by Brian Hodge
The CD was skipping. And he couldn’t stop it.
Across the club, seated by the bar, Leslie spotted the man in black. He held up his drink toward her. And grinned.
And the dancers kept on dancing.
Aftermath
Ask anyone.
They’ll tell you.
It’s the aftermath that’s making the world crazy. Now, don’t get me wrong. The actual event wasn’t your simple Jack & Jill act of terror that whacked you over the head and sent you back to work the very next day, not by any means. But, because it all just…happened, well let’s just say we’ve been taking our daily head-whacks for the past five years.
There’d been no warning. No anticipatory anxiety. No time for planning. No ‘lock up your daughters and throw away the key’. And, no damn flash on the six o’clock news. It makes me think of that priest in Caddyshack, you know, the one who shook his iron in the air on the golf course in the middle of a thunderstorm? Well, WHACK! Lightning struck, the effing priest was fried, and we were ever so suddenly on our own.
Yep, if you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, you were chum in the shark pool, brother.
The dead. You know, those people, if you can call them that, although I kinda like to think of them as the vile-maggot-ridden-scary-mother-fuckers-that-want-to-eat-you. The spineless jellyfish we refer to as our government crumpled beneath the undying weight of the crazier-than-thou conservatives who insisted that these ‘people’ (I’ll refer to them as ‘scary mother-fuckers’ for short) deserved the same equal rights as anyone else. Anyone else? Hello? What flat rocks have these folks been hiding under? The scary mother-fuckers are DEAD! And it doesn’t take a mortician to tell you that the dead have no damn rights! So, in a sort of weak, ego-massaging compromise, our world leaders have created (and don’t get me started on the whole creationism arguments that have arisen because of this) a new category in our library of human races simply called The Dead (frightening when you consider that our world leaders put their heads together to come up with that one). The deads. As in the whites, the blacks, the Asians, and the deads.
Remember the good old days? How in the past we would all gather together like the good, God-fearing human beings we were, dressed in our best black-wear, wiping away our tears with cotton hankies and chatting with those relatives seen exclusively at these sorts of occasions. We’d kneel down before the body (man, what a thing of the past that has become), that would be drained of all its fluids and placed out for proper viewing so that we could pay our last respects. Well, these very people—you know, the dead ones?—they were up and about in the middle of the night as though some internal clock went off in their brains and said, I’m hungry…how about you? It was like God had said, “Brothers and sisters…I fucked up. This is the way it’s supposed to be,” and then He sprinkled a little God-dust down on all the dead people, who in turn stretched their arms and legs and came to the breakfast table, yawning for eats.
Eats. Yeah, you guessed it. That would be you and I. The living, the breathing, the emotional.
Eats for the dead.
Of course, that’s all ancient history now. You really don’t see too many human beings getting eaten these days. You read about it every now and then in the papers, but not too often. The government will tell you it’s because they’ve got a real tight leash on the situation, but I’m figuring it’s because those that get eaten aren’t really around anymore to report it, you know? You gotta figure that if it makes the papers, it’s because someone’s grandma kicked in the middle of the night and was found noshing on the new baby next door, or one of the school-bound children in the complex who didn’t have the strength to fight the scary mother-fucker off.
Phew…time flies, man. Has it really been five years since the dead introduced themselves into society? So much has happened since then, and I highly doubt we’ll ever get used to this way of life that’s been forced upon us—think about it, a whole century is gonna have to pass before all memories of the dead staying dead are extinguished. And then after that, it’ll just be life followed by afterlife—a process of everyday living as universal as you and I spending our Saturday afternoons pinned to the tube watching the ‘dead channel’. All dead, all the time!
Shit.
There’s all sorts of new laws in place, and if you have a year, I can go over them with you. They even amended the fucking constitution so the scary mother-fuckers could retain their rights as citizens, which includes, at the right price, a proper tending to an individual’s afterlife wishes.
Afterlife wishes, you ask?
