Summer of Zombie: Bob The Zombie
(teaser) by Jaime Johnesee
Oops! We had a mix-up. The excerpt is actually from
Bob the Zombie but I'll include the Valentine guy too (cuz I like him!)
About Bob the Zombie: (46 pages)
Life is rough,
unlife can be even more difficult, especially when you're a zombie with bad
luck. Follow Bob as he deals with all sorts of trouble. This is not your
average zombie novella.
About the Book: (50 pages)
Dating is dead difficult. It's even worse when you're undead. Bob is back and this time he's celebrating Valentine's Day. February fourteenth is the perfect time to ask a crush out on a date, even if your luck runs more toward that of a disaster movie than a romance. After all, what's the worst that could happen?
Excerpt: from Bob the Zombie: I lead a very Griswoldian life. If you've ever seen those 'National Lampoon's Vacation' movies, you know what I mean. Even my death was hysterically funny. I was a twenty five year old college dropout and was living at home with my parents. In fact I had been hanging out, relaxing in their garden, when I decided to prune my mom's roses. I was cutting a stem that was growing too close to the house and turned to respond to a neighbor who hollered a hello. It's at that point the stepstool I was using tipped and I impaled myself, jugular first, on the pruning shears when I fell to the ground. Sure, at the time it was horrifying, but now I can look back, see the vague similarity to the earlier referenced Chevy Chase character, and laugh.
My mom, however, was distraught at my demise and she hired a witch who specialized in necromancy to bring me back. The spell went a little funny and, instead of being brought forth from the ground in a geyser of dirt, I awoke in my casket and had to dig my way out. Luckily, Mom waited for me and gave me a nice mug of hot chocolate after I dug myself out of the fetid earth. Unluckily, my body was dead so the hot chocolate really messed with my stomach and I threw up all over mom's shoes. She forgave me. It took some time to learn how to eat food again. Not to mention having to learn which foods I could tolerate better than others. Chicken nuggets are fine, but beets lead to Exorcist-style vomit.
It wasn't long before I had to leave home. The rotting began and it creeped my family out when large chunks of me fell off. The necromancer had told my mom it would happen, and had suggested I invest in a ton of cheap staples and a good stapler. The iron in the staples bonds with the magic that animates me and --voila!-- whatever has been reattached looks just like it did before it sloughed off. Not that it makes me good as new, what with the constant greenish hue and festering wounds, but it's nice to know that I won't have to worry about leaving pieces of myself behind.
The clouding of my eyes bothered my mom (and me, really) the most. I have the eyes of a corpse now, mostly because...hello, Undead American over here! Now, don't get me confused with the ghouls. No, we zombies are sentient, and able to talk for ourselves. Unlike ghouls nobody is pulling our strings. Nope, we're pretty much the same people we were before our death and raising, it's just that now we need a steady diet of meat. Sometimes, we can tolerate other foods...and nonfood items. As for me, I like cake.
Sadly, I don't get cake very often. There's not a lot of supernatural bakeries around, and it's not as if I can go into the town bakery up the road and ask for a quarter sheet cake without setting off warning bells. Most of the world has no clue supernatural creatures exist. The humans that need to know about it, already do, but everyone else is kept in the dark. I imagine if I did hike on up to the bakery the conversation would go something like this:
"Hello Ma'am I'd like a..."
"ZOMBIE!!!!" Then out comes the shotgun and off goes my head. Nope, I think I'll stick around with the other supernatural critters and stay away from humans. Even though these days when people do spot me they tend to think I'm just some special effects genius with a hard on for zombie fiction. I'm a much more complicated guy than that, really.
Take for example how much it hurt when my family rejected me. I didn't ask to be brought back from the dead. Oh, and before you ask, no, I don't have a gaping wound on my throat where the shears pierced me. The funeral directors sewed that up and it healed when I was raised. I came out of the ground whole, my only flaws being the scars marking the place that wound was and a shaving nick I received the morning of my death. I stayed looking mostly human for awhile, it took about two weeks for the decomp to actually start. I am told the woman who raised me must have been a very powerful necromancer as the rotting usually starts by sundown on the day of the raising. The greater the magic of the witch, the longer putrefaction is staved off. The best witch can raise and keep a zombie for up to six months before it starts decomposing. I was glad to have had those two weeks, but the ending of them broke my heart into a million pieces. Being asked to leave by your own mother is deeply painful. That she was the one who brought me back made it even worse.
So, there I went, off by my little old lonesome, when I ran across another zombie named Face. I won't get into why he is nicknamed Face, but let's just say it's not because he's pretty. Face and his crew were hanging at the cemetery, messing with the stoner kids. I soon found it was one of his favorite pastimes and that he visited every cemetery in town looking to mess with people. The kids would smoke a little pot (or drop acid) and Face would wait about ten minutes and start clawing his way out of a grave. We'd sit back and watch as the drug addled victims started pointing and screaming. Sometimes they ran, sometimes they soiled themselves, and once, a kid had a gun with him and I was almost shot in the shoulder.
