skonen_blades | Entries tagged with zombie

Remote control carcass
Enjoy the flowers while you can
The sun on your life-support skin
Revel in your pre-zombie senses
Frankenstein’s monster running out of batteries
Temporary miracle
Your own planned obsolescence working hard within
The zippers being undone
Threads ripping
One long battle of attrition being lost
A leaking of heat
Diminishing returns on the fuel-to-cost ratio
A constant triage party
Happening without your consent
Throughout the damaged ladder of your body

But your gelatinous fragile cameras
Behold so much
The puzzle pieces you assemble in your meat crown
Add up to so much more than what you see

Outside
You plod damaged towards the end
But inside
You leap to conclusions
Pirouette into space
Think around corners
And dodge bullets

We’re pilots tied to our seats
Welded into our planes
Puppeteers gone full method
There are only three escape hatches
And one of them’s permanent

But this prison has a glorious window
Where anything can be outside
And travel is always possible
Escape can be recreational
Imagination making sanity possible
By letting us be
(what if)
(yes and)
not here, not here

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It was a 100% party and I was the guest of honour.

My day had come. Twenty-seven tours of duty in the war zones of the Kuiper belt. I was a veteran of over 700 combat missions. My chronological age was 76 but with time dilation and rejuve treatments and body part replacements, my true age could be anywhere from 18 to 312.

I was one of the near-immortal soldiers in the endless war. So many years of fighting and nothing budged on the borders. If anything, we were merely a testing ground for combat medicine and weaponry.

But today was my 100% party. I was officially dead.

Over all the battles, I’d been wounded and patched up hundreds of times. Head shots, shrapnel in m organs, limbs detached, junk shredded, one time I had my face torn clean off.

Today was the day that I no longer had any original parts left on my person. I had crossed that border from human to total amalgam. I was a patchwork zombie. A soulless. I had transitioned into a new level of soldier.

There were a lot of us. I’d heard that some soldiers went a little crazy after their transitions. Like being fully replaced was too much for their minds philosophically. Am I still me? What is me? That sort of thing.

It’s hard for us to find a way to effectively commit suicide but when there’s a will, there’s a way.

I looked down at my forearms. One was a little longer than the other. Both were covered in the zigzag patches of grafts that made us look like we were stitched together out of rags. Unintentionally excellent camouflage beneath the leaf shadows in the jungle.

My eyes were different colours. My teeth were all vat grown. My insides had mostly been 3d printed. I was brand new as of waking up from the last operation.

I was eager to get back to it.

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The dead came back ten years ago.

They're really pissing people off with their high-falutin' ways.

They've been to the other side and back. They've seen the face of God. They're at peace. They claim to have no memory of the experience other than an incredible sense of well being but those of us that haven't died yet think they might be lying.

They're calm and educated and dedicated to finding solutions. They've already come up with ecologically sound ways to house themselves. They don't go to the bathroom or eat or breathe. In terms of greenhouse emissions, they leave almost no footprint. They don't need much in the way of plumbing and because they don't breathe, they can live in places that are deadly to us living humans.

When they need to speak, they pull in breath so that their vocal cords will work. Other than that, they barely make a sound.

The dead walk around like ghosts. They laugh at jokes but it's like they're being achingly polite all the time. There's something unsettling about them. They're pale and they don't rush. Nothing makes them really angry or sad. They seem to be at peace but at the same time, they seem to have lost all their primal passion.

They don't need to sleep. They get twice as much work done as we do because of that.

I wonder sometimes if they even talk to each other when a few of them are in a room with no living people. Do they just sit there, staring at the walls, being all 'at peace'?

There are nasty rumours; That they're stupid, that they eat brains, that they're stinky and rotting. All false. Just mortist notions designed to create fear amongst the stupid who fear change.

They've really become a driving force behind this society. They've delved into science. They don't have much use for art or finance. They've make great strides in energy-saving technology. They're saving the Earth for us in small increments as part of our living human teams.

We feel like we owe them but they make us feel uncomfortable. They don't need our thanks, they say, they're just working for the greater good and the better future. Somehow, the fact that they have no use for our gratitude makes it even worse.

There are those that are attracted to the post-dead girls, of course. They're called Comebacks.

There are those who like to try to hurt or kill the risen, of course. They're called Morts.

Both groups are dwindling in number. The dead are immune to pain. To torture them is, for lack of a better word, boring.

As for having sex with them, well, if you're into necrophilia, then you won't like sleeping with the dead girls. They respond like the living but it's slightly robotic. Learned. Flatline. Beige. The thrill just wears off after a while.

