Voodoo Children - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story

by John Hartness

  I came over one last hill and walked into the set of a cheap horror movie. And we’re talking ultra-low budget stuff here; the kinda flicks that make Roger Corman look like Spielberg. There were Dollar General tiki torches sending up black citronella smoke into the night sky, arranged in a lopsided ten-foot circle. A battered purple Civic hatchback was parked just outside the circle with the hatch open and creepy music playing over the car’s stereo system. And it was a serious stereo, too. Whoever owned the junker didn’t spend any money on bodywork or paint, since there was more Bondo than metal showing along most of it, but there was a thump coming out of that little piece of crap car that made my teeth rattle.

  Inside the circle of bamboo torches, a skinny witch doctor danced around slashing chicken throats and tossing blood out in what looked like random patterns. But every time the voodoo priest dropped another dead chicken onto the growing pile, another pile of dirt shifted and another zombie crawled out and started walking towards town. Judging by the stack of chicken crates this little guy had in the circle with him, he planned on raising half the cemetery tonight. There were close to thirty zombies milling around waiting for instructions, so I decided to go ahead and get to work. I set Tiger down on a nearby headstone and opened up on the crowd of dead guys with the Fat Man. Fat Man boomed, lead and fire blew out the barrel, and zombie heads exploded about as fast as I could pull the trigger. It started to get boring after the first five or six re-killings, so I decided to mix things up a little, shooting over one shoulder, off the hip and behind my bag a la Annie Oakley, if Annie Oakley had been six-five with a ponytail.

  Fat Man finally clicked on an empty chamber, so I blew the smoke off the barrel and set him down beside Tiger. My ears were already ringing from the combination of the shotgun and the horrible music, so I decided it wouldn’t do any more damage to let Bertha come out and play. There were only five or six zombies left standing, and they were all moving away from me, so I flicked the laser sight back on and blew their heads up like watermelons at a Gallagher show. One clip, six re-dead zombies, and a couple of freshly painted smears on the marble and granite markers throughout the cemetery. I felt a weak grip on one ankle and looked down to see half a zombie clawing at my ankle, apparently offended that I’d cut him in half with the Fat Man. I parted his hair with my bowie knife, holstered Bertha, and cleaned the knife off on the grass beside the zombie.

  I took a good look around at my work, and was pretty impressed by what I had wrought. There were about two dozen zombies blown into about eight dozen pieces scattered all around the graveyard, and I’d been fortunate enough to blow out the car stereo with a particularly lucky shot. The grass was thick with clotted blood, entrails and other zombie parts, plus the odd surgical implement and fast food wrapper. I’ve thought for a long time now that undertakers sew their garbage up inside the dead bodies instead of throwing it away. You know, just another way to screw the customer — make them take out your trash when they take out Granddad. Seeing half a dozen taco wrappers floating away in the breeze only confirmed my suspicions.

  I turned back to look at the witch doctor, and his eyes met mine. He stood stock still, the carnage that was a visit from Bubba finally coming clear to him. He wore a huge African tribal mask, what looked like those really ugly fur-lined boots chicks wear in the summer with shorts, Uggs I think they call them, and a jockstrap. That’s all. He was tall, not as tall as me, but still over six feet, and skinny. Maybe one-sixty soaking wet in those stupid boots. He held a kitchen knife in one hand and a dead chicken in the other, and I heard the ground behind me crumble as another zombie worked its way up from the earth. I drew Bertha and sent the dead guy back to his eternal rest, then turned my attention back to the scrawny voodoo guru.

  “Hey.” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Nothin’ much. Raising the dead, stuff like that. You know.”

  “Yeah I see that. Got a little Hendrix thing going on?” I played a little air guitar riff.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, Voodoo Chile? Jimi Hendrix?”

  “Sorry, I’m more of a hip-hop guy myself. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more zombies to raise.” Well, if he was an idiot with terrible taste in music, at least he was polite.

