by D. M. Guay
“Jealous?” Kevin shot me four thumbs up—well, you get the idea—as DeeDee rained kisses on him. “Don't just stand there, dipshit. Pour me a drink. I've had a hell of a night.”
It took longer than usual to ride home. Apparently, when a hundred people who have been turned into mindless zombies by the local hamburger stand trample your bike, the frame and wheels bend. And bust the gears. And the chain falls off. Like ten times. On one ride home.
When I stepped in the front door, Mom was in the kitchen getting ready for work. She stood comatose by the coffee machine, as usual, until she saw me. Then she perked up. “Oh my goodness, honey? Are you okay? What happened?”
“I had a rough night.” And I looked it, too. Yeah. I still had salt, embalming fluid, and Larry slime all over me. Did I forget to mention that the employee shower was cursed? It sprayed acid, not water. No magic shower for me. Faust was spritzing it with curse breaker as we speak.
Mom started crying. “You tell me right now what you do all night. I know something is up. Look at you. And all that money? What's going on?”
Angel eight ball hit my foot, leaking red. “Remember, lying to your parents is a sin.”
Yeah, yeah. I know. Thanks for the assist.
While my Mom cried and checked me over for injuries, my brain spun. What the hell was I going to tell her?
Something stiff appeared under my shirt. (Not that. Get your mind out of the gutter.) I sunk my hand under the hem and pulled out a manila envelope. The label read, “Loan agreement between Asmodius Faust and Lloyd Lamb Wallace.”
Oh. This must be my blank check. My reward.
I thought about it. Huh. A loan. That was a great excuse. A logical, easy answer for Mom. It would explain the money.
“It's a lie, though,” angel said. “From a devil.”
I looked at Mom. Her sad eyes, her tears, the worry wrinkle, and my mind reeled.
After a minute or two, I said, “Look. Working at Dairy Mart is dangerous. All kinds of crazy people wander in. Stuff's always exploding or breaking. Mr. Faust, my boss, pays me well because it's dangerous. He can't find good people to work there, so he'll do anything to keep me. He says I'm doing a good job.”
“But—” Mom had stopped crying, but that worry wrinkle was still super duper deep.
“The money? My boss knew I was in debt. I was looking for other jobs because I needed money. He helped me out. He paid my bills.”
The manila envelope? The writing disappeared, and so did the thick stack of papers inside. It was empty. I didn't cash my blank check. As crazy as it sounds, lying to my Mom just felt too bad.
“Oh, honey.” She hugged me. Big mistake. She was definitely gonna need another shower before work. “I'm so sorry I doubted you. I'm so proud of you. My baby boy.”
Angel eight ball hit my shoe. “Holy crap. You pulled it off. You didn't lie. Sure, you equivocated a little, you that's not technically lying.”
Ugh. Shut up. I kicked him away.
Mom eventually let me out of her death grip hug and left for work. I took a very long shower, extra soap. Seriously, like two whole bars. Then I crawled into bed. I sunk into a pile of nice warm covers, exhausted. Gertrude snuggled up next to me and purred—alive, totally not smited by God—and for the first time in a long time, I felt like maybe, just maybe, the worst was behind me. Everything was going to be all right.
So of course, that's when a tiny green portal opened right above my head. Kevin dove out. He landed on my chest and started waving around a triangle of black plastic. “Do you wanna explain to me exactly what happened to my Zebra record? You had one job, kid. One!”
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
“What the hell was that?” Kevin dropped the sad remains of his Zebra album and put his fists up, karate style.
I sat up. Gertrude hissed.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
We all turned to the closet. My employee manual emerged from underneath a pile of ugly wool sweaters my Great Aunt Edna had knitted me for Christmas. It growled at us, then snapped up one of my dirty french fry and zombie guts soaked socks and dragged it back to its closet hobo lair.
“Jesus Christ! Don't tell me.” Kevin shook his head. “You still haven't read your employee manual, have you?”
Thank you so, so much for reading Monster Burger. The adventure continues in Angel Trouble!
If you like horror comedy, get “Monsters in Your Inbox” by clicking here or going to http://eepurl.com/czs0Rr.
