Texas Ghoul Dancing
Oct. 31st, 2011 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonThe storm has finally passed. Three slices of dust speckled sunbeams filter through the blinds lighting up a dead room. The man sits hunched over on the edge of a bed with sheets the color of cobwebs, reeking of cheap aftershave and cheaper whiskey, hands in his lap holding both a beaten up old Stetson and a cigarette curling blue smoke off a red cherry. His hound dog eyes, covered in two pools of shadows, looks back on one, long vicious cock sucker of a day.
Border Towns have their own unique problems from the rest of America. Hands down Grave Traders are the worst. Death Merchants & Evil sons of bitches every last one of them. They provide unscrupulous ranch owners and farmers with cheap illegal ghoul labor. Bad as that is, it's not the worse. See Grave Traders (GTs for short) don't find ghouls, they make them. Under the guise of smugglers, the GT prey off the desperate, taking whatever scraps of cash hard up Mexican families can afford and promising them passage through the border and into the Land of the Free. Packed in the back of a cab like cattle, dozens of men, women and children squeezed, shoved and piled into trucks to never be seen again. That's how they do it. They don't shoot 'em. To messy. Besides they don't have to. Why waste bullets when you can just let them asphyxiate, dehydrate and starve to death.
Know that one of the simplest ways to kill a man is the time honored tradition of sitting back and doing nothing.
Once they've 'Turned' the next step is making them "Presentable". A complicated procedure that's one part circus trainer, one part jail warden and one part butcher. First thing you gotta do is rope 'em. Usually a hook on a pool will do the trick. Then you drag 'em out, keep 'em in relatively in one spot and then have a designated man knock out their jaws with a sledgehammer. These men are often jokingly referred to as "Dentists". Next up is the significantly more difficult procedure of removing the tips of their fingers. After all a scratch'll infect you just as good as a bite. Just takes longer that's all. After that they drop them off where they'll be 'trained' to pick harvests, provide manual labor and do all that other shit that no one wants to pay $5.15 an hour to have done.
The problem is that inevitably something goes wrong. They get greedy and pack too many of the poor fucks in a truck, so that sooner or later they'll spill out in a meat wave before you can get the cab door shut back again. Sometimes the hook breaks. The Dentist misses with the hammer. Gets bit. Turns before the other GT can put 'em down. Now you have a mob of unruly undead wandering around the desert.
Which is exactly what must've happened one mile outside of Unity.
Thunder crackles through the storm cloud hanging low above the U-Haul sitting a few dozen yards off the Interstate. Surrounding the truck are twenty or so walking dead. A few are hunched over by the back, fighting each other for the last scraps of meat left on the bones of a hapless GT. The rest are sleepwalk swarming towards the lone Sheriff, who has found himself in the unenviable position of being pinned on his back and wrestling for his life with one of them.
A veil of hair falls across his face while a pair of blood stained teeth snap in bursts inches from Laredo's throat. He's got both hands wrapped around her wrists, pushing the ghouls body back up even as it tries to lean in closer for a bite. The thing they never tell you about the Walking Dead is that, despite what you might've seen in the movies, they're strong as shit when their recently turned. This is because often there is a significant amount of adrenalin produced by the body before it succumbs to what is often referred to as "Argento Syndrome".
A fact currently irrelevant to a man Ghoul Dancing for both his life and after-life.
"Fer Fucks Sake Cicero take the shot... take the shot!!!" he screams.
Behind him, emerging from the passenger window of an old blue Apache, a Bonobo in an army green fishing cap leans out and carefully aims a Colt .45, narrows his black button eyes, shrieks dismissively and cracks out a single shot.
Brain juice and undiluted gore splatter across the sheriffs face as the ghoul goes limp in Laredo's grip. He pushes her off and scrambles to his feet just as another half dozen appear within grabbing reach of him. He hears a loud burst of thunder above him and four more miniature bursts of gunfire behind. One, two, three and four creeps dropped with a bullet perfectly buried between the eyes. Laredo lounges for his own pistol, dropped in his brief skirmish when he first arrived and thought the woman was a car wreck victim. He fires: One, two, three, four and five shots slam into what appears to be a Mexican Tor Johnson. It takes the sixth, blowing a crater clear through the back of the skull, before El Tor finally goes down.
