Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 40

The talent for mesmerization came effortlessly to a man who had devoted years to charming the camera's unblinking and all-seeing eye. Jerry preferred to consider his ability innate, a divine, G.o.d-granted sanction pre-approved for the new use he now made of it: Don't eat the Reverend.

Deacon Moe moistened his cracked and greenish lips with a mildew-furred tongue, not in antic.i.p.ation so much as a wholly preconditioned response to Jerry's act of holding the cup into the light. The demarcations of the urine container showed a level two ounces. Little Luke could be fully milked slightly more often than once per month, if Jerry's touch was gentle and coaxing. He tilted the cup to Deacon Moe's lips and the poison was glugged down in nomine Patris, et Filii...

"AND G.o.d WAVED HIS HAND!" Jerry belted out.

"And when G.o.d did wave His hand, He cleansed the hearts of the wicked of evil. He scoured out the souls of the wolves, and set His Born-Agains to the task of reclaiming the Earth in His name. The Scriptures were right all along, brethren-the Meek did inherit! Now the world is grown green and fecund again. Now must the faithful seek strength from their most holy Maker. The d.a.m.ned Sodom and Gomorrah of New York and Los Angeles have fallen to ruin, their false temples pulled down to form the dust which makes the clay from which G.o.d molds the G.o.d-fearing Christian! Our G.o.d is a loving G.o.d, yet a wrathful G.o.d, so he smote down those beyond redemption. He closed the book on secular humanism. His mighty Heel did trample out radical feminism. His good right Fist did mete out rough justice to the h.o.m.os.e.xuals; His good left Fist likewise did silence the pagans of devilsp.a.w.n rock and roll. And He did spread his Arms wide to gather up the sins of this evil world, from s.e.xual perversion to drug addiction to worship of all the false G.o.ds. And you might say a Memo did come down from the Desk of the Lord, and major infidel b.u.t.t got kicked doubleplusgood!"

Now he was cranking, impa.s.sioned, his pate agleam with righteous perspiration. His hands clamped down on Deacon Moe's bony shoulders. His breath misted the zombi's dead-ahead eyes. His conviction was utter. Moe salivated.

"And today, right here right now, the faithful walk the land, Brother! G.o.d's legions grow by the day, by the hour, by the very minute, as we stand here and reaffirm our faith in His name! We are all Children of G.o.d, and G.o.d is a loving Father, a Big Daddy who pro-vides for his pro-geny! Yes, we must make sacrifices and forsake transient comforts. But though our bellies be empty today, our hearts are full up with G.o.d's greatness-aren't they?!" His voice was cracking now; it was always good to make it appear as though an overload of pa.s.sion was venting accidentally, spilling out despite decorum. "From that goodness, Brother, you and I must draw the strength to persevere until tomorrow, when the Millennium shall come and no child of the Lord shall want! Peace is coming! Food is coming! Go forth unto the congregation, Deacon Moe, and spread this good news! Amen! Amen! Can I hear an Amen?!"

Jerry reaped what he had asked for. Deacon Moe wheezed, his arid throat rasping out acknowledgment that sounded like an asthmatic trying to say rruuaah through a jugfull of snot. Jerry spun him about-face and impelled him through the curtain to disseminate the Word. He heard Moe's stomach-load of acc.u.mulated detritus slosh. Corrosion was amok in there. Any second now, G.o.d's gravity might fill Deacon Moe's pants with his own zombified tripe.

Tonight they were billeted inside an actual church-long looted, windows smashed, pews askew amid dust and vermin. Most of the faithful loitered in the deconsecrated sanctuary. The four Deacons led the faithful through Jerry's motions; the response quotient of the entire group, twoscore and ten, was about as dependable as a trained but r.e.t.a.r.ded lab rat. Less control, and Jerry would have starred at his own Last Supper months ago. Right now he saw his congregation as vessels itching to be filled to the brim with the prose of G.o.d. He tried to keep them fed as best he could manage.

