APOCALYCIOUS: Satire of the Dead (13 page)

The side of her car was caved in and he could see that the airbags had deployed. He could hear what sounded like four or five of the reanimated corpses in pursuit behind him. He saw his sister and mother unconscious inside the vehicle and wanted to help them. The sounds of peeling tires and metal scraping metal were everywhere. Daniel could hear sirens in the distance and he hoped they would be in time to save his family. He looked over his shoulder and saw that there were six of his dead relatives rapidly jerking toward him, he glanced to where his mom slumped in the car once more then ran around the back alley of the funeral home and got into his own car, his heart hammering and aching for leaving his family. He vomited into the empty passenger seat then fumbled to get his keys in the ignition, bile dripping from his five o’clock shadow. He began to shake with long, heavy sobs. In his mind he kept seeing what he had done to that little girl. Eventually he managed to find enough control to drive away and he slammed the car into gear, spinning tires as he sped from his aunt’s funeral.

                                                                      
Chapter 9 - Turkey Season

Sundowner Bowling Alley

Peebles, Ohio

             
Bodie Barnes, large and in charge, had hit the lanes with a couple of his buddies. It was his usual Saturday morning routine. Normally he was a mild mannered factory working slob that packed fake meat. This was a fact that was not lost on some of his friends that didn’t work at the same factory and they constantly made lame jokes about his job title. But here, he was something of a minor celebrity. Here at the Sundowner it wasn’t a party until he got there. Barnes was a huge man that stood at a towering 6’6” and topped the scales at over three hundred pounds. Where he could have been a bouncer at any of the local dives and people might have feared his power-lifter physique, he instead preferred to laugh and make others around him join in. Loud, boisterous and often obscene in his choice of comic material, everyone loved the big lummox, not to mention that he was one of the best bowlers in town.

             
As he was approaching the line to release the ball he heard a commotion behind him. A loud drunken man was shouting at someone. Barnes knew where beer and bravado met, there was often a fight. Barnes stopped his approach and began polishing his prize ball with the bottom of his shirt, which revealed his large hairy belly. As he did this he surveyed the bar behind him and saw the aforementioned drunk shoving an old man away from him. The old man was quiet, but he had to give the old dude credit, he kept coming back at the drunk.  He hitched up his rubber elbow brace then grabbed his cloth bowling ball bag off the seat behind him and slipped the ball inside. He slid one of his large paws into the loops and walked up to where the disturbance was taking place to help calm things down. As he got closer he watched as the old man reached out with both arms toward the drunk and was immediately met with a stiff right cross to the jaw that sent the old man landing in a heap on the floor. Bodie ran the remaining thirty feet to the drunk and slammed him against the bar. Normally he was an easy going sort, but seeing the beating of an old man, no matter if he had deserved it or not, had enraged him. He towered over the drunk who was sporting a Real-Tree Budweiser cap and a huge dip of snuff in his bottom lip. Barnes pinned the man with the forearm of his free hand and glowered at him. He didn’t speak; he didn’t have the words. 

Suddenly and unexpectedly the right word hit his vernacular. “Sonuvabitch!” he howled shocked to see the old man with his teeth clamped into the rubber brace on the arm that held his bowling ball. He tried to shake the old man off, but the old man was firmly clamped down. It felt to Bodie like a blood pressure cuff that had been pumped up to far, pinching and constricting his arm.  Still, Bodie fought for control over his emotions and tried to give the old man one more chance. “Dude, I’m warning you…”

              “That’s what
I
tried to tell him, Bodie!” croaked the drunken guy from beneath Bodie’s forearm.

Barnes eased up and allowed the drunk to slink away. Bodie watched him for a moment and could hear the drunk tell one of his good old boy friends that the old man had bitten him. Bodie focused his attention back to the old man who still held his arm clamped between his jaws. He felt his anger rising and gave the old man a light punch to the forehead with his free arm, but the old guy wouldn’t budge.

“Mister… I am going to hit you
real hard
next time,” warned Bodie.  Around him, onlookers laughed and took short drinks from their long necks so they didn’t miss anything. Barnes’ shoulders drooped for a moment in frustration then he cranked his right arm around his opposite side, punching the old guy in his forehead that sent him cartwheeling in one direction and several broken teeth in another. He looked at his arm. There wasn’t any blood, so he hadn’t bitten through the rubber brace, but he had sure as hell pinched the hell out of it.

“There’s something wrong with that guy; someone had better call the squad,” he muttered to no one in particular. Bodie Barnes was no longer in his usual jovial mood. He heard a roar from behind him, recognizing the drunk’s voice and saw the good old boy charging toward him. Real-Tree looked sick and deranged, the whites of his eyes were a jaundiced yellow and his skin had taken on a mottled bruised appearance. He heard another scream behind him, but he did not have the time to look backward without getting mugged by the drunk. This sort of thing happened a lot; little man syndrome.  Bodie shot out a meaty right hand and sent the intoxicated red neck pirouetting into a crowd of other drunks that fell around him, like the pins had earlier. Mostly he hated this sort of thing, but a small part of him became exhilarated by it, perhaps a little drunk on the adrenaline. The screams from behind snapped him out of the perusal of his own handiwork. He was amazed at the site. The blood; there was so much blood. The old man crouched over his victim, tearing chunks of flesh and cartilage from a woman’s throat. He could hear the tearing and the gristly sound of soft tissue popping and ripping beneath the violent shaking of the man’s head. There were others clutching at bleeding wounds, at least three that he could see. All of the wounded looked like they were about to throw up, much as he felt himself. It was disgusting, but a spirit of resolve came over him and he strode forward to where the old man knelt over the dead girl. He lifted his bowling ball bag over his head and swung it down in a long powerful arc onto the old man’s wispy gray head. He heard it crack, as the ball actually entered the skull and showered those huddled closest with rancid globs of brain, blood and puss. The old man collapsed onto the girl’s neck. Barnes watched with horrified fascination as the jaws of the old man continued clenching then unclenching, refusing to release the meat even after death.

