I just stood there for a minute. Without moving my head, I looked from side to side. Then I climbed onto Centaur111’s back and we set off.
After I had all kinds of good times with female fairies, pixies, nymphs, and sprites—the details of which I won’t go into here; talk to me later—and after I went on a series of exciting adventures I can’t be bothered to relate here, Centaur111 was beside me as I stood in front of the ATM.
“Remember,” said Centaur111. “In exchange for this money, you can never tell a girl you love her. If you do, you lose all your money.”
“I remember,” I said.
The ATM asked me how much I wanted to withdraw. I hit the “Completely” button.
Now I have so much money it’s obscene. Recently the zombie Supreme Court ruled that money is speech. That’s typical zombie mindlessness. It’s like ruling that water is cross country skis. Obviously, it’s not. But if money is speech, then I have the most say in the world. (And the poor are silent. Which sucks for them.)
Anyway, it turns out it’s really hard to wipe zombies off the face of the planet and tear down all their mindless institutions, especially when you’re drunk and partying with hot young girls all the time, so I decided to start small: I resolved to clean up my high school.
Here at Scare City High School, the occasional drop of total darkness, interspersed with stroboscopic sights from the flickering lights, combined with the constant presence of electricity and water in close proximity (i.e., the leaking pipes and exposed wires), like in our brains, lends an (oxygen-less) air of terror to the hallways.
Leaning back against my locker, I take another swig of whiskey, savouring the holy fire in my throat and mind. I’m wearing a ceremonial robe. It’s made of shiny, white, high-tech-plastic; it’s divided in the front, but it seals there seamlessly. Additionally, I’m wearing a pirate hat. It’s the Pope’s hat: the big tall golden one. I had it pirated. Now it’s mine. Completing my look, and juxtaposed against my shiny white robe, is my glossy-dark-feathered faithful shoulderperched bird that never craps on me like my parents did.
“Hey, Guy Boy Man,” someone calls out. “I like your black parrot!”
“It’s a raven,” I call back. “Get it right. But thanks.”
I basically pirated all my money from the global economy, and, in order to lead others out of despair, I became a spiritual leader, and all spiritual leaders are basically pirates, taking power and giving nothing in return, so now I consider myself, and encourage all others to consider me, a pirate. (The details of my religion can be found on HowToEndHumanSuffering.com; it’s basically a violent, individualistic form of Christianity.)
When I was searching for the best shoulder-perched bird, I briefly considered the pirate’s traditional companion: the parrot. I quickly discarded this idea because I don’t want some stupid squawker reciting a list of all my secrets at some inopportune time. Then I considered the most badass bird: the bald eagle. (America!) It turns out this is the mistake most pirates make; hence the eye-patch. Finally, I decided on the raven. Firstly, the raven is always ready to feast on the dead bodies of my enemies, which I appreciate. Secondly, goth girls dig it, which is cool.
The ghost of my parents’ voices haunts me. My father criticizes: “Back in my day, we didn’t have time for birds. We had to get to work.” My mother worries: “You’re wearing a ceremonial robe! What are my friends going to think?” My father grabs me: “Back in my day, if you walked around in a stupid hat like that, people looked at you like you were weird.” I shake my head, trying to get rid of them.
Here’s something you might not know just from looking at me: I’m very attractive. I’m not good-looking or anything. I’m skinny. I’m pale. My eyes are sunken and circled by dark rings. (I’ve always been engaged to the inside and kept awake by its night.) And my thick black hair is in constant revolt, never lying down. (No matter how often I go to the salon, my thick black hair is always too long to be short, and too short to be long.) No. I’m attractive because I’m powerful; I’m powerful because I’m wealthy; and I’m confident because I’m both.
Walking in the hallway, zombie teenagers stare at me warily, and, I have to admit, scarily. I’m the only one who can see them for what they are, and they know it. Their outstretched arms are bound at the wrists with grey rope. Their open mouths (full of blue tongues and broken but still sharp teeth) are muzzled behind shiny stainless steel face cages. They still disturb me. They’re no threat to me, physically, bound as they are now, but they do something to my mind. I want to get away from them. I want them to get away from me. Looking at them, I shudder. I shudder to think. I take another drink.