He permitted himself modest pride in remembrance of the glorious day he had commenced his latest cross-country revival. It had come to pa.s.s at a Baton Rouge honkytonk called the Corner Pocket, a rural watering hole festooned with strings of Christmas lights-Christmas tree lights!-whose trailer-hitch rollaway marquee announced the presence of some musical ent.i.ty known as Slim Slick and his Slick d.i.c.ks. Jerry strode boldly into the murky bar and drank in the h.e.l.lacious noise of the band (d.a.m.n'd souls, tormented by pitchforks), inhaled the brimstone of cigarette and marijuana smoke, and Witnessed, with his own eyes, the drinking of alcohol, the pawing of loose women, the degradation of the entire human race right there in microcosm.

He had raised his Bible high and begun Testifying. Even the band stopped playing to pelt him with garbage.

Jerry had marched deeper into this bottomless pit of vice, unafraid... and right behind him were twenty hungry Born-Agains. What began as a holy purge quickly waxed into his new congregation's first big feed. Slim Slick, et al, had been forced to see the light. Some of them had even joined the marching ministry, those not too chewed up to locomote.

Like Jesus to the temple, the Right Reverend Jerry had come not to destroy, but to fulfill. To fill full.

He poked his snakestick into the hatch of the pet caddy. n.o.body buzzed. n.o.body could. Rattling tended to upset the faithful, so Jerry had soaked the rattle of each of his four favored wine-makers until they rotted into silence. Little Matthew was disengaged from the tangle of his brothers. Eastern dia-mondbacks were legendary for their size and high venom delivery; full contact bites were almost always fatal. Little Matt was five feet long, with large glands that could effortlessly yield a Love Gift capable of converting six hundred and sixty-six adults to the cause, and wasn't that a significant coincidence of mathematics? Jerry had shoved the figures around a smidgen, converting milligrams to grains to ounces; how a lethal dosage was administered was also a big variable. But the final number summoned by his calculator was 666, repeating to infinity. That was how many sinners could swing low on three ounces of Little Matt's finest kind. To Jerry, that number had been a perfect sign, and wasn't that what really counted in the Big Book? Perfection just tickled G.o.d green.

Deacon Curly had not come forth to receive communion. Perhaps he had wandered astray?

Back in the days before comedy had become synonymous with s.m.u.t, Jerry had enjoyed a good laugh. Upon his nameless Deacons he had bestown the names of famous funnymen, the cla.s.sics, the unspoiled ones from the days of black-and-white nitrate film. As his ramrods wore out or were retired with honors, Jerry's list of available names dwindled. Just now, the Deacons in charge were Moe, Curly, W. C, and Fatty. Curly was running late. Tardiness and disobedience were a compound sin.

The Right Reverend Jerry felt secure his flock would follow him even without the able a.s.sistance of his Deacons. He represented the Big Guy. His tent-revival roots ran deep and wide and his TV version of the same had pealed out the Word into the ozone. Mental messages, invisible vibrations, sheer goodness proved Jerry had always trodden the upward path, so it was no surprise to him that his congregation followed him, because they would burgeon beneath his loving ministrations. When he sermonized, the Born-Agains seemed to forget their earthly hungers. He could not pinpoint why, exactly, past his own Rock-solid certainty that the Word held the power to still the restless, and quiet gnawing bellies. There were other kinds of nourishment; these lost ones were spiritually starved, as well. Jerry, hyper-aware as always, held a deep reverence for sheer unsupported faith, which he fancied he saw in the eyes of his flock when he vociferated. It was during a sermon he realized it had been a miracle-he looked out upon the milling throng and just knew. These Born-Agains depended on him as much for the Word as his Deacons counted on him to deliver the holy imbibitions. Venom governed the Deacons, but had been a new kind of faith that had thrown an umbrella over the entire marching ministry. Had to be.

