Another 920 Spot: Following Skim Milk

The plan was for Laura Lee and me to walk behind the bar pretending we saw a skunk. It worked like a charm--no one wanted to help us find the critter. Skim Milk’s two co-workers came armed with handguns with silencers, several kitchen knives, and a complete set of silverware for eight. The man was squat and looked like he was stretched and widened to fill a 70-inch flat screen TV. His name was Joe, which he decided to shorten to Jo because he didn’t trust silent letters. Next to him stood, Maria, a woman whose large round butt made me think she was sitting on a globe.

We snuck out the back door and down the hall, Skim Milk holding a flash light steady in her cleavage. In each hand she held a kitchen knife ready to slice up the first dead thing she saw. She didn’t see any and neither did we. When we arrived at the CEO’s office, she slowly opened the door, made a sound like a crow, and never explained why. Then swinging her breasts into the room, like they had tassels stuck to them, she sent the shaft of light in circles until she was sure there were no zombies. Skim Milk turned on the office light and led us to the private elevator. As the elevator door slid open a zombie in a three and half-piece business suit, wire-rimmed glasses, and a bad toupee lunged out from behind a cabinet, knocking me to the ground. He would have taken a chunk out of my shoulder, if his toupee hadn’t slid over his head, which blocked his view. When he tried to push the toupee away he knocked his glasses off. He leaned forward to bite me and stepped on a lens—the crunching sound distracted him like a tantalizing appetizer. With each bite of air his teeth got closer to removing part of me. Just as he was about to simultaneously make me both a meal and a brother, his head exploded off his neck, in too many pieces for even a show as unreal as CSI could reconstruct. That’s how we got the idea that Jo was a good shot, which was soon confirmed when we tossed zombie body parts out the window so he could demonstrate his shooting skill. When the last appendage was blown apart, Skim decided it was time to try the elevator. Jo, of course, shot the elevator and was dejected when it didn’t bleed. Skim sat Jo down and using charts on anatomy, scientific periodicals on the chemical make-up of DNA, and string theory, plus a quick game a Pictionary was able to convince him that elevators are not a life form.

I pressed the button on the wall and the elevator opened immediately, since it was left on our floor. At first we entered the elevator in alphabetical order, then Jo insisted we go by height. Maria thought weight would better, since she always carried a scale. I’ve always hated scales. I found them difficult to stand on long enough to get my correct weight since one of my legs was ten inches shorter than the other. I tried to keep it a closely guarded secret, even though I tended to lean severely to the left. They were adamant that I take off my custom shoes, which would have made my body nearly parallel to the ground. I refused to cooperate and insisted that instead we enter by the lowest social security numbers first, which put Maria, who was an undocumented worker at a distinct disadvantage. (She did argue that not having a social security card made her number the equivalent of zero.) Even though under normal circumstances Maria spoke perfect English, under this stress of being eaten alive, she began speaking Albanian every other word. Rather than try to understand her or find another solution, we just piled in.

The elevator was fast, since it didn’t stop at any other floors. Whatever weapons we had were pointed toward the opening of the door. When the door opened there was no one to kill or even ask if they knew if the Yankees were now over paid zombies. Curiously enough there were lights on in a few sections of the basement, which normally worked as a garage for executives.