At Least He's Not On Fire: A Tour of the Things That Escape My Head

by Philbrook, Chris

  “Kiss my ass,” Wally spat at him. "You're a dirty cheat."

  “Again with the rudeness Wally. And you haven’t even lost yet. You’ve still got a sporting chance here!” The Devil slowly twirled his glass, clinking the ice cubes floating in the greasy fluid.

  “Do it, come on.” Wally closed his eyes and tapped his fingers on the table, cascading the fingertips from left to right and back again, hoping his luck would finally rise to the top. In the back of his mind he said a short prayer to a God he rarely leaned on. There was some regret in that part of his mind.

  “As you wish, Wally.”

  Wally couldn’t see what was happening through his shut eyelids, but he sensed the first card move into the air, and heard the poomph when it burst into flames. In his mind’s eye he envisioned the next card, the final card of the hand, slide off the top of the deck and come to a rest next to the six of hearts.

  Silence.

  “Hm.” He heard the Devil mutter. “Well Wally, don’t you want to see your fate? This seems like the kind of thing you might want to aim your eyeballs at.”

  Wally envisioned a queen, any queen in his mind. He slowly cracked his eyelids and peered out at the Devil’s face. The Devil’s eyes were locked on the fifth and final card of the game. Wally’s line of sight slowly slid downward, following the line the Devil’s eyes took.

  The queen of hearts was the fifth card. Wally had made his straight.

  “WOOO! WOOO!” Wally leapt up out of the chair, shaking the card table and sending the cracked leather chair flying backwards. He pumped his fist and walked in circles, yelling at the top of his lungs. “I beat the Devil baby! Yeah! I’m the MAN! FUCK YEAH!”

  The Devil sat emotionless at the table, watching his failed prey celebrate the victory. After watching Wally for as long as he could stand, the Devil spoke up, “Wally.”

  Wally froze at the sound of the Devil’s cold voice. He spun and looked at Mr. Scratch, an expression on his face that looked as if he’d been caught with his hands in the cookie jar. “Yeah?”

  “Congratulations.” The Devil nodded his head, showing respect to Wally.

  “Thanks. So I win every pot for the rest of my life now? No matter what?” Wally was starting to get giddy just thinking about what he could win. Cars, fame, women, all of it was just a wager away. The thoughts of paying child support, and covering the crushing cost of his son's rehabilitation had slipped into the ether.

  The Devil’s response was flat, devoid of emotion. That scared Wally more than the Devil’s earlier gloating. “Every hand Wally. Winnah winnah, chicken dinnah. What say we go double or nothing? Make this interesting? One more hand?”

  Wally’s color drained away. He had everything he wanted already, why risk it? He’d beaten the Devil, and would now win every pot for the rest of his life? Why bother risking it? “What’s in it for me? I’ve already got what I want. And if I win everything else from here on out I won't want for a damned thing.”

  “Mmm. Greed. I like it. Let’s say if you win this one, I’ll guarantee you get a free pass with the big guy, and the pearly gates open as wide as can be at the end of your days, no matter what. And if I win, well, let’s just say your soul goes back on the block.” The Devil's eyebrows danced up and down flirtatiously. Once again the Devil interlaced his fingers, and Wally was reminded of those leathery wings cocooning around a chunk of coal, a nugget of purest evil.

  Wally considered it, and then abruptly picked his knocked over chair up off the empty casino floor. “Alright, let’s do this. I got this. I beat you once, I can beat you again.”

  A slow insidious smile crept across the Devil’s face as Wally pulled up to the card table once more, “Arrogance too Wally? You spoil me. This is like that birthday holiday you all celebrate in December.”

  “Don’t get used to it. I won’t be here long.”

  “Of that I am sure Wally. Shall we?” The Devil’s hands came apart and the deck on the table began shuffling itself. The Devil’s fiery eyes were locked on Wally’s, and this time, Wally didn’t look away.

  “Whoa. Wait a damn second. New deck there Mr. Scratch. All fifty two cards. No cheating,” Wally said as he shook his head, giving the Devil a dirty look.

