Beach Blanket Zombie. Mark McLaughlin
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medley.
The cheery strains of Alley Cat, intertwined with Kitten on the Keys, and Memories from that musical, the one he’d seen with Nicole a few months earlier. CATS.
Slowly Landford turned around. Claude was seated at the piano, his back to the party. His playing was—Inspired. Lively. Bubbling with enthusiasm.
Landford looked at the arm stumps, hanging down like deli salamis on each side of the fat man, and wondered: What the hell is he PLAYING with?
Zuzie began to sob. “I told him to stay home. I told him I told him I told him I told him...”
The guests stared at the raving woman. Then Mrs. Finlay poked an elbow into her husband’s ribs and nodded toward the door.
Mr. Finlay walked up to Landford. “It’s been an interesting evening, Isaac. But we’ve got to be going. You understand.”
Mr. Dietrich and Mr. Henderson moved forward. “It’s getting kind of late,” Dietrich said. Henderson just nodded frantically.
In a moment, all the guests were rushing out the door. Marla and Peg grabbed hands and sped out by way of the patio.
By now Zuzie was sobbing so loudly that it echoed off the glassware with a slight brrringggg. “They said he’d be all right! And I believed them. Pets are good for you, you know. They said he’d be as right as rain...” She blew her nose on a corner of the couch cover.
Landford slowly walked up to the pianist. He looked over the fat man’s shoulder. A moment later, he wondered why he was feeling so dizzy. It dawned on him: the sight before him had temporarily made him forget to breathe. He gasped for air and sucked in a whiff of Claude’s putrid stench.
Claude’s sweatshirt had been pulled up—or more probably, pushed back—over his protruding gut, to reveal a raw, gaping opening. Three orange cats had crawled out of the opening, but they hadn’t gone far. They were attached to Claude by thickly veined umbilical cords. The cats were capering merrily on the piano keys, pounding out the feline hits. A couple of them wore slime-streaked miniature tuxedoes. The third wore a black velvet evening gown. All of them had bulging eyes, heavy brows, and jagged yellow teeth.
A loop of slithering tissue spooled out of the opening and wrapped around Pickle’s dead kitten, pulling it into Claude’s belly.
“Pets good. Soooo good,” Claude whispered. “Come to Papa.”
I’ve Got Those Synthetic-Zombie-Penis/Andy-Warhol-Came-from-Venus/Cha-Cha-Dancin’-Headless-Movie-Mama Blues
THE FATE OF HUMANKIND HANGS IN THE BALANCE
One two chopchopchop:
B-movies told us that Mars needed women, but in reality, it was the citizens of Venus who had a mighty fierce hankerin’ for MEN: big sweaty stallion-butt hunky guys like the ones in old prison movies. The thing is, they didn’t want the whole guy. Just the cock. Venusians liked to cook up Earth cocks for dinner. They liked to fry ’em up in a fiendish alien compound that tasted a lot like the substance known to Earthlings as garlic butter.
You could always tell Venusians because they were platinum-blonde, with a vacant stare and wispy little voices that sounded all stupid, like they were reading cue cards. Years ago, the man-hungry Venusians sent Special Agents M and W—a.k.a. Jayne Mansfield and Andy Warhol—to acquire human cocks for their trendy Venusian supper-clubs, where big clunky Cuban heels were all the rage.
The Venusians weren’t really mean: they knew guys kinda liked having cocks. So after they cut off some fella’s yogurt-gun, they replaced it with a fully functional synthetic boner made out of durable alien bio-plastic, capable of having seven orgasms in a row.
So Agents M and W travelled the world, luring hunky-boys to their evil lairs, plying them with pills and cigarettes laced with hog tranquilizers, then chopping off and teleporting the tasty tube-steaks to Chez Twilight Zone. The woozy hunky-boys then woke up with big plastic schlongs, complete with faux veins, waggling around between their legs. And first the hunky-boys would be all freaked out—but then they’d find out that these particular Thanksgiving turkey-necks were able to spurt home-style gravy ’til the cows came home. That made them feel a little better.
