“Oh, it is,” Gideon replied coolly. “I’m the Grim Reaper. Daisy is the Angel of Mercy. Candy Vargo over there with the machine gun is the Keeper of Fate. And Charlie, he’s not a medical scientist, he’s the Enforcer. We’re all Immortal. The inhuman-looking freaks on the lawn are zombies—reanimated dead. They’re after Jennifer, Alana Catherine and Shitty Ritchie, who are also Immortal and next in line to be the next Higher Power. We need to stop them, and you’re in the way.”
“Wait,” he said. “Shitty Ritchie is real? I thought he was a character from a kids show… is he really a cannibal?”
“Used to be,” Shitty Ritchie called out. “Not anymore.”
Gideon shook his head and closed his eyes briefly. “Dip, I’m going to apologize to you right now.”
Dip was still pissed. “For what? You already said you were sorry. And sorry isn’t really cutting it.”
“For this,” Gideon said as he reared back, punched Dip in the face and knocked him out cold.
Dip Doody fell to the floor with a thud.
Jennifer kneeled at his side and cried. “Lord have mercy. Did you really have to do that?” she asked.
“I did,” Gideon replied. “It’s too dangerous for him to be conscious. Do you think if we told him to stay in the house during the battle that he would do that?”
“No, he would not do that. My man is all cop—through and through.” She shook her head. “But couldn’t you have just,” she snapped her fingers, “sparkled him into unconsciousness? Was punching him in the face necessary?”
Gideon tucked his chin, looking a little chagrinned. “Umm...”
Candy Vargo piped up. “No worries. We’ll fix up his eye...” She looked at Dip’s bloody face, shaking her head as she fished a toothpick out of her pocket and stuck it between her teeth. “And nose. He’ll be good as new.”
Jennifer did not look reassured.
“Okay,” I said, cracking my knuckles. With a horde of zombies on the lawn, there wasn’t time for more niceties. “Are we ready? We have trespassers outside who need their asses kicked.”
“Born ready,” Candy Vargo announced. “Reaper. Count us off again. Hopefully, nobody else shows up at the door.”
Gideon obliged. “On three.”
The situation was almostidentical to our previous fight with the undead, which wasn’t surprising. The zombies couldn’t think for themselves. They’d been programmed by the Higher Power to be relentless.
Last time there were ten. This time, at least fifty of them had shown up for the fight. Again, they didn’t look like the zombies from TV or the movies, in that they weren’t rotting corpses.Even so, they weren’t pretty to look at. The Higher Power had raised men from the dead who were large in stature and muscular to populate her army. Their eyes were milky white and soulless, and each of them was bald and toothless. They didn’t resemble cadavers, but they didn’t appear to have many human qualities left either.
They stood shoulder to shoulder and stared at us. I scanned the line, searching for Tom Hanks, but there was no sign of him. The Higher Power had shown up at the end last time. I wondered if it planned to grace us with Its disgusting presence once again, after we finished off this second wave. Probably. There wasn’t anything original about the Higher Power, and the entire scene felt like I was watching a reboot of a shitty B horror film.
I was ready to get to the credits. “Okay guys,” I yelled at the bald freaks on the lawn. “Let’s get this over with. I have a wedding to plan.”
If they zombies understood, it didn’t show.
“And I have to take a crap,” Candy Vargo added, giving them the middle finger salute. “Start talkin’, fuckers.”
“Give us the child, the tiny one, and the recently turned Immortal woman. We know they are in the house,” the zombie bellowed. His robotic voice rocked the earth beneath his feet, and the ground split opened on either side of the zombie throng. Several trees in the yard fell into the large craters left by the explosions. “We don’t want to kill you,” he intoned, as if he hadn’t just ruined my yard. “No violence is necessary. The choice is yours.”
“Isn’t that the same fuckin’ thing they said the other day?” Candy asked.
“To the word,” Gideon replied. “Except they added Jennifer to the list of demands.”
“Original much?” Candy shouted.
They didn’t have an answer for that. Fine. We had an answer for them.
“Nope. No can do,” I yelled. “You get nothing, nada, bupkis. Not today. Not ever.”
That they understood. Before the battle could start, the door behind us opened. Jennifer poked her head out. The zombies saw her and began salivating like Pavlov’s dogs. The screeches that came from their mouths shattered all the windows in the house.
“On the end,” she said, pointing. “Left side. All the way on the end. That’s the leader.”
