Mark Henry_Amanda Feral 02 (15 page)

Wendy dropped to her knees in front of the gorilla. He let out a feeble, “Woo,” as her frigid breath lit on his tiny pecker; it nearly turtled in under a pocket of hairy fat—that for our purposes, we’ll call a pooch, if you don’t mind. Her eyes fluttered and a shudder rolled through her body. I didn’t need a therapist to tell me she was revolted.

I said a quick prayer and peeked down at my guy’s dick.

The horror.

Because I am who I am and not someone with actual luck, I was faced with a throbbing fleshy poultry mallet. This cock was not content to be simply misshapen in its engorgement—no—its oversized mushroom cap oozed a thick yellow discharge. Why me?
Why was I subjected to such atrocities? I didn’t deserve it. Yet, there it was, stretching out toward me. Reaching like those horrible claws in the shower room.

I turned away and saw Wendy positioning her guy by the hips, turning him to obstruct our audience’s ability to see. They moved away from the swing, one walking in close enough to grab. I winked at the straggler, hoping to lure him in. He took another step and stopped.

It would have to do.

“Close your eyes, big boy,” I said.

The snarling began before my jaws cracked open, ratcheting to shark-bite radius. The Grillz tingled, bonding magically. Gold canines emerged from my gums forcing my lips back in a way that was too uncomfortable to make a habit. I slapped at Adolf’s dick and bit through his hip and pelvis, dropping him instantly. His scream was cut into a short crow-like “caw” as his throat was the next to go.

To my left, Wendy had taken out the gorilla’s genitals and abdomen, leaving him looking like a cartoon-ish bow-legged cowboy, albeit dripping with blood. In the next instant, she tore into the closest guy, snapping his head clean off before he had any awareness of what was happening.

Impressive.

So much so, that I’d nearly forgot about the straggler. The shorter skinhead was already at the corner of the bar when I caught up to him, biting through his shoulder. His dismembered arm fell to the ground. My feet caught on it and I fell face first into the dirt.

When the man looked back I could see the bite had begun the change. Despite my ability to breathe someone into a zombie, my bite still carried the viral load
necessary to create a mistake and this guy was turning quick.

“Aaaarrrrghhhh!” he cried, which was totally dramatic since they’re really fully capable of words, but seem to get lazy vocabularies.
⁷⁸

He darted through the swinging doors into the bar.

“Wendy! One of them turned mistake!”

She pulled her mouth off her prey to acknowledge me. “Let the reapers get ’em.”

If only. “Hello? We’re in Bumfuck, Egypt. There aren’t any reapers coming. We’ve got to handle this.”

“Shit!” She leapt to her feet and followed me to the doors.

The inside of The White House had devolved into a full-blown zombie outbreak. At least ten new zombies shambled between the tables, chewing on an assortment of limbs, organs and the ubiquitous sweetbreads.
⁷⁹
The bartender dragged his legless torso from behind the bar, a swath of intestines draped from his mouth like a gory handlebar mustache—never a good look.
From the pool tables, a burly woman fought off my armless mistake with a pool cue. Behind her, a blood-spattered ghoul crept up on tiptoes with the child-like precision of a Santa/parent bust. I almost yelled for her to watch out.

Almost.

“What are we gonna do?” Wendy’s face was smeared with blood, chunks of hairy skin and drippy globs of fat. Her look of horror was sadly incongruent. Her teeth were shiny and gold, though.

I realized I was still wearing the damn Grillz, too, reached in, pulled them off and handed the sloppy things back to Wendy. She shrugged and did the same, tossing them in her purse.

I scanned the front of the building. “Maybe we could find some way to lock them in. A stick. Something.” I pointed to the two looped handles on the slatted wooden doors. She nodded and darted off into the woods. I turned back toward the Volvo, considering the tire iron. That would definitely be sturdy enough to hold them back.

Honey stood next to the car, her hand dangling from the open door, pale with shock. Mr. Kim stood atop, shaking his head.

“Get back in the fucking car!” I yelled. “And lock the doors!”