Well, as you know, with every adverse situation, there are the entrepreneurs.
Let’s take for example Dead Heaven Enterprises. They are a privately held company that offers, prior to death of course, three post-death alternatives to the public crematorium:
You are sent to one of seven private factories where you’re cremated into nothing. Your family gets a death certificate and your ashes. There is a nominal fee for this service (which is much less costly than those hokey wakes of the past).
You get your head cut off, your body is sent to the factory where you’re cremated into nothing and your family gets a death certificate, plus a proper burial for your head. Same fee as above, plus a nominal burial fee. Headstones are additional.
For a monthly fee, you’re maintained in active dead form, then are sent to an all-dead resort where you can bang around inside some guarded pen with 20-foot fences alongside a few hundred other scary mother-fuckers. Now, the selling feature about this option is that there are on-site scientists studying you around the clock, and damn, if they somehow find a way to un-undead you, then maybe you’ll be one of the first few to come back as a living, breathing human being again! (common sense dictates that if indeed this does indeed happen, you’ll probably feel the pain of being half rotted, something I can live without; common sense also dictates that this isn’t ever going to happen—think about it, we weren’t able to bring anyone back from the dead before all this happened, so it’s doubtful it’ll happen now).
Option number three is an attractive alternative for those who can afford it, and every week there’s a story in the tabloids (complete with photographs) about some recently dead celebrity being transferred into his or her very own holding pen (complete with faux pearly gates) on Napa Valley’s most luxurious ‘all-dead’ resort. Here’s where the people—the dead people, that is—with the big bucks go. There are skilled trainers on site around the clock whose jobs are to cultivate the scary mother-fuckers into, well, tame scary mother-fuckers, and hopefully, eventually, thinking people. They advertise it as Feng-Shui for the dead. I call it a load of bullshit. I mean, I’ve never heard of a dead being cultivated into a law-abiding citizen. But still, there are those folks who remain hopeful, and are more than willing to shell out their retirement funds to the empty promises of the entrepreneurs—just ask the CEO of Dead Heaven, who’s got himself a nice mansion in the hills, far away from the urban rot in the cities below.
Another business that seems to be thriving of late is dead security. Instead of employing attack dogs on unguarded grounds, scary mother-fuckers are set free behind the fences to ward off would-be burglars and interlopers. It’s a lot cheaper than training the dogs, and you don’t need to feed them either. The only problem is that they have to be replaced on a monthly basis, because sooner or later their limbs are gonna fall off. Sure, sometimes you can stretch it to six weeks, but the smell, oh, the smell, which in and of itself is enough to keep the bad guys away.
It’s also rumored that the nation’s largest dead security company has signed a contract with the government and are aiming to drop ten-thousand scary mother-fuckers into insurgent territories in the Middle East. Apparently they’re going to be fitted with protective helmets that will make full deactivation nearly impossible. Since the dead have an uncanny way of finding living breathing humans, it’s assumed that they will work their way into the hiding places of t
he enemy hideouts. I keep imagining some idiot extremist group holding a US dead in its possession, threatening to behead it in one of their grainy videos. What a laugher that ought to be!
Then there are those individuals that take great pride in reversing the tables, so to speak. Studies show that many people who have lost loved ones to the dead feel a driving need to enact some sort of revenge. So, if you’ve got the money (oh, those entrepreneurs), you can patronize one of the many fine restaurants specializing in dead cuisine. How about a nice cold plate of human pate, or hot grilled fleshburgers to ease your troubled mind?
But what concerns me most of late is the growing epidemic amongst necrophiliacs. This is an issue I have mixed feelings about. As far as I’m concerned, if someone is sick enough to want to have sex with a dead, then let ’em be. After all, no one is really going to get hurt except for the guy who’s fixing to bang it. But then, I wonder: is there really anything wrong with sexing a dead if it’s under proper restraint? I mean, if we’re legally permitted to shoot them in the head, then why can’t we be allowed to fuck them afterwards?