I try to focus on the (few) living kids going by. Mostly the hot young girls. They pick their way over the brokenness and try not to slip on the slickness. Slim girls, slender girls, thin girls. I look at them all. I don’t discriminate. As I watch the flashing, artificial-light girls in the hallway, random voices divide the living murmurs and the moans of the undead, the shuffling zombie feet and the alive kids’ squeaking sneakers, and call out to me, “Hey, Guy Boy Man, your religion is better than all the others put together, including science!” and “Your religion saved my useless and worthless life, Guy Boy Man!”
I hold up my whiskey bottle at the youth of America. “Good morning, idiots,” I say, in a toast. I take another swig.
The main goal of my religion is to have a really great time; adjunctive to that goal is my plight to end all human suffering, mostly through ending all human reproduction (right now any idiot can breed, and, sadly, most idiots do). When human reproduction has ceased, or been drastically reduced, we’ll decrease, perhaps even eliminate, the zombie food supply. I readily admit my objective is ambitious. Humans have been reproducing for a long time. But it’s good to set goals.
Since I probably won’t be able to stop people from reproducing within my target timeline—six to eight weeks—I’ve set myself a more manageable goal: to stop the One responsible for the horrific state of Scare City High School and for all the terrifying things that happen here.
Suddenly, a zombie girl turns and walks straight into the locker next to mine. She bounces off it. (All the zombie teenagers are forced, by their zombie parents, to wear helmets at all times to avoid accidentally bashing out their own brains.) The zombie girl backs up a bit and walks into the locker next to mine again. She stumbles back again. She seems to think she should be able to get through it. Actually, no. It seems like she doesn’t think at all. It also seems like she doesn’t recognize negative stimuli. I don’t know, though. Maybe she’s attempting to align all the empty spaces in her body with all the empty spaces in the locker so she can pass through it into a classroom. Or maybe there’s supposed to be some sort of zombie portal at the locker next to mine. (I think I’m really giving her the benefit of the doubt with those last two.)
Every time she walks into the locker, her hands, which are tied together, clang into the locker first, and are forced up over her helmeted head as she continues forward without paying attention to her outstretched arms. She’s wearing a ragged, knee-length, black skirt and a grey T-shirt that’s splotched purple with blood stains. She’s also wearing heavily scuffed white high heels. One of the shoes challenges the definition of “high heel” because it no longer has a heel; it’s, like, a “low heel,” or a “non-high, non-heel,” or a “messy white flat” or something; (the word “white” is probably misplaced too.) From under her battered black helmet, the zombie girl’s dirty red hair sticks out and hangs in impossible ways, held in place by garbage goo and the scum of scum. She walks into the locker again. I push-kick her in the hip, moving her a few zombie steps to the side. She turns and stares at me with her lifeless white eyes. A (manly) chill runs up my spine. I look at the shiny stainless steel cage covering her mouth. Those thin bars arranged horizontally and curved up and back to meet just above her ears where they curve over and down—spreading into another array of stainless steel bars behind her head, holding the muzzle in pl
ace under the back of her helmet— are my only protection from her bite, and from sharing her pointless plight. “Get out of here, zombie chick!” I hiss. She doesn’t understand, and it’s obvious, but, luckily, she stumbles away, so it doesn’t matter.
Teenagers keep passing me in the hallway. They don’t go anywhere. They just keep passing. They’re nameless. Faceless. They’re zombies. Even the ones that aren’t zombies. They just aren’t zombies yet. The ones that won’t become zombies are doomed to be zombie food. God. I hate high school.
The kids aren’t the only life-(and non-life)-forms in the hallway. There’s something greenish-brown on all the water fountains. I think they’re water fountains. The water has never been tested, as far as I know. If I sound paranoid, it’s because there’s a very real chance someone is trying to kill us so they don’t have to neglect us anymore. Anyway, the greenish-brown life-form is making pretty good progress up the walls. Our biology teacher says it’s God’s will. I assume the musty smell is God’s will too.
