Heist of the Living Dead
By Clarence Walker (the late)
translated from the original Zombish
by Jared Oliver Adams
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, undead or otherwise, are either fake or used fictitiously. Also, the organizations and events of the story are fake or used fictitiously. The National Brain Tissue Repository may have possibly been broken into, but that’s just a coincidence. What reason would I possibly have to lie to you?
HEIST OF THE LIVING DEAD
Copyright © 2014 by Jared Oliver Adams
All rights reserved. Published by Previously Perished Press, a subsidiary of Pretension House Publishing Group.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or by express written permission of the author. So if you downloaded this illegally, and you’re studiously reading all the front matter of the story, as I’m sure everybody does, now you know you’re not supposed to be doing what you’re doing. So there.
Cover designed by Jared Oliver Adams.
For George A. Romero.
We’re more than just shambling hordes.
You, of all people, should know.
Big jerk.
Table of Contents
Front Matter
Table of Contents
Heist of the Living Dead
About the Author
About the Translator
Heist of the Living Dead
Ned, the demolitions expert of our undead crew, pumped his wrinkled, greyish fists in excitement. “Aaaaargh,” he said, which in Zombish means “It’s so crazy it just might work!”
“Aar aargh, arga-raar?!” exclaimed Freddy in response. Freddy was always nay-saying.
“But that’s why it’s perfect, Freddy old boy,” countered Ned, still in Zombish, “they’ll never expect us to break into something protected by the Pentagon! It’ll be a heist like no other. Those damned vampires won’t be bragging so hard about their little blood bank holdups after we’ve knocked off the national brain tissue depository.”
I could always count on Ned to defend my schemes. Still, what with all the bad press going around about our sub-par intelligence, it was important to put Ned straight.
“Re-pository,” I corrected. “Not de-pository.” It was kind of a difficult distinction to make in moans and groans, but you let these things slide, and you deserve every bit of prejudice the media heaps on the previously perished.
“What’s the difference?” asked Ned, who I swear had a bit of gore between his front teeth.
“One’s the place we’re going to break into and steal a fortune in frozen brains. The other’s a dumbass thing to say. And go brush your teeth. We have planning to do.”
“Blara Graaaargh?” asked Freddy as Ned shambled off.
“No, Freddy,” I said. “Your teeth are fine.”
*****
We crouched in the darkness by the gated entrance and watched Sarah sashay herself up to the lit guard’s booth. She’d worked hard to sexy up the shambling step that plagues our kind, and I have to say if I was alive, I’d have found it downright appealing. She wore a mini skirt and some kind of shiny top. Her wig looked good too. Covered over every bit of her patchy scalp. And the makeup, well the girl was just a wonder at makeup. Somehow, she’d even managed to fill in that hole in her cheek, the one you could see her teeth through.
Well, up she walked. The guard leaned out his glass window on cue, and she smiled and batted her mascara at the poor sap.
And then her arm fell off.
Sarah looked down at it. The guard looked down at it. The fingers on it twitched. Sarah jumped into the booth through the window and ate the man’s face.
“Aaaaarrgh,” said Freddy.
“Yeah, no kiddin’,” groaned Ned.
I turned to look at Ned and would you believe it, his freshly stolen black T-shirt was hanging out of his black skinny jeans, and he already had rips in them both. We knock off a Gap so we can look professional, and here he is looking like a bad stereotype! “How does that even happen?” I asked.
“Aaaarg, Clarrr,” said Freddy in Ned’s defense.
“Nobody’s that clumsy,” I told Freddy. “And you,” I said, rounding on Ned. “Have some self respect. At least keep your shirt tucked in.”
Back at the guard’s booth, the chain-link gate was sliding aside and Sarah was looking down at her arm on the ground. Her face was now a smear of blood and makeup, but you could still see her perplexia. Should I pick it up and take it with me? Should I leave it? Hide it in the bushes? What?
“Leave it,” I said as Ned, Freddy, and I walked through the gate. “Give ‘em something to wonder about.”
“Aaargh,” Sarah purred seductively.
“Sure,” I said. “The best prosthetic money can buy. One for every day of the week.” Sarah’s smile was grisly, but warm. I could see her planning outfits to match her new arm already.
Past the guard’s booth, the place was dark, with a few floodlights along the roof of the bunker-like building. A camera was perched beside each one, but I’d already dealt with that. All it took was a wheelchair, an old army uniform, and an overly-glossy Repository brochure.
See, the whole place was built to study how trauma effects the brain, particularly the type of trauma one encounters while driving armored trucks over improvised explosive devices. As such, it relied heavily on donations from former service-people. Not the monetary kind of donations, either.
So, naturally, to entice people to part with their gray matter when they shuffled off their mortal coils, there were weekly tours of the facility run by a petite blonde in tight-fitting pinstriped pants and a blouse that was missing a couple buttons at the top. She walked everyone around the place in her high heels, and waxed eloquent about “leaving a legacy” and “being a part of protecting the next generation of patriots.”
