Uschi! (8 page)

Denny was working at getting his britches back where they belonged. He was an individual who assumed he knew enough about anatomy from repeat viewings of classic Herschel Gordon Lewis splatter movies to voice an opinion. “Yeah. You’ve got the gallbladder there.”

She popped the whole thing in her mouth and hungry big dog chewed. Noxious fluids moistened her lips. She spat the gravel-like gallstones out as if they were watermelon seeds. Swallowed it all in one impressive gulp. Followed it with the last of her Dr Pepper, and then tossed the cup aside. “Mmm, not halfass bad. Almost go far enough to label it ninja killing cool tasty. Think I’ll try a bit more.”

Chesty Morgan from beyond the grave moved, coming at Li’l Bocephus with the self-confident sashaying of a stripper taking to the stage to the pounding beat of a Nashville Pussy tune and satisfied only with hundred dollar bills stuffed in her G-string. She energetically clacked her teeth together in anticipation of more.

Li’l Bocephus told himself to remember what the movies had taught him. The brain. The only way to kill a zombie was to destroy the brain. That totally sounded like a chore he could accomplish. Get with it.

Lunging up off the parking lot with all the inhuman force he had to spare, Li’l Bocephus went at the organ thieving zombie female with arms spread wide and lips skinned back from his creepy Zuni fetish doll freak teeth. His mouth was a gusher, instantly and quite profusely salivating yarns of stout drool that were wind-tossed as he was in motion to thrash and wave about the lower portion of his face like the tentacles of some animated jellyfish. His eyes were bloodlust blazing. Fast as ever, he got her down with a linebacker’s tackle before being challenged by even so much as a molecule of any resistance from her.

Moist wash rag limp, Uschi was laid out toes up over the asphalt, and Li’l Bocephus perched himself atop her. He pinned her arms to her sides by planting his knees into her bicep muscles and parked his bony ass on her buoyant breasts, which audibly sloshed as he wiggled and situated himslef into the most comfortable position he could find. Sitting there as if he were on a bean bag chair, high and mighty and lording himself over her, he clamped a hand over her mouth, putting a stop to all that obscene teeth chattering, while his other hand obliged itself to a right large fistful of hair located just in front of her head’s crown.

That bantam rooster cockiness in him refused to keep its attitude in place. “Yeah, how ’bout that?” he said. Li’l Bocephus laughed like a southern sheriff in a ’70s era blaxplotation movie, condescending and unkind. “I got you with the greatest of fucking ease. Ain’t I pure motherfucking spectacular?”

The grip that Uschi was a prisoner of was superhuman, clearly beyond any normal physical limits. She imagined these hands could with minor exertion rend through sheet metal like a sharp knife making easy work of rotten cloth. His fingernails were uncared for, the dirt under them as dark as the ink from a defensive octopus. They were long and chipped to the point they were serrated like a hacksaw’s blade, tough as the bark on a pine tree and yellow from a mature fungus infection thriving deep beneath.

He raised her head, set his hold as firm as he could make it. The plan here was to take the zombie titty bitch’s head and just bash it against the parking lot until he came upon the promised land and split her skull wide open and brains spilled out like an overturned supper bowl of soupy baked red beans. He figured half a dozen admirable hits at most should get things done.

A wise plan. A sound plan. Sinfully easy, wickedly productive, decadently doable.

Shame Li’l Bocephus never got to find out whether or not it would’ve worked.

Uschi’s mouth snapped open, defying Li’l Bocephus’s hand, and a pair of his fingers dropped inside. They dragged over her tongue, tasting of the dirt and disease under the nails. She bit down, and then all she could taste was a peculiarly spicy flesh type she found difficult not to immediately fall head over heels in love for.

Yum-yum, eatum up. This shit is quality.

Yelping, Li’l Bocephus yanked his hand back and learned his ring and pinkie fingers were MIA. “Shit, fuck, damn, Democrat.” She’d bitten them off right above the knuckles. Blood pumped from the raw and juicy stumps like transmission fluid from a punctured hose. Li’l Bocephus brought the pitiful three-fingered hand closer to his face. A muscle in his jaw spasmed, his cheek rolling and undulating as if there were nightcrawlers squirming under his face. The wet sounds of Uschi’s eating echoed in his ears.

He gave her a mean-eyed stare. “Well, at least you had the common decency to spare the pussy finger.”

