Zombie Kong (2 page)

I looked to my left. No keys in sight.

I looked to my right, just as the monster released another roar, and this time the noise was louder than I can possibly explain. The sound was coming from everywhere, from all directions. The sound was penetrating, getting right inside me, into my heart. When the noise ended, I found that I was screaming in terror with my hand gripping my chin and my bottom lip trembling uncontrollably. Frightened beyond words, I clicked on my phone and coughed a number of times, in desperate need of a germ-free environment.

The air, of course,
was
toxic. How long would it be before the air itself killed me? It was impossible to say, although I couldn’t image I’d survive much longer.

I guess this is a good time to tell you that I have asthma, for it was at that moment I felt the first signs of an asthma attack, which, in so many ways, was the very last thing I wanted to add to the situation.

Half the phone number was dialed with jittery hands; then I saw something, and needed a moment to see it again. I hung up.

My phone, like most, came with a backlight. And because I had a light, I could see…

Dead bodies.

I was sitting in a pile of dead bodies: faces pale, mouths opened, noses smashed, eyes locked in fear, arms chewed into mulch, scalps yanked from heads, skin torn, spines protruding from shattered backs, legs broken, fingers missing, feet twisted, kneecaps obliterated, a child…

A child with little yellow ribbons braided into her blonde hair… she had her face pounded into her shoulder. I saw a man that had been bitten in half at the waist; he looked about forty. A pair of chubby arms sat alone, stacked together almost neatly on a mangled corpse. The owner of the arms was nowhere to be found.

I saw a baseball glove, an unopened bottle of wine, a laptop, a pack of cigarettes, a pair of sunglasses, and what I later realized was a horse’s head, covered in blood, guts, and bone. And this––
all this
––was turning in a circle, blending, mixing, churning.

Fighting for balance, I stood up and dialed my wife’s number. My legs sank into the mulch.

And then it had me: the small intestine. I was going in.

The phone began ringing.

Candice answered, sounding completely stressed out. “Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Dale, is that you?”

“Oh my God, yes! It’s me! It’s me!”

“Where are you? I thought––”

“I’m inside the monkey!”

A slight pause came before Candice said, “What?!”

“I’m inside! He tossed me into his mouth and swallowed me down!”

“You’re kidd––”

Panic consumed me in a way I can’t possibly explain, and I started screaming: “I’M IN THE MONKEY’S STOMACH! YOU’VE GOT TO TELL SOMEBODY! HELP ME! GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE! I’VE GOT TO GET––”

The monster unleashed another thought-crushing yell and pounded on his chest. Instead of finishing the sentence, I screamed more loudly than before. Then something happened. Not inside. Outside. Maybe the monster fell; maybe he jumped off a car or did something as simple as sit down. I don’t know, but my center of gravity changed and the corpses around me shifted position. The dead were piling my way, causing the phone to pop from my hand and tumble from my fingers. The world became a fraction darker than the far side of the moon and before I had a chance to catch my breath––before I realized what was about to happen––Kong’s intestine sucked me in.

CANDICE

“Hello? Hello!?” Candice hung up and dialed her husband back at once. After several rings the answering service came on, so she hung up and tried her luck again, only to be addressed with the same prerecorded greeting that had annoyed her moments before.

As she hung up a second time, her son, Jake, said, “What is it, Mommy? Was that Daddy? Is he okay?”

Candice looked her boy in the eye, smiling falsely. He was so young. So scared. “Everything’s fine, Jake,” she lied.

Everything wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine.

“Was that Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“Is he––”

“Jake,
please!”
Standing on the sidewalk next to a misshapen motorcycle, Candice exhaled a deep breath and placed her thumb between her teeth. It was something she often did when she was feeling nervous or upset. After tossing her cell phone into her purse she wrapped her purse-strap around her shoulder and crouched down like a rugby player in a huddle, eyes scoping the ground. One hand gripped her forehead while the other was planted on her knee. She thought she might faint. Or throw up. Or both.

