Humanity's Death: A Zombie Epic (12 page)

The old woman stopped for a moment and let out a
shrilled cackle of laughter and then started pulling again,
laughing hard and coughing up something deep inside her. Andrew
bounced up and down as she pulled him up brick steps, then dragged
him into an old shack. Inside it stank of dead meat and bones.
Hooks hung from the ceiling and chains on the walls.

Oh jesus mother of god! His mind was screaming.
He was laid out in the middle of the floor. She stepped outside and
flung coals on a grill and lit it up. She then laid a cold iron
onto the grill. The grill sat under an umbrella and the rain
coursed off in all directions. “Let fires rumble! Baby here comes
the meat!” She walked back into the shack and stood over him.

Andrew stared up at her with huge bug eyes, “You
don’t have to do this. You are better than this. Come on! Put that
down!” A sharp blade cut into his leg. He screamed. Writhing pain
shot through his body. The hot blade sliced off his leg with ease.
He watched in screaming terror as she raised it up and ran her nose
down the length of his now detached blood dripping limb. Her eyes
gleamed as she stared at his severed leg. Then her dark eyes looked
down at him, “Hunny. We all just meat.”

Andrew’s face was white. Blood oozed out of his
leg. His pulse was slowing to a slow tick. He watched helplessly as
she walked out and then came back with a red hot iron. She pressed
it hard against the wound, “Don’t worry boy. You aint gonna die
yet.”

His screams filled the shack and permeated into
the surrounding swamp land. Not a creature nearby didn’t hear his
hair raising shrieks. Then he just lay there, a panting piece of
dying meat. He didn’t see Sally. He didn’t see much of anything.
His body fell into the arms of pain induced shock.

The old woman walked over to a small cabinet
nailed to the wall. She opened it. The inside was stocked with baby
food—one on top of the other. She took one out, opened it, grabbed
a dirty spoon, and walked over to Andrew, “Gotta keep you alive
son.” She force fed him the baby food, “There you go now. That’s a
good boy.” It dripped down his face. His eyes opened just for a
moment, then closed. She picked up the severed leg and walked over
to a small wood bench. It was stained dark red. Andrew’s leg landed
with a squishy flop. His boot was still on the foot.

She first cut the skin off. She peeled till the
leg was clean of flesh. She flung the dead flesh into the woods.
She then took the protein rich leg over to the charcoal grill. The
charcoal was red hot. The meat sizzled as she laid it across the
metal. She breathed in deeply. She kept her nose over the grille.
The gray smoke flowed around her. She twirled. Then twirled
again.

After the meat was done, she returned to the
shack and sat down Indian style bedside Andrew. She ate the human
leg with bare hands. “We just meat.” She said.

She finished the leg, chewing it down to the
bone, then licking it for any residual protein. She then flung it
into a pile of bones on the floor. She stared at the small mountain
of white carbon. Each one represented a former life. Someone that
used to dream and scream. Now they just turned slowly to bone
dust.

She’d found the owner of those bones back when
this first all went down. But, back then, the bones still moved
inside the living flesh of the people they supported—the family was
cooking when she walked silently to the edge of the tree line that
surrounded the shack. She’d wondered out here after the Fever
caused dead men to walk in the cities. Her belly had growled. Her
mind had spun. In her right hand she held an Army issue .45 she’d
picked off a dead solider. He didn’t need it, she had thought. He’s
just meat now. Meat for the roaming dead. She’d shot the family
dead.

That memory faded. She still sat beside Andrew,
staring blankly over his body. In her mind's eyes she saw
fraternity boys surrounding her. They'd pushed her and pulled her.
Her clothes tore off. She'd screamed.

“Shut up! Fucking street rat!” They lobed spit
in her face while each on took a turn with her on a sticky beer
stained carpet. After they’d used her up, they tied her up, and
loaded her in a car trunk. Her mascara, which she’d so delicately
put on before the party, was smeared all over her face like pen ink
exploded from her eyes. Tears created tributaries of pain in long
squiggly lines that dripped down her chin. She’d been so excited.
Real college boys. They’d really liked her, she’d thought. Jackie
Mason, so tall and stout, had called her a real dazzler. Said she
was a fine woman. She’d smiled up at his big blue eyes and fell in
love instantly. But Jackie was driving the Cadillac as she vibrated
in the trunk, a rag tied in her mouth, her hands and ankles bound
tightly. Heavy music blared as fear took hold of her soul. She laid
there, begging a deity for help, until the car came to a slow and
creeping halt. The music stopped. The doors opened then closed. The
trunk latch unlocked and moon light shimmered in. They stood above
her with angry glares. She was jerked out with a harsh pull. Her
eyes burned with fear as they dragged her naked body into an old
cemetery, throwing her hard against a head stone.