They needed saving. Jerry needed to save. Symbiosis-plain, ungarnished, and G.o.d-sanctioned as all get-out. In a most everlasting way, they fed each other. Maybe it was not such a big whodunit, after all.

Still no sign of Deacon Curly in the vestibule. Jerry motioned Deacon Fatty inside. Fatty's lazy eye had popped out to hang from its stalk again. Jerry tucked it in and brushed the bugs from this Deacon's shoulders, then re-knotted the armband which had drooped to the zombi's elbow. Each member of the congregation had been outfitted with a Red Cross, which seemed appropriate as a symbol for this New Dawn, and gave Jerry a handy way to take quick head counts while on the march, or track his disciples from afar.

The sudden, flat boom of an explosion not far away made Jerry's heart slam on the brakes. Deacon Fatty stood unimpressed, awaiting his communion, insects swimming in his free-floating drool.

It was in the prep room that Wormboy first encountered the brand-new living dead lifeform.

Valley View's mortuary was a stainless steel holy-of-holies in Wormy's personal religious lexicon, and the cleanest thing in his entire life. There were three canted dressout tables with flushable drain troughs, and an overhead conveyance resembling an upside-down model racing track, used so a single mortician could transfer clients from freezer to slab without a lot of wrestling, like an a.s.sortment of treats in an automat. He routinely sluiced the trays with a ten-percent bleach solution to wipe out stray viruses.

By the time he delivered the bisected cemetery intruder onto the center table, there was not much left, and he could hoist the unmoving jumble of body parts one-handed. Soon he was going to have to venture beyond the safety of Valley View merely to procure fresher kills.

He cut a fair imitation of a mad doktor in his double-wide rubber ap.r.o.n and goggles (you never wanted to get zombi spew in your eyes if you could help it). His PVC gauntlets strapped at the bicep and had to be adapted to his manly dimensions using modified trouser belts. While he was filleting the reeking remains of the zombi, the backbone squirmed in his grasp as though it had other ideas.

The zombi was less one head, therefore minus a dead-alive brain, ergo nothing should still be wiggling around. Wormboy actually startled and dropped the slippery spine on the floor, where it splatted on the tiles...

... and then righted itself, coiled, and-apparently-looked right at him.

The backbone from tip to tail looked less like a spine and more like one of those wooden snake marionettes made in Mexico. Two pellets, igneously faceted like kidneystones, had sprouted from the top k.n.o.b of cervical vertebrae, completing the illusion of eyes. The tip of the coccyx vibrated. It was not unlike a finned sea-snake, with blind, atavistic eyes akin to those found on the scolex of a tapeworm.

Wormboy was blinking very fast and breathing shallowly. Before he could think what the f.u.c.k? the d.a.m.ned thing tried to bite him on one ma.s.sive calf. It struck bluntly, without a mouth, teeth, or equipment to sting. Without musculature, it nonetheless mustered a formidable hit that would raise a bruise. Wormboy's expression darkened, fat and adipose slithering beneath his face to convey annoyance, anger, mild fear. He kicked the knotwork of bones across the room. It curled up defensively in the corner near the meat lockers.

Eventually he used tongs to deposit the alien, with much thrashing drama, into a vacuum-locked specimen container, a confined cylindrical s.p.a.ce in which it whipped around until it calmed down. Only then did Wormboy's blood drain as though a tub drain had been freed. He felt the vertigo-lurch of impending shock and sat down heavily on the bare floor, his sandbag b.u.t.t vibrating the steel tables with impact. He had to get some sugar, and p.r.o.nto, to avert nausea.

He poured down, virtually without swallowing, two liters of a fondly remembered brown fizzy soft drink, feeling regret that the gross supply of this beverage would eventually deplete. He wondered how much of it he could drink before the end of the world. Thoughts of food always calmed him. Then he glanced again at the animated backbone with eyes-that-weren't, its skeletal structure clinking against the tempered gla.s.s of the jar. It did not seem to need air.

