ChiZine Publications
FIRST EDITION
Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies © 2012 by James Marshall Cover artwork © 2012 by Erik Mohr Interior design © 2012 by Samantha Beiko
All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction that was given to a pirate (eGod) after it was retrieved from the future by exotically beautiful Eastern European girls. Then diabolical Eastern European scientists worked tirelessly to ensure that every name, character, place, and incident in the world which, even remotely, resembled one within the book was “erased.” (How? Ninjas.) If any similarity still exists, it’s purely accidental (and suggests you live in an alternate dimension). Any lingering resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental and highly unlikely.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ninja versus pirate featuring zombies / James Marshall.
(The how to end human suffering series ; 1) Issued also in electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-926851-58-7
I. Title. II. Series: Marshall, James, 1973- . How to end human suffering series ; 1.
PS8626.A78N56 2012 C813’.6 C2012-900419-7
CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]
PROLOGUE:
What’s Past is Not; Nor Will it ever Be
One day I recognized I was a prisoner in my parents’ basement, which I thought was the real world, but it wasn’t the real world; it was my parents’ basement, and once I realized I was a prisoner in my parents’ basement, okay, I didn’t realize it was my parents’ basement right away, and to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t fully aware I was even being held prisoner and, in the interests of full disclosure, I’m not entirely sure how I ever realize anything at any given time, I just do, or seem to, and anyway, I basically woke up, not that I was asleep exactly, but it definitely wasn’t a state of full consciousness, and I’m not arguing I’m fully conscious now; I’m merely suggesting I’m more conscious than I was then, and anyway, when I woke up (the whole sleep/waking thing is a metaphor), I noticed I was bound, like, with chains, so I hung out for a while, waiting to see if anything sexy was going to happen, and then, all of sudden, out of nowhere, and to my complete amazement, it totally didn’t, so I decided my situation was lame, and I looked around and saw the entire human population of the planet Earth was stuck there in my parents’ basement with me (I still didn’t know it was my parents’ basement), and they, the entire population of planet Earth, were all frantically but soundlessly bashing keyboards that weren’t attached to anything, shaking wireless mice beaming invisible signals nowhere, and yelling, but wordlessly, into headsets that weren’t connected to anything, bound and determined to remain completely chained-up, staring straight ahead at a huge screen where a bunch of shapes, figures, and forms were displayed, and these shapes, figures, and forms were what—I realized this later—they were what I’d always believed to be real, and they were what the whole world continued to believe was real, and I looked at the whole world chained up in my parents’ damp, dank, dark basement and, even though everyone’s eyes were wide open, they were, to bring back the metaphor, sleeping, or, at the very least, not fully conscious and, if it isn’t already obvious, when you’re trapped in my parents’ basement, it’s like you’re dreaming, but you’re absolutely convinced you’re awake and everything you’re experiencing is real—it’s all there is, was, and ever could be—but you don’t notice the chains binding you, or that you’re trapped in your parents’ stupid, stinking basement (I’m bitter about the basement now), and as soon as I realized I was being restrained and nothing sexy was going on, I struggled to free myself so I could find some suckers to punish and fools to beat-down for holding me hostage, and when I got loose, I tried to rescue/ wake up some of the people who were trapped nearby, and okay, maybe I focused primarily on the hot young girls initially but it doesn’t matter because nobody woke up, and it was then—okay it was a little while later; first I thought about just saving myself—but it was right after that that I knew I had to do something big, dramatic, and important to save the world, and I knew it was going to make me really popular, get me laid lots, and make me very, very wealthy, so feeling pretty good about myself, I left the basement (it had a rapid transit system), even though I still didn’t know it was the basement and, en route, with the wind rushing through my heroic hair and over my brave face (it was sort of an open-roof rapid transit system), I passed into another room in the basement, the utility room, where I saw the figures, shapes, and forms again—the ones that were displayed on the big screen that the whole world was staring at, believing they were impacting with their keyboards, mice, and headsets, in the other room—but here, I saw the figures, shapes, and forms in a different way, a three-dimensional way, but they were all covered in tight black cloth and there were little white dots stuck to them all over in what appeared to be strategic locations, and the rapid transit system slowed because I wanted to stop here (it was thought-powered apparently), since at that moment I believed I’d entered the real real world, where everything was authentic, true, and legitimate, and it was so beautiful, a valiant tear bulged muscularly over my lower eyelid and rolled triumphantly down my fearless face, but then I noticed everything was being filmed by zombies who were broadcasting it, presumably to the other room in the basement where the whole world was watching it on the LCD display, and the zombies noticed me, Guy Boy Man, gallantly looking at them, and they started ambling in my direction, so I got the hell out of there, but in cool way, and the high-speed convertible train raced me toward a pinprick of piercing white light at the top of a gigantic staircase, and the light grew more and more blinding as I ascended the stairs and passed through the open doorway, leaving behind the basement (that’s when I realized it’d been a basement), and I sped through the kitchen, and then the front room where my parents were watching TV (that’s when I realized it’d been my parents’ basement), and then the foyer, racing toward the front door, and the light, which was already painfully bright, grew brighter and brighter until I closed my eyes and covered them with my forearm and suddenly I was transported outside the house, leaving the entire population of the planet behind me, and when my eyes adjusted, I gawked, open-mouthed in awe at the real world, and I saw everything, the animals and the trees, for example, as they are, alive and endangered, obviously, because of climate change, but I saw the animals and trees for what they truly are, dying, gasping-for-breath beings, instead of two-dimensional images of shapes, figures, and forms on an LCD display, or three-dimensional representations of the real deal being motion-captured by zombies, and I resolved, resolutely, to return to this abomination, this degradation, this house with its stupid, stinking basement, to free everyone, starting with the hot young girls, and I set off, stout-hearted and determined (by my genetics, upbringing, experiences, and the strange age into which I was born) to save the world.
