APOCALYCIOUS: Satire of the Dead (12 page)

             
“No sir, I don’t. This is the Lord’s kitchen,” she explained patiently.

             
He smiled revealing a set of yellow teeth that were packed with remnants of previous meals.

             
“Are you alright, mister?” she asked

             
“Yeah…just so...hungry,” he repeated absently.

             
Karen eyes widened when she noticed an ethereal gray black haze that seemed to writhe around the fat man and she suddenly felt the urge to pee. She turned her head to ask her friend Gladys if she would take her place while she used the bathroom. As she did the man lunged forward, grabbing her wrist and pulling her forward over the counter. The tin of eggs clattered to the floor and she screamed. The man brought her arm to his mouth and bit down, sinking his yellow teeth into her flesh.

             
Several of the other patrons jumped on his large back, others grabbed his arms and one began to punch the man in the side of the face. Karen screamed again as she tore her arm from the fat man’s mouth, blood pouring from the jagged wound. She watched as the pastor, Dick McManus, a reformed biker, tackled the fat man and beat the man in the head with the handle of a thick wooden spoon. She hated to see the good pastor resort to his former behavior, but thanked God for his intervention.

             
The wound on her hand burned like it was on fire and she felt the fire slowly travel up her arm. “Oh Jesus, help me,” she whispered and heard the pastor yell for some of the kitchen staff.

             
“Call an ambulance!” Dick shouted as he continued to piston his right fist into the fat man’s face. He drove it forward again hitting the fat man in the mouth, the fat man accepted the fist into his gaping jaws and clamped his broken yellow teeth around the knuckles. The pastor screamed and that was the last that Karen Oswald remembered until she woke up in the ambulance.

       
Chapter 8 - We Put the Fun in Funeral

Chard and Mangold Funeral Home

Dayton
, Ohio 

             
Daniel Tyson had driven from Zanesville to attend his Aunt’s funeral. He hadn’t known her very well, at least since he was ten or eleven. Daniel remembered that she had been nice and had made him cookies. The rumor was that she had been loaded. Sure, he was sorry that she had died, but he secretly hoped that there was a surprise waiting for him at the reading of her will on Tuesday.

             
He met his mom and sister in the parking lot. His mom smiled wanly at him as he approached them on the sidewalk in front of the funeral home. He bent toward her and kissed her on the cheek. She grasped his tie and straightened it.

             
“You look very handsome.”

             
“I feel like a douche bag,” Daniel said, “This suit makes me itch.” He irritably ran a finger under the collar of his shirt.

             
His mom smiled, “You said the same thing when you were six.”

             
Daniel shrugged. He felt extremely uncomfortable, not only because of the cheap suit he had just bought two days ago, but also because he hated funerals. He was aware that the ritual was supposed to give closure or some other load of crap, but to him they were just plain weird. He wasn’t trying to be insensitive or apathetic, but he didn’t believe that the worm farm lying in that box was anxiously awaiting the preacher’s kick ass eulogy.

             
There was also the smell of all those flowers, powdery like an old woman’s perfume that made him want to choke. He figured that they were there to cover the underlying scent of death and slow decay or formaldehyde.

             
His mom slid her arm into the crook of his, and they walked into the parlor together, his sister trailing behind as she hot-boxed a cigarette.

             
They walked to the casket and peered upon the motionless body of his aunt Vicky. There, lying in that quilted crate she
slept.
It was a sad and distorted image of his vague memories of the woman. She was caked with make up in a pitiful attempt to make the carcass look rosy-cheeked and ready to crawl out of its box and do some jumping jacks.

             
From behind him he heard the same old rehearsed lines that made his skin crawl.

             
“She looks so peaceful.” That was his favorite. It was an oldie, but a goodie. He was looking right at the old girl and she didn’t look that peaceful to him. If you asked him she looked downright creepy; like she should be in a wax museum, almost lifelike, but not quite.

