Hot for combat, Barb spun. “It hurt Rumplecatskin!” The kill light was in her eyes.
She swept aside the dust ruffle. Two eyes returned her gaze from about a foot in. Then it charged, before she could bring the bat into play, and got a tight grip on her throat.
It was Victor’s hand, all right. He’d grabbed her throat enough times for her to make a lightning ID. Whatever else had befallen Victor’s mor-tal parts, his right hand was still strong and mean as ever. Barb’s wind was cut and in seconds she’d see the purple spots. Victor knew exactly how to throttle her.
She collapsed into a heavy, spread-legged sit-down as Renny dived across the bed, not as fast as he could have been. He didn’t really want to touch it. The severed wrist terminated in a reddish-white bag of muscle, like the fat, nontapered tail of a Gila monster. Renny grabbed that end and tried to yank it off.
Goddamn it, but this was getting to be much more trouble than any-thing was worth.
Barb’s face had shaded to mauve. Renny crawled in tighter, bent back the clutching index finger, and heard it pop as he broke it at the base joint.
Shouldn’t he just let it polish Barb off? Would this all be over then?
Nope, he thought as he levered the middle finger out of the flesh of her neck. No way he was going to be beaten and humiliated by disorganized body parts. He cocked the finger away savagely and smiled when he heard it snap.
There were eyeballs on the back of the hand, and they swivelled a full one-eighty to glare at Renny. The pupils dilated. Barb was sucking wind in big horsey gasps, her face flushing crimson.
Renny remembered the first time he had ever shaken this hand. Howyadoo. Victor Jacks was the sort of guy whose very existence dared you to be better than him, and promised to humiliate you if you tried.
The thumb and ring finger could not hang on alone; apparently Barb had smashed the pinky, a lucky hit with the bat; it jutted crookedly, alienated from the choking operation. Renny pried the hand free and chucked it across the room as Barb fell down. The hand bounced from the wall to the floor, leaving red impact smears. Clumsily, it tried to locomote.
Barb stumbled over and started stomping on it. She got gook all over her heel, slipped and nearly fell again. This enraged her enough to bash the hand with the bat until it didn’t move anymore.
Both of them squatted down at a safe distance and got their first really clear look at it.
Apart from the killer hand and about four inches of forearm, there were Victor’s eyes. Eyes that had always been the color of pastel blue enamel, opaque eyes that did not deal in emotional shades, with the hair-trigger flecks of silver buried deep like vague rumors of madness. The eyes were seated across the first three knuckles on the back of the hand, and looked roped down by strings of muscle and threads of optic nerve. One eyeball had just been imploded by Barb’s death-dance. At last, Renny could recognize the bulbous bag that hung off the far end of the wrist.
“That’s his heart.”
The whole assemblage reminded Renny of something that Victor might jerry-rig on his auto workbench. He was known to be miraculous when it came to solving your vehicular woes with a bent coat hanger, spit and a soldering iron.
“His heart.” This was not the sort of news Barb was eager to hear. “His heart, oh godddd…how could it be his heart, they took it out, you beat him to pieces, didn’t you break his hand? Last time?”
Renny honestly could not recall.
“I mean…he didn’t have no head, Renny! What’d the eyeballs do, roll here by themselves-?”
As they watched, the heart-end caved in, voiding blood in a final death-spurt. It made a large, wet, wide stain on the finished wood of the now-exposed floor.
It appeared to Renny as though it had farted. It was kind of funny. “Wow. You really broke his heart.”
She began slapping him. The blows were openhanded and basically harmless. “Renny, goddammit, that’s not funny! That’s his fucking hand! It’s been around my throat plenty of times, and for a minute there I could actually see him, like he’d come back whole to beat me up again, and it’s not funny!”
Barb was a pace and a half from an asylum. Her tirade petered out and left her sobbing. Renny did the right thing and tried to hold her. She let him. If he had given her a Kleenex, she would have dislocated his jaw.
“Okay, okay. Sorry I’m such a jerk.”
Pangs of selfishness could occasionally make Renny feel guilt, or some-thing like guilt. More important right this minute was the abrupt de-duction he’d made while keeping an untrusting eye on the no-longer-moving hand thing.
Victor had been slabbed and gutted…and had come walking back. He’d had all his bones busted and he’d come blobbing back. And Renny had dumped Victor in the sewer and Victor had come back again, from the sewer. Up through the toilet, just like those urban legends about scuba-diving rats, and snakes, and crocodiles, all of which the eyeball-hand resembled.
“Look, babe-I know what this thing needs. I’ll make sure there ain’t nothin left this time.”
“And how do you plan on doing that?” Barb had regained enough of her equilibrium to peek at herself in the bureau mirror to ensure she didn’t look too messed up.
Renny lifted the interloper by its broken pinky. He could feel himself piling up jungle smarts by the minute.
“You got any charcoal starter out back?”
It stank. Truly. It sizzled when it burned, a roundly unappetizing spectacle that Barb forced herself to witness. They both watched it cook down and Renny periodically batted the chunks apart with barbecue tongs until it was reduced to black goo and bone ash.
Barb plodded back inside to take her third shower in twenty-four hours. There was just no washing Victor off her life.
Renny watched the goo smolder and bubble on the coals. Kind of like pork, the smell.
He rubbed the smoke from his reddened eyes and finished up, not really wanting to enter the house again. He no longer wanted to play bed games with Barb. He just wanted to get some sleep.
By the time Barb towelled off, she discovered Renny deep in slumberland. Igg, she’d have to change the sheets despite her shower. A job for tomorrow. She sat on what was, de facto, “her” side of her own bed, successfully not waking her partner in crime.
Renny was different, she knew. Their relationship had turned. Flow-ers decay. Banquets spoil. Water evaporates. And their sneaky victory had soured. At first it had been a delicious, shared secret; now it had become a horrid quickmire that bonded them like a pair of panicked dogs struggling to uncouple.
She felt, well, dead inside, to hammer a phrase. Blown out, wasted, spent, scorching at the edges. She did not want to feel anything so much as she wanted to feel nothing.
Renny was sleeping with his mouth unhinged, as usual, just begin-ning to snore. That snore would tell her that she was far, far away from his thoughts. She gently grabbed his nose and tilted his head so he no longer faced her. The incipient snore died with a gurgle.
She felt unusually sensitized, to the point where the dust on the sheets and comforter bothered her. Grit was in her eyes and she fancied more dust layered upon her soul, like wet snow. The thought that it might be the powder of dead bones made her start crying, and she never stopped.
Caught up in her own grief, she missed seeing the tenacious little gob of charred protoplasm as it wormed past Renny’s slack lips, to slide easily down his esophageal tract. Soon it would renew its work deep inside of him, where the heart was.
Good People by David Wellington
David Wellington is the author of the zombie novels Monster Island, Monster Nation, and Monster Planet, and the vampire novels 13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, Vampire Zero, and 23 Hours. A werewolf novel, Frostbite, came out last October. Another zombie novel, Plague Zone, was serialized on his website, davidwellington.net, but is not yet in print. Wellington’s short fiction has appeared in the zombie anthologies The Undead, The Undead 2: Skin and Bones, and The New Dead, and he also has a story in my vampire anthology By Blood We Live. He recently made his comic book writing debut with Marvel Zombies Return.