Scattered, Smothered, & Chunked

Voodoo Children-2

By the time I secured the gate, the three zombies walking my way had turned into eight zombies, with two of them standing right in front of my truck. I walked up to one of them and gave him a push in the chest. He fell over backwards, then lumbered to his feet and tried to take a bite out of my face. I swung my machete through his neck and then pushed his body back down. Headless, he stayed there like he was supposed to this time.

I pushed the button in my ear. “Good call, Skeeter. They’re pretty damn slow.”

“That’s good, but don’t underestimate them. There may be quite a lot of them, and they don’t feel pain. You can’t just sever the spinal cord, like with vampires; you have to destroy the brain. Otherwise they can grown back together and attack again.”

“Ow! Now you tell me!” I said as the head I’d just chopped off took a big bite out of one calf. I tossed the machete aside and pulled my battle-axe from my belt. At five feet of sharp steel and bad attitude, that axe promised pain to anything in its path. Too bad for me nothing I was fighting could feel pain. I stomped on the detached head with my other boot, putting one hand on the hood of my truck for balance and finally kicking the head free. It rolled across the graveyard, coming to rest against a headstone.

“I’ll deal with you later, asshole.” I muttered.

“What was that, boss?”

“Not you, Skeeter. Now lemme go do some killin’. I’ll call you back.” I pressed the button in my ear and looked around again. All seven remaining zombies were gathered around my truck, bumping into it as they tried to walk forward.

“Alright, assholes!” I yelled, waving the axe in the air to try and get their attention. “Get the hell off my truck! I just had her detailed!” One zombie turned to follow me as I walked out from behind the truck, and I caved in its skull. Pain sensors or not, twelve pounds of axe in your head will ruin your day. I pulled it free and spun around, crushing two more zombies with one big swing. Problem was, that big swing ended in a big tree, and my big axe got stuck big time. I tried for a minute to pull it out, but when a pair of dead hands grabbed my ponytail, I returned my attention to the problem at hand.

I solved the problem in my hair with Bertha, my polished chrome Mark XIX .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol. I pressed Bertha under the thing’s chin and squeezed the trigger, removing most of the top of the zombie’s skull. I used my left hand to knock the thing’s hands off my hair, then dispatched the other four zombies in fairly quick succession with Bertha. When I’d splattered the last one’s brains all over the ground, I gave Bertha a little kiss on the rear sight, replaced her half-spent magazine with a full one, and put her away in her holster. Then I walked over to the grave marker with the last zombie head lying against it, reared back my size fourteen steel-toe boot, and kicked the head to jelly.

Mission accomplished, I pushed the button and redialed Skeeter.

“Are you okay?” He asked. The little guy actually sounded a little worried about me. I was touched.

“Yeah, I’m fine. A little surprised you hadn’t commandeered a spy satellite to see what I was up to in the five minutes since I last talked to you, but I’m fine.”

“Not a bad idea, Bubba. I’ll keep that in mind for next time.” Me and my big dumb redneck mouth. “Now, are you ready for the rest of them?”

“Rest of them? Skeeter, I just killed like eight zombies, dude. I think I’m done for the night.”

“I don’t think so. Uncle Joe’s records show over two hundred bodies in that cemetery, and if this necromancer is worth his spellbooks, he’s going to try and raise them all to come after you.”

“Two hundred zombies? Damn, Skeeter, I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat.” I looked around, but nothing in the vicinity indicated that a couple hundred dead people were going to crawl out of the ground to recruit me any time soon, but Skeeter had this unhealthy habit of being right, so I figured I’d better load up. I went around the bed of the truck and pulled out my “special” toolbox. I made sure I had half a dozen magazine or so for Bertha, then I started pulling out the heavy artillery.

First I checked on Tiger, my modified Husqvarna T435 chainsaw. I named it Tiger for the Clemson Tigers, on account of it being orange. I’ve been a fan of Husky saws since I was a little kid, but the T435 had a lot going for it in my line of work. The shorter bar on the little saw made it perfect for pruning limbs, especially if those limbs were attached to something that wanted to rip your head off. I like the compact size for interior work, but the light weight made it usable one-handed. At least if your hands are attached to arms like mine, that is. I’d modified the trigger to lock in the “on” position so I could swing the saw better, and disable the inertia chain brake. I didn’t care much about kickback with the soft tissue I was cutting through, but if I had to sling the saw back over my head fast, I wanted to know it was going to cut whatever was back there.

