Eighty miles back up the highway Bard’s legs began to stir. His arms moved after that and his hands pressed flat against the pavement, pushing himself up and to his feet. He was dead, and his face was a ruined mass of flesh and bone, the front of his short torn and ragged and red. He didn’t remember his name; he didn’t remember what it was like to be alive. But he did remember one thing; he remembered that he had been going down this highway. He put one foot in front of the other, beginning a slow trek towards Florida, his guitar still on his back.
****
After eating a can of beans each the three Dead Jesters climbed back onto their motorcycles and continued on for another couple of hours before the adrenalin of the previous day wore off and they needed sleep. They pulled off of the highway and took shelter in the back of a convenience store, locking themselves and their bikes into a cramped office after dragging out a desk and a few rolling chairs. Toga and Willy fell asleep quickly, while Big Mack lay with his feet pressed against the door, looking at nothing in the pitch blackness.
Hundreds of miles away, Bard’s corpse was still making his way slowly south, lurching forward with small steps down the center of the highway. Bard’s heart no longer beat, so his wounds had long stopped bleeding, now there were simply two ragged holes in his body, his skin stained a rusty brown around them. Bard’s muscles were tight, and each step took a tremendous amount of effort for the ghoul. His brain was working, but his mind was not. He could walk, he could flex his fingers, and he could open and shut his jaw. But thoughts eluded him, beyond an intense and primal drive to eat, a hunger that tore at the pit of his rotting stomach. Memories were hazy but things remained, memories of a life lived, a life gone. As Bard walked down the street he could see the faces of his parents, the girls he had slept with, but it all meant nothing to him now. It was simply there. There too was the desire to go south, and this too would have been ignored if not for the feeling that if he headed south Bard would be rewarded with food. The living were headed south he knew, and he wanted to feast on their flesh.
Bard came to a mess of cars on the highway, a congested section Big Mack, Toga, and Willy had thread their bikes through hours earlier. Bard was walking on auto pilot, and his legs began carrying him this way and that, around the cars abandoned there. Bard stopped suddenly, rocking forward, dangerously close to falling face first onto the black top. A slight movement at the corner of his eye had stopped Bard, and now he swung toward the car he had been walking past. He pressed his hands against the glass of the passenger door and lowered his face, peering in. A girl no older than sixteen sat curled up on the passenger seat, her eyes wide with terror.
Bard didn’t have the ability to wonder why she was alone, he simply knew she was living and he was driven to eat her warm flesh. He made a fist and slammed it against the window again and again, cutting the skin on his hand before finally causing razor thin cracks to appear on the glass, resembling a spider web in the faint moonlight. The girl began to scream, throwing herself into the driver’s seat just as the passenger side window shattered and Bard fell forward, sliding halfway into the car.
The young girl scrabbled for the door handle, her fingers wrapping around it and pulling, but the door was locked. She was unfamiliar with the car and it was hard to see in the dead of night, so by the time she unlocked the door and threw it open Bard was further into the car and had wrapped his hand around her ankle. The girl fell sideways out of the car, landing painfully on the pavement and dragging Bard the rest of the way into the car. She kicked her leg angrily, managing to loosen Bard’s grip on her on the third kick. The girl was too slow to move though and as she turned to stand Bard’s hand darted out and caught a fistful of her hair. Her screams filled the night air as she fell down once more landing on her stomach and Bard pulled himself out of the car and on top of her.
“No, please!” the girl yelled, thrashing violently underneath Bard’s undead body. “Please don’t kill me!”
Bard opened his mouth, not able to do more than groan. His one hand remained at her hair, pulling so hard the girl had tears streaming down her face. Bard lowered his head, finding her flesh, letting his teeth tear into the teen in the crook of her neck. When he pulled away he had some of her in his mouth and red blood ran from the wound in waves, pulsing forth with each beat of her heart. The girl was screaming and crying, snot running from her nose and down into her mouth. She rocked back and forth, tried to push up with her hands to throw Bard from her back, but he was too heavy. She thrashed so wildly she slammed her own head into the ground and her vision exploded into nothing but bright stars. Bard swallowed the flesh in his mouth and lowered his head for another bite. The girl stopped fighting as much, whimpering as she became resigned to her fate, only groaning when Bard took another bite from her neck. The pain which had been unbearable was starting to fade along with
