That ‘70s Show with Zombies

Excerpt from Book Six, Clash©

Southie - That ‘70s Show with Zombies

A cloud of marijuana smoke filled apartment A's living room. Chris sat in the recliner while everyone else sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the couch or on the floor. They missed Pez for these sessions. Family obligations required him to move to a motel to be with them.

“I have a question, y’all,” said Chris.

“Uh-oh,” Peter responded.

“Are you going to get philosophical?” asked Brandon from the floor.

“He always does when he gets high,” said Matt from the couch. “He sorted out the Ten Commandments for us last time. There were more but Moses couldn’t carry them down the mountain without a wheel barrel, which God did not provide him with, so Moses just left the other tablets up on the mountain. One of the lost commandments was ‘Thou shall not be a dumbass.’”

“Kind of vague, isn’t it?” asked Brandon.

Chris rotated the recliner to face them and hunkered down with elbows on his knee. “I have a question, y’all,” he repeated, sounding very serious. “Why is it that in the living dead zombie shows, people don’t outrun ‘em? Hell, they could outwalk their slow asses. They ain’t like ours, hauling ass as they do – got fat people sprinting like they going for the gold at the Olympics. According to what I seen, just that skinny white woman in the remake of Night of the Living Dead figured out she could outwalk them. And, further, how come these people fall down? Do they have a problem that they fall down at inopportune moments or what? Now, if these folks were high, okay.”

“Nuh,” said Matt. He caught up on the entertainment by having only one TV and Chris sought to watch these movies as if they held great intel in them.

“What do you mean ‘nuh’?” Chris asked. “No, wait. I get ya. Good ole boys getting high. A bunch of corpses walks up on them. They sober up real fast.”

“Exactly. And they would go to the minister after they shoot the zoms and see what’s going on.”

“They always leave the preacher out of these things. Country people would be all up in their churches. They’d call an emergency meeting with the preacher-man. He wouldn’t have too many answers, ‘cause I reckon this ain’t in the Bible.”

“Lazarus,” said Peter.

“But that was one dude and our Lord did it. Not whole shitloads of people and the Lord ain’t nowhere to be found.”

Matt said, “I don’t recall Lazarus trying to eat people.”

“What the fuck is with the eating brains shit?” asked Brandon. “Why does that get mentioned in things?”

Peter, the zombie apocalypse entertainment aficionado, said, “It’s from 1970s Romero shit when the living dead zoms sought out people’s brains as their main target.”

“Why? And how could they get through the skulls?”

“Ah, I guess it’s up there with how come people cannot outwalk slow-ass reanimated corpses.”

Chris added, “Or how in the hell these weak ass corpses are busting through windows and windshields. Do you know how much strength that takes? In Night of the Living Dead, the original, they could have real old glass, that single pane type, or whatever that’s called. The kind where the wind blows and the curtain flaps even with the window’s closed and locked. So, maybe their weak asses could bust that up. But not modern home glass. Or else people would be falling out of windows like it was raining human beings, especially in the cities. And every little thing that hit your windshield would shatter it. We’d have worse problems than corpses walking around then.”

They stared at him in bewilderment.

Matt asked, “Where is the United States Armed Forces in those things?”

Peter answered, “The implication is we were killed early.”

“That is as unrealistic as all the rest of the shit Chris mentioned.”

“Really? Very, very dead people get up and walk around, Matthew, but this shit is the unrealistic part? According to Romero Seventies shit, each part of their bodies reanimates. Severed arms are alive. Oh, and in Dawn of the Dead, the remake, a head stays alive without the body. It’s in a cooler.”

“Arms?”

“The Seventies movies come with a prereq that you have to be really high to watch them. Romero completely forgot to put in a plot. It’s more of a notion than a plot.”

Brandon asked, “Why would modern people watch shit from the Seventies when they get high?”

“I don’t think that is actually happening,” Peter answered.

“We have by far better shit to watch when we’re high.”

“I think it’s actually Boomer influence in these brain-eating references, and they watched these movies in the first release because, I agree, we have by far better shit to watch when high. And Romero’s shit still doesn’t make any sense when high.”

Chris said, “Maybe it was that good Seventies weed.”

Peter snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “That could be it. The shit was more potent back then.”

Matt said, “That goes a long way in explaining the Seventies.”

“But back to the issue at hand,” said Chris.

“Oh, no.” Matt laughed.

“How come no one has guns and those that do can’t shoot worth shit? Where are the rednecks?”

“Guess they disappeared with the Armed Forces,” said Matt. “If corpses got up out of the graves of their own accord, the Pentagon would order airstrikes of every cemetery in the United States.”

“Nip that motherfucker right in the bud,” Chris responded. “Soldiers would be luring living dead zombies into open fields and calling in airstrikes.”

“We called airstrikes for far less,” said Peter.

“We did.”

“These movie and TV series makers do not realize that a secret fantasy of the Armed Forces has been living dead zombies.”

