Uschi! (24 page)

“We’re under attack,” said Denny, “from a guest star from the worst ever episode of
Lost in Space
.”

It, this alien invader from beyond our solar system, was a tree. The wide trunk was covered in scaly brown bark and the leafy branches it carried reached high enough to scrape noisily against the store’s ceiling. The fruit these branches produced were its eyeballs; the ripest ones around the size of a farmer’s market fresh peach. They were gruesomely human-like in many details, with a dozen or more hanging on the larger branches. The eyes peeked through the foliage and stared upon Denny and Uschi with less than loveable interest.

“Ain’t nothing positive,” Denny grimaced, “is going to come from an encounter with this unwholesomeness.”

Along with the eyeball fruit, many Get It Quick customers were also seen caught and entangled in the ghastly devil vegetation’s branches. These branches featured multiple spherical and puckered suckers dotting the bark. The suckers had attached themselves, leechlike, in multiple places to the people in the branches and were hungrily draining them. All were dead and in different stages of desiccation ranging from a leathery skeletal cowboy husk shriveled up worse than a mummified cat to a little boy in
Power Rangers
pajamas with still a fair portion of juicy freshness clinging to him.

“Pathetic Earthlings,” taunted a mad Gator. “Who will save you now?”

With leaves rustling, it slithered along the floor on its wriggling roots with the boneless fluidity of an octopus traversing the bottom of an aquarium tank. As it fast approached Denny, a sizeable group of rubbery vines that seemed better suited for scenery work in a jungle thriller motion picture than contributor to a North Texas convenience store’s décor extended beyond the alien tree’s branches. These vines thrashed and squirmed like water moccasins struggling to swim upstream, making cracking whip sounds as they wrapped around a defenseless Denny’s waist and neck and snatched him up high off the floor.

Denny got his hands on the vines coiled around his neck and fought to break their strangling embrace.
Now I know what it feels like to be on the sour end of a calf-roping contest at the rodeo
. His legs were kicking as if he were pedaling in an invisible bicycle race. He was useless in freeing himself, the best he managed was his fingernails scrapping away some of the surface bark covering. The tree began to pull him in toward its eager to feed branch suckers.

“And here I am without the Impala’s steering wheel,” said Uschi. “Oh well, I don’t mind improvising. This is mine now.”

And Uschi reached out and got hold of Gator under the chin and ripped his jawbone clean off. There was a can’t miss
pop!
as joints separated and muscle and sinew tore as easily as the pages from an old thirty-five cents
House of Mystery
comic book. It looked at first the store clerk’s tongue was going to come along with the mandible, but the tough tendons residing in the throat and mouth came from behind and won the brief tug of war between them and her and kept it. Free of any lower support, the tongue dropped and flopped against Gator’s Adam’s apple like a saturated paintbrush. Gore flowed from his missing chunk of face as if it were spewing from an open wide showerhead and down the front of him. His eyes panic swelled to three times their normal dimensions and arms flailed. Gator tried to scream, but it was difficult to articulate and instead it came off as more of a gargling croak.

She examined the bone, enamel and bit of a lower lip. Gator must’ve been a regular brusher, Uschi surmised. His teeth and gums appeared fine and healthy. That was pleasing news to discover, especially considering the task she had in mind for them.

Uschi’s other hand went behind Gator and without any complication her fingers penetrated into the meat of his backside and burrowed a more than fair ways inside of him. She converted his left shoulder blade into a handle and used it to lift him up off of the floor, her forearm and elbow a brace against his spine so she could hold Gator out before her as a shield. His jawbone her sword, Uschi bounded over the sales counter and charged the creature that had taken her best thing.

By now the tree’s vines were dangling Denny upside-down, his resistance impotent and the loose change falling from his pockets. He was looking as attractive as a worm on a fishing pole’s hook. Other vines came at Uschi, at least a dozen, and closing in fast, wiggling like snakes in copulation frenzy.

“Come on, you rascals,” Uschi said to the vines. “I’m anxious to create some mega damage on y’all.”

