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.
She landed hard on her left shoulder. Adrenaline numbed the blow but she felt the thud of the connection in her core. Her skeleton vibrated. She pedaled on useless feet, making a mess of herself. What little blood she had left in her body was leaking out through whatever dam she’d broken loose down there. Because of this, she couldn’t find traction in the mud created by the clay and blood. She felt as if she were trying to stand up on a Slip ‘N Slide.
“You’re still alive?” called a voice. She was only vaguely aware that the red priest was rushing from his car toward her.
“HELP ME!” Something rational told her that she was asking help from the very individual who’d put her in this predicament but she didn’t care. She only wanted to be gone from that hellish puppeteer. She didn’t care if the red priest strung her up for sale in a fish market. At least she wouldn’t be torn asunder by whatever devil lurked among the trees.
Hands rolled her over. Scooped her up under the arm pits. Dragged her away from the scrub and toward the fire.
Juliet caught sight of her feet for the first time. A vague memory came to mind. The movie was Total Recall. Arnold Schwarzenegger watched as the mutant taxi driver took off his false arm to reveal a weird two-fingered appendage. Juliet’s legs looked like bloodier versions of those alien hands. For a split second, the devil in the woods was gone from her mind. For the briefest of instances, she considered how she felt about never being able to walk again.
Then a voice came from the bushes, soft and amused, and Juliet screamed so she wouldn’t have to listen to it.
“Boogedy… boogedy-boo!”
11.
She tried to mark the demon’s location, but failed. Those lithe shadows were back, dancing through the bushes and trees, flitting across the scrub and soaring into the entwined branches overhead.
“You’re stronger ’n I give you credit for, child,” the red priest grunted, as he dragged her away from the road and into the clearing with the campfire. The Mercury sat idling off to the left, white exhaust exhaling from its tail pipe. “Did it eat the boy?”
Only half, Juliet answered, but it took the red priest repeating his question for her to understand that she hadn’t spoken the words.
She swallowed what little spit she had. “Only… only his legs.”
“Ah,” the red priest sighed. “He must not be that hungry today. You’re lucky.”
“He?” was the only word she could form.
“Silas, child. Silas. Surely you saw him. I can see it in your eyes.”
Stop calling me Shirley, Juliet mused, and barked forced laughter.
I’m going mad.
The thought of madness was comforting—a welcome reprieve from red priests and devils with vacation homes deep in the Georgia woods. Hell, she might be in Hell. What a helluva concept Hell was. She’d been taught to expect a place of fire and brimstone, not a forest in the southern US of A. What a funny thing, putting Hell in the middle of the Bible Belt. Or, maybe Hell was like a flabby tummy hanging over the edge. Perhaps God had the Dunlop disease. His belly done lopped over…