by Mark Tufo
“Let’s do this!” I was psyching myself up. I was nearly standing when the front door opened slowly. I half-expected the barrel of a rifle to poke out. Instead, a young man, somewhere in his twenties, stuck his head out, looked both ways, and then the rest of him stepped out onto the porch. A match lit up his face. He certainly looked as if he could be related to Yorley. He was clearly of Hispanic descent. I loved those fuckers; they always tasted just a little bit spicier, like they bathed themselves in hot sauce, marinating. From across the street, I could smell the sweet leaf of a burning joint. He was getting stoned.
“Don’t stay out there too long, Hector,” I heard a woman’s voice call out. I couldn’t be sure if it was Yorley.
“Yeah, Hector, don’t stay out here too long. You just never really know who you’re going to run into,” I said from the relative safety of my hiding spot. I thought about coming out and chatting him up, but the joint had me rethinking that. Some people got real jumpy when they were high, and I wasn’t going to risk catching a bullet. I was going to wait until the full effects of the drug took hold, wait until he slept, and then I could deal with Yorley in peace. He took three quick huffs in succession, blew out a hell of a cloud, carefully snuffed out the cherry on the railing, placed it in his pocket, and went back inside.
It was a few more hours when the candle finally went out. After that, I gave it as much time as I could before the excitement in me just threatened to boil over. Yorley was here, and I was going to savor every delicious piece of that melted milk chocolate color of her skin. I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted something as bad as her. It was a pull like no other. I was going to check the front door just because it was the closest, and who knows, maybe Hector was a little hazy in remembering to lock it up. As much as I thirsted to taste Yorley’s flesh, I also had to keep it in the back of my mind that she was easily the most dangerous adversary I’d had to date and it would be very unwise of me to lose focus on that.
“Fucking locked,” I said as I tried to twist the knob. I crept around back, happy that there was no dog. That made sense. Dogs made noise. In the old world, that’s what you wanted. Noise scared humans with bad intentions away; noise in this day and age brought zombies. Their loss, my gain. It was the same around back. I was pretty sure, even with this body, I could kick the back door in. They’d be confused for a few seconds, but nobody survived these days without having some skill, and Yorley was jam packed with it. No, I needed a more stealthy way in.
The basement windows looked promising—small, but so was Scarlett. I grabbed a blouse out of my bag, placed it over the glass and punched. There was a crunch, and then a slight tinkle of glass raining down onto a carpeted floor. That was a stroke of luck. I waited for a flashlight to click on or some sort of movement. Nothing. I reached in, undid the latch, and pushed the window open. Pure silence, not so much as a squeal. Scarlett wasn’t much more than a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, but by the time we were up to our waist through the window, I had a moment of panic where I thought we were going to get stuck. My legs were flailing trying to get some momentum to pull the rest of me through, and in the throes of my movement, I struck and knocked over a floor lamp. It fell to the floor, sounded like a foghorn cutting through the dark. I didn’t know if I should stop everything I was doing and listen to see if anyone was coming or struggle harder to break free.
I wiggled like an epileptic until I popped loose, scraping my chin up pretty good when it bounced off the window sill. I dropped to the floor and spun around, figuring for sure Yorley had me in her sites. My heart labored to keep up with the demands I was exerting on it. Still nothing, no questioning words, no sounds of alarm, and more importantly, no bullets firing. It was at this point I knew I wasn’t at Yorley’s. I’d be dead, end of story. That didn’t mean Hector and company weren’t going to pay, because they were. Mostly because they weren’t Yorley but partly because Manny and I were hungry. I waited a minute or two, allowing my eyes to become accustomed to the murkiness of the basement. I’d gone two steps when I stopped.
“You have absolutely got to be fucking with me.” It was the half snort, mouth smacking sound of someone with extreme dry mouth. Hector was on a crappy, old pull out bed, looked like something that had been passed down from generation to generation then left on the curbside for trash collection before Hector and his friends had liberated it for their own needs. I’m a disgusting individual, I know that, but there’s no fucking way I’d sleep on that thing. There were probably worse things than me in there to worry about. Well not really, but you get the point.
Manny thrust forward. He wanted to eat, and he wanted to do it now.
