Shadsie
Sage of Tales
An original short story. Semi-autobiographical. My man and I stand valiantly against the Zombie Apocalypse. Most of the things in this story are true.
Horror/Comedy - mostly the latter.
____________________________________
It was a pleasant and downright boring evening in June when the Zombie Apocalypse happened.
Bob and I had just pulled into the single parking space allotted to us in front of the sub-divided house we shared with other tenants we never bothered to get to know that well. Our apartment was the one on the second floor rear. We’d been living there since winter and were still getting used to the place. It sat across the street from a cemetery that had seen continual use for over one-hundred years.
It’s a peaceful place to walk in, really, when the corpses aren’t popping up out of the ground.
To this day, I haven’t any idea how the fresher members of the undead horde were able to pop the lids on their modern caskets. Those things are thick and pretty well-sealed. We just watched as, among the dancing fireflies, people just started tearing their way out of the ground, the finery they’d been dressed in for their sendoff covered in dirt and their own ichor. There were skeletons, too – some folks had been there a long time.
Staring in disbelief as they moaned and advanced toward the hedge that divided the cemetery from the street, I didn’t know whether to run, to warn the neighbors, or to take a moment to revel in the fulfillment of a nerd-fantasy. Bob and I didn’t own any firearms, but I did own a sword and I knew of at least one video game hero who could take care of the undead with a trusty blade.
I guess it’s a good thing that the cadavers were slow. I wondered, for a moment, just what had caused this. I looked to the stars to see if any of them had gone funny. I didn’t think we were near any radiation dumps. It was just the dead, randomly rising (and not in the way they teach you in religious eschatology courses).
There was no need to worry about the neighbors. We saw the blond woman who lived downstairs whom we’d met a couple of times and her fluffy white dog, both looking like road kill. The fresh-looking blood around their mouths told me the probable fate of the man they’d lived with – the guy who was really bad at playing drums… at obnoxious hours of the night…
A corpse in a gray suit screamed “FLESH!” at me. Bob and I were climbing the stairs up to our apartment in an instant.
“Do we have anything we can use as a flamethrower?” I yelped. “If we burn them to ash we might have a chance.”
Then we heard it coming from outside – subtle but distinct.
Clank, click, click, click, clank, clank, don!
Bob stared out the second-story window. “Joys and blessings…” he gasped sarcastically, “It’s a gestalt.”
“A what?” I responded. Then I looked at where his finger was pointing. Shambling across the street, among the standard-issue cadaver-horde was something that could only be described as an amorphous monster, or something akin to some anime-style mecha… constructed of cremation urns.
A closer inspection of the cemetery itself showed urns popping up out of some of the family plots like rockets. They’d land and roll and hop, self-animated and motivated like objects in some perverse children’s cartoon movie. When a number of them would gather….
Clank, click, click, click, clank, clank, don!
They’d form an urn-beast. I briefly wondered about the fate of Bob’s family members – ashes buried in another graveyard not too far away, and his deceased sister in particular, who was in the care of his other sister. From the tales told about her, she’s a woman I very much regret never getting to meet.
Was this happening all around the world or just here?
Bob dialed emergency on his cell phone. I did the same on the landline.
“No signal.”
“Line’s dead.”
We could hear the zombies pounding upon the door downstairs. A thought suddenly hit me - a horrifying, terrifying thought.
“The skulls!” I gasped. “Is it just humans rising, or does this affect animals, too?”
“Well, there was the dog…” Bob said. That animal, however, was not previously dead. It was obvious that he’d been the living victim of a zombie-bite.
To explain: I am a rather unusual artist. One of the stranger things I enjoy doing is taking the bones of animals I find while out on walks in the woods, cleaning them and painting them. It’s something of an extension of my upbringing in the American Southwest – where having a decorated steer skull in one’s living room was not an unusual thing. I’ve sold work of this nature, but my personal room is filled with work I have not sold – the skulls of deer, leg bones fashioned into crosses and even a horse skull that I’d originally found in the desert of my old stomping grounds.
I rushed to check upon the status of my collection of dead things.
They were as dead as they were when we’d left the house, to my relief. I also ran into the kitchen to check upon the meat in our refrigerator and freezer. None of it was animated. I suppose not everything dead would come to life in a proper Zombie Apocalypse… technically, things like the dead skin cells in the carpet or the hair in the shower drain would be coming back to life and attacking, too.
