Funny Horror (Unidentified Funny Objects Annual Anthology Series of Humorous SF/F) Page 5

  These things have to be done right, for the sake of romance, he types.

  I don't care!

  But you should, my Sweet. There is, too, the matter that my power will not be at its greatest until the end of the month.

  I have experienced enough of his power to last me a lifetime and I want more, but I do, ultimately, have to wait. The routine goes on. I listen to what Mom and Dad say to each other every morning after they come back from terrorizing the countryside. I can even hear the soundtrack of the movies Poppa plays inside his coffin.

  I cross the days off the calendar.

  28th, 29th, 30th.

  And then, just after sundown, the front door explodes like it's been dynamited, and I hear Max yelping and then such screams and snarls as you've never heard before, like there's a rabies outbreak at the zoo, and furniture is crashing.

  Then Max is whimpering outside my door.

  "It might hurt the Master and Mistress! It might hurt them!"

  Crash! Smash! Howl.

  It?

  I pound on the door.

  "Max, can you hear me?"

  He whimpers and whines and slobbers. I hope I have his attention.

  "Max! Let me out!"

  "Can't!"

  The chaos downstairs continues. It doesn't sound as if Mom and Dad are getting the best of it. The whole house begins to shake and sway. If this goes on much longer, the place may be ripped off its foundations.

  "Max! I can help them!"

  Max stops whimpering, and in a voice that sounds almost like his old self, asks a surprisingly intelligent question. "But why should you help them after what they've done to you?"

  "Max! They're my parents! Can't you understand that?"

  Then he's tearing away the boards nailed to the door, and in a moment I'm walking downstairs into what used to be the living room, with Max shambling somewhere behind me.

  There isn't much of the downstairs left. The walls are out. The TV is smashed to bits and smoldering. Most of the furniture is in splinters. Wading through what used to be the dining room, a huge, hairy Thing faces off against my parents, circling as they do. Momma's dress is in tatters. Poppa's cape is gone, and his vest and starched shirt are shredded, and everybody's claws are covered with I-don't-want-to-know-what. Everybody's eyes are blazing like furnaces. They lunge at one another, jump out of the way, parry and thrust with their whole bodies like fencers.

  "Stop it! All of you!" I scream at the top of my lungs, and somehow, like my hearing and my sense of smell, my voice has become something it didn't use to be, and the whole house shakes with the sound of it, and they all stop, and turn toward me, their eyes still blazing, fangs gleaming.

  Quickly I reach into one of the few surviving pieces of furniture, a little sideboard cabinet, and take out two of the long silver nails I had carefully placed there when we opened my parents' coffins for the first time.

  It's trite, I know, and not what you'd expect from someone of my background, but I actually hold up the two long nails like a cross as I say, "Now everybody back off."

  They do, equally recoiling from the silver nails.

  "Mom, Dad . . . is that you, Heinrich?" The Big Hairy Thing nods, breathing heavily. "Mom, Dad, you have to learn to let go. I'm grown up now. You have your life—or unlife or whatever it is—and I have mine. I'm not a minion. I'm your daughter. I ask you to respect that. Do you think you actually can? Do you?"

  The fire fades from their eyes, and their fangs retract. Heinrich, a.k.a. the Hairy Thing, just stands there, panting.

  Before anyone can say anything, I continue.

  "Mom, Dad, I've got an announcement to make. I'm not the same as I once was. I've been . . . bitten."

  For an instant I can see Momma's eyes beam with pride, in the sense of our little girl has grown up, but then she seems just confused, because she knows it isn't what she thought.

  I turn to show her the bruise on my neck, which I've had for a month now. "That ain't a hickey, Momma."

  She just looks stupefied.

  "Momma, I want you to meet Heinrich. I love him."

  The Hairy Thing leans over, as if to lick my face, the way a dog would, but then whines and draws away from the silver.

  That is when I realize my hands are smoking and the silver nails are burning me. I let them drop to the floor, and before anyone can react, I rush over to the window, tear aside the drapes, and let the light of the full moon flood what is left of the dining room.

