by Jeff Abugov
The twenty zombies, far more attracted to the scent of the Commander’s fleshy flesh than that of the scaly bug, climbed onto the flatbed and converged upon the Commander’s corpse, wholly unaware that they were stepping on, lying on, rolling on the activated keypad strapped to his lower forearm, banging on the alien symbols as they jockeyed for a better feeding position.
The ground shook more ferociously than ever before. A giant wormhole opened—twice the size of any the aliens had thus far unleashed. Hazy moments of Earth’s past randomly flickered in and out of the void as the zombies continued to stomp on the keys. Lincoln is shot; man discovers fire; Mardi Gras; the first Ice Age; Elvis in concert; pioneers travel west in covered wagons; the first two amoeba join together; the final episode of Friends; an early creature crawls out of the sea; a picnic in a park; and on and on. But it didn’t take long until the zombie’s relentless thumping cracked the light alloy casing and ruptured the sophisticated technology, and the wormhole stuck on a time long forgotten in which tens of frenzied Deinonychus were embroiled in deadly battle with two crazed Tyrannosaurus rexes. The dinosaurs stopped dead in their tracks to look into our present-day, and they were utterly confounded by what they saw. Even the highly intelligent Deinonychus could not make heads or tails of it.
The Alien Sub-Commander had been trained to assume command, but he had never been trained for conditions such as these. His army was in shambles, and the undead were converging all around. Their only hope was to outrun the zombies, but their only escape was into the wormhole behind them, into a world and toward strange beasts he knew nothing about—but the zombies were too close to give that consideration its due.
“Retreat!” he coughed as loudly as he could, then led his few hundred remaining soldiers to charge into prehistory.
The dinosaurs didn’t know what was happening. Rex and Tyrene roared. The Deinonychus shrieked. The Sub-Commander panicked and coughed out an order!
“Fire!” he shouted, and his soldiers did as instructed.
The roars, the shrieks, and the deafening explosions of the alien rifles caused Dinah to stir awake just in time to see the Sub-Commander blast a hole through Tyrene’s head exactly where Claw had been clutching her, killing them both with one shot. Dinah shrieked in horror. Rex roared in fury. The great Tyrannosaurus bolted at the aliens, as did Dinah, as did the thirty-seven remaining Deinonychus.
But despite the aliens’ impeccable accuracy, the Deinonychus’ movements were too jagged for them to get a clean shot. The Deinonychus pounced upon one bug after another, their dagger claws and razor teeth slashing through the bugs’ thoraxes, heads and abdomens. All the insects could do was keep running and try to fire on the move.
Rex’s giant body absorbed the alien blasts like annoying mosquito bites. The gaping holes popping open along his massive frame missed his vital organs because the bugs didn’t know where to aim, and it only made the giant beast all the more enraged. The bugs had seen that a shot to the head could take down the T. rex, but he was so fast that he would be upon them before they could fire, trampling them with his massive weight, biting off their heads and spitting them out. The few soldiers able to hold still long enough to take proper aim were pounced upon by the ferocious Deinonychus who slashed, clawed, and bit them to death, while those who ran back in full retreat found themselves face-to-face with the encroaching zombies who had been lured into the past by their precious booms.
Even the little ones pitched in. Donald leapt upon the back of an alien soldier, but the bug easily grabbed hold of the hatchling before he could do any real harm, threw him to the ground and took aim. Donald landed hard on the trigger-button of a dead alien’s rifle, which then blasted a perfect void into his bug assailant’s chest. The highly intelligent Deinonychus smiled as he assessed what had happened in an instant, then purposely hopped up and down on the button, joyfully blasting bug after bug to death—and the fact that he had no concept of technology or sophisticated weaponry took none of the fun out of it. It wasn’t too long before Daffy and Dizzy followed their big brother’s lead, jumping up and down on alien weapons of their own finding, blasting the mysterious, deadly beams to their hearts’ content.
