Vampires & Chocolate

Zombies, Shopping Mall, Love Letter

This is a piece of flash fiction I started a while ago, and though I never loved it, I wanted to finish it. So here it is, naked and bashful but here just the same, for you to judge or enjoy. Or maybe both?

***

I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I just wanted to feel something that wasn’t dread or fear or a never ending sense of doom. Something like hope, maybe. She wasn’t even dirty or disheveled like the rest of them, and she walked like a normal kid. She stopped in front of the McDonald’s, staring at the menu with the wide-eyed gaze of someone who hadn’t eaten for days. She was so skinny and I thought, poor kid’s hungry as hell, maybe she’ll want these shitty gritty canned pears. So I said hello, put my hand on her shoulder, and God damn if she didn’t waste any time chomping those little milk teeth into my hand. To be fair, I should’ve known better. To be fair, I knocked her head clean off with my sledge hammer, opened that kid’s head like a smashed pumpkin.
“Take it back!” I screamed, in that moment of rage, crisp and white like fresh linen. I know it didn’t make any sense, but everyone deals with their sudden impending death differently I guess.

Just like that, I was fucked. I knew it, and I’m man enough to admit I cried a little. I mean, wouldn’t you? I just stood there blubbering, wondering who the fuck dressed their daughter in a pretty blue sundress for the apocalypse. Who had the nerve to brush her hair, and keep her so clean and so well loved that even when she was dead some dumb shitbird would walk up and try to save her from becoming what she’d already become? What am I supposed to tell my girl, when she looks at me with those eyes and sees my hand? “Oh, hey baby! I got bit, but it’s cool cause right after you cut my hand off we can pound this can of mushrooms”? I still had to get past all the ghouls and even if I made it back to camp with a heavy backpack and a dead hand, they would probably shoot me. Shit, I’d shoot me. And when you are a grown man crying in the city’s biggest shopping centre and your only company is a few shuffling corpses, those echos remind you just how pathetic you are. I take out a pad, scribble a note to Karen, stick it in my shirt pocket.

I’m hoping when I get back - if I get back -  maybe someone’ll have the stones to chop off my hand. I pray it’s not my Karen. She was never good with change. Not before the world went to hell, and certainly not after. The hungry dead don’t give a hot buttered fart about your weekly itinerary, and the people who didn’t get that got ate in the first days. Until now, me and my mean right swing have been the only things between her and some dead man’s gullet. Yeah, all I have to do is get my hand lobbed off, and even as I think it I laugh, it’s too late for that shit.

So here I am, trudging through the Eaton Centre covered in zombie head cheese. Behind me, I hear the shuffling horde of hungry sloths as they follow me to the gate like I’m the pied piper of fucking doom. What am I gonna do, shoo them away? I rattle the gate, calling, hollering her name. It doesn’t sound like ‘Karen’. One by one the others peek out, gaunt, hungry, filthy - not so different from the ghouls. With their guns drawn, barrels pointed at my head and I know how fucked up I must look, how I can’t even form fucking words, standing there holding the backpack and grunting like some agitated ape.  I see her, finally, and she pushes past them, shoves them out of the way. She looks pissed. Again I’m like “Uuugghhhn!”, and I’m just hoping she understands. She lifts the gate, just a foot, and I slide the backpack underneath. She reaches through the bars, plucks the note out of my pocket. I catch a whiff of her skin. Smells…good.

“Karen. I’m sorry. I tried. Love you.” She reads. She looks at me with those eyes. And when she pulls the pistol out of her waistband I nod, and she smiles, and she pulls the hammer back, and I am so proud, cause she’s lining up the shot just like I’d shown her, and I know she’ll make it clean.

Ronnie’s Dream

Last night I dreamt I killed a man with a chainsaw.

I picked up the sputtering thing, light in the hand and vibrating with anticipation.
I severed his leg, grinding through thick muscle and bone, hands slick with blood in an instant. 
I tore into his bloated belly and blended his guts.
I drove the whining blade into his neck, his eyes.

Bits of meat hit my face like hot, sticky Spackle  and I realised only then that I was not so much trying to kill as to destroy this man.
And I did rather well.

They say you can’t kill people in your dreams.
He will be my second. 

If it makes you feel any better, he started it.

Happy NaNoWriMo, kids!

Keep Calm and Destroy a Perfectly Good Book.

Let me start by saying I don’t keep a journal or diary or inflammatory accounting of every wrong done to me by another human being (wouldn’t want to incriminate myself). But I’ve taken on this project, with the idea that it might be helpful in relieving some of my many (and highly attractive) neuroses. 

Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith is a book I’ve had my eye on for a while, a journal full of destructive prompts designed to encourage reckless creativity.
I flipped through it in the store, but put it back. Flipped through it, put it back. Journaling is a commitment and though I liked it, I was not ready to put a ring on it. The very idea of purposefully and methodically destroying a book is so abhorrent to me it borders on blasphemous. I’m the kind of reader who reads a paperback without touching the cover (gotta avoid those finger prints). I’m the kind of reader who goes through the entire shelf at Chapters to find the most perfect, most pristine book, the book least molested by other shoppers and their filth-mitts. I’m the kind of reader who would rather crack a bone than crack the spine. Wreck a journal? Bitch, you better move.

It took me twenty minutes to decide which cover I wanted. 

I made my choice eventually, taking note of the dire warning inside:

I was ready. Bring it, Miss Keri. This journal is about to get all fucked up!

