Voodoo Children
By John G. Hartness
A Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story
Copyright 2011 John G. Hartness
Smashwords Edition
*****
I rolled into town a couple hours before sunset, the better to get the lay of the land. Of course, my idea of getting the lay of the land pretty much meant pulling up in my F-250 in front of the only titty bar in Columbia, Tennessee to see what the afternoon shift looked like. I’ve always been able to learn about a town by the level of talent working a pole at four in the afternoon. If the saggy boobs and cottage cheese butt cheeks on display at the Ride ‘Em Cowboy Saloon were any indication, Columbia had seen its better days. To start with there were only about five guys in there plus me. There was a bartender, a DJ who looked like a meth addict on the tail end of three-month tweakfest, an old man asleep with his face down on the bar, and two fat rednecks that must have been what passed for successful businessmen in that part of Tennessee. They had the red faces of the terminally drunk, more chins than a Chinese phonebook, and the laugh of guys who expected the whole room to laugh with them. I hated them on sight and figured if I couldn’t get a decent lap dance I’d at least get a good fight in before the sun set and the real ass whoopin’ started.
I took up a seat at the end of the stage and looked up at a bored girl with stringy bleach-blonde hair and eight-inch clear lucite heels. She had tattoos covering her legs, track marks covering her arms, and a g-string covering her crotch. Otherwise she was naked as the day she was born and probably just as skinny. She saw me sit down and threw me the half-smile that says “yeah, it sucks, but we’re here together, so why not at least stare at my tits for a while?” At least, that’s what I figured it said, so I gave her a dollar and waved a hand at what passed for a cocktail waitress. It didn’t surprise me that the cocktail waitress was hotter than the stripper, that had made its way onto my checklist of nasty strip club qualities some years back. She jiggled her way over to me and I handed her a twenty.
“Gimme a pitcher of Bud.”
“Gimme another twenty bucks.”
“I don’t want a dance yet, I just want some beer.”
“Pitcher’s thirty, jackass.” I handed her another twenty and turned my attention back to the stage. Blondie was standing in front of me staring down from her stilts. I gave her another dollar and waved her off toward other customers before I remembered there weren’t any other customers. She clomped off up the runway to the pink shimmer curtain and I heard the DJ announce that Brandy was coming up. He repeated himself, and I heard a thump and a yelp from backstage, then a sleepy black girl stumbled out onto the stage and started walking around in a bit of a daze.
My beer made it back about then, along with ten dollars in singles for my change. I left one on the tray for the waitress and motioned for her to sit. “Join me?”
“I can’t. Got customers.”
“No you don’t.”
“You’re right. I don’t drink beer.”
“And I ain’t paying whatever they’re asking for better booze. So sit down and take a load off. And help me beat the girls off with a stick.”
She laughed at that and looked around. There were two girls taking turns gyrating on the businessmen, and the only other girl in sight was the sleepy Brandy, who’d obviously been awakened backstage to come dance. “I’m Wendy,” she said as she sat down and poured out two plastic cups full of watery beer.
I downed my first cup in one long swallow, then poured the cup full again. “You thirsty?”
“Kinda, why?”
“Then you keep the cups.” I took a long pull off the pitcher and just held it. It keeps things easier to just drink out of the pitcher most times for me. My hands are too big for most normal cups, and I’m less likely to break a pitcher without thinking about it.
“What brings you to town?” She asked.
“Hunting.”
“It’s not hunting season for another month. Trust me, once it is you won’t be able to swing a dead cat in here without hitting some jerkoff in an orange vest bragging about the one he almost got.”
“The deer or the girl?”
“Yeah.” She toasted my pitcher with her cup and I caught her taking stock of what she saw. It didn’t bother me, when you’re this damn big you get used to the staring. And the questions, which I figured were about to start.
“You a wrestler or football player or something?” Right on cue.
“Or something. I’m a hunter.”
“What does that even mean?”
I leaned in close, setting the pitcher on the edge of the stage. I locked gazes with the girl, my brown eyes with her green ones. I stared deep into her eyes and said “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Are you high?”
“It’s Shakespeare, dammit. A buddy of mine said quoting Shakespeare to a chick was guaranteed to get me laid.” Damn that Skeeter, I should have know better. That boy couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse. And if I kept listening to him, I wouldn’t either.
“Well your friend was a dumbass. But if you wanted to get laid, you shoulda said something.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, then I wouldn’t have wasted my time and you wouldn’t have wasted your beer. I ain’t screwing you. One, I don’t mix business with funtime. And two, you’re a big boy. If you’re that big everywhere…”
“And I am, I promise you.” I grinned, showing my recently repaired smile, new false tooth and all.