  I begin to change then. Fur grows on my arms and legs. I feel my whole body melting, falling down, hardening into something else. My senses are much sharper than they've ever been before. It's as if I can hear a cloud passing across the face of the Moon, like silk wiped across glass, and I can hear every sound of the night. I can see in ways that I've never seen before, through things, sensing heat and life. Were I so inclined I could tell Max where every bug in the whole damn house is hiding.

  But I am not so inclined. Heinrich nuzzles me behind the ear. We play. I try to say something more to my parents, and I think I actually do manage to say "His middle name is Wolfgang."

  And my mother sputters, "But he's not Jewish!" and she is sobbing in Poppa's arms. "We've lost our daughter!"

  "No," Poppa says, "It'll be all right, Honey Love, as long as the . . . er . . . cubs are brought up Jewish."

  Howling, Heinrich Wolfgang Schroeder and I leap through the window, out into the night.

  What beautiful music we make.

  This story originally appeared in the Full Moon City anthology, Simon & Schuster, 2010.

  Darrell Schweitzer believes that he has twice achieved the distinction of "best Jewish vampire of the year written by a Gentile," although he admits receiving help from his more qualified wife Mattie, who serves as his CYC (Certified Yenta Consultant). He is otherwise the author of about 300 published stories, some of which are collected in such books as Awaiting Strange Gods, The Emperor of the Ancient World, Refugees from an Imaginary Country, Nightscapes (which contains the original "Kvetchula"), etc. He is the author of three published novels, The Mask of the Sorcerer, The Shattered Goddess, and The White Isle. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award three times, and won it once, with George Scithers, as co-editor of Weird Tales, a position he held for 19 years. He is a critic and interviewer, who has written for publications as varied as The Washington Post and The New York Review of Science Fiction. He has published books about H.P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany. He is also a poet, winner of an Asimov's SF Readers' Award, but also known for rhyming "Cthulhu" in a limerick.

  The Great VÜDÜ Linux Teen Zombie Massacree

  Lucy A. Snyder

  BOB AND I ATTRACTED a pack of zombies when we stopped to fuel up at the Texaco in Buffalo Springs. I hoped we'd lost them, but hope was all I had. Bob said they were the fresh remains of a high school football team who'd been drowned and de-souled by water daemons at a lakeside party.

  Young, strong corpses have the speed and stamina to run down a deer. Until the sun and wind finally turned their flesh to stinky jerky, they'd be dangerous enough to make a vampire crap bats. And fresh zombies are persistent as porn site pop-up ads. If they take a shine to the smell of your blood, they might track you for days, stopping only if live meat falls right in their laps.

  It'd be months before they got the Dead Man Shamble and could be taken out with a well-placed head shot. Of course, with the right software and hardware, you could kill even the most problem zombie, but that was some fairly arcane stuff, even for experienced hackers.

  If my editor was right, Bob was one of only about five genuine cyberspiritual experts in the U.S. But so far he seemed more like a second-rate grease monkey than a computer guru. I had my doubts.

  "Maybe we should go back to the gas station," I suggested. "That guy Bubba said he had a sick badger in one of his pens. Wouldn't this work better with a fresh animal?"

  More important, Bubba had plenty of guns and ammunition; all I had was a small 6-shot
Beretta in the thigh pocket of my cargo pants. Bob had a small deer rifle in the gun rack of his cab. Not nearly enough firepower if the zombie teen squad showed up.

  "'Tain't no challenge, little lady," Bob said, his voice dripping with scorn and tobacco juice. "Any fool with a copy o' Red Hat and a pair of pliers can put Linux on a live badger, or even a fresh-kilt one."

  Bob hit a pothole, and I nearly lost my grip on my old iPhone. My nice shiny new Nokia phone had fallen out of my pocket when the dead kid in the tattered Nickleback tee shirt was chasing me through the parking lot by the gas pumps, and I'd be damned if I was going to lose anything else on this trip.

  I was going to kill my editor for sending me on this Texas Hellride. Absolutely kill her. Or at least demand a paid vacation. I could still hear Wendy's simpering wheedle: "The highway patrol says the Lubbock area is all clear; you'll be perfectly safe, Sarah."