Great, now your food tries to murder you even after it's dead-twice. He imagined eating a whole baked trout, keeping weapons ready so the spine did not jump up and try to gouge out his eye. Hysterical.

He preferred heavy caliber projectile peace of mind. Cordite calm. He had named his M6o "Zombo" and it was swell, a devastating auto-weapon sized to his own bounty. One round (the size of his sausage finger) made raspberry slush out of anything organic it hit. Vaporize the head and the leftovers could not eat you or infect you with the geek germ. And spraying on Pam kept them from sticking to the cookery.

Wormboy hated it when the rules decided to change on him with no warning and no lubrication, just wham! and you're stuck up the hiney-hole with an express missile of bad news. The snaky bone-thing clattered about, offering no clues.

On the other hand, maybe he had just discovered something new. Maybe he had the scientific right to name it. Which made him better than Dukey Mallett, the first person Wbrmboy had ever eaten, a giver-of-names without portfolio.

"Yo, Wormy, whatcha got in your locker, more worms, huh?"

Quoth Dukey Mallett, who bestows the epithet upon Wormboy (15th Street Junior High's resident wimp, blimp, p.u.s.s.ywhip, and pariah), who, per Dukey, sucks up three squares chock full 'o nightcrawlers every day, with squiggly snacks between. Just because. This is always good for a chorus of guffaws from Dukey's intimates, 15th Street's other future convicts.

Dukey smokes Camels. His squeeze, Stacey, has awesome b.o.o.bs and a lot of pimples around her mouth. She uses bubblegum-flavored lipsmacker. Two weeks prior to becoming a high school freshman, Dukey wraps a boosted Gran Torino around a utility pole at ninety. He, Stacey, and a pair of their joyriding accomplices are barbecued by sputtering wires and burning Hi-Test. Paramedics pile what parts they could retrieve onto a single stretcher, holding their noses.

Tompkins Mortuary provides local ambulance service. Wormboy races there as fast as his sweaty, obese teen corpus could move him, once he catches wind of the news. Old Man Tompkins admires his s.p.u.n.k and gristle when he requests to view the remains of his beloved cla.s.smates. "I have to be sure!" Wormy blurts, having rehea.r.s.ed his grief. Tompkins is one of those guys of a mind that youngsters can never be exposed to death too soon, and so buys Wormboy's melodrama, and consents to give the kid a peek at the carbonized component mess filling Drawer Number Eight.

Wormboy thinksTompkins smells like the biology lab at shark-dissectingtime. While the old man averts his gaze with a sharp draw of untainted air, Wormboy sucks wind, fascinated. This flash-fried garbage staining the slab and blocking up the drains is Dukey. Harmless now. The sheer joy of this moment threatens to effervesce, create pressure, explode, so Wormboy quickly swipes a small sample. When Tompkins turns back, Wormy has to remember to look mortified. He sheepishly claims to have seen enough. He is lying.

Later, alone, he wallows.

Papaw had always said that orthodoxies had spent too long s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the world. That whole religion thing? Yeah, come to America, and enjoy religious freedom... as long as you pick one of these. d.a.m.ned hypocrites, Papaw had said; enough was enough and too much, Idiots in the real world blundered blindly about, expending their existence by accident, begging unseen G.o.ds for unavailable mercies, trusting in supernatural beings and nebulous powers of "good" or "evil" that predetermined what breakfast cereal they ate. Papaw's doctrine was Get Some, and if there was any "evil," now, its name was either Starvation or Stupidity-two big helpings of which could make you instantly gone. True Believers spent their time preparing to die. Wormboy preferred fighting to live.

His honed survival ethics could conceivably become the first writ of a new doctrine- Get Some, Now. Better that than any other system that would rise, given time. n.o.body in the real world ever learned a G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing.

Wormboy dumped his dishes in the surgical sink and relaxed on another of his prizes, a sort of lazy-boy loveseat that held his mammoth b.u.t.tocks tight as a lover. His alarm system primed, he dozed.

