by Javan Bonds
Jamming his knife into the skull of a beast and kicking it away forcefully, he charged up the energy collector connected to the Cannon.
Somehow, it was still possible for at least one peevie to sustain its obesity. Sagging testicles could be seen under the rolls of excessive blue fat, clarifying the creature was male. Swaying blue breasts jiggled with every step. This finale was going to be massive!
The red, white, and blue superhero launched up onto the closest table. Robert began kicking cannibals as they attempted to come to his level. As he broke the cranial bones of so many undead, it was surprising he hadn’t broken any of his own bones. One of the final demons lurched to the base of his mountain. A tall, rail-thin, elderly thing was unbelievably, still functioning.
Captain America took a few steps back and ran forward to leap up and off the table for a slam-dunk. Robert spread his feet apart just as he came down onto the shoulders of the blunatic. The zombies split in two, being ripped apart like a rotten banana full of blood. Feet clank against pelvic bone before what was left of the monster fell…twitching.
Standing alone in the reeking remains of the undead, Robert relaxed and watched the mayor take on his final opponent. The grotesque behemoth waddled toward Randy at full trot. It reached out, appearing as a classic Romeroesque zombie before its Keto diet.
Mayor Collins waited for the animal to come within his reach. Thrusting his arm straight out the cannon jammed into the massive, blubbery gut. The animal attempted doubling over. Epic jiggling rolls of blue sweaty, fat flesh shook together. Raw meat and sewage shot violently from either end. Organs ruptured when the blunt steel penetrated the skin, drawing blood. At this moment, the mayor sent a flow of electricity to the end of his wrist. Yellow eyes grew wide when a volcanic eruption seemed to take place. What had to be tons of excess fat and meat, rippled under the skin before ballooning outwards. The demon burst like it was a piñata jam-packed with fireworks and rotten-flesh-flavored candy. Clearly destroyed, it took longer than expected for body chunks to start raining down. Covered in bloody strands of what could be mistaken for cloudy, melted superglue, Randy was simultaneously sickened and awed.
Covered in every type of fluid, all Randy could do was smile. He turned to face Captain America. Neither of them made a sound, only smirking at each other. Before either of them could start laughing maniacally, the mayor broke the silence. “Well, at least it wasn't full! Now, let’s get what we came for.”
13
Sako’s Journal One
Dog’s picked clean bones in alley behind chicken feed mills on Eastside of island this morning. Looked fresh. Surprising there are any dogs left in the wastes to be hunted.
These monsters should be afraid of me. I’ve seen their true faces. Blue skin, yellow eyes, completely naked. Unwashed, unclean, undead, infected, soulless, sick, plague victims. Peevies.
Any of their paths are extended latrines. Long and torturous roads paved with the refuse of the new blue age. These latrines are expectedly full of shit. When the storm drains cake over, and the black tar-like feces pool up around their waists, they’ll look up and scream in impotent rage. I’ll look down and simply smile.
☠☠☠
My accompanying investigators and I were tasked with finding another missing child: Sabrina Peters. It just so happened to be a young, blonde girl. Just like the last.
The reason I became a detective, was to solve mysteries. Giving parents no hope of seeing their children again was horribly depressing. Nothing was satisfying about a mystery.
A trend seemed to be forming, but there was no need to suspect anything more than the most likely scenario. The girl accompanied her parents on their collecting mission with Brother Brown. That was her last known whereabouts, which was over forty-eight hours before she was reported, missing, possibly abducted. Her baffled parents supposed their missing daughter had just returned, here, to the local Pilgrim’s Pride feed mill to explore. Just like any child would want to do. There had yet to be any other children reported unaccounted for as part of this particular investigation.
Mahatma pressed his foot on the brake behind the first row of cars in the parking lot. There was a small nagging in the back of my mind to order him to find a parking spot, but I knew that was just crazy. I don’t understand why anyone would follow traffic laws after May Day. Ridiculous!
