Timothy 02: Tim2 (23 page)

“I don’t know anything about that,” I told him. “I shot them, zombies must have come after the fact.”

“See there’s a couple of inconsistencies in that one sentence, friend.”

“Timothy.”

“Shut up.”

I did, seemed the wisest course of action.

“You see, we’ve noticed a few things about zombies. First…they don’t eat the dead, I mean unless of course they do the killing. And secondly, zombies have normal teeth. Yeah, they chip bone when they bite into it, but they don’t cut it like say something with pointy pearlies would. Something like yours.”

“What?” Jürgen asked. “You think this crazy fuck ate Jordie and your nephews? What’s wrong with you?” Jürgen asked of me.

“Olaf, man, just kill it. If it was ever human, it isn’t now. What kind of sick fuck eats its own?” Sven asked.

“Oh I’m going to kill it, that’s for certain. But it’s going to pay a little first.” The teeth of the chainsaw were resting against my neck. The vibrations of the engine running were making the teeth rock slightly back and forth and I could feel them trying to bite in. “Jürgen, tie him up.”

One pull on the trigger and my head would roll away like a King Henry ex. I stayed steadfast as Jürgen shouldered his rifle and bound my hands.

“I was in the Navy,” Jürgen told me. “Don’t even bother trying to get out of that,” he said, referring to my clasped hands tied securely behind my back. “That’s a constrictor knot, the more you fight against it, the tighter it gets. It’s brutal really. It will start to wear on your wrists and your body’s natural tendency is to shift and find a more comfortable position. Doesn’t work. The rope just keeps getting tighter and tighter. It won’t be long until you can’t feel your hands anymore and once the blood flow stops, well, the tissue starts to die. And if too much of it dies, you’ll have to cut your hands off just to make sure the death doesn’t flow through the rest of you. Although I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about that too much,” he said as he shoved me to the ground.

Olaf finally moved the saw away from my neck. “Let’s get him up in a tree,” he said, placing the wicked death-dealing instrument down.

Jürgen tied a rope around my ankles and then looped it around my hands, pulling me into a hog tied position.

“We’ve left prisoners of war tied like this, some up to twenty-four hours. Most go insane within sixteen,” Jürgen told me as he found a particularly large bough to throw the end of the rope over. “And that’s not even including the ones we pin up like you. In about a half an hour your own body weight is going to wrench your arms right from their sockets. Normally we’d put a rope around your neck tied to your ankles so that if you let your head drop you begin to choke. Personally, I wish I could, but Olaf wants to carve you up a little. You’re going to wish your daddy had just beat off instead of dropping his seed into your whore of a mother by the time we’re through with you.”

“I already feel that way,” I panted as the trio of men hoisted me up like a fucking piñata.

“What now?” Sven asked.

“We build a fire and get some rest,” Olaf said.

“Are you shitting me? Let’s do this and be done with it, being around this diseased maggot makes my skin crawl.”

“He killed my kin, Sven, he’s going to pay. If you want to wait back at the truck until tomorrow, I’ll understand.

Sven looked around. The dark had taken root like a mighty oak and a low level of ground fog was lazily drifting across the ground. “Shit, Olaf, even if I wanted to leave, now doesn’t seem like the best time. Looks like the beginning of a horror movie out there.”

Olaf laughed good-naturedly.

“I’ll check the perimeter,” Jürgen said.

Sven gathered materials to start a fire, which was far enough from me so as to not offer any heat but close enough that I was visible from the glow of the flame.

“Jurg, set the string,” Olaf said, looking over at me.

“Out here? You think there are zombies out here?” he asked.

“I don’t know what’s out here, but if this thing has any friends, I want to know about it.”

I could just make out Jürgen pulling out a spool of fishing line from his vest pocket. Although it was tough to keep sight of him, my head was being pulled down and the sweat of the strain of keeping my arms firmly locked into my body was making salted water pour off my head and sting into my eyes.

“This fucking hurts!” I bemoaned.

“No shit,” Olaf said, turning to go and help Sven get the fire ablaze.

Jürgen tied off the string with a tin can secured to the end, must have been small stones in
it as the can pulled the line down further than an empty can should. I could only guess that he had encircled the entire encampment, and if anything bigger than a field mouse broke through the line, the can would clatter to the ground and warn them.