  “Oh my, I had totally forgotten.” The Devil said with feigned guilt in his voice. He waved his hands and the deck disappeared with a puff of smoke. He reached inside his suit and produced a new deck. Wally noticed the glow of embers peek out when the suit opened.

  The new deck, possibly fresh from a printing press in Hell itself came to life in the Devil’s hands. His dagger like fingers split the cards, shuffled them, and did it again. After a multitude of shuffles the Devil sat the deck down again, slowly pushing it to Wally. He tilted his hand, offering the cut to the man.

  With no tremble this time Wally reached out and cut the deck in half. He picked up the second half and placed it on the first. The warmth of the cards was there again, but it didn’t frighten Wally. Wally was positive he had this game in the bag. He was sure of it.

  The Devil’s eyes narrowed as Wally sat back confidently. “Ready Wally? Double or nothing, remember?”

  “Yeah you bet, let’s do this.” Wally waved a dismissive hand at the Devil.

  The Devil made an annoyed face, and sucked on his gleaming white teeth. He raised his long fingers again, and the cards flew to their proper places in front of the two players, man, and evil.

  “All in.” Wally didn’t even glance down at his cards. He looked the Devil in the flaming eyes and put on his stone cold poker expression. No emotion, no thoughts, just confidence.

  “Interesting. I suppose I’ll take that bet. Double or nothing Wally, flip ‘em.” The Devil reached down and flipped over his cards, and Wally did the same.

  In front of the Devil was the ace of spades, and the king of spades, a powerful hand that was nearly unbeatable. Wally nodded in approval and looked down at his own cards. His hand consisted of the seven of clubs, and the two of diamonds.

  “Hahahaha!” The Devil roared in laughter. He spread his arms wide, making clenched fists in triumph. Wally watched the Devil celebrate and had to blink to clear his eyes. He thought for a moment a pair of giant wings had sprouted out of the pinstriped suit. His eyes cleared, he saw he was in error. No wings were there.

  “Come on Nick. I got things to do. Let’s see these cards.” Wally picked at his front teeth with his fingernail, illustrating how unimpressed he was with the Devil’s hand.

  “Oh Wally, you gloated when you won, spare me a little joy over this dramatic turn of events, yes?” The Devil leaned forward, a Cheshire grin spreading on his face.

  Wally ignored the sinister King of Demons. “You haven’t won anything yet. Let’s do this.”

  The Devil’s nose wrinkled, as he barely contained his impulse of fury at the insolence Wally was sending his way now. The Lord of Darkness had little patience for pricks like Wally. However, a deal is a deal, and Old Scratch was pot committed. The Devil tugged at the air, and as if it were connected to an invisible string, the top card flew off the deck, immolating itself. Before the puff of smoke had dissipated into the casino ceiling, the next three cards were flat on the table, revealing the developing hand.

  Wally leaned over the table, clearly not surprised by what had come down. The Devil looked to Wally’s face and saw the lack of alarm. The Devil’s eyes, full of restrained rage, darted down and analyzed the cards.

  The two of clubs, the seven of hearts, and the seven of diamonds appeared. The Devil’s upper lip twitched. His nose wrinkled once more in disgust. The Devil was being betrayed by Lady Luck. Normally she was in his corner.

  “Do you wanna fold? Or do you want to take this all the way out to the bitter end Nick?” Wally asked the Devil in a smarmy tone. The Devil’s eyes shot back up to Wally’s, glowing red like oven coils. Wally recoiled from the heat.

  “This seems… unfair Wallace. At the very least I suspect you may have cheated me. There are grave consequen
ces for cheating the Prince of Darkness you know.” The Devil dragged his fingernails across the felt, ripping rents in the green fabric as easily as tearing tissue.

  “Nah, nope. I’m playing by your rules. Your fault on this. Flip the next two, you’ll see.” Wally pointed a finger at the deck, all the while staring at the growing black talons erupting from the end of the Devil’s long fingertips. The olive skin was splitting apart around the nail bloodlessly, like clay cracking in the heat.

  “As you wish Wallace.” The Devil’s voice had changed. It had gotten deeper. Wally noticed the Devil’s canine teeth had grown, and his jaw seemed to be jutting out. The pinstripes on the suit had gotten wider as well, as if the suit was now being stretched apart by the wearer.

