"If you don't quit being so annoying I'm going to go make out with Dar, Captain."
"No you won't."
"No? Why not?"
"Because if you get anywhere near his fucking mouth I'm gonna knock his fuckin teeth in. With YOUR head."
"I hate you."
"I hate you."
"I hate you."
"I hate you."
"I hate you."
"I hate you."
"I hate you."
"I hate you."
Since neither of them could remember who had spoken last Lucy and Cam both fell into silence.
“I want some gum.”
“Shut up.”
There were no more zombies to whale on. The Cleaning Lady was a thing of the past. Even his own body, the only thing Cam had left in life that his mama gave him, had said sianara. The only thing in the world now was a sick-ass stink that wouldn't let up. Cam reached for Lucy’s right tit and squeezed it without thinking (it was sorta nice having these things so handy all the time, kinda stress relieving.) He wanted to kill something. But the only thing in the world left to kill was steering the ship behind where Lucy and Cam sat in the bow. God, how he fuckin’ hated that. Dar, Captain, captaining the ship. All the stupid little fuck needed was a stupid little fucking white hat.
As though he’d known Cam and Lucy were thinking of him, Dar, Captain left the helm and approached. A deep gurgling strangled sound came out of them as Lucy groaned and Cam chuckled. Good! Let the fuck head come forth! Maybe he’d say something stupid and Cam could kill him. They didn’t need him anyway. Cam could drive a freakin ship his own damn self.
Lucy and Cam stood up to greet him. “Well, ma’am, I can’t tell what direction we’re headed,” Dar, Captain said. “The compass is busted.”
The compass is busted? Fucking pansy. Lucy and Cam stared at him a moment, then Cam scrambled to their feet. Cam caught Dar, Captain by the arm with no trouble, then heaved him, with only a little more trouble, over the side of the ship.
“I can’t swiiii. . . .” SPLASH! said Dar, Captain.
“Yo fuckin’ ho!” yelled Cam over the side. He slapped Lucy’s tit in self-congratulations.
“Would you knock that off?” Lucy said. “Just because you can grab my boob anytime you want doesn’t make me a ho.”
Cam wouldn’t even honor that with a reply.
“And what’d you do that for, anyway? He was useful.”
“Useful like a saddle on an atom bomb. Guy was a fuckin’ prick, I did us a favor. I can drive the fuckin’ ship myself.”
“Pilot.”
“Huh?”
“You pilot a ship.”
Cam wouldn’t even honor that with a reply. He got behind the big wheel, grabbed the spokes, and spun it so hard it went around in a blur until it jerked against something and stopped. The ship spun around and faced another direction. Heh, this was easy.
"You don't know which way you're going," Lucy pointed out.
"So?" he said. "What, are we gonna miss the fuckin' turn for McDonald's or something?" Not that Cam ever ate McDonald's. Cam never ate anything but jerky and power bars and whiskey. These things were all in short supply these days. He thought Lucy might have something to say about that diet, anyway.
Lucy knew they were supposed to be going to find Virgil, but damned if she knew which the hell way to go.
'Damned if she knew which the hell way to go'? Wow. Cam was rubbing off on her in more ways than one. She couldn't believe it was her hands that were spinning the wheel this way and that as though it weren't connected to a rudder at all, as though her hands weren't connected to a brain at all - let alone two brains. She didn't have any better ideas at the moment, and she was tired of fighting. What did she care what Cam did?
She ignored him as profoundly as possible for the next two and a half hours.
Then the ship hit something.
"What the fuck was that?" Lucy said, clinging to the helm as she and Cam nearly hit the deck.
"Don't know," Cam said, and whipped the helm around - but it stuck on something and would not budge further either way. "What the . . . ?" Cam said.
They ran to the side, not even arguing about whether it was "port" or "starboard", and peered over.
The zombie goo was solidifying. The ship had grounded on . . . well, on the ground. Lucy had thought that the zombie apocalypse was the most horrifying thing she had ever seen. Then that certainty had been supplanted when the zombies had turned into a gooey necromantic sea. This development had made Lucy wish for the simple days of the zombie apocalypse when the undead had been shambling around the earth looking for flesh to consume. Ahh, those were the days. But what Lucy saw now eclipsed both the days of shambling undeath and the zombie sea, for all the zombie matter was congealing. The parts were coming back together. But they were not congealing in any semblance of anything remotely biologically, or even necromantically, possible.
A giant mutated mass of zombie flesh with human-sized arms connected to human-sized legs, humanoid hands protruding from humanoid heads. Eyes everywhere. Mouths everywhere. Teeth sticking out of hairy unidentifiable patches of hairy places. The giant mutant rose to it's hundreds of feet (and hands and heads) on it's five legs (and arms and pelvises). It's four heads rolled limply on it's six necks. It's eight arms flailed like tentacles. As parts continued to join to it's legs, it rose above Lucy and Cam, silhouetted against the cloudy sky.
Zombie Kong.
For the first time Lucy began to understand that the zombie apocalypse was the end of the fucking world. It hadn't seemed real before. Maybe because she'd been in high school, where it seemed like every day the world died a little more. The zombie apocalypse had, in a way, been the obvious conclusion to high school. But this? She could never have foreseen this.
Then multiple zombie eyes spotted Lucy and Cam and a massive, rumbling groan issued from Zombie Kong out of every mouth all over it's body.
"RUUUUUNNNNN!!!!!" Cam screamed.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Saturday, April 4, 2009
ZA 28: The Life of Dar, Captain
Dar Sprinkletoes grew up poor and lonely, his easy-to-tease surname a result of a busy day at Ellis island, a forebear with a swollen tongue, a hard-to-pronounce original surname (Prenklehoff), and four generations of American-born Sprinkletoes men with neither the initiative nor the imagination to correct the error. Up until his twenty-ninth birthday, Dar Sprinkletoes seemed bizarrely luckless. Indeed, if chance ever had even the slightest opportunity to interfere in Dar's life it would do so and with resounding and negative results. For example, Dar learned early not to do anything even slightly risky. If he swung at a baseball pitch, he'd somehow thrust his body into the path of the ball. If he tried to jump over a tiny stream, he'd fall in. If he played pin the tail on the donkey, he'd end up pinning the crotch of a hot-tempered uncle. Nothing was safe. As Dar grew, so too did his foul luck. At 18, Dar bought a scratch lottery ticket, won $500, and then was beaten to within an inch of his life and robbed by a gang of thugs. At 20, Dar finally gathered his courage and tried his luck with a lady of the night. He ended up getting the girl, his long-lost sister, pregnant with conjoined siamese twins. None of which ended well.
All of that changed, however, on Dar's 29th birthday. His mother (his only friend), got Dar a cake with a stripper inside. When the stripper emerged, she turned out to be one of the first zombies. After eating Dar's mother in front of him, the stripper zombie turned on him. While she was chewing on his neck, the police arrived and blasted the hell out of the stripper. They then shot Dar's mother who'd been zombified and then each other as each of them exhibited symptoms. Dar was left alone, a bit nibbled, but otherwise fine. He was, apparently, immune to the zombie virus.
Over the ensuing weeks and months, Dar found himself increasingly in the right places at the right times. Though he lacked any skill or talent whatsoever, he always managed to be the last man standing in a zombie brawl. Before long he joined up with a band of zombie killers and due to a number of strange circumstances (and a rather high death rate) he was eventually made their captain.
From then on, if anyone asked his name, Dar would reply simply: Dar, Captain.
On the evening of the great zombie goo flood, Dar happened to be sitting alone in a small sailboat in the middle of Cherry Creek reservoir. The sailboat was the place he went to get away from it all, to think and ponder his strange luck far from the madding hordes. On that particular night, however, he was planning to kill himself. It was just too much. He was done. As he raised the gun to his mouth and prepared to pull the trigger, his boat was hit by a massive wave of zombie spludge. While the wave knocked the gun out of Dar's hand and overboard, it did not capsize the boat. Before long, Dar, Captain was aloft upon the sea, floating wherever the winds carried him.
I'm still lonely, Dar, Captain thought. And at that precise moment, surfacing off the port bow, a beautiful woman emerged from the spludge.
All of that changed, however, on Dar's 29th birthday. His mother (his only friend), got Dar a cake with a stripper inside. When the stripper emerged, she turned out to be one of the first zombies. After eating Dar's mother in front of him, the stripper zombie turned on him. While she was chewing on his neck, the police arrived and blasted the hell out of the stripper. They then shot Dar's mother who'd been zombified and then each other as each of them exhibited symptoms. Dar was left alone, a bit nibbled, but otherwise fine. He was, apparently, immune to the zombie virus.
Over the ensuing weeks and months, Dar found himself increasingly in the right places at the right times. Though he lacked any skill or talent whatsoever, he always managed to be the last man standing in a zombie brawl. Before long he joined up with a band of zombie killers and due to a number of strange circumstances (and a rather high death rate) he was eventually made their captain.
From then on, if anyone asked his name, Dar would reply simply: Dar, Captain.
On the evening of the great zombie goo flood, Dar happened to be sitting alone in a small sailboat in the middle of Cherry Creek reservoir. The sailboat was the place he went to get away from it all, to think and ponder his strange luck far from the madding hordes. On that particular night, however, he was planning to kill himself. It was just too much. He was done. As he raised the gun to his mouth and prepared to pull the trigger, his boat was hit by a massive wave of zombie spludge. While the wave knocked the gun out of Dar's hand and overboard, it did not capsize the boat. Before long, Dar, Captain was aloft upon the sea, floating wherever the winds carried him.
I'm still lonely, Dar, Captain thought. And at that precise moment, surfacing off the port bow, a beautiful woman emerged from the spludge.
Friday, March 6, 2009
ZA 27: Fuck it. 'bout time someone spoke for Selig, since Selig won't speak for himself.
For a moment, watching Virgil struggle with the decision to shake Selig's hand or reject him, inhaling the smell of Meg's butterscotch-and-human-yearning cookies filling the air, hearing the sound of Cam-zombie noisily licking his lips after consuming a wise-ass fellow mutant, and feeling the rush of Lizzie's magic as--unbeknownst to her--it began flowing out of her and into Selig, Selig felt a curious feeling. It came upon him like a long forgotten lover emerging from a mist. What was it? Something he hadn't felt in years, maybe decades... ...aah. The absence of boredom. How quaint. Virgil spoke. The moment passed.
"You're a vile monster, Selig, but you've done a fair job muscling me into a corner. I'd rather be your slave free than your free slave."
Selig was content to let Virgil have his moment. Meg, however, had less tolerance for overly-cute word play. "That makes no sense at all, Virgil. Cookie?"
"I simply meant that I would rather serve Selig with a free mind, than be free to go my own way with a slave's mind. In other words, no. I would not like a cookie."
"Firstly, Virgil," Selig spoke, beginning to feel a bit awkward with his dragon hand extended but, as yet, ungrasped. "Your mind is not free. Your mind is saddled with an infinitude of tacit agreements about the nature of reality, particularly as it pertains to the human sphere. For example, you still believe in such obviously trite fantasies as temporality, individuality, and--though you will no doubt try to deny it--morality. You believe there is such a thing as past and future, despite the overwhelming and undeniable evidence to the contrary. You believe in the 'you' that sits like a hairshirt over your essential essence--constantly forcing your attention, constantly emphasizing and enhancing your suffering. You believe that there is such a thing as good--regardless of whether you call it aesthetics or moralizing. Indeed, you just betrayed as much with your breathless posturing about free slaves and slaves freed. Your judgment could not have been thicker or more sticky were it the world's largest regurgitated hairy gumwad.”
"Umm...Selig..." interrupted Meg. "Not sure if I’m interpreting the psychic field properly, but I think there’s a problem with the zombie pyramid.”
While Selig appreciated the information--confirming it was so with a quick scan of the psychic field--and while he recognized the great courage it took for Meg to interrupt him, he could not afford to look bad in front of his zombie hordes.
"Button up, cookie witch!" Selig shouted, and slashed Meg's throat open with one of his razor claws. Gasping for air and reeling from sudden blood loss, Meg fell to her knees. In a few moments her wretched invulnerability would kick in and she'd begin to regenerate, but for now, at least, she was humbled.
"Now keep quiet or I'll demote you to zombie washer," Selig snapped.
Meg buttoned up. She no doubt remembered the last time she was assigned to wash the zombies. Alas, the cost of power. Selig truly liked Meg. She was a glorious scoundrel with a heart of coal and one hell of a talent for baking. If only Selig could cast off the mantle of his authority, how much happier he might be. If only Virgil would take his hand...
"We have limited time, Virgil. So I must ask you to make your decision. While you may not fully agree with my methods, you cannot impeach my ends. Humanity was lost and sick. The patient, as it were, was dying. Our reckless and relentless pursuit of that which we could never have—true and lasting control over our own destinies—had all but destroyed the world and ensured humanity’s destruction. It was this" (and Selig waved half-heartedly at the zombies and blood-soaked Meg) "or total system failure. Now, I realize you have a thing for making stands and acting noble, so let me be plain. If you take my hand, your dearest wishes will come true. Indeed, in time you will become so powerful that you will not only be able to depose me, but you will also have the power to reset what I have done, to turn back the clock on my cure and return mankind to the brink of disaster you so quaintly refer to as 'The Time Before.'"
"And if I don't?" Virgil asked.
Selig checked the psychic field once more. A veritable ocean of melted zombie hash was at that moment flooding toward them. In moments, the bunker would be underwater...or rather, undergoo. How could this have happened? As Selig asked the question, he knew the answer. This was Lady M's revenge for the monkey. She'd worked a spell of truly breathtaking magnitude. In that moment, Selig stopped regretting his cruelty to Meg. The witch deserved it.
Selig, meanwhile, might need to expedite things a tad.
"Cam zombie will pop open your skull cap and eat your brains out of your head while you're still alive.”
Selig pushed his hand toward Virgil again. Virgil took it. Outside, the last of Lizzie’s magic left her and she dropped from the air with a screech. Simultaneously, Selig pumped all of his magic, all of his power through the handshake into Virgil. Now Virgil would be the zombie king and Selig could go back to doing the things he liked. Reading, rock climbing, and seducing innocent farmgirls (if there were any left in the world). Of course, he still had to find his damn penis. And escape the goo. Oh well. Selig glanced at Virgil, whose whole body was convulsing with the surge of power flowing into him. There were worse things.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
ZA Chapter 26: Hell's Treadmill
As Lucy leaned close to Blanchett Galadriel, relishing the moment of intimacy in the midst of the chaotic destruction in the high-school-turned-zombie den, Cam could not believe his good luck. A high-school full of zombies to kill, AND the best threesome he’d ever been part of in his life? Fuck yeah!
“Fuck yeah!” he yelled aloud as Lucy leaned into the shimmering vision of the ancient before her.
Blanchett Galadriel grimaced and drew back. “Nice," she said.
“Sorry!” Lucy said. Then she whispered, "Shut up, Cam!"
Cam did.
“Now, where were we?” Blanchett Galadriel leaned in again, fluttering her eyelashes -- for a moment Cam stopped. Was that glitter? Heh, stupid ancient.
Lucy leaned in. Blanchett Galadriel leaned in. Cam leaned in. Blanchett Galadriel’s skin glittered like stars and smelled of the summer wind. Lucy took a deep breath. Cam salivated. They all continued leaning in. They leaned very, very close . . . and Cam and Lucy fell on their face.
“What the--?” Cam spluttered. He looked up from the floor where Blanchett Galadriel stood above them, like an otherworldly smug high-school cheerleader, her hands on her hips and a smirk on her face.
“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t resist doing that. You flesh-wads are such suckers, you can’t make out with an ancient! We’re incorporeal! Ha, ha, it was pretty funny, though. You can have my shirt, if you like. Once I cast something away from myself it becomes corporeal.”
Cam didn’t know what corporeal meant. Was it like a corporal? But he kept his mouth shut because Blanchett Galadriel was pulling her gossamer shirt up over her head, revealing breasts more pale and glorious than the moon, with tips like pink roses. The shirt, however, got stuck on her elaborate hair and Lucy and Cam had to help her get it off, which was difficult because Blanchett Galadriel was still incorporeal, as was her shirt, so the most Lucy and Cam could do was stand by and give her helpful advice and encouragement – well, Lucy tried to give helpful advice and encouragement, using the small bits of attention she had left over from what Cam spent trying to touch the ancient-yet-youthful incorporeal breasts. Finally the shirt was freed from the ancient incorporeal bobby pins, and Blanchett Galadriel tossed it at Lucy.
The shirt was softer and more transparent than any Lucy had ever owned. “There you are, my chosen one,” Blanchett Galadriel said in her most ancientest and enticing of voices. “This shirt, though it may appear delicate, is made of the strongest material in the universe. Nothing can destroy it. Not fire, not blades, not the strength of lust trying to rip it from your body. It will keep you warm in winter, cool in summer, and yet will satisfy all who desire to look upon your youthful flesh and bounteous breasts. So you will never have to take it off for any reason whatsoever imaginable.”
Neither Lucy nor Cam knew quite what to say to that.
"What if I want to?" Lucy said.
"If you want to, you can take it off. But you can only take it off and put it back on three times. After that it will either dissolve to ether on your skin, or shrink until it breaks all your ribs, collapses your lungs, and compacts your torso into a tiny torso-shaped brick. I'm not sure which. I kinda just grabbed a shirt on my way out so I'm not sure which one this is. You’d better wake up now. The bars of the cage are nearly crushing you both. They have bent in such a way that you will be able to slip through – once I take care of the zombies obstructing your path. Also, you have about one deep breath of oxygen left.”
“How will you—“Lucy began.
WAKE UP!” Blanchett Galadriel snapped her fingers, and Lucy and Cam awoke in the rank, fetid press of the cage, the bars collapsed so much they were practically pinning Lucy and Cam in place. They couldn’t breath. They were sloshing in some chunky kind of sewage dripping from the top of the cage, puddling in the bottom.
“Sick . . .” Cam growled.
“Take a deep breath and close your eyes!” an incorporeal, tinkling voice demanded.
Lucy and Cam obeyed. No sooner had their eyes closed than the dripping liquid overhead turned to a sudden deluge, crashing down as though a dam had burst above them. Lucy’s first reaction was to freak out – but Cam quickly put a stop to that. He remembered what the hot, half-naked elven chick had said. He hardly ever remembered what naked chicks said. The act of talking while naked didn’t really make sense to Cam – if you were naked you were either sleeping, showering, or fucking – why talk? But when a naked chick was talking about zombies, Cam remembered. The bars would be bent open, for them to get through. He felt around for an opening, ignoring the slime and chunks of not-quite-liquefied bone and glop, and found a big gap between the iron bars. Pinching Lucy’s nipple again to bring her back to her senses, he pushed off the bottom of the cage with all the force his sexy-yet-not-too-strong legs could muster. Then they swam. They forced their body upward with all of Lucy’s physical strength.
Cam! I can’t take it! This stuff is—
Don’t think about it, Lucy!
Ew, sick, that was a leg, I think—
I said don’t think about it!
Oh god oh god oh god oh Cam oh I can’t do this oh my fucking god--!
Lucy! Lucy goddamn it, don’t you lose it on me! Just move for the surface!
She did. When it felt like their lungs were about to burst, they finally crested the surface, and took the deepest, slowest, most audible breath of either of their lives.
There was no getting around opening their eyes, though Cam tried to keep them shut as long as possible -- more to spare Lucy whatever sight awaited them than himself. But opening their eyes was the next awful step on Hell's treadmill. That's what this whole goddamn zombie apocalypse was. Hell's treadmill. It might not get you anywhere, and every step was more horrifying than the last, but you had to keep walking because if you didn't, you'd fall off. That meant the zombies won. YOU couldn't win. But you could lose. Fuck, could you ever lose. So Cam let their eyes open.
What Lucy saw stretching in every direction was a vast sea of putrescence. The goo was basically gray, with brown and black and green streaks and patches and THINGS. Slime covered her face and her hair. The sky was a similar shade as the liquid. Fuck the whole world had gone zombie.
"Now I guess we swim, huh?" she said.
"Unless one of your hot ancient aunts can get us wings or a boat or something."
They treaded goo for a moment. When no boats or giant birds appeared to rescue them, they began to swim, Lucy working her arm and leg, Cam working his. For several moments they just splashed about awkwardly, and then Lucy began to direct them.
"Right, left, right, left -"
"Hang on, Barbie." The left side of their body stopped moving.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, what now?"
"I ain't taking marching orders from a chick."
