by Bryan Smith
“I thought your Nazi friends were buried in that cemetery. Where the fuck are we going?”
“To the old cemetery.”
Darby frowned. “A different one?”
“Same property, technically. Same owner. But an older part of the grounds, hidden away from prying eyes for obvious reasons.”
“Right. Makes sense.”
Actually, none of this made any kind of sense at all, but Darby knew he had passed the point of no return long ago. All the evidence of a lunatic brand of genuine Satanism aside, a small part of him kept thinking this might all still turn out to be some kind of elaborate gag. He was able to imagine a few possible alternate explanations. The one that seemed most likely was that these girls weren’t Satanists at all, that instead they were actresses or performers en route to some sort of weird porn or B-movie shoot. That would account for the outfits and possibly even some of the offbeat behavior. But it didn’t explain how Lexie knew his name.
The dense expanse of trees began to thin out and soon Darby was able to discern a clearing in the distance. He and the cheerleaders emerged through the last of the trees into the clearing a few moments later. And Darby saw at once that Lexie had not been lying about at least one thing. They really had come to an older section of the cemetery. The grass here was overgrown and patchy, but there were many tombstones protruding from the uneven ground. Some of them bore names, but others were just plain stones. Still others showed evidence of disrepair, lying shattered in pieces. And it was obvious kids had been using this neglected part of the cemetery as a place to party. Darby saw many empty beer cans and rubbers scattered about. Some of the tombstones had been desecrated with anarchy symbols and, appropriately, swastikas spray-painted on them. A few had even been dug up. Darby saw mounds of old earth and splintered pieces of very old coffins.
Darby lit up again and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “This is some spooky-ass shit.”
Lexie giggled. “Just the way we like it.”
“Be even spookier if you were doing it at night.”
“I know, right?” Lexie rolled her eyes. “It would be fucking wicked as shit to do this at night, but this is the way the boss wants it.”
“The boss being . . .”
She gave him a withering look. “Really, Darby?”
“Right. Satan. I know. I just keep thinking—”
“That this is all a hoax or something?”
He shrugged. “Well . . . not meaning to offend or anything, but . . .”
She nodded. “Sure. I get it. But your doubts are about to be erased, baby.”
She gave him a wet smooch on the cheek and then bounced away from him, skipping across the patchy ground toward the largest tombstone in the clearing. Several other cheerleaders had already gathered there. Darby opted to remain where he was for the moment. He had no role that he knew of in whatever they were planning, nor did he know exactly what kind of crazy shit they had in mind, but for now he thought it’d be best if he just stayed out of the way.
A couple of long wooden crates were stacked against a side of the big tombstone. One of the cheerleaders—a platinum blonde with heavy, pendulous breasts—had produced a crowbar from somewhere and was using it to pry open one of the crates. She cranked the crowbar furiously up and down, making her big breasts flop around in that tight little top. As he watched her work, Darby prayed this would turn out to be exactly what he’d imagined—an epic porn shoot, some kind of horror T&A parody. That would rule. But so far no one had shown up with cameras or other moviemaking equipment. Maybe that was what was inside the crates.
The girl with the monster tits got the top crate’s lid removed and a couple of the other girls helped her set it aside. Monster Tits reached both hands into the crate, got a grip on something, and slowly pulled it out. Lexie reached into the crate next and removed an identical instrument. Darby’s mouth dropped open. The filter end of his cigarette clung to a wet corner of his mouth for a moment before tumbling to the ground.
Fucking chainsaws. What the hell?
One by one, the rest of the cheerleaders reached into the crate and removed more chainsaws. Once the crate had been depleted, it was tossed aside and the one below it was opened. It contained more chainsaws. The sight of all that potentially deadly steel made Darby feel queasy. So much so that he seriously considered a dash back through the trees to the pristine modern cemetery beyond. Each new thing that happened while he was in the company of these strange girls was just a deeper level of insanity. He shuddered to think what might happen next.
Lexie broke away from the other girls and came running at him with her chainsaw.
Darby screamed and staggered backward a few steps.
