“The trouble with talk is,” I say, pointing my handguns over the shoulders of the overweight and special needs kids, “it doesn’t solve anything.”
“That’s not true,” says Baby Doll15.
I squeeze the triggers. Nothing happens. Disappointed, I say, “Baby, please don’t say anything between the time I say something bad-ass and the time I pull the triggers. It’s okay you did it just then because the guns didn’t shoot but don’t do it again, okay?”
“What if you say something else stupid?”
“Ignore it.”
“That’s what I usually do.”
“Well then, keep doing it.”
I turn the guns and look at them. The safeties are on. I click them off. I point the guns at the troubled zombie teens again. “I wonder what my mom’s friends are going to think about this.” I pull the triggers again. Nothing happens again. I mutter curses while I stick one gun in my armpit and chamber a round in the other gun. Then I stick that gun in my armpit and I chamber a round in the first gun. I point the guns at the troubled zombie teens again and pull the triggers again. The noise and recoil scares the hell out of me. I dance around a little, cursing some more.
Baby Doll15 looks at me, holding her fingers in her ears.
“I didn’t think they’d work,” I explain.
She nods. “You blew the side of a teenager’s head off.”
“Was it awesome? I had my eyes closed.”
“It was terrible and gross.”
“Awesome, then. Just say, ‘Awesome.’ ”
Suddenly the troubled zombie teens open fire! There are so many of them! (Thirty-nine.) It’s times like these that I curse America’s restrictive gun laws! If only I were allowed to purchase fully automatic weapons (legally)! In front of me, heavy kids start dropping like (enormous, wingless) flies. Baby Doll15 and I hunker down behind a big pile of their bulky bodies. Behind us, the remaining student body lays flat on the rubble-strewn stroboscopic hallway, covering their ears, staring at me, wide-eyed, depending on me to keep them alive (and from becoming zombies), so they can die old and, most likely, miserable.
Emptying my clip, yelling in a way I contend is manly, I blind-fire over the dead bodies of obese kids. The kid who works in my (alleged) big cock-fighting ring hands me fresh clips when I pop out the empties. I slam home the magazines and take a quick look over the bodies. I dropped four more troubled zombie teens with lucky shots. They’re writhing around but no longer advancing. I can send them to Hell later (or Heaven if God is forgiving and understanding). I blind-fire again. And again. I empty clip after clip. It’s not working. The troubled zombie teens are getting closer and closer. I’m thinning them out, but I’m not stopping them. What’s taking Sweetie Honey so long? It’s time to get creative.
“I need books,” I yell. “Thick books.”
The student body comes through. Within moments, I have a big stack of thick books. “Somebody tape them to the girl in the wheelchair,” I yell.
“What are you doing?” asks Baby Doll15, scared.
“I’m going in,” I say, determined.
“Guy Boy Man,” she says, horrified, kneeling, sitting on her heels, giving me another look at her panties. “Don’t. Please. I . . . I can’t lose you.”
I pull Baby Doll15 to me and kiss her long and hard and with lots and lots of tongue. “You’re not going to lose me here today. Maybe somewhere else. Later on. You never know.” I squint at her, glance at her panties, and squint at her again. “That’s not true. Sometimes you do.”
“I never want to lose you, Guy Boy Man,” she says, with tears in her eyes.
I stare at her panties for quite a while. Then I grab my shotgun. A few seconds later, ducked down, I push the wheelchair girl ahead of me with one hand, and with the other hand, I let loose with blast after blast of sawedoff shotgun fire from between her legs. Zombie feet get separated from zombie legs. When the zombies fall, I fire into their heads. The wheelchair girl is riddled with bullets from the troubled zombie teens ahead of us. The thick books taped to her keep the bullets from penetrating her thin-wheelchair-girl body and, more importantly, from hitting me. Unfortunately, nobody taped books to her face, probably thinking it was rude to tape books to a wheelchair girl’s face, and that’s where she gets shot, a whole bunch of times, pretty much as soon as we set out.
