Bring Me Flesh, I'll Bring Hell

by Martin Rose

  Blond hair swirls as the Dead Woman pauses to look at him, her brow furrowing. The Dead Man struggles to make the words but his lips trip like a pair of clumsy feet.

  “Who. Ooooo. Whooo. Who is.”

  A splitting headache rips into the side of his frontal lobe, the tender, spongy brain matter controlling logic, reason, and good manners. The pain is excruciating and delivers pulses of earth-shattering agony through his forehead and down to his splintered nose, his rotted lips, and his lacerated cheeks. He struggles with the sentence.

  “Is. Vight. Us.”

  Who is Vitus?

  The Dead Woman smiles and does not answer. Instead, she pulls him forth so hard that he falls onto his face and breaks the thin cartilage piecing his nose together against the concrete. Gore falls out and all that remains is a triangle of dark emptiness, accentuating his skeletal appearance. He wipes a long smear of broken bone matter and blood over the front of his suit and barely has time to do so before he is dragged forward once more, struggling to keep his feet as she draws him closer to the altar room door. A hunk of metal presses up against his chest, concealed within his suit.

  Gun. Old gray fox likes 1911s and you swore you’d never carry a 1911 just to piss him off. Gun. Firearm. The Glock. Your baby, the Glock. Don’t forget.

  And like a cassette tape ribbon unraveling in a wind, the thought is gone, an errant radio transmission lost in space.

  “I was going to provide you your usual meal, but you are our guest of honor. And you always did have such passionate appetites, Vitus. Ah.”

  She sighs, gone misty with past memories, and what she needs now is a little Vaseline smeared around the memory lens like a two-bit soap opera. Dream sequence. The tinkle of a harp. She blinks and her manner changes, forgetting the rosy-colored past and catapulting into the stark future.

  “Well, no more waiting, then. Here you go, Vitus.”

  She opens the door and closes it behind her, reaches for his collar and unsnaps the chain, setting him free.

  *

  The Dead Man’s senses were far from dead.

  Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

  An errant fly drew a lazy circle about the room before settling on a white plate piled high with strips of bloody flesh like raw bacon. A room of concrete, with a table and chair at its center. Walls dripped with slow lines of dark sweat while a bare bulb swung back and forth on a chain. Stains proliferated and embedded the pocked surface of the floor.

  From the far shadow in the corner, a man stepped forth.

  The Dead Man’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. The man in the shadow raised a cigarette to his thin lips and produced a lighter. He lit up with lazy satisfaction, pausing to look at the Dead Man with a penetrating gaze beneath the brim of his hat.

  The Dead Woman seated herself before the table with the plate of festering flesh. She helped herself as though the strips of human flesh were delicacies, oysters on the half-shell that she gobbled one by one with hungry, slurping noises. She licked from her lips as though she were experiencing an orgasm with eyes half-lidded and her breath hitching fast.

  She took no notice of the man in the corner.

  The Dead Man growled. People were food sources, nothing more; it was not a cognitive thought reaction, but something he pursued on instinct alone; primordial forces drove the Dead Man when all other functions ceased.

  But the man in the corner was different.

  He moved with fluid grace, smoking at his leisure; rings of blue smoke circled his head in a tenebrous corona and a slice of his mouth made visible in the shaky light. While the Dead Woman dined, oblivious to the distress of her zombie pet, the man in the corner spoke directly to the Dead Man and she did not seem to notice at all.

  “Vitus.”

  The Dead Man stared, dim witted, slow—unable to connect the name to the collection of rotting tissue that defined him bodily.

  “Don’t you recognize me?”

  The words were meaningless, and the Dead Man met them with silence, cocking his head like a dog attempting to discern his master’s voice.

  “Do you have the word, Vitus?”

  He did not have the word.

  “Noo. Ooooo.” The Dead Man blew rotten breath between his sore lips like a locomotive, overtaken by a panic he could not explain. A new sensation in his limited faculties. His clumsy skeleton shook and shivered until every joint ground painfully and collapsed in on its decaying supports.

