by Eirik Gumeny
“Don’t worry,” Mark answered coolly. “I’ve got it under control.” The manager of the Holiday Inn turned and stepped to the side, revealing his creation. It appeared to be a vacuum cleaner situated on top of a lawn mower.
“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” said Timmy.
“It’s a reverse vacuum cannon,” explained Mark. “I rewired it and boosted its range. Now, instead of sucking dirt up, it’ll launch whatever we can load into it.”
“OK, great, but how’s that –”
“Those zombies who work at Pier 1. Are they still alive? Or, uh, re-alive?”
“Most of them.”
“Get the keys to the store from them. I’m going to need everything they’ve got in their inventory.”
“On it,” replied the squirrel, scurrying back out of the hotel and into the plaza just as a large explosion exploded. The smell of smoke and lamb filled the air.
“I’m OK,” shouted Timmy with his brain.
“The Greek place,” rumbled Mark, furrowing his eyebrows. “That was the only place to get a gyro on the entire coast! You assholes!”
A number of tiny gasps came from behind the overturned furniture fort.
“Sorry,” said Mark sheepishly, turning to the kids. “It’s these pirates. They really get me and your parents on edge. They make us say bad words.”
“I thought pirates were supposed to be fun,” sniffled one little girl, a mixing bowl on her head and a frying pan duct-taped across her torso.
“Pirates suck, Amy,” explained Mark sternly. “Don’t you ever forget it.”
He began wheeling the lawnmower/vacuum contraption out towards the plaza. “Stay behind those couches,” he shouted over his shoulder.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Summer of Sixty-Nine
Much to her surprise, Queen Victoria XXX woke up a few hours later. Even more surprisingly, Queen Victoria XXX woke up surrounded by zombies. Perhaps most surprising of all, though, Queen Victoria XXX woke up surrounded by zombies that weren’t devouring her flesh.
“Wha ...” she said hazily. “This is because of some kind of sustained blood loss, right? One of you has my foot in your mouth?”
The zombies, in blurry unison, shook their heads.
Queen Victoria XXX stared at the horde of living dead seated around her. As her vision slowly regained clarity, she realized that they were in fact not eating her, and were instead holding flowers and gazing longingly at her scarred yet beautiful visage.
“OK, I’m confused.”
“The zombies showed up right after you passed out,” said Andrew Jackson II, sitting behind the queen and poking a small fire with a stick, beyond the circle of reanimated corpses. “As near as I can tell, they were hunting the butter monster. They managed to get you free, but then they backed off and let the thing get away.”
“They let the butter monster ...” The reincarnated member of British royalty squinted and looked at the zombies again. She noticed the long, withered hair; the filthy, fringed vests; and the multiple “Make Love Not War” buttons that adorned the walking cadavers. Also, the wheelbarrow full of glistening toast that was situated behind them.
“Ohhh,” she said. “I get it now.”
“Nek-rooo ... feelya?” said the zombie closest to her, holding out a single dandelion.
“Yeah, no,” said the queen.
The zombie with the dandelion frowned, part of his lip flaking off. A few of the reanimated corpses behind him turned and, visibly dejected, began shuffling away.
“But, uh, thanks?” she called after them. “I guess?”
The zombie turned away from her in a slow and rotting huff, waving off the queen and sliding the dandelion into what was left of his shirt pocket.
“Oh, come on, it’s not my fault I’m not into decaying husks!” shouted the exasperated queen. “Can I at least get some toast?!”
The circle of walking dead shambled into the forest, muttering and slobbering to themselves.
“Jerks,” she said under her breath.
“Here,” said Andrew Jackson II, dropping a few slices of buttered bread into the queen’s lap. “Eat up.”
Queen Victoria XXX raised an eyebrow and looked at the artificially reconstructed president, now standing beside her. “I get why those stupid hippies didn’t kill me,” she said, “but why aren’t you killing me?”
“You’re not on my list,” replied Andrew Jackson II with a shrug.
“OK, sure, but then why are you helping me?”
