by Will Lemen
"It leaves less bruises," he said.
His advice also left Beth next in line for another public beating, which was administered moments after leaving the sight of the man in charge.
Beth knew that if she gutted the punk (the punk Sarge) within the compound, she would most likely be skinned alive (literally) and her dermis pelt would be fed to the zombies that always ghosted the perimeter of the building while waiting for human scraps to be tossed their way by the Caucasian's henchmen. All the while, skinless, she would be forced to watch as they devour it.
If there was one thing that the Caucasian prided himself on, it was equality between women and men. It didn't matter whether you were a man or a woman, he would have you skinned equally.
This procedure was commonplace within the confines of the Caucasian's fortress, although it was usually reserved for those who had made assassination attempts on the leader (which for some reason seemed commonplace also), although it was not unheard of for this punishment to be arbitrarily doled out by some of the meaner guards for any infraction of the Caucasian's laws.
Thus, the zombies walking the circumference of the compound property were dubbed Skin-Eaters.
So, totally fed up with the pain from being beat on almost every day, being called Everlast, and having to endure jokes about her having to be told twice about everything (because of her perpetual two black eyes), Beth decided to take her chances with Jolene outside the wire so to speak.
Even though she knew that being caught would most likely mean certain death, she felt that sooner or later the Sarge was going to go into one of his intoxicated rages and beat her to death anyway. Therefore, she decided that she would be the one that would choose the method of her own demise, and it wouldn't be at the hand of the man that she had grown to despise.
With Jolene's plan now in motion, the two determined women made their way out of the communal sleeping area where the second-class citizens were housed.
The Sarge had Beth moved into the communal quarters after her countless rejections of his drunken sexual advances. A move that he considered as punishment for her, and she considered as a welcome relief from him.
However, every morning, he would join her at breakfast, and begin her regiment of daily torment.
"The guard called Kenny said he would make sure that we made it out of here, as long as we got to his station before the changing of the guard," Jolene informed Beth.
"Then quit yapping and let's find Kenny," Beth whispered back, nudging her friend forward.
As the girls reached Kenny's post, they could hear the corporal of the relieving guards in the ready room, giving last minute orders to his patrolmen.
"Hurry up you bitch's, are you trying to get us all caught?" Kenny scolded in a low voice, as the two females approached. "Well at least you two brought your guns with you, you're going to need them out there."
"Shut the fuck up, and tell us which way to go, the other guards are right behind us," Beth scolded back.
"Go straight for that tall tree in the distance, that will take you into a residential neighborhood, and keep going from there and you'll be headed south into the countryside," Kenny directed them. "And watch out for zombies, they're kind of thick in that direction this time of night."
Beth and Jolene scurried out the door held open by the guard Kenny, who at the same time waved off the other guards that had been bribed (fucked), and ran as fast as they could toward the tall tree on the horizon that was barely visible in the dark.
As they ran, Beth fished out a small folding pocketknife with a four-inch blade from her pants pocket and unfurled it.
"We're heading into zombie country and we're too close to the compound to fire our guns," Beth warned. "Unless we want to wake up every guard in the joint."
"All I have is my rifle," Jolene whined, looking concerned.
Once at the residential housing neighborhood, the girls stopped behind a row of bushes to rest for a moment and check to see if they had been seen running from the fortress by anyone that Jolene had not bribed.
"So let me get this straight," Beth asked. "You planned this escape for months and forgot to bring a knife with you?"
"I guess I was just too busy paying out your bribes to the guards and it just slipped my mind," Jolene answered sarcastically as she smiled.
"Okay you got me, I owe you one," Beth confessed.
"One my ass, do the math, four guys, three weeks worth of bribes?" Jolene appealed fervently.
"You're right, it was your ass, at least a piece of your ass, but now it's both of our asses, so next time, bring a knife," Beth announced. "I don't see anyone following us; it looks like we made a clean break so far, but speaking of our asses, let's get them moving.
"Next time?" Jolene questioned curiously.
******
Beth was a seasoned fighter known to her peers at one point as a possible psychopathic killer wielding a .22 caliber M-4 clone. She was well versed in the killing of zombies, feral dogs, and rogue humans, and anything else that needed her services.
Jolene however, not so much. She had been making a living as a fluffer in the porn industry while waiting for her big break, before the planet went belly up and started coughing up dead bodies to feed on the living.
After she got over the initial shock of the first days of the plague, she found that her talent from her past life offered her options against the roving man-eaters, by performing certain services to men in return for their protection.
She couldn't recall if she had ever put down a zombie or a dog, and she was positive that she had never killed a human being.
If the two of them were to meet in the square circle, the introduction of the fighters would go something like this.
Beth's introduction...
"Ladies and gentlemen! Fighting out of the red corner, standing 5 foot, two inches tall, hailing from parts unknown and weighing in at a mouth-watering 115 pounds, sporting natural blonde hair, blue eyes, and a 38-inch chest. Her record includes victories ranging from the rotting flesh of the zombies hordes, to the foaming mouths of roaming packs of feral dogs. She has several rogue humans to her credit, and at least one highbred hermaphrodite. Once know to her peers as "that cute little psychopath", she now makes her living as a freelance killer roaming across the mountains and the prairies, fighting for the American way in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. Ladies and gentlemen... I give you Beth."