And damage the zombie titty woman did make. Gator protecting her from a frontal attack, she put his mandible to work on the vines, hacking whichever ones came around him and got in reach of her. Jim Bowie and his famous namesake blade couldn’t have cut any better.

The vines promptly recoiled, not wanting a thing to do with being pruned. Where they were slashed and severed the wounds secreted a milky white and sticky sap that had an odor like raw beef and a fresh mown lawn. At this point in its development the devil vegetation had a low threshold for pain. Give it another month or so of eating right and healthy growth and it could laugh off a tank attack, but right now an injury of any noteworthy caliber would not be tolerated.

The second attack was a touch more thought out. The man-eating plant’s objective was to remove the human shield she protected herself behind. Whipping and snapping vines came for Gator and wrapped around whatever purchase on him was available. As Gator shook his head no and tried to plead with his eyes to his vegetable best buddy to leave him be, they entwined heavily around his arms and legs like kudzu, pulled hard, and left nothing behind but a bloody and ragged writhing torso. More of them went after his head and face, invading the sockets and uprooting his eyes, finding the tongue and performing what Uschi couldn’t—yanking it away. The ensnared skull was squeezed until it shattered, and mashed brain matter squirted loose like Spam out of a can run over by a speeding pickup truck. Still more vines became like knives and stabbed into the chest and abdomen, going deep and showing no signs of stopping. The ribcage was split apart and lungs were punctured and the plant life thrashed about wildly and destructively around inside them like rats eager to make their escape from a twin set of brown paper grocery bags. Multiple ruinous lacerations on the heart and other organs were performed, shredding the stomach and ripping entrails to muddy slush. Gator was whittled away to chunky grue in a matter of seconds, exposing the decaying corpse super female for attack.

Uschi was by this time in reach of a suspended Denny and was able to cut the vines that held him. He dropped to the rubble-strewn convenience store’s floor and untangled the mass of herbage around his neck. He resumed breathing, sat there on his ass and helplessly watched as a new crop of vines were able to overpower an unshielded Uschi and pick her up.

Gator had not been telling any stories concerning the killer tree’s telepathic gifts. It now broadcasted its thoughts inside both of Uschi and Denny’s minds.

(
I will eat you to death, female of the species. But first there shall be some humiliating mistreatment for you. Have at it.
)

The devil vegetation maliciously hammered her bountifully bosomed rotting dead person into the aisle shelves. She smashed all she came in contact with. Impact with the canned goods section was especially rough; they didn’t show much give at all give when she was meeting them.

(
What Gator told you is only a half-truth. I am on your planet to overtake, correct, but I have no intentions of ruling you miserable beasts. All I care to do is eat you. You are indeed tasty apes, this I can not deny. I told Gator what he wanted to hear so that he would act as my willing slave and care for me during my more vulnerable development period. Another week or two of his aid, and then I would have been large enough to betray his trust and consume his bodily fluids. I hope that didn’t come off sounding too heartless. Because I am not a heartless thing. I can love. I can sympathize with others. Don’t judge me too fast. As apes go, Gator was an enjoyable pet. He was good to me and fine company. His services were appreciated, and I must admit I will miss him. Now I must move on and find another weak-willed ape and con him into taking care of me until I am ready to go out on my own and destroy your world’s armies and feast on all the living matter your planet has. I would offer the task to you, male of the species, but I sense you possess more intestinal fortitude than I am willing to put up with. I will simply have to satisfy myself in eating you and your mate. Once your world is stripped barren of nourishment and I am satiated, I will do as I have done countless times before and launch a seedpod containing my intellect into outer space and move on in search for the next populated planet to appease my unending appetite. I know it may not be the most glamorous existence, but it is what I do. I am happy enough with my lot in life.
)

Uschi was stirring. While the dust cloud caused by her collision with what was likely the majority of the Get It Quick’s inventory began to settle around her, her head came off the cracked and leaking bottle of Windex it was resting upon like a pillow. Gator’s jawbone was still with her, clutched in her hand. She went back to work with it. She cut any vine that encroached on her and ran at the tree. Not wanting it to try escaping from her, she stomped a cha-cha shoe wearing foot down on a particularly fat root, pinning the plant to this one spot. Uschi next began to swing the jawbone as if it were a hatchet, chopping away at the tree.

