Uschi! (21 page)

(
You have performed well.
) The strange voice that telepathically communicated with Gator seductively oozed and slithered amongst his brainwaves. (
I am proud of you. Continue to serve me like this, and soon all of Earth will be at your feet.
)

The Master was pleased with his meal. The adrenaline rush satisfaction of knowing he had done well for the one he served pumped through Gator as if it were a really excellent drug. All felt right with the world.

The shelf rack was returned to its place and the door closed. The riding lawn mower parked by the gas pumps he could take care of shortly. He knew some people to telephone that would take it off his hands with no questions asked, just like they had done with all the abandoned cars left here.

He went to the stock room in back of the store and got a bottle of Pine Sol and a mop and bucket and set to work cleaning up the blood. He labored hard, generating sweat that dripped from his face and a burn in the muscles of his arms and back. He wiped down each can of condensed milk and chopped olives and placed them on their correct space on the aisle shelf. The price-labeling gun was unholstered from his slacks’ pocket and a $30.00 tag Gator slapped on the Dallas Cowboys football helmet. He set it on a shelf between jars of salsa and bags of pork rinds.

Gator mounted back up on the barstool behind the sales counter. He turned the volume on the TV set up and learned he was just in time to watch a post
Beverly Hillbillies
Buddy Ebsen turn a pre
Barbary Coast
Bill Shatner over to the police. He resumed scrutinizing the pages of the fatty pornography magazine.

In the beer and wine cooler, a thing not of this world continued to feast.

Chapter Sixteen

H
ondo was in the front yard of his trailer home and playing Frisbee by himself. Shirtless and in blue jeans, he tossed the plastic disc up in the air at a sharp forty-five degree angle toward the morning sky, lot of muscle behind it so it’d really take off and soar high. This wasn’t actually an authentic made by Whammo Frisbee, only the lid to a can of Folgers coffee. But it worked as well as a real Frisbee, giving Hondo a lot of fun.

He watched as it reached the peak of its ascension and commenced to descend. He scrambled to position himself under it before it was too late and the Frisbee could hit the ground. His legs were pumping through the yard’s unkempt grass, footfalls squishy when they struck the saturated and muddy from last night’s storm ground, the wind blowing in his Allman Brothers’ hair and Jesus beard. A lit cigarette was going between his lips as he was at play, puffing away. The ash from the end of the smoke dropped on him and mixed with the sweat coating his bare chest and speckled him like runny bird shit clods on the windshield of a car. His eyes never wavered from his spinning quarry, face rigid in locked concentration. It was going to be close. He looked like he might be a step behind this one. He stretched out his arm and was just in time to catch it by his fingertips.

About that time was when a pimp’s suit purple El Camino with a rubber shrunken head dangling from the rearview mirror and Chewbacca action figure glued to the top of the dashboard pulled in the drive and parked behind the up on cinderblocks Impala. Hondo watched with the coffee can lid absently spinning on the end of his finger as the car came to a stop and the engine shut off. He put a hand over his eyes to block the sun and recognized the girl in the passenger seat—the titties and green darling who came by yesterday morning shopping for weed.

Uschi told Denny, “I just want to pop in here real quick and tell everybody howdy and kill them.” The barbed wire sewn into her assembled like a jigsaw puzzle figure was looking especially sparkly in the bright sunlight of the day. She was perfumed in an entire can’s worth of Black Flag ant and roach killer spray. “Then we’ll hightail it from here for good, okay?”

“Uh, okay. I suppose. If that’s what you really care to do.” Denny was in jeans and a
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
T-shirt that flaunted much Tura Satana cleavage. A fresh Jerry Lewis as Buddy Love in
The Nutty Professor
varnish of hair pomade was in the psychobilly hairstyle his homemade zombie girlfriend now insisted he maintain.

They weren’t done with Li’l Bocephus. Uschi intended to keep him close by so she could continue eating on him for a while yet. Dormant these daylight hours, he was in the bed of the El Camino, rolled up inside a bed comforter as tight as the meat in the center of a tamale, sealed in snug with duct tape to keep the damaging rays of the sun away from him. Dozens of miscellaneous blessed pages from
The Watchtower
were glued in place over nearly every square inch outside the comforter to prevent an escape after sundown.

