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[Maxfield Perish: Zombie Fighter]
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Fagein Sarks
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Maxfield Perish: Zombie Fighter
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Greetings, all.
I'm fresh to the site and will be catching up on the earlier topics and other creative morsels. Meanwhile, I'd like to offer this for your consideration. "Zombie Fighter" is the first chapter in a much longer work. Please enjoy irresponsibly. Yours truly, Fagien Sarks.
ZOMBIE FIGHTER
By Bradley James Weber
fagiensarks@gmail.com
My name is Maxfield Perish.
I am fifteen years old.
I am a zombie fighter.
*
You’d think the zombie fights were exciting, but they’re all kind of the same. I really wish LemonJello would do something else, come up with some other kind of way to keep the folks here entertained, or at least busy. Isn’t there enough **** to do around here without taking time away from the middle of the day to watch some dopes fight zombies?
Elliot Ghoul is our announcer. He’s got an old top hat, black make-up around his eyes an and glue-on sideburns. ‘Thirsty’ Howell says Elliot is trying to look like the Son Of Svengoolie. Whoever that is.
I don’t know how he does it, but the Elliot is still fat. A whole year on regular servings and healthy foods and the guy still weighs more than three of me. It’s a ****ing mystery.
Elliot says he used to be in the theater, an actor somewhere in Chicago. He was in Joliet the night of the big get-out, slumming at the riverboats, losing at blackjack. That’s how he got here. He’s got a hell of a voice, which is good, because there’s no PA system. He needs to have everybody in the stands hear him do the introductions.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the Wednesday edition of Zombie Fights! I’m your announcer, Elliot Ghoul.
“Let’s get ready to shammmmmmmmble!”
The applause are kind of light today. Sounds like the stands are less than half full. I can’t tell if it’s that or if the crowd’s finally getting sick of Elliot’s lame-o jokes.
“This afternoon’s entertainments are a three-fight card. These are battle-to-the-death events, ladies and gentlemen. Two combatants enter, one combatant leaves. Please be advised: these contests are not for the squeamish or faint of heart. Infants and the elderly are strongly urged to remove themselves from the premises. Should these patrons wish to remain, the management cannot be held responsible for any damage –– physical, psychological, or emotional –– that you may experience today or in the future.
“Now, please stand and join me in singing our National Anthem.”
I don’t even know why Elliot bothers with the disclaimers any more. It’s not like anybody’s going to sue him. It’s not like what we’re doing is illegal. Maybe it is somewhere, but here, in the Land of LemonJello, it’s all good.
“. . . The bombs bursting in air . . . .”
And what’s with the National Anthem? There is no National anymore, no nation. But if I peeked around the corner, I’d see them all with their hats off and a hand over their hearts. Kind of weird and pathetic. Even weirder, the people singing the National Anthem and saying the Pledge of Allegience? A lot of them are the ones who, after Hurricane Z hit, told God to **** off. Well, if God didn’t save them, what makes them think the government will? It makes no sense.
“. . . and the hooooome of the braaaaaaaaaaaave!
“PLAY BALL!”
The first two bouts are just all right. Standard stuff, fairly harmless: ToneDef vs. something in what used to be a suit, then Sandwich took down a SoccerZom.
Tone’s still a little green, so instead of putting on a show, he went in swinging and bashed Z’s head within the first twenty seconds. I know how it goes. That twenty seconds is like the longest in your life.
Sandwich did a little dance, toyed with his some. He likes to use a samurai sword. It’s not a real one. Are you kidding? I’d love to have one of those babies. A real samurai sword cuts through squishy like a bird through air. It’s beautiful to see that tool at work. But Sandwich’s came from some junk-ass pawnshop. He likes to say it’s real, but he’s full of ****.
Sandwich knows how to put on a show. The brother takes risks, though. He gets close, lets Z grab at him, like on purpose, lets them get a handful of shirt –– then he whips around, blade up, and lops off the arm. Then, with the dead hand still dangling from his shirt, Sandwich starts to bob-and-weave around Z, slicing at its face and hands with the tip of the sword.
Oops! There goes an eye.
Whoops! There goes the nose.
Somebody once said his moves were ‘surgical.’ I don’t know about that. But he does put on a good show.
Pretty soon it’s over and Boyle’s dragged away the big chunks.
I don’t know who Boyle was before or what he did to piss-off Jello, but whatever it was must have been bad. Not bad enough for LemonJello to toss Boyle off the wall, but bad enough to make him the poor ****er who has to clean up after the fights. Boyle as to drag off the zombie parts, scrub down the pool, clean out the pipes, and get rid of all the mess. This is the ****tiest job in the joint, worse than taking care of the bathrooms, which, by the way, is also Boyle’s job.
