by Will Lemen
That time my tomahawk peeled out of the zombie's forehead as it dropped to the ground, and I stood ready to bury it into the next and final undead cannibal that was quickly closing the gap between us.
I was only slightly distracted by the sound of some of the maggots hitting the blistering asphalt and sizzling as if they had been tossed onto a greasy spoons hot griddle.
As I raised my weapon to split the skin craver's skull and destroy its diseased brain, I took a double take, because the stumbling flesh eater that was eyeballing me for a mid-afternoon snack looked familiar.
Even with a swarm of flies hovering around it, and some of its skin discolored to match the nasty pastel green tint of the rotting meat that inundated its teeth, the scab filled face of the ungainly cadaver before me finally rang a bell.
All at once, the face of the once well-known and familiar slobbering man-eater that was doing its best to stand in front of me, brought back a flood of memories from my past life.
This now rotting and stinking maggot trap that was staggering toward me, intent on making me its mid-day meal, was my former boss Batshit Bobby, from the hellhole where I worked before the zombie outbreak caused civilization to go belly up.
"So there really is a God," I said aloud, as we closed the narrow gap between us.
I could have walked up to Batshit and instantly blown the top of his head clean off using one of my 9mm firearms, and got back into my truck and drove away, leaving his now totally dead festering body to rot away in that parking lot.
I might have advanced toward ole Bobby and planted my tomahawk deep into his brain (about twenty times), putting him out of mine and everybody else's misery, forever, and again leaving him to be consumed by the maggots that seemed to be so fond of him.
I could have ran screaming and crying into the nearby woods and pissed my pants like a six-year-old girl (that's not going to happen by the way), and hope that Bob wouldn't follow.
Or, I could have even just got back into my vehicle and drove away, allowing Batshit Bobby to live out the rest of his slowly decomposing undead life in peace.
However, my former boss who got the name Batshit Bobby because we all figured that he was crazier than... how did we used to say it... oh yes... crazier than a clump of dried bat shit on a proverbial stick, didn't deserve to be treated in any of those common, uncaring, pedestrian ways by me or by anyone else. No, I had something better in mind for my ex-boss Bob.
Unfortunately for Bob (while he was still alive, as opposed to undead, he liked to be called Bob, he thought it made him sound more human) too many of the memories that flooded back into my head and took me back in time to my old place of employment, were not fond memories. They were reminders of how Batshit Bobby and his little concubine fucked over most of the people there on a daily basis, including me. That is, while they weren't busy just plain fucking each other in the naked nasty way. At least that was the rumor at the time.
"Well, well, if it isn't Batshit Bobby my old boss," I stated, not really expecting a practicable answer from the maggot-seething maniac.
"Raaor...eerr...sheeaor," Bob the zombie slobbered his answer back, not recognizing his former minion.
"Bobby, don't you recognize me," I asked. "You should, you fucked me so much when you were my boss, that at times I thought we were married."
"Arrraagga...uuch...barruu...ieerr!" Bob this time slobbered back in response to my inquiry, as he labored to slurp a lump of coagulated fly larvae that was dripping down his chin back into his mouth, and still not remembering me.
"I'm hurt Batshit, and I thought we were friends," I said smiling, as I stepped back from one of his staggering lurches toward me.
"Uraaup...cauugh...pwiih," the pugnacious zombie wheezed, as he choked back into his throat the drooling wad of escaping maggots.
"Bobby you should take better care of yourself, I mean look at you, Bob you look like shit.
Your clothes are dirty and torn and you've got pieces of rotting skin hanging off you, not to mention the scabs and open lesions all over your face and arms, and who knows where else.
Bob, let's do you a favor and keep this next assessment of your personal hygiene just between us shall we?"
"Woreee...aaarroo!" Bob grunted in agreement, as he lunged at me again.
I sidestepped Bob's unwanted advances, and began to explain my impromptu assessment of his lack of cleanliness and his nonexistent sanitary practices.