Book Sausage
“What the hell is up with the title on this page?”
Yeah, yeah. I know you're thinking that. Well, twist my arm, and I'll tell you. You know that old adage: No one wants to know how the sausage is made? I disagree. Sometimes, you just really really HAVE TO KNOW what unholy substance was ground up to make your meat. Or in this case, your book. That's why I'm pulling back the curtain, so you can see how this author killed, chopped, molded, and stuffed all of her life tidbits into the book you hold in your hands right now.
Hi, guys! Welcome to the end of yet another 24/7 Demon Mart book. I am SO amped that you're here. Seriously, it means the world to me. It's May 22, 2020, and a lot has happened since The Graveyard Shift was released last October. (I did NOT see Pandemic 2020 coming, did you?)
First, Podium Audio will be producing the audiobook editions of the 24/7 Demon Mart series, and they have hired voice actor Todd Haberkorn to narrate. I am over the moon. He's been part of so many shows that I love: Ben 10, One Piece, Attack on Titan, One Punch Man, Tokyo Ghoul, AND the World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, and Resident Evil 2 and 3 video games. Yeah. He rocks, and I can't wait to hear him bring Kevin, Bubby, Lloyd, and the rest of the gang to life.
And, because of you, dear readers, we've been able to donate $1,587 to the Kidney Cancer Research Alliance since March 2019, and $910 to food banks in Ohio in 2020, since this stupid C virus popped onto the scene, causing demand for food assistance to rise. So thank you for supporting me. I donate part of my book sales to charity every month. I'm not a Stephen King-level big money author with millions to spare by any stretch, but hey. We all have to do what we can. Be the good in a hard world, right?
As if all this good news isn't enough, I am also in remission. I have stage 4 kidney cancer. It totally sucks, long story. But, by some miracle, I have made it into the eight percent of patients who have a “complete response” to immunotherapy, meaning there are no visible tumors on my scans. I'm incredibly grateful. Of course, I don't know how long it will last. Three months, ten years, forever? Whatever it is, I'll take it. Because life is beautiful and I want MORE!
I never dreamed the Demon Mart series would receive so much love. I didn't even think I'd live long enough to write these books, but here we are. Holy cow. We made it people, and it's been a wild ride!
Now, let's talk about zombies.
The first zombie movie I ever saw was Return of the Living Dead. It played on endless repeat on cable TV in the late 1980s, and young, rural country bumpkin me was hooked. OMG. I'd never seen anything like it. I tuned in to watch every single time it was on. This movie was a magical combination for me. It was scary. It was funny. And the soundtrack? Amazing. I mean, The Cramps? Hello! I can't point to this movie as the reason I became punk rock and dyed my hair pink, purple or blue—I blame that squarely on the Missing Person's “Words” video—but I do still love The Cramps. And zombies. And horror comedy. And this movie, like so hard.
(Let's agree not to talk about the sequels. Return of the Living Dead 2? Groan. I don't even know what was up with that Tar man. Seriously. Couldn't they just use the same suit from the first movie? Shoot. Now we're talking about the sequels, aren't we? Crap. All right. You got me. The only one I liked was No. 3, the one with the punk rock chick with the piercings. Moving on.)
Now, when I was making Monster Burger, I tried really hard to include all of my favorite bits and pieces of the zombie fiction formula. Like the trope about how humans pretty much always act like
zombies, at least a little bit, all the time. Which is why they wander the mall after they die in Dawn of the Dead, and why the main characters never notice that the zombie apocalypse has begun until it's too late. Waaaaay too late. (My favorite use of this trope is in Shaun of the Dead, when Shaun walks past a dozen zombies on his way to the store and doesn't even notice.)
But I also tried to dig deeper. I love a snarling legit dead zombie as much as the next guy, but those weren't your standard zombie until Night of the Living Dead lurched onto the scene in 1968. Before that, most movie zombies were created by magic—usually voodoo—and were living, enslaved people beholden to their magical creator. Bela Lugosi's 1932 White Zombie created the mold for the genre, by featuring Lugosi as magical master enslaving the living via clever use of magic and pharmaceuticals. (Along with your standard offensive stereotypes of island residents. Ahem. Moving on...) It really wasn't until George Romero came along that zombies turned primarily into walking, flesh-eating dead people.