And wouldn’t you know, at the end of the tour there were papers you could sign to have your brains scooped out by a board-certified organ removal specialist when you died. Never mind that there were people out there who could use those brains, people who would rather sit at home and watch HBO over a quiet cerebellum soufflé, than have to join a hoard and go hunting for their food like someone out of the Romero era.
No, just put the brains on a shelf. Run some tests. Let them sit there and pickle while good zombies are forced to do things that inevitably get them killed by ragtag, yet resourceful, bands of humans.
While the blonde’s attention had been on positioning her cleavage so that it hid some of the more unsavory clauses on the “brain scooping” form, I’d wheeled out of sight and shambled back to the server room. After that, making the cameras show a loop of empty parking lot had been easy as dying. Now, several hours later, I smiled up at those cameras as we strolled over to the main entrance and Freddy got to work on the lock.
Meanwhile, Ned limped around to the back of the building where the loading dock was. He’d be sitting pretty in a recently liberated cold storage truck by the time we got there with the first load of brain canisters. He wouldn’t bother with locks like Freddy; he had a duffle bag full of explosives and he wanted to use them.
And hey, part of being a good leader is letting your people go with their strengths. The complex was surrounded by woods. Nobody’d hear a couple little explosions now that we’d taken care of the guard.
“Aaar Arp,” said Freddy proudly, and pushed open the front door. Inside was a fancy lobby with framed posters showing soldiers looking wistfully into the distance. Underneath their faces were slogans like, “The Few, The Proud, The Donors” and “Died 2012. Still s
erving our country today.”
I kind of liked that last one.
This was where they took prospective donors, and we followed the tour route I’d been taken on until we came to a hallway with a long observation window. That window looked down on the repository itself, row after row of stainless steel shelves, each one filled with brains packaged in individually sealed plastic canisters.
The jackpot.
“Start cutting,” I said, but Freddy was already taking the circular glass cutting saw out of his satchel. All the official entrances into the warehouse below had arrays of sophisticated alarms. Not so the observation window.
“Who goes there?” demanded a rent-a-cop as he came around a corner.
I took out my pistol and shot him in the forehead.
Guns are the way of the future for zombies, I always say. The guard fell backwards, and I turned to Sarah and Freddy, who were gaping at me slack-faced like “Night of the Living Dead” extras. They didn’t approve of me carrying a gun.
Then again, they were Democrats.
“Sarah,” I said, pausing to blow dramatically on the barrel of the gun, “radio Ned. Tell him the guards are dealt with, and he can go ahead wi—”
“That really stung!” said the guard, pulling himself up to his feet as I swung around and trained my gun on him again. “You should warn a fellow before you just up and pop him like that. Common courtesy. I say ‘Who goes there?’ and you say ‘None a’ your business, Copper,’ and then we shoot. What’s the world coming to?” And then he gave us a crooked smile and I could see his canines, sharp and pearly white and cocky as hell.
“What’s your kind doing here?” I said, gun still on him, but now a little lower so that I could empty my clip into a line across his neck. “You’ve obviously got no need for brains. Isn’t there a high school girl you should be off impregnating right now?”
The vampire guard’s face looked confused, and then he burst out laughing. He lifted his hands and made talking motions with them, back and forth like they were having a conversation. “Aar aar aargh! Aar aar arr arr!” he said between bouts of laughter. “You sound like a demented seal or something! Aar aar arr!” The bullet hole in his head wasn’t bloody at all, just kind of black, and it appeared to be knitting together already. The rest of his skin was so flawless it could have been photoshopped.
“Naar war Daaarnt!” exclaimed Freddy. “Yaaargh MarMar.”
This just made the vampire laugh harder. I’d decided to pull the trigger when his hand shot out like a snake, grabbed the gun, and ripped it out of my grasp. “Look,” he said, now leveling the gun on me, serious, “you guys, and . . . ugh, is that a girl? . . . Well, you people are the bottom of the barrel. Me, I’m the next stage in human evolution. There’s no competition.”
“For an übermensch, you sure look like you’re working as a security guard to me. What do they pay you, twelve bucks an hour?”
“I am not unkind to the less fortunate,” the vampire continued as if I hadn’t said anything. “In fact, I’ll make a deal with you. You leave, go into town, and come back with a couple warmbloods for me to snack on, and I’ll forgive the whole thing. I get to tell my boss how I valiantly foiled their robbery. You get to go on with your little barrel-bottom existence for another night. Win-win, Capiche?”
I realized now that the vampire possessed the cultural acumen of a drunk spring breaker streaking through a hotel lobby, and therefore didn’t speak a lick of Zombish, but I couldn’t help but mutter “Capiche? You get turned while watching Full House reruns, or what?”
Suddenly an explosion rocked the building. At that moment, several things happened at once. Sarah shrieked, the guard stumbled, and Freddy shoved past me with his glass cutter. Before I knew it, the vampire was relieved of his head and dissolving into a pile of dust on the linoleum floor. Freddy stood over him, the glass cutter still whirring. “Araaargh Ar,” he said through clenched gums.