"You fucking stink Bob!
You have flies hovering all around your dumb ass. When you walk, if that's what you call that staggering stomping you're doing, you leave a contrail of vectors of disease flying along in your wake.
You can come clean with me Bobby; did you shit your pants too?" I asked, laughing as I dodged another one of Bob's untimely advances.
Paying no attention to my critique of his hygienic practices, the marauding epidermis eater, and former supervisor burped up a clutch of his favorite little white worms mixed with a bundle of incubating fly eggs onto his bottom lip, and then announced just before they dribbled down his chin.
"Eeaaap... juwwr... aawwooa... oorge," he said, no longer able to hold in the deluge of wiggling entities as he expectorated the mixed cluster of house fly larvae and eggs out of his mouth and onto his waiting chin.
As the sickening concoction of maggots and insect spawn were being expelled from his mouth to make room for my tastier body parts, Bob began to salivate even more in anticipation of feasting on me for a late brunch.
Upon the ejection of the distasteful blend that Bobby had discharged in my direction and that had ultimately came to rest on top of his right shit covered shoe, Batshit lunged at me once more.
"Well, if that's the way you feel about it Bob, I guess our friendship is over," I answered, pulling my underused machete from its sheath.
It was time to give Batshit some of his own medicine. Although I would have preferred to give him his dose of payback while we were still back at the old Buffoonery where we both worked, but I guess any payback is better than no payback at all.
However, before I got started dismantling my old boss, I just couldn't resist asking him one last question, a question that I been dying to ask for years, and this looked like the perfect time to ask it. I mean after all it wasn't like I was going to let Baitshit off the hook with just a warning, so I said to him.
"Bobby old pal, before we get down to the business at hand, I want to ask you something."
"Orragagi...poawtha!" Bob replied, stepping toward me quickly.
"I'll take that as an okay," I answered back, raising my machete as I sidestepped another one of the zombie's unwanted advances.
"Grrooltha!" the zombie Bob confirmed his earlier affirmative answer.
"Okay Bobby, here goes.
On the day the world went to shit. Just how high was the blowjob count that your ballsy masculine looking little concubine had been dispensing to you? I mean the total from the day that you hired that little cunt?" I asked, harshly. "One...two...three hundred? Don't be shy Bob; we all knew what you two were up to.
As a matter of fact, most of the people that worked for you thought that it was a miracle that as much as her head was bobbing up and down in your lap, that she didn't compress a couple of vertebra in her neck, or develop a severe case of chronic whiplash."
I knew it had to be a coincidence that Baitshit Bob scowled, then grimaced and stumbled toward me quicker than he had before.
I'm sure the maggots gushing from his mouth as if he were trying to spit them at me was nothing more than a brain dead maniac accidently ejecting his vile contents as he opened his mouth wide enough to take a big bite of me as he lurched forward.
Nevertheless, his reaction to my question was so well timed, along with the expression on his greenish-blue tinted face, that I couldn't help but to laugh in his face while he charged at me. His coincidental facial contortions coupled with his unintended body language was just too convincing, as I imagined his anger was the res
ult of my query into his past sex life with the odd looking co-worker that he had once lavished so many unearned promotions onto.
I mean, I'm sure they were earned, just not in the normal sense that one conducts a professional business, unless of course your professional business happens to be a prostitution ring.
With my question satisfactorily answered by the look on Bobby's rotting face, I decided to proceed with administering Baitshit's well-deserved medicine.
Without hesitation, however still chuckling, I systematically began to carve protuberances from Bob's lurching cadaver, starting with his fingers.
I swung my machete in the manner that I thought a very successful, yet highly underrated pirate such as Black Bart would have swung his saber while boarding one of the many ships he ravaged during his under publicized, yet illustrious career.
Visualizing myself as Black Bart I swung my machete at Batshit's hand.
