Zombie Kong - Anthology Read online

  “Tubbo!” I gasped.

  Bets and I clung to one another, ducking behind his great heel. The monster rolled to his knuckles and paced toward the shore, sniffing deep. Just then, a cannonball came roaring through the thick mist: it passed not a hundred yards from Tubbo, and sank into the side of an abandoned factory.

  Tubbo reared. He loomed above us. His good arm pounded his chest in a sluggish arrhythmia, and the scream from his torn throat was an ungodly rasp of dead flesh and broken teeth. I recognized his behavior at once. He was posturing––not at us, but at the ship, the floating thing twice his size spitting boulders at him. He challenged it as he would a living thing. He would attack it like one, too.

  I clutched Bets. “He’s going to tear that ship plank from plank!” I hissed in her ear. “We must stop him.”

  She looked at me with dull, sad eyes. “Okay, Tom,” she said. She put a hand in her bag. “You’d better run.”

  “I won’t run!” I said.

  She drew a pistol and aimed high. It lurched hard in her hand.

  Tubbo reared forward. Bullets were not enough to fell his type, but this one lodged in his skull, and he noticed it. He made a huge swooping turn. His knuckles pounded down yards from us. Bets took my hand and began to back away. Her mouth quivered. “I’m sorry, Tom,” she whispered––or maybe she couldn’t quite get the words out. I knew what she meant.

  “It’s all right,” I said. I knew this was my last chance. I had to make it count. “I’m glad I’m with you. Bets… I love––”

  I finished the sentence in a howl as Tubbo swiped his giant hand toward us, took hold of me like a child holds a crayon, and swept me into the sky.

  I would have been sick if I’d eaten anything that day. I faintly heard Bets calling from below, but the whoosh of wind in my ear covered it. In seconds, I was face to face with the beast. His vast eyes were as large as my head and white as wool. His breath reeked of the death he had eaten and the death he had become.

  I became suddenly very calm. Just avoid the teeth, Tom, I told myself. They’re barely held together, they’re decaying flesh. Some people have clawed their way out of the gullet and lived. Only be sure to avoid the teeth. And take a deep breath.

  I took a deep breath.

  Tubbo roared again––that rasping scream, that insane alarm that heralded our demise and broke down our city. I cringed between his fingers. I forced myself to straighten, to go down aware, alert, like a man. I could see so far from here. The city stretched out to my left: not quite lifeless. The sea stretched out to my right. I saw the ship clearly now. It was not one, but many. A dull, far-off boom. And then, to my terror, I realized that what I had taken for cannons emerging from below deck were, in fact, cannonballs––and they were getting bigger––I heard them whizz through the air, all around me––one struck Tubbo’s ear and burst out the other side with a massive spray of white bone and black flesh.

  And then I was falling.

  And then I was not.

  Darkness and stars warred in my vision. I thought I heard Bets calling my name, although I must have been addled from the fall, because it sounded like there were three or four of her. My head reeled. I rolled to my elbows and crawled across the spongy black palm toward the pad near the thumb. I thought I saw someone coming toward me, but my vision made multiples of him. He reached me––got me under my arm––one on each side––could it be that I was not so addled? Were there many, after all?

  “Got you, old boy.” It was Bradbury, on my left. “Nice adventure you had, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t nice at all,” said Bets, on my right. “Can you walk, Tom? They have a lifeboat.”

  My vision cleared. I saw Jenny and Lillian before me, and Bets and Bradbury at my sides, supporting me. “I can walk,” I croaked. I wasn’t sure right then that I could, to be honest. But I had the desire to be useful.

  “They’re warships!” said Jenny, as we went, as quick as we could, to the docks. “They’re going to shuttle us north where there aren’t so many of the you-know-whats. We’ve been taking people back and forth. There are more survivors than you can imagine, Tom! This city isn’t as dead as we thought.”

  Bets helped me into the lifeboat. She stroked my cheek. “And neither are you.”