Lucy sighed. She was all but naked in a sea of liquefied zombie without a shore in sight, half her body was possessed by a rocking hot dude with a rock hard bod and a rock for a brain, and she was about to start her period. She'd had enough. "Yes, you are," she said. "So shut up, suck it up, and deal, Rambo. Right! Left! Right! Left!"
Cam would have continued to protest but he was pretty turned on right now. He concentrated his half a brain on getting them to something solid so he could masturbate her to another hellacious rocking orgasm.
They swam for a length of time that is indefinable, because any length of time spent in a sea of liquid zombie is indefinable. (Especially when some of the not-quite-liquid bits kept twitching and trying to bite.) After this time, though, they spotted something up ahead.
"It's a shore," Lucy said, squinting her eye.
"It's a ship," Cam said, squinting his.
Then they argued for the next two miles about whether the solidness up ahead was a shore-like solidness or a ship-like solidness. Lucy's argument consisted of the questions, "What the fuck would a ship be doing on this necromantic sea?" "Where would it have come from?" and "Who would even be on it?" Also, "You are such a dumb piece of shit." Cam's argument consisted of Cam's belief that everything in the world had turned into zombie versions of itself, and they were simply in what had once been the ocean.
It turned out to be a ship. With big white sails.
"Ha, suck it, Barbie," Cam said.
"Suck what?" Lucy taunted.
As they drew nearer, a voice called down from the ship and interrupted their arguing. "Halt!"
"What?" Lucy and Cam yelled back.
"I said, HALT! Declare yourself!"
"I'm --" Lucy started. "-- Awww, fuck," Cam finished. Just his fucking luck. This sack of horse shit was still alive? Hell's treadmill had just gotten a little more pointless. Cam forced their throat into silence. He was not declaring shit.
But wouldn't you know it - the fuck had binoculars. Of course he did. Standard issue Queller of Hell gear. He saw sweet young Lucy through the binoculars and threw down a rope ladder.
Lucy and Cam climbed the rope ladder, arguing about whether Dar, Captain was "kinda cute" or "a big fucking jackass." They swung themselves over the obscurely old-fashioned wooden railing and were immediately buried under a towel and siezed by the shoulders. "It's okay!" Dar, Captain, was yelling. "It's okay, ma'am, everything's going to be okay! You're safe now!"
"Fuck, okay, I get it!" Lucy squirmed. "Get off me!"
"You are safe now!"
"I told you he was a big fucking jackass," Cam said.
Cam grabbed Dar, Captain's wrist through the towel, and through sheer force of pissed-off-ness, held it still. It had to be pissed-off-ness. Lucy wasn't that strong. She had bird arms. While Cam held Dar, Captain at bay, Lucy toweled the chunks of zombie off herself. The shirt from Blanchett Galadriel was pristine, as was Lucy's body beneath it, so Lucy concentrated on her legs, and Cam focused on cleaning her crotch as thoroughly as possible.
"That's uh . . . that's a lovely garment," Dar, Captain said. Lucy and Cam sneered. "Ma'am, how did you come to be--"
"Listen, dude," Lucy said. "I don't feel like reliving my life story for your benefit, okay? It's past and gone and not very interesting."
"Well, I fail to see how such a lovely young woman in such unwelcome circumstances could have a life story that is dull in any--"
"I just need you to take me somewhere."
Whoa. Cam was impressed. He was starting to get turned on again, actually. His lust went a little slack, though, when Dar, Captain spoke. "Anywhere," Dar, Captain said, smiling cheesily. Shit, is this what guys looked like when they thought they were charming? Cam was glad he had never been charming. Dar, Captain said, "At this point my agenda is virtually . . . well, liquefied. So I'm very open."
Cam sighed and rolled his eyes. Dar, Captain's cheesy smile faltered. "Sorry," he said. "So . . . where to, ma'am?"
"Can it with the ma'am crap," Lucy said. "I just swam an indefinable distance in a necromantic sea of undeath. Could you gimme a minute before you go all sparkly-smiles?" She strode to the bow to collect herself. And have a conversation with her other half.
"So, where to?"
"We gotta get a match."
"A match?"
"Or a lighter. A flare. Something."
"Why?"
"Because the whole world's gone zombie, and that sea is bombie, which means gasoline! I'm making a zombie world pyre!"
"You are such a dumb piece of shit. Will you do me a favor and forget destroying the world for now? We have to get to your body."
"No, we have to get to Virgil," Cam said. Virgil probably wasn't a zombie. V had such crappy luck, he was probably the only other living thing in Zombie World.
"What we should really do is get to Selig . . . Hey, didn't Selig say he was going to see Virgil before he left us?"
"Fuck if I know."
"He did! And if Selig is with Virgil, and if your body is with Selig, then Selig, Virgil, and your body are all in the same place!”
“Kinda narrows down our destinations, don’t it?”
“Fuck yeah!” he yelled aloud as Lucy leaned into the shimmering vision of the ancient before her.
Blanchett Galadriel grimaced and drew back. “Nice," she said.
“Sorry!” Lucy said. Then she whispered, "Shut up, Cam!"
Cam did.
“Now, where were we?” Blanchett Galadriel leaned in again, fluttering her eyelashes -- for a moment Cam stopped. Was that glitter? Heh, stupid ancient.
Lucy leaned in. Blanchett Galadriel leaned in. Cam leaned in. Blanchett Galadriel’s skin glittered like stars and smelled of the summer wind. Lucy took a deep breath. Cam salivated. They all continued leaning in. They leaned very, very close . . . and Cam and Lucy fell on their face.
“What the--?” Cam spluttered. He looked up from the floor where Blanchett Galadriel stood above them, like an otherworldly smug high-school cheerleader, her hands on her hips and a smirk on her face.
“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t resist doing that. You flesh-wads are such suckers, you can’t make out with an ancient! We’re incorporeal! Ha, ha, it was pretty funny, though. You can have my shirt, if you like. Once I cast something away from myself it becomes corporeal.”
Cam didn’t know what corporeal meant. Was it like a corporal? But he kept his mouth shut because Blanchett Galadriel was pulling her gossamer shirt up over her head, revealing breasts more pale and glorious than the moon, with tips like pink roses. The shirt, however, got stuck on her elaborate hair and Lucy and Cam had to help her get it off, which was difficult because Blanchett Galadriel was still incorporeal, as was her shirt, so the most Lucy and Cam could do was stand by and give her helpful advice and encouragement – well, Lucy tried to give helpful advice and encouragement, using the small bits of attention she had left over from what Cam spent trying to touch the ancient-yet-youthful incorporeal breasts. Finally the shirt was freed from the ancient incorporeal bobby pins, and Blanchett Galadriel tossed it at Lucy.
The shirt was softer and more transparent than any Lucy had ever owned. “There you are, my chosen one,” Blanchett Galadriel said in her most ancientest and enticing of voices. “This shirt, though it may appear delicate, is made of the strongest material in the universe. Nothing can destroy it. Not fire, not blades, not the strength of lust trying to rip it from your body. It will keep you warm in winter, cool in summer, and yet will satisfy all who desire to look upon your youthful flesh and bounteous breasts. So you will never have to take it off for any reason whatsoever imaginable.”
Neither Lucy nor Cam knew quite what to say to that.
"What if I want to?" Lucy said.
"If you want to, you can take it off. But you can only take it off and put it back on three times. After that it will either dissolve to ether on your skin, or shrink until it breaks all your ribs, collapses your lungs, and compacts your torso into a tiny torso-shaped brick. I'm not sure which. I kinda just grabbed a shirt on my way out so I'm not sure which one this is. You’d better wake up now. The bars of the cage are nearly crushing you both. They have bent in such a way that you will be able to slip through – once I take care of the zombies obstructing your path. Also, you have about one deep breath of oxygen left.”
“How will you—“Lucy began.
WAKE UP!” Blanchett Galadriel snapped her fingers, and Lucy and Cam awoke in the rank, fetid press of the cage, the bars collapsed so much they were practically pinning Lucy and Cam in place. They couldn’t breath. They were sloshing in some chunky kind of sewage dripping from the top of the cage, puddling in the bottom.
“Sick . . .” Cam growled.
“Take a deep breath and close your eyes!” an incorporeal, tinkling voice demanded.
Lucy and Cam obeyed. No sooner had their eyes closed than the dripping liquid overhead turned to a sudden deluge, crashing down as though a dam had burst above them. Lucy’s first reaction was to freak out – but Cam quickly put a stop to that. He remembered what the hot, half-naked elven chick had said. He hardly ever remembered what naked chicks said. The act of talking while naked didn’t really make sense to Cam – if you were naked you were either sleeping, showering, or fucking – why talk? But when a naked chick was talking about zombies, Cam remembered. The bars would be bent open, for them to get through. He felt around for an opening, ignoring the slime and chunks of not-quite-liquefied bone and glop, and found a big gap between the iron bars. Pinching Lucy’s nipple again to bring her back to her senses, he pushed off the bottom of the cage with all the force his sexy-yet-not-too-strong legs could muster. Then they swam. They forced their body upward with all of Lucy’s physical strength.
Cam! I can’t take it! This stuff is—
Don’t think about it, Lucy!
Ew, sick, that was a leg, I think—
I said don’t think about it!
Oh god oh god oh god oh Cam oh I can’t do this oh my fucking god--!
Lucy! Lucy goddamn it, don’t you lose it on me! Just move for the surface!
She did. When it felt like their lungs were about to burst, they finally crested the surface, and took the deepest, slowest, most audible breath of either of their lives.
There was no getting around opening their eyes, though Cam tried to keep them shut as long as possible -- more to spare Lucy whatever sight awaited them than himself. But opening their eyes was the next awful step on Hell's treadmill. That's what this whole goddamn zombie apocalypse was. Hell's treadmill. It might not get you anywhere, and every step was more horrifying than the last, but you had to keep walking because if you didn't, you'd fall off. That meant the zombies won. YOU couldn't win. But you could lose. Fuck, could you ever lose. So Cam let their eyes open.
What Lucy saw stretching in every direction was a vast sea of putrescence. The goo was basically gray, with brown and black and green streaks and patches and THINGS. Slime covered her face and her hair. The sky was a similar shade as the liquid. Fuck the whole world had gone zombie.
"Now I guess we swim, huh?" she said.
"Unless one of your hot ancient aunts can get us wings or a boat or something."
They treaded goo for a moment. When no boats or giant birds appeared to rescue them, they began to swim, Lucy working her arm and leg, Cam working his. For several moments they just splashed about awkwardly, and then Lucy began to direct them.
"Right, left, right, left -"
"Hang on, Barbie." The left side of their body stopped moving.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, what now?"
"I ain't taking marching orders from a chick."
Lucy sighed. She was all but naked in a sea of liquefied zombie without a shore in sight, half her body was possessed by a rocking hot dude with a rock hard bod and a rock for a brain, and she was about to start her period. She'd had enough. "Yes, you are," she said. "So shut up, suck it up, and deal, Rambo. Right! Left! Right! Left!"
Cam would have continued to protest but he was pretty turned on right now. He concentrated his half a brain on getting them to something solid so he could masturbate her to another hellacious rocking orgasm.
They swam for a length of time that is indefinable, because any length of time spent in a sea of liquid zombie is indefinable. (Especially when some of the not-quite-liquid bits kept twitching and trying to bite.) After this time, though, they spotted something up ahead.
"It's a shore," Lucy said, squinting her eye.
"It's a ship," Cam said, squinting his.
Then they argued for the next two miles about whether the solidness up ahead was a shore-like solidness or a ship-like solidness. Lucy's argument consisted of the questions, "What the fuck would a ship be doing on this necromantic sea?" "Where would it have come from?" and "Who would even be on it?" Also, "You are such a dumb piece of shit." Cam's argument consisted of Cam's belief that everything in the world had turned into zombie versions of itself, and they were simply in what had once been the ocean.
It turned out to be a ship. With big white sails.
"Ha, suck it, Barbie," Cam said.
"Suck what?" Lucy taunted.
As they drew nearer, a voice called down from the ship and interrupted their arguing. "Halt!"
"What?" Lucy and Cam yelled back.
"I said, HALT! Declare yourself!"
"I'm --" Lucy started. "-- Awww, fuck," Cam finished. Just his fucking luck. This sack of horse shit was still alive? Hell's treadmill had just gotten a little more pointless. Cam forced their throat into silence. He was not declaring shit.
But wouldn't you know it - the fuck had binoculars. Of course he did. Standard issue Queller of Hell gear. He saw sweet young Lucy through the binoculars and threw down a rope ladder.
Lucy and Cam climbed the rope ladder, arguing about whether Dar, Captain was "kinda cute" or "a big fucking jackass." They swung themselves over the obscurely old-fashioned wooden railing and were immediately buried under a towel and siezed by the shoulders. "It's okay!" Dar, Captain, was yelling. "It's okay, ma'am, everything's going to be okay! You're safe now!"
"Fuck, okay, I get it!" Lucy squirmed. "Get off me!"
"You are safe now!"
"I told you he was a big fucking jackass," Cam said.
Cam grabbed Dar, Captain's wrist through the towel, and through sheer force of pissed-off-ness, held it still. It had to be pissed-off-ness. Lucy wasn't that strong. She had bird arms. While Cam held Dar, Captain at bay, Lucy toweled the chunks of zombie off herself. The shirt from Blanchett Galadriel was pristine, as was Lucy's body beneath it, so Lucy concentrated on her legs, and Cam focused on cleaning her crotch as thoroughly as possible.
"That's uh . . . that's a lovely garment," Dar, Captain said. Lucy and Cam sneered. "Ma'am, how did you come to be--"
"Listen, dude," Lucy said. "I don't feel like reliving my life story for your benefit, okay? It's past and gone and not very interesting."
"Well, I fail to see how such a lovely young woman in such unwelcome circumstances could have a life story that is dull in any--"
"I just need you to take me somewhere."
Whoa. Cam was impressed. He was starting to get turned on again, actually. His lust went a little slack, though, when Dar, Captain spoke. "Anywhere," Dar, Captain said, smiling cheesily. Shit, is this what guys looked like when they thought they were charming? Cam was glad he had never been charming. Dar, Captain said, "At this point my agenda is virtually . . . well, liquefied. So I'm very open."
Cam sighed and rolled his eyes. Dar, Captain's cheesy smile faltered. "Sorry," he said. "So . . . where to, ma'am?"
"Can it with the ma'am crap," Lucy said. "I just swam an indefinable distance in a necromantic sea of undeath. Could you gimme a minute before you go all sparkly-smiles?" She strode to the bow to collect herself. And have a conversation with her other half.
"So, where to?"
"We gotta get a match."
"A match?"
"Or a lighter. A flare. Something."
"Why?"
"Because the whole world's gone zombie, and that sea is bombie, which means gasoline! I'm making a zombie world pyre!"
"You are such a dumb piece of shit. Will you do me a favor and forget destroying the world for now? We have to get to your body."
"No, we have to get to Virgil," Cam said. Virgil probably wasn't a zombie. V had such crappy luck, he was probably the only other living thing in Zombie World.
"What we should really do is get to Selig . . . Hey, didn't Selig say he was going to see Virgil before he left us?"
"Fuck if I know."
"He did! And if Selig is with Virgil, and if your body is with Selig, then Selig, Virgil, and your body are all in the same place!”
“Kinda narrows down our destinations, don’t it?”
Monday, March 2, 2009
ZA25: The Trouble with Pyramid Schemes
At the end of the hallway, Cam turned right. Or at least, the left half of him turned right, whereas the right half of Lucy turned left, thus leading Lucy to collide with herself and go sprawling.
"What the fuck?" Cam started to say as Lucy shouted, "fuckin' testicle jockey, learn to drive!"
"Whoa!" Cam said, lifting Lucy's left arm and grabbing her-and-his right boob. "How come I can't move my other arm?"
"It's not your arm, half wit."
"Listen, babe, if you don't start talking nice to me, things are going to get real ugly."
"As opposed to now, when we're somehow stuck in a hallway of my former school--presently a well known den for zombies--with hundreds of bombies exploding behind us threatening to suffocate us with the noxious smoke from their burning corpses since we can't actually move our body away from said smoke since we can't seem to even walk straight since our minds have now each taken control of one hemisphere of our tragically shared body and your first reaction is to grope my fuckin' boob such that I apparently now have three boobs, one being groped, one inexplicably naked, and one living in my head? You're telling me that despite all that I should worry because you're starting to get your fucking feelings hurt?"
Cam pinched Lucy's nipple. Hard. Unfortunately this had an opposite effect from the one desired and the two halves of Lucy spent a moment reeling from the rush. A swirl of pleasure and pain not unlike that experienced by a homophobe sucking a sour candy from the sweet cleavage of a suddenly revealed transsexual.
"Alright, listen, Cammy," Lucy said when the rush subsided. "I know this place, can you just back off the stick and let mama take us outta here?"
"Whatever, just so long as I get to smash some fucking zombie heads, soon. You make me itchy."
With that, Lucy picked herself up and took the left turn she'd been wanting to take, strode down the hall and was about to turn toward an exit when she heard a voice talking from a nearby classroom. Cautiously, she edged to the door and peeked inside, hoping against hope that Selig Retsuc would be in the midst of some shit-faced discourse to his legions.
Instead, Lucy saw a room full of zombies in varying states of decay looking up at a chalkboard. This might not have been so odd if the zombies weren't all identically dressed in perfectly pressed zombie tuxedoes with red bowties, or if the presenter zombie weren't pointing at a drawing of a triangle and saying in a British accent,
"If any of you has just three friends who'd be interested in not only buying some of these exciting products, but selling them as well, you can go into business for yourself, and before long you'll understand my patented Wealth-o-Rama 5000 system." At which point, the presenter zombie winked, smiled, and gave a thumbs up. And then his eyebrow fell off. And then his left ear. And then his jaw.
And then all the zombies in the room began to melt, oozing out of their tuxedoes and turning into zombie goo. The smell was about what you'd expect from liquefied zombie, which is to say it was the kind of smell you'd expect from an over-felched gerbil, left to stew in the anal canal of an unbathed meth junkie who'd died three days ago whilst pawing around a garbage dump looking for a rat to stick up his ass to get out the other rat he'd stuck up there to get to the gerbil.
Happily, the smell was replaced by a waft of roses as a lovely elven creature in a transparent silk blouse strode down the hall to stand beside Lucy.
"Who are you?" Lucy asked, though she had the squidgiest feeling she somehow already knew.
"I'm an ancient. Name's Blanchett Galadriel. I'm here to tell you to wake up."
"Fuck you talking 'bout?" Cam asked.
"None of this is real. You two are still inside your cage. There's a pyramid of zombies rising above you. You've passed out from the fumes and only imagined you somehow managed to fall through a hole in solid ground and land in the gymnasium of Lucy's old school several miles away. Physics, after all, is not so negotiable as you'd like to think."
"So no hole-in-the-floor trick?"
"No. No hole-in-the-floor trick. It was lame."
"It was a hell of a lot more original than a fucking dream sequence."
"I admit, it would be terribly cliche to just pretend that something that supposedly happened didn't happen because you merely dreamed it. That would be cliche and, truth to tell, rude. That's why this is actually a vision. A vision wrought by bombie fumes. How else do you think your otherwise passably dressed person became naked but for a thong?"
"This vision sucks."
"Would you prefer it if we were making out?"
"No," Cam lied, mostly out of spite.
Lucy, however, didn't hesitate. Between the prospect of waking up in a cage at the bottom of a zombie pyramid and making out with a hot elven-looking chick whilst the two of them were mostly naked, Lucy didn't figure there was much of a contest.
"What the fuck?" Cam started to say as Lucy shouted, "fuckin' testicle jockey, learn to drive!"
"Whoa!" Cam said, lifting Lucy's left arm and grabbing her-and-his right boob. "How come I can't move my other arm?"
"It's not your arm, half wit."
"Listen, babe, if you don't start talking nice to me, things are going to get real ugly."
"As opposed to now, when we're somehow stuck in a hallway of my former school--presently a well known den for zombies--with hundreds of bombies exploding behind us threatening to suffocate us with the noxious smoke from their burning corpses since we can't actually move our body away from said smoke since we can't seem to even walk straight since our minds have now each taken control of one hemisphere of our tragically shared body and your first reaction is to grope my fuckin' boob such that I apparently now have three boobs, one being groped, one inexplicably naked, and one living in my head? You're telling me that despite all that I should worry because you're starting to get your fucking feelings hurt?"
Cam pinched Lucy's nipple. Hard. Unfortunately this had an opposite effect from the one desired and the two halves of Lucy spent a moment reeling from the rush. A swirl of pleasure and pain not unlike that experienced by a homophobe sucking a sour candy from the sweet cleavage of a suddenly revealed transsexual.