The Alien Sub-Commander was on the run, having long since given up on the futility of shooting. He found a nice little hiding place behind a tree so he could focus on the keypad strapped to his lower arm in order to wormhole his brethren to safety. He banged frantically on the symbols to bypass his vessel’s main brain and plug directly into the quantum generators when two things happened: (1) Dinah leapt at him from the right and sunk her razor-sharp teeth into his lower abdomen, and (2) Rex charged him from the left, engulfing the entire bug head in his mouth.
Both Dinah and Rex recognized the Sub-Commander as the killer of their mate, and they each yearned for vengeance. A vicious tug-of-war ensued—Rex yanking from the top, Dinah’s teeth dug into the bottom. Dinah soared through the air as Rex thrashed his mighty head but she would not let go. Only when the bug’s thorax ripped in two did the contest end, green pus and organs spilling everywhere.
All the while, the other enraged Deinonychus sprung from one alien to the next, slashing and severing bug after bug till not a bug remained.
With all the aliens dead, the dinosaurs turned their wrath on the zombies—we’re all aliens to them—and they charged forward into the twenty-first century. The zombies’ rotted teeth and fingernails could not penetrate the dinosaurs’ thick hides, and it took the Deinonychus all of a minute to determine how to best kill them—far quicker than it took the aliens because the dinos had no concept of external weapons. With great speed and agility, they slashed at the fragile zombie skulls, stabbing, biting, clawing. Rex alone was worth twenty of them as he trampled, chewed, and crushed the creatures into nonexistence. The zombies’ only advantage was their numbers—there were just so many, and they never tired.
That advantage was not lost on the Commander in Chief. For although the mood back at HQ was positive, Peyton had seen what sixty-four thousand zombies had done to an impeccably trained alien army, and he didn’t like the odds.
“There are still too many zombies! We need more dinosaurs!” he shouted, then added, “did I just say that?”
Johnny and the kids heard Peyton through the walkie-talkie. Patrick, who had been thinking the very same thing, elbowed Johnny to get his attention then pointed off in the distance. Johnny looked through his binoculars and immediately saw what the kid was getting at, and he smiled.
“Nice,” he told the boy, then reached for the walkie and cockily spoke into it. “We got this one, Mr. President.”
He stood up, grunting from the searing pain in his belly, then picked up one of the RPGs that lay on the ground—part of the debris he had tossed from the helicopter when he had saved the boy. He focused the scope on the clearing in the prehistoric woods where hundreds of Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus and other dinosaur breeds grazed peacefully, aware of some kind of commotion but considering it the sole business of the nasty carnivores. Johnny took aim and fired a grenade over the far side of the expanse.
BOOM! The herbivores spooked! They bolted away from the explosion in a mad stampede as Johnny fired another rocket behind them.
“Zombies for dinner!” he shouted with a smile, then fired yet another to keep them moving. “Get ’em while they’re hot!” he screamed as he fired again to keep them on course. “Don’t be the last of your friends to kill one! Eeeehaaaa!!!!”
The docile herbivores weren’t specifically looking to kill anyone as they stampeded into our world. They had nothing against zombies—they were just so crazed and so enormous that they couldn’t help but trample the creatures en masse.
Herds of Stegosaurus swung their tails wildly as they charged, impaling zombie after zombie upon their spikes.
Droves of hulking Triceratops, blocked by dormant alien tanks, dug their armored heads under the rims of the vehicles, flipping them up to the sky and back down to the ground, squashi
ng scores of zombie skulls in the process.
Mobs of giant Brontosaurus stomped through the city, their towering necks plowing across electric cables, yanking the wooden beams out of the concrete road. The live wires floated to the ground to electrocute the thousands of zombies they touched, the bolts of electricity extinguishing the last of their tiny brains, zombie-Sanchez among them.
“Aww,” Johnny said sadly. “Now she’ll never go out with me.”
The violence and mayhem continued on and on, and it would through the rest of the day and into the early evening. Herbivores and carnivores alike. Slash, stab, bite. Impale, squash, electrocute. Even little Donald, Daffy and Dizzy took down zombie-Jeb, zombie-Marcus, zombie-Joey and the plethora of zombie children. It was a zombie bloodbath. Carnage, carnage, carnage.