“Dumb bitch.” Jackie said as he removed his
member and peeded yellow onto her face. The others followed, then
left her there in the dark, with their disgusting urine dripping
off her. Tears fell as she laid in the dirt.

That morning a grave digger found her and she
learned she’d been carried over to Sumter, SC, a little shit hole
of a back woods hick town. The grave digger was a tall and thin
black man with a few teeth missing. He was kind. He found her some
old clothes to put on and drove her to the sheriff’s office.

She'd sat there staring at Sheriff Bass. His big
belly protruded from his waist line and flopped over his belt. A
large cigar dangled from his mouth. White hair sat on his head,
accented by an even whiter handle bar mustache. She’d just told him
the tale. He gleamed at her with menacing eyes, like he’d heard
this before and resented it more every time. “It all sounds like a
lot of horse shit to me, honey. You street girls get all liquored
up, go out with these party boys, and then whine when you get what
you knew was coming.”

She stared at the floor. It was gray carpet,
recently vacuumed. She looked up and saw a black and white clock
ticking. Below it and directly above the sheriff’s head was a
confederate flag mixed with the palmetto flag.

“
Listen. I’m
not gonna lock you up,
this
time. I’ll have one of my deputies drive you over to the
homeless shelter. Don’t come in here with bullshit like this again,
ya hear?”

The image of the sheriff faded into a past that
was never forgotten. She looked at Andrew and breathed out a sigh
of relief. “Them days over… them days over…theys all dead.” She
then took the hot iron outside and laid it on the grill.

14

She reentered the shack and shut the door, “OK! One
more to go!”

Andrew screamed as she dismembered his final
leg. Tears gushed from his eyes and he begged for death, “Kill me!
Kill me! Just kill me!”

“Did I say yous gonna feel some pain? Oh hells
yeah I did!” She walked back outside, grabbed the iron, and walked
back in.

She pressed the iron onto the bleeding nub. “Now
whos the dummy? Whos in charge now, boy?!”

Andrew screamed a cry of deathly agony. His eyes
were wide and fierce with pain. His veins pumped hard under his
skin and bulged through his neck like long purple worms. Never in
his life did he think such pain existed.

After she finished, she pushed his body onto the
floor causing him to whimper. She'd unstrapped him. He started
crawling on his elbows. His legs were now blackened nubs. His
vision was filled with strange, black butterflies floating
aimlessly.

“Gotta get rid of those now. I specially like
that fat under the arms.” A long hook hung from the center of the
ceiling. A chain pully system was attached to it. The metal clanged
as she pulled the sharp hook down. She wrapped her hands around the
cold metal. She stepped up to Andrew and positioned the hook at the
center of his back. She forced it in hard. He screamed and the
metal clanged as she lifted him into the air.

He hung, suspended with the hook driven into his
back. His knubbed legs moved like two short table legs. He prayed
for death. Begged whatever god existed, please, oh please, end it
now. Make this pain stop. What had he done to deserve this torture?
He never hurt no body. Never cheated no body. Oh god, please just
make it sto—

The door swung open sharply and knocked the old
women to the floor. Candy stood in the door way and stared at her
brother. She saw his blackened nub legs. She saw the pale, white
horror in his face; the life had drained out of him. His eyes
darkened like a storm cloud over black pupils, and a crooked smile
spread across his face. “It’s OK. Candy…it’s OK.” His face grayed
while his blue eyes closed. His chin fell against his chest and his
head dangled loosely to the side.

Candy fell to her knees. Pain cringed across her
face. Her little brother. Look what this world did to her little
brother. Behind her the old woman cackled loudly. “Let’s not let
that meat go to waste dearie. We all nothing but dead meat in the
end.”