As you know, I’ve taken it upon myself—I’ve also taken it upon a bunch of other people who will actually do the hard work—to stop the One who’s to blame for all the terrifying things that happen at Scare City High School; the One who’s responsible for the horrific state of everything. Who is he? (Not that he couldn’t be a she.) Who’s accountable for all this? He’s a mystery: unknown and unknowable. Yet we here at Scare City High exist according to his pronouncements. A figureless shadow, he rewards the good, punishes the bad, and decides which is which or just always knows. He is my enemy. I’ve never seen him, personally, but I’ve met a few who swear they have. I’ve shaken their shoulders. I’ve seen the fear in their wide eyes. “Where is he?” I’ve cried. “Where is he?”
He’s in the broken glass threatening to cut us. He’s in the mould slowly poisoning us. He’s in the leaking plumbing and backed-up toilets and graffiti. He’s in the warping and staining and rot. He’s everywhere and we are not. Does he have a name? No. He has a title.
The Principal.
And I, Guy Boy Man, will end his reign of terror.
Or I’ll guide the people who will end his reign of terror. Usually I like to act in a supervisory capacity.
In my head, my dad says, “Back in my day, we didn’t have time to end reigns of terror. We had to get to work.”
As if to cleanse my palate from my encounter with the zombie chick who kept walking into the locker next to mine, a cute girl with pink hair emerges from the hallway’s flashing filth and gloom. The cute girl’s pink hair is straight, slightly longer than shoulder length, and twice divided: once at her centre part; again at the tops of her shoulders. Some of it falls in front of her; some of it behind. Her flawless skin is breast-milk-white.
She walks right up to me. A glowing white unicorn struts beside her. Its hooves click silently on the hallway floor. I didn’t know hooves could click silently, but apparently they can. With unicorns. In any event, the girl and the unicorn stop directly in front of me. Lowering her head a little, meekly, the cute girl brushes hair back behind her ears with her fingertips, looking at me the whole time. Her eyes are the most amazing colour I’ve never seen before. The grey of them is so light it’s almost white. She looks dead. Not undead. When she looks at me, she looks peacefully dead. All I see is white, absence, the lack of black, nothing holy, just nothing, and I think it’s all the more beautiful for just being the product of chance, of the unspeakable, unimaginable number of possibilities that were tried and rejected before we both somehow ended up right here, at this exact moment, which is, of course, magical and, arguably, holy, in how mind-bogglingly fortuitous it is, if you’re a fan of suffering, which I, personally, am not, and if you believe this, all of this, life (or whatever it is) is real, truly real, happening once and only once, exactly as it seems, tangibly, substantially, and that other people are actually experiencing it in the same way, which I, personally, don’t.
If they did, they would’ve fixed it, right?
At my school, in addition to the greenish-brown “lifeform” growing on and from what we believe (we’re supposed to think) are water fountains, there’s also a blackish-red substance splashed and splattered over all the lockers on both sides of the hallway. Some think it’s dried blood. Others aren’t so sure. Most of us are pretty convinced, though.
Suddenly the cute girl turns cautious. She glances side to side, making sure no one is watching. Then she leans close, lifts her chin at me, and says, conspiratorially, “You’re Guy Boy Man, right?”
I squint at her, suspicious. “You a cop?”
“No.” She leans back, stunned. “I’m a regular girl with pink hair and a unicorn.”
I nod, still squinting at her. “Maybe that’s your cover.”
She’s wearing four-inch shiny black stilettos, very skinny dark blue jeans, and a tight, white man’s dress shirt. It isn’t a “white man’s dress shirt,” per se. Obviously, men of different ethnicities could wear it. Anyway, this cute girl looks great in the shirt I’m talking about, which isn’t tucked in, but isn’t long enough to cover her ass in case I want to take a look later, which I will, just so you know. The sleeves are rolled up just below her elbows. The top three buttons are undone, showing off the tops of her big breasts and a bit of her lacy red bra. I didn’t mention she had big breasts earlier because that sort of thing isn’t polite to notice right away, even though I totally noticed it right away. I even noticed how the two pieces of her divided shirt are brought together and held in place by phallic buttons pushed through vaginal holes, and I noted the way the fabric is stretched in taut ripples over her breasts like a textbook picture of (dissatisfied) cells dividing.
