Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies

by James Marshall

  “Okay,” says my follower, cheerfully, slinking away with the cell phone tray of drinks.

  “I believe life starts at four,” I call after her.

  “What makes you think they’ll do what you suggest rather than what their zombie leaders command?” asks Oana.

  “I don’t think they will. They might want to. They might stand over their screaming, wailing, completely selfabsorbed, monstrous offspring, and consider killing them, but they won’t be able to bring themselves to do it. They’ll be arrested, halted by their twisted belief they love their children, even though they brought them into this horrible world only to suffer and, at best, become zombies like them someday or, at worst, to become zombie food.”

  “So why suggest it and draw attention to yourself when you don’t think it’ll work?”

  “The more zombies I outrage, the more human children will learn of my existence, and those who learn of my existence will visit HowToEndHumanSuffering.com and learn the horrible truth and, if they’re generous, they’ll make a donation, whatever they think is fair, using the PayPal button. Then, when the time is right, we’ll take back this world for real human beings and all our online identities and avatars!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  Ninjas Can’t Be Nice all The Time

  Later that night, after I send the four exotic Eastern European girls home, saying I want to be alone with my morbid thoughts, I sit sadly staring at nothing, thinking about everything, and how I lost it. Another of my followers comes into the room.

  “Baby Doll15 and her unicorn are at the front gate,” she says, gingerly.

  The words fill me with excitement and dread, hope and fear. I don’t know what to think. I don’t think I have time to think about what to think. I pull out my cell phone. I call up the security feed. I see her in there, in the phone. In several screens, from a number of angles, I see Baby Doll15 and her unicorn or another unicorn that looked exactly like her last one. I suppose the possibility also exists that the pink-haired girl I see isn’t actually Baby Doll15 but instead a clone or perhaps a robot built in Baby Doll15’s image. Perhaps Baby Doll15 never existed and the robot is built in someone else’s image or in no one’s image, which is a startling thought. Maybe Baby Doll15 is some sort of hightech replication the likes of which I’ve never even imagined, or what I’m looking at in the security monitors is merely a recording taken of Baby Doll15 standing at the gate some other time. It’s hard to know these days.

  “Let them in,” I say.

  I panic for a few seconds, trying to think of something casual to do, so she doesn’t know I’m waiting for her like this, so eagerly. I put my cell phone away. I run in one direction, stop, turn, and run in the other direction. I go the drawing room. I pick up a feathered pen, dip the tip in ink, and start drawing devil horns and a moustache on a Rembrandt portrait that’s hanging on the wall; it’s of some old lady. Baby Doll15 walks in a minute later. She’s wearing a pink pair of high heels, pink thigh-high leggings, and a royal purple baby doll. After glancing over at her, I look back at my work. “What are you doing here?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Why don’t you talk to your boyfriend, Sweetie Honey?” I ask, smarmily.

  “Because I have to talk to you.”

  “Why?” I start shading the right-hand sides of the devil horns, like the light is coming from the left.

  “It’s about this killing-children-aged-three-and-younger business.”

  “It’s not a business. At this stage anyway. It’s just an idea.”

  She puts her hands on her hips. “It’s a terrible idea.”

  “Look. You’re not my girlfriend anymore. You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

  “I never told you what to do. Even if I had told you what to do, you wouldn’t have listened to me. You always do things your way.” She crosses her arms. “Like that text you sent me.” She knows it verbatim. She quotes it to me. “It’s over. There’s nothing to talk about. It was fun. Say ‘Bye’ to your big breasts for me.”

  “Thanks for bringing your big breasts for a visit,” I say, concentrating on my work. “Now, you’ve said what you wanted to say. You know the way out.”

  “I can’t believe you,” she says, shaking her head, looking away. “I tell you I love you, you don’t say it back, and the next day you break up with me. I guess I feel more strongly for you than you do for me. That’s fine.”

  “Feel?” I think, startled. “Do?” Shouldn’t it be “felt” and “did”? Aren’t we in the past? Tense?

