Undead Ed

by Rotterly Ghoulstone

  The one thing I was seriously failing to outrun was my own stink. Back when I was alive, I might have been guilty of the odd smelly armpit or a few secret bits that only got a wash on the weekends, but now everything stank: my teeth, my hair, the backs of my hands. I could even smell my own face…and it was ripe.

  “Arm!” I screamed, desperately looking for a manhole cover so I could figure out where the heck I was. “Arm! I know you’re down here somewhere! You belong to me! GET back here and face me like a—like a man’s arm!”

  An eerie, almost demonic cackle echoed through the sewer. It gave me shivers up what was left of my spine.

  Then I saw the note.

  It was pinned to a drainpipe and dripping in what appeared to be some sort of black mucus. The writing looked like blood, but I couldn’t be sure. I snatched at it almost on instinct and felt a sickness rising in my stomach as I read the words:

  Hellllo, Loser,

  It’s me—your left hand. You can probably tell—nobody else spells Hellllo with four l’s. Get ready for a dark surprise, Ed…because I’ve been waiting for this moment for YEARS.

  On the day you electrocuted yourself, all those moons ago, I woke up and found myself inhabiting your pathetic stringy limb. I’ve been fighting for control ever since. Remember that scaffolding accident when you were twelve? I did that on purpose. You probably don’t remember, but I actually slapped you on the back of the head after you fell. You see, I’ve always had the feeling that I’d be free if I ever managed to kill you, Ed, and—as it turns out—I was right.

  I wrote you this letter because I felt you twitching and I wanted to gloat. How or why you’re back from the dead, I don’t know—but I DO know I’ll kill you if I ever run into you again.

  Got any problems with all that? TALK TO THE HAND!

  I froze, and the note slipped out of my shaking fingers. What was all this madness? What had I done to deserve any of this?

  I caught sight of my reflection in the shimmering glow of the drainpipe and almost threw up. I looked like a road accident, which I guess I should have expected since technically I was one. I felt sick and hungry. I knew I had to forget my traitorous arm for the time being and get out of the sewer—and fast.

  When you’re dead, you think exactly the same way as you did when you were alive, so my first instinct on finding myself in a strange place like this was just to go home.

  But you can’t go home when you’re dead. Ever.

  I didn’t know that then, so I tried to do it anyway. But as I began to hunt through the maze of tunnels for a way out, I ran into something right out of a horror movie, something that made me look like a little fairy princess…

  I heard the growl before I saw the outline of the thing that had made it. If I’d seen the face first, I might have added my own stink to the sewer.

  There, crouched slightly above me on a metal scaffold beneath an open manhole cover, was a moving shape covered in patchy brown fur.

  I froze and gulped some fetid air.

  “Hello?”

  “Grrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.”

  The snarl that came from the creature was the most wild, feral noise I’d ever heard.

  I swallowed a few times. “Look, I think I might have died, and my arm’s gone off and—”

  I took a step back as the creature dropped onto the sewer floor, peeling apart its lips to reveal a mouth full of giant teeth and thick, dripping gums.

  “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaarggggghh.”

  “The thing is…um…”

  As the beast crouched, ready to spring, I turned and ran as fast as my stiff, undead legs would carry me, down tunnel after tunnel after tunnel, twisting left, turning right, leaping pipes, and ducking walkways. I could hear the thing behind me at every step, galloping forward on all fours, moving like a racehorse as it sniffed and slobbered, hunting me down.

  When it caught me, I was taken off my feet with such force that I felt like a pin hit with a bowling ball. I hurtled to the ground in a furious ball of teeth and claws and screamed like a banshee when the crazed beast bit a massive chunk from my leg.

  My flesh still hanging in its terrible jaws, I flailed around with my single remaining arm, snatched up a loose piece of pipe from the sewer floor, and scrambled until I managed to reach the creature. Then, with every last ounce of strength I could muster, I brought the pipe down hard across the creature’s twisted, mangy skull.

