Busted Flush

“Don’t you be speakin’ blasphemy with my poor dead lips, Josephine Hebert,” Miss Partridge snapped. “I know your hoodoo tricks. I knew you even before, back when you an’ Shaquilla Jones was smokin’ joints and drinkin’ Mickeys under my porch an’ you begged me not to tell your mama.” She wheeled her chair right up to the zombie’s legs. “An’ I didn’t, so don’t you be sassin’ me now. You ain’t got no call to be abusin’ my corpse after all I done for you.”

“Fuck you,” the old zombie spat, “you ain’t Miss Partridge. You’re some rich-ass white chick.”

Miss Partridge raised one hand and looked at it in wonder. “Why so I is. But you sure ain’t me neither, Joey Hebert, even if you be talkin’ with my old lips.” She put her hands on the wheels of her chair decisively. “An’ I may be a white girl now, but I kin still tan your backside once I fine where you is.” She wheeled, scanning the crowd, and stopped as she came to a scrawny girl-child, not quite a woman, with a ring in her navel, a red streak in her hair, and her eyes unfocused and glassy as any zombie’s. “There you be. . . .”

She began to wheel forward but suddenly the connection was broken. Ellen felt claws around her throat, strong as a harpy’s, tearing her out of the chair, throttling her from behind, and then there was a deafening explosion. Something spattered the back of Ellen’s head and she fell to the ground beside the wheelchair, landing hard on her hands and knees, rainwater and blood splashing as the crowd screamed, nat and joker alike running in horror, trampling the press.

Ellen rolled, then Jonathan was helping her up, pulling her away from the headless corpse of the old woman as it staggered about in the rain, waving her gnarled hands, blood spurting from the stump of her neck. A bubble floated through the air and blew off her right arm.

There was a momentary echoing silence. Then, behind them, came the roar of the bus.

Jonathan shoved Ellen out of the way but was not so fast himself, the bumper throwing him to the ground, the wheels coming over his legs as the jauntily smiling zombie driver flashed Ellen a gilded grin. But rather than an explosion of red, the tires sprayed green, thousands and thousands of wasps flying out from under the undercarriage, swirling around her. Then came a horrible rumbling and a quaking of the earth and the bus moved another seven yards before its front end was swallowed up by a huge crevasse in the asphalt.

The second bus wheeled toward the panicked crowd, Reverend Winter-green waddling after it, waving his cross. “The Power of Christ compels thee!” He fell on his belly in the rain, a sad and tragic figure until the next moment, when his legs pulled into his body, his arms as well, and then a huge fleshy sphere wrapped in white linen rolled over where his head had been, gathering momentum until it struck the bus square in the side, tipping it over.

Vines began to erupt from the crevasse, pale green with purple blossoms, but ginormous, a cross-pollination of Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Shop of Horrors, overgrowing the whole fleet, stopping the last bus in its tracks, and sealing the zombies inside.

“Kudzu!” Mayor Connick cried aghast. “I told her to plant anything but kudzu!”

Ellen heard a soft moan behind her then and turned as Jonathan crawled out from under the first bus—or more horribly, half of him did. Like a bisected wasp, his upper torso struggled forward until Ellen hoisted him up, cradling him in his sport coat. “Are you okay?”

“No, but—” He paused, wincing. “Well, no butt. It got my butt and my upper legs. Help me, I—” He winced again.

Ellen carried him over to Miss Partridge’s wheelchair, the wasps swarming over him, forming a green lap blanket as the rain continued to fall.

“I’ve never really done this before,” Jonathan admitted shakily.

“You’ve lost your legs,” Ellen stated, horrified.

“No, just my pants.” Jonathan winced and the green wasps seethed. “Most of my legs are here, just not all the bits that connect them.” He gasped and squeezed her hand. “I can re-form pieces but . . .” Ellen just held his hand as he clenched his eyes shut tight and moaned in pain, and she watched as his paunch melted away along with most of the fat on his body, tiny lumps moving under his skin, moving purposefully down to what there was left of his lower half.

“Is everyone all right?” Bubbles asked, squelching over with someone’s umbrella. She’d ballooned up fatter than the Reverend and then some, evidently having stopped another bus.

Jonathan opened his brilliant eyes and stared at her. “Apart from losing my legs, just peachy,” he said at last. “You?”

She stood there, her kaftan now a skintight muumuu. “You lost your—”

“I think I can get them back. How’s everyone else?”