The three men sat down and pulled out some food packets. I was tied here in a pain indescribable and they were sitting down for dinner. I wanted to rip their lungs out through their ear holes. Hugh was around, but right now I couldn’t be bothered; the misery was a palpable entity. It had form. It had definition. Insanity would be a welcome reprieve. It could have been three days, three hours or three seconds later; time has no meaning when all of the pain centers in your brain are engulfed in an apocalyptic blaze. I surfaced long enough to see that the men had finished eating. They were talking animatedly about something. But to care less would have meant that I would have had to care at all. And I didn’t; I just wanted to be down on the ground, to not feel like my arms were going to pop off of my torso, like the rope was going to severe my wrists, like my back wasn’t going to snap from the awkward position it had been forced into.

And when I truly thought I could not be in any further agony, Hugh surprised me. A screech that dwarfed anything – maybe like the sun dwarfs the earth is a good comparison – shaved through my brain, shredding and molting pieces of me off to the side. My existence blurred as Hugh continued on. This was it. This was my death peal. I could feel myself sliding down the drain of existence. Hugh had been playing possum with me the entire time. I had not now, nor ever, the strength to repel the onslaught he was throwing at me right now. The only thing I could wonder was,
why now?
And then I faded into obsidian.

“Rise and shine, pretty boy. Fuck you’re ugly.”

The softest of light basked against my eyelids. I struggled mightily as I came up from the depths of consciousness. Pain rushed into the void. Crusty blood and thick drool hung from my mouth as I swayed slightly in the morning breeze. We were encapsulated in a loosening fog. It was giving the feeling that if I were to make it through the Pearly Gates this would be very much what it would look like.

“You still with us?” Olaf asked as he cracked a good sized stick across my back.

I would have screamed if I could have found the strength.

Jürgen got up and wiped the sleep from his face. “He’s still with us?” he asked, peering into my eyes. “Figured he would have snapped sometime during the night.”

“That’s just going to make this that much better,” Olaf said as he went back to the now smoking fire to retrieve his chainsaw, which started in one effortless pull.

“Motherfucker,” I sighed.

“You say something, precious?” Olaf asked as he got closer.

It took multiple gulps through my arid throat, but I was finally able to get out what I figured were my last words. “Parents...had a...chainsaw...always...took fifty fucking...pulls.”

Olaf laughed. “Proper maintenance,” he said, revving the machine making sure to have the teeth whir dangerously close to my face. “You’ve suffered enough, I figure. I’ll make this quick.”

Enough talking already, just fucking do it
, I thought.

Olaf brought the chainsaw high above his head, Jürgen stepped back. Sven was cleaning up camp and had stood to watch my demise. There was a lull in the engine noise as the engine choked for a moment accepting the intake of gas as Olaf squeezed the trigger a little too enthusiastically. The tinkle of the can as it hit the ground froze all the men. If I could have found a way to speak I would have told him to finish me off first. The stay of execution did not seem like such a favor right now.

“Zees!” Sven shouted, grabbing his rifle.

“How many?” Olaf asked, peering into the diffused light.

“Dozens! Hundreds!” That last part cut off as he began firing.

The imagery took on a surreal feel as I watched the battle through an insubstantial light. The ground fog and the fog of pain contributed a lot to my take on the scene in front of me. The three men fought with a vehemence I’d only ever seen in movies – and those were the unbelievable kind. I don’t know what kind of battle Sven had been expecting when he first entered the woods, but he appeared forewarned as he kept pulling magazines from strategically random places on his body. It was impressive. The chattering of his rifle was keeping the zombies at bay.

Jürgen had not taken any lessons from Sven and had already resorted to using his rifle like a club. His time left was measured in hummingbird heartbeats. It was Olaf that looked like a Norse god as he slaughtered zombies with his mighty chainsaw. Odin, the Norse God, was looking down enviably as he watched Olaf cut down the hordes as they approached. Heads rolled through the grass, arms flopped down. Butchers with band saws weren’t as productive as Olaf that day. Although, to be fair to butchers they weren’t overly concerned about the cow getting up off the table and trying to eat them.

The ground became slicked with the brackish fluid that leaked from the zombies, Hugh was mourning and I was laughing in delirium. I was struggling with even remembering who I was pulling for. Was it the kind I had been most of my life? Or the other that was threatening all I’d ever known? Did it matter? The pain had a way of both distorting and crystallizing every thought.