Back at HQ, the mood was joyous and even relaxed, as all but Peyton sensed the end of the war a mere matter of time—with ten billion bugs or more up in the sky, he knew that this war was far from over—but for the others, their relaxed, victorious thoughts turned to other matters.
“So if you’re queen,” Harve asked his new lover. “Does that make me king?
“Only to me, my treasure,” Africa answered with a loving smile. “Only to me.”
“’Kay,” he said, as he took it in. “And am I going to have to talk like that, say stuff like ‘my darling’ and ‘my treasure’?”
“No, my flower, you may speak in whatever manner you feel comfortable.”
“’Kay. But, you know, another thing. ‘My flower’ is kinda gay. Can we just stick to ‘darling’ and ‘treasure’?”
“Harve?” Johnny asked, hearing his old captor over the walkie. “Is that you? Shouldn’t you be dead by now?”
“Well, more like undead.”
“You? A vampire? You, you religious freak? How the hell did that happen?”
“Well, she was hot and she liked me,” the Lieutenant answered, calling back to a more innocent time between them. “What was I going to do, not be a vampire?”
“The circle is now complete.”
“So what are you doing here anyway? I thought you gave up on humanity.”
“I tried, man,” Johnny answered with sincerity. “Swear to God, I tried my ass off to give up on humanity. Maybe there’s just something in us that makes us care, even when we don’t want to care. Something in us all that just needs life to go on.”
“Tell me about it,” replied the Baptist vampire.
“All right, people! Enough!” Peyton shouted at last. “Let’s not go licking our strawberries just yet! There’s still a few billion bugs flying over our heads, and we need a goddamn plan for when they come back! Because they will!”
Then a crackly voice came over the loudspeaker. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about them anymore, General.”
One of the monitors suddenly flickered to snow, and a new image flickered back in its stead. Julius sat on the plush captain’s chair on the bridge of the alien vessel, looking out at sun and stars through a wall-sized filtered window, surrounded by a dozen alien corpses lying dead on the ground. The vessel’s alarm system blared a deafening “whoop whoop whoop” while bug soldiers tried to break through the gray alloy bridge door from the other side.
“Julius!” shouted a gleeful Africa as she jumped up from her seat.
“You’re alive!” shouted a thrilled Laurel.
“Welcome back, son,” said the President. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
“More than all right, General,” said the vampire. “You see, it occurred to me that it’s not only vampires. Too much sun isn’t good for anyone.”
“What are you talking about?” Africa exclaimed, already ahead of him.
“Oh no! Sir!” shouted Lance. “In all the commotion, I stopped checking. The bug vessel left our orbit some time ago, and it’s on a direct course toward the sun!”
He quickly punched keys on his laptop, and then a wide shot of the alien vessel careening toward the sun popped onto one of the screens.
“Julius! What are you doing?!” demanded Laurel.
“What I always do,” the vampire answered as his skin began to sizzle. “What must be done.”
“But you’ll die!” Africa shouted as her eyes welled up. Harve moved beside her and wrapped his arm around her for comfort.
“Yes, Africa, I will die, so that you all may live.”
“But we need you here, Julius. I need you here.”
“You got this, my Queen,” he told her.
“I don’t.”
“You have a generous spirit and an untapped wisdom, Africa. Say it for me, my Queen. You got this.”
“Julius . . .”
“Deny not your dying leader’s last request.”
“You can do it,” Harve whispered softly, lovingly in her ear. “I’ll make sure of it. I got your back, my treasure.”
She gazed into her Lieutenant’s eyes, sniffled once, then turned back to Julius. “I got this,” the new Queen softly conceded.
“My liege,” Julius answered as he bowed his head and tipped an imaginary cap in royal deference, then turned back to Peyton. “It was an honor to serve under you, my General.”
“Um, you too,” the President replied sadly, at a loss for words. “Take care.”
“Julius, you don’t have to do this!” Laurel insisted. “There’s got to be another way.”
“But alas there is not. Fare-thee-well, slayer. Fare-thee-well, y’all.”
Then his skin began to bubble from within, and he groaned in anguish. Patches of fire erupted from his pours. His face melted to a creamy goo that dripped off his vampire skeleton. His wretched screams of agony were soon joined by billions of aliens who screamed and cried and melted and burned as well, and the monitor flickered back to snow; and the screen of the vessel exterior showed the craft growing ever smaller as it streaked into the sun, becoming a tiny spec, and then nothing at all.