Oh, but sex after the bullet, that’s not the glamour of it all. No sir. You want an active, thrashing, bucking dead babe to ride you good and hard. And my friends, that’s just what some female scary mother-fucker will do, especially one that’s recently dead, still warm, with no bullet in its head. The inherent problem with this is getting them under leash, something you’ll need two or three men to do without the proper tools—if some lonely chap attempts to bang his recently deceased girl-next-door, he may very well find himself food for non-thought.
And of course, with every new circumstance that arises comes a matching set of problems. Like that creepy neighborhood perv who’s spent his life fantasizing about fucking the hot chick that lives around the corner. Well, the story goes like this: one day she shows up undead. Her ankles and wrists are tied to the bed, her mouth ball-gagged, and you have to stop and consider as to whether the perv did all his dirty work before making his way inside her. Of course he’d re-kill her afterwards, but that would lead to an investigation, which would ultimately find the perv guilty of rape and murder. Oddly enough, this sort of practice still goes on, despite the punishment for the crime: death by deads. Here the criminal is tossed into a cage with a half-dozen scary mother-fuckers. The event is broadcasted live at government-run betting parlors, where people place wagers on how long the he will last.
Anyway…as I was saying earlier, it is perfectly legal (albeit not recommended, and I’ll explain why in a moment) to kill a scary mother-fucker that trespasses on your property. It’s like this: the little old lady that lives all alone drops dead of heat exhaustion. She comes back to life and tries to eat the neighbor’s kids. Bet your ass you can put a baseball bat to grandma’s head before she makes a meal out of Jack or Jill (of course, if you must resort to doing this, please send the kids to their rooms before doing so. It’s a messy job, and one they don’t necessarily need to see).
But, and I reiterate, unless the scary mother-fucker is inside your home, it is highly recommended that you lock your doors, and immediately call 611.
That’s where I come in.
My job.
I’m a sergeant of the DPU—dead patrol unit. It’s an organization (paid for by your tax dollars) that keeps a lookout for any scary mother-fuckers that might be out and about looking for a meal. Think of us as dog catchers, only for the walking dead.
I work the evening shift, from five to twelve, and let me tell you, every night it’s a different story. Last night, I was called to the mini-mart on Broadway and Twelfth. When I got there to check up on things, I found a young woman behind the counter with blood and gristle on her face, a human arm in her hands. She looked at me, growled, then jammed the arm into her mouth as though it were a damn turkey leg on Thanksgiving day. On the other side of the store was the proprietor, and he was screaming his ass off (c’mon dude, haven’t you ever seen a dead before?), and it wasn’t until much later did I find out that the dead woman behind the counter (the one down below with her arm missing) was the guy’s wife. Completely ignoring me, the scary mother-fucker reached down and ripped something away from the unseen wife on the floor, something that made a wet, gut-wrenching sound. When it rose back up, there was a heap of steaming organs laced through its fingers. It shoved whatever it could into its mouth, and chewed.
Now, you may ask—why didn’t I just shoot it? Well, just as the dogcatcher doesn’t kill the dogs, we don’t kill the deads. Why? Because I am a white man, and it is a dead man, and according to the constitution, deads possess the same sole right to exist as I do (despite the blatant fact that any dead would be more than willing to end my time here on earth). The truth of the matter is that the whole equal-rights thing with the deads is a cloak to cover the needs of the groups and businesses—the afterlife resorts, the dead security forces, the restaurants, the government-run training facilities—that utilize the scary mother-fuckers for profit. It’s all about the money, and there’s way too much of it being thrown around in the world of the deads.
Damn entrepreneurs. Damn government.
So, instead of putting a bullet into the head of the scary mother-fucker, I immobilized it with a thick spray of chemical foam in the eyes (yep, they can see), plus a series of nets that tangled up its limbs. The rule is this: only in life-or-death situations is any member of the DPU allowed to shoot a dead in the head, and even then, we must be careful not to shoot any innocent victims; there are more than a few DPU officers that have been suspended for panicking under the gun, so to speak. So anyway, the scary mother-fucker kicked and flailed and made quite a valiant attempt to escape, but I managed to grab hold of the net handles, and quickly dragged it into the armored truck. Once locked up in the back, I transported it to the closest DPU annex, where it would be tagged and sold to the highest bidder on the never-ending waiting list.
