Prose: I loathe the undead
note: title inspired by this The Penny Arcade comic
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I loathe the undead.
They’re always whining about “brains” and “guarrrgh” all the time and they’re clawing at you with their nasty clammy maggoty-infested hands and biting your wife with their rotten yellow teeth and trudging along in a big stupid horde, losing their limbs all over the place and blocking traffic like they owned the world. Would you believe there was a zombie stampede on the I-41 this morning? Yeah, they held up traffic for like an hour. It was a huge stampede. They made me late to work and I think they almost cost me my job. Never mind that the boss has been later for less important reasons than a zombie stampede.
Some day I’m going to stick him in a room with a zombie in it and see how he likes it.
Anyway. I would have been later to work this morning (‘cause I think that stampede’s still going on, I mean they just said on the news half an hour ago that the last body count was like sixty, and that’s way too many for just an hour-long stampede) if I hadn’t gone and installed those flamethrowers on the front of my car. I just rolled up my windows, turned on the heat, and just drove on through ‘em. It was nasty—they would fall down and their skin would be all bubbling, and their clothes gave off all this smoke and I couldn’t see, and some of them must’ve had gas or something because they just, well, exploded. Yeah. They literally exploded. All over my fresh paint job.
I was still only about twenty minutes late, though, and since I knew the boss wouldn’t like it if I parked and my car was all covered in little bits of burning zombies, plus with the flamethrowers I was almost out of gas, so I stopped at a car wash and I was thinking I’d get gas somewhere when I was done, but would you believe it, one of the zombies left an arm on my bumper.
I had to pry the thing off before the car-wash people would even let me in the place and this was a huge arm. It must have been a foot around, I’m not kidding. First I had to get it to let go of my bumper and then I had to keep it away from my face while I took it across the street to a dumpster. It was all slimy and blue and it smelled—you know what it smelled like? It smelled just like a barrel full of water that you leave out for like a year, y’know, only it had a piece of rotten meat in it. Yeah. It was horrible.
So, I get this zombie arm thrown in the dumpster, finally, but somehow I stepped in a puddle of gasoline, so now my pants leg is all stained and stuff but I don’t think the boss noticed.
Anyway—you know what happens when you have to fight off a zombie’s disembodied arm? See, zombies still have some blood in them, but it’s all congealed, y’know, so it flows really slowly. And it stinks to high heaven. God, there’s nothing smellier than a zombie. I got some on my tie—my best tie, I might add—and I had to put that in the dumpster too.
And these zombie arms, they have pus or something under their fingernails, and sometimes they don’t have fingernails—this one did, and I don’t know whether or not that’s a good thing—and they try to claw at you and sometimes they get pus all over you and it is just nasty. And that’s saying nothing about their skin which is practically falling off their bones, and the fact that they’re still moving when you have to deal with them. Ugh.
So, I get back to my car, and what do I find? The guys at the car wash are all joking about it. I mean, about me having to take the zombie arm and throw it away, and about having all those undead entrails all over my car, and they’d just say “Hey, buddy, having zombie trouble?” and they’d just laugh their stupid little laugh of theirs, like it was the funniest thing in the world. And when they’d laugh you could see their teeth and they were all yellow and you wouldn’t think they could get your car clean, ‘cause you could tell they needed a shower and a shave. One of them swallowed his cigarette and I laughed at him, too.
But they did a really sloppy job of cleaning my car—like they didn’t dry it enough, and it leaves all those little lines and you have to go in and get it washed again. Like I’m ever gonna come back there. There was a twenty-dollar bill missing from my car when they gave it back. And they took their own sweet time, too. By the time I got here I was an hour late. Did you ever see the boss get angry? Like, really angry? His face turns purple, and there’s this little vein in his forehead that sort of sticks out and throbs like there’s something living in it. It’s funny, almost worth making him mad to see it. But see, the thing is, he was mad at me. So I have to work unpaid overtime every day this week.
And, as if that weren’t enough, I’m probably going to run out of gas on the way back home. That’ll just be great, sitting on the side of the road, waiting for a tow truck to come by and everyone who drives by is staring and saying “I wonder what happened to that poor man.”