  “Yiiiiiiiargghgghghghghghgghghghghh!”

  The cry echoed throughout the sewer, a frantic, petrifying, canine howl of pain that pierced my ears.

  The pipe was fiercely snatched from my grasp and a voice said, “What on earth do you think you’re doing, meathead? Are you nuts?”

  My instinct made me look around for the source of the voice. Almost as a last resort, my searching eyes came to rest on the still-ravenous face of my attacker.

  “D-did you speak?” I gasped, ready to try for the pipe again.

  The beast nodded. “Yes! What’s wrong with you? Why did you hit me in the face with this?”

  I scrambled back onto my feet…which took longer than I’d hoped.

  “M-me? What are you? You just, like, seriously attacked me!”

  Astonishingly, the beast seemed to relax a bit.

  “I’m Max Moon,” it said. “I’m a registered werewolf, and I’m your assigned DB…er…that stands for Dead Buddy. I attacked you so you wouldn’t get eaten. Sorry about the growling thing—I’m a bit of a joker.”

  I stood in the half-dark for a few seconds, looking down at my new wounds and trying to work this all out.

  “You ate some of my leg so that no one else…er…eats me?”

  Max shrugged.

  “I didn’t eat your leg—I bit you to leave my mark. Trust me, it helps if you’ve got a wolf mark—keeps all the other wolves at bay. You’ll be okay with the vampires since they don’t touch zombies. Anyway, biting you seems to have taken that green glow away, but don’t bother to thank me or anything…”

  With that, he turned and began to lope off—I had to run at full speed just to keep up with him. As we hurtled along in the murky sewer, I was filled to bursting with questions for Max, and they all came tumbling out. Things like “Where are we?” and “What do I eat?” came a close second to the more pressing ones like “Have you seen my evil arm?” and “Wait up—I’m a ZOMBIE?”

  LESSON 6: KNOWING WHEN TO RUN

  Max didn’t answer any of my questions. In fact, he almost completely ignored me as we moved faster and faster through the sewer.

  It was only when we reached a heavy metal door cleverly concealed behind a section of fake pipe work that he turned around, very slowly, and bared those horrific teeth again.

  “I want you to listen to what I say now, very carefully…and I don’t want you to say anything until I’m finished. Understand?”

  I nodded, grateful for the attention.

  “First, you stink worse than my last dump of the day—but that’s because you’re effect-ively a rotting corpse…and it’s not your fault. We’ll get you some air freshener, which should take off the edge—okay?”

  “Er…yeah?”

  “Good—glad that’s cleared up. Now, see this door? It leads to the Undergraves: that’s the name we give to the maze of tunnels beneath Mortlake Cemetery.”

  “We’re still in Mortlake?”

  “I’ll ignore that. Now, we’re going to run quite quickly…and if you see a fat baby, I want you to leap onto my back and hold on tight with your one arm.”

  “Wait a minute—a fat baby?”

  “Did you get all that?”

  “Yeah, but seriously—”

  “Just do as you’re told and we’ll both be fine.”

  As Max turned to wrench at the door with his hairy hands, I wondered—and not for the first time—if he was actually insane. First he’d bitten off half my leg and now he was telling me to watch out for fat babies? Had I seriously landed the world’s only lunatic Dead Buddy?


  The door flew open and Max started to run. I tried to keep up with him once again, and we both hurried through the weird, earthy passageways. I noticed that there were holes above us at regular intervals. My stomach turned over as I thought of all the dead people who’d been stashed over our heads, lying there in ancient coffins, crumbling to dust in the—

  A little blur flashed across a tunnel section behind us. I heard it before I saw it and spun around to see if I could fix my gaze on the shape. No good—it had vanished completely.

  Not wanting to bother Max, I continued to follow him down several new passages, but I was looking over my shoulder the whole time, wondering if I might be going a bit nuts myself.