The first time I saw them, though, I was hanging back in the tree line. I watched, and chuckled, as the kids spotted Face and began shrieking and running. After the humans hightailed it out of there, I came down and introduced myself. We became great friends and I became a member of their horde. Before you even ask, no, hordes aren't like gangs or mob branches. Hordes are...well, they're families. We might scare a few humans from time to time, but we don't harm anyone. We mostly just stick together and have fun.
Well, we did. Then I got a sort of mental memo from the Goddess. She told me that some woman needed my help in the course of her becoming the go between for God, the Goddess, and the world. The first time I met this chick she was asleep in the woods and a bunch of supernatural creatures had gathered around all with the same mission to help her. Each of us had received a similar psychic email from Goddess. My first impression was that she was a nice lady, but for the biggest hope the human race has ever had, she was a bit dim. I mean, honestly, who falls asleep in a forest? Although, it gives the phrase 'sawing logs' a whole new meaning. Anyway, after getting to know Holly Andrews a bit, I realized she wasn't dense, just overwhelmed. I can relate to her, and that. I'm overwhelmed on a daily basis. However, I try to make jokes and keep things light. Life is enough to beat you down all by itself. Keep a smile and a sarcastic comment close by and it can make things just a bit better.
I really do hate not being able to get out much, but I understand the rules of our society. For the most part, humans don't want to know that we various supernatural critters exist, and we hide from them to keep it that way. My friend Holly will change all of that. I can't tell you more about it now, but, one day you'll see. She is going to create a whole new world for us all, human and other. I have my own part in this new world and I am really proud of it. But, I digress, that's not what this story is about. No, that's a tale for another time. Instead I'm going to tell you more about my pals and me.
So, one of our favorite pastimes, other than scaring people at the cemeteries, is clubbing. We hit every zombie friendly club in town. I love to dance. Mostly, I love watching people smile and laugh when they see me dancing. I'm no Fred Astaire, or MC Hammer, but my dancing brings joy to most everyone who watches. Well, until a piece of myself flies off and hits someone. It happens more often than you'd think, and definitely more than I care to admit, but I've been reanimated for almost a decade now. Hardly anything on me is fresh these days, except my sarcasm. Don't wrinkle your nose up at me like that. I take daily showers and use a special deodorant. I don't reek. I may drop chunks of rotting flesh now and then, but I smell damn good doing it.
So, one day the Horde and I were at this club called Coyotes, just dancing and having fun, when my finger flew off me and into this icy blonde bitch's drink. Hey, it was AC/DC playing. One must dance 'Balls to the Wall' for Angus and his crew. Anyway, she was repulsed, understandably so. Decomposing fingers and strawberry daiquiris don't exactly go together. I must ask you, though, who the hell orders a frozen daiquiri at a night club? A restaurant/bar, sure, but a nightclub? Tacky! She turned out to be the owner's girlfriend. We were banned for life, or until he "switched broads." His words, not mine. I had a feeling our banning would be lifted soon, if the look she'd shot him meant anything.
We went looking for a new place to hang, and I heard from a guy, who heard from a werewolf, that this place called Martin's was a cool bar to chill at. The horde and I shambled on over there and were surprised when a wave of calm rolled over us as we entered. I whistled in surprise, "Hey, how about that?"
"What?" Face asked, confused.
"Someone here is an expath. That calm you feel is coming from them. Must keep bar fights to a minimum. Smart move on the owner's part."
"Thank you." A tall man with green hair, eyebrows, lashes, goatee, and even a slight greenish hue to his skin grinned at me.
"I take it you're the owner."
"Griffin Martin. Nice to meet you."
"Bob."
"Pleasure. Feel free to check out the jukebox, and the menu." He gave me a wink and headed back behind the bar.
"He seems like a nice fella," Face said as he scanned a menu he'd lifted from one of the many booths lining the walls.
"Yeah. I think I'm going to...oh, my Goddess!"
"What? What's wrong, man?"
"Absolutely nothing, Face. Everything is right. Do you see what he has over by the jukebox?"
"The videogame?"
"Videogame? Nay, my friend, that's not just any game. That, my dearest zombie brother, is an original Donkey Kong in mint condition."
"Bob, you're drooling." Face handed me a napkin and I swiped the corner of my mouth. Sure enough, there was a string of drool cascading down my face. Hey, don't judge me, it was an original Donkey Kong and it was cherry! I mean, come on! What can I say? I wasn't exactly Mr. Popularity before I was impaled on a pair of gardening shears. Videogames, and the conventions associated with them, made up the bulk of my social life.
Jaime Johnesee is the author of Shifters and the Bob the Zombie series (the Clark Griswold of the Zombie world.) Check out her book info here.
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The stench of rotting flesh is in the air! Welcome to the Summer of Zombie Blog Tour 2014, with 30+ of the best zombie authors spreading the disease in the month of June.
Stop by the
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