“Then there’s reason number two right there. You’re liable to split me right in two! So why don’t we just have a beer, make stupid jokes about the floppy titties on Brandy up there, and then you can maybe get a lap dance once the night shift comes in.”
“I won’t be here when the night shift gets here.”
“Why not?”
“I gotta work. A brother’s gotta earn a living, you know.”
“Yeah, about that. You never did say what you hunted.”
“You’re right, I didn’t.” I drained the last of my pitcher, dropped a couple of bucks on the stage for Brandy and her floppy tits, and headed out the door.
*****
Whoever invented titty bars must have installed a damn time machine in every one. I coulda sworn I’d only been in there long enough to have a beer or two, and maybe irritate one cocktail waitress, but somehow it had gone from four in the afternoon to full dark, and my wallet was two hundred bucks lighter when I got into the truck. I put the little Bluetooth thingy in my ear, pushed the button and said “You there, Skeeter?”
“Yeah, boss. I’m here.” Came the voice on the other end of the phone. He even sounded skinny, something I never managed to understand.
“Well that thing about quoting Shakespeare to women is bullshit, Skeeter. I no more got laid with that Horatio bullshit than I did that time I gave Erlene a cactus instead of flowers for her birthday. That’s the last time I take advice on women from a homo.”
“The fact that I’m gay has nothing to do with the fact that you’re a complete disaster with the opposite sex. I bet you tried that line on some floozy at a topless bar, didn’t you?”
I took a minute to look for the camera before answering. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out the little shit had me bugged. “No, I didn’t. I was talking to a nice lady. A librarian, I’ll have you know.”
“You usually find those in libraries, Bubba. Not in places called the Ride ‘Em Cowboy Saloon.”
“And how do you know I’m at the Ride ‘Em?”
“I track your GPS and cell phone, remember?” Oh yeah. He started doing that when I got bit by a manifestation of Apep, the Egyptian snake-demon. I kinda wandered off into the desert for a couple weeks after that. Skeeter was worried about me. It was cute, how upset he was. All I ended up with was a hell of a sunburn, but he wanted to keep track of me ever since.
“Alright, alright, I was in a titty bar. But that don’t explain the thing with Erlene!”
“Should I even bother to remind you that she’s your cousin?”
“Second cousin once removed. We’re barely blood related at all. But anyway, where am I going and what am I killing?” Skeeter never told me anything about a case until it was time for the killing. He said he didn’t want to clutter my thoughts. I figured he just didn’t like repeating himself, since I usually only about half listened to him anyway.
“You’re headed out of town to an old cemetery. There’s been a rash of zombie attacks.”
“Zombies? Slow zombies or fast zombies? I don’t like fast zombies. Fast zombies ain’t right, just not natural.”
“All evidence points to these as voodoo zombies, so they would be slow. And you don’t have to worry about their saliva, either.”
“I don’t spend much time thinking about zombie slobber, Skeeter.”
“And this time that’s okay. Now get on the road and I’ll explain more as you drive.”
Skeeter gave me the skinny as I cruised through the sorry excuse for a town. You like that? It’s funny, ‘cause he’s skinny, and I said…never mind. I guess you had to be there. Well anyways, apparently there had been a bunch of robberies on the eastern side of Columbia, where what passed for hillbilly high society lived. One of the robbers had been caught in the act, which was usually a good thing, because robbers tended to talk when arrested. Problem was, this robber had a long criminal record. A criminal record that ended in 1987, when he died in a drunk driving accident. So the local constabulary (I don’t know why the hell Skeeter can’t just call them the po-po like everybody else) had consulted with the nearest Catholic Church, which happened to be in Nashville. Nashville didn’t have very many exorcists on staff right now, thanks to a bad case of non-belief in these here United States, so they kicked it up the food chain until they finally got to Skeeter’s uncle Joe.
Now most of Skeeter’s family didn’t talk to Uncle Joe, because of the whole turning Catholic thing, but most of them didn’t talk to Skeeter neither, because of the whole liking boys thing. So Skeeter and Uncle Joe got to be buds, because they was the only people who talk to either of them at the family reunions, except for Aunt Linda, who had cerebral palsy and didn’t know enough to do anything but love everybody. So whenever something came across Uncle Joe’s desk that seemed to need my particular talents, he sent his favorite nephew a little email, and we went out and killed a bunch of something. We weren’t officially on the church’s payroll, but since we weren’t all that holy, we got to keep any loot the bad guys we smoked were hiding. And supernatural bad guys usually kept some pretty good loot around, so we made ends meet. And when we didn’t, Skeeter whored me out as security for rock concerts.