  The man left the corner and approached the Dead Man with the confidence of a grown man who has left the uncertainty of youth behind and embraced the prowess that only experience can temper. Assured. More than self-confidence. Kinesthetic ease. Ashes fell from the tip of his cigarette and the Dead Man cowered before him as his face lifted into the light.

  The Dead Man’s brain split into two halves—each one a radiating migraine, exploding with stars and light. He clutched at his head with trembling fingers, tearing at the dead skin like old cheese as though he could extract the pain with his splintered, yellowed fingernails. The man filled him with fear but the pain crippled and annihilated what was left. He could not cower but hold his position, frozen before the man’s approach.

  “You’re me, Vitus,” the man said. “I’m the you that served my tour in the army and came back to raise a son. I’m the you that could have been, the you without Virus X, the you without Jamie.”

  The words were like pennies dropped into a well. They made a tinny rattle, but the Dead Man could barely hear it through the axe strokes boring repeatedly into his skull. He clapped his hands over his ears, determined to stop the ache from there.

  The man took off his fedora and braved a step forward into the Dead Man’s sphere of influence—clear brown eyes to his spoiled ones. He set the hat on the Dead Man’s forehead. His skin split beneath the pressure, like overfilled denim tearing at the seam.

  Once he’d placed the hat, he brushed off the Dead Man’s suit with a paternalistic air, inspecting him like a prize animal. He straightened out the lapel with a sad gesture of familiarity.

  A handsome man; hair cropped close against his scalp, his eyes clear, lucid, a man well-satisfied and at peace with himself. He studied the Dead Man with an apology written in his mud-brown eyes; a regret that pierced him deep and called up lost moments, broken promises. A life that could have been.

  “I was there, watching you when it happened. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. I was just a background watcher. I’m the guy in your dreams, your Id that demands and hungers and wants and feels. You’re like an older software version of me, y’know? Back when we were lizards, with scales instead of skin. Right?”

  The Dead Man said nothing, and the other man took it as encouragement to continue.

  “You don’t remember what happened to your son or your wife. You always could have asked me, if you really wanted to know; but then, you never really wanted to know, did you, Vitus?”

  He was silent a moment, collecting his thoughts.

  “I know thinking is difficult for you right now. And that meat over on that plate must be really distracting. A clever trick, that headache, right? That’s the sensation of your frontal lobe trying to process forward thinking thought, choices between good and bad, recognizing consequences, and a lot of other boring shit. A bitch, huh? Don’t worry. Some people aren’t even zombies and they can’t manage it.

  “Do you want to know what happened that night, Vitus?”

  The Dead Man stared, and dark eyes met moonstone ones. The man sighed, as though speaking to a small child, and forged on, relentless. The Dead Man trembled to hear his voice, feel the pain shiver through his ear and into his soft, gray matter.

  “You should know,” he said gently, and reached out to touch the Dead Man’s shoulder. “Sometimes, I’m there in the background when you remember a fragment of the past, in that time just before sleep, or when you’re awake but not quite there, yes? Make no mistake about it—we can never go back to the way things were before.

  “Hell,
Vitus. You made Hell in your home. You killed your son outright. Deep down, you know Owen isn’t Clay. You knew it from the beginning—but still you tracked him down, doggedly, loyal to the end. For what loyalty is worth.

  “And your wife, the one you married because you were too dickless to do the right thing and set her free? If you had, she’d still be alive right now. Our fate turns on the many things we lack the courage to do, as well as the mistakes we commit to.

  “Well, you didn’t quite kill her. That would have been a mercy, compared to the hell she lives in now. In case you haven’t noticed, she’s not quite all there. She believes a dark force animates her, an evil god, and we are all manifestations of that Dark Lord—you in particular, Lord of the Flesh Eaters. Here she is, still trying to be the perfect wife, feed you, love you, gain your approval in a final, desperate attempt to heal the wounds of the past—wounds scarred over many times with thick and unreliable tissue. She is not the woman you married. She is a devil of your own making. And deep down, she’s not truly evil. She believes she’s helping you. With just enough nourishment. With just enough love, you could be made whole again. But we both know that’s not possible.

