by Will Lemen
Seeing the startled look on my face that I was unable to contain, even though I had been leery of my new would-be girlfriend from the moment we walked through the front door, Cassandra screamed out.
"Now Carla, now!" as she quickly slipped her stained t-shirt back over her head and pulled it down, once more hiding her exposed tits from view.
Sensing that there was no time to try to contort my neck to the right and tweak my body in the direction of the ominous reflection to get a better look at the perceived threat. I instead, leaned forward on the couch and twisted my body the opposite way to try to create some distance between myself, and the person I now knew to be Cassandra's not so dead sister Carla.
Now in full twisting mode I dropped the generic glass of wine and stood up. The momentum of my adrenaline powered pirouette spun me around to the left so quickly and so forcefully that if I hadn't have grabbed the double barreled shotgun that Carla was brandishing in my direction with my left hand, I would have completed a full 360° rotation and ended up with my back to the maniacal sister and her 12 gauge riot gun again.
With my hand midway down the barrel of the gun, I pulled the muzzle passed the left side of my body and cradled the shotgun under my left arm.
Carla's index finger (trigger finger) had been gently caressing the forward edge of the gun's trigger until I yanked the firearm to me. Her finger placement on the weapon's trigger in conjunction with my violent tug caused enough pressure to be applied to the firing mechanism to produce a discharge of the firearm.
The noise of the shotgun's blast not only signaled that the double barrel weapon had now spent half of its ammunition, but together with a shrill scream that came from behind me, helped announce that two fingers on Cassandra's right hand were now missing in action.
I tugged further on the barrel of the gun, dragging Carla halfway over the back of the couch where she had been hiding.
As she squirmed helplessly, bent at the waist over the couch, and struggling to retrieve the gun from me, she tilted her head up to see her sister sitting against the living room wall clutching her bleeding three-fingered hand.
Carla was much huskier that Cassandra, taller and built like a professional football player. She had the same garden tool haircut, and it was apparent that she was no stranger to a fork entering and exiting her mouth.
I didn't know if they were really sisters or not, and at the time I didn't care, nor was I in any mood to ask.
With Carla's head two feet from my crotch, I heaved up one more time on the barrel of the gun under my left arm, raising her head as I did so, and with one smooth and coordinated motion, I parted the chubby girl's oily hair three inches into her brain with a swift downward stroke of my machete.
Then I quickly turned around to face Cassandra (if that was her real name) anticipating her attacking me too, only to find her still huddled against the wall squeezing her wounded hand and sobbing.
I unloaded the shotgun, stuck the single remaining un-spent shell into my pocket, and tossed the gun onto the couch beside Carl's dead body as I shared my thoughts with Cassandra.
"You fucking cunt," I said to her calmly and in a monotone voice. "I was thinking about making you my main squeeze, taking you to Indiana with me, the whole nine yards, but you've ruined that for yourself, you fucking cunt.
If you and your sister, or lover, or whatever in the hell that "Bull Lesbian" looking thing is over there twitching on the couch hadn't tried to go all Dick Cheney on me with that coach gun. Well you'd still have all of your fingers, and Carla wouldn't be draped over the back of that sofa with a new part in her nasty custom cut hair, thrashing around and thinking about where she went wrong in life as her brains leak out onto the floor.
Now let me guess, I'm supposed to just take this despicable and heinous act of treachery in stride and blow it off, after all, I lived through it, so no harm no foul right?" I asked, as I pointed to the middle linebacker flopping up and down on the couch."
Reeling in pain Cassandra cried. "I'm sorry, it was my sister, she made me do it, I didn't want to, she made me."
"Bull shit," I maintained, still in a low monotone communication.
"No really, she has been a little off for over a year now.
A few months after people began to rise up and walk around dead, Carla swore that she had seen dinosaurs roaming the countryside. She claimed to have seen a T-Rex and two raptors while she was out alone trying to find us some food.
I never saw any such thing, but I was sequestered in Pam's house during that time and we were both too scared to go outside, even to look for food.
I don't know what Carla saw that day, as if seeing dead people walking around trying to eat you wasn't enough, but whatever it was that she saw, dinosaurs or not, it seemed to put the zap on her head. Because when we finally met up she wasn't the same as she used to be," Cassandra remembered, as she cringed from the pain caused by her absent digits.
As Cassandra continued to try to convince me that she had not been a willing participant in the planning or the execution of the failed ambush that ultimately extracted two of her fingers, her eyes became glassy and began to roll back in her head.
"Oh, now you're going to pass out on me, what, the pain is too much for you," I asked, sarcastically.
******
Jack hadn't been this pissed-off in a long time. He had befriended this woman, saved her life, offered to team up with her and travel together, and had not really asked for anything in return.
Although he had figured that sometime in the future they might get acquainted a little better and maybe even do some naked wallowing down the road somewhere, and even though she had seen him close up in the raw, and turnabout is fair play, he wasn't in a big hurry to jump her bones before she was ready.
And what was his reward for all of his hard work, bravery, patience, and kindness?