I pulled into the cemetery at around ten o’clock, which I figured would be good zombie-raising time. It was dark, and the zombies would have plenty of time to shamble off to wherever they were being sent, steal stuff and bring it back before the sun came up. I didn’t know if voodoo zombie could run around in daylight or not, but I preferred to do my killing in the dark. Just always seemed fitting that way.
I knew I’d come to the right place because the gate was wide open. Most cemeteries are pretty good about locking the gate at dark. Not usually for keeping things in, but mostly for keeping kids out. I never saw the appeal to making out in a graveyard myself, but I’ve been killing things that go bump in the night for a long time, so I reckon the place has kinda lost its luster for me.
The three dead guys walking down the path to the gate were the other indication I’d found the right place. I pulled the truck into the graveyard and pulled the gate shut behind me. I took a piece of chain out of my toolbox and fastened the gates shut. I didn’t have a lock, so I ran a piece of baling wire through the links to hold the chain together. I kinda figured zombies wouldn’t have the manual dexterity to unwind a piece of wire. If they did, my troubles were just starting.
By the time I secured the gate, the three zombies walking my way had turned into eight zombies, with two of them standing right in front of my truck. I walked up to one of them and gave him a push in the chest. He fell over backwards, then lumbered to his feet and tried to take a bite out of my face. I swung my machete through his neck and then pushed his body back down. Headless, he stayed there like he was supposed to this time.
I pushed the button in my ear. “Good call, Skeeter. They’re pretty damn slow.”
“That’s good, but don’t underestimate them. There may be quite a lot of them, and they don’t feel pain. You can’t just sever the spinal cord, like with vampires; you have to destroy the brain. Otherwise they can grown back together and attack again.”
“Ow! Now you tell me!” I said as the head I’d just chopped off took a big bite out of one calf. I tossed the machete aside and pulled my battle-axe from my belt. At five feet of sharp steel and bad attitude, that axe promised pain to anything in its path. Too bad for me nothing I was fighting could feel pain. I stomped on the detached head with my other boot, putting one hand on the hood of my truck for balance and finally kicking the head free. It rolled across the graveyard, coming to rest against a headstone.
“I’ll deal with you later, asshole.” I muttered.
“What was that, boss?”
“Not you, Skeeter. Now lemme go do some killin’. I’ll call you back.” I pressed the button in my ear and looked around again. All seven remaining zombies were gathered around my truck, bumping into it as they tried to walk forward.
“Alright, assholes!” I yelled, waving the axe in the air to try and get their attention. “Get the hell off my truck! I just had her detailed!” One zombie turned to follow me as I walked out from behind the truck, and I caved in its skull. Pain sensors or not, twelve pounds of axe in your head will ruin your day. I pulled it free and spun around, crushing two more zombies with one big swing. Problem was, that big swing ended in a big tree, and my big axe got stuck big time. I tried for a minute to pull it out, but when a pair of dead hands grabbed my ponytail, I returned my attention to the problem at hand.
I solved the problem in my hair with Bertha, my polished chrome Mark XIX .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol. I pressed Bertha under the thing’s chin and squeezed the trigger, removing most of the top of the zombie’s skull. I used my left hand to knock the thing’s hands off my hair, then dispatched the other four zombies in fairly quick succession with Bertha. When I’d splattered the last one’s brains all over the ground, I gave Bertha a little kiss on the rear sight, replaced her half-spent magazine with a full one, and put her away in her holster. Then I walked over to the grave marker with the last zombie head lying against it, reared back my size fourteen steel-toe boot, and kicked the head to jelly.
Mission accomplished, I pushed the button and redialed Skeeter.
“Are you okay?” He asked. The little guy actually sounded a little worried about me. I was touched.
“Yeah, I’m fine. A little surprised you hadn’t commandeered a spy satellite to see what I was up to in the five minutes since I last talked to you, but I’m fine.”
“Not a bad idea, Bubba. I’ll keep that in mind for next time.” Me and my big dumb redneck mouth. “Now, are you ready for the rest of them?”
“Rest of them? Skeeter, I just killed like eight zombies, dude. I think I’m done for the night.”
“I don’t think so. Uncle Joe’s records show over two hundred bodies in that cemetery, and if this necromancer is worth his spellbooks, he’s going to try and raise them all to come after you.”
