Uschi!

by Tony Ungawa

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. It’s a very negative habit you have, best thing. And the sooner we cure you of it the better you and I both will be. But you especially will be the better.”

  “I guess I don’t know no better.”

  “I think you do,” she told him. “But it’s just much easier for you to hate on and talk bad about yourself than to actually face whatever problem has put you in such a fit. You won’t let yourself be confident and try to do anything to make things better. You’d rather wallow in self-pity and self-abuse than go to work and risk any kind of failure. You keep yourself closed up and unwilling to partake of the world happening around you.”

  He didn’t have any answer for that. It was true and he knew it and she wasn’t going to let him avoid it.

  Attention returned to the honky tonk undead in the bathtub.

  “There’s sure as shit nothing worse y’all can do to me now, I’ll tell you that,” he said.

  “Oh, tasty-fangy, what famous last words.”

  Along with the washing her hair, Uschi had used her time in the kitchen to assemble a tool for herself. She had unscrewed the wooden handle to a toilet plunger and taped to the end of it a rolled and fat stack of The Watchtower magazine.

  A born hoarder, Denny rarely if ever threw anything away, so whenever the Jehovah Witnesses came to the Big Kahuna grounds for door to door preaching, he’d take a copy of their Jesus loving pamphlet and just toss it into any ol’ pile of periodicals. Besides copies of Starlog, D-Cup, Filmfax, Gorzone, Juggs and Bust Out throughout the place, there was a plentiful supply of God rags given to him in hopes of saving his soul.

  Uschi brought her construction down and brushed the magazine half lightly along the exposed base of Li’l Bocephus’s neck, drawing a line across his hairline. Where it touched the skin he instantly smoked and blistered and globs of sizzling melted flesh drooled off of him.

  There was pain. A pain unlike any Li’l Bocephus had ever experienced either in death or the days of a pulse and ability to acquire a sunburn. This was a hurting more than God and government both ought to allow, a tremendous searing napalm pleasant agony.

  He spit out his dip of snuff and screamed all he could give. Li’l Bocephus bucked once, elevating himself out of the tub high enough to slam a hip into the mounted on the wall soap dish and hammer it to rubble. Broken limbs uselessly flapped about like the flippers on a baby walrus unable to remove itself from dry land, and his whole body shook as energetically as an old electric football game’s metal field. His trembling skull caused the faucet spigot to quake and the pipes in the trailer’s wall to rattle.

  He eventually found the gumption for this comment: “That was … Oh shit … That was so wrong in so many different ways.”

  Jehovah Witnesses generally made it a practice to bless each copy of their magazine; thus The Watchtower was transformed into a type of low rent holy object. It held the same destructive powers against a vampire as did a crucifix or holy water. The pain those pages visited upon Li’l Bocephus’s wretched carcass was literally biblical in proportion. The hellish energies that animated Uschi and gave her her winning personality operated on a different frequency than those that kept Li’l Bocephus and others of his like functioning, making her immune to the burning touch of mundane holy instruments.

  She dragged her torture device down the length of his back. It cut him open as if a surgical laser were being used in the procedure, burning away his western shirt and scorching a four-inch deep furrow into his meat. Boiling and bubbling parts of him ran off of his body in sloppy rivulets, and what parts of his spinal column that The Watchtower came in contact with were reduced to shriveled and steaming clumps of charcoal ash.

  More screaming. Li’l Bocephus sounded positively girlish with how high-pitched his yelling could reach. He was freely weeping from his one eye by now.

  “Please stop doing that,” he begged.

  She parked her ass down on the side of the tub, posing herself like a ’40s cheesecake pinup model. She stroked Li’l Bocephus’s hair and this seemed to calm him some. The shaking decreased and the pipes rattling quieted. Then she was reaching inside his vertebra damage and clacking the tips of her fingernails against the parts of bone that had avoided being scorched. Uschi asked with a hellcat purr in her voice, “Where is your nest? Where are the rest of the Salem’s Lot rejects spending the daylight hours? And don’t bother trying to tell me any stories. I know things such as you like to keep together like a pack whenever manageable. There are more of you out there. I want to know where we can find them. Tell me. Tell me real quick.”

