The Way of All Flesh

by Tim Waggoner

  His people would get inside, they would confront the demons, and regardless of how many losses they took, they would prevail in the end, for they far outnumbered their foe. Bellies would be full to bursting this day, and once he freed Sarah, the two of them would join in the feast. His stomach cramped with hunger so intense it nearly doubled him over. He pictured the Gyre lying at the center of his being, an insanely vast gulf of Nothing, ever ravenous, never sated. Eat now, it seemed to say to him. Eat, eat, EAT! Without realizing it, he started to turn toward the castle, but then he stopped himself. Sarah needed him. There would be time enough to feed the void inside him later.

  He sensed Simon watching him more closely than ever before, but the boy said nothing. David forgot about him and continued on to the small building where Sarah was being held.

  It was fashioned from the same insectile substance as the castle, but its dome-like shape was far simpler. Crimson rain coated the structure, giving it the appearance of a reverse chocolate-covered cherry. The thought of food made David’s stomach clench—EAT NOW!—and once more he had to fight to keep from turning aside and running to the demon stronghold. He could almost taste the warm, wet meat, feel it sliding down his throat…

  He shook his head to clear it, and in that moment, he sensed that someone was following him. Not Simon—the boy walked by his side. Someone else.

  He glanced back over his shoulder and saw the female demon coming toward him. She wore a poncho made of a substance that resembled lizard skin, just as the male had. He assumed it was designed to keep the blood rain off her. She held her strange weapon at the ready, but she wasn’t aiming it at him, and he chose to take that as a positive sign. She seemed unconcerned that his followers were attempting to break into her people’s stronghold—certainly she was making no attempt to stop them—but then, she was a demon. How could he possibly hope to understand the inhuman drives that motivated her?

  He felt dizzy then, his vision blurred, and he found himself looking not at a white-fleshed, sharp-toothed monster, but at…

  “Kate?” he said.

  His sister stood in the rain—plain, old-fashioned water-falling-from-the-sky rain—and he heard her say, “David?”

  Then his vision cleared and the demon returned. He looked at her for another moment, unsure what he’d seen. Finally, he growled, “Just don’t get in my way,” then he turned back toward the dome.

  “Family reunions are so touching,” Simon said.

  “Fuck off,” David muttered. He was beginning to realize there was no way he would ever be able to tell what was real and what wasn’t, not for certain. All he could do was keep plodding forward and hope for the best.

  “And that, in a nutshell, is the entire history of Life,” Simon said. “The sad part is, you know what’s waiting at the end of it all.”

  The Gyre.

  Fuck it. He was here, now, and Sarah needed him. Nothing else mattered.

  He reached the door of the dome. It had a craggy handle, and he took hold of it and pulled the door open.

  “Showtime,” Simon said.

  David stepped inside.

  Kate wasn’t sure what had happened. For an instant, she’d seen David as human once more, although he’d been covered in what looked like blood. The boy stood next to him, clean and dry, grinning as if he were enjoying himself immensely. David looked at her—no, more than that—he saw her…and he spoke her name. Then the illusion—or hallucination or vision or whatever the hell it was—ended, and once again she found herself looking at a zombie. He moaned and snarled, almost as if he were attempting to speak, then turned and continued heading for the shed, limping on his injured foot.

  She followed after him.

  The groundskeeper’s shed had a pair of swinging doors, and a length of chain dangled from one of the handles, an open padlock hanging from a link. This close, she could see that the windows were black, as if they’d been covered from the inside, or maybe painted. The doors were closed, but after a bit of fumbling, David grabbed hold of one of the handles and pulled open a door. He lurched inside, and she hurried to keep up with him.

  The smell hit her first, a strong odor of bleach that couldn’t quite mask a reptile-house stink. The interior was illuminated by a battery-powered lantern, and she saw the landscaping equipment the shed was intended to house had been pushed toward the back.