  “Do you know what you did, to her, Vitus, the thing you block out that you cannot remember? You tried to kiss her. One last act of love. But you turned while you were kissing her. Ate her face off. While you were busy cannibalizing Clay, she escaped, and all this while, she’s been focused, intent with one purpose—to find you, bring you back, and resume the life you both had before. That is all that animates her, drives her, makes her conscious. Without that, she is as animal as you are, dead inside are you are at this very moment. And the ghost of your dead child between you both. How goes the saying? Ah, dear old father would have known: Amor vincit omnia—love conquers all. And destroys all, in the same measure.

  “It would be so much easier if she was just a two-dimensional villain, wouldn’t it? Something you could kill without regret. But inside, she doesn’t really understand why death came to her door in the form of the man she loved, the man she worshipped, the man she put up on a pedestal, just to watch him crawl down to eat everything in his path. Still, even after all these years, she doesn’t understand. Remember Jackie Kennedy, pulling the brains and bits of skull from back of the car, desperately trying to put something back together that is beyond saving? That’s your wife. Still putting the pieces back together.

  “Yet, they don’t fit, they cannot enmesh and unite once more. They fail, they darken, they decay. And still she persists, waiting for your love, your approval. You cannot let this cruel existence continue.

  “It’s time for me to go, Vitus. But before I do that, do this last thing before we part.”

  The man set his hand against the Dead Man’s heart, but there was no heart—only a hunk of metal and dense plastic called a firearm, and the man smiled at the touch.

  The Dead Man smiled with him—in imitation or genuine pleasure, impossible to know.

  “Unmask the bitch and end her suffering.”

  *

  The fog lifted—and I stood there a long moment.

  They were gone, the Dead Man I was, the stranger I had once been, a new monster restored in its place. The splitting pain dividing my head faded to a steady, dull throb and I swayed, dizzy and disoriented.

  Jessica remained at the table. She left a portion of the plate in reserve for me, for when I was ready to dine with her—very un-zombie behavior. With her blond hair like a halo in the trembling light, I memorized her as she was at this very moment. I did not like what I saw, an emotionally crippled monster wearing the flesh of a woman, destroyed from the inside out. Her lips were red with blood, her teeth with bits of boy-flesh between them.

  Is that what people saw when they looked at me?

  Is that what Niko saw?

  There was still time to make things right, for her and myself.

  I approached and with each step made my measurements and calculations and strategies—no longer the shuffling of a pre-deceased corpse. The collar around my neck chafed against the skin and heightened the sensation of claustrophobia. The walls sweated in damp lines.

  I put a hand on the back of her chair, the sort of thing I used to do when we had both been alive. My wedding ring winked in the feeble light, a circle of reflection. DADDY scrawled across the hand—Owen’s desperate plea to bring me back to life.

  I deflated a long sigh into her ear. Jessica turned in the seat to stare up at me.

  “My love,” I whispered.

  Up close, I made out a seam by her scalp, extending down along the base of her jaw. Spots and lesions of rot made visible, imperfections she cleverly hid with the assistance of scarves and clothing. Until now. Her flesh bared in all its hurt and waiting for my ministrations.

  Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

  The errant fly would be dealt with later. I had a wife to tend to, a woman I promised I would be faithful to, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health.

  ’Til death do us part.

  And the time had come to part.

  *

  I leaned down to kiss her. The past merged with the present, the long-buried memory surfacing and overlaid across time like transparent paper. The moment of turning, divided between monster and human and crossing the line of consciousness. I did it again. Lucid and aware to taste the rot of my saliva as I opened my mouth and kissed her. With our lips interlaced, I bit down hard and pulled away with force, feeling her flesh give between my teeth and taking her entire face away with me.