At first, old family members had embraced the returned folk. After a while, however, it became apparent that these risen people, while retaining the memories of the departed, didn't have much of the same personality left. They were creepy. None of these reunions lasted long and there were no hard feelings on the part of the post-dead when they were told to leave.

They all tend to live in the same part of whatever city they've come back to. They take care of each other. They save up and buy entire city blocks for them and any new arrivals. A lot of old crimes have been solved since the dead tell tales now.

They've been accepted into society. It's a strange place.

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As Jhayne has already mentioned, The Zombie Walk is this Saturday.

Need to have your makeup done professionally before you go and eat brains? Check this out! For twenty dollars, a student will make you zombified at The Fall Tattoo Gallery on Seymour. Shambling distance from the Art Gallery when the walk begins. They'll have a team of zombie make-up ladies at your disposal. There's sure to be a rush so get there early or get in contact and organize yourself a chair.

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The cape was made from the skin of crows, not the feathers. It was pink and nubbly. It felt like a cold lover. It was unsetting.

That’s why Foot Admiral Ovenshack wore it. It freaked people out. They could have their sable, their mink, and their panther. That was the artifice of the rich.

When Ovenshack came for you in the birdskin cape and the mask of his office, all jokes were aside.

“I can’t be bribed and I think your display of wealth is a thumb in the eye of society” is what the cape said. It allowed him into the upper crust restaurants where capes were a necessity. Its unsettling appearance got him past repulsed bodyguards that didn’t want to touch it.

It got him into poor hovels. It protected him in places where his position would have gotten him killed if he was a more pompous person. The off-duty knife gangs laughed at him but quickly left him alone afterwards. He bore the scars of a veteran and his stare cut to the chase. His cape said to the poor people, “I have to dress like one of them but I have more in common with you.”

It was almost magical.

Without it, no one knew him. Becoming famous for wearing the cape let him be anonymous without it. With the help of a fake moustache or a nice hat and a change in carriage, he became a regular member of the populace. It was more dangerous to appear this way but it worked for undercover work.

Ovenshack was almost genetically destined to be a member of the patrols. He had a distaste for everyone that left him perfectly neutral. He believed in the dependability of human nature but not it’s virtue. Money held no temptation for him. It couldn’t buy him back the love he had lost. The threat of violence held no sway over him. He knew he would die in battle at some point and it might as well be tonight if it couldn’t be avoided.

Foot Admirals rarely survived more than a year. Ovenshack had been in this stinking city for six.

He was as good as it was possible for a Foot Admiral to be.

Until his dead wife came to town.

She’d been dug up and enchanted. She’d been slipped into the work force for canal work.

Not illegal but unsettling. Most zombies were shipped away from the cities where they’d been disinterred for the very reason that people might recognize old loves or relatives.

Ovenshack’s wife’s re-animated corpse had been shipped from the city he had run away from. The city he’d fled. The city he’d tried to leave behind. Cruel fate. Capricious destiny.

He started legal proceeding to free her but no one would listen to him.

His office suffered from disarray and soon enough, outright neglect. The rest of his men soon resorted to taking bribes. Anarchy was soon to come without a Foot Admiral at the helm.

The found Admiral Ovenshack under a bridge, arm around his smelly, green, and naked wife. Her eyes stared without emotion at the iron strutwork above her. She blinked if a fly came too close to her eye.

Ovenshack was dead.

He’d killed the zombie crew overseer, freed his wife and dragged her here to kill himself.

His eyes also stared without emotion at the iron strutwork. They did not blink as flies crawled freely over them.

The crowskin cape was draped over both of their cold bodies.

This is where we get the song.

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He was wearing the recording helmet when he died.

John DeMangus, out like a light, rest in peace. It was an embolism that took him out. He was by himself in the studio, and had the helmet recording.

He had noticed a background hiss in the first few tapes that the lab had made so far. It was like ambient noise on a badly made mix tape from before CDs. John didn’t know if it was the act of recording itself, the servos pulling the tape across the heads, that was causing the hiss or if it was possibly his own mind. Like maybe the background chatter was his subconscious whisperings. The prospect scared and fascinated him.

He had cleaned the heads on the giant machine and blasted air into the innards of it to remove all the dust. The interface to the machine took up a quarter of the lab’s wall space in the back corner. The machine itself was the size of an entire room. All the sensors and computational equipment were funneled down into two rainbow cables the thickness of a pair of arms. They snaked into the back of Dr. DeMangus’ chair. Wires from the chair led up to the helmet.

