by Tim Curran
The Mad Hatter took out a carving knife. He slit Boyle’s throat and the blood really started to run. “This will drain our pig a lot faster,” he said. “About five, ten minutes and we can commence work on him.”
Butch and the Mad Hatter lit cigarettes, chatted about the weather, all the rain they’d been getting.
Slaughter felt a greasy, heaving sludge crawl up his throat. Felt his mouth go hot, wet, and sweet. He pushed past the Hatter and Butch, vomiting into the toilet with great shaking spasms until there was nothing left and he was just coughing and gagging and spitting.
Butch patted him on the shoulder. “It’s always tough the first time,” he said. “You’ll be okay. Now your cherry is popped. Ain’t that right, Sean?”
The Mad Hatter laughed and then sang:
“On looking up, on looking down,
She saw a dead man on the ground;
And from his nose unto his chin,
The worms crawled out, the worms crawled in.”
Butch and the Hatter tossed their cigarettes into the toilet, flushed them, along with what Slaughter had deposited in there.
What came next was even worse.
Butch, who was now Dirty Mary with jiggling bared breasts, untied the tool bundle and rolled it out flat. In little pockets there were meat cleavers, butcher knives, steak knives, medical instruments, hammers, hacksaws, bone snips. He/she told Slaughter to strip off Boyle’s bathrobe.
It wasn’t hard with him hung up like that, but to do so he had to come in close proximity with the corpse. He pulled one arm out, then another. The robe dropped. He reached down to retrieve it, needing badly to be sick again, and one of Boyle’s tangling arms brushed his face. The feel of the flesh was cool and moist. It was almost too much. He pulled out the bathrobe and bagged it.
The Mad Hatter cut the ropes and Boyle fell into the tub, the bag coming off his head. His skull had pretty much come apart now. Plates of bone with tufts of hair sprouting from them were connected only by gristle. The tub was red with blood. The Hatter turned on the faucet, splashed some water around, helped clean it up a bit.
“Okay,” he said. “Tweedledee.”
Dirty Mary took a cleaver and started chopping through Boyle’s left ankle. Did so, and set the foot aside. The Mad Hatter took the hacksaw and, lining up his cut with the gash made by the knife, started sawing through the neck. As he sawed he said, “Don’t worry, John. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
Slaughter stood there with a butcher knife in his hand. His face was bloodless, his legs like putty.
“Grab a wing,” Dirty Mary laughed. “Plenty for everyone.”
The Mad Hatter was watching him now through the slits of his pink eyes. Slaughter did not look at those eyes, not for long, because whenever he did they began to run like pink tallow, flowing from the puckered sockets in rivers of pink slime.
Licking his sticky lips, Slaughter sucked in a breath, took one of Boyle’s hands and started cutting through the wrist. His guts throbbed in his throat and an itching madness tickled at his brain. Like cutting through a chicken leg, except it was so very fleshy.
“You have trouble with the bones and cartilage, asshole, use the bone snips,” Dirty Mary instructed, working Boyle’s left leg free. The pale globes of her tattooed breasts were speckled red. “Just cut and twist his hand. It’ll pop.”
“Now you know,” said the Mad Hatter, “why a raven is like a writing-desk.”
When Slaughter came out of that he was still in the park, crawling madly in ever-widening circles as his brain told him to just go with it, just ride it out because in its unreality was its very reality. Dirty Mary was his oracle that had become mixed up with the 158 Crew and a book from his childhood. He knew better than to reason it out. He knew that something was coming, whether revelation or stark insanity or perhaps both, he could not know.
You make everything so difficult, John.
Dirty Mary again, fondling herself.
You make no sense, he told her.
I make all the sense in the world. Pay attention now: why is a raven like a writing-desk? C’mon, John, answer the riddle. If you don’t I’ll toss you down the rabbit hole.
Slaughter’s mind was very clear and sharpened, it turned back upon itself, seeking and probing, opening doors that had long been closed. It looked in the dusty back corridors of his brain, found something. A place. Like some wellspring of childhood terrors opening before him and he knew it was where Black Hat had come from.