              Bodie hurriedly carried the bag into the men’s room and washed the gore from his baby, then went into one of the stalls to instantly shed about five unwanted pounds from his colon; whenever he was nervous he felt a need to evacuate the bowels. He braced the door to the stall with a size thirteen as he did his business, in case someone wanted to give him an unwelcome, surprise payback.

             
When he returned from the restroom he found that uncertainty and fear had escalated to utter chaos. The usual carefree attitude of the Sundowner had been replaced with screams of panic, screams of inebriated rednecks spouting the usual prefight profanities and verbal poses. It was a cacophony; frenzied interludes of panic mixed with a symphony of terror as Hank Jr. serenaded them with Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.

             
“C’mon, you want some?” screamed one.

             
“He bit me! Oh God, he bit me!” screamed another.

             
“Somebody get this freak offa me!”

             
Barnes adjusted the grip on the cloth handle of his bowling ball bag. He saw blood everywhere as blue and red lights strobe from outside the glass doors. He heard gunshots as a blood-streaked blonde girl with bad teeth charged one of the EMTs, clawing at his eyes, gouging one from its socket.

             
“Help me….please, help me… oh God….God!”

             
Barnes mused in his shock that it sounded a lot like his family reunions. He felt something slam into his hip, looked down and saw that it was a boy, maybe ten years old, who had ran into him, or been thrown into him. The kid was unconscious or dead, he wasn’t sure, but he knew that the kid probably hadn’t had his bottom lip chewed off and the flesh dangling from his chin when he had come in today. He heard more gunshots, and from outside he heard tires squealing on the asphalt. Bodie found that he liked that sound and thought that maybe he should be making the sound himself. He had the hysterical image of Fred Flintstone leaving a body shaped outline through the wall as he made a hasty escape. Bodie would be just as hasty, but he had enough sense to use the door.

             
                                         
Chapter 10 - The Death Wagon

Pittsburgh
, Pennsylvania.

             
Tony Pena believed that zombies had always been with us. Maybe they didn’t wander aimlessly in the night in search of human flesh to eat, but they were there, none the less. They fed off society as a whole instead of individually, which was about the only difference. Well, that, and maybe the stench, but not necessarily.

             
So when the dead reanimated he really wasn’t all that surprised, maybe it was all part of the process, the evolution. He actually thought it was pretty cool; for an eighteen year old kid that was raised on the most violent of horror movies, this was ideal.

             
Up to this point, Tony had lived his life by the code of a typical die hard metal head. He drank beer, played guitar in a band called Love Knuckle, the name was invented not because it made any sense, but because it conveyed a feeling of sex and violence like any good metal band should. When not doing playing gigs or helping his father in the garage he went to concerts and picked up drunk chicks; it was all a part of the image and he believed if he ever wanted to make it into the big time then he’d better damn well act like it. His jet black hair fell in straight lines down the middle of his back, but after the zombies came he decided that it was safer if he pulled it back in a ponytail most of the time while dressing strictly in black Levis and black concert tees. These usually were adorned with album art from various death metal bands by an artist he admired named, Pussbucket.

             
Tony believed that there were two types of zombies. There were your regular flesh–eaters, your run of the mill decaying corpse that trudged along looking for a snack. These were the kind he sort of liked or, at least didn’t enjoy killing. The other type he called True-zombies. True-zombies were pretty much the same as when they were alive. They sat around mashing buttons on their cell phones even though the battery was dead. There were others that had thronged to shopping centers and malls wandering through aisle after aisle of merchandise they really had no use for. These he realized had been already labeled by George Romero in the movie Dawn of the Dead and he gained even more respect for the film maker, other than the fact that he was from Pittsburgh. Some True-zombies still sat at desks clattering on their keyboards, some you could find in fitness centers all ‘roided up as they had been in life, lugging around dumb-bells. Still others could be found in bars and pubs (when they were alive they had been the ones pouring whiskey down their gullets). Now they didn’t do much drinking, but they still staggered as they all seemed to do, bumping into other dead patrons.  They all seemed to be mindless in their rituals and routines.

             
Tony tried not to kill zombies, they were attempting to be productive, a part of the social system, they worked for a living. Zombies were the blue collar dead. Tony did, however, enjoy killing True-zombies. They deserved it. They just took up space still clinging to a past life that didn’t have much of a meaning to begin with. Usually a Molotov cocktail with some petroleum jelly in it could incinerate a room full of those bumbling suits of skin and they would just wander around on fire still doing the same rituals until gravity and fire consumed them and rendered them to ash and smoldering piles of bone.

             
At the tender age of eighteen, when other kids his age were cruising the strip, he was working at his father’s garage: ‘Hemi-God Customs’, where he had worked after school and during the summers of the last four years. His favorite was The Death-Wagon. A 1958 Cadillac Hearse that belonged to a local mortician. Sleek and black with ghost tombstones airbrushed along its long low sides and sitting on old school Cragars.