The piece of Dukey Mallet he has purloined from Tompkins turns out to be one of Dukey's frica.s.seed eyeb.a.l.l.s. It has heat-shrunken and wrinkled into a raisin pattern, deflated on one side, mildly petrified, but without a doubt one of Dukey's baby blues. The eye that has directed so much scorn at Wormboy is now in the grasp of Wormboy himself, subtracted of blaze and swagger and no more threatening than a squashed seed grape. It gives under the pressure of Wormy's fingers, like stale cheese. It is sour-smelling, like an eggsh.e.l.l in the trash, with no insides.

Wormboy pops the eye into his mouth and bites down before his brain can say no. He gets a crisp bacon crunch. His mental RPMs redline as flavor billows across his tongue and floods his meaty squirrel cheeks.

Mamaw would not approve. This sort of thing was... well, it just wasn't done. Good thing Wormy is locked in the bathroom.

"n.o.body on G.o.d's green Earth takes half an hour to comb their hair" Yapaw's voice comes through the door, simultaneous with a disdainful thud. "Finish up in there, boy-I gotta potty."

They think he's in here beating off, and in a way, they are right.

Mamaw is cooking dinner for eight, which means only she, Yapaw, and Wormy will be dining tonight. The short corridor leading to the bathroom of the mobile home is only wide enough to accommodate one of them at a time, in any direction. And all of a sudden, those chicken wings, those potatoes, all that gravy and b.u.t.ter, doesn't raise that familiar, pleasant tectonic plate shift in Wormboy's gut.

Biting Dukey's eye brings a rush of... liberation, yeah, that's what it is. The ultimate expression of revenge, of power wielded over Dukey the d.i.c.k-nosed s.h.i.theel. It is the nearest thing to s.e.x that Wormboy will ever experience, d.a.m.ned close to religious.

Once Wormboy gets older, he scores a part-time, after-school job at Tompkins' place. By then, his future is cast in bronze, and his extra weight gain attracts no notice at all.

When history delivers him to the National Guard Armory, nostalgia compels him to tuck into a few boxed, Type-A government-issue combat meals. The gel-packed pucks of mystery meat he pries from inside the olive drab tins is more disgusting than anything he ever sliced off down at the morgue.

Wormboy's wet dream was just sneaking up on the gooshy part when another explosion, outside, jerked him back to reality and put Zombo's trusty rubber-banded grip in his hand faster than a samurai's katana.The vast flow of his stomach rippled in waves. Brriiittt! Lunch was still in there, fighting. But what his binoculars revealed flushed the need for a bromo right out of his mind.

Two dozen geeks, maybe more, were lurching toward the front gate of Valley View. Wormboy's jaw unhinged. That did not stop his mouth from watering at the sight. It was getting to be a busy Monday.

The Right Reverend Jerry unshielded his eyes and stared toward the corpulent sinner on the hilltop as smoking wads of Deacon W. C. rained down on the faithful. Something fist-sized and mulchy smacked Jerry's shoulder and blessed it with a smear of yellow. He shook steaming glop off his shoe and thought of Ezekiel 18:4: The soul that sinneth-it shall die!

Boy, he was getting a mad on now.

Deacon Curly and Deacon W. C. had both bitten the big one and bounced up to meet Jesus. The closer the congregation staggered to the graveyard, the better they could smell this sinner, and his fatted calves. The hour of deliverance-and dinner-so long promised by Jerry seemed nigh.

Jerry felt something else skin past his ear faster than sound. Behind him, another of the Born-Agains came unglued, skull and eyes and brains all cartwheeling off on different trajectories. Jerry recoiled, stepping blind, his heel skidding through yet something else, moist and slick. His feet took to the air and his rump introduced itself to the pavement and much, much more of Deacon W. C, who had always been the biggest. New colors soaked into his coat of many.

The Right Reverend Jerry involuntarily took his Lord's name in vain.

