Timothy 02: Tim2 (2 page)

“Who the fuck is Hugh?” the voice asked again.

“Who the fuck are you?” I shouted. “This is my death, don’t ruin it for me!”

“I’m...I’m Clarence,” he responded, the trembling in his voice making the words difficult to understand.

“The fat fuck?” I asked. “What are you doing in me?”

“In you? You’re in me,” he answered. I began to feel quaking in body parts.

“HUGH!” I screamed.

“Who-who’s Hugh?” he repeated. I was pretty certain he was crying.

“It’s someone that has a shitload of explaining to do.”

“W-w-who...who are you?”

“Please tell me you’re not a stutterer, I can’t take those Porky Pig sounding idiots.”

“Tyler!” he shouted.

“Not sure what’s going on yet, kid, but I can guarantee you Tyler’s not going to be able to help you.”

“Oh God,” he wailed.

“Him either by the way.”

He was blubbering. I could feel his gelatinous stomach bobbing up and down.

“Am I dead?” he asked.

“I was wondering the same thing…about me, of course. But unless I’m completely off the mark, you’re not and neither am I. Although I can pretty much assure you that you’re going to wish you were before this is over,” I said as I laughed.

I’m not going to get all technical because, first off, I can’t; but I’m thinking that Hugh pulled us into this new meat bag. He didn’t eat the fat fuck because nothing short of a Lazarus event was going to get me off the ground, so he transferred his virus into Clarence, but that didn’t explain my consciousness. How could that be transferred by a bite? Are we now that intermingled that we’re indistinguishable from each other? Are we one in the same? And then reality slammed into me: if I was corporeal I would have fallen over. The body that had housed me was dead – MY BODY WAS DEAD. I loved my body!

“Hey, fat fuck!” I shouted.

“Clarence,” he blubbered.

“Whatever. Are your eyes closed?”

He sniffed. “Ye-yes.”

“Open them, dummy.”

“Zombies all over the place. I don’t want to see them.”

“Open your eyes! Or I’ll shove your brains out your nose!” Idle threat I think, but it scared the hell out of Clarence. Light flooded in as his eyes took in the stark ugliness of the world. “Turn around.”

He was much more pliant. From this vantage point I could see my shoes. “Look lower.”

He immediately panned to his own feet.

“You’re an idiot. Look at the perfect beast BY your feet.”

He hesitated.

“Squish squish, tardo. Do it!” My heart – if I had one – would have stopped. I was looking down on myself and I looked like shit. I mean, even more so than a dead guy should, but it was still me. I had one missing eye and two bullet holes in my head. I was covered in filth and…oh shit! I just remembered that I had even lost my penis. That is not something easily forgotten about or gotten over. I was truly going to miss myself.

“Hey, Maurice!”

“Clarence.”

“Whatever.”

“Let me see your dick.”

“What?”

“Hey listen I’m not into guys or anything, but I figure since we’re now in this together I might as well see what we’re packing.”

“There’re zombies around!” he wailed.

“I didn’t say pull it out and play with it. I just want to see it. I lost mine in an unfortunate hunting accident and it’s kind of nice to know I have one again.”

“It’s mine!” he said fiercely.

“We’ll see.”

His head swiveled down as he first spent some practiced time shifting the enormity of his stomach around and then pulled the elastic of his waistband out.

“Tightie whities? Really? Nobody wears those things anymore. And from the looks of them, doesn’t look like you’ve cleaned them very often.”

“I was scared,” he replied.

“Pull the band further. I can’t see anything down there. What’s it doing, hiding? That’s it?” I told him as he grasped it in his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve seen bigger cocktail weenies.”

“Who the hell are you!” he screamed indignantly.

Funny
, I thought,
guy was a heartbeat away from crapping himself from fear, but question his manhood and he was a half a step away from becoming Rambo
.

“Calm down, Diggler. I’m sure the women folk found you...adequate.”

He paused. I figured he would retort with ‘Damn straight’ or something equally as inane. Still nothing. “Whoa…wait, the zombie apocalypse comes and you’re STILL a virgin? Why didn’t you screw that little honey you came out here with?”

“STOP!” he screamed. “SHE’S SPECIAL!”

“Oh, you have a hard on for her, don’t you? Not that she’d be able to tell, mind you, but you’ve got something for her! We can fix all of this!” I told him with glee.

“Please don’t hurt her.”

“We are going to have so much fun together,” I told him.

***

The problem right now was I didn’t know how I was going to accomplish anything. All I knew was that I was just a voice in this guy’s head. I couldn’t
make
him do anything. I mean, at least in the traditional ‘I control him’ sense. I was pretty sure indirectly I could make him do almost anything, like a puppet. But I don’t want to be a puppet master. I want to run the whole show.

And then it kind of hit me. Clarisse here wasn’t quite a zombie yet. Yeah, the virus, germ, worm, whatever Hugh is, was in him and even now probably gaining momentum. Building up and overwhelming his immune system. Sure, when he became a zombie, me and Hugh would become a team again! Happy Days!

“Hey, Clarisse!” I shouted.

“It’s Clarence!” he shouted out.

“How you feeling?” I asked him.

“Why?” he asked cautiously.

“Hey…listen, man, we’re in this together now. I just want to see how you’re doing.”

“I feel fine mostly except for this crazy fucking voice in my head, and where that zombie’s tooth snagged me is stinging like a bitch. Can you just tell me who you are?”

“I’m the zombie that bit you.”

He cried out. “I wasn’t bitten!”

“I beg to differ.”

“Why are you in me?”

“Well, that part I’m not too sure of. Hugh did something.”

“Who’s Hugh?”