  In the forefront was a workbench covered with neat rows of tools, and a table on which lay…lay… Her mind refused to go there, not yet, and so she took in the remaining details. In one corner lay an armless, legless zombie, her chest and stomach cut open to reveal her internal organs. She writhed as if trying to sit up, her mouth opening and closing as if she were a fish out of water. Another female zombie hung from chains bolted to the ceiling. Like the first, she was naked and had no limbs, but her chest and abdomen—while covered with dozens of oozing slashes—remained intact. Her stump wounds dripped black ichor, and Kate knew she’d been operated on recently.

  David stood in front of this zombie, staring at her, and with a start of horror, Kate understood why. She recognized this one. It was Sarah, David’s ex-wife. And from the looks of things, David recognized her too.

  Kate saw Sarah’s arms and legs lying in another corner, the one on the other side of the table she didn’t want to look at too closely yet. Nicholas stood next to the table, watching David gaze upon his mutilated ex-wife. The smile on Nicholas’s face was one of utter contentment and peace.

  “This is wonderful,” he said softly, as if speaking to himself. “It’s like coming home.”

  Her subconscious mind screamed for her to face what was lying on the table, and although she really, really didn’t want to, she forced herself to look. Marie lay naked and spread-eagled, held to the table’s surface by barbed wire encircling her wrists and ankles. The barbs cut deep into her skin, and blood oozed from the wounds. Just as with Sarah, cuts crisscrossed her body—some long and deep, some short and shallow—but as horrible as it was to see her new lover mutilated like this, the zombie head resting on the table between her legs, held in place by silver duct tape and chewing savagely at the ruin that had been her vagina, like a hound worrying a bone, nearly pushed her over the edge to insanity.

  Nicholas turned to face Kate, and his smile broadened. “Sorry if it seems a bit overdone, but the irony was just too delicious to resist.” He glanced at the furiously chomping head. “Looks like Marie’s cunt was too.”

  And as bad as this was, there was one thing worse yet. The blood oozing from Marie’s cuts and pouring like water from her ravaged sex was black as tar. Her skin had taken on a leathery texture and yellowish cast, and her eyes were clouded white.

  Those who had been spared Blacktide’s touch during the initial outbreak weren’t always immune to later infection, especially not when bitten by a zombie. Once infected, some changed slowly, but others—Marie among them, it seemed—changed swiftly.

  “Look on the bright side,” Nicholas said. “Now she has the chance to understand zombies from an insider’s point of view.” He laughed.

  Kate didn’t hesitate. She raised her 9mm and started firing.

  “Sarah?”

  David had to say her name once more before her eyes focused on him.

  She mouthed his name, but no sound came out. The scar around her throat explained why. She was concentration-camp-survivor thin, her hair was filthy and matted, her flesh was covered head to toe with cuts, and blood dripped from her arm and leg stumps. But despite the awful injuries she had sustained, she was alive, and he was glad for that much. He looked between her legs and saw that the place from which their children had emerged had become a blackened mass of tissue that resembled nothing so much as scorched marshmallow.

  Sarah saw where he was looking. She nodded weakly to the workbench—an arrangement of bones upon which rested a variety of bizarre metal implements—and David followed her gaze to an object shaped like a silver lizard. Its mouth was blackened, as if by flames.
>
  “It’s a blowtorch really. It just looks different to us now. I’m not sure why.”

  David turned toward the voice. A young woman lay on an obsidian table that seemed to have grown from the floor. She was bound to it by barbed wire, and another woman’s head rested between her legs, held in place by strips of tanned hide. The head was savaging the woman’s vagina with her teeth, but she seemed unaffected by this. Standing next to her was the male demon he’d seen outside—with Kate—with the female. He was garbed in a lizard-skin poncho and held one of the demons’ bone-and-meat guns in his hand.

  “You’re Kate’s brother, David,” the woman said. Then she frowned. “Who’s the guy with you?”

  Simon executed a mocking bow. “He likes to see me as the image of a bully he knew in high school. The boy was named Simon. You’re welcome to call me that too, if you like…Marie.”

