Zombie Man & Fan Girl

vs

The Cathode Ray Cult

A novelette by

Nick Thomson has asserted his right under

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

to be identified as the author of this work.

To have one's eyeball sucked from its socket was a form of passion to which few beings were accustomed, and even fewer approved of.

Indeed, theirs was a love that was banned in thirty-one countries.

To see his lover's cold tongue swirl it about her mouth, like one might do with the stem of a cherry, or a never-ending super sour sugar-coated gobstopper, was an experience like simultaneously riding atop a rumbling washing machine and clattered about inside it akin to a forgotten penny during the spin cycle.

Nobody performed an eyejob like Fan Girl did.

That was all just foreplay, however, and the bone ash kept him going all night long if they so desired, which was usually the case, and that night was typical of many others – at least up to that point of their evening.

Some people say “I'll sleep when I'm dead”, but they don't know what fun they would be missing. Similarly, those who profess to be experiencing an undying love don't know the meaning of the depths that those two words can summon, like so many incantations brewed together.

Afterwards, he rolled back onto the red silk sheets, listening to her contented sigh, and watched as she stretched her limbs, working out the exhausted feeling of pleasure. It stretched out through her dancing toes with their chipped Deepest Noir polish, and to the tips of her similarly adorned fingers, which brushed the burgundy velvet curtains that hung over their bedstead.

Fan Girl loved him dearly, but there still resided a sense of guilt deep within his bones about that one particular night.

As she allowed her arms to fall back down against her naked, moon-lit form – those lingering goosebumps melting away as her feet curled together to brush back and forth – he looked over to her and brushed aside the long and tangled black hair from her face.

“You know, tonight is the six month, six day, and six hour anniversary,” he said.

She rolled to face him and laced her fingers between the ridges of his protruding ribs. “It is? Well, aren't you a sentimental slice of something special?” Her hair fell back off the shoulder and revealed the healed-over scar on her neck, the pattern of the teeth that bit her matching those of her lover and partner in crime.

He gazed at the pattern of the pitted teeth marks sunk into her cool, grey flesh, and traced the bumps and divots with one bony finger.

What had started out as a holiday romance on a faraway island, caressed by the ultramarine waves lapping at the shores of the white sandy beaches, quickly evolved into a passionate love affair that straddled the line between life and death. Fan Girl's glowing soft peach skin in contrast to her raven black hair, and his own flesh with its multitude of festering purples and greys and blues, had struck the spark between them. She was a very peculiar woman indeed, and the only one who had not only wanted to be that close to him, but had actively pursued such a communion.

For weeks they spent their nocturnal hours in various states of supercharged chaos, either in the bedroom or amidst the gloomy neon-tinged shadows of down town, seeking flesh and blood, danger and violence. It was clear that Fan Girl fit the bill like a poison pill, and he was enraptured.

But six departed months, days, and hours beforehand, as he was lost in the strenuous pangs of forced withdrawal, with his middle brain and medulla oblongata drowning in delirium, a terrible flash of hunger overtook his entire being. Fan Girl's warm blooded, peach perfect skin bled away to greyscale and the sparkle in her cerulean eyes dissolved into a pure, infinite whiteness.

At the very least he was thankful that he had kept that scrap of paper with Doctor West's phone number scribbled on it, and so she was resurrected quickly enough to reconstitute the fibres of her being, and though her bloodlust had increased, it was nothing that they couldn't handle.

Still, sometimes he found himself watching her in the early glimmers of dawn with a melancholic eye...

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Zombie Man & Fan Girl in their boudoir.

“If you're thinking I have any regrets, then you're one wrong little silly billy,” she smirked. “So, what do you think we should do to celebrate?”

She planted a loving kiss upon the ridges of his zygomatic bone, her lipstick lingering in a scattered pattern like cracked leather, and gazed into the wakeless oceans of his abyssal eyes. They were enveloped in blankets of yellowed white splintered with deep burgundy vessels, which appeared to her like stagnant strikes of lightning captured in the masterwork of a lesser-known gothic painter who suffused their cadmium oils with the sacrificial blood of her victims.

The discovery of Amelie Hildegard Sanguina (1313 – 1340), the first and last of her name, had come to Fan Girl during her formative years like so much violet plasma flowing from the sliding gold doors of an elevator. Even after Sanguina's mysterious death, new paintings that had clearly been crafted by no-one else but her, kept being discovered. They were not old works newly unveiled, but freshly painted portraits and landscapes of doom that were still wet to the touch.

It was through those paintings that Fan Girl's curious fascinations and yearnings had been seeded and then bloomed, so to stumble upon Zombie Man, The World's Number One Celebrity Zombie, as she incongruously worked as a beach resort cocktail waitress, had been the perfect punctuation point at the close of the opening chapter in her book of necrotic pressed flowers.

“Anyone home?” she teased, knocking upon his frontal bone like one would with a fractured oak door.

The flickering candlelight caught the rigid grin on his face. “We haven't been to the drive-in for quite some time,” he said.

She smiled and nestled down against her silk covered pillow, her eyes dreamily looking deep into his. “I love going to the drive-in. Is anything good on?”

“A little birdy told me that they're having a monster movie triple feature picture show tonight.”

She sprung from the bed like a dynamo and bellowed “A million times yes!” Twirling about the room, her tar black hair fanned out like a ballgown for a Stygian gala, then she clasped the carved bone door handles of her wardrobe and flung the shutters aside to reveal a wide but shallow assortment of clothing.

He wasn't entirely sure why, but the red bikini seemed to be her go-to choice in vesture. No matter the occasion and no matter the weather, it was always the way forward. Of course, now that the cold nor damp affected her already icy corporeal state, it certainly proved to be a practical choice when the going got bloody. Fan Girl always loved to get wet beneath a crimson gore jet, and it washed far more easily from skin and elastane than from cotton blends and wool.

She blitzed through the multitude of hangers from which the bikinis dangled, quickly scanning and assessing each one before flinging them over her naked shoulders in a flurry of hydrophobic synthetics.

“This one is blood red, but this one is the red of blood dashed on the rocks of a lonely island with a haunted lighthouse perched atop a jagged rock face that resembles the razor teeth of a nether-beast.” She considered it for a moment, and then sent it airborne. “And this one is blood moon red with a hint of weeping paper cut.” Again, it was sent soaring to the ceiling before crashing to the mouldering old rug that covered the creaking old floorboards.

