Husk

by Corey Redekop

  “You’ll need to work on that.”

  “Oh, Sheldon. If I had only known. I never would have waited.” He stretched out his limbs, examining muscles that had not moved with such grace in generations. “Glorious. Absolutely. Glorious. I have never felt. This good.” He walked over to me, his stride smooth and unwavering, and crouched down to look me in the eye.

  “This isn’t right, is it? You could never. Move like this. With such. Fluidity?”

  “Can’t say so,” I wheezed. “Always preferred the. Lumbering look myself.”

  “Fascinating.” He looked himself over again. “It seems I. Have changed a bit. From your template. I’d say we were. Able to refine the process. Filtered out the impurities.” He raised his hands to the sides of his head and closed his eyes. “Sparks. Such. Such colors! Sheldon, I can see my brain evolving. To a higher level of consciousness. Already I can feel myself. Getting stronger.”

  He looked back at me, thoughtful. “How long did it take you. To learn to speak?”

  “Hours.”

  “And here I’ve mastered. It in minutes. I’m not a zombie, Sheldon. Not entirely. I am something new. A step in evolution. What a gift you’ve given me.” He cocked his head, looking up. “And what is that noise? No, not noise. But in my head. Do you hear that? The screaming?” I nodded glumly, my scraps of brain bouncing about. His eyes brightened. “It’s them, isn’t it? Your children. No. My children.” He clapped his hands in joy, and his still-withered manboobs quivered. “What wonderment. They’re just waiting for their orders. A whole species, mine to control. Much like humans.”

  “At least it hasn’t. Gone to your head.”

  He shot me an expression of pity. “And there you were. With all this power. This potential. Wasting it. Hiding from your true self. You don’t deserve this.”

  “Never thought I did.”

  He stood, stretched his limbs, becoming aware of his newfound death. “Imagine what I’ll be like. Once I get my full strength! Once we start the alterations. That Doctor Rhodes had planned. I’ll be unstoppable.”

  “Not if you keep eating your doctors.”

  “Details. I’ll become invincible.”

  “A king among men,” I said.

  He nodded to himself. “To start. I think—” His eyes widened, then bulged, an impossibility with no blood flow. “Oh my,” he whispered. “Can you see them?”

  I glanced around.

  “There, Sheldon.” He pointed past the machinery, to the wall. “In the cracks. Between the atoms.” I looked, seeing nothing but painted concrete. His face slackened in astonishment. “Oh, Sheldon. If you only knew. I understand. I see it all now. I see them.” He looked back to me, unnervingly peaceful. “You never knew about them, did you? Somehow, you never knew.”

  A whimper rose from the corner of the room, distracting Dixon from the invisible spectacle. He looked over his shoulder at Rowan, huddled against the wall, watching us, knees curled to her chest, her fingers dabbing at her wounds.

  Lambertus slid his eyes over her, and I watched the appetite return. Blood oozed from her injuries, alive with copper, the scent already distinct from the dead plasma that filled the room.

  He gave me a slow wink, not yet a mastered skill. “What do you think. Sheldon? Should I let her live?” He took a deep breath. “Shall I let you go?” he bellowed. “Shall I be merciful?” His voice ripped through the boundaries of time and space. The gouged remnants of my brain shriveled at the sonic assault. Rowan’s electronic plugs sparked in her ears, singing her hair. She vomited over her blouse.

  He laughed, taking a breath beforehand, the intake of air already a natural process. His cackle was a crime against humanity. “What fun. Sheldon, you truly missed out. And to think. I thought you could be a messiah. You are a worm compared to me. You couldn’t even be. A proper zombie. You had to be conflicted. How pathetic.”

  He reached down and tore off a mercenary’s arm, biting off the index finger and swallowing it whole, bones and all. “You disgust me, Sheldon,” he said as he nibbled on the thumb. “That I ever thought I should. Be like you. I see now, there is. No limit to what I can achieve.”