“NO!” I told him with as much force as I could muster. “I did all the work; you’re not just going to swoop in here and take all the fucking credit!”
Manny was thrumming; that’s the best way I can describe it. We were on a precipice, and he was deciding what to do next. I slowly reached into my bag and grabbed the bottle of pills. If he wanted a fight, I was going to give him one. Scarlett was caught out in the open like an old western townsperson when the two gunmen face off to do battle. If we were about to draw guns, his hand was on his grip. I’d unscrewed the cap and was slowly moving my arm up so the bottle would be close to my mouth. We stood that way for quite a while, right up until Hector asked who we were. I turned and got up next to him. I gave him the over used cliché.
“Your worst nightmare!” Tough to pull that off as a MILF with a velvety voice. Maybe it wasn’t delivered by the most intimidating person in the most intimidating way possible, but it had an effect on Hector. Got to remember he was stoned, disorientated, in the dark during a zombie invasion with someone he didn’t know staring him in the face. You’d have to have balls of chromed steel not to be scared. Or be Yorley. One of the two would work.
Hector rubbed his face. “I’m sure hoping that this is some sort of bad dream. Are you real?”
“Having a lot of problems with that I take it? You know how all those medicinal marijuana advocates talk about how weed never killed anybody?”
Hector didn’t respond, so I slapped him. “Yeah … yeah, I’ve heard that, man. Ease up!”
“Well, they lied.” I pulled my knife from its sheath and plunged it into his throat, making sure that he would not be able to scream in his final moments. He began to cough and choke as heavy volumes of blood began to clog his airway and flow into his lungs. There was some push back on the blade from the ligature as I twisted it around. Manny lost all interest in our earlier face off with the spilling of hot blood. He dove in with gusto. I didn’t fight him on it. I was gaining strength as I gained a foothold in Scarlett’s brain. I don’t think I was pure consciousness anymore. I don’t know what I was. Parasite? My own virus? I don’t know, but there was a good chance those pills would do me as much harm as good. Was it possible that Manny and I were so intertwined we couldn’t be separated even if we wanted to? Would killing him kill me? I didn’t like the implications of that. Sure, I loved the benefits of having a body that could repair at a level usually reserved for super heroes, and fucking with the human condition, well that was just a bonus.
Would telling Manny we were linked help or hurt my cause? So many questions they made my head hurt, but one thing was for sure, this body, the way it was, wasn’t going to scare many people, and that needed to change. I ran it by Manny. He didn’t give a shit; his mouth was full of pancreas.
“No! NO!” Scarlett was flipping out when she caught wind of what I wanted to do.
“Come on, Freud wrote about this stuff. I’ll be doing you a favor.” She did the equivalent of huffing off and slamming doors. I pulled down Hector’s pants. “It’s muy pequeno, mi amigo, but it will have to do.” I grabbed his shriveled cock and balls, pulled up, and with my knife I cut it all off in one swift motion. “Relax man, you aren’t going to need them anymore anyway.” I reached into the bag, pulled out a needle and thread and went to work. “I wonder if I’ll be able to ge
t a rise out of you?” I smacked my new appendage around and laughed gleefully. I think I was going fucking nuts, but it’s not like I could really ask myself for an unbiased answer. I completely sewed over Scarlett’s lack of a package. Didn’t matter, it wasn’t like Manny used that portal anyway. Manny took his sweet ass time getting to the repair, too busy shoving food in his pie hole. By the time he got there, necrosis had started, blackening the flesh all around the edges and half way up my new sack. Really wasn’t all that much, they weren’t much bigger than marbles. Apparently, Hector liked to lace his pot with steroids, because his balls were about the same size mine had been when I was ten.
It was about an hour later. Manny was smacking his lips after finishing off the man. As far as the zombie part of me was concerned, the man hadn’t been much more than a large appetizer, we were ready for the main course. I was under the impression Scarlett needed some more enhancements, like maybe I’d cut off her tits and drag the blade across her delicate facial features in an effort to create some visual scarring. Things that would indeed scare. Manny had other plans. That was all right; we had plenty of time for me to reconfigure this body. I was pretty convinced I could do a lot of it internally, like there were switches I could turn on to make her taller, larger, thicker skulled, smarter, if I was so inclined. I could sense they were there. I just needed more time to locate them and actually figure out how they worked. With enough time and enough practice, I was convinced I could turn her into me. Now wouldn’t that be fucking fantastic! First things first, had some chores to take care of.
