In Laymon's Terms

“Mmm,” he continued. “You’ll be a fine fuck tonight. I’m going to enjoy this.”

He bent her slowly forward. There was nothing she could do. She could feel the bouncing head of his cock between her butt cheeks.

He pushed her down and kept one hand on her back, making sure she stayed folded in two. She grabbed her ankles for balance as blood trickled from the stinging wound in her cheek.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“Who do you think, bitch?” he asked as the tip of his penis rubbed against her anus. “I’m the Mountainside Murderer.”

Fear spread through Fiona’s body.

“You would’ve heard about me,” he continued as his cock began to force its way into her anus. “I’ve killed five people.”

“Nine,” Fiona whispered, grabbing her ankles tighter and readying herself for the pain.

“Huh?”

“You’ve killed nine people,” she said again.

His low, guttural laugh filled her ears. “You’re wrong, girlie. The newspapers say five.”

“They haven’t found the other four yet,” Fiona replied, her right hand slipping into her right cowboy boot.

“Shut the fuck up and stop trying to confuse me!” he said as his cock slid inside her. “I’m the Mountainside Murderer, so I should fucking well know!”

“No, you’re not,” Fiona said, her fingers sliding around the knife handle held snug inside her right boot. She lunged away from him in one movement. His cock slipped from her with a slurp as she spun around quickly, diving forward and burying the blade of the knife deep into his right eye.

She smiled as he fell to his knees screaming and clawing at his face, blood and white-milky eye juice flowing from around the knife blade imbedded in his skull.

“You’re not the Mountainside Murderer,” she whispered. “I am.”

James Futch

FIRST DISCOVERED Richard Laymon through his short stories. They were realistic, brutal, fast-moving, unflinching, assaults on the senses. Descriptions that made me shake my head and think, “This dude is doing it right!” And like the very best short stories, most of them cut in on the action and never let up, never got dull, right down to the surprise ending, the prose so smooth and clear, you could skip stones off it.

Throughout his long career, he wrote tons of short stories and it’s always a treat to stumble across one of them. Their frequent appearances in the magazines and anthologies kept the horror genre jumping with fresh new ideas and new spins on old ones. Among the first I read was the zombie gore-fest “Mess Hall” from the Book of the Dead anthology. I remember it as being the best of two worlds, with Richard Laymon blending serial killers with zombies in one totally gross-out story. I really admired that.

His influence on my writing has been tremendous and continues to this very day.

James Futch

HE ZOMBIES WERE on the move. Aimless yet relentless, they shuffled onward until one of them would trip and fall to the street. Advancing zombies then stumbled over the fallen, groaning incoherently as they writhed in a heap of soft decay.

Lyle Benning took advantage of these collapses to rest. He learned to snooze amid the slowly rocking pile of animated cadavers. It was like drifting on a gentle ocean, rotting corpses for waves. Eventually, the pile would begin to separate as the zombies, along with Benning, clambered to their feet and resumed the shuffling walk of the dead.

The masquerade was actually quite easy. He kept his facial features as emotionless as possible. With his mouth hanging slightly agape, he sporadically rolled his eyes around or crossed them. His arms hung limply at his sides. He occasionally let out a moan of agony. He shuffled about as though intoxicated. With the make-up, the disguise was complete. Benning had successfully walked undetected among the dead for a month now, maybe more. He had lost track of the time.

At first, Benning was dubious about pulling off the trick of fooling the zombies. But he soon concluded that it was only a matter of time before he was found and eaten. There were simply too many of them in the city and nowhere left to hide. So one night, he used the cosmetics in a dilapidated pharmacy to turn his face and hands the bluish green pallor that characterized some of the “fresher” zombies.

Benning had waited in the alley beside the pharmacy and when a group of the corpses walked by, he shambled forward and joined the procession. It was just that simple. And it proved that the zombies hunted by sight. They went after anything that looked alive, anything animated.

The sight of a fast moving human being had a dramatic effect on the sluggish zombies. For a bunch of dead bodies, they could move.

Two things posed a problem for Benning. First was his need to eat. So far, he had been lucky enough to periodically break away from the zombie parade to forage for food and drink. He would then either catch up with the group or wait for another. The risks were high, chief among them being eaten himself.