Zombiez! Read online

  Zombiez!

  By OJ Wolfsmasher

  Smashwords Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Read more from OJ Wolfsmasher at www.bardandbook.com

  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

  I

  THE CRAZY LADY

  THE SCIENTIST

  THE CONGRESSMAN

  II

  IRISH MAN

  MR. SUNGLASSES

  CRAZY LADY II

  THE CONGRESSMAN II

  III

  EPILOGUE: THE IDIOT II

  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.

  THE CRAZY LADY

  Rose Fitzgerald Walker-Hughes held the small brown bottle in her leathery and yellowed hands, pausing to feel the power that accompanied the decision whether or not to take her crazy pills. This was her daily morning power trip, and it always went the same way – looking down at the bottle, tilting it so the tiny peas inside rolled from one side to the other, and allowing a feeling of absolute power to flood into her inner mind. She had total control over her day, one way or the other. If she took the pill, it would mean lucidity and productivity; if not, it would mean scary yet somehow comforting voices and making the lives of those around her a living hell. 99% of days, she took the pill. Today, she plucked one of the peas out of the bottle and threw it right in the toilet.

  She looked up at herself. Her face seemed different already, older and wilder and wrinklier. When did she become this old lady? She couldn't possibly be having hallucinations this early, though, could she? The pills were supposed to last for 26 hours, and she had taken one exactly 24 hours ago. Would pills lie? She shuffled to her bedroom and peered inside her clothes closet. No, none of her Red Friends were peeking out amongst the dresses and slacks. She decided to go back and clean her bathroom mirror, reasoning that it must be dirty if she didn't recognize herself in it. Subconsciously, she knew that she was having crazy-person thoughts, but didn't mind because that was the kind of the point of flushing the pill.

  She bent down and reached underneath the sink for the glass cleaner. The spray bottle was almost empty! Welcoming the feeling of disgust at this discovery, she threw the bottle against the bathroom wall. The spray-top of the bottle popped clean off and careened into the bathtub, and blue fluid sprayed everywhere.

  “Cleaner cleans, but what cleans the cleaner?” she thought to herself as artificial blue droplets crawled down the bathroom walls. She unwound some towels and began to wildly wipe down all the surfaces of the bathroom – the walls, the floor, the bathtub, and finally the very mirror she was there to clean in the first place. It took a while, but she couldn't just leave the cleaning fluid running down the walls while she was off doing her crazy-person things for God only knows how long.

  When the manual labor was finished, Rose looked back at the mirror and saw her own face staring back at her in utter confusion. This was always how it started – with her own face and confusion. She closed her eyes, turned around, and calmly walked to her bedroom. She then tried to pick out something from her clothes closet, knowing exactly what (else) she would find in there. A stereotypical-looking red devil-creature danced amongst the hangers, wordlessly picking out an outfit for Rose to wear. It grabbed a floral tank and some jeans and expectantly pushed them at her hands. It did not phase her, this little red creature, because she knew it was only a figment of her imagination caused by an absence of psychoactive drugs. She had been living with these little guys for at least 30 years, and they always looked the same – exactly like the logo on the packages of “deviled ham” that were ubiquitous in her childhood home. She took the clothes without complaining. The Red Friends were okay at picking out stuff that matched, and she didn't want to start the day with a ruckus. How many times had she woken up on the bedroom carpet with piles of slashed clothes around her, each arranged in the shape of a smiley face? No, they didn't like it when you ignored them or their suggestions. For that matter, neither did Rose.

  She put on the springy outfit and turned to face the closet on the opposite side of the room, The Closet of Crazy. Rose knew that a world of brightness and possibilities would appear when she went inside and closed the door. Insanity did not always mean wearing tank tops in Winter and being oppressed by imaginary food mascots; sometimes it meant sitting in a giant imaginary farmer's field with a bunch of imaginary cute baby cows and eating an imaginary feast with an imaginary suitor, all localized
inside a 3' x 7' space. It was kind of like being hooked up to a Virtual Reality machine where you couldn't take the goggles off.

  Rose only threw her pill in the toilet on days when life was too intense for her to handle. Reality never really felt comfortable to her in the first place, with its Fate and its Other People and its Responsibilities. She grew up in an unreal world caused by chemicals in her brain, and it's only natural that she would feel at home there with the cute little angry red creatures and all the other stuff her mind invented.

  And then yesterday her son called up and said he was moving to fucking Alaska with that shrew of a girlfriend of his. What kind of person does that, just up and moves halfway around the world? Who's she supposed to call in the middle of the night to come over and rub her feet now? Is she supposed to conjure up a nocturnal foot-rubber out of thin air? Ahh, that evil girlfriend, what was her name again? Stacy. Stupid Stacy. Stupid Stacy with her red hair and freckles and gigantic jugs and unwelcome advice. She could just see the conversations between this whore and her son now:

  Stacy: You know, you're spending way too much time with your mother. What are you, some sort of mama's boy?

  John: No, I really want to be with her. She's so cool. Why don't you like her?

  Stacy: I don't know, but I'm withholding access to these ***s of mine until you forsake her utterly.

  John: Ok, then. Alaska it is. ***s > my poor crazy mother, that's for sure.

  Stacy: My plan is complete.

  So you see why it was a foregone conclusion that Rose would today find solace in the farmer's field amongst the gently mooing baby cows and the one man on whom she could always count – John F. Kennedy, the greatest man who ever lived. She tore at her turkey leg with her teeth as he used his delightful, iconic accent to compliment her on her choice of clothing. Rose was beloved and satisfied, and all was right in the 3' x 7' world.