“I didn’t know dead guys could run as fast as a centaur.”
“What the pale junkie fuck are you talking about? I just wanted to tell you there is a giant shit monster following us.”
Pestilence shakes his head. Is he sitting on his horse or is he half horse?
“Huh?” asks the dreaded Horseman as his eyes cross and uncross and drool drips down his chin.
General O’Coddle reaches over with one meaty gray hand and grabs the reins to Pestilence’s steed. He tugs it to a halt, and Pestilence slumps forward as the horde stops. A huge cloud of dust rolls forward and engulfs them. Pestilence winces and blinks grains of sand out of his eyes. It burns, and the acid in his system makes his vision a rainbow of strange colors. General O’Coddle stares at him with his shriveled unblinking eyes despite the vicious sand cloud.
O’Coddle turns and points behind them. The horde of zombies step to either side so Pestilence has a long, clear line of sight. Not quite a mile away is a large dark sloppy shape slouching toward them. Pestilence squints, but his eyes refuse to focus. He shakes his head and pulls his hood down over his face.
“Shit,” Pestilence murmurs, “is that Famine?”
General O’Coddle stars dumbly at his hooded junkie master and something rolls in his undead brain. A dusty memory bounces, and the dead officer blurts out, “The big girl from the desert?”
“It is?” Pestilence asks.
“No, I don’t think so,” O’Coddle says. His dead withered eyes focus more easily than Pestilence’s drugged living ones. “It’s a big shit monster.” The general nods. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
O’Coddle looks back to Pestilence and asks, “Is that big girl single?”
Pestilence pulls his hood off in a flash and stares at the talking zombie with wild eyes.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“What?”
“She is a fat, abrasive, disgusting, rude…” he trails off and stares at the general incredulously. “Fucking gross, man!”
“I’d do her,” General O’Coddle shrugs. “Do you know where she is?”
Pestilence scoffs, “No, and thank fuck for that.”
Even as he says the words, a vision flashes brilliant and clear over the harsh barren desert. He sees dark rock walls lit by unseen flames that send trembling shadows across them. Famine walks around a corner, bleeding and sweating with her robe in thick shreds. Pestilence opens his eyes so wide the dry desert air burns them, but still he sees her. Holy shit, he really sees her.
Famine staggers, looking cautiously from side to side. She waddles with a limp, and her terribly thick make up runs down her cheeks to circle her beady eyes like a raccoon’s mask. She winces in pain and leans one hand on the nearest wall. It groans at her weight, and she pulls her hand away slowly. Then she slams her fist into it, sending a crack from the dirt floor to the high cavernous ceiling. She growls and turns from the wall, resuming her pained waddle with vigor.
“Horsey,” she calls in a high whiney voice. “Horsey, come here. Right NOW, Horsey!”
She leans forward and puts her hands on her knees to catch her breath. She seems unaware of the soft clop-clop of her emaciated steed until it sinks its teeth into her big ass. She screams in pain and spins to face the horse. Famine opens her mouth to yell, but the apocalyptic steed snaps forward and tears her floppy throat out in one quick bite. She stumbles backward, gurgling incoherent curse words as she dies. The skinny horse nuzzles up to her ample bosom like a loving pet before tearing one tit half off. It chews Famine’s flesh, strings of connective tissue still hanging from her wounds.
Pestilence snaps back to reality. “She’s dead,” he tells the general. “Let’s find this Leon cat, and we’ll find you some other fat girl.”
“What do you got against fat people?”
“Nothing, as long as they aren’t her. God is fat. Super fat,” Pestilence chuckles.
Borne on the desert wind, a copy of The Daily Cunt flies through the air and slaps hard across the general’s solid gray face. Pestilence grabs it and opens it up. He pages to the centerfold, which happens to be a big aerial map of Satan’s exposed ass and head.
“Put on your shit kickers, O’Fondle; it’s time to kick some shit!”
Chaos Reigns!
“Howdy fellas!” the squat demon yells before battering into them. The two guards have M-16s at the ready when the massive creature comes down the ramp. It lumbers and stumbles, shrugs aside gunfire from above and then bursts into view. The other demon is smaller, but he holds a giant claw that looks like it came from a fifty-foot lobster. The thing reaches out and snaps one of the guards in half, leaving body parts splattered all over the floor. The last thing the man says is “ARFULGARGUL!!!!”
The second guard, Foley Shanktwan, does the one only thing he can think to do. He turns and pounds on the door. He screams for help, but the giant metal portal doesn’t slide open. It is made of several feet of solid metal and can withstand a nuclear explosion. It can also withstand Foley’s frantic pounding.
Guard duty? Guard duty! That’s what he screamed at his supervisor just before they dressed him in a uniform and gave him a gun. He is a scientist, not a fighter. He understands quantum physics and chaos theory, but he barely knows how to slide the thingy back on top of the gun that puts the metal thingy in the tube so another metal thingy can slam against a firing cap and project a round metal thingy at high enough speed to become subsonic in a split second. He could probably write the formula for the force of the recoil against the dampening effects of the rifle. He could go on about the accelerating bullet that leaves a barrel at high speed.
But he can’t explain the things coming down the hallway.
“Mate. Mate. We don’t want to hurt ya. See me and sunny Jim here just need a way in. We don’t mean to cause no harm.”
Foley scratches at the door in fear, expecting the claw to snap shut at any second. He slips on his fellow ‘guard’s’ guts and almost falls. He looks down in fear only to see a twitching hand, and his little scientist mind can’t help but wonder how long until the synapses in the dead guy’s head stop firing.
“Buddy! Look at us, buddy!” the demon croaks behind him.
“Yeah look at him, not at the guy next to you. He was gonna shoot at me, and there was no call for that mate. No call at fookin’ all.”
Foley turns in a half circle and looks the two up and down. They are walking nightmares that can’t exist. They can’t! Not even the top genetic engineers could design these sick things on a trillion-dollar grant.
“Please…” He trembles and almost faints at the sight. The two are dripping fire and sparks that sizzle and splatter on the hard metal surface of the floor. The smell of brimstone, has to be brimstone (What the hell else could that acrid scent be?), makes him want to gag.
“Right. See we just need to get in and have a little chat with the folks on the other side. Right civil one at that. We just need to make sure those nukes never get launched. Never.”
“Never,” the second demon echoes in his scraggly voice.
“Can I go then?” Foley asks in a trembling voice.
“Yep. Soon as we get in. So get us in and we are all good. Square, you and us. You walk right on up that ramp and embrace the new world.”
“You can’t get in. The door is shut from the other side.”
The two demons look back and forth. Then the smaller one drops the claw and walks toward Foley, who wants to cower behind something. But the only thing to hide behind is a big pile of nothing. Nowhere to even cower, what a way to die. Once upon a time Foley was the pride of the Pentagon. He was going places. He has an unlimited budget as long as he worked on larger and more powerful bombs. He had one of his babies right here, just about finished. Ready to move into an ICBM casing.