             
As the trio turned from the casket and made their way to their seats Daniel scanned the room, shaking his head indignantly and did a poor job of masking his disdain for his extended family. He saw his Uncle Dan fidgeting as he nicked for a smoke, but Daniel knew that anxiety all too well, he needed a cigarette himself. There was one of his cousins sitting against the far wall. Daniel couldn’t remember the dude’s name, but he had an earphone screwed into his left ear. The man’s wife sat beside him and kept shooting him glances that glared with disapproval, but more than likely it was on what she feared as public perception than it was actual distaste. He saw the same bored expressions that virtually screamed that they were thinking more about picking up a Quarter Pounder or a Whopper when they busted out of this joint than reminiscing about the deceased. He noticed a dude that he didn’t recognize checking out one of his cousins, and judging from the expression that dripped like grease from his lips; Daniel didn’t want to know what the dude was doing to her in his head.

             
Of course, sitting in the front row was his Aunt Shirley. She wailed like a banshee and made exaggerated movements so everyone would be aware of her enormous despair at the loss of her sister. The only thing she was missing was a bull horn and a neon sign.

             
Daniel had to stifle a laugh when he saw his Uncle Pete doze off and smack his forehead on the chair back in front of him. He thought that Uncle Pete must have Narcolepsy because the man was always falling asleep at the most inopportune times.

             
They sat three rows back from the casket. It was odd for close family to sit so far back from the casket, but due to the sheer volume of phony mourners, it was as close as they could get. He saw his Mom dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her handkerchief, trying in vain to keep her mascara from running, and he put his arm around her shoulder. She patted his knee as she looked at him, and he nodded. Daniel had never been very good with words, he knew what he wanted to say, but his words always betrayed him, not to mention that his tone seemed to invariably sound sarcastic. He was aware that he often sounded like a dick when he spoke, so unless he was around his closest of friends he tended to keep his mouth shut if at all possible.

Daniel saw that some of his more distant relatives were looking at him suspiciously, as if he were about to start praying to Satan or sacrificing a goat anytime now. They hated his long hair, which was pulled back into a pony tail and trailed down the middle of his back. He was sweating nervously and was aware that he was starting to smell riper than his Aunt laying at the front of the viewing room. Although he hated the smell of all those flower arrangements he was also glad their smell was enough to at least mask his own nervous odor. His stomach and guts were churning and he squirmed in his seat as he tried desperately not to fart out all the gas produced from last night’s Taco Bell. He tried to focus his mind on anything other than what the Reverend was saying. As an agnostic and mostly apathetic, he didn’t know, and he didn’t care, but he had to concentrate on something. He wondered how his own eulogy would sound and the scenario played in his mind. Would the preacher be swimming in sweat, nervously patting down his forehead trying desperately not to offend his family? Probably; he figured that the preacher would have a hard time convincing the audience that Daniel rested in the arms of Jesus. Daniel knew how he was perceived and that clergy probably didn’t believe that heaven had tattoo parlors or tittie bars.

The reverend said something that snapped him back to reality so he grudgingly listened for the sake of his mother. Eulogies were hokum. The description given of Daniel’s Aunt Vicky could have been used interchangeably on a thousand other people.

Vague, but final.

To his credit the preacher tried to say the right things in the right tone of voice to comfort those that desperately needed that reassurance.

An image crept into Daniel’s mind and he again had to stifle a fit of laughter. In his mind he tried to reanimate his aunt by scuffing his shoes on the carpeted floor and zapping her on the nose with his finger
like a super low budget Frankenstein.

             He didn’t know what he was supposed to believe other than the fact that last night’s pintos and cheese had been a very bad idea. He listened to the light sounds of sniffing and sobs that dotted the room. He tried focusing on the pictures of his aunt, her family and friends that were posted to a large board propped on an easel to the left of the casket. He felt the gas bubble in his bowels recede for a moment and he was
able to relax his sphincter for a second.

