by J. S. Volpe
* * *
After leaving Moe’s, the Zombie Hill Boys had followed the road south until they came to a stretch of woods in the midst of which sat a dilapidated shack that looked as if it would collapse at the next puff of wind.
This was the Boys’ hideout. Their original hideout, located atop Zombie Hill, had become too insecure. When they’d started their life of crime as highway bandits, they’d foolishly named themselves the Zombie Hill Boys, a mistake they compounded by dramatically announcing that name to all their victims. It was only after returning from a robbery one night and finding a dozen constables waiting for them in their hideout (and thankfully they managed to escape said constables without any arrests or loss of life) that they realized how terribly unwise their choice of name had been.
Hence their new hideout, an unnamed derelict house in an unnamed, unsettled area, which meant that not even the dumbest member of the group (Bone Boy, without question) could reveal the location of their hideout without detailed instructions.
The Boys gathered in the house’s large living room, in which sat a hooch still, five chairs, a table, a stack of barrels, a pile of pre-Cataclysm porno magazines, and the Boys’ only decoration, an unclothed female department store mannequin that was missing its left arm.
“Well now, bodoes,” said Daddy Vermin, the group’s founder and leader. He was the oldest and smartest of them and had invented most of the Boys’ special lingo, which was designed to be utterly incomprehensible to anyone not in the know. “We gots to make like tips and get our schnobs on the oraction, got it?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Bone Boy. “You’re yammin’ what the oboe nobarbs, daddinger-one.”
“Hoovit!” said the Hatcheteer, the youngest member of the group. “But we need a skip-belly of the g-bombs. Else we’ll be lining it like smushy boxes.”
“Troot!” said Bone Boy. “Pulsin’s no good without the g-bombs!”
Daddy Vermin nodded. “You’re all so stinky-sweet. We take a sepper of the bombs.”
“Fuzzy!” shouted Mosquito. He nodded his head rapidly, his long brown hair flying, and smiled a broad, bleary smile. While the others had been talking, he’d already helped himself to some of the still’s output.
The Hatcheteer grinned. “This gonna be scrolled, bodoes! Scrolled! Aftertime droolers are gonna be throatin’ us, I say!”
The Brooder, who sat morosely in a chair in a corner, his sad eyes fixed on the floor, sighed and said, “I could gull some throatin’. But throatin’ never jizzles for the Brooder.”
The Hatcheteer rolled his eyes. “With a twennercent of the glitz, you’ll have a post-p of pinkoles all set to throat you.”
Daddy Vermin laughed and nodded again. “Spoot!” He waved an arm at a pile of bottles next to the still. “Glug it in, forkers, and we’ll get our schnobs goin’!” His eyes narrowed. “And if any tin-gray tries to cade us, we’ll glussify ‘em!”