“You’re not going to be able to show Yorley anything with that little pud,” I told him.
“Who’s there!?” he asked, quickly pulling his pants up. “I had an itch!” he beseeched.
“Is that what you kids are calling it now? We just called it beating off when I was young. You look a little like Yorley. Are you related? You really shouldn’t be teasing the weasel to images of a relative. Treading on dangerous ground there.”
With his pants up, he was now starting to get worried, and with good reason too, with what exactly was going on. “Who are you?” He placed his hands around himself looking for the weapon he’d forgot to bring with him.
“You can stop wasting your time. I have it. What’s your name?”
“Fuck you,” he spat then took another swig of his drink.
“I catch you here, playing with your pickle, talking about your cousin. Yeah, I bet she’s your cousin. And you tell me to fuck off? How about I just put a bullet in that twisted purple thing you call a dick and we’ll be done with it.” I pulled back on the hammer, the metallic sound extremely loud in the confines of the basement. Liquid courage or not, there isn’t a man alive that doesn’t take a threat to his manhood seriously.
“Wait, wait, wait.” He had his hands up and was attempting to stand.
“Don’t bother.”
He sat back down heavily. “What do you want?” he asked angrily as he took another drink. It was easy enough to tell he was a mean drunk; that was most likely why he’d been banished to the basement.
“I want you to show me how you were going to give it to Yorley,” I said evenly.
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I have a past grudge with Yorley and have a thing or two I’d like to give her myself and … well, I’d like to see how you would go about it. Maybe I could get some pointers or something.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? You that crazy bitch she’s calling Tim? What kind of chick is named Tim? You a tranny or something?”
“Oh, so you know my name. You know who I am, but you don’t seem too afraid.”
“Yorley doesn’t seem afraid. Why should I, bitch?”
“Because you aren’t Yorley. Now, I asked you to show me how you were going to give it to her, now do it!”
He sat there with a confused look on his face.
“Your pants; pull your pants down, dumb ass.”
His eyes narrowed and a look of lust washed across his features.
“Oh. You want to see Franco’s anaconda. Is that it? You want to see his venom?” He pulled his pants down to his ankles, his shriveled little dick hiding like a scared turtle in his meaty fist.
“Has the booze caused you to go blind, Franco? I’d be hard pressed to call that thing you’re squeezing the life out of a Vienna sausage. And no, I don’t want to see you beat that thing mercilessly, I just wanted to make sure you couldn’t move fast when I did this.”
His eyes grew wide and he was about to scream. He would have if his larynx wasn’t in my mouth. I’d chewed a decent-sized hole in the middle of his neck. It was that fucking cock though. I was dipping into his neck and when I’d turned, the little thing was just staring back at me, like something that was going on right now excited it. I dug my fingernails up and underneath his balls. When I was certain I had a firm grasp, I ripped them outwards. It stretched so far it was almost comical, like this was a comedy and they’d replaced the skin with rubber.
Franco’s movements though, they were no joke. He was thrashing about like only one can who is literally having his balls ripped off. Like with a stubborn bag of potato chips, I could not get the seal to break. That was, of course, until I dipped down and just bit the edge of his skin to get a tear going. After that, they came loose easily enough. His legs flailed around wildly, like he was being tasered by multiple sources. His penis had rapidly deflated. In fact, due to Franco’s stout gut, it looked like it had actually retreated inward.
“Good try, but that’s not going to save you,” I told it. I had to eat fast, first off was because there was a battle going on above my head, and secondly, I like my food warm. It had been quiet going on twenty minutes by the time I was wrapping up with Franco. There was still a good portion of meat available, and Manny was not too thrilled to leave him behind, but with Yorley in the house, I needed to be careful. If I somehow did not make it through the night or someone discovered this household after I left, what was left of Franco would haunt their sleep for years to come. From his navel up, he had been stripped clean; this was also the same from his hips down. All that would be left of my latest victim would be his ass and ball-less dick. They’d spend a lot of time trying to figure out just what had happened there.
My gut cramped up, I knew what that meant. I turned to go find a place to take care of some business. My foot almost slipped out from under me as it came down upon Franco’s carelessly discarded balls. I made sure to put all of my weight on them, so that the fibrous material burst out from around the sides of my shoes. I wanted to get away from the stairs, only because of the stench, so I went to a door on the far side. I had my hand on the handle and was about to enter when I heard a loud chuffing sound on the other side.
Emus, it had to be. I wonder what would have happened if I’d broken into that room? Would they have attacked? Is there such a thing as an attack emu? I pondered eating them. “First things first.” Franco made more of a splash as he exited my ass than he ever had in life. “They say it’s the little things in life that make you happy. Maybe the big things make you ecstatic, because this is fucking great, jets of Franco by-product were striking the concrete floor with force. If I could keep this up, I was under the impression I could start to carve channels into the ground.
“All good things must come to an end I suppose.” I stood, delighting in the way my ass cheeks slid together, lubricated by the offal. Scarlett was heaving. It was perfect. I had my foot on the first step when I realized it was silent. I was somewhat hopeful that was because they were all dead, but it was highly more likely the attack had been repelled.