Walking into my room again, I had an overwhelming feeling. I looked at the colorfully-painted horse skull atop my bookshelf and to its companion, the skull of a doe painted with a technological theme. Something – and I don’t know what – told me that these were “at peace.” Perhaps they had not risen like the dead shambling outside because they felt no need to – being at peace having been honored in the strange way that I honor bones.
I went to my closet and retrieved my sword. Bob had bought it for me at an anime convention and I used to have it hanging up on a wall, but there was no place for it in this apartment. It was a strong live steel blade, but it was crafted as an ornament. It wasn’t anything I thought would hold up in a real steel-on-steel swordfight, but perhaps it could serve me against rotten flesh.
I rushed out to the living room and found Bob doing something with wiring. I think he was trying to craft some sort of device with which to control an electrical current. “Got my sword,” I gasped. “The skulls aren’t doing anything.”
“Good,” he said, concentrated on his work.
“I really don’t know too much about zombies,” I admitted. “I think the traditional way of re-killing the buggers is by damaging the head or incineration….but…. the urns…”
“Ryan… of all the times for him not to come for a visit…” Bob quipped, referring to a zombie-mythos loving friend of his.
I ran to the stop of the stairs in the vestibule of our apartment. The zombies had breached the door, but, to my surprise, the group that had entered were just shuffling and moaning at the bottom of the stairs.
Dumb beasts… they didn’t know how to climb stairs!
I started laughing, that is, until I saw our cat come my way. She’s an adorable little tuxedo-colored cat and very chubby. Bob and I refer to her as our “bowling ball with feet.” It certainly wasn’t typical for her to come out into this off-area of the apartment, but curiosity must have gotten the better of her.
“Welsper!” I cried as she toddled down the steps. She curled back and hissed as a skeletal hand – barely being held together by rotten yellow sinew - reached for her and grabbed her by the leg. Welsper was unmercifully dragged down into the stench-pit at the foot of the steps.
I said a quick prayer to Zombie Jesus (for the record, yes, I do believe in silly things but it doesn’t mean I do not have a sense of humor) and brought my sword down upon the arm bones of the offending hand. Welsper became a black and white blur as she streaked up the stairs back into the main apartment to find something to hide under.
I heard pounding upon one of the walls outside. The vaguely metallic sound of it told me that it was an urn-beast attempting to break its way in. The cadavers moaned about the stairs. I saw two of them go to their hands and knees and begin to figure out how to crawl up one step…two steps…
I heard a sharp popping noise and smelled the distinct odor of electricity above the gagging aroma of decay. Have you ever smelled a three-day-dead rotting deer on the side of the highway? Doesn’t even compare… I wondered what Bob was up to with those wires.
I steeled myself, gulped down my fear and summoned up a berserker-rage from the depths of the genes bequeathed upon me by my ancient Viking ancestors. We were going to survive this – and if we didn’t, I, at least, was going to go down fighting. Those that came up the stairs, I sliced back down. Weird sensation – a sword going through half-rotted flesh and in between the weak points of dried bones… A bit like the time I took a bow-saw to a road killed three-day-dead deer because I wanted its skull to paint. I sold that skull later for a nice sum, too…
Well, the Zombie Apocalypse didn’t turn out all that bad, really. A week after the day they came out of the ground, we only see a few of them shambling about the streets anymore. They only come out at night. Direct application of electrical charge seems to stop them dead (ha, ha) in their tracks. Cutting the zombies into pieces (particularly beheading) does the job, as well, although you have to watch your ankles when you do that… sometimes the heads hop around and try to bite. When there are animated ashes hopping around in urns, don’t ask me why any of this stuff works. Oh, the urn-beasts… it turns out that breaking them apart and spilling the ashes all over the ground seems to quiet them.
Don’t ask me why…
As it turns out, our cat got bitten before I could save her. She became a zombie-feline, but it hasn’t affected her lifestyle much. She just lounges around all day… just as she always has. Her eyes glow in this really creepy way now, though.
We got in touch with some of our friends and relations, too. We’re surviving, but it’s such a different world now, what with the large-scale collapse of civilization that naturally results from zombie hordes. I wish I could say I’ve been writing this little ramble as a survivor’s memoir, but I just don’t know. I just don’t know.
Bob and I are living off our reserves and what we can catch. There’s a creek and other water sources not too far from here, full of fish…
I tried sushi fairly recently and fell in love with the stuff. I never knew that fish could taste so good raw. I’ve found there’s a lot of things you never know taste good raw until you try them… rich, iron-laden bloody flesh… fatty, creamy, silky brains…
Mmm… Brains.
