*****
As Charlie Farro dreamed of the girl who'd broken his heart, the rabbits that had taken refuge in his compound first heard then smelled the fast approaching screaming monstrosities.
The men reeked of death and madness. The rabbits stopped chewing on the remaining vegetables and marijuana plants as they sensed the mad men coming closer. At first it was just a few that broke and ran but within seconds a small furry stampede was underway. The only ones that were still in the compound as the men found their way inside were the ones that had been gorging themselves on the marijuana plants. They may have sensed the danger but were much too mellow and relaxed to be very concerned about it.
The chain link fence that surrounded his trailer was indeed six feet high, but Charlie had grown complacent and not checked its overall condition in twelve years. The sections nearest his trailer looked intact, overgrown here and there with climbing vines, but from where he could drive his scooter the fence seemed secure and insurmountable.
The problem was since nearly half the fence was beyond the scooter's range, or in areas too impassable to visit, he never noticed the three separate sections which had fallen down to varying degrees over the years. Two medium size sections had been crushed by fallen trees many years earlier. The other section had lost its support pole's concrete footing from constant water erosion in the stream bed and also collapsed.
As the record player continued in repeat mode, playing the same album over and over, the music attracted but in no way served to soothe the savage beast.
Charlie had installed quite a few large outdoor speakers on five foot tall wooden poles throughout his garden. He did this because he strongly believed his plants grew better when exposed to classic rock music. In addition to Lynyrd Skynyrd he knew marijuana grew best while being serenaded to with a wide variety of music including The Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Blue Oyster Cult, and Three Dog Night.
After stumbling into the moonlit garden the two men, which Colonel Lester would have classified as Screamers, attacked everything around them including all the plants that got in their way. They pulled and tore at the poles and ripped and bit at the wires until the music was nearly silenced. The two Screamers missed some speakers on the far side of the garden and the music continued to play, just much less loudly, as they finally noticed the rabbits strewn about on the ground.
Being Screamers, they were both very much alive and extremely hungry. They literally stumbled on the sleeping rabbits that had eaten some of the marijuana plants, ripped the furry animals to shreds, and feasted as the songs continued to play- albeit at a much lower volume. With over two dozen comatose rabbits to dine on there was no lack of food.
Since they'd become infected the men had been in an almost constant state of rage marked with explosive attacks on anything occasionally including each other and some of The Dead Heads, when they sometimes got in their way. They found very little fresh meat to eat over the last few days as the animals that used to reside in the park had run away. So, finding twenty rabbits in a comatose state was an excellent opportunity to eat their fill. They bit, ripped, and ate voraciously- reveling in the feast much the way a fat man will make multiple trips back to the dessert offerings at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
After a while, the pair of Screamers stumbled about in the pitiful looking remains of the garden and felt something other than the relentless explosive rage that had consumed their every thought since the moment of their infection. The one who used to be known as Gabriel began giggling while staring at the moon, felt dizzy, and finally fell into the dirt. He rolled over onto his back and grinned with blood stained lips up at the black velvet sky pin pricked with stars. His mind was still extremely confused yet, at least for the time being, he felt totally non violent as he gazed at the bright stars and moon.
His infected companion, who used to be called Exavier, staggered over and saw Gabriel smiling serenely up at the sky and tried to scream. The powerful desire to shriek and howl was somehow muted. His mind was just as affected with the Marijuana's chemical, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol or THC for short, as his giggling star gazing companion. The scream didn't come forth, instead he muttered, “Hola,” and sprawled out in the dirt beside Gabriel and smiled.
Gabriel smiled back and answered, “Hola,” then returned to looking at the moon.
Gradually, with the passing of time, they managed to speak in multiple word sentences as the moon floated across the star filled night sky. “Feel... weird-, why here?” Gabriel asked as he looked at the man he grew up with and was almost able to recognize.
For countless pot heads, the question, “Why here?” was perhaps the most identifiable with that he could have asked. But unlike the deep philosophical debates regarding the question of existence often debated under the influence of marijuana, Gabriel was meaning why are we here sitting in the dirt and staring up at the moon.
