in my new duds. And I got to say, even then I was feeling a little superior. This was some old poor fucker. Looked about a million years old and being a mudhead hadn’t done him no favors. He was as naked as I used to be and I guess while he’d been walking, his knee had cracked and the whole bottom part of his leg was lying beside him in the street. He was mumbling and gurgling, moaning. Picking up that leg and having a good look. Made like to try and reattach it but that was all just feathers on a fish. Realized I was standing there and held it out to me like I was gonna do something. I just took it and flung it off into the darkness. Then watched him drag off after it.
When I watched him go I thought ain’t that a bitch. He scratched and groveled along the roadway and I watched him as he faded outta sight. It was right about then I figured there was two ways to look at this thing. You feel sorry or you feel glad. It’s all up to you.
Here I was standing in the finest clothes I’d ever seen any mudhead wearing. Did I just hang my head now and cry over all the spilled milk? Or did I just say fuck it and continue on? I mean, let’s face it, Time is Time. Use it or lose it. Hell, for all I knew at any second some crazy ass redneck could come tearing outta the bushes and bust me one right through the noggin. And that old man? Shit he was dead already. Probably what I done was give him something to do for the next little eternity he had to suffer through.
No goddamnit, it was Senator Mudhead I was right then, and here, in this place, right now, I couldn’t figure on anything in the future looking much better than it did right now. These were my peeps. I might walk through a hundred miles of horseshit in the future and never have the opportunity I had right now!
I turned away from the shadows and started walking right down the middle of mainstreet. There were several out and about now, shambling along, tongues hanging out looking stupid as shit. But they were moving. Some even had a way of walking that showed some sort of attention to detail. A little hitch in their step here or there, a wavering foot in the middle of a turn, hell, it was these little things that made me okay with walking around in the first place.
The moon was coming out better now and it might as well have been high noon. All the doors left that was worth opening was coming open. The Dead started pouring outta the side yards and behind all the dumpsters. There was almost a festive air in the air. I caught myself groaning less and walking straighter. Even when I wanted to punch out at something that wasn’t there I held myself off. Said is that the kinda behavior a Senator would promote?
Well hell no.
I stopped and readjusted the tie. Got a real good tug on it to pull it away from my chin. Decided to stop by wherever it was happening around town. Because it was surprising, really. All the Dead that were out and about. Big ones, small ones, everything in between. Doing what we all used to do. Fucking around with nothing. Some going this way, some going that. Not a thought in these motherfuckers’ heads and they were still going on with it. I tell ya, for just a moment I thought about trailing all this shit into the past and disappearing into the woods, but I didn’t. If it was all useless it was still something.
Where the hell was it to go around here?
Most of these sad fuckers seemed to heading to what I guessed to be the middle of town. There were old sheets draped through the trees in that direction and a few bodies laying about so I figured with our collective intellect these would be as good a sign as any that things were cooking up ahead. I got my loafers heading in that direction and knew I was smiling as I made my way along.
The middle didn’t turn out to be the middle at all. The little town died out like somebodies’ leftovers just past a little copse of trees in front of a church. A real old-fashioned number too, the steeple, double door, sign out front built in someone’s wood shop that told you what to expect on Sunday. The doors were red and blown open; back there in the darkness it looked like there was something moving around, but that wasn’t what I was looking at. The graveyard out back had all my attention.
This motherfucker was chock-full of mudheads. I mean those sonofabitches were everywhere. I figured there musta been some kinda cave or sheltered pit around here somewhere where they all chilled during the day, from the number of em out now. Because they were out enforce. At first I just thought it was a buncha random action because let’s face it, I’m used to that. But then, standing there just outside the knee-high fence in my new duds, I started looking a little closer. And damned if I didn’t get a surprise.
The mudheads had somehow got an idea in their heads and it seemed to have stuck. They were all out there digging like blood hounds down into the earth. Sneezing and snorting, horror-movie shit, hell, it had me backing up a pace or two. They were digging down in the graves and cracking all the caskets open. And let me tell you boys, ain’t everybody the same.
Some of those somebitches had been in the ground since Jesus and some of em had just stepped off to the Big Sleep. But those motherfuckers were hungry. When the rescue crews got down about four feet or so (at least on the several that I saw) there was the most god-awful wailing and kicking that you ever want not to hear. Then they’d wrestle around a little more frantically, kicking dirt back like a buncha Great Danes, and they’d be on the casket. Ripping and tearing, until they had whatever that was left of whatever had been down there out and in the open.
And let me tell you, it was not a pretty fucking sight.
Some weren’t much more than leathery skeletons, fragments of skin hanging off like rags. Empty eye holes, bones falling off even as they were being wrenched from their graves. Others, like I said, just reaching the point of full ghouldom. Fluids leeching out through the burial shrouds, wild eyes staring up into the night moon.
I don’t know how long they’d been liberating these things but it musta been a good while. There weren’t a whole lot of graves left untouched and between the knocked over tombstones and the mounds of dirt everywhere, it looked like bombing raids had been targeting this area for time out of mind. I just continued standing there by the fence, looking out over the horror and thinking just look what’s become of us all. New duds or not, it didn’t do a lot of good for my frame of mind.
Here I was on the run from the terrors of the past and even though I’d come as far from my home as to be an alien among the inhabitants, I didn’t see how this had been worth the effort. As I watched another crew jerk what was left of somebody from her dirt bed, I got the nastiest wave of helplessness wash over me that I could recently remember. Amid all the noise and digging I turned away from the fence and looked around. There were more of the mudheads clustered around the church near the broken front doors, and from the added noise back in that direction, I figured there was something new going on back there. But I didn’t have the energy to go and find out what.
Right then I just wanted to curl up somewhere and forget all this.
Scattered along the road I’d followed to the graveyard were a number of houses. All dark with the windows and doors busted out of most, but at least they hadn’t burned down. And even with all the action going on around me, the houses did provide a sort of distance from reality.
My eyes fixed on one little place across the street. It had a couple of windows that hadn’t been destroyed and in the moonlight I could almost imagine it as it had been before the Fuck-All. Something was pulling me and I thought I might as well stop in for a visit. I really don’t know why. I broke away from the road and made my way over to the grass verge by a ditch that separated the front yard from the street. There was a culvert not far off to the right and I got to say the pull of that darkness almost took me off my mark. I knew inside that tube would be moist and nice, a little muddy, tight. Wonderful. But I didn’t go. I wrenched my eyes away from the darkness and looked again at the house. Tried to convince myself that the culvert would still be there regardless of what I found or didn’t find inside. I could always come back and crawl back there in the darkness.
I lurched across the ditch, losing one of my new loafers in the soft
mud, and continued on across the yard to the front porch. A mudhead peeled around the side of the house when it sensed me by the front door and as I stood there it came around the side and up the short two steps to where I was. It was wild-eyed and broken-necked. One foot was twisted off at a bizarre angle and it was missing most of its left arm. When it got close I shoved it back and it went down like a department store mannequin. I looked down at it. The head was resting on the other shoulder now and the eyes were a little dimmer. I figured I must have messed something up with the spinal cord because it didn’t look like it’d be getting up to go anywhere else.
I turned back to the door. Tried the knob. It was unlocked and I pushed it back into darkness. The smell inside got that chicken bone in my throat twanging again and I stepped inside. It was a small house and the floor was tacky like some kind of mayhem had gone on a while back. And from the looks of things that wasn’t a far stretch. I paused there in the gloom waiting for my eyes to adjust. Slowly things came into focus. Something had gone on in here for sure. Shit was all busted up and there was blood splashed as far as the ceiling in a couple places. And the whole place stank like