  She continues, uninterrupted by my grammatical thoughts. “You don’t want to be with me, knowing how differently we feel about each other. I understand. But you don’t even have the decency to break up with me face to face! You do it in a text! I knew you were a spiritual leader, a pirate, and a bad boy, Guy Boy Man, but I never knew you were so cold.”

  I look away from my Rembrandt, angrily. “I only sent you that text because of the note you left in my locker.”

  She frowns, like I’m making something up, something ridiculous. “What note?”

  One of my hot young female followers comes rushing in, breathless. “Sweetie Honey is here,” she squeaks.

  “Damn it.” I grab my cell phone. I bring up the security feed. When I see it for myself, I swipe through screens, tap an app, and turn the phone into a microphone (actually more like a megaphone) that relays my voice and my words through the air and into towers and back into every room in the castle, reproducing it and amplifying it out from hidden speakers, and into the ears of my bodyguards. “Sweetie Honey is here!” I yell. “Flee!”

  Back in the security feed, in the phone, I watch my bodyguards turn left and right, panicked. They throw down their automatic weapons. They run.

  “Save yourselves!” I yell into phone. “If he finds you, he’ll kill each and every one of you, in numerous inventive ways, and he won’t even feel bad afterwards! Flee! For God’s sakes, flee!”

  Sweetie Honey pushes the intercom button at the front gate again.

  I swipe through screens, push another app, and say, calmly, “Hey, Sweetie. It’s me. What’s up?” I go back to the microphone. “Sweetie Honey is going to whip throwing stars at you, invariably striking you in some very vulnerable spot, killing you, even when that spot is only penetrated slightly, perhaps because the tips of the throwing stars have been dipped in some sort of impossibly fast-acting poison known only to ninjas, or he’ll slice you to pieces with his magnificent sword, or he’ll end your life with his bare hands, feet, knees, elbows, or in some amazing combination of those things!”

  “I need to talk to you,” says Sweetie through the intercom, space and time, wires, my ears, into my brain. “It’s important.”

  I switch back to the intercom. Casually, I say, “All right. Cool. Come on in.” I buzz open the gates. I go back to the microphone. “I couldn’t hold him off any longer! I tried! Believe me, I tried! Flee! He’s coming for you! He won’t stop until he’s spilled a fatal dose of your blood, snapped your neck, or destroyed internal organs you really, really need! Hey, bodyguard-whose-name-I-don’t-know, I can totally see you hiding under the bed! That’s, like, the first place he’s going to look! Don’t hide! You can’t hide from Sweetie Honey! Just keep opening doors and fleeing until there are no more doors, and no more places to which to flee!”

  Leaving Baby Doll15 standing there, I hold my pirated Pope pirate hat on my head, and run to the big front doors. When I get there, I just stand there for a minute, trying to catch my breath. Then I nod to the two girls. They throw open the doors. “Sweetie,” I say, holding open my arms. “Great to see you. Come on in. Usually you don’t bother with the gate. You just make yourself one with the night, slip past my security precautions, kill all my bodyguards, and then scare the hell out of me when I think I’m alone. What’s up?”

  He’s wearing a cheap-looking dark blue suit, a washedout white dress shirt, and a dark blue tie. There’s a sad little stain on his ti
e that’s darker than the surrounding dark blue. “I’m here on official business,” says Sweetie, sombrely.

  “Official ninja business?”

  “Official detective business.”

  “I thought you were a ninja.”

  “I am,” he shrugs, not looking at me. “I’m both. I’m a ninja detective.”

  “That’s cool, I guess. A ninja detective. Yeah, I like it. Let me see if I understand. As a detective, you investigate crimes committed by other ninjas?”

  “No. That’d be ridiculous. Pretty much everything ninjas do is a crime. For example. I’m in your office. I’m waiting for you to enter, and when you do, and you close the door, I drop down behind you, and slit your throat. That’s breaking and entering. No. I’m a ninja who also just so happens to be a detective.”

  “Right on. That’s awesome, Sweetie. You’re really doing something with your life. I’m proud of you.” I high five him. “I’ll be honest with you, though. I wish I would’ve known you were a detective when I was doing all that illegal stuff in front of you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Hey, where’s your ninja outfit?”