  Not waiting for any answers, she held the roll of magazines against his forehead and cooked away his sinus area. The smell of burning Li’l Bocephus reminded Denny of bacon cut from a diseased hog staying too long on a hot skillet. His brow in under a minute was reduced to a smoldering and blackened crust ringed crater.

  “Mapache,” whimpered Li’l Bocephus, ruined brow trickling in watery streams down his impaled on a faucet face and dripping off the chin like hot melted wax. “We’ve been spending the last few months camping out in the Mapache Thicket. We’re just off of Nyman Road, in spitting distance of this old abandoned goat ranch. We’re pretty out in the open, not trying to hide ourselves from anyone.”

  “I know about Mapache,” said Denny. “It’s just a couple of miles away from here, toward the east. It’s this undeveloped patch of wilderness that goes avoided by a good deal of people. There’s been gossip about it for as long as I can recall. They say it’s haunted and where the unnatural tends to thrive. Story goes lots of folks have wandered in there and never been heard from again.”

  “How many are left of you?” asked Uschi.

  “Not counting myself, only four. But they are the four strongest of us. Especially the sisters.” Thinking of the sisters suddenly had Li’l Bocephus rediscovering his smile; it came loaded with a dash of that old time mean-cockiness disposition he had believed lost to him. Nothing positive could come from a shitheel such as this finding his good humor again. “Oooo, titty bitch and retardo, y’all aren’t going want to tangle with them two sisters we got. They can do violence like no one else I ever seen.”

  Uschi grinned. “They sound like my kind of girls.”

  “You’re chickenshit compared to them.”

  “That a fact?”

  “Fact.”

  The storm was starting to peter out, the thunder and lightning on the wane and the rainfall down to a polite shower. Give it another half an hour or maybe less and it should all be over for the night.

  “Well, fangface, let me take a moment here and demonstrate to you just how chickenshit a zombie hellspawn such as my little ol’ big-busted self can be. I would like to dedicate this next act of obscene cruelty to all the lovers out there in the world. Especially the handsome one standing next to me with the superhero tallywhacker that delights me so.”

  Denny made with a bashful one side of his mouth smile. “Aw, that’s sweet of you to say, sugar cube.”

  Over time the exposure to Li’l Bocephus’s unholiness had contaminated his clothing with the same evil that possessed his body. Uschi positioned her torture device in the general vicinity of Li’l Bocephus’s ass. The seat of his britches was eaten away to smoke and inconsequential cinders after only the briefest contact with the collection of magazines. The Hanes underwear beneath went the same way, the heat produced sufficient enough to melt the elastic in the waistband of the briefs and fuse it with his blistering hide. Buttocks were fully revealed.

  “Time we said good-bye to that virgin ass.”

  Li’l Bocephus was hip to the situation. The homosexual attack threats from earlier were becoming reality. “Don’t!” His behind was in mortal jeopardy. His being a man was on the verge of being erased. Not this. Not anything like this. Please. Why doesn’t she just eat him like a good zombie should do?

  “Don’t worry too much,” she said, and joined him in the tub, climbing
in behind him. “You won’t feel a thing but for extraordinary agony.”

  Uschi reached between her legs and moved the crotch of her panties over to one side. The plunger half of the torture implement she inserted inside her vagina. Pretty much a whole half of the handle’s length was swallowed. A bubbly, loud queef she cut as it slid in. She locked down on it, tight as a steel trap. Nothing was going to budge from there until she wished it.

  “Don’t. Don’t! DON’T!”

  Li’l Bocephus’s cheeks were clenched together and his sphincter puckered up tighter than the vacuum seal on a Tupperware bowl. It did him no help. Uschi pushed with her hips and drove forward, and the Jehovah’s Witness dildo bore right through, burning its way into his asshole.

  The potency of her pelvic thrust was pure superhuman. The penetration was deep and the cornholing had commenced. She went at it hard and fast. Push, push, push, push, push, push. Uschi was going at this business like she was apeshit to set some new world’s record.

