Curran Array - Zombie Pulp

But, as Strand explained, he could not.

He told Bolan what it was like with Mama Lucille being gone, how it had all pulled out his guts, emptied him, the grief stuffing something else back in there that was poisoned and foul. He told Bolan how he had gone to the straw-witch and paid her and all the rest.

“ Then I dug her up and she was dead…but she was alive,” Strand said.

But not really alive, he admitted. She was animate, but not human anymore. After she had woken up down in that grave, he climbed out of there, his mind just gone to sauce. He ran home and hid in the farmhouse and Mama Lucille followed him.

Strand was running his hands through his hair roughly like he wanted to yank it out by the roots. “She…she wasn’t mama, she was something else. Like a living scarecrow, something that should not walk but did. Not human, not like me and you. Not warm and feeling, just a cold shell… walking, breathing meat.”

She would not speak, Strand said.

She made funny hissing sounds and grunting noises like a hog rooting in soil, but that was about it. She did not sleep. She walked around the house, flies nesting in her hair and mouth and she did not seem to care. She would stand in the hallway for hours staring into space or in the corner just looking at the wall. At night, she would pace back and forth, that black flyblown stink hanging on her. Once, she got outside and laid down in the turnip patch. By the time Strand found her, there were beetles and ants tunneling in her.

“ I…I tried to pretend she were really mama, sheriff, I know it’s blasphemy and I’m going to rot in the bowels of hell, but I just weren’t thinking right,” he said in a squeaking, childish voice. “I wanted her to be mama, I needed her to be mama. I tried to get her to eat. I gave her soup and bread and taters with no salt just like Missy Crow said, but mama wouldn’t touch it. Then…then two days ago, I dug a grave out in the field and I made her lay in it. I buried her down near five feet. She was dead, she was walking carrion, stinking and rotting and always chattering her teeth like she were hungry. But she was dead so I buried her.

“ I thought that would be the end of things. That she was dead and she would stay dead. Eileen had left me, she never saw none of it. When I went to dig up mama she just left, went back to her people, I reckon. I was thinking that the madness had passed and things could be sane again. But that night…that night I was lying in my bed and I heard Rafe Short’s old hound begin to howl down the road a piece and I knew what was going to happen, I just knew it. Then I heard the creaking of those loose boards out on the porch and the door opening. Then those slow, heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. I think…I think I screamed when the door opened. Mama stood there in the moonlight coming in through the window and I smelled her long before that and heard all them flies buzzing on her. She stood there, just dirty and moldering and wormy, clods of earth falling off of her. She was holding out her hands to me like she wanted something, chattering her teeth, just chattering and chattering those teeth…but I knew what she wanted, God help me, but I knew what she wanted.”

Bolan looked a little sick himself by that point. He crushed out his cigarette under his boot. “And what was that? Tell me, boy.”

Strand licked his lips. “Meat. She wanted meat. She wanted salt. Missy said not to give her none, but I did. I had a joint of beef, raw and bloody, and I gave it to her. I dumped salt all over it. She chewed it right down to the bone…just gnawing and chomping on it, then licking it. When I tried to take it away from her, she snarled at me, she hissed and there was something in her eyes, something evil, Sheriff. It hadn’t been there before. Something black and godless and…and hungry.”

Strand said she went down in the root cellar with her bone and he could hear her down there nibbling on it. He ran out of the house and did not come back until the next night, which was last night. Eileen must have come home and found Mama Lucille…and Mama Lucille found Eileen.

“ Oh dear God, Sheriff,” Strand said, barely able to catch his breath. “I came home and right away I could smell it…that bloody, raw smell like you get around butchering time. I found mama with Eileen. She had bitten most of the meat off her face and eaten her fingers. She was chewing on her leg when I got there.”

“ What did you do?”

“ I hid in the corn patch all night,” Strand said. “I thought she would come after me, too. Then I got on my horse and I rode off. I was heading out of Boone County and never coming back. Then a couple hours ago, I thought I better come and see you.”

Bolan thought it over for a long time. Then he stood up and strapped on his Army. 44s. “All right, we better go take care of this, son. Ain’t no one but us that can.”

*

Missy Crow was sitting on her porch when they rode up. “I warned ye, Luke Strand. Did I not warn ye, boy, what ye were bringing onto yerself by calling up the dead? Oh, I knowed, God, how I knowed! I knewed ye wouldn’t listen! I knewed ye’d feed her the salt and the meat!”

Bolan dismounted his dappled mare, tying her off at the hitch post. “Then you know, don’t you, you old hag? You know what you’ve brought to being here? What terrible things you’ve set into motion?”

The straw-witch pulled off her ash pipe, grinning like a stuffed ape. “It’s not what I set into motion, Sheriff. It was that fool there! He’s the one! His mind and his hands and his heart! I was not the fire that burned down his house and damned his soul!”

“But you struck the match, you old witch,” Bolan told her, trying desperately to keep his hands from his guns.

Strand was beyond fear now, beyond retribution. He was just pale and small and lifeless. “She were not human, Missy Crow. She killed my wife…she et her…”

The straw-witch laughed with a booming, unpleasant sound like thudding from inside a buried box. “Ye gave her the salt? Ye gave her the meat? I cain’t help ye now, boy, ye brought this on yerself! She were a dead, mindless thing before, but now she’s something else! There’s things out there, boy, hungry and evil things that were never meant to be born…but now ye have birthed one and it’s in yer mama, hear? A scratching, hungry pestilence! Ye have to bury her deep in a chained box! Let her go back to death, let her feed on herself, starve until there’s nothing left but bones!”

Bolan had pulled one of his. 44s now. “I should put you down right now, you goddamn hag.”

“Yes, maybe ye should, Sheriff. But ye won’t. No sir, ye won’t. It’s not in ye to kill an old woman even if she be the devil’s own.” Missy Crow leaned forward in her rocker, her eyes blazing and sulfurous. “Hear me well, Sheriff Bolan. Ye might be thinking of mayhap riding up here with a posse tonight or tomorrow to burn me out. But ye better think on that careful. I know yer wife is with child. Didn’t know that, eh? Well, she is, boy, she certainly is. I knowed what’s growing in her now and I also knowed what could be growing in her if I make it so! Something with teeth that would bite her from inside. Now ye don’t want that, do ye?”

Bolan was taken aback, but not for long. “Listen to me, you hag. You’ve existed in this county because I’m a tolerant man. Now I give you fair warning: get out. Get out of my county before that posse does come, you hear me?”

Missy Crow just nodded. “I hear, Sheriff. I hear just fine.”

*

It was sundown by the time they reached the Strand farm.

And just riding up there, Bolan could feel something like fingers unfurling in his belly, white and cold and clutching. If there had been doubts seeded in his brain, looking for soil to spread their roots, they were gone now. There was something spiritually defiled about the farmhouse, a palpable sense of rottenness that was not sensed with only the nose. It crawled and coiled like it was looking for a throat to wrap itself around.