Voodoo Children - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story (2 page)

By the time I secured the gate, the three
zombies walking my way had turned into eight zombies, with two of
them standing right in front of my truck. I walked up to one of
them and gave him a push in the chest. He fell over backwards, then
lumbered to his feet and tried to take a bite out of my face. I
swung my machete through his neck and then pushed his body back
down. Headless, he stayed there like he was supposed to this
time.

I pushed the button in my ear. “Good call,
Skeeter. They’re pretty damn slow.”

“
That’s good, but don’t
underestimate them. There may be quite a lot of them, and they
don’t feel pain. You can’t just sever the spinal cord, like with
vampires; you have to destroy the brain. Otherwise they can grown
back together and attack again.”

“
Ow! Now you tell me!” I
said as the head I’d just chopped off took a big bite out of one
calf. I tossed the machete aside and pulled my battle-axe from my
belt. At five feet of sharp steel and bad attitude, that axe
promised pain to anything in its path. Too bad for me nothing I was
fighting could feel pain. I stomped on the detached head with my
other boot, putting one hand on the hood of my truck for balance
and finally kicking the head free. It rolled across the graveyard,
coming to rest against a headstone.

“
I’ll deal with you later,
asshole.” I muttered.

“
What was that,
boss?”

“
Not you, Skeeter. Now lemme
go do some killin’. I’ll call you back.” I pressed the button in my
ear and looked around again. All seven remaining zombies were
gathered around my truck, bumping into it as they tried to walk
forward.

“
Alright, assholes!” I
yelled, waving the axe in the air to try and get their attention.
“Get the hell off my truck! I just had her detailed!” One zombie
turned to follow me as I walked out from behind the truck, and I
caved in its skull. Pain sensors or not, twelve pounds of axe in
your head will ruin your day. I pulled it free and spun around,
crushing two more zombies with one big swing. Problem was, that big
swing ended in a big tree, and my big axe got stuck big time. I
tried for a minute to pull it out, but when a pair of dead hands
grabbed my ponytail, I returned my attention to the problem at
hand.

I solved the problem in my hair with Bertha,
my polished chrome Mark XIX .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol. I
pressed Bertha under the thing’s chin and squeezed the trigger,
removing most of the top of the zombie’s skull. I used my left hand
to knock the thing’s hands off my hair, then dispatched the other
four zombies in fairly quick succession with Bertha. When I’d
splattered the last one’s brains all over the ground, I gave Bertha
a little kiss on the rear sight, replaced her half-spent magazine
with a full one, and put her away in her holster. Then I walked
over to the grave marker with the last zombie head lying against
it, reared back my size fourteen steel-toe boot, and kicked the
head to jelly.

Mission accomplished, I pushed the button and
redialed Skeeter.

“
Are you okay?” He asked.
The little guy actually sounded a little worried about me. I was
touched.

“
Yeah, I’m fine. A little
surprised you hadn’t commandeered a spy satellite to see what I was
up to in the five minutes since I last talked to you, but I’m
fine.”

“
Not a bad idea, Bubba. I’ll
keep that in mind for next time.” Me and my big dumb redneck mouth.
“Now, are you ready for the rest of them?”

“
Rest of them? Skeeter, I
just killed like eight zombies, dude. I think I’m done for the
night.”

“
I don’t think so. Uncle
Joe’s records show over two hundred bodies in that cemetery, and if
this necromancer is worth his spellbooks, he’s going to try and
raise them all to come after you.”

“
Two hundred zombies? Damn,
Skeeter, I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat.” I looked around,
but nothing in the vicinity indicated that a couple hundred dead
people were going to crawl out of the ground to recruit me any time
soon, but Skeeter had this unhealthy habit of being right, so I
figured I’d better load up. I went around the bed of the truck and
pulled out my “special” toolbox. I made sure I had half a dozen
magazine or so for Bertha, then I started pulling out the heavy
artillery.