Jolene's introduction...
"Ladies and gentlemen! Fighting out of the Blue corner, at 5 foot, three inches tall, hailing from off camera on many of the porno movie sets that you once knew and loved, and weighing in at another mouth-watering 117 pounds. Sporting bleached blonde hair, brown eyes, and an impressively firm and perky 39-inch chest. Her victories include, but are not limited to... four of the meanest perimeter guards in the Indiana Badlands, and numerous other weak-willed and sex starved males she's come into contact with throughout the plague ridden countryside. She once put an end to the life of a small rodent using nothing more than a wooden mousetrap...and...well that's about it. Ladies and gentlemen... I give you Jolene."
******
An hour before the sun broke the horizon in the east that morning, Beth and Jolene had force-marched nearly ten miles south of the Caucasian's fortress through the zombie-infested countryside.
At that same time, the alarm was being sounded at the compound and the search for the two women had begun.
"Find Beth and that other bitch and bring them both back here," the Sarge barked. "You know how he gets when someone escapes... I mean leaves."
"Yes sir," the corporal of the guard of the graveyard shift replied, having no idea where to begin looking for the women. "Sir, which way do you think they went?"
"How in the hell do I know? There is only four directions, north, east, south, and west, so send a patrol in each direction and get them back here," the Sarge raged, wiping the slobber from his mouth. "And do it now! Unless you want those skin-eaters outside to
have your hide for lunch."
The guard scrambled to rally his men for the search, and as he was ordered, he sent a small group of men to patrol in each direction.
"When I get that little bitch back here, I'll teach her to run away from me," the Sarge mumbled to himself, as he took his first swig of the day from his personal stash of warm beer.
******
While the Caucasian's compound was buzzing with the news of the latest citizens that were absent without leave, Beth and Jolene were busy with their own problems.
******
"Me and that asshole Ron traveled the last hundred miles to the compound on a motorcycle, we had to ditch our regular ride because the roads almost don't exist around here anymore. I don't know what happened in this whole area, but the place is filled with deep craters, and burned out rubble from the houses and other buildings that look like they've been blasted apart.
I don't remember seeing all of this carnage on the way to the Caucasian's fortress, and certainly not all of these flies," Beth said, as she shooed away only a fraction of the massive amount of insects soaring around the area. "But we were traveling at night when we came through the Badlands, and most of the time I was busy just trying not to fall off the back of the bike and fend off those ravenous bastards at the same time, so I guess I probably missed a lot of the scenic landscape the first time through."
"It sure does smell bad, but I think I'm getting used to stench, if that's possible," Jolene claimed.
Continuing to shoo away the flies that were circling around her, Beth said. "If the stink from all of these rotted body parts and the reek from those walking shit sacks isn't bad enough, these damn flies are just too much. And I don't care what you say, I've been out in this kind of shit for a long time, and I'm not even close to getting used to the smell."
"I can barely breathe without one or two of these little fuckers flying into my mouth," Jolene retched, as she coughed out a large hairy-backed fly with a metallic green and blue tint that had almost gagged her. Which was really saying a lot, when you consider her former occupation?
"That guard Kenny said that the zombies were pretty thick out here, but I thought he meant just these walking zombies," Beth said with a grunt, as she drove her knife through the eye socket of an advancing female undead cannibal. "But holy shit, there are dead ones lying all over the place too, not to mention the quantity of severed limbs and chunks of decomposing meat."
"They seem to be faster than I remember, do you think their faster than they used to be?" Jolene asked, just before tripping over the skeletal remains of two long dead soul-less reanimates.
"They are definitely faster than I remember them, which means that they are definitely more dangerous," Beth insisted, as she stuck the blade of her pocketknife into the middle of the forehead of another charging and angry freak of nature. "That's why I'm going to need some help holding them off. We're too far out to turn back now, and I'm not going to risk getting eaten fighting my way back through the same zombies that we spent all night avoiding. Besides, even if we did turn around and made it back alive, we'd just end up as the main course for the skin-eaters on the fringe of the compound grounds."
After pulling the blade from the head of the last zombie she had dispatched, Beth bent over and pulled the left femur bone from a semi-skeleton that had been separated into several parts by unknown forces, and had most of meat already rotted off it, or gnawed off it by hungry rodents in the neighborhood.
Handing the grisly 18-inch piece of whitish calcified bone to a cringing Jolene, Beth informed her partner.
"Here take this, you can use it as a club, there's too many of them around here, if we fire our guns they'll zero in on our position and a hundred of them will swarm down on us, we won't have a chance."
"Eeewwwuuu! It still has skin on it!" Jolene whimpered, hesitant to touch the macabre weapon.
