by Mark Henry
Beach Blanket Bloodbath
by
Mark Henry
Beach Blanket Bloodbath
Book Four in the Amanda Feral Series
by Mark Henry
Copyright © 2014 by Mark Henry
Cover Design © 2014 by Mark Henry
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
To All the Glamazombies,
Past and Present
Table of Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Book One: Beach Blanket Bloodbath
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Appendix
Other Books by Mark Henry
Acknowledgments
Biography
Connect with the Author
Author’s Note from Yours Truly, Amanda Feral
You’re holding what is widely known to be a “novella.” Those extra two letters on the word aren’t tacked on because I’ve eaten too many Spanish sailors or to make it look pretty when written in cursive. They simply mean this story is shorter than a regular book (but not by much). Please don’t be the dumb-ass that comments that it was way too long for a short story or far too short for a novel.
I don’t want to have to cut you…but I will. Sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered—yes, in this scenario, I’m also the doctor. I might even have a scalpel.
Beach Blanket Bloodbath is the first in a trilogy of insane adventures that all happen over the course of a single road trip. Don’t say it. I know I could have titled it Road Trip of the Living Dead Part Two (after the second novel in the series). You want to know why I didn’t? Because I’m not some burned out Hollywood studio executive who jerks off over his brilliant idea to remake some shit show that wasn’t any good the first time around.
I have scruples—three at last count. Don’t worry, none of them involve me being less vulgar or bitchy or whatever (I reserve the right to be morally flexible, you should know that).
Also notice a lack of numbered footnotes—but thankfully plenty of meandering asides—frankly, they are a pain to read in eBook format and even more difficult to listen to an audio book voice actor stumble through, so I’ve incorporated the snarky self-referential shit within the narrative…as it should be. Each book will have an appendix of extras, so make sure to check those out—I don’t collect that crap for my own enjoyment. Or yours really. Who knows why I amass it?
I might have suffered brain damage in the fall. Don’t tell anyone.
Finally, despite my allergy to general niceties, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how pleased I am that you found your way back to my continuing story. I sincerely hope you’ll bust a nut—that could be the wrong phrase—laughing at our horribly insensitive antics while simultaneously disavowing your shame spiral.
Cheers!
Amanda Feral
Prologue
When I was young, five or six, I became keenly aware—with the clarity of a martyr being burned alive—that my mother, Ethel Ellen Frazier, was an absolute asshole. She didn’t have any of the regular excuses that other parents did for being tragically awful—she wasn’t an adult child of an alcoholic or untreated childhood abuse or extended unemployment—she was just plain evil.
And still is, but that’s not my point.
Upon enrolling me in a kindergarten of her choosing, Ethel paraded me through the class and extolled, “I apologize in advance for Amanda. She’s a horrible child, generally unlikable and ultimately untrustworthy. If I could, I’d lock her in the basement away from normal, polite society. Some people take issue with that kind of thing, so I’m not at liberty to do it. But, mark my word, if you’re thinking this pretty girl would make a good friend, you’re wrong and you’ll be sorry.” She patted me on my head and strolled out while the teacher and her assistant tried to pick their lower jaws up off the floor. I burst into tears. I sobbed inconsolably.
It was pathetic and didn’t do a damn thing to change my classmates’ opinions of me. Or my opinion of myself.
I’m not a great friend. Ethel was right.
Now, that I’m less young and definitely less living I’m aware of another thing. Just when I think I’ve gotten a firm grasp on the intricacies of friendship something inevitably comes along to fuck it all up.
It seems I’m unreliable—both as a friend and a narrator (so if you’re looking for universal truths, quit rubbing one out and go read the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Koran or any of the many pothead philosophers who bandy about lists of quotables).
Come for the lies, stay for, well, whatever it is you stay for.
All the trouble started the day the letter came.
We met at Ricardo Amandine’s latest bar offering to the zombie set, GUTS—three floors of winding, mazelike passages, fleshy pink walls decorated in veins of plastic tubing throbbing with thousands of gallons of theatrical blood, and the occasional diverticular pit festooned with glittering grains and bedazzled kernels. The lower intestinal theme was not lost on me. Sure it’s a bit over-the-top and meta—zombies traveling like meat through a giant tulle colon just to get a martini—but the drinks, as always, were strong enough to strip paint…and the years of calluses built up in our livers.
Every zombie in Seattle seemed to be crammed into the place like a bowel impaction. The beats were decidedly ironic (see playlist in the appendix—the one in the back of the book, not in the glass bowl on the buffet), the dress-code, homeless chic and the owner was watching over it all from his private office loft above the bar. I gave Ricardo a quick wave and resumed my search for everyone’s favorite blond carnivore.
Wendy glowered steadily my way from a booth in the shadows of an infected anal polyp. I snatched a pair of martinis floating by on a waiter’s tray and ignoring his complaints sashayed over to join my bestie in ill humor.
