ZA 17: Immortalization, Deboobification, Brainwashed Minion Footrubs and Backstory

Meg flossed her straight, white teeth, getting the last of the meat from between them.

Mind-read this, Lady M: Monkey tastes good! A little like bacon.

Meg idly wondered if it was Billy Ray or Cyrus that was currently being digested by her stomach acid. Not that it mattered. The message had been sent either way. The war with Lady M was on. But Meg secretly hoped that she'd ingested Cyrus. He was M's favorite, whether Miss "I don't have favorites" M would admit it or not.

Damn do-gooder. And to think, they used to be best friends, back before M was a "Lady." Back before M's good-doing instincts had caused her to ruin Meg's plans to be the Queen of the Dead. Or the Un-dead, rather.

It had happened like this....

One rainy evening in the distant past, Meg had been wallowing in the gangrenous blubber of her one true love, Selig Retsuc. They were in the thralls of passionate consummation, at the peak of the ultimate act that would make her Selig's Queen forever. His lips formed a very large "O" around her very large, milky-white breast, and his pointy brown teeth were poised for de-boobification. As they neared climax, Meg was anticipating the glorious pain that would seal her regal fate. That's when Miss M had deigned to appear, purporting to "rescue" her best friend Meg.

M, hopped up on her studies of the ancients and self-inflicted hot-needle acupuncture to increase her spiritual awareness, had ripped Meg from Selig's embrace, nearly severing his calcified member--a deed which may prove Selig's undoing in the end. M spirited Meg away to the Vast Wasteland, thinking she'd receive Meg's undying (no pun intended) gratitude, and perhaps they'd enjoy a little girlfriend-bonding with a latte and some shoe shopping. (Though Meg knew that M actually preferred bondage to bonding, Meg didn't indulge her fantasies. Often.)

Instead Meg cursed her so-called friend for foiling her secret plan, interrupting the most incredible night of her life just before the best part, and nearly severing her man's glorious (though somewhat putrified, and according to Virgil, "minuscule") parcel of joy-flesh. Meg pinned M to the sand and pulled her head back with her long black braid exposing her slender neck. Meg whipped her favorite pearl-handled dagger from the sheath attached to her garter, and brought the razor-sharp tip to the pale, thin skin that Meg knew veiled M's carotid artery. (Meg had been in med school when the zombies invaded, and though her knowledge of human anatomy had come in handy on occasion--like this one--she was secretly gleeful that she was spared the drudgery of using her medical knowledge for good.) Just as the dagger pierced M's skin and the first drop of ruby red blood oozed from the puncture, M cried out in an unearthly language that sounded vaguely like the names of movie stars from before the zombie era--

"Uma oprah lohan cruise. Jolie swayze, klum pitt-rourke. Phoenix close knightly, keanu-keanu-keanu!"

Lightning streaked across the night sky, illuminating the swirling cauldron of storm clouds in an amber glow. Thunder crashed, drowning out the obscenities flying forth from Meg's red lips. She couldn't believe she'd forgotten to muzzle the bitch. Now M had called down some kind of hell-fire--or was it heaven-fire?--on both of them.

Meg thrust the dagger hard and fast into M's throat, but it was as if M's neck had turned to stone. The point of the blade snapped off--oh no, not her favorite dagger! Now the voodoo princess was really going to pay. Meg tossed aside the useless weapon and wrapped her fingers around M's neck. But M just smiled at Meg, a sad smile full of pity. That really set Meg off. She squeezed M's throat and slammed her head into the ground--

But the ground was gone. They were ten feet above the sand. Levitating. The witch was even more powerful than Meg had given her credit for.

M did some hinky move with her forearms that broke Meg's grasp on her neck, then flipped around so she was on top. Without M below her, Meg dropped to the ground like a lead mannequin. M hovered above her looking like a goth-ninja doing water ballet, except in the air. She was laughing.

"This is rockin!" M said.

"This sucks nails!" Meg said.

"The power. The POWER!" M said, skyrocketing backward through the air as she shot laser-bolts from her fingertips. "Who knew?"

"You're ruining my life!" Meg shouted, trying futilely to dislodge an irritating sand wedgie.

"I wonder what else I can do?" M said pirouetting and somersaulting in the black sky as the laserbeams changed from red to green.

"You can mind your own goddamned bees wax, is what you can do. Do you have any idea what you interrupted between me and Selig Retsuc? ANY IDEA? I was about to be made Queen of the Zombies. Before long the whole world will be populated with zombies, so that would make me Queen of the World and All Who Live In It. Or All Who Are Undead In It. Or something like that. Whatever. You fucked it up."

"The powers of the ancients flow through me," M intoned in an unusually deep voice. "You should try it, Meg. It's like one great big orgasm that never ends!"

M squealed like a pig, which only made Meg madder. Who knew how long it would take to find Selig and re-bed him so she, too, could experience an unnatural orgasm and the power to rule the world.

"I'm outta here," Meg said, tromping across the sandy vastness toward what she hoped was the ruins of Denver.

"Hey, where are you going? Don't you want to try this flying thing? I could hook you up," M called.

"No, you enjoy your little ancient carpet ride. I'm going back for some hard Queen-making zombie flesh. And don't even think about interrupting again."

"What? Are you serious? That Selig action is nothing compared to this," M said, swooping down alongside Meg. "Come on, you've got to try it."