Another of the faithful to burst into a pirouette of flying parts, followed by the flat crack of the gunshot. Chunks and stringers spattered the others, who had the Christian grace not to take offense and continued marching forward.

Jerry scrambled in the puddle of muck, his trousers slimed and adherent, his undies coldly bunched. Just as wetly, another Born-Again ate a bullet and changed tense from present to past. Jerry caught most of the jetwash in the bazoo.

It was high time for him to bull in and start doing G.o.d's work.

Wormboy cut loose a throat-rawing war whoop of pure joy at what was heading his way. Home delivery! One guy in the rear did not twitch and lumber the way most geeks did, so Wormy reslung his Remington hunting rifle and checked through the scope. He saw a dude in a stained suit smearing macerated slush out of his eyes and hopping around in place with Donald Duck fury. It was apparently a live guy, among the dead guys.

Like all the others, he wore a Red Cross armband.

While Wormboy had the rifle up, he zeroed a fresh geek in the crosshairs, squeezed off, and watched another head screw inside-out in a pizza-colored burst of flavor. With a balletic economy of motion for a human his size, he ejected the spent bra.s.s and left the rifle open-bolted, because Zombo was still hot for mayhem. Zombo was itching to pop off and hose stragglers. A stretch belt of high velocity armor-piercers was draped over one sloping hillock of Wormboy's shoulder; the sleek column of sh.e.l.l casings obscured the Dirty Rotten Imbeciles logo on his T-shirt. Ca.s.serole time. Zombo lived. Zombo ruled.

The next skirmish line of Bouncing Bettys erupted, ooh, ahhh, fireworks. They were halfway to the moat. The stuff pattering down from the sky sure looked like manna.

Jerry let the faithful have it in his stump-thumper's bray, full-bore: "Onward! Onward! Look unto me, and ye be saved, all the ends of the earth!" Isaiah 45:22 was always a corker for rousing the rabble. They surged as one. By now even the hindmost had scented the plump demon on the hilltop in his false palace. He was bulk and girth and ma.s.s and calories and salvation. Valley View's iron portals were smashed down. Within seconds, a holy wave of living dead arms, legs and innards were airborne and graying out the sunlight.

"Onward!" Jerry frothed his pa.s.sion to scalding and dealt his nearest disciple a fatherly shove in the direction of the enemy, the sinner, the monster. "Onward)" The flat of his hand met all the resistance of cold oatmeal. A cow patty had more tensile strength and left less mess. Jerry ripped his hand free with a yelp. Gooey webs followed it backward. The Born-Again gawped hollowly at the tunnel where its left t.i.t had been a second before, then stumped onward, sniffing fresh Wormboy meat.

The sequential explosions had become deafening, slamming one into the next, thunderclaps that mocked G.o.d. Jerry thought he could hear a low, vicious chuddering in the interstices, not a heavenly sound, but an evil noise unto the Lord that was making the faithful go to pieces faster than frogs with cherry bombs inside. He tried to snap away the maggot-ridden brown jelly caking his hand and accidentally boffed Deacon Moe in the face. The zombi's nose tore halfway off and dangled. Moe felt no pain. He had obediently brought the pet caddy, whose occupants writhed and waxed wroth.

Zombo hammered out another gunpowder benediction and Jerry flung himself down to kiss G.o.d's good earth. Hot tracers ate pavement and jump-st.i.tched through Deacon Moe in a jagged crotch-to-chin zig-zag. The pet carryall took two big hits and fell apart. Moe did likewise. His ventilated carca.s.s executed a juice dump and the Right Reverend Jerry found himself awash in gallons of zombi puree garnished with four extremely aggravated rattlesnakes.

Jerry never identified the first to betray him. The first bite pegged him right on the b.a.l.l.s, and the rest of his time was spent howling.

Deacon Moe, his work on this world finished, keeled over with a ker-splat It was like watching a hot cherry pie hit a concrete sidewalk.