He thought it was the proverbial sharp stick in the eye, and he was sick to hell of people poking him with sharp sticks.
From the start, he didn't completely buy Cassandra's story about the baby Kyle, and how he met his demise.
Although it wasn't all that farfetched considering everything he'd seen since the undead began to walk the earth.
The excuse she gave him about not wanting to be a part of her sister's bushwhacking attempt didn't wash either.
On their way to Carla's (alleged) house from the river, she could have easily said, "Can I go with you?" and never even mentioned Carla or the house where she was hiding, and none of this would have happened.
They'd be on their way to Indiana together.
She would still have ten fingers.
And her supposed sister Carla, wouldn't be twitching on the couch in dire need of seven hundred stitches in the top of her skull, along with an emergency brain transplant.
Yes, Jack was really pissed off at Cassandra, so pissed off in fact that his angry brought back memories of Matt the hillbilly he had scalped as he passed through Arkansas, leaving the man alive, bald, and most likely waking up with a horrendous headache.
******
"If it's good enough for Matt, I think that's it's good enough for you," I said, as I walked toward the front door.
"What?" Cassandra mumbled, just barely conscious.
"I've got something for you, it's out in the truck," I answered. "You know; the truck that we would have been, could have been, and should have been driving up to Indiana as we speak."
"Oh, that truck," Cassandra acknowledged, murmuring as her eyes again rolled back into her head.
I sprinted out the door and off the porch, scurrying to my truck to retrieve the bottle of whiskey that I had stashed behind the seat.
In the distance I could see a small cluster of zombies making their way west down a side street four or five blocks away, and another group that was much farther away coming toward the house.
Due to the absence of the brain-eaters close to the house, the sound of the shotgun blast inside the home had been muffled enou
gh that the undead a few blocks away hadn't been attracted by the noise.
However, their presents told me that feral dogs roaming in the neighborhood were probably none existent, at least that was the ongoing theory up to now.
Dogs move in, zombies move out. Zombies appear, and dogs disappear.
Who knows what that's all about, but everyone that's still alive has already figured out that in this hellish new world, you had better be ready for anything, because sooner or later, it's probably going to show up and try to kill you.
In any case, the zombie population was beginning to multiply in the neighborhood and I would need to be quiet and try not to attract uninvited guests to Carla's house.
With whiskey bottle in hand, I bolted back onto the porch and back into the house.
Cassandra hadn't moved from the spot where she had squatted the moment her finger's departed from her hand.
With Cassandra still on the verge of passing out, I held the tainted bottle of booze up to her mouth.
"Here you cunt, drink this," I offered politely, knowing that she would take a drink, whether she wanted to or not. I would make sure of that.
"What is it?" she asked groggily swaying from side to side.
"It's what you're going to need to kill the pain, it's whiskey," I answered. "It's the really good stuff."
In shock and sitting on the border between consciousness and blacking out, Cassandra thanked me and took a sip from the drug-laced bottle.
It was the last sip of anything that she would drink as a full-fledged woman.
For school was in session and I was the teacher, and I intended to teach the little bitch a hard lesson that she wouldn't soon forget.
It was apparent that she liked surprises; after all, she showed up at my private beach unannounced with a pack of feral dogs, begging me to help her. Then she and Carla didn't hesitate to surprise me with their shotgun pointed at my back.
Therefore, I figured who was I to deny her what seemed to be one of her favorite pastimes, which was obviously to blind side people with surprises. So I intended to give her the surprise of her life, and she'd get it as soon as she woke up from the drug induced stupor that I was about to inflict upon her.
"Take another sip, I think you're going to need it," I insisted, as I pressed the neck of the bottle between her lips. "Pretty good stuff isn't it?"
My question was to go unanswered as Cassandra's eyelids slowly dropped over her eyes as the knockout drug quickly took control of her conscious will and plunged her into a deep slumber.
"Well Cassandra, if that's your real name, this is your lucky day, you're lucky I like you and decided to give you something to put you to sleep first, " I told the unconscious woman that was slumped over at my feet.
I pulled my four-inch folded skinning knife from my front pocket and flipped the blade open. I had yet to kill or maim a zombie with this knife, I had only used it to slice the food I was eating and to cut rope and other relatively clean inanimate objects that needed to be cut, so I deemed it safe to use to maim Cassandra.
I shoved Cassandra's limp body from its sitting position onto the floor, and turned her onto her back.
I put my pocketknife up to her throat, and with the blade turned upward, I used a sawing motion to cut the neck of her t-shirt.
I continued to slit her bloodstained white shirt down the middle, being careful not to nick her skin with the sharp blade, and avoided slicing through any of the dried blood on the shirt.
With Cassandra's shirt now resembling a vest more than a shirt, I peeled back both sides of the ruined garment revealing her hefty set of major league yabos once again.
Tearing a thin strip of cloth from her shirt, I wrapped it around her wrist, making a tourniquet to stop the profuse bleeding from her wounded hand.
I left the girl who once was my would be girlfriend, lying bare-chested and unconscious on the living room floor, and made my way into the kitchen.
