The Zombie Show - Excerpt 4
In her healthier years, Mama had been a beautiful, tall, shapely woman. It burned Cole to see how men looked at her, but he knew why they looked. But that had been at least two hundred pounds ago and the full weight of her on his eighty-something pound body drove almost all the air from his lungs. If there was anything good about her size now it was that he suffocate before she could eat him and there was such an ocean of flesh between her face and any part of her body that she simply couldn’t get to him like this.
Cole saw pulsing black spots in his eyes. His free hand began worming between them even before he knew what he was doing. Mama’s hands had begun clawing at the carpet and it sounded as if it were being torn from the floor. She lunged her head at him, snapping her teeth together so hard it hurt his ears and as soon as he got his index and thumb around the butt of the knife, he began tugging it free.
He had seconds before he passed out and gave a series of quick pulls, each one bring his arm farther and farther out. Cole finally tugged his arm free and without hesitation, brought it up high and down, over and over until her jaw froze in place and his hand pulled away without the knife.
The Mama-thing made a sound as if something was caught in her throat. Cole quickly felt up the wide-expanse of her back until he found the end of the knife just below her ear. He pushed up on it and she rolled easily off of him.
She seemed frozen in place, as if the knife had penetrated to a tangle of nerves somewhere inside her head. Cole rolled over onto his knees and straddled her big tummy. He looked into the remaining eye, something akin to fear and perhaps… recognition in it. Her hands and feet began drumming off the floor and he reached up and grabbed the heavy metal ashtray he’d made her in summer camp last year.
Cole aimed for the temple and began swinging, crashing the metal lump into her head until it dented, until flesh broke, until bone was exposed, until brain was exposed…
…until he finally took a breath.
Cole climbed off his Mama’s dead body—not a dead thing trying to kill him—but the woman who’d given birth to and cared for him his entire life. He couldn’t hear his own sobbing voice, but knew he was crying as he stumbled into the bedroom, shoved a hand into her purse and chucked out contents until he had her keys. He didn’t feel the pain of his broken elbow as he shoved the key in the lock of the front door, not taking a moment to look over his shoulder at the corpse lying half-in, half-out of the kitchen.
When he was outside, he screamed. He screamed for someone to help him, to help his mother, but not with words. His was the language of agony, of despair, of hatred freshly born, of love newly dead.