“Vermilion Vino La Petite Mort? Too freaky. Carmine. Cerise. Crimson. Simple classics, but lacking that special wham-bam thank you ma'am whip-cracking kapow punch.”

He watched as more bikinis went flying, attempting to snatch them from the air as they plummeted to mingle with the dust motes on the heavily patterned rug. He slid off the bed and assembled his own wardrobe from a heaping mound of jumbled clothing, and with an efficient laissez-faire attitude: flip-flops, khaki shorts, floral shirt, and a pair of sunglasses beneath the rim of his straw hat. Each day with Fan Girl was like a vacation, so why not embody that fully, he had figured.

“Chromatic Ruby Rouge with scarlet and magenta accents?” considered Fan Girl. “Too formal.” Another example was cast aside where it bled into the red silk sheets of their bed. “Cherry Red Warhead or Profondo Rosso?” She about-faced, cocking her hips, and posed.

He stood there, rendered babbling and inert by her natural state as she held the two finalists up against the moonlight, which was glinting through the cobwebs and cracks of the bay window of their gothic boudoir. The patterned black wallpaper was adorned with budding roses rendered in complimentary shades of mordant darkness and crepuscular pitch, the silvery moonlight tracing the raised textures and shapes much like it illuminated the smooth and rolling lines of her body, like the off-set of a silhouette.

She smirked and her grey cheeks blushed a darker shade of graphite. Throwing the runner-up choice at the chiselled bones of his face, Fan Girl half-turned in a coy fashion, purring as she said “Go and fire up Reynolds. I'm almost ready. Just need to choose the right shoes, hat, and jacket to complete the ensemble.”

He didn't know which colour red she finally settled on, but he knew that she always looked killer in it. Her appearance was de jure phantasmagorical, he thought. How could a walker get such a stunner on his arm? She always took his breath away in whichever red bikini she chose to wear whichever day of the week. She could make any bikini look amazing, even a green one with sickly pink polka dots.

As he meandered away in a beauty-struck daze, Fan Girl fully drew open the doors of her wardrobe and unveiled an assortment of black (or sometimes red) converse sneakers, black cowboy hats, and blue denim jackets, all identical to the untrained eye, but each infinitesimally unique in its own way.

The only exception was a lone duster coat, ankle-length, and flesh-coloured. It had the appearance of some kind of leather, but was made of differing shades of stretched and tanned human skin, all crudely sewn together with thick black surgical stitching, innumerable coils of which she had stolen from the derelict ruins of a Victorian mental asylum. Urban exploration, specifically into the murkiest depths of the human fingerprint stamped upon the natural landscape, was her favourite teenage past time years ago, and from this she had accrued her entire aesthetic taste and the means with which to furnish it.

After dancing her fingers along dozens of denim jackets, all identically incomparable, her gleaming white eyes were drawn to the long, flowing coat.

She had spent many special nights out on the hunt with her Zombie Man while wearing that coat, and so it felt more than fitting to adorn herself with it. After all, it danced in the midnight breeze in such a way that it always stole the breath from her lover's fetid lungs.

* * *

Their car, or 'Reynolds' as Fan Girl had named it, was a fussy old thing, often requiring a great deal of tinkering and coaxing to ignite the engine, yet it could always be relied upon when the going really needed to get gone.

Zombie Man slid into the driver's seat of the 1965 Plymouth Sport Fury and teased the key against the ignition port that fed into its seven litre 426 V8 engine.

The vehicle had been purchased after Fan Girl had spotted a classified ad in Nevermore Automotive magazine. The list price was steep considering its condition, so she worked her magic and wrested a considerable discount from the withered yet greedy owner who, as it later transpired, would have given the thing away for one single penny if push had come to shove, anything to ensure a legal bill of sale and transfer of ownership.

Slowly sliding the key into the ignition, Zombie Man gently tap danced his bruise-coloured fingernails around the steering wheel and twisted the key. The engine rumbled into life without hesitation, unleashing the rumble and thrum of 365 horsepower. It seemed that Reynolds was an old romantic at heart.

Fan Girl slid in beside her zombie man, and allowed her long and flowing human skin duster coat to slide away from her crossed legs to reveal she was packing heat – dual magnum pistols housed in a brown leather hip holster. “You never now,” she said with an alluring wink.

“Always seeking something to butcher,” he said.

She ran a finger down the side of his mandible and glanced knowingly into the backseat where two short-handled fire axes were loosely wrapped inside a burlap sheet.

A humoured smirk stretched her bloody red lips. “I can't take you anywhere without some blood getting spilled, can I?”

'Reynolds' the 1965 Plymouth Sport Fury

The road to the drive-in was long and winding, and it slithered through dense and ancient autumnal woodlands that encircled pockets of civilisation that, to some eyes, appeared to be held hostage while to others seemed to be safe and protected. Occasionally, when rising up and over the highest peaks of the cracked stretch of tarmac, one could observe a fleeting glimpse of the city in the far distance. Twinkling lights rustled through the branches and leaves of the trees at first, and then a whole lake of light would be revealed like a gaping hole in the landscape, the concrete and glass tower blocks rising as if dozens of vengeful hands were crawling from the mass grave of a hidden tragedy, some brainsick cult that had spun off the tilt-a-whirl during an all-night orgy of ascension, only to flounder and collapse on the mashed grass of a lonely field to lay undiscovered until the circling armies of crows could be denied no longer.

“What are they showing tonight?” asked Fan Girl, gently pawing at her zombie man's free hand that lay at rest between them.

“First up is Stripper Zombies Take Las Vegas,” he said.

“Ooh, I've never seen that one. Sounds amazing!”

It was one of his favourites, going back to when he was a warmblood like everyone else, and there was no doubt that he was the number one renter of that lone videotape copy of the movie at the Video Schmideo rental store.

Another pang of guilt prickled the ridges of his spine. He had been madly in love with Mae Mills, who was a rental clerk at the store, but he could never get up the courage to ask her out. He would trundle up to the counter in his punk rocker leather jacket and ripped jeans, mustard stains on his Misfits t-shirt, and lay down a stack of videotapes. Always horror, and almost always zombie-related somehow.

Mae Mills was a tragedy he rarely spoke of.

“And then what?” asked Fan Girl, clawing him back to reality.

“Love Beasts of the Deep.”

“Is that the one with those seaweed slime glopola things that run around shagging girls in bikinis?”