"Alright, listen, Cammy," Lucy said when the rush subsided. "I know this place, can you just back off the stick and let mama take us outta here?"
"Whatever, just so long as I get to smash some fucking zombie heads, soon. You make me itchy."
With that, Lucy picked herself up and took the left turn she'd been wanting to take, strode down the hall and was about to turn toward an exit when she heard a voice talking from a nearby classroom. Cautiously, she edged to the door and peeked inside, hoping against hope that Selig Retsuc would be in the midst of some shit-faced discourse to his legions.
Instead, Lucy saw a room full of zombies in varying states of decay looking up at a chalkboard. This might not have been so odd if the zombies weren't all identically dressed in perfectly pressed zombie tuxedoes with red bowties, or if the presenter zombie weren't pointing at a drawing of a triangle and saying in a British accent,
"If any of you has just three friends who'd be interested in not only buying some of these exciting products, but selling them as well, you can go into business for yourself, and before long you'll understand my patented Wealth-o-Rama 5000 system." At which point, the presenter zombie winked, smiled, and gave a thumbs up. And then his eyebrow fell off. And then his left ear. And then his jaw.
And then all the zombies in the room began to melt, oozing out of their tuxedoes and turning into zombie goo. The smell was about what you'd expect from liquefied zombie, which is to say it was the kind of smell you'd expect from an over-felched gerbil, left to stew in the anal canal of an unbathed meth junkie who'd died three days ago whilst pawing around a garbage dump looking for a rat to stick up his ass to get out the other rat he'd stuck up there to get to the gerbil.
Happily, the smell was replaced by a waft of roses as a lovely elven creature in a transparent silk blouse strode down the hall to stand beside Lucy.
"Who are you?" Lucy asked, though she had the squidgiest feeling she somehow already knew.
"I'm an ancient. Name's Blanchett Galadriel. I'm here to tell you to wake up."
"Fuck you talking 'bout?" Cam asked.
"None of this is real. You two are still inside your cage. There's a pyramid of zombies rising above you. You've passed out from the fumes and only imagined you somehow managed to fall through a hole in solid ground and land in the gymnasium of Lucy's old school several miles away. Physics, after all, is not so negotiable as you'd like to think."
"So no hole-in-the-floor trick?"
"No. No hole-in-the-floor trick. It was lame."
"It was a hell of a lot more original than a fucking dream sequence."
"I admit, it would be terribly cliche to just pretend that something that supposedly happened didn't happen because you merely dreamed it. That would be cliche and, truth to tell, rude. That's why this is actually a vision. A vision wrought by bombie fumes. How else do you think your otherwise passably dressed person became naked but for a thong?"
"This vision sucks."
"Would you prefer it if we were making out?"
"No," Cam lied, mostly out of spite.
Lucy, however, didn't hesitate. Between the prospect of waking up in a cage at the bottom of a zombie pyramid and making out with a hot elven-looking chick whilst the two of them were mostly naked, Lucy didn't figure there was much of a contest.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
ZA 24: Falling for You
Lucy sat up and said with Cam’s voice:
“Fuck me, that’s a good plan.”
“We have to stop him,” Lucy said. “He’s destroyed everything, and now he’s trying to remake the world in his image.”
Cam, with Lucy’s eyes, looked up at the dead, gray flesh that pressed against the bars of their cage. One of the zombie’s faces was wedged between the bars. Its cockeyed eyeballs looked in two different directions, and its jaw hung limp. Its teeth clacked together feebly every now and then as it bit at them. The stench was unbearable: rotting eggs, rancid chicken and gasoline. As more and more zombies piled on top of their cage, the light dimmed.
“What’s this horseshit?” Cam said.
“I don’t know,” Lucy returned.
Cam cleared his throat. It was damned inconvenient to sound like a girl every time he talked. A hot girl. A hot girl who fondled herself to one hellacious, rocking orgasm in the middle of a room full of zombies. This was a fucking trip. He felt like his brain was sprained. “I don’t know what to do with you,” he said.
“Help me defeat Retsuc.”
“Duh,” he said.
“And fuck me every now and then.”
“I don’t know if you’ve been readin’ the paper lately, but I don’t have a dick anymore. Or anything else, for that matter.”
“You’ve got me.”
That was a reality that Cam couldn’t deny even if he wanted to. And he didn’t want to. After what he’d just felt thrilling through his –er, Lucy’s– body, he didn’t.
The light went out as the zombies mashed themselves against every available area of the cage.
“Okay, this is fucking creepy. I can’t believe you talked me into dropping The Cleaning Lady.”
“Wouldn’t do you any good,” Lucy replied to Cam-Lucy. “These are bombies. Can’t you smell the gas?”
“Yeah,” Cam said, grinning. “Imagine how this whole fucking place would go up.”
“Aren’t you afraid of dying?”
“No.”
Lucy trembled with a little aftershock.
“Fuckin’ stop that, you’re distracting me.”
“Sorry,” Lucy said.
They sat in silence as undead bodies shifted, slithered and groaned above them. The stink intensified. The zombie face above them said, "Rrrrggflf."
“I think we’re going to suffocate in here,” Lucy pointed out. One of the iron bars groaned. Cam reached up with Lucy’s hand and touched it. It had bent under the weight.
“Or something worse is going to happen quicker,” he said.
“What’s worse than suffocating?” she asked. He felt her heart beating faster as adrenaline hit their system.
“Calm the fuck down, Jitters. It’s not going to do a damn bit of good going to pieces now.”
“How are we going to get out of here?” Lucy said. “How are we going to get out of here?”
Cam smacked himself in the face, wincing at the sting. Lucy quieted down.
“Don’t you got that magic of the Ancients thing?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said.
“Well, the shit sucked the gas out of the Cleaning Lady and smacked me right outta my head. Ain’t you got a zombie-melter in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what the fuck do you know?”
“I know that I like you.”
“What are you, twelve?”
“I don’t know what the Ancients are going to do! I didn’t study them, that’s Lady M’s schtick!”
It was getting tough to breathe. Cam could feel their lungs working harder and harder.’
“Who the fuck needs to study? Just let ‘er rip!”
Cam felt Lucy retreat into their mind. He followed, just to see what she would do. They headed toward a light, which got brighter and brighter. But before they reached it, Lucy mumbled something that sounded like “Deepfried barbell hooters” and the bright light flashed and turned everything blinding white.
Cam felt like he was falling. And when the fucking floor slammed into his back and elbows, he realized he had fallen. Fresh air whooshed in to surround them, and he sucked in a deep lungful of it. Wire-covered lights illuminated the painted cinderblock walls. “Gymnasium” was written in foot-tall black letters with an arrow pointing to the right. He looked up and saw the cage over the hole in the ceiling with the zombie pile still smashed against it.
“Nice!” Cam said. “The ancients fuckin’ rock!”
“The old hole-in-the-floor trick,” Lucy said, “Gets ‘em every time.”
The iron cage groaned as if in response, then snapped and zombies started tumbling through the hole like lemmings. Exploding lemmings.
Lucy shielded her eyes while Cam laughed. Lucy took control of the body. “We’re getting the hell out of here,” she said. Glancing down at her clothing, which at this point consisted of nothing but a wet thong, she threw up her hands and sprinted up the hallway, Cam’s laughter trailing from her open mouth.
“Fuck me, that’s a good plan.”
“We have to stop him,” Lucy said. “He’s destroyed everything, and now he’s trying to remake the world in his image.”
Cam, with Lucy’s eyes, looked up at the dead, gray flesh that pressed against the bars of their cage. One of the zombie’s faces was wedged between the bars. Its cockeyed eyeballs looked in two different directions, and its jaw hung limp. Its teeth clacked together feebly every now and then as it bit at them. The stench was unbearable: rotting eggs, rancid chicken and gasoline. As more and more zombies piled on top of their cage, the light dimmed.
“What’s this horseshit?” Cam said.
“I don’t know,” Lucy returned.
Cam cleared his throat. It was damned inconvenient to sound like a girl every time he talked. A hot girl. A hot girl who fondled herself to one hellacious, rocking orgasm in the middle of a room full of zombies. This was a fucking trip. He felt like his brain was sprained. “I don’t know what to do with you,” he said.
“Help me defeat Retsuc.”
“Duh,” he said.
“And fuck me every now and then.”
“I don’t know if you’ve been readin’ the paper lately, but I don’t have a dick anymore. Or anything else, for that matter.”
“You’ve got me.”
That was a reality that Cam couldn’t deny even if he wanted to. And he didn’t want to. After what he’d just felt thrilling through his –er, Lucy’s– body, he didn’t.
The light went out as the zombies mashed themselves against every available area of the cage.
“Okay, this is fucking creepy. I can’t believe you talked me into dropping The Cleaning Lady.”
“Wouldn’t do you any good,” Lucy replied to Cam-Lucy. “These are bombies. Can’t you smell the gas?”
“Yeah,” Cam said, grinning. “Imagine how this whole fucking place would go up.”
“Aren’t you afraid of dying?”
“No.”
Lucy trembled with a little aftershock.
“Fuckin’ stop that, you’re distracting me.”
“Sorry,” Lucy said.
They sat in silence as undead bodies shifted, slithered and groaned above them. The stink intensified. The zombie face above them said, "Rrrrggflf."
“I think we’re going to suffocate in here,” Lucy pointed out. One of the iron bars groaned. Cam reached up with Lucy’s hand and touched it. It had bent under the weight.
“Or something worse is going to happen quicker,” he said.
“What’s worse than suffocating?” she asked. He felt her heart beating faster as adrenaline hit their system.
“Calm the fuck down, Jitters. It’s not going to do a damn bit of good going to pieces now.”
“How are we going to get out of here?” Lucy said. “How are we going to get out of here?”
Cam smacked himself in the face, wincing at the sting. Lucy quieted down.
“Don’t you got that magic of the Ancients thing?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said.
“Well, the shit sucked the gas out of the Cleaning Lady and smacked me right outta my head. Ain’t you got a zombie-melter in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what the fuck do you know?”
“I know that I like you.”
“What are you, twelve?”
“I don’t know what the Ancients are going to do! I didn’t study them, that’s Lady M’s schtick!”
It was getting tough to breathe. Cam could feel their lungs working harder and harder.’
“Who the fuck needs to study? Just let ‘er rip!”
Cam felt Lucy retreat into their mind. He followed, just to see what she would do. They headed toward a light, which got brighter and brighter. But before they reached it, Lucy mumbled something that sounded like “Deepfried barbell hooters” and the bright light flashed and turned everything blinding white.
Cam felt like he was falling. And when the fucking floor slammed into his back and elbows, he realized he had fallen. Fresh air whooshed in to surround them, and he sucked in a deep lungful of it. Wire-covered lights illuminated the painted cinderblock walls. “Gymnasium” was written in foot-tall black letters with an arrow pointing to the right. He looked up and saw the cage over the hole in the ceiling with the zombie pile still smashed against it.
“Nice!” Cam said. “The ancients fuckin’ rock!”
“The old hole-in-the-floor trick,” Lucy said, “Gets ‘em every time.”
The iron cage groaned as if in response, then snapped and zombies started tumbling through the hole like lemmings. Exploding lemmings.
Lucy shielded her eyes while Cam laughed. Lucy took control of the body. “We’re getting the hell out of here,” she said. Glancing down at her clothing, which at this point consisted of nothing but a wet thong, she threw up her hands and sprinted up the hallway, Cam’s laughter trailing from her open mouth.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
ZA 23: Outback out back
Lizzie chewed her stick of peppermint quietly so as not to rouse the smallish zombie horde. Of course, floating in a bubble of silent and invisible invulnerability basically negated the need for such measures, but Lizzie was nothing if not careful.
Having been raised by a family of cross-bred dingo wolves in the far reaches of the Australian outback, Lizzie learned stealth and caution practically as soon as she could snarl. When a svelte Adonis wearing naught but loincloth first walked into a clearing where she was bathing many years ago, her instincts allowed her to completely disappear, such that he saw nothing of her, though she was naked in the water not twenty feet away.
She followed the mysterious stranger, for she had never seen one of his kind before. One of her kind. After two days of tracking the strange but beautiful man, she could no longer help herself. She jumped him. Her appearance and her devastating beauty affected him like a sparkling hammer to the groin. Which is to say, he doubled over, moaning in orgasmic agony.
Lizzie decided this was probably a good effect to have on people.
When the stranger recovered, he told her his name--a name that would change when the stranger changed a few years later, obsessed with his experiments and the magic Lizzie offered him. To her profound disgust, Selig Retsuc would be born, a loathsome blob with a wanker one tenth the size of his original equipment.
Sigh, maybe Lizzie didn't have such a good effect on people.
The trouble was, by being raised purely in the natural world, free of all human contamination, Lizzie learned about the extraordinary magic that underlay all things, the magic humans had disowned and forgotten when they became civilized, when they became infected with the idea that any human could know the mind of the magic, could tell the difference between good and evil. While this infectious idea liberated man from the rhythms and constraints of the natural world, it also plunged him into a despairing fog of violence that would only escalate over the coming years as competing ideas about good and evil met and clashed.
Lizzie, however, was innocent of such things. She only knew the stories the rocks and trees told of mankind's fall. She did not know she had only escaped such a fall by being abandoned by her feckless mother on the eve of her birth. When Selig, whose former name was once music to her ears, told her of his high minded ideals and began to infect her with his own moral disease, Lizzie didn't know what was happening. She told Selig about the magic, showed it to him, not knowing that doing so would cost the human world everything.
Now, years later, she had come to reset the natural order. Her plan had been simple. Selig gained his magic from being inside Lizzie and thus it was concentrated primarily in his pocket snake. As he began to use the magic for himself, draining its powerful concentration from his chief of staff and infusing it into his increasingly putrescent form, said powerprawn shrunk to pinkie-size and came close to falling off. After Lizzie stopped allowing him between her legs, the fat lug took off for America to find another source. Apparently, he mistook Lizzie's sister for Lizzie and thus lost his Admiral James T. Cock.
Making an unholy pact with her wretched mother, Lizzie managed to get hold of the calcified wrinklebeast and was prepared to cast a spell ending Selig Retsuc's reign forever when a gentleman walked in to the burnt-down house she was occupying. This was not just any gentleman. This was a man so beautiful he smashed a sparkling hammer into her groin.
He then lifted Lizzie's poor crispy sister and walked with her into the desert to bury her. So moved was she by this man's beauty and handsomeness and intelligence and perfect ass and grace and great sense of humor and--perhaps most of all--his humility, Lizzie nearly forgot the zombie zipper ripper in her hand. Instead she watched as her hunka hunka burnin love set fire to an entire plateau's worth of bombies simply by singing in his peculiarly wonderful voice. Then, she looked into the man's mind as he began, slowly but surely, to unravel the mysteries of the universe. When Lizzie's mother's evil cookie magic took over once more and the man was forced to go commit an act of unspeakable atrocity against a raven-haired wizardress's furry companion, Lizzie intervened. Teleporting the wizardress back to her home and to a tray full of zombie guts, Lizzie took the woman's place on the plain. Apparently, she was a sometimes lover of this man, this scion of all that was good and holy, this Virgil. Pretending as best she could to be the raven haired wizardress, Lizzie did her best to work a spell to save her dear love.
She then followed at a safe distance until he arrived at her mother's cookie bunker. Floating in her bubble, Lizzie hovered over the bunker and listened. When the dialogue became unbearable she took over one of the zombies to try to straighten things out a bit, but...unfortunately...as was too often the case with zombies, her mouthpiece was eaten before he could really accomplish anything.
Finally, a moment of truth came. Having laid out his diabolical plan, Selig Retsuc reached out a claw to Virgil. If Virgil shook it, her love for him would disappear like a twinkling snowglobe smashed by a sparkling hammer, but if he resisted...if only he resisted, she would do all in her power to save him and to at last set right the evil Selig Retsuc had wrought.
Unfortunately, so caught up was she in the tension of the moment, she didn't notice that her magic--that which had been with her since birth--began to swiftly drain away.
Having been raised by a family of cross-bred dingo wolves in the far reaches of the Australian outback, Lizzie learned stealth and caution practically as soon as she could snarl. When a svelte Adonis wearing naught but loincloth first walked into a clearing where she was bathing many years ago, her instincts allowed her to completely disappear, such that he saw nothing of her, though she was naked in the water not twenty feet away.
She followed the mysterious stranger, for she had never seen one of his kind before. One of her kind. After two days of tracking the strange but beautiful man, she could no longer help herself. She jumped him. Her appearance and her devastating beauty affected him like a sparkling hammer to the groin. Which is to say, he doubled over, moaning in orgasmic agony.
Lizzie decided this was probably a good effect to have on people.
When the stranger recovered, he told her his name--a name that would change when the stranger changed a few years later, obsessed with his experiments and the magic Lizzie offered him. To her profound disgust, Selig Retsuc would be born, a loathsome blob with a wanker one tenth the size of his original equipment.
Sigh, maybe Lizzie didn't have such a good effect on people.
The trouble was, by being raised purely in the natural world, free of all human contamination, Lizzie learned about the extraordinary magic that underlay all things, the magic humans had disowned and forgotten when they became civilized, when they became infected with the idea that any human could know the mind of the magic, could tell the difference between good and evil. While this infectious idea liberated man from the rhythms and constraints of the natural world, it also plunged him into a despairing fog of violence that would only escalate over the coming years as competing ideas about good and evil met and clashed.
Lizzie, however, was innocent of such things. She only knew the stories the rocks and trees told of mankind's fall. She did not know she had only escaped such a fall by being abandoned by her feckless mother on the eve of her birth. When Selig, whose former name was once music to her ears, told her of his high minded ideals and began to infect her with his own moral disease, Lizzie didn't know what was happening. She told Selig about the magic, showed it to him, not knowing that doing so would cost the human world everything.
Now, years later, she had come to reset the natural order. Her plan had been simple. Selig gained his magic from being inside Lizzie and thus it was concentrated primarily in his pocket snake. As he began to use the magic for himself, draining its powerful concentration from his chief of staff and infusing it into his increasingly putrescent form, said powerprawn shrunk to pinkie-size and came close to falling off. After Lizzie stopped allowing him between her legs, the fat lug took off for America to find another source. Apparently, he mistook Lizzie's sister for Lizzie and thus lost his Admiral James T. Cock.
Making an unholy pact with her wretched mother, Lizzie managed to get hold of the calcified wrinklebeast and was prepared to cast a spell ending Selig Retsuc's reign forever when a gentleman walked in to the burnt-down house she was occupying. This was not just any gentleman. This was a man so beautiful he smashed a sparkling hammer into her groin.
He then lifted Lizzie's poor crispy sister and walked with her into the desert to bury her. So moved was she by this man's beauty and handsomeness and intelligence and perfect ass and grace and great sense of humor and--perhaps most of all--his humility, Lizzie nearly forgot the zombie zipper ripper in her hand. Instead she watched as her hunka hunka burnin love set fire to an entire plateau's worth of bombies simply by singing in his peculiarly wonderful voice. Then, she looked into the man's mind as he began, slowly but surely, to unravel the mysteries of the universe. When Lizzie's mother's evil cookie magic took over once more and the man was forced to go commit an act of unspeakable atrocity against a raven-haired wizardress's furry companion, Lizzie intervened. Teleporting the wizardress back to her home and to a tray full of zombie guts, Lizzie took the woman's place on the plain. Apparently, she was a sometimes lover of this man, this scion of all that was good and holy, this Virgil. Pretending as best she could to be the raven haired wizardress, Lizzie did her best to work a spell to save her dear love.
She then followed at a safe distance until he arrived at her mother's cookie bunker. Floating in her bubble, Lizzie hovered over the bunker and listened. When the dialogue became unbearable she took over one of the zombies to try to straighten things out a bit, but...unfortunately...as was too often the case with zombies, her mouthpiece was eaten before he could really accomplish anything.
Finally, a moment of truth came. Having laid out his diabolical plan, Selig Retsuc reached out a claw to Virgil. If Virgil shook it, her love for him would disappear like a twinkling snowglobe smashed by a sparkling hammer, but if he resisted...if only he resisted, she would do all in her power to save him and to at last set right the evil Selig Retsuc had wrought.
Unfortunately, so caught up was she in the tension of the moment, she didn't notice that her magic--that which had been with her since birth--began to swiftly drain away.
ZA 22: Someone finally gives Virgil a hand
Rubbing Meg's feet in the cookie bunker had its perks. First--and perhaps most importantly--it allowed Virgil to soak the bottom part of Meg in a highly flammable oil that would make her coming encounter with The Cleaning Lady rather...eventful. Second, it gave Virgil a chance to think about Jesus. Jesus, after all, was a foot washer, which--in Virgil's unfortunately less than humble opinion--was perhaps the most powerful lived metaphor in the Bible.
