ZOMBIES DON'T PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS

THE RIVAL doesn't come out until summer 2012.

Many of my new friends wondered about the "playground" incident mentioned yesterday.

Here is the version found in THE RIVAL that contains surprises even for my old friends :

My real memories begin when I was seven. And where I started was where I almost ended. I know I wanted to end right then.

Why?

Mother ended when I was seven.

Leastways, me being with her ended. Though I can’t remember it clearly, I know she and I travelled the world together before then. Always together.

Never again.

I can never see her face clear that last day. No matter how hard I try. Her whole body is vague even. All I see clear are her winter-gray eyes. Wet with tears. Then, becoming granite cold.

“I must leave you, Victor.”

“W-What?”

“Hush! I have taught you better than to lose control like this. Though I take his face from your mind, remember Chiron’s lessons.”

“Don’t leave me, Mother!”

“It is done. My nature is what it is. You must survive as best you can. Beware. My taking time to leave you here has spawned foul creatures in Detroit. And they are hungry. I must leave before even worse happens.”

Cold lips press down upon my forehead. “I-I love you, Victor.”

Then, she simply vanished. One heartbeat there. The next gone.

My mind told my eyes they were wrong. People just didn’t disappear like that. My blinking eyes screamed the obvious : I was alone.

My mind refused to believe. The heart dying inside me believed my eyes. Mother was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.

The world slowly grew into focus. A chill Autumn air made me shiver. At least, I told myself it was the cold winds that were doing it.

My nose wrinkled. Exhaust fumes. Grass. Yelling kids. A playground.

Mother had dumped me at a playground. That was just so … so mean.

Cold, distant. Mother had always been that. Still, I always felt loved somehow. My face closed like a fist. You didn’t dump someone you loved like an unwanted kitten at a playground.

I stepped back from the thought. My feet followed. The chains of a swing brushed my shoulders. I sank down into it hard, my legs not wanting to support me anymore. Like Mother didn’t want me anymore.

I grabbed the chains and squeezed with all my might. Why? Why didn’t she love me anymore?

To my right whined a girl’s voice, “I don’t like you.”

I blinked my eyes to focus my mind. I turned. A girl was in the swing next to me.

A year younger than me, she had long, wavy black hair. Her eyes were the color of the wine-dark sea. The same sea that Triton had surged out of, blowing death from his spiral horn.

I shook my head.

Where had that thought come from? I caught a fleeting image of a wrinkled face, sad eyes milked over in blindness. Homer.

His name was Homer. And he always found a way to make me laugh. I went cold inside. Ulysses. He always called me ‘Ulysses.’

The girl cleared her throat. “I said I don’t like you.”

“Take a number,” I muttered.

“I said I don’t like you!”

“I didn’t hear you that time, and I’m not going to hear you the next.”

She pointed over my shoulder. “And I don’t like them either!”

I smiled as cold as my heart felt. “Must be my kind of people.”

I turned in the swing. “Or not.”

The dead-eyed children swayed on lead feet our way, their faces rotting, their dress clothes torn and dirty, their nails broken from having clawed their way out of their coffins and up through the dirt of their graves.

Was this what Mother meant? Were they the reason she had to leave me so quickly? I swallowed hard remembering her words. Had she somehow made these corpses into zombies just by being here?

No. That couldn’t be. She was just Mother.

“Zombies!,” I muttered. “Fricking kid zombies. Oh, why the hell not?”

The girl covered her mouth, “Oh, you said a naughty!”

“On my best day, Sunshine, I’m PG-13.”

Mother’s slate-hard eyes flashed before mine. “And this is not my best day.”

“My name’s not Sunshine! It’s Becky.”

I jerked my thumb to the jaw-snapping, hungry kid zombies moving our way much too fast. “It’ll be ‘Kibble ‘N Brains’ if you don’t get the lead out.”

What had Chiron told me? When surrounded by enemies, get a sword, a shield, and the high ground.

Becky pulled out a wooden slingshot. “I’ll stop them!”

“Lots of luck with that, Nibbles.”

“My name is Becky!”

We were almost surrounded. I ran to a fallen baseball bat. Two zombies were making sure that the boy whose blood was all over it, wouldn’t miss it.

I darted in between them, nervous laughter bubbling from my lips. I tumbled through their grasping arms, snatching up the bat.

“My life is like a loaded gun,” I panted.

One lunged at me.

I beaned him with all my might, and his rotting head burst. I laughed, “I hope your name was Homer. ‘Cause I always wanted to hit a homer.”

