Zombie Kong - Anthology (17 page)

My Life Was Saved By Coffee… (Meanwhile, in Suburbia, Part Two)

Seated, alone, at the kitchen table, in a wrinkled shirt and trousers, I stared at my cold bowl of bran flakes with a sigh. Muriel always made me eggs and bacon. She ironed my shirts too, just the way I liked them. If she could’ve just seen my need for the occasional nip every now and again… but what’s done is done, I suppose.

Her letter said she wanted out before our marriage went to hell.

In a hand basket, of all things.

Who even says that anymore?

I didn’t really have time for sighing, seeing as how I was already an hour late for work. At first, when the swimming numbers of the alarm clock came into focus this morning, I thought the boys had set it ahead for a lark. Then I remembered. They couldn’t have set it ahead because they were gone to North Carolina, with Muriel. Gone a week now. They weren’t on vacation, either, no matter what I told the neighbors, the guys at work, the mailman, or my parents. Shaking off the melancholy of missing my kids and my woman, I turned my attention to the only thing that remained rock steady in my life, there through thick and thin, there forever and always, amen.

Coffee.

The machine sputtered the last bit into the pot beneath, and that sound had me salivating more than Pavlov’s dogs at a bell ringer’s convention. I jumped up, ignoring the lingering effects of a week’s drunkenness, and scrambled to the counter to pour my cup of addiction. Muriel might have been able to wrestle liquor from me, but coffee? Never!

I grabbed the only clean cup in the house from the top shelf of the almost empty cabinets—yeah, Muriel did the dishes, too—and watched with glee as the dark brown––nay, almost black––liquid swirled into the bottom of its porcelain offering vessel. Forgoing the squat canister of sugar and the tall container of non-dairy creamer, I lifted the cup to my nose and inhaled its pure coffee goodness. Keep your fancy creamers and low calorie sweeteners, strong black coffee was a man’s drink, even more so than straight bourbon or cold beer. For me, coffee was nirvana, and I wasn’t even sure what nirvana was.

I turned the cup up, downing that first blessed mouthful. God, how it burned! My tongue was as dry as sandpaper and my throat was raw from far too much drinking. And before you point out how the bitch was right, let me explain that no matter what the woman claims, I do not have a drinking problem. I drink just fine.

It’s the vomiting that I have trouble handling.

Anyways, that first sip slipped down my throat in a warm ooze of caffeinated splendor. The second went smoother than the first, hydrating my dry mouth and filling my empty belly. The third, fourth, and fifth were just as good, each gulp bigger than the last as I got used to the fresh-from-the-pot scorch. I held the cup away, smacking my lips and feeling more like a human being than before. It was then, when I reached out for the pot again to pour my second and slower cup of glory, when I felt it.

That familiar, warm, wet slop running all down the front of my chest.

I glanced to the cup in my hand, and winced when I saw it was that old ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ coffee mug. The one with the huge crack down the middle. The one we kept way in the back of the cabinet because you couldn’t actually use it, but the boys gave it to me, so we couldn’t throw it away, either. I then looked down with a grimace, finding just what I hoped I wouldn’t find.

“Shit,” I said, to no one in particular.

My shirt was covered in coffee. My last clean button-down that has a collar so I can wear a tie for the office dress code. I only had five of the bastards to begin with, and the other four had suffered similar food-related fates earlier in the week. Mustard on one. Grease took another. Chili all down the third. And mustard again on the last. (What can I say? I eat a lot of hotdogs.) Now coffee. I didn’t even know how to get coffee out of a shirt. Could you even get it out? Maybe Muriel…

Okay, so she wasn’t here to help. What could I do? No clean shirts and I was already an hour behind. I would have to stop on the way and pick up a new one, which would make me well over two hours late. It was either that, or call out for the day.

No way! That’s what everyone expected. I could hear their tongues wagging now. It was only a matter of time. His wife leaves him and he falls apart. But the fact of the matter was simple: if Muriel had been here to do the dishes, I wouldn’t have had to use that cup in the first place.