If I’d had kids, I felt like this would be how the conversation would go: “Do you need to take care of anything before we go?” I was asking Manny.
“Time to eat,” was his terse reply.
“I know it’s time to eat. I’m asking, do you need to take care of any personal business before we leave and do that.”
“Just eat.”
“I don’t think you’re listening to me. I’m not going to be halfway there and need to stop because you didn’t use the bathroom when you had a chance.”
“Eat now.”
“I know how this is going to go down. Fine, we’ll do it your way. You get us shot, though, because you have to move a bowel, then it’s on you.” Like an irritable child, he was paying no attention, just ready to get the show on the road. At least there wasn’t a power struggle to regain control. I didn’t know if it was because he was really starting to enjoy the benefits of not having to do anything to reap his reward or something much more sinister, but we were so tightly bound now as to be indistinguishable from one other. I wouldn’t dwell on it; thinking wasn’t my strong suit. I’d take the normal male approach: That which I ignore will invariably get better and/or go away. We were quiet as we headed up the stairs. That was easy enough, since they were carpeted. Had another stroke of luck when, at the top, the door wasn’t locked and it made no noise as I silently pulled it open. The kitchen was cloaked in shadow but not of the deep variety. Enough moonlight was bleeding in that I could see pretty well. I almost checked the fridge for a beer. With my new penis, I was feeling more manly by the minute. As soon as I found the testosterone button, I was going to turn those jets on full blast. I wonder what Scarlett would think about a bearded face? Oh ho! She was going to be a lot of fun to have around for the next few weeks or so. I was going to make her body as foreign to her as it had been to me.
Did a quick once over on the main floor. There were some dog toys off to the side and a fair amount of blood stains on the floor and carpeting. A few people had died here. The pictures on and over the mantle let me know that Hector had not been an original part of the family. Or if he had been, he was the black sheep that everyone tended to ignore. Probably because of his habitual pot smoking and subsequent Twinkie eating. What a piece of shit he was, constantly mooching off those that actually worked for a living. I’m fucking glad I ate him, saved Yorley the headache of having to feed his ass. I know how hard it is having a mouth dependent on you.
I grabbed the railing and looked upstairs. She was there, oh she was there, and I could not wait to kill her and the kids. Yorley first though, definitely Yorley first. I placed my foot on the stair, it creaked like an old man’s bones. “Son of a bitch,” I hissed. At any second, I was expecting Yorley to come to the top of the steps with a laser aimed rifle. The second step was a little better, the third and fourth completely quiet, so I should have known my luck was going to run out by the fifth. Our stomach cramped like someone had placed two electrical leads directly on it. One hand clenched the railing to keep us from toppling backward, the other reached behind. To do what? I don’t know? It wasn’t like I could clench my asshole with my fingers. Then I thought about shoving a couple of them up there wondering if that would stop the flood that was about to take place.
“Manny you’re going to get us killed!” I was fairly confident I had screamed that internally, especially when no one came out to drill us a new ventilation system. I forced my left leg up to the next step. Big mistake. Apparently, that stretched out my anus just far enough to start the wet works. Soggy flatulence blew with such force it caused my cheeks to reverberate. The sound was nearly comical, it was so loud. This was immediately followed by the glooping of heavy waste material running down my leg and hitting the wooden steps and descending down like the world’s first shit-soaked slinky. “This can’t be happening.”
My stomach constricted so tightly I could not move. Not up, not down. I was seized with the fear of just how vulnerable we were right now. And then it happened. I could hear noise as if someone were awakening.
“Hector?” came the tentative request. “I told you not to come up here!” There was a thud; either she’d rolled out of bed or her rifle had dropped. I had a hard time picturing Yorley letting either of those things happen. “Oh mi Dios! What is that smell?!”