Legs together, Uschi moved as if she were down on the living room floor in front of the television set working on her abdominal muscles to a Jane Fonda work out video, springing her knees up in a pistons motion and driving them mercilessly hard against the center space of Li’l Bocephus’s spine. The brutality of the impact made his head snap backwards in classic whiplash fashion, fangs making a skeletal
clack
when jaws slammed together, and it was a damn miracle none of his warted tongue was snipped off. He released his hold on her head of hair and was thrown off of her mammarian carriage and sent tumbling away.

Keeping it meek and really eager to get on home, a sweaty and ashen-faced Denny stood at the side of the pickup. He watched his walking dead honey rise to her feet. “Can I do anything to help?”

“Don’t think so.” Uschi took the time to give Denny a winning smile and a saucy wink of the eye. Then she was whirling around in a pirouette, the fuzzy pink cuffed hem of her nightie billowing out like a blossoming buttercup flower, turning to face Li’l Bocephus. “I got this Barnabas Collins of the rodeo circuit right where I want him. Appreciate your thinking of me, though.”

Out of the corner of his eye Denny became aware that by now this ruckus in the parking lot had attracted the attention of everyone inside the Dairy Queen. Faces of employee and customer alike were pressed to the dining area’s plate glass windows, watching, thoroughly bumfuzzled at what they were witnessing.

Zombie vs. vampire. Was this a
Fangoria
moment or what?

Li’l Bocephus managed to stand. “Aw man, this night ain’t treating me right at all.”

Uschi came in on Li’l Bocephus with an animal’s swiftness that totally belied her decaying walking dead statehood and shoved him back between a new model Cadillac and a late ‘70s Ford Maverick. He slammed against the driver’s side of the Mav, collision fracturing the window’s glass. Its shocks were shot and the auto rocked back and forth like a small raft afloat on a choppy lake, creaking and squeaking during the whole thing. Uschi tore his shirt open and revealed a hairless and Karen Carpenter skinny torso; the ribs under his skin stood out like the ridges on a Ruffles potato chip. Never missing a single beat, she unhesitatingly put both hands inside that nifty gallbladder wound she earlier delivered upon him.

She looked into his face, her tone of voice nefariously teasing, “Excuse me while I pig out.”

Oh momma, that sounded way too unpleasant to be comfortable with.

“No … Don’t …” Li’l Bocephus spoke as if he were gargling with warm road tar, “… please …”

She ripped him open—tissue, tough muscle and abdominal vault so easy for her zombie hands to rend asunder. A wet horizontal opening that ran in a jagged path from one end of Li’l Bocephus’s abdomen to the other. His belly button was literally torn in two. The bleeding was an absolute insane monsoon of vital fluids that went everywhere, drenching the two of them entirely under its spray and painting both the hoods of the Caddy and Maverick the shade of gore. Freed viscera spilled out and poured into Uschi’s waiting arms. Her laughter was rapturous as it all went over her. The spillage was too much for her to carry it all, and quite a bit of slimy and colorful entrails overflow splattered to the ground.

She buried her face in the armfuls and feasted. Her supper grunts and groans loud and excited and her head kept continuously twisting from side to side like an anxious dog worrying a tasty bone.

A wild howling like it was gravely past feeding time at the zoo’s monkey house erupted from Li’l Bocephus. “You get the fuck away from me! AWAY FROM MEEEEEEE!”

And he took hold of her in his arms and lifted her 44-22-36 racy physique above his head and tossed her toward the Dairy Queen, her arms emptying as she sailed off and all those delicious eats splattering wet and messy down to earth.

The Satanic homemade zombie girlfriend traveled a healthy thirty yards, bulleting through the air at a spooky clip of speed above car rooftops, her trajectory holding steady and never faltering. A swift thinking individual inside the DQ yelled “Incoming!” and people scattered like frightened squirrels as Uschi hit one of the plate glass windows. The chiming of a multitude of glass shards falling to the floor carried a surprisingly musical cacophony. She cleared the whole length of the dining area, a big-boobed flesh eater missile that entered customer service air space above the main counter area and smashed into the electric menu board suspended from the ceiling.