“What is it that thing you say?” Chris asked.

“The American dream is to shoot other human beings without legal or moral recourse?”

Chris roared with laughter. “That’s it, right there.”

Matt still disapproved of Peter’s saying, so he ignored it. “Country people usually have firearms of one kind or another.”

“Got that right,” said Chris. “Got our hunting rifles. Then got our anti-meth head home defense guns. We got meth heads climbing in our dang windows in the country. They run a fuck load faster than those living dead zombies, tell you what. Family men got a fear of that six foot four, three hundred pound flakka motherfucker gonna bust down his door one day and throw his ass around his house like a dog tosses a toy. He got himself an elephant gun.”

“A what?” Peter laughed.

“Most high-powered firearm he could find.”

“How the hell do you find an elephant gun?”

“That ain’t the point, son.”

“Man, the kick from an elephant gun. Blast the flakka motherfucker down the street and you threw a wall.” Peter laughed so hard that he fell into Matt.

Brandon laughed and said, “I don’t think there would be much left of the flakka motherfucker to go down the street after hitting him with that.”

“Body parts would rain down through a pink mist,” said Matt.

The group found this incredibly funny.

“That ain’t the point, y’all,” said Chris, getting back to business. “The Southern redneck man would open his front door at hearing someone pounding on it at three a.m. He’d see a living dead zombie there instead of the meth head, shoot him, close and lock the door. Then he’d holler to his wife, ‘Baby, can you look up on the internet if I have to drag a living dead zombie in the house to make it a legal shooting? What’s the law regarding corpses trying to get up in the house?’ She’d respond, ‘You sure it was a dead person?’ ‘Cause women never trust their men to have a brain in their heads.”

“They left that scene out of the entertainment,” said Peter.

“They always leave rednecks out, even when it’s supposed to be Georgia and shit like that. Ain’t that Walking Dead supposed to be Georgia, though no one sounded like it except for that doctor?”

“It was supposed to be Georgia. The one apparently up by Michigan.”

“It’s always the South up by Michigan. A white man saying ‘y’all’ would end the world to Hollywood people. Only black people are allowed to sound like they are from the South.”

“And they may not be,” said Peter. “They still say ‘y’all’ even when they’re not from the South.”

“But a white Southern man cannot say ‘y’all.’ We should have fought for our right to say ‘y’all’ in a television series. A million redneck march on Washington, D.C.”

They stared at him, perplexed.

Matt said, “Country guys like to blow up shit.”

“Hell’s yeah!” Chris yelled too exuberantly. “Good ole boys would run up to slow ass living dead zombies and pop lit M-80s in their mouths to see how their heads explode.”

They laughed.

Brandon said, “There’s no way living dead zombies could cause an apocalypse.”

“No way at all,” Chris responded. “‘Least not in this country. Yeah, it would be some disruptions to life. Can’t leave the kids at the school bus stop to wait for the bus when you got living dead zombies shuffling around all over the place. Gotta figure out something to do about that since the kids need to go to school, no matter if Grandpa got up outta his grave last night. Don’t want no ignorant children! But I am not seeing this causing an apocalypse and stopping everything. The United States Armed Forces will not go down that easy. Period.”

Peter said, “We have trigger-happy cops who’ve been waiting for this opportunity to legally shoot people for decades.”

“Them too. It is like the people making this shit are new to America. Is this just the people who hate guns and got themselves too many feelings?”

“Uh-oh, the L-word is coming,” said Peter. “And that L doesn’t stand for ‘love.’”

“Fuck you.” To be belligerent, Chris didn’t proceed as he would normally. “It’s like the city version only. No firearms. And people talking about rights of dead people.”

“That’s Walking Dead,” said Peter. “Way too much of the cushy-gushy shit throughout it. I could not relate. I wanted most of the major characters to be killed. But the ones I did like were the ones that got killed. Like Glenn.”

Matt asked, “How in the hell did that last so long, what? Twelve years or something? We couldn’t get through ‘em all.”

“No clue, dude,” Peter responded. “I think it’s because there was nothing else to watch. Reanimated corpses causing an apocalypse among Georgia people who sound like they came from Michigan was still more believable than the Millennial politically correct shit.”

“I could see that.”

Brandon said, “Everything’s reality TV. We watch TV to get away from other people.”

“I know,” responded Peter. “Not to watch a shitload of annoying assholes behaving in ways that make you want to kill them. Hey, they should have the Walking Dead intrude on the reality shows and the zoms go after those people.”

“That would be awesome!” Brandon howled with laughter.

Chris said, “They’d scream and fall down.”

Peter retorted, “But we would like this. We want the Kardashians to scream and fall down and get eaten.”

Brandon added, “And all the Real Housewives of wherever the fuck.”

Peter responded, “Basically, all the chick reality TV, bring in the living dead zoms.”

They roared with laughter.