“Two hundred zombies? Damn, Skeeter, I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat.” I looked around, but nothing in the vicinity indicated that a couple hundred dead people were going to crawl out of the ground to recruit me any time soon, but Skeeter had this unhealthy habit of being right, so I figured I’d better load up. I went around the bed of the truck and pulled out my “special” toolbox. I made sure I had half a dozen magazine or so for Bertha, then I started pulling out the heavy artillery.
First I checked on Tiger, my modified Husqvarna T435 chainsaw. I named it Tiger for the Clemson Tigers, on account of it being orange. I’ve been a fan of Husky saws since I was a little kid, but the T435 had a lot going for it in my line of work. The shorter bar on the little saw made it perfect for pruning limbs, especially if those limbs were attached to something that wanted to rip your head off. I like the compact size for interior work, but the light weight made it usable one-handed. At least if your hands are attached to arms like mine, that is. I’d modified the trigger to lock in the “on” position so I could swing the saw better, and disable the inertia chain brake. I didn’t care much about kickback with the soft tissue I was cutting through, but if I had to sling the saw back over my head fast, I wanted to know it was going to cut whatever was back there.
Once I got Tiger gassed up and ran a sharpener over the chain for a second, I pulled out the big hoss. No, the Desert Eagle was not the biggest gun I was carrying, not by a long shot. I called my Atchisson AA-12 semi-automatic shotgun Fat Man after the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki, ‘cause I figured if I pulled that thing out I was planning on laying waste to everything around me. And with a 20-round drum magazine of 12-gauge double-ought buckshot shells loaded into it, that’s exactly what I set out to do. I finished out my armory with a pair of 12” Kukri knives in a back sheath and 14” Bowie knife on my left thigh. Feeling sufficiently armed to take over a small Central American nation; I clanked and banged my way across the graveyard towards the center of the cemetery.
The cemetery was surprisingly large for such a podunk town, but I figured more people had died there than were interested in living there. Lugging all that gear got me pretty out of breath by the time I’d walked a couple hundred yards, so I sat on a tombstone for a little breather. I had my most important backup ammo with me, a six-pack of beer in a bandolier across my chest, so I popped a Bud and looked around. Pretty basic small-town cemetery, a few crosses, mostly rectangular headstones, one or two angels or Virgin Marys dotting the landscape. I saw a zombie wandering around off to my right, so I flipped on the Bertha’s laser sight and blew his head off. The .50 report sounded even louder than normal in the silence of the graveyard, and about a half second after the boom I heard the pitter-patter of skull and brains falling to earth and gravestones. Glad I didn’t have to clean up after myself, I holstered Bertha, picked up the rest of my rig, and headed on towards the center of the graveyard.
I came over one last hill and walked into the set of a cheap horror movie. And we’re talking ultra-low budget stuff here; the kinda flicks that make Roger Corman look like Spielberg. There were Dollar General tiki torches sending up black citronella smoke into the night sky, arranged in a lopsided ten-foot circle. A battered purple Civic hatchback was parked just outside the circle with the hatch open and creepy music playing over the car’s stereo system. And it was a serious stereo, too. Whoever owned the junker didn’t spend any money on bodywork or paint, since there was more Bondo than metal showing along most of it, but there was a thump coming out of that little piece of crap car that made my teeth rattle.
Inside the circle of bamboo torches, a skinny witch doctor danced around slashing chicken throats and tossing blood out in what looked like random patterns. But every time the voodoo priest dropped another dead chicken onto the growing pile, another pile of dirt shifted and another zombie crawled out and started walking towards town. Judging by the stack of chicken crates this little guy had in the circle with him, he planned on raising half the cemetery tonight. There were close to thirty zombies milling around waiting for instructions, so I decided to go ahead and get to work. I set Tiger down on a nearby headstone and opened up on the crowd of dead guys with the Fat Man. Fat Man boomed, lead and fire blew out the barrel, and zombie heads exploded about as fast as I could pull the trigger. It started to get boring after the first five or six re-killings, so I decided to mix things up a little, shooting over one shoulder, off the hip and behind my bag a la Annie Oakley, if Annie Oakley had been six-five with a ponytail.
Fat Man finally clicked on an empty chamber, so I blew the smoke off the barrel and set him down beside Tiger. My ears were already ringing from the combination of the shotgun and the horrible music, so I decided it wouldn’t do any more damage to let Bertha come out and play. There were only five or six zombies left standing, and they were all moving away from me, so I flicked the laser sight back on and blew their heads up like watermelons at a Gallagher show. One clip, six re-dead zombies, and a couple of freshly painted smears on the marble and granite markers throughout the cemetery. I felt a weak grip on one ankle and looked down to see half a zombie clawing at my ankle, apparently offended that I’d cut him in half with the Fat Man. I parted his hair with my bowie knife, holstered Bertha, and cleaned the knife off on the grass beside the zombie.
