Weekend at Vidu's: A Dead Drunk Short (2 page)

He finished
the salty morsel, shrugged off the angel ornaments and snowman knickknacks, and
went to stand up. But he couldn’t move. Someone had handcuffed him to a radiant
heater.

“Damn, you
really did a number on Old Jake there,” the elderly woman said as she
reattached her prosthetic leg. Her name was Eileen, a senile eighty-year-old
bar owner with eccentricities galore. “It’s a shame too, ‘cause he was my best
customer. Boring as hell, but he paid his tab. And he tipped well.”

Eileen walked
to the front window and looked outside at the growing pandemonium. She had seen
some major shit go down over the years, but nothing like this. No one had.

She calmly
turned the neon sign off and twisted the deadbolt before lowering the blinds.
Then she walked back towards the bar to pour herself a drink from her private
stock. “But this place has seen its share of death before.”

Vidu shot
towards her but got yanked back as the handcuff dug deeply into his wrist. His
infected blood trickled onto the floor and mixed with Old Jake’s.

Eileen
grabbed a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle and poured three fingers of the expensive
bourbon into a glass. She looked at Vidu as if sizing him up, and then downed
the drink in one gulp. The widower poured another.

“Those
handcuffs were my son’s when he was on the force. James was his name, and he
passed a long time ago. Before you were even born.” She downed the smooth
whiskey and refilled her glass. “Died right there playing pool. His partner
reached back to take a shot and the stick smacked James’s revolver. It went off
and the bullet severed an artery in his leg. That was on Christmas Day, 1977.
Same year Elvis died.”

Vidu
continued to struggle as Eileen walked back around to the window and peeked
outside, just in time to see some of Vidu’s friends shooting zombies before
piling into an SUV and taking off at high speed.

She smiled.
“Ahh, that’s where I recognized you. You’re the Paki that hangs out with those
guys from across the street, aren’t you? So what’s going on? You and everyone
else in the neighborhood hopped up on angel dust? Bath salts? Krokodil?”

Of course,
Vidu had no reply other than to bite the air and drool like an idiot.
“Surprised an old lady knows about that stuff?” she asked and unplugged the
extension cord running to the jukebox.

Eileen walked
a little closer and Vidu’s free arm shot out to grab her. But the old lady
merely caught his wrist and soon had his other arm tied to the bronze bar rail
with the cord. She was much stronger than she looked.

“One of your
friends, the one called Smokey, has been selling pot in the bathroom here for
years. I’ve learned all sorts of stuff from him.” With a wistful look on her
wrinkled face, she stopped her monologue to pour and down another drink.
“Sweet, sweet Smokey. Anyway, I noticed you never left a tip in all the times
you’ve been in here drinking. Now that was rude, maybe even bordering on
naughty. And eating my best customer, well, that was just plain rotten.”

Eileen
sauntered over to Vidu as seductively as a one-legged octogenarian could and
promptly slapped him across his slobbering face. Then she reached down the
front of his pants and fished around for a moment. “So it looks like I’m gonna
get that tip after all.” Disappointment crossed her face, and then she
shrugged. “I guess at my age beggars can’t be choosers, am I right?” She
dropped her actual granny panties to the ground as Old Jake’s lifeless eyes
looked on.

What happened
next was lurid and perverted, but had Vidu been consciously participating, he
would have enjoyed every second of it. All fifteen of them.

“You have got
to be kidding me. That’s all you’re good for? I’ve had better—”

The
short-lived though furious zombie-sex had loosened the power cord enough that
Vidu’s hand had slipped out. He was able to grab the trash-talking senior by
the throat and pulled her in for a massive bite to the shoulder.

Eileen
screamed and backed away, leaving behind an oozing mass of tissue that her
former captive scarfed down with gusto. She stumbled to the bar and poured one
final glass of bourbon as Vidu tugged violently once more on the handcuff. The
lubrication from his blood combined with the fact that Eileen hadn’t made the
cuffs tight enough to begin with let Vidu’s other hand pop free.

He charged
forward to finish her off, but stopped cold when Eileen’s whiskey glass
shattered on the floor. She had turned, and now the pair of zombies looked
stupidly at each other in silence like an awkward couple with nothing to say.

Due to his Sri
Lankan upbringing, Vidu had always held the elderly in high esteem, which meant
this event was all the more sordid. Unbeknownst to anyone else, he had worked
so hard to rip people off at the dealership in order to send money home to his
relatives. The truth was, Vidu was half the douchebag his friends thought he
was. But if they could only see him now: pantless and covered in God knows what
kind of bodily fluids while fraternizing with a one-legged granny named Eileen
of all things. The jokes would practically tell themselves. Only it wasn’t
funny.

There was a
clicking sound as the front door unlocked from the outside. It was one of
Eileen’s sons coming to look for dear old mom. Big mistake.