Olaf moved like a samurai; instead of a sword, he used a four-foot-long rotary blade. It was magnificent. I think he could have survived, too, if not for the fact that Jürgen got pushed into him. As Olaf brought his blade left to right, Jürgen slammed into the back of his right leg making Olaf fold down to that side, the torque of the blade brought it into Jürgen’s thigh. I didn’t have the angle to truly see, but with the power Olaf wielded that death-dealing machine, I had to imagine he was halfway through Jürgen before he realized his mistake. I’ve got to imagine having your junk cheese-grated with a chainsaw might just be a worse way to go then I was dealing with right now. I started laughing uncontrollably as I thought about Jürgen’s junk being repeatedly pulled across a steel slicer.

“I’ll take a pizza with head cheese!” I screamed.

Jürgen easily drowned me out. Olaf made the mistake of stopping to see how bad he’d hurt his friend. That was the final mistake he would ever make. Zombies piled on to him even as Sven fought desperately to keep them off. He fought valiantly for another couple of minutes before finally succumbing. I was thankful they were dead, happy to realize they would no longer be a threat to my kind who were even now ravenously feasting on their bodies.

“Hugh, I don’t know how much longer I can last.”

The words had no sooner escaped my thoughts when I wondered if I had just made my own final mistake in this life time. Hugh could do this forever, discomfort, pain, bodily damage; he basically didn’t give a shit. I, on the other hand, was holding on like only a man that fears what awaits him can.

“Hugh, please.” I was begging a parasite, how low had I stooped? I could feel him in the peripheries of my mind lurking about. He was avoiding me like he owed me twenty bucks.

“Hugh, I know how to get food!”

That piqued his interest; it wasn’t hard, it’s not like he was a nuclear physicist. Hugh was an eating machine, his entire world revolved around food. And how different was he from man whose entire existence revolved around finding a place to put his penis. I laughed again, maybe outwardly, it was getting difficult separating fiction from fact at the moment. One of the zombies involved in the feeding frenzy looked up and over at us.

A deep-seated fear roiled in my gut as we became the center of that thing’s attention. Its head tilted like the world’s ugliest dog hearing a strange sound. It stood completely up, half-chewed intestines spilled from its maw as it silently mouthed its disapproval at being pulled away from its meal. Hugh was going to kill us both. He had pulled back so far from the fore that the zombie thought I was human.

“No, you stupid fuck, I’m one of you!” I shouted as the zombie advanced.

I struggled against my bonds so hard that I thought for sure I would fall to the ground as the rope cut through my wrists. As it was, blood leaked from the serrations, curved around my back, down my side, and was even now creating a stain among the carpet of the forest.

“Hugh, if I die…you die!” I said as I tried to get my body rocking, hoping that I could generate enough force to possibly head-butt the creature and knock it to the ground. The zombie easily avoided my pathetic attempt at self-defense and circled around. I tried to kick my legs to swivel in his direction, but it was a useless cause. I waited for the inevitable crunching of my spine. I’ll admit I was somewhat curious to how much it would hurt, I’d been doling out punishment for so long, now I’d have insight into the damage I’d done. Don’t get me wrong I wasn’t looking forward to it, quite the contrary. What I was feeling was resigned and defeated, and I was laying that all on the feet of Hugh for putting us in this situation.

I waited and then I waited some more. I couldn’t figure out what was going on; zombies don’t generally play with their food. And then I felt it, a slight tug at my wrists that became more pronounced. The thing was biting at my bonds. Hugh had somehow communicated enough with the zombie to give it direction. If I hadn’t been so immersed in my own misery and need to be released I would have realized the grave implications this had for the remainder of mankind. Right then I didn’t give a shit if Tiny-fucking-Tim himself were to be snatched up and eaten if it would get me free one second sooner.

Even over the crunching of multiple bones being snapped at the buffet I could hear my zombie gnashing at my lashings, occasionally busting a tooth, but that didn’t deter my eager little go-getter. The longer he took, and presumably the closer he got to completion of his task, the more I begged to be released. My shoulders burned in an unimaginable pain that radiated down to my fingers. I think they were only being held in place by sheer force of will at this point. The strain of my bulk malformed my shoulders nearly into wings as it pulled back on the bone and connective tissue.

Something(s) cracked as I dropped to the ground. At least the top half of me did anyway. My face slammed into the ground, my features grinding against the ground as I swayed back and forth. I thought I couldn’t be in any more agony than I had been. I was wrong. When my hands became free and my arms flopped in front of me, my shoulders popped with a force that had me screaming, but that’s not quite right I had gone to a pitch that was inaudible. My arms hung uselessly by my side as I sobbed. We swung there for time undefined as my new best friend chewed through the rope attached to my legs. I hardly noticed as they joined me on the ground. I was slipping into unconsciousness at an alarming rate, and Hugh was watching with great interest.