I would just go to work in the coffee stained shirt and explain it to the guys.

Really, Jon? You’re going to blame her for this, too?

Still clutching the offending bit of ceramic, I growled under my breath as I stomped back into the bedroom at the far end of the house. The empty house. The quiet house. I set to digging about in the dirty laundry hamper—or as it had come to be known since my wife had abandoned me, the floor—searching for the least stained of shirts. It became a sword in the stone moment for me; if I could locate the cleanest of the dirtiest shirts, perhaps I could redeem my pathetic life.

That’s when I began to feel the tremors.

At first I thought it was just the lingering effects of a week’s worth of drunken pity parties, but no, it was external. They ran through the floor, making my already unsteady stance even more exaggerated as I doubled over, rifling through dirty clothes. Within moments, the furniture was shimmying and the photos on the walls were dancing, and I was doing my best to keep from going ass over elbows into
ye olde lande
of filthy clothes. An earthquake? In this quiet Floridian suburbia? No, it couldn’t have been, because the shudders were too steady, and had a distinct pattern to them.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

The house shook with a groan, just as a shower of plaster rained over me. I fell to my knees and crawled into the doorway of the bathroom, holding my arms over my head as I braced for the worst of whatever this fresh hell was. The thumping continued, growing louder and stronger. A terrible crash and a screech sounded, as the house shook to its very foundation. I saw the light of the morning through the seams of the walls; they were close to bursting wide open! This was followed by a moan of epic proportions. I swear it sounded like a million howler monkeys got their privates trapped in a million vises while screaming into a million loudspeakers.

And the smell.

Oh my God, there came this smell in the air. I had never in all my life smelled anything like it, and I hoped never to again. In a word, it was rotten. Rotten and decayed and festering and decomposed, and you just can’t imagine how bad it was. One time, a stray cat got under the house and died, and Muriel made me crawl under there and pull it out three days later. I ended up puking all over her shoes from the smell alone. Well, I would rather coat the insides of my nostrils with three-day rotting cat carcass for the rest of my life rather than smell whatever the hell I smelled as I held onto the doorframe and waited for the house to fall down around me. Or on top of me, preferably.

But no, the house held firm, and just as quick as it started, the shuddering passed. The thumps faded. The smell lessened, but didn’t go away completely. I was left as white as a sheet on my hands and knees, gripping my nose and trembling like a wind driven leaf. I took a moment to make sure that that was all there was, that there wasn’t an aftershock on the way. No. The world seemed to return to normal. Well, normal as it could be, all things considered.

I got to my feet and tiptoed around my house, or rather what was left of it. The north end of the house was somewhat okay. I mean, it was trashed, sure––wires popped and sputtered, and pipes sprayed water all over the place, that sort of thing. But it was better than the south end of the house. I poked my head through the remains of the hallway and into the open air that was once my beautiful kitchen. And there I stood, slack jawed and wide eyed, surveying what was left of my kingdom.

The south end of the house was flattened. Everything, and I mean
everything
, was crushed into the earth beneath, as if something had squashed it like a bug. The stove, the fridge, even my precious coffee machine was ground into a mulch of useless bits. That smell was stronger here, too, lingering in a miasma of gut twisting, putrid stench. And to make things even stranger––as if things weren’t already weird enough––there was an oval print over the remains of my house, including the distinct shape of toes at one end.

Yes, I said
toes
.

I turned my gaze to the horizon, and watched the hazy form of some enormous thing lumbering away in the distance. I swear to God—I swear by all that is holy and good and right—it looked just like a big ape. A big, dead ape. Only it couldn’t be dead, because it was up and shambling about. Each step of its huge feet crushed anything beneath, and the moan of it echoed enough to make my walls tremble once more. I tried to rub at my eyes, to clear this vision of a giant, putrid smelling, dead looking ape lurching across my neighborhood, but found it was hard, considering I was still clutching that mug. The same mug I had cursed only minutes before. The same mug that dribbled coffee all down the front of my shirt and forced me from my cold cereal, back into the bedroom. Away from the kitchen.

