Necrophobia #3 Page 4

  I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. His voice droned on and on endlessly. Somewhere during the process, I heard it saying: “Was a fellow named Sawney Beane back in the old country of Scotland where the Camberlys sowed their wild oats back in the day. Old Sawney, now there was a peculiar character. He was a highwayman, one of them brigand types that robbed and murdered folk. But he was more than that, my fine young friend. Oh, much more than that. I read all about it in a book, you see. Sawney Beane was a cannibal. He killed folks for food. Can you imagine that…can you?”

  I was trying to keep my eyes open because I felt it was important. I could hear the rain lashing against the roof, the booming thunder shaking the walls, and see lightning flashing through the grime-streaked windows. And, inside, the old man was leaning towards me, his pale face licked by shadow and flickering orange light from the fire. His grinning mouth was filled with long, moon-yellow teeth, his eyes wide and wet, shining with strange obsession.

  He pointed at me with a long dirty finger like the digit of a skeleton. “Now, this Sawney Beane fellow weren’t alone in his grisly doings. No sir. He had himself a brood of foul flesh-eaters at his side. They were his family—forty or fifty women and children, all interbred and intermixed in the bad way the Good Book warns us of, like mating with like until his kin were not so human no more, but skulking things, moon-eyed animals, ghouls and people-eaters. They lived in a deep cave on the Galloway coast that you could only reach at low tide. High tide, the opening was under water. But at low tide…oh yes, son, you could wade in and follow the mud flats into the bone-strewn lair of the Sawney Beane clan, the cave of ogres and child-eaters.

  “Well, it went on for years and years, friend Steve. Finally, so many had gone missing and so many human bones had washed-up on lonely beaches, that the high sheriff himself was forced to listen to the wild tales of the human-hunters that were told in chimney-corners and at hearthside on windy, dark nights. The sheriff and his armed posse found the lair of the monsters and went in there at low tide. And what they saw by torchlight! Ho, what they saw! Caverns of bones and shoes and clothes and what have you! All the cast-off belongings of their victims. And in the main chamber, ah yes, this was the lair of the cannibals and what a lair it was! Limbs salted and strung overhead, skins and hides drying on racks, entrails simmering over fires in black greasy cauldrons, organ meats pickled in brine—and bones! Can you imagine the bones? It was an ossuary in there! And what spry, clever folk were the Beanes! Like old time Injuns following the herds of buffalo…making all their wares and what-nots from buff flesh: ball sacks for tobacco pouches, bladders for water jugs, skin for clothing, gut for stitch-work and arrow strings, sinew for lacing—like that, you see, but with humans! You understand? With humans, boy, with humans! The Beanes used people as raw materials and livestock…crops and cattle. Oh yes. And it was these people, pink-cheeked and fat-bellied, that was the victuals for the feasts of the Beanes!

  “Imagine, friend Steve, imagine that posse if you can. Imagine them seeing all this and imagine what went through their heads…it would haunt them until their death days! All them dirty, wild-eyed flesh-eaters huddling in the dark, gnawing on liver steaks and sipping blood soups, naked children gathering around fires, faces greased with human fat, mouths grinning with rodent’s teeth sharpened on human bone! Was it any wonder that the posse started shooting with their flintlocks and slashing with their sabers, just putting them animals down? Oh, but what a pitched battle it must have been! The Beanes like rabid rats defending their nest and the posse filled with hate and abhorrence! But in the end, oh yes, in the end, the lion’s share of the Beanes was dead…those that survived, whether man or woman or child, were put to slow death in the old way…broken on the wheel, disemboweled, and burnt alive!”

  Henry raged on and on about how he read it in a book, then read it again and again. Haunted by it, dreaming and thinking on it. It became an obsession, a living and breathing obsession that tormented him night and day.