My voice had a second effect, one I hadn’t considered; it alerted the horde of newly departed to our presence. I turned back in time to see a pack of the mindless creatures shamble for the doors. To my right, Wendy was barreling through the dirt lot with a piece of pipe raised over her head. I pressed against the doors, grabbing the handles and evening them. I braced for either Wendy to save the day, or a zombie to
bust through and make my already dead flesh unrecognizable with their fury.

Tables were upended and chairs and bottles crashed on the wood planks as the undead scrabbled toward the door. A wave of blood, bile and excrement preceded them. It washed out from the gap and splattered its warm mess on my shoes and ankles. The first zombie to reach me was a petite woman—thank God—not that I could tell that from her horrible makeup job;
that
had been stripped clean off her skull along with her scalp. The whole mess hung around her shoulders like a shawl. Her sunken lidless eyes glowered; she pushed at the doors, shaking them. Alternating one to the other. Creating an opening.

Behind her a couple of husky ghouls sprang forward, tossing the woman into an electronic dartboard and scoring a bullseye with a splinter of bone that protruded from her mangled nose.

“Wendy!” I screamed.

And she appeared, powering forward with the length of pipe, slipping it through the door handles on her first attempt. We stepped away, hugged. I nearly collapsed in her arms.

“Whew. That was close,” I said, taking her arm and just turning back to the RV, when a loud crack broke behind us. We turned just in time to see the door handles come loose and the pipe fly toward us.

I don’t enjoy being dirty or bars where you can’t get good vodka, yet there I was splayed out like roadkill in front of a crappy Idahoan skinhead joint. I wasn’t even sure what had happened. But, I did know two things … one: zombies were shambling towards me, ready to tear me three new assholes … and … two: I was going to need a new ensemble.

I pushed myself up out of the mud and scanned the ground for Wendy. She wasn’t wallowing like me, in-stead—to my horror—I spotted her stumbling toward the RV, sporting a brand new accessory, a metal pipe piercing her gut.
⁸¹
When she reached the door, she turned back.

“You’ve got a cigarette stuck to your cheek,” she said, disregarding her more heinous accoutrement.

I flicked the butt from my face and pointed out the pole. Wendy’s gaze followed mine to flesh puckered and gray where it protruded; a slow gurgle of puss ran from the injury like sap.

“Oh shit.” She grimaced and jiggled it as I joined her.

The zombies were a good fifty feet away and closing, every bit as dangerous, though slowing and losing focus. One merely sat on a piece of broken door preening and eating the bits of flesh that clung to his tattooed arms in such a dainty manner you’d think he’d stopped for a quick spot of tea and a raspberry scone.

I certainly knew where he could find some lemon curd. It was pouring from the widening gash in Wendy’s gut and splattering the ground in fat plops.

“Gross,” she said, as she twisted the pipe. “Could you help get this out of me?”

“Oh God. Do I have to?”

Her eyes narrowed into slits. “Um … yeah. Look at this shit.”

I looked at the side of the Winnebago and directed her to hang on to the handle by the door. I grabbed on a little lower with one hand and with the other I gripped the pipe. One foot bracing against the side of the RV I threw my weight into pulling out the projectile, which detached with a sucking thunk. Decomposed entrails clung to my hand like gravy. I tossed the pipe away, disgusted.

“Does it look okay?” Wendy performed a poorly executed grin.

I dropped to one knee and examined the gaping hole. Its edges were ragged and drippy but the muscle behind was drier. I poked at a dangling piece of abdomen
that resembled beef jerky; it gave with some flexibility. Her stomach seemed to be intact and surprisingly red. It contracted with the remains of the afternoon neo-Nazi sample menu. The pipe missed her spine, but not by much. Its knobby presence protruded into the puncture like a pair of scuffed knuckles.

As fascinating as the injury was, the scene it framed in gore seemed a far more pressing matter. Past the rusty transport of the undereducated, past the gravel and mud parking lot, past the overgrowth of weeds and wildflowers a splotch of orange was on the horizon and getting bigger.