“Hey, Queen Gazongas,” said Hondo at Uschi’s exiting the El Camino. “Good to have you back on the Ponderosa. Needing some more pot? That’s cool. Or maybe this time around I can interest you in something stronger? What can I help you with?”

Uschi was wearing a quite saucy original Fredrick’s of Hollywood fetish red and black latex nurse’s costume. The short skirt hugged her hips as tight as the skin on a copperhead snake and squeaked like a dog’s chew toy whenever she moved fast or sudden. The neckline was cut low and provided access for a bonanza of Ziploc implants augmented breast exposure. The hosiery on her legs streetwalker fishnets and on her feet cha-cha shoes hot enough to make Dawn Davenport homicidal with jealousy. Finishing out the ensemble was a little retro nurse’s cap on top of her long and lustrous locks of platinum blonde hair.

“You can help me,” she informed the Big Kahuna Trailer Park Oasis’s top drug dealer, “by acting like a top-notch sweetie and allowing me to murder you ninja killing cool wise.”

The Frisbee/Folgers’ can lid stopped spinning and fell from the end of his finger and dropped forgotten to the grass. “What the fuck sort of talk is that?” he demanded with lips separating wide enough for the cigarette to loose its perch and also plummet to the ground.

Smile on her rancid spookshow face, she stepped up to the driver’s side of the Chevy Impala and put her fist through the window glass. She took hold of the steering wheel roughly somewhere around the ten o’clock position and tore it loose with no more than a quick yank accompanied by the unmistakable sounds of metal tearing and plastic snapping apart. She brought the wheel out and held it up in front of herself. Uschi did all of that as easily as if she were fetching a done meatloaf from the oven.

Hondo’s .38 Smith & Wesson was in a back pocket of his jeans. He went for it. But Uschi was quicker.

She was on him before the gun could clear denim, swinging her arm out with the Impala’s steering wheel on the end of it as if it were a scythe. Made this great
whoosh
of a sound as it sliced the air and went towards Hondo’s head at a horizontal angle and hit the skull around two inches above the eyebrows. So quick and with such inhuman Satan made force behind the swing, the steering wheel cut clean and effectively through the bone and brain.

The top of Hondo’s head popped off of him as flawlessly as the removal of a bottle cap. The skullcap, fuzzy on one side with a thick tuff of hair and now perfect on the other side to work as a breakfast bowl for a kid to eat his Freakies brand cereal from while sitting in front of the television set and watching Saturday morning cartoons, flew a decent distance, spinning around and around during its flight as good as Hondo’s Frisbee, and became lost in the weeds and grass when it landed somewhere in the shaggy lawn. The amount of brain cut loose and sent sailing from the cranium the same moment the skullcap departed was the size of a porkchop and was able to reach the cement walkway leading to the trailer home’s front door. It crashed with a wet splatter and puddled like chunky dog barf.

And now there was one less drug dealer to trouble the world.

Denny saw the kill go down from the comfort of the El Camino. “Thunder clitoris,” he whispered to himself. That was an act of extreme termination worthy of one of the more quality practical effects Tom Savini would do in any of the better
Friday the 13th
movies.

The small smattering of neighbors that witnessed the creatively different and in broad daylight murder quickly averted their eyes and made themselves scarce. Nobody at the Big Kahuna Trailer Park Oasis ever wanted to get involved with other people’s affairs. Especially the criminal ones.

The gore that poured down dead Hondo’s face and drenched his beard was a textbook example of what the professional wrestler’s commonly call in the business a crimson mask. The body fell forward and into Uschi’s waiting arms. She reached inside the skull and filled the hollow of her hand with the remaining brain and scooped it out. As Hondo’s corpse was cast aside and dropped to the ground, she crammed the choice cut of meat in her mouth. Jaws laboring, her food was slowly chewed as she stood there in the front yard and admired her fingernail polish. She had to swallow twice to get it all down her throat.

That was some capital brain eating. Made Uschi hungry for more. Got to have more.

From there she went to the cement walkway and put herself down on all fours in front of the last remaining portion of Hondo’s brain. The ants had already found it and were swarming. No biggie, they’re supposed to be high in protein. Invoking the five-second rule, she slurped the puddle up and enjoyed.