“You’re in Heaven now, wheelchair girl,” I say, over the deafening roar of gunfire. “I’m sure you’d thank me if you could.” As I let loose with blast after blast, hiding behind the dead body of the wheelchair girl, pushing my way forward through the fallen, I wonder if we go to Heaven as soon as we die. Not all of us, obviously. People who haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and saviour don’t get to go to Heaven, which is unfortunate, because I (almost always) like (way) more of those people than I do people who have accepted Jesus as their lord and saviour. But that’s neither in between nor off to the side. I wonder if we get to go to Heaven as soon as we die. Jesus is supposed to come back and judge the living and the dead, right? So, when we die, do we just lie in our graves, dead, until he comes back, judges us, and then we get to go to Heaven? Or is there, like, some sort of pre-judgement, pre-approval stage, which allows us to go to Heaven until Jesus comes back, judges the living and the dead, returns to Heaven, and then verifies, either orally or perhaps in writing, that we, the dead in Heaven, pass muster, and can stay? Or is Heaven totally empty right now and no one gets to go until Jesus comes back and judges the living and the dead? I wish I knew someone who knew, because I’d ask that person.
When I take a quick look beyond the dead wheelchair girl, just as I’m starting to believe I might be able to kill all the troubled zombie teens by myself, I see Sweetie Honey drop from the ceiling. His magnificent sword flashes, slicing through troubled zombie teen after troubled zombie teen. He moves fluidly, wasting no energy, transferring momentum from one kill to the next. He stuns with his (admittedly impressive) body and removes life (or introduces death) with his beautiful sword. Sweetie sidekicks a zombie kid in the chest. The zombie kid flies back, lands on the ground, slides back (farther), and rolls (stiffly) around. As the (floored) zombie kid tries to raise the handgun it managed to hold, Sweetie front-flips toward it. Sweetie lands in the fighting stance over the zombie kid and stabs his sword down into the zombie kid’s forehead. Through zombie bone. Into zombie brain. Sweetie withdraws his weapon and ducks down under the M16 that another zombie is holding a foot from his back. Sweetie spins and sweeps that zombie’s legs out from under him. The M16 rapid-fires into lockers and then into the ceiling as the zombie falls! That’s illegal! That zombie modified a semi-automatic M16 and turned it into a full-auto M16, which you’re not supposed to do, because it isn’t fair to people who’re shooting at you in full accordance with American law! Regardless. Before the fallen zombie can point the M16 at its target again, Sweetie stands over the zombie and stabs his shining sword down into the zombie skull. The point where the sword disappears into skull seems magnified out of all proportion. Pulling out his blade, Sweetie spins and spin-kicks away another troubled zombie teen’s outstretched rifle. He forward-snap-kicks the troubled zombie teen under the chin, sending the troubled zombie teen flying up and backwards. The troubled zombie teen freezes, mid-air, at the height of its flight, and then falls, at normal speed, hard. In slow-motion, Sweetie permits himself to fall backwards to the floor. On his way, he lets loose with throwing stars. Five zombie students stand for a moment with throwing stars embedded in their foreheads, before they collapse, no longer undead, but instead dead, which is better.
And then it’s over.
Sweetie is back on his feet. He bows respectfully to the fallen students. Then he sheathes his sword and walks toward us.
Sweetie’s four exotically beautiful Eastern European girlfriends run to him. They wrap their arms around him, covering his masked face with kisses. “You were so great, Sweetie!” says Oana.
“Actually, I made a lot of mistakes,”
says Sweetie, pulling off his mask.
“Nobody could tell,” says Oana.
“No, I know,” says Sweetie. “Only a ninja could recognize my errors.” Sweetie walks up to me and shakes my hand. “You did well, Man.”
“Thanks, Honey.” After a while, I let go of his hand, because I think we’ve shaken hands long enough, and he seems to want to keep going. “Hey,” I say. “Where were you? What took you so long?”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” He points his thumb over his shoulder. “I ran into someone. A friend. From my old school. I knew you’d be okay so I stopped and talked for a bit.” He lowers his hand. “Is that all right? You’re not upset with me, are you?”
“No. Of course not. It’s cool. I was just wondering. Because you’re a ninja, and you said you’d help, and I just had to take on forty heavily armed troubled zombie teens pretty much singlehandedly.”
