by Jack Geurts
Either way, Esau bites his tongue. Doesn’t see how sharing that information will help.
Ishmael goes on, “But, eventually, I met my wife, Sharon, and settled down, had some kids. Just like your dad. That’s the key for a zombie – you gotta settle down. Otherwise, I would’ve just kept eating people and never found my passion. Been doing stand-up ever since.”
“Seems like an odd career move.”
“Zombie hunting to stand-up comedy?” Ishmael thinks about it, unconvinced. “I suppose...” He shakes his head. “I guess I just kind of forgot about all this stuff until you came along. Got so busy writing jokes.”
“You forgot about your promise to exterminate your dad’s bloodline?”
Ishmael nods, oblivious to the implications of Esau’s question. “She made me swear on her grave, then passed right on into the next world.” He pauses. “Then she came back, and I cut her head off.”
“Oh.” Esau swallows, not knowing how to move the conversation forward after that. He tries to make his point a little more obvious. “But, uh...aren’t you technically Abe’s bloodline? So wouldn’t you have to kill yourself in order to keep that promise?”
“Well, I haven’t killed Ike yet, either. Or Jake. Or you, for that matter.”
Esau laughs nervously, but Ike just stares at him with dead eyes until he goes quiet.
Finally, Ishmael laughs. “Jesus, you should see your face. Look, I never really cared about all that stuff. The patriarch and being the father of a great nation. As long as I have a stage and a crowd of people ready to laugh, I’m good.”
“You never intended to follow through on your promise?”
“Nope.”
“The deathbed promise you made to your mother before cutting her head off? The one where you swore on her impending grave?”
“Yeah,” Ishmael says, almost cheerfully. “I just told her what she wanted to hear. Forgive and forget, you know? That’s what I’m about.”
“You do realise you’re doing pretty much the opposite right now?”
“Yeah, but I’m doing it so you’ll come on the road with me. A little vengeance now for a lot of fun later. I think the joy you’ll bring to people on our tour will outweigh the horror you’re about to inflict on your family. We’ll call it...” He scrunches up his face, trying to think of a good title. Suddenly, his eyes widen as it comes to him. “The ‘Entertainin’ Canaan’ tour.”
A big, stupid grin spreads across his face as he slowly turns to gauge Esau’s response.
“What do you think?”
Esau just shakes his head. “Jesus...”
“You like that?” Ishmael says, chuckling. “Entertainin’ Canaan?”
The skinless guy says nothing.
Ishmael continues to laugh quietly, shaking his head as if amazed by how funny and creative he can be.
*
It takes them over a week to get back to Ike’s camp, due in no small part to Ishmael constantly needing to take a break and get high. Esau’s frustrated at first, but soon learns that it’s easier to indulge the zombie comedian, and ends up getting stoned along with him.
And you know what?
It ain’t bad.
Esau quickly comes around to the idea that smoking weed is pretty...fucking...good.
It’s not long before he’s the one saying they should stop, take a break, and Ishmael’s more than happy to oblige him. As it turns out, the majority of his pack is just bags of weed and rolling papers. Screw water and basic provisions. Who needs that when you’ve got some sweet, home-grown Desert Kush to smoke?
When they finally arrive at their destination, it’s still daylight, so they crawl on their bellies up to a ridge-top overlooking the tents in the valley below.
There’s still movement down there – smoke rising from a fire, Becca preparing dinner, servants tending the flock. Jake’s nowhere to be seen, naturally. Probably inside with his head in a scroll.
“Nerd,” Esau thinks, and wriggles back to get stoned with Ishmael on their side of the ridge.
They wait until nightfall, when they’re sure everyone’s asleep, and then crawl back up to the ridge-top. The fire’s all but burned out now. Not a sound to be heard.
“Alright,” Esau says. He takes a puff, then passes the joint to Ishmael. “I’ll take Jake and mom. You take Ike.”
“You want me to kill a blind guy who can’t get out of bed?”
