The mine went off with an eardrum-compressing clap of bogus thunder. Two hundred pounds of granite and marble took to the air right behind nearly four hundred pounds of Wormboy, who was catapulted over the moat and right into the middle of the feeding frenzy on the far side.
It was the first time in his life he had ever done a complete somersault.
With movie slo-mo surreality, he watched his hunky magnum pal drop away from him like a bomb from a zeppelin. It landed with the trigger guard snugged around one of the moat's deadly metal speartips. The firmly impaled Deacon W. C. was leering down the bore when it went bang. Everything above the Adam's apple rained down to the west as goulash and flip chips.
Wormboy heard the shot but did not witness it. Right now his overriding concern was impact.
A geek turned and saw him, raising its arms as if in supplication, or a pathetic attempt to catch the UFO that isolated it in the center of a house-sized, ever-growing shadow.
Eugene Roach's overpriced monument stone veered into the moat. The mushy zombie watched it right up until the second it hit. The fallout was so thick you could eat it with a fondue fork.
Wormboy clamped shut his eyes bellied in headfirst. Bones snapped when he landed. Only the yellows of the geek's eyes were visible at the end. It liquefied with a poosh and became a wet stain at the bottom of the furrow dug by Wormboy's touchdown. All heads turned.
His brain was like a boardroom choked with yelling stockbrokers. The first report informed him that aerial acrobatics did not agree with his physique. The second enumerated fractures, shutdown, concussion, an eardrum that had popped with the explosive decompression of a pimento being vacuumed from an olive, the equitable distribution of slag-hot agony to every outback and tributary of his vast body… and the dead taste of moist dirt.
The third was a surprise news flash: He had not been gourmandized down to nerve peels and half a dozen red corpuscles. Yet.
He filed a formal request to roll back his eyelids and it took about an hour to go through channels.
He saw stars, but they were in the post-midnight sky above him. He lay on his back, legs straight, arms out in a plane shape. What a funny.
Eight pairs of reanimated dead eyes appraised him.
They've got me, dead bang, he thought. For more than a year they've whiffed me and gotten smithereened… and now I've jolly well been served up to them airfreight, gunless, laid out flat on my flab. Maybe they waited just so I could savor the sensual cornucopia of being devoured alive firsthand. Dr. Moreau time, kids. Time for Uncle Wormy to check out for keeps.
He tried to wiggle numb fingers at them. "Yo, dudes." It was all he could think of to do.
The zombies surrounding him — three up, three down, one at his feet, and one at his head — rustled as though stirred by a soft breeze. They communed.
The skull of the Right Reverend Jerry had been perched on his chest. He could barely see it up there. The blood-dyed and tooth-scored fragments had been leaned together into a fragile sort of card ossuary. He could see that his bullet had gone in through Jerry's left eyebrow. Good shot.
His insides convulsed and he issued a weak cough. The skull clattered apart like an inadequately glued clay pot.
More commotion, among the zombies.
The Right Reverend Jerry had been gnawed down to a jackstraw clutter of bones; the bones had been cracked, their marrow greedily drained. All through the feast, there he had been, mere feet distant, representing bigger portions for everybody. He had gone unmolested for hours. Instead of tucking in, they had gathered round and waited for him to wake up. They had flipped him over, touched him without biting. They had pieced together Jerry's headbone and seen it blown apart by a cough. They had witnessed, all right.
He considered the soda-cracker fragments of skull and felt the same rush of revelation he had experienced with Duke Mallett's eyeball. So fitting, now, to savor that crunch stone-ground goodness.
The eyes that sought him did not judge. They did not see a grotesquely obese man who snarfed up worms and eyeballs and never bathed. The watchers did not snicker in a Duke Mallett drawl, or reject him, or find him lacking in any social particular. They had waited for him to revive. Patiently, on purpose, they had waited. For him.
They had never sought to eat of his lard or drink of his cholesterol. The Right Reverend Jerry had taught them that there were hungers other than physical.
One of his legs busted, but with effort he found himself capable of hiking up onto both elbows. The zombies shuffled dutifully back to make room for him to rise, and when he did not, they helped him, wrestling him erect like dogfaces hoisting the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. He realized that if he cared to order them to march into one of Valley View's crematory ovens according to height, they'd gladly comply.
He had, at last, gained the devoted approval of a peer group.
And any second now, some asshole would try to whore up his resurrection for posterity in a big, bad, black book… and get it all wrong. He decided that anybody who tried would have a quick but meaningful confab with Zombo.
I win again. He had thought this many times before; in reference to those he once dubbed geeks. Warmth flooded him. He was not a geek… therefore they were not.
What he finally spoke unto them was something like: "Aww… shit, you guys, I guess we oughta go hustle up some potluck, huh?"
He began by passing out the puzzle pieces of the Right Reverend Jerry's skull. As one, they all took and ate without breathing.
And they saw that it was good.