THE HUMAN ATE MY PUMPKIN!
By
Jon Mac
Copyright © 2011 by Jon Mac
www.jonmac.me
* * *
It wasn’t just any other night in the unlife of Ned The Undead, it was Halloween! But the world had changed a lot lately, and nothing seemed to turn out the way he expected. Find out why Zombies are people too in “The Human Ate My Pumpkin!”
Contents:
The Human Ate My Pumpkin!
Author's Note
THE HUMAN ATE MY PUMPKIN!
It wasn’t dark, it wasn’t stormy, and it wasn’t quite night. Despite this, Ned enjoyed the crisp autumn air anyway. He always looked forward to the peaceful promise of twilight. Ned was undead and, like most of his kind, didn’t really prefer the term Zombie. He was tall, and some had gone so far as to describe him as quite dashing. He certainly un-lived up to it, with his exposed, twisted neck bone and ever-so-slightly enhanced decayed flesh that revealed just a tantalizing hint of his skull. But this evening he looked different. Very different. Unfortunately, too different. And, since it seemed everybody else had lost the spirit of Halloween, it was going to make his journey home from work a lot more difficult.
Ned sighed up at the dimming sky and began shambling down the road along the edge of a suburban park. The undead were surprisingly particular and set in their ways. Two things they enjoyed above all were long walks at night and the comforts of a dilapidated old house. He had a long way to travel before he would be able to see the inviting rusty iron gates guarding the pathway to his creepy old mansion on the hill. Unfortunately, it was rush hour, and he knew it would take a while.
Rush hour hadn’t usually been much of a problem before The Invasion Of The Things From The Sky. That’s what all the cable news networks called it, anyway. It sounded ridiculous to him. He thought they should have come up with a better headline, like ETs Ate The Dead, or Alien Lifeform Impact Extravaganza Now! (ALIEN! - Ned loved acronyms.) Oh well, maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t a TV news copywriter.
He’d actually paid scant attention to the whole brouhaha, at least at first. It wasn’t until his daily commutes from his job at the graveyard were adversely affected that he really began to take notice. He worked the midday shift, universally dreaded by his coworkers, but he didn’t mind. As jobs went, it was reasonably comfortable, almost always quiet and not overly stressful. But the last thing he wanted to deal with after a long, tiring day of work was hordes of marauding Invaders mucking up his commute.
Ned was pretty easy going, but now even he longed for the pre-Invasion days. This evening, it was worse than usual, but he had to shoulder some of the blame himself. He’d realized just before the end of his shift that today was Halloween. He couldn’t believe he had almost missed it. It would be the first Halloween since The Invasion Of The Things From The Sky, and he felt a need to return to normalcy. He refused to let alien Invaders ruin a good holiday.
Nobody knew where the Invaders came from. One evening, out of nowhere, a light had appeared in the sky. Few people noticed it, and those that did just gave it a passing thought, then turned to more important things. As the strange light grew larger, night after night, it began to cause a growing buzz of speculation. All the leading intellectuals and the talking heads on TV declared it was either some kind of optical illusion or mass hallucination. Fringe conspiracy nuts thought it was probably a weather balloon, and one famous scientist was convinced it was some previously undiscovered type of swamp gas.
Finally, it was so large that even the government couldn’t ignore it. While they were still debating what to do about it, it swooped down and landed right on the weeds in the front graveyard of the Capitol Building. It turned out that the light from the sky was actually some kind of ship. After lots of skull scratching and claw clattering, scientists eventually came to the conclusion that the vessel contained a strange kind of alien life. Only instead of the normal kind of un-life that all people dreaded, yet were familiar with, the strange occupants of the vessel were some kind of bizarre “life”, without an “un.” And that was when everything changed. Ned, like pretty much all undead, was not overly fond of change.
By the time the big brains had figured it all out, it was too late. The Invasion Of The Things From The Sky had already begun, and massive amounts of undead were infected, turning them into fast moving, fairly weak yet diabolically clever living beings. The problem slowly grew worse, until the situation had become downright hazardous. But it did give Ned an idea for what he should be for Halloween.
That day, he had managed to get Karl the undertaker to cover for him while he slipped away from work to one of the Invader neighborhoods. It was a quite daring scheme in an impulsive quest to procure the ultimate Halloween costume, but that’s just the kind of guy Ned was. Who else would think of being a Living Thing for Halloween?
The Invaders rarely bothered anybody in the daytime, so he felt relatively safe. But he had to admit, it was pretty thrilling. It was a scary place, with not a weed or dead thing in sight. For some reason, the aliens liked to display their empty clothes by hanging them from wires in their yards. It baffled him, although he suspected it may have been some kind of bizarre mating ritual. His stomach had done a flip as his plodding feet sank into green and perfectly ghastly manicured grass, but he’d been able to snatch a shirt and pants that looked about the right size. The clothing had that horrific, freshly laundered stench that the Invaders were famous for. He had second thoughts about whether it was worth all this effort, but he would definitely have the most authentic costume ever.
Back at the graveyard, Ned and his smelly purloined clothes were instantly unpopular. He had ignored that and spent the rest of his shift thinking of ways to make his costume better. Luckily, his job was to help people look even more deathly, so he had access to all kinds of materials he could use in creative ways not intended by the manufacturer. He had stayed after work and scavenged some old makeup that he used to cover up bits of rotted flesh and protruding bones from his face and hands. He’d had to dig around all the bottles of fake blood and imitation brain in order to find something he thought would work. It was ironic that, when properly applied, a bottle of fake scar tissue could actually make him look almost alive.
Once his costume had been complete, he’d looked into a cracked mirror and was literally shocked. The arc of electricity zapped from the mirror to his chest and singed the little embroidered animal on his otherwise pristine stolen polo shirt. Then another crack appeared in the mirror. He’d tried to wipe away the burn spot on the shirt. Hopefully nobody would notice. The mirror was right, though. He had looked hideous. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought he was among the living.
Now he was paying the price for that authenticity. Rush hour normally required him to either avoid the living mobs of Invaders, which could take him far out of his way, or just plow right through them and hope for the best. He usually chose the latter option, although there was a chance he would be destroyed in the process. This evening, the Invaders seemed to see right through his disguise and didn’t hesitate to accost him with shotguns, chain-saws and other assorted annoyances. But even worse than that, his fellow denizens of the undead actually believed he was an Invader. They really thought he was alive! Not only did he have to dodge the fear crazed masses of the living, now he had to deal with clumps of shambling undead commuters who were convinced he was trying to destroy them. He would have grimaced with glee over how well his costume worked, if it wasn’t so irritating. He really had the worst of both worlds.
His commute continued to bog down as, one by one, then in larger groups, the living things came out of their strange, clean buildings. Their squeaky clean stink of fear a
nd soap was really more than he could take. He decided to bite the silver bullet and take a detour around the noisy, shrieking throng of axe and machete wielding living creatures in his path. In their blind panic, a few of them rather stupidly ran right in front of him. Seriously, how did these things ever manage to come from wherever it was they came from? They didn’t seem to have the common sense of a coffin nail.
By chance, another commuter happened by. She was a rather fetching lass with a half-missing arm and an empty eye socket. She seemed to be preoccupied with putting a worm into her beautifully snarled hairdo and apparently didn’t notice the Invaders.
Ned’s dead heart almost fluttered as he