I had to suppress a laugh when I realized that Hector had indeed violated whatever border treaty they had in place, maybe not the way he’d meant to, but he sure as shit had. My pun got the better of me, and I did start to laugh. It had the added benefit of tightening my stomach muscles even further, forcing out the unprocessed leftovers of Hector that much quicker. What I made up for in speed I paid out for in volume. A bad trumpet bleat from an inexperienced musician would have been softer.
Yorley came out of her room. She looked shorter and thicker, could have been a trick of my vantage point.
“Hello, Yorley,” I half-grunted through gritted teeth.
“Where’s Hector?” she asked, confused. I didn’t see a gun in her hands. This wasn’t the Yorley I knew.
“He’s here.” Flatulence slapped my left cheek against my right. I managed to make it up two more steps in my condition. Yorley had not moved away or to get a gun. She was making this too easy, plus she wasn’t gaining in height or thinning out. That was disconcerting. Two more steps, I was nearly at the top, Hector was petering out by this time. The woman started screaming, I knew without a doubt this wasn’t my intended prey. Yorley wouldn’t scream even as I placed my teeth against her neck.
Scarlett was laughing, but not in a “hey, this is funny” kind of way, but in an “I’ve lost my fucking mind” kind of way—or maybe it was a “you’re a fucking idiot” kind of way. Tough to tell, but one thing’s for sure. I was pissed off, pissed off I had wasted my time on “not- Yorley.” Have you ever bought chicken nuggets from the grocery store? Sure you have, it’s perfectly processed food to easily feed the kiddies when you feel like lying in the tub letting the water faucet give you that perfect orgasm you wish that your fat husband who spends way too much time at the local pub would do for you instead. Two-Pump Pete is too busy pickling his liver to ever give you your due. When you’re done making your thighs shake, you should go back to the kitchen and the trash barrel, pull out the box of nuggets and read the ingredients. It will say “mechanically separated chicken” as one of the ingredients.
“Where the fuck was I going with this?
” My head hurt, so did my arms, my legs and my ass ached, probably prolapsed the fuck out of that thing again. Could probably clean it off by just pulling it up and between my legs and placing it in the sink. Then all you’d need to do was rinse that bad boy off. “Oh yeah, I know,” I said as my eyes focused. Mechanically separated chicken, that is exactly what was once a woman, looked like in front of me. I had ripped her arms and her legs free from her body, she was long gone by the time I got to popping her not fucking Yorley head off her not-Yorley body. Manny was screaming bloody murder we weren’t eating her. I was too enraged that she had the fucking audacity to NOT be Yorley. It was a slap to my face, a fucking insult!
I yanked her intestines out like they were ribbons in a magician’s mouth. I tossed her internal organs around, screaming as I did so. When we were done stripping her of her meat, I smashed her bones, making sure to break every last one of them. When we were done, the sun was just beginning to leak into the nightmare I had created. A person swallowing a bomb wouldn’t have made the disaster I left in that hallway. I’d expended so much energy destroying her, I’m not sure we were on the plus side of calories taken in compared to calories expended. We were going to need to eat again and soon. Manny was quiet and resting for now, but he was like a newborn bird; he’d be squawking soon enough.
I drunk stumbled around the house, covered in enough gore I could have played a stand-in for Carrie. We had to clean up. I peeled off my clothing. I didn’t give a shit that my hastily sewn on package was turning the color of an eight ball. I sat under water that wasn’t much above the temperature of freezing, retreating back past the pain receptors so that as the tiny ice daggers cleaned us off, I would be spared the discomfort. I stepped out and was about to leave the room when I noticed some make-up. Now normally this wasn’t my type of thing, but I was still on a quest for Yorley and she’d expect a clown, so I didn’t dare to disappoint. My disposition, which had been down in the dumps, began to improve dramatically as I coated my face in a heavy dosing of white matte foundation. Then I grabbed the eyeliner. This I used to draw triangles around my eyes to give a nice diamond shape and sort of the universal sad clown expression. I had no red ball to put on my nose, so I’d have to do the next best thing. I colored the end of my nose red and then dabbed a nice healthy dose of it around my lips. I wouldn’t call myself terrifying looking, but it was a start. Maybe if I led off with my dick I could freak my victims the fuck out! I was back!