“Mama! Mama! Kill! Kill! Kill!” Candy stared at
the ghostly images of her girls then back at the old woman. Candy
rose. Her eyes locked onto the old women. A hatchet laid on a
wooden bench to Candy’s right. It scraped against the wood as she
picked it up.

“Kill! Kill! Kill!” the girls screamed.

The old women’s face stopped laughing. She
trembled. “We all just meat honey!”

Candy looked at her girls. “Kill her?”

“Yes mama! Kill! Kill! Kill!”

“Who you talking to girl? We can work together
you know?” said the old woman.

“For your daddy?”

“For daddy!”

“For your uncle?”

“We loved Uncle Andrew!”

“Who you see girl? They ain’t nothing there!
Don’t do it! Don’t!”

The hatchet rose high and candy’s eyes shined
with a mad glare and the blade came down fast and hard, split
between the old woman’s skull, sinking between her eyes and
stopping above the bridge of the nose. The ragged old body tumbled
over and her blood pooled around Candy’s black Kevlar boots.

Behind Candy, a noise caught her attention. She
turned. Andrew’s body jerked. Jerked again. And then jerked fast,
hard, and violently. His eyes shot open; they scowled a white hot
glare; a rumbling roar erupted from him, and his neck careened, and
his arms flayed forward, and his entire body jerked with wild and
hungry passion.

“That’s not Uncle Andrew Mama.”

“No baby. It sure isn’t.” She removed her
revolver, aimed at his head, fire erupted from the barrel, and a
bullet whizzed through the air and torn asunder her dead brother's
brains.

Candy smiled as her translucent girls danced
hand in hand in a circle around her. “Mama! Mama! Mama! Kill! Kill!
Kill!” The old woman’s blood now streamed around Candy’s boots,
spreading through the old shack’s blistered wood floor. Bloody
axes, hackets, and knives surrounded her. The smell of dead flesh
stank the room. Humidity clung to the air and bugs buzzed above
body parts and bones. She exploded in laughter as she stared at the
ceiling and let tears run down her red speckled face. This room
represented the New World, she thought as her mind courted
insanity. The bones, the flesh, the bugs, the death, the pain, the
hate—it’s all that’s' left. This is all that's left when the lights
are gone, the cell phones are dead, the reality shows are
cancelled, the pop artists are out of business; this is what
remains. May be this is all that there ever was. All the glamour of
the Old World was just a thin, lying veneer hiding the grim reality
of man's primal need for the gore and mayhem of the New World. May
be the Fever freed humanity from its self-imposed, civilized
shackles.

Candy gathered herself

(
babykiller!)

and walked out of the shack, back into the New
World; where she knew new horrors waited, ready and willing to show
her that if she thought this was bad—she aint seen nothing yet.

15

Candy moved back down the path heading to the
pontoon boat. The rain had stopped; the sun had broken through. The
day was heating up, the humidity already making a stellar come
back. She didn't feel much of anything in that moment. Her mind had
stored the image of her brother hanging from a hook, surrounded by
death, far back into the nether regions of her subconscious; a
place that comes alive during dark nightmares; a region of
traumatizing pain that waits for an opportune time to hit the play
button; reeling the drama in the mind's eye like a digital
projector.

She was closing on the clearing that led to the
pontoon and the water's edge; she heard voices, male voices,
stranger danger, red alert; her own primal instincts now sharpened
and tuned in on the new horror frequency sent her hand straight to
the handle the Colt revolver. She slunk down into a slow and
stealthy walk; she edged her way to the clearing.

She saw three men. Camouflage covered their thin
and rugged bodies. They stood around the pontoon. Then the men saw
the hummer and smiles broke across their faces; faces that looked
higher than a fucking kite; jacked up on something crazy strong;
she'd seen that kind of look countless times dealing with meth
heads; but this look was more intense, like they weren’t quite
human anymore; they looked like primal savages with the
intelligence of rabid bears.

"Mama... can't let em take the Hummer." The
girls spoke in hushed whispers, their translucent bodies shivering
in hot swamp air like ghostly vapor. Earth's hot steam rose,
surrounding Candy with stealthy mist. She removed her revolver and
quietly opened the cylinder. Three bullets left. Primal savages
with insane bear intelligence or not; powerful drugs fueling their
intensity withstanding; hot lead shot by an award winning
gunslinger was a fix all for such circumstances.