Of course, that's not to suggest that many uninfected college students hadn't found themselves in similar circumstances at one time or another- usually after a wild party or while on Spring Break, for example.
“Dreams... bad- smell... sh... shit,” Exavier responded feeling slightly less confused, yet still unable to make the leap back to where his mind used to be. He sniffed both his own and Gabriel’s pants that were packed full of four days worth of excrement.
This is also not an unheard of occurrence with some of the more experimental collegians throughout the world of academia.
He started giggling again and Gabriel joined him as far off in the distance they heard a scream. They both felt a momentary urge to answer the call but just laughed harder while rolling around in the dirt. Chewing on fresh rabbit meat, laughing at the moon, swaying to the music, and sometimes drinking from the small stream, time passed and they felt happy. They were both confused and disoriented with little sense of time or where they were- again very similar to many other marijuana users.
Regrettably, all good things must come to an end. And just like kids caught getting high in their parents basement, the good times came to an end. In this case it wasn't their parents who were about to ruin their party but a one armed hermit who did not like trespassers.
Charlie awoke to Cha-ka chirping and tugging at his ears. The little monkey bounced on his chest as laughter could be heard coming from somewhere nearby in the darkness. Momentarily disoriented, he looked around while reaching for his pistol. He pulled it out of its holster and reached by the wall of his trailer for the fuse box he had rigged up between the solar panels on the roof of his trailer and the batteries in the storage shed. He found the floodlights switch and turned them on.
The lights exposed the totally devastated garden across the stream that flowed by his trailer. Every one of his plants was destroyed. The corn stalks and tomato bushes were trampled or eaten, but far more infuriating to Charlie, every single one of his nearly nine foot tall marijuana plants were gone. It looked like someone had purposely ripped them out of the ground.
He noticed the music was much quieter as well and saw three poles where the speakers used to hang were bent at angles as if they'd been pulled down. Tears flowed down his cheeks as he looked upon his devastated garden, his life's work, his pseudo children senselessly ripped and torn apart. Decades spent creating his idea of a new Garden of Eden was utterly ruined. His fortress of solitude, hidden far away from the evils of the civilized world, was gone forever.
Charlie screamed a long loud bellow, “Who did this?!” and managed to stand up clutching his walking stick with his prosthetic arm while holding the Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver in his badly trembling left hand.
His whole body was shuddered in rage as he saw the two bloody dirty men stand up and look at him with vacant grins on their faces. He cocked the gun and took aim. The gun was shaking as he tried to focus on the intruders and not the devastation they had brought to his home.
Gabriel, the tall lanky wearing a faded denim vest and jeans, with a bandana tied around hi
s forehead had dark curly hair that matched the color of his mustache and black beard. He smiled widely with his dry blood covered face and said, “Hola.”
That greeting was followed seconds later by Exavier, who was much shorter and wore a bloody knit cap and a large Groucho Marx style mustache. He gave a sort of half remembered wave with his fingers and also managed to say, “Hola,” while smiling at Charlie.
Had they said anything else without those gigantic idiotic smiles on their faces, Charlie Farro might have asked some questions before he fired the gun. But seeing them stupidly grinning amidst his devastated life's work was too much for him. Charlie screamed and sputtered incoherently as he repeated pulled the trigger.
He fired three shots into the tall man and Gabriel flew backward off his feet and fell dead with his arms and legs splayed wide.
Gabriel laughed and turned to watch his friend being propelled backward several feet. It was confusing to the little man but very funny looking. He turned back to face Charlie, chuckled, and said in a hopeful tone of voice, “Me too.”
Charlie smiled briefly and shouted, “You got it, dumb-ass! Then fired two more times at the short man. The bullets both hit him, but even as Gabriel was lifted off the ground by the force of impact and flew backward with his fatal gunshots wounds, he managed to laugh briefly before crashing into the dirt with a mystified smile on his face. From where he stood Charlie couldn't see it, but Exavier had an almost identical grin as he quickly left the world of the living.