He glanced at her outfit. “Are you scared or are you jealous?”

“Why not both?” she teased. “And what, do tell, is the capper of tonight's monster mash?”

“Psychotronic Swimsuit Succubi.”

“I've never heard of that one. Is it any good?”

“If it isn't much cop we can just get freaky during the dull parts.”

“That's the thing about the undead kind,” she sighed. “They're always stiff. Be good and keep your hands in the popcorn bucket tonight.”

“Only my hands?”

“We'll see where the night takes us,” she grinned.

Her eyes slid from her lover's toothy grin and caught sight of something metallic glinting in front of the headlights. Zombie Man slammed on the brakes and Reynolds came to a skidding halt on the rain-slick tarmac that was mottled with brown and yellow rotting leaves.

As the Plymouth wallowed on its springs, they watched as a pale-faced man with distant eyes shuffled across the road in front of the car. He was wearing a long black trench coat smeared with strange symbols in white paint, and he was sporting one hell of a mohawk haircut in a fetching shade of electric blue.

“Hey! I'm drivin' here!” yelled Zombie Man, blasting Reynolds' diabolical horn.

The man didn't jump or stagger or respond in any kind of way, while his leather-strapped boots clomped on the tarmac without missing a beat. He was robotically pushing an old shopping cart with squeaky wheels, one of the four doing the booby hatch jitterbug, and it was stacked high with old CRT televisions. A wooden-clad monstrosity with twist dials formed the base of the pile, and a smattering of portables with multi-coloured plastic shells were arranged on top like so many ducklings hitching a ride.

Punk Rocker on a mysterious mission.

Coils and bundles and tangled multitudes of electrical wiring formed a kind of nesting material for the discarded television sets, and a few loose ends and plugs dangled from the rusted metal cage of the shopping cart to scrape along the ground.

Reynold's engine grumbled as a drone echoed from the exhaust pipe, like the slow motion grinding gurgle of a carnival organ wound by a dying hand. Zombie Man and Fan Girl stared at the young man pushing the cart, whose soft-focused eyes gazed forward with benign intent. The trolley rumbled onto the dirt at the side of the road where he turned ninety degrees and kept on rolling.

“Weird,” said Fan Girl.

They drove on and soon the neon lights of the drive-in signage came fluttering into sight in the distance.

“Look! There he is again!”

Zombie Man slowed the car and they crawled past a pale-skinned punk rocker with a blue mohawk, adorned in leather-strapped boots and a black trench coat daubed with bizarre symbols and lettering. They looked back down the bleak unlit rural road, then at each other, and then at the doe-eyed punk, still pushing the shopping cart.

“How the hell did he do that?” asked Zombie Man. “It's impossible.”

But the television sets looked different, same too with the bundled wires. Fan Girl rolled down her window and leaned out for a closer look.

“Hey, going anywhere fun tonight? Lookin' for some action?”

The punk rocker ignored her.

“Got a killer party lined-up?”

Again, no response.

“I like your hair, and that's a pretty sweet coat you got there. How do you like mine?” Kneeling on the passenger seat, she leaned further out the window and modelled her human skin duster, peeling it apart to reveal her bikini of choice underneath as she whistled.

Still trundling forward, the punk rocker finally seemed to take notice of the tenebrous Plymouth Sport Fury puttering alongside, and their eyes rolled unblinkingly to settle for a brief moment on Fan Girl's smooth grey skin and bristling white eyes before the midnight shopper's mysterious purpose resumed control and returned them to their seemingly pre-programmed path.

Fan Girl slid back inside the car and rolled up the window. “Somebody different,” she said.

“How can you tell? Looks just like him from back there.”

“Two big reasons,” she giggled, running her hands down her body.

He gunned the engine and they took off towards the drive-in. “Wearing so much black all over I'm surprised either one hasn't become roadkill pâté by now.”

“Brain chomper by day, road safety advocate by night,” she said.

Date Night at the Stardust Drive-In

The glittering red and blue neon sign of the Stardust Drive-In shimmered, dissolved, and was overcome with patches of crusty, flaking rust as the apocalypse sky black Plymouth Sport Fury hardtop gurgled up to the ticket booth, nestled beneath a buzzing light box with Monster Movie Triple Feature proudly displayed.

'Mein Teil' by Rammstein was blasting from a CD ghetto blaster that was smeared with greasy butter popcorn fingerprints. The music was loud enough to visibly rattle the perspex windows of the ticket booth, and to tremble the connections of the flickering phosphorescent strip light above the tangled mop of hair that belonged to the young man who was dispensing the tickets.

Zombie Man rolled down the window and extended a bony hand to gesture for attention. The booth boy's eyes darted over with a frightened start, but his expression quickly changed when he peered inside the open window of the vehicle.

“Holy shit! It's you!” The young man cranked down the volume of his music, slid the foggy ticket window aside, and leaned out looking like a kid on Christmas Day. “I'm your biggest fan, Mr Man, or, uh, Mr Zombie?!”

“Just call me Zed-Em.”

“Oh, wow! Hey! I love that thing you say. Could you … oh, nah, you're probably sick of saying it,” blushed the giddy booth boy, sweeping the tangled mess of hair away from his bashful eyes.

Zombie Man lurched out of the driver's side window, pointing a trembling bony finger, and snarled. “Zombies can't fucking run!” He cackled, dropping the act, and slid back into his seat.

“Alright, awesome!” said the booth boy with a childish, gurning expression on his face. “Hey, let me get you in for free.”

Fan Girl slid up beside her zombie man and prodded one of the beautiful orange petalled flowers of his blue floral shirt. “Oh no you don't. Our special anniversary is not gonna be a freebie. Can't have people thinking I'm a cheap date,” she teased, leaning across his lap to peer through the open window to look at the goggle-eyed booth boy. “How much?”

Even more dazzled, the ticket seller stammered. “Four bucks.”

Fan Girl pulled back inside the car. “Pay the man, babe.”

* * *

As the credits rolled on Stripper Zombies Take Las Vegas, Zombie Man licked the dust, from their emptied tub of bloody butter popcorn, off of his bony fingertips. His eyes scanned the smattering of cars parked in the rows before them, and saw meandering perverts peering through fogged-up windows at coupled silhouettes, while over near the fence line in one of the darkest corners of the drive-in, a gloomy figure seemed to be vandalising one of the speakers, drawing out lengths of electrical wiring and stuffing it into the pockets of their coat.

