By R R Stark

Even zombies have enough brains to seek revenge – or was it just hunger?

The old witchdoctor hunched over his latest victim, who squirmed in his bonds of heavy kemp rope, his mouth plugged with a small gourde.  He was a white man that his faithful servants had captured, someone who had aimlessly ventured onto the dangerous island of Haiti. Some poor fool from the civilized world.

The lanky, dark-skinned voodoo sorcerer had painted his body with red and orange stripings, and his face was painted white  to look like a skull.  He wore beads of tiger claws and falcon talons around his thin neck and he wore a headdress of long dried reeds.

He hunkered over the squirming victim and chanted something eerie while the frightened man continued to struggle. Then the witchdoctor  grabbed a small bludgeon and whacked the man over the head, knocking him out cold.

The Witchdoctor had recently develop a new technique for his sinister arts, what some may call zombification. He took an old-fashioned hand drill and applied it to the man's right temple, then began swiftly rotating the drill, hand over hand, until a  small hole was made in the side of the skull.  He dumped a grey powder over it, which caused coagulation.  Then he inserted a small bamboo straw into the hole. He took a hardened gourde cup with some kind of bluish liquid in it, consisting of several ingredients, the staple of which was the deadly mungumba herb, whose property was to suspend certain functions of the brain, rendering the person vulnerable to the will of his new master.

The voodoo wizard slowly poured this bluish mixture through the straw, and the liquid poured into the hole and entered the brain.  Then he plugged the hole with a thin piece of cork and pushed it in.  Then he sat and continued chanting his eerie chant, the kind of undulating sinister sound that could wake the dead.

One of the steps of his new technique involved bypassing the traditional burial, so he draped a reed blanket over the still body and waited.  He had to wait at least two hours for the ingredients to seep into the brain and take effect.  This had worked only once before, but he had used too much of the zombie potion, and when the creature had revived, it instantly tore through its bonds and ran around the encampment wildly, until the witchdoctor had to spear it through the head, returning it to death.

This time he had only used half of the potion, and he wondered if it was not even enough this time.  He may have to wait much longer.  But he continued the eerie, undulating chanting, but only an hour passed when the  transformed creature beneath the reed blanket began to stir and move about.  The witchdoctor removed the blanket, and the glazed-eyed creature began struggling with its bonds, but in a slow lethargic manner, and it groaned dismally.  The witchdoctor smiled and felt he was successful this time.

The human creature seemed to relax and stop moaning.  Perhaps it was not enough potion, the witchdoctor surmised again.  He would have to add a little more next time.

Suddenly, the creature screamed piercingly, jerked its arms spasmodically, and ripped through the ropes.  Instantly it grabbed the unsuspecting witchdoctor’s head, opened its jaws wide, and bit through his neck.  Blood gushed from the gaping wound where it tore open the jugular, and the hungry creature lapped it up.  Satiated for the moment, it dropped the dead witchdoctor to the ground, got up and ran around wildly, growling and screaming, and clawing the air.  Then it proceeded to run through the woods, looking for more fresh blood.

No one was around to stop it this time.  The only one that could have was dead now. The old dark-skinned witchdoctor was the only one who knew that piercing the creature through the brain with a poisoned spear-tip was the only way to kill it.  Inhabitants of the island of Haiti had no idea what dangers they had in store.

Copyright Oct. 2008