"Yeah, shut up and take it, it's got some rotting muscle on it too," Beth insisted, shoving the human baton into Jolene's hand. "Club a couple of the dumbasses up side their heads hard enough to crack their brittle skulls and that shit will fall right off."
Taking the ghoulish weapon in hand, Jolene's actions were instantly dictated for her as two casually dressed male zombies accosted her simultaneously.
Jolene swung the heavy leg bone into the temple of the charging monster on her left, crushing its skull on the left side.
Without a pause, she then swung her calcium-fortified club in the opposite direction and planted the head of the femur (the round part of the bone that allows the leg to rotate within the pelvic bone) into the forehead of her next undead victim.
Just as Beth had predicted, chunks of rotting meat and skin separated from the bone and was hurled onto the head of the brain-dead monster upon impact, and was now draped over the zombie's punctured and bleeding face, leaving only strands of decomposing sinew and a section of the femoral artery dangling off the end of the bludgeoning thighbone.
Both of the former attackers fell to the ground in front of Jolene as she jerked the leg bone from the flesh-covered cranium.
"Talk about boning a couple of guys," Beth joked, trying to contain her laughter. "Let's get moving this area is too infested."
"Yeah, I think I've boned enough guys in the last few weeks," Jolene assured, easily containing her laughter as she coughed up another fly.
The girl's banter didn't last long, as more of the voracious undead appeared, blocking their path southward.
Although Jolene always felt that she wasn't really cut out for zombie killing, especially zombie killing on such a massive scale, her survival along with Beth's, mandated that she quickly acquire the skills necessary to carry out the extreme amount of extermination essential to completing their journey and finalizing their escape.
At daybreak, the girls found themselves standing beside a road sign stating that they were at the city limits of a small Indiana town once called Lebanon.
Since they had began their trek south from the Caucasian's stronghold the night before, together they had claimed the lives (or deaths), of over a hundred zombies that were roaming under the stars of the Badland's night sky.
Hungry, thirsty, and overall exhausted from their cross-country trek, and weary of all the zombie killing, Beth formulated a plan and shared it with Jolene.
"I've got an idea, we need to get some rest and find some food and water, or we're going to do something stupid and get ourselves killed," she told Jolene.
"Well, I'm open for suggestions, let's hear your idea," Jolene admitted with a sigh.
"First we need to find a house that looks like we can use it for shelter for awhile, and if we're lucky, maybe the previous owners were stupid enough to buy bottled water before the epidemic hit, and still have some stored there," Beth dictated, pointing toward a group of destroyed houses. "Shit, look past those trees, one house is still standing. Once we clear that house, we'll secure it if that's possible, and then maybe we can get a few hours rest without having to worry about being eaten. Then we'll ferret around the joint and see what we can find, food, weapons, ammo, that sort of thing."
"Sounds good to me, and the sooner the better, but if we stop now, won't that give Ron and the Caucasian's guards a chance to catch up to us?" Jolene asked, with a concerned look.
"They don't know which direction we went, and even if they beat that information out of Kenny, between the burnt out houses and their basements, the craters, and the general rubble from all of the buildings that have fallen down, there's a thousand places to hide between here and the compound, they can't check all of them," Beth assured. "At least I don't think they can."
"Well that's reassuring," Jolene said sarcastically, as she followed Beth toward the cluster of demolished houses in the distance.
"Just in case those bastards did torture the shit out of that guard Kenny, and he did spill his guts before they fed him to the skin-eaters, I picked up a little trick in Texas that should serve to help us avoid them for a little whi
le anyway," Beth bragged, as she quickened her pace toward the intact house she had spotted.
Back to Contents
THE BADLANDS OF INDIANA
"Okay Jack, we're coming up on Indianapolis, on the other side of that is the Badlands," Derek informed me, his traveling companion.
"If that's the case, I guess it's time that you decide if you're going to join me in my little jaunt through that scenic wonderland," I noted, looking Derek in the eye.
"Well, you know you've yet to tell me what your real reason for going into the Badlands is.
I know you told that fool Tony and his idiot friend Danny that you were going in looking for the Caucasian, but you never told them why.
They assumed that you were somehow connected to his group in some way, and you just let them think that. That's when they both about shit their pants," Derek declared.
"So you noticed that too?" I said smiling.
"I certainly did. So before I decide whether or not I want to risk my pathetic life by going deep into the Badlands in search of someone known to be a little on the crazy side of town.
Someone that is rumored to have a small army at his disposal.
Someone that has the ability to make a couple of hardcore Kentucky hillbillies about shit their pants at the mere mention of his name.
I think you can tell me the real reason that you are so hell bent on risking life and limb by trudging through the infamous Badlands of Indiana to search out this Caucasian character."
Having no intention of telling him, or anybody else for that matter, the real reason that I was willing to walk straight into a fiery inferno deep in the lower depths of hell itself, stark raving naked if I had to, I chose to tell Derek a convincing half-truth, and let the chips fall where they may. He would find out the real truth soon enough when I found the Sarge.
"That's fair enough," I said, nodding my head as if I really believed the line of bullshit I was about to ask him to swallow whole.