I took a good look around at my work, and was pretty impressed by what I had wrought. There were about two dozen zombies blown into about eight dozen pieces scattered all around the graveyard, and I’d been fortunate enough to blow out the car stereo with a particularly lucky shot. The grass was thick with clotted blood, entrails and other zombie parts, plus the odd surgical implement and fast food wrapper. I’ve thought for a long time now that undertakers sew their garbage up inside the dead bodies instead of throwing it away. You know, just another way to screw the customer — make them take out your trash when they take out Granddad. Seeing half a dozen taco wrappers floating away in the breeze only confirmed my suspicions.
I turned back to look at the witch doctor, and his eyes met mine. He stood stock still, the carnage that was a visit from Bubba finally coming clear to him. He wore a huge African tribal mask, what looked like those really ugly fur-lined boots chicks wear in the summer with shorts, Uggs I think they call them, and a jockstrap. That’s all. He was tall, not as tall as me, but still over six feet, and skinny. Maybe one-sixty soaking wet in those stupid boots. He held a kitchen knife in one hand and a dead chicken in the other, and I heard the ground behind me crumble as another zombie worked its way up from the earth. I drew Bertha and sent the dead guy back to his eternal rest, then turned my attention back to the scrawny voodoo guru.
“Hey.” I said. “What’s up?”
“Nothin’ much. Raising the dead, stuff like that. You know.”
“Yeah I see that. Got a little Hendrix thing going on?” I played a little air guitar riff.
“Huh?”
“You know, Voodoo Chile? Jimi Hendrix?”
“Sorry, I’m more of a hip-hop guy myself. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more zombies to raise.” Well, if he was an idiot with terrible taste in music, at least he was polite.
“Why are you raising the dead?”
“I need money.”
“We all need money. Why not try a job?”
“Don’t you read the paper, jackass? There aren’t any jobs!” His voice was surprisingly high and not threatening for a voodoo priest. Not that I’d encountered any other voodoo priests in my life, but we all have our ideas of what certain villains should sound like. And squeaking like a chipmunk was not what I expected from a guy summoning zombies.
“I know things are tough, man, but you can’t be calling up dead dudes to rob people. That ain’t right. And it’s kinda nasty. Zombies tend to leave spots on folks’ carpet, you know?”
“No, I didn’t know that. Man, I kinda feel bad about that. Well, after tonight I’ll only send my minions into house that have hardwoods, or at least that laminate stuff.” A considerate voodoo priest, that’s something I didn’t see every day. And figured I wouldn’t even if I ran into a bunch of voodoo priests, which we’ve already established I haven’t. He grabbed a fresh chicken and made to cut its throat, but I pulled Bertha and drew down on him before he could raise another zombie.
“Stop it. I don’t want to shoot you.” Which was at least partly true. There was a lot more paperwork to deal with if I killed humans, but if they needed killing I wasn’t really too bothered by it. After all, Uncle Joe and Skeeter dealt with that part. I was more the kill ‘em and let God sort ‘em out type.
“That’s good, because you can’t. I’m protected by my magical circle, and nothing can get in unless I let it or release the circle.” Of course I didn’t believe him. So of course I tried to shoot the chicken out of his hand. The magical barrier flashed red, and I dove to the ground as the slug passed back over my head. I heard the little fart laughing at me as I picked myself up and brushed grass and zombie bits off my pants. I tossed a stray finger back to the ground and looked back at the witch doctor.
“Alright, asshole, now I’m serious.” I took a running start at the circle, and promptly found myself lying on my back in the middle of the graveyard looking at the little birdies circling my head and hearing the shithead’s laughter roll across the foggy grass. He beheaded three more chickens in quick succession, then pricked his own finger and mixed it with the chicken blood on the ground and chanted something that sounded like it wasn’t going to be good for me.
I pushed the Bluetooth thingy and said “Skeeter, what does ‘Omagara Grathnor Tingawa’ mean?”
“What language is it in, boss?”
“I don’t know Skeeter, I’m in the middle of the cemetery killin’ zombies and fightin’ a half-starved voodoo priest with ugly boots and his ass hangin’ out!”
“Then it’s probably some kind of ancient African dialect, so that means…” I heard him typing in the background, then say “Uh oh.”
