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.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)