“What’s new, bitch?” I slipped the glass her way and it was instantly drained.
“This.” Wendy dug in her purse and slid an envelope onto the table.
There were three clues indicating something terrible lurking inside Wendy’s correspondence:
1. Her name, printed in strikethrough staring out of the envelope’s glassine window, speaks to, at the very least, a disregard for her personage.
2. The lack of a stamp probably means the sender is still waiting in the bushes.
3. The skull and crossbones seal, stamped in dried blood, probably doesn’t mean she’s won the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes.
As is befitting the walking nightmares that are the Greater Seattle Area Reapers, gloom and doom extended beyond their hideously adorable faces to their billing notices—in keeping with the cruel joke of the world, the most foul of supernatural beings were also the cutest, except for the rows of needle thin teeth and the attitude. For the newbies among you, these reapers, though grim as all fuck, aren’t in a position to nick off a newly dead soul, they’re more about keeping secrets…at any cost.
“There’s probably a puff of supernatural ricin inside.” Wendy tore it open, smoothing the folds of the papers flat against the table. As she scanned the contents her frown turned into somethin
g much more concerning.
She was glaring at me, her jaw cracking as she ground her teeth.
“Those bitches!” I tapped the invoice with one fuck-me-red nail, drawing her attention back to the matter at hand. “How dare they try to charge that much? I mean your procedure was pretty gross, but—”
“You know exactly what this is about.” Wendy’s voice was uncharacteristically deadpan as she cut me off, her eyes narrowed to slits.
“I vaguely remember.” Stabbing a cigarette in my mouth and lighting it, I pointed it in her general direction, casting her sour face in a hot cherry glow. “This, right here, is not a good look.”
Let’s say, for the sake of argument—I’m always up for a pissing match—that I didn’t know what the hell Wendy was talking about. Any “normal” business would simply let the heinous total due stand as self-explanatory. Not so the reapers. The comment section at the bottom of the bill left no margin for error on that front.
Surcharge for slander perpetrated by your “associate”: 200% of gross due.
“Slander?” I shouted. “When did those bitches get so sensitive?”
“People get pissed when you go on TV and implicate them in a black market menstrual blood juice pack business.”
“Whatever.”
“Also, you called Hillary a period-slurping chicken hawk. So she’s super happy about that.”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“It was for entertainment value!” And for my own personal enrichment. Hillary bore the 1-800 number of the beast. The leader of the razor toothed girl scouts of evil, Hillary for sure had it out for me. I wasn’t about to lay down while she stomped me like a house mouse. “Plus,” I continued, shouting this time. “Those little bitches are totally tampon wringers. They probably have an assembly line. Row upon row of fresh-faced little pageant princesses squeezing used jelly rolls into vials to sell in their gift shop. You know better than anyone that some vampires have their quirky tastes for that shit. And who knows? Maybe I’m clairvoyant, or something. Like your telephone psychic?”
“Oh yeah. That’s you. Because you’re all about thinking out here.” Wendy waved jazz hands in the air around us like a carnival barker. “And not completely self-absorbed.”
“There’s no need for personal affronts, Wendy. Besides, I’m on a roll. I wouldn’t put it past the reapers to have a menses farm, like those hair farms in India.”
“What the fuck? Do you ever stop?”
“Rarely. Listen. They pay those girls like a nickel an inch for their hair. What if the reapers have a whole town of women who they just pay to bleed?”
“You’re demented. I mean more than usual.”
“Anyways, back to your expense issue.”
“Our expense issue.”
I shook my head, ignoring her comment. “If I were the one with flies fleeing a raised welt on my stomach, I’d be happy to get that shit cured at ten times the price. And, you didn’t have to have your thighs done either so you can’t blame me for that.”
“I blame you for this.” She tapped the figure after the subtotal.
“Seventy-eight thousand dollars? That’s insane. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t pay that. And if I could, I’d be getting another Birkin Bag. You know my current situation.”
After the dust settled from the lawsuits following the demise of Johnny Birch and the subsequent TV show’s ratings nose dive, I was left with no choice but to expose the whole goddamn supernatural underground to the world through—what else—a gigantic zombie celebrity tell-all.
Stupid, I know. Becoming a writer is like making a conscious decision to be poor. There are so many hidden costs; marketing, conference attendance, feeding the ghostwriter you keep locked in a steamer trunk—and why does he eat so much? It’s really excessive.
“You know what this means?” Wendy had the deadeye stare of a sniper.
I shook my head. “Bake sale?”
“No,” she said, leaning forward and dimpling my lips closed with her index finger. “It means you’re my bitch.” She raised her eyebrow viciously.
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes.”
Whoever said, "Death acquits us of all obligation" clearly never met Wendy Carmichael. I've held multiple jobs since breathing in an enormous cloud of toxic living death and ending up zombie—marketing executive, TV producer and now…writer—but I've never been so beholden to responsibility as when my best friend Wendy demands that I be. Each of my protests was cut down by a machete-quick reminder of some madcap scheme I forced Wendy to take part in.