Both zombies
were upon him before he even stepped inside, and the expressions on his face
went from surprise to fear to sadness in mere moments.

Done with
their feast, the new summer/winter couple tore off down Armitage Avenue in
search of new victims with Eileen falling behind due to her age and health
conditions.

A few blocks
away, a handful of other cannibals were attempting to break into the local
charter school while children from the summer breakfast program screamed
inside, further driving the zombies into a frenzy.

An old pickup
truck bounced the curb and stopped with a rattle as a potbellied man hopped out
and quickly moved to the bed of his truck. His name was Tom Fisher, and he was
the school’s gym teacher and volunteer landscaper. Tom had come to school that
morning to pull weeds, but he was about to get his hands dirty with work of a
very different kind.

One zombie
ceased pounding on the door and made his way to the truck, as did Vidu and
Eileen.  Tom turned to face them and then pulled the starter rope on his
old sixteen-inch chainsaw, usually employed for cutting down small tree limbs.
It fired right up and he gave a quick swipe at the lead zombie, catching the
former alderman right underneath the chin.

The gush of
blood was more than Tom expected and it immediately waterlogged the chainsaw
just as the Sri Lankan arrived, hungry and half-naked. So Tom improvised and
slapped him in the face with the steel blade, knocking him down and opening a
deep gash on his forehead. The wound bled directly into Vidu’s eyes, forcing
him to search for his prey using those newfound super hearing abilities. While
he reached about blindly, the teacher furiously tried to restart the chainsaw.

Of course,
this is when Eileen caught up and climbed right over Vidu’s back. In her haste,
the woman’s prosthetic leg came loose and she toppled over. To add insult to
injury, the chainsaw started back up and Tom brought it down hard, lodging it
six inches into her skull.

Still blinded
and now disoriented by the loud chainsaw, Vidu pounced after Tom in the wrong
direction and was immediately hit by a passing car, whereupon his naked lower
half became lodged in the windshield.

Tom yanked
his improvised weapon out and retreated to the rear of the dilapidated school
as the car disappeared around the corner with Vidu flailing away.

Minutes later,
a passenger in the car was finally able to push Vidu back through the
windshield, jingle bells and all.

He hit the
pavement at high speed and rolled for twenty yards before the curb stopped him.
Unfazed, Vidu sat up with a mean case of road rash and his left arm dangling
uselessly beside him, shattered in six places. The good thing was he couldn’t
feel it.

So far that
morning he’d had his fingers bitten off, been turned into a zombie, and then
got beaten with a fake leg before getting kidnapped and raped by an old woman.
After that, he’d been smashed in the face with a chainsaw and hit by a car. And
it was only 9:30.

But he had
neither the capability nor the inclination to dwell on the past. So when the
unmistakable sound of children’s laughter reached his ears, as did the loud
noise of a carousel, Vidu stood up in a hurry, banging his head on an
elephant-shaped sign. It read “Zoo Parking,” but it might as well have read
“Free Food,” because that’s what he was after.

Battered and
bloody but far from broken, Vidu headed towards the happy sounds. Unfortunately
for many, many people, his morning was just picking up steam.

Check Out “Dead
Drunk: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse... One Beer at a Time”

Charlie Campbell was your average, balding, thirty-year-old
alcoholic with a dead-end job and a penchant for shambling through life one
mistake after another. However, none of that mattered following the sudden
arrival of a mysterious sickness that brought with it infected mobs of
zombie-like creatures thirsting for the flesh of the living.

Trapped in a Chicago apartment the morning after a raucous
bachelor party, Charlie and his old fraternity buddies must battle for survival
against the cannibalistic horde, a military invasion and their own rampant
stupidity.

With supplies, common sense and brain cells dwindling by the
hour, the motley crew — including a racist cop, a Sri Lankan used car salesman,
a stoner landlord and a pet raccoon — must pull out all the stops to avoid
joining the ranks of the dead.

If you like zombies, action and humor, crack a beer, pull up
a barstool, and prepare for one wild ride!

Credits

I would like to thank all of the people who have helped me
finish this latest project as well as those who have given me encouragement along
the way. I never in my wildest dreams believed I would have actual fans, and
now I have messages coming in from places like New Zealand, Great Britain,
India, and Mexico. The support truly has been phenomenal.

I’d like to once more thank Derek Murphy of Creativindie
Covers for creating another fantastic cover design, and the editors at
Manuscript Magic for their excellent editing work.

Thank you to my friends and family for believing in me,
thank you to my lovely wife, Kristin, and my boys, Kevin and Ryan, for keeping
life interesting, and thank you to my parents for allowing me to watch gory
zombie movies at an inappropriately young age.

Most importantly, thank you for taking an interest in my
books. If you keep reading them, I’ll keep writing them, and that’s a promise.

Richard Johnson