Don't get me wrong. I love all the Romero films and was totally stoked to run into his Dawn of the Dead and Creepshow DP, Mike Gornick, at a horror movie festival last October. Yes, I geeked hard and got an autograph!
But I hope that my burger zombies paid appropriate homage to all the magic zombies that came before George transformed the genre. My magic zombie inspiration came from old 1930s and 40s voodoo zombie movies, as well as the books DeeDee mentions—The Magic Island and The Serpent and the Rainbow. They are real books about Haitian voodoo and include legends of living people turned into zombie slaves. The Magic Island by William Seabrook debuted in 1929 and was the inspiration for White Zombie and all the zombie films that followed. It's a dated book, but it's also the reason zombies are a thing at all in pop culture.
And if you're wondering about my use of salt as the cure: That isn't made up. There is a link to salt and zombification in real life. Stories suggest that people were drugged into a zombie-like state so they could be used as slave labor on large island plantations. In some accounts, food fed to the living zombies contained no salt. The working theory is the food was drugged, and not salting it alerted the zombies' handlers just in case they ate out of the wrong pot at lunch time. According to Alfred Metraux's 1959 book Voodoo in Haiti, the folk belief is that salt ends zombification. So yeah. I took that whole salt idea and ran with it.
I totes stole the idea for the zombie containment collars as well. They were inspired by the horror comedy movie Fido, which in my humble opinion, is an overlooked gem. I have included a short list of my favorite overlooked zombie films below.
We also have some special guest stars in Monster Burger. Gertrude was inspired by a cat my family adopted when I was in the third grade. She was fat, gray and had three-legs. (She'd been caught in an animal trap, and no one wanted to adopt her. I did a 4H veterinary medicine project about three-legged cats that won a rosette ribbon at the county fair. Yes, I'm bragging. I still have the ribbon.) She lived to the ripe old age of twenty, and at the end was blind, mostly deaf and liked to pee all over everything.
Steve from the plant is a not even disguised version of my friend Steve. Who is from Pittsburgh, frequently refers to people as idjits, jagoffs and morons—mostly during Steelers games—and has a serious Pittsburghese accent. Like seriously. He talks just like Pittsburgh Dad. (Check him out on Youtube.) God bless him. He's got a gruff exterior, but he's all sweet genuine kindness and gold on the inside. I have no doubt that if the zombie plant in Monroeville were real, Steve would be running it and he wouldn't be putting up with any patty cake hands nonsense from any of us.
As for Kevin's Zebra album. Music is huge in my life. I love listening to music and going to shows. I once saw a Journey cover band in a Louisiana dive bar located on a bayou sandbar that you could only get to by boat. I once stood around the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival in the sweltering heat for hours waiting for Zebra to play. I'm dedicated. I lived in New Orleans for a decade, and Zebra is one of our many hometown rock stars.
Kevin's love of both Dio and Zebra are a nod to my long-time bestie Lee Williams, a true fan who is able to articulate exactly why they are awesome and why you should love them, too. We have many conversations about this. When he was a kid, Lee rode his bike to the record store to buy Zebra's album the day it was released. Sadly, he lost that copy when Hurricane Katrina flooded his house. Alas, there's no replacing it, just like there's no replacing Kevin's copy, but the music and the love lives on. (Yes, I own the album on vinyl.)
Maybe I shouldn't be telling so many stories, because they tend to come back to bite me. If you remember, in The Graveyard Shift's Book Sausage, I told you about my Mom, who passed her love of horror onto me, and about my six-month stint working the graveyard shift in a convenience store in Portland, Oregon, in the mid 1990s, for the princely sum of $4.50 an hour.
Well, I don't know how many of you read these ramblings, but my Mom did. She stepped in my front door clutching her paperback copy of The Graveyard Shift to the embroidered snowman on her sweater and said, “You never told me you were robbed at gunpoint!” Cue the sobs.
Yeah. I may have left out some of the more unseemly details of my life as they were happening, because I was young, female, and two thousand miles from home. Why worry your mom?
