The Rising Dead

by Devan Sagliani

  “Hold it right there,” Gunner screamed with what little breath was left in his burning lungs. The blood covered man didn't even hesitate. He snapped his head towards Gunner. His feral eyes had gone solid black. Dark trails of oily blood leaked from them like remorseful tears. A white foam covered his chapped lips, making them looked frost bitten with all the cracks. He sprung up like he was possessed by a demon and began howling as he raced towards Gunner. His limbs looked somehow rubbery and rigid as he ran. Gunner mused that it was like watching a nightmarish version of his childhood Gumby doll coming to kill him. He felt calm as the monster charged towards him, calmer than he'd felt in a long time. It wasn't until he began pulling the trigger, until the volley of head shots had taken the wind out of Satoshi's sails, knocking him twitching lifelessly on the ground, that he realized how much he needed this. It felt good to have an excuse to really shoot someone in the face, to be doing it for the right reason, to be saving people's lives.

  “I didn't realize how much I'd missed that little buddy,” Gunner said, stepping over the quivering corpse of the former scientist and using his boot to roll the body flat onto its back. “It's not an easy feeling to describe to your every day average citizen, blowing a guys head off. Once you get a taste of killing a bad guy well that's hard to forget I guess.”

  Gunner unloaded the clip into what was left of Satoshi's skull. Pieces of scalp, brain, and hair flew in a wide radius as the bullets penetrated through the sunken face, leaving smoking trails in the wet meat. A dark oily substance ran out and covered the stone still body. It practically climbed the side of Gunner's boot. Gunner was staring hard at the substance. It was like nothing he'd ever seen. Tiny white microscopic foam seemed to be seeping out of it, just like with Torres. He was so deep in concentration that he didn't hear the police cars as they screeched to a halt in front of him. It took several calls over their PA system to shake him back to reality. He looked up to see officers on all sides of him, flashing sirens blue and red splashing over him, guns drawn and pointed at him as if he were the source of the commotion. He was confused. He was obviously not the villain. He'd save lives. He was a fucking hero!

  “This is your last warning,” the lead officer yelled over the PA. “Drop your weapon and put your hands slowly on your head or we will shoot!”

  This is all wrong, thought Gunner. This is no way to treat a veteran, much less the guy that just stopped a killing rampage.

  He calmly leaned over and gently set down his beloved HK. It was too precious of a weapon to simply drop. He could feel their guns, along with their hatred, trained on him with every move.

  “Now put your hands behind your head and get on your knees,” the officer instructed him.

  Gunner could feel his pride stinging. It wasn't supposed to be this way. He did as he was told and several officers raced out to him. In seconds he was handcuffed and dragged to his feet towards the lead officer. He was a pudgy white guy in his late thirties with a widow's peak and coffee stained teeth. He looked more agitated than scared now. This was his town, and someone was tearing it up. Gunner turned his head for a moment, watching as an officer picked up his HK with gloves. A pang of jealousy shot through him unexpectedly, like the officer had tied him up and made him watch while he fondled his wife's bare breast in front of him.

  “You wanna tell us just what's going on here pal?”

  Gunner grinned at him as he shook his head from side to side.

  “Guess it's true what they say,” he began.

  “What's that shitbird?” The officer looked tired and impatient.

  “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Looks like we've reached the end of today's episode kiddies. Let's do a quick rewind for those of you still drooling on your keyboard, or as I like to affectionately call them - boob noobs.”