I don’t know anybody who talks to Boyle. I don’t know anybody who wants to. Maybe it’s because they don’t want to piss off LemonJello by being friendly to Boyle or maybe they’re just too creeped out by him, think something’s wrong with him, that he’s got zombie cooties and he might be contagious. I don’t talk to him because I don’t like the looks of the guy. He’s a nasty little ****er. Jello has to keep him around for a reason. What that is, I can’t even guess.
Elliot walks to the edge of the pool.
“Ladies and Gentlemen! It is time for our final match of the afternoon. At only fifteen years old, the next contestant is one of Zombie Fight’s most enduring champions. Standing five feet nine inches tall, weighing one hundred forty-two pounds, and with a record of one-hundred-ninety-one, zero, and zero, he is our winningest fighter ever. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our very own Maxfield Perish!”
Coming out from around the wall, I can see I was right –– the stands are empty this afternoon. Only thirty or forty people. I wonder what’s going on . . .
Whatever it is, the super-fans are all here –– the ‘Die-Hards’ as they like to call themselves.
It’s supposed to be a joke. I don’t get it. Maybe because those people are nuts.
I make a lot of eye contact and wave to everyone. Cassandra, my favorite “bath assistant” is here, too. I give her a wink; she blows me a kiss.
All of my gear is strapped on: full–face helmet and neck guards, gloves, boots, long shirt and long pants.
My weapon is kind of hard to describe. It’s called a mace. Not like that pepper spray **** the cops used to use. This thing has a handle wrapped in heavy-grit sandpaper. The length of it is round and straight, about two feet long and as thick as my big toe. The business end is about as long and wide as my hand. There are four faces to the thing, each sticking out from each other at right angles and shaped kind of like long diamonds. The top and side points and the thick edges are all sharp as hell and will crack a melon better than Sandwich’s knock-off samurai. It has a name, too. It’s called SkullCrusher.
“And in this corner –– weighing in at two hundred nineteen pounds –– Travellin’! Tim! Taaaaaaaaagert!”
The way the wranglers hook a contestant is they go outside the wall, find what they think is a good zombie, and clamp a steel collar around it’s neck. The collar has six loops welded to it so the wranglers can hook on chains or, what they usually use, long steel poles with hooks on the ends. There’s a trigger system in the poles that lets the wranglers work the catch-and-release from a safe distance.
Taggert looks like he spent some time in the water. Bloated, baggy, kind of saggy around the face and hands. The hair is all gone and his eyes and lots of his face skin was snacks for fish or birds, or both.
Taggert has no lips, so I can see all his teeth, shiny-white and strait, all the way up to his rotten black gums. The crowd loves this kind. Makes them look scarier than the little old ladies, goth grrrls, or skater boys we sometimes get.
I look for ears but don’t see any. Most of his clothes are still on, which is unusual lately. Looks like he was mowing his lawn or playing golf when he got bit.
Once the wranglers get Z on the line, they bring it in and chain it to the wall where they go over the body looking for stuff: money, drugs, guns, watches, jewelry, cell phones, iPods, crackberries. You wouldn’t believe some of the **** they find. The wranglers skim some of it, a perk of the job. Most of the rest goes strait to the vault where Lemonjello takes a look, picks his picks, then distributes the rest.
This is how we find out the names of the Z we’re up against. I don’t figure the wranglers are able to get ID off of every one they hook, which means some of the names would have to be made up. Not that it matters. Whoever they were in the world makes no difference now. At least not to me, anyway.
Along with SkullCrusher, I have a couple of other tools –– a machete, a hunk of filed rebar, an aluminum baseball bat. I still keep the machete and the rebar on me as a back-up pieces, but the bat had to retire. It’s still hanging in my cell, kind of a trophy.
On Elliot’s signal, the wranglers lead out my fighter. They’ve got Timmy on the trigger poles, shoving him ahead. Once Timmy catches wind of the crowd, he starts to rear up, flail around, trying to get loose, get to me, the wranglers, to the warm and crunchy snacks sitting in the stands. Ohh, he’s a scrapper, this Timmy Taggert. Wonder what he did in the world.
