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.Zombie bodies burned pretty well, and in fact, because they kept bumbling into one another, the fire spread—though it didn’t kill them, either.They just kept flailing around, blinded by the light, limbs ruined by fire.Of course, they’d spent all their remaining gas lighting those fires.Because someone had decided to break free of his doggy kennel and start shooting up the place.Ambrosia looked down at the plate of food in front of her—the ‘plate’ was really just the lid flap from a piece of luggage and the food was the scorched head and torso of their most recent visitor, interloper, and victim.His arms were mostly burned to brittle sticks.His leg stumps looked like charred elbows.Only things left unblackened were his teeth and his eyes.Ambrosia belched, took her knife and fork and cut another wedge of meat from his mid-section.It wasn’t bacon, but hell with it, she didn’t care.This was delicious.Far tastier than any meat she’d ever consumed—and, by this point, Lord knew she’d eaten a lot of so-called ‘long pork’ or ‘pink pig.’ But this? Exquisite.It wasn’t the fat—frankly, he didn’t have much fat on him.And the meat by now was long cold.But every once in a while she’d get into a sweet pocket, and the pink juices ran like she was squeezing a fresh steak in between her hands.Bloody and delicious.The one good thing about the fire on the roof was that it had cooked the meat just right: charred on the outside, rare on the inside.Cookie, the Chef, said it wasn’t the explosion that got him, though—he said the body just caught fire all on its own.“Spontaneous convection,” he said, even though he meant combustion.Cookie was a meth-head—as it turned out, making meth once the world ended was a lot easier when you had no competition for supplies and no cops kicking down your trailer door—so anything that came out of his mouth was more than a little dubious.Still, in some places the char was a little challenging.She wiped her greasy hands on her mammoth cleavage, licked her lips, and then saw a precious gem—like a pearl hidden in the ugly labial folds of an oyster.The tongue.The tongue wasn’t burned.It was pink, perfect, untouched by fire.She felt herself salivate.Ambrosia knew she deserved a taste.She deserved everything.The whole world.This place was her kingdom because it was what the universe owed her.Grandpaw—her actual grandfather—made that dream possible.With his mind and her girth they were a pair of easy, natural leaders.Plus, why would anyone rebel against such a wondrous system? They were fed, weren’t they?She took her fork and knife and poked around the corpse’s mouth the way a dentist might, but when she tried cutting into the tongue she really couldn’t get a good angle on the whole affair.“We’re losing it all,” Grandpaw said, wheeling up.He looked haggard.Long day of fighting off zombies—and punishing the men for letting a goddamned camper full of fresh meat go driving past—and now night was coming, which meant the zombies would start to get riled up again like a kicked-over hive of killer bees.“They’re on all sides.And they keep coming.”Ambrosia snarled at him: no words, just a brutish, animalistic sound.Its intent was clear: I am eating.“It’s all falling apart,” he said, turning his chair and wheeling away.“It’s all going away…”Ahhh.Alone again.So.Fork and knife not working.“Let us try a more direct route,” Ambrosia said, lifting the corpse’s face to her own.She cracked back the jaw like she was busting open a crab claw, exposing the sweet meat—the tongue—within.Then she sucked the tongue into her own mouth and started to chew.The cannibal’s French kiss, she thought, and felt a bubble of giddiness rise inside her.The tongue was tough—not unusual, really.No fat on the tongue.All meat and muscle.Were you to cook it, you’d cook it long and low and slow, but now she did not have that luxury.She bit down hard—And in the process, bit into her own cheek.She tasted blood.The tongue between her teeth—not hers, but his—wiggled.Her eyes went wide.Did she just feel what she thought she felt? Wasn’t possible.Or maybe it was.Corpses sometimes moved after death.Didn’t nails and hair continue to grow? Or was that just a myth?An odd thought struck her: he didn’t die very easily, did he? Grandpaw shot off his legs.Shot him in the chest.And still he lived.Hell, he didn’t just live—he got out of his crate and bit somebody and stole a sentry’s gun.That, in retrospect, seemed strange.Teeth clamped down on her tongue.She screamed.The fangs sank deep.Blood filled her mouth—but then was vacuumed away, sucked into the carcass cradled at her bosom.The corpse made hungry, happy noises.This, then, was how the vampire imagined it:What lurked before him was a massive puffed pastry, its pillowy dough filled with a salty-sweet umami karate kick from its unctuous blood filling.He was like a little boy and this meal awaiting him was like a bean bag chair—no! Something even bigger, like a moon bounce full of coppery icing, like a piñata one could shatter and live within.He was going to eat his way through.And that was precisely what he did.He had no arms, so he chewed like a worm boring to the heart of an apple.First, her tongue—then, his head stuffed into her bulging cheeks, he drank deeper, chewing downward until he felt her ragged face-flesh flapping at his shoulders.Her screams long-dead, Coburn wormed his way into what must’ve looked like some kind of bizarre reverse birth—What remained of his body disappeared within her hulking flesh.She was still alive, of course, flailing about—but where could she go? Her legs had long atrophied beneath her.It was hard to say when she died.And it was hard to determine how long it took him to feed—and feed, and feed some more.For a while, all was quiet.Her booming canned ham of a heart eventually shuddered one last shudder and then gave out like an old motor.In the distance, gunshots.Zombie moans.Cannibal screams.Ambrosia’s stomach—hidden beneath a ‘shirt’ made from diaphanous bedsheets—rippled.Like water disturbed by fish feeding beneath.Then, another ripple—this one, stronger.The flesh tented.Finally, a bone erupted.A sharpened rib, actually, broken from within.It was enough of a hole.Coburn stuck his fingers in the fleshy tear, got his hands around the skin, then tore it open.He emerged, the reverse birth itself reversed, emptying out of her midsection like the contents of a shark’s stomach after having its belly cut open.Coburn slid down off the dais, naked as the day he was born.He had new legs.Fresh flesh.Real arms.Everything was back.He sat up, and saw Grandpaw sitting there in his chair, a shotgun across his lap.The old man’s hands shook as he looked beyond the vampire to the woman, a mound of flesh who in places looked less like a human and more like a microwave-exploded hot dog.“Ambrosia,” the old man said, his voice a hoarse whimper.Then he turned his gaze, now hateful, toward Coburn.“You,” the old man hissed.“Me,” Coburn said, grinning, his teeth slick with blood.Hell, all of him slick with blood.“It’s not possible [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]