Esau’s getting sick of his attitude. “No, I want you to kill the brother who stole your inheritance. The guy who was the reason you and your mom were cast out into the desert to begin with. If he wasn’t born, your mom would never have been attacked by zombies and you wouldn’t have been forced to kill her. In a way, he killed your mom.”
Esau nods, eyes wide and red, like what he’s saying is some mind-blowing, cosmic shit, when really, he’s just high as hell.
Ishmael furrows his brow, trying to work out the logic. “But...if he wasn’t born, you wouldn’t have been born either.”
They both react to this like they’ve just been told their universe is one of those marbles the aliens were playing with in Men In Black.
Esau snaps out of it, shakes his head. “Just get your fucking knife out and let’s go do this, already.”
They draw their blades and head down into the camp, staying low, like they’re in a Splinter Cell game. They part ways – Esau going left, Ishmael right. Both of them weaving through the tents and trying to stay quiet.
Esau approaches Jake’s tent, planning to kill his brother first. But before he gets there, he sees something that makes him stop dead in his tracks.
Himself...
Esau freezes, staring at the figure walking up to him. It’s like looking directly into a mirror (or, since mirrors didn’t exist yet, the surface of a calm lake, I guess?).
But, no – it can’t be him. Because he is him. He’s almost a hundred percent sure of that fact.
The doppelganger shuffles forward, moaning horribly. Almost like he’s a zombie...
“Jesus Christ!” Esau thinks. “Am I dead? Is this what an out of body experience feels like? I was flayed alive, after all. How many people survive any length of time without their skin attached to their body? Not many, I’m guessing.”
Then another thought occurs to him.
Maybe it’s the weed.
He’s been smoking pretty heavily for the past week, up to and including this very night. He hasn’t had a chance to build up any kind of tolerance, and maybe it’s altered his perception of reality.
It isn’t totally out of the question.
Maybe he’s just having some weird hallucination, like the time when Ishmael thought he saw a lake and broke several of his fingers trying to dive into it.
Esau touches his chest to make sure he’s still there, still real.
It’s at that moment that he realises he doesn’t have any skin. Jesus, what happened to his skin?!
Then he remembers he didn’t have any skin to begin with.
He didn’t have any skin because his mom cut him out of it.
His mom cut him out of it so Jake could wear the skin and cut Esau out of his inheritance.
Then it all comes crashing into place:
The doppelganger is Jake!
His hands are behind his back like he’s carrying a weapon, and Esau lunges at him before he has a chance to draw it. He stabs what appears to be himself and Jake slides off the blade onto the ground.
He continues moaning, but this time he’s moaning in pain. Esau stares down at him, breathing heavily.
He’s done it.
He’s killed his brother.
He got his revenge and it feels great. He feels energised. He feels like he could run a marathon, drop down and do fifty push-ups, then go run another one.
Esau crouches down, wanting to look into his brother’s eyes as the life drains out of them. He cuts the stitches at the back of the skin suit (the Skoot™) and pulls the face-hood down to reveal...
&n
bsp; Ishmael’s first-born son, Neb.
The one who greeted him at the desert commune.
Esau’s blood runs cold. He swallows, terrified.
“No, no, no...” he thinks. “It can’t be.”
Neb has been gagged with a thick wad of cloth and his dead, frozen eyes are staring up at Esau, full of betrayal. Looking down, Esau sees that the guy’s hands are not only empty of weapons, but bound at the wrists.
He’d been forced into the Skoot against his will...
Those weren’t zombie moans Esau was hearing earlier, but muffled cries for help.
Before Esau can do or say anything, Ishmael comes around the corner, holding Ike’s severed head by the hair. “Hey, man, you’re never gonna believe what I...”
He stops.
Freezes.
When he sees Esau kneeling there beside the body of his first-born son, knife in hand, blood everywhere, he only has one thought.
This motherfucker tricked me...
“You son of a bitch!”
“No, wait. I...”
As Esau stammers to explain himself, Ishmael hurls the severed head at him. It hits him in the cheek, knocking him backwards.
“Ah! Gross!”