  Is my deranged arm coming after us? Could it be that—

  The flash appeared again, only this time it slowed to a blur, scrambling along the walls and ceiling with such incredible speed that I almost bit my tongue as I jumped out of my skin in shock.

  “Fat baby!” I screamed. “FAT BABY!”

  I catapulted myself onto Max’s back and he took off like a rogue missile. Within seconds, we were bombing it along the tunnels so fast that I could hear my hair ripping sparks from the roof. I risked a quick glance back and soon wished I hadn’t.

  “Faster!” I yelled at Max. “There’re hundreds of them! It’s a fat baby army!”

  The description was actually pretty accurate—the things following us looked exactly like newborn babies, albeit extremely overweight ones with glaring eyes and rows of razor-sharp teeth.

  That was when Max truly furred up. While I was still clinging frantically to his back, his bones began to crack and expand, twisting and turning under all the flesh and the hair so it looked as though he was spawning an alien or something. As I desperately tried to keep hold of him, he morphed from a two-legged wolfman into a giant, rampaging canine monster…and he started to move at a speed that made my teeth ache.

  Unfortunately, the fat babies were just as fast. As we shot along each new tunnel in a maddening blur, the little critters were snapping, biting, and shearing tiny scraps of flesh from my back and Max’s ankles. I could feel every near-bite, every sharp pinch as those needle teeth missed their mark by a fraction of an inch. I closed my eyes and prayed—then realized I was dead anyway so praying probably wasn’t much use.

  Then, all of a sudden, everything changed. There was a breathtaking rush of air, a stomach-churning, gut-thrusting leap upward, and I felt the outside air hit my face in a cold gust.

  We were slowing to a careful sprint. There were gravestones all around us and the full moon was high in the sky. The familiar sight of Mortlake spread out below us, and I breathed an audible sigh of relief when I realized I could no longer feel the nail-biting terror of being followed.

  Max padded to a halt and half-dropped, half-dumped me on a fresh grave.

  “Those things,” he panted, morphing back into a sort of hairy teenage tramp, “are ghouls. Try to avoid them if you can—they eat the dead.” He saw the look on my face and added, “Yeah, I know they look like fat babies. Pretty gross, huh? They tunnel into new graves from below and devour the corpses. I hate ’em. Oh, welcome home, by the way!” He grinned wolfishly and pointed at the gravestone behind me. “I can give you a few minutes if you want—some folks find this part…um…hard to deal with.”

  I nodded vacantly and turned to look at the message carved on the stone. It said:

  LESSON 7: ASK A LOT OF QUESTIONS

  I looked at the gravestone and back at Max. I guessed I should have cried or at least felt something…but the only thing clouding my head was the buildup of questions that all desperately needed answering.

  I scrambled off the dirt of my own grave and struggled to my feet. It was like doing a one-armed push-up, but eventually I managed it.

  “I was buried?”

  Max nodded.

  “B-but how could I have been? Surely, I just died.”

  Max peered around him, then up at the moon. He sniffed the air—once, twice, three times before staring back at me with a suddenly wary look in his eyes. He seemed distracted by something, something that scared him. It was a while before he spoke again.

  “You died last Monday, Ed. Your mangled body was found at the scene and sewn back together for the burial, which was on Friday. You would probably still be in your grave, but you died while under a powerful curse…so you’re back. Sorry, dude, but it’s true—your possessed arm clawed its way, towing you, into the tunnels after a bunch of ghouls came to eat you. Um…you were still unconscious while all that was happening, which was probably for the best.”

  “But…my arm—”

  “Ripped six ghouls into shreds, yeah. That’s why I’ve been watching you for so long—I was waiting for it to detach before I came to get you. No way I’m messing with that thing.” Max stared at my empty arm socket and, for a few seconds, looked as though he was about to tell me something important. Then he seemed to change his mind. “Look, you have questions, Ed—I get that—but I’m lousy at explaining stuff to people. You really need to speak to the leader of our…er…gang.”

  “You have a gang?”