“Right,” says Sweetie. “So what’d you think of the fight, Baby Doll15?”
Baby Doll15 has her arms wrapped around me, happily. “I thought Guy Boy Man did amazing,” she says, looking up at me proudly. “He killed so many people. Using the wheelchair girl as a form of moving-cover was a stroke of genius.”
Sweetie nods for a while. Then he says, “No, I meant about how I did.”
“You did well,” says Baby Doll15, with a shrug.
“Really? Because I wasn’t sure. It felt okay. But you can’t always go by that. It’s important to get an outside perspective.”
The four exotically beautiful Eastern European girls narrow their eyes at Sweetie.
“Yeah, no,” says Baby Doll15, holding me tight. “I think you did fine.”
“Thanks,” says Sweetie. “I appreciate that. And hey. You were really brave.”
“I was so worried about Guy Boy Man,” she says, putting the side of her head against my shoulder. “I didn’t want him to get shot. Not even once.”
Sweetie’s shoulders fall. “Right.”
You can’t see what anyone else sees. You can’t be them, seeing the same thing. The chances of two people witnessing the same phenomenon and placing it in exactly the same context—categorizing, ranking, or arranging it in whatever ordering system they have in their minds—are about as astronomical as life evolving on the fragments of an exploding grenade. I wonder if Sweetie sees Baby Doll15 the way I saw her initially (cute), or the way I see her now (moderately to highly attractive). Which is the real Baby Doll15?
“Somebody fetch my whiskey and smokes!” I yell.
“Hey, Baby Doll15,” says Sweetie, excitedly. “If you had to pick a favourite part, like, of what I was doing and everything, what would it be?”
“I don’t know,” says Baby Doll15, indifferently. “The throwing stars?”
“Really? That comes so easy to me. Seriously. I can put a throwing star into somebody’s eyeball from a hundred yards away on a windy day.”
“Great,” says Baby Doll15, uninterested.
Hurt and angry, the four exotically beautiful Eastern European girls glare at Sweetie Honey.
“Am I drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes right now?” I yell. “Because if I am, I can’t tell. I only like it when I can tell!”
CHAPTER SEVEN:
When You Get attacked By a Pack of ravenous Wolves, at least You’ve Got a Chance
After sending forty heavily armed troubled zombie teens to their second and final deaths at my high school, the zombie establishment leaves me alone for a few weeks. There’s nothing about a school shooting on the news. There’s no public outrage over the re-deaths of so many young zombies. No angry zombie parents stumbling toward my castle with torches and pitchforks. The zombies cover it up. They bury it. I’m disappointed. I need publicity. How am I supposed to end human suffering if the suffering humans (for the most part) don’t even realize they’re (always) suffering? I should know better by now.
Zombies control everything. The media is just one of their playthings. Zombies create reality. If they don’t want you to know, they don’t tell you. If you figure things out for yourself, they produce “experts”—aside from human children, experts are the thing zombies produce most of— and these “experts” have multimedia presentations that (should) prove to you that you’re wrong (even though you aren’t). If you’re still not convinced, the zombies invite you to one of their many zombie institutions for additional help (translation: infection). I’m contemplating when to make my next move when Baby Doll15 makes the decision for me.
She and I have been growing closer and closer. For some reason, I hardly ever want to have sex with any of my followers now. I’m just not into it. My followers don’t like Baby Doll15 at all, but they treat her well, because they know I want them to. My demons, Mike Hawk and York Hunt, love Baby Doll15. Whenever she isn’t around, they remind me about her. They praise her. They extol her virtues. It makes me nervous, but I can’t disagree with them. She’s amazing. Whenever we’re together, I’m happy, and wracking my brains for ways to make her as happy as she makes me, but nothing I buy her, and no place I take her, seems to make her as happy as when she sees me. I don’t understand. I can’t believe I have the same effect on her as she has on me. It seems impossible. Too good to be true.