  “You don’t know how I fought it! You don’t know how I suffered and sweated and trembled with it…but always, always, that gnawing hunger for the taste, the sweet juicy taste of my own kind!” He was breathing so hard, his entire body shivered. He wiped drool from his pale mouth with a shaking hand. “And every deer season! Gawd! I would hang my kill, gut ‘em, smoke their meat and paw through the finest cuts…my hands red with blood, wishing, wishing it weren’t deer hanging in my gut shed but something else! Something tall and vanilla-skinned, blue-eyed and tawny-limbed…”

  As he went on in his shrill, near-hysterical voice, I tried again and again to move, but my limbs were rubbery, my head spinning, my mouth unable to form a single word.

  The lightning flashed and the thunder crashed, rain pelting the old narrow house and I lay helpless, unable to move, to do anything but shake inside with terror.

  “…it took some doing, son, learning how to dress out a human. How to butcher ‘em up proper, filet and de-bone them. I went through five or six before I got the knack to which parts made the best roasts, cutlets, and stewing meats. Then I knew! I knew it all!” he gasped. “It was only a matter of selecting the proper cuts, applying the proper seasoning, curing, and salting! Why, with the proper craft, you can make human meat taste just like juicy sirloin or tender rolled roast! Or…heh…you can make the meat of a woman’s thighs taste like the finest hickory-smoked slab bacon you ever did et! If you catch my drift, son…if…you…catch…my…drift…”

  But I had already caught it and my stomach roiled with nausea, bile coming up the back of my throat. I screamed inside my skull and tears ran down my cheeks.

  Henry laughed. “Don’t fuss so, boy. You ain’t going nowhere and you ain’t gonna do nothing! That applejack was spiced with belladonna root poison…you’ll survive it, yes sir, but you’ll be helpless as a rag doll for hours yet, probably well into tomorrow.”

  With everything I had, I forced my mouth to form one word and one word only: “Why?”

  “Glad you asked that,” he said as he took my knife away. “You see, that bacon you so enjoyed was made from a girl—plump and pretty she was—who stopped to drink from my well. Poor child, poor, poor child…she had the pox, Steve. So I did her a favor when I put her to the knife, didn’t I? Terrible it would have been to see her die thrashing and chewing off her own lips, only to come back as a walking carcass.” He shook his head at the inhumanity of it all. “But I saved her from that. And don’t worry, son. I ain’t gonna et you. You’re what they call a…a feasibility study. You ate the child’s bacon which I figure was crawling with pox germs…and now, through you, I’ll find out if it can survive the smoking and curing. If you don’t have the fits and die, try to rise back up, then I know I can bag more like her, get some fine cuts put up for winter…”

  That was it then.

  I thought I was his prize suckling pig for the week, but the reality was even more gruesome. I was a guinea pig and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  FEASIBILITY STUDY

  I think I opened my eyes once or twice that night and each time I did, Henry was still sitting there, still staring at me with his glassy, crazy eyes, a pink bud of tongue stuck between his lips. His shotgun was leaning up against his chair and I got the feeling he was just looking for a reason to use it.

  I was no threat.

  I was a rag doll, as he said. The root poison had kicked out my legs and my body was like poured rubber. I dreamed variations of the same dream all night: bad people were after me and I could not get away. I stumbled, I fell, I crawled, I crept. Every time I tried to run, it was like there were lead weights in my boots. It’s a common enough dream, I suppose. But they were like torture. I think the root poison made me feverish. The dreams were weird like the kind you have with a bout of the flu. I slept for hours and was glad of it. Had I been awake, I would have been wondering how Hillbilly Henry’s feasibility study was proceeding and whether or not Necrophage was running rampant in my system
.

  When I did wake sometime in the middle of the night, Henry was still watching me. My hands and feet were tingling. I had feeling in my limbs. The storm was still raging and the candles had burned low. Henry looked exhausted. I listened to the rain and the wind in the trees. Then I drifted off again.

  When I woke next, near to dawn, it was because of a resounding explosion that threw me right off the sofa. I think that old house took a direct hit from the lightning and it was like an air-to-surface missile. I hit the floor and Henry cried out. The roof crashed down upon us, but I wasn’t pinned in the debris. I started crawling right away, my body still numb but responding. I could smell smoke and feel heat. I wormed free of the wreckage and in the flashing lightning, I could see I was near the stairs.