“I can’t help an old friend in need?”
“No, you can’t,” countered Queen Victoria XXX, her mouth full of toast. “At least I thought you couldn’t. Literally. I didn’t think you were capable of it.”
“I’ve done nice things,” said the cloned president. “They just tend to be overshadowed by my homicidal rampages.” He extended a hand and lifted Queen Victoria XXX from the ground. “Speaking of, care to join me?”
“On your pointless political massacre? No thanks,” she answered. “Besides, I’m still pissed off about you murdering my boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?” asked Andrew Jackson II, raising an eyebrow. “Since when does Ms. Independent have a –”
“I don’t. We’re not,” said Vicky sharply, shaking her head. “It’s the butter talking. I can actually feel it rolling around in my sinuses.” The queen scrunched up one side of her face and snorted. “It’s delicious.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Well, it’s the only thing keeping you alive right now, buddy,” explained the cloned royal. She put a finger against one side of her nose, forcefully blew a wad of butter from the other nostril.
“Charlie was a lucky man.”
“He was. And you’re lucky my unceasing vengeance is apparently allergic to being drowned in a dairy spread.”
“Then why don’t we take advantage of this little time-out,” offered Andrew Jackson II. “Help me kill Susan B. Anthony III and, if you’re still mad at me afterwards, you can have your revenge-fueled fight to the death.”
“That bitch?” said Queen Victoria XXX, wiggling her pinky in her buttery ear. “Yeah, OK. Did you at least borrow your friend’s car like you were planning on? I lost a shoe.”
“No can do. The tent-city got swallowed up by the Hollow Men.”
“Damn it,” said the queen. Standing on one foot, she removed her remaining riding boot and tossed it into the forest. “This is going to suck.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Time to Make the International Incidents!
“Are you in favor of the adoption of Amendment One, as proposed by the planning board for the town zoning ordinance, as follows,” began Moderator Chaney, standing at a podium before the members of Wulfsburgh Village, the town elders seated behind him, “amend Table One, Zoning Districts and Uses, as it relates to commercial agriculture, bakeries, cluster developments, greenhouses, restaurants, heavy equipment and trailer repairs, two family dwellings and manufactured housing parks? Those in favor please raise your –”
“What’s that?” blurted out one young werewolf, pointing a claw skyward, towards an approaching black speck.
“Intruders,” growled War-Shaman del Toro, rising dramatically from his chair and staring at the airborne interlopers. His heavily-medaled military tunic threatened to explode off his burly, wooly shoulders.
“They might not be,” said Peace-Shaman Zevon calmly. “We shouldn’t be rash. We should reach out to them before –”
“That’s dumb. You’re dumb.”
“It can’t hurt to try it, right?” said Apathy-Shaman Green.
“Fine,” replied the war-shaman. “But only to shut his furry, pacifist ass up.”
“Thank you,” the peace-shaman responded. He got up from his chair and walked over to an absurdly large horn, his tie-dyed dashiki swaying in the breeze. The shaman took a deep breath and then yelled into the horn: “ATTENTION UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT AND/OR VISITORS! YOU ARE IN VIOLAT
ION OF WULFSBURGH AIR SPACE! PLEASE SIGNAL YOUR LACK OF ILL INTENT OR LEAVE NOW! WE HAVE ARROWS AND, WHILE SOME OF US WOULD PREFER NOT TO USE THEM, WE ARE NOT, IN POINT OF FACT, AFRAID OF USING THEM!
“IF YOU FORCE OUR HAND, THAT IS!” he amended.
“There,” he said, stepping from the horn. “That should do it.”
The crowd turned from the peace-shaman then, and, as one, stared at the encroaching speck, necks craned upward, waiting for a response.
The object drifted closer, and closer.
The werewolves continued waiting.
“I don’t think they’re leaving,” said one of the townsfolk.
“It doesn’t look like it,” said Peace-Shaman Zevon, “but, to be fair, my accent is terrible. They might not have understood me.”