A city.
It was a city.
Yes, a city of the dead and the damned, those unliving and those undead and those that were never really born. A blasted urban gutter of nightmare.
The city was a shrouded, evil place of cyclopean buildings and crumbling streets that were mazes leading everywhere and nowhere. There were rivers and stagnant pools of refuse and broken bodies. The shadows had textures, physical presence; colors had odors; the ground heaved tears and flame; the sky rained blood and filth. There were great empty spaces, blackened and blasted, dismembered bodies spread in every direction as if some terrible battle had taken place there. The lanes were flanked with crucified children and adults impaled on stakes and set aflame. The flickering illumination intended to guide strangers to valleys of punishment they were better off not seeing. And everywhere, the hot, nauseating stench of cremated flesh and the cries of the damned.
It was Hell.
Maybe not literally, but something very much like Hell.
And this is where his tripping brain had dumped him, marooned him: the city with no name.
There was no time here or no sense of the same. Slaughter ran through black mists, from one street to the next, feeling something behind him. Something or someone. Always following. Footsteps coming through the darkness, slow and methodical and stalking. They were patient and relentless. No matter how far he ran, they only edged in closer and closer. Now and again, he’d see a face peering from the shadows. The face of Black Hat. Always watching, always waiting.
Slaughter kept running, passing through the rotting thoroughfares of the deserted city, looking for somewhere to hide or someone with warm blood in their veins to help him. But there was nothing and nobody. Just the breath of ghosts and the whisper of shadows.
So he stopped, a wild and raging voice in his brain asking: why the hell are you running anyway? This is what you came to see.
That was true.
Now nothing was following him. He stood there in a black wind of gritty crematorium ash and bone dust, thinking, trying to make sense of it all and knowing it was senseless but maybe not entirely.
This is the place you found when you went down the rabbit hole, he understood. This was it. A killing ground, or maybe the place where killing was born, the epicenter of violent death. Yes, that was it. That made perfect sense to his tripping/soaring mind.
He looked around.
He knew this was a place to fear. But he had not come here to be afraid, he had to learn, to, to know.
“Knowledge is the razor that slits your throat,” a voice said.
Slaughter turned and there was Black Hat, his white face almost luminous, his dead salmon eyes bright. “John Slaughter,” he said. “My favored son. What dealings we have had through the years! What heights we reached together! But our work is not yet done. Listen: there was once a king who killed indiscriminately. He had himself a wife, did this king. She was low and crude, a slatternly Judy was she. The king grew tired of her so he stuffed her like a tripe with bushels, pecks, and pipkins of loathing, falsehood, steaming servings of excrement. When his fatted calf was quite full, near to bursting, he offered her up to the soldiers of a dark kingdom, mercenaries and throat-slitters, gut-stabbers and belly-eaters, seed-spillers and blood hands. They ate of her and found her pleasing. The king, at any time, could have saved his fair wench, she of the hungry holes, his whore-bride fishwife, his vixen ogress. But he found amusement in her undoing and laughed did he as the soldiers filled themselves wi
th her. Only at her moment of greatest defilement and violation did he step in and take the lives of the soldiers. But then it was too late, kind sir: for the clay, once cold, was not to be molded by mortal hands and the skein, once unwound, was not to be threaded by guilty fingers. Eh? Do you see, John?”
“You’re talking about Dirty Mary. How I could have saved her.”
“Excellent! There is meat between yon ears, not just dull gray sludge but pink dreaming meat!” said Black Hat. “Perhaps there was a parable in that story after all. I cannot tell you the how of the why and the how of the how but I can show you the ending of the game, the scene upon which the final curtain draws…”
Slaughter blinked and before him stretched an endless bone field where the skeletal remains of men, women, and children were intermixed with the bones of animals and rubble and refuse as if an immense graveyard had vomited up its dead and a city had been shattered to dust and fragments. Yes, an ossuary. An urban graveyard. He saw a few blackened buildings standing in the distance but everything else was rubble and bones and a blowing dust of desertion and a choking charnel smoke boiling into the sky.