  I thanked my Maker it was true. As we rowed away from shore, I realized it didn’t matter where the giant zombie gorillas had come from––or even where the rescue ships came from, although I certainly intended to ask. All I had to know was that they did exist, and that I had done everything I could. As I held Bets in my arms, gazing out at man’s last army fighting nature’s most hideous one, I realized that I had everything I needed right here: my girl, my health, my friends.

  Giant zombie gorillas or not, it wasn’t such a bad life after all.

  MARK ONSPAUGH

  Dear Fay Wray, We Need Your Help…

  It came chittering and moaning from farm country in Iowa.

  Easily fifty feet tall, its vast size made it visually incomprehensible, an enigma the mind simply refused to reconcile. Even films of the creature could only resolve that it was a massive primate, and that what had been thought to be mange was instead decomposition.

  The thing was rotting as it traveled toward the east.

  Farmers and hunters in the area, the sons and daughters of pioneers, shot at it with rifles and shotguns, pistols and hunting bows.

  Nothing slowed the creature as it shoveled vast quantities of livestock and people into its gaping, fanged maw, chewing them into a bloody mass of muscle and fur, skin and bone, its copious, foul-smelling drool leaving small, toxic ponds in its wake.

  The Army joined in the fray, as well as members of law enforcement and local gangs, each bringing high-tech weaponry and sheer bravado to the fight.

  They were crushed underfoot or swept into the crushing jaws of the thing, while bits of corrupted, furred flesh the size of Persian rugs dropped into the streets, one such loathsome cast-off smothering a mother and her newborn.

  The President called in fighter jets, perhaps thinking back to a movie his grandparents had told him about. Following that line of reasoning, he tried to contact Fay Wray, only to find out she was dead, and her estate refused to have her exhumed.

  As if getting into the spirit of things, the oversized simian clambered up the side of a skyscraper with the practiced ease of all primates, evacuating its bowels and bladder as it climbed, claiming another ninety lives in that awful tide.

  The press, having little to offer in the way of weapons beyond the metaphorical, gave it names like Prince Primate, Astounding Ape, and The Mighty Monkey.

  Scientists were called in as it began to lay waste to Illinois.

  Probes were shot into the thing, dislodging huge parasites, fleas the size of corgis and ticks the size of schnauzers. These fed upon hapless grad students and pets, adding dozens to the death toll.

  The probes revealed that the creature had no life signs beyond locomotion, vocalization, and feeding.

  No heart beat, no respiration, no cellular activity of any kind.

  Clearly this was impossible. After all, this wasn’t a world of wizards and witches.

  Probes were recalibrated and relaunched, and more grad students were sucked to withered husks by oversized vermin.

  The new probes confirmed the impossible.

  The thing was dead. The rotting flesh was consistent with death, although a more rapid rate of putrefaction would have been expected.

  The stench of the thing became so great that its coming was known from several miles away, and some people succumbed to the foul odor. One old woman left a suicide note under a plaster bust of Lincoln: ‘I would rather be dead than smell that (expletive deleted) critter anymore.’

  The press tried names like ‘Stinkosaurus Rex’ and ‘Stenchzilla’, but the public wouldn’t accept them. The reporters went back to their Zim’s Zoo Book and thesauri for new ideas.

  At the White House, nuclear options were dis
cussed and discarded.

  Pheromones as bait were considered, but what was the gender of the beast, and would it even be attracted to the opposite sex? And where would we find another creature––preferably undead?

  Meanwhile, in Addison, Iowa, Doctor Emily Grange made a remarkable find.

  Under an enormous red tent trimmed in gold, she found the remains of a carnival, and a barrel of toxic waste labeled An-775.

  The toxic waste had gone inert by that time, which was a small blessing. It was traced to a small Iowan trucking company, and from there, to a shell corporation called Goosie Juice. This proved to be a front for a black ops, off the grid, unofficial and unsanctioned research arm of Medusa––the team first commissioned by FDR to fight Nazi zombies in World War II.

  Further digging by journalists and Iowan Senator Ken Farley revealed that An-775 was called ‘Anubis gas’, and had been developed by Doctor Helmut Waschbär to fight undead Nazis with good old American zombies (plus some Brits and maybe a few Aussies).