To my far left, Becky screamed, “Fall down! WHY WON’T YOU FALL DOWN?”

I ran over, grabbed her by the pony-tail and snapped, “Cause the fun never stops with zombies!”

“Stop!,” cried Becky. “You’re messing up my pigtail.”

I spotted a slide/jungle-gym. All right! High ground.

I grunted, “Those zombies will mess up more than your ….”

A kid zombie with a half-eaten face lurched through the garbage cans lining the playground, knocking them over. A garbage can lid rolled to my feet.

My shield!

I snatched it up and smacked the zombie in the face with it. “Watch out! Low bridge.”

I thumped Becky on the butt to get her moving faster to the slide/jungle-gym.

“Hey, that’s my butt!”

I jerked my head to the shambling, but all-too-fast kid zombies. “It’ll be theirs if you don’t get a move on!”

We made it to the slide at the same time that a black kid took a mop handle and used it as a pole vault to get to the top of the metal tree-house at the top of the slide.

“Whoa!,” I gasped. “Way to go, LeRoy.”

He looked down at me. “Ya gotta learn free runnin’ if you gonna make it on these streets, bro. How did you know my name anyway?”

I got uneasy. “Lucky guess.”

But it hadn’t been. I had just known it. Like I had known Chrion’s lessons but couldn’t remember his face.

I smacked Becky up the slide with the garbage lid. The ladder was too slow as a couple of screaming kids found out the hard way. We ducked aside a girl with glasses. I shield-blocked the brick she aimed at me.

“Save it for the dead heads,” I barked, scooting by her.

The slide/jungle-gym was a big son of a gun. I skipped down the steps from the tree house to the walkway where six kid zombies scrambled towards us moaning, “Brains, brains, brains.”

I winked at Becky who was taking aim at them with her ball bearing loaded sling shot.
“They can’t mean you. It’s gotta be me they’re after.”

Becky let go with her sling shot, sending a ball bearing into the only eye of a grasping girl zombie. “Ha, ha. Very not funny!”

LeRoy pushed a boy zombie off the top of the tree-house with his mop handle. “Damn! They just too many of ‘em!”

It hit me then.

Mother hadn’t abandoned me.

She had left me here to be killed.

She … she wanted me … dead. She didn’t want me anymore. She didn’t love me. Had she ever loved me? Hot tears filled my eyes.

“Wrong!,” I yelled. “There aren’t enough!”

I leapt onto the walkway, swinging with bat and shield, knocking the grasping kid-zombies every which way.

Zombies scuttled like cockroaches out of Hell along the top of the rungs of the jungle-gym. They dropped down on the walkway. I swung at them with all my hurt, all my anger.

Brains, bits of skull, and rotted flesh flew in chucks as I danced about, smacking them with all the rage I felt at Mother for just dumping me … for not loving me anymore.

Glasses sobbed, “I-I’m outta bricks. They’re going to eat us.”

They kept coming. I kept blocking and smashing.

Becky went for more ball bearings but came up empty. A giggling girl-zombie knocked LeRoy down. He screamed.

{Tune in this summer for the rest.}
***
What could be the theme for Victor's friendship with Becky & Glasses :

THE LAST NEWSCAST

Ever wonder what happened to Becky, Glasses, and LeRoy from Victor's zombie run-in at that playround in Detroit?

You'll find out in THE RIVAL.

{Due to be published this summer!}

But here is the bit called "THE LAST NEWSCAST."

{Detroit has become the city of the undead except for four very frightened children -- one of them a murderer and worse.}

“You can find everything you need at Sears,” I whispered with a smile, remembering what Mother had once told me.

“Aren’t you finished yet?,” whispered Becky.

Over the past month we had learned to whisper whenever we talked. It had been a pretty lousy thirty days.

Especially for Becky and Glasses. Both had lost their parents long ago. Becky lived with an older sister, Glasses with a maiden aunt. Both sister and aunt died in that playground.

I made a finishing twist of the screwdriver and nodded, “All finished.”

I handed her the tinkered leg of a walker I had worked on for nearly an hour. “Your Zip gun.”

Becky took it with a frown. “Gee, it’s heavy!”

“Should be. It fires ball bearings.”

LeRoy cocked his sullen head. “How it do that?”

“It uses compressed air to shoot ball bearings. I took a couple of things Leonardo di Vinci taught me ….”

All three of them looked at me as if I were Forest Gump, and I hurriedly added, “ … in a dream.”

Glasses smiled timidly, “What was the dream, Victor?”

