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Something wicked this way comes
Chapter SIX
Simon was done with the wrangling, tent rigging and all around elephant shit pickup and was making his way through the fairway
when he saw Master Pong sitting alone. He has peering out with his milky blind eyes looking in the direction of every noise
that popped up in hopes that it was his beloved daughter Pei Chee.
“Wow Pong, what the hell are you doing sitting out here alone? Shouldn’t you be getting your wagon all set up
for the suckers to arrive tomorrow?” Simon patted the blind old man on the shoulder.
“Where is Pei Chee? I must find her.” Simon took the old man by the arm and helped him stand.
“I wouldn’t worry about her, Pong. She’s a big girl and can look out for herself.” Simon knew about
the affair that was going on between Carson and Pei Chee and he knew that Pong didn’t know. How a man with a sixth sense
could not know something that seemed to obvious to him was a true mystery.
The old man was shaking as Simon led him by the arm. “Something is not right.” He said as he looked blindly around
with an expression of terror on his face. “Simon, I had a vision today. There is an evil in this place that has been
sleeping a very long time and it has now awakened.”
“Its ok mate,” Simon said, softening his gruff manner as much as he could to sooth the worried old man. “It’s
been a hard few weeks and you just need some rest. I’m sure Pei Chee will show up soon. She’s probably just wondering
around somewhere, getting familiar with the place.”
Simon was the head roustabout and assistant circus manager right under Carson. Even though Carson thought of himself as Simon’s
boss, Simon actually did much more around the circus and was much more respected by the circus folk. He was the guy everyone
came to when there was a problem because they all pretty much deemed Carson as useless. Needless to say they hated each other’s
guts.
“What is all this I hear about gloom and doom and pending wrath of god stuff?” Smiley and Buggy had gotten back
a couple of hours before and they were in the small area between two tents called ‘Clown Alley’ polishing their
shoes and getting props in order.
“Hey Pong, man you have to chill out. You’re going to drive yourself crazy with all these mystical Chinese visions
you’re having.” Buggy, who usually looked on the bright side of things, took Pong’s hand to relieve Simon
and began to tug him in the direction of his wagon.
“Yeah, Smiley added,” Pong you get some rest. Nobody seems to be able to find Carson so we’re going to postpone
dress rehearsal an hour or so, so Buggy, spread the word.”
Buggy led Pong to his wagon and Smiley and Simon walked away bitching about what an asshole Carson was. Little did they know
they were speaking ill of the dead.
********
The old wagon sat empty as it had for so many years. But now the door was hanging from one hinge and the scene was gruesome.
Blood and glass everywhere and wood from the smashed furniture was splintered and mangled with bits of human flesh dangling
from its sharp twisted edges. The victim of this heinous crime was nowhere to be seen. The dead could no longer rest but where
Pei Chee and her victim Carson Bailey had gone was a mystery. The grass beneath the wagon was wet with the sticky blue liquid.
The grass and the soil had absorbed the toxic substance and its healing power had caused the grass to become vibrant and lush.
For a moment it almost seemed to move, but it wasn’t the grass that was moving it was the soil beneath that slowly bulged
and heaved until something broke the surface. Slowly it emerged up from the brown clumps of damp soil. It was grayish blue
and covered with charred burned flesh that had been rotting in the soil for oh so many years but now it was rejuvenated by
the Apa Vie. Slowly and surely making its way up from the earthen grave, it rose. It was bony and gnarled and almost unrecognizable
except for the shiny ring that adorned its finger, crested with mud-covered gems and an unmistakable cross insignia studded
with diamond chips. It was a hand long since severed from its body and lying dormant in a mass grave where it had been for
sixty years until now. Until the rejuvenating and healing power of the Apa Vie had awakened it like a dormant animal awakening
form a deep sleep, it was now free from it’s grave and bent on only one thing and that was revenge.