“What do you mean, uh-oh? I don’t like uh-oh, Skeeter! What the hell’s going on?”
“Well, if you remembered the phrasing right…”
“I remembered it right, the little dingaling is prancing around inside a magic circle cutting the heads off chickens and yelling it as loud as he can!”
“Okay, then, I hope you’ve got plenty of firepower, because that’s a mass resurrection spell.”
“What. Does. That. Mean. Skeeter?” I looked around where the ground was starting to roll and bubble like a big pot of turkey stew on a cold Sunday morning. But I didn’t think I was going to like what came to the top this time.
“That means that your voodoo priest just called up every dead guy in about a half a mile. And they all want to kick your ass, Boss.” Sure enough, as I looked out over the graveyard, dozens and dozens of zombies were crawling up out of the ground, in various states of decay. A couple of them were barely more than skeletons, and one looked like he was sleeping. If people slept without their faces, that is. As they got out of the ground, they all turned to look at yours truly, and then they all started moving. They moved just like the other zombies, only about ten times faster.
“Skeeter, I told you I hate fast zombies.”
“These shouldn’t be fast, Boss. Did your voodoo guy do anything else?”
“You mean like cut himself and mix his blood with the chicken’s blood?”
“Yeah, just like that.” I heard Skeeter sigh on the other end of my earpiece, and I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
“He put enough of his life force into them to let them move at least as fast as when they were alive.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Hey, Skeeter?”
“Yeah, Boss.”
“I gotta go kill a bunch of dead guys. I’ll call you back.” I had one spare drum magazine for the Fat Man, so I slapped that into place and cocked the shotgun. Then I cranked up Tiger and hefted it into my left hand. I took a deep breath, looked over at the scrawny bastard hiding behind his magical circle, and said “I’ll be back for you in a little bit. Don’t bother goin’ nowhere.”
Then I waded into a mass of dead dudes thicker than the mosh pit at a Metallica Concert. I laid onto the Fat Ma’s trigger and just turned around in a slow circle, blowing zombie brains around like a green, grey and red slip n’ slide. Pieces of white bone, yellow skin and eye juice got blasted straight through the backs of the skulls, and the heavy lead shot was good about going through more than one brainpan before it finally spent its energy and lodged in the second or third zombie it hit. That little pirouette of doom, as I liked to think of it, took out close to three dozen zombies in less than half a minute. I flipped the heavy gun in my hand and buried the stock in another monster’s forehead, then concentrated on tearing the apart with Tiger.
The chainsaw was not as good a weapon for zombie killing as I had expected. The first couple of normal-sized zombie went down just fine, but the chain got hung up in the neck of this great big old fat boy, and I lost valuable seconds pulling it free and sawing the top of his head off. While I was distracted, a little girl zombie jumped up on my back and started trying to chew through the side of my neck. I don’t know if she had a taste for fresh blood, or if redneck jugular is a particular delicacy in the zombie kingdom, but my Carhartt denim shirt held up to undead teeth pretty good, and I was able to reach over my head and throw her up against a tree before she did any major damage.
That distracted me long enough for one of the critters to walk up and impale himself on my chainsaw, gumming up the works worse than a cedar tree after a heavy rainstorm. I let go of Tiger and punched the thing in the face, then reached down and drew Bertha. She barked seven times, clearing out a little space in front of me, and bulldozed my way over to the edge of the circle.
“You still can’t get through, moron!” Yelled the scrawny priest.
“I don’t need to, jackass, I just need them not to get to my back.” I turned and pressed my back up against the magical barricade and faced the oncoming horde. There had to be forty or more of the things all lumbering in my direction. I put Bertha away, drew my kukris, and made ready with the chop-chop.
They were on me in a flash, but I was ready. The thick, curved blade of the kukri did me as well as it had served the Indian Gurkhas for centuries. The heavy blade made for good chopping, and every downstroke crushed a skull. I settled into a rhythm of swing, crush the skull, kick the corpse down, swing the other hand, crush the skull, kick the corpse down. After a while it was like I was swimming in dead guys, and the bodies started to pile up around me like sandbags. Just as my arms started to really get tired, something completely out of character happened — I had an idea.
I looked over at the nearest tiki torch, which was just about two feet to my left, and saw the flame dancing in the breeze from falling zombie bodies. “Hey shithead?” I asked over my shoulder.
“Yeah, dumbass?” The little witch doctor replied from behind me.
“What happens if your circle breaks before these things are all dead or the sun comes up?”