I got her a diamond. It was an enormous diamond, but it wasn’t enough. So I had the diamond covered with a thick layer of gold. I didn’t think that was enough, either, so I had the thick layer of gold caked with more enormous diamonds. Then I had that dipped in gold again. I repeated those steps a few more times. It still wasn’t right. Why wasn’t it good enough? What was it missing? A ruby layer? I added it. An emerald layer? Stuck them on. A thick coating of platinum? I was never satisfied. By the time it got to the size of a ten-pin bowling ball—big, gold, and studded with huge diamonds—I was so desperate to give her something, anything that might begin to start the infinite journey that a million eternal wanderers would have to undergo (forever) to never find the far-flung reaches of the awkward (mere) representations of my feelings for her, I gave the grotesque and obnoxious thing to her. “I wanted to give you this,” I told her. I’d had a thick gold chain and ankle cuff made, and attached to the big gold and diamond ball, so she could drag it around without worrying about losing it.
“A ball and chain,” she noted, noncommittally, as I kneeled before her and affixed it to her leg.
“You can see the gold and diamonds,” I said, “but there’s a bunch of other stuff in there too.” I stood up and admired my handiwork.
“Is this a representation of what I mean to you or what you believe you mean to me?”
I tried to make sense of that but I couldn’t. “There were so many words in that sentence,” I complained.
“Am I burden to you?” she asked, simply.
“Of course not,” I scoffed. “Baby, I’ve got so much money I don’t even notice you.”
She limped away from me, dragging the big gold and diamond ball behind her.
“You’re welcome,” I called after her.
Now, I’m by myself in the bathroom. I’m not really by myself. No. If I had to metaphorically state my position in regards to myself, I’d say I’m behind me. One hundred percent. But I’m not doing anything dirty. No. In truth, right now, I’m alone in the bathroom, and I’m in front of myself. I’m looking at myself in the mirror, trying to tame my crazy black hair with a diamond comb. The guy who sold me the diamond comb said it would definitely tame my wild hair, but he was a liar! Or else he truly believed it would work and he was merely wrong. He’s not my concern. He’s the business of the assassins I hired to have him killed in as painful a manner as they could dream up. I really encouraged them to put some thought into it and, as they left, they were already bouncing ideas off each other, so I’m optimistic. I’m combing my hair now because it’s wet. And it’s not like I’m fresh from the shower.
I just finished wrestling my demons, and trying to drown them. They were really getting on my nerves. I had Mike Hawk in a headlock, trying to strangle th
e life out of him. While I struggled with Mike Hawk, York Hunt suggested different (elaborate) scenarios I could orchestrate to tell Baby Doll15 I love her: a romantic stroll on a beach in the Caribbean; she and I sipping espressos at an outdoor café in Rome; space tourism. I filled the bathtub. I stuck Mike Hawk’s head under the surface of the water and held it there until Mike Hawk went limp. When I released my demon and stood, Mike Hawk emerged from the water, laughing.
“You can’t drown demons,” he said.
“You can try,” I replied, annoyed.
“Why don’t you just tell her?” said Mike Hawk. “Tell her how you feel. That’s all you want to do. It’s three little words. You imagine yourself telling her, for the first time, a thousand times a day, and you imagine yourself telling her a thousand times a day after that.”
“Don’t tell me what I imagine,” I warned, pointing a finger at Mike Hawk. “You can’t even imagine what I imagine.”
“You believe love is a zombie emotion, right?” said York Hunt. “Well, why does it have to stay that way? Why can’t you pirate it and make it human?”
(This was sort of like when Jesus got tempted in the desert.)
“You have trillions of dollars but the only thing you want is to tell Baby Doll15 you love her,” said York Hunt. “That’s beautiful, good, and important. You should do it.”
I tried to drown York Hunt too, but that didn’t work either.
Anyway, now, I open the mirror (not the layers of it; rather the cabinet it conceals) to put away my diamond comb after having accomplished nothing with it. When I close the mirror, Baby Doll15’s unicorn is standing behind me, looking at me in the mirror over my shoulder. It’s startling. In a brave manner that bespeaks of my calm in a crisis, I jump around for a while, wide-eyed, slapping at the air, cursing mightily. Then I turn to the unicorn behind me in the bathroom, and say, coolly, “Hey, unicorn. You startled me.”
The unicorn snorts.
Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies Page 10