  “It’s in my backpack.” He answers my next question without waiting for it. “My backpack is in the car.”

  “All right. Well. Come in, come in. Don’t just stand there. You want something to drink?”

  “No thanks. I’m on the job.”

  Sweetie and I walk to one of the sitting rooms. We stand facing each other for a while. Neither of us says anything. There’s so much to say. I go over and grab a decanter that’s half-empty of whiskey, pull out the stopper, and guzzle. I pat the front of my ceremonial robe, looking for my cigarettes. Before I get worked up about it, a hot young girl runs in with a fresh pack and a light. Plastic wrapper crinkling off. Foil pulling away like a curtain lifting from a statue. There’s a Mexican laying at my feet, with his hands in front of him like he’s ready to catch a baseball. He’s smiling, nodding vigorously. I drop the garbage to him. Once I get a cigarette lit, I exhale a stream of blue-grey smoke.

  “I don’t know where to start,” admits Sweetie Honey, ninja detective.

  “Maybe you want to apologize for being such a big fat liar,” I suggest.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  “Apology accepted.” I point at him with the glowing tip of my smoke. “We’re friends. Obviously, there’ll be little deceptions between us. Betrayals, if you will. After all, we’re only human. Well, you’re a ninja detective, and I’m a spiritual leader and pirate, so we’re probably more special than people who’re only human.”

  “Why don’t we start with how you stole the Pope’s hat?”

  I wave my hand at him, dismissively. “How do you know I stole it?” I take a drink of whiskey. “How do you know it was even stolen? Maybe he just misplaced it. Did anyone ever think of that?”

  “For one thing,” says Sweetie Honey, pulling out a notepad, a pen, and jotting something down, “you’re wearing the Pope’s hat right now. For another thing, a note was found in place of the hat.” He stops writing. “It read and I quote”—he flips back a few pages—“ ‘My religion is way cooler than yours. Sincerely, Guy Boy Man.’ ”

  I think it’s interesting he made a note of a note. Which is the real note? His? The one found in Vatican City? Is the real note the note that existed in the mind of the person whose idea it was to steal the hat?

  “Let me address your concerns point by point,” I say, confidently. “Firstly, this isn’t the Pope’s hat.” I take it off and, with one hand, try for a few seconds to resurrect my hat-head hair. When that doesn’t work, I hold up the hat and point at one part of it in particular. “I think you’ll find the Pope’s hat doesn’t have this detail work here.”

  “It does, because that is the Pope’s hat. We know it’s the Pope’s hat. There’s really no point in arguing that it isn’t.”

  “Secondly, anyone could have written the note that was found in place of the hat. Lots of people have religions, okay? Lots of religions are way cooler than the Pope’s. And lots of people whose religions are way cooler than the Pope’s are named Guy Boy Man.” I lift the crystal decanter to Sweetie like, cheers, and take a swig.

  “As your friend, I advise you not to represent yourself in court. But it won’t come to that if you give me the hat. I’ll make this go away.”

  “It’s my hat now,” I say, putting it back on and adjusting it.

  “Give it back. You’ve had your fun.”

  I glare at him and glare at him. “I have not yet begun to have my fun.”

  Just then Baby Doll15 walks in.

  “Hey, Baby,” says Sweetie, surprised. He rushes over, kissing her on the cheek. “I didn’t know you were here.” He leans back to see what she’s wearing. “You look amazing: your hair, your makeup. I love everything you’re doing.”

  “Thanks, Sweetie,” says Baby Doll15, forcing a smile. “What are you doing here? Why are you dressed like that?”

  “Sweetie just came by to tell me he’s a ninja detective,” I explain, with a cigarette between my lips, orange-glowing tip bouncing up and down. I scissor-pinch the white tube between my fore and middle fingers and pull it away from my face. Slumping down into a big soft brown leather wingback chair (the colour is soft brown; the leather is soft brown both in colour and in texture), I continue, “I knew he was a ninja, which is awesome, but I didn’t know he’s a ninja detective, which is also awesome; some might say significantly more so because of the doubly macho role; others might disagree, pointing to the law enforcement, status quo, little-bitch-for-the-corporate-zombies aspect, but my point is this: I thought I knew Sweetie Honey and I don’t.”

