Another 920 Spot: The Good News

The doc told us the news. “The bad news is that he’s miserable and suffering and probably wishes he weren’t dead. The good news is that hives are living cells and so whatever this solution is doing, it’s converting dead cells into living ones-- extra itchy ones and not attractive even on a zombie—oh, and I didn’t kill him yet. He may end up as one giant hive, but he’d be alive.” Then he started shouting. “It’s alive. It’s alive!”

We all looked at him. “Sorry, in the last fifteen minutes I’ve become obsessed with Young Frankenstein. Remember the scene where--”

I interrupted him. “Doc, what does that mean?”

“Gene Wilder was Dr. Frankenstein and he”

“No, what does this mean for us, now!

The doc stopped, scratched an itch on the roof of his mouth and spoke. “It means that his zombie half is producing living tissue, other than that I’m stumped.”

Laura Lee jumped in. “Doc, is there any possibility that you could induce cells to grow that aren’t hives?” “If I knew what the hell I was doing, sure, absolutely. But since I’m basically a quack and had to cheat to pass my medical exams, and have been sued for malpractice by the few surviving relatives of patients, before they contracted incurable diseases from my germ infested office, we’d have to get lucky—very, very lucky. Is it too late to buy a lottery ticket? I’ve got my numbers right here in--”

Skim Milk shouted at him. “Doc, forget the damn lottery. You need to keep trying -- find some other stuff to stick in him. What do we have to lose?”

“Of course you’re right. I’ll fill this bastard with so much fluid his insides will float out his mouth.”

Laura Lee almost turned my way when she said. “We should keep our things close so we can gather them up quickly, maybe even have a fast garage sale. If Dr. Quack can somehow cure him, we should be ready to roll. Maybe we’ll be able to spread the cure. If it works fast enough, there’s so many zombies out there, maybe one of them is actually not on Match.com.” That’s when she turned to me and spit in my face, several times.

I just let it go, I figured she was just overcome with emotion and couldn’t verbalize it. Sure, I wanted to spit back, or ask her, Skim Milk and Maria if they wanted to do threesome plus one, but I’m not a man to take advantage of a damsel in distress unless she was too drunk and high on psychotropic drugs to know what’s she’s doing.”

We split up, except for Klaus and his zombie half, all of us gathering our own stuff; my new porno collection was the first thing I boxed up. I had become very attached to those DVD’s, in some cases literally; I’m not one to waste paper products. It was the closest I’d ever get to love at first sight. I looked back at that visit to the porno store, and finding the sections on Brazilian Barbarian Broads Bang Gay Gynecologists Gone Comatose, Medieval Masonry Moms with Big Wet Asses, or Self-flagellating Slutty Saints in Penis Penance, as one of my fondest memories from those turbulent days. For the first time, my feelings of absolute doom changed for the better to just plain hopelessness. There was a ray of light, but the glare still blocked my vision of the future, which probably came from sitting too close to the screen.

While I obsessed about my fate: shrimp organized his work force, Laura Lee stood in front of a mirror playing charades and losing (although she won’t admit it), Skim Milk and Maria helped Dr. Bliffover find stuff to inject into Klaus, JO debated with himself on whether or not to put the “e” back in his name, and the zombies formed a horde that was about to welcome us to the neighborhood.

Maybe if we were playing closer attention to the zombies only a few of us would have died, but on the other hand maybe that’s what saved the human race and left me with the most difficult decision of my life without a Ouija board. Because of the sounds of glass shattering and the nerve biting screams coming from the lobby, Dr. Bliffover and Skim Milk were forced to stop filling Klaus with liquids and pack up—that was when dumb luck saved mankind. We didn’t know the exact mixture of the serum until later – Skim Milk had taken detail notes, but encrypted it with a little known cypher that was used to keep the ring sizes of the rich and famous secret during the Second World War. When she heard the roar of the horde of zombies, a sound exactly like heavy metal harmonies, she panicked and misplaced the key code inside a box of vanilla wafers that she had also misplaced inside a large box of recycled heterosexual lesbian greeting cards that she had found inside a huge vat of Canadian trail mix – the Edmonton blend.