“What did you think?” he said, tossing the tub out the window and into a nearby trash can.

“Yeah … I liked it,” mumbled Fan Girl, pondering her wider response. “They kinda spent a lot of time on their way to Vegas, though.”

“Budget cuts, so it was only the last half hour in Sin City.”

“And it didn't look much like Vegas, if you ask me.”

“Yeah, they mostly shot that stuff in Reno.”

“That's outrageous,” she giggled, then chugged the remainder of her cherry-flavoured fizzy pop, crushed the can in her grey fist, and ripped a throat-shaking belch. Seeing the intermission messages slide onto the giant screen, with anthropomorphised food cheerily sauntering towards their doom in the digestive tracts of a nuclear family with rictus grins, her stomach rumbled. “Can we get some lady fingers for the next movie?”

Zombie Man playfully grabbed one of her hands and pretending to nibble on her fingers with ravenous hunger. “Southern fried?”

“Always.”

He exited the car and Fan Girl followed, patting the dashboard affectionately on her way out. “Be a good boy while we're gone, Reynolds.” She kissed the cream coloured steering wheel and bounced out, slamming the door. After a few steps she paused for a moment and listened to the wind. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

Between the disorderly and mumbled half-sentences of patrons coming and going, there were snatches of distant voices drifting to and fro on the breeze, which seemed to stiffen and soften like the flexing of a muscle.

“Come on,” he said to her. “The second feature will be starting soon.”

Movie #1 in their Triple Feature date night.

They were arm-in-arm as they left the concessions booth, Fan Girl teasing her zombie man as she seductively nibbled at one of the southern fried lady fingers from a greasy, sugar-sprinkled cardboard box. The mix of sweet and savoury tingled on her tongue.

Love Beasts of the Deep was just beginning when their Plymouth came back into view, parked in the murky shadows back in the further reaches of the parking lot with the dumpsters and chain-link perimeter fence that was overgrown with weeds.

Reynolds' gleaming black hood was up, exposing the engine bay to the moonlight, and two shadowy figures were leaning inside pulling and tugging at something.

Zombie Man noticed first, glaring over the rim of his sunglasses. “Hey!” He yelled, before rolling into a Hinzman hobble towards the car.

Fan Girl's attention pulled away from the screen – where a buxom glamour model turned B-Movie actress was being menaced by the silhouette of a seaweed monster – and her refulgent white eyes widened. “Shitting bastard!” she growled, and then took off running.

She overtook Zombie Man and, as she bounded closer to the car, she saw that the vandals were wearing long black trench coats covered in strange symbols. “Leave Reynolds alone!” she wailed.

One of the figures extracted themselves from the engine bay, clutching a bundle of wires in a jittering fist, and their blue mohawk brushed away some mud and rust from the underside of the car's engine cover. With a clumsy physical control over his body, he looked at Fan Girl, and mumbled something to his fellow vandal, who jerkily extricated herself from underneath the hood – just before it suddenly slammed down with a ear-splintering crash of metal on flesh and bone.

With a violent jerk, the male punk rocker tugged away from the front of the vehicle, its chrome details reflecting circus mirror versions of the seaweed monster chasing the girl, and rose the severed stump, which was gouting spurts of deep dark blood. He looked at the gushing wound with an almost entirely blank expression, no sign of pain on his face, only a misty degree of perplexion. He patted the stump with his remaining hand and watched the oozing blood dribble down his fingers. Then, with an undulating gait, he shambled away into the shadows and headed for the treeline beyond the tarmacadam confines of the drive-in.

“Eat this!” yelled Fan Girl, as she leapt into a cartwheel and then up into the air with a flying air kick that rocked the punk square in the jaw.

Her mohawk wobbled as much as her jaw, and she dropped to the ground in a shambolic heap.

“What are you doing to Reynolds?!” demanded Fan Girl, one fist clenched and ready to deliver a visit to pound town by way of the knuckle coast highway.

Fan Girl grabbed the punk rocker by the scruff of her greasy black trench coat and punctuated the question with a swift strike to the nose.

A quick fire splat of blood gushed out.

The punker was delirious and her discomposed eyes rolled about their sockets like pin wheels. “S-s-s-s-satan...” she rasped, lazily clawing at Fan Girl's grey leg.

The fingers drew blood, oozing and black, from Fan Girl's smooth grey leg. She kicked away the punker's hand and stamped on her wrist to isolate it. Her fingers glinted under the moonlight from myriad splinters of electrical wire that had become lodged in her flesh, protruding like the bristles of a steel wire brush.

Zombie Man caught up and assessed the situation, noticing that the other punk rocker was disappearing into the woodland that bordered the far side of the parking lot. “We'd better catch them and find out what the hell is going on here.”

He lurched over, drew open the door, flipped the seat down, and extracted his short-handled fire axes from the back seat.

“What should we do with this Reynolds-desecrating bitch?”

“Lover's choice,” said Zombie Man.

Fan Girl's blazing white eyes dropped down and focused on the crazed vandal.

“S-s-s-s-satan is...”

Fan Girl snapped her neck with a sudden motion, and immediately dragged the body to the trunk of the car and stashed it inside. “Waste not, want not,” she said matter-of-factly.

“You got his scent, babe?” asked Zombie Man, limbering up his wrists as he twisted and twirled the axes.

“You know I do,” she said, before brushing a loving hand against the side of the car. “They will have your vengeance,” she whispered, and then took off running in the direction of the woods.

Zombie Man followed in her breezy wake as best as any walker could; the Hinzman hobble was better than nothing, and walkers always got their meal in the end. He couldn't quite figure out why Fan Girl was so lithe and flexible, not that he had ever complained on that front; the advantages were plentiful and appreciated.

Whenever he needed a slice of pickled brains from the cookie jar, right then and there to stave off the darker pangs inherent to his walking dead condition, she was always able to leap into action with swift dexterity.

The only time Zombie Man was ever capable of anything resembling a burst of action was when he hoovered up a big old bump of the bone ash through the gaping hole beneath his nasal bone. The mysterious medical complexities of it all never fully added-up to him, especially on those days when he was shambling about doing the creaky-knee shuffle and snap.

Fortunately, those days were fewer and further between. The brains culled from the least and worst that society had to offer went a long way to greasing his temperamental joints and tendons. That, and Fan Girl's affinity for always stretching before any rigorous exertion, which she had finally managed to get through his thick skull. When she had introduced the notion of yoga to Zombie Man, he had initially balked at the idea.