But: there was a side effect.
IT’S ALL UP TO ME. STORED IN A MISSILE SILO ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, I STAND READY TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE, THE FLOWERS, AND ALL THE LOVELY BOOKS.
You’d think a guy with that much money could afford a better haircut:
Death doesn’t exist on Venus: them jet-trash space jackanapes used to just wear out...just erode away like living pencil erasers. And all the little chunks and bits that wore off kept on living. If something and someone cut up a Venusian with a machete or farm implement or something equally nasty, the pieces instantly became separate entities that could not be reattached. You could hardly walk down the street on Venus without stepping on somebody’s pinky or spleen or something. But then, if you were wearing big clunky Cuban heels, you probably wouldn’t notice. If a Venusian was badly injured, or got really sick, he or she would just take a nice refreshing decades-long nap. The sort of nap any Earthling might easily mistake for death.
That whole ‘ain’t-gonna-die’ quality is inherent in all things Venusian—even their bio-plastic. So, when those radically-altered hunky-boys passed away, their undying synthetic boners would begin sending polymeric pseudo-nerves through their rotting flesh. It would take about fifty years, but finally, revivified zombie-boys would come a-scratchin’ and a-squirmin’ and a-creepin’ out of their graves—and oh, surely each was a slave to the rampant Venusian trouser-boa between its legs.
Fast forward:
One fine day, John Q. Spaceman and Little Miss Meteor were flying around on Buck Rogers jetpacks, happily blabbing about all the test-tube babies they’d have after they were connubially interfaced. They had just landed in Neutron Park, right next to the statue of Rex Reed, America’s most beloved President, when suddenly! from out of nowhere! Andy Warhol and headless Jayne Mansfield came strolling along. Despite a touch of worm-nibbling around the edges, Jayne looked pretty good for a women whose head had been snicked off in a car crash. She carried a sequined pink bowling bag, swinging it back and forth in time to the swaying of her hips.
As for Andy Warhol: well, he’d always looked a little zombied-out anyway, so his groovy dirtnap (in his top-secret vault beneath the employee lounge of a Campbell Soup factory in Idaho) had actually improved his appearance by fifteen percent.
And THEN! John Q. Spaceman and Miss Meteor were felled by simultaneous heart attacks when they saw the unspeakable horde that followed Agents M and W. Those wacky plastic-penised hunky-boys had risen from their graves, and now they were on the loose. The crusty, lusty zombies bumbled forth like erotic rumba dancers on acid, sticking their insatiable pseudo-salamis into every available hole: knotholes, beehives, even the sundry orifices of two young lovers who’d dropped dead of fright directly in their path.
A ROBOTIC SENTINEL (DESIGNED BY THE RENOWNED NEPTUNIAN SCIENTIST ERNEST HEMINGWAY) BIO-ENERGIZES ME TO OUTLANDISH PROPORTIONS, MUTATES MY HIDE INTO A METALLIC CARAPACE, AND SLAPS A FEW HEAT SHIELDS HERE AND THERE FOR GOOD MEASURE.
Sassy neck-stump lookin’ fine/gonna make it mine all mine:
Cha-cha-dancin’ Jayne Mansfield and an undead battalion broke into the jetpack factory, and soon the skies were filled with happy-pronged zombie flyboys. Andy Warhol led his troops into the studios of government-regulated PTV (all propaganda, all the time) and began producing and directing art film/pseudo-documentaries about zombie junkies having sex with zombie boywhores. Somewhere along the line, Andy Warhol took a moment to broadcast a message to Venus: “Fire up the frying pans. OPERATION: EARTH-SAUSAGE back in action.”
But what Andy Warhol didn’t know is that, while he had been asleep:
The body of Theda Bara, megalomaniacal Plutonian empress-in-exile, had been stolen from its mausoleum by a league of intergalactic vampire performance artists, led by their trans-dimensional high priest, Aleister Crowley. The vampires