  Max had turned her extra room into a small webcam studio with walls of bright Kino Flo lights arranged around her bed and her right in the middle. She had a bank of monitors on her desk and a mounted video camera to stream her show, instead of just the camera already built into the laptops most people used. She looked almost ridiculous with all that makeup on, her hair done up with furry cat ears topping her head. She had a custom video game guitar with sexy Coop-style demon girls drawn on it, designed by an insanely rich and obsessive fan, cradled in her hands. She was wearing a pink glitter lipstick that matched the pink glitter paint covering up her puffy nipples, She didn't have a top on. She preferred to leave her breasts almost fully exposed when she taped episodes, to give as much tease as she could without going full porno. She'd spawned a legion of fans with her razor's edge routine and a slew of copycats, including a Suicide Angel who'd gone as far as getting her face tattooed on her ribcage. From the waist down she had on skin tight black booty shorts that showed off her lean curves, a bullet belt filled with 50 different shades of lip gloss, and oversized furry boots. It was all part of the act. When she was recording her show she wasn't simply Max, post graduate communications major and part-time geek. Under the lights, she transformed into something far more magical--Asphyxia Stardust--adored by hundreds of thousands of desperate, horny, video-game-and-porn-loving boys from all over the world--some who watched the show live, others who saw it on her YouTube channel and then came over to her website. She offered a podcast version and had seen her subscriptions growing fast despite Apple's endless and tedious restrictions. She was most proud of her rabid Reddit fans who kept her name in new discussion threads and even turned her into a cool meme!

  Those guys are my bread and butter, she thought. Cool, smart, and generous.

  The truth was, she didn't even need to finish school now. The world was changing. It wasn't like the days her parents remembered, when having a degree or a postgraduate degree meant something. Those days were long gone. Nowadays every barista at Starbucks had a Masters in something. Years of tax breaks for the super rich and government deregulation had ruined the country, maybe permanently. Now the only language that mattered was money, and you didn't need a degree to get to it, you just needed to be clever and willing to do whatever it took. They were entering the era of the Golden Rule: She who has the gold makes all the rules!

  Max's website already had sponsors. She had sick amounts of traffic. Her Google analytics were through the roof and her worldwide Alexa seemed to be steadily climbing, with little help on her part. She got interviewed every week by sites like Wired and Gamespot and Kotaku and Bleeding Cool. She'd had a profile posted about her on Gawker and survived the scathing comments. She'd been invited to do an AMA on Reddit long before that. She had offers to do amazing things from big names, to the tune of six figures.

  She was in her prime and she knew it.

  Her mom wanted her to finish school, start a career, fall in love, get married, and have children. Basically, she wanted her to be taken care of for the rest of her life--by a man. Max just didn't see the sense in that. It was a dead paradigm from a repressive era when women had to fight for things like the right to use birth control or burn their bra, as far as she was concerned.

  “There is nothing wrong with having a degree to fall back on,” her mother had told her. “But a woman's first duty is to her husband and children.”

  As a rebellious teen she might have rolled her eyes at her mother, or even played along by egging her on to make more absurd and old fashioned quips. As an independent woman, however, she found it harder and harder to hide her disappointment in her mother when she made statements like that now. Over the summer her mother had tried to set her up with several ‘eligible bachelors her age’--which amounted to her having to shoot down several obnoxious law students and one completely disinterested pre-med who wanted to barter with her.

  “We're both doing this to get our parents off our backs, right?” the oily haired future doctor said, barely looking up from his plate at the restaurant. “I keep telling my mom I don't have time to date, but she doesn't listen. I propose we pretend to be a
couple so they leave us alone. We can chat by text to keep our stories straight. We'd only have to see each other at holidays. Deal?”

  He didn't seem to notice when she slipped out of her chair and left.

  I wonder if he thinks we’re still dating, she thought.

  At this point, she was still planning on finishing her degree because she only had a year left and she felt really guilty about letting her dad down. He wasn't the pushy type like her mom was. Her dad was the quiet, confident type, an engineer who'd worked hard his whole life with no breaks and nothing handed to him. He was her real role model, inspiring her to do it all herself and not wait for anyone to hand her what she dreamed for her life. Her dad had shown her through his example how he'd ripened his disappointments--he’d called them ‘the sour vinegars of mere mortal existence’--into a sweet wine, enjoying each moment as it unfolded on life's terms. He was pretty much the most fearless man she knew because he accepted things as they actually were. Unlike most people, he didn't lie to himself or try to candy-coat reality. Back home, people referred to him as ‘the sensitive, artistic type’ behind his back. That wasn't it at all. He was thoughtful and introspective, never callous or cut off from his emotions. He was always seeing the best in people and trying to get other people to see it, too. That was part of what Max loved about him.

