I should have felt an awful, eating guilt knowing that I had brought it all into being, that I was the stillborn breath of life that animated the entire nightmare. But I felt no guilt. Not then. Death was coming from every direction, empty-bellied, gape-toothed, diabolical and gluttonous…higher realms of self-loathing were denied me. There was only survival or, in the case of those in the shelter, lack of it.
I fought my way free of the dining hall and dorms with only one thought in my mind: the children. They were locked away downstairs and I had to keep them safe. The blood of those self-centered, egocentric assholes who were dying in numbers-the adults-meant very little to me by that point. It was the kids I thought of. The kids I lived for. The kids I fought for.
I darted down an interconnecting series of corridors knowing I had to get to the lower level before the undead did. I had only a bloody machete in my hand that I had taken from a Wormboy. There was no one or nothing in the hallways leading to the stairway door that went below. I felt a weird exhilaration of good luck, but it did not last.
There was a sudden stench in the air that cut through the usual stink of putrescence that had now flooded the compound. This was stronger…dank like subterranean pipes clogged with ancient filth, like backed-up sewage, the gurgling ammonia odor of urine.
I turned and there was Dragna.
I had thought-I suppose we all assumed-that Dragna, the zombie master, the lord of the ravenous dead, would be a man, but it was no man. It was female…but I wouldn’t call what I saw a woman exactly. It held my eyes, made them feel varnished into sockets of flypaper, frozen, sticky with salt-tears and immobile, unable to look away from the hideous mass of corruption that was wallowing in its own juicy foulness.
At first, I thought what I saw was two naked women and then three, perhaps four that had been melted into a running, pliable human clay and then fused together under great, damaging pressure. But no…it was a single woman or something that had once been a woman…a huge, lolling slab of a woman with swollen balloon-like, blue-veined tits, seven or eight of them, bouncing against a green-gray, fungus-threaded, ulcerated flab. And not one but several enormous corpse-glutted, pendulous bellies slopping from side to side like feed bags stuffed with mush, a trickle of fluid black as ink leaking from puckered navels that looked like blow holes.
In one bloated hand she held a spear and impaled upon it, a squirming infant blown up with gas…blackened, tiny face smeared with blood, its mouth a pulsing hole ringed by sharp milk teeth.
And she was coming for me, coming to drown me in oceans of flaccid rot.
I should have screamed.
I should have ran.
But I just stood there as she came forward, filling the corridor with a black, fetid stench of corpse-gas and decomposition. From her greasy, mucid bulk I saw faces, dozens of agonized faces erupting like blood blisters, rising like bubbles of dough, each of them eyeless and the color of gray sausage, mouths opening and closing and spraying a mist of sputum. She was looking at me, not hating exactly…but almost amused beyond her voracious charnel appetites that I dared stand against her. Her face was a bulbous and liquefying clot of fleshy gruel-like white pulp riddled with graveworms and carrion beetles nesting in the hollow of her nose. Each time she exhaled out came a cloud of black, buzzing flies. Loops of greased, matted hair hung in her face and seemed to coil like flatworms.
She smiled at me with a crooked, saw-toothed pumpkin grin of gnarled teeth.
But it was her eyes that held me.
They were huge gloss-white yolks, veined with blood and oozing a clear fluid. They had no pupils…yet she was seeing me with a gyroscopic intensity, looking not just at me but into me and filling my brain with graveyard imagery…demons and corpseworms with the faces of mewling infants, babies cooked in fat-bubbling pots and oil-skinned women who offered me vaginas sluicing with steaming larvae.
She came closer, her breasts pulsating, throbbing with sloshing milk, lactating freely with a grayish bile that ran down her flab and squirted through the air.
Opening her mildew-specked thighs, she gave me a glimpse of the corkscrewing darkness between her legs that dripped with slime like a slobbering mouth, teaming with parasites…insects and hookworms and green suckering planaria.
And it was with that second mouth, I knew, that she would eat me…after she made me suckle the fleshbags of her tits.
Maybe I should have run like I said, but I was all that stood between her and the children. Such was her arrogance and appetite, she had come to feed on the children alone, to stuff herself with sweetmeats and kidflesh, selecting the most succulent cuts and rarest treats for her own discerning palate before turning her hordes loose on what was left.
She probably expected me to cry and cower and shiver, terrified and overwhelmed, struck mad by her horror as others had been…but she didn’t get that. Machete held high, I attacked with a mindless ferocity and she reached out for me, her tongue like a thorny rose stem flaking into petals…and we collided there in the corridor. All those faces began to scream and maggots began to fountain from her mouth and eyes, her breasts and cunt, the ulcers in her hide…they came out in a slimy pink flood to drown me.
And as she took hold of me, I brought down the machete again and again as I gagged on her mortuary perfume, snotty tangles of blood and foam and slime gushing from her. Carrion paste blew from her mouth and the channel of her nose as I slashed her open and beat her down. Then she fell apart…bursting into a pink river of tissue and worms and rot and sticky ova. I fell away as it flooded the corridor, rushing past me in hot rivers of decay. I saw a dozen malformed, grotesque fetuses drowning in that outpouring, crying out with mewling voices that echoed into nothingness.
The revolting waste of Dragna went to a boiling steam that was hot and suffocating. In the end, I sat there, shocked and mindless as she evaporated around me.
15
It’s been two weeks now since I destroyed her.
Two weeks since the adults of the shelter were exterminated.
Two weeks since I cleaned out the compound and burned the remains in a huge funeral pyre in the parking lot and two weeks since I gathered the children together and told them we are a family and we must look after one another and care for another and only this way can we survive. It sounded like one of Doc’s speeches and I felt an eerie sense of deja vu while I gave them the spiel. But I believed it. And I think they did, too.
I feel no guilt over what I did. But every day I miss Maria and I dream about her every night. I know she would be ashamed of my petty revenge on Doc and the others and that hurts. But, likewise, I know she would respect how I care and teach the children.
Following Dragna’s destruction, I noticed something very peculiar with the Wormboys out there. They had devolved into your average b-movie zombies. Shambling deadheads, wandering around, bumping into one another, picking at scraps. No organization whatsoever. Dragna had been their brain and without her, they were really just mindless walking corpses. Creatures of opportunity.
It gave me hope.
I started planning out how we would escape the shelter. Go somewhere and find other people. Maybe an armory or a military base somewhere. But the more I thought about it the more I began to picture us wondering the wastelands, finding empty city after empty city, nothing but the dead haunting the cemetery sprawl of the brave new world.
Soon enough, I pictured us becoming little better than animals. Maybe living in caves, huddled around fires, drawing crude pictures on the walls of Wormboys sacking civilization until we reached the point in our crowded, primitive brains where we could no longer remember what civilization was.