  I made it quick; moved with the velocity of a snake strike. She did not expect it and went reeling back into the table, sending the cutlery, the dishes, and the furniture upside down in a clatter that filled and echoed throughout the room. I stood with the flap of skin that was her face in my hands, leathery, as though my wife just asked me to hold her purse.

  Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

  I turned it over in my hand. Against the side of glistening red decay that fit against her inner face, things crawled and squirmed over the surface. My eyes stared but could not process what I saw; could not make sense of the white worms writhing and stitching through her tissues.

  Maggots.

  She was riddled through with maggots. Flies giving birth in her veins.

  I dropped the mask of skin. It fell to the floor like an empty pancake. Maggots erupted from the surface and scattered. A shrieking commenced and filled the room like a siren.

  Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

  The sound of buzzing grew persistent and rose in volume. Her mask hid the festering gobbits of larvae all this time and grew in the damp heat of the underground lair. Now they hatched by the thousands as she writhed and screamed, sending torrents of flies from her open mouth, crawling along her tongue, from deep within her belly.

  Later, I told myself. I would deal with the flies later.

  Take care of her, Vitus, my Id breathed from within.

  She ran for the door. I drew my weapon and squeezed the trigger, once, twice, three times. The first shot went wild and punched into the door frame inches above her head. I heard a sizzle as the second bullet caught a tangle of her hair in midair. The stench was lost amid the other rank and vile smells preceding it. The third caught her in the back of the throat where it exited and exploded through the door. Gore and maggot guts followed and sprayed the wall around it.

  The buzzing increased in intensity. The final shot impacted too low and missed all the important bits—not high enough to take her head off and incapacitate her. She ran, shrieking through the hole in her throat as she yanked the door open and pounded through. Swirls of skirt flowed behind her in one eclipsing shadow.

  Too late, I cursed, and slapped the back of my neck. My hand came away black with fly guts. My lips peeled away from my teeth and I hissed my disgust. They were everywhere. Filling the room and pacing the walls with their pin-prick feet, with their emerald and sapphire bodies, tasting, sampling, mindlessly eating everything they touched. Some crawled into my collar a
nd another grazed my ear. They alighted, settled, and flew off like snowflakes in a blizzard.

  While I stood there, repulsed and horrified, slapping at the horde of flies come to eat of my flesh, my wife closed the door and threw the lock.

  My brief moment of lucidity faded; the headache returned with greater force and my overwhelming fear in the face of these dirty insects sent my consciousness reeling back inside myself, throwing forward the monster part of me, better equipped to deal with the horror and disgust of the flies.

  Not now, I thought, groaning.

  I dared not open my mouth for fear they would dart in and insert themselves along the lining of my gums and plant their children in the spaces between my teeth. I stared at the word written across my hand—DADDY. I thought of Owen, who was already taking the place of Clay inside my head, until their two identities were indistinguishable from each other, one and the same, and then where was I flies zzzt zzzt I am zzzt so hungry

  dark

  zzzzzzzzt

  zzzzt

  zt

  z

  PART 3

  KNIGHT RISING

  Suck. Thump.

  Suck. Thump.

  Like a heartbeat. I have not heard that sound since I was alive, the steady thump of four chambers in a beating heart coursing with blood. The sound comforts, recalls me to a time when I was a fetus in the cave of my mother’s womb; fingers curled in imitation of the weapon I would fire when I grew up.

  Suck. Thump.

  The sound does not originate from inside me. There is no legitimate heart in the dark, empty cavity of my chest. Images blur and thoughts grow sluggish. These are sensations I felt when I was alive, when I was stupid and young and drunk and woke up every other day nauseous and hungover.

  I did not feel young. I felt mummy-ancient.

  I moved my fingers and tapped a porcelain beat against a metal gurney. I lay on a table. The ceiling above me came into focus, industrial tiles arranged in rows and columns. I blinked, but the action failed to complete. My vision fuzzy. I focused but the dark and rotted spots in my eyeballs had destroyed parts of what I once could see. I blinked again and failed. My eyelids must be pinned open, because despite my best efforts they would not descend and soothe the dryness.