"Cover me!" Laredo hollers at Cicero, running for the truck. The Bonobo, finished reloading shrieks affirmatively and takes down another six without wasting a single shot. Laredo reaches into the back of the truck, stops to un-holster his flask and pound back a shot of another kind, then yanks the 12 gauge shotgun behind the seat free.
The sheriff slams the door shut revealing a twelve year old boy missing the lower half of his face so that he wears a perpetual sardonicus smile. They just stand there for a long second looking at each other. The rain finally falls down on them. Blood gargles in it's mouth as it releases a furnace blast of a moan. The sheriff raises his shotgun...
"Fuck you" he tells a God he is increasingly learning to hate, the now headless boy slumped at his feet. It's the smoke in his eyes, he tells himself, when he feels the tears building up.
After the last ones are picked off, Laredo makes his way to the truck. He opens the door and catches someone getting out on the other side, running. He doesn't have to say a word. Cicero aims, fires and the man goes down in the sand, his left knee cap blown out from the back. Laredo drops his 12 gauge and draws his pistol walking slowly through the torrential down pour until he's hovering over to the man trying to crawl away.
He puts a shot clean through the mans other leg. The man scream can be heard over the rumbling storm.
"Freeze" he tells him and fires a warning shot into the lumbar section of the spine, "You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent..." and puts one more between his head. He looks down and see Cicero looking up at him. Cicero whimpers.
"I know buddy, I know... let's go home."
Laredo sits there watching the smoke drift in and out of the slats of light. There is a cold draft that blows into the room, the smoke begins to shimmer, sparkle almost, gathering the dust and the light around it. Slowly with the poetry of a mirage, Sally Mae rematerializes in front of Laredo.
"Oh Baby" he tells her, cold gray eyes, bloodshot framed, emerge from those two pools of shadows. Sally Mae, mute as the day she died some hundred odd years ago, floats out of the smoke and envelopes Laredo Beaumont with a love both cold as the grave and just as honest too.
***
Alright, now to end our Coffin Hop tour of the Dark Side of the Blogosphere - a contest!!!
Two, yes, two lucky readers will have a chance to win an autographed copy of my debut novel - "High Midnight". Just pop down into the comments below and answer two very simple questions:
1) What is the name of the publisher that's put out 'High Midnight' (along with plenty of other great literary horror treats you should really check out)?
2) The only sure-fire way to kill a zombie is...?
A few important notes. Due to shipping restrictions contest applies only to folks living here in the United States. All comments will be screened and the winners will be chosen at random. So, we cool then?
Border Towns have their own unique problems from the rest of America. Hands down Grave Traders are the worst. Death Merchants & Evil sons of bitches every last one of them. They provide unscrupulous ranch owners and farmers with cheap illegal ghoul labor. Bad as that is, it's not the worse. See Grave Traders (GTs for short) don't find ghouls, they make them. Under the guise of smugglers, the GT prey off the desperate, taking whatever scraps of cash hard up Mexican families can afford and promising them passage through the border and into the Land of the Free. Packed in the back of a cab like cattle, dozens of men, women and children squeezed, shoved and piled into trucks to never be seen again. That's how they do it. They don't shoot 'em. To messy. Besides they don't have to. Why waste bullets when you can just let them asphyxiate, dehydrate and starve to death.
Know that one of the simplest ways to kill a man is the time honored tradition of sitting back and doing nothing.
Once they've 'Turned' the next step is making them "Presentable". A complicated procedure that's one part circus trainer, one part jail warden and one part butcher. First thing you gotta do is rope 'em. Usually a hook on a pool will do the trick. Then you drag 'em out, keep 'em in relatively in one spot and then have a designated man knock out their jaws with a sledgehammer. These men are often jokingly referred to as "Dentists". Next up is the significantly more difficult procedure of removing the tips of their fingers. After all a scratch'll infect you just as good as a bite. Just takes longer that's all. After that they drop them off where they'll be 'trained' to pick harvests, provide manual labor and do all that other shit that no one wants to pay $5.15 an hour to have done.
The problem is that inevitably something goes wrong. They get greedy and pack too many of the poor fucks in a truck, so that sooner or later they'll spill out in a meat wave before you can get the cab door shut back again. Sometimes the hook breaks. The Dentist misses with the hammer. Gets bit. Turns before the other GT can put 'em down. Now you have a mob of unruly undead wandering around the desert.
Which is exactly what must've happened one mile outside of Unity.