“You’re an idiot,” barked War-Shaman del Toro. “I’m getting the arrows.” Twirling a sharpened claw in the air, he signaled to his lieutenants, standing at the back of the throng.
“Hold on, hold on,” said the dashiki-wearing werewolf. “It’s only the one ...” He squinted. “... floating basket, it looks like? Why don’t we let them drift through?”
“OK, sure,” said the apathy-shaman.
The war-shaman, out-voted, growled thunderously. “If they violate another of our rules,” he grumbled, “anything, even something as stupid as littering, we’re going to murder them dead.”
“That’s fine, too,” agreed Apathy-Shaman Green.
***
“Damn it,” said Thor, leaning over the edge of the balloon basket. “Can’t this thing fly any straighter? I dropped my donut.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Like Shooting Fish in a Tidal Wave
The flaming arrow sailed up and over the basket, narrowly missing one of the guide-ropes tethered to the lead flamingo. The bird squawked and wobbled all the same, throwing the entire flock of flamingos, the basket, and its passengers off balance.
Catrina wrapped one forearm in the safety-line of the basket’s interior and used the other one to pull Chester A. Arthur XVII’s lifeless waist close to her. Honest Clark of Honest Clark’s Aerotorium carefully siphoned liquid propane from a portable stove into a beer bottle, stuffed it with a rag, lit it, and handed it to the man from Dunkin Donuts to throw at the werewolves below.
The makeshift incendiary plummeted to the ground and exploded. A half dozen flaming arrows were fired at the flying apparatus in reply, causing the flamingos to attempt to go in several different directions simultaneously. And then several more directions. Catrina vomited over the side of the basket. Something else on the ground exploded.
The thunder god, leaning back against the wicker wall, sighed heavily.
“How much longer ‘til we get there?”
***
Inside the fortified Chili’s, the non-possessed Pier 1 employees were tossing every piece of home decor they had into a pile behind Mark Hughes, dumping boxes and boxes of candle holders and candy dishes onto the restaurant floor. Outside, a half-dozen Armenian jewelry wholesalers were using broken chairs and portable diamond lathes to try and hold back the customer service pirates climbing over the corpse-wall of their counter-jockeying contemporaries.
It was not going well.
Mark positioned his jury-rigged junk launcher – now christened the Re-Vacuu-Cannon – in a booth near a broken window and pulled the starter cord. The Re-Vacuu-Cannon roared to life. Then, with a tremendous amount of clattering and banging, Mark began loading the bric-a-brac into the machine’s chamber.
The sidewalk battle ceased almost immediately. Everyone, pirate and diamond merchant alike, tilted their heads and stared at the clunking machine and the industrial vacuum nozzle being threaded through the shattered glass.
“Does that be ... a vacuum cleaner?” asked a pirate in a tattered yellow and blue polo, scrunching his face.
“Yes,” snarled Mark, pulling the trigger on the Re-Vacuu-Cannon. A ten-dollar gemmed zebra desk bell cut through the air – and then straight through the pirate’s forehead. The young man’s fleshy body toppled to the ground, leaving a very confused – and very hunchbacked – ghost floating in his stead.
Timmy, rushing over and jumping, squirrel-style, immediately sprinkled a pinch of salt over the spectre, the crystals falling like fairy dust through the flickering phantom until – poof! – the booing buccaneer was gone forever.
After murmuring some and then exchanging a series of looks, the pirate’s comrades charged, en masse, toward the Chili’s, screaming all manner of epithets.
Mark Hughes smiled.
Then he adjusted his aim.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Miss Manners Would Have Beaten His Ass
“So ... explain this plan to me again,” said Queen Victoria XXX, shoveling scrambled eggs into her mouth. She and Andrew Jackson II were sitting on the scorched, radioactive earth beside a roadside lemonade and breakfast stand run by two little girls. The booth wasn’t exactly ideally located, standing in the exact center of several radial miles of absolutely nothing, an area of land even the Sovereign Nation of Atomic Mutants thought was too barren and depressing to do anything with, but the girls’ overhead was low so they seemed to be doing all right. Plus, there was no competition and they were adorably pushy.