Of course, maybe Jesus just dug on feet, which is all the more unpleasant when you think about how funky feet must have been in the age of homemade leather sandals. But no, Virgil had too much respect for Jesus (the man, not the deified sacrificial cow) to believe that. Instead, Virgil truly believed that Jesus had figured it out--solved the mysteries of existence that, to this day, eluded Virgil. One of the mysteries Jesus had solved was the mystery of purity. Or rather--he realized that all the purity rituals ensconced and entwined in the religion of his day were bullshit (or sacrificial cowshit, if you'd prefer).
When Jesus "changed" the water into wine at the wedding at Cana, he probably did nothing more than fill jugs meant for water with wine--something that would have been perceived as phenomenally blasphemous given the purity laws of the day. When he consorted with lepers, tax collectors and women (of all repute--not just low), he broke generations of ingrained custom. When he washed the feet of beggars, he washed away the sins of centuries of religious discrimination. In The Time Before, the conservative Christians had become the Scribes and Pharisees of old, painting homosexuals, counterculturals, and foreigners with much the same brushes as used by their philosophical forebears centuries earlier. These fools obsessed with purity demonstrated the clear end of institutionalized religion--the zombification of a horde of followers who would eat at themselves and each other through a series of aggressively discriminatory and life defeating purity rituals in the mistaken belief they were saving their souls. J-dog wasn't down with that.
"Lick it," Meg said, cocking her big toe at Virgil's chin.
"Excuse me?" Virgil asked, startled from his reverie.
"What do you mean, 'excuse me?'" Meg snapped. "You are my servant, you do as I command without question. Are the cookies wearing off so soon?"
"No ma'am," Virgil replied, cursing himself for not obeying faster. He bent his head, hoping against hope Cam would choose that moment to appear--the moment before he ran his tongue over the well oiled toe of his foe. But no. His bro was so, so...not there. He licked.
"Now suck it a little," Meg commanded.
Virgil sucked--which, if you haven't guessed--sucked.
"Slurp it..."
Virgil slurped.
"Good, now eat another cookie."
Virgil gulped. If he did as Meg ordered, he would be back under her spell and poor Cyrus (or was it Billy Ray? Virgil never could tell the difference) would have died in vain. Come on, Cam. Pull out of whatever hussy you're inside of and get your zombie-scorching ass down here. A bang at the door startled Virgil, leading him to drop the cookie he'd just grabbed and dive for cover behind the kitchen island. Cam had come!
"What odd behavior, child," Meg said, not the least bit perturbed by the knocking. "Tsk. Tsk. Very odd indeed." She then went to open the door.
"Nowhere near as odd as what's about to happen to you, cookie witch!" Virgil shouted from behind the island as Meg turned the handle.
The door opened.
Virgil peeked out. No Cam. Instead, the blubbulous mass of Selig Retsuc slithered into the room, bearing with him his trademark stink of fermented diapers. Strangely, he walked with one arm behind his back, a pompous pseudo-Napoleonic pose the likes of which Virgil would not have pictured on the putrid villain.
Selig raised an eyebrow at Virgil who now wanted desperately to rewind the clock to the part where he was sucking on Meg's big toe (or preferably just after, or maybe well before, or really any time in the 32 years of Virgil's life not including this moment).
Meg clucked her tongue. "I had him bound, Master. Most assuredly. But somehow he got free. I suspect Glinda Goodwitch or perhaps the cursed monkey he killed had something to do with it."
"You allowed him to perform a killing?" Selig asked, voice dripping with disdainy slime.
"Of course. How better to prove my ownership of his soul? The boy recoils at flyswatting and even has moral qualms about bug spray."
"Virgil has moral qualms about everything. For chrissake, the guy's a walking qualm. All you had to do was make him lick your big toe or something. But letting him kill the monkey? No doubt Lady M made a proper Sacrifice of the whole affair and liberated the boy's soul in the process. Indeed, she might have even attached a rider spell. A short while ago, this fool," at which point Selig gestured to his zombie minions out of which rabble emerged a zombie Cam, drooling and clawing at a bacon-sized patch of bubbling flesh on his shoulder, "came popping out of a bar in town like a prairie dog on high alert. No doubt he was in the midst of being summoned."
During this speech, Virgil watched Meg's face go from looking fucked to shamed to triumphant. Virgil, on the other hand, mostly just stuck with fucked.
"Well, isn't that a lovely turn of events," Meg smarmed. "Would anyone like a cookie?"
"Put your shoes on, woman," Selig snapped and blobbed over to stand before Virgil, naught but a frail kitchen island between them.
"This is actually perfect," Selig said, beginning to sound unattractively perky--which is not to say Selig ever sounded attractively anything, just that "perky" and "Selig" were about as proper a match as ice cream and diarrhea flavor. "It's perfect because we can leave Virgil with his free will while I tell him of my master plan. Then we can force feed him a plateful of Slavecaroons and make him act out the very vilest of my instructions." Selig cocked his head back to laugh maniacally when one of the zombie minions cleared his throat.
"Umm, sir, pardon a moment," the zombie said. Selig, Meg and Virgil all swiveled to stare gape-mouthed at the zombie. It had bits of flesh dangling from its neck like a turkey gizzard. One of its ears had long ago been chewed most of the way off, and a couple of its ribs were poking out of its tattered rag clothing. This was not the kind of being that should be expected to use the word "pardon," let alone use it in a sentence. All zombies were supposed to say was "rrrggh" and "ggggahhh" and "republican."
The room hushed as the zombie cleared his half-eaten throat. "So sorry to interrupt, sir, but this just smacks of cliche--you know, with the whole speech and the cocked head and the laughter and whatnot."
"H...h...how did you speak...?" Selig stuttered (an unusual thing for the normally eloquent zombie overpope).
"Not sure, just suddenly felt compelled to, sir. Perhaps a gust of animating wind has been blown through my windpipes by some Divine Author displeased with the progress of events."
"But... but..." Selig said. "But I was being ironic. You know, I was like consciously milking the whole trope of the bad guy master speech for effect. Sort of a postmodern commentary on bad guy speeches. I meant for there to be some humor to the whole situation."
"Sure, but isn't that just playing on another trope? I mean, begging your pardon again Mr. Overpope, but the postmodernists have been deconstructing classical motifs for some years now, such that it's now become a cliche again to use such a cliche in conscious ironic mockery-slash-celebration of said cliche. I mean the whole bad guy speech was new once, but then it got old, and then it got new again with the irony thing, but now we're back to old, arent we? Unless of course you were expressing yourself more out of true sincerity, in which case--although this is dicey--we'd be back to the really, really old, which at one time was so original and sincere it had no choice but to become a cliche, and in so doing maybe the old-new-old cycle can be renewed once more."
"Let me just be clear," Selig clarified. "If I say the words while trying to be edgy about trying to be sincere about trying to be diabolical, it's a no go because what was once old that became new has become old again, but if I say the same exact words whilst trying to be sincere about not trying to be edgy about trying to be diabolical, then that's okay because I'll be restoring that which is lost thus making that which was new and then old and then new again and then old again, new again? And, for the record, how are you not an already worn out postmodern cliche yourself--with your unexpected talking and your confusing old-new business and your neck gizzard? Sorry, that wasn't fair. Your neck gizzard was just impossible not to stare at and I just had to mention it. I mean, Jesus, the way it kind of dangles there. Kind of flabby but also bloody. A little fleshy, a little meaty. What is that anyway? Neck? Chin? Is it like a muscle that's popped out. Whatever that shit is it's very unappealing. I think you should probably have something done with it. I'm just saying, is all."
The zombie looked puzzled. Selig had a way of clarifying things all the way back to their primal muck stage.
With a sigh, Selig reached over and yanked the animated zombie's head off and tossed it to the others for a snack. He then turned back to Virgil.
"Let's just make this quick. Here's the deal. I've just left Lucy Tisdale, the only hope for humanity, buried in a cage under a rising mountain of zombies. Basically, they've been surrounding and climbing on top of each other since I left, trapping her with the weight and stink of their thousands of bodies, sort of a living pyramid thing, such that if she does manage to shriek or kill the zombies or set them on fire or whatever her Ancients allow, they'll just go from barely-alive and wriggling weight above her to pure dead weight all around her. Mostly, I suspect, she'll be able to fashion a crude chamber at the very base of the pile. This will be no good to her, however, because she will be all alone in the bottom of a zombie pyramid, which--if you hadn't guessed--is not particularly conducive to sanity. Now-- assuming she does survive her initial burial and finds a way to begin digging out without going completely bonkers, new zombies from all around are on their way to continue adding to the pile. By morning, we should have something to rival the Pyramids of Giza. By the following evening, the smoking skyscrapers of Denver will be dwarved and then--assuming I can get a good group deal bringing in zombies from Canada and Mexico--not even the finest Malaysian or Dubaian skyscrapers will compare."
"Ahem," came a noise from the midst of the snacking zombies. It was the head, mostly debrained at this point. "Sir, honestly, wasn't there an easier way to just kill Lucy Tisdale and get it over with. I mean, are you being ironic again, leaving the hero alive but imperiled? I mean there's only so far irony or even sincerity can carry you before it just seems sloppy or perhaps overly convenient. After all, unlike her mother, Lucy's not immortal or anything, and given that you got close enough to her to block the voices of the ancients, you could have just killed her."
Selig's flabby upper lip began to quiver and he blinked a couple of times, but to his credit he didn't address the head.
"I'm just saying, is all," the head continued as Zombie Cam slurped its left eyeball out of the socket.
Selig took a calming breath and then continued.
"Lady M, meanwhile, is being seduced by a rather unique minion of mine. He's a trained chiropractor, acupressurist, and bodyworker with your Keanu-good looks, Virgil, as well as your perfect ass. This gentleman also has seven tattoos, eight piercings and one or two body modifications you can't see when he's wearing all his clothes. He's also into monkeys and bondage and doesn't have a nasal voice or mantis arms. In other words, Lady M should be rather tied up for the foreseeable future."
The head let out one last groan before the rest of its jaw was crunched to bone meal by Zombie Cam.
"Now for my plan. And while you may not believe it, by the end of this telling, Virgil, you may in fact not need any Slavecaroons to join my cause. You might just choose to do so willingly. You see, I did not set out to fill the world with zombies. They're merely a byproduct, or rather--a chrysallis stage. The virus I've infected humanity with is designed not to end evolution, but rather to kick-start it. Over the next few weeks, the zombieism will begin to fade as the poor, wretched creatures either die off--a fate that awaits most of them--or transform into superior beings--which, in point of fact will probably happen to your old friend Cam. Some will be shape shifters, freely transmogrifying from human to beast and back again. Others will be wizards--like Lady M--open at last to the powerful currents of magic that have so long been dormant in the world. Others will be epic heroes possessed of extraodinary strength and courage. Still others will be, well, functional morons, but you always need a proletariat, right? And finally, there will be some who will take forms you and I could barely imagine--so strange and different as to be entirely inhuman. This, my dear amoral Virgil, as you can surely begin to see, shall be a profound accomplishment of aesthetics. I will have purified humanity and made them beautiful once more (while also dramatically reducing crowding and lessening the burden on overstressed ecosystems, I might add). So, old friend...will you join me?"
With that, Selig finally revealed the arm that he had been holding behind his back the entire time, only instead of a slimy, sausage fingered, puffy pink skinned hand, he extended a glossy, green-and-gold-scaled dragon's claw.
Of course, maybe Jesus just dug on feet, which is all the more unpleasant when you think about how funky feet must have been in the age of homemade leather sandals. But no, Virgil had too much respect for Jesus (the man, not the deified sacrificial cow) to believe that. Instead, Virgil truly believed that Jesus had figured it out--solved the mysteries of existence that, to this day, eluded Virgil. One of the mysteries Jesus had solved was the mystery of purity. Or rather--he realized that all the purity rituals ensconced and entwined in the religion of his day were bullshit (or sacrificial cowshit, if you'd prefer).
When Jesus "changed" the water into wine at the wedding at Cana, he probably did nothing more than fill jugs meant for water with wine--something that would have been perceived as phenomenally blasphemous given the purity laws of the day. When he consorted with lepers, tax collectors and women (of all repute--not just low), he broke generations of ingrained custom. When he washed the feet of beggars, he washed away the sins of centuries of religious discrimination. In The Time Before, the conservative Christians had become the Scribes and Pharisees of old, painting homosexuals, counterculturals, and foreigners with much the same brushes as used by their philosophical forebears centuries earlier. These fools obsessed with purity demonstrated the clear end of institutionalized religion--the zombification of a horde of followers who would eat at themselves and each other through a series of aggressively discriminatory and life defeating purity rituals in the mistaken belief they were saving their souls. J-dog wasn't down with that.
"Lick it," Meg said, cocking her big toe at Virgil's chin.
"Excuse me?" Virgil asked, startled from his reverie.
"What do you mean, 'excuse me?'" Meg snapped. "You are my servant, you do as I command without question. Are the cookies wearing off so soon?"
"No ma'am," Virgil replied, cursing himself for not obeying faster. He bent his head, hoping against hope Cam would choose that moment to appear--the moment before he ran his tongue over the well oiled toe of his foe. But no. His bro was so, so...not there. He licked.
"Now suck it a little," Meg commanded.
Virgil sucked--which, if you haven't guessed--sucked.
"Slurp it..."
Virgil slurped.
"Good, now eat another cookie."
Virgil gulped. If he did as Meg ordered, he would be back under her spell and poor Cyrus (or was it Billy Ray? Virgil never could tell the difference) would have died in vain. Come on, Cam. Pull out of whatever hussy you're inside of and get your zombie-scorching ass down here. A bang at the door startled Virgil, leading him to drop the cookie he'd just grabbed and dive for cover behind the kitchen island. Cam had come!
"What odd behavior, child," Meg said, not the least bit perturbed by the knocking. "Tsk. Tsk. Very odd indeed." She then went to open the door.
"Nowhere near as odd as what's about to happen to you, cookie witch!" Virgil shouted from behind the island as Meg turned the handle.
The door opened.
Virgil peeked out. No Cam. Instead, the blubbulous mass of Selig Retsuc slithered into the room, bearing with him his trademark stink of fermented diapers. Strangely, he walked with one arm behind his back, a pompous pseudo-Napoleonic pose the likes of which Virgil would not have pictured on the putrid villain.
Selig raised an eyebrow at Virgil who now wanted desperately to rewind the clock to the part where he was sucking on Meg's big toe (or preferably just after, or maybe well before, or really any time in the 32 years of Virgil's life not including this moment).
Meg clucked her tongue. "I had him bound, Master. Most assuredly. But somehow he got free. I suspect Glinda Goodwitch or perhaps the cursed monkey he killed had something to do with it."
"You allowed him to perform a killing?" Selig asked, voice dripping with disdainy slime.
"Of course. How better to prove my ownership of his soul? The boy recoils at flyswatting and even has moral qualms about bug spray."
"Virgil has moral qualms about everything. For chrissake, the guy's a walking qualm. All you had to do was make him lick your big toe or something. But letting him kill the monkey? No doubt Lady M made a proper Sacrifice of the whole affair and liberated the boy's soul in the process. Indeed, she might have even attached a rider spell. A short while ago, this fool," at which point Selig gestured to his zombie minions out of which rabble emerged a zombie Cam, drooling and clawing at a bacon-sized patch of bubbling flesh on his shoulder, "came popping out of a bar in town like a prairie dog on high alert. No doubt he was in the midst of being summoned."
During this speech, Virgil watched Meg's face go from looking fucked to shamed to triumphant. Virgil, on the other hand, mostly just stuck with fucked.
"Well, isn't that a lovely turn of events," Meg smarmed. "Would anyone like a cookie?"
"Put your shoes on, woman," Selig snapped and blobbed over to stand before Virgil, naught but a frail kitchen island between them.
"This is actually perfect," Selig said, beginning to sound unattractively perky--which is not to say Selig ever sounded attractively anything, just that "perky" and "Selig" were about as proper a match as ice cream and diarrhea flavor. "It's perfect because we can leave Virgil with his free will while I tell him of my master plan. Then we can force feed him a plateful of Slavecaroons and make him act out the very vilest of my instructions." Selig cocked his head back to laugh maniacally when one of the zombie minions cleared his throat.
"Umm, sir, pardon a moment," the zombie said. Selig, Meg and Virgil all swiveled to stare gape-mouthed at the zombie. It had bits of flesh dangling from its neck like a turkey gizzard. One of its ears had long ago been chewed most of the way off, and a couple of its ribs were poking out of its tattered rag clothing. This was not the kind of being that should be expected to use the word "pardon," let alone use it in a sentence. All zombies were supposed to say was "rrrggh" and "ggggahhh" and "republican."
The room hushed as the zombie cleared his half-eaten throat. "So sorry to interrupt, sir, but this just smacks of cliche--you know, with the whole speech and the cocked head and the laughter and whatnot."
"H...h...how did you speak...?" Selig stuttered (an unusual thing for the normally eloquent zombie overpope).
"Not sure, just suddenly felt compelled to, sir. Perhaps a gust of animating wind has been blown through my windpipes by some Divine Author displeased with the progress of events."
"But... but..." Selig said. "But I was being ironic. You know, I was like consciously milking the whole trope of the bad guy master speech for effect. Sort of a postmodern commentary on bad guy speeches. I meant for there to be some humor to the whole situation."
"Sure, but isn't that just playing on another trope? I mean, begging your pardon again Mr. Overpope, but the postmodernists have been deconstructing classical motifs for some years now, such that it's now become a cliche again to use such a cliche in conscious ironic mockery-slash-celebration of said cliche. I mean the whole bad guy speech was new once, but then it got old, and then it got new again with the irony thing, but now we're back to old, arent we? Unless of course you were expressing yourself more out of true sincerity, in which case--although this is dicey--we'd be back to the really, really old, which at one time was so original and sincere it had no choice but to become a cliche, and in so doing maybe the old-new-old cycle can be renewed once more."
"Let me just be clear," Selig clarified. "If I say the words while trying to be edgy about trying to be sincere about trying to be diabolical, it's a no go because what was once old that became new has become old again, but if I say the same exact words whilst trying to be sincere about not trying to be edgy about trying to be diabolical, then that's okay because I'll be restoring that which is lost thus making that which was new and then old and then new again and then old again, new again? And, for the record, how are you not an already worn out postmodern cliche yourself--with your unexpected talking and your confusing old-new business and your neck gizzard? Sorry, that wasn't fair. Your neck gizzard was just impossible not to stare at and I just had to mention it. I mean, Jesus, the way it kind of dangles there. Kind of flabby but also bloody. A little fleshy, a little meaty. What is that anyway? Neck? Chin? Is it like a muscle that's popped out. Whatever that shit is it's very unappealing. I think you should probably have something done with it. I'm just saying, is all."
The zombie looked puzzled. Selig had a way of clarifying things all the way back to their primal muck stage.
With a sigh, Selig reached over and yanked the animated zombie's head off and tossed it to the others for a snack. He then turned back to Virgil.
"Let's just make this quick. Here's the deal. I've just left Lucy Tisdale, the only hope for humanity, buried in a cage under a rising mountain of zombies. Basically, they've been surrounding and climbing on top of each other since I left, trapping her with the weight and stink of their thousands of bodies, sort of a living pyramid thing, such that if she does manage to shriek or kill the zombies or set them on fire or whatever her Ancients allow, they'll just go from barely-alive and wriggling weight above her to pure dead weight all around her. Mostly, I suspect, she'll be able to fashion a crude chamber at the very base of the pile. This will be no good to her, however, because she will be all alone in the bottom of a zombie pyramid, which--if you hadn't guessed--is not particularly conducive to sanity. Now-- assuming she does survive her initial burial and finds a way to begin digging out without going completely bonkers, new zombies from all around are on their way to continue adding to the pile. By morning, we should have something to rival the Pyramids of Giza. By the following evening, the smoking skyscrapers of Denver will be dwarved and then--assuming I can get a good group deal bringing in zombies from Canada and Mexico--not even the finest Malaysian or Dubaian skyscrapers will compare."
"Ahem," came a noise from the midst of the snacking zombies. It was the head, mostly debrained at this point. "Sir, honestly, wasn't there an easier way to just kill Lucy Tisdale and get it over with. I mean, are you being ironic again, leaving the hero alive but imperiled? I mean there's only so far irony or even sincerity can carry you before it just seems sloppy or perhaps overly convenient. After all, unlike her mother, Lucy's not immortal or anything, and given that you got close enough to her to block the voices of the ancients, you could have just killed her."