“I’m your saviour; I’ve come here to destroy you.” Guy Boy Man
CHAPTER ONE:
aside from her Big Breasts, Pale Blue lips, Child-Bearing hips,Baby-Powder-White skin,Cotton-Candy-Pink-hair, and The Unicorn That follows her everywhere, Baby Doll15 seems like Just a regular fifteen-year-old Girl
I’m American so I believe in God. I mean, even if people “invented” God instead of the other way around, God is “real” as far as I’m concerned. Just because something didn’t exist before you invented it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist after you invented it. You don’t stand in front of a speeding car because it’s an “invention” and there was a time when it didn’t e
xist. No. You get the hell out of the way.
It’s first thing in the morning and I’m at Scare City High School and the hallway is full of living human teenagers and zombie teenagers so I pull out a half-empty bottle of whiskey, undo the top, take a swig, and lean back against the lockers.
The hallway is a horror show. It’s dark. Fluorescent lights flicker off and on, illuminating the nightmare sporadically. Broken bits of (not really) ceiling cover the floor. Failed water pipes spill out. What isn’t covered with hazardous rubble is treacherously slippery. Over our heads, insulation is exposed and dangling, like we are, in the heights of uncertainty, over the long deadly fall of discovery, in the futile hope of being helped, and the rectangular metal boxes, which house the bare fluorescent bulbs, hang unevenly from taut wires crimped around sharp metal corners. The destiny of the wires is knowable.
As is ours.
Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Guy Boy Man, which, I admit, is pretty weird, because I’m not Asian, or a series of keywords to search for gay porn, or heterosexual porn, I guess, if you’re a chick and you’re into porn and if you are, let me just say, that’s awesome. I’m sixteen years old and I’m in the tenth grade, which is super convenient if you’re into underage girls like I am. Recently I became fantastically wealthy. So that’s nice.
In the interests of full-disclosure, I may have, inadvertently, caused a crisis in the global financial system in the process of becoming fantastically wealthy. When I, through a series of exciting adventures I can’t be bothered to relate here, gained access to unspeakable wealth—I actually like to talk about it but it turns out a lot of people don’t want to hear about it—I, unfortunately, [or fortunately if you’re me (and I am)] caused, it seems, trillions (and trillions) of dollars to be transferred from various (zombie) financial institutions—in fairness, they were being horribly mismanaged and their CEOs were receiving obnoxious salaries—to my personal account, and I did all this while standing in front of an ATM machine—as you can imagine, the people waiting behind me were a little annoyed—but everything is possible, and more than that, necessary.
My fateful trip to the ATM created staggering zombie unemployment and mind-blowing deficits for zombie governments everywhere. Now hordes of mindless undead monsters Occupy Wall Street and protest in cities around the world. (FYI: I’m 99% of the 1%.)
Where did all these zombies come from? Invariably, zombie outbreaks occur when you’re in the hospital. And I was in a coma of sorts: I didn’t think people were that bad. Oh sure, I knew there was greed and war and religiousmass-media deception. And, of course, I was aware of the poverty, pollution, and corruption. But I thought that was just the way things were. I didn’t think there was anything anyone could do about it.
Recently, however, something happened which exposed the fundamentally irredeemable nature of people to me. It made such an impression, I decided to take matters into my own hands and wipe people off the face of the planet Dearth. One of my teachers visited my parents’ house one evening. I managed to eavesdrop on Mrs. Miriam Burnett informing my mom and dad that I was destined to perform exceedingly poorly on an upcoming standardized test. Now there’s something you should know about me. Until this point, I’d suffered from a problem. Okay, I’d suffered from more than one problem but I’m talking about this one problem in particular. It was called Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I suffered from constant anxiety and depression resulting from the knowledge that, one day, I was going to experience a highly traumatic event. I didn’t know what this event was going to be or when it would occur. All I knew was that it was going to be really, really bad.
The traumatic event I’d been waiting for was when Mrs. Burnett told my parents I was going to blow this standardized test. I underwent a profound change. I realized this standardized test wasn’t just any standardized test. It was the ZAT: the Zombie Acceptance Test. (Those who pass become zombies and those who don’t become zombie food.) I realized my parents weren’t my parents and Mrs. Burnett wasn’t Mrs. Burnett. They were zombies. Pretty much everyone who was “good” and “moral” and “responsible” is a zombie.
