By this point, they were all dead. I was the last one.
The Chief was standing at the edge of the wave pool, looking at me. He raised his left arm and pointed the dripping nub at the end of it at me. He didn’t have a hand any more. That was because of me. Some brown-green sludge was still dripping out of it, down onto the periwinkle blue concrete. The edge of the waves would catch it and pull it into the pool, turning the water muddy all around his zambo feet. He was pissed, but I didn’t care. He might have been a zombie, and he might of got his hand chopped off, but he wasn’t having the two-dicks-in-the-ass kind of day I was having, so fuck him.
Fuck all of them.
All the other zombies were standing around the Chief, waiting to see what he was gonna do. I was still tied up to the big old Stumpy Shark statue they’d ripped from the main gate and hauled right into the center of the wave pool. They had me backed up right into Stumpy’s good fin, and his stupid thumbs up was grinding right into the center of my back. It hurt like hell.
“Come on!” My voice sounded like shit. “Just get it over with!”
The Chief turned to the zambo next to him, a short little dumpy one that didn’t have a jaw, and with a real quick move, ripped his whole fucking arm off, right from the socket. That brown-green sludge started spraying everywhere, all over the Chief, all over Dumpy No-Jaw, and all the other zambos started tossing their heads back and doing that clicking they do, click-click-click, all mad crazy-like, loud as anything I ever heard in my life.
And then the Chief took Dumpy No-Jaw’s arm and held it up high, the fingers on the end of it still clawing and grasping, like what a chicken does when you cut off its head. And he reared back with it, a quarterback with a football, those grasping zombie fingers starting to reach out to where I was, and he hauled off and flung that thing dead at me in the center of the wave pool.
And I thought about Aunt Terrie and the last thing she said to me before the zambos pulled her through the duct work at La Fondita’s.
You pay for who are.
I’d seen some shit. I’d seen it, because I’d done some shit. Some shit so bad that whatever’s up there in the sky, the One God, or the ten Gods or every God that ever was, brought these monsters out of nowhere and had them rain down from the sky and dig their ugly way up out of the earth to sweep through everything and kill me dead.
You pay for who you are.
So, the arm’s coming at me, and its fingers were still squirming. But I had my eye on the Chief, and he was still looking right at me.
“What are you looking at, huh?!?”
The Chief threw his head back and started to click-click-click, deeper and rounder than the clicking hordes around him. The flailing fingers on the zombie arm flying across the wave pool at me started to twitch and jerk in ways it hadn’t done before, and I watched it peel three of its fingers back, leaving only the pointer and middle finger extended, making the peace sign.
Like the fucking Three Stooges, I thought, before the zambo arm gouged my eyes out.