Selig's flabby upper lip began to quiver and he blinked a couple of times, but to his credit he didn't address the head.
"I'm just saying, is all," the head continued as Zombie Cam slurped its left eyeball out of the socket.
Selig took a calming breath and then continued.
"Lady M, meanwhile, is being seduced by a rather unique minion of mine. He's a trained chiropractor, acupressurist, and bodyworker with your Keanu-good looks, Virgil, as well as your perfect ass. This gentleman also has seven tattoos, eight piercings and one or two body modifications you can't see when he's wearing all his clothes. He's also into monkeys and bondage and doesn't have a nasal voice or mantis arms. In other words, Lady M should be rather tied up for the foreseeable future."
The head let out one last groan before the rest of its jaw was crunched to bone meal by Zombie Cam.
"Now for my plan. And while you may not believe it, by the end of this telling, Virgil, you may in fact not need any Slavecaroons to join my cause. You might just choose to do so willingly. You see, I did not set out to fill the world with zombies. They're merely a byproduct, or rather--a chrysallis stage. The virus I've infected humanity with is designed not to end evolution, but rather to kick-start it. Over the next few weeks, the zombieism will begin to fade as the poor, wretched creatures either die off--a fate that awaits most of them--or transform into superior beings--which, in point of fact will probably happen to your old friend Cam. Some will be shape shifters, freely transmogrifying from human to beast and back again. Others will be wizards--like Lady M--open at last to the powerful currents of magic that have so long been dormant in the world. Others will be epic heroes possessed of extraodinary strength and courage. Still others will be, well, functional morons, but you always need a proletariat, right? And finally, there will be some who will take forms you and I could barely imagine--so strange and different as to be entirely inhuman. This, my dear amoral Virgil, as you can surely begin to see, shall be a profound accomplishment of aesthetics. I will have purified humanity and made them beautiful once more (while also dramatically reducing crowding and lessening the burden on overstressed ecosystems, I might add). So, old friend...will you join me?"
With that, Selig finally revealed the arm that he had been holding behind his back the entire time, only instead of a slimy, sausage fingered, puffy pink skinned hand, he extended a glossy, green-and-gold-scaled dragon's claw.
Chapter 21 - It Takes Two, Baby
We have to get to my body!
There’s no time to get you back in your body, we don’t even know how—
Without another moment’s thought-argument, Cam silenced Lucy’s protestations and took control of her body. He didn’t even stop to think about how he did it, he just did it. Sheer force of will, baby. He leapt her onto the table, meaning to continue jumping, using several of Selig’s minions as leap-pads if he had too.
There was his body. Look at that. Huh. He was sprawled on the ground beyond the rotting, grey heads of the zombies.
We don’t know how to get you back in! Lucy was yelling inside their heads.
Fuck getting back in! I just want my goddamn Cleaning Lady! I gotta do something about all these goddamn . . .
. . . zombies.
The zombies . . . his body . . . rotting . . .
“OH SHIT!!!” Cam screamed through Lucy’s throat, and was surprised at the delicate sound that all his force had managed to produce. Fuck, a goddamn cricket might have squeaked.
Lucy realized his fear at once. OH SHIT!!! She screamed inside him. Inside herself. Whatever. This whole fucking situation was so fucked up, and if he didn’t do something real fucking quick, it was about to get worlds worse. But what could he do?
“Fuck no! Fuck no, fuck no, FUCK NO!” Virgil, where the FUCK are you when I need you?!
But as much as Cam believed in his friend, he knew even Virgil wouldn’t be able to come up with something quick enough to stop what was happening. Virgil was in his own tight spot – tighter than a virgin whore’s pussy OR pocketbook. And Cam couldn’t get to him. Even as Cam watched, his own body staggered to it’s feet, like it was drunk. It’s face hung slack like a limp dishrag, saliva dripping like dirty dishwater from his open mouth.
“Awww, shit, FUCK NO! Fucking zombie bacon!”
Stop bitching! Lucy’s voice came tinkling inside his head. Her head. Whatever. We’ve got to get out of this! Selig thinks you’re dead! We can’t let him know you’re in here with me! And then Cam was along for the ride as Lucy sprang into an ultra-aerial somersault and landed on the other side of the zombies, next to the spot where Cam had recently been lying. She fell to the ground and grabbed the Cleaning Lady as the zombies turned to face her.
Lucy aimed the Cleaning Lady. Cam let her hands slide, quickly but sensuously, over The Cleaning Lady’s curves. Cam put his finger on the trigger. Lucy held her breath.
Then they both stopped as they realized what they were about to do.
Zombie Cam was at the head of the pack of undead shuffling toward them.
If there was anything lucky about this moment, and there were very few things that could be considered so, it was that, due to the inexorable yet apallingly slow pace at which the zombies shuffled, Lucy and Cam had an inordinately long time for some cathartic dialogue which would take their bond to an even deeper level, if that can also be considered possible in this moment.
If there is one thing the zombie apocalypse had taught both Lucy and Cam, it was that anything is possible. So, as the zombies lurched toward them, Cam’s finger eased off the trigger. Then tightened again.
No, Lucy thought.
That’s not me over there, Lucy, Cam thought. It’s a fucking undead zombie bastard. I’m still a Queller of Hell. And I’m gonna waste myself.
That’s your body, Lucy thought. Don’t you want it back?
Damn straight I do, but—
I want you to have it back. Not as a zombie. Alive.
There was a moment in which both of their minds experienced a deep, dramatic pause of all thought, which neither of them had ever achieved during their days as individuals. It could have been the first true moment of meditation either of them had known.
And the zombies continued shambling forth.
It’s not me. Cam’s finger tightened again.
We can’t. Cam, listen to me.
How can I not?
You’re doing a pretty good job of it. Listen. This is perfect. Inconvenient and freaky, maybe, but the awesomeness of the perfection is actually kind of . . . wow, the ancients really know what they’re doing!
How is it possible that I hate you more now than before? His finger tightened again. He wouldn’t want to watch his own body, barely even rotten with the zombification, charred by the beloved Lady it had once depended on, but he would do it. He was a goddamn motherfucking Queller of Hell. He would do it.
No! Cam! I know Selig’s grand plan! I know the ins and outs of what he intends to do, and what his strengths and weaknesses are! I can show you everything now – everything. Cam – I said we should join forces. This is better than anything I could have imagined.
There was another of those pauses.
I gotta admit that kinda has some sense to it. You seriously are one fucked up bitch.
I have a feeling you’ll get to know that better than you ever hoped, Lucy thought.
As Zombie Cam closed in on them, Cam removed his finger from The Cleaning Lady’s trigger. Sorry, baby, no fire tonight.
Relief washed through Lucy as her arms obeyed HER will, and strapped The Cleaning Lady to her back.
Cam’s voice came in her head. So what now?
Now? . . . Now we let them take us. I wonder what it’ll be this time . . . Selig doesn’t have his dick anymore, so you don’t have to worry about rape. I really don’t think you could handle zombie sex, Cam.
Now the zombies surrounded them, but, as Lucy had expected, they did not attack. Instead they parted, and Selig Retsuc stepped through to stand at Lucy’s feet where she still lay.
“Well, young Lucy. You have some thing that belongs to me, I believe.”
Keep quiet, let me handle this! “I don’t have anything that belongs to you,” she said.
“We shall see,” Selig Retsuc said, “about that.” He got to his knees at her feet and, in a move weirdly fast for a zombie – but then, he never was one of the flock – grabbed her ankles. “Anyway, you had better hope you have something that belongs to me.” Another one of those quick moves and he wrenched her legs apart. “If you don’t, you are in for a much less pleasant experience with me than we shared last time.”
Zombie Cam held her right ankle while Selig reached between her legs and pulled the crotch of her panties aside. His thick, wormy sausage finger pushed up inside her and felt . . . nothing.
She wished she could say his face fell.
“Ahh,” he gargled. “This is going to be fun.” He stood up and waited. Lucy felt him send some command out into the ranks, and she pushed the feelings of degradation aside, waiting to see what she would have to face.
No. What she and Cam would have to face.
Several of the zombies dragged forth the same cage she had been suspended in at the school. “You remember your old nest, little bird?” Selig gargled. “I am sure you will find it as comfortable as your last stay.”
She found it exactly as comfortable as her last stay.
Now, as the zombies dragged her cage to wherever they were dragging her cage to, the degradation returned. It was as if Selig had her again, just the way he wanted, and even though she had the satisfaction of detaching his dick, and even though she knew she was going where she was most needed, and even though she had Rambo deeper inside her now, his power joined more completely to hers than she had ever imagined, it did not make her feel better. She felt horrible.
So did Cam.
Shit, Cam’d never known what being violated felt like. Now that he did, he didn’t much like it. No wonder this bitch was such a freakshow. Being inside her – funny how that still turned him on – he knew that she was just doing her part. Her part was more fucked up and grossed out than any part he’d ever played, but she was doing it and she was doing her best, too. It wasn’t her fault that she was hot. She was just strong enough to bear being that hot.
Was he feeling . . . sympathy?
Cam . . . Cam, I need you. She was calling to him with her mind. Her raw, naked need called to him. This lust was more powerful than the lust to kill zombies, more than any lust he’d ever known.
I can’t, I have to get to Virgil, he thought. He oughtta be able to find some ancient spell or something to cure my body.
There’s no way out of this. Trust me, I’ve been here before. And we can’t leave your zombie body behind . . . Cam, everything has changed. Cam . . . I need you. Haven’t you ever thought about what it’s like for a woman?
Cam never had thought about that, actually. Now that he was thinking about it, he thought it had to be hot. Okay. This would be weird, but it also just might be the hottest thing he’d ever experienced in his life, including The Cleaning Lady. Fuck yeah. He used her hands. Lucy lay back against the cool iron grid of the back of the cage, and let go of all control. There was nothing she could do, but she could still feel. They could take her free will. The ancients could have her soul. M could have her mind. Selig could have her body – so could Cam. But no one could take her ability to feel. It was like her hands were not even hers, like it was someone else entirely touching her body, sliding her own hands over her naked breasts (since her blouse was not only dirty with zombie goo, and not only ripped to shreds, but also very far behind them on the floor of the café. And since it always seemed that Lucy spent an inordinate amount of time naked, and since zombies were not sentient, she was not self-conscious about touching herself in front of them.) Her delicate fingers pinched the tips harder than she would have done herself, and she gasped. Her nails raked over her smooth belly, leaving raised red marks, then rubbed gently over the ravaged skin. She moaned with longing. After she was aching with the lust, after her body was sensitized and swollen, her hands finally slid down her belly to the soft, warm, sopping cleft between her legs.
“Yes . . .” she said aloud. The cage lurched steadily along. The zombies with their stink surrounded her, and she cried out with pleasure. “Oh, GOD YES!” Never had her own fingers moved with such fierce demand, seeking the most sensitive spots, and when the pleasure became too much they did not let up but forced it in deeper. She was shaking and whimpering, and when the orgasm rocked her she realized with horrified excitement that it was not going to stop – he was not going to stop. “Cam,” she whimpered, falling back and surrendering to it again, “everything I have is yours. Listen . . . listen while you love me.”
Taking her time about it, finding solace and safety in Cam’s continued presence and touch, Lucy thought over every moment of her time with Selig Retsuc. Each touch, each shiver, each truth revealed in the dank stink of undeath’s dark embrace, brought Cam closer to grasping the full scale of Selig’s grand plan.
There’s no time to get you back in your body, we don’t even know how—
Without another moment’s thought-argument, Cam silenced Lucy’s protestations and took control of her body. He didn’t even stop to think about how he did it, he just did it. Sheer force of will, baby. He leapt her onto the table, meaning to continue jumping, using several of Selig’s minions as leap-pads if he had too.
There was his body. Look at that. Huh. He was sprawled on the ground beyond the rotting, grey heads of the zombies.
We don’t know how to get you back in! Lucy was yelling inside their heads.
Fuck getting back in! I just want my goddamn Cleaning Lady! I gotta do something about all these goddamn . . .
. . . zombies.
The zombies . . . his body . . . rotting . . .
“OH SHIT!!!” Cam screamed through Lucy’s throat, and was surprised at the delicate sound that all his force had managed to produce. Fuck, a goddamn cricket might have squeaked.
Lucy realized his fear at once. OH SHIT!!! She screamed inside him. Inside herself. Whatever. This whole fucking situation was so fucked up, and if he didn’t do something real fucking quick, it was about to get worlds worse. But what could he do?
“Fuck no! Fuck no, fuck no, FUCK NO!” Virgil, where the FUCK are you when I need you?!
But as much as Cam believed in his friend, he knew even Virgil wouldn’t be able to come up with something quick enough to stop what was happening. Virgil was in his own tight spot – tighter than a virgin whore’s pussy OR pocketbook. And Cam couldn’t get to him. Even as Cam watched, his own body staggered to it’s feet, like it was drunk. It’s face hung slack like a limp dishrag, saliva dripping like dirty dishwater from his open mouth.
“Awww, shit, FUCK NO! Fucking zombie bacon!”
Stop bitching! Lucy’s voice came tinkling inside his head. Her head. Whatever. We’ve got to get out of this! Selig thinks you’re dead! We can’t let him know you’re in here with me! And then Cam was along for the ride as Lucy sprang into an ultra-aerial somersault and landed on the other side of the zombies, next to the spot where Cam had recently been lying. She fell to the ground and grabbed the Cleaning Lady as the zombies turned to face her.
Lucy aimed the Cleaning Lady. Cam let her hands slide, quickly but sensuously, over The Cleaning Lady’s curves. Cam put his finger on the trigger. Lucy held her breath.
Then they both stopped as they realized what they were about to do.
Zombie Cam was at the head of the pack of undead shuffling toward them.
If there was anything lucky about this moment, and there were very few things that could be considered so, it was that, due to the inexorable yet apallingly slow pace at which the zombies shuffled, Lucy and Cam had an inordinately long time for some cathartic dialogue which would take their bond to an even deeper level, if that can also be considered possible in this moment.
If there is one thing the zombie apocalypse had taught both Lucy and Cam, it was that anything is possible. So, as the zombies lurched toward them, Cam’s finger eased off the trigger. Then tightened again.
No, Lucy thought.
That’s not me over there, Lucy, Cam thought. It’s a fucking undead zombie bastard. I’m still a Queller of Hell. And I’m gonna waste myself.
That’s your body, Lucy thought. Don’t you want it back?
Damn straight I do, but—
I want you to have it back. Not as a zombie. Alive.
There was a moment in which both of their minds experienced a deep, dramatic pause of all thought, which neither of them had ever achieved during their days as individuals. It could have been the first true moment of meditation either of them had known.
And the zombies continued shambling forth.
It’s not me. Cam’s finger tightened again.
We can’t. Cam, listen to me.
How can I not?
You’re doing a pretty good job of it. Listen. This is perfect. Inconvenient and freaky, maybe, but the awesomeness of the perfection is actually kind of . . . wow, the ancients really know what they’re doing!
How is it possible that I hate you more now than before? His finger tightened again. He wouldn’t want to watch his own body, barely even rotten with the zombification, charred by the beloved Lady it had once depended on, but he would do it. He was a goddamn motherfucking Queller of Hell. He would do it.
No! Cam! I know Selig’s grand plan! I know the ins and outs of what he intends to do, and what his strengths and weaknesses are! I can show you everything now – everything. Cam – I said we should join forces. This is better than anything I could have imagined.
There was another of those pauses.
I gotta admit that kinda has some sense to it. You seriously are one fucked up bitch.
I have a feeling you’ll get to know that better than you ever hoped, Lucy thought.
As Zombie Cam closed in on them, Cam removed his finger from The Cleaning Lady’s trigger. Sorry, baby, no fire tonight.
Relief washed through Lucy as her arms obeyed HER will, and strapped The Cleaning Lady to her back.
Cam’s voice came in her head. So what now?
Now? . . . Now we let them take us. I wonder what it’ll be this time . . . Selig doesn’t have his dick anymore, so you don’t have to worry about rape. I really don’t think you could handle zombie sex, Cam.
Now the zombies surrounded them, but, as Lucy had expected, they did not attack. Instead they parted, and Selig Retsuc stepped through to stand at Lucy’s feet where she still lay.
“Well, young Lucy. You have some thing that belongs to me, I believe.”
Keep quiet, let me handle this! “I don’t have anything that belongs to you,” she said.
“We shall see,” Selig Retsuc said, “about that.” He got to his knees at her feet and, in a move weirdly fast for a zombie – but then, he never was one of the flock – grabbed her ankles. “Anyway, you had better hope you have something that belongs to me.” Another one of those quick moves and he wrenched her legs apart. “If you don’t, you are in for a much less pleasant experience with me than we shared last time.”
Zombie Cam held her right ankle while Selig reached between her legs and pulled the crotch of her panties aside. His thick, wormy sausage finger pushed up inside her and felt . . . nothing.
She wished she could say his face fell.
“Ahh,” he gargled. “This is going to be fun.” He stood up and waited. Lucy felt him send some command out into the ranks, and she pushed the feelings of degradation aside, waiting to see what she would have to face.
No. What she and Cam would have to face.
Several of the zombies dragged forth the same cage she had been suspended in at the school. “You remember your old nest, little bird?” Selig gargled. “I am sure you will find it as comfortable as your last stay.”
She found it exactly as comfortable as her last stay.
Now, as the zombies dragged her cage to wherever they were dragging her cage to, the degradation returned. It was as if Selig had her again, just the way he wanted, and even though she had the satisfaction of detaching his dick, and even though she knew she was going where she was most needed, and even though she had Rambo deeper inside her now, his power joined more completely to hers than she had ever imagined, it did not make her feel better. She felt horrible.
So did Cam.
Shit, Cam’d never known what being violated felt like. Now that he did, he didn’t much like it. No wonder this bitch was such a freakshow. Being inside her – funny how that still turned him on – he knew that she was just doing her part. Her part was more fucked up and grossed out than any part he’d ever played, but she was doing it and she was doing her best, too. It wasn’t her fault that she was hot. She was just strong enough to bear being that hot.
Was he feeling . . . sympathy?
Cam . . . Cam, I need you. She was calling to him with her mind. Her raw, naked need called to him. This lust was more powerful than the lust to kill zombies, more than any lust he’d ever known.
I can’t, I have to get to Virgil, he thought. He oughtta be able to find some ancient spell or something to cure my body.
There’s no way out of this. Trust me, I’ve been here before. And we can’t leave your zombie body behind . . . Cam, everything has changed. Cam . . . I need you. Haven’t you ever thought about what it’s like for a woman?
Cam never had thought about that, actually. Now that he was thinking about it, he thought it had to be hot. Okay. This would be weird, but it also just might be the hottest thing he’d ever experienced in his life, including The Cleaning Lady. Fuck yeah. He used her hands. Lucy lay back against the cool iron grid of the back of the cage, and let go of all control. There was nothing she could do, but she could still feel. They could take her free will. The ancients could have her soul. M could have her mind. Selig could have her body – so could Cam. But no one could take her ability to feel. It was like her hands were not even hers, like it was someone else entirely touching her body, sliding her own hands over her naked breasts (since her blouse was not only dirty with zombie goo, and not only ripped to shreds, but also very far behind them on the floor of the café. And since it always seemed that Lucy spent an inordinate amount of time naked, and since zombies were not sentient, she was not self-conscious about touching herself in front of them.) Her delicate fingers pinched the tips harder than she would have done herself, and she gasped. Her nails raked over her smooth belly, leaving raised red marks, then rubbed gently over the ravaged skin. She moaned with longing. After she was aching with the lust, after her body was sensitized and swollen, her hands finally slid down her belly to the soft, warm, sopping cleft between her legs.
“Yes . . .” she said aloud. The cage lurched steadily along. The zombies with their stink surrounded her, and she cried out with pleasure. “Oh, GOD YES!” Never had her own fingers moved with such fierce demand, seeking the most sensitive spots, and when the pleasure became too much they did not let up but forced it in deeper. She was shaking and whimpering, and when the orgasm rocked her she realized with horrified excitement that it was not going to stop – he was not going to stop. “Cam,” she whimpered, falling back and surrendering to it again, “everything I have is yours. Listen . . . listen while you love me.”