“No wonder why you never got laid. You talk too much. You’re giving me a fucking headache and I don’t even have a head. Alright, I’m going to run through this with you. I was a powerful CEO of a Fortune 500 company (what’s he going to do? Fact check me?) My hot-ass wife was having a birthday party for our daughter. She was a protégé, pianist. (I hoped that was the right word). Anyway, one of the little brats at the party was sick and bit me, must have had the zombie virus in him. I don’t know if he was trying to eat me or not, but I threw him across the room to get him away from me. At that point the party was over and the little fuck-faces went home.”

“I can see you’re a kid person,” Clarence interjected.

“That’s what my wife says. I love the little pukes. They’re like little sweet meat treats. Ju-veal-niles! Man I crack myself up. Tough to catch, though.”

I could hear Clarence retching as he thought about me eating children.

“Hey, I didn’t always eat them!” I shouted indignantly. “The kid turned me into a zombie.”

“Wait! You’re a zombie? Zombies think?”

“I’m getting to that if you would just shut up. The zombie is really a virus or something. It has a consciousness, sort of. Pretty rudimentary, really only concerned with eating for the most part. He…it…came after me when it was taking me over. I thought I was going insane.”

“You sure you weren’t already? You sound plenty insane to me,” Clarence whimpered.

“Hey, man, you weren’t there. I was huddled in my mind, much like I’m huddled in yours right now, and I could hear him coming for me. I fought with everything that I was to hold onto my...self, I guess. Me and Hugh.”

“Hugh?”

“I named him.”

“You named the zombie?”

“I named the thing that made the zombie. Anyway, me and Hugh came to an agreement. He would stop trying to kill me and I would help him in his quest.”

“You mean to eat? You help the zombie to eat?”

I thought about it. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

“How could you? You’re killing innocent people.”

“Listen, Clarinet, this thing took over
my
body. I couldn’t do shit except watch. I watched as he ate my date.”

“You said you were married.”

“I get around. Then I watched as it ate my dad.”

“Your dad?”

“Don’t worry, he was an asshole. And after he was finished with him we were stuck in my apartment with nothing to eat. Hugh was screaming bloody murder and we were SO hungry. Stupid shit couldn’t even open a door.”

“How’d you get out then?”

“I opened the door for him.”

“You let that monster loose on the world?” Clarence asked as he looked down on my used up body.

“What choice did I have? He was locked in the apartment and I was locked in my own damn head. He was driving me insane with his moaning for food. I told him to give me control of my hand back and I opened the door so he could feed.”

“And that’s it?”

“Hell no. He was still stupider than dirt. He kept finding ways to get himself shot. I promised him food if he let me direct the ship.”

“You’re sick!” Clarence screamed.

“DON’T YOU JUDGE ME! He was in MY body. If he got shot…I got shot. And you know what? I didn’t want to get fucking shot, plain and simple.”

“So you valued your life over all others?”

“Sure I did. Who’s more important to me, than me? That’s a stupid friggin’ question.”

There was an uneasy silence between us. I didn’t like having my morals (or lack thereof) challenged, and I would imagine Claude didn’t like being pregnant with me. Another case of unplanned childhood. A little protection goes a long way.

Chlamydia hadn’t moved in a while. We were still pretty much in the same place we had
met.
Sometimes he would look at the sky, sometimes in the direction his sweetheart had gone. Every blue moon or so he would glance over at my prone form and shudder. But he didn’t move, not much anyway. Sometimes he would get down on his haunches and that would be about it.

“What are you doing? Why don’t you go find a nudie magazine that we can look through at least?”

“I don’t feel so good,” he answered right before he leaned over and puked.

“What did you eat? Borscht?” I asked him as I looked at the voluminous jets of bile being spewed on the ground.

I thought I was being witty. He sounded pissed when he told me to fuck off. On second thought, as I gazed upon his pool of mouth refuse, it looked like that shit they eat in New Orleans. What’s that crap? Jambalaya? All that is, is some poor country shit, that some barefoot, toothless hag was ripping through her bare cupboards and put all the crap in a big stew pot that hadn’t been eaten yet, and when her fat beer bellied husband came home from putting his drink on, he asked what that shit was his old lady had put on the table, and she came up with that name on the spot. I mean, pretty fucking industrious of her, but a turd is still a turd even if you call it a ham. So, yeah, that’s what Clambake’s puke looked like.

“My head is killing me,” Clarence said as he dropped to his knees.

I started singing the
Battle Hymn of the Republic
as loud as I could. He didn’t appreciate my humor.

“Oh, God, please let it stop,” he said as he got into the fetal position.

I was once again bathed in darkness as he clamped his eyes shut. I’d been to this rodeo before. Me and Hugh went way back, but I wasn’t sure who was in here with us. I started to prepare my zombie fallout shelter.

“Dipwad! Hey, dipwad!”

“Shut up, just shut up. I need some sleep,” he sniveled.

“I figure you’ve got another hour or so as a human, then my buddy Hugh is going to come along. At that point he’s pretty much going to destroy you.”

“W-what?”

“Not the stuttering shit again. Have you not listened to anything I’ve said?”

“I don’t want to die!”

“You can’t stop from becoming a zombie.”

He started to heave again, maybe from being sick or maybe from the oncoming realization. Who really gives a shit.

“You can save
yourself
, though,” I continued. Why did I care? That was the interesting part. I told him about considering himself a person within his own mind and how he needed to build the deepest darkest void within himself. He needed to become his own personal black hole. I could ‘hear’ him rooting around inside his mind; he sounded more like a hippo running around a bubble wrap factory. He was hurting my ears, but even through his loud fumblings I heard something else, something much more insidious. It was the wrigglings of what I considered worms. They were coming…and by the millions.