Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (115 page)

Paddy boarded up the windows.
Marilyn nailed a two by four tornado warning across the door.

Daddy stared, eyes hungry, same as always. Finally Paddy picked up his mottled hand and hauled him down to the root cellar, the way he’d done with her all her life.

She lit the hurricane lamp. Bushel baskets of rotting potatoes and carrots and cabbage lined the shelves and the floor was littered with broken jars with pickled foods she’d put away she didn’t know when. The place stank, but no worse than Daddy.

She positioned him on a Peaches and Cream Corn crate. His glazed, half-rotted eyeballs wandered the room aimlessly, like he didn’t recognize anything. Paddy was used to that. All the Deadies resided in Bliss, a drive-in theater she hoped to visit real soon.

Marilyn stood in a corner, legs spread, hands on knees, cleavage scrumptious, waiting for the wind to whistle up her skirt on cue.
Paddy nodded. Daddy’s head kept bobbing like an antenna in a storm because his neck had snapped so she held it steady and made him look in her direction, but she couldn’t get his eyes to stay put. Black mixed media belched from his lips; his digestive juices were working; he must be watching the screen.

Marilyn hiked her skirt and turned.
Paddy, skirt lifted, waved her backside at Daddy’s oscillating face, the way he always liked. Nothing.

Marilyn peeked over her shoulder and pouted her lips into an ‘O’.
Paddy planted a movie smooch on Daddy’s crisp lips. His rotted nose mashed against her cheek and a chunk with crusty stuff inside broke off.
A blowfly with eyes like Daddy’s emerged. “Thanks ever so!” the fly said. Paddy yelled at Marilyn, “Cut!” MM tossed back her platinum hair, thrust out her tits and giggled.

Paddy glanced down at her nearly flat chest and felt lousy. Daddy had always hungered for her before and now he didn’t and now she was truly alone on the set. She plunked down onto the dirt floor and cried, something she hadn’t done since way before she started taking the meds she’d run out of. The leak created micro mud puddles between her legs.
The fly dived into one and bathed. He smiled up at her with Technicolor eyes in all his clear iridescent holiness and winked.
Paddy found enlightenment. She saw the solution to all her troubles.

“
It’s a wrap,” she said, but MM refused to vacate the studio. Instead, she straddled a Mason jar of pickled banana peppers and mumbled on and on about misfits and how some of them like it hot.
Paddy fast-forwarded.

She crawled to Daddy and peeled rotting fabric from his groin. His penis, always so big and full, dangled like a thick black connecting cable with green eyes. The eyes leaked puss-yellow tears that white life forms swam in.
Those baby bugs are joining heads to tails! Paddy realized, astonished. The word LOVE flashed onto the screen and a ball bounced along the letters. Wasn’t this what Dolly Parton always sang about, and what Marilyn always got?
Now Paddy knew exactly what everybody meant.

Marilyn skipped over with a rotting banana pepper dangling from her wet lips. “When it’s hot like this, I store my undies in the ice box.”

Made sense to Paddy. She swallowed the last bits of her Daddy, the bits that meant anything to her. He tasted like all the buttered popcorn they ever ate watching movies together.

As his head bobbed her way, he grinned like he used to, and Paddy felt proud. At last she’d landed a part in The Deadie Movie. She would play Daddy’s Little Deadie Girl and the movie would run forever, or at least until the reel ran out of film.

Sweetbread

TONIA BROWN

Mary Mooney stood in the doorway of her kitchen with a shotgun aimed at her icebox. Or rather, she aimed at the black clad rump of some stranger poking out of her icebox. The rump wiggled about as its owner’s front half rooted through her leftovers. Now, it wasn’t unusual for someone to stop by for a glass of iced tea or an hour’s gossip, but never unannounced and certainly not at five in the morning. Mary caught the flash of a blueberry pie with the middle scooped away. The whole, freshly baked pie was spoiled.

She cocked the gun, to show the rump she meant business, which she most certainly did. A pair of big hands, caked with filth and every nail black with grunge, lifted as the stranger stood. He was as tall as the fridge, almost as broad, and looked like he hadn’t seen the inside of a washtub in a good year. His black hair was greasy and short on his grubby neck. His black jacket was sore-fully tattered, too short for his long arms and covered in grime. He looked like he had spent the last hour rolling around in the pig pen. Smelled like it too.

“Now turn round, real slow like,” Mary said. “One wrong move and I’ll empty this here buckshot inta your butt.”

When he turned to face her, Mary regretted having asked him to. He was a horrible site. The skin of his face not covered in blueberries had a sick green tint to it, like a moldy hide stretched taunt across his skull. His lips were thin, black lines pulling in a tight grimace from his blueberry stained teeth in an eerie half grin. His eyes were milky, dark marbles floating free in their sockets. In short, he was a monstrosity. A big, filthy, blueberry pie stealing monstrosity.

