Intertwine

  Of course, before he became a zombie he had a nasty habit of raping and murdering prostitutes, although he didn’t consider it a horrible thing, just a thing that might have gotten him into trouble with his girlfriend or the police, if he had been caught. He was sure his girlfriend wouldn’t have approved of him hacking a naked woman to bits and then throwing the dismembered corpse into the river, even though it was a family trait. His father had been a Bible thumping, whore murderer as well. Baxter was just following in his father’s footsteps. Except for Baxter, the electric chair was not an option. The problem, in this case, was that if he hadn’t been a hooker-murdering businessman, he might never have become a zombie.

  During one of his late night slash fests, he was bitten by a cat. He should have been paying better attention to his surroundings. That night he was tired and just wanted to get through the bone and be done with it so he could go home and have sex with his plain Jane girlfriend, whose name was actually Jane. Baxter was sure she would be waiting at his apartment with some organic wine and organic berries in a vegan negligee. He tired of her clinginess and at times wished that he could kill her. She was weak, lived in a rent controlled apartment, and liked to dine in.

  Instead, he was bitten on the right forearm by a scraggly orange tabby cat with one eye and a collar that jingled. The cat didn’t wear a nametag; Baxter guessed that at one point, it did. Its name was probably something stupid like Twinkie, Buster, or Chuck Norris. Swearing, he turned to kill the cat but it was gone, apparently it had not taken a liking the taste of Baxter’s forearm and didn’t need a second taste. So he finished what he was doing, took care of the debris, cleaned himself up and went home. Having become a professional in the arena of murder, the clean-up only took him fifteen minutes. Killing in the nude had become habit, so there wasn’t much else to do besides push the body parts into the river. He was, of course, happy that the cat had not bitten him on his unprotected penis. Who would have guessed that there was a cat zombie roaming the world?

  It wasn’t until two days later that he thought something was wrong. Antibiotic cream burned. In fact, his arm had become swollen and there was a weird, sickly smell that emanated from the wound. He was never a man with a tan, in fact his pale skin regularly seemed to reflect light but he did seem paler than usual. Even his best friend and office mate, Toby, noticed. Toby commented on it one day, four days after he had been bitten.

 

  “Man, Bax, you need to get out more in the daylight. You are so pale someone might mistake you for the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man.” One of Toby’s favorite movies was Ghostbusters, of course he really loved watching the scenes with Sigourney Weaver, which was the reason he also liked the ‘Alien’ movies (even Alien Resurrection which was a horrible movie; but Sigourney Weaver was wet, so she was sexy).

  Baxter had laughed it off, making a joke about Sigourney Weaver’s tits to distract Toby, but he wondered. He also worried and when he realized what had happened, he began to use precautions. Formaldehyde became a staple of his daily skin care routine.

  Baxter was forced to take two weeks off from work, the last three days of which he didn’t remember. When he woke up on the last day, he was covered in blood and there were several rat carcasses around his body. Apparently, while he slept the rats had decided he might taste like garbage, a favorite among the rat population, so they came in and nibbled on his feet. Thankfully, they only got stuffing while they nibbled on his brown slippers. He wished they hadn’t come at all. The rats didn’t seem to bother him while he was sleeping and from the looks of it he had gotten the best of them. There were easily fifteen dead rats, or at least the pieces of them, strewn about his pale green and yellow bedroom. Well, now his bedroom looked a little more like Christmas with the blood on the walls, carpet and him.

  Jane had wanted to come over and bring him soup, or something to make him feel better. She wasn’t much of a cook and had gotten on this vegan kick, which was annoying since he was a rare steak and fries man. He didn’t care for miso soup, or tofu, or raw vegetables, or any of the other crap she brought by. So he told her no, don’t come over, and ignored the hurt and whiney voice on the other end of the line. Jane was beginning to bore him. She was so like vanilla in her tastes, wanting to watch chick flicks and cry on his shoulder. Jane even begged to stick with the missionary position when they had sex. Baxter had begun to think about dumping her, yet it was so hard to find a simple, easy to maintain girlfriend.