“Well, that probably wouldn’t be good for me. I would lose control over my minions, and they might attempt to take some form of revenge up me. Fortunately you can’t break my circle. Nothing bigger than a drop of water can get past my magical barricade.” He let out a good old-fashioned Bwa-ha-ha-ha villain laugh that I just knew he’d practiced in front of mirror, and I sighed a little.
“If you weren’t such a little douche, I’d probably feel bad about this.” I said, sheathing one knife and pulling a Bud out of my beer bandolier. I mourned the waste of good American lager, then shook the beer up like a baseball player after winning the pennant. When I felt the contents were properly agitated, I popped the top on the can and directed the spray of amber liquid straight onto the flame of the tiki torch. The beer extinguished the flame instantly, and the smell of domestic alcoholic goodness mixed with nasty citronella oil, making my eyes water. But more importantly, the fire at one of the skinny wizard’s cardinal points blowing out served to break his circle, and I fell backwards onto the dirt, the wall at my back suddenly gone.
I looked up at the necromancer, who stood frozen at the sight of a couple of dozen grumpy zombies who were suddenly less interested in the fat redneck on the ground than they were the skinny idiot in front of them. He let out a yelp and dove into the hatchback of his waiting Civic, pulling the glass rear door closed behind him. The zombies quickly surrounded the car, but without any real understanding of tools anymore, couldn’t get the doors or the windows open. They walked into the car, bumped into it, and stayed there, kinda like they knew they were supposed to be doing something to somebody, but couldn’t remember what.
I stood up and looked around. About three hours until sunrise, and I was in a graveyard with a bunch of zombies, a voodoo priest in a compact car, and only four beers and twenty-eight rounds of ammunition. I popped a beer and sat on a headstone to wait. I was taking a leak on some family’s memorial crypt as the sun peeked over the horizon for the first time, so I missed the zombies turning back to dust and the effects of the magic vanishing from the graveyard, but I got back in time to see the little weasel crawl out of his car, still wearing the ugly boots and the tribal mask.
“Looking for these?” I asked, holding out a set of car keys.
“Where did you find those?”
“On the ground while you were cowering in your car.”
“They must have fallen out when I was jumping around casting spells last night.” I didn’t ask where they had fallen out of, since all he was wearing were boots and a jock, I just dropped the keys and started looking around for a place to wash my hands.
“So what was all this crap about, anyway?”
“What crap?”
“Kid, don’t screw with me. I have been awake in a graveyard all night. I have brains all over my favorite boots and what used to be a clean pair of jeans. I have a couple of random zombie teeth stuck in my knuckles, there is no bacon within half a mile and I am out of beer. If you don’t want me to stomp a mudhole in your ass and walk it dry, I suggest you commence to talking.”
“Well, there’s this girl, you see.”
“There always is.” I muttered.
“What?”
“How old are you, kid?”
“Twenty-four. But I’ll be twenty-five next month.” He puffed himself up to try and make himself look older, but that’s hard to do when you’re in a graveyard with your buttcheeks flapping in the breeze at seven in the morning.
“That fits. You see, kid. I’ve got a theory that whenever a guy, or a lesbian, but that part has less data to back it up, under the age of thirty does something spectacularly stupid, that there’s always a girl involved.”
“How often does your theory turn out to be true?”
“So far, one hundred per cent of the time. Now go on. There’s a girl. You like her, but she won’t give you the time of day.”
“Well, kinda. We like each other; at least she says she likes me. But she won’t go steady with me until I can come up with seven thousand dollars cash.”
“Do I even want to know what the money is for?”
“She wants a boob job. It’s tax-deductible, because of her work. She’s an exotic dancer at the Ride ‘Em Cowboy. And she swears she’ll pay me back, but I’ve got to come up with the money before the prices go up again.”
“So you’re in love with a stripper, who tells you that she likes you, and she’ll be your girlfriend if you’ll buy her a new set of boobies?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take that stupid mask off.” I reached out and snatched it off of him. He wasn’t a bad looking kid. Certainly didn’t look like a rocket scientist, but he was no freak show. Eyes in the right place, nose shaped roughly like what a nose ought to be, one ear on each side of his head. All in all, he was alright. A couple of leftover zits from high school maybe, and he might have had a little of that ferrety look that skinny people sometimes have, but he wasn’t hideous or anything.
“Why in the world do you think you have to buy this girl a pair of boobs for her to like you? Don’t you think a girl can like you for who you are?”
“Maybe some girls do, but not this girl. And she’s the prettiest girl in the whole world, mister. I know if you met her you’d see what I mean.”
