Authors: OJ Wolfsmasher
Tags: #horror, #zombies, #zombie, #black comedy, #undead
Zombiez!
Zombiez!
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Read more from OJ Wolfsmasher at
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Copyright OJ Wolfsmasher 2012. All Rights
Reserved
Published by Bard and Book
Publishing
Website:
www.bardandbook.com
Cover by Julius Broqueza.
Contents
PROLOGUE: THE IDIOT
The Unaired Incident was infamous now; it was
a cloud that hovered in the air around Bro Gator at all times,
obscuring everything else about him. There were runs and reruns of
the original TV show, and even more reruns in syndication on
various low-rent cable channels, but every time Gator was on the
screen, no matter what he was doing, the Unaired Incident is all
people thought about.
Even before said Incident, Gator had achieved
a tiny fraction of what could be called fame, mostly among those
aged 12-20. With that slight notoriety came the requisite misplaced
confidence that was the hallmark of the self-proclaimed leaders of
his silly generation.
And it wasn't like he needed anything to
increase his self-esteem. He was born with the disease of
Ubermenschian Cockiness, a debilitating condition that had only
gotten worse since he convinced the producers of
Frat Blast
Season 3
to let him on the show. Gator killed that audition
with something he called Keg Stand Canyon Belching, an act that
pretty much summed up his man-child charm in four simple words. The
producers couldn't get enough of his steroid-fueled immaturity
after that, and neither could the TV audience -- the ratings for
Frat Blast Season 3
exceeded those of
Frat Blast Season
2
by 15-20 percent. The producers would call him into their
office and give him instructions like “Pick a fight with Barry” or
“Run naked though the house screaming random numbers like you're a
giant angry telephone book” and he would obey them without
hesitation. He really was a dream come true for
Frat Blast
,
a concept that was already exhausting itself after just two
six-episode seasons.
The Unaired Incident and the subsequent civil
trial made him a household name among the tabloids and the internet
gossip douchelords. For at least a month he was Bad Boy Number One,
the heartthrob who had recklessly and remorselessly torn another
man's scrotum in half by trying too hard in a wedgie contest on a
Reality TV show. America hadn't really seen anything like this
(which is saying something), and it became mildly fascinated by
this dangerous roided-up boy-man with a faux-hawk. And then, out of
nowhere, the trial was settled out-of-court – thus picking up
America's attention and placing it somewhere else.
It didn't help that his low IQ and lack of
wit was obvious from the moment he opened his mouth. He literally
could not end a sentence in any word other than “dude,” “bro,”
“brah,” or some combination of the three. This tended to not play
well in any situation where skilled editors weren't sifting through
hours of footage to get the best five minutes of his day.
Ironically, this verbal ineptitude and lack of depth made him
successful with many of the dumber Hollywood starlets for as long
as his slight notoriety lasted. They very much enjoyed his fame,
his muscular body, and his minuscule vocabulary. But when his
appearances went away and that fame dried up, they quickly deleted
him from their phones and stopped answering his inane texts. It was
less than a year after the trial ended, and he was completely out
of the public consciousness and living in his mom's basement. Which
made the noise coming from his phone kinda weird.
Oh how he had longed to hear that noise. It
had been over three months, but he still knew exactly what it was
-- the special ringtone reserved for his condescending agent and
publicist, Janey Smith. He dropped the syringe he was holding and
ran to where he thought his phone was. It wasn't there. He spun
around, seeking to pinpoint exactly where the tone was coming from.
It seemed to be following him. Bro, he thought to himself, your
phone is in your pocket, dudebrah. And so it was. By the time he
reached it, the call had been missed. He stared in pure hope at the
phone's sleek colorful screen, trying to will the voicemail
indication icon into existence. When it appeared, he heard an “eek”
come out of his mouth, and then scowled around to make sure nobody
heard him say “eek.” Thankfully, nobody did. There were advantages
to living in one's mom's basement.
“Hey, Gator, long time no talk. Listen, call
me back. I can't believe this, but a guy came into my office asking
about you today. He inexplicably wants to get you to do some
appearances to promote his new energy drink. I tried to get him to
take someone less repellent, but he insisted on you. So call me,
um, Bro. Whatever.”
Gator always thought she was making fun of
him when she used big words, but wasn't smart enough to pinpoint
exactly how. He looked back at the phone and saw himself, all manic
and open-mouthed. He was so amped he could barely breathe, and this
was pre-injection. It would take him over six minutes to regain his
composure enough to call back. All he kept saying was, he knew God
wouldn't forsake him forever, brahbro.
I
“First of all, I don't want to hear any more
of this crap about zombification being an infection or a disease.”
said the tall man with the balding head and the shotgun, “I saw
those suckers crawl up out of the ground with my own eyes. Dead as
a stump, you'd better believe!”
He should know, he was a doctor. Or at least
he
had
been – he was pretty sure in the past hour he'd
violated the Hippocratic Oath upwards of 50 times. He wiped some
bloody sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. All
eyes in the chapel were on him now; he had gotten the survivors
there, coordinated the barricading process, and currently held the
only thing in the room that resembled a weapon. He felt the weight
of their gaze on him, which is why he felt like he needed to say
something – the tension was too great with those
ever-moaning...
things
out there, surrounding the confined
stone space of the chapel like ants around a donut.
