Bob the Zombie
By Jaime Johnesee
Copyright ? 2014 by Jaime Johnesee LLC
All rights reserved.
Third Edition
Edited by Leigh M. Lane
Cover and interior art designed by Jeffrey Kosh
Graphics
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Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to my all my friends. A special thank you goes out to Nate, Face, Ren Martin, Bill Dittmar, Christine Sutton, Leslie Whitaker, Vix Kirkpatrick, and David H Church. Without you guys I wouldn't be able to do what I love so dearly. I can not thank you enough for everything you've done for me.
Author's Note: Bob the Zombie is an homage to my friend Nate, Griffin has his roots in Ren Martin, and Face is...well, he's based on Face. Bill Dittmar is the spark that I used to bring Wilhelm VonKarolinas to life. To all of these folks I can't thank you enough for giving me the opportunity to bring a bit of you into my world.
I'd like to thank my family for putting up with my reclusive tendencies. I love you all.
Acknowledgements
I'd like to thank the folks (family and friends) who have helped me through this year, it's been a really hellish year and you guys have been there to keep me standing and walking in the right direction. I don't know where I'd be without you and your kindnesses.
I'd especially like to thank Jeffrey Kosh and Lorraine Tidilidim Versini for their amazing work on the covers and promos for my work. You guys are the best damn team in graphics today. It's an honor to know you both.
Big, huge, heaps of thanks to the hawk-eyed Lisa Lane for the use of her skills as an editor. I am a much better author for knowing you, and a much better person for having you as a friend.
Vix Kirkptrick, you are so more than just the world's greatest beta reader. You also represent the soul of the Indy industry for so many of us. You keep us going and make our work shine. On a personal level, you are family to me and I honestly don't know what I'd do without you.
Tracy and Mark Tufo, I can never thank you enough for your guidance and for believing in me. Your friendship and support have been so very appreciated. Chris and I are proud to know you both.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Bob the Zombie
Also Available
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Bob the Zombie
I lead a very Griswoldian life. If you've ever seen those National Lampoon's Vacation movies, you know what I mean. Even my death was hysterically funny. I was a twenty-five-year-old college dropout and was living at home with my parents. In fact, I had been hanging out, relaxing in their garden, when I decided to prune my mom's roses. I was cutting a stem that was growing too close to the house and turned to respond to a neighbor who hollered a hello. It's at that point the stepstool I was using tipped and I impaled myself, jugular first, on the pruning shears when I fell to the ground. Sure, at the time it was horrifying, but now I can look back, see the vague similarity to the earlier referenced Chevy Chase character, and laugh.
My mom, however, was distraught at my demise, and she hired a witch who specialized in necromancy to bring me back. The spell went a little funny and, instead of being brought forth from the ground in a geyser of dirt, I awoke in my casket and had to dig my way out. Luckily, Mom waited for me and gave me a nice mug of hot chocolate after I dug myself out of the fetid earth. Unluckily, my body was dead, so the hot chocolate really messed with my stomach and I threw up all over Mom's shoes. She forgave me. It took some time to learn how to eat food again, not to mention having to learn which foods I could tolerate better than others. Chicken nuggets are fine, but beets lead to Exorcist-style vomit.
It wasn't long before I had to leave home. The rotting began, and it creeped my family out when large chunks of me fell off. The necromancer had told my mom it would happen and suggested I invest in a ton of cheap staples and a good stapler. The iron in the staples bonds with the magic that animates me and--voila!--whatever has been reattached looks just like it did before it sloughed off. Not that it makes me good as new, what with the constant greenish hue and festering wounds, but it's nice to know that I won't have to worry about leaving pieces of myself behind.
The clouding of my eyes bothered my mom (and me, really) the most. I have the eyes of a corpse now, mostly because ? hello, Undead American over here! Now, don't get me confused with the ghouls. No, we zombies are sentient and able to talk for ourselves. Unlike ghouls, nobody is pulling our strings. Nope, we're pretty much the same people we were before death; it's just that now we need a steady diet of meat. Sometimes, we can tolerate other foods ? and nonfood items. As for me, I like cake.
Sadly, I don't get cake very often. There aren't a lot of supernatural bakeries around, and it's not as if I can go into the town bakery up the road and ask for a quarter sheet cake without setting off warning bells. Most of the world has no clue supernatural creatures exist. The humans who need to know about it already do, but everyone else is kept in the dark. I imagine if I did hike on up to the bakery the conversation would go something like this:
"Hello Ma'am I'd like a--"
"Zombie!" Then out comes the shotgun and off goes my head. Nope, I think I'll stick around with the other supernatural critters and stay away from humans--even though, these days, when people do spot me, they tend to think I'm just some special effects genius with a hard-on for zombie fiction. I'm a much more complicated guy than that, really.
Take, for example, how much it hurt when my family rejected me. I didn't ask to be brought back from the dead. Oh, and before you ask, no, I don't have a gaping wound on my throat where the shears pierced me. The funeral directors sewed that up, and it healed when I was raised. I came out of the ground whole, my only flaws being the scars marking the place where that wound had been and a shaving nick I received the morning of my death. I stayed looking mostly human for a while. It took about two weeks for the decomp to actually start. I am told the woman who raised me must have been a very powerful necromancer, as the rotting usually starts by sundown on the day of the raising. The greater the magic of the witch, the longer putrefaction is staved off. The best witch can raise and keep a zombie for up to six months before it starts decomposing. I was glad to have had those two weeks, but their ending broke my heart into a million pieces. Being asked to leave by your own mother is deeply painful. That she was the one who brought me back made it even worse.
So, there I went, off by my little old lonesome, when I ran across another zombie named Face. I won't get into why he is nicknamed Fac
e, but let's just say it's not because he's pretty. Face and his crew were hanging at the cemetery, messing with the stoner kids. I soon found it was one of his favorite pastimes and that he visited every cemetery in town looking to mess with people. The kids would smoke a little pot (or drop acid) and Face would wait about ten minutes and start clawing his way out of a grave. We'd sit back and watch as the drug-addled victims started pointing and screaming. Sometimes they ran, sometimes they soiled themselves, and once, a kid had a gun with him and almost shot me in the shoulder.
The first time I saw them, though, I was hanging back in the tree line. I watched and chuckled as the kids spotted Face and began shrieking and running. After the humans hightailed it out of there, I came down and introduced myself. We became great friends, and I became a member of their horde. Before you even ask, no, hordes aren't like gangs or mob branches. Hordes are ? well, they're families. We might scare a few humans from time to time, but we don't harm anyone. We mostly just stick together and have fun.
Well, we did. Then, I got a sort of mental memo from the Goddess. She told me that some woman needed my help in the course of her becoming the go-between for God, the Goddess, and the world. The first time I met this chick, she was asleep in the woods and a
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