In the confusion, Esau drops his dagger. Before he can recover, Ishmael descends on him, going for a good old fashioned face-stab. Esau holds his wrists, keeping the knife just inches from his left eyeball – his father’s blood dripping down into his tear duct.
“Bastard!” Ishmael says. “Traitor!”
He’s grunting, frenzied, putting all his weight behind the dagger. It takes every bit of Esau’s strength to hold him at bay, but every second, the blade draws closer, closer...
He pushes Ishmael’s hand to the side and his knife sinks deep into the sand. Quick as a flash, Esau grabs his own dagger lying nearby, swings it around, and shoves the blade between Ishmael’s ribs.
The zombie screams, and drops to the ground beside his son. He looks over, seeing the kid dressed up in what he can only assume is Esau’s flayed skin.
“What in the fuck...?” he groans.
Esau stands, looks around – desperate, paranoid, breathing heavily. There’s no one there. Ishmael’s writhing on the ground and Esau takes pity on him. He kneels down beside the guy.
“Ishmael, I didn’t... It wasn’t me.”
“You tricked me. You son of a bitch. All this time...” He coughs up blood. “You cut your own damn skin off...”
Esau frowns. “What? No. Why would I do that?”
“To trick me.”
Esau tries to piece his logic together. “Yeah, but...you didn’t know what I looked like. Maybe if I wanted you to kill your son, that would’ve been a pretty sweet plan, but...”
Sick of listening to reason, Ishmael groans. “Smoke. Give me a smoke.”
“I don’t...”
“Left pocket.”
Esau reaches into the left-hand pocket of Ishmael’s cloak, taking out a half-smoked joint. He leans over, holding it to the coals of a nearby fire to light it. He takes a few quick puffs to get the thing going, then places the end between Ishmael’s lips.
The guy sucks in deep, and proceeds to cough up a shit-load more blood, spraying Esau with it. The skinless guy winces as he’s misted with the zombie comedian’s lung-blood, but otherwise ignores it.
“I’ve been a fool,” Ishmael says, in a pathetic, woe-is-me tone of voice. He sounds like he’s coming to some great revelation. “I should’ve listened to mom. I should have wiped Abe’s bloodline out while I still could, when I was still in my prime.” Another cough, more blood. “I can’t do it now. I’m too old. Too stoned all the time. The weed’s dulled my killer instincts, mellowed me out too much. I got Ike, but that was nothing. I just walked up to him while he slept and cut his head off. Don’t get me wrong, it was hard work with a knife, but...” He swallows. “She made me promise...and I never carried it out. I’ve been a coward. I’ve wasted my life...telling jokes...that no one ever laughed at.”
Esau feels a stab of guilt and empathy. He wonders if he should tell Ishmael that it’s because of Abe sacrificing Isaac that the zombie plague was unleashed to begin with – that Abe wasn’t only responsible for casting him out into the desert to die, but also for Hagar becoming a zombie and for Ishmael being forced to kill her.
“My only regret...” Ishmael goes on, “...is that I didn’t...kill enough members of my family.”
“I don’t think she meant your side of the...”
Ishmael speaks over him. “My wife, my children. Their wives and husbands. Their children. A great pile of corpses rising up to heaven...”
Esau cuts him off. “And, y’know, Ike and Jake and Becca – the people who were actually guilty of something.”
Ishmael nods like he just forgot about them. “Them, too. But mom was right – this family’s nothing but a curse on the world. How do I know that in a few generations, my kids and their kids won’t be just as fucked-up as you guys are? Better for God to just wipe us all out and start again. But...he’s done that before already, with Noah, so...I don’t know. Maybe this is just the way things have to be.”
Esau thinks about that for a moment – the sad clarity that Ishmael’s come to about his life, about the world and the nature of humanity.
“I’m sorry,” Ishmael says, meaning it. “I’ve gotta clear my conscience.”
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” Esau finds himself meaning it, too. Welling up a little. Connecting with the guy in a way he never thought he would.
“No, I do. I...I never actually thought...you’d be a good comedian. I only wanted you...for the gimmick. I thought I’d...sell a lot of tickets if...I partnered with the skinless guy.”