  Safe, my butt.

  Bob was warming to his rant. "This zombie business is war. War, little lady, the kind Patton never dreamt of. We are fighting the gall-darned Forces o' Darkness. We gotta use some serious finesse, and there ain't nothing that spells finesse like installing a home defense system on a dead badger. You write that down, little lady. The readers o' MacHac need to know this stuff if they're gonna keep them an' theirs safe."

  I dutifully typed it down on my iPhone. I'd gotten pretty quick with the screen keyboard, but as a precaution against being dropped in the mud I'd stuck it down in a sandwich bag, which added an extra layer of challenge to note-taking.

  "Hot damn, come to papa!" Bob abruptly swerved over onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes. The Ford slewed to a stop in the caliche beside a stand of mesquites.

  In the glow of the headlights was a dead badger, all four legs stiff in the air. It was on the large side, maybe close to twenty pounds. Bob hopped out of the truck and ran over to the badger, turning it over and feeling around in the blood-matted fur.

  "The legs and spine and skull are in right fine shape," he yelled back to me, as excited as a ten-year-old on Christmas morning. "I can't feel nothing but some broke ribs. This'll do!"

  He tossed the badger into the bed of the truck, and soon we were speeding back to Bob's shop.

  Bob's Computer Shack was wedged in between a hair salon and a Subway sandwich shop in a little roadside strip. The big storefront windows on all the shops had been boarded up with plywood sheets and reinforced with two-by-fours and rebar; all the shopkeepers were relying on neon "Open" signs to tell passersby that they were carrying on with business in the face of the zombie apocalypse.

  I followed Bob into the shop and he locked and barred the door behind us. The air smelled of dust and plastic with a faint metallic stink from a burned-out monitor he'd hauled in for parts. Soon, it was all going to reek of rotten badger. Bob carried the carcass over to a work table he'd already cleared off and covered with a long sheet of butcher paper. He wiped his hands off on his overalls and pulled out an ancient tangerine iBook, which he set on the other end of the table. I pulled out my phone to take notes.

  "Okay, first the easy crap: puttin' the Duppy card in the iBook so's we can get OSX to talk to the badger," Bob said. "I already downloaded a copy of FleshGolem from the Apple site—it's in the Utilities section."

  Bob pulled what looked like a wireless notebook card out of a drawer of the table. It had a hinged lid and a clear cover over what looked like a small, shallow ivory box inlaid in the card.

  "Next, you take some hair and blood from the critter and put them in this here compartment." He popped the cover open and smeared a hairy clot into the box.

  Bob lifted the keyboard off the iBook to reveal the Airport slot. He slid the Duppy card inside, replaced the keyboard, and set the iBook aside.

  I heard a thump and a shriek from the hair salon next door.

  "Marla, git yer shotgun!" I heard a woman holler.

  The woman sounded a little like Wendy, though the only time I'd ever really heard my editor scream was when a college intern lost an entire set of page proofs. Mostly she just took on a fakey-sweet patronizing tone when she thought you'd screwed up: "Well, we'll do this better next time, now won't we, Sarah?" She talked down to practically everyone like we were preschoolers. No wonder she'd been divorced twice.

  Damn her for sending me out here. If I survived this, I was gonna demand a vacation and a shiny new workstation.

  "Okay, now we gotta install the Duppy security antenna," Bob said, apparently oblivious to the shouting next door. "You can run your badger without it, but it'd be pretty easy for someone to hack him if they could get some blood and hair offa it."

  I jumped as the shotgun boomed twice in rapid succession next door. A chorus of zombies roared in pain.

  "I told them they need a better lock on their back door," Bob grumbled. He got a penknife and made a small incision at the nape of the badger's neck. He picked up a long, thin, coppery wire and shoved it down into the incision like a mechanic forcing a rusty dipstick into a car engine. "You gotta get this to lay as flat on the spine as possible, or your security won't be good."

  Now somebody was firing a pistol, the pops punctuating the zombie roars.

  "Shouldn't we go see if they need help?" I asked.