  Henry was moaning with agony and delirium. “Don’t et me, boy. Please don’t come back and et me,” he said.

  The front of the house was gone, wind and rain blowing in.

  I pushed myself forward.

  I wriggled and crept.

  My hands were feeling pretty useable and I put them to work dragging myself forward until my legs caught up and pulled their own weight. When I got outside into the wet grass, crawling through puddles, I turned and looked back at the house. The near-collapsed upper story was burning, the wind making the fire rage through the tinder-dry woodwork, the roof keeping the rain from putting the blaze out. Flaming timbers were falling, tongues of fire ejecting from blown-out windows.

  It was a wild night.

  A real tempest of a night. Mother Nature was filled with hate and wrath. I think maybe I half-believed that she had sent a finger of destruction to purge the pestilence that was Henry Camberly and his evil ways. Wishful thinking probably, but as I crawled away like a drowning rat, the idea of it gave me peace of mind. There was a two-rut drive leading to Hillbilly Henry’s House of Horrors (as I came to refer to it in my mind) and I found it, creeping ever forward through the rain and mud, knowing that eventually it would lead to a road.

  The feeling slowly returned to my legs and arms, but it was slow going and I still couldn’t stand. But I was driven ever forward, needing to distance myself from that awful place even if it meant crawling into the lap of the living dead.

  So I crawled.

  The will to survive is amazing. I’ve learned that again and again. You would think that after all I had been through I would have been more than content to curl up and die. At the very least, to stretch out underneath a tree and sleep. Not so. Something inside me wouldn’t give up. I think it was more than instinct that drove me, I think it was my son; he needed me and I think that kept me going. I knew he wouldn’t give up on me so there was no way I could give up on him. The drive to be with him again was overwhelming and I was going to see it through one way or another.

  So I dragged myself ever forward through one of the ruts, crawling on my belly like a reptile (as we said when we were kids) through puddles, through gooey mud and slimy clay. My leg muscles were getting stronger and my trunk muscles were coming around, but I was far from my old self. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say I crawled for miles. The sun came up, but the rain still fell. I was soaked and miserable.

  I crawled up a hill, resting two or three times, and there before me was a road. I managed to drag myself to its edge, slopping through more mud and the strength to go on just ran out of me. I was done in. Like a pig in a sty, I lay there, panting, covered in mud and globs of clay. I just set my head down on my hands and closed my eyes. I’d had it.

  I’d really had it.

  I didn’t go to sleep; I lost consciousness.

  THE MARCHING DEAD

  There was no way to know how long I slept like that.

  It was probably many hours, but it was impossible to gauge with the day being so hazy, gray, and overcast. The rain was little more than a drizzle. The weather, though, was the least of my worries…because standing around me were the living dead.

  Not five or even ten of them, but thirty or forty or fifty, maybe more. I was lying in the middle of what looked like some mass zombie exodus, a marching train of the dead.

  Panic?

  Oh, yes, I was panicked, all right. Fear shot through me like bolts of electricity. I wanted to jump up and fight, run, anything except what I was doing. But all those things were still beyond me because of the root poison. I was better, stronger, but still not right.

  Here’s the insane part: the dead were oblivious of my presence. They kept stumbling along. I lifted my head a few scant inches—as much as I dared—and they just kept coming through that misty drizzle, an army of them. I was a dead man. That was what I kept telling myself. At any moment, they were going to figure out that dinner had been served and come for a taste.

  But they didn’t.

  That was the incomprehensible thing.

  They were driven in their marching, so entirely oblivious of me that one of them tripped over me, another stepped on my back like I was a WELCOME mat, and another trod on my hand. I just couldn’t figure it. Something was up, but I had no idea what. After I was stepped on and tripped over a half a dozen more times, I did what must have been the stupidest thing I could possibly think of—I stood up. I was still somewhat weak and woozy, but I stood up and I stayed up. It didn’t arouse the zombies’ attention in the least. They bumped into me, shoved me aside, but kept right on going.