The now crushed kitchen.

I stared at the cracked coffee mug and thought about Muriel, and my boys. Any normal morning we would have all been in there. Bitching and moaning, passing the salt and the milk, just carrying on with a regular suburban day. And had we been there… in there… had my kids… my wife… me…

Muriel. I always suspected I couldn’t live without her, and now that I had seen my life flash before my hung-over eyes, I knew I didn’t want to. What good was I without her? Maybe she was right. Maybe I did drink more than was good for me. Maybe I should call her and apologize. I mean, after all, it isn’t every day that your life is saved by your wife having the foresight to leave you.

Or by a leaky cup of coffee.

MICHAEL O’NEAL

Kooking With Kong

Thank God It’s BRAINS! Coming up is Zombie Television’s Must Eat TV line-up!

Out of the hundreds of nameless faces wandering in the dark, one zombie grunted. It steered toward the voice and its lights, the only light in the dead city.

Set in a protective electrified kiosk, the television towers––flatscreen stacked over flatscreen, crowned with a row of overhead speakers––wailed into the night. Through the iron bars protecting the boob tubes, the announcer begged for the crowd’s mindless attention.

Got a hunger that won’t stop? Got a hankering for more than subhuman slop? Get ready for a show that’ll blow your mind… without the bullet!

More of the undead trudged away from their endless stroll. Soon, dozens surrounded the caged stall, hypnotized by the pretty colors.

Premiering in less than a week, ZTV presents: Kooking with Kong!

The screens flashed with pictures and shapes that none of them recognized anymore. Yet, when they saw the image of a giant gorilla with two fistfuls of goop wearing a chef’s hat, they cooed in unison. The camera zoomed in on the gorilla’s cranium, its skull the size of a pick-up. At the scale of such a brain, those with saliva leaked it through their cheeks; those without simply pawed at their mouths, wondering where the hell they’d misplaced their tongues.

That’s right!

Kooking with Kong––ZTV’s newest show that tells you simple bastards there’s more than one way to cook a cat!

The commercial had barely been on a full minute, but already the zombies filled the street. Some got too excited and dared to reach their fingers through the bars to grab the gorilla’s head. Their hands sizzled and popped free at the wrists. It did little to deter the hungriest. Without hands, they tried their faces instead.

Don’t miss it! It’s not like you idiots have anything better to do.

So stick around!

And for all of you too stupid to understand what I’m saying, remember our catchphrase:

Brains! Brains! Brains!

That’s TGIB programming! That’s Z-T-V!

* * *

Zeek ducked his head to get through the double garage doors that led into his dressing room. It was a tight fit. He had to admit to himself that he’d put on a few pounds in the last year––over 700 to be exact, though most were insect larvae and worms, but who was counting? Thankfully, the zombie execs at the studio had refashioned an old sound stage to accommodate his “upscale” requirements.

A team of make-up artists and designers waited by his vanity mirror, swiped just for him from the telescope at Mt. Wilson Observatory. Astronomy was so out of vogue; the only stars given an ounce of interest these days drank serotonin lattes, got Botox to keep their flesh from dripping off their skulls, and walked around like their maggots weren’t as creepy as the next guy’s. Most zombies don’t look up, or so he was told, so who cared that they stole the mirror?

Of course, they needed to tilt their heads skyward now, if they wanted to see him. The point was really moot.

Somehow, the idiots had managed to find enough brainpower between them to rig the mirror at an angle through a series of scaffolding and ropes. The mess appeared ready to collapse if he didn’t tiptoe around it.

After he glimpsed his reflection, he thought about stomping.

Holy hell, you’re falling apart, Zeek. Some moneymaker you turned out to be.

The bright lights from the commercial shoot had begun to peel the buckets of plaster they used as concealer. Holes large enough to dig a finger through opened in his cheeks. The glue that secured his wig had slipped, exposing bald patches like mange on his furry scalp. Even his glass eye (the damn thing was bigger than a workout ball and made of solid marble) tilted in its groove, giving him the mug of a retarded chimp.