M grabbed Meg's hand and pulled her into the sky. The laserbeams from M's fingers were pink, now, and tickled as they skittered up Meg's arm and permeated her body.

They were about fifty feet in the air when M realized what she had done. "My Gods, what have I done?" she said, looking at her pink-glowing hand. Of course she'd had to let go of Meg's hand in order to do this, so Meg was now careening toward the desert floor.

M shot toward the ground like a rocket, but she wasn't fast enough.

Meg lay in a Meg-shaped crater in the desert floor.

"You bitch!" Meg said.

"You're alive!" M said.

"Do you know what this means? Do you know what you've done?"

"No, not really," M said, looking awfully confused for someone empowered with the knowledge of the ancients.

"That stupid pink laser has made it impossible for me to die," Meg said, rolling her sparkly blue eyes.

Now M looked really confused. "So what are you mad about? Isn't that a good thing?"

"No, you idiot. If I can't die, I can't become undead. If I can't become undead, I can't become a zombie. And if I can't become a zombie, it follows that I can't become the Zombie Queen. NOW do you see why I'm a little ticked off?"

And that's when the friendship ended between Meg and M.

That's also when the ancients took away M's ability to fly as punishment for her carelessness. The act of making Meg immortal, no matter how unintentional, had kinda fucked up the ancients' plans, too.

In order to compensate for this unforeseen and quite unfortunate circumstance, the ancients promoted M to "Lady" M, gave her the ability to read minds, and made her talk like a cryptic motivational speaker.

Which brings us back to the monkey flesh in Meg's teeth. Meg knew that her once-best-friend, M, loved her precious monkeys more than anything. More than body-modification, endless orgasm, or even organic red wine. Meg knew that the one sure-fire way to piss off the Lady was to eat her monkey. And no doubt about it, Meg wanted to do some pissing off. Heck, she wanted war. It was bad enough making your ex-best-friend immortal against her wishes. On top of that, everyone knows you don't just go resurrecting someone's daughter without parental permission. That crossed the line.

Oh yes, Meg knew what M was planning to do to Lucy in the Vast Wasteland even before M knew it. She knew M was going to re-flesh the little bitch, not just to piss Meg off, but to steal the Member of Power out of her hoochee. That's why Meg had magically summoned Lucy's twin sister Lizzie, who was somehow Australian and had been raised by wolf-dingo hybrids after having been kidnapped at birth unbeknownst to almost everyone. To think, Meg had been worried about how--and even IF--she'd be able to find Lizzie, when all along the power to summon her had been right there in her recipe for fresh, hot caramel chip devil's food cookies.

So summon Lizzie she had, right to the side of her dead twin, Lucy. With more than a little melancholy for what might have been, Meg pulled the paltry, petrified penis from her daughter's little hidy-hole and handed it to Lizzie.

"Now, don't try to use this on your own," Meg had warned. "Take it to Selig, unless you want to end up a charred mass like your sister." Here she laughed manically for some unknown reason.

After Lizzie nodded and scampered away, Meg had turned just in time to see Virgil sneak back into the cookie-making fortress. He thought he'd gotten away with spying on her, but this was exactly what Meg had hoped would happen.

She slunk back inside the cookie bunker and whipped up a batch of macaroons for Virgil. Magical macaroons that would make Virgil do her bidding, like a long-distance puppet. While they were baking, Meg taught Virgil to dance, playing that annoying song by the Killers "Are We Human or Are We Dancers?" over and over as they practiced.

When the oven timer chimed, Meg brought the steaming coconut cookies to the table, and let the sumptuous aroma waft into Virgil's aristocratic nose.

"Go on," she said. "No need to wait until they cool." She knew that just the scent of the magical mounds would make it impossible for Virgil to refuse her suggestion.

Virgil ate two in rapid succession.

"That burned my tongue," he said.

Meg smiled and nodded. The cookies were just as powerful cold as they were hot, but she had a sadistic itch that needed scratching, and watching Virgil burn his own tongue was just the ticket.

"Now go," she said. "Do what you need to do with Lucy's body--I'd rather not know any details--then put what I've taught you to good use in the Vast Wasteland. After that, lay in wait for Lady M. Stay hidden until she's done with her magical bullshit--you wouldn't be able to stop her if you tried, even with your powerful mantis arms. Then when she's basking in the afterglow of her ancient arts, steal one of those goddamned monkeys and bring it back to the cookie fortress. Do you understand?"

When he returned with the monkey--Billy Ray or Cyrus, he wasn't sure--Meg made Virgil skin and cook it himself. This neatly accomplished three things: she didn't have to get her nails bloody, it proved that she had complete control over Virgil (who was a vegetarian and absolutely squeamish when it came to any kind of non-zombie flesh), and it ensured that M would despise Virgil until her dying day. M really loved her monkeys.

And that REALLY brings us back to Meg removing the monkey flesh from her teeth in the cookie-baking fortress while Virgil rubbed her feet with oil humming "Are We Human or Are We Dancers," and the heavens outside churned with Lady's M's fury.

"Bring it on, my mind-reading sista," Meg said.

"Huh?" Virgil said, looking up.

"Nevermind, honey. Just keep rubbing."

"When can I have another cookie?" Virgil asked.

Meg patted his head. "Soon, dear. Soon."

Man, she loved a good footrub from a brainwashed minion as she anticipated an impeding war.