First task: cake walk. Seriously, Keri? Write my name? Yeah, I’m gonna crush this.

Second task:

…fuck.

Red Re-loaded: A Red Riding Hood Tale

The van jerked to a stop, able to go no further. This is where the forest truly began, where the great evergreens loomed large and unyielding, bent only by time and snow. Valhalla.
Mary cut the engine. The girls piled out, save two.  The new girl sat staring at the floor, chewing the inside of her lip. Her pretty curls had been cropped to within an inch of her scalp. Long hair was a liability in combat. Mary had been watching the new girl in the rearview the entire ride into the mountains. She wasn’t ready.

The night they found her, there had been a dinner party, food laid out in expensive dishes and hot soup in a gleaming silver tureen. French rolls Mary had jammed into the pockets of her hoodie, the others following her example and stuffing their mouths with handfuls of turkey and pie and baked ham. It was Christmas, she’d thought. Let them enjoy it. She and the girls had searched the house, stepping over what was left of the guests: entrails, fingers, ribbons of shredded flesh. Save the massacre, it was a lovely spread.

Room by room they searched often finding nothing, sometimes finding more unfortunates with their bellies gutted, faces and arms clawed to oblivion.
Finally, they’d heard a whimpering behind a locked door in the master bath. She screamed as they broke it down. Screamed as they bundled her up in her pretty party dress. Screamed as they held her down and injected her with sedative. Mary cleaned her up as best she could. She’d been mauled and bitten, but she would live, and The Collective would take her.

 Now, Mary handed off her kaiken and semi-automatic pistols loaded with silver hollow-point bullets.  
These in addition to her uniform, the standard issue red Kevlar-Aramid hoodie.

“Listen,” she said. The girl looked up. “This isn’t like training. They don’t wear shock collars and if you give them an opening they will kill you.”
The girl nodded.
“I know this is your first mission, but this is also your vengeance.”

Outside, Bronwyn kicked the van.

“What’s the fucking hold-up?”

Time to go. They hopped out of the van onto the snow- covered trail.

“Come on, Princess. Let’s get you wet.”

Mary peered into the darkness. She could make out a few hulking shapes, puffs of hot breath rising through the trees into the ancient canopy. The girls were already surrounded. Probably had been for some time.

 “Hoods up,” Mary said.

From all sides they came, smashing through the trees, churning the earth as they ran on all fours.
The girls got into formation, shoulder to shoulder, facing the enemy with pistols drawn. Beside her, Mary could feel the new girl shaking, hear the rattle of the pistols as they vibrated in her hands.
Bronwyn was the first to fire, the other girls following suit in a deadly semi-automatic staccato.
Yelps and howls erupted in the night. The Alpha was first to burst through the tree line, leading his pack as they charged the girls. He was headed for Mary, as she knew he would be. They’d done this dance before. He leapt for her throat and Mary dodged, skidding on her back through the mud and slush as she fired into his underbelly. The wolf was unfazed, panting heavily as he rounded on her for a second attempt. She’d missed his heart. Mary scrambled up in time to deny him the pleasure of opening her jugular with his snarling, snapping jaws. He was getting frustrated, and more importantly, sloppy.
He charged again and she let him close, let him get a hold of her shoulder in his vicious maw.  She felt the joint dislocate and put the pain out of her mind as she unsheathed her silver-edged kaiken and plunged it into the Alpha’s chest. Blood trickled down her hand, then gushed as she released the blade. The wolf slumped against her, his form shrinking, fur falling away as he reverted to his human form. His last desperate gasp would be as a man.

Mary heaved the dead man off of her and surveyed the field. With their Alpha dead, the wolves were retreating. Those that had been cut down lay naked, human and bleeding on the ground.
All her girls were accounted for – except one.

*

Princess had been a coward. She’d run from battle, and now she would have to keep running. If the wolves didn’t get her, the Collective certainly would. She stopped to catch her breath on an old tree, the sounds of the violent clash distant and far behind her. The whispering crunch of approaching footsteps sent her heart racing. She turned, kaiken drawn. An old woman picked her way through the trees toward her, moonlight revealing a gentle face wearing a warm smile.

“Are you alone out here, dear? Separated from your friends?” she asked. There was something familiar about her. Princess nodded.
“We’re camped nearby. Why don’t you stay with us until morning?”

Princess eyed her, still gripping her blade. The night her family was murdered, an old lady had knocked on the door and asked to use the phone. She and her husband were on their way to a Christmas party and needed directions. They’d let them in, and then they changed, and then there were more of them, and they devoured everyone she loved.

“Don’t you have trouble seeing in the dark at your age?” she asked.

The old woman hunched over, her bones popping and expanding into her grotesque wolf form, clothes tearing and falling away, grizzled fur erupting on her skin. The wolf reared, and Princess stood, feet planted in the soft earth. She Grabbed her pistol, aimed at the beast’s heart, and closed her eyes as she pulled the trigger. The wolf collapsed at her feet, the transformation undone as she expired.
The old woman reached for her, clawed at the air. Princess put another bullet between her eyes.
This was her vengeance.

Model live-tweets douchcannon’s adultery fail.

ohno-polio:

Tip for modern adulterers: If you’re planning to cheat on your wife of 10 years by awkwardly hitting on the model seated next to you on your flight out of Los Angeles, make sure she isn’t live-tweeting the entire miserable experience to her 13,000 followers;