First I checked on Tiger, my modified
Husqvarna T435 chainsaw. I named it Tiger for the Clemson Tigers,
on account of it being orange. I’ve been a fan of Husky saws since
I was a little kid, but the T435 had a lot going for it in my line
of work. The shorter bar on the little saw made it perfect for
pruning limbs, especially if those limbs were attached to something
that wanted to rip your head off. I like the compact size for
interior work, but the light weight made it usable one-handed. At
least if your hands are attached to arms like mine, that is. I’d
modified the trigger to lock in the “on” position so I could swing
the saw better, and disable the inertia chain brake. I didn’t care
much about kickback with the soft tissue I was cutting through, but
if I had to sling the saw back over my head fast, I wanted to know
it was going to cut whatever was back there.

Once I got Tiger gassed up and ran a
sharpener over the chain for a second, I pulled out the big hoss.
No, the Desert Eagle was not the biggest gun I was carrying, not by
a long shot. I called my Atchisson AA-12 semi-automatic shotgun Fat
Man after the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki, ‘cause I figured if I
pulled that thing out I was planning on laying waste to everything
around me. And with a 20-round drum magazine of 12-gauge
double-ought buckshot shells loaded into it, that’s exactly what I
set out to do. I finished out my armory with a pair of 12” Kukri
knives in a back sheath and 14” Bowie knife on my left thigh.
Feeling sufficiently armed to take over a small Central American
nation; I clanked and banged my way across the graveyard towards
the center of the cemetery.

The cemetery was surprisingly large for such
a podunk town, but I figured more people had died there than were
interested in living there. Lugging all that gear got me pretty out
of breath by the time I’d walked a couple hundred yards, so I sat
on a tombstone for a little breather. I had my most important
backup ammo with me, a six-pack of beer in a bandolier across my
chest, so I popped a Bud and looked around. Pretty basic small-town
cemetery, a few crosses, mostly rectangular headstones, one or two
angels or Virgin Marys dotting the landscape. I saw a zombie
wandering around off to my right, so I flipped on the Bertha’s
laser sight and blew his head off. The .50 report sounded even
louder than normal in the silence of the graveyard, and about a
half second after the boom I heard the pitter-patter of skull and
brains falling to earth and gravestones. Glad I didn’t have to
clean up after myself, I holstered Bertha, picked up the rest of my
rig, and headed on towards the center of the graveyard.

I came over one last hill and walked into the
set of a cheap horror movie. And we’re talking ultra-low budget
stuff here; the kinda flicks that make Roger Corman look like
Spielberg. There were Dollar General tiki torches sending up black
citronella smoke into the night sky, arranged in a lopsided
ten-foot circle. A battered purple Civic hatchback was parked just
outside the circle with the hatch open and creepy music playing
over the car’s stereo system. And it was a serious stereo, too.
Whoever owned the junker didn’t spend any money on bodywork or
paint, since there was more Bondo than metal showing along most of
it, but there was a thump coming out of that little piece of crap
car that made my teeth rattle.

Inside the circle of bamboo torches, a skinny
witch doctor danced around slashing chicken throats and tossing
blood out in what looked like random patterns. But every time the
voodoo priest dropped another dead chicken onto the growing pile,
another pile of dirt shifted and another zombie crawled out and
started walking towards town. Judging by the stack of chicken
crates this little guy had in the circle with him, he planned on
raising half the cemetery tonight. There were close to thirty
zombies milling around waiting for instructions, so I decided to go
ahead and get to work. I set Tiger down on a nearby headstone and
opened up on the crowd of dead guys with the Fat Man. Fat Man
boomed, lead and fire blew out the barrel, and zombie heads
exploded about as fast as I could pull the trigger. It started to
get boring after the first five or six re-killings, so I decided to
mix things up a little, shooting over one shoulder, off the hip and
behind my bag a la Annie Oakley, if Annie Oakley had been six-five
with a ponytail.

Fat Man finally clicked on an empty chamber,
so I blew the smoke off the barrel and set him down beside Tiger.
My ears were already ringing from the combination of the shotgun
and the horrible music, so I decided it wouldn’t do any more damage
to let Bertha come out and play. There were only five or six
zombies left standing, and they were all moving away from me, so I
flicked the laser sight back on and blew their heads up like
watermelons at a Gallagher show. One clip, six re-dead zombies, and
a couple of freshly painted smears on the marble and granite
markers throughout the cemetery. I felt a weak grip on one ankle
and looked down to see half a zombie clawing at my ankle,
apparently offended that I’d cut him in half with the Fat Man. I
parted his hair with my bowie knife, holstered Bertha, and cleaned
the knife off on the grass beside the zombie.