I collected a hodgepodge of flammable items such as paper towels, wooden spoons, and anything else that would burn, piled them into the right side of the double sink, and opened the kitchen window above it several inches to vent the smoke.
An eight-inch iron skillet hanging with a four-piece set was perfect for the job at hand.
A box of kitchen matches above the stove was the final component needed to begin the first phase of the process.
As flames rose from the right side of the sink, I filled the left side with water from Cassandra's bottled water stash that she and Carla had no doubt pilfered from somewhere, or somebody, and searched the kitchen cabinets for a container of salt and a large freezer bag.
After locating a 12-inch plastic bag and cardboard container of salt with a girl on the label that was too stupid to get in out of the rain, I poured the entire contents into the bag and sat it on the counter on the left side of the sink.
Before I returned to Cassandra in the living room, I tossed two more wooden spoons, several more paper towels, and a box of breakfast cereal onto the fire. Then I carefully placed the black cast iron frying pan on top of the cereal box.
The fire in the sink was burning nicely and its smoke was being sucked out of the kitchen window as planned, so I hurried back into the living room knowing that Cassandra would be anxious to receive her surprise.
Cassandra hadn't moved an inch and had even began to lightly snore under the influence of the drug she had ingested.
The tourniquet was doing the job that it was intended to do, stopping the flow of blood, and allowing it to coagulate.
I knelt down beside the unconscious woman with my skinning knife in hand, and began to have second thoughts about what I was about to do.
My hesitation lasted only a moment as I began to think.
"Fuck this bitch, she had her chance, she made her choice, she chose poorly. And if she and that bull on the couch had had their way, I'd be the one flopping around on the other side of the room picking buckshot out of my ass."
"And besides, I need something that will be a constant reminder of all the horse shit that seems to keep spewing out of every orifice of the people that I meet," I said, aloud to myself.
With that, I straddled the woman's stomach as if I was climbing into the saddle of my favorite filly, and I began a surgical incision around the circumference of Cassandra's left tit.
Of course, I mean as surgical as one can be using a folding pocketknife that's been dipped in whiskey for sterilization as a scalpel.
Her pair being symmetrical, I chose her left breast only because I'm right handed and thus from my point of view it was the easier of the two to extract from her chest.
As I cut the skin around the large mammary gland, I tried to be as precise as I could be using the primitive tool at hand, and make the circle as perfect as possible.
When the circular cut was completed, I lifted the edge of the lacerated skin and sliced the flesh that was still connected to the tit holding it in place.
I pulled Cassandra's severed breast from her chest and held it nipple down in the palm of my left hand as I wiped the blood from the blade of my skinning knife onto the leg of the patient's designer jeans.
As these events unfolded, a strange thought crossed my mind, which made me smile.
"No doubt several warrants had been issued for my arrest for past felony hit and runs, not to mention leaving the scene of multiple accidents, I wonder if now I'll be charged with practicing medicine without a license?"
Juggling (no pun intended again) Cassandra's left tit in one hand, and my knife in the other, I dashed into the kitchen and threw the separated yabo along with my skinner into the cold water in the left side of the sink, and grabbed what was left of the roll of paper towels I had used to fuel the fire.
Sticking the handle of the hot frying pan into the cardboard center roll of the towels, I crushed the flimsy roll against the handle of the pan using it as a homemade potholder.
I ran back into the living room and knelt down beside Cassan
dra as she continued to snore, unaware of the operation that I had just performed.
As I put the bottom of the hot iron skillet on the gaping wound left by the boobular extraction, I saw steam rising from the girl's chest and heard the sizzling sound of flesh being seared as the wound was cauterized to stop Cassandra from bleeding to death.
The drug-laced whiskey was far exceeding expectations, and Cassandra had hardly moved from the time I had stretched her out on the floor to prep her for her boob-job, to the time I placed the hot iron frying pan on her chest.
With her wound cauterized and the bleeding stopped, I removed the skillet from her chest and went back into the kitchen.
The fire in the sink was almost out and was beginning to emit more smoke from the embers, even though the kitchen window was open and disseminating most of it outside, the residual fumes were beginning to sting my eyes.
I dipped the frying pan into the sink where the solitary twin was soaking, and filling it with some of the marinating liquid (H2O), I doused the smoldering embers in the adjoining sink.
I knew that the zombies that I had sighted when I fetched the whiskey must be close by now if they had stayed true to their course, and a sense of urgency began to set in.
"I don't have much time, I've got to make this quick, I don't want those eaters out there trapping me in this house," I muttered, as I dipped my hands into the cold water and pulled the sunken pocketknife and amputated breast out of the sink.
Fortunately, the short blade on my folding pig sticker was perfect for hollowing out the mango-orange colored core of Cassandra's cut off tit, and in addition, the rounded portion of the blade worked well to scrape off the left over fatty tissue from the skin, so that part of the preparation went quickly.
With the breast now hollow and the inside devoid of excess fat and gland, I inserted the prepared skin into the plastic bag of salt.
Salt serves to draw all of the moisture out of the hide, thereby tanning it and turning it into a fine leather product.