  “Why are you raising the dead?”

  “I need money.”

  “We all need money. Why not try a job?”

  “Don’t you read the paper, jackass? There aren’t any jobs!” His voice was surprisingly high and not threatening for a voodoo priest. Not that I’d encountered any other voodoo priests in my life, but we all have our ideas of what certain villains should sound like. And squeaking like a chipmunk was not what I expected from a guy summoning zombies.

  “I know things are tough, man, but you can’t be calling up dead dudes to rob people. That ain’t right. And it’s kinda nasty. Zombies tend to leave spots on folks’ carpet, you know?”

  “No, I didn’t know that. Man, I kinda feel bad about that. Well, after tonight I’ll only send my minions into house that have hardwoods, or at least that laminate stuff.” A considerate voodoo priest, that’s something I didn’t see every day. And figured I wouldn’t even if I ran into a bunch of voodoo priests, which we’ve already established I haven’t. He grabbed a fresh chicken and made to cut its throat, but I pulled Bertha and drew down on him before he could raise another zombie.

  “Stop it. I don’t want to shoot you.” Which was at least partly true. There was a lot more paperwork to deal with if I killed humans, but if they needed killing I wasn’t really too bothered by it. After all, Uncle Joe and Skeeter dealt with that part. I was more the kill ‘em and let God sort ‘em out type.

  “That’s good, because you can’t. I’m protected by my magical circle, and nothing can get in unless I let it or release the circle.” Of course I didn’t believe him. So of course I tried to shoot the chicken out of his hand. The magical barrier flashed red, and I dove to the ground as the slug passed back over my head. I heard the little fart laughing at me as I picked myself up and brushed grass and zombie bits off my pants. I tossed a stray finger back to the ground and looked back at the witch doctor.

  “Alright, asshole, now I’m serious.” I took a running start at the circle, and promptly found myself lying on my back in the middle of the graveyard looking at the little birdies circling my head and hearing the shithead’s laughter roll across the foggy grass. He beheaded three more chickens in quick succession, then pricked his own finger and mixed it with the chicken blood on the ground and chanted something that sounded like it wasn’t going to be good for me.

  I pushed the Bluetooth thingy and said “Skeeter, what does ‘Omagara Grathnor Tingawa’ mean?”

  “What language is it in, boss?”

  “I don’t know Skeeter, I’m in the middle of the cemetery killin’ zombies and fightin’ a half-starved voodoo priest with ugly boots and his ass hangin’ out!”

  “Then it’s probably some kind of ancient African dialect, so that means…” I heard him typing in the background, then say “Uh oh.”

  “What do you mean, uh-oh? I don’t like uh-oh, Skeeter! What the hell’s going on?”

  “Well, if you remembered the phrasing right…”

  “I remembered it right, the little dingaling is prancing around inside a magic circle cutting the heads off chickens and yelling it as loud as he can!”

  “Okay, then, I hope you’ve got plenty of firepower, because that’s a mass resurrection spell.”

  “What. Does. That. Mean. Skeeter?” I looked around where the ground was starting to roll and bubble like a big pot of turkey stew on a cold Sunday morning. But I didn’t think I was going to like what came to the top this time.

  “That means that your voodoo priest just called up every dead guy in about a half a mile. And they all want to kick your ass, Boss.” Sure enough, as I looked out over the graveyard, dozens and dozens of zombies were crawling up out of the ground, in various states of decay. A couple of them were barely mo
re than skeletons, and one looked like he was sleeping. If people slept without their faces, that is. As they got out of the ground, they all turned to look at yours truly, and then they all started moving. They moved just like the other zombies, only about ten times faster.

  “Skeeter, I told you I hate fast zombies.”

  “These shouldn’t be fast, Boss. Did your voodoo guy do anything else?”

  “You mean like cut himself and mix his blood with the chicken’s blood?”

