I had to see for myself.
Maybe then I could understand. Maybe then I could try to mend things.
When I got back to the bamboo clearing, only one head was left, on a pike. The face was distorted, but familiar…and I knew who it was as I stepped closer.
The crazy zombie the Italian hiker had encountered was Toshiba.
Janeen.
My stomach collapsed.
I was dead.
This whole trip was devious from the get-go.
I was being used. I was being molded into someone else. Barbara was going to kill me now – no matter what. And she was right behind me. I was too afraid to turn around.
If you’re going to kill me…do it fast.
A beat.
Nothing.
Nothing?
Barbara walked past me and stood next to the head on the pike. She said that she had eaten the other heads. She didn’t boil them though, and that any minute now she would be a member of the living dead. Barbara pulled up Toshiba’s head and cradled it, humming “Aerith’s Theme” from Final Fantasy 7.
She began to cry…then reached out to me, her hand shaking.
I walked up to her and hugged them both.
Barbara kissed Toshiba as I kissed Barbara.
We all slept on the ground.
When Barbara’s cellphone woke us with its blaring ringtone the sun was setting, stretching the shadows. Barbara nodded as she spoke, only saying Yeah’s and Uh huh’s. She hung up and stood and began doing stretches. I wondered if it was okay for me to talk.
There was the crunching of shoes on dead leaves in the distance.
It was Barbara’s mum, carrying a duffle bag.
She hugged her. The mum did not hug in return. I wanted to say something – anything – but I couldn’t form the words, only managing to produce bizarre chirping sounds.
Barbara walked over to me, smiling, and then embraced me.
I didn’t want to let her go.
“What’s happening?”
Barbara turned around to face her mum and said:
“This will make it easier.”
She punched her mum in the face, sending her sailing ten feet through the air in a heavy WHOOSH, right into a thick bamboo shoot. It cracked in two and fell over with a disturbing whine.
I yelled out in protest and stood between them, but her mum pushed me out of the way and shook her head at her daughter, then said to the heavens, “Forgive me, Father, for I know what I do!”
Barbara attacked her mum – to my horror – and proceeded to punch and kick her and throw her onto the ground and into the bamboo shoots. She even whacked a heavy length of bamboo on top of her mum’s head in a sickening THUNK. Barbara got out a machete. Her mum revealed a heavy medieval sword from her duffle bag and they both took mad swipes at each other.
I tried to stop them, but they kicked me out of the way, hard. I found myself massaging various parts of my body.
They began shrieking at each other, all those years of pent-up frustration and anger finally coming through. I began to retreat. This wasn’t my fight. There was nothing I could do – no matter how much I tried. Someone was going to die, and I didn’t want to be around when it happened – especially if it was someone I cared about.
I ran with their battle cries at my back.
I could feel the zombies above and all around me – staring from behind the dark bushes. I knew they could hear them fighting. Any minute now Barbara and her mum would be attacked.
Well, maybe that was what they wanted. They knew what they were doing – what all their screaming would do.
As I jumped over a tree stump, I remembered what Barbara had told me, about loving me, trusting me in killing her if ever necessary. And then that scared Italian hiker popped into my mind like a jack in the box. I hated how he had left his friends behind. What kind of human would do such a thing? Not help? Not do everything in his power to save the ones he cared for?
It was a way to measure the love of a man.
I stopped dead in my tracks, holding my breath.
Barbara and her mum were clanking blades. Their voices were shrill and echoed throughout the woods.
Then…silence.
No wind. No crickets. Nothing, except for a growing ringing sound in my ears.
I fixed my hair, then straightened my shirt…
…and ran back.
Twenty-one.
They were making zombie calls. They had stopped fighting long ago. I ran faster, slipping and falling in mud every twenty steps. The trees above me rustled, trying to scare me away from the upcoming bad news bears.
I thanked the trees for their concern and ran even faster, falling even more. When I reached the bamboo clearing, zombies surrounded Barbara and her mum.
No one moved.
The undead stood under streaks of moonlight that melted through the bamboo ceiling, reflecting in their eyes and made them glow.