The Mustang, barreling toward us.

Someone’s timing sucked, and I don’t think I need to tell you it wasn’t mine.

“Oh fuck!” I yelled.

“What?” Wendy looked down, tried to press the wound together with her fingers. “You don’t think a band-aid will do?”

I stood, and turned Wendy toward the approaching Mustang. It sped into the lot, trailing a cyclone of dust, swerved into a sideways slide and plowed into five of the skinheads.
⁸²
Body parts flew like dandelion seed.

There were five left, scattered and roaming. One was still coming toward us, scratching the air ahead of him with curled fingers too newly dead to be atrophied—it took me a second to realize he’d had cerebral palsy while living, which totally explained a limp, not to mention the ergonomic crutch attached to his forearm. The legless bartender had teamed with a willing horse, hanging around the neck of a pimply teen and wandering toward the highway. Then there were the other two. A scraggly-haired woman in dingy flannel
shuffled toward the Volvo while repeatedly shoving her own jawbone back into the hamburger that used to be her face.
⁸³
Mr. Kim jumped and raised his fists menacingly—as menacing as a middle-aged Korean businessman in a button-down shirt can be, not to mention see-through. The last was a giant. A bodybuilder-type who’d let his muscle go to flab, bounded toward the Mustang, man boobs jiggling.

Zombies on the loose and threatening to spread a global plague not dangerous enough for ya? Containment a near impossibility as it is? Why not throw in a bloodthirsty werewolf hellbent on murder and mayhem?

That oughta do it.

Markham’s man stepped out of the car, casually, as though fashionably late for a photo shoot, six-two if he was an inch, with a mop of sandy waves flopping and the bone structure of an underwear model. I would have had to fan myself, if I’d actually been a Southern belle. Sadly, the vapors don’t really go with my body temperature.

A car horn cut through the air from our right. Fishhook popped up from the driver’s side window, a deranged homeless jack-in-the-box. He pointed at the man, shouted something. I didn’t need to know that this was the pizza guy. Honey opened her door and ran over, brandishing the gun that Wendy hadn’t hidden so well, apparently.

“I thought you hid that?”

“I did.” She shrugged.

“Super job.”

Honey raised the gun, aimed for my head and fired. The bullet whizzed past my ear and thunked into something behind me. I turned in time to catch the
crooked hand of the palsied zombie on my shoulder; it snagged on the sleeve of my shirt, tearing it clean off. The thing’s last action was to bring the fabric to its nose and breathe in; it probably smelled like wardrobe dilemma. Honey had busted a cap right through the ’tard’s forehead.
⁸⁴

I swung back to find her focused on the scene in the center of the parking lot. Markham’s man had gone all wolfy during our scuffle and, let me tell you, six-two is a hell of a lot of meat to work with; he’d grown three feet taller—easy—and his claws were massive, thick and long.
⁸⁵
Dexterous though. He eased the door shut with such comfort in his lupine form as to seem controlled rather than monstrous. The muscle-zombie reached for him then, jaw jacked open like an alligator’s maw. A warbling cry issued from its bloodied gape. The werewolf reached out and snapped off its bottom jaw and then slapped it against the thing’s head on the backswing. The zombie went down, tits jiggling.

The meathead dispatched, Gil’s would-be executioner aimed his snout at the dead woman approaching the Volvo. She’d managed to get the door open and was garbling sweet nothings to Fishhook, who seemed to be scrambling inside for a weapon, or possibly his drugs.

The werewolf dropped to all fours and galloped across the parking lot. His blonde coat glistened and bounced with every pounding of his considerable haunches.
⁸⁶
As he reached the zombie, he reared up and swiped at her head, knocking it into the side of the
car and spraying the back fender with blood. He stepped back and cocked his head. The woman was still moving, clawing her way under the SUV. His claws gripped her ankles and pulled her loose, dragging her across the parking lot before swinging her body against the wall of The White House with such force, it exploded into hot dog fixin’s, a veritable buffet of lips and assholes.
⁸⁷