  Now, when he saw his pale face in the bathroom mirror, he could see it all, could see what he had become, could see what he really was. He didn’t know how long he could hide the fact that he was a zombie. Baxter had to remember to breathe; if he didn’t breathe, people would realize what he was. A hard part was that he had to remember to eat, even though all the food he ate tasted like burnt hamburger. What he would have given for a bloody raw steak, or the raw flesh of something delicious, more savory than bloody rat. He had to remember to comb his receding blay (brown, blonde and grey) hair gently every day, so it didn’t all just fall out of his dead head. There was probably no possibility that hair grew back when the body wasn’t producing anything to grow hair.

  When he walked into the office each day, he knew he probably looked worse and worse. He would have stayed home or quit but he didn’t want people to figure out his secret; plus he needed the money.

  His skin was becoming sallow, he looked as if he hadn’t slept in days, or even weeks, but he could pass off his more than unfortunate looks because he had just been out sick for a couple of weeks. However, just by the glimpses he had caught of himself in the urine tainted men’s room, he knew he wouldn’t be able continue blaming his mysterious illness for the way he looked. Baxter was surprised every day he walked into the office that no one noticed the slightly sweet smell that was beginning to emanate from his body. He knew from research the smell was a beginning sign of decomposition, and he wasn’t sure how long he could keep himself together, literally.

  “Hey Mr. Kingsley, there is a meeting at ten in the main conference room. Mr. Derrwitaker wants to see you there,” said Ashley, the reception secretary.

  She was always smiling her goofy bright smile. For some reason she thought that getting braces at the age of thirty was a good idea and might help her land a man. It was pretty silly of her to think that. A man wouldn’t want to kiss a mouth full of metal, unless he had a fetish for young schoolgirls. Maybe that was her catch, maybe she caught men by putting her hair in pigtails and offering them a little rub and tug. Ashley had tried to seduce him once. Jane had just become his serious girlfriend, so he had been forced to say no thank you. Maybe he should bite Ashley, make her his sexy zombie slave.

  The smells that used to get him when he walked into the office weren’t as pleasant since he became a zombie. He used to love the smell of the freshly made coffee, the doughnuts from the mom and pop bakery down the street, the mix of perfumes that all the ladies all wore. It was an intoxicating mix. The integration of smells made him want to eat and have anonymous sex all at once. Not a bad thing, sometimes he went home and masturbated to the remembrance of that mix of smells. Now he rarely masturbated. He was afraid that his penis would just fall off. The smells just made him want to vomit. The aromas that he liked now were the fragrant odors of the ladies, their skin, the blood pulsating through their bodies, and for some reason their heads smelled the best, a mix of sickly sweet shampoo and a butcher shop.

  Baxter knew that today, almost a month after his transformation, was going to be another long day in acquisitions. It was a good thing that there were all these giant brains around here pretending to work. Meetings were the worst, always Mr. Derrwitaker talking, talking, talking, and nothing coming from it. Everyone knew big, fat Mr. Derrwitaker just liked to hear the sound of his own voice echo throughout the conference room, which was why he usually chose the main conference room to hold these meetings in; it was large and had pretty good acoustics.

/>   When Baxter got to the room, four of seven people were there already, he made five. Mr. Derrwitaker would arrive late, per his usual route. Hunger ached in Baxter’s newly formed and forever empty stomach. It often felt as if his stomach was eating itself. He knew that wasn’t possible, he assumed it was just the way things were when one became a zombie. What Baxter really wished was that he had found that cat instead of finishing with that stupid, heroin addicted hooker. She hadn’t even known who the sixteenth president was. Who didn’t know who the sixteenth president was?