“I think I should have maybe pressed Franco for some details about the inhabitants before I just started choking him down. Stupid gluttony. Our stomach has gotten us into more trouble than I care to recount.” I wouldn’t admit this to anyone—I could barely admit it to myself—but I was scared. I definitely wanted to kill Yorley and in the worst possible way. I just didn’t want to die trying. I needed to move. Getting stuck in the basement was not a good place to be, but I didn’t want to come up onto the first floor and be confronted by a half dozen pissed off Garcias. Again, I found myself stuck. I forced my way up to the second step and so on until I was on the small landing by the basement door. I grasped the handle and turned slowly. It was quiet enough I could hear the internal workings of the mechanism as they moved.
There was no reason to think anybody would start shooting. The last thing anybody knew was that Franco was down there. Maybe he was just coming up for a snack or to drunkenly hit on someone. I’m sure both of those things had happened on a plethora of occasions. Unlike in the basement, there was light up here. It was steady but soft, like a battery-operated lantern turned down very low. I pushed the door open just far enough so I could peer out. I couldn’t see much from this vantage point, except a living room couch and a window completely boarded up. I pushed a little further, this time enough that I could stick my head out, which I did. Straight ahead was the other side of a hallway. On the right was what looked like the kitchen. I could just make out the leg of someone sitting.
“Jesus, Franco! You’re supposed to clean the emu room every once in a while. You stupid drunk!”
The man at the table had yelled but had not moved. Must be difficult trying to eat a little something when all you can smell is the blown mud I’d left downstairs. I was halfway out the door when he pushed back on his chair and stood.
“Fuck, Franco, you couldn’t be any more useless if you were
just a giant ass.” The man had turned and was preparing to come down the hallway. He caught sight of me and stopped.
“You’re damn near psychic,” I told him right before I shot him square in the chest. The look of surprise and confusion that had been on his face immediately changed over to pain.
“Pablo?” Came from upstairs. “Franco? What’s going on?” a man, an older teen boy, really, asked. I thought about saying something, but if I could draw even one more of them down and dispose of them, then all the better. I heard footsteps rapidly coming down the stairs.
“NO!” It was Yorley. “Pedro get up here now!” Her voice so authoritative he could do little else but obey it. My phantom penis wanted to get hard at just the sound of her.
“Something is wrong down there. Pablo isn’t answering!” Pedro cried out.
“Most likely never will either. Get all the way up here and out of the stairwell. I’m going to kill you tonight, Tim-Tim, I promise you that.”
“I’m in your home, Yorley. I tracked you down and have already taken care of two people here. It’s destiny that I finish this job. How else can you explain this? Kismet maybe?”
“Scarlett, it sounds just like you but I know it’s not. I hope you’re still in there. No wait, I’m sorry, I truly hope you’re not. But if you are, these words are for you. Tim-Tim, if you could fuck off for a minute I would greatly appreciate it.”
“Speak your mind, bitch, Scarlett’s listening. Oh yes, indeed she is. It’s been so much fun having her company. Manny and I just wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if she wasn’t around to brighten up our lives.”
“Scarlett, your babies are fine and I’m going to put you out of your misery tonight, honey, I promise you that. I’m so sorry you’ve had to go through this.”
“Holy fuck sticks, is this vag-fest almost over? I’m getting heady from the estrogen overflow. Smells like bad patchouli oil and bulldog ass.”
“Be patient, Tim-Tim. I’ll get to you, and by the time I’m done fucking you over, you’re going to be pissed at your bitch of a mother for ever bringing you into this world.”
I popped a round into the ceiling in the approximate direction of where I figured Yorley was. It happened so fast I wasn’t really sure what had happened. A three round burst had been returned, one blew right through my left foot. One had missed by an inch or two, the third had grazed down my right side, leaving a trail of fire where it had ground a groove into me.
“Two can play at that game,” she rang out.
I didn’t say anything. I was in extreme amounts of pain, and if she’d known just how close to killing me she’d come, she would have kept shooting. I backed out of that hallway as fast as I could with my hobbled foot. Manny seemed to be perturbed that I’d disturbed his lazy ass to start the patching up process.
“Just my luck I get a couch potato virus. What are the fucking odds? Probably been playing fucking video games all day while I slaved away for your ungrateful ass. Let me guess, plant versus zombies?” I chuckled. It beat crying out.
“Awfully quiet down there, clown. Did I get a wee bit lucky?”
“Come down and find out.” I was hoping to sound as menacing as possible, but it would have been hard to miss the tremor in my voice. There was a loud banging that came down the stairs. I fired off a round hoping she was the one coming. Anger was the emotion that took over when I watched a bowling ball come to rest against the wall.
“Someone’s a little jumpy!” Yorley shouted. “You scared, Tim-Tim?”
“I am evil incarnate, come to take your very soul away. I am afraid of nothing!”