Cha-ka screeched and scurried onto the trailer's roof and stared down with her tail flicking rapidly in the air behind her. The monkey was terribly scared and confused while Charlie stood trembling and staring at the carnage and destruction. He was very much lost in deep thoughts.
Your average one armed, pot growing, hermit that just murdered two men might be thinking about a variety of things. Will the police come? How can I dispose of the bodies? Will their friends come and exact revenge? Who the Hell did I just kill? However, Charlie had none of those questions floating through his mind. His thoughts were dark and only of himself.
Everything is gone. They stole it from me. What do I do now?
True, I have enough seeds to grow a whole forest of pot. But what’s the point? Why spend all the effort to regrow it all just so another pair of Cheech and Chong lookalikes come destroy it? How much do I need to suffer in this life?
Cha-ka made an inquisitive hooting noise from the trailer's rooftop, and Charlie sighed before looking up and smiling weakly at his small simian friend. “It's okay, sweetie. Sorry about the noise. Daddy's having the mother-of-all shitty days. You can come down now. I'm not mad at you,” he said holding out his prosthetic arm toward her.
She jumped off the roof, climbed up his arm and sat on his shoulder nuzzling his face with her own.
He stood on his two trembling prosthetic legs and tried to calm down, except even with his eyes closed he saw the garden in his mind utterly ruined. “Oh, Cha-ka, what should I do? What can I do?” He asked, feeling dizzy and nauseated after witnessing all the senseless devastation. He turned to fall back into his lounge chair as bitter tears rolled down his cheeks unchecked. With his vision obscured by tears, he tripped over one of his half full plastic jugs of urine which spilled across the porch.
Badly off balance, he tried not to fall into the pool of fluid then did just that. He slipped and shouted, “Shit!” a moment before collapsing extremely hard onto his homemade lounge chair. He landed very badly and felt his remaining testicle smash excruciatingly against the wooden armrest. Laying face down on the lounge chair, he cursed, shrieked, and cried harder.
Cha-ka seized a marijuana bud, quickly climbed back to the roof, looked down at the man, and scratched her butt while gnawing on the bud.
The hermit's testicle felt as if it burst like a small water balloon filled with warm water. His stomach and groin were both enveloped with an earth shattering pain. Moaning, he slowly rolled onto the lounge chair into a less agonizing position and fought down a powerful urge to vomit.
The pain was almost the worst he’d ever felt in his life. (Almost)
It felt nearly identical to a pain that he endured back in Vietnam.
He lied to the beautiful girl from the concert and everyone else who ever learned of his missing testicle and wanted to know what happened. The true story was infinitely worse than the tale of stepping on a landmine. Private Charlie Farro visited an infamous brothel that a friend of his recommended when he learned of his desire for younger girls. Most prostitutes in and around Vietnam's most notorious towns that were well known for the sex trade were teenagers, or in their early twenties, but none of them appealed to him.
When Private Farro learned from a friend that there existed a nasty excuse of a hotel where young children were enslaved in the worst conditions imaginable and abused in every degenerate way possible he couldn't resist visiting it. Believing himself smart and also afraid of catching any sexually transmitted diseases, Private Farro paid considerably more for a girl who was still a virgin.
The Madam operated the brothel that used the hotel's top floor introduced him to Kim Soo. She was a terrified sweet looking girl that was recently kidnapped from her village and sold into the sex trade. Even though Kim Soo was considerably younger than the girl Charlie later met at the concert, in later years both of them meshed in his mind as being similarly attractive. The child was rightly terrified as he spent the afternoon abusing her but rather than becoming more docile, she became increasingly violent toward him as the night wore on.
Kim Soo slapped him, scratched like a wildcat, and even bit him while trying to defend herself, but he was too strong and excited to be put off. Finally, after he pinched her arms so hard that she screamed and cried, while begging in a language Charlie couldn't understand, the child seemed resigned to his wishes. Very mistakenly, Private Charlie Farro thought that she had finally learned her proper place in life- kneeling between his thighs.
