Sharon’s note: Hardship can make or break a family, but some relationships couldn’t be saved by a zombie apocalypse. Warning: This was intended of splatter punk.
“Suck it up Jess. Now is not the time to run off again because you’re butt hurt. We’ve got other problems.” Penny leveled her shotgun at the corpse that was starting to twitch.
“Fuck.” Dad swore and stepped up beside her, and I join him. It was an unspoken rule of the family. When bad shit went down, personal shit could wait.
The worm thing started dragging the body back towards the water, making the water-logged flesh ripple and the legs pull up at a strange, broken angles. This was so not zombies.
“Fuck this,” Ray said. He pulled his .44 mag snub nose out of his pocket and fired. The worm this was severed in a spray of watery black goo and disappeared into water like slurped spaghetti. The burning smell of gunpowder overpowered the rot for just a moment, and then the only this I could concentrate of was the screeching of something very, very big.
Thirty yards out the water started to bubble, going from green to brown as stagnant smelling sludge kicked up from somewhere deep. Heads broke the surface, followed by bodies that rose above the water, suspended by long black things that I was certain now were tentacles. Around a dozen, bloated corpses in torn, rotting clothes hung in the air, dead eyes focused on us and bared teeth snapping.
“Grenades?” I asked, focused less on the meat puppets and more of the great black dome of blubbery flesh that just poked out of the water.
“Grenades,” Dad agreed, and fired at the first body that raced towards us.
The thunder of the shot followed me back to the truck. I hopped in the cab and grabbed the giant tackle box and started digging through it. Damn Uncle Ray. He’d just thrown everything in instead of packing it neatly. There was a dozen candy bars of top of all the crucial equipment. How the hell was anyone in the family alive with an idiot like him in tow? Finally, I found a pouch. A single pouch with one freaking grenade.
“Fuuuck,” I moaned. If we made it out alive, I was going to kill my uncle. I took the pouch with me and ran back to my dad. “We only got one, so unless you’ve got some other artillery, we got to make this count.”
“Damn it, Ray!” My dad roared, and started to walk backwards while firing into the puffed up face of my highschool chemistry teachers. That was satisfying. Mr. Swan had been a creeper. “Everyone walk it back. We got to try to lure this thing out of the water. We got to see how big it actually is.”
“Dad, we got to call for backup!” Penny yelled as she unloaded a round between the legs of Hailey Peterson, huskier in death than I’d ever been in junior high when she’d made fun of me. The tentacle was severed by the shot and the body flopped to the ground, spasming under the dying control of the bit of monster left up its ass. The tattoo at the small of its naked back was on full display, showing she’d changed it from her highschool boyfriend’s name to a butterfly at some point.
“Do it,” I said, moving in front of her to take on the next puppet so she could retreat and send out the call.
“Shit!”
Gray Matters: The Works of Sharon and James Gray 