  Max caught her mind drifting and reminded herself she was hosting a live show. She held up several new DVD releases, their covers facing out toward the camera. She'd been getting a steady stream of them since she added “The Alt Review” to her show. It was nice to get new releases before they were out without having to bootleg them off torrent anymore. It was taking a minute to get used to the whole “going straight” thing. She hadn't been on Pirate Bay for months. It was, well, weird.

  “El Diablo De Santa Muerta? This movie is pretty weak, but rentable. Seems like a good choice this Halloween if it hits your On Demand for under three dollars. Buy a bottle of tequila and do a shot every time someone screams Dios Mio! You'll be wasted in the first fifteen minutes.”

  She threw the movie on the ground and it crashed, then rolled over by the door, almost hitting Parker’s shoe while he watched on in silent amazement. Though she didn't turn her head, he got the distinct feeling that somehow she knew he was there and it sent chills up his spine for a single, tingling second. He'd tried the door and it had opened so he came in. Thunderdome rules. He thought he might seem like a good guy, dropping by to invite her to a party. Now he felt like a creepy stalker as he waited for her to finish her broadcast. Still, there was something so magical about her that he completely understood how so many of her fans had fallen under her spell. Watching her he completely forgot himself for a moment and was sucked in to her quirky, Cosplay show.

  “Dark Children of the Black Dream. This movie kinda blew me away. With the mix of conceptual images meant to be the serial killers inner monologue slash dream-scape and the over the top gore and violence it kept me on the edge of my seat, which is hard to do. Trust me. Plus it was full of hot topless chicks, so you know you'll love that.”

  She shook her breasts at the camera and giggled like a naughty school girl before chucking the movie away, striking the door next to Parker. He ducked as it flew past him.

  Okay, he thought, she definitely knows that I’m here. She’s obviously throwing things at me on purpose.

  “Next up we have Hell Hearse, a not altogether awful movie, despite kinda ripping off Stephen King's Christine a bit. Guess any time you have a possessed vehicle now it's an homage to King, so that may not be all that fair. Still if you're going to have a car that is controlled by blood thirsty demons what better kind to have than a hearse? Plus this one seems to only kill people who are total dicks as it goes down its owners shit list, knocking off people who've wronged her one by one. At one point the car seems to eat the nosy local cop that won't stop asking questions. You'll have to see it to believe it. It's dark and glossy and has a great soundtrack. For such a low budget movie we don't know how they got so many big names in metal. I say you buy it. Fuck it. Why not? If anything it will make great conversation starter. Plus with a director this talented, and obviously insane, supporting their work now could lead to bigger and better things later, kinda like a clash of Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino.”

  She extended her arm out, flinging the hard, plastic box like a Frisbee and connecting dead on with Parker's stomach. He stifled a cry. Max held up one last box cover and smiled, a little too wide in Parker's opinion.

  “And finally Queens of the Crimson Dawn. I was not ready for this one. It is nothing short of amazing. After the fall of every major government in the world a coven of witches joins forces with the oldest known female vampire on earth creating a super race of warrior hunters who rule the night, stalking down their helpless prey and serving up justice as they see fit! It's practically a requirement that all members either go naked or wear skin tight latex. The Queens move at lightning speed, kill without mercy, and take whatever they want. They can also shape shift too, by tricking humans into believing the spell they've cast over them is real, usually when they are seducing them. It's like True Blood meets the Craft meets Hunger Games. I found myself rooting for the bad girls to win the whole time. A world where women rule over men, treating them like nothing more than objects to be toyed with and sexed up before eaten and discarded? Makes a girl all warm and fuzzy on the inside.”