As we walked to the main entrance, passing parked vehicles, it was apparent many of the employees had been Hispanic. Mexican flags hung on the inside of windows or flew from antennas. These people had been showing national pride on their Independence Day. If only they had been carrying around guns to shoot into the air, like classic TV would have you believe they celebrate, they might still be alive today.
Before entering the large, double doors, the green accented Clone Trooper squirted a heavy dose of bleach all around the entrance. It wasn’t a guarantee, but with at least some type Peevie deterrent around the door, we were less likely to be ambushed from behind. The odor might also mask our presence to any plague carriers already inside this complex. If we were spotted by any of the animals though, an Olympic sized swimming pool full of Clorox wouldn’t slow them down.
☠☠☠
We entered a large office, complete with a shag rug, doused in the impeccable peevie decorating style: feces. Why the hell would anyone use thick carpet in a processing plant? Undoubtedly this carpet was nearly as disgusting before the turned cannibals started using it as a waste receptacle. Had it originally been green, tan, gray, brown, or even a shade of black? Original color could never be determined. There was no descriptor for what looked like regurgitated charcoal chowder coating an extraordinarily huge burnt pizza, topped with liquefied anchovies.
“Quicksand would be more pleasant to walk through,” one of the Phantoms grunted.
Trudging through the goop, listening to the air scream in pain and terror as it was forced down by my boots into the putrid stew, I nodded in silent agreement. For some reason walking in this made me think of that pilot, Benji who wore the Indiana Jones hat, and I laughed. “Yeah, as long as there aren’t any snakes!” I attempted an impersonation of Harrison Ford even though Mahatma and Rajesh probably didn’t get it, anyway.
Moving further into the complex, we traveled down darkened corridors noticing occasional evidence of shoed children marked in the black tar-like peevie shit which was covering the floor. Many times, they had climbed onto the equipment. Clearly, they had just been playing around in the near total darkness.
The ingredients for chicken feed would have been mixed on this assembly line. First, the yellow mush would start out with a consistency akin to peevie crap. Then, the paste would be steam dried into a large block. After that, the giant block must be broken up. Continuing to be broken down, by the end of its journey through the plant, the feed is eventually granulated and at its apex of quality. Workers became so attuned; the entire process was completed in a seemingly shorter time than it took to write this paragraph.
Aha! Evidence showed of several small feet congregating around one particular area located at the end of the line. There was a bar about the height of a child’s chin. This must be where it happened!
Obviously, the children left as a group. The pairs of footprints pretty much became one large scuff. Unsure why, but I pictured several children carrying the injured outside.
At least some of them must have returned to Pilgrim’s Pride feed mill later on. Possibly, including the one that injured herself. Apparently defiant, she wasn’t going to let a simple injury get in the way of her exploring.
We must investigate further into the plant.
☠☠☠
At the end of the next shadowed hall, we waited at a sealed pair of doors leading into the exhaust tower. Before the apocalypse, the tall, oval-shaped tower constantly released a giant pillar of steam. The thick plume appeared to be toxic, but it was only superheated steam from cooking the chicken feed. Since May Day, the tower had been nothing more than a giant, silent un
used monolith. Watching. Waiting.
It was unused at least, for the reason it was created by humans. Before going inside, I was confident it housed something malevolently unnatural. It just had the feeling of being “off.”
Blackened footprints marked the floor, and smears of excreta coated the push bars on the doors. Concluding this area had been used frequently, as suspected, and not by living people.
Another hive!
Would it contain humans, being used to feed one another clutch? Though it would be sickening to discover the children within, being slowly harvested, it would be a relief to be able to close this case. Whether or not the little girl was inside, there were definitely infected beyond these doors. A small bit of satisfaction could be met by sending the undead to their true graves.
☠☠☠
It took the three of us to push open the heavy pressure sealed doors. As they swung open, we cautiously moved through the doorway one at a time. Some light streamed down from a gaping hole at the top, providing decent illumination. There was a metal staircase which leads up to a platform spiraling to the opening above. For some reason, there was an elevator shaft on the far wall, which started at the floor and disappeared into the hazy distance above. This enormous tower seems to have no other purpose than exhausting steam. Puzzling also was the metal ladder caged on the far wall.