Through the haze there was a face above that nightmare cityscape, a face that was the sun but darkest orange giving over to blood-red. A grinning skull-face which was the face of Black Hat the Skeleton Man smirking with satisfaction over the heaped and bird-picked death far below, happy, happy, happy was he. The face faded into the haze but the grin, like that of the storied cat, remained toothsome and smiling.
“That is the ending, favored son,” said Black Hat who was only a grin of teeth himself now. “It’s up to you to fill in the rest.”
When Slaughter again came out of it, he was sitting on the bench. He was breathing, damp with sweat, knowing he had been shown something and knowing that it would never make complete sense to him. Was that post-apocalyptic glimpse he’d been given something he needed to stop from happening or would it happen regardless? And why was it all channeled through his guilt of Dirty Mary, his childhood love—and fear—of a certain children’s book, and his tenure as a member of the dreaded 158 Crew?
The trip was slowing now, coming down to earth, yet the buzz was still owning him, just beginning to release its grip. There was a cigarette in his hand and he smoked it and tried to think, but his head was like a colander and his thoughts were liquid that spilled through the holes. All that remained was gunk and shit, like the stuff caught in a lint trap—guilt, self-doubt, self-recrimination, self-loathing, despair, and melancholy. All the very things that were snares that would trip him up, baggage that would slow him down, shovels that would dig his grave.
He blinked, and somehow the cigarette had burned between his fingers or maybe he had smoked it. As he came down he began to feel how sore his body was, his joints stiff and aching, and he wondered, truly, why he had done it in the first place. Did he really expect revelation from a drug? All he had, in the end, were more questions and half-thoughts, muddled suspicions, and vague apprehensions.
He sighed and stood up.
Time was not disjointed now, it was slow and smooth and orderly. The buzz was fading to a mild exhilaration. Despite the soreness, he felt good, he felt solid and real and grounded. His eyes only saw this world.
And as they saw it, they also saw the occupants of this world: the living dead. For all around him were zombies, twenty or thirty of them at least.
Chapter Twenty-One
How long they had been watching him, he did not know.
He couldn’t say that they were necessarily amused but they did seem almost curious. Twenty or thirty had been his rough guesstimation but that was certainly wrong because there were more now and they were pushing in from every quarter. The stink of them was their symbol of office and it was nauseating and maggoty. They stood about while clouds of meatflies rose and descended, feeding and planting eggs and ensuring the cycle of vermin. The dead cared not. Faces that were bleached and pouchy, raw-boned and oozing, held eyes that were flat black and dull red and pus-yellow and sometimes they held no eyes at all. Here were old men and women, wrinkled and naked in dry flaking skins like yellowed parchment or faded, discolored silk. They were crones and reapers and eye-biters with exaggerated skulls and tousled hair like white straw. With them stood men and women from youth to middle age with bloodgreased faces and bodies cankered with sores and gaping ulcers. Some of the women were obviously pregnant or blown-up with gas…but no, their swollen bellies moved with oily gyrations as the children turned within their wombs. Little ones stood with them, boys and girls, some in moldered burial suits and dresses, most simply naked. They were small and hunched and elfin, some skinless and others wearing borrowed hides and still others appearing as if they had been turned inside-out.
Slaughter knew what this going to be.
He felt it coming off them with the hot corpse-gas that blew out from their orifices and innumerable lacerations: the need to kill. Not just to take life but to feed, to stuff themselves. The majority were already doing that—stuffing themselves with any available carrion whether it came from their own putrescent bodies or goodies yanked or clawed from those standing near them. And that was almost ritual with them, he knew: the stuffing, the filling, the instinctive need to shove meat into their mouths and chew it, crush it to pulp, swallow it and feed again with voracious gluttony until they fell to the earth to become food. The worms inside them demanded it.
As they watched him, he watched them.