I know, it’s a fucked-up job, but somebody’s got to do it.
So, I think I’ve given you a little taste of the way things are now. When you really think about it, things ain’t much different than they were back in the 1700’s, during the whole slave trade. Soon enough, some scientist is going to get a dead to talk, maybe even show a level of common decency. Then the equal rights crowd will come out in full force, fighting to grant the deads their freedom, and consequently, for themselves, their own death certificates.
Another day, another dollar. After my DPU shift, I went home. I sat in front of the TV with a glass of wine and a bowl of salad (I’m a vegetarian), watching the dead channel.
I began to nod off when I heard the groans. I startled at first, then realized they were coming from the basement.
They always come in the middle of the night.
So I unwrapped the turkey-leg arm, the one that belonged to the store-owner’s wife. The one I had to pluck from the captured dead’s mouth. It had a few chunks taken out of it, but was still in pretty decent shape.
Dinner. For my pet dead baby.
I keep him caged in the basement.
Scary mother-fucker, he is.
Raingods Dancing
“My God, you were right,” Sheriff Ralph Clarkson said with utter disbelief. “The whole damn resort is gone.”
“From what I can see, all of the low-lying cabins are completely submerged.” The elderly security guard who’d phoned the sheriff’s office thirty minutes ago tugged nervously at the red-stitched ‘Vinnie’ on his shirt. “A lot of ’em are only half under water, though. Those are the two-levelers.”
Ralph attempted to radio in for backup, but couldn’t get a signal. He turned his bewildered gaze back toward the employee for Heaven’s Cove Couples-Only Resort. Apparently ‘Vinnie’ had gotten a lot more than he expected upon arriving for work this morning.
“You’re gonna need the boat Sheriff.” Vinnie pointed to the small skiff hitched to the back of his pickup.
They worked at getting the boat released and in five minutes it was
in the water at the top of the hill. Ralph stepped into the boat then looked over his shoulder, brow furrowed. “How many people were registered here?”
“‘Bout one-fifty. One seventy-five if you include the staff.”
Gently, Ralph sat down in the boat. “Well…you gonna come?”
The guard took a step back, head shaking. He’d looked pale and sweaty when Ralph first arrived, and now his hands were trembling as he fished a pack of Winston’s from his jacket pocket. “I’m too old for this, Sheriff. Nothing personal, of course.”
Of course Ralph had his reservations too. There was no rain last night, yet something made the water in Lake Wachnapachta rise. Well, not just rise. It looked like a damn Tsunami had come rushing through. For a moment Ralph wondered if man-made lakes could really do that. Maybe there was some kind of catastrophic fissure in the bedrock? Maybe.
Whatever it was, the entire resort of Heaven’s Cove had found itself under water overnight, and Vinnie seemed to be the last man standing. This must be the type of thing that’d happened to Atlantis, Ralph thought.
“There’s bound to be some people out there that need our help.”
Vinnie’s eyes filled with tears. He lifted his gaze to the sky and spoke in a vacant manner: “There ain’t no one there. They’re all dead. Just listen. No birds, no crickets. Only silence. I’ve never heard it this quiet before. You might be better off just calling in some outside help. Nothing much you or I can do by ourselves.”
Ralph nodded. Indeed, he would need some help from the surrounding towns. But he wanted to take a quick look anyway. If there was anyone alive out there, then every second would be crucial.
“I can’t get a radio signal down here in the valley. Call my office. Tell ’em I said to send backup from Wellfield and Ashborough.” He saluted the old man as he pushed off with an oar and took himself into what used to be the entrance to Heaven’s Cove Resort. The guard waved back.