buttercup?” she asked.
Kenny rolled his eyes and huffed in frustration. The hostess took the tea kettle from the center of the table and walked around, topping off each guest’s empty cup with imaginary tea.
“Now, settle down, everyone,” the hostess said in between suckles at her thumb. “I apologize for the carelessness. I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared and Kenny glanced around the room, desperate to find some means of getting out of this situation. Glistening with blood, the carving knife still sat where May had left it. Kenny lunged for it, imitating the corpses around him who were still lunging for the blood it had drawn. He could get no closer than a foot or two away.
He wasn’t sure quite what he’d do if he closed the gap, anyway. Perhaps carefully use the knife to saw through the stitches in his lips, and finally express himself. Better still if he could grab it and put it through that bitch’s heart.
Maybe if his legs had been bound with rope instead of wire he could have loosened them. But this madwoman was too good at keeping butts in chairs. He pressed down with his feet. She had taken his boots and replaced them with silk slippers, which was a shame because he thought they would have given him a decent amount of extra leverage. As it was, all he could do was rock back about the length of his toes, then lurch forward, attempting to drag the chair a few inches with him.
He repeated the process and found himself even closer to the knife than before. A low, curdling growl emerged from Troy’s nose, like a cur warning a lesser member of the pack away from its meal.
A muffled “Fuck you, Troy,” emerged from Kenny’s nose.
He leaned the chair back again, but this time, distracted by Troy and the other dead shit, he did so too eagerly. The chair toppled backward. He had a chance, he realized in mid-air, perhaps too late. A chance, if he threw all of his body weight into it, to perhaps smash the chair to matchsticks and escape.
To his delight, he heard a crunch as the chair hit the floor. He jerked his head up in time to avoid bashing himself unconscious. (Who knew how he would wake up after that.) He tried to shake himself loose of the wire bonds and broken chair parts, when a bolt of lightning passed through the cloudless night sky and struck his ankle.
He lay there, silent for a moment, attempting to regain his breath as best he could through only his nose. The white-hot shaft of pain had been as surprising as it was unbearable. He slowly flexed his arms, then his belly, then finally his legs, which made the lightning strike again. This time, though it had been no less agonizing, he had been a bit more prepared for it. The crunching sound had not been his chair smashing apart. It had been his ankle.
This was bad. He sat there, doing nothing but concentrating on his breathing and wondering what he could possibly do to escape this nightmarescape when a shadow fell over him. He glanced up. May was standing there, her thumb newly bandaged.
“You’re proving to be quite an inconvenience, Madam Buttercup.”
“I’m not a corpse, you bitch! I’m not a doll!”
“Shh, shh, Madam Buttercup,” she said, running her hands through Kenny’s hair and sending a shiver down his back, “I know, I know, ‘I don’t belong here, please let me go. I’m alive, I’m not a monster, wah wah wah.’ I’ve heard it all before.”
May was tossing a long Bungee rope over a ceiling rafter. Kenny lay stock-still as a cloud of warmth spread across his crotch. She was clearly insane—or mentally disabled—but she knew he was alive. Maybe Troy had been alive when she had caught him. Maybe every corpse that had ever been made to endure one of her mad parties had started out alive. She attached the Bungee cord to the back of his chair.
Kenny shook his head feverishly as she began to yank on the makeshift pulley. He began shrieking as the pain in his ankle reached a crescendo and rushed over him like a wave. When the white spots disappeared from his eyes and he could see again, he was breathing raggedly but sitting back at his place at the table. And May was sitting on his lap.
“I’m lonely now, Madam Buttercup. I’m lonely since my caretaker left. He said he was coming back, but he didn’t. So you’re going to keep me company. You and all my other dollies.”
“I’m a human being,” he said, slowly, hoping it would get through.
“There’s just…one problem,” she said. “You’re not a proper doll. Dolls don’t have these.”
He shrieked in pain as she grabbed his crotch, crushing his pecker and balls thoughtlessly in one hand. She hopped out of his lap and walked over to pick up a well-used and naked Ken doll from a nearby coffee table. She waggled the hunk of plastic in front of Kenny’s watering eyes.
“You see?” she asked, “Dolls are smooth ’round the bend. You can’t be a proper doll unless you’re smooth. ’Round the bend.”
As he began hyperventilating and screaming and railing against his bonds for all he was worth, ignoring the overwhelming pain in his ankle, she snatched the cake knife from the table.
A moment later he was smooth ’round the bend. The blood spurted from his open crotch at first, whipping the cannibal corpses into a frenzy as it spattered into their tea cups and against their perfectly coiffed wigs and faces. The arterial bleeding slowed, but the blood continued to seep out of him, and with it, his life. Cigarette burns filled his field of vision and he began to black out. When his eyes opened again he’d be a perfect doll.