  He smiled, his grin broad, his teeth red. “Perhaps I’ll keep you around. As a pet. A reminder to myself. Of what could have been. I will feed you scraps. Just enough to keep you aware. And you can watch as I fulfill your potential.”

  I wish I could have thought of a witty rejoinder. Something pithy and devastating. Something a hero would have said. Something a movie star could have spat out before the climactic turnaround.

  Even a non sequitur would have done.

  But my mind was blank to all but purpose.

  I was no hero. I never was. You can’t be a hero and a cannibal.

  I wasn’t even human. I was a zombie who dreamed of humanity.

  It was time to wake up. But not before one final gasp of compassion for what I once was.

  I raised my arm, my hand gripping the gun Simon had tucked away into his holster, and fired.

  The slug pierced Dixon’s throat, pureeing the Adam’s apple, puncturing the trachea, and splintering the cervical vertebrae. The shards gladly joined the bullet in its destruction and rampaged through the spinal cord, punching nerve cells through the back wall of Dixon’s neck.

  Dixon gaped. His arms twitched as he tried to raise them up, to plug the hole. His legs gave way and the old man fell forward to his knees, next to Simon’s body, closer to me. Dixon tried to speak; his new orifice whistled.

  I took aim and fired three more times, almost completing what I started.

  Dixon’s head flipped back, the vertebrae useless, the discs punctured, the spinal cord almost completely demolished. His body went into spasms as he tried to order his limbs to fight back, to attack. The movements ruined whatever balance he had, and he fell back, knees bending at unfamiliar angles. He squirmed as his appendages protested their orders, confused.

  I couldn’t finish the job from where I lay. Dixon was twitching his way across the floor, out of my line of fire, and I didn’t know how many shots I had left. I swung the gun Rowan’s way. “Rowan, would you be a dear. And toss me that saw?” She looked at the tool in her hand, her face slack, responses sluggish. She was going into shock. I fired a shot over her head to get her attention focused on the here and now. She squeaked and threw the saw across the floor, sliding it through the fluids that drenched the tiles. It came to a rest next to Simon’s groin.

  I heaved myself off the gurney and fell heavily onto the dead giant’s chest, forcing a glut of black matter to eject from his mouth. A small chunklet of me wrested free from my open brainpan (How much is even left? I worried) and landed next to Simon’s nose, jiggling as I rolled off his torso.

  Holding the gun in one hand, grabbing the saw in the other, I crawled toward the zombie that was convulsing itself away from me. My digestive tubing snagged behind me, leashing me to Simon’s belt. Cursing, I switched on the saw and sliced away at my intestinal rope until I was free, leaving me with an esophagus, trachea, stomach, and not much else.

  Wouldn’t have needed it much longer anyway.

  I arm-walked through the sludge until I reached Dixon’s side. He was flopping away, still angrily commanding compliance from his rebelling physique. His neck had twisted around; his face banged against the floor. I slid in next to him and used my gun hand to right his skull. The two of us stared up at the ceiling, his twitches slowing.

  “Can you hear me?” I asked. “Dixon, can you hear me in there?”

  His frame calmed its thrashings.

  I turned his head so that he could see me. His eyes shook in their housing.

  Yes. The word filled my mind. Yes, I can hear you still, cocksucker.

  “Nice. That makes this easier.”

  With the saw, I carved through the last shreds of his spinal column. Dixon’s b
ody instantly deactivated itself.

  His eyes blinked at me. I had always wondered whether that was possible.

  I took him by the nose and slipped the two of us forward, feeling his curses swarm over my neurons, tossing him across the doctor’s body and having him wait for me as I lugged myself over. I brought myself to a sitting position against the wall and picked the head up to face me.

  “So,” I said. “Here we are.”

  What do you want, Sheldon? There wasn’t much movement in the face, the musculature too vandalized, but his eyes still shone with fury.

  “What do I want?”

  I can help us both, Sheldon. We can be rebuilt. You know this is possible.

  “You trying to bargain with me?”

  You and I, Sheldon. We could rule this world. You just need a little guidance.