Taking her time about it, finding solace and safety in Cam’s continued presence and touch, Lucy thought over every moment of her time with Selig Retsuc. Each touch, each shiver, each truth revealed in the dank stink of undeath’s dark embrace, brought Cam closer to grasping the full scale of Selig’s grand plan.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
ZA Chapter 20: Say a Little Prayer for You
Lucy strutted away, resisting the urge to look over her shoulder. She knew she had a mission. She had to find Selig Retsuc. She had to ensnare him with her young body and bring him to Lady M so that she, and the ancients, could break this icky zombie cycle. She shouldn’t be wasting time on Rambo, but…
She glanced down at the green-black stripe across her blouse and the spittle on her Mary Janes. How could a zombie master compare with that? Lucy’s senses were enflamed. She wanted to moan as Cam bit her ear and savaged her naked body. She wanted him inside her. Deep, deep inside her. Without thinking, she sent a mental prayer to the ancients.
Cam's annoyance at her incessant chatter –born of this sudden, undeniable need to have his eyes on her, his hands on her– only heightened the flames of her desire. She hadn’t been this turned on since Bobby took his finger and-
No wait. Come to think of it, she’d NEVER been this turned on.
Oh hurry up, you muscle-bound rock-for-brains, she thought, turning her strut to the left, where there was a cozy little café that would be perfect for what she had in mind, with a shattered picture window and crumbling brick wall. She stopped at the half-a-door sagging on its hinges and there –finally– turned to look back at her quarry.
He was following. Of course he was following. She’d put a strong dose of you-know-you-want-some-o-this-bubble into her strut, didn’t she? And men were so predictable.
Except Cam wasn’t so predictable, was he? He might ravish me. Or he might kill me.
Lucy’s body shivered. Yes. Oh god yes.
She entered the café, put her hands flat on one of the tables and arched her back as Cam stomped through the door.
“I’ve been thinking,” she purred.
“What’s the point o’ that?” Cam growled.
She smiled. “Oh, you took the words right out of my mouth.” She gyrated her hips, just a little bit. “What is the point of that?”
Cam’s furrowed gaze went from her face to her ass, then back to her face. He swallowed, then snarled.
“Can’t you take a break?” she asked. “Just a little break from zombie killing?”
Cam shouldered The Cleaning Lady and strode toward her. He drew his dagger in a flash, his knuckles white where they gripped the handle. Lucy closed her eyes. Which would it be? Big death or little death? The anticipation rocked her body, and she shivered again. She felt the cold steel against the small of her back, and she tensed.
A quick rip and her blouse fell away.
“Yes,” she moaned. His rough hands slid across her belly, up over her ribs. She thanked the ancients. Yes, she thought. Further. More. Please. She wanted him inside her.
He stopped.
“Don’t stop,” she murmured, looking over her shoulder.
But Cam stood up straight, neck erect and head turned to the side as though he was listening to something.
She grabbed his thick belt and yanked him toward her. “Don’t stop, Rambo.”
But the big dolt looked like a giant meerkat sniffing the wind.
“Virgil needs me,” he said.
“Fuck Virgil. I need you!” she said.
He glanced down at her with glazed eyes that looked right through her. He shook his head, sheathed his dagger, and stooped to pick up The Cleaning Lady.
Lucy ground her teeth. Jesus H. Christ, didn’t ANYthing go right in this fucking world? She pushed off the table and grabbed his T-shirt, but he shrugged her off, and she stumbled to her knees.
Cam kicked the half-door off its hinges and marched into the street. He looked left, looked right.
Then his whole body spasmed, and his head snapped back. The Cleaning Lady clanged on the concrete as Cam dropped like a sack of stones.
Something smacked Lucy in the forehead, and she doubled over. She couldn’t see for a moment, and put a hand up to what she figured would be the bloody mangled bits of her torn-open head. But there was no blood. Her eyesight returned in time to see Selig Retsuc shuffle through the doorway, a horde of zombies at his back. Half of them moved to surround Cam’s body in the street.
“Oh hell…” she groaned, gritting her teeth at the pain.
“Dear Lucy,” the shredded, burnt fat man said, lurching forward. “How lovely to see you again. I’ve missed you so.”
Lucy put both hands on her head. She felt like she had to hold her brains in or they’d come spilling onto the floor.
Selig continued, his slightly British-accented voice tapping on her tender skull like a hammer. “I’ve felt incomplete since I last saw you. It’s almost as if you took the most important part of me with you when you left.”
Lucy said, “Rrrggflf.”
“Things were going quite nicely until that meat-headed jock opened your cage and set you free. I didn’t expect to see him, you see. I thought he would have become one of my flock long before now, but it appears the brainless bastard can carve on himself like a Christmas turkey and like it. The infection wasn’t getting anywhere.”
Voices carombed off the walls of Lucy’s skull, and she hummed through gritted teeth, rocking back and forth.
“So I sucked his soul out of his body. Quick, quiet. No fuss. It’s one of dear Lady M’s tricks, you know. Well, except reversed. Isn’t it wonderful that the most benevolent treatments can always be twisted into something nasty?” Selig sighed, and his crispy belly shreds jiggled. “I won’t have to worry about dear Mr. Sparks mucking with my plans anymore. Things will go back to normal with Dar, Captain and Virgil leading the charge.”
He shuffled closer. “And now, dear Lucy, though I do like this particular subservient posture on you, we can get to that later once certain pieces have been put back in their proper places.”
The painful voices in Lucy’s head coalesced into one as Selig’s pale, bloated hand lifted her chin up to face him.
“I have some questions for you, young Lucy.” His zombie army shuffled into the café behind him, stinking of dead flesh, petroleum and cookies. “And I do hope you’ll answer them, otherwise this encounter is likely to be much less pleasant than our last one.”
“Go fuck yourself, ya goddamned zombie whale!” Lucy head-butted Selig straight in the chin. He stumbled back into the arms of his zombies. Lucy jumped to her feet, reached for her knife-
-and smacked her bare thigh.
“Where the fuck am I?” she said in a gravely voice, staring down at her body.
“Holy hell,” Lucy said again, this time in her own voice. The realization crashed in on her with shocking clarity.
The ancients had answered her prayer.
She glanced down at the green-black stripe across her blouse and the spittle on her Mary Janes. How could a zombie master compare with that? Lucy’s senses were enflamed. She wanted to moan as Cam bit her ear and savaged her naked body. She wanted him inside her. Deep, deep inside her. Without thinking, she sent a mental prayer to the ancients.
Cam's annoyance at her incessant chatter –born of this sudden, undeniable need to have his eyes on her, his hands on her– only heightened the flames of her desire. She hadn’t been this turned on since Bobby took his finger and-
No wait. Come to think of it, she’d NEVER been this turned on.
Oh hurry up, you muscle-bound rock-for-brains, she thought, turning her strut to the left, where there was a cozy little café that would be perfect for what she had in mind, with a shattered picture window and crumbling brick wall. She stopped at the half-a-door sagging on its hinges and there –finally– turned to look back at her quarry.
He was following. Of course he was following. She’d put a strong dose of you-know-you-want-some-o-this-bubble into her strut, didn’t she? And men were so predictable.
Except Cam wasn’t so predictable, was he? He might ravish me. Or he might kill me.
Lucy’s body shivered. Yes. Oh god yes.
She entered the café, put her hands flat on one of the tables and arched her back as Cam stomped through the door.
“I’ve been thinking,” she purred.
“What’s the point o’ that?” Cam growled.
She smiled. “Oh, you took the words right out of my mouth.” She gyrated her hips, just a little bit. “What is the point of that?”
Cam’s furrowed gaze went from her face to her ass, then back to her face. He swallowed, then snarled.
“Can’t you take a break?” she asked. “Just a little break from zombie killing?”
Cam shouldered The Cleaning Lady and strode toward her. He drew his dagger in a flash, his knuckles white where they gripped the handle. Lucy closed her eyes. Which would it be? Big death or little death? The anticipation rocked her body, and she shivered again. She felt the cold steel against the small of her back, and she tensed.
A quick rip and her blouse fell away.
“Yes,” she moaned. His rough hands slid across her belly, up over her ribs. She thanked the ancients. Yes, she thought. Further. More. Please. She wanted him inside her.
He stopped.
“Don’t stop,” she murmured, looking over her shoulder.
But Cam stood up straight, neck erect and head turned to the side as though he was listening to something.
She grabbed his thick belt and yanked him toward her. “Don’t stop, Rambo.”
But the big dolt looked like a giant meerkat sniffing the wind.
“Virgil needs me,” he said.
“Fuck Virgil. I need you!” she said.
He glanced down at her with glazed eyes that looked right through her. He shook his head, sheathed his dagger, and stooped to pick up The Cleaning Lady.
Lucy ground her teeth. Jesus H. Christ, didn’t ANYthing go right in this fucking world? She pushed off the table and grabbed his T-shirt, but he shrugged her off, and she stumbled to her knees.
Cam kicked the half-door off its hinges and marched into the street. He looked left, looked right.
Then his whole body spasmed, and his head snapped back. The Cleaning Lady clanged on the concrete as Cam dropped like a sack of stones.
Something smacked Lucy in the forehead, and she doubled over. She couldn’t see for a moment, and put a hand up to what she figured would be the bloody mangled bits of her torn-open head. But there was no blood. Her eyesight returned in time to see Selig Retsuc shuffle through the doorway, a horde of zombies at his back. Half of them moved to surround Cam’s body in the street.
“Oh hell…” she groaned, gritting her teeth at the pain.
“Dear Lucy,” the shredded, burnt fat man said, lurching forward. “How lovely to see you again. I’ve missed you so.”
Lucy put both hands on her head. She felt like she had to hold her brains in or they’d come spilling onto the floor.
Selig continued, his slightly British-accented voice tapping on her tender skull like a hammer. “I’ve felt incomplete since I last saw you. It’s almost as if you took the most important part of me with you when you left.”
Lucy said, “Rrrggflf.”
“Things were going quite nicely until that meat-headed jock opened your cage and set you free. I didn’t expect to see him, you see. I thought he would have become one of my flock long before now, but it appears the brainless bastard can carve on himself like a Christmas turkey and like it. The infection wasn’t getting anywhere.”
Voices carombed off the walls of Lucy’s skull, and she hummed through gritted teeth, rocking back and forth.
“So I sucked his soul out of his body. Quick, quiet. No fuss. It’s one of dear Lady M’s tricks, you know. Well, except reversed. Isn’t it wonderful that the most benevolent treatments can always be twisted into something nasty?” Selig sighed, and his crispy belly shreds jiggled. “I won’t have to worry about dear Mr. Sparks mucking with my plans anymore. Things will go back to normal with Dar, Captain and Virgil leading the charge.”
He shuffled closer. “And now, dear Lucy, though I do like this particular subservient posture on you, we can get to that later once certain pieces have been put back in their proper places.”
The painful voices in Lucy’s head coalesced into one as Selig’s pale, bloated hand lifted her chin up to face him.
“I have some questions for you, young Lucy.” His zombie army shuffled into the café behind him, stinking of dead flesh, petroleum and cookies. “And I do hope you’ll answer them, otherwise this encounter is likely to be much less pleasant than our last one.”
“Go fuck yourself, ya goddamned zombie whale!” Lucy head-butted Selig straight in the chin. He stumbled back into the arms of his zombies. Lucy jumped to her feet, reached for her knife-
-and smacked her bare thigh.
“Where the fuck am I?” she said in a gravely voice, staring down at her body.
“Holy hell,” Lucy said again, this time in her own voice. The realization crashed in on her with shocking clarity.
The ancients had answered her prayer.
Friday, February 20, 2009
ZA Chapter 19: In which Lady M figures it out…
Lady M was elbow deep in zombie guts, trying to detect exactly what it was about this particular zombie that made it different from the other garden variety zombies she was used to dealing with, when Cyrus came bounding in from the Vast Wasteland with another meaningless trinket. M's little monkey jumped to the dissection cart, rattling the stainless steel knives, picks, and spoons, and held out a small scorched chunk of meat as though offering a tasty sausage link to her mistress. It was an appendage of some sort—possibly human, probably zombie—with a gold ring (at least 24 carat) pierced through one end of it.
Lady M wiped her brow, smearing zombie viscera across her nose and cheek. But she was used to that, being a zombie dissector and all, and she was a firm believer in the phrase "if you can't swallow the smell, get the hell out of the perfume factory!" Or something like that. See, the stench of zombie rot caused severe headaches in most people, right behind the eyes, though some got addicted to the euphoric high and ravenous hunger the stench created, which caused all manner of chaos in The Fringe. Addicts went berserk for it, scraping zombie bacon from any flambéed undead flesh they could find, chopping it into a fine black powder, and snorting it right up into their mushy brains, eventually necrotizing the gray matter and zombifying the user from the inside out. Even getting it on your skin could have an eventual zombifying effect. Once the shit worked its way into the central nervous system, you were done, cooked. Dead, damned, and doomed to forever seek out live flesh to satiate your eternal hunger. Think about that for a moment, willya? Never knowing the loving embrace of another human being or the sight of a beautiful sunrise … no more feminist porn at 3 a.m. … no more Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt with extra chocolate chips from the bag … no more rolling Meg's orgasmic hot caramel chip devil's food cookies around in your mouth like the tongue of a gentle and particularly generous lover (because this entry is all about hunger and food, and by extension, sex) … endless reruns of Oprah, Wife Swap, The Bachelor, and Jerry Springer…. It became all about the glut. And the gut.
Fucking parasites, sucking the life out of humanity, turning us all into automatonic mushy-brained mushbrains! They weren't just fuckers. They were undead zombie fuckers. They were zuckers.
M took the ring and its appendage (obviously) from Cyrus and placed it under the microscope lens. Cyrus chattered, annoyed and impatient, tossing up her little monkey hands in exasperation.
"I know, I know" Lady M said. That monkey sure had a thing for sparkly stuff. The more blue and twinkly, the better. "Just give me a sec."
Cyrus sat back on her haunches and crossed her arms, looking admiringly at the shiny bauble on her wrist. She bobbed her head from side to side, staring at her reflection in the shiny-silvery zirconia, and smiled that mischievous capuchin smile that could win over any zombie with half a necrotized brain. Even Virgil.
"Uh-oh." Lady M straightened and looked at her monkey. "Where did you get this, C-baby?"
M listened as Cyrus chattered and screeched in capuchin-speak, tossing in some street slang because the tiny primate often fancied herself a spotted leopard, a sleek and stealthy wildcat, a delusion that got her into a pickle from time to time. (I would tell you exactly what Cyrus told Lady M but capuchin is a bitch to translate).
Lady M's expression darkened. She looked again into the eyepiece of the microscope, saw that familiar green-black goo writhing in worm-like fashion, thickening, transforming, healing, regenerating the tissue right before her eyes. She knew this already from the many statistical analyses and careful dissections she'd been performing in her lair since the beginning of The Zombie Revolution so long ago. But what was it exactly? What made these second-wave zombies so stinking hard to decapitate? What made these more resilient than the ones that came before? And, more importantly, what was that delicious, intoxicating smell?
M's stomach growled. She glanced at Cyrus, who was still admiring her reflection in the bauble, pulled off her zombie gut-covered, arm-length, black rubber gloves and tossed them into the basin in the corner as the room filled with the aroma of fresh baked goodness and … and … and … chicken. Yeah. Lemon chicken. With just enough tang to make it sweet and sour at the same time. And roasted new red potatoes. Soaked in butter and garlic. Ginger baby carrots … and … and … cookies … warm right-outta-the-oven devil's food caramel chip. With a scoop of Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt on top, and …
M shook herself and brought a trembling hand up to wipe the sweat from her brow, the drool from her chin. She was prone to bizarre psychic breaks, sure—you know, visions from the ancients and all—but what the hell was that about?
Then she noticed something. She looked at her narcissistic little monkey.
"C-baby, where's your brother?"
Cyrus pouted, grabbed her tail (which had a pretty purple ribbon tied around it) and began obsessively grooming, something she did only when she got into trouble or there was trouble brewing somewhere in The Fringe.
A deep dread filled Lady M from marrow to flesh. "Cyrus Christine. Where's Billy Ray?"
Cyrus began chattering. Something about a wild-haired dingo, or a hairy wild child with a pet dingo, or a dingo-wolf-man hybrid with hairy armpits, or a baby-eating dingo wearing a cape, or a crazed capuchin-munching mantis, or a were-dingo wearing a bathrobe in the outback, or a chocolate-covered primate-eating hairy-pitted robed mantis, or a monkey-masticating much-maddened mantis-macking Meg-monster … like I said, hard to translate.
Thinking only of Virgil and his perfect ass—if he’s betrayed me like all the others, there will be hell to pay!—Lady M bolted across the room, grabbed her satchel, tapping stick and ink, and skinning knife, and, leaving behind the regenerating love-shaft and a pile of cold zombie intestines, set out to find her monkey, an unsettling realization forming at the edges of her mind …
It's the marinade that's making the zombies more flame resistant and regenerative! Damn Selig Retsuc! He's in cahoots with the Masterful Mixologist Meg Monster and her miraculously maniacal macerated metastasizing marinade! That cowardly, contrary, cunning cootie-concoctor is contaminating contemporary culture with coercive crack-like cookies containing corrupted, crumbly, cruddy zombie corporeality!
In other words, there's frackin' zombie dust in the cookies, people!
M set her jaw, narrowed her catlike eyes, and strode out of the lair into the Vast Wasteland. If anyone knew anything about Lady M it was that one surefire way to piss her off good was to eat her monkey.
Meg would pay dearly for this. If she thought Billy Ray was yummy, wait till she got a taste of Lady M's flying monkeys. They would not be kind or merciful in their slow, sadistic torture of Meg. Indeed, Meg would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, never ever be the same again. And that's just too bad, because that bitch could whip up a rockin’ Irish cream milkshake.
Lady M wiped her brow, smearing zombie viscera across her nose and cheek. But she was used to that, being a zombie dissector and all, and she was a firm believer in the phrase "if you can't swallow the smell, get the hell out of the perfume factory!" Or something like that. See, the stench of zombie rot caused severe headaches in most people, right behind the eyes, though some got addicted to the euphoric high and ravenous hunger the stench created, which caused all manner of chaos in The Fringe. Addicts went berserk for it, scraping zombie bacon from any flambéed undead flesh they could find, chopping it into a fine black powder, and snorting it right up into their mushy brains, eventually necrotizing the gray matter and zombifying the user from the inside out. Even getting it on your skin could have an eventual zombifying effect. Once the shit worked its way into the central nervous system, you were done, cooked. Dead, damned, and doomed to forever seek out live flesh to satiate your eternal hunger. Think about that for a moment, willya? Never knowing the loving embrace of another human being or the sight of a beautiful sunrise … no more feminist porn at 3 a.m. … no more Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt with extra chocolate chips from the bag … no more rolling Meg's orgasmic hot caramel chip devil's food cookies around in your mouth like the tongue of a gentle and particularly generous lover (because this entry is all about hunger and food, and by extension, sex) … endless reruns of Oprah, Wife Swap, The Bachelor, and Jerry Springer…. It became all about the glut. And the gut.
Fucking parasites, sucking the life out of humanity, turning us all into automatonic mushy-brained mushbrains! They weren't just fuckers. They were undead zombie fuckers. They were zuckers.
M took the ring and its appendage (obviously) from Cyrus and placed it under the microscope lens. Cyrus chattered, annoyed and impatient, tossing up her little monkey hands in exasperation.
"I know, I know" Lady M said. That monkey sure had a thing for sparkly stuff. The more blue and twinkly, the better. "Just give me a sec."
Cyrus sat back on her haunches and crossed her arms, looking admiringly at the shiny bauble on her wrist. She bobbed her head from side to side, staring at her reflection in the shiny-silvery zirconia, and smiled that mischievous capuchin smile that could win over any zombie with half a necrotized brain. Even Virgil.
"Uh-oh." Lady M straightened and looked at her monkey. "Where did you get this, C-baby?"
M listened as Cyrus chattered and screeched in capuchin-speak, tossing in some street slang because the tiny primate often fancied herself a spotted leopard, a sleek and stealthy wildcat, a delusion that got her into a pickle from time to time. (I would tell you exactly what Cyrus told Lady M but capuchin is a bitch to translate).
Lady M's expression darkened. She looked again into the eyepiece of the microscope, saw that familiar green-black goo writhing in worm-like fashion, thickening, transforming, healing, regenerating the tissue right before her eyes. She knew this already from the many statistical analyses and careful dissections she'd been performing in her lair since the beginning of The Zombie Revolution so long ago. But what was it exactly? What made these second-wave zombies so stinking hard to decapitate? What made these more resilient than the ones that came before? And, more importantly, what was that delicious, intoxicating smell?