The severed bony hand scurried away like a sewer rat, into the forest. As if it had a mind of its own, it wanted only one
thing and that was to find its original master be he dead or alive. As the severed ring studded hand disappeared into the
dusk, more movement broke the surface of the ground beneath the wagon. Suddenly up it came, another gnarled and rotted hand
but this one was not severed but belonged to the bony decrepit body of the long dead ringmaster Hal Zimner. Up he came, pushing
his way through the wet sticky mud. His bony hands supporting him on both sides, as he pushed his way up out of the ground
until his entire torso was free from its earthen grave. A twisted evil grin cracked his charred rotten face as he looked around.
Beady eyes glowing blue, possessed by the power of the supernatural elixir, he slowly brushed the mud from his charred rotten
clothes. His ringmaster suit still recognizable but long since rotten and hanging from his bony twisted frame. Wish mud and
dirt hanging, falling from his gaping mouth; he looked down into the grave from which he had come. With his bony twisted claw
he reached into the dirt and pulled out the remains of his badly burned and rotten top hat and placed it on his bony rotten
skull.
“Ha, ha, ha,” He laughed with an eerie otherworldly gurgle. Like some kind of evil beckoning for his children
to join him, he pulled himself up from the soil until he stood upright and erect with his ornate rotten cane to support his
weight.
The ground behind him began to surge with motion and a disquieting whaling noise began to fill the air. Out they came, all
of the members of his longtime dead circus family, all rotten and charred and unrecognizable from their former selves, they
were being born from the earth in which they had slept for six decades.
Being skeletal emaciated corpses that had been rotting for decades by themselves they would never have had the physical ability
to move, alive or otherwise, but with the healing, rejuvenating properties of the Apa Vie, it had transformed and mutated
the remains of their rotting putrid flesh into a hybrid of rotting flesh and bluish white tendons by which they drove themselves
forward out of their graves.
They rose up from the dead, demented rotten clowns, mangled freaks and performers of every kind. The entire circus family
that had been the Fink and Zimner circus was now a demented army of the dead led a vengeful ringmaster with only murder on
his mind. They were all there, the ventriloquist, Boris with his rotten dummy. The Siamese twins still joined at the waist
and the rotting midget clown that had once made children smile was now a horrid monster hungry for the flesh of he guilty.
Even Hal’s old partner Marty Fink came up from his grave with the same thing driving him up from the ground. It was
all about a long over due vengeance that was owed for much too long.
The rotting motley crew stood there moaning as they gathered themselves, when all of the sudden Hal cocked his gnarly head
to one side and there it was. The bright shining circus tent that had just planted it’s steaks in the ground not knowing
it was for the last time. With his rotting wooden cane with its tarnished silver handle, Hal motioned toward the circus camp
and started to lead them towards it, an arm of thirty or so rotting putrid corpses silhouetted against the orange sunset made
its way toward the unsuspecting victims.
********
“Savini, I want to use the knives with the blue handles in tomorrow’s show. They match my new costume better.”
Donya was digging through a truck backstage behind the large round spinning bull’s eye target that she would soon be
strapped to. Savini came over and looked into the trunk she was digging through when they both heard the circus’s
one elephant trumpet loudly in the distance.
“Jesus, what is Barney doing to that poor elephant?” Savini looked off in the distance. The elephant’s cry
sounded almost painful as if the elephant wrangler, Barney was abusing the poor creature.
“Nah old Bertha has been having some digestive problems; she’s probably just got a tummy ache.” Donya chuckled
and blew it off.
“Freaking ah, an elephant with a stomach ache? That’s a freaking scary thought.” Savini laughed and threw
the knife he had been holding at the wooden mast holding up that section of tent where it stuck with dead accuracy. “Well
I think the blue handled knives are in my other trunk, I’ll go check.” With that Savini left Donya rummaging around
and went over to the canvas tent wall where his other trunks were stacked up.
As Savini knelt down and rummaged around in his other trunk he didn’t hear or see the slender rusty blade that punctured
the canvas and slit its way down making a five foot slit in the wall next to him.