  The Devil looked back to the deck and in rapid succession the top card burned into ash, a second card came out, another burst into flames, and the final card came after. The entire hand had been revealed.

  “Haha, look at that.” Wally laughed and pointed at the remaining cards on the table.

  The Devil grunted and turned his head downwards to the cards. Wally noticed his forehead seemed shiny, and the skin tight. He noticed two bumps growing near the temples, just above the brow and pressing their way up through the skin. It looked quite painful to Wally.

  The final two cards of the Devil’s poker game were the remaining seven in the deck, and the two of hearts. Once again Wally had defeated the Devil at his own game.

  “Take your pick, you can choose to lose to sevens full of deuces, or deuces full of sevens. Full house Devil, I win. I told you.”

  The skin stretched across the Devil’s forehead popped with a ripping sound as two black horns pierced the flesh like curved obsidian stalagmites. They grew to a foot’s length in the blink of an eye as the Devil bared a mouth filled with razor sharp yellowed teeth. His pearly whites were long gone.

  “I... do not understand. You should have lost.” The demonic face of the evolving, mutating Devil still had the capacity to show confusion. He looked left and right at the cards arrayed in front of him, trying to make sense of how he’d lost.

  Wally leaned forward, almost apologetic in his approach. “Look, you TOLD me I’d win every pot I played until I died if I won that first hand. I won the first hand, and this was the next hand. You told me I’d win. The Devil’s in the details man, of all people to remember that, I would’ve thought it would be you.”

  The Devil’s body exploded in crimson light, forcing Wally to shield his eyes. His forearm was bright red from the heat when he pulled it away and looked. The Devil had returned to his pinstripe suit wearing, dashingly handsome prior form. Presently he had both hands on his stomach, and was letting loose a laugh that shook the chandeliers in the casino. Wally didn’t know what to make of the situation, so he joined in on the Devil’s self deprecating laughter.

  “So I did Wallace, so I did. You know, I must be getting rusty. This is the third one of these I’ve muffed this week. Man that’s frustrating. You people are getting clever. Too much cable television maybe.” The Devil smiled, and shook his head at his own folly.

  “Yeah well Nick, I guess you can’t win them all, right?” Wally shrugged, offering up some comfort to Lucifer.

  “Haha.. No Wally I guess not. Doesn't matter if I stack the deck sometimes or not. Good times Wallace. Oh hey, you know what’s funny about all this?” The Devil asked, half in a laugh.

  “What?” Wally asked through a smile.

  “I said you’d win every pot for the rest of your life, right? Hahahaha…” The Devil’s laughter was barely contained. Wally was reminded of when he was a young kid, and he came down with a case of the late night giggles. His mom used to call them “Wallygigglefits.”

  “Yeah, and I plan on using that prize to gain fame, and fortune. I'm going to pay for my kid's drug rehab too, and bank some child support payments to get that bitch off my back. You also said that if I won this second hand, I’d get into Heaven too, no questions asked.” Wally sighed in appreciation of this tremendous victory over the Devil, and over evil. His life had finally taken the turn for the better he knew he deserved.

  Absent of laughter, the Devil said, “Yeah, well, I’m a poor loser Wally. Plus I never said how many pots you’d have the chance to play. Have fun in Heaven. I'm gonna swing by Malibu and say hi to your kid on the way home.”

  Wally looked down at the Devil just as his head came off his shoulders.

  The Devil watched Wally’s head roll away down the casino aisle between the roulette tables and the craps tables. It bobbled sideways several times, and spun in a circle until it came to a rest against a velvet rope stand. Wally's eyes were stuck wide open, staring back at the Devil in shock. Lucifer stood up and licked the warm red blood off his hand like an infernal cat. Once he was clean of Wally’s vitae, he adjusted his blood red tie, and walked away.

  “Can’t win ‘em all is right Wallace. A lesson I wish I could learn.”

  Adrian's Undead Diary

  When I was growing up in rural New Hampshire, my friends and I used to spend lots and lots of time doing three things; adventuring in the woods, playing Dungeons and Dragons, and watching the original zombie movies that kick started the genre.