“Ah, Mother and I visited him when he was a real old man. She told him it was time to go.”

“Go where?,” Becky frowned.

I shrugged. “Somewhere he really didn’t want to go from the way he looked. Mother left me with him, saying she’d postpone his going as long as he taught me needful things.”

Both Becky and Glasses made me uncomfortable by getting closer than they needed to be.

LeRoy huffed, “And did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Show you those needful things, fool!”

“Yeah, he did. It was a pretty fun month. He was a neat teacher. Then ….”

“Then, what?” whispered Glasses.

“Then, Mother came back. But Leo took it better than I expected. He ruffled my hair and told me I had made his last month one of the best.”

Becky got even closer. I couldn’t understand it. In a month she seemed to have grown older by a full year at least. I had a sinking feeling my scream on the playground had something to do with it.

She whispered, “What happened next?”

I grew uneasy and muttered, “The dream ends there.”

LeRoy grunted, “Dreams always do.”

He sneered at my red wagon by the Sears hardware check out. “What else you got in there?”

I reached down and pulled out the mini-crossbow I had jury-rigged for Glasses and handed it to her. “Lighter than bricks.”

She took it gingerly. “Ha. Ha.”

I smiled thin. “I used pulleys and chains in ways Archimedes showed me.”

LeRoy sneered uglier. “In another dream, right?”

I nodded. “In another dream.”

Becky made a librarian face. “How many of those silly dreams do you have?”

“Don’t know. I just seem to remember ‘em when I need them.”

I sniffed at the faint traces of familiar perfume and pulled at the cuffs of my work gloves, uncomfortable at the memories they stirred. LeRoy smiled like a shark. He shook his head.

“What? You don’t want those lily white hands to get dirty?”

“Cut. I don’t want them cut. Remember how fast Shamblers get when they smell fresh blood?”

That shut him up. He looked concerned all around the empty store. He gnawed his upper lip.

“This places spooks me. It so empty. It should be full of Shamblers as you call them.”

Glasses shook her own head. “It’s as if somebody cleared them out before we got here.”

Becky laughed bitter. “Maybe it was Victor’s Mother.”

I might have laughed with her if I weren’t smelling her strange perfume in the air.

To change the subject, I pulled out two back packs. One marked G and the other B. I handed them to the girls.

“It has bolts and ball bearings in them. First Aid kits, magnesium flares, matches, Zippo’s, lighter fluid …..”

“Why both matches and Zippo’s?,” growled LeRoy.

Glasses’ eyes lit up. “Oh, I know! You skirt a Shambler with the lighter fluid, light up the pack of matches with the Zippo, and throw it on the zombie!”

For once LeRoy nodded in appreciation of one of my ideas. "Barbequed Shambler! I like that."

I figured he was smiling because it was spoken out loud by Glasses. If Becky had done it, he would have done hand-stands.

He suddenly frowned, “Hey, where’s my back pack?”

“With that free running of yours, you don’t need to be loaded down with a pack.”

I bent down and pulled out my gag gift. “Here’s a new mop though .. to replace the one you broke over that Shambler's head in the playground.”

As the girls giggled, he snapped, “You know where you can stick that.”

“Where do we go from here?,” asked Becky.

I grinned, “The mattress department.”

LeRoy huffed, “I ain’t sleeping in this death trap.”

“We’re gonna sit while the girls snooze for a couple of hours.”

Becky clasped both hands together. “Oh, LeRoy, could we? To sleep on a real bed again ….”

He relented. “Oh, all right. But not for no two hours. Maybe thirty minutes. Those Shamblers may be gone now, but they be coming back.”

Becky and Glasses literally skipped on the way to the Mattress Department. Sears had three beds as models. The girls picked the biggest to snuggle up in together.

LeRoy made me antsy the way he looked at Becky in the bed. I unfurled long sheets of bubble wrap all around their bed.

LeRoy muttered, “The Shamblers get that close, getting warned won’t do no good.”

But the bubble wrap seemed to ease the girls in the way that I hoped it would. LeRoy glared at me, seeing it. Let him. We were never going to be Prom dates anyway.

They snuggled in their new Sears jeans and blouses and sighed. I sighed, too, as I noticed they kept their sneakers on. It was a new world with new rules.

I had already set up two Lazy Boys by the beds before I led us here. With the TV in front of it. LeRoy arched an eyebrow.

“Where the popcorn to go with the movie?”

“No movie. Only a DVD recording marked THE LAST NEWCAST.”

LeRoy made a face. “I can hardly wait.”