The wranglers swing Tim around and kind of drag/shove him to the door. It’s a three-foot drop to the bottom of the pool and Z don’t use ladders. Stairs, yeah, but not ladders. They get him right to the end, unhook the poles, then use them to shove him in the back. Zombies almost always go down face first. They never use their hands to break the fall, just their foreheads. We’ve lost some contestants that way, when a soft-skulled Z splits a head on the pool bottom. Nothing we can do about that. I’ve had it happen to me once. It was nice to have a night off. And, since Z technically forfeited, I got another WIN tacked on to my record. Yeah, it’s kind of a cheat, but what the hell?
Maybe Engineering should build some stairs. It’d save on Z damage and might make it a little safer for the wranglers. I think I’ll mention it to the Sarge or LemonJello himself. The Man likes that kind of innovative ****.
I’m in the deep end, waiting for Timmy to peel himself off the ground, dark oozy something smeared from his face sticks on to the bright blue pool bottom. It hits me as kind of wrong –– like seeing a small sneaker, torn and bloody, laying in the middle of a street and you just know some kid got killed. People die every day, some deserve it, some don’t. But black blood on the bottom of an empty pool? It’s just somehow not quite right.
I stand here, hands empty, SkullCrusher still strapped to my back. I look relaxed but I’m all tensey. Why? What the **** is all this **** going through my head right now? I ought to be clear, focused. My heart pounds against my chest, like it wants to run away, get the **** out, get back to the cell, or, better yet, get with Cassandra.
I look around the pool, around the stands, into the jeering faces of the Die-Hards. They’re really in a whip today. Mouths wide, lips stretched tight across shiny white teeth, yelling. And they all look like Z, man. Every last one of them, even Cassandra. They all look dead-eyed and hungry, like they want to eat me.
A moan in my face. Timmy’s hand crushes my right shoulder while he bites for my neck. I tilt my face plate and deflect his snapping teeth into the soggy meat of his own hand. He takes a bite, tears off the back flesh, doesn’t even notice he’s eating himself.
I try a rolling shoulder block, but my right arm is tingly–useless. Jab left thumb into Timmy’s right eyehole, wrap my hand around the back of his head, lever his face away. Timmy’s scalp slips, letting him turn into the jam-up, teeth snap at my left wrist, missing, thank Christ. ****er almost got out my tendons.
The crowd is going nuts.
What the **** is wrong with me?
Timmy’s not slow. He’s not fast either, but not slow. He’ s what we call a Pack Leader. Not that he has any smarts or leadership ability; he’s just the type of Z that walks a little faster than the others, moves a little faster than the others. Nobody knows why that is. Thirsty Dennis says it has to do with standard distribution, kind of like taking a test in school. Some people will get As and Bs, some will get Ds and Fs. Most will get a C. Same with being a zombie: some move faster than the rest, others move a lot slower. So, in short, Timmy gets an A in Zombie. So, good for him. Gold stars all around.
My thumb is still stuck in Timmy’s eye while he moves in for another bite at my wrist. He won’t be able to get through the gloves and shirt, get any skin or infect me –– but those teeth will do major damage to my moveables. I’ll be damaged beyond repair and that I don’t need today.
I rotate my arm up and over Timmy’s head then shove him under and spin around behind him, my thumb still jammed in his skull. It looks like we’re dancing now, for christssake. The crowd loves it, going nuts, cheering their throats out for a bite or a bashing, I don’t know which.
Face-to-face now, I get my thumb back, along with a lot of Timmy’s eye juice, brain puss, and at least a third of his scalp. He gets a Shaolin Wonder Palm to the middle of the chest, where the bones should still be strong. No point in caving in his chest just yet.
I shouldn’t have worried, though. The Wonder Palm from the left is weaker than my right, which has feeling coming back to it, but still ain’t working right. The left sends Timmy back two feet, then he’s at me again, rawling and growling, showing me those nasty, nasty zombie teeth packed tight with somebody else’s rotting skin.
Step right, block Timmy’s left arm with my left, spin him around again so that he’s facing the deep end. A shove in the spine and a boot in the ass gets me a little more space, gets me a little more time to pull myself together, a little more time to get my arm working again, a few more seconds to decide which tool I’m going to use to finally waste this undead mother****er.
Another boot in the ass sends the rest of Timmy’s face scraping along the bottom. If he looked bad before, he looks like total **** now: Cracked skull, skin flaps and broken teeth. He gets up. They always do.
The arm feels better. I can make fists and probably swing it all around my head by now if I want to, but I don’t. I leave it hang at my side, even drop the shoulder a little to make everybody think it’s hurt, that I’m at a disadvantage, that, I don’t know, that I might not be a match for this pushead, that this might be my last fight, that I might bite it here, in the bottom of this gore-slicked pool? Gasp. Oh, no. Oh, the horror.