She didn’t mean to snap at Jake. Her only child deserved better than
that,
especially now. But the situation was a little too much to handle and she didn’t know if she could take it. The summer heat was too much; it wasn’t at all pleasurable. And there was a giant zombie gorilla smashing the town apart. Worse still, the man she married nine years ago––on a spring day filled with rain and hail and 75 mile-an-hour winds that destroyed a tree and smashed a church window––was calling her on a telephone from inside the animal’s stomach. This was a
colossal
situation. And yeah… she could admit it: she was worried, she was scared; she was freaking right the fuck out.

“Jake.”

“Yes, Mom?”

“I’m freaking out.”

“What?”

“Sorry, I’m… I’m having a hard time with this.”

Jake didn’t say anything. He just stood there, looking at his mother with concern rooting its way into his features. He was trying to be a big boy, trying not to cry, but his mother had never looked so worried. So upset. So saddened. Never. Not once. Not even on the day that Aunt Margie died. That was a bad day, but
this
was worse.
Way
worse. He wasn’t having
any
fun––none whatsoever. Nothing here was making him happy, and it was a
Saturday.
Weekends were supposed to be nothing
but
fun, not like this. Not scary.

At once, Candice stood tall. She snatched Jake’s hand and started walking. Together they marched along the sidewalk and onto the road, ignoring the sirens blaring, the people weeping, and the dead bodies littering the area around them. They walked past a woman that had fallen to her knees and a man that was openly crying. They moved their way through a cloud of smoke and past a blue pick-up truck that had a huge dent in the hood. The dent seemed to be full of implication, much like the flat tires, the broken windshield, and the young man strapped into his seat, impaled with glass.

Candice tugged on Jake’s hand, encouraging the boy to turn his head away from the truck. She didn’t want him to observe such a catastrophe, even though tragedy could be easily witnessed from every direction.

They kept walking.

Jake could see that his mother was taking him into a greasy spoon that had a faded billboard attached to a brick wall above a dirty strip of windows. The billboard had the words––

-THE LUNCH ROOM-

Putting smiles on faces since 1968!

––stenciled across its front.

Candice pulled the door open and trudged past a
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
notice with Jake in hand. They moved down an aisle that had a row of vacant booths on each side and sat next to a window, facing each other in an empty cubicle that had nothing cluttering the table.

She opened her purse, pulled out her phone, and made her call again. Nothing.

Broken dishes peppered the floor. Half-eaten meals sat abandoned on tables gathering flies. Someone had left a purse sitting in the booth next to them, along with an iPod and a pair of cheap sunglasses. On a different table a twenty-dollar bill, folded in the middle, had been tossed atop an empty plate. There were no waitresses to be found, no cooks, no hungry customers, no people standing behind the counter eager to serve food. Aside from Jake and Candice, there was only one other person in the restaurant: a stiff-jointed man with a chiseled face and razor short hair. He might have been thirty-five years old, give or take a year.

Standing motionlessly in the center of the room, beneath a ceiling fan that spun wobbly-circles above him, the man looked a little bit like a shorthaired version of Jack Nicholson back in the 1970s. Specifically, when Jack played the role of Randle Patrick McMurphy in the film
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
except that the man in the restaurant wasn’t wearing a white hospital shirt; he was wearing a referee’s jersey, covered in dust. And he didn’t seem cheerfully zealous. He seemed downright weird.

It took Candice a moment to remember the sports store across the street and grasp the fact that the people working there wore the referee jersey as part of their uniform. The store,
Athlete’s Delight
, had always done excellent business as far as she could tell. She had assumed it always would. Of course, that was before––

Slowly, as if he was in a trance, the man cocked his head towards them. He looked at Jake. Then Candice. “What do we have here?” he said.

Technically it was a question, but he wasn’t asking it to anyone in particular. He just said it––quietly, almost emotionlessly, with his eyes locked on the empty space between them. He mumbled something under his breath after speaking, and then he stumbled forward. In some ways he looked like he was suffering the effects of a voodoo curse.