3.
The newswoman looked like she had seen better days. Her fancy hair-do was all frazzled. Her business suit looked like it had been slept in for days.

The camera was even off-center as if not wanting to get too close a look at her. Her first words explained the camera.

“T-Ted, the camera man is … dead. I … shot him myself.”

She peered into the camera as if begging its owner’s forgiveness.

“You asked me to, Ted. I – I didn’t want to. God, you know I didn’t want to. B-But you said women were the stronger sex.”

(“Yeah, right,” muttered LeRoy. I shushed him.)

She sniffed once, picked up a stack of rumpled news copy, and laughed bitterly.

“I don’t feel stronger. I feel … that’s just it. I don’t feel. It’s like my heart and mind are both wrapped in cotton.”

I heard the pounding and grunting from behind the camera at the same time she did.

She went stiff, dropping the papers in a messy sprawl on the desk in front of her.
“I don’t have long. But if I’m going to die, I’m going to die a newswoman.”

The pounding on the unseen door got louder. The grunting was worse somehow, and the poor lady echoed my thoughts.

“It’s that damn hungry, incessant grunting. It’s more than hunger. Sexual almost. Damn.”

She looked back into the camera, now seeing, not Ted, but the audience. “Ted set this up to repeat over and over again. So if you’re watching this, I’m not really here.”

She looked off into the shadows and murmured, “I haven’t been here for a long time now.”

She snapped out of it with the increased pounding and grunting behind the camera. Splintering wood was added to the mix. She tried to wet her mouth, her dry tongue.

“Anyone close to you gets bit, you kill them. In hours, minutes even, they become ….”

The grunting grew obscene somehow, and she looked towards it then back to the camera.

“… one of them. Shoot them. But not in the body.”

She smacked her forehead. “There! If you don’t have a gun, a bat, a lead pipe. Fire. Burn them! But save yourself. They are already dead.”

She looked down at the floor by the camera and whimpered, “Already dead.”

The door sounded ready to go, and she pulled out a revolver.

“Don’t bury them. Kill them. But don’t burn the bodies! God, don’t burn the bodies.”

“Ted and I were there when the National Guard started burning the bodies. The smoke. God, the smoke. It infected everyone by the fires who breathed it. They changed so fast.”

She closed her eyes tight as the grunting got louder, the splintering wood more shrill. “Those changed didn’t shamble.”

(LeRoy looked at me with the speaking of the word. His face was ash gray, his eyes wide.)

“They were like rabid dogs. They ran so fast, their open mouths foaming. T-That’s when Ted got bit. I think I might have gotten a whiff of that damn smoke myself. I – I don’t feel human anymore.”

It sounded like the door was about to go.

“No, I feel like a little girl back in church, knowing I’m going to get a spanking when I get home.”

She stroked the revolver as if it were a cat and began to sing “O Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” in a little girl’s voice :

“H-Here I raise my Ebenezer ….”

She put the gun’s barrel under her chin.

“H-Hither by Thy help I’m come,
And I hope by T-Thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive a-at ho-home.”

She pulled the trigger.

I jumped in my chair. The door to the newsroom finally tore off its hinges right then. The camera was knocked down. We saw a flurry of shambling feet. Then, there was a click.

The newswoman was back looking at us again. “T-Ted, the camera man is … dead. I … shot him myself.”

The clip was repeating itself. I was shaking. LeRoy husked out , “Shit.”

I managed to say, “What you said.”

LeRoy frowned, “Hey, the grunting didn’t come so soon, did it?”

I quick turned off the TV with the remote. The grunting kept on. LeRoy suddenly looked like an albino.

“They found us!”

We popped out of the Lazy Boys. I turned to the far end of the third floor. There. At the escalator.

The Shamblers were tumbling to the floor as their feet no longer remembered how to step off an escalator. They hadn’t seen us yet. They had only smelled us.

LeRoy started for Becky. I was closer. I whispered shrill.

“Cover Glasses’ mouth when you wake her.”

“Why the hell for?”

“Don’t you remember? They always wake up screaming.”
***

***
Alice & Victor's love theme :

WHERE DO YOU END YOUR NOVEL?

One of the criticisms of the last LORD OF THE RING movie was that it appeared Peter Jackson couldn't decide where to end the movie

and tricked the audience into thinking they were watching the end, only to be moved to yet another false ending.

By the time the movie did end, many were grumbling about the whole experience.

Are we authors like that?

Do we linger too long, milking the afterglow of the story. Or do we end too abruptly once the crisis is averted or overcome?