“I think I found them,” Savini called to Donya who still had her head stuck in the trunk. “But I don’t
think I have a complete set.”
Two gnarled and bony hands pulled the rip in the canvas wide open and the skeletal face of Hal appeared in the slit. He peered
over Savini’s shoulder when suddenly he grabbed his forehead with one hand and drove the dagger through the back of
his head, plucking out one of his eyes as it made its way through the socket.
“Aaahggg” Savini could barely yell out before Hal had pulled him through the rip in the tent into the darkness.
“Jesus Savini, I really wanted to use those for the show…. Savini… hey where did you go?” At the lack
of response from Savini, Donya straightened up and looked around. He was nowhere in sight. “Where did you go? Dammit….
Men… they have the attention span of a hamster!” Donya stood up and walked over to where Savini had gone. His
trunk was still standing open but he was nowhere to be scene.
Suddenly something whizzed past Donya’s head and stuck in the wooden tent pole next to her, just inches from her face.
She spun around and looked at a blue handled dagger sticking in the wood.
“What the fuck!” Thinking Savini was playing some very bad joke on her, she spun around in the direction the dagger
had been thrown from to see not Savini standing there, but a very bedraggled and bloody version of what looked like Pei Chee,
but there is no way it could have been her, what with her face ripped apart and her jaw bone sticking wildly sideways out
of the side of her head.
“Pei Chee… is that you?” Donya took a step forward toward the little Chinese acrobat. “Sweetie…
what happened to you?” Thinking the girl was in dire need of medical help, Donya took another step and put out her hand,
just to be met with another dagger flying through the air at her. Being quite quick herself and being used to daggers flying
at her, she dodged it, just to have it stick in the back of the big wooden spinning bull’s eye that she was still standing
near.
“Arrrgggh” Pei Chee’s face changed expression, from indifference to pure evil as she gurgled up a sticky
blue liquid and made her way forward. It was obvious to Donya that something was very wrong and that she needed to protect
herself from this mangled monstrous version of what had once been her sweet Chinese friend.
“Look Pei Chee, I don’t want to hurt you.” Donya said as she reached back and grabbed the dagger from the
wooden tent pole, followed by the one in the back of the bull’s eye. She squeezed them tightly in anticipation of having
to use them.
“Listen sweetie, I’m a crack shot with these, so don’t make me use them. What ever is wrong we can talk
about it?” Pei Chee just moaned and inched her way forward toward Donya, who was now cornered against the wooden target
with nowhere really to go. She pinched the blades of the knives she was holding so hard she thought she was going to cut herself.
She could not understand what had happened to Pei Chee but she knew something was very wrong.
Pei Chee made her way closer through the maze of trunks that had fallen over when Savini had been pulled through the tent
by Hal. She moaned with an agonizing moan that almost made Donya’s heart stop. It was horrible and otherworldly making
Donya somehow know that Pei Chee was no longer alive but some sort of automaton or animated dead thing.
“Look you bitch!” Donya was feeling very threatened at this point. “If you take one more step I am going
to bury these blades so far in your ass you won’t know what hit you.” She waved one of the daggers up for Pei
Chee to see, hoping she would stop, but it was futile. She suddenly lunged at Donya from across the tent. In a knee jerk reaction,
Donya threw both daggers, one after the other and they flew across the tent with pin-point accuracy and embedded themselves
one in each of Pei Chee’s eye sockets.
Donya’s words were right… Pei Chee acted just like she didn’t know what hit her. The two daggers in her
eye sockets seemed to phase her very little if at all. Now blinded Pei Chee was slower in her pursuit, but she was still lunging
for Donya every bit as much as she had before and she was relentless.
Realizing the danger she was in, Donya screamed and ran for the nearest exit she could see, which was the huge rip in the
tent wall. She ran outside and immediately tripped over something. It was dark but in what light there was she could see Savini
lying there on the ground and kneeling over him, ripping the intestines from his open abdomen was a twisted rotting figure
in what looked to be tattered old ringmaster garb. She staggered to her feet just as Pei Chee grabbed at her through the rip
in the canvas.