“You’re assassinating all these clones because ...”
“Because I’m going to run for president and I don’t feel like going through a long, drawn-out election,” explained Andrew Jackson II, taking a break from his breakfast burrito. “It’s much easier for me to just get rid of my opponents now rather than have to out-debate them later.”
“Even though almost all of the clones harbor no political ambition?”
“That’s not a chance I’m willing to take.”
Queen Victoria XXX furrowed her brow. “You do know there’s no United States anymore, right? We voted to get rid of it. Now everyone’s just, kind of, here, doing their own thing. We all get along better than ever.”
“You say that. But I know, deep in my heart, that that is a lie,” replied the clone of the seventh president. “A terrible tragedy has befallen this country and it’s up to me to make it right. I love America like a fat kid loves cupcakes, Vicky. Like zombies love fat kids. If I have to kill a couple hundred people to unite these states again, then, by God, that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Why don’t you just skip to the uniting and not kill all of my friends? It seems like an unnecessary step.”
“They’re not all your friends,” said Andrew Jackson II, taking a bite of his burrito. “You called Susie a bitch.”
“Well, she is,” mumbled the queen in between forkfuls of hash browns. “After strangling the last of the other Queen Victorias, I started walking to the dorms, minding my own business, and then that pile of crazy came running out from behind a storage shed and started shanking me with a spork she stole from the lunchroom.”
“Uh huh,” mumbled Andy, chewing.
“Look!” She stretched uncomfortably, pulling down the waist of her skirt and, even more uncomfortably, inching up her Kevlar corset, showcasing a series of tiny scars on her lower abdomen. “A spork, Andy! Why would she even do that? I’d never so much as seen her before, much less done anything to incite a stabby rage.”
Andrew Jackson II shrugged nonchalantly.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“It’s not surprising.”
“I beg to differ,” said Queen Victoria XXX, correcting her clothing. “If nothing else, you never really expect to get attacked with a spork, you know? She had an entire cafeteria of cutlery to choose from and that’s what she went with?” She began chewing on a strip of bacon. “Nevermind the whole ‘hiding in an alley and attacking me for no reason’ thing.”
“You ... really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“The AD GmbH scientists,” explained the president, “accidentally mixed Susan B. Anthony’s DNA with Adolph Hitler’s. They never actually planned o
n cloning him, mind you, but they used the permits they had to exhume his corpse anyway, just for fun. The company passed Hitler around from department to department, as, like, a bonus, or something, letting the employees have their way with him, until he eventually wound up in the cloning laboratory. The engineers there, being engineers, rigged him up like a puppet so they could make his corpse do obscene things behind people’s backs.
“Things progressed kind of exactly as you’d assume from there, and, soon enough, the engineers had his rotting cadaver dressed up in a wig and pantsuit and playing the lead in a full-scale production of Anything Goes.”
Andrew Jackson II sipped his coffee.
“During the first big dance number,” he continued, “the one with all the horns and the guys in tuxes, one of Hitler’s legs came off and went sailing into the vat of good ol’ Susie B. The lab staff were too invested in the show to care, though, so no one actually stopped to fish it out. By the time they remembered, it was too late. All of Hitler’s racist dickishness had been infused into the Susan B. Anthonys.”
“So Susie’s literally –”
“A femiNazi, yes.”
“Huh,” said the dark-skinned clone. “That does explain why she’s so insufferable. Although it doesn’t explain the spork.” She put the last of the bacon in her mouth. “How do you know all this?”
“It’s amazing what people will confess to when you’re disemboweling their co-workers in front of them.”
“Oh, right, the rampage,” said Queen Victoria XXX before chugging the last of her orange juice. She wiped her mouth. “Remind me again why you don’t think you’re evil?”
“Everything I do, I do for the greater good. We were toys, pawns to that company. Slaughtering everyone was the only way to make them see that. People need help sometimes, Vicky, and I’m the only guy willing to do it. It’s not my fault everyone else is retar–”