“Yuck! I can't stand all the lumpy bits, and don't even get me started on Greek style. Some things are meant to be lumpy and some things are meant to be smooth – like yoghurt.”

After she had explained the difference between yoga and yoghurt, and began to make inroads, she had to start all over again as soon as she used the term 'Runner's Lunge'.

“Zombies can't fucking run,” he grumpily stated. “Lunge? Perhaps. Run? Now that's just crazy talk … our ankles are much too fragile for that. Be thankful you still have all of your coordinating faculties.”

When she had attempted to resume with an explanation of 'Ankle to Knee', he exclaimed “That's exactly what I'm talking about!”

That conversation had proceeded for a long time before he finally picked up what she was putting down. The bone ash had little in the way of ill-effects for the already crossed-over, and they didn't seem to transfer through bites either, but consumption of the powdered concoction during a traditionally animated and living state – such as how he had come to consume it for the first time – did have a tendency to mangle the finer capabilities of one's cerebrum, and especially the middle brain area.

The trail of spilled punk rocker blood set him to drooling with anticipation and his lumbering gait began to pick up pace as his joints loosened and the ligaments felt a flush of lubrication seep through them. The bone ash was doing its job, as was the thrill of the impending kill.

Shambling lightly through the tree line and deeper into the ancient woodland surrounding the drive-in, Zombie Man soon heard the purring tones of Fan Girl's voice. She was questioning someone, as interested in playing tease as she was in any answers.

She was squatting ahead of the punk rocker, who had run off one-handed, and her tanned flesh duster coat was brushed open on the dirt. The glint in her eyes chimed with the moon peering through the thick clouds trundling across the sky overhead.

Even more pale than he had been, the punk was lying flat on his belly, struggling to continue crawling forward with a long trail of blood and disturbed mud in his wake.

“Why were you hurting Reynolds?” Fan Girl demanded in a hushed tone that barely contained the brutality bubbling beneath the surface of her grey skin.

No answer came, just a few weeping spurts of blood from the gaping stump of the punk's butchered wrist. The whites of his eyes appeared sickly and now exhibited a soft, pale blueness.

Fan Girl released a slow and calculating breath. She drew some strands of black hair away from her face, tucking it behind an ear, before she reached out and began to brush those Deepest Noir fingernails through the electric blue mohawk of her latest victim. “Who are you? Where are you going? What are you doing? What's up with this coat?” She jabbed a finger against some of the bizarre symbols and shapes painted on the dirty black trench coat of the punk rocker. “Well? What have you got to say for yourself?”

“S-s-s-s...”

“Yeah, yeah, Satan. Ain't he a hoot, but so what?”

“S-s-s-s-satan is...”

Fan Girl groaned with displeasure and looked up at Zombie Man. “Can I kill him now?”

He offered her one of his short-handled fire axes, but a rasping gurgle drew her eyes back down into the mud as the fingers of the punk rocker's one remaining hand grazed across the top of her converse sneaker just as he expired.

“Ugh! That's no damn fun!” she sighed with exasperation. “I'm packing some meaty old blue balls right now.” She stood up and kicked the dead punk's hand away. “What about you, cool stuff?”

Zombie Man raised a bony finger to his toothy grin.

A grumbling moan trembled past them on the breeze. “Satan is good.”

“Well, that's a matter of perspective if you ask me,” she smirked.

They followed the haunting lilt of the words through the trees, which began to take on a curious green glow that became bolder and more intense the further they followed the eerie proclamation through the woods.

Droning vocalisations began to vibrate between the tree trunks and unsettle the trampled earth beneath their feet.

Fan Girl slipped a hand over the hilt of one of her magnum revolvers and brushed a finger against the edge of the cylinder.

Suddenly, a great thrum could be heard, like a surging of electricity, and the green glow breaking between the branches of the old, clustered trees took on a hue of neon emerald. The droning vocalisations rose in conjunction with the growing light. Fan Girl looked at her zombie man and kissed him.

Together, they stepped forward.

* * *

A parting in the dense forest came into view. At the centre of the muddy cloister, shimmering through a damp mist that hung in the air like so many mouldering bodies in a crawl space, was the source of the emerald luminescence.

Littered on the outskirts of the cloister were abandoned shopping carts, and at the heart of a wide circle of trampled mud, rotting leaves, and electrical wires, was a great tower that reached for the small patch of cloudy night sky beyond the tree tops.

The cloying mist began to dissipate and the towering structure slowly revealed itself. It was a tower of television sets, balanced on top of each other in a teetering display – a monument – but to what, or to whom?

Like mesmerised mountain climbers, two more punk rockers scrambled like three-legged creatures with one free hand each that grasped the handle of a portable television. With mindless, automatic movements, they heaved the weighty devices up and above their heads to place them atop the perilous-looking structure at the base of an old TV aerial – patterned loops of thick metal wire wrapped with patches of aluminium foil like some kind of mechanical flower.

“Somebody I went to school with wound up becoming a Health and Safety Executive. He'd shit everything out of his arse if he saw this,” chuckled Zombie Man.

“What do you think it's for?” whispered Fan Girl.

“Some weirdo cult shit. It's always some creepy fucking fanatical crap. Just look at them.”

Several more punk rockers emerged from the trees surrounding the bizarre structure and formed a circuit around the base, craning their necks to look at its summit. They were all wearing the same uniform of all-black clothing, leather-strapped boots, trench coat covered with runic scrawls, and blazing blue mohawks.

They lazily raised and spread their arms in testament and began to speak their chorus in unison. “Satan is good,” they rasped. “Satan is our pal.”

“See? Cult,” mumbled Zombie Man.

“Freaks,” added Fan Girl, as her burning white eyes simmered between her squinting grey eyelids. She picked her nose and flicked a booger beyond the tree line. “They creep me out.”

The punk rockers atop the structure awkwardly plucked an extension cable from the mass of cabling that was the mud and twigs of this exotic birds' nest, slick with moisture, and plugged the portable televisions into the power source.

A zap of electricity sparked through their damp flesh and caused the spaced-out freaks to twitch and jerk with sudden, bone-breaking snaps that sent one of them tumbling backwards down the monument to crash land in a heap at the bottom.