Donya took off running again, making her way between the smaller tents until she go to open ground. She could hear Pei Chee
moaning behind her as she ran for her life. In the glow of the circus lamp poles, Donya could see, what looked like Bertha
the elephant lying on her side writhing on the ground. Donya ran over and ducked behind the elephants head. Bertha seemed
to be alive but she was making strange sounds like she was in pain or something. Donya looked around to see if Pei Chee was
still on her tail when she noticed something. The elephant’s abdomen was moving. Almost like she was pregnant and the
baby was squirming inside.
“What’s wrong baby?” Donya patted the elephant on the back of the ear. She could tell something was wrong
with her. The elephant just squirmed in agony as her abdomen moved again.
“What in god’s name is wrong with you baby?” Staying low, Donya slowly moved around the massive creature
to her mid section to see what was wrong. In the dim light she could see that there was a gaping hole in the elephant’s
stomach. Suddenly as if the elephant were giving birth by way of a crude C-section, something began to come out of the opening.
It was a bony hand gripping what looked like a massive sausage casing but it was obviously one of the elephant’s intestines.
Donya screamed as the horrible sight revealed itself. It was the decayed corpse of a short man dressed in a charred and rotten
pin striped suit and he was making guttural laughing sounds as he gnawed on the intestines of the poor innocent animal.
Just then as if following Donya’s screams, Pei Chee as well as that horrible ringmaster corpse she had seen before,
were lumbering their way around a nearby tent. It was obvious that they were coming directly toward her. Determined not to
scream again so as to not attract anymore unwanted guests, Donya made one last ditch effort for help. She ran up to Smiley’s
trailer and yelled through the window.
“Smiley, help me…. Get out here and help me goddamit! Something crazy is going on.” She threw something
at the window to get his attention. “Savini is dead and Pei Chee is some sort of freaked out zombie!” She tried
to jump up and look in the window but it was too high for her to see through.
On the inside of the trailer an unsuspecting Smiley was sitting, still in make up, listening to his classical music while
stuffing a small bouquet of feather flowers in a concealed pocket in the sleeve of his clown coat. His music was so loud that
he could not hear her screams.
Finally giving up, Donya ran toward the woods until in the edge of the pool of dim light coming from the circus grounds, she
could see an old wagon tucked away in the trees. She ran to the door of the wagon and looked in. It was hopeless. With the
door broken and hanging on one hinge there was no way she could barricade herself in there. As she turned to run back, a huge
figure rose up in front if her. In the light she could see it was tall and hairy and had a lacy tutu around its waist. As
her eyes adjusted she could see it was Helga the dancing bear, but the ordinarily docile and mild mannered bear was not it’s
normal self. Like Pei Chee it had obvious gaping wounds on it and its eyes seemed to be glazed over with some sort of bluish
white film. The bear made a horrible gurgling growling sound and swiped at Donya with its massive paw. She was instantly knocked
to the ground. The bear appeared to be some sort of zombie just like Pei Chee but what had done this? Donya crawled on her
hands and knees along the edge of the wagon, just escaping the constant swipes of the massive zombie bear’s paws. Donya
stopped and turned toward Helga just as the bear that had been standing on two feet lunged down on all fours and sank her
teeth into Donya’s leg.
“No Helga!” Donya screamed as the bear ripped into her leg with its gnarled teeth.
Donya began to beat on the bear with both hands when suddenly a pair of gnarled rotten arms reached out from under the wagon
and pulled her under, just as her ankle snapped and was ripped off, leaving her foot in the mouth of the drooling zombie bear.
Her screams fell on deaf ears as she met her end under the old circus wagon where this had all started.
The zombie plague spread like a virus. The Apa Vie regenerating corpses as it was spread in the saliva of each attacker to
it’s victim. The old army of the living dead being joined by the newly dead, all rising to their feet to follow their
rotten twisted leader to his destination…. Revenge.
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