  "Those gals know how to handle themselves. Opening the door right now's kinda a bad idea."

  He wiped his hands off and pulled out a bright yellow software box with a cartoon of a witch doctor on the cover. "Now we get to the fun part. We're gonna install VüDü; it's a wicked little Linux distro. If your badger's got some kinda brain damage, you can do a modified install, but it's a real bitch. And rabies makes the whole thing a crapshoot. Read the frickin' manual before you try it."

  My heart bounced as dead fists hammered the plywood protecting the computer shop's front windows. I couldn't hear anything from next door; I hoped that meant the women inside had driven their attackers away.

  "Don't pay that no nevermind; even if they got through the wood, they still got to get through the window bars. We got plenty o' time."

  Bob pulled a small, rolled-up piece of parchment out of his desk. "This has the system config info, spiritual program components, and your password. You gotta write it all down on blessed parchment in something like Enochian or SoulScript. Write neatlike. Roll it up, and stick it down the badger's throat, all the way into the stomach." He demonstrated with the aid of a screwdriver.

  The zombies were still hammering the plywood. A couple of them had found a loose edge and were wrenching one panel away from the bricks. One shoved a gray arm between the bars. The pane fractured and fragments shattered to the floor.

  My hands were shaking too hard to take notes, so I set my iPhone aside and dug my Beretta out of my thigh pocket. Not that I was in much condition to shoot straight, either.

  "You ain't gonna need that yet," Bob said sharply, apparently irritated I'd stopped taking notes. "Them bars'll keep 'em back better than that little peashooter you got there."

  I reluctantly stuck the pistol in my waistband and picked up my phone.

  He opened the VüDü box and pulled out an herb-scented scroll of paper. "This is the entire code behind VüDü. Fold it up into the shape of the critter, and put more blood and hair inside."

  He unrolled the scroll and started folding it up into an origami badgerlike shape. "It's real hard to make your own paper, so don't lose it. Open-source only takes you so far with this stuff."

  The zombies had wrenched the first plywood sheet clean off the window. Three of them were growling and rattling the bars while the others hammered and yanked at the remaining boards. My stomach was twisting itself into an acidic knot; the bars really didn't look that sturdy. With every good pull, I could see the steel bolts in the cinderblocks giving, just a little. I wondered how far I'd get if I made a run for the back door.

  I cursed Wendy a thousand ways. A vacation and new computer wouldn't even begin to make up for this trip.

  Bob was studiously ignoring the zombies. F
inished with the origami badger, he smeared a foot-wide pentagram on the paper using the badger's blood. He set the carcass at the top point, and put the origami badger in the middle.

  "Now, burn the paper an' do your incantation." He got out his lighter, opened up the VüDü manual, and started chanting while he lit the paper. Bright green flames erupted, and the smoke curled around the badger's carcass. We watched as the smoke flowed into the badger's mouth and nose. It shuddered as it took a breath.

  "We got badger!" He pulled out the tangerine iBook and started typing furiously.

  The badger was trying to get up, its rigor-mortised legs jerking like Harryhausen stop-motion. It got its head up and growled at us, baring long canines. It sounded more like an angry grizzly bear; I didn't think something that small could generate such menace. I took a step back, just to be safe.

  "An' that's why they call them badgers, little lady ... when they get mad, they're real bad news!" He laughed. "Nothin' pisses critters off like bein' woke from a good dirt nap."

  I was feeling sicker by the minute. I'd had my doubts about the reanimation working, but it had never occurred to me that he wouldn't have the thing under control. The zombies had pulled the rest of the plywood off the window and were heaving hard on the creaking bars.

  Bob opened a Telnet window and started tapping in commands. "Junkyard dogs ain't got nothin' on badgers. I seen a 15-pound badger send a 60-pound pit bull mix yelpin' and bleedin' back to his mamma. I mean, lookit the claws on this sucker. This bad boy could dig his way through highway pavement—"

  The badger abruptly lurched to its feet and leaped on Bob, chomping down on his left forearm. Bob hollered and fell backwards into a table of disassembled PCs. The badger worried his arm furiously as it tore at his belly with its clawed forelegs.