She laughed as she came to a lurching stop a few feet away from him. “You should see your face, Darby.”
“Please don’t kill me.”
Lexie laughed some more. “I’m not gonna kill ya, silly. Daddy Satan has plans for you. But you look terrified. It’s so fucking funny.”
Darby sucked in a big breath and let it slowly out. He nodded as he listened to the frantic beating of his heart. “Yeah. Funny. Hilarious, even. Look . . . what are the fucking chainsaws for?”
“We’re using them in the resurrection ritual.”
Darby stared at her uncomprehendingly for long moments. She was smiling the whole time, looking at him in an expectant way, as if something truly wonderful and obvious was about to occur and she was just waiting for him to get it.
“I don’t get it.”
She sighed. “You’ll see soon enough, baby.” She held the chainsaw aside and leaned into him for a kiss. She lingered close to him for a moment as her voice dropped to a whisper. “I saw you staring at Candy.”
“Who?”
“The chick with the monster tits.”
“Oh. Yeah. Her.”
Lexie’s breath was warm against his face as she laughed softly. “If you want, we could have a threesome with her later. Would you like that?”
Darby couldn’t keep his eyes from flicking in Candy’s direction. She was swinging her own chainsaw around in some kind of crazy acrobatic dance, making her breasts do an enticing dance of their own inside the tight top. He licked his lips and looked at Lexie again. “You’d be okay with that?”
Lexie laughed. “Of course, baby. We’re Satanists. You’ll be my main man, but monogamy is against our beliefs.”
“Huh.”
Maybe there was something to this Satanism thing after all.
One of the other girls called out to Lexie. “Hey, Lex! It’s time.”
Lexie gave him another loud smooch on the cheek and bounded away from him, calling back to him over her shoulder as she went. “Enjoy the show, baby!”
He raised his own voice in answer: “I will!”
He fished another cigarette from the dwindling pack as he watched the girls gather into a loose crowd in the middle of the old cemetery. As they conferred, they spoke much more quietly than they had at any point since Darby had unsuspectingly hopped aboard Team Satan. The loose crowd became a tight huddle after a few moments, with the girls standing in a circle with their heads bowed, their chainsaws hanging loosely by their sides. Then a loud cheer erupted and the huddle broke apart. They spread out across the cemetery in a way that looked random at first, but soon they were forming precisely grouped rows of six girls apiece. Lexie, however, stood alone before them, with her chainsaw held ready at waist level. She looked kind of like the conductor of a demented symphony orchestra.
She raised her voice as she addressed them: “Ready, girls?”
General cheering appeared to indicate assent.
Lexie raised her chainsaw above her head. “Then in the name of our glorious dark father, let us commence with the resurrection of our honored Aryan brethren.”
She yanked the starter cord on the chainsaw and it roared to life. The other girls followed her lead and in seconds the cemetery was alive with the sound of dozens of buzzing metal blades. The sound set D
arby’s teeth on edge and made his head hurt. He again was seized by the impulse to take off running while he still could. Now, while the girls were occupied with this weird fucking inexplicable goddamn thing they were doing. He’d never get a better chance. However, though he knew this was true, he couldn’t take his eyes off the girls. Had he thought the events he’d witnessed and participated in on the bus were surreal? Well, they seemed almost ordinary by comparison with this.
Lexie marched backward a few steps while the other girls remained absolutely still. She then executed a stunningly graceful spin move. A pirouette. Darby was pretty sure that was what they were called in ballet. He was just as sure very few—if any—ballerinas had ever performed such a move while clutching an activated chainsaw. The other girls all performed similar moves, all while keeping their chainsaws perfectly poised above their heads. From this surprisingly elegant beginning, they transitioned to a perfectly choreographed but considerably more lewd series of dance moves. They shook their shapely asses as provocatively as any dance music diva’s background dancers, twirling their chainsaws in the air like circus performers as they moved. At one point, they all squatted simultaneously and slid the whirring chainsaws between their spread legs, their contorted faces miming expressions of purest ecstasy. Then they were upright again, writhing and wiggling and spinning the chainsaws in the air. Several minutes into the performance, the girls stood rigid and flung the chainsaws high into the air above their heads. Darby’s breath caught in his mouth as this happened and he cringed as the chainsaws began to descend again. He fully expected to witness at least one catastrophic accident. But each girl caught her chainsaw smoothly out of the air as it came back down. After that, they were spinning around and around again, their movements becoming more frenzied than ever. They were moving so fast after a while that Darby was no longer able to make out individual girls, just blurs of flesh and hungry, buzzing steel. Then, at last, each of the girls came to an abrupt, perfectly poised stop, with their chainsaws pointed toward the ground. At a signal from Lexie, the cheerleaders silenced their chainsaws.