  Max paused for dramatic effect, letting her words sink in before starting again. She was good at this. No one could doubt that. She placed a single finger to her lips, gently biting the glossy, blood red nail and cocking her head around as she arched her back in a sexy pose that nearly knocked the breath out of Parker.

  “Sounds damn near perfect if you ask me,” she purred in a low, bedroom voice. “But don't worry your pretty little heads. I'd make each and every last one of you my personal sex slave.”

  Max pulled the game guitar off and set it aside, then rolled over on the bed like a playful kitten, knocking the remaining DVD's out of her way as she came to rest on her side. She stared into the camera, using one arm to prop her up on her side, allowing viewers to drink in her curvy bosom. It was no mystery to Parker or anyone else what her appeal was. She was like the sexy girl next door you always fantasized about but never had the courage to tell you had feelings for, the one who told you all her secrets, kept you on the hook, writhing, but never let you out of the friend-zone. It was as if that girl had gone bad, really bad, and it had made her ten times as hot, and a million times more unattainable.

  “Sadly, it's the end of summer,” she said. “You know what that means, right? Back to school hustle and bustle. Blah. Blah. Blah. Boring.”

  She pulled herself up, swinging her legs back and forth coquettishly over the edge of the bed. She leaned in toward the camera like she was planning on leveling with her fans, giving them a hard truth in a soft voice, with orders that she expected to be followed by her faithful hordes.

  “I've already updated my wish list with new toys you can buy for me, fan boys. You know who I'm talking to out there, Ubersnark and Death2Google. You better get me something good! What's in it for you? I'm glad you asked. It just so happens that when I was home this summer, I spent a lot of time at with my girlfriends and I took lots of sexy pictures and videos. Most cam girls put up a couple bikini pix and a topless shot, arm in front, to keep you at attention? Not us. We got a list of sexy cosplay you're bound to love. It starts with Star Wars, naturally, but it doesn't end there. How about we throw in some Nightmare Before Christmas, just in time for Halloween? Do I have you attention? We've also got 5th Element, Transformers, and a very special fully naked set of yours truly playing Black Widow.”

  Max pouted seductively, then reached down and began to slide her skin tight shorts over her hip bones, thrusting her hips up and towards the camera. Parker could feel a tingle run through him. He held is breath as he waited to see if she would flash the camera. He wished he'd been logged in to catc
h this performance but knew he could download a play of it later.

  “Want a sneak peek?”

  Max froze with her shorts just at the crest of her pubic bone, exposing nothing more than a trimmed patch of nutty brown hair shaved into an exclamation point.

  “Sorry Charlie, you gotta pay the piper first.”

  Parker felt himself exhale a little too loudly. His heart was racing in his chest. What was this effect she had over him? Where did it come from? Usually he was the one that made girls swoon while ignoring them, not the other way around. It was maddening. He hated it with every fiber in his being but here he was, still standing by waiting for her to notice him, like one of her countless puppy dog followers.

  “If you plan on seeing any of the sets of videos that me and my naughty new friends slaved over to make for you this summer I'd better have a pile of new presents waiting for me at my PO Box by no later than Monday afternoon, got it? Did I mention one of them is a real life porn star? Guess you'll have to wait and see which one. And for those of you catching the rebroadcast of this, filthy little trolls, get your ass over to my site now and sign up for a full membership! That's an order!”

  She made a quick salute that came off quirky and cute. She was irresistible when she turned on her charm.

  “For those of you within a two thousand mile radius of Sin City,” she cooed, “or with bonus points and extra air miles just burning their way through your credit card statements, I expect to see you this weekend at Las Vegas's first ever Zombie Con and Dead Walk. No excuses. Get all dolled up and come witness as I host the deadest weekend on the planet. You'll never guess what surprises I have planned so, here's a hint. How about a live burlesque show from a B movie actress you've all been fantasizing about for years? I've said too much! No!”

  Max threw her arms up over her face in mock horror. She sat up and saluted the camera, thrusting her heaving chest toward them. Parker rolled his eyes.