“I should've been recording that,” said Fan Girl. “That would've been two hundred bucks from The World's Dumbest Deaths Caught on Camera for sure.”

Swirling images appeared on the newly-connected screens, the same as those already playing hypnotically on the established TV sets. They were all connected by electrical wiring and extension cables hooked up to a grumbling generator that was imprisoned inside a shipping container where oily, choking plumes of exhaust smoke excreted through the rusty cracks and splits in its otherwise resolute structure.

The droning vocalisations resumed and the green neon illumination became brighter still.

With a sudden twitching, the fallen punk rocker burst back into life with a choking inhale of breath and they clumsily got back on their feet, at which point they trundled away into the trees on the other side of the monument, completely unaware of the ninety-degree angle of their flip-flopping left foot.

Some kind of device was buried deep in the heart of the mountain, radiating with a rhythmic heartbeat.

It was controlling the tower of discarded and reclaimed and repurposed televisions, which in-turn controlled the indistinguishable punk rocker cultists who were swaying lazily about its base as they chanted their Cathode Ray Rationale over and over again with metronomic reliability.

To them all, as witnessed in the hollow expressions of their watering eyes, Satan was indeed good and Satan was in fact their pal.

“This has got her stink all over it,” said Zombie Man.

That was who was ultimately controlling them, Nightingale Galdor, the supernatural witch woman who had provided Zombie Man with his first taste of the Bolivian bone ash, back when he was still alive in the most acceptable sense of the term, back when he was a small-town punk rocker himself, going by the stage name of Max Action.

That one hit alone, responsible for his permanent transformation was, more tragically, the cause of Mae Mills' death. The cute and fun video store clerk was still officially listed as a missing person.

He knew he was responsible, but he had no memory at all of the event itself. He had merely come-to, already ravaged by the powerful effects of the bone ash, and discovered the detritus of what had transpired.

An oath was made that day – only those truly deserving would fall by his hand from that moment forward, the people for whom the world would not give a shit at least, or perhaps at best even champion their demise and encourage it, revel in it, find solace in a cosmic righting of wrongs by the hands of some unidentified societal avenger.

Zombie Man had certainly made the most of a bad situation, but he knew that one day – when he knew how to make sure it would be forever – he and Fan Girl would have to deal with Galdor and end her reign over them and anyone else who was unfortunate enough to foolishly walk into her clutches.

“Where do you think they're going?” asked Fan Girl, snapping Zombie Man out of another reverie. Their anniversary had got him all turned around with nostalgia and remorse.

The cult members surrounding the televisual mountain filtered away silently, disappearing into the woods. The snapping of twigs beneath their feet faded into nothingness.

“What do you think that thing is inside … whatever that is?”

“You never can tell when it comes to Galdor. Anything, everything, or nothing. But we can't leave it to do whatever it's doing, or for why. Nothing good will come of it,” said Zombie Man, assessing the trees and undergrowth beyond the televisual tower with its neon green mist oozing from its guts.

“Let's fuck it up,” said Fan Girl with a devious grin. Chaos and destruction was one of her favourite past-times, and they seemed to have an awfully good knack of getting into trouble. “We can probably squeeze it in before the third movie comes on, and then we can get this anniversary back on track. What do you say, my darkest love?”

They crept from their hiding spot and emerged into the clearing to prowl around the cultist's cathode ray tube monolith. Zombie Man checked the storage container housing the generator, but it was locked up tight with no way to break in or cut the power running through a steel reinforced cable system from the generator to the heart of the hypnotic structure.

“There's a way in,” whispered Fan Girl, pointing to a small tunnel near the base of the mound. The mist crawling from every fissure of the monument's facade was flowing most strongly out of that point. “I'm going in. Watch my back in case those freak-o-rama creepozoids show up again.”

“Uh, babe...” he said, glancing over the rim of his sunglasses.

Blinking wisps of blue light appeared at the outer reaches of the ancient woods surrounding the hypnotic beacon, as if fireflies drawn to the dewy sanctuary of tall grass.

Then, with a crackling of twigs broken underfoot, members of the cult began lurching forward through the ragged undergrowth and emerged into the moonlight. One or two at first, then more, until a steady stream of them were lumbering inexorably closer.

Moving at a plodding pace, as if motorised by one of those cheap plastic wind-up toys with the grinding, flimsy brass metal mechanisms dictating their movements, they ambled nearer in a languorous fashion. The candescent and ethereal blue haze exhaling from their mystified eyes was like the drip-drip-drip of an inescapable dream leaking from their minds, which had been infiltrated by Nightingale Galdor. She luxuriated in control, and any and all forms of domination revived the life forces of the ancient enchantress.

Zombie Man prepares for battle.

Zombie Man looked at the growing army of spellbound punk rockers who had been infused with the ethereal spirit of the cathode ray hypnosis, and couldn't help but marvel at the apparent health of the town's punk rock scene.

If it had been that way when he was a living, breathing warmblood, he might've made it beyond 7pm bar shows for tips and a couple of free drinks.

Their leather-strapped, steel-toed boots stomped through the rotting fallen leaves and their fingers, bristled with splinters of fragmented electrical wiring, twitched on crooked hands, which jolted at the wrist joints.

He didn't know whether to be offended, litigious, or flattered that they all seemed to be biting his style.

“Satan is good,” they droned in unison. “Satan is our pal.”

“Yeah, I've heard that one before,” snarled Zombie Man, stepping forward between them and his beloved lady of gleeful darkness, readying his twin short-handled fire axes.

The blades were stained with the dried, brownish blood of former conquests, total wastes of humanity who had been removed from existence and which kept his temperamental body going.

Fan Girl quickly examined the heaped mound of old televisions again and focused on the aerial, replete with wrapped tinfoil for maximum signal transmission. It quivered in the breeze at the summit.

“I've got an idea,” she said, beginning to scale the cultist's hand-built tower.

Zombie Man added-up their decreasing odds as more and more punk rockers, with their slack faces and stupefied eyes, loped out of the woods and began to close-in. “Whatever it is, make it fast!”

“Just a quickie. You got it, cool stuff,” teased Fan Girl as she began to scramble higher up the unstable stack of outdated electronic devices.

The glowing emerald swirling patterns being broadcast seemed to possess an otherworldly pull, and it was all she could do to peel her pure white eyes away from the humming screens. She squinted and guided her vision between the alluring luminescence of the screens.

With a rasping exhalation, a cultist stumbled near to Zombie Man.