Darby let out a breath. “Holy shit.”
He raised his hands and began to clap them slowly together.
Lexie snapped her head in his direction and glared at him. “Quiet!”
Darby’s hands froze in mid-clap. He opened his mouth to utter an apology, then realized that would be a mistake and shut it again. An eerie calm descended over the cemetery. No discernible sounds drifted over from the other areas of the cemetery. There were no animal sounds nor any buzz of insects, the latter a sound that was pretty much constant near any wooded area in Tennessee during the summer. The girls didn’t talk and they stood as still as statues, all of them standing there with their eyes trained directly on Lexie.
Darby was unsurprised to discover Lexie was the leader of what he had to figure was the world’s only squad of gorgeous, Satan-worshipping cheerleaders. After all, she was the one who had lured him onto the bus. In fact, she was the only one he’d interacted directly with at all. It made him feel special in a weird way. Prideful, almost. On the other hand, she was a servant of ultimate evil, which was a thing he should probably chalk up to the negative side of the ledger. Plus he wasn’t much digging the whole fixation on dead Nazis. On one level, the idea of sexy cheerleaders who happened to be evil was kind of fun and hot. But the Nazi thing had the potential to leech the fun right out of the whole situation. Those fuckers were the true face of evil. It made sense that someone like Satan would want to align himself with them.
A faint, initially unidentifiable sound seemed to issue from nowhere. The girls still weren’t moving. Their mouths were shut. No one else had entered the clearing. And yet here came the sound again, a rising whisper of murmuring voices. Voices coalescing into a chorus of groans. Something drew Darby’s gaze to the ground by one of the nearest tombstones. A flicker of movement he perceived from the corner of his eye. He watched the tombstone for a while and began to suspect maybe he’d imagined it. But then it happened again. The ground moved. Shifted. A hole formed in the earth and loose dirt began to pour inside. Then the ground shifted upward again.
Darby took a tentative step backward.
Fuck this and fuck these hellbound bitches.
He took another step back. And another.
And then Lexie’s head snapped toward him again. “Stay.”
She didn’t scream at him and she didn’t blatantly threaten him. But there was a deadly calm in her voice that instantaneously stopped him in his tracks. She held his gaze for a moment and when she was sure he wasn’t going anywhere, her mouth curved in a smug way. A way that said, You’re my bitch now, Darby, and you and I both know it.
Though Darby took no more steps backward, he remained in a deep state of panicky agitation. Every nerve-ending in his body screamed at him to get gone from this place, but his fear of Lexie was even stronger. He couldn’t fathom why Lexie and the other girls were so unperturbed by what was happening around them. Because the earth disturbances were happening all over the clearing. And all of the disturbances were happening near tombstones. Darby’s whole body was shaking by the time he finally connected the dots and figured out what was happening. The dead interred here were slowly clawing their way out of their graves.
Darby was unable to stifle a whimper.
Holy shit. Holy shit! Zombies. Nazi fucking motherfucking zombie fuckers!
Lexie had been telling him the total truth all along. They had come here to perform a resurrection ritual. The resurrection ritual being that kooky chainsaw dance. How a bunch of babes gyrating and throwing chainsaws around could bring a bunch of dead motherfucking Nazis back from the goddamn dead was well beyond his ability to comprehend. Or any normal person’s ability, he was pretty sure. It was madness. And did it really even matter how they had accomplished it? The fact was, they had done it and now some kind of crazy zombie blitzkrieg was only moments away from getting underway.