The fingers on Bobby's right hand were tossed into the air briefly as the upward diagonal cut from my pirate saber (my machete) sliced them off cleanly while taking the lower half of the hand that they were attached to with them.
I then concentrated on my former boss's left hand, trying to be a bit more precise while cleaving off the fingers on that side.
The degree of refinement of a precision operation of this type is critical to its success, and would have been a bit easier a week earlier, before the undead got what seemed to be their second wind and began to move at a higher rate of speed and with a less gangling gate.
With that said, I managed to endeavor to persevere, and I was much more successful in my undertaking (need I say it) to hew only the digits off the left hand, as I watched all four fingers and the tip of Bobby's thumb being hurled into the air and ultimately landing at his feet.
The process of carving my ex-employer up like a Thanksgivings Day turkey, at first had little effect on his will, or his cravings to have me for lunch, as he continued to stumble toward me with his arms outstretched and his fingerless hands dripping blood that was quickly coagulating.
However, after I had managed to cut off both of his arms at the shoulders, the look on the ghoul's face was priceless as his armless torso leaned in my direction in a futile attempt to grab me, only to find that his squirming arms were lying on the ground blindly groping at his own ankles.
After seeing the confused look on Batshit's decomposing mug as he stared at his arms on the ground, I began to think.
"Maybe these zombies aren't as brain-dead as I thought! Maybe Bobby was really pissed about me questioning his integrity in his past dealings with his oddly masculine looking concubine?"
Then it occurred to me, who gives a shit what these sons-a-bitches think, or how they feel, or even if they think or feel. They are here to do two things as far as I am concerned.
1. They are here to eat humans, dead or alive. That's why my family called them Eaters.
2. They are here for me and people like me to kill, and honing my skills to a fine edge in the process is just another perk this world offers to the living.
Without further ado, I sashayed to the zombie's right side and knelt down; swinging my machete downward and casually hacked off part of Batshit's excretion covered right foot (Bob had apparently shit down at least one leg during his stint as a zombie), slicing through one of his $350 Florsheim shoes and several drooled out maggots in the process.
By now, I had abandoned my pirate fantasy which went 180° in the opposite direction of my rethink of my rather caviler methods of killing zombies, although I still found myself adhering to my old modus operandi a little too much given the fact that I was by myself in the midst of a world filled with ravenous corpses. Nevertheless, I just couldn't help myself when it came to getting even with my former boss and nemesis.
After all, it was payday for Bob, and I was the paymaster.
However, although I was concentrating more on dismembering my old boss, I did try to keep a watchful eye out for other zombies in the area that might be aware that it was not only high noon, but also lunchtime, and as usual, I was the prime cut at the top of the menu.
And speaking of keeping an eye out.
Before I cut the head off the wandering corpse that had once ordered me around with impunity while he and his manly looking concubine reveled in my misery, I raised my machete into the monster's line of sight, and with a quick jab, I shoved the point of my weapon into its eye socket. I followed the thrust with a swift clockwise twist, thereby extracting the stiff's dominate eyeball and flinging the gel filled ovoid orb onto the ground.
No matter how I decided to leave this poor excuse for a former human being, who I felt was apparently a substandard excuse for a zombie as well. I wanted to make sure that as long as he and his severed body parts twitched and convulsed on the tarmac, his visual cortex would still be able to process the view of the surrounding area that was cluttered with his own disconnected remains, and hopefully add to this piece of shit's slowly rotting torment. Therefore, I left his remaining eyeball intact.
With no arms and only one and a half feet, Bob wavered in front of me dripping his vile smelling juices onto the ground. And just before I separated his head from his neck, I flipped my machete upside down and with both hands I drove it hard into the former man's (and I use the term loosely) lower abdomen and began a sawing motion as I lifted the long razor sharp knife up the living corpse's belly.
My machete quickly unzipped Batshit Bobby's gizzard, allowing his semi-bloated viscera to be belched out of his body cavity onto the hot noonday sun-heated tarmac, and unfortunately onto my boots as well; giving a new meaning to the term spilling your guts.