(
Damnit, that hurts.
)

At that same moment the devil vegetation was coming again for Denny, one vine behaving like a tentacle and slithering around his leg all the way up to the hip. Denny found in the wreckage close beside him a shard of glass that once belonged to a Hellmann’s jar of mayonnaise. It reminded Denny of what he imagined a dragon’s tooth must look like: serrated, number of inches in length, and curved a scimitar’s blade crescent shape. Could be he could perform a miracle or two with this nasty bit of trash.

He slashed at the vine and was amazed when he found he won his freedom. The mayonnaise-slimed glass went through the vegetable matter like a machete on cardboard, hardly any resistance. Then he looked over at Uschi and saw the wood chips flying where she was hitting the trunk. Sure, a sharp-edged tool would’ve performed better, but don’t sell Gator’s back molars short, they were getting the job done on the tree’s fibrous, moist material. Uschi never showed signs of tiring, never deviated in the amount of unholy supernatural power she devoted to the chore. Her arm was a blur as it went down and came up, down and up relentlessly against the trunk.

(
You dare to assault a devourer of worlds in such a classless manner. For this your suffering shall be the stuff of legend.
)

Vines were reaching out of the branches and closing in on her, anxious to put a stop to her malicious lumberjack mischief.

She needs me.

With no concern for his own well-being or any hesitation, Denny sprang to his feet and raced to join his homemade zombie girlfriend under the man-eating tree.

“I got your back, sugar cube,” Denny told her.

“I know you do, best thing,” Uschi told him.

He and the broken Hellmann’s jar prevented any nonsense out of the devil vegetation from interfering in Uschi’s wood cutting chore. A hack and slash sending all vines back in sliced and sap-bleeding retreat whenever they got too close to her.

(
I will deplete you both of every last particle of digestible material. I so swear that I will.
)

When about halfway through the plant, Uschi ceased chopping. She lowered her unbothered arm, not a drop of sweat anywhere on her, you’d need to start with a heartbeat for it to be racing, and no breath for her to be huffing and puffing to try and recover. She told Denny to back up a ways and heisted one of her legs and executed an amateur karate fighter style sidekick directly above where she had been cutting.

Whole fucking lot of oomph behind that kick—getting backed over by a truck might’ve gone more gently. Perhaps yelling “Timbre!” may have been appropriate, but neither Uschi nor Denny thought to do that. Uprooted as it was the devil vegetation’s center of gravity was all top half; there was no hope of it remaining upright. It toppled over, the trunk splintering and snapping in two with a great cracking report. The felled world-eating thing from another solar system came crashing down on the sales counter, smashing it to bits. The electric cash register managed a final ring before it was bashed into a shorted-out mess. Little TV set turned off for the final time. The CASHIER DOES NOT KNOW THE COMBINATION TO THE STORE SAFE sign broke into three separate pieces. The ever-popular adult reading material newsstand behind the counter was torn asunder, dirty picture magazines cruelly decimated.

Uschi dropped Gator’s jawbone, and Denny tossed aside the fragment of mayonnaise jar glass. They watched together as the plant’s leaves blackened and withered like a vegetable garden victimized by an unexpected late spring freeze. The eyeballs suddenly spoiled and rotted and dropped from the branches. Those troublesome vines now lay lifeless and motionless.

But the slaying of the thing was still not finished. Like any plant, it was not dead until you killed the roots. The less than a foot high stump scuttled along the floor on its root ends, and was leaving an obvious trail through the convenience store debris easy for Uschi to follow. As she tracked it down and got hold of it with both hands, it put these words into their heads:

(
I will yet have your world!
)

An empty boast. For as it telepathically spoke, Uschi was approaching the nearest available wall space and mercilessly set to work battering the stump of the devil vegetation against it three to four dozen times. She pounded the plant into a weak and pulpy mess. After that she returned to the frozen foods case and dropped it inside with the ice cream and microwave enchiladas and chicken pot pies.