“Satan is good,” he babbled.

Zombie Man drew back and then swung a fire axe in a grand arc which terminated deep inside the cranium of the blue-haired, blue-eyed automaton, whose mohawk quivered with the sharp intrusion of the axe blade.

“Satan is our pal,” came the gasping, glottal utterance of another cultist from the other side.

Zombie Man looked away from his first kill and saw the out-stretched, bristling fingers of another enchanted punk rocker lurking closer to him. With one axe still embedded in the skull of one cultist, Zombie Man flipped his spare axe in the air, caught it in an inverted hold, and drew a long sweeping uppercut motion, the shimmering blade edge of his second fire axe scything through the cool night air, and once again it became embedded in the skull of his enemy.

“Satan … is … good,” murmured the cultist to his right.

“Satan … is … our … pal,” blabbered the cultist to his left in a sloppy, mangled manner. The axe had bisected the punk's jaw with the edge of the blade wedged between their eyes, and their tongue – split in two – licked up and down on either side of the blood-slathered axe head, the two parts of the tongue undulating like rolling waves.

“This is our Cathode Ray Rationale,” added the next cultist lining up for a taste of Zombie Man's razor sharp steel.

“Tell me something I don't already know!” He tugged on the axe in his right hand. A strong slurping sound came squelching from the cultist's penetrated skull. He tugged on the axe in his left hand. A similarly globular noise of deep suction emerged from the other cultist's skull, as their diverging eyes looked about aimlessly and long, sticky strands of blood came dribbling out of their senselessly flapping maw.

“Join us,” wheezed the approaching cultist, whose piercing blue eyes left behind seductive trails of supernatural light that washed out into nothingness in the swirling green glow of their televisual obelisk. “Join us!”

Zombie Man tugged on the embedded fire axes. “I'm more of a leader than a follower.”

Again, he pulled at the axes, both arms spread wide and now being dragged downwards as the spasming bodies of his first two kills began to finally expire.

“Join us!” Glinting with the moonlight, the approaching cultist's splintered fingers rose up and clawed at the diminishing air between them and their target.

“Join us!” came the unified whispers of the many more mohawked minions of Nightingale Galdor.

Stamping one sandalled foot against the shoulder of the cult member to his right, Zombie Man heaved with all his creaking might and finally extracted the axe blade from the skull. A great wash of bloodshed washed into the air as he tumbled backwards, rolling away from the swiping hands of his next enemy. He felt one of his knees pop out and slurp back in to the socket, and willed himself to literally keep it together.

The second fire axe broke free in the tumble and, pooling his remaining strength for such exertions, Zombie Man swung both axes simultaneously, blood streaking from the blades like a rainstorm on glass, performed a two-bladed decapitation of the mesmerised son of a bitch in a swift, clean motion.

“Try joining your head to your body, motherfucker.”

The head tumbled down to the muddy ground, bounced and bounded and rolled away into the undergrowth, while the body slumped to its knees and folded over to gush spurting eruptions of steaming hot blood across the autumnal ground.

Zombie Man stood straight with a proud sense of accomplishment, only to be skewered with the sight of several more cultists closely approaching his position.

He looked up at Fan Girl ascending the mountain, slipping and sliding on plastic cables and wood-effect housing that had become slick and slimy with the verdant and oozing emerald mist. The aerial was still well out of her grasp.

With a disgruntled sigh, he dropped one axe to the ground and reached into the pocket of his tattered shorts to extract a small, bulging baggy of off-white powder. Tearing it open with his exposed teeth, bleached red with the blood of his kills, Zombie Man raised the baggy to his nasal cavity and sprinkled the contents inside.

A spoonful of coovan keeps him going.

A deep inhale unleashed a fiery powder keg of bone ash and cherry red warhead slashes of lightning, which exploded behind him as the supernatural concoction hit the slithering streams of his blackened circulatory system. As it coursed through his necrotic veins, he saw the whispers of a thousand generations sparkling through a billion pin pricks in the infinite void on the other side of existence.

“Hey!” yelled Fan Girl, pointing to the scalpel-like quivers of lightning surrounding her Zombie Man. “It matches my outfit! Talk about simpatico!”

So that was which colour of bikini she had settled on.

He paused to admire her for a moment, Fan Girl rising up the monolithic shrine of interwoven television sets, her pitch black hair fluttering in the wind. Her blazing white eyes turned on him like tractor beams and she reached for her hip, pulling one of two magnum revolvers from its suede leather holster, and aimed its gleaming barrel at him.

The hammer snapped and a bullet traced towards his skull, but tore past like the buzz of a speeding hornet to obliterate the screwed-up face of a cultist.

“Eyes on the prize, cool stuff,” she teased, holstering the pistol with a tender flourish. She blew him a kiss and kept on climbing.

Zombie Man looked back over his shoulder and gazed through the seeping tunnel of flesh and bone and cranial sinew that had been bored through another cultist's face, the blue mohawk trembling as the uncoordinated body spasmodically flailed and fumbled before collapsing at Zombie Man's sandalled feet.

His fire axes claimed several more victories in what seemed like a flurry of blurred action, as Zombie Man's bone-ash-infused muscles swung his blades of limb-severing, head-lopping chaos.

A couple of punk rockers began to scramble up the monument to chase Fan Girl, but he dragged them off and sliced their craniums in two.

His flip-flops splashed in the blood-soaked mud as he shambled back and forth, circling and weaving to watch his own back while he bought Fan Girl some time.

KA-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!

Fan Girl was within grasping distance of the aerial and had just blasted away the head of another cultist, whose body fell from the peak against a cloud-choked sky that enclosed the rippling light of an approaching storm.

“You good?” he yelled up to her.

“It's a thrill a minute up here!” she cackled, finally grabbing hold of the aerial.

Sputtering jolts of electricity coursed through her body as she wrenched the aerial loose, tossing it away into the woods.

The humming of the televisions changed pitch, and a pained wail spread through the fanatical cultists who clutched and clawed at their aching heads. The green glow of the monument exploded in a surge and resonated stronger, causing the punk rockers to double-over in contortions.

“Let's finish this thing!” she cried out, before leaping from the top of the mountain with both pistols blazing hellfire bullets into the skulls of some of the cult members who were twitching and retching below. She crash landed on one, crippling their body beneath her, the ribcage fracturing and piercing through the flesh like so many daggers.