The sizzling sound of my former employer's internal organs being seared by the blistering sun baked parking lot, along with the smell of those simmering organs on the ground, made me gag as steam from the zombie's boiling bodily fluids rose up from the hot black surface.
I kicked the zombie's disemboweled guts off my boots before slashing Bob's neck into two pieces with a horizontal swipe from my machete. And watched as his head flip over a couple of times, flinging maggots in a spiral formation on its way down to splashing into the pile of slowly cooking innards at our feet.
It was at that time that I thought, even though I was still trying to involuntarily gag up the back of my tongue into my mouth.
"This is the putrid stench of sweet revenge!"
What was left of Bobby's body soon followed his head into the malodorous mound of his former inner self.
Now as my ex-manager's divided body parts quivered and quaked in the middle of the museum's parking lot, bloating somewhat in the heat of the day as his internal gases expanded, each severed part seemed to take on a life of its own, as per the further evolution of the zombie hordes.
On the blistering asphalt, the slimy gut pile slowly churned, looking as though a can of giant worms had been emptied onto the ground and now the worms were trying to find a place to hide.
It was just another sickening sight in a long list of sickening sights that I had become desensitized to, as the entrails undulated and twisted, intertwining in the pile, deforming and reforming the shape of the slippery mound in a grisly blob-like display.
"Wow, talk about gut-wrenching, uh Bob?" I jested, glancing at his fluctuating decapitated head slowly oscillating back and forth and up and down on the churning mass of extracted internal fortitude.
"Clack, snap, click, click, click, clack," Bob answered back, as his jaw was thrusting upward sending the bottom row of his teeth slamming into the upper row of his discolored choppers repeatedly in a futile yet unfaltering attempt to still feast on my delectable, although out of reach living flesh.
Smacking, clacking, and clicking with his teeth was the only sounds that Bob's mouth could make now, considering that his lungs were dangling out below his rib cage and lying roughly four feet away, completely separated from his vocal cords.
However, the postmortem contractions of Bobby's undulating lungs, continued
to send air wheezing in and out through his loosely connected and rotted trachea. Causing the flesh by his neck-hole to act as lips, which flapped and vibrated against each other, making a juicy farting sound both when the air entered and when it was expelled from his bronchial tubes.
Besides the sinister sound of teeth clattering on the gut pile, mixed with the sounds of someone taking an acutely significant dump in unison with the rattling. Batshit's skull ejecting maggots orally and being bounced up and down driven by the force of his thrusting mandible, gave the freakish illusion that Bobby was agreeing with my every word while he puked up a zombie apocalypse version of Uncle Ben's perverted rice at the same time.
"Well I guess they don't call them choppers for nothing," I replied to the detached chomping head that was still intent on having me a la carte, even though it seemed not to be able to keep down its earlier meal of rice pudding.
The severed fingers of the zombie twitched quicker than the unconnected arms flexed, as they meandered in circles like wounded inch worms near the heap of squirming guts.
Meanwhile, the half of the hand with the fingers still attached, roamed the parking lot a little farther from the chaotic scene, resembling a crippled tarantula on the prowl.
The weight of the arms flexing on the blacktop, left them skidding back and forth on the torrid surface, peeling off layer after layer of flesh that was quickly singed and curled up into little balls of scorched skin, as they inflicted a serious case of road rash onto themselves clear down to the bone.
After I had completely and to my high standards, satisfactorily butchered my former overseer, I saw that my job there was done, and I thought that it was about time to return to the task of hunting down my old friend the Sarge.
After all, there was still more work that needed to be done.
I left Batshit Bobby in somewhat of a pile in the middle of that parking lot, that is, in as much of a pile as undulating limbs, and twisting intestines will stay in as they typically and unwittingly try to inch their way away from the center of the assemblage.