Horror/Comedy - mostly the latter.
____________________________________
Second Floor Rear
It was a pleasant and downright boring evening in June when the Zombie Apocalypse happened.
Bob and I had just pulled into the single parking space allotted to us in front of the sub-divided house we shared with other tenants we never bothered to get to know that well. Our apartment was the one on the second floor rear. We’d been living there since winter and were still getting used to the place. It sat across the street from a cemetery that had seen continual use for over one-hundred years.
It’s a peaceful place to walk in, really, when the corpses aren’t popping up out of the ground.
To this day, I haven’t any idea how the fresher members of the undead horde were able to pop the lids on their modern caskets. Those things are thick and pretty well-sealed. We just watched as, among the dancing fireflies, people just started tearing their way out of the ground, the finery they’d been dressed in for their sendoff covered in dirt and their own ichor. There were skeletons, too – some folks had been there a long time.
Staring in disbelief as they moaned and advanced toward the hedge that divided the cemetery from the street, I didn’t know whether to run, to warn the neighbors, or to take a moment to revel in the fulfillment of a nerd-fantasy. Bob and I didn’t own any firearms, but I did own a sword and I knew of at least one video game hero who could take care of the undead with a trusty blade.
I guess it’s a good thing that the cadavers were slow. I wondered, for a moment, just what had caused this. I looked to the stars to see if any of them had gone funny. I didn’t think we were near any radiation dumps. It was just the dead, randomly rising (and not in the way they teach you in religious eschatology courses).
There was no need to worry about the neighbors. We saw the blond woman who lived downstairs whom we’d met a couple of times and her fluffy white dog, both looking like road kill. The fresh-looking blood around their mouths told me the probable fate of the man they’d lived with – the guy who was really bad at playing drums… at obnoxious hours of the night…
A corpse in a gray suit screamed “FLESH!” at me. Bob and I were climbing the stairs up to our apartment in an instant.
“Do we have anything we can use as a flamethrower?” I yelped. “If we burn them to ash we might have a chance.”
Then we heard it coming from outside – subtle but distinct.
Clank, click, click, click, clank, clank, don!
Bob stared out the second-story window. “Joys and blessings…” he gasped sarcastically, “It’s a gestalt.”
“A what?” I responded. Then I looked at where his finger was pointing. Shambling across the street, among the standard-issue cadaver-horde was something that could only be described as an amorphous monster, or something akin to some anime-style mecha… constructed of cremation urns.
A closer inspection of the cemetery itself showed urns popping up out of some of the family plots like rockets. They’d land and roll and hop, self-animated and motivated like objects in some perverse children’s cartoon movie. When a number of them would gather….
Clank, click, click, click, clank, clank, don!
They’d form an urn-beast. I briefly wondered about the fate of Bob’s family members – ashes buried in another graveyard not too far away, and his deceased sister in particular, who was in the care of his other sister. From the tales told about her, she’s a woman I very much regret never getting to meet.
Was this happening all around the world or just here?
Bob dialed emergency on his cell phone. I did the same on the landline.
“No signal.”
“Line’s dead.”
We could hear the zombies pounding upon the door downstairs. A thought suddenly hit me - a horrifying, terrifying thought.
“The skulls!” I gasped. “Is it just humans rising, or does this affect animals, too?”
“Well, there was the dog…” Bob said. That animal, however, was not previously dead. It was obvious that he’d been the living victim of a zombie-bite.
To explain: I am a rather unusual artist. One of the stranger things I enjoy doing is taking the bones of animals I find while out on walks in the woods, cleaning them and painting them. It’s something of an extension of my upbringing in the American Southwest – where having a decorated steer skull in one’s living room was not an unusual thing. I’ve sold work of this nature, but my personal room is filled with work I have not sold – the skulls of deer, leg bones fashioned into crosses and even a horse skull that I’d originally found in the desert of my old stomping grounds.
I rushed to check upon the status of my collection of dead things.
They were as dead as they were when we’d left the house, to my relief. I also ran into the kitchen to check upon the meat in our refrigerator and freezer. None of it was animated. I suppose not everything dead would come to life in a proper Zombie Apocalypse… technically, things like the dead skin cells in the carpet or the hair in the shower drain would be coming back to life and attacking, too.