Thunder crackles through the storm cloud hanging low above the U-Haul sitting a few dozen yards off the Interstate. Surrounding the truck are twenty or so walking dead. A few are hunched over by the back, fighting each other for the last scraps of meat left on the bones of a hapless GT. The rest are sleepwalk swarming towards the lone Sheriff, who has found himself in the unenviable position of being pinned on his back and wrestling for his life with one of them.
A veil of hair falls across his face while a pair of blood stained teeth snap in bursts inches from Laredo's throat. He's got both hands wrapped around her wrists, pushing the ghouls body back up even as it tries to lean in closer for a bite. The thing they never tell you about the Walking Dead is that, despite what you might've seen in the movies, they're strong as shit when their recently turned. This is because often there is a significant amount of adrenalin produced by the body before it succumbs to what is often referred to as "Argento Syndrome".
A fact currently irrelevant to a man Ghoul Dancing for both his life and after-life.
"Fer Fucks Sake Cicero take the shot... take the shot!!!" he screams.
Behind him, emerging from the passenger window of an old blue Apache, a Bonobo in an army green fishing cap leans out and carefully aims a Colt .45, narrows his black button eyes, shrieks dismissively and cracks out a single shot.
Brain juice and undiluted gore splatter across the sheriffs face as the ghoul goes limp in Laredo's grip. He pushes her off and scrambles to his feet just as another half dozen appear within grabbing reach of him. He hears a loud burst of thunder above him and four more miniature bursts of gunfire behind. One, two, three and four creeps dropped with a bullet perfectly buried between the eyes. Laredo lounges for his own pistol, dropped in his brief skirmish when he first arrived and thought the woman was a car wreck victim. He fires: One, two, three, four and five shots slam into what appears to be a Mexican Tor Johnson. It takes the sixth, blowing a crater clear through the back of the skull, before El Tor finally goes down.
"Cover me!" Laredo hollers at Cicero, running for the truck. The Bonobo, finished reloading shrieks affirmatively and takes down another six without wasting a single shot. Laredo reaches into the back of the truck, stops to un-holster his flask and pound back a shot of another kind, then yanks the 12 gauge shotgun behind the seat free.
The sheriff slams the door shut revealing a twelve year old boy missing the lower half of his face so that he wears a perpetual sardonicus smile. They just stand there for a long second looking at each other. The rain finally falls down on them. Blood gargles in it's mouth as it releases a furnace blast of a moan. The sheriff raises his shotgun...
"Fuck you" he tells a God he is increasingly learning to hate, the now headless boy slumped at his feet. It's the smoke in his eyes, he tells himself, when he feels the tears building up.
After the last ones are picked off, Laredo makes his way to the truck. He opens the door and catches someone getting out on the other side, running. He doesn't have to say a word. Cicero aims, fires and the man goes down in the sand, his left knee cap blown out from the back. Laredo drops his 12 gauge and draws his pistol walking slowly through the torrential down pour until he's hovering over to the man trying to crawl away.
He puts a shot clean through the mans other leg. The man scream can be heard over the rumbling storm.
"Freeze" he tells him and fires a warning shot into the lumbar section of the spine, "You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent..." and puts one more between his head. He looks down and see Cicero looking up at him. Cicero whimpers.
"I know buddy, I know... let's go home."
Laredo sits there watching the smoke drift in and out of the slats of light. There is a cold draft that blows into the room, the smoke begins to shimmer, sparkle almost, gathering the dust and the light around it. Slowly with the poetry of a mirage, Sally Mae rematerializes in front of Laredo.
"Oh Baby" he tells her, cold gray eyes, bloodshot framed, emerge from those two pools of shadows. Sally Mae, mute as the day she died some hundred odd years ago, floats out of the smoke and envelopes Laredo Beaumont with a love both cold as the grave and just as honest too.
Alright, now to end our Coffin Hop tour of the Dark Side of the Blogosphere - a contest!!!
Two, yes, two lucky readers will have a chance to win an autographed copy of my debut novel - "High Midnight". Just pop down into the comments below and answer two very simple questions:
1) What is the name of the publisher that's put out 'High Midnight' (along with plenty of other great literary horror treats you should really check out)?
2) The only sure-fire way to kill a zombie is...?
A few important notes. Due to shipping restrictions contest applies only to folks living here in the United States. All comments will be screened and the winners will be chosen at random. So, we cool then?