He pressed record.

He’d read about some meditational techniques that he was going to use to try to clear his head of anything that could cause any chatter on the tape. He needed a clean baseline to work from. It was not to be.

Fate struck the blow. John DeMangus died suddenly as the blood vessel in his brain took that moment to give up. It ripped open. John stiffened in his chair and then went slack. He wasn’t found until morning. The machine kept on recording for six minutes after his death.

The machine was built to record thoughts. We’d just started to tap the potential of the human mind.

The tape of John’s death was appropriated by the military, wrapped in red tape and yellow danger stickers, and stuck without ceremony in a sub-basement outside of Tuscon. It was a grave of sorts.

A shallow one, as it turns out. Colonel Magda Jefferies sniffed it out five years later and picked it up. She was looking for a way to interrogate prisoners.

Playback machines were smaller by that point. Laws were in place. What she was doing was so far beyond illegal that there wasn’t even a name for her crime yet.

She played the tape back on a few prisoners, bound and crying in their tiled cells. She placed the standard helmet on their heads and pressed play. The relived the experience of having an embolism. They died.

Colonel Magda took the physical feeds out of the tape and played it back on a few more prisoners. It was the beginning.

The prisoners experienced Dr. John DeMangus’ death without the physical symptoms. They experienced his soul slipping loose.

The souls of these prisoners were ripped from their bodies and flung to whatever other side there was.

The human-shaped construct of meat and bone that was left was open to suggestion, non-verbal, and remorseless.

She created an army from POWs after that.

Magda’s zombies, they were called. Or merely Doctors, as a throwback to DeMangus. Her crime was called soul-stripping. The official name for it became Murder in the Fifth Degree.

Many of the troops in today’s army are stripped. It makes them more pliable and obedient while they still retain the motor control and reflexes of a normal human.

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Vancouver Zombie Walk, bitches! That's how we roll! Brains were eaten, fun was had, rain was endured, and we freaked a few people out. If you have pictures, please upload them here. I'm posting my set but if you go to the group page, you'll see thousands of honest-to-goodness brain-eating shenanigans. A true success. Mad props. Brains. Click on the picture.

Peace out. Brains.

She walked into the room through her entry portal like a male teenager’s soaking-wet dream. She wore tight dark blue chrome-tinted leather, ludicrous high heels, a snarl beneath the reflective cop glasses and a whip trailing behind her.

Her waist would have been impossible even with the tightest of corsets and her leather didn’t creak when she moved. She was a fantasy exaggerated through the binary to become grotesque.

She was a tiger cross-bred with the cover of Vogue and she was pissed off in the virtual world and looking for vengeance.

Sparks raced up to meet her heels when they snapped down onto the floor of my sense-around.

I’d heard about the Leather Betties. I had porn on my drive. I immediately tried to jack out.

Nothing. I blinked twice to hit the backup outjack emergency procedure. Nothing. I subvocalized the password to cut the power. I’d wake up with a headache and I’d need a new startup but at least I’d be alive.

Nothing.

She had set the trap around me with walls of fire while I surfed and trawled. I knew I was about to enter another life. I was about to die and be put to work for the Betties post-mortem. My computer and I were about to become zombies.

It worked like this. My computer was hooked into the net and I was hooked into my computer. With the ‘trodes on, a power surge could fry my frontal lobes and leave me lobotomized. With my personality safely out of the way, they could go about using my alpha waves with puppetry to mimic all my id tags.

My computer and I would then become a puppet behind a mask. I’d be another Leather Betty, living on in the image of my creator, stalking other stockpilers of porn.

All of my friends were in my V-World, my iLife, and my e-home. It would be weeks before the smell of my body would alert neighbours and landlords and eventually, the police.

I’d be put into care with the rest of the zombies. The facilities were being filled past capacity. The Betties were busy.

She stepped forward to my chair and straddled me. She ground herself down on me. Huge breasts crushed up against me. She brought the whip up to the side of my head. She smiled with teeth too white, too sharp. She was drooling. The drops sizzled when they hit my chest.

I felt a sharp pull at my temple and smelled burning oranges. Then my world went black.

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Bonus love for you guys. A friend of mine is an actress who gave birth to a delightful young child not too long. She starred in a locally shot zombie picture a year or two back and managed to snap this winner. I can't get enough of this shot. Oh. Zombies. Terrifying. Wake me when something scary comes along. Yawn.