  “Yeah, just like that.” I heard Skeeter sigh on the other end of my earpiece, and I knew it wasn’t going to be good.

  “He put enough of his life force into them to let them move at least as fast as when they were alive.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. Hey, Skeeter?”

  “Yeah, Boss.”

  “I gotta go kill a bunch of dead guys. I’ll call you back.” I had one spare drum magazine for the Fat Man, so I slapped that into place and cocked the shotgun. Then I cranked up Tiger and hefted it into my left hand. I took a deep breath, looked over at the scrawny bastard hiding behind his magical circle, and said “I’ll be back for you in a little bit. Don’t bother goin’ nowhere.”

  Then I waded into a mass of dead dudes thicker than the mosh pit at a Metallica Concert. I laid onto the Fat Ma’s trigger and just turned around in a slow circle, blowing zombie brains around like a green, grey and red slip n’ slide. Pieces of white bone, yellow skin and eye juice got blasted straight through the backs of the skulls, and the heavy lead shot was good about going through more than one brainpan before it finally spent its energy and lodged in the second or third zombie it hit. That little pirouette of doom, as I liked to think of it, took out close to three dozen zombies in less than half a minute. I flipped the heavy gun in my hand and buried the stock in another monster’s forehead, then concentrated on tearing the apart with Tiger.

  The chainsaw was not as good a weapon for zombie killing as I had expected. The first couple of normal-sized zombie went down just fine, but the chain got hung up in the neck of this great big old fat boy, and I lost valuable seconds pulling it free and sawing the top of his head off. While I was distracted, a little girl zombie jumped up on my back and started trying to chew through the side of my neck. I don’t know if she had a taste for fresh blood, or if redneck jugular is a particular delicacy in the zombie kingdom, but my Carhartt denim shirt held up to undead teeth pretty good, and I was able to reach over my head and throw her up against a tree before she did any major damage.

  That distracted me long enough for one of the critters to walk up and impale himself on my chainsaw, gumming up the works worse than a cedar tree after a heavy rainstorm. I let go of Tiger and punched the thing in the face, then reached down and drew Bertha. She barked seven times, clearing out a little space in front of me, and bulldozed my way over to the edge of the circle.

  “You still can’t get through, moron!” Yelled the scrawny priest.

  “I don’t need to, jackass, I just need them not to get to my back.” I turned and pressed my back up against the magical barricade and faced the oncoming horde. There had to be forty or more of the things all lumbering in my direction. I put Bertha away, drew my kukris, and made ready with the chop-chop.

  They were on me in a flash, but I was ready. The thick, curved blade of the kukri did me as well as it had served the Indian Gurkhas for centuries. The heavy blade made for good chopping, and every downstroke crushed a skull. I settled into a rhythm of swing, crush the skull, kick the corpse down, swing the other hand, crush the skull, kick the corpse down. After a while it was like I was swimming in dead guys, and the bodies started to pile up around me like sandbags. Just as my arms started to really get tired, something completely out of character happened — I had an idea.

  I looked over at the nearest tiki torch, which was just about two feet to my left, and saw the flame dancing in the breeze from falling zombie bodies. “Hey shithead?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “Yeah, dumbass?” The little witch doctor replied from behind me.

  “What happens if your circle breaks before these things are all dead or the sun comes up?”

  “Well, that probably wouldn’t be good for me. I would lose control over my minions, and they might attempt to take some form of revenge up me. Fortunately you can’t break my circle. Nothing bigger than a drop of water can get past my magical barricade.” He let out a good old-fashioned Bwa-ha-ha-ha villain laugh that I just knew he’d practiced in front of mirror, and I sighed a little.