  “Looky here,” she was telling Li’l Bocephus. She never deviated from her stride, riding the country boy bloodsucker like she was barrel racing at the rodeo. “Looky here at this. I got you. I got you so good. You’re ass is mine to do with as I see fit.”

  Denny could only stand there and stare. Wolfman’s got nards; this was anal mistreatment for the history books.

  The holy dildo mercilessly obliterated whatever it came in contact with up inside Li’l Bocephus. Its influence was a fast moving poison spreading through his whole system. The butt cheeks deteriorated to loose and mud-like goo that each time Uschi’s groin slapped into, it splattered a putrid mess along the sides of the bathtub. His back turned boiled lobster red and developed swollen pustules that then popped and spewed scalding hot Li’l Bocephus pus magma. Entrails and organs were reduced to sewage slush that gushed from his ruptured open stomach and all spilled to the tub’s bottom and swirled down the drain. The muscles in Li’l Bocephus’s face fell into ruin, collapsed and withered terribly. His when cousins marry good looks became as handsome as an old timer’s shriveled and wrinkled scrotum.

  One final thrust, then Uschi dismounted from him and with good humor and dignity exited the tub. She stood on the bathmat, dripping from her crotch gross vampire slop. The roll of magazines on the end of the stick sticking out of her snatch had caught fire sometime while in Li’l Bocephus. A little flickering orange fireball, bright and black smoke making, sparked into being from the holy on unholy contact.

  “Oh,” she said when noticing it and uncorked herself and dropped her torture tool in the toilet. The bowl’s water extinguished the flame with a quick sizzle.

  Li’l Bocephus’s one eye was now a blood gorged scarlet orb that had grown too big to rest comfortably in his head. It ballooned from the socket, as big as and steaming hot like a baked potato fresh from the oven. His violated and close to three-quarters dissolved person hung from the tub’s faucet, loose as wet laundry on the line.

  “You done homsexualized me,” he pitifully moaned in his good ol’ country boy drawl. “I did not enjoy any part of that unsavory business not one tiny bit. I hate y’all fucking people so goddamn much. I swear … I honestly do.”

  He and his dismal condition were soundly ignored.

  “We’re going hunting, ain’t we?” said Denny. “You want to take me vampire killing. Gadzooks, you intend to Van Helsing me. This is your master plan? What you think is going to macho me out more than John Milius on a gun range?”

  Uschi hungered for comfort food. She helped herself to the bicep muscle in one of Li’l Bocephus’s arms, tearing it off the bone. She bit into it as if she were enjoying a ripe peach and spoke to Denny as the colorful gore circled her lips and hung in stringy, glistening yarns from her chin. “When you put it like that it may not sound like the most mastery of master plans, but, yeah, in a nutshell, best thing, that’s what we gonna do starting bright and early tomorrow morning. So be sure before we turn in tonight to set the alarm for seven o’clock.”

  He wasn’t going to argue with his darling returned from the dead lady. Denny only stated the obvious to her. “You’re going to get me killed.”

  “Poppycock. I will be with you, best thing, every step of the way. And I’m the best protection you could ever hope to have. I would sooner have a breast reduction surgery and give up eating people than see any harm come to you. We will have sexy fun and ass puckering adventure and lots and lots of lovely murdering. It’s going to be positively grand. The human adventure is only just beginning.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Get It Quick convenience store was inside the boundaries of the Mapache Thicket. This was the country, with mostly open pastureland and grazing livestock for company on this lonely part of two-lane road. The establishment came equipped with four self-serve gas pumps—unleaded, super unleaded, premium unleaded and diesel—and this was one of those godawful businesses where you had to come inside and pay before you could begin to fill your tank. Except for the metal doorframe, the entire front of the store was glass, and lit up glowing neon beer signs occupied nearly every available inch of space like electrified graffiti. Small but well stocked, the inside of the Get It Quick featured everything from brake fluid to tunafish, dishwasher detergent to ladies sanitary napkins. A large metal sign bolted to the front of the cashier stand in back of the place informed in both English and Spanish THE CASHIER DOES NOT KNOW THE COMBINATION TO THE STORE SAFE. The smells of lottery ticket ink and microwaved burritos forever dominated the atmosphere in here.

