So Wrong To Me

“Well, we got her,” Natsumi said.

“Did we though?” Catherine retorted. “Seems a little too easy.”

Natsumi shrugged. Sometimes taking care of dangerous ghouls could be like that. The hard part always seemed to be waiting around for them to show up, but once confronted they were knockovers. She opened her mouth to relate that to Catherine, but before she could Fujiwara-dono spoke up.

“Uh! Uh… UH! GUYS!” Fujiwara-dono’s voice increased in volume and urgency as he watched what unfolded in front of him.

The once possibly-dead, undead ghoul, now began to twitch and seize in little shivers and shudders and removed all doubt as to its dead vs. Undead status.

To her left, Natsumi listened to the gentle squeeze of leather as Catherine’s fist tightened over the handle of her whip. She widened her stance ready for a fight. Natsumi remained at ease and turned her nose up, annoyed with the zombie flopping around on the concrete like a fish out of water.

She double-dared her to get up.

Like a tilapia fillet being fried in a pan, it was as if an imaginary spatula scooped up the corpse and flipped it over onto her back. The weight of the body fell with a thud and several sharp cracks as bones snapped.

“This is…” Fujiwara-dono continued to speak.

Natsumi rested her hand on her hip and frowned deeply. What was she going to do now? Get up on all fours and…

Before Natsumi finished that thought, the corpse did that exactly. The ghoul planted her feet and hands on the ground, and arched her back. She craned her neck elongating the gray, vein-y flesh of it. The vertebrae of her spine snapping and cracking as the ghoul got into a very deep crab walking position.

“…Real bad!” Fujiwara-dono said with a low shrill cry, like the sound of a tire being deflated through a tiny pinprick.

The monster hissed as it forced its jaw open and unhinged it from its face breaking the brittle, leathery skin into a deranged smile. There was no chapstick that could fix that.

“Oooo! That looks painful!” Fujiwara-dono continued to narrate as if he were relating a sporting event for some unseen audience.

Natsumi grew even more cross. The dead, and even the undead, should stay that way: dead. At least that’s what she thought in her not-so-humble opinion.

The corpse stared at them with empty eye sockets for a moment. Could she see them? Did she know they were in front of her? Well, with the way Fujiwara-dono yelled, the answer was probably “yes.”

The arms, legs, and entire body continued to shiver and shake, not unlike a golden retriever waiting with eager anticipating for a treat. But instead of cozy yips and barks, this undead creature’s bones crunched and cracked. Her head swiveled left and right like a pendulum mopping the long tangled mass of black hair over the concrete blocks. With one violent snap the head swiveled a full one-hundred and eighty degrees. The head was upright, but the body was upside down.

Natsumi winced and she got the sense that Catherine did as well.

“OOO! OH NO! That shouldn’t happen!!” Fujiwara-dono cried out as he used his long floppy arms to cover his face. Despite wanting to hide from the horror in front of him, he continued to peak at it and scream out in terror.

To Natsumi’s left, Catherine let out a small surprised peep when the head snapped around. She said with a quiet voice, “Ew.”

Natsumi signed. So this was on again. “For real?” She muttered gripping the Heartwing Staff.

Natsumi shared a glance with Catherine. They each knew what they had to do.

“This is wrong to me!” Fujiwara-dono said. “So wrong to me!”

The fact that they had to deal with this creature at the end of a long night, certainly was, to Natsumi, wrong to her.