Many teachers of creative writing stress not to begin writing until you have the ending clearly in mind

so that you can head to it with skillful foreshadowing and firm precision, not meandering until the end just comes to you.

I think that approach also helps you to know when to begin.

If you know the ending with its transformation of the main character, then you know where to start your story ...

and you get a sense of how to bring your protagonist to his destination.

What mood do you want the reader to leave your novel holding in his heart?

Hope. Despair. Laughter. Resolve in the face of dissolution.

Or a mix of all of the above?
***

SNOOPY VERSUS ZOMBIES!

Woodstock has just got to stop watching those DVD's of

THE WALKING DEAD!

And don't forget one of the prizes in THE FRIENDS OF VICTOR STANDISH contest

is

a CHARLES SCHULZ AUTOGRAPHED program of WINTER DREAMS!

http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-and-old-prizes-i-am-giving-away.html

THE WALKING DEAD makes me ask WHY ZOMBIES?

My fascination, and many others', with THE WALKING DEAD

makes me ask,

WHY ZOMBIES?

The undead.

They captivate us.

The appeal to vampires is obvious :

even Bram Stoker, who coined the term "undead," painted Dracula as sexy and seductive (at least in London).

Don't get me started on the "sparkly" ones.

While most vampires are etched as lovely, though deadly, predators, what is up with our fascination with zombies?

They are Id's brought to hungry life : only appetite, no morals or guidelines. And terrible table manners.

Why are we so obsessed with zombies? They are not seductive, not appealing, what with body parts missing or rotting away as you watch.

Zombies symbolize those threats like actual skin-eating diseases,

terrorist bombs,

and natural disasters like the promised California SuperStorm that will someday in the future dump ten FEET of rain over 30 days.

Zombies symbolize our fears of death that will not be reasoned or threatened away.

Does immersing ourselves in zombie movies give us an illusion of some measure of control over death, cancer, and other all-too-real threats in our modern lives?

Seeing teens surrounded in a cabin by milling, moaning zombies, we know that soon those pretty girls will be either eaten or transformed into eternally hungry zombies.

And in a sense, we, the viewer, have become with them Death in our imaginations : unstoppable, forces of nature, unthinking.

But the zombie is never at rest : like a shark, it must continually shamble in search of prey or it will die.

Then, take little Karen Cooper (please, you take her 'cuz me and Victor want nothing to do with the little munchkin), from the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD :

Newly undead, the zombie girl happily starts to feast on her father's arm, then lay waste to her mother with a trowel of all things. There is something deeply unsettling about seeing an innocent child turn to a flesh-eating monster in front of your eyes.

Which is why I used the Zombie Playground picture in yesterday's post :

http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2011/10/walking-dead-meets-victor-standish.html


This, for me, is the worst facet of becoming a zombie : it robs you of your identity, of your sense of self.

Is our fascination with zombies an extension of 21st century Man's self-loathing? Or do we place ourselves in the roles of the survivors?

What would we do in their place? We revel in their violence against those shambling things which are already dead. We can mutilate and destroy with no regret, no remorse.

Or is it that zombies offer us the ultimate crucible : that arena which hones our characters and our souls into something better or into something infinitely worse than zombies -- a knowing evil against our brothers?

I already know what Victor Standish thinks about this. But don't be too sure you know. Remember his "ghoul friend," Alice. What do you think?
***

THE WALKING DEAD meets VICTOR STANDISH

With the debut of THE WALKING DEAD,

friends have emailed asking me,

"What would Victor Standish do?"


Here is the answer from the prologue to his third novel, NO VICTOR :


When you're seven, you're too old for a swing. But I wasn't sitting in it for fun. No. My legs were just too weak to hold me up.

Mother had left me. Me. For days, maybe weeks she said. "Survive as best you can, Victor. I must be alone with my latest conquest."

And then, she was gone with her muscled bad boy. What was I going to do?

"I don't like you," sniveled the little girl in the swing next to me.

"Pick a number. It's a long line."

The black-haired girl pointed her finger past me. "I don't like them neither."

"Must be my kind of people," I grunted, turning to look.

"Or not," I gulped.

Zombies. Fricking kid-zombies. "Oh, why the hell not?"

"Oooh, you just said a no-no."

"On my best day, I'm PG-13. And Sunshine, this ain't my best day."

"My name is Becky not Sunshine!"

I got up, looking all around. Damn, we were surrounded.

"It's gonna be 'Kibbles-N-Brains' if you don't put some muscle to the hustle."