M's stomach growled. She glanced at Cyrus, who was still admiring her reflection in the bauble, pulled off her zombie gut-covered, arm-length, black rubber gloves and tossed them into the basin in the corner as the room filled with the aroma of fresh baked goodness and … and … and … chicken. Yeah. Lemon chicken. With just enough tang to make it sweet and sour at the same time. And roasted new red potatoes. Soaked in butter and garlic. Ginger baby carrots … and … and … cookies … warm right-outta-the-oven devil's food caramel chip. With a scoop of Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt on top, and …
M shook herself and brought a trembling hand up to wipe the sweat from her brow, the drool from her chin. She was prone to bizarre psychic breaks, sure—you know, visions from the ancients and all—but what the hell was that about?
Then she noticed something. She looked at her narcissistic little monkey.
"C-baby, where's your brother?"
Cyrus pouted, grabbed her tail (which had a pretty purple ribbon tied around it) and began obsessively grooming, something she did only when she got into trouble or there was trouble brewing somewhere in The Fringe.
A deep dread filled Lady M from marrow to flesh. "Cyrus Christine. Where's Billy Ray?"
Cyrus began chattering. Something about a wild-haired dingo, or a hairy wild child with a pet dingo, or a dingo-wolf-man hybrid with hairy armpits, or a baby-eating dingo wearing a cape, or a crazed capuchin-munching mantis, or a were-dingo wearing a bathrobe in the outback, or a chocolate-covered primate-eating hairy-pitted robed mantis, or a monkey-masticating much-maddened mantis-macking Meg-monster … like I said, hard to translate.
Thinking only of Virgil and his perfect ass—if he’s betrayed me like all the others, there will be hell to pay!—Lady M bolted across the room, grabbed her satchel, tapping stick and ink, and skinning knife, and, leaving behind the regenerating love-shaft and a pile of cold zombie intestines, set out to find her monkey, an unsettling realization forming at the edges of her mind …
It's the marinade that's making the zombies more flame resistant and regenerative! Damn Selig Retsuc! He's in cahoots with the Masterful Mixologist Meg Monster and her miraculously maniacal macerated metastasizing marinade! That cowardly, contrary, cunning cootie-concoctor is contaminating contemporary culture with coercive crack-like cookies containing corrupted, crumbly, cruddy zombie corporeality!
In other words, there's frackin' zombie dust in the cookies, people!
M set her jaw, narrowed her catlike eyes, and strode out of the lair into the Vast Wasteland. If anyone knew anything about Lady M it was that one surefire way to piss her off good was to eat her monkey.
Meg would pay dearly for this. If she thought Billy Ray was yummy, wait till she got a taste of Lady M's flying monkeys. They would not be kind or merciful in their slow, sadistic torture of Meg. Indeed, Meg would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, never ever be the same again. And that's just too bad, because that bitch could whip up a rockin’ Irish cream milkshake.
ZA 18: Just Deserts...followed by Just Desserts
Watching the Bombies burn whilst they writhed in spastic fits of pop abandon moved Virgil. First, it moved him about fifty yards away behind an outcrop of rocks where he wouldn't be completely covered in exploded Bombie goop. Then it moved him to a realization. The realization was that nothing--nothing in The Time Before or The Unfortunate Since was quite so beautiful as a hundred thousand dancing zombies bursting into flame on a desert wasteland in the first purple moments of sunrise. Virgil understood, in that moment, that he had found a new purpose in his life.
In seminary, in The Time Before, Virgil had been often perplexed by the assumed interchangeability of morality and religion--as though the two were not just of one fabric but of one thread--as though no person could be moral without religion and those with religion were innately moral. This, in Virgil's mind, constituted perhaps the greatest corruption in the thieves den of institutional religion.
Ironically, the truth of the corruption was aptly, if misleadingly, described in Genesis as the source of the Fall. When Eve ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she did not sin against God by violating His command (for how could a creature ignorant of good and evil be expected to understand that it was evil to violate a command of God's), but rather she sinned against her nature by taking upon herself the damning responsibility of morality. While Virgil disdained any literal interpretations of ancient scriptures and despised how insecure penis-bearers used such narrow understandings to deny the power and validity of the vaginaed, he relished this story of the Fall--for in it lay the very seeds of institutional religion's undoing.
He knew that most saw naught but virtue in judging good from evil, Right from Wrong, but to Virgil the entire enterprise was fraught with soul-killing peril. When is it wrong to steal? to kill? to commit adultery? For every single argument in one direction, there is an equal and opposite justification in another, both framed in absolute terms by starkly oppositional personal moralities. The institution of religion, meanwhile, mindful always of its own importance bends its endlessly limber interpretational weight not toward the noble but toward the nobility, toward those with the means to enrich and endow, thus further muddying the black and brackish waters of moral judgment.
In The Time Before, if someone dragged out the tired trope of the holocaust to argue the case for an objective moral compass, Virgil would always reply that the holocaust was only possible because of moral judgment. Hitler could never have persuaded his thousands to exterminate millions without the unholy power to define evil at his command. Morality does not prevent murder, it justifies it.
In the Time Before, Virgil was convinced that if he could only communicate this message sufficiently, if only he could teach people the danger of ascribing to themselves the poison power of judgment, he could free them. He longed to shout from rooftops, "spit out the fruit! Renounce morality! Judge not!"
Of course, Virgil's quest to unmake the institution of religion, destroying its power while saving its spirit, was a bit derailed when the zombies came along and ate religion along with everything else.
The sun rose fully over the desert plain, washing the land in light.
Resurrection. This must have been what Virgil's intuition was telling him. Watching the zombies burst beautifully into flames had reminded him of his quest and its true importance. It wasn't really that Virgil wanted to wreck religion. There were plenty of religious zombies doing that for him even before the actual zombies came along. Instead, Virgil wanted to suggest a replacement for morality--aesthetics. Ethical, informed aesthetics--by which he meant that instead of determining Right from Wrong, Good from Evil, people should instead seek after beauty and happiness. In a world dependent on human connection, happiness was only sustainable in the presence of kindness and honesty, art and truth and mindful being.
When the zombies came, Virgil forgot all his high-minded striving and instead surrendered to the tooth-and-claw imperative--the day-to-day fight for survival, but now his aesthetic sensibility had been reborn. He would kill all the zombies in the world not because they were evil and he was good, not because he sought life and they sought his edible parts, but because it would be beautiful to do so, and he wanted to share the sight with his friends. Cam, Meg, Lady M, Lucy if only Virgil hadn't let her die, perhaps even a redeemed Selig Retsuc.
Just as Virgil was racing off to tell his friends of his plans, that still small voice that had saved him earlier spoke to him again. He stopped, his pulse thundering in his ears, overwhelming the divine communication. While Virgil despised what the scribes and pretenders had made of holiness when they imprisoned prophets' truths in the marble and gold hem of institutional religion, he trusted the prophets nonetheless. He believed in, sought after, longed for a relationship with the mystery of that which lay beyond. And this still small voice was a force he could not--or rather, would not--ignore. But what was it saying now? He listened harder, straining his inner ear to pick out the exact pitch of truth...
"Kill the monkey."
Virgil shook his head. Surely, he'd misheard. Surely God hadn't just told him to kill one of Lady M's precious, hirsute companions. But there again, the command came, as clear as the Killers song that had saved him a few short hours before. "Kill the monkey."
Perhaps this was like God speaking to Abraham, urging him to prove his faith by placing on the sacrificial block that which was too dear, too essential to part with. After all, Virgil loved those monkeys. And by "loved," he meant he really, REALLY liked the monkeys and wanted them to ALWAYS be with Lady M in every scene...umm...moment. To kill one would be an offense of the greatest magnitude against that ineffable presence some might call The Divine, others of a more poetic bent--The Story. But no, the call was undeniable. Virgil had to kill the monkey. It was as clear as if it had been written.
So, Virgil went to find Lady M, which turned out to be much easier than it typically was since--at that very moment--Lady M was watching a resurrected Lucy Tisdale wading through mounds of smoking zombie flesh on the very plain Virgil had just been observing.
"Lucy!" Virgil cried, but Lady M hushed him, casting a spell of both invisibility and silence over his head. That and containment. Virgil could have sooner walked on his lips as gone to hug Lucy.
"Lucy's got work to do," Lady M said, her voice echoing in Virgil's head even though her mouth did not appear to move. "She has to clean up your mess."
"My mess?"
"Aren't you the one who half-killed all these zombies?"
"Well, technically, they half-killed themselves."
"Pish posh, Virgil. Stop gerrymandering reality and embrace the truth of your half-assedness."
"Yes, Mistress," Virgil said, bowing his head, because Virgil had learned that was the only way to deal with Lady M when she started saying things like "pish posh."
"I can tell that you want something, Virgil. Out with it."
"I want one of your monkeys."
"Why?"
"God told me to kill it. I'm hoping He'll change his mind, though, once He sees how faithful I am."
Lady M sighed--not visibly, but in his mind.
"First--Virgil--I'm sure you understand how you've just completely exposed your faithlessness and thus ruined all hope of heavenly pardon, thereby making you a fool as well as a half-ass. Second--though this makes you no less a fool or half-ass, just a lucky half-ass fool--that command was not from God."
"It wasn't?"
"Nope."
"But...it was still...and small...and a voice."
"Not God," Lady M said and he could almost see her shake her head with disdain.
"What was it then?"
"Cookie."
"Cookie?"
"Yes, Virgil, a goddamned macaroon."
"I'm not following."
"You've been minionized by that nasty, albeit clever, cookie witch, Meg Tisdale."
"What are you talking about? I'm nobody's minion!"
"You wouldn't be if you weren't such a sugar whore, but apparently that lovely brain of yours is no match for your sweet tooth."
"Can you fix it?"
"If you'd only eaten one cookie, maybe, but you had to go back for seconds. Cookie magic is pretty strong stuff."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying what I've already said, you've been minionized. Pretty soon, you're going to be massaging callouses and kissing asses."
"Don't forget, killing monkeys," Virgil said, trying to instill some urgency and indicate precisely why Lady M might want to step off the high horse for a moment and join Virgil down in the miniony mud.
"You touch one hair on even one of my monkeys and I'll reach up and pull your tongue out through your pee-hole."
"You don't understand, Lady M. It is written. I can't help but kill your monkey. You'd have to kill me to stop me."
Lady M's lower lip twitched--which, when you're as unflappable as the Lady, is like screeching at the top of your lungs and pulling all of your hair out.
"As tempting as that option is, Virgil," Lady M said, her voice cold as Kelvin's basement. "I can't kill you. While I prefer the monkey in just about every way to your sorry ass, there are three problems. #1: You're right--destiny's pull is damn near undeniable at this point. #2: You're also right that I can't stay mad at your perfect ass, and #3: I understand your vision even if you--despite your best efforts--do not. At least, you don't understand it yet. Apparently, Virgil, your continued place in the divine order--The Story if you will--seems assured, whereas my dear beloved Cyrus seems to be on his way out."
"But wait, maybe Cyrus doesn't have to die. Can't you just conjure up a substitute? Let's beat Meg at her own game."
"Cookie magic is too powerful, particularly when you go back for seconds. No. Meg has won this round, but my Cyrus won't die in vain. As the ancients knew, the one kind of magic that can, while not defeating cookie magic, at least subvert it, is sacrificial magic. When you return to Meg, you will indeed kill my beloved monkey, but you'll do so with a special knife I give you and you will chant the special words I tell you. This will free you from Meg's spell and--as a bonus--send a psychic signal through the ether like a distress beacon to your closest ally alerting him to your need."
"My closest ally?"
"A man whose depth has yet to be fully revealed, whose value goes far beyond the weapons he so artfully handles and the thoughts he so artlessly thinks. While no one can hope to kill Meg yet, he can at least cause her some pain."
Virgil took a moment to relish the thought of Meg looking down the cold steel pipe of the Cleaning Lady. Indeed, as soon as Virgil got to Meg, he would do everything in his power to make sure that when Cam bashed in the doors of the cookie bunker, Meg would be if not wholly vulnerable, at least highly flammable. And not because it was the right thing to do, but because it would be lovely to watch her burn.
In seminary, in The Time Before, Virgil had been often perplexed by the assumed interchangeability of morality and religion--as though the two were not just of one fabric but of one thread--as though no person could be moral without religion and those with religion were innately moral. This, in Virgil's mind, constituted perhaps the greatest corruption in the thieves den of institutional religion.
Ironically, the truth of the corruption was aptly, if misleadingly, described in Genesis as the source of the Fall. When Eve ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she did not sin against God by violating His command (for how could a creature ignorant of good and evil be expected to understand that it was evil to violate a command of God's), but rather she sinned against her nature by taking upon herself the damning responsibility of morality. While Virgil disdained any literal interpretations of ancient scriptures and despised how insecure penis-bearers used such narrow understandings to deny the power and validity of the vaginaed, he relished this story of the Fall--for in it lay the very seeds of institutional religion's undoing.
He knew that most saw naught but virtue in judging good from evil, Right from Wrong, but to Virgil the entire enterprise was fraught with soul-killing peril. When is it wrong to steal? to kill? to commit adultery? For every single argument in one direction, there is an equal and opposite justification in another, both framed in absolute terms by starkly oppositional personal moralities. The institution of religion, meanwhile, mindful always of its own importance bends its endlessly limber interpretational weight not toward the noble but toward the nobility, toward those with the means to enrich and endow, thus further muddying the black and brackish waters of moral judgment.
In The Time Before, if someone dragged out the tired trope of the holocaust to argue the case for an objective moral compass, Virgil would always reply that the holocaust was only possible because of moral judgment. Hitler could never have persuaded his thousands to exterminate millions without the unholy power to define evil at his command. Morality does not prevent murder, it justifies it.
In the Time Before, Virgil was convinced that if he could only communicate this message sufficiently, if only he could teach people the danger of ascribing to themselves the poison power of judgment, he could free them. He longed to shout from rooftops, "spit out the fruit! Renounce morality! Judge not!"
Of course, Virgil's quest to unmake the institution of religion, destroying its power while saving its spirit, was a bit derailed when the zombies came along and ate religion along with everything else.
The sun rose fully over the desert plain, washing the land in light.
Resurrection. This must have been what Virgil's intuition was telling him. Watching the zombies burst beautifully into flames had reminded him of his quest and its true importance. It wasn't really that Virgil wanted to wreck religion. There were plenty of religious zombies doing that for him even before the actual zombies came along. Instead, Virgil wanted to suggest a replacement for morality--aesthetics. Ethical, informed aesthetics--by which he meant that instead of determining Right from Wrong, Good from Evil, people should instead seek after beauty and happiness. In a world dependent on human connection, happiness was only sustainable in the presence of kindness and honesty, art and truth and mindful being.
When the zombies came, Virgil forgot all his high-minded striving and instead surrendered to the tooth-and-claw imperative--the day-to-day fight for survival, but now his aesthetic sensibility had been reborn. He would kill all the zombies in the world not because they were evil and he was good, not because he sought life and they sought his edible parts, but because it would be beautiful to do so, and he wanted to share the sight with his friends. Cam, Meg, Lady M, Lucy if only Virgil hadn't let her die, perhaps even a redeemed Selig Retsuc.
Just as Virgil was racing off to tell his friends of his plans, that still small voice that had saved him earlier spoke to him again. He stopped, his pulse thundering in his ears, overwhelming the divine communication. While Virgil despised what the scribes and pretenders had made of holiness when they imprisoned prophets' truths in the marble and gold hem of institutional religion, he trusted the prophets nonetheless. He believed in, sought after, longed for a relationship with the mystery of that which lay beyond. And this still small voice was a force he could not--or rather, would not--ignore. But what was it saying now? He listened harder, straining his inner ear to pick out the exact pitch of truth...
"Kill the monkey."
Virgil shook his head. Surely, he'd misheard. Surely God hadn't just told him to kill one of Lady M's precious, hirsute companions. But there again, the command came, as clear as the Killers song that had saved him a few short hours before. "Kill the monkey."
Perhaps this was like God speaking to Abraham, urging him to prove his faith by placing on the sacrificial block that which was too dear, too essential to part with. After all, Virgil loved those monkeys. And by "loved," he meant he really, REALLY liked the monkeys and wanted them to ALWAYS be with Lady M in every scene...umm...moment. To kill one would be an offense of the greatest magnitude against that ineffable presence some might call The Divine, others of a more poetic bent--The Story. But no, the call was undeniable. Virgil had to kill the monkey. It was as clear as if it had been written.
So, Virgil went to find Lady M, which turned out to be much easier than it typically was since--at that very moment--Lady M was watching a resurrected Lucy Tisdale wading through mounds of smoking zombie flesh on the very plain Virgil had just been observing.
"Lucy!" Virgil cried, but Lady M hushed him, casting a spell of both invisibility and silence over his head. That and containment. Virgil could have sooner walked on his lips as gone to hug Lucy.
"Lucy's got work to do," Lady M said, her voice echoing in Virgil's head even though her mouth did not appear to move. "She has to clean up your mess."
"My mess?"
"Aren't you the one who half-killed all these zombies?"
"Well, technically, they half-killed themselves."
"Pish posh, Virgil. Stop gerrymandering reality and embrace the truth of your half-assedness."
"Yes, Mistress," Virgil said, bowing his head, because Virgil had learned that was the only way to deal with Lady M when she started saying things like "pish posh."
"I can tell that you want something, Virgil. Out with it."
"I want one of your monkeys."
"Why?"
"God told me to kill it. I'm hoping He'll change his mind, though, once He sees how faithful I am."
Lady M sighed--not visibly, but in his mind.
"First--Virgil--I'm sure you understand how you've just completely exposed your faithlessness and thus ruined all hope of heavenly pardon, thereby making you a fool as well as a half-ass. Second--though this makes you no less a fool or half-ass, just a lucky half-ass fool--that command was not from God."
"It wasn't?"
"Nope."
"But...it was still...and small...and a voice."
"Not God," Lady M said and he could almost see her shake her head with disdain.
"What was it then?"
"Cookie."
"Cookie?"
"Yes, Virgil, a goddamned macaroon."
"I'm not following."
"You've been minionized by that nasty, albeit clever, cookie witch, Meg Tisdale."
"What are you talking about? I'm nobody's minion!"
"You wouldn't be if you weren't such a sugar whore, but apparently that lovely brain of yours is no match for your sweet tooth."
"Can you fix it?"
"If you'd only eaten one cookie, maybe, but you had to go back for seconds. Cookie magic is pretty strong stuff."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying what I've already said, you've been minionized. Pretty soon, you're going to be massaging callouses and kissing asses."
"Don't forget, killing monkeys," Virgil said, trying to instill some urgency and indicate precisely why Lady M might want to step off the high horse for a moment and join Virgil down in the miniony mud.
"You touch one hair on even one of my monkeys and I'll reach up and pull your tongue out through your pee-hole."
"You don't understand, Lady M. It is written. I can't help but kill your monkey. You'd have to kill me to stop me."
Lady M's lower lip twitched--which, when you're as unflappable as the Lady, is like screeching at the top of your lungs and pulling all of your hair out.
"As tempting as that option is, Virgil," Lady M said, her voice cold as Kelvin's basement. "I can't kill you. While I prefer the monkey in just about every way to your sorry ass, there are three problems. #1: You're right--destiny's pull is damn near undeniable at this point. #2: You're also right that I can't stay mad at your perfect ass, and #3: I understand your vision even if you--despite your best efforts--do not. At least, you don't understand it yet. Apparently, Virgil, your continued place in the divine order--The Story if you will--seems assured, whereas my dear beloved Cyrus seems to be on his way out."
"But wait, maybe Cyrus doesn't have to die. Can't you just conjure up a substitute? Let's beat Meg at her own game."
"Cookie magic is too powerful, particularly when you go back for seconds. No. Meg has won this round, but my Cyrus won't die in vain. As the ancients knew, the one kind of magic that can, while not defeating cookie magic, at least subvert it, is sacrificial magic. When you return to Meg, you will indeed kill my beloved monkey, but you'll do so with a special knife I give you and you will chant the special words I tell you. This will free you from Meg's spell and--as a bonus--send a psychic signal through the ether like a distress beacon to your closest ally alerting him to your need."
"My closest ally?"
"A man whose depth has yet to be fully revealed, whose value goes far beyond the weapons he so artfully handles and the thoughts he so artlessly thinks. While no one can hope to kill Meg yet, he can at least cause her some pain."
Virgil took a moment to relish the thought of Meg looking down the cold steel pipe of the Cleaning Lady. Indeed, as soon as Virgil got to Meg, he would do everything in his power to make sure that when Cam bashed in the doors of the cookie bunker, Meg would be if not wholly vulnerable, at least highly flammable. And not because it was the right thing to do, but because it would be lovely to watch her burn.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
ZA 17: Immortalization, Deboobification, Brainwashed Minion Footrubs and Backstory
Meg flossed her straight, white teeth, getting the last of the meat from between them.