With horror, I listened as my parents and Mrs. Burnett agreed they might as well just eat me right then and there.
Suddenly I realized people/zombies are a scourge!
I confronted my parents and Mrs. Burnett. They were sitting in the (not really) living room. Their slack jaws hung. Their blank white eyes stared. I saw their broken teeth. Sharp and vicious. I saw their blue tongues. Thick drool slow-oozed from the sides of their mouths: viscous. Their skin was the colour grey would be if grey turned grey. It was cracked in places and old-wound purple. I didn’t say anything to them.
I didn’t have anything to say.
In one hand, I had a hatchet. In the other hand, I had a video camera.
Walking toward them, I lifted the hatchet.
While decapitating my zombie parents, in the process of progress, I separated their mealy-mouths from their sour stomachs. Regardless of the surprise-attacking, the hardcore hacking—working the hatchet forwards and backwards so it would come loose, bracing myself against their stiff bodies with one hand and one foot for leverage and then, wide-eyed, swinging, again and again, my weapon of no-choice through the air, chopping into their necks, bathing me in their toxic blood—my parents groaned in an unfeeling way.
“Back in my day, we didn’t have time to decapitate our parents,” said my dad. “We had to get to work.”
“All this violence,” said my mom. “What are my friends going to think?”
“Back in my day, if you decapitated your parents, people looked at you like you were weird,” said my dad.
Perhaps I should’ve gone with a sword, for ease of use and relative cleanliness, but I find, and this is just my personal experience, maybe you’ve had different results, but I find nothing beats the hatchet when your goal is the spectacle kill, because it’s smaller and lighter than the axe, yet it retains that menacing look, and furthermore, its reduced size brings you closer to your victim or, if it’s your parents, your victimizers, because ultimately, your parents are your murderers.
“I like your hatchet,” said my dad.
“Really? I just got it.” I held it closer to him. “I don’t know if you noticed this little detail right here but . . . hey . . . wait a minute. Yeah, nice try, Dad.”
After I severed my parents’ heads, and Mrs. Burnett’s, so they’d starve to death and die again, or at least not actively live undead anymore, I decided I couldn’t leave them like that, so I cut their doctrinally rigid, covered-inclosed-minded-wounds-that-never-bleed, not-sorry-soresthat-never-weep, gross, pale grey bodies into little pieces, and then I destroyed their mindless minds—it was sort of a mincing action—and to put an exclamation mark on the whole monstrous matter, I doused their inflexible, bloodless pieces, and when I say “bloodless” I mean “emotionless” because their pieces were, in point of fact, actually very bloody, which was awesome; blood is awesome, everybody knows that; and anyway, in addition to all the parts of my parents and my English teacher, I doused the house—my childhood home—in premium gasoline, lit it, and walked outside, casually, letting the dripping hatchet hang down by my side, bad-ass style, and then I turned back to watch, remorselessly, while my past strained uselessly toward the sky in a magic orange-yellow shape, and, shortly thereafter, I uploaded video of the entire event to my website: HowToEndHumanSuffering.com.
I don’t know if it happens every time, but sometimes when you kill your parents with a hatchet, a centaur appears to you. That’s what happened to me. He had the upper half of a man and the body of a horse. His upper half, the man half, was shirtless and muscular. His lower half, the horse half, was palomino: golden-tan.
“Guy Boy Man,” he said, bowing down to me. “My name is Centaur111.” He straightened up. “I’ve come from Fairyland to accompany you on a series of exciting adventures.”
“I always thought Fairyland was a mythical place, like Nirva
na, Shangri-La, or Funkytown,” I said.
“Fairyland is real and some of our exciting adventures will take us there,” he said. “Right now a lot of beautiful female fairies, pixies, nymphs, and sprites want to spend some serious quality time with you there; everybody is buzzing about the stand you’re taking against the undead. We, the supernatural creatures, have been forced into an uneasy alliance with zombies. We rebuild what they tear down so the cycle of creation and destruction can continue.”
“If supernatural creatures partner with zombies, then supernatural creatures are my enemy too.”
“One thing at a time, Guy Boy Man. Before you declare war on me and my kind, first enjoy the pleasures of female fairies, pixies, nymphs, and sprites.”
“Yeah, I can do that,” I said.
“And then let’s go on a series of exciting adventures,” said Centaur111. “They will prepare you for your struggle with the zombies and those that control them. And when we get back, I’ll help you attain unimaginable wealth in exchange for one simple promise.”
“What’s the promise?” I asked.
“In exchange for trillions and trillions of American dollars, you can never tell a human female you love her. If you do, you lose your money.”
“Why can’t I just have the money without any conditions?” I asked.
“That’s just how it is,” said Centaur111.
It sounded okay to me. I mean, I’d never been in love before. And I couldn’t see myself experiencing that for the first time in the near future so it didn’t really seem like a huge ask. It wasn’t like I had a girlfriend or anything. I didn’t know how hard it could be to go without saying those three little words. “I guess you’ve got a deal,” I said.
“Ride me, Guy Boy Man,” said Centaur111.
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