3 Rocking C by JL Curtis
“Rocking C, Rocking C, this is Johnny, how copy?” A burst of static followed, then the call was repeated: “Rocking C, Rocking C, this is Johnny, how copy?”
Old Tom, pulling his suspenders up over his shoulders, limped into the parlor-cum-radio-room, grumping, “Can’t even take a piss in peace…” Flopping into the chair in front of the desk and propping his cane against the wall, he punched the microphone bar. “Sheriff, this is Rocking C, go head.”
“Rocking C, you’ve got fifteen, maybe twenty shamblers heading down fourteen sixty-nine toward your north forty. I can see some steers up in the corner of that pasture,” the sheriff said.
Old Tom cussed under his breath, then keyed the mic. “Gonna take me fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to get up there. Me, Tommy, and Olivia are the only three here.” Spinning the chair around, he bellowed, “Tommy! Olivia! Muster!”
Sheriff Coffee answered resignedly, “I’ll come in behind them. We can pincer them between us. How you folks sitting for gas?”
Spinning back around, Tom mumbled, “Damn kids. Never can find ’em when you need ’em.” Keying the mic, he said, “We’ve got a couple hundred gallons left. Sure wish you had a diesel. We’re good on that, probably two thousand gallons left in the tanker.”
“Where is everybody else?”
“Micah, Dot, Jose, and Eric are up on the rail line by Panhandle, trying to get some propane out of that tanker you spotted last month. Mrs. C, John, Bruce, and Tammy are up on two eighty-seven with Box H and Diamond J; they’re trying to hit that warehouse, if they can get in and out without setting off a bunch of damn zombies. They want to see what’s in it. Might be food.”
Tommy, thirteen, gangly, with a shock of straw-colored hair sticking out in all directions, came sliding in the door, “What’s up?”
“Where’s Olivia? We got shamblers coming up on the north forty.”
“She’s feeding the goats. We gonna go?”
Old Tom levered himself up. “Yep, go get her. ARs only. Two mags only. We’re gettin’ low on ammo.” Tommy grinned, scrambling back out the door, as Old Tom limped into the library and now armory. Looking out through the barred windows, he noticed some rust on the welds and shook his head. “Damn shoddy work. Shoulda taken more time on them.”
Reaching up, he took down two AR-15s, checked that they were unloaded and safed, and pulled four magazin
es out of the filing cabinet. He stumped down the hall to the bedroom he and Bruce shared, reached into the chest of drawers, and slung his old single action around his hips. He buckled the gun belt, pulled a box of 200gr long Colt wadcutters out of the drawer, and opened the box. He loaded one, skipped one, then loaded four more and slipped the single action into the holster, flipping the thong over the hammer to keep it tight in the holster.
Limping back to the library, he found Olivia, also thirteen and starting to blossom into what he was sure was going to be a beautiful woman, if she lived that long. Black haired, sloe eyed, and dusky skinned, she’d definitely gotten her beauty from her mother, Juanita, God rest her soul. Thankfully, she hadn’t seen her mother turn, since it’d happened in town. Sheriff Coffee said he thought she’d died in the fire that burned half the town that night. Old Tom glanced up at the calendar, thinking, That was exactly a year ago today. Which means I broke my leg six months ago. Shit… At least I’m still alive.
Olivia smiled shyly as she racked the bolt on the AR, rolled it and confirmed the chamber was clear, “We’re it?”
“Yes, we are, Ollie. Ain’t nobody left but us. Sheriff Coffee is going to meet us up there. You got your eyes and ears?”
Olivia pointed to the bag sitting on the chair, “Mine and Tommy’s too. He never remembers to bring his. Are we taking the wagon or the truck?”
“Truck. It’ll give y’all some height, and, once you’re in, ain’t nobody getting in there with ya.”
Olivia replied ruefully, “But it’s going to be hot and noisy when we start shooting.”
“I know. But I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to either one of y’all. Now let’s go! Move it!”
Olivia slung the AR, picked up her bag, and ran out the door. “I’ll give Tommy his stuff and we’ll be locked in by the time you get there.”
“Smart-ass kids,” Old Tom mumbled under his breath, as he grabbed the keys off the board, limping out behind her. Tommy was standing at the back of the truck, AR at low ready, as they walked out. Olivia had also loaded her AR, and was scanning back and forth as she walked slowly across the yard. Old Tom slipped the thong on the single action asking, “Truck clear?”
Apoc Series (Vol. 1): Whispers of the Apoc [Tales From The Zombie Apocalypse] Page 4