  The woman’s frown deepened into a scowl. “I don’t know what you are, but you’re not a zombie.”

  “Zombie?” David said. He felt a sudden pain between his eyes, like a white-hot drill bit boring a bloody hole into his brain. Too much was happening at once, and he couldn’t process it all.

  “Not only is she exceptionally intelligent, she turned a short time ago,” Simon said. “Give her an hour for the metamorphosis to fully take hold, and her mind will be as fuzzy as yours. But you don’t have time to worry about that—or contemplate how you’re going to schtupp your ex when her glory hole’s been sealed shut. Things are going to start moving fast now, and everything depends on what you do in the next few minutes.”

  Before David could ask Simon what the fuck he was talking about, the female demon raised her weapon with a swiftness that would have done a Wild West gunfighter proud and fired at the male. He was ready, though, and moving just as swiftly, he dove for the floor before the first round could strike him. The bullet smacked into the dome’s carapace wall instead, and it was followed by several more as she unloaded her clip. She seemed to be unaware that each of her rounds missed her intended target, almost as if she was firing on autopilot. She didn’t adjust her aim and she didn’t stop squeezing the trigger until her weapon was empty, and even then she kept trying to fire, her weapon clicking ineffectively.

  When the male demon realized she was out of ammo, he stood, leveled his weapon at her and fired once. The round struck the female in the chest, and the impact knocked her back several steps. She swayed and turned to face the woman on the table.

  “Kate!” the woman shouted, and then the demon fell to the floor.

  The creature landed on her side, and David could still see her face. He watched as it flickered back and forth between its demon aspect and the image of his sister. Could that thing really be Kate? He tried reaching out to her through their link, but he felt nothing. Either this wasn’t his sister…or she was dead.

  He glared at the male demon. “You did this—all of this.”

  The demon’s crimson eyes blazed brighter, and his lips drew back from his sharp teeth in a hideous parody of a smile. He spoke an alien language in a hissing tongue, raised his weapon lightning fast and fired.

  Sarah’s head snapped back as a chunk of her skull disappeared. Her eyes rolled white, her head lolled forward, and her limbless body swayed back and forth on the chains that held her.

  The demon said something else in his unintelligible language, and then he laughed. Keeping his weapon trained on David, he walked to the workbench and regarded the instruments displayed there. After a moment he selected one that looked roughly like a hatchet made from a row of sharpened deer antlers lashed together with strips of rawhide affixed to a humerus. He tucked his gun somewhere inside his lizard-skin poncho, and then, gripping his nightmarish hatchet in his clawed hand, came rushing at David.

  David held no weapon, but even if he had, the demon moved far too fast for him to have used it. He could only stand there as the demon brought the hatchet down in a vicious arc, slamming the antler points into the side of his neck where Lizzie had nuzzled him on the way to the hospital. The wound had only partially healed, and while David felt no pain, the hatchet sank deep, sending up a gout of blood. His left arm went instantly numb and hung limply at his side, nothing but useless meat. The demon roared with laughter and kept hacking at the wound until David’s arm came free and fell to the floor.

  “One point for Demon Douche Bag,” Simon said. The youth stepped back several feet to give the two combatants more room to fight, David guessed. Or maybe it was because he simply wanted a better vantage point from which to view the action.

  Blood gushed from David’s newly created stump, but he didn’t care. The injury hurt, but not as much as it should have, and so what if he’d lost an arm? He had another. As swiftly as the demon moved, he could’ve decapitated David, but he hadn’t. The only reason David could think of for why the demon hadn’t done so was because he was into the whole cat-and-mouse thing. Big mistake. David marshaled his concentration, focused his entire will on his remaining arm, and when the demon lunged forward to strike another blow, David curled his fingers into a fist and pistoned his arm straight at the demon’s throat.

  Fist and Adam’s apple collided with a meaty smack. A wet clicking noise issued from the demon’s throat, and he dropped his weapon. He put his hand to his neck as he stagger-stepped backward, wheezing as he tried to breathe.

