The Zombie Show - Excerpt 3
In those brief few moments, he confessed to himself he had hated his Mama on more than one occasion. Most specifically the needle incident. But he didn’t hate her. Not really. He knew no matter what she said or did, she loved him. Or at least had. Maybe she wasn’t all the way dead. Maybe there was something of her left inside.
“Mama?” Cole’s voice shook. Her room was suddenly silent and he wondered if his mother was herself again or if the dead thing that she’d turned into had stopped to listen. He felt the weight of the quiet in his bones, resonating from his trunk to his fingertips. Cole figured the longer he waited, the worse it would be, regardless of whether Mama or the thing that had been her moments before was there.
Cole clutched his knife, the sandwiches and his empty belly long forgotten. Even though it was where he intended to go, he steered away from her bedroom, closer to the ratty old couch against the far wall. There was a backdoor in the kitchen, but they hadn’t been able to open that since they’d moved in. Her bedroom door came into view and it was a minor and brief relief to see that it was mostly shut. Brief because the door was yanked open and the thing focused a baleful stare on him with his mother’s eyes before charging.
He couldn’t have recalled the last time he’d seen his mother run. It had been years, even before she’d been diagnosed, but this thing did. Cole had nowhere to run. To the right and back to the door would have brought him even closer, to the left and into the kitchen was an even more cramped space. In his panic, he pulled back and held up his arms, his eyes closing involuntarily as he turned his head.
There was a sound as if someone had jabbed a pin into a big, meat-filled balloon and a sharp pain that thrummed up his arm and into his neck. The Mama-thing’s forward motion stopped and so did its guttural grunting. Cole opened his eyes to see she was impossibly close. His arms were still outstretched, the one resting on her shoulder, the other… the other bent sickeningly inward at the elbow, the hand still holding on tightly to the knife.
It chomped the air between them, its arms hanging loosely at its sides as if the thing had not figured out how to use them. He looked into his Mama’s eyes, ignoring the intense pain in his arm as best he could, using it, in fact, to focus him into doing something to save his life.
Those light brown, almost hazel eyes—his were a carbon copy, just as big in a child’s head—were locked onto him, bloodshot and filled with a rudderless hatred. So much hatred, they didn’t look real to him in a way. Like the googly eyes on the armless stuffed monkey in his room. Cole took his free hand, raised it, and fixed his thumb the same way he did before plunging it into the hole of a bowling ball. Mama had been alive not more than a half hour ago; dying, but alive. Maybe she wasn’t all the way dead. It made sense to him on an instinctual level and without hesitation, Cole plunged his thumb into the Mama-thing’s eye socket, hooking it around something behind the eye and yanking.
The thing screeched, shaking its head once before pulling back and wrenching the entire eye out. Cole’s knife hand slapped into his thigh, numb and as useless as her two had been. A fat drop of near-black blood oozed from the new empty hole in the Mama-thing’s face. A red-green froth had begun at her mouth and nose and when he saw she was readying to charge, he let his body do what came natural. Cole’s legs slid out from under him and he rolled forward and to his right, avoiding her just before she crashed into the wall. He tried crawling on his hands and knees, but a sick feeling squeezed his stomach into his chest as he tried to use his broken arm.
Cole felt a foot kick him in the backside as he rolled over onto his back, the arm flapping onto his chest in a manner that looked totally wrong. Mama fell on the floor next to him—she must have dived and missed—and then frog-hopped on top of him.