“Araargh Ar,” is a common Zombish idiom of unknown origin. It means, roughly, “Tell me more about evolution while I go get the dustpan.”
It seemed apropos.
I kicked through the dust, pulled out my gun, and patted Freddy on the back. Never been so proud of somebody in my unlife.
Another explosion rocked the compound as we cut into the window and lowered ourselves into the frigid warehouse. I went straight to the computer terminal and disabled all the alarms. Then we went over to the shelves together to start gathering our spoils. For a moment we just stared at the bounty before us, taking in the blue light reflecting off the polished white plastic of thousands of canisters. We’d done it. Not only that, but we’d gotten to kill a vampire in the process. Our crew would be legendary after this!
Sarah reached out and tapped one of the plastic containers. There was a thin, vertical window in each, and her long purple fingernail made a clicking sound as it tapped the small strip of glass.
“Umm,” she said. “This one’s empty.”
I looked at the one in front of me. It was empty too. And the one beside it. And the one beside that. And—
“Aaar aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh aar!” shouted Freddy, a little ways over.
“Just calm down, everybody,” I said. “It’s probably just this row.” All the talk about calm though, and I ran as fast as I could around to the next section of shelving. Empty. And the next. And the next.
“Aar aarda ar?” cried Freddy.
“I don’t know!” I snapped back. “This whole place was supposed to be full!” I pried one open to make sure the window wasn’t one of those fake transparent things, but no, there was just a slushy, half-frozen liquid in there. From the smell, brains had been soaking in that liquid recently too.
“Uh, Boss,” came Sarah’s sultry voice from two rows over. “Boss, there’s a, uh, note.” I rushed over to investigate and found her pointing at a piece of paper that looked like it’d been torn out of a spiral-bound notebook. The paper was taped to the side of one of the empty brain canisters, and large jagged letters were written on it with a Sharpie marker.
“Dear Zombies,” it read. “Nice try, suckahs! If you want brains, looks like you’ll have to buy them from us like everyone else. Bidding starts at five hundred dollars a canister while supplies last. Love, the Westside Werewolf Posse.” Underneath the signature line was a URL for an eBay auction.
As if they’d been watching us somehow, waiting for the note to be picked up, a chorus of howls sprang up around the building. I stood there and listened to their taunts and looked at the note for who knows how long.
Werewolves. We were beaten by dogs. We’d never live it down.
Sarah ripped the paper off the canister and crumpled it one-handed. There was something on the back.
“Wait,” I said. “Let me see that.” I snatched the crumpled wad of paper, crouched down, and smoothed it out on the floor.
In the dead center of the page was a cherry-red kiss mark.
“Aaar arr agh?” asked Freddy, over my shoulder.
The tour guide was a werewolf, that’s Aaar arr agh. Her lipstick had been that exact shade of cherry-red.
“Let’s go home,” I said, grabbing Sarah’s proffered hand and pulling myself up.
As we shambled off to the loading bay empty-handed, werewolf howls sounded distant through the warehouse walls. I untucked my shirt and tore a couple holes in it. “Sarah,” I said, “I think we need to go back to the gate and get that arm after all.” If the werewolves hadn’t dragged it off out of spite.
Stupid werewolves.
Suddenly, there was a third explosion, bigger than all the rest. Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, all in such quick succession that you could hardly tell where one ended and the next began. The building groaned. The floor shook. We were bounced into each other like bowling pins. There were explosions all around the building, and as each explosion went off, the howls of the werewolves turned into yelps.
When they stopped, the stillness was heavy. That’s when Ned shuffled i
nto the warehouse. His shirt was hanging by a single thread, and his entire right side was charred and smoking, but his slack eyebrow-less face molded itself into a grin. “Sorry, Boss,” he said. “Explosions got a little out of control. Might have killed some local wildlife. You know me and explosions.”
“Well, we better get out of here before the SPCA comes to give us a citation,” I said with a smile of my own.
“I reckon we do, Boss,” said Ned.
We piled into the cab of the refrigerated truck, and Ned drove us out over hairy, smoldering bodies. I was already planning my next score. The werewolves had to have a storage facility somewhere. A facility that was now decidedly un-manned. Or un-wolfed. Whatever.
Freddy broke the silence that had descended on the cab.
“Ar ga Ar ga Warda-aargh?” asked Freddy.
“Sure, Freddy,” I said. “We can stop by Wendy’s.”
THE END
About the Author
Clarence Walker is an undead individual currently residing in the suburbs of our great nation’s capitol. In addition to writing, he is also an advocate for Zombish language and culture, as well as Undead rights. He is currently pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the AMC television network for defamation of character and hate speech propagated by the program “The Walking Dead.”
He has a rational fear of chainsaws.
About the Translator
Jared Oliver Adams met Clarence while attending the short-lived Million Zombie March in solidarity of Undead rights. He remains a steadfast supporter of Zombie-kind to this day, and is currently working on a PhD in Zombie-Human relations from a well-reputed online university that shall not be named. When not organizing his popular “Shamble Ins” at local malls, Jared writes fiction of his own.
He can be found at www.jaredoliveradams.com.
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