Africa buried her head in her lover’s chest and cried, and he held her tight.
Laurel bravely held back her tears as she blew a loving kiss to the monitor. “Be at peace, my monster.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The sun was setting in the West for it had taken the whole day for the dinosaurs to crush, slice and decapitate first their alien foes, then the zombies. With the last of the undead lying vanquished on the ground, the exhausted, panting animals found themselves standing still amidst a sea of strange-looking corpses, surrounded by towering constructions they could not comprehend, utterly confused by the very world in which they stood, unsure how they even came to be here at all.
Dinah and Rex locked eyes with grave hesitation. They began their day as enemies in a war of their own, only to find themselves the most unlikely of allies in a land that made no sense to either.
What’s next? their eyes asked of each other.
Dinah waited for the hulking T. rex to gesture an answer, one way or the other. He was by far the stronger—and the dumber—so it was his move.
The colossal beast pondered for only a moment before he shook his massive frame like a wet dog, as if shaking off the bizarre events of the day. It had begun with the loss of his son, then the loss of his mate, and that was enough loss for one day. He was tired. If the pesky Deinonychus were as weary as he, good. They would all live to fight another day, but only in a world he could understand.
He turned and slowly trudged back through the wormhole. Dinah sighed, relieved—she felt no more urge for continued war than he. She followed him home, as the other Deinonychus followed her, and as the herbivores followed them.
The Deinonychus hatchlings brought up the rear, skipping and prancing and shrieking their personal battle highlights in boastfulness. They were not tuckered out like the grownups, but invigorated by the whole adventure, thrilled that they had been allowed to participate as if adults themselves. Nor had the modern world felt particularly strange to them—they were so young their own world was still full of mystery. And as one final “screw you,�
� little Donald jumped onto the severed thorax of the Alien Sub-Commander, but he lost his balance on the slippery scales and fell hard onto the bug’s lower forearm, and onto the keypad that was attached.
The ground shook violently, and the wormhole closed, and then vanished.
There was a moment of stunned silence in the streets, in the buildings, on the rooftops, and inside HQ. Is that it? Did we really win? And the silence was finally broken when Peyton breathed a smiling sigh of relief. “It’s over.”
“Praise Jesus!” shouted the vampire Harve.
Cheers, applause, handshakes and high fives abounded; a single tear rolled down the creviced cheek of the Captain-with-the-scar; and Harve and Africa kissed.
“We must find you a proper vampire name,” she said to her new love.
“What’s wrong with ‘Harve’?”
“It lacks majesty,” she answered with a smile. “Vampires draw names from great lands to which they feel connected, or transformative figures who inspired them. Plato titled himself after the great philosopher, Julius after the mighty Caesar.”
“Okay, I get that,” Harve answered as he considered. “Then I’ll be . . . Reagan.”
“We’ll work on it,” she smiled, then kissed him passionately once more.
On the battlefield, the surviving soldiers emerged from the buildings in which they had remained silent and motionless for so long, and they too cheered, laughed, shouted, and they threw their helmets in the air.
On the rooftop, Patrick and Rhiannon exchanged a high five, then offered their hands out to Johnny to do the same. “You did well, kids,” he said as he slapped their palms in celebration. “Amazingly brave. I’m proud of you. Everyone is.”
“So are you going to adopt us now?” asked a gleefully optimistic Rhiannon. “And take care of us and send us to good schools and love us forever?”
“Come on, guys,” Johnny replied. “Wasn’t what we just went through horrifying enough?”
But back at HQ, Petyon knew that there was still much work to be done. “I want a plan on how to dispose of the enemy bodies,” Peyton ordered the Captain-with-the-scar. “Make sure to keep a few for science—those guys cream over this stuff. And keep Lance involved. He knows zombies like nobody’s business. As for the rest,” he added as he leaned into the microphone, “nice work, everyone. I thank you. Mankind thanks you. Vampirekind thanks you. Open the bars and serve the booze!”