Mind-read this, Lady M: Monkey tastes good! A little like bacon.
Meg idly wondered if it was Billy Ray or Cyrus that was currently being digested by her stomach acid. Not that it mattered. The message had been sent either way. The war with Lady M was on. But Meg secretly hoped that she'd ingested Cyrus. He was M's favorite, whether Miss "I don't have favorites" M would admit it or not.
Damn do-gooder. And to think, they used to be best friends, back before M was a "Lady." Back before M's good-doing instincts had caused her to ruin Meg's plans to be the Queen of the Dead. Or the Un-dead, rather.
It had happened like this....
One rainy evening in the distant past, Meg had been wallowing in the gangrenous blubber of her one true love, Selig Retsuc. They were in the thralls of passionate consummation, at the peak of the ultimate act that would make her Selig's Queen forever. His lips formed a very large "O" around her very large, milky-white breast, and his pointy brown teeth were poised for de-boobification. As they neared climax, Meg was anticipating the glorious pain that would seal her regal fate. That's when Miss M had deigned to appear, purporting to "rescue" her best friend Meg.
M, hopped up on her studies of the ancients and self-inflicted hot-needle acupuncture to increase her spiritual awareness, had ripped Meg from Selig's embrace, nearly severing his calcified member--a deed which may prove Selig's undoing in the end. M spirited Meg away to the Vast Wasteland, thinking she'd receive Meg's undying (no pun intended) gratitude, and perhaps they'd enjoy a little girlfriend-bonding with a latte and some shoe shopping. (Though Meg knew that M actually preferred bondage to bonding, Meg didn't indulge her fantasies. Often.)
Instead Meg cursed her so-called friend for foiling her secret plan, interrupting the most incredible night of her life just before the best part, and nearly severing her man's glorious (though somewhat putrified, and according to Virgil, "minuscule") parcel of joy-flesh. Meg pinned M to the sand and pulled her head back with her long black braid exposing her slender neck. Meg whipped her favorite pearl-handled dagger from the sheath attached to her garter, and brought the razor-sharp tip to the pale, thin skin that Meg knew veiled M's carotid artery. (Meg had been in med school when the zombies invaded, and though her knowledge of human anatomy had come in handy on occasion--like this one--she was secretly gleeful that she was spared the drudgery of using her medical knowledge for good.) Just as the dagger pierced M's skin and the first drop of ruby red blood oozed from the puncture, M cried out in an unearthly language that sounded vaguely like the names of movie stars from before the zombie era--
"Uma oprah lohan cruise. Jolie swayze, klum pitt-rourke. Phoenix close knightly, keanu-keanu-keanu!"
Lightning streaked across the night sky, illuminating the swirling cauldron of storm clouds in an amber glow. Thunder crashed, drowning out the obscenities flying forth from Meg's red lips. She couldn't believe she'd forgotten to muzzle the bitch. Now M had called down some kind of hell-fire--or was it heaven-fire?--on both of them.
Meg thrust the dagger hard and fast into M's throat, but it was as if M's neck had turned to stone. The point of the blade snapped off--oh no, not her favorite dagger! Now the voodoo princess was really going to pay. Meg tossed aside the useless weapon and wrapped her fingers around M's neck. But M just smiled at Meg, a sad smile full of pity. That really set Meg off. She squeezed M's throat and slammed her head into the ground--
But the ground was gone. They were ten feet above the sand. Levitating. The witch was even more powerful than Meg had given her credit for.
M did some hinky move with her forearms that broke Meg's grasp on her neck, then flipped around so she was on top. Without M below her, Meg dropped to the ground like a lead mannequin. M hovered above her looking like a goth-ninja doing water ballet, except in the air. She was laughing.
"This is rockin!" M said.
"This sucks nails!" Meg said.
"The power. The POWER!" M said, skyrocketing backward through the air as she shot laser-bolts from her fingertips. "Who knew?"
"You're ruining my life!" Meg shouted, trying futilely to dislodge an irritating sand wedgie.
"I wonder what else I can do?" M said pirouetting and somersaulting in the black sky as the laserbeams changed from red to green.
"You can mind your own goddamned bees wax, is what you can do. Do you have any idea what you interrupted between me and Selig Retsuc? ANY IDEA? I was about to be made Queen of the Zombies. Before long the whole world will be populated with zombies, so that would make me Queen of the World and All Who Live In It. Or All Who Are Undead In It. Or something like that. Whatever. You fucked it up."
"The powers of the ancients flow through me," M intoned in an unusually deep voice. "You should try it, Meg. It's like one great big orgasm that never ends!"
M squealed like a pig, which only made Meg madder. Who knew how long it would take to find Selig and re-bed him so she, too, could experience an unnatural orgasm and the power to rule the world.
"I'm outta here," Meg said, tromping across the sandy vastness toward what she hoped was the ruins of Denver.
"Hey, where are you going? Don't you want to try this flying thing? I could hook you up," M called.
"No, you enjoy your little ancient carpet ride. I'm going back for some hard Queen-making zombie flesh. And don't even think about interrupting again."
"What? Are you serious? That Selig action is nothing compared to this," M said, swooping down alongside Meg. "Come on, you've got to try it."
M grabbed Meg's hand and pulled her into the sky. The laserbeams from M's fingers were pink, now, and tickled as they skittered up Meg's arm and permeated her body.
They were about fifty feet in the air when M realized what she had done. "My Gods, what have I done?" she said, looking at her pink-glowing hand. Of course she'd had to let go of Meg's hand in order to do this, so Meg was now careening toward the desert floor.
M shot toward the ground like a rocket, but she wasn't fast enough.
Meg lay in a Meg-shaped crater in the desert floor.
"You bitch!" Meg said.
"You're alive!" M said.
"Do you know what this means? Do you know what you've done?"
"No, not really," M said, looking awfully confused for someone empowered with the knowledge of the ancients.
"That stupid pink laser has made it impossible for me to die," Meg said, rolling her sparkly blue eyes.
Now M looked really confused. "So what are you mad about? Isn't that a good thing?"
"No, you idiot. If I can't die, I can't become undead. If I can't become undead, I can't become a zombie. And if I can't become a zombie, it follows that I can't become the Zombie Queen. NOW do you see why I'm a little ticked off?"
And that's when the friendship ended between Meg and M.
That's also when the ancients took away M's ability to fly as punishment for her carelessness. The act of making Meg immortal, no matter how unintentional, had kinda fucked up the ancients' plans, too.
In order to compensate for this unforeseen and quite unfortunate circumstance, the ancients promoted M to "Lady" M, gave her the ability to read minds, and made her talk like a cryptic motivational speaker.
Which brings us back to the monkey flesh in Meg's teeth. Meg knew that her once-best-friend, M, loved her precious monkeys more than anything. More than body-modification, endless orgasm, or even organic red wine. Meg knew that the one sure-fire way to piss off the Lady was to eat her monkey. And no doubt about it, Meg wanted to do some pissing off. Heck, she wanted war. It was bad enough making your ex-best-friend immortal against her wishes. On top of that, everyone knows you don't just go resurrecting someone's daughter without parental permission. That crossed the line.
Oh yes, Meg knew what M was planning to do to Lucy in the Vast Wasteland even before M knew it. She knew M was going to re-flesh the little bitch, not just to piss Meg off, but to steal the Member of Power out of her hoochee. That's why Meg had magically summoned Lucy's twin sister Lizzie, who was somehow Australian and had been raised by wolf-dingo hybrids after having been kidnapped at birth unbeknownst to almost everyone. To think, Meg had been worried about how--and even IF--she'd be able to find Lizzie, when all along the power to summon her had been right there in her recipe for fresh, hot caramel chip devil's food cookies.
So summon Lizzie she had, right to the side of her dead twin, Lucy. With more than a little melancholy for what might have been, Meg pulled the paltry, petrified penis from her daughter's little hidy-hole and handed it to Lizzie.
"Now, don't try to use this on your own," Meg had warned. "Take it to Selig, unless you want to end up a charred mass like your sister." Here she laughed manically for some unknown reason.
After Lizzie nodded and scampered away, Meg had turned just in time to see Virgil sneak back into the cookie-making fortress. He thought he'd gotten away with spying on her, but this was exactly what Meg had hoped would happen.
She slunk back inside the cookie bunker and whipped up a batch of macaroons for Virgil. Magical macaroons that would make Virgil do her bidding, like a long-distance puppet. While they were baking, Meg taught Virgil to dance, playing that annoying song by the Killers "Are We Human or Are We Dancers?" over and over as they practiced.
When the oven timer chimed, Meg brought the steaming coconut cookies to the table, and let the sumptuous aroma waft into Virgil's aristocratic nose.
"Go on," she said. "No need to wait until they cool." She knew that just the scent of the magical mounds would make it impossible for Virgil to refuse her suggestion.
Virgil ate two in rapid succession.
"That burned my tongue," he said.
Meg smiled and nodded. The cookies were just as powerful cold as they were hot, but she had a sadistic itch that needed scratching, and watching Virgil burn his own tongue was just the ticket.
"Now go," she said. "Do what you need to do with Lucy's body--I'd rather not know any details--then put what I've taught you to good use in the Vast Wasteland. After that, lay in wait for Lady M. Stay hidden until she's done with her magical bullshit--you wouldn't be able to stop her if you tried, even with your powerful mantis arms. Then when she's basking in the afterglow of her ancient arts, steal one of those goddamned monkeys and bring it back to the cookie fortress. Do you understand?"
When he returned with the monkey--Billy Ray or Cyrus, he wasn't sure--Meg made Virgil skin and cook it himself. This neatly accomplished three things: she didn't have to get her nails bloody, it proved that she had complete control over Virgil (who was a vegetarian and absolutely squeamish when it came to any kind of non-zombie flesh), and it ensured that M would despise Virgil until her dying day. M really loved her monkeys.
And that REALLY brings us back to Meg removing the monkey flesh from her teeth in the cookie-baking fortress while Virgil rubbed her feet with oil humming "Are We Human or Are We Dancers," and the heavens outside churned with Lady's M's fury.
"Bring it on, my mind-reading sista," Meg said.
"Huh?" Virgil said, looking up.
"Nevermind, honey. Just keep rubbing."
"When can I have another cookie?" Virgil asked.
Meg patted his head. "Soon, dear. Soon."
Man, she loved a good footrub from a brainwashed minion as she anticipated an impeding war.
Mind-read this, Lady M: Monkey tastes good! A little like bacon.
Meg idly wondered if it was Billy Ray or Cyrus that was currently being digested by her stomach acid. Not that it mattered. The message had been sent either way. The war with Lady M was on. But Meg secretly hoped that she'd ingested Cyrus. He was M's favorite, whether Miss "I don't have favorites" M would admit it or not.
Damn do-gooder. And to think, they used to be best friends, back before M was a "Lady." Back before M's good-doing instincts had caused her to ruin Meg's plans to be the Queen of the Dead. Or the Un-dead, rather.
It had happened like this....
One rainy evening in the distant past, Meg had been wallowing in the gangrenous blubber of her one true love, Selig Retsuc. They were in the thralls of passionate consummation, at the peak of the ultimate act that would make her Selig's Queen forever. His lips formed a very large "O" around her very large, milky-white breast, and his pointy brown teeth were poised for de-boobification. As they neared climax, Meg was anticipating the glorious pain that would seal her regal fate. That's when Miss M had deigned to appear, purporting to "rescue" her best friend Meg.
M, hopped up on her studies of the ancients and self-inflicted hot-needle acupuncture to increase her spiritual awareness, had ripped Meg from Selig's embrace, nearly severing his calcified member--a deed which may prove Selig's undoing in the end. M spirited Meg away to the Vast Wasteland, thinking she'd receive Meg's undying (no pun intended) gratitude, and perhaps they'd enjoy a little girlfriend-bonding with a latte and some shoe shopping. (Though Meg knew that M actually preferred bondage to bonding, Meg didn't indulge her fantasies. Often.)
Instead Meg cursed her so-called friend for foiling her secret plan, interrupting the most incredible night of her life just before the best part, and nearly severing her man's glorious (though somewhat putrified, and according to Virgil, "minuscule") parcel of joy-flesh. Meg pinned M to the sand and pulled her head back with her long black braid exposing her slender neck. Meg whipped her favorite pearl-handled dagger from the sheath attached to her garter, and brought the razor-sharp tip to the pale, thin skin that Meg knew veiled M's carotid artery. (Meg had been in med school when the zombies invaded, and though her knowledge of human anatomy had come in handy on occasion--like this one--she was secretly gleeful that she was spared the drudgery of using her medical knowledge for good.) Just as the dagger pierced M's skin and the first drop of ruby red blood oozed from the puncture, M cried out in an unearthly language that sounded vaguely like the names of movie stars from before the zombie era--
"Uma oprah lohan cruise. Jolie swayze, klum pitt-rourke. Phoenix close knightly, keanu-keanu-keanu!"
Lightning streaked across the night sky, illuminating the swirling cauldron of storm clouds in an amber glow. Thunder crashed, drowning out the obscenities flying forth from Meg's red lips. She couldn't believe she'd forgotten to muzzle the bitch. Now M had called down some kind of hell-fire--or was it heaven-fire?--on both of them.
Meg thrust the dagger hard and fast into M's throat, but it was as if M's neck had turned to stone. The point of the blade snapped off--oh no, not her favorite dagger! Now the voodoo princess was really going to pay. Meg tossed aside the useless weapon and wrapped her fingers around M's neck. But M just smiled at Meg, a sad smile full of pity. That really set Meg off. She squeezed M's throat and slammed her head into the ground--
But the ground was gone. They were ten feet above the sand. Levitating. The witch was even more powerful than Meg had given her credit for.
M did some hinky move with her forearms that broke Meg's grasp on her neck, then flipped around so she was on top. Without M below her, Meg dropped to the ground like a lead mannequin. M hovered above her looking like a goth-ninja doing water ballet, except in the air. She was laughing.
"This is rockin!" M said.
"This sucks nails!" Meg said.
"The power. The POWER!" M said, skyrocketing backward through the air as she shot laser-bolts from her fingertips. "Who knew?"
"You're ruining my life!" Meg shouted, trying futilely to dislodge an irritating sand wedgie.
"I wonder what else I can do?" M said pirouetting and somersaulting in the black sky as the laserbeams changed from red to green.
"You can mind your own goddamned bees wax, is what you can do. Do you have any idea what you interrupted between me and Selig Retsuc? ANY IDEA? I was about to be made Queen of the Zombies. Before long the whole world will be populated with zombies, so that would make me Queen of the World and All Who Live In It. Or All Who Are Undead In It. Or something like that. Whatever. You fucked it up."
"The powers of the ancients flow through me," M intoned in an unusually deep voice. "You should try it, Meg. It's like one great big orgasm that never ends!"
M squealed like a pig, which only made Meg madder. Who knew how long it would take to find Selig and re-bed him so she, too, could experience an unnatural orgasm and the power to rule the world.
"I'm outta here," Meg said, tromping across the sandy vastness toward what she hoped was the ruins of Denver.
"Hey, where are you going? Don't you want to try this flying thing? I could hook you up," M called.
"No, you enjoy your little ancient carpet ride. I'm going back for some hard Queen-making zombie flesh. And don't even think about interrupting again."
"What? Are you serious? That Selig action is nothing compared to this," M said, swooping down alongside Meg. "Come on, you've got to try it."
M grabbed Meg's hand and pulled her into the sky. The laserbeams from M's fingers were pink, now, and tickled as they skittered up Meg's arm and permeated her body.
They were about fifty feet in the air when M realized what she had done. "My Gods, what have I done?" she said, looking at her pink-glowing hand. Of course she'd had to let go of Meg's hand in order to do this, so Meg was now careening toward the desert floor.
M shot toward the ground like a rocket, but she wasn't fast enough.
Meg lay in a Meg-shaped crater in the desert floor.
"You bitch!" Meg said.
"You're alive!" M said.
"Do you know what this means? Do you know what you've done?"
"No, not really," M said, looking awfully confused for someone empowered with the knowledge of the ancients.
"That stupid pink laser has made it impossible for me to die," Meg said, rolling her sparkly blue eyes.
Now M looked really confused. "So what are you mad about? Isn't that a good thing?"
"No, you idiot. If I can't die, I can't become undead. If I can't become undead, I can't become a zombie. And if I can't become a zombie, it follows that I can't become the Zombie Queen. NOW do you see why I'm a little ticked off?"
And that's when the friendship ended between Meg and M.
That's also when the ancients took away M's ability to fly as punishment for her carelessness. The act of making Meg immortal, no matter how unintentional, had kinda fucked up the ancients' plans, too.
In order to compensate for this unforeseen and quite unfortunate circumstance, the ancients promoted M to "Lady" M, gave her the ability to read minds, and made her talk like a cryptic motivational speaker.
Which brings us back to the monkey flesh in Meg's teeth. Meg knew that her once-best-friend, M, loved her precious monkeys more than anything. More than body-modification, endless orgasm, or even organic red wine. Meg knew that the one sure-fire way to piss off the Lady was to eat her monkey. And no doubt about it, Meg wanted to do some pissing off. Heck, she wanted war. It was bad enough making your ex-best-friend immortal against her wishes. On top of that, everyone knows you don't just go resurrecting someone's daughter without parental permission. That crossed the line.
Oh yes, Meg knew what M was planning to do to Lucy in the Vast Wasteland even before M knew it. She knew M was going to re-flesh the little bitch, not just to piss Meg off, but to steal the Member of Power out of her hoochee. That's why Meg had magically summoned Lucy's twin sister Lizzie, who was somehow Australian and had been raised by wolf-dingo hybrids after having been kidnapped at birth unbeknownst to almost everyone. To think, Meg had been worried about how--and even IF--she'd be able to find Lizzie, when all along the power to summon her had been right there in her recipe for fresh, hot caramel chip devil's food cookies.
So summon Lizzie she had, right to the side of her dead twin, Lucy. With more than a little melancholy for what might have been, Meg pulled the paltry, petrified penis from her daughter's little hidy-hole and handed it to Lizzie.
"Now, don't try to use this on your own," Meg had warned. "Take it to Selig, unless you want to end up a charred mass like your sister." Here she laughed manically for some unknown reason.
After Lizzie nodded and scampered away, Meg had turned just in time to see Virgil sneak back into the cookie-making fortress. He thought he'd gotten away with spying on her, but this was exactly what Meg had hoped would happen.
She slunk back inside the cookie bunker and whipped up a batch of macaroons for Virgil. Magical macaroons that would make Virgil do her bidding, like a long-distance puppet. While they were baking, Meg taught Virgil to dance, playing that annoying song by the Killers "Are We Human or Are We Dancers?" over and over as they practiced.
When the oven timer chimed, Meg brought the steaming coconut cookies to the table, and let the sumptuous aroma waft into Virgil's aristocratic nose.
"Go on," she said. "No need to wait until they cool." She knew that just the scent of the magical mounds would make it impossible for Virgil to refuse her suggestion.
Virgil ate two in rapid succession.
"That burned my tongue," he said.
Meg smiled and nodded. The cookies were just as powerful cold as they were hot, but she had a sadistic itch that needed scratching, and watching Virgil burn his own tongue was just the ticket.
"Now go," she said. "Do what you need to do with Lucy's body--I'd rather not know any details--then put what I've taught you to good use in the Vast Wasteland. After that, lay in wait for Lady M. Stay hidden until she's done with her magical bullshit--you wouldn't be able to stop her if you tried, even with your powerful mantis arms. Then when she's basking in the afterglow of her ancient arts, steal one of those goddamned monkeys and bring it back to the cookie fortress. Do you understand?"
When he returned with the monkey--Billy Ray or Cyrus, he wasn't sure--Meg made Virgil skin and cook it himself. This neatly accomplished three things: she didn't have to get her nails bloody, it proved that she had complete control over Virgil (who was a vegetarian and absolutely squeamish when it came to any kind of non-zombie flesh), and it ensured that M would despise Virgil until her dying day. M really loved her monkeys.
And that REALLY brings us back to Meg removing the monkey flesh from her teeth in the cookie-baking fortress while Virgil rubbed her feet with oil humming "Are We Human or Are We Dancers," and the heavens outside churned with Lady's M's fury.
"Bring it on, my mind-reading sista," Meg said.
"Huh?" Virgil said, looking up.
"Nevermind, honey. Just keep rubbing."
"When can I have another cookie?" Virgil asked.
Meg patted his head. "Soon, dear. Soon."
Man, she loved a good footrub from a brainwashed minion as she anticipated an impeding war.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)