  When we weren't rolling dice, or going on long expeditions into the woods in search of adventure, we'd stay up late into the wee hours, hatching our plans in the event the apocalypse via zombie came into reality. I cannot emphasize how many hours we poured into these plans. To say they were extensive would be an epic understatement. These are some of my fondest memories and I'd relive them in a heartbeat if I could.

  Joe, one of my best friends (and still one of my best friends, going on 25 years later) loved my ability to be a dungeon master and loved the silly short stories I wrote for creative writing class, and he begged me for years to write a story about all of our old zombie survival plans. "Do it," he said a thousand times, mimicking a goon from Goodfellas.

  In the summer of 2010 I had a chance meeting with the godfather of the zombie craze at Rock N Shock in Massachusetts; George Romero. Ten minutes with George was one of the coolest things I've ever been able to do, and when I left the show that day I said to myself, "Self, write Joe that story. If George and friends can do it, so can you." I won't tell you about how I pulled up my shorts to show him a tattoo on my thigh. Nope, that's not coming up in casual conversation.

  I started writing a day or two later, after coming up with a loose plot incorporating some of the ideas we hatched as kids. In a single night I wrote 25 pages of what would become AUD, and I sent it off to Joe with the message: Here bud, here's that story for you.

  My intention was to write a chapter or two a week, send it to Joe, and we'd have fun with it. After Joe read the start of it, he wrote me back and asked, "What are we doing with this, because it's good, people will like it, and you should share it."

  I fought him at first. Me? Share my writing? Fuck that. That would invite criticism and ridicule. He wouldn't take no for an answer, and he built a website, and we started to post the entries and such, and the world was introduced to Adrian Ring. Day one we had 23 visitors, and 444 hits. I'll never forget those numbers.

  AUD exploded. Within days we had fifty regular readers a day, and within weeks a hundred. A month saw us reach a few hundred, and within six months we had thousands of daily readers, all chomping at the bit for me to post the next entry in Adrian's journal.

  Now, it's published in book form, and is being translated into German by Voodoo Press. Audio books are in process. It's been read by over fifty thousand people, and book one, Dark Recollections, has a 4.81 average review on Amazon. The subsequent books in the series are even higher rated.

  I've got shirts now, hats, stickers, and more. It's a thing.

  Adrian is flawed. He begins the story arrogant, cocky, and sure he's the best person for the job. He's wrong, but he'll figure that out in time. He's also funny. And foul mouthed. But he loves his cat Otis, and reading with him, inside his he
ad as he spills it all out in his journal you'll learn to love the big guy, whether he deserves it or not. Alongside his entries you'll find short stories inserted that expand the scope of the world of AUD, and fill in the blanks that Adrian couldn't know about. AUD is raw. It's spiritual in a way that's hard to describe. It's changed lives, and more than mine. It's fan base is rabid. I'm a lucky guy for having written it.

  Here's a sampler of the start of Dark Recollections, the beginning of the eight book epic of Adrian's Undead Diary.

  Enjoy.

  September 21st

  It’s pretty fucking cold out tonight. The big ass plastic thermometer on the tree outside says its 35F out tonight. I’m glad I figured out where the emergency generator is here, otherwise I would be freezing my balls off now. Despite the fact that this place was kind of a bitch to clear out, I’m glad I did it. It’s got everything I need to survive for a long time.

  I don’t even really know where to start. It’s a Tuesday today. At least I know what day it is. Someone in the main office building was wise enough to buy their calendar early this year so it’ll be easy for me to keep track of the days until the end of next year. After that I guess I’ll have to use some of the graph paper and make my own calendar. That’s being pretty optimistic though. The way the last few months have been I’ll be goddamn lucky to make Christmas, let alone next Christmas.

  I decided to start writing this mainly to keep track of my daily activities and to have a way to purge my nugget. Frankly I talk to myself way too goddamn much to be mentally healthy and I was always told that writing a journal helped. Sooo.. let’s call this my journal. Thank God for spell check. I also realize that now is not the best time to be writing. I’m using up some of my gasoline to run the generator, which is basically a waste, and honestly having any lights on at night draws them in. Moths to a flame as the old saying goes. But I can’t sleep and I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time now. Having the electricity back has set a fire under my ass to do this.