Zombie Man decapitated the crushed specimen and gestured at the small tunnel leading into the depths of the monument's base. “Hurry!”

The transmission was no longer spreading far and wide, but the local signal was still beating loudly from the sickly neon bosom of the structure, which pulsed with an intense jade hue.

Fan Girl dived into the hole and began to crawl between the jagged corners of the clumsily heaped-together television sets and the intertwined lengths of knotted cables, like the hollowed-out underside of a root bound old tree. Such a place was always an ideal location to stash the body of a victim when in a rush, and the creatures would always swallow what you gave them.

The startling brightness of the radiant green heart of the monolith came into view, penetrating the cluttered darkness, and it made Fan Girl think of a gleaming blade thrusting into supple flesh.

A good old after midnight hunt, amidst the sleazy alleyways of the city, for perfect wastes of humanity was on-the-cards. Two undead lovers on the loose and cleaning up the trash that normal folks wished they could do away with. The urge for it was rising. She re-focused her mind.

Safely enclosed within the deepest depths of the cultist's televisual mount was a device, cobbled together from numerous video cassette recorders like some deranged inventor's infernal engine. Whirring tapes were rigged to play on a loop inside the intermeshed VCRs, which were all wired up to a bundle of thorny vines wrapped in strips of cloth soaked with an oozing black substance, as well as clumps of brittle, slate-coloured hair. The strands of long hair seemed to writhe and crawl, winding about the barbed vines in a protective manoeuvre.

“I think they're getting their strength back!” came the muffled yell of her Zombie Man.

She could hear the sound of hacking and slashing, the steaming sizzle of possessed hot blood spilled on cold, damp soil.

“Satan … is … good!”

“Satan … is … our pal!”

“In your own time, my darling!” he added with a sardonic point of punctuation.

She smelled the copper scent of more disbursed blood, felt droplets of crimson raining down between the cracks and gaps of the structure, splashing on her human skin coat to seep between the stitching and grace her own grey skin. It was a sensation that she could never get enough of, and she licked her lips with seething anticipation. Her zombie man was in for a roller-coaster tumble in the weeds when it was all over.

Fan Girl changes the obelisk's signal.

“Almost there, my ghoulish slab of love meat!” she said with a devious grin. Tearing the enchanted bundle from its place, Fan Girl shredded it into useless pieces.

“Why are there so many of these freaky fuckers?” Grunts and swipes and cracking bones. “This is for interrupting date night!” Slice. Slash. Splat.

“Just a little longer, babe!” She slipped an arm back and ripped off a patch from her coat, then wrapped it around the dangling mess of wires that protruded from each of the video cassette recorders; the machine needed a new heart.

With the tanned flesh stitched into the device with a series of frayed coaxial cables, she sliced open a finger and blooded the patch. Then she tore the mangled metal cover away from the Frankenstein's monster of a device and doused the spooling videotapes with droplets of her cold blood.

The emerald light faded away and a brilliant neon pink glow began to bleed-in and take over until its brightness burned with pride.

“What the hell is going on?!” Zombie Man's voice was obscured by the rising whir of the video recorders as the new message crept its way through the miles of knotted wiring that kept the whole trembling monument tied together.

Its weight shifted. Cables moved, and a large, heavy television set housed in a weighty wooden frame slumped down and blocked the narrow tunnel through which she had crawled.

“Is it working?!” she bellowed, but no answer came.

The droning of the machine increased and halted all other sounds from penetrating the glistening depths of the hypnotic obelisk.

Trapped inside the belly of the beast, Fan Girl peered through the luminous rose-coloured light and felt for a way out. There was a pocket of space above her, and a pathway seemed to open up. “Keep fighting, my love!” She bellowed, a tremor of concern lacing her words. “Just a moment more!” She crawled and climbed, gouging holes and tearing strips from her coat as it got caught on sharp corners and rogue wires.

“I'm coming!” she screamed.

Her zombie man was loyal when it came to her, he was a lover and he was a fighter, and he just wouldn't quit, but he was in danger. There was only so much a walker could manage, even when blasting off on a jolt from a bulging bag of bone ash.

Strobing blasts of emerald light coursed through the innards of the mountain; surging, pulsing shocks of an electric death rattle.

The faster she scrambled and crawled upwards through the vibrating throat of the obelisk, the more her coat became ensnared in the shifting mass. At last she slithered free of it and took one last deep surge of energy before she burst out of the top of the crooked cliff face of television sets that had been recycled into a psychotropic tower of mind-altering influence.

“I'm here, babe! I'm coming!”

Fan Girl struggled to free herself from the quaking peak of the mountain, but when she finally broke through she breathed a deep sigh of relief. Down below, basking in the emerging moonlight that cut through the retreating storm clouds, she saw her zombie man casually picking bloody chunks of flesh and shredded pieces of blue mohawk from his floral shirt. Falling leaves of burnt umber browns and rotting apple reds swirled about Zombie Man like confetti, and he looked up at her and tipped his straw hat, which dispensed a loose eyeball onto the saturated ground.

“The final movie's starting soon,” he said, shaking loose a severed hand that was gripping his bony ankle.

Fan Girl enjoys her new fanbase.

She laughed and sat atop the monument, now emanating a new signal as lambent pink mist fell like drizzling rain from its summit all the way down to its base, across the blood-drenched soil and into the woods where she saw the lingering, blinking eyes of even more cultists flitting from blue to pink.

Amidst the gory detritus of the battlefield below, she heard the vocal humming rise once again. Instinctively, she reached for her revolvers, but the cultists who had managed to survive the slaughter were all now down on bended knee gazing up at the peak of their labours, at Fan Girl as she posed and accepted their adulation.

“Fan Girl is good,” they droned. “Fan Girl is our pal.”

She gestured at the expression of devotion. “Now this is how you show a lady a good time!”

Zombie Man, standing amidst the assembled adulators, flicked some fleshy strands of gore from his axes and looked up at his beloved with a modest shrug. “Happy Anniversary.”

The End

A note from the author: while the images were generated using Microsoft Image Designer, the text of the story was entirely written by Nick Thomson with absolutely zero involvement of AI.

If you would like to read more by Nick Thomson, his novel "Murder at the Grindhouse" is available to purchase on paperback and eBook formats worldwide via Amazon now.

A loving ode to his deadly dearest.

ZOMBIE MAN & FAN GIRL WILL RETURN!

Monday, 9 November 2026