He found his pack on the ground and made ready. He strapped on the holster with the Combat Mag and the sheath with the Gurkha knife in it. He stuffed three extra speed loaders into the ammo pouch on the holster. He was thinking that if he could draw them away, out into the town itself and lose them in the streets he might make his way back to his scoot and ride out.
The dead began to move.
At least, half a dozen of them did: children. They were so unspeakably filthy with grave-dirt and corpse-drainage and the festering ordure of what they had been feeding upon, it was hard to tell if they were boys or girls and in the final analysis, it really did not matter. They grinned at him with faces like pocked membranous sheaths and liquid putrefaction. One of them was certainly a little girl that looked oddly like a Raggedy Ann doll with her stitched red grin and bulging black glass eyes, a gray watery discharge running from the holes in her face. The others to either side were like walking bone sculptures or cages of animated bones lightly fleshed in leathery pelts. One of them had an almost ritualistic pattern of sewing needles jutting from her face and what that could mean he did not know.
He began to move.
Their numbers were thinnest off to the right so this is where he went, moving casually, suppressing the desire to whistle, knowing he was in incredible danger but refusing to give in to fear. That was mostly the aftereffects of the peyote, that singular sense of indestructibility and joyous exhilaration at being alive.
They had not grouped to stop him.
But just as he got close to his opening and was already notching up his muscles for a wild run, a woman stepped out to stop him. She wore a finely-tailored business suit…at least it had been until the mildew started growing all over it. When he got within spitting distance, she hiked her skirt up so he could see the ruin of her sex. It looked like a Venus Fly-Trap, spiked and hungry. He brought up the Combat Mag and shot her in the head, the slug making a clean entrance by splitting her septum lengthwise. Although most of her brains and skull were ejected out with the back of her head, she took three or four drunken steps and then vomited out a black, gushing curd of corpse-chum that splattered at his feet before she tipped straight over face-first into the grass. The others covered her like locusts, stuffing themselves and Slaughter charged through their lines, casting three or four aside and blowing the head off another.
Then something looped around his throat and he brought his elbow back and felt it sink into flesh gone to mush and the dead man that had taken hold of him stumbled back.
Three more ringed him in.
But his hand was practiced and sure. The Combat Mag barked and they all went down with perfect headshots. He spun and drilled another, but his aim was off and the slug went into another’s throat. And that was six rounds and he knew it.
No time to reload.
He holstered the .357 and slid the Kukri out.
They screamed and converged and he went straight into their numbers with the Gurkha knife slashing back and forth in lethal arcs, severing limbs and opening guts and splitting open faces. He kept hacking and cutting as they fell and others surged over the top of their comrades and he stumbled through their masses, tripping on entrails and fluids, splashed with their drainage and foul gouts of blood.
Stumbling, tripping, Slaughter hopped forward, fell again, rolled free and came up running.
Breaking free momentarily he ran out of the park and saw there was no way in hell he could make it to the hog. He dashed towards a row of storefronts, gasping as he tried doorknob after doorknob and the dead poured in at him from every direction.
An open one.
A hardware store. He locked the door, ran behind a counter thick with grime and went down on one knee, pulling out the Combat Mag and a speedloader. He dumped the spent cartridges, quickly inserted the speedloader drum, twisted the knob, and the Mag was loaded.
By then they were thick outside.
They battered into the door and threw themselves against the dusty plate glass windows until cracks began to appear. He took aim and fired at a wormboy leading the charge and the slug took out the window and his target. The others surged forward in a sea of rot, spearing themselves on shards of glass that didn’t even slow them down.
At the same time the window went, the door crashed open and seven, then eight, of them pushed through. He dropped two more, kept firing, emptying the gun as the zombies were felled like dead trees and their fellows began to feed on them.
Slaughter quickly made it into the back of the store, slamming the door shut and throwing the lock. He was in a short corridor with two doors. Think fast, man: door number one or door number two. Fuck it. He tried them both. The first led into a cramped storeroom and the other led into the alley…he hoped.