Needless to say, Esau is not impressed.
He isn’t feeling betrayed so much as he is just sick of hearing this guy talk about his stand-up. He drops his uncle’s hand, gets up and walks away.
Ishmael wipes the bloody hand on his cloak and says, “Gross.”
Esau’s only taken a few steps when he sees two figures up ahead. One of them is Jake, holding a bow with an arrow pulled back to his cheekbone, aimed directly at his brother. The other one is Becca, hair done up like Lagertha from Vikings and for some reason wielding a gigantic battle-axe with spikes and shit.
“Jesus...” Esau thinks. “How did I not know my mom was such a bloodthirsty killing machine?”
Instead, he goes, “You planned this?”
Becca nods, the slightest hint of a smile on her face. “I followed you out there. When I saw you leaving with Ishmael and realised what your plan was, I kidnapped his first-born son and brought him back to use against you. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to use him, but I think it turned out pretty well, don’t you?”
Esau fumes.
“This isn’t over,” he says, and sprints off into the night.
Jake lowers his bow. He and Becca don’t say a word. They just look down at Ishmael, who, with his final ounce of strength, takes hold of the dagger in his ribs and yanks it out.
He doesn’t see Jake and Becca watching him, but raises shakily up onto all fours, crawling over to Ike’s severed head. He grabs a handful of its hair and lifts it up to the moon.
“Are you up there, mom? You seeing this? I got Ike. You see that? I got...” He coughs up blood. “I fucking got him.”
Ishmael puts the head back down, feeling like a failure. “That’s as good as I can do.”
As he stares at the head of his half-brother – milky, white eyes staring back at him – Ishmael gets an idea. He nods, accepting his fate.
Almost without thinking, he takes the knife and begins sawing into his own neck...
Jake and Becca react with stunned silence.
Ishmael groans in pain, blood pouring from the wound.
“Is this what you want, mom?!” he shouts at the moon, cutting through an artery and spraying blood everywhere. “I failed you! I can’t take out the rest of Abe’s bloodline, b
ut I can take me! I’m coming, mom! Roll a few joints and bust out the Doritos, because I’m a-comin’...”
His last few words devolve into a gurgling mess as he cuts clean through his larynx. With his free hand, he tilts his head like Nearly-Headless Nick while he saws through the rest of his neck and chips through his spinal column.
Finally, the head comes free and Ishmael flops to the ground, dead.
His head rolls over next to Ike’s so they’re cheek to cheek – decapitated zombie brothers, reunited at last.
Jake and Becca just watch, horrified.
“Jesus Christ...” says Becca.
Jake doubles over and retches.
GENESIS 28
Stairway to ‘Heaven’
Lest you think Ishmael’s story ended with him having cut his own head off, I’ll go right ahead and summarise the rest of his lineage in a paragraph or two:
In the same way Isaac’s descendants would go on to form the Israelites (and later still, the Jews), Ishmael’s children (the Ishmaelites, strangely enough) would go on to form the beginnings of the Arab people.
As such, the modern-day religions of Judaism and Islam both trace their origins to Abraham, and are therefore known as Abrahamic religions. Christianity is another such religion, which we’ll get to in a future series.
But back to the earliest Abrahamic religion...
The OG, as it were.
At this point in the story, the family is divided. Esau’s gone off and married a couple of Canaanite women just to piss off his mom. He’s still a little sore about the whole ‘her flaying him alive’ thing and isn’t ready to patch things up yet.
Hold a grudge much, Esau?
Anyway, one of these lovely young lasses is Judith (Judy, for short), daughter of a Hittite named Beeri – naturally, a raging alcoholic. Esau’s other father-in-law has a similarly-fitting moniker, due in no small part to his terrible body odour.
Elon the Musk is a strange cat, even by biblical standards.
He spends the majority of his time in what he calls a ‘lab’, where he does everything from trying to invent a type of wagon that doesn’t need a driver or a donkey, to pondering a future where humans live among the stars like gods.