Those stinkin’ zombies ruined my whole week.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I loathe the undead.
They’re always whining about “brains” and “guarrrgh” all the time and they’re clawing at you with their nasty clammy maggoty-infested hands and biting your wife with their rotten yellow teeth and trudging along in a big stupid horde, losing their limbs all over the place and blocking traffic like they owned the world. Would you believe there was a zombie stampede on the I-41 this morning? Yeah, they held up traffic for like an hour. It was a huge stampede. They made me late to work and I think they almost cost me my job. Never mind that the boss has been later for less important reasons than a zombie stampede.
Some day I’m going to stick him in a room with a zombie in it and see how he likes it.
Anyway. I would have been later to work this morning (‘cause I think that stampede’s still going on, I mean they just said on the news half an hour ago that the last body count was like sixty, and that’s way too many for just an hour-long stampede) if I hadn’t gone and installed those flamethrowers on the front of my car. I just rolled up my windows, turned on the heat, and just drove on through ‘em. It was nasty—they would fall down and their skin would be all bubbling, and their clothes gave off all this smoke and I couldn’t see, and some of them must’ve had gas or something because they just, well, exploded. Yeah. They literally exploded. All over my fresh paint job.
I was still only about twenty minutes late, though, and since I knew the boss wouldn’t like it if I parked and my car was all covered in little bits of burning zombies, plus with the flamethrowers I was almost out of gas, so I stopped at a car wash and I was thinking I’d get gas somewhere when I was done, but would you believe it, one of the zombies left an arm on my bumper.
I had to pry the thing off before the car-wash people would even let me in the place and this was a huge arm. It must have been a foot around, I’m not kidding. First I had to get it to let go of my bumper and then I had to keep it away from my face while I took it across the street to a dumpster. It was all slimy and blue and it smelled—you know what it smelled like? It smelled just like a barrel full of water that you leave out for like a year, y’know, only it had a piece of rotten meat in it. Yeah. It was horrible.
So, I get this zombie arm thrown in the dumpster, finally, but somehow I stepped in a puddle of gasoline, so now my pants leg is all stained and stuff but I don’t think the boss noticed.
Anyway—you know what happens when you have to fight off a zombie’s disembodied arm? See, zombies still have some blood in them, but it’s all congealed, y’know, so it flows really slowly. And it stinks to high heaven. God, there’s nothing smellier than a zombie. I got some on my tie—my best tie, I might add—and I had to put that in the dumpster too.
And these zombie arms, they have pus or something under their fingernails, and sometimes they don’t have fingernails—this one did, and I don’t know whether or not that’s a good thing—and they try to claw at you and sometimes they get pus all over you and it is just nasty. And that’s saying nothing about their skin which is practically falling off their bones, and the fact that they’re still moving when you have to deal with them. Ugh.
So, I get back to my car, and what do I find? The guys at the car wash are all joking about it. I mean, about me having to take the zombie arm and throw it away, and about having all those undead entrails all over my car, and they’d just say “Hey, buddy, having zombie trouble?” and they’d just laugh their stupid little laugh of theirs, like it was the funniest thing in the world. And when they’d laugh you could see their teeth and they were all yellow and you wouldn’t think they could get your car clean, ‘cause you could tell they needed a shower and a shave. One of them swallowed his cigarette and I laughed at him, too.
But they did a really sloppy job of cleaning my car—like they didn’t dry it enough, and it leaves all those little lines and you have to go in and get it washed again. Like I’m ever gonna come back there. There was a twenty-dollar bill missing from my car when they gave it back. And they took their own sweet time, too. By the time I got here I was an hour late. Did you ever see the boss get angry? Like, really angry? His face turns purple, and there’s this little vein in his forehead that sort of sticks out and throbs like there’s something living in it. It’s funny, almost worth making him mad to see it. But see, the thing is, he was mad at me. So I have to work unpaid overtime every day this week.
And, as if that weren’t enough, I’m probably going to run out of gas on the way back home. That’ll just be great, sitting on the side of the road, waiting for a tow truck to come by and everyone who drives by is staring and saying “I wonder what happened to that poor man.”
Those stinkin’ zombies ruined my whole week.
posted by ~Allie~ @ 10:18 AM
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