There was a waitress zombie with strips of muscles for arms; a hiker zombie with a samurai sword through its neck; a nude, muscular male zombie with no legs, resting on its belly – its head poised (eyes wide and crazy); a little girl zombie with backward legs; a butcher zombie, gripping two butcher knives and eating its own dangling eye; a priest zombie, standing very close to three zombie boys; and a surfer zombie with a surfboard sticking out of its back.
Barbara and her mum had dropped their blades and were holding hands, making no attempt to run. I moved back and stepped on an empty bag of Doritos. Barbara and her mum turned around and looked at me, surprise in their eyes, mouths agape. The crawling zombie made a mad dash for me. Barbara’s mum jumped on its back – feet going right through it. She yanked out its spine and used it as a whip to take off the priest’s head, which flew toward me. I shrieked and kicked it, sending it flying into the waitress’s mouth. She ate the head.
Barbara and her mum picked up their blades. They stood back-to-back, yelling at me to stay where I was.
The butcher zombie snuck up behind Barbara’s mum and made to bite her. I yelled out in warning and she spun around, cutting its head in half from ear to ear. The brain popped out and the waitress zombie leapt into the air like a fish and caught it in her mouth, then ate it.
Barbara butchered the child zombies, hacking them into tiny cubes. The surfer zombie bear hugged her. She reached back and pulled out a rather large portion of its ribcage. The zombie fell to the ground, but was persistent, gripping onto her ankle. She fell and yelled out as the undead surfer crawled over her, drooling and growling. Barbara chopped at it, but in her fright only managed to cut its ears and the front portion of its face, revealing a grinning white skeleton. She reached out to me.
“Not like this! Not in this way!”
Her mum was busy, struggling with the hiker zombie, the sword in its neck shining moonlight. I ran up to the hiker and pulled out the sword, leaping into the air and driving the heavy blade through the back of the surfer’s head. Red showered loudly over Barbara’s face. The blade was mere inches from her face and I felt immediately guilty. She stayed on the ground, struggling to breathe and spitting. Something was wrong with her. Her skin was turning blue. She shut her eyes tight…and when she opened them they were completely black.
I backed up.
She massaged her eyes and they were normal again. Her mum was strangling the hiker zombie like an insane person. Its eyes popped out and then there was the snapping of spine. Barbara’s mum gave out a mighty yell and an equally mighty squeeze. She made to rip off its head, slowly stretching the neck – the zombie’s moan rising in pitch.
The hiker zombie’s spine whipped like mad from out the lonely neck, slapping her in the face. She spun around and kicked the zombie’s torso away, which landed onto a bamboo pike, moved around for a bit, then froze. Barbara’s mum threw its head into the air and punched it toward the waitress zombie – who was feasting on the children’s remains like a chicken. The flying head hit her in the face, hard, explodin
g both skulls into a rain of gooey bits.
Barbara and her mum then chopped everyone into tiny fractions, dug a large hole with their hands, and buried everything, topping it all off by sticking bamboo shoots over the gave to disguise it.
Barbara accused me of meddling and ruining her plans. I said nothing. She turned around and regurgitated, squatting. Her mum walked up to me briskly and poked my chest with her finger, asking why I had to come back – everyone would’ve been happy if the zombies just had their way. She said more things, but I wasn’t even listening. I was watching Barbara. Her mum noticed the perplexed expression on my face and also looked.
Barbara was standing, facing us, eyes black as night, her arms glued to her sides. She wasn’t standing upright – she was more in a half-squat, like a standing crab, legs spread. Perfectly still.
It was now windy. Her mum got her machete and slowly walked toward Barbara with her free hand out, as if to keep her daughter at bay.
She raised the weapon.
In a bust of energy, Barbara attacked her mum. The machete cut into Barbara’s neck and got stuck halfway down her chest…I could see her heart beating…My head grew dizzy…I fell to my knees…Her mum yelled out for me to help, weeping, pleading…I just stayed there…staring with my mouth open as Barbara threw her hands into her mum’s mouth…and tore her head in half with the sound of ripped paper.
The corpse fell, twitching.
Barbara sat down and ate her mum.
I walked away.
I looked over my shoulder and noticed that she was following me. She’d stop whenever I stopped, hiding in the shadows of the hiking trail,