  An-775 did reanimate the dead. It also turned live things un-live.

  Unfortunately, An-775 also had problematic side effect: it enlarged the organism twenty-five times its original size.

  While an army of one-hundred-and-fifty-foot undead Yanks might seem like a real advantage in a fight with puny six-foot Aryan zombies, there were the questions of control, feeding, and transport.

  Project Anubis was scrubbed, and Dr. Waschbär went on to the highly successful Red Rover Program, turning Russian soldiers into werewolves.

  In the time it took to track down the potential source of the ravaging zombie primate, it had reached the Appalachian mountain range. Here, brave hill people fought with a tenacity and ferocity still celebrated in songs like, “Monkey on the Mountain”, “Critter Ruined My Still and Ate My Grandpappy”, and “Stinks to High Heaven”.

  Thanks to a flaming barrier of old tires, strip mine leavings, and moonshine, the creature was held at bay for two days, giving the President, his top advisers, and key members of the populace––senators, doctors, scientists, entertainers, and sports figures––time to evacuate to a secret underground bunker codenamed ‘Bedford Falls’. From there the President could coordinate attacks against the Behemoth Baboon in safety, along with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Sammy Alcala, the MVP of the recent World Series.

  (Editor’s note: It should be noted that the fire that saved the President rendered the Appalachian range––arguably one of the nation’s most beautiful––into a charred and stinking mire of burned trees, homes, people, and livestock. Efforts by Dolly Parton and Billy Ray Cyrus have already raised two million dollars for aid and reclamation, thanks in part to the release of their duet, “Monkeyshines”.)

  Once past the mountains, the creature consumed an entire fleet of tour buses (nicknamed ‘Zombuses’ by All-Star Tours, and featuring ‘Tours of the Zombie Primate and Other Undead Horrors’) pausing only to pick some large clumps of tendons and muscles from its teeth with a telephone pole.

  In Virginia, the thing hesitated, as if trying to get its bearings. It was unmindful of various attacks by American and UN forces, even though one lucky rocket strike took out the monster’s left eye. Unfortunately, the rogue eyeball destroyed most of the CIA headquarters in Langley, something the FBI gleefully posted on YouTube (with the caption, ‘Suck on that, spooks’) and tweeted to their fellow domestic law enforcement agencies throughout the free world.

  The creature headed north, straight for Washington, D.C. Government officials decided to move the President even further down, to a sub-sub-shelter known as ‘Satan’s Rumpus Room’. Though well stocked with plenty of gourmet foods and wines (plus Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper, the President’s favorite), a private movie theater, a game room, a nine-hole golf course, and a theme park recently confiscated from the estate of a dead pop star, accommodations were more limited than they had been in Bedford Falls. Certain sacrifices had to be made. (Editor’s note: The wisdom of leaving the Vice President and his family behind in favor of the cast of the President’s favorite sitcom, Cheez-Heads, is not something we will debate here.)

  The colossal beast reached the nation’s capital and a curious thing happened.

  It spent two entire days seemingly obsessed with manhole covers. It would see one from several blocks away and rush over––or through––several buildings to get to it (see side article: Ape Destroys Lincoln Memorial and Most of DC’s Starbucks in Mad Rush to Manholes). It would then pick up the manhole, examine it closely with its one remaining eye, then bite it.

  “Like a feller checkin’ a silver dollar to see if t’were any good,” observed homeless squeegee jockey Donald “Gummy” Olberstein, former Western sidekick of the popular 1950s series, The Sons of Doc Holliday.

  Unfortunately, whatever the primate was looking for was not to be found under any of the manhole covers of Washington. After biting the one hundred pound cast iron and concrete treat, the gorilla would roar and hurl the disc. This resulted in several more thousand dollars in damages (negligible in the face of the billions already run up) and the decapitation of the entire DC Jammerz street gang (see YouTube video: Fronters Loose (sic) Heads, posted by Li’l Diablo).

  A number of D.C.’s finest, hoping to get a jump on the military and the Secret Service, filled the streets with SWAT vans and weapons confiscated from cartel minions and gang members.

