Zombie Pulp

24

The Conqueror Worms

“Turn and face me, Creel,” came the voice that was oddly eloquent like Death himself yet garbled as if spoken through a mouthful of suet. “Look upon me.”

Creel did as he was told, kneeling there in the mud and slopping brown water, clay packed beneath his fingernails and dirty water running down his face. It was not a voice you could refuse. He looked and his throat filled with hot desert sand, a choking whirlpool of it. His lungs gasping, his eyes refusing to shut out the horror they took in.

The Angel Of Death-for it could be nothing else-was a huge, hulking, bulging mass of muscle, fleshy growths, and corded artery barely contained in a stretched, shining gray skin that was intersected by black suturing, a zigzagging, overlapping maze of it that held it together. It was manlike in form, but bulbous and mounded, its misshapen head bald on one side and sprouting with irregular tufts of long greasy black hair on the other, plated machine-like beneath by a jutting, distorted skull that was trying to burst free, the nose but a skullish cavity, one eye set much lower than the other, black and juicy like a tumor, the other yellow and bright and unbearably sentient.

It stood there breathing with a deathly rasp, its barrel-like chest rising and falling, ribs slats tearing through the skin, knobs of bone protruding from holes worn in the hide. It was like something put together from a dozen separate corpses, stapled and wired and catgut-threaded, a patchwork ghoul made from human hides and oily gray lizard skin and the bristling pelts of hogs. A mortuary crazy quilt. Even its face was an assemblage. Black stitching ran from the crown of its skull, down its forehead and nose and below the jawline. Suturing lines split off it, dividing the face into thirds, then fourths, and finally fifths…each offset and sucked in by hollows or pushed out by abnormal mounds of bone so that the effect was hideous…the blurred, subhuman face of something seen through a cloudy freakshow jar.

It reached down with one hand, fingers wired to the knuckles and hung with ropy strands of skin. It was immense and fleshy, disfigured, as it gripped Creel’s own. And the feel of it…like being embraced by the cold guts of a dead fish…he could feel the squirming larval motion within.

“You’ve hunted death your entire life,” it said to him, swollen black lips peeling open from pockets of scar tissue and intricate stitching to reveal glossy yellow-gray teeth. “Now death hunts you and has found you.”

“Please…”

It reached in his bag, emptying his collection of mortuary photos over his head like pillow down.

“Mercy?” it breathed. “At this juncture? Really, Creel. I expected more. I have cast aside my shroud to reveal my true nature…maybe at this hour, you would do the same…show us the ghoul within…expose it so we may gloat upon its unbearable ugliness…”

“Dear God…just let me live,” Creel sobbed. “Please just let me live…”

But the creature had no intention of that. It had been pursuing him for sometime now and this was the crossroads of their fates which had been twined together from the very first, from the moment Creel had stepped upon his first battlefield and seen his first ravaged corpse and taken his first photograph for his private morgue. “You came to see and you came to know,” it said to him. “Now you will SEE and soon you will KNOW…”

Then without hesitation, it released him, grasped a few strands of loose stitching at its chest and, like a child unthreading a bootlace, pulled itself open and unwound itself and Creel screamed as what was inside came flooding out in a slimy gushing river that covered him, enveloped him, drowning him in a steaming, wriggling sea of grave-maggots. They filled the trench, rising and bursting over the banks of sandbags and he fought in their depths like a swimmer going down for the last time. His fingers broke the surface of the squirming, noxious sea, but no more. They were at his eyes, in his ears, up his nostrils and pressing through the cleft at his ass. His mouth pulled open in a demented scream of violation and they flowed down his throat, filling him, gagging him, plummeting him into loathsome charnel depths, suffocating him on the death he had sought and finally made his own.

He sank beneath the carrion graveworm waters and the reanimated, carefully-sewn husk that had held the Angel of Death within collapsed like a balloon bled of air, just a collection of yellow bones and a shroud of skin that drifted to earth like a sheet blown from a line.

And from every quarter, the dead sank back into their holes, sunless, bleached faces closing their eyes for a final time and limbs going stiff and trunks dissolving into pools of maggoty rottenness and hot gassy putridity. Soon they were only carcasses, what was inside taking wing in great buzzing black clouds of corpse-flies seeking higher plains and fresher winds.