Wormboy rubbed his salt-stung eyes. He had not been aiming for the caddy. Zombo had missed. It was not just the sweat that had spoiled his aim. His vision was bollixed. The oily drops oozing from his vast pate were ice cold.

Probably somebody's something he ate.

Zombo's beak was dipping, p.i.s.sing away good ammo to spang off the metal spikes crowding the moat. The huge gun was growing too heavy, too frying-pan hot to control. Wormboy gritted his teeth (always flossed), clamped his trigger finger down hard, and seesawed the muzzle upward with a bowel-clenching grunt. He felt himself herniate below the broad weightlifter's belt. Zombo continued his speech as geeks blocked tracers, caught fire and sprang apart at the seams. Those in front were buffaloed into the moat by those behind. They seated permanently onto the pungi pipes with spongy noises of penetration, to wriggle and gush bloodpus while reaching impotently toward Wormboy.

Zombo demanded a virgin belt of fresh slugs. Wormboy's appet.i.tes had churned into a platinum-cla.s.s acid bath of indigestion. This night would belong to Maalox.

The air blackened with the tang of geek beef in no time. One whiff was all it took to make Wbrmboy vomit long and strenuously into the moat. Steaming puke pasted a geek who lay skewered through the back, facing the sky, mouth agape. It spasmed on the barbs, trying futilely to lap up as much fresh hot barf as it could collect.

Wormboy dropped the tagged-out Zombo and unholstered his beloved.44 to send a pancaking round into Barf Eater's brain pan. Its limbs stiffened straight as hydrostatic pressure blew its head apart into watermelon glop.Then it came undone altogether, collapsing into a mound of diarrheic putrescence that bubbled and flowed around the pipework.

Now everything was beginning to look like vomit. Wormboy's ravaged stomach said heave-ho to that, and contracted to expel what was no longer vomitable. This time he brought up blood, fizzing like soda pop from both nostrils. He spat and gagged, crashing to one catcher's mitt knee. His free hand vanished into the cushion of his stomach, totally inadequate to the task of clutching it.

The Right Reverend Jerry saw the sinner genuflect. G.o.d was still in Jerry's corner, punching away, world without end, hallelujah, amen.

Jerry's left eye was smeared down one cheek like a lanced condom. Little John's fang had put it out (it must have offended him). Jerry seized Little John and dashed his snaky brains out against the nearest headstone. Then he rose and began his trek uphill, through the valley of death, toting the limp, dead snake as a scourge. Consort with serpents had won him several dozen bites, but Jerry knew the value of immunization. He stung all over and wobbled on his feet, but so far he was still chugging, and his wherewithal had to have a Divine source.

This must be h.e.l.l, he thought, dazed, as he Witnessed most of his congregation get sliced and diced to droop all over Valley View's real estate like wet Christmas tinsel. Tendrils of smoke curled heavenward from the craters rudely gouged in the soil. Dismembered limbs hung, spasming their last. A few Born-Agains had stampeded over the fallen and made it halfway across the moat.

Jerry could feel his heart thudding, impelling G.o.d knew how much snakebite nectar through his veins. He could feel the Power working inside him. Blood began to leach freely from his gums, slathering his lips. His left hand snapped shut into a spastic claw and stayed that way. His good eye tried to blink and could not; it was frozen open. The horizon tilted wildly. Down below, his muscles surrendered, sending down s.h.i.t and p.i.s.s express delivery.

He wanted to raise his voice to his children, and tell them in the name of the Lord that the famine was ended, to hoot and holler about the feast at last. He lost all sensation in his legs instead. He tumbled into the violence-rent earth of the graveyard and began to drag himself further with his functioning hand, the one still vised around the remains of Little John.

He wanted to declaim, to shout, but his body had gone too stupid too fast. What came out, in glurts of blood-flecked foam, sounded like nam He hess ed begud!

Just the sound of that f.u.c.ker's voice made Wormboy want to blow his ballast all over again.