What had Chiron told me? When surrounded by enemies, get a sword, a shield, and the high ground.

Becky pulled out a wooden slingshot. "I'll stop them."

"Lots of luck with that, Nibbles."

I ran to a fallen baseball bat. Two zombies were making sure that the boy who dropped it wouldn't miss it. I darted in between them. I tumbled in a roll, snatching up the bat. One lunged at me.

I beaned him with all my might, and his rotten head burst.

I laughed, "I hope your name was Homer. Cuz I always wanted to hit a homer."


To my far left, Becky screamed, "Fall down! WHY WON'T YOU FALL DOWN?"

I ran over to her, grabbed her by her pony-tail and snapped, "Cuz the fun never stops with zombies!"

"Stop!," cried Becky. "You're messing up my pigtail."

I spotted the slide/jungle-gym. High ground.

I snapped, "Those zombies will mess up more than your ...."

A kid-zombie with a half-eaten face lurched through the garbage cans lining the playground, knocking them over. A garbage can lid rolled to my feet. My shield!

I snatched it up and smacked him in the face with it. "Watch out! Low bridge."

I thumped Becky on the butt to get her moving faster to the slide/jungle-gym.

"Hey, that's my butt!," she yelled.

I jerked my head to the shambling but all-too-fast kid zombies. "It'll be theirs if you don't get a move on!"

We made it to the slide as a black kid took a mop handle and used it as a pole vault to get to the top of the metal tree-house at the top of the slide.

"Whoa," I gasped. "Way to go, LeRoy."

He laughed down at me. "Ya gotta learn free runnin' if you gonna make it on these streets, bro. And how did you know my name?"

I got uneasy. "Lucky guess." But it hadn't been. I had just known it. Just like Mother seemed to know the names of some strangers on the streeet.

Usually the really sick looking ones.

I smacked Becky up the slide. The ladder was too slow as a couple of screaming kids found out the hard way. We ducked aside a girl with glasses. I shield-blocked the brick she aimed at me.

"Save it for the dead heads," I snapped, scooting by her.

The slide/jungle-gym was a big son of a gun. I skipped down the steps from the tree house to the walkway where six kid-zombies scrambled towards us, moaning, "Brains. Brains. Brains."

I winked at Becky, who was taking aim at them with her ball-bearing loaded slingshot. "They can't mean you. It's gotta be me they're after."

Becky let go with her slingshot, sending a ball bearing into the only eye of a grasping girl zombie. "Ha. Ha. Very not funny."

LeRoy pushed a boy zombie off the top of the treehouse with his mop handle. "Damn! They just too many of 'em!"

It hit me. Mother had left me to die. Die.

She didn't want me anymore. She didn't love me. Had she ever loved me? Ever?

Hot tears filled my eyes.

"Wrong!," I yelled. "There aren't enough of them!"

I leapt onto the walkway, swinging with my bat and shield, knocking the grabbing kid-zombies every whichway.

Zombies scuttled like cockroaches out of Hell along the top of the rungs of the jungle-gym. They dropped down on the walkway. I swung at them.

Brains, bits of skull, and rotted flesh flew as I jumped about, smacking away with all the anger I felt at Mother for just dumping me ...

for not loving me any more.

"Die. Die! DIE!"

Glasses sobbed, "I-I'm outta bricks. They're going to eat us."

They kept coming. I kept blocking and smashing. Becky went for more ball bearings but came up empty. A giggling girl-zombie knocked LeRoy down. He screamed.

I raised my shield and bat to the uncaring skies and roared, "WOULD YOU JUST DIE!"

Whoa.

I could've sworn a pale green circle pulsed out from around me. The kid-zombies keeled over as if their electric plugs had been pulled from the wall socket. They just lay there, all limp and finally as dead as they looked.

Becky gasped, "H-How did you do that?"

"I just yelled like Mother."

LeRoy muttered, "Bro, she must be one bad mutha."

I looked down at the swing where she had dumped me. "You have no idea."

{And neither does Victor. What really happened? Tune in to the last sentence of the last chapter to THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH for a clue.}
***
Oh, and as for the following clip, had Victor been there, Victor, being Victor, would have said,

"Yo, she-bitch. Get over it! He saved your life. Why?

Because you were too dumb to realize that if you hung around long enough, the zombies will starve!

They only eat us. And how many US do you see?

I mean, you don't see any zombie squirrels around do you? Of which I am really glad 'cause I do not want to have to wander around the heavenly clouds, explaining I was eaten by zombie squirrels!"
***