Walking into my room again, I had an overwhelming feeling. I looked at the colorfully-painted horse skull atop my bookshelf and to its companion, the skull of a doe painted with a technological theme. Something – and I don’t know what – told me that these were “at peace.” Perhaps they had not risen like the dead shambling outside because they felt no need to – being at peace having been honored in the strange way that I honor bones.
I went to my closet and retrieved my sword. Bob had bought it for me at an anime convention and I used to have it hanging up on a wall, but there was no place for it in this apartment. It was a strong live steel blade, but it was crafted as an ornament. It wasn’t anything I thought would hold up in a real steel-on-steel swordfight, but perhaps it could serve me against rotten flesh.
I rushed out to the living room and found Bob doing something with wiring. I think he was trying to craft some sort of device with which to control an electrical current. “Got my sword,” I gasped. “The skulls aren’t doing anything.”
“Good,” he said, concentrated on his work.
“I really don’t know too much about zombies,” I admitted. “I think the traditional way of re-killing the buggers is by damaging the head or incineration….but…. the urns…”
“Ryan… of all the times for him not to come for a visit…” Bob quipped, referring to a zombie-mythos loving friend of his.
I ran to the stop of the stairs in the vestibule of our apartment. The zombies had breached the door, but, to my surprise, the group that had entered were just shuffling and moaning at the bottom of the stairs.
Dumb beasts… they didn’t know how to climb stairs!
I started laughing, that is, until I saw our cat come my way. She’s an adorable little tuxedo-colored cat and very chubby. Bob and I refer to her as our “bowling ball with feet.” It certainly wasn’t typical for her to come out into this off-area of the apartment, but curiosity must have gotten the better of her.
“Welsper!” I cried as she toddled down the steps. She curled back and hissed as a skeletal hand – barely being held together by rotten yellow sinew - reached for her and grabbed her by the leg. Welsper was unmercifully dragged down into the stench-pit at the foot of the steps.
I said a quick prayer to Zombie Jesus (for the record, yes, I do believe in silly things but it doesn’t mean I do not have a sense of humor) and brought my sword down upon the arm bones of the offending hand. Welsper became a black and white blur as she streaked up the stairs back into the main apartment to find something to hide under.
I heard pounding upon one of the walls outside. The vaguely metallic sound of it told me that it was an urn-beast attempting to break its way in. The cadavers moaned about the stairs. I saw two of them go to their hands and knees and begin to figure out how to crawl up one step…two steps…
I heard a sharp popping noise and smelled the distinct odor of electricity above the gagging aroma of decay. Have you ever smelled a three-day-dead rotting deer on the side of the highway? Doesn’t even compare… I wondered what Bob was up to with those wires.
I steeled myself, gulped down my fear and summoned up a berserker-rage from the depths of the genes bequeathed upon me by my ancient Viking ancestors. We were going to survive this – and if we didn’t, I, at least, was going to go down fighting. Those that came up the stairs, I sliced back down. Weird sensation – a sword going through half-rotted flesh and in between the weak points of dried bones… A bit like the time I took a bow-saw to a road killed three-day-dead deer because I wanted its skull to paint. I sold that skull later for a nice sum, too…
Well, the Zombie Apocalypse didn’t turn out all that bad, really. A week after the day they came out of the ground, we only see a few of them shambling about the streets anymore. They only come out at night. Direct application of electrical charge seems to stop them dead (ha, ha) in their tracks. Cutting the zombies into pieces (particularly beheading) does the job, as well, although you have to watch your ankles when you do that… sometimes the heads hop around and try to bite. When there are animated ashes hopping around in urns, don’t ask me why any of this stuff works. Oh, the urn-beasts… it turns out that breaking them apart and spilling the ashes all over the ground seems to quiet them.
Don’t ask me why…
As it turns out, our cat got bitten before I could save her. She became a zombie-feline, but it hasn’t affected her lifestyle much. She just lounges around all day… just as she always has. Her eyes glow in this really creepy way now, though.
We got in touch with some of our friends and relations, too. We’re surviving, but it’s such a different world now, what with the large-scale collapse of civilization that naturally results from zombie hordes. I wish I could say I’ve been writing this little ramble as a survivor’s memoir, but I just don’t know. I just don’t know.
Bob and I are living off our reserves and what we can catch. There’s a creek and other water sources not too far from here, full of fish…
I tried sushi fairly recently and fell in love with the stuff. I never knew that fish could taste so good raw. I’ve found there’s a lot of things you never know taste good raw until you try them… rich, iron-laden bloody flesh… fatty, creamy, silky brains…
Mmm… Brains.