  A number of them, taking in the miasma that surrounded the creature, fell violently ill and collapsed in the street, where they were consumed by maggots the size of piglets dripping from the ruined eye socket of the beast.

  Others, wearing gas masks, did not succumb to the foul stench of the undead thing, but found that their bullet-proof vests and heavy wool uniforms were no barrier against the questing proboscises of the giant fleas and ticks searching for fresh blood in the streets of Washington.

  The creature, unmindful of the bullets, tear gas, and rocket fire, filled its putrid maw with squirming victims and its own parasites. Their screams became muffled and were soon lost in the din of battle, while partially-chewed officers rained down upon their fellows, one with a leg still kicking, and a head and torso screaming for a full five minutes before a grizzled desk sergeant put a bullet in the man’s head.

  Though it was not the worst encounter with the gorilla, the D.C. police came to call it ‘The Everett Avenue Massacre’, and it was made into a TV movie with Miley Cyrus and John Stamos.

  In Iowa, Doctor Emily Grange woke up in a cold sweat on her cot, shouting “Petroglyphs!” Without delay, she made a call to local law enforcement for a chopper and found that all aircraft in the area had been either stepped on or grabbed out of the air and chewed on by the creature. She eventually found a crop duster willing to take her up and over the carnival site, and perhaps beyond, if her suspicions were warranted.

  She prayed that they were not.

  In Satan’s Rumpus Room, the President appeared in a mock-up of the Oval Office and assured the beleagured nation that he had “not left his post.” This claim was shown to be a rather transparent fiction when the backdrop behind him collapsed and revealed an impromptu bowling tournament between the President’s family and several well-known 80s musicians, including Hall & Oates.

  Enraged, much of the population of Washington stormed the White House, not realizing that the President was safely underground in Nevada. The protesters were mowed down by the Secret Service and the police, delighted to finally have a target they could take down with bullets, tear gas, and rockets.

  Though the action would later be whitewashed and the body count chalked up to the rampaging gorilla-ghoul, people would come to call it ‘The Pennsylvania Avenue Massacre’, and it would be made into a big budget Michael Bay movie with James Franco and Anne Hathaway, with WETA providing a motion-control zombie ape, played by Andy Serkis.

  As bodies were piling up outside the White House Rose Garden, the gorilla took this moment to put in an appearance. By this t
ime, the Army had mobilized Project Coconut, and had instituted an emergency draft to beef up its decimated ranks. A warhead with a low nuclear yield (called an ‘Oppenheimer Junior’) was deployed from an M1 Abrams tank and fired by Corporal Scott “Scooter” James, the President’s nephew.

  The missile slammed into the creature’s mid-section and exploded, sending putrescent flesh and some of the larger undigested human bones flying. These destroyed the White House Rose Garden and made a charnel house of the Lincoln Bedroom, which, at the time, was occupied by the Vice-President and one of the docents from the midday tour.

  The creature halted as its entrails spilled out in a foul, fetid mass. Its stomach acids ate through several tanks, including the M1 Abrams, where Scooter James died a messy and agonizing death.

  Several hundred brave men and women closed in to finish off the creature, when five undead tapeworms, each nearly a quarter mile in length, broke free of the rotting intestines and attacked the troops. The tapeworm, generally an annoying but somewhat passive creature, had been transformed by An-775 into something like a moray eel crossed with an anaconda on meth––a really huge moray eel and anaconda, on a really huge quantity of high-grade meth.

  The tapeworms strangled, poisoned, and devoured over fifty percent of the troops before the gorilla began scooping up vast mouthfuls of its own innards, parasites and hapless humans. (Editor’s note: Video of the event showed the living dead primate healing while continuing to decay, a contradiction that scientists are still investigating to this very day.)

  The President and his staff were considering more extreme options (move the U.S. to an offshore territory, annex Canada, relocate to the moon) when Dr. Grange called in from Iowa. “Mr. President, I believe I have a way to lure the creature into the sea… however, we do have a bigger…”

  “How do we lure it, Doctor?”