  “You know, I’m sick of guidance. It feels like I haven’t been myself in. Forever.”

  We can be gods. I can feel the power out there, in a way you never could. I am so much more than you. I can sense the powers beyond our world. Given time, we can harness them! Reshape the planet with our minds!

  “Wow, magic zombies. Where were you when. I was looking for scripts?”

  Don’t be a fool, Sheldon. There has to be a reason why you were chosen. I believe this is it! You were meant to be so that I could be! Sacrifice for the greater good! I see this now. They tell me this. We are their emissaries. It was fate that brought us together, to become avatars for beings long absent from this reality!

  I mulled that over. Rowan started to slide herself over to the door as I pondered; I fired another shot over her head to keep her still, raining plaster dust over her hairdo.

  Fate. If there had to be a reason . . . maybe the gods did choose me as a vessel. Who was I to say they didn’t exist, or that there wasn’t some force beyond my comprehension moving me across a hyperdimensional chessboard? Nothing about me made sense anyway. Wasn’t it just so much fucking easier to say I never had a choice at all? That I was just a pawn, a character in a poorly conceived pulp novel of gore, tragedy, and painful metaphors?

  I thought of Fisher, watching myself gut him with my fingers.

  I thought of setting fire to Mom’s body.

  I thought of Duane, above me, brain all but gone, his lovely soul scrambled like eggs in an omelet. I thought of what could have been with him, had I still been alive and not a coward to my own insecurities.

  I thought of my stomach, open in my lap, somehow still gurgling.

  “I never put much stock in gods,” I said. “As you said. I’ve never been the contemplative type.”

  This is a chance for immortality! We’ll become vessels for beings of unimaginable energies. Can you not see them? Can you not hear them, bellowing from the void? They are ordering us to proceed, Sheldon! The plan is almost complete. They are willing to forgive; they understand that they didn’t get the formula right with you.

  “You know,” I said, bouncing Dixon’s head back and forth between my hands like a basketball, “there are schools of thought. That say when you eat someone. You gain their knowledge. I saw some movies like that. Until now, I knew that wasn’t true.

  “But in your case” I raised his head and stared him in the eyes “I wonder.”

  I placed him on my lap, face down, and sawed through the top half of his skull, spinning him slowly in my lap as the blade spun through the bone and freed his pulsing cerebrum to the air. I plunged my fingers in and ripped loose a McNugget of Lambertus and popped it into my mouth, hearing his screams of anger and somehow tasting his rage as my molars made quick work of whatever embers of personality abided within its tissue.

  I tore out handfuls of his personality and squished them in my fists before licking his cogitations off my fingers. Around me, I fancied I could hear the walls scream as I denied vast gods/monsters from hidden realms their exit strategy.

  As I devoured him, I began to see. Random clouds of his consciousness crept through my system while I chewed, jolting my neurons, pushing the rods and cones of my one eye to the edges of their capacities and then beyond.

  I began to see. The walls were tissue, reality a thin veneer that masked untold wonders and horrors. Light filled the infinitesimal interstices between atoms, and silhouettes the size of mountains wriggled and pushed against the fabric of existence. Colossal tentacles wrapped around the room and squeezed. Teeth the size of galaxies gnawed at the walls.

  Do you see them? the morsels asked as they were impaled upon my incisors.

  “Yes,” I answered truthfully. “I see them.”

  Do you understand?

  “Oh yes.”

  They were nameless, and leviathan. What peeked through the fractures were the original old ones, the progenitors of every religious movement that had existed since man had shrugged off the last drops of primordial ooze and decided to wonder what else there could be to life. I was to be their vessel. They had been waiting eons for their chance to break through and claim their birthrights as rulers of time itself. Past efforts had been futile; our brains were too simple, our technologies unprepared, and the best messiahs they could summon were deceased humans with thought, and even that success they achieved only a few times among untold numbers of braindead corpses hungering for flesh. But deathlessness had taught them patience; they continued to experiment, reaching though the ruptures between worlds, molding our minds, raising us to do their bidding. Now humanity had split the atom, finally advancing to the point where we could conceivably open gateways between dimensions; all they needed was a patsy. It had been me, but as Dixon said, they had once again fucked up the recipe, and it was only through happenstance that the old man had lucked into the proper procedure.