  “If you weren’t such a little douche, I’d probably feel bad about this.” I said, sheathing one knife and pulling a Bud out of my beer bandolier. I mourned the waste of good American lager, then shook the beer up like a baseball player after winning the pennant. When I felt the contents were properly agitated, I popped the top on the can and directed the spray of amber liquid straight onto the flame of the tiki torch. The beer extinguished the flame instantly, and the smell of domestic alcoholic goodness mixed with nasty citronella oil, making my eyes water. But more importantly, the fire at one of the skinny wizard’s cardinal points blowing out served to break his circle, and I fell backwards onto the dirt, the wall at my back suddenly gone.

  I looked up at the necromancer, who stood frozen at the sight of a couple of dozen grumpy zombies who were suddenly less interested in the fat redneck on the ground than they were the skinny idiot in front of them. He let out a yelp and dove into the hatchback of his waiting Civic, pulling the glass rear door closed behind him. The zombies quickly surrounded the car, but without any real understanding of tools anymore, couldn’t get the doors or the windows open. They walked into the car, bumped into it, and stayed there, kinda like they knew they were supposed to be doing something to somebody, but couldn’t remember what.

  I stood up and looked around. About three hours until sunrise, and I was in a graveyard with a bunch of zombies, a voodoo priest in a compact car, and only four beers and twenty-eight rounds of ammunition. I popped a beer and sat on a headstone to wait. I was taking a leak on some family’s memorial crypt as the sun peeked over the horizon for the first time, so I missed the zombies turning back to dust and the effects of the magic vanishing from the graveyard, but I got back in time to see the little weasel crawl out of his car, still wearing the ugly boots and the tribal mask.

  “Looking for these?” I asked, holding out a set of car keys.

  “Where did you find those?”

  “On the ground while you were cowering in your car.”

  “They must have fallen out when I was jumping around casting spells last night.” I didn’t ask where they had fallen out of, since all he was wearing were boots and a jock, I just dropped the keys and started looking around for a place to wash my hands.

  “So what was all this crap about, anyway?”

  “What crap?”

  “Kid, don’t screw with me. I have been awake in a graveyard all night. I have brains all over my favorite boots and what used to be a clean pair of jeans. I have a couple of random zombie teeth stuck in my knuckles, there is no bacon within half a mile and I am out of beer. If you don’t want me to stomp a mudhole in your ass and walk it dry, I suggest you commence to talking.”

  “Well, there’s this girl, you see.”

  “There always is.” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “How old are you, kid?”

  “Twenty-four. But I’ll be twenty-five next month.” He puffed himself up to try and make himself look older, but that’s hard to do when you’re in a graveyard with your buttcheeks flapping in the breeze at seven in the morning.

  “That fits. You see, kid. I’ve got a theory that whenever a guy, or a lesbian, but that part has less data to back it up, under the age of thirty does something spectacularly stupid, that there’s always a girl involved.”

  “How often does your theory turn out to be true?”

  “So far, one hundred per cent of the time. Now go on. There’s a girl. You like her, but she won’
t give you the time of day.”

  “Well, kinda. We like each other; at least she says she likes me. But she won’t go steady with me until I can come up with seven thousand dollars cash.”

  “Do I even want to know what the money is for?”

  “She wants a boob job. It’s tax-deductible, because of her work. She’s an exotic dancer at the Ride ‘Em Cowboy. And she swears she’ll pay me back, but I’ve got to come up with the money before the prices go up again.”

  “So you’re in love with a stripper, who tells you that she likes you, and she’ll be your girlfriend if you’ll buy her a new set of boobies?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Take that stupid mask off.” I reached out and snatched it off of him. He wasn’t a bad looking kid. Certainly didn’t look like a rocket scientist, but he was no freak show. Eyes in the right place, nose shaped roughly like what a nose ought to be, one ear on each side of his head. All in all, he was alright. A couple of leftover zits from high school maybe, and he might have had a little of that ferrety look that skinny people sometimes have, but he wasn’t hideous or anything.

  “Why in the world do you think you have to buy this girl a pair of boobs for her to like you? Don’t you think a girl can like you for who you are?”