It wasn’t until he felt her small sharp teeth tear away half his scrotum, mangling his right testicle beyond the ARMY surgeon’s ability to save, that the young soldier realized (while vomiting from the agony) he should have stayed back at the barracks and just masturbated, just like everybody else usually did.
How could everything go to shit so fast? Charlie wondered.
On top of losing everything he'd cared for in life, the intense throbbing pain throughout his lower body started to hurt more instead of less. Afraid to look down, he reached out carefully with his left hand and felt a warm wetness on the crotch of his tattered blue jeans. He raised his fingers and stared at the blood that coated them.
Crying pitifully, he pulled the gun back out of the holster and looked at it through eyes filled with tears.
“Karma's a bitch.” That was what his squad leader Carl always said back when they served together in the war. As his remaining testicle bled and tormented him all Farro could think about was how much he hated the man.
Carl never shut up about how Karma was sort of like the Golden Rule with a bad temper and an ironic sense of justice. Kids would always run up and catch the candy that Carl threw to them when he walked the streets. Carl was the only son of an Alabama Baptist minister and always went out his way to help anyone whenever he could. He even won a medal for rescuing three other grunts that were caught in an ambush.
Charlie thought about Carl with his buck teeth and holier than thou attitude and felt like puking. The son of a bitch helped at the schools teaching kids how to read and speak English. He probably even taught that whore, Kim Soo! The dirty bastard even visited and brought me magazines and some chocolate while I was in the hospital the day after the little bitch bit off my nut.
After recovering enough to return to the field, Charlie clumsily managed to trip a Viet-Cong booby trap. Later, once more in the hospital, Farro was so happy to hear that the landmine he tripped had killed Carl in addition to leaving himself a triple amputee he couldn't stop smiling for a week.
Of course the morphine probably accounted for some of his happiness. But there was no medic there at his trailer, and no morphine- just a couple of corpses lying in the middle of his decimated garden.
Charlie thought feverishly as he considered the situation. Everything I ever wanted was right here. What's the point of all this pain and suffering that I have to endure before it's over? I have no legs. I'm missing an arm, my right testicle, and now I think I've managed to castrate myself in the stupidest way since that night in the brothel. What more will I lose before this life is over?
He sighed in resignation, shut his eyes and remembered the girl who broke his heart long ago and smiled. He saw the girl who stole everything from him. She was smiling with her blue eyes sparkling like magic as they reflected the sunset beside the beach. With his eyes clenched tightly shut, he opened his mouth and stuck the barrel of the gun inside pointing up. He tasted the cold, faintly oily, metal and slowly squeezed the trigger.
She was still smiling at him at the beach as he pulled the trigger harder.
“Excuse me, sir?”
Charlie heard the voice and jerked involuntarily. He couldn’t stop pulling on the trigger as he opened his eyes.
He had a microsecond to see two young men holding big odd looking clubs. They were nervously watching him as the gun fired.
The shot would most definitely have blown the top of his head off had he not jerked at the last second. What happened instead made both Issac and Jeremiah turn away. The bullet went where the muzzle was pointed, on a trajectory through Charlie's tongue and right side of his face. Where the right side of his face had been a moment earlier there was now a large gaping smoking hole with shreds of flesh and meat dangling. All the teeth on the right side of his mouth were reduced to tiny shards of white and yellow shrapnel which rattled off the trailer’s door before falling in the dirt.
Issac turned back first and was unable to believe it possible. It seemed nothing short of miraculous, but somehow the man with the ruined face looked up at him with an expression of total awareness. The man's right eye was blown completely from the socket and hung from a pinkish colored string of meat. It seemed to be looking up at the night sky. The other eye stared straight at Issac. The badly injured man's body shook for a few seconds and then became motionless, but Issac saw that his chest continued to rise and fall.
Charlie had managed to shoot himself in a way that left him paralyzed from the neck down, yet from the neck up he felt every iota of blinding agony his horribly wounded head was suffering. When it was blown out of the socket by concussive force, he lost control of his right eye and all it could see was his bloody groin as it pointed downward. With his intact and considerably better functioning eye, Charlie glared at the strangers dressed in identical white shirts and black ties and half sputtered half screamed at him. Nonsense sounds were all he could make due to the extensive damage the bullet did to his mouth.