Darby gasped as a withered, leathery hand punched through the earth by the tombstone nearest him. The hand flailed and clawed desperately at the empty air. Then another hand emerged through the ground a few feet from it. Darby groaned as an even larger shifting of dirt occurred and the head and torso of a long dead German soldier clawed its way to the surface. A thin layer of blackened, rotted skin clung to the zombie’s skeletal face. The zombie hissed as its head jerked this way and that. Its empty eye sockets locked on Darby in the last instant before it pulled itself the rest of the way out of its grave. Though its eyes had rotted away a long time ago, Darby had the sense the hideous thing could see him plain as day. The dead soldier was dressed in a rotting black uniform, including a black helmet. Both the helmet and the uniform were adorned with SS insignia. The resurrected storm trooper got to its feet and took a staggering, lurching step in his direction. The clearing reverberated with the groans of other reanimated dead. There were many dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.
Lexie was shouting something about the glory of Satan and the everlasting Third Reich.
Right, Darby thought. This right here is where I check out. I don’t care how much that crazy bitch threatens me.
He took a few quick backward steps and let out a startled grunt as he bumped into something. Someone was behind him. But that wasn’t possible. There had been no one behind him . . .
Darby turned around and found himself staring up at a very tall dead Nazi.
Aw, shit.
He heard footsteps behind him. Rapid, strident, even on the patchy, rocky ground of the forgotten cemetery. “You’re not going anywhere, Darby.”
The towering Nazi opened its rotted mouth and hissed at him.
“Well, Lexie, that’s where you’re wrong.”
He gave the zombie a hard shove and it went staggering backward, its claw-like hands flailing clumsily. These things had been underground a long, long time. They were dangerous, no doubt, but Darby’s hunch that their debilitated physical condition could be used against them pro
ved accurate. The creature’s spindly legs buckled beneath it and it toppled to the ground.
Darby wasted no more time.
He vaulted over the zombie and took off into the woods. Lexie screamed at him and he had no doubt she was coming after him. Darby didn’t bother looking back to confirm this. The only chance he had at getting free of this madness was to keep going all-out. So he focused on that, making his arms and legs pump just as hard as they could. He was running faster than he had at any point since leaving high school. But he was slower than he’d been back then. A decade of smoking had taken its toll. Despite being in decent physical condition, his lungs were straining. He sucked in great gasps of air as he ran, praying he could keep going long enough to get clear of Lexie and her lunatic cohorts.
He came out of the woods at a full gallop. The rolling grounds of the cemetery sprawled outward before him. He saw the roof of the school bus glinting in the sun in the distance. If he could get to it and overpower the driver before Lexie could catch up to him, he might have a chance. But his feet went out from under him and he took a tumble as he started down a steep slope. He heard Lexie laughing as he rolled and rolled on the ground, finally thumping to a stop as he slammed into a tombstone.
Then Lexie was standing over him with her hands on her hips, sneering at him. “Well, that was stupid, Darby. I’ll have to punish you now.”
“Fuck you.”
She was close enough. He decided to take a chance.
He jerked his right leg back then kicked out at her. He heard a satisfying crunch as the heel of his boot connected with her knee. She cried out and toppled to the ground next to him. Darby drove an elbow into her face, snapping her nose and triggering an eruption of blood.
He got to his feet and looked up the slope to see an army of Nazi zombies and enraged lesbian cheerleaders swooping toward him. Some of the more rotted zombies tripped and went tumbling down the slope, much as he had. But there were so many of them. A lot of them would make it down the slope intact. At this point, though, he was more terrified of the goddamn cheerleaders. So he turned away from them and took off running again. He ran more easily now that he’d had a few moments to catch his breath. His side was hurting some where he’d collided with the tombstone, but it wasn’t a crippling pain. He guessed maybe he had a cracked rib. It was something he could get taken care of if he managed to live another day and the odds of that didn’t seem too good right now.