"Remember that time you made me pretend to be a hooker so you could lure those boys into a motel room and eat them, Amanda?”
“Unfair!” I cried. “I didn’t see you going hungry that night.”
“You made me clean up!” She shouted and slid a mysterious package across the table, bundled in brown paper and twine as though its contents were used primarily by embarrassed suburbanites to “bring the spark back to the marriage”—which of course is code for any device that vibrates and/or can be inserted in someone’s pooper.
After a struggle with the wrapping so monumental I was certain a sadist had been employed, I opened the package to reveal three jars, each full of a toxic white cream and meant for delivery to a highly confidential locale—one I couldn’t possibly mention here lest I end up with my head on a car hood—and not bent over and resting on it either while someone pounds me, you perv. I mean separate from my body.
Chopped the fuck off.
These folks are serious about their skin cream.
You see, occasionally, when two or more vampires love each other very much—and by “love,” I mean “tolerate,” and by “very much,” I mean “not as much as their drugs”—it’s customary for them to gather in a sleazy apartment, strip naked and grind up against a human liberally slathered in a white paste called cloud for a little while (read: several slack-jawed hours). It’s all perfectly consensual, of course—especially since the living crack pipe pockets a few thousand dollars on a good night. The vamp doesn’t make out too bad either, unless you consider being left curled on your side, sexual parts twitching, drooling in a puddle of your own urine “bad.”
I mean, I do. It’s gross.
But to each his own. I understand you, the reader, might be into that kind of thing, because you’re a pervert. Who am I to judge? You go on now. You live your pervy life.
(End pep talk)
At first, I shot for a pretty outlandish excuse not to. "You're selling out your own!" I claimed.
"If only, Amanda.” Wendy slapped her palms together in prayer and looked skyward—that she didn’t explode into flame was an actual miracle. “If I could sell-out on a regular basis, then I'd be able to afford that house in Madrona. You know how I love a gigantic Americanized Tudor. As it is, I can barely afford the penthouse and the Ferrari. I’m practically on fucking food stamps."
It was true. There was nothing Wendy liked more than a gutted out and modernized historical landmark. But that was beside the point.
"That's not what I'm talking about and you know it. Cloud is leached from us, from our kind. It's made from the breath, regardless of how stinky it is."
Normally, our “breath” is a killer for vamps if inhaled, but apparently when harvested from one of the few of us zombies who can expectorate the toxin into the air, the made, rather than through bites like the ones we call mistakes, its properties become euphoria-inducing and highly addictive.
"Jee-zus. Don't act so high and mighty,” she said. “It's not like you're of the highest moral fiber and everyone knows it. Hell, they know about all of us, now!"
Wendy never missed a chance to point out the critical reviews of my first memoir, Happy Hour of the Damned, a thinly veiled—it couldn't have been more transparent if it were made of Saran Wrap—exposé of the seedy underbelly of supernatural Seattle. As I knew they would, the living disregarded it as mere paranormal fiction—the f
ew that read it, that is—but amongst the dead, it caused quite a stir, at least when it came to me, Wendy and Gil, our predominately gay friend—we’d heard stories of him straying to the vadge, but passed them off as urban legend—who we keep around to tell us how fucking amazing we look, also because he’s hilarious and despite being a bloodsucking fiend at least fifty percent more in touch with his humanity, which helps to ground a couple of undead glamour killers like us.
Since the first book came out, there'd been some retaliation from those mentioned in an unfavorable light. Particularly those little pre-teen bitches, the reapers. What's worse? We'd seen a major slump in red carpet event invites and virtually no drink tickets.
And for that, I was deeply sorry.
So, I agreed to peddle vamp drugs.
Now, before you go judging, understand that all writers who don't have day jobs are forced into a life of crime. It's a simple fact. If you've never seen your favorite author on the bestseller lists and yet they keep magically putting out books, you can bet they're earning some extra cash via some scheme or another. I'm not saying they're all assassins-for-hire, but some are. So don't be surprised when they become embroiled in a political sex-ring shakedown or some perfectly reasonable human trafficking.
It's simply what we’ve been reduced to.
***
The living trudged past, lagged by the heat wave. Their scent lingered on the fevered striations of air rising from the concrete—this one: succulent, juicy, with just a hint of sea salt; that one: meaty, organic with a faint bouquet of garlic; the next: McGriddle, totally McGriddle.
In early August, Seattle sweats. People’s bodies are so used to the mild climate that during the single week of summer, they can’t acclimate…unless that includes whining incessantly.
Fucking summer.
Even my glass was sweaty. I trailed a fingertip over its surface, dabbing the chilly water against the back of one ear then the other, even as I glowered disgustedly across the table at my best friend Wendy who had the nerve to appear cucumber-cool and breezy in her sundress and Chanel sunglasses. Bitch. She could at least have the decency to fan herself.