In the center of the tower floor lay what had to be literally a metric ton of shit. The enormous, gelatinous mound seemed to have a life of its own. Much like the shit covered bathroom at the campground, it actually seemed to be breathing, or were those ripples just seismic shifts from the earth? Expectedly, the reason this mass of feces existed exposed itself. And damn, there were a bunch of reasons.
An uncountable number of starving monsters looked down at the food that had delivered itself and roared as one in delight. The echo of their combined howls inside this chamber of horrors was deafening. Peevies had started running with all their strength to get down the almost never-ending staircase. In such an excited hurry, more than one of the demons toppled over the railing, taking its final journey to the cold concrete layered in excrement. The horrified screams echoed through the tower, reverberating for an impossibly long time as beast after beast came crashing to the ground.
It was raining peevies and shit.
Stampeding down such a narrow walkway quickly became a fight for space. Arms slinging, pushing, and even suicidal tackling was prevalent. Tripping and stumbling down the stairs, the frenzied cannibals became enraged at being halted on their rush to food. Each crazy had to be in front of the next, just because it wanted to be the first one down. It was like rush-hour traffic. The insane pushing only slowed the entire group, rather than propel the individual.
Numerous zombies shrieked in horrible terror as they tumbled to their painful, final true deaths. Remember those stories of investment bankers jumping from skyscrapers in New York City circa 1929? Now envision hundreds of those guys jumping from different floors of the same building. This is what looking up would compare to. Only they were blue, naked and emptying everything in their digestive track as they fell. All of them were screaming and shitting as they played chicken with gravity. It was disturbing to see what I’d come to think of as mindless, reanimated corpses, yelling in unimaginable fright as they plummeted to their end.
As they topped from every level, the inhuman howls sounded, as one after the other lost its fight with gravity. The plague ridden enemy sounded like a chorus, splitting wide the gates of oblivion. Earsplitting cries would be abruptly cut off with bone crushing thuds. Some of the unfortunate creatures landed feet first, shattering everything below the ribs. Wailing tapered as the revenants slowly died; their organs spilling out from their exploded abdomens. Everything below their belly buttons basically disappeared when they meshed with the unforgiving floor.
Just as chilling to witness were those that landed on their bellies or backs. Dermis would seemingly evaporate, allowing organs to be pushed up. Muscles and tendons added to the goopy remains drenching the base of the tower.
Instantaneous infinity came to those that landed on their heads. Grey matter, bone, cartilage, and everything above the shoulders suddenly became a liquid with the consistency of semi-set Jell-O. Upon the devastating impact, spinal columns often shot through the tailbone, landing several feet away. Though I didn’t have a problem with the undead suffering, it was a relief that their screams of pain would no longer be sound pollution.
Even the dozens of fresh bodies barely added a noticeable mass to the festering cesspool. These corpses would summarily be forgotten and caked over with black putty. This brings a question to mind. If a monkey falls out of the tree in the jungle and dies, do the rest of the monkeys in the group just leave their fucking dead, stinking brother where it fell? Will they even continue to live in the same tree? Scenes like this just make me hate the evil monsters more. They can’t be anything close to human or even of this world.
Rushing, yipping zombies continued spiraling down. We waited and watched the undead get closer to the ground floor. Being within throwing distance only panicked the creatures to reach us quicker. A brave fraction chose to dive off the last two or three platforms, receiving nothing for their troubles but broken legs, shattered knees, or even destroyed hips.
Mahatma Doshi, the Clone Trooper accented with black, scraped his axe knife along the railing of the last three steps. The green-tinged Clone Trooper, Rajesh Mattu flipped his three-headed trishula in acrobatic stretches, readying himself for the coming onslaught. I unsheathed Ivory, my white handled katana, and breathed in the blessings of my ancestors, watching in anticipation. We were primed for the approaching ghouls.