“Well that’s a fine ‘how’d ya do.’ Come down for a snack and you wanna kill me fur it?” Rufus frowned as he wiped the pie from his face. He stopped as he spied the berries on his muddy sleeve. Understanding came upon him and he felt duly guilty. “That pie was for church. Weren’t it? I’m sorry, sugar. ‘Aint no need to shoot me over it.”

He stretched his black lips back, baring his teeth. Mary’s stomach lurched at the gruesome sight. What should have been a sweet smile ended up a slavering snarl. Her knees wobbled and she grabbed a kitchen chair to steady herself.

“You sure you ‘aint been at the shine?” His head was pounding, his guts were growling and she stared at him so hard it made his skin crawl. Or rather she made him feel like something under his skin was crawling. He jerked his chair from the head of the table, and the sound of twisting leather rose from his knees as he sat.

“Roo, we put you in the ground and everything.”

Rufus looked down at his dirt caked hands and soiled suit. He realized he looked like he just crawled free from a hole in the ground. But that was to be expected because he had, indeed, just crawled free from a hole in the ground. “Well, that would explain a lot. I thought I fell asleep in the field and got all plowed over by Charlie.”

“No Roo, you was dead. I swear it. Here…” she paused and slid a pie pan down the table. “Look at yourself.”

Rufus lifted both brows to her as he lifted the pan to his face. In the dull metal he saw a monster staring back at him. “That ‘aint me,” he said. The monster mouthed his words and Rufus groaned. “Aww Mare Bear. What happened to me?” He patted his rotting face with a decaying hand.

“You don’t remember? Charlie kicked you in the chest. Broke your chest bone and crushed your heart is what the Doc said.”

“Dammed mule ‘aint never been nothing but trouble.” He ran his hand over the breast of his muddy suit, and felt it give where his heart should have been. He didn’t dare open his shirt to look inside, for fear he might see inside his insides, and that would be too much insides for one man to bear. He looked back to his reflection and frowned. “Am I really dead?”

“Didn’t you see your stone when you came up?”

“It was dark. Plus I weren’t really looking for it, was I? You don’t wake up in a hole and just assume you’re in the grave, do ya?”

Mary squinted at his odd question. “Well, it was kind a like… boiled fish heads, mixed with wet manure and week old eggs. ‘Course you smell a lot less now, but I reckon––”

“Besides,” she added in a tender yet devious voice. “I don’t rightly remember a whole lot about it. I were knee deep in grief over ya, Roo.”

But Rufus would not be moved. “Ya don’t remember nuthin?”

“If I’d a known you’d be back for a play by play, I’d ‘ave took notes.” Mary crossed her arms and returned her lips to their previous purse.

The couple fell quiet and stared at one another. Thirty years of marriage had seen them through a lot, but nothing prepared them for this.

“Sorry about the pie,” Rufus said. “But I couldn’t help myself. I got this powerful hunger, Mare Bear.” As if on cue, a rumble rolled across the quiet kitchen and Rufus covered his belly with his big hands. “Why ya lookin’ at me like that?” he asked. She was looking at him the same way she did when she thought she had caught him doing something wrong. Which was to say, she was looking at him the way she always did.

Mary frowned. She didn’t want to think of this dead thing as her Roo, but he sure acted like it. “Maybe you’re one of those things they make them movies about. A zomblie.”

Mary had only seen one zomblie film, when she was much younger, but she was sure they all pretty much had the same plot. “Zomblies eat… people… the brains mostly…” her words trailed off. Rufus was lifting his nose, sniffing at the kitchen air like an old hound dog.

“Brains you say?” Rufus asked as he breathed deeper, enjoying a sudden delectable scent. He nosed around, wondering if Mary had something on a slow boil, until he realized it was coming from her. Rufus Mooney, despite his best effort to the contrary, began to drool.

Mary stared as the dead man raked his black tongue back and forth across his putrid lips. He was looking at her the same way he looked at her whenever he wanted that certain special something. Which was to say, he looked at her with hunger. She went white in terror.

Her look of horror snapped Rufus back to his senses. This was his wife, not some early morning buffet! “I don’t think I could rightly eat people,” he said to ease her mind. He lied, because he was sure he might just be able to choke down a chunk or two. “Besides, if all I eat were brains I’d starve in this town inside a week!” He laughed, forced and hoarse.

Mary shuddered at the horror of it, but part of her laughed with him. Part of her knew he was an abomination, yet part of her wanted him to stay. But want as she might, she knew in her heart that her Rufus was long gone, kicked to death by his own ass.