“Don’t worry. I know first aid, just relax and try to be calm,” Issac said, opening his backpack and pulling out a clean white t shirt which he quickly placed over the gaping hole in the right side of Charlie’s face. It instantly started staining red as it soaked up the blood.
The song Gimmee Three Steps performed by Lynyrd Skynyrd began to play from the record player as Jeremiah spoke up. “Issac, you better look at this.” Jeremiah's voice was choked as he watched the two men they had just seen killed were now not only standing but starting to move toward them. “What do we do, run or fight?”
Issac picked up the revolver Charlie had used in his monumentally failed suicide attempt and pointed it at the two men across the stream. Aiming carefully at the shorter one's head he pulled the trigger.
Few things in either of their respective lives were as disappointing as the anti-climatic click that followed. All six shots had been fired.
“Should I look for some bullets? What do we do? OH JESUS! What do we do!?” Jeremiah yelled while watching the obviously dead men starting to cross the stream.
Issac dropped the gun, grabbed his club he had laid next to the lounge chair, and joined his friend. “There’s no time to look for the bullets and we can't run off and leave this guy- besides we're Good Samaritans, remember? Let’s go bash their heads in.”
And with that, Issac ran toward the small stream the undead men were halfway across with his oak table leg club raised over his head. Saying a quick silent prayer, he hurried to the edge of the water and changed the club's position to that of an enormous baseball bat. He glanced to his side and saw Jeremiah with his face pale and arms trembling as he held his shaking club in both hands.
“Have faith, brother,” Issac said, before swinging at the tall lanky man who had three large (still slightly smoking) bullet holes in his chest. It was a tremendous swing and had it connected with the undead man's head it would surely have shattered the skull, but the lanky one stumbled over some submerged rocks and tumbled forward.
When he fell, he latched on to Issac's leg and bit down hard.
Issac was knocked to the ground, screaming, “God Damn you!” as he kicked and pushed the lanky ankle biter off. He jumped back to his feet and felt the bite on his leg aching as he lifted the club again. Ready to finish the fight, he swung the club down on the kneeling lanky man's head. It connected with a solid wet sound and crushed his skull. Issac watched as the man shuddered in the stream for a second and then lay still as water flowed over his body.
Jeremiah was considerably taller than the short man, but his wild eyes, open bloody mouth, and the sheer insanity of the situation forced him to retreat a step as the undeniably undead zombie continued splashing through the stream. Jeremiah hadn't been in a fight since elementary school and even then it had been against a girl. (Admittedly it was a very big girl, but still just a girl nonetheless.)
The young man swung the table leg at the short mustache sporting zombie’s chest and saw the impact do little more than knock him off balance. The short man stumbled and fell back into the stream as Issac screamed. Jeremiah spared a brief glance over and watched as his older friend finished his enemy off with an impressive skull shattering wallop.
The short one tried to crawl toward him through the water and Jeremiah held him at bay with his club. He knew what needed to be done, but didn't believe he could do it. Staring down at his opponent the young man who believed in being merciful and forgiving, in fact lived by those ideas, felt uncertain and only kept the undead crawling man in the water away by poking him with the table leg.
Issac walked over and said, “Think of it as destroying the enemy of God, Jeremiah. He's not a man any longer. There is no image of God in this abomination. Hit him in the head if you love God. Just do it.”
Jeremiah lifted the club over his head and brought it down with all the righteous fury he could muster. The wooden table leg felt heavy as he swung it at the man who had never done anything to him. It connected and the resultant powerful vibration that ran up his arms made him nearly drop the club.
The little man with the Groucho mustache fell back into the water. The hair and scalp were torn partially off of his fractured skull but he was not yet defeated. He grunted and gibbered while rushing forward as Jeremiah backed up another step.
Give me strength, Lord, the young man prayed silently while swinging the club again. On impact, the skull collapsed in on itself and the dead man finally ceased to move. Jeremiah gagged and quickly looked away.