  It was the mud, the clay. It had to be.

  I was slicked with it. It was clotted in my hair, caked on my clothes. That had to be what it was, I thought. Maybe that’s how the dead found their prey, by smell. They could scent a living human and that’s why they generally didn’t attack each other. The mud and clay were covering up my natural “prey” scent.

  It made sense…but I wasn’t convinced. You see, there was another very good reason why they wouldn’t bother with me and it had nothing to do with mud or clay and everything to do with the fact that I had eaten human meat tainted with Necrophage bacteria.

  No, no, no, I kept telling myself. That’s not it at all. It has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.

  But I didn’t believe it.

  As I said, I was still feeling weak and woozy. I felt listless, slow, thick-limbed, and weirdly feverish like I had the flu. It was Necrophage, I decided. Hillbilly Henry’s feasibility study was a failure and I was the zombified proof. You could not eat meat infected with Necrophage. I had the germ. I had Zombpox. Maybe I wasn’t a full-fledged cannibal corpse yet, but it was coming.

  It was about this time, in my delirium, that I realized that I was walking with the dead, just stumbling along with them as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  I panicked.

  I tried to break free—sluggishly, I might add—but it was no good. I was stuck in a knot of them. As they walked, I was forced along in a stumbling gait. It was either that or they’d trample me.

  It took some doing to get control of my fear.

  I think I was nearly hysterical.

  Not that you would have known or guessed at my state of my mind by the way I trudged along. I looked like something that chopped sugar cane in an old Bela Lugosi movie. After a time, I calmed down. As I walked, I thought. Surely, if I was a zombie I’d know it. They didn’t strike me as being truly conscious like a functioning human being, but operating at a simple instinctual level. So, realistically, if I was one, I wouldn’t be debating the fact. Yet, something was going on and it was more than being dosed with hillbilly root poison. There was something happening to me. Something inside. My knowledge of zombies was hardly complete, but I did know that most people infected by Necrophage became them. I had heard of a few that survived the bite of the dead, but very few.

  Was I going to be a lucky one?

  Other than feeling weak, feverish, and queasy, I didn’t seem to have the other symptoms—aching joints, vomiting, spasms, delusional behavior, paranoia etc. I had not slipped into a coma and I was not chewing off my own lips. My mind seemed relatively clear. My
thought processes were functioning; I figured I could carry on a rational conversation anyway…had there been anyone rational to do so with. And I sure as hell had no inclination to eat anyone.

  Maybe I was going to skate zombiedom.

  Maybe Hillbilly Henry’s slow smoking and seasoning, the heat of the fire itself, weakened the bacteria. Maybe, because of all that, I had gotten a weakened strain. And wasn’t that how they vaccinated people against dangerous pathogens? By giving them weakened strains?

  I decided to ride it out and see what happened.

  Honestly, what choice did I have? So I walked on with my new posse, wondering where we were going and what we were going to do when we got there. More importantly, I kept wondering when the deadheads would figure me out and realize that a smoked ham was walking amongst them.

  But it never came to that.

  We walked right into an ambush.

  I heard rifles firing and rounds were drilling into the dead. Six or seven of my zombie brothers dropped in the first volley, several with massive head wounds that sprayed gore like chocolate fountains filled with blood. I went down as one of them fell into me and I suppose it saved my life. My reaction time was pitiful. Oh, I would have dropped to the ground eventually on my own, but with all the stamina of an old man that had dropped his cane.

  Two or three writhing, foul-smelling corpses fell on top of me, pushing me down into the mud. The shooting went on for some time and I did the only thing I could do: I kept my nose out of the slop so I could breathe and just laid there, waiting for whatever came next.

  I didn’t wait long.

  Not very long at all.

  I heard men walking around. I smelled cigarette smoke. Someone hacked up some phlegm. Then a voice said, “Throw ‘em in the back of the trucks. One of these maggot-fucks is the one that got Georgie.”