Crawl(13)
Hide? Hide where?
The scrub.
But there’s something bad in there.
You don’t know if it’s real. You know the red priest is real. Really real.
But the sneaker—
Fuck the sneaker, Julie. Get your ass into the scrub!
Before another bit of argumentative chatter could vomit forth, she felt herself rolling to the side, her feet slapping about like wet flippers. There was only a soft glow of pain this time, just enough to let her know it was there, and she had a fleeting thought that, if she made it out of this ordeal alive, she’d have a closet full of shoes she’d never get to wear again.
Juliet came to rest in a pile of leaves at the edge of the tree line. She hauled herself with tired hands through two bushes and into the woods she’d previously been too terrified to enter. She hid behind thick shrubbery, head propped on her uninjured elbow.
She had no idea if the red priest had seen her escape into the trees. Minutes passed like hours. Juliet found that, at some point, she’d started counting, and was now up to three-hundred-fifty. She stopped her tallying of the seconds and held her breath, listening for the telltale crunch and hum of trundling tires. She reached out, drew a thicket of tightly woven twigs apart, and witnessed the Mercury’s languid passing. The car couldn’t have been going any more than two or three miles per hour. She let out a blast of pent-up oxygen.
The red priest hadn’t seen her. Or at least Juliet assumed as much. If he had, she’d already be dead. Of that she was sure.
Juliet lay prostrate, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths.
A few feet to her right, the dead teenager with the half-crushed-in face glanced around the trunk of a tree, waved, and disappeared again. Like a child playing peekaboo.
9.
Juliet pressed her hands down at her sides and edged back, dragging her legs out in front of her. She backed into a tree and sat trembling against its rough bark. She buried her feet in leaves so she wouldn’t have to see them.
Any number of things could have peeked around that tree trunk and scared Juliet less than the cold terror she felt now. There was no mistaking the dead ginger for a hallucination. He was there. This was true. But something about him didn’t seem right. His head lolled to one side, and even though his arm was extended and flopping around in a “Hello there!” fashion, his wrist was limp. Actually, everything about him looked limp. Even zombies had a bit of stability to them, didn’t they?
Actually, Julie, babe, zomb-zombs don’t exist. Dawn of the Dead is a piece of fiction, not a documentary.
“Then what’s that?” she asked. Her own words startled her, and she flattened against the tree, glancing left to right to find the source of the voice.
The dead teenager leaned out from the trunk a little more and waggled his head at her.
Then, he spoke.
“Boogedy boo!”
Juliet gasped, then frowned. “The fuck?”
She said this because the dead teen hadn’t truly spoken. Its purple lips hadn’t moved. The crooked jaw didn’t even flex. He hung there, jutting from the trunk, as animated as a sack of laundry. And that’s when she saw the filthy fingernails. Dirty fingers wrapped around the wrist supported the teen’s floppy hand. Soot-blackened digits were also dug in around the back of the neck. Someone was using the boy’s corpse like a puppet. Someone with hands. Someone human.
Now a new problem came to light. Who was she more scared of? The red priest or the unseen puppeteer? The devilish clergymen who’d kidnapped and nailed her to a post out in the woods or the sick Twinkie who had turned a dead teenager into a Muppet? This Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY! at the Tree Dome: Evil Fuck versus Morbid Comedian! GETCHER TIGGIDS!
“Boogedy boo!” the macabre ventriloquist repeated. The dead teen was made to waggle his head at her again.
Juliet shuddered in disgust rather than terror. Her brain made the illogical conclusion that, because this asshole had a sense of humor, albeit a twisted one, he didn’t mean her any real harm. Sure, his actions disturbed her, but he wasn’t actively trying to kill her, as she assumed the red priest intended.
Had the chewing she’d heard really been fire sounds? Perhaps…
The teenager leaned out farther and slipped from the puppeteer’s grasp. The torso crashed onto the bed of leaves covering the forest floor. Juliet had just enough time to wonder what had happened to the poor boy’s legs before the thing with the dirty hands revealed itself.
It might have hands, Julie, babe, but that thing ain’t human. From my best guess, it never was human. Because those aren’t hands, Julie, babe, those are gloves. It’s wearing flesh like fashion accessories. And your brain isn’t making connections anymore, is it? Nope. You’ve lost it. You think this is actually Colton talking to you, Julie, babe, but Colt’s trapped under a million pounds of steel somewhere at the edge of the world. And you’re stuck here with a real life monster. A monster they don’t warn you about in storybooks. A monster made of other people. Made of Hell. Yes, Hell-with-a-capital-H. Because it has horns. Goat horns. And isn’t that red skin peeking through the flesh it wears? Yes, I think it is. Shiny, red flesh. And yellow eyes. Such piercing yellow eyes…
10.
Tired hands be damned, Juliet scrabbled out through the bushes, kicking detritus behind her with her mangled feet, ignoring the pain, needing to be gone from the demon in the woods. She exploded back onto the road, shrieking and spitting, trying to beat the devil.