Jerry clawed his way to the lip of the pit. The remaining Born-Agains congregated around him, including his only still-standing Deacon, Fatty. Ironic. His eye globbed onto his face, his body jittering as the megadose of poison took firmer hold, Jerry nevertheless raised his snake and prepared to Spake.

Wormboy had just enough gumption left to drag his.44 into the firing line and blow the evangelist's mushmouthed head clean off, before that mouth could pollute the air with any further religious noise. Papaw would have beamed with pride.

"That's... better," Wormboy ulped, his gorge pistoning. Then he ralphed again anyway and blacked out.

Weirder things had happened, and none of it had been a dream. Wormboy's brain insisted these were true things. It added that one eye was shut against the dark of dirt and his nose was squashed sideways. When he opened his other eye, the incoming light and information was going to hurt, but it would permit him to survey the situation, feigning sleep or death while peering over the topography of regurgitated lunch in front of his face.

Keystone Kops, he thought. Chowing down on a headless corpse. Worm-boy watched strips of meat get ripped and gulped without the benefit of mastication, each glistening shred sliding down a gullet like a snake crawling into a wet red hole. One geek was busily gnawing a russet ditch into a Jerry drumstick with the foot still attached. Others played tug-o-war with slick spaghetti tubes of evangelist intestine, or wolfed double facefuls of thinner, linguini strands of tendon or ligament, all marinated in that special, extra-chunky maroon secret sauce.

Wormboy's tummy recommenced grumbling jealously. It was way past dinnertime. The surviving geeks would not just enjoy dessert and leave, no, not with Wormboy uneaten. Sick or not, subpar or handicapped, he'd have to crop 'em right now, unless he wanted to try a mop-up in total darkness with half his tools missing in action, and maybe waiting all the way to sunup to snack. He got cranky when he missed any feeding.

He saw one of the geeks in the moat wrench free of the pungi. Its flesh no longer meshed strongly enough for the barbs to hold it. It spent two seconds wobbling on its feet, then did a clumsy header onto three more pipes. Ripe plugs of rotten tissue spat upward and acid bile burbled forth.

Wormboy rolled toward Zombo, rising like a wrecked semi-righting itself. His brain rollercoastered; his vision strained to focus; what the f.u.c.k had been wrong with lunch? He was no more graceful than a geek himself, now. His heavy-bag muscles grated as he put one pillow-sized hand against a headstone to steady himself. The marker memorialized someone named Eugene Roach, Loving lather. The late Mr. Roach had lurched off to consume other folks' children a long time ago.

What happened next, happened fast.

Wormboy had to pitch his full weight against the tombstone just to keep from keeling over. When he leaned, gra.s.s and sod levered free with a sound like hair tearing out by the roots. His bloodshot eyes bugged and before he could arrest his own momentum, the headstone hinged back, a loose tooth freed from the tissue of Valley View's overnourished turf. Arms windmilling, Wormboy fell on top of it. His mind registered a flashbulb image of the tripwire, tw.a.n.ging taut to do its job. The mine detonated with an eardrum-compressing clap of bogus thunder beneath him, and two hundred pounds of headstone took to the air, with four hundred-plus pounds of Wormboy on top of it like a floundering surfer. The stone protected him from the blast, but the blast catapulted him over the moat to land right in the middle of the feeding frenzy on the other side.

Wormboy did a complete somersault, another first for his life.

With movie slo-mo surreality, he saw his pal, the hunky.44 Magnum, drop away like a bomb from a zeppelin. It landed with its 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. Just now, his overriding concern was gravity, and impact.

A geek turned as Wormboy flew in, 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 geek struggling off the spears, the mushy one, watched it right up until the instant it hit. The fallout was so thick you could eat it with a fondue fork.

Wormboy clamped shut his eyes and screamed as he bellied in, headfirst. Bones snapped when he touched down. Only the yellows of the skywatching geek's eyes were visible in the end. It liquefied with a poosh and became a wet stain at the bottom of the furrow excavated by Wormboy's crash-landing.