Corn, Cows, and the Apocalypse

THE BIG G and the little d's

As if the puppeteered corpse wasn't creepy enough, the damn thing had to speak. Chucky dolls and rabid clowns had nothing on this demon-spawn. There wasn't even anything strange about his voice, except perhaps the clarity. The preloaded voice box had to be useless, but he managed to push his voice through from hell, along with his marionette skills.

August stilled, prepared to draw her sword at a moment's notice. I knew I should have been doing the same, but fighting still wasn't a knee-jerk reaction for me unless my life was in imminent danger.

"What the hell do you know about it?" I asked him. Snarky comments were my preferred defensive tactic.

I stood up, and August did the same. I glanced at her for some indication of what to do next, but she only nodded to me. Apparently this was my show; time to introduce myself to the players.

The grim laughed when I approached him. I checked the chain connection again. There was a slight tremor where the bolt buried into the wood siding, but it was secure. When he lunged at me, as I suspected he would, he didn't make me flinch.

Disappointed by my lack of fear, he lost his playful smile. He chanted something in Latin. He seemed wholly satisfied by his gibberish when he had finished. He panted and waited for me to do or say something. When I did nothing but stare at him, he examined me.

"Something wrong?" I perked my brow at his disenchanted inventory.

"I cursed you," he said, leaning over slightly as if he was about to puke on his loafers.

"I see." I looked back at August and gave her a confused look. She gave me the slightest head shake, indicating she had no idea about this. "Seems to have run you down," I pointed out, returning my stone stare to him.

"You are protected. Who has protected you?"

I tipped my head back with an inhalation that should have been followed by a long "oh." Priest had blessed me dozens of times. Perhaps he knew I might need it someday. "I suppose there are benefits to having priests for friends."

The grim glared at me through his hooded eyes. "Prayer is useless now."

"Shows what you know. I thought it was pretty useless before the apocalypse."

"He can't save you now," he declared.

"Yeah, duh, none of us are hanging around waiting for that phone call. God's number was pretty unlisted before, now it's disconnected."

"Not your god... your priest." I momentarily lost my protective sarcasm, but it was enough for him to get a bead on me. "Oh, yes, your priest has burned." I glanced back at August, but she had already settled back on her log, with her head down. Her sword was in hand, still ready at a moment's notice, but I got the impression she was trying to give me as much privacy as she could without leaving me unprotected.

"You're reading my thoughts, huh?" I asked, a little more disconcerted by that than I thought I should be.

"Did you even cry for him? Were you too busy crying for yourself?"

"Technically everyone mourns for their loved ones by mourning for themselves. It's just how it works."

"Was he... a loved one?" I was about to ask him if I should pull up a couch. "Did you want to fuck him?" I couldn't help but flush at that question. Before I could retaliate he went on. "Or do you prefer to stick with your sadist?" I resisted the urge to see if August caught the meaning of that.

"What the hell is your point?"

"What's the matter? Can't face your demons?"

"I'm going to let that little cliché pass for now, because you're new to the talking thing, but any more and I will have to kill you." I wiggled my finger in his face.

"Nothing you do to this body will kill me. I survive. I move on. I revive. I will eat your soul." The last statement thoroughly disturbed me, but I wasn't sure why, since it was clearly a rhetorical threat.

"So, I destroy your puppet and you move on to another crystalline dead, and then I destroy that one, and eventually you have no one left to inhabit, so you just get to stay stuck in hell. Great plan, evil genius. I think if I were you, I would pack this body on a flight to the Virgin Islands where you can camouflage yourself in the beach sand."

The grim smirked and a guttural laugh started deep in his throat. "There are still many, many dead."

"Not for long," I said flatly.

"Not for long," he said, mirroring my lack of inflection.

"Doesn't that bother you?"

"Doesn't that bother you?" he asked overlapping my own words.

"What's—"

"—this?"

"Are we seriously playing this game?" His voice overlapped mine exactly.

"Holy shit," he said, speaking the words I was only thinking. "We should sing a duet," he suggested even as I was forming the sarcastic statement in my mind. "Are you finished?" I didn't bother trying to speak. I just let him pluck the questions from my head. "What the hell do you want from us, you sick spawn of hell?" He leaned in, ready to tell me his secret. "Do you really want to know?" he asked me.

"You know I do," I answered with my own voice.

He licked his lips as seductively as he could with a dehydrated tongue. "Your souls."

"That's it?" I glanced back at August. She frowned at me, reprimanding my humor, but I couldn't resist. "I mean don't get me wrong, the whole "brains!" thing was way overdone, but I mean, demons wanting our souls, isn't that just... Well, it's been done—to death."

"Without your soul you will never rise."

"Yeah, I get it, we all go to hell."

"No! You go nowhere. You are oblivion. We rip away all hope, starving your soul. Your pain will sustain us until..." he pinched his fingers together, "...the light within extinguishes. Then nothing."

I stepped back from him. He took it as fear or shock and I let him. I had never thought of death in terms of heaven or hell, but I had assumed that some consciousness remained. Essence, energy, or the soul, it wasn't technical; simply an understanding of physics with the weight of an entire civilization's hopes and dreams resting on it. Without the soul, death would be what everyone always feared it would be. The end.

Before I could object August decapitated the grim. I watched his head roll away with the faint disappointment of not getting to do it myself. She looked me over, saddened that I had to go through the experience. "You okay?"

"I don't know. I think I have more questions than when I started, but I guess it helps to know they aren't just mindless automatons. I didn't know they could read minds."

"Human interaction feeds them. Talking to them for long periods of time is dangerous. They get in your head, as you saw. They can be difficult to resist. That's why we need to kill as many as we can. The last thing we need is them getting in so deep that they can eat our souls."

I nodded. There was nothing to disagree with. I was all for saving souls, but for some reason my instincts were flaring. August told me to trust my instincts, but she also told me to trust her. In the end, I would do as her instincts told her. After all, she was the hero.