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  I tried to do as I was told and keep quiet, but I just couldn’t hold back the tide of curiosity welling up inside me. “I am a zombie, though? You told me that much! Are zombies…er…a bit pathetic?”

  Max shrugged. “Not always. It’s all ups and downs, you know. Being undead sucks.”

  An icy wind had blown up from the coast road, and I was surprised to find myself feeling cold. It got slightly more chilly, however, when part of my face fell off.

  “What on earth?” I looked down at a small section of my own bloodied cheek, which looked a bit like a piece of jelly on the ground.

  “Get used to that,” Max warned. “It’s likely to happen a lot—just let it go. Don’t try to stick it back on or anything. The parts that fall off of their own accord tend to smell worse than the parts that hold on.”

  “So what happens now?” I asked, trying not to get tearful as a whiff of my own stink almost made me gag. I would have hugged myself for comfort, but—with just one arm—what was the point?

  Max motioned for me to climb onto his back once more.

  “We need to get to Mortlake Middle School by sunrise.”

  “The school? My school? B-but what if someone I know—”

  “The living don’t see or hear the dead,” he said as I clambered onto his back and prepared myself. “We can see and hear them, but it’s like background static—you know, weird shapes and sounds.”

  “Like ghosts?”

  “Exactly. Now, just hold on—we’re going through the trees—it’s safer that way. If anything major falls off, give a shout and I’ll double back.”

  I clamped on tight. We started off at a decent pace, and the air began to rush through my stringy, undead hair.

  LESSON 8: HIDE WELL

  Max Moon could smell danger a mile off. Unfortunately, his way of dealing with that sense of danger seemed to be to stop without any warning and dump me unceremoniously in the dirt.

  I hit the ground while still in the position of holding onto Max’s back and bounced along like a basketball until I hit a tree. When I eventually rolled to a halt, I checked myself for more missing bits, but the only bad development seemed to involve my right eye leaking some sort of pus that smelled like a cross between peanut butter and dog turds.

  “Eugghh!” I moaned.

  “Shh! Shut up, will you!”

  Max was crouching on his haunches between the trees, sniffing the air and scraping up some turf with his bare feet.

  I hope he’s not going to take a dump, I thought. I wouldn’t know where to look…

  Fortunately, Max quickly lowered himself onto his stomach and put one ear to the ground instead.

  “We need to get into the trees,” he growled. “It’s coming.”

  Leaping up, he dug his powerful claws into the bark and shinnied up it. Fo
r a few seconds, I genuinely thought he’d just left me there. Then there was some movement from the lower branches and a furry hand appeared.

  “Here, take hold!”

  I reached up and Max pulled me into the tree. We climbed a bit farther and both slithered onto the highest branch overlooking the path through the wood.

  “What are we hiding from?” I whispered.

  Max rolled his eyes. “What do you think?”

  I didn’t hear any noise, but looking down, I could see something moving through the shadows.

  Max signaled for silence by raising a hairy finger to his lips, and we both held our breath as my hand appeared on the path.

  It still looked like nothing more than a severed arm, but there was a sort of demonic confidence in the way the fingers spider-climbed along, dragging the limb after them.

  The arm worked its way underneath the trees but stopped when it reached ours and began to rise like a snake, balancing on the hand.

  I looked up at Max, but he was frozen with fear.

  We both lay deadly still, willing the evil terror below to shrink away, but it didn’t.

  The arm stayed exactly where it was for several long minutes.

  Then it flopped over again and crawled away, every bit as quickly as it had arrived.

  “Awesome,” Max whispered. “It’s going the wrong way!”

  I smiled with equal relief and was about to jump back down from the tree when Max snatched hold of me and held me back. “Wait!”

  There was a low rumble, and a line of earth began to spew out of the ground. It ran all the way along the path, as if a team of particularly determined moles was tunneling beneath it.

  The line ran out of the woods and seemed to trail after the arm.

  Finally, Max jumped out of the tree, landing easily. Sadly, he had to catch me when I tried and failed to do the same.