Edward Lorn - Crawl

She creaked out another lackluster “Help me,” to whoever would listen, before elbow-launching forward again. This time she cracked her chin against the soft-packed ground and bit her tongue. The taste of pennies rolled around inside her mouth. She’d crushed her boobs, too, which was only slightly less agonizing than the lacerated tongue.

She hauled herself onto her elbows again. Not wanting to risk breaking a rib or cracking her sternum, she eased up, pushed forward, and rolled onto her forearms.

There, that’s better.

Her right elbow tore open as she moved from the clearing to the road. The fresh wound leaked thick blood onto the clay and spread, like ink on glass. Whimpering, Juliet rolled to her side and fingered the wound. It wasn’t more than an inch long and not too deep, but it bled as if she’d hit an artery. Superficial wounds always bleed the worst , she recalled reading in one magazine or another.

Juliet rested. Whether or not her weakness and lack of motivation stemmed from blood loss, she couldn’t have said, and didn’t really care, either. The world had become a blurred spectacle of muddy white light. It pulsed and thrummed. And behind it all, the wax and wane of someone’s car engine, set to idle, mocking her, driving her hazy mind mad with frustration.

“Come down here and get me or go the fuck away, you lousy shit,” Juliet croaked. She flopped over onto her back and laid her head back on the cool earth. She tried to find the stars through the boughs above, or maybe the first hint of approaching dawn seeping through the branches. Neither greeted her. The space between the entwined branches was dark; an unceasing, uncaring blackness. A void. Her hopes died there.

“ Fuuuuuuuuuuck !” she wailed, drumming the balls of her fists at her sides. “ I can’t die like this !”

Her head lolled to the side as she wept, wallowing in her own weakness. Blissfully aware that she no longer felt her split feet and sure that cold death now circulated through her veins instead of warm, life-sustaining blood, Juliet closed her eyes and prayed for the end.

“Just don’t lemme suffer, okay?” she asked God in a small, pitiful voice. “Lemme fall asleep and not wake up. Let it be like that”—her voice hitched with emotion—“okay, God? Okay? Please ?”

The idling engine revved. Juliet heard the transmission shift with a clunk, and then tires crunching gravel.

They ( who? ) were coming. Juliet realized this in the middle of an inhalation of air. She choked on that breath as she rolled over and pushed up on her hands. A black shape blocked the lower half of the ball of light pouring in from the end of the tunnel of trees. No headlights. Not that they were needed, what with the grand illumination behind the wide-bodied car. The vehicle rolled along slowly, as if it still only idled, and a spike of fear drove into the space between Juliet’s breasts.

“It’s him,” she said, with the utmost certainty, not really seeing him but quite clearly picturing the red priest grinning over the Merc’s steering wheel.

The evil son of a bitch is coming back to see if I’m still alive. How nice of him. I wish I had a .357 Magnum and a shovel with which to properly thank him for being so attentive.

Another voice, this one sounding a lot like the husband she’d lost track of, entered her thoughts. Julie? Julie, babe? You think you might wanna hide? Maybe he’s coming back to finish what he started, and you shouldn’t be around to find out how he plans on doing that.

Hide? Hide where?

The scrub.

But there’s something bad in there.

You don’t know if it’s real. You know the red priest is real. Really real.

But the sneaker—

Fuck the sneaker, Julie. Get your ass into the scrub!

Before another bit of argumentative chatter could vomit forth, she felt herself rolling to the side, her feet slapping about like wet flippers. There was only a soft glow of pain this time, just enough to let her know it was there, and she had a fleeting thought that, if she made it out of this ordeal alive, she’d have a closet full of shoes she’d never get to wear again.

Juliet came to rest in a pile of leaves at the edge of the tree line. She hauled herself with tired hands through two bushes and into the woods she’d previously been too terrified to enter. She hid behind thick shrubbery, head propped on her uninjured elbow.

She had no idea if the red priest had seen her escape into the trees. Minutes passed like hours. Juliet found that, at some point, she’d started counting, and was now up to three-hundred-fifty. She stopped her tallying of the seconds and held her breath, listening for the telltale crunch and hum of trundling tires. She reached out, drew a thicket of tightly woven twigs apart, and witnessed the Mercury’s languid passing. The car couldn’t have been going any more than two or three miles per hour. She let out a blast of pent-up oxygen.

The red priest hadn’t seen her. Or at least Juliet assumed as much. If he had, she’d already be dead. Of that she was sure.

Juliet lay prostrate, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths.

A few feet to her right, the dead teenager with the half-crushed-in face glanced around the trunk of a tree, waved, and disappeared again. Like a child playing peekaboo.

Juliet pressed her hands down at her sides and edged back, dragging her legs out in front of her. She backed into a tree and sat trembling against its rough bark. She buried her feet in leaves so she wouldn’t have to see them.

Any number of things could have peeked around that tree trunk and scared Juliet less than the cold terror she felt now. There was no mistaking the dead ginger for a hallucination. He was there. This was true. But something about him didn’t seem right. His head lolled to one side, and even though his arm was extended and flopping around in a “Hello there!” fashion, his wrist was limp. Actually, everything about him looked limp. Even zombies had a bit of stability to them, didn’t they?

Actually, Julie, babe, zomb-zombs don’t exist. Dawn of the Dead is a piece of fiction, not a documentary.

“Then what’s that?” she asked. Her own words startled her, and she flattened against the tree, glancing left to right to find the source of the voice.

The dead teenager leaned out from the trunk a little more and waggled his head at her.

Then, he spoke.

“ Boogedy boo !”

Juliet gasped, then frowned. “The fuck?”

She said this because the dead teen hadn’t truly spoken. Its purple lips hadn’t moved. The crooked jaw didn’t even flex. He hung there, jutting from the trunk, as animated as a sack of laundry. And that’s when she saw the filthy fingernails. Dirty fingers wrapped around the wrist supported the teen’s floppy hand. Soot-blackened digits were also dug in around the back of the neck. Someone was using the boy’s corpse like a puppet. Someone with hands. Someone human.

Now a new problem came to light. Who was she more scared of? The red priest or the unseen puppeteer? The devilish clergymen who’d kidnapped and nailed her to a post out in the woods or the sick Twinkie who had turned a dead teenager into a Muppet? This Sunday, Sunday , SUNDAY ! at the Tree Dome: Evil Fuck versus Morbid Comedian! GETCHER TIGGIDS !

“ Boogedy boo !” the macabre ventriloquist repeated. The dead teen was made to waggle his head at her again.

Juliet shuddered in disgust rather than terror. Her brain made the illogical conclusion that, because this asshole had a sense of humor, albeit a twisted one, he didn’t mean her any real harm. Sure, his actions disturbed her, but he wasn’t actively trying to kill her, as she assumed the red priest intended.