I took a good look around at my work, and was
pretty impressed by what I had wrought. There were about two dozen
zombies blown into about eight dozen pieces scattered all around
the graveyard, and I’d been fortunate enough to blow out the car
stereo with a particularly lucky shot. The grass was thick with
clotted blood, entrails and other zombie parts, plus the odd
surgical implement and fast food wrapper. I’ve thought for a long
time now that undertakers sew their garbage up inside the dead
bodies instead of throwing it away. You know, just another way to
screw the customer — make them take out your trash when they take
out Granddad. Seeing half a dozen taco wrappers floating away in
the breeze only confirmed my suspicions.

I turned back to look at the witch doctor,
and his eyes met mine. He stood stock still, the carnage that was a
visit from Bubba finally coming clear to him. He wore a huge
African tribal mask, what looked like those really ugly fur-lined
boots chicks wear in the summer with shorts, Uggs I think they call
them, and a jockstrap. That’s all. He was tall, not as tall as me,
but still over six feet, and skinny. Maybe one-sixty soaking wet in
those stupid boots. He held a kitchen knife in one hand and a dead
chicken in the other, and I heard the ground behind me crumble as
another zombie worked its way up from the earth. I drew Bertha and
sent the dead guy back to his eternal rest, then turned my
attention back to the scrawny voodoo guru.

“
Hey.” I said. “What’s
up?”

“
Nothin’ much. Raising the
dead, stuff like that. You know.”

“
Yeah I see that. Got a
little Hendrix thing going on?” I played a little air guitar
riff.

“
Huh?”

“
You know, Voodoo Chile?
Jimi Hendrix?”

“
Sorry, I’m more of a
hip-hop guy myself. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more zombies
to raise.” Well, if he was an idiot with terrible taste in music,
at least he was polite.

“
Why are you raising the
dead?”

“
I need money.”

“
We all need money. Why not
try a job?”

“
Don’t you read the paper,
jackass? There aren’t any jobs!” His voice was surprisingly high
and not threatening for a voodoo priest. Not that I’d encountered
any other voodoo priests in my life, but we all have our ideas of
what certain villains should sound like. And squeaking like a
chipmunk was not what I expected from a guy summoning
zombies.

“
I know things are tough,
man, but you can’t be calling up dead dudes to rob people. That
ain’t right. And it’s kinda nasty. Zombies tend to leave spots on
folks’ carpet, you know?”

“
No, I didn’t know that.
Man, I kinda feel bad about that. Well, after tonight I’ll only
send my minions into house that have hardwoods, or at least that
laminate stuff.” A considerate voodoo priest, that’s something I
didn’t see every day. And figured I wouldn’t even if I ran into a
bunch of voodoo priests, which we’ve already established I haven’t.
He grabbed a fresh chicken and made to cut its throat, but I pulled
Bertha and drew down on him before he could raise another
zombie.

“
Stop it. I don’t want to
shoot you.” Which was at least partly true. There was a lot more
paperwork to deal with if I killed humans, but if they needed
killing I wasn’t really too bothered by it. After all, Uncle Joe
and Skeeter dealt with that part. I was more the kill ‘em and let
God sort ‘em out type.

“
That’s good, because you
can’t. I’m protected by my magical circle, and nothing can get in
unless I let it or release the circle.” Of course I didn’t believe
him. So of course I tried to shoot the chicken out of his hand. The
magical barrier flashed red, and I dove to the ground as the slug
passed back over my head. I heard the little fart laughing at me as
I picked myself up and brushed grass and zombie bits off my pants.
I tossed a stray finger back to the ground and looked back at the
witch doctor.

“
Alright, asshole, now I’m
serious.” I took a running start at the circle, and promptly found
myself lying on my back in the middle of the graveyard looking at
the little birdies circling my head and hearing the shithead’s
laughter roll across the foggy grass. He beheaded three more
chickens in quick succession, then pricked his own finger and mixed
it with the chicken blood on the ground and chanted something that
sounded like it wasn’t going to be good for me.