Helpless
sheep,
he thought,
always needing to be told where to go.
Why were some of you running away from the only shelter in the
area? Where the hell were you going? Why am I suddenly responsible
for what happens to you, just because I happened to be in the area
and happened to have a shotgun?
“Anyway, that doesn't matter,” he lowered his
volume a bit, “what matters, for now, is that I don't think they
can get in here.”
Collective shock remained in the air, and
people for the first time began to take stock of the situation.
Even though some of them knew each other, nobody besides the doctor
had spoken a word in the 27 seconds since the doors were locked and
barricaded. People were having a hard time jibing their beliefs
about the world with what their eyes had just witnessed.
“Actually,” answered a bespectacled
middle-aged man, continuing the argument he and the doctor had
started in the middle of the melee with the undead,
“'zombification,' as you say, is not possible. We MUST look for
possible explanations, to understand what we're dealing with here.
Time is of the essence. Our lives depend on it!” His arms were
crossed defiantly, and he did not seem to care about the gravity of
the situation as much as he cared about winning this clearly moot
dispute.
“GLGGAAAGH!” a wild-eyed woman in the back
piped up, too angry to form words. She ran to the would-be
scientist, grabbing him by the lapels of his black trenchcoat and
foaming right at his glasses. She yanked him partially off his
feet, and he stumbled backward and braced himself against a stone
pew. He pushed back with angry force, dislodging her crazed grip
and sending her flying into a man in a dark suit who was holding a
briefcase.
“Hey!” said the briefcase-carrying man as he
caught her in his arms to prevent her from falling.
The scientist looked at the woman with a
combination of gentrified disdain and residual panic in his eyes.
“SHUTUP AND LET ME THINK!” he barked. He turned his back to her and
put his finger to his chin so everybody could see he was thinking
real hard. It was something he learned in Science.
The ire of the wild-eyed woman shifted from
the man who pushed her to the man who caught her. She brushed him
off and spat, “LET ME GO, CREEP!”
“Creep? Excuse me? You got yourself pushed
into me!” said the man, obviously not happy to be attacked by
someone he had so graciously refrained from dropping.
“YEAH, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO TOUCH MY BOOB.
BOOB-TOUCHER!”
“What the...you are one crazy lady. Don't you
know who I am?”
“I don't know and I don't fuckin' care. Mama
didn't carry this body for nine months to get groped by the likes
of you, whoever you are.”
The mental picture of this wild-eyed woman's
gestation period floated through the heads of everyone in the room,
making the dire situation even direr. The man in the suit nodded to
an attractive blonde woman next to him, who was also wearing a suit
and carrying a briefcase. She looked at him, rolled her eyes, and
sprang into action.
“That's the one-and-only Dr. Albiers Burnett,
bitch. You know, the U.S. CON-GRESS-MAN?” overemphasized the young
woman as if she thought the crazy lady had trouble understanding
English. “You should consider yourself blessed that he even caught
your bony ass.”
Burnett gently grabbed her arm as if to say,
“Don't bother...she's not worth the time.” He did not verbally say
that, though, because he was a true Jedi in the ways of not
offending potential constituents.
The wild-eyed woman's eyes got even wilder,
and people backed slowly away from her and the two well-dressed
people, afraid of what would happen next. The young women shook off
the congressional grasp and stepped between the crazy eyes and
lasers they were shooting at the one who supposedly touched her
boob. The two women just scowled at each other for a second.
Some idiot said, “O-Ho! Looks like there's
about to be a GIRL FIGHT, dudes!”
But nobody even heard him. The moaning
outside was even momentarily forgotten, at least until the sound of
a cocking gun reverberated off the chapel's gray stone walls. The
doctor stood with his gun trained on the wild-eyed woman.
If I
don't step in here
, he thought,
these people won't need
protection from zombies, because they will have already eaten each
other alive
.
“I've killed 50 dead people today, and I'm
not in the mood for this,” said the doctor.
The crazy lady looked at him, crossed her
eyes, and hissed.
The doctor held her gaze. “Just try me, I
dare you.”
It was enough to make the lady forget her
newest grudges and remember all the zombies. She looked away from
the attractive lady with a harrumph and trudged down some stone
stairs into the darkness below, taking care to throw her shoulder
into the congressman as she passed in an expression of impotent
frustration.
“Ee can't belEEve you peyople!” said a tall,
beefy man with a buzz-cut. He was seated on top of an
ornately-decorated stone crypt in the front of the room. “Cin't you
seea that we nid ta stee-ak toegether? For gosh's seyak! Zombiez!”
His thick Irish accent poked through everyone in the room like
rusty nails through a steak.
“Please stop talking, everyone! I need to
think clearly!” the scientist proclaimed as he sat down and put his
hands over his ears.
Unbeknownst to him, and directly beneath him,
a high-tech-sunglass-clad face shivered in fear, not wanting to be
discovered by anyone or anything. It was praying to Whatever Exists
Up There to keep him and his new sunglasses alive and intact. The
man attached to the face then started to wonder if God might be a
chick, and shuddered.