  The lone employee working there tonight was sitting on a bar stool behind the counter, wasting time and life span on a fat girls porno magazine he was “borrowing” from the adult reading material newsstand with him behind the counter.

  This was Gator. His eyes were bland and vacuous like a ventriloquist dummy’s and his hair he kept cut short and shaped in a Moe Howard chili bowl haircut. In the back pocket of Gator’s dark slacks was his price labeling gun, and the feel of it pressing against his left ass cheek continuously kept reminding him there was work to be doing around these parts. There was a corner aisle display of canned dog food that required a ten-cent mark up. Yes, he knew he best be getting on it, but Gator was just in too much of a lazy mood right then and there to snap into high flying dog food pricing action.

  A small thirteen-inch TV set was sitting on the counter, in close proximity to the cash register, and it was showing an old, old Barnaby Jones episode. Special guest-star William Shatner was the obvious fiendish killer, so that left Gator with marginal if any interest in the program.

  Soon he could hear the racket made by a weird sounding engine. A weak, bad carburetor putt-putt-putting. It was too small for an automobile or motorcycle. More suited for a go-cart or a kid’s moped. Gator took his eyeballs away from a particularly graphic full-page spread of a three-hundred sixty pounds Nebraska farm girl who was more than happy to give the world an especially up close and personal examination of her hairy like a cat’s belly where babies come from and sat up straight on the barstool. He turned down the volume on the television. The weird engine sounds were steadily growing closer.

  He came off the stool. A powerful curiosity had taken hold of him. What was this all about? He approached the storefront, looking outside. He watched as a going at it in third gear riding lawn mower, its twin headlights doing puny little to cut through the evening’s darkness and the disengaged mower deck raised maybe at best six inches off the road, pulled into the Get It Quick’s parking lot and stopped beside the gas pumps.

  It was a Murray brand mower, dirty and its paint job sun-faded, driven by a woman trying to work the wheel while balancing a small child perched on her lap.

  After a brief hunt, she found the key and switched off the engine. She hadn’t considered throttling down and there was a backfire as loud as a shotgun blast. Both her and the kid jumped and wailed and had a short crying fit over that. Some effort and figuring things through, but in time they disembarked safely enou
gh. They held hands as they walked together to the store.

  The woman wore a man’s western cut shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a down to the ankles pioneer dress skirt that did nothing to complement the shape of her ass. The child was a little boy in Spider-Man pajamas and a Dallas Cowboys football helmet that swallowed his head whole and wobbled on top of him like the dome on a bobble head doll.

  By the time the door was opening, Gator was back comfortably on his stool seat. He put the dirty fat girls periodical away under the counter. “Well howdy.” He smiled at the two of them and watched as they were approaching the counter. “Good to have y’all come in. I was hoping for some company to come around for a while now. Tell me how I can help y’all tonight.”

  The woman’s hair was long and straight and dark and parted down the center in a beatnik coffeehouse poet girl style. She had recently been on the receiving end of a brutal beating. She looked just godawful. A considerable fat lip to her mouth and a turnip purple bruising had swollen her left eye shut; red welts of differing sizes pocked her forehead and much of her face. Only recently had she stopped bleeding from her nose, the red stuff dried and crusty around her nostrils and staining the front of her shirt. There was a tangible sadness about her that filled the immediate air surrounding her. She seemed frightened, insecure and terribly fragile right this moment. Gator imagined that if he were to only breathe on her too hard she’d snap in two like a Popsicle stick.

  It took a spell before she could muster up the initiative to speak to him. “Sir, did you see what we drove up in?” Her voice was sounding rough, strained and small. “The lawn mower?”

  “Uh, yeah, missy, I did happen to notice that.”

  “Its gauge is sitting on the E. I don’t know much about these kinds of machines. Do you by any chance happen to know how much gas it holds?”

  “Oh, I’d imagine three or four gallons worth. Give or take a share.”