When the horde drew within yards, I threw myself forward, and up the staircase, slinging my blade like that of a lawnmower. Blue limbs flew like birds. Well, not really. They launched away from the bodies from which they’d been severed, but they immediately dropped like dead weight. Blood rocketed from the gaping stumps. It was almost comical to watch the terrified, undead amputee’s trip over the railing; they would begin to scream as if anticipating a more prolonged fall. But their screaming would end after the four foot drop to the cold floor. They seemed almost surprised at not meeting the blue Grim Reaper as soon as they expected. Now, the only thing to do was to die slowly and painfully in a bloody pool of gooey bodies.
The Phantoms were itching to get in on the action. Taking a step back, I held out a gloved hand to Rajesh. Lifting his chin, I could picture his eyes widening in surprised understanding. He reached out to hand me his trishula. I held the staff in both hands and ran straight at the oncoming monsters. A few of them looked at me confusedly when I got within a few steps of them. Angling the triple-bladed weapon down, I jabbed into a lifeless, reanimated corpse. I pole vaulted over the heads of the cannibals. Rajesh stepped forward to reach the weapon of Shiva from the punctured corpse and held it at the ready. My Indian comrades would now be able to tear into their own peevies until there were none standing between the three of us.
☠☠☠
After the process had been repeated several times, and we had traversed platform after platform on the staircase, Doshi threw himself behind enemy lines. He jumped directly into the wave of creatures behind me. Slamming his bhuj into the shoulder joint of a former human, he used it to propel himself deeper into blue territory. At the full extent of his arm, the axe knife came free, leaving the reanimated appendage dangling by only skin and a few tendons. A faucet of blood ran as the animal tried to hold in the crimson with its other hand.
Mahatma had earlier removed the ornate elephant head, fixed onto the end of the metal shaft and was using both blades to drop peevies. He stabbed the small stiletto into a yellow eye and brought the larger blade straight into the next infected’s cranium. Orbs popped from the ocular cavity as the re-curved edge dug into its temple. The monster could surely feel grey matter being sliced into before it finally dropped to a twitching heap.
The black Cl
one Trooper bled beasts from one direction while the green Trooper sliced into them from the other. Unsure which way to turn, it looked like some monsters were simply leaping from the platform, committing suicide. Doubtfully this was intentional, they were simply moving away from the pain, and more than one tipped over the rail.
As we moved upward, I noticed bones, that had been gnawed clean, scattered along the walkways. The horde had obviously been feasting on more than one dish. Most of the bones, thankfully, didn’t appear to be human. With only a few more platforms to go until we reached the final level my mind raced. Will the girl be found? Would there be any people found alive? Half eaten?
The atrocities committed by these inhuman fiends were beyond nightmarish. I could only hope we don’t find the same despicable, horrors witnessed at the campground.
☠☠☠
Looking down at the base of the ventilation shaft it was now covered in blue and red “paint.” Occasional hints of white bone made me snicker with morbidly patriotic pride. Metric tons of feces had been nearly completely covered up by a new form of waste. Hundreds of truly dead infected littered the floor and every inch of the spiraling platform we had climbed so far. We were almost there.
☠☠☠
The Phantom Clone Troopers watched our six o’clock. They made themselves ready with their destructive tools. I was the first to climb the last set of stairs. Before coming to the top, I could see the elevator at the top of the shaft from here. This small box had to hold what we sought — the end of our saga or the treasures at the end of the dungeon. Maybe Sabrina Peters would be found still alive, and there would be enough of her to save.
As I seemingly rushed at top speed, both hands around the pommel of my katana and tanto on my hip, no peevies moved in the area. Closing in on the large service elevator, I started hearing shuffling, chittering, and even what sounded like the occasional whimper. The noise was too, animalistic to have come from any human mouth. I remember seeing a Discovery Channel special on infant chimpanzees, and their near sapient cries. The monsters compared to that exactly.