“Evil? No, I don’t believe in evil, Tim-Tim. Twisted, demented, and sick, well that I believe in, and I’m pretty sure you have all those bases covered. Psychiatrists probably don’t have the correct terminology for everything that ails you, but evil isn’t one of them. Good, evil those are just words. Mostly used in regards to a religion I hold no stock in. Want to know my take on it?”
“Nothing much else to do at the moment except to hear you drone on with your pop new-age psychology.” In reality, this was fine. Not the part about her talking but about the part where she gave me time to get my broken foot knitted up and ready for action again. That part I was fine with.
“Humans are much like machines,” Yorley started. “Very highly evolved, complex machines. You with me so far? I know you’re kind of a dumb shit with a one-way mind, so I don’t want to confuse you.”
I growled.
“I expected no better answer than that. Anyway, so like I was saying, we’re very complex machines, and sometimes, Tim-Tim, they just break. Something goes wrong within all that circuitry. It’s not really anyone’s fault, these things happen. There’s a weak part and it breaks under the strain of normal use. Or possibly it was defective right from the onset. That kind of thing is bound to happen when you build something with so many moving parts. Look at the auto industry. How many cars come off that assembly line as lemons? We’re just like that. Any chance you were conceived on a Monday? How about Friday?”
“What the fuck are you talking about, bitch?”
“It’s a statistical fact, Tim-Tim, that cars produced on Mondays or Fridays are more likely to have problems. Mondays because, well, it’s Monday and some folks are still suffering the after-effects of a hard partying weekend, and Fridays because of the “I don’t give a fuck” attitude that particular day has inherently built into it. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re not evil Tim-Tim, you’re defective, and defective things need to be repaired. Well, in your case, destroyed because there aren’t enough spare parts to fix you. So all this bullshit people used to spew about good and evil is just that, bullshit. They needed something to blame the defectiveness on. Most just aren’t willing to accept that they are just plain flawed. Too painful to look inwards like that, I suppose.”
“You talk a lot for a dead person.” I stood up from the same chair Pablo had vacated a few minutes previously. I put some weight on my foot. Manny might not like to work, but he does a good job. There was still some lingering pain, but I was thinking I’d be able to get back into the thick of it pretty soon.
“I could say the same for you.”
“Why don’t you just come down and we can settle this woman to woman.”
“I’m thinking about it, Tim-Tim, I really am. In the meantime, before I kill you or by some stroke of misfortune you kill me, could you at least humor me for a second?”
“What do you want?” The stalling still worked in my favor, so I thought I’d keep the game up for a while longer.
“How are you doing it? How are you staying conscious in a zombie? At first, I just figured you for a regular person who thought it would be better to act like a zombie in a zombie filled world. The whole “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality. But I witnessed all you did. I saw all the damage you took while you were in Clarence’s body. I’m just curious.”
“Curiosity killed the cat.”
“Clichés Tim-Tim? That’s the best you can do?”
“I didn’t want to die.” There was long pause.
“That’s it? You didn’t want to die? I’ve got to think that nobody that became a zombie wanted to die, there has to be something else.”
“You writing a fucking book?”
“You’ve hunted me across the city, you’ve killed people I’ve known and loved, I think I deserve to know.”
“I hid.” I don’t know why I felt the need to tell her. My swan song maybe? Maybe I could finally give her a reason to be frightened of me. “I hid inside my own mind. I watched as the virus swarmed over and through everything that was me. How it took control, wrenched everything about me away. My sight, my movements, and it had started on my thoughts. I made my stand, I used what I had available in the defense of myself. When I knew I could never overpower him, I struck a bargain.”
“You struck a bargain with a virus?”
“It beat dying.”
??
?Really? Running around with a deadly virus inside of you that compelled you to eat innocent people was better than dying?”
“Fuck them, I didn’t know most of them and I didn’t give a shit about any of them.”
“You’re a real pariah aren’t you? The sacrificing of the many, to save the one, isn’t really the way it’s supposed to work. Now that I know what you are, Tim-Tim, and what you’re capable of, I cannot allow you to live any longer.”
“Cannot allow it?” I scoffed. “What makes you think you have the power to do anything about it?”
“My stand is here. One of us is going to die soon. My money is on you.”
She said it so fucking calmly that a large nugget of fear thundered through me.
“You see, Tim-Tim, I think in reality you’re a coward, always hiding behind a mask. Whether it’s a clown or a zombie, you’re too afraid people will see you for what you really are, a pathetic psychotic—”
“SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I screamed. She was in my head, and she was kicking things around, unearthing stuff I never wanted to see.
“I want to eat.” Manny picked this most inopportune of times to throw in his two cents. Before I could berate him, he told me he had an idea.
“You can do that?” I asked him. It was no secret that zombies could communicate telepathically. And it was also true that the virus and I could communicate. I don’t know if it was because of my exposure to zombies or Manny’s exposure to me. Whatever it was, Manny thought he could now reach out in a limited way to other people. “Can you control them as well?”