Once I got Tiger gassed up and ran a sharpener over the chain for a second, I pulled out the big hoss. No, the Desert Eagle was not the biggest gun I was carrying, not by a long shot. I called my Atchisson AA-12 semi-automatic shotgun Fat Man after the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki, ‘cause I figured if I pulled that thing out I was planning on laying waste to everything around me. And with a 20-round drum magazine of 12-gauge double-ought buckshot shells loaded into it, that’s exactly what I set out to do. I finished out my armory with a pair of 12” Kukri knives in a back sheath and 14” Bowie knife on my left thigh. Feeling sufficiently armed to take over a small Central American nation; I clanked and banged my way across the graveyard towards the center of the cemetery.

The cemetery was surprisingly large for such a podunk town, but I figured more people had died there than were interested in living there. Lugging all that gear got me pretty out of breath by the time I’d walked a couple hundred yards, so I sat on a tombstone for a little breather. I had my most important backup ammo with me, a six-pack of beer in a bandolier across my chest, so I popped a Bud and looked around. Pretty basic small-town cemetery, a few crosses, mostly rectangular headstones, one or two angels or Virgin Marys dotting the landscape. I saw a zombie wandering around off to my right, so I flipped on the Bertha’s laser sight and blew his head off. The .50 report sounded even louder than normal in the silence of the graveyard, and about a half second after the boom I heard the pitter-patter of skull and brains falling to earth and gravestones. Glad I didn’t have to clean up after myself, I holstered Bertha, picked up the rest of my rig, and headed on towards the center of the graveyard.

I came over one last hill and walked into the set of a cheap horror movie. And we’re talking ultra-low budget stuff here; the kinda flicks that make Roger Corman look like Spielberg. There were Dollar General tiki torches sending up black citronella smoke into the night sky, arranged in a lopsided ten-foot circle. A battered purple Civic hatchback was parked just outside the circle with the hatch open and creepy music playing over the car’s stereo system. And it was a serious stereo, too. Whoever owned the junker didn’t spend any money on bodywork or paint, since there was more Bondo than metal showing along most of it, but there was a thump coming out of that little piece of crap car that made my teeth rattle.

Inside the circle of bamboo torches, a skinny witch doctor danced around slashing chicken throats and tossing blood out in what looked like random patterns. But every time the voodoo priest dropped another dead chicken onto the growing pile, another pile of dirt shifted and another zombie crawled out and started walking towards town. Judging by the stack of chicken crates this little guy had in the circle with him, he planned on raising half the cemetery tonight. There were close to thirty zombies milling around waiting for instructions, so I decided to go ahead and get to work. I set Tiger down on a nearby headstone and opened up on the crowd of dead guys with the Fat Man. Fat Man boomed, lead and fire blew out the barrel, and zombie heads exploded about as fast as I could pull the trigger. It started to get boring after the first five or six re-killings, so I decided to mix things up a little, shooting over one shoulder, off the hip and behind my bag a la Annie Oakley, if Annie Oakley had been six-five with a ponytail.

Fat Man finally clicked on an empty chamber, so I blew the smoke off the barrel and set him down beside Tiger. My ears were already ringing from the combination of the shotgun and the horrible music, so I decided it wouldn’t do any more damage to let Bertha come out and play. There were only five or six zombies left standing, and they were all moving away from me, so I flicked the laser sight back on and blew their heads up like watermelons at a Gallagher show. One clip, six re-dead zombies, and a couple of freshly painted smears on the marble and granite markers throughout the cemetery. I felt a weak grip on one ankle and looked down to see half a zombie clawing at my ankle, apparently offended that I’d cut him in half with the Fat Man. I parted his hair with my bowie knife, holstered Bertha, and cleaned the knife off on the grass beside the zombie.

I took a good look around at my work, and was pretty impressed by what I had wrought. There were about two dozen zombies blown into about eight dozen pieces scattered all around the graveyard, and I’d been fortunate enough to blow out the car stereo with a particularly lucky shot. The grass was thick with clotted blood, entrails and other zombie parts, plus the odd surgical implement and fast food wrapper. I’ve thought for a long time now that undertakers sew their garbage up inside the dead bodies instead of throwing it away. You know, just another way to screw the customer — make them take out your trash when they take out Granddad. Seeing half a dozen taco wrappers floating away in the breeze only confirmed my suspicions.

I turned back to look at the witch doctor, and his eyes met mine. He stood stock still, the c*****e that was a visit from Bubba finally coming clear to him. He wore a huge African tribal mask, what looked like those really ugly fur-lined boots chicks wear in the summer with shorts, Uggs I think they call them, and a jockstrap. That’s all. He was tall, not as tall as me, but still over six feet, and skinny. Maybe one-sixty soaking wet in those stupid boots. He held a kitchen knife in one hand and a dead chicken in the other, and I heard the ground behind me crumble as another zombie worked its way up from the earth. I drew Bertha and sent the dead guy back to his eternal rest, then turned my attention back to the scrawny voodoo guru.