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.