Attention then turned to the trailer home. Uschi could sense a number of warm and alive human beings inside, waiting to receive her company.

“Hey there, good Americans!” She yelled that out as she entered Hondo’s trailer home so everyone inside would be aware Uschi was here and taking charge. The living room carpeting had never been cleaned and was sticky from years of accumulated filth; each footstep Uschi made on it made this tearing sound quite similar to strips of Velcro being separated. The place smelled like burnt hair and unsanitary toilet water and the vile fluids that collect at the bottom of a full kitchen trash bag and long time unwashed human beings.

There was this dude on the sofa, dirty and unwholesome, splayed across the cushions as if he were growing on them like some renegade mutant fungus. He wore a wash faded Cradle of Filth T-shirt and piss-stained boxer shorts. His dick was out, poking through the flap in the shorts. The head of his tallywhacker was almost walnut-sized and was adorned on top with a tattoo no bigger than a thumbprint of a blue and green butterfly. He ate a taco and watched a movie on TV. He seemed inclined to hardly acknowledge Uschi’s presence. He finished his taco and drank chocolate milk from an old pickle jar.

The movie he was watching was
Highlander
. People getting their noggins lopped off by swords left and right, the main title theme performed by Queen, and big Clancy Brown doing his badass shit better than anyone else.

The sofa surfer’s words rode out of his mouth upon an unsavory and palatable belch. “What you want, bitch?” His teeth were saddle leather brown.

Stepping in close on the sofa and its occupant, Uschi examined the bare feet of the dude. He had large, hairy gorilla toes. She caught hold of him by one of his big toes. It wasn’t a hard grip at all, mostly fingertips, and light enough to barely go noticed.

“Uh?” said the dude, and his eyebrows arched in mild curiosity. The high he was currently on kept him hardly caring what was going on way down there, but still he felt compelled to give it at least a halfass investigation. He lifted his head and aimed his eyes at his feet. “Why is my toe being bothered?”

Uschi broke the toe off where it joined with the foot. All that was required was a brief and brittle snap of bone and a swift rending of flesh and it was removed.

Naturally, she ate it; the bark-like toenail crunchy between her rear molars like a piece of hard candy.

Damn if this didn’t manage to get some excitement into the dude. Right suddenly he couldn’t help but get to moving. The nine-toed wonder ejected himself from the sofa as fast as a horse-kicked dog hightailing it for safer territory. He was screaming and all in a fit and behaving like a flightless bird just desperate for once the experience of soaring, flapping his arms in all directions all at once.

“Oh, it isn’t that bad,” said Uschi. “Many people with less than the standard number of toes on their feet have gone on to have full, productive and, yes, even making a positive contribution to society lives. I’m sure you can too.”

The Impala’s steering wheel was still with Uschi, in her hand, gore-slimed, but otherwise in fine and dandy condition.

“That is they can have lives like that as long as no shit like this then comes along and befalls them.”

She raised the steering wheel and hammered it at a vertical angle into the dude’s breastbone. The Cradle of Filth T-shirt ripped and his flesh parted and the bone shattered. The wheel buried itself a full quarter of the way inside him, now lodged in tight and solid and reluctant to leave, like a coin trapped in a vending machine’s jammed slot.

The screaming and the get up and go activity all instantly stopped. Like the shrapnel from a detonated handgrenade, bone shards went in all directions through the dude’s internals at a high velocity. The lungs received multiple punctures, and breathing now was a taxing strain to endure. The abdominal cavity and its contents were violated and quick to bleed and leak other fluids.

He looked at Uschi with this flawlessly pathetic “How could you do this to me?” expression. And then expired.

Next Uschi sat him back down on the sofa. She peeled his scalp back and cracked his skull open. His brain was just as good eating as Hondo’s.

There was another one waiting for her in the kitchen. Uschi was happy about that. The brains of Hondo and the sofa surfer were delicious, but not all that filling. There was room for much more.

This one was looking like a failed tennis pro hit hard times, all grungy sweatband on his head and white socks on his sneakers wearing feet and tight shorts that showed the outline of his phallus. But instead of a racket in his hands he was carrying a Heckler & Koch G-11 assault rifle. He stood with his back to the kitchen counter.