  “And one point for the One-Armed Wonder,” Simon said.

  The woman on the table—Marie, Simon had called her—struggled against her bonds, but all she managed to do was make her wrists and ankles bleed more. The head duct-taped between her thighs continued munching away, but if it bothered her, she gave no indication.

  “You can’t beat him like this!” she said. “He’s faster than you, and his mind’s clear!”

  Simon looked at her. “You know something, honey? You make a lousy cheerleader.”

  The demon massaged his throat. He managed to draw in enough breath to speak, and alien words spewed from his mouth. David wondered what he was saying.

  “I can translate,” Simon said. “He’s saying that when he was finished fucking your ex-wife for the last time, he used a blowtorch to seal her cunt closed so his sperm wouldn’t leak out. He was curious to see if he could create hybrid babies. It’s an interesting idea, but it has no scientific basis.” He paused for a moment. “Not yet, anyway. I’ll have to give it some thought.”

  The demon continued speaking in his hissing tongue.

  Simon rolled his eyes. “And now he’s going on about how he’s the true avatar of Death and how your kind are nothing more than two-legged carrion eaters, with no more dignity or majesty than cockroaches. Boo-fucking-hoo.” He curled his fingers then shook his hand back and forth to mime jacking off.

  The demon went on ranting in his alien language, his voice growing stronger as he got his breath back. He went to the workbench, and David didn’t need Simon to interpret this action. The demon was going to select another weapon.

  “You’re a zombie,” Marie said. “You know, like in the movies? I’m one now too. I don’t know how or why it happened exactly, but I think we—meaning humanity—somehow changed ourselves. Maybe we had some kind of species-wide death wish or something.”

  The demon took his time sorting through his tools. He kept sneaking glances at David, but as long as David made no move toward him, he seemed to be in no hurry. Cat and mouse, David thought. As long as he behaved like a good little rodent, he could buy some time. But time to do what?

  “Listen to me, David,” Marie said. “Try to focus on what I’m saying. It’s…it’s starting to get hard for me to think, and if I don’t explain this to you now, soon I won’t…won’t…”

  “Be able to,” Simon finished for her.

  “Fuck off,” she snapped, and then turned to look at David once more. “I believe it’s possible for zombies to…to become human again. All they have to do is…is will themselves to change back.”

  Zombies? David had encountered a
ton of crazy since returning to awareness, but this was the most insane thing yet. People didn’t turn into movie monsters. It was…was…

  Once more, he remembered that unseasonably warm day in March, remembered playing Frisbee on the lawn with Steve and Lizzie, remembered Lizzie changing, sinking her teeth into her mother’s neck, tearing away a chunk of flesh. Remembered his last thought before the change took him away too. It’s beginning. Almost as if he’d expected what would come next, perhaps even in a sense welcomed it.

  Suddenly Marie didn’t seem so crazy anymore.

  Simon looked at her. “Seriously? Even if he could somehow reverse the change simply through sheer force of will—and I’m not saying he can—how would that help him?”

  “He’d be able to think clearly again,” Marie said. “He could move at normal speed.”

  “And he’d bleed to death from the giant fucking hole where his arm used to be attached,” Simon said. “The only reason he hasn’t keeled over yet is because he is a zombie.”

  Marie opened her mouth as if she intended to say something, but then she frowned and closed it again.

  David thought of the two versions of the world he’d been seeing. Which was real?

  “In a manner of speaking, both are,” Simon said. “Perception is reality, and all that. But right now you have more important things to deal with than an existential crisis.”

  He nodded toward the demon, who’d finally decided on his next weapon—a mace made from a baby’s skull encased in a solid-glass globe, with a section of an adult’s spine serving as a handle. But David narrowed his eyes, and the mace now looked like a rubber mallet with an ordinary wooden handle, and the demon became a man with empty eyes and a cold smile. The man may have looked human, but those eyes told the truth. Regardless of his appearance, he was still a demon.