  When everyone finally arrived, the hunger was overwhelming. While they were passing around the pink frosted doughnuts and the bear claws, he was looking at each employee’s head wondering how hard it would be to bite through bone (although he knew it was hard to cut through).

  Reaching across the table for a bottle of water, he instead grabbed the arm of his cubicle neighbor, Jeffery Darling, and took a toothy chunk out of his forearm.

  “Son of a,” Jeffery screamed grabbing his arm, “what the hell, Baxter?” Standing quickly, Jeffery grabbed his arm and watched as the blood flowed through his baby blue dress shirt and pooled on the maroon room carpet. That wouldn’t be too hard to hide later, blood mixed well with the color maroon.

  “Hungry,” Baxter mumbled, blood dribbling down his hairless pale chin.

  Screams echoed out in the hall as Jeffery stumbled out of the room holding his bleeding arm close to his chest. Girls screamed like girls, boys screamed like girls and everyone ran towards the room to find out what had happened.

  Jeffery was quickly infected and almost immediately became a new species of zombie. Then it began.

  Jeffery bit into Sally, the mail girl, who just happened to be passing by, and she bit into Mark, her secret mail room lover who she liked to screw while sitting on the office mail in the mail cart; Mark bit Julie who he had wanted to bite for a long time but thought she was too beautiful with her large fake breasts, big blond hair, and bright blue eyes. Julie bit Anthony, her pool boy when she got home, which is where she raced after being bitten by Mark, and Anthony, well he unfortunately bit his wife, Alice, and their six year old daughter Alyssa. Things just went downhill from there. Alyssa, being a child, was oooed and awwwed over and every person she came in contact with, she bit. In fact, she survived for three months, until Officer David Brennen found her, half her beautiful brown face missing, her left eye dangling out of its eye socket by a ligament. Everyone she ate wanted to help her, to save her. Officer Brennen just shot her in the head then shot her again, knowing that this was what you were supposed to do when you were going to kill a zombie.

  Of course Baxter still knew how to survive and his minor feeling of guilt at having started this whole zombie uprising thing, helped keep him hidden. He stayed low, didn’t go out if he didn’t have to, let his meals come to him, which they always did when stupid survivors were looking for a place to lay their weary heads. Baxter had moved three times since he had created the first zombie in Jeffery. After Jeffery he had eaten Toby because of the all the stupid Sigourney Weaver comments he had been forced to listen to for the twenty years he had been working there. After finishing Toby, he ran out of the building, screaming, “There is so much blood! Oh God, somebody help us!”

  Currently Baxter lived in a nice three bedroom, two and a half bathroom house. Formerly occupied by the Morris family, he had assumed control of the house after he had killed and eaten Mary, the mother, Steve, the father, and Seth, the teenage son.

  Teenagers were especially meaty. The fat content in their bodies was almost as fresh as a chunky little babies’. Baxter couldn’t bring himself to eat a baby, and actually didn’t like the idea that he had been forced to become a cannibal. When he felt bad about eating a person, he reminded himself again that you are what you eat; he was human so why not eat humans.

  The good thing was that he realized he wasn’t the only zombie anymore; in fact he was the king of zombies. A god among zombies, the zombie maker, he was sure that he could destroy both the humans and the zombies if he needed to.

  Hearing a noise, Baxter stood, wondering who would be coming in during the night, since everyone else had come in during the day, when they could open the forest green blinds and see the vast living room in the radiance of the sun. Tilting his head to the right, he was startled when his neck popped; he wondered if it was a regular creak or if he had just snapped his neck by tilting it too hard to the right.

  Baxter heard a very audible click and knew exactly what it was. There was no where for him to go so he closed his eyes and waited. The blast wasn’t as loud as he thought it would be. Unfortunately, a side effect of being dead was that his ears had also been dead for a few months now so they had lost some of their usefulness. His head ached as the birdshot exploded his face, probably a memory of pain not really pain since he no longer felt pain either. Falling to his knees he tried to smile, teeth fell from his mouth and tinkled on the floor; they sounded like the bells of a cat’s collar, the bell of that cat’s collar.

