The DEAD PEOPLE of WAL-MART, Part 4

From the pages of BLEEDING KANSAS, Part 1 of THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER, from SEVERED PRESS

Episode 4: Fatty foods are bad for dead and living alike

(Episode 3)  (Episode 2)  (Episode 1)

Setup: We’re one week into the zombie apocalypse. Our zombie-fighting hero, Derek Grace, has been put in charge of a grab-and-go mission at the local Wal-Mart. Hijinks ensue.

I’m jogging down the middle of the aisle, rounding the corner of the Men’s section. I find my size in boxers and grab five three-packs. I pick up some socks and colored T-shirts. I need something to carry this so I step out into the broad main aisle between the main goods and the checkout lanes and look for the chrome tree with the cloth shopping bags. There’s one by the outside corner near the shuttered entrance.

Now I’ve got one arm free. Time to find Marta. I see movement in the pharmacy area. I jog down the aisle and find myself face to rotting face with the most distressed-looking dead person I’ve seen yet. 

He’s in his late teens. I don’t see the terror of his death so much as he looks…green. His chin-to-crotch gore bib glistens with bright yellow gobbets like crumbs of wet rancid popcorn. He staggers towards me. I swing the panga but instead of taking off his upraised arms—which he doesn’t seem to have strength to raise—I slash his throat clear back to the spinal column. The rust-brown corpse gravy oozes thickly through the flap, his already discolored face paling visibly as it leaves his skull. 

I don’t want to step up to him without first taking off his arms and he won’t hold them up for me. Dropping my bag I put both hands to the handle of my panga and swing a hard chopping blow between his shoulder and elbow on either side. His limbs tumble to the linoleum, rank blood splats from his stumps. Instead of charging me in a rage, though, he backs off, moaning miserably. I draw my hammer, switch hands with my panga. I do the same snare drum snap with the hammer as I’d done with the girl. He falls to his knees and maybe I’m seeing things but his dead mottled face looks relieved.

“Another one of those, huh?” says a sharp-toned female voice behind me. I turn to see Marta, carrying a cloth shopping bag of her own. “I dropped four of ‘em on my way here. Looked sick as dogs.”

I’m looking around the pharmacy area. It occurs to me I might need something while I’m here.

“Don’t even think about it,” says Marta. “I got all the good shit.”

“Good for you,” I say. I go to the vitamins and start scooping bottles of Vitamin C supplements into my bag.

“What the hell you want all that for?”

I go to the aspirin aisle and scoop the shelves there. I consider getting another bag, maybe a cart. On the other hand, there’s plenty of places to loot between here and Colorado Springs. We really need to finish this up and hit the road….

“Wait,” Marta says as I turn to go. I stop and she runs up to me. I resume walking as she catches up. “Look, you don’t have to be all anti-social and stuff. I’m not gonna give you grief like those other little show-offy shits.”

“Nice to know. I take it you’re not bothering with the ice?”

“Fuck that. Old Man Kerch got plenty of ice and everything where he is. We’ll get the runty and the rotten and the leftovers down at the high school, like since we got corralled in there.”

“You’re telling me this?”

“C’mon. Everyone knows you don’t wanna be here. Including Kerch, I imagine. Better watch your shit, is all I’m sayin’. By the way, was that you hollerin’ a few minutes ago?”

“I thought all you were saying was I’d better watch my shit.”

“Hey, look, those four I killed? I’m not sayin’ I took ‘em on at once. I mean, I’m not sayin’ you—”

“Shhh! Listen!”

It’s a heavy flop-slide, flop-slide. A clattering as the thing gets caught in one of the circular racks of clothing.

“Oh, God,” says Marta. “That thing sounds huge.”

The morbidly obese woman pushes aside the racks like a squat Tyrannosaurus Rex pushing aside trees to get to its prey. Her curly white hair is a nauseous pale yellow from the dead scalp showing beneath but at least the rest of her looks more or less normal. That is, normal about her head. Discounting the red, gore-clotted teeth and mouth, and the rage to rip, rend, and feast in her face.

The rest of her as seen through the streaming rags of her muumuu is a horrible sea of red-yellow holes in a wide ocean of pale, quivering flesh. Globs of rank, yellow fat fall from some of the wounds, especially the one opened in that broad, naked fleshslide flopping over her privates.

“God, no!” and now it’s Marta’s turn to surrender her breakfast.

I bring the panga up and slice it hard through the middle of the woman’s skull. It goes in but not deep enough; it’s sticking. Her arms reach out for me and I lean into the blade and push her back. The blade slices further down the middle of her face, squeaking through the groove it carves through her skull. Finally all 300 pounds of this woman spill over. We jump back barely in time as glistening fatty tissue like bright yellow corn kernels in red gelatin bursts forth from all those bite wounds, ripped wider by the heavy woman’s impact to the floor.

Marta is coughing and spitting. “Goddamn zombie shit!”

“Yeah, that explains the sick ones,” I say through the hand cupped over my face. We’re already moving away from the massive spill on Aisle Get Me the Fuck Outta Here.

“Huh?” says Marta.

“The sick ones with the yellow down their fronts. They’ve been eating the stuff they shit. Off that fat woman.”

“What?”

We hear the gunfire from outside. “Goddamn it,” I mutter under my breath. Mindful of yellow zombie droppings we run down the long aisle to the back of the store where the service doors lead to the prep area and the loading dock.

NEXT: “Their oozing stumps, their foul teeth”

Bleeding Kansas Copyright © 2013, 2014, 2017 by L. Roy Aiken.

All photos from Google Images.