“Well, what’s her name?”
“Brandy.” I remembered her. And her boobs.
“Yeah, I saw her at the club yesterday.”
“Then you know why I’m doing this.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you’re an idiot. Look, kid, lemme tell you something about women. Especially women that take their clothes off for money. They are all after one thing, and it ain’t the same thing all us guys are after. You understand me?”
“No.” This boy was obviously dumber than a box of hammers.
“Look. She don’t love you. She loves the money she thinks she can get from you. You give her that money the only thing you’re gonna get in return is bigger boobs when you buy your next lap dance from her.”
“That ain’t right! She loves me! We’re gonna get out of this town and run away together.”
“Yeah, and I’m gonna be the next spokesmodel for Jenny Craig?”
“Really? How much weight you gonna lose?”
I slapped him upside the head so hard he fell to one knee. “Don’t be stupid son. Or at least try not to be as stupid as you’ve been this week. You are tampering with things you can’t control. You are raising the dead, boy! Don’t you get what happens to people who mess with the forces of darkness?”
“Well, I might go to hell, but if I quit right after I get enough money and repent of my sins and don’t do it again, I oughta be okay.”
“What are you, Presbyterian? You don’t get off that easy once you go down the dark path. Kid, I wasn’t sent here to save you from yourself, I was sent here to kill you.” I might have stretched the truth a little, but he didn’t need to know that I was being paid to kill zombies and remove the creator. Uncle Joe didn’t care how I did it, as long as the dead people stayed dead in Columbia after I left.
“Oh.” He went even paler than he already was and sat down in the dirt. I watched as a couple of big fat tears started to well up in his eyes and roll down his cheeks. Then his skinny bare shoulders started to shake, then he threw his arms around my legs and he sobbed into my knees. “Please don’t kill me, mister! I’m too young to die! Please, let me live!”
I gave him a little kick and got up so I’d be out of range if he started crying again. “Cut that shit out, you’re getting snot on my boots. And brains in your hair.” He sniffled, but straightened up a little. I sat back down.
“Alright kid, here’s what we’re going to do. How much cash do you have?”
“Fifty-five hundred.”
“I’m going to give you fifteen hundred, to get you where you need to be. Then I’m going to take whatever spell books and magical hoo-ha you’ve got that showed you how to raise the dead, and I’m going to destroy it. And I’m going to leave town. And if I ever see or hear of you involved in anything like this again, I swear I’ll shoot your nuts off. Any questions?”
“Why?”
“Huh?”
“Why are you going to do this? I sent zombies to kill you. Sorry about that, by the way.”
“Forget about it. I’ve done stupid things because of women in my time, so I’m sympathetic.”
“So you know what it’s like to be in love.”
“Not to the point where it rots my whole brain like it did you, but yeah, I know what it’s like.” Besides, the Church was paying me five hundred bucks for every zombie I killed, so I figured I was making some decent bank on this gig. Just had to get the video footage back to Skeeter and wait on good old Uncle Joe to send me my check.
I loaded up my gear and headed back to the truck. I loaded everything up, pulled my axe out of the tree I’d got it stuck in the night before, and handed the cash to the kid. He handed over his spellbooks and a funky little dried-up thing that looked like a chicken’s foot.
“What’s this?”
“Blessed chicken foot of the Baba Yaga. It grants the bearer the ability to cast any spell. That’s how I was able to do the stuff in the book.”
“Neat.” I hung it from the rearview mirror of the pickup next to the little green pine tree air freshener and my fuzzy dice, then pulled out of the cemetery and back onto the main road. If I timed my trip back through town right, I might just make it for the start of the afternoon shift at the Ride ‘Em Cowboy.
The End
*****
Also by John G. Hartness
The Black Knight Chronicles
Movie Knight
Black Magic Woman
Other Work
*****
About the Author
John G. Hartness is a recovering theatre geek who likes loud music, fried pickles and cold beer. He’s been published or accepted online in several journals including The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, cc&d, Deuce Coupe and Truckin’. He can be found online at http://www.johnhartness.com and spends too much time on Twitter, especially after a few drinks. His first novel, The Chosen, is an urban fantasy about saving the world, snotty archangels, gambling, tattooed street preachers, immortals with family issues, bar brawls and the consequences of our decisions. John has been called “the Kevin Smith of Charlotte,” and fans of Joss Whedon and Jim Butcher should enjoy his snarky slant on the fantasy genre. Feel free to visit him online, and if you see him in person, you’re buying the beer.