A moment of silence came, followed by Jake leaning across the table, whispering, “That man’s acting funny, Mom. Look at him. Look at his hands. Do you see what he’s doing with his hands?”

Candice looked over her shoulder. Once again her thumb found its way between her teeth.

Meaner than a pit-bull with blood on its snout, the man was opening his hands slowly then snapping them into fists, then opening them once again, and snapping them into fists––repeating the motion, over and over. If the oddball look sheet-rocked across his vacuous face wasn’t reason for concern, the way he was moving his hands definitely was. The guy had toys in the attic; it wouldn’t have surprised Candice if he pulled his pants to his knees and sang Happy Birthday in French while doing a jig.

“Mom,” Jake said. “Do you think––”

“Quiet. Don’t look at him. Just… ignore him for now.”

“But––”

“Hush!”

Jake nodded and his eyes found the table but he felt no comfort knowing his mother was ignoring something that needed to be addressed. The smell of lunacy was in the air, only she didn’t recognize it, or perhaps she didn’t care. He wanted to tell her that the man was not in touch with things, only he could not find the words.

Candice considered leaving the restaurant but needed a moment to think, and the relative tranquility of room was the most she could hope for.

Help. She needed help. And she needed to do something smart, but what? What could she do? Her husband Dale had phoned her from inside the gorilla’s belly and he wanted her to do
WHAT
exactly? What was she supposed to do about
this
little situation, phone the police? Without a doubt, the police were already well aware of the fact that there was a giant gorilla smashing the shit out of the town, so that was one phone call she didn’t have to make.

She needed a cigarette.

Or better yet, a joint… a big fat one. One grown by Snoop Dogg, rolled by Ziggy Marley, and endorsed by Cheech and his good buddy Chong.

“Oh God,” she muttered. “I don’t know what to do about this.”

She looked out the window.

On the far side of the street most of the buildings had been knocked down.
Athlete’s Delight
, she realized, had been replaced with a pile of rubble that had a flattened car squashed into it.

The man spoke again: “What do we have here? Who do you think you are?”

Candice found herself wishing there was a waitress in the house so she could order a cup of coffee and look at the menu. She turned towards the counter. As luck would have it, a pot of joe was sitting right there, and it looked like it had been freshly brewed, too. She turned towards Jake. “Would you like something to drink? A chocolate milk, maybe? Coke?”

Jake nodded. “Okay, Mom.”

“Which?”

“Huh?”

“Which? Coke?”

“Coke.”

“Okay. I’ll get you a––”

“No, wait. Chocolate milk. I want chocolate milk.”

“Okay. Chocolate milk it is. Stay right here and I’ll fetch us some drinks. Then we’ll figure out what to do.” Candice forced a smile.

Jake tried to do the same but failed.

After plunking her phone and her purse on the table, she stood up and started walking, avoiding the man standing at the center of the restaurant. As she was making her way behind the counter she heard the man say, “What are you doing?”

She didn’t respond.

His hands opened slowly and snapped shut.

She was getting a bad feeling, a scary feeling. A feeling of imminent doom.

Two modern-looking refrigerators with glass doors sat together like wide-shouldered soldiers. Inside the unit on the left, there was an entire shelf dedicated to milk, chocolate milk, and cream.

She opened the appropriate door, reached inside, and liberated a liter of chocolate milk. The container had a cartoon-drawn, brown-colored cow licking its lips with its eyebrows raised, suggesting the milk it produced was ten times more delicious than the milk from any other cow.

As she sat the carton on the counter the man spoke again. His eerie voice was enough to make her skin crawl: “You’re not allowed back there. Get away from there!”

The man was suddenly coming at her with a noticeable amount of aggression in his awkward movement. His head was still cocked sideways in an outlandish predatory gesture, but more disturbing were his eyes. Chicken-eyes, red-rimmed––frightful and filled with the promise of pain; they were lit up like hateful firestorms.

Before Candice knew it would happen, she snatched the container of milk from the counter and held it up defensively; it was a knee-jerk reaction, not a game plan. She found herself backing away while scanning the restaurant for a weapon more threatening than a cold beverage.