She next dropped to the coutertop, limp as an old tube sock, landed very near the spot where earlier Denny had paid for their cheeseburgers, and crushed under her body a pair of steak finger baskets waiting to be collected and eaten here. Side of her head connected with a corner edge of a cash register, causing the little bell inside to make a brief
jing
sound that shivered through the atmosphere. Hissing sparks and glass fragments from the damaged and swinging menu board showered down on Uschi’s motionless form.

Somebody took a bite from their burger and commented around the mouthful, “Goddamn. I got to tell y’all goddamn.”

“Yeah,” said Li’l Bocephus, “that ought to calm your freak ass down a fair share.”

He looked down at the pile his unspooled internals made at his feet. As a boy growing up on a working farm, Li’l Bocephus had watched a cow give birth, and the load of rank and gooey afterbirth ol’ Bessie passed along with her calf were Miss America handsome in comparison to this nastiness from within himself. Sure was a lot of it, too. He must now be hollow inside. Trash was already mixed in—he spotted a straw impaled lid from a small Coke caught in the coils of a loop of large intestine, a few crushed cigarette butts trapped here and there in the snotty slime that coated his liver, a crusty ketchup packet stuck to what he assumed was supposed to be his spleen.

“Ain’t this the shits?” Li’l Bocephus told the world and himself. He next bent forward and put his hands to work in trying to shovel himself back inside. It was like wrestling with dead eels in taffy—the shit was delighted to go everywhere but where it was supposed to go. But he managed some progress: the bowels were returned home, maybe not back in their original position inside him, but beggars can’t be choosers, they were back in there and that was good enough for the time being.

Again Denny Gleeth went against his typical nature and was compelled to become courageous.

No one manhandles my lady like that and goes unpunished.

The Maverick’s car antenna snapped off in Denny’s hand shockingly easy. There was a tacky little plastic Dallas Cowboys football helmet mounted on the end of it. Denny got rid of that. The antenna screamed like an upset white woman when he sliced at the air with it. Denny reached the ways across the hood and whipped it into Li’l Bocephus’s face, the balled tip striking the left eye.
Pop!
The eyeball exploded like a pinpricked balloon and sent eye jelly gunk the color of fresh pus from a lanced boil oozing down half of his face. The eyelid collapsed and puckered like a cat’s sphincter.

“MOTHER and FUCKER!”

Forgetting all else, Li’l Bocephus was quick to retreat to the center of the parking lot, entrails pouring back out of him like groceries from a shopping sack tearing open along the bottom and dragging across the ground, leaving a bright red trail in his wake. His snakeskin boots became wrapped up in them, tangling his legs, and he tripped and fell hard to his knees and elbows.

“Shitfire … I so do not deserve this.”

Meanwhile, back in the Dairy Queen, Uschi was stirring. She lifted herself off the Formica and lowered her feet to the floor. The pair of ruined steak finger baskets all down the front of her looked like a good quantity of chunky vomit and the mashed french fry dangling from the end of her nose a king-size booger. The bell ringing collision with the cash register had torn open her face along the temple, and a flap of spoiled green flesh shaped roughly like how Florida looks on a map now hung low over her eye, a patch of yellowy-white skull out there for all to look upon.

People just silently stared at Uschi, unsure exactly what to do about her.

Her mouth was still full of Li’l Bocephus, cheeks puffed out, a large, partially jellied chunk of intestine protruding past her lips. She watched the people watch her chew and finally swallow it all down. The belch she cut loose with was like a foghorn, only juicier and carrying a chemical toilet odor stout enough to water the eyes and put a bitter taste on the tongue.

Uschi raised her hands and spoke to the crowd in a reassuring tone, “Citizens, there is no need for alarm. I am made from Satan reanimated dead body parts. My shit is together in ways y’all can’t even begin to understand. Now excuse me, there is more violence I need to be committing outside.”

The crowd of Dairy Queen people couldn’t part fast enough for Uschi when she started walking toward the nearest exit, everyone’s footsteps crunchy under all the broken glass. The door’s hydraulic arm hissed as it shut behind her. She calmly walked the parking lot and approached a Nissan and tore one of its door’s clear off, its steel hinges groaning in useless protest and snapping apart like they were made of peanut brittle.

Li’l Bocephus stood up and turned himself in the direction of Denny. The look to his face was all bad attitude. There was a retarded boy he needed to slaughter. He pointed a finger at the hemorrhaging eyeball wound and coldly and levelly said, “I got to tell you, retardo, I didn’t appreciate that stunt one speck.”