  A creature as old as the universe pressed its scaled digits into reality and pleaded for release.

  I lifted Dixon back into my eyeline. Only a few tablespoons of thought remained in his skull. The old man’s eyes were still bright and focused, and he pleaded with me to stop, that it wasn’t too late. My stomach burbled in my lap, digesting a god.

  “Can they hear you?” I asked the severed head in my hands. “Are you in contact with them?”

  Yes, Sheldon. They understand your confusion. They are willing to forgive. This can still work; I can still open the doorway. I see how, it is so simple.

  I bore the tips of my fingers into his remnants and took a firm grip.

  “Tell them something for me.”

  Anything, Sheldon.

  My fingers tightened.

  “Tell them that this is all your fault.”

  His memories imploded.

  “You should never have killed Duane.”

  I wrested the last of Dixon free. His eyeballs sucked back and out of his sockets and jiggled between my fingers.

  I crammed Lambertus Dixon into my mouth and swallowed him up.

  The walls blinked back to normality.

  I let the empty head tumble from my fingers. It rolled into my chest cavity, and I was too tired to care.

  I looked over at Rowan, still sitting, watching me warily.

  “Do you know what I just saw?” I asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “Neither do I. And I am too tired. To think about it.”

  We regarded each other.

  “So, what happens now?” she asked uncertainly.

  “What do you think. Should happen?”

  “Could I go?”

  “That’s one option. Or I could eat you. Option two.”

  “I always had your best interests at heart, Sheldon.”

  “That’s true. Until the end, of course.”

  “Well, I am an agent, after all.”

  We shared a chuckle over that.

  “I don’t know what I am anymore, Rowan. I thought I was an actor. Then I thought I was a zombie. Jus
t now, I could have become a god. Where do you go from that?”

  “We could still make some money together. Go on an international tour. Tell people what you’ve seen. You could donate the profits, if you want. You’re still functioning, more or less.”

  I lifted up my stomach, dancing happily as Dixon’s eyeballs dissolved. “Definitely less.”

  She smiled. “We’d have to clean you up a bit, of course.”

  “I think that would be. Like putting lipstick. On a pig at this point.”

  “You’d be surprised what a touch of rouge can do.”

  “I’m sure I would be. Catch.” I tossed the saw over to her. She picked it up hesitantly.

  “Do you . . . do you want me to . . . kill you?”

  I waggled the gun at her. “Don’t get any ideas, Rowan. No, I still blame you for Duane. And all this, of course. You could have told me at any time. But you used me. Like a good agent should. Sold me out for thirty pieces of silver. I don’t think I can forgive you.”

  She hung her head. “I am sorry, Shel.”

  “Too little, too late.”

  “Then why—”

  “Why the saw?” I pointed at the bulk of Simon. “Don’t you see him twitching there?”

  Rowan looked. Simon’s fingers were beginning to spasm.

  “I don’t think. I’ll have much time left here. But since I’m going to go. I’m going to go as what I am.

  “I am a zombie. It’s time to monster up. But I figure I do owe you. A fighting chance. You did stay with me. When others doubtless would have dropped me. I haven’t forgotten that. And I am grateful. So we’re going to wait here. Until my new disciple Simon. Is good and ready.”

  Simon started to shake. Rowan rose unsteadily to her feet.

  “And then, we will see. If you deserve to leave this place. Alive.”

  She took a step toward Simon, raising the saw.

  I cocked the gun, stopping her.

  “Not before he’s up. Let’s keep this fair.”

  c

  She gave as good as she got. Have to give her that.

  v

  After Simon finished deboning his meal, I had him scoop out Rowan’s braincase and wolf down the matter; I didn’t want her returning.