It’s all part of the show, man. This is what they’re here for. Me, too, in a way.
Timmy’s at my face again. The Shamblers always go for the face and neck. I don’t know why. It’s not like it’s the easiest place to get at. Meatless fingertips scrabble at my headgear. I step just out of their reach, then again, again. Foot into something squishy, a little skid but I’m safe, my eyes never leaving Timmy’s death mouth.
Right arm still limp, I reach across with my left, grab Timmy’s left shoulder and sweep-kick his legs our from under him. He goes down like a sack of meat, skull–bounce off the cement bottom sounds like somebody knocking on a door. Crowd cheers. I wave then reach over to massage my right shoulder. I wince, make it look bad, milk the tension.
Timmy on the ground. Timmy reaching for me, his mouth already wide–wide, anticipating that sweet yummy bite of Leg Of Max. I grab his left wrist, step to the outside and dislocate his shoulder. Two more good yanks and it’s free from the socket. One more and it’s out of his shirt. Timmy doesn’t even know it’s gone.
I step behind him, stand there and wait. He’s still face-down on the ground. He tries to get up with two hands, face-plants twice, then somehow figures out how to get up with the one arm. On his feet and facing away, he’s already forgotten about me and starts for the meat–filled stands.
I yell, “Yo, Tim-may! You forget sump-un?” and smack him in the head with his own hand. Timmy turns back to me, fans forgotten.
Whether he sees me with his one good eye, or if he senses me somehow, I don’t know. I’ve seen loads of pusbrains with no eyes still lock on a guy doing nothing but standing still. Do they key into heartbeats with some kind of super-hearing? Some kind of ESP?
I guess it’s one of those things. I want to know but I don’t want to know. You know?
Timmy’s arm is now my toy sword. I swashbuckle his face, poke him in the melon with his own fingers, slap his face, tickle his chin. Crowd roars. Laughs and cheers all around.
There are no rounds in a Zombie fight. Bouts last as long as you have the crowd, which with their short attention spans, is about four minutes. Four minutes is a ****ing eternity when you’re up against Z, no matter how well you’re protected.
A few seconds of ****-around, then I get to it. Boot to Timmy’s chest then toss his arm in the air with a flip, a wrist-first catch, then whip the knob-end across his skull. Timmy’s head cracks left, the rest follows by a quarter turn.
He comes back, grabbing for my face again. Backhand/forehand combos to his head with all the juice I’ve got. It’s enough to snap his neck, but it stays attached, goddamnit. Another backhand swing, rushed, so there’s not enough power and, Timmy’s in the wrong place so all he gets is a glancing blow off his empty sleeve. He stumbles forward into my gut, gets his arm around my waist and I go down hard.
I take it on my right shoulder –– again, goddamnit!
Timmy’s on me, in for a bite. I jam his right hand into his mouth. This buys me two seconds, long enough to drop the arm and grab his broken neck, which, even through my gloves, feels like a water balloon full of chicken bones. The only thing keeping his head on is a few layers of rotten meat.
I start yanking, hard. Every pull drags Timmy’s mouth across my faceplate, gag-nasty teeth, the hungry moan, the smell coming from him –– the smell of dead thousands, the rotting bodies packed in his putrified guts. Augh, the ****ing smell!
Timmy’s neck tears through mid-yank. I used the rest of the momentum to throw his head to the other end of the pool. Over the crowd I don’t hear it bounce.
The body collapses on me, dead juice leaking from somewhere, out and onto my faceplate and gear. I roll the body off, stand, signal Elliot for a towel.
Timmy’s head lays ear-down on the center drain, left eye socket weeping puss while the right slowly circles, searching for meat, his horrible mouth still chewing the air.
I force my right arm up and back, make it work, make it reach for SkullCrusher. Then she’s in my hand, the Super-Grit sandpaper biting into my leather gloves. I raise her high, high to the crowd, the crazy, ****ed-up crowd who’s only there to see one thing: Somebody die.
But they don’t ****ing get it: This isn’t a battle to the Death. By the time we both get here, somebody’s already dead. He just doesn’t know it.
I turn SkullCrusher over so she’s tip down and pointed at the gaping head. With both hands wrapping her grip, I steady the tip over Timmy’s temple then let gravity do all the work.
I say, “Vaya con Dios, Timmy,” but I don’t mean it. After all the **** He’s pulled, God doesn’t deserve anybody to go with him.
Copyright 2008 Bradley James Weber
Fagien Sarks |
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