  Looking up he saw the face of the person who had finally killed him, and he wanted to laugh. It was his girlfriend. Sweet Jane, the pathetic woman who would never hurt a fly, or an ant, or a spider. Boring Jane, who he had been planning to dump, and was thinking about possibly finding and eating. Plain Jane, now a beauty reflected in his cold dead eyes.

  Patient Zero fell to into a bloodless heap. Now the cure would never be found.

  Let the zombie revolution begin.

  The Angel of Death’s First Kiss

  (A Moonlit Wings Novel short story tie-in) Feared and misunderstood, the angel, Aksariel, is forced to reconsider his methods of obtaining souls when one in particular stirs his heart in unimaginable ways, but then refuses the paradise he offers her.)

  ******************

  “Beat it,” the angel of death, Aksariel, growled to the guardian angel still hovering over his dying charge. Aksariel knew that being gruff was the only way to get through the myriad of profound emotions overwhelming the other angel at the moment. Aksariel made a sweeping gesture towards the snow-filled night sky. “Go wait for her. I’ll bring her to you as soon as she passes.”

  The guardian, Jael, blinked back at Aksariel with a crestfallen expression. His gaze shifted from the angel of death to where his charge lay dying, and then back again.

  “No. I want to take her with me,” Jael protested, passing his hand over his fair face in a clear attempt to stave off the tears that threatened.

  Aksariel sighed and pushed his long burgundy-colored hair over his shoulders so it settled down the center of his spine, between his two wings, and out of his way. It was time to get down to business. Of course, his job would be a lot easier if these guardians ever did what they were told.

  “It doesn’t work that way and you know it,” Aksariel told him, softening his deep voice to comfort the young angel, but too late, he realized he’d only come off sounding as impatient and weary as he felt.

  Aksariel knew after spending a lifetime by this girl’s side, the other angel was hard-pressed to leave her just because she was dying. Aksariel was aware Jael was both grieving the tragic end of his charge’s life and celebrating her impending arrival into heaven. The guardian was conflicted and not thinking right. He obviously didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  In any case, he was only delaying the inevitable and Aksariel wasn’t in the mood to take the time to coddle his younger brother tonight. There was a soul in need of his comforting and that was where the angel of death intended to focus his energies.

  “Get lost, Jael! I’m telling you for the last time,” Aksariel said through his teeth. With new determination, he turned to face the smoking, hissing wreckage of the demolished automobile.

  “All right!” the guardian retorted under his breath, sounding frustrated and irritated. He shook his head as if with disbelief. “You don’t have empathy for anyone, do you, Aksariel? Why do you have to
be such a miserable, cold-hearted jerk all the time?”

  Aksariel froze in his tracks and resisted the urge to punch the guardian in the face for being so mouthy but he didn’t want to let the other angel know the insults he had spat actually had any kind of impact on him.

  “Jael, I’m giving you to the count of three,” Aksariel growled, curling his hands into fists at his sides in an additional warning.

  For a moment longer, the guardian stood where he was, regarding Aksariel coolly, then he snapped his wings open and fanned them back and forth. He nodded his head. “I’m going.”

  Aksariel turned his back on him then, assured he was complying. As the other angel took to the air and disappeared into the night, the angel of death paused just long enough to grumble at him over his shoulder.

  “Good riddance, you stubborn, thick-headed, lovesick fool,” he snarled. He shook the snow from his wings and refolded them comfortably down his back, shaking off his anger and settling his temper at the same time. “I am not cold-hearted.”

  Aksariel conceded to being a jerk readily enough, however. He realized his rather straightforward, somewhat tactless mannerisms sometimes rubbed people who didn’t know him well, the wrong way, but he was not about to admit to being cold-hearted. He liked to think he was as gentle and compassionate as any of his angelic brethren, in spite of what he was.