“Cops pretend to be cute fifteen-year-old girls all the time,” I point out.
The unicorn has its majestic head turned toward the girl. It’s looking at me, nobly, not threateningly, but with complete confidence, from one of its dark eyes. (I’m not too surprised to see a unicorn; unicorns are mentioned six times in the King James Version of the Bible; I believe in a strict literal interpretation of pretty much everything; doesn’t everybody?)
The girl shrugs. She’s wearing a pearl necklace, and a thin gold chain that carries a small gold cross. (I don’t use the word “jewellery” because I’m not anti-Semitic.) I think about the nature of the decorative circles around her neck. I think about the divided beginning and end. I think about the clasps. Her skin is so white, the tight string of pearls around her neck looks darker in comparison. She isn’t wearing makeup, but her lips are almost blue, like she’s hypothermic. “I’m not a cop,” she insists.
“Well I’m going to tell the judge you said so.” I take a slug of whiskey. “Obviously, the judge won’t care, because he’ll be out to get me, but I’m going to tell him anyway, just so it’s on the record, and then, someday, historians can write about how unfairly everybody treated me!” I guzzle a few more shots and set the bottle down on the floor, next to my backpack. I turn away from the girl. “I didn’t mean to imply the judge couldn’t be a woman.” I grab my cigarettes and lighter from the top shelf of my locker. When I turn back, I offer the cute girl a butt, but she just shakes her head. “So what do you want, cop?” I spark a cigarette and blow smoke up at the broken ceiling. “If this is in regards to my big cock fighting ring, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
No one knows exactly when the school started falling apart. It’s unclear whether anyone tried to maintain it after it was built—if those who built the school gave up sometime during construction, or if the materials themselves were just never really that into it. I guess it’s all about how close you want to look or how far back you want to go. I’m not sure there’s a difference.
“It’s not about your big cock fighting ring.” Turning away, the pink-haired girl reaches over, puts her hand on the unicorn, and pats its back a couple of times. It seems like a gesture more to comfort her than the unicorn.
“Sure.” I nod at her, unconvinced. She
’s slender but not skinny. There’s a softness to her. Looking at her, I feel like if I grabbed her arms, I’d grab something, something real, but I’ve been wrong before. “Do you like hardcore pornography?”
“Of course not.” She says it like it’s a ridiculous question.
“How come?”
“It degrades women.”
“It degrades men too. It degrades everybody equally.”
“Whatever,” she says. “It’s disgusting.”
“My dad used to say that back in his day, you couldn’t get hardcore pornography, day or night, without leaving the comfort of your own home,” I tell her. “You had to buy it from a guy in a brick-and-mortar store. And he looked at you like you were weird.”
“Really?” she asks, trying not to look at my robe, trying to think of something else to see. She reaches out to her unicorn again.
“Yeah.” I take a drag off my smoke. “So what are you going to pretend you want to talk about when you really want to talk about my big cock fighting ring?”
Most of the (few) students who (can be bothered to) think about where everything went wrong with the school (usually) point to the ill-qualified, faint-hearted, nambypamby, liberal administration’s (surprisingly principled) decision to stand up to the corporate interests providing so much of the school’s funding. You see, in exchange for millions of dollars that went toward the school’s operating budget, these corporate interests—almost entirely junk food and caffeinated sugar drink vendors—were allowed to advertise in the school’s hallways, cafeteria, and (ironically) gymnasium. They were permitted to place vending machines near every entrance and exit. Along with every middle area. One day (it might have been around the time we had to bring in bigger desks and chairs for some of our “more loveable” schoolmates), the administration decided it might not be in the (ballooning) student body’s best interests to have such easy access to unhealthy food and drink. To be fair, some of the (few) students who (can be bothered to) think about where everything went wrong also point to the lack of funding that necessitated the acceptance of corporate funding in the first place.
Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies Page 2