  “You’re a ninja detective,” says Baby Doll15, taking a step away from her boyfriend, shocked.

  “I was going to tell you,” says Sweetie, stepping toward her, holding out one hand. “But then I remembered I couldn’t, because I was deep undercover.”

  “You can’t tell your girlfriend you’re a ninja detective when you’re deep undercover,” I acknowledge, begrudgingly.

  “I’m here because the Pope wants his hat back. Originally, I was supposed to investigate how Guy Boy Man managed to acquire the hat. Was it an inside job? Did the Swiss Guard merely stand by as the dastardly deed was perpetrated? An investigation of that scope takes time. I had to gain Man’s trust. I was told it had to be an airtight case. But the Pope grew impatient. He wanted his hat back. Vatican officials exerted pressure on the Chief of Police.”

  “Native American Leader of Police,” I correct.

  “So tonight I was ordered to break cover and recover the hat,” continues Sweetie. “I was also ordered to inform Guy Boy Man that he should stop encouraging parents to kill their children aged three and younger.”

  “You guys are really spinning that, aren’t you?” I shake my head. “I wasn’t encouraging anybody. I think you’ll find, if you examine the record, your honour, that I simply stated if zombies were to kill any of their children, aged three or younger, I’d be okay with that.”

  “It’s a tacit approval.” Sweetie Honey looks at Baby Doll15, jerking his thumb over at me like, do you believe this guy?

  “No. It’s a meaningless offer of non-judgement from someone whose opinion holds no legal sway.”

  “That’s why I’m here too,” explains Baby Doll15 to Sweetie Honey. “Not for the Pope’s hat, but because he’s encouraging people to kill kids aged three and younger.”

  “Not encouraging.” I take a swig of whiskey, wipe my lips with the back of my hand, and take a drag from my cigarette. “How’d you get to be a detective when you’re so young, Sweetie?”

  “Being a ninja opens a lot of doors.”

  “I believe that.” I exhale smoke into the room’s confusion; I blow slow poison into its tension. “I mean, if you wanted those doors to open, and they didn’t, you’d just find another way in, right?”

  “Exactly,” confirms Sweetie.

&
nbsp; “So you’re only interested in the hat?” I say. “That’s funny. You never asked any questions about it.”

  “I was working up to it. I didn’t want to make you suspicious. But no. I was also supposed to investigate whether or not you’re the head of a big cock fighting ring.” “Oh, yeah?” I say. “How’d that go?”

  “Not very well,” confesses Sweetie. “I couldn’t get my cock in a fight. I knew I’d have to start out at the bottom and work my way up, through the cock-fighting ranks, but I faced a dilemma: if I had a small cock, I’d never advance, but if I had a big cock, no one would be willing to risk his cock in competition with it. Ultimately, I went with an imposing cock, because I needed one that would see me through, but I couldn’t get any guys to put their cocks up against mine.”

  “Cock fighting isn’t easy,” I say, nodding. “Or that’s what I hear.” I chuckle. I turn serious again. “Let me get this straight. You were assigned to me in your role as detective only?”

  “No,” admits Sweetie. Looking down, holding his tie, he thumbs at the stain. “Coincidentally, the same day I received my orders to investigate the theft of the Pope’s hat, I was also tasked, as a ninja, to derail your plans to end human suffering.”

  “Not to kill me?” I ask, disappointed.

  “Are you alive right now?” Sweetie looks up from his tie at me, but he keeps holding it.

  “I think so.”

  “Then you better think I wasn’t tasked to kill you too, because if I had been, you wouldn’t be.”

  “I wouldn’t be thinking, I wouldn’t be, or I wouldn’t be alive?”

  “All of those,” says Sweetie, nodding seriously. “Any of them.”

  “So did you do it?” asks Baby Doll15, genuinely interested. “Did you derail Guy Boy Man’s plans to end human suffering?”