The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(53)

But she loved the way Renny liked to chew on her, just nibble and bite and suck all the right places, as though he was desperately hungry for her, physically starving. She always orgasmed first, even when she tried to outlast him, and once she was coitally zoned, she really did want him to leave marks. Little ones she’d see in the morning, when she felt the delicious residual ache of their workout.

She liked to tease Renny about all the women he must have learned his bag of tricks from. If she had a headache or a rotten mood, Renny could bang it right out of her. Victor would never even touch her at her time of the month; Renny did not have that particular cultural problem. He made her feel more desirable on her doggiest days, and feeling desirable made Barb feel womanly indeed. Renny even understood about her having to go back to work at Nasty Tramps, now that Victor was no longer winning the bread. In fact, Renny had suggested Barb rejoin the working world. What a guy.

Crude, dumb, uncaring, and boy-howdy opportunistic. Yeah, Renny was a prize, for sure. Prize catch of the day.

Except that this day, somehow, Victor had found time out from his busy schedule to come back from the dead. This did not shock or be-fuddle Barb overtly. Maybe she’d seen too many monster movies, and lacked the emotional capacity for astonishment. She stared down her reflection eye-to-eye and reminded herself that Victor had done a lot of uppers in his thirty-odd years on the planet. Hell, he was probably spin-ning in his new grave right now—at 78 rpm.

The bathroom light was harsh. It made her feel lonely. She was for-tunate to know that it was a loneliness she could drive away. She wanted Renny on her, inside of her, the fastest way she knew not to feel lonely anymore.

She found him semiconscious and semi-erect. Renny functioned best with a five-minute nap between rounds. Barb woke him up with her mouth. She didn’t say a word, but he awoke anyway. They made a great deal of noise over the next half-hour. Renny always lasted longer once he’d “primed his pump”; his words.

They were both on their backs, kicking away sheets to let their own sweat cool them off, when Barb said, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Little scritchy noise. Like a mouse.”

“Probably that stupid cat of yours.”

“No, he doesn’t make noises like that.”

“Then it probably is a mouse. This house is—”

“No, listen.”

Renny listened. If the thing making the noise was a mouse, it was dragging off a dog for a bit of fun.

Barb pounded his shoulder. “It’s under the bed!”

“Jesus Christ.” Renny stayed calm and leaned overboard for a look-see.

From beneath the dust ruffle, the baseball bat shot out like a piston, hitting Renny foursquare in the chin and making him see night sky. It still had clots of Victor drying on it. Then something whip-snaked tight coils around Renny’s throat and dragged him down to tussle.

Renny made a gargling noise in the dark as he was reeled in. Discombobulated, he thought he was being engulfed by a giant wiggle-worm with a whole lot of little worms attached. He dug his heels into the rug and fought to breathe. Barb was already making those screamy gasps that truly bugged him, deep down.

It was a hand on his throat. He peeled it off. As he did, another ap-pendage trapped his hand.

Renny pulled back and dragged his rubber-limbed assailant out from under the bed—the preferred place of concealment for seasoned, traditional boogeymen.

It was Victor again.

Moreover, it was Victor as he had been buried that afternoon. Bones all smashed. No head.

Renny was instantly mummified in a barbwire-tangle of leathery muscles and nonliving rubber flesh; it was like trying to wrassle a waterbed. What used to be Victor’s arms and legs—now freed from bones and framework—coiled and constricted into tentacles that were much quicker than Renny’s fist. They slithered snug around his windpipe, his chest, his stomach, and Renny could feel it coming—the big squeeze that would make the life jump right out of him.

Now Renny was making those screamy noises.

He was clawing at his own face when Barb, no longer wailing, charged back from the kitchen, brandishing the biggest meat cleaver Renny had ever seen.

Victor had threatened her with the cleaver once; that was how she’d known where to find it.

And Barb had, in fact, seen too many monster movies. Especially the ones about psychos and kitchen implements; you could get every-damned--thing on cable nowadays. She hacked and chopped and slashed and hollered and only nailed Renny by accident once.

The grabby Victor-thing began falling to pieces faster than a clay vase run through on the wheel with a cutoff needle. Tearing a suffocat-ing creeper of skin free from his mouth, Renny flailed to a sitting position and sucked air.

“Barb—you cut me open, goddammit!”

“I missed, honey, I’m sorry, okay? That thing was all over the place!”

She helped him stand. He was wobbly, unused to needing help, to being nearly beaten. Their feet buried in the desiccated meat on the floor, she felt him shake. He hugged her tight and genuinely.

“I know. I know, babe…but that thing is ole you-know-who again.”

“Can’t be. No way.” She pressed her face into his neck, not looking. He lifted a scrap of now-inanimate flesh and turned it to the faint light, so Barb could see the tattoo. A cherubic, comic book devil-child looked back at her from a corona of flame.