Now for the movies. We all know Return of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead plus sequels, 28 Days Later, etcetera etcetera. But there are so many more awesome zombie movies out there. Here's a very short list of some of my forgotten favorites!
Denise's favorite underrated and overlooked zombie movies
Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore. 1994). This is an Italian film about an outcast cemetery caretaker and his hunchbacked, Igor-like assistant who watch over the cemetery and kill the recently risen dead. In this town, some people rise from the dead as man-eating zombies seven days after they die. No one knows why, they just know it's a thing. Add in romance, great effects, and artful filming, and you've got a really well done movie that is a rare combination: equal parts horror, comedy, and art.
Fido. This is a 2006 movie about a post-zombie apocalypse world that looks suspiciously like 1950s America. Colorful, perfectly manicured towns are surrounded by fences to keep the zombie hoards out, while the affluent use collar-controlled zombies as maids and butlers. The questionably ethical corporation Zomcom runs the show, and anyone who steps out of line risks being cast out of town, left to fend for themselves on the other side of the gate, which is a barren wasteland. Naturally, things go south.
Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town (1989). When an all-female motorcycle gang looking for a good time rolls into a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere—which just happens to have a mortician/mad scientist conducting zombie experiments and an abandoned mine—what could go wrong? Someone slipped this gem to me on VHS tape back in the 1990s, and I was hooked. MTV VJ Martha Quinn, Billy Bob Thornton, and Don Calfa, who played Ernie the undertaker in Return of the Living Dead, are all in it!
Zombies of Sugar Hill. I totes love this 1974 blaxploitation zombie film, not quite as much as I love Blacula, but pretty close. When Sugar Hill's boyfriend is murdered by mob thugs, she does what any grieving woman would do. She summons the voodoo loa Baron Samedi and his army of zombies, so she can kill them all spectacularly. Duh. Thugs beware: Never take a cab out to a pigpen in the middle of nowhere. Oh, and watch out for alligators and quicksand!
BrainDead (aka Dead Alive in the US. 1992). Did you know Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame made a zombie film before he traveled to middle earth? Oh yes, he did, and it is fantastic. When a rabid Sumatran rat monkey at the Wellington Zoo bites Lionel's incredibly domineering and unpleasant elderly mother, she turns zombie. And boy, she does it spectacularly, in a slow burn gross out that builds to what might be one of the bloodiest and most fun zombie slaying scenes ever. I first saw this movie at its U.S. Premiere at a 24-hour horror movie marathon, and I have been in love with it since.
Night of the Cr
eeps. (1989) Night of the Creeps is an overlooked comedy mish mash of both sci-fi and horror comedy. Its fun. It's tacky. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and that's why it's such a fun movie. When a canister of extra terrestrial brain eating space slugs crash lands on earth, well, nothing good happens. The cryogenics lab gets wrecked, and you can forget about the spring formal. You can't resist a movie where Tom Atkins of The Fog and Creepshow fame gets to deliver this epic line: “The good news is your dates are here, the bad news is, they're dead.”
That's all for now. Stay tuned for the next 24/7 Demon Mart books, “Angel Trouble” and “Critters from the Poo Lagoon.” Coming soon! Until next time.
Who the Heck is D.M. Guay?
D.M. Guay writes about the intersection of real life with the supernatural. She's an award-winning journalist, a hobby urban farmer, a painter, and a retired roller derby player.
Her favorite things—besides books— are tiki bars, liquid eyeliner, the 1968 Camaro, 24-hour horror movie festivals, art by Picasso, rock concerts, and people who make art, despite adversity, no matter what life throws at them.
Some of the profits from her annual book sales go to research into kidney cancer treatments and cures. She has stage four kidney cancer and is still alive and kicking, two years after her oncologist said she'd be dead.
Thanks for reading. You can visit her at dmguay.com. Or, on Bookbub.
Books by D.M. Guay
24/7 Demon Mart
The Graveyard Shift: A horror comedy
Monster Burger: This one has zombies in it
Angel Trouble: A grim reaper comedy
24/7 Demon Mart Stories
(Read anytime after The Graveyard Shift)