             
His mom screamed suddenly, which startled the loud and long-winded fart from the confines it had longed to escape. He absently thought that he might have shit himself. He stared at her in shock and wondered what her malfunction was, but she kept screaming, oblivious to his ringing ears. He wondered if maybe he should slap her or something. Then her screams were echoed by many others behind him, he turned in his chair and wondered what their problem was, this wasn’t a wake after all. The he heard the Reverend scream, “Get offa me you crazy bitch!”

             
He was relatively sure that this wasn’t a normal reference used in a eulogy; at least he didn’t think it was. Daniel jerked his head back around to the front of the room and saw his dead aunt clinging to the minister’s back and chewing on his neck, severing the carotid artery that sent a jet of blood pumping in long arcs as he thrashed back and forth trying to free himself. “Jesus! Jesus!” he cried frantically. Her Lee Press-on nails digging into his chest, Aunt Vicky looked like a MMA fighter trying to cinch in a rear naked choke. Daniel sat there stunned and was vaguely aware that he was still farting.

             
The Reverend fell, forgotten, to the floor as Daniel’s Aunt Vicky released her infected prey and scanned the room for more. Her body jerked in a disjointed manner, stiff and strange. Daniel shrunk back, shielding his mother and sister. He winced. The dead woman grabbed her nearly senile widower by the lapels of his suit and bit into his neck.

“That woman has good aim,” Daniel muttered as another spout of blood drenched everyone that was sitting in the vicinity. Daniel grabbed his mother and sister and knocked over the chairs behind him, where one of his cousins was babbling incoherently.

“Move, moron!” shouted Daniel. He pushed his mother and sister past his cousin and herded them to the doors where a bottle neck had developed as his family fought each other to get out of the funeral home. He ran up behind one of his overweight uncles who had lodged his wide girth in the doorway with two other chunky monkeys, he picked up a metal folding chair and cracked him in the back of the head. His uncle dropped instantly, his scalp split open and blood poured down the collar of his shirt, staining it red.

He pushed his family through the opening and told them to go start the car. He felt a hand grabbing him by the neck of his jacket; he pulled away and heard the cheap material rip at the seam.

He pushed forward, but another one of his aunts had wedged herself into the opening. He hadn’t realized up to this point how much of a weight problem his family had. He spun around to see the pastor had reanimated and lurched toward him. Daniel slammed the metal chair down onto the reverends forehead, he heard that man’s skull crack, but the reverend still clawed at him. Daniel put the chair between them and shoved backward, sending the man of God sprawling backwards tripping over another one of his dead relatives. He turned back around and used the chair once again on his herd of panicked relatives. He wasn’t sure that bashing his family was good for his karma, but his sense of survival outweighed any semblance of pity or good will toward men. He had to get to his mom.

One skinny, yet deceptively strong, old guy with a leathery face turned and snatched the chair from his hands and glared at him. The skinny old guy then turned and walloped his wife in the back of the head, dropping her instantly. The old farmer then cracked a six year old girl before he disappeared into the gap. Daniel pushed his way forward, accidentally stepping on the little girl’s calf. He cringed and felt his gorge rising, but swallowed it back down tasting the acid.

              Again a hand grabbed his tattered jacket, he looked around frantically searching for a weapon. He saw none. Out of instinct and less by thought he reached down and grabbed the unconscious girl by the ankles; Daniel swung her around like a hammer thrower and slammed her into his dearly departed aunt’s chest. Her jagged nails tore into the girl’s flesh, ripping it. She seemed to prefer the tender flesh of the child and was content to drop to her knees and devour the back of her neck. Behind his aunt, Daniel watched as his uncle rose to his feet, his face was pale with the exception of the blood that covered his left cheek. He seemed no more motivated now than before he had been dead. He just tottered there for a minute, and then his expression changed into one of some insane incarnation of greed, or lust; something. Daniel didn’t stick around to find out. He sprinted down the hallway, bouncing off the frenzied crowd of mourners and out to his mother’s car.