Posts Tagged ‘zombies’

Walking Dead Killed the Dinosaur Star

Posted: March 7, 2012 in Uncategorized
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I heard today that Terra Nova has been cancelled.  This saddens me because I was one of the apparent few who watched the show.  I dvr’d it if I wasn’t home.  I  imdb’d the cast during commercials.  I always stay tuned to catch a sneak peak of next week’s episode.

There are a handful of  TV shows I have loved so much that viewing them is akin to a religious experience.  Tops in my small-screen hall of fame are Lost and The X Files. Destined to join them one day are Dexter and Fringe, and probably Walking Dead. But the jury’s still out on that one.

Even if it had been renewed, I don’t think Terra Nova would have made the elite list.  The characters didn’t crack your heart open the way Charlie, Hurley, Sayeed and the rest of the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 did every week. (Just writing their names makes me verklempt).  Despite their attractiveness, Terra Nova’s  leads never generated the romantic chemistry that Scully/Mulder/Dunham/Bishop delivered.  Maybe because the Shannons were already married with kids and often too exhausted to have sex let alone create any tension over it.   Most importantly and most egregiously missing were those jaw dropping moments  that instantly attach themselves to hash tags across the Twittersphere. Those shocking twists and reveals that have you yelling out loud, “Oh my God!” even though you’re watching alone. 

 So why am I disappointed that the Shannon saga is no more?  Why did I ever start watching it in the first place?  The answer is simple.  Dinosaurs.

In my 49 years I can honestly say, with the exception of Barney, I have never met a dinosaur I didn’t like.  The first one I ever saw was a Ray Harryhausen allosaurus chomping on a caveman in One Million Years B.C.  Being 4 years old at the time, I wasn’t too concerned that cavewoman Rachel Welch wore eyeliner, let alone co-existed with dinosaurs.  All I cared about was the menacing monster appearing out of nowhere.  Maybe it was because I had an older sister who scared the crap out of me.  It was comforting to know there was something bigger and badder than her, even if it only existed in stop animation.

Sometimes dinosaurs showed up in the nick of time and saved the day.  It was a sixties sci-fi staple to see the romantic leads cornered by a tongue slashing gargantuan (Usually a garden variety iguana tricked out with triceratops frills or spikes).  Just as the hero and heroine were about to become steak tartare, a second dinosaur would arrive on the scene and a lizard smackdown quickly ensued.  Through an obstacle course of whipping tails and tendrils, the humans used the distraction to make their escape.

 One classic example of this scenario featured David Hedison and Jill St. John in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.  Michael Creighton not only borrowed the title for the sequel to Jurassic Park, the climatic scene in the first Spielberg screen adaptation paid homage to this motif. The sequence with the raptors chasing Alan Grant and company through the compound were some of tensest moments I’ve ever spent in the movie theater.  Thank God for T-Rex party crashers.

My son inherited my love of dinosaurs and related beasts.  By the time he was four years old he had already seen every Godzilla movie rentable at our local video store.  (Video stores – another victim of natural selection). I introduced him to the fire-breathing rubber-suited dude mostly to keep my sanity.  His obsession with Biollant, Hedorah, Rodan and King Ghidorah kept Barney and Friends off our TV screen and out of our lives. 

I’m not sure if I passed all of my dinosaur fixations onto him, though.  I don’t know if he ever looks across a meadow on a bright sunny day and wishes that a brontosaurus head would suddenly pop up over the tree line.  Or if he ever looks at a piece of construction equipment and wonders what the dinosaur equivalent would have been back in Bedrock.  Actually, I do know that he never watched a single episode of Terra Nova, so clearly the fruit has moved on from the tree.

I guess impact tremors and deafening roars just aren’t thrilling people the way they used to.  Maybe if the characters in Terra Nova had been stalked by prehistoric zombies or sexy vampires instead of giant man-eating predators, ratings would have been higher.  A TV show about serial killing zombie dinosaurs. Now that would be worth tuning into!

Eat and Be Eaten

Posted: November 8, 2011 in Uncategorized
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We are now a week beyond Halloween 2011, and while most of us have put away our fake limbs, Karo syrup and red food coloring, zombie fans will continue to tune into episodes of The Walking Dead and dream of lurching and shambling in the year ahead.

 It’s not news that society is fascinated with all things zombie or that many fans enjoy the annual ritual of pretending to be flesh-eating ghouls in zombie walks across the country.  Many theories have circulated as to why this cultural phenomenon has such wide spread appeal and staying power.  What I find interesting about zombies is the fact that they are simultaneously victim and victimizer.  Zombies are just people like us who have been bitten by other zombies.  They represent both the top and the bottom of the food chain. Like Buddha said, “We all eat and we are all eaten.”

 Except for a few dietary habits I’d like to change, I’m fairly comfortable with the eating aspect of the great circle of life.  It’s the being eaten part I have trouble with, and I suspect that I am not alone.  Is that why I and so many others are riveted by stories that tap into our primal fear of being devoured?

 Tales of folks getting eaten by something bigger and badder than us date back to the beginning of time.  Often they involve whales.  And we were told these stories usually at the dawn of our histories.  Maybe if our caregivers had just stuck to the big fish sagas we’d have been better off.  After all, Jonah and Pinocchio survived.  But we were also fed bedtime stories about wolves, bears and witches that loved to gobble up little piggies, gingerbread men and children.  No wonder we ran screaming when Grandma lunged at us with outstretched arms cackling, “Oh, I could just eat you up!”

 When I was a very small child, I invented imaginary creatures called Desert Monsters.  At least I think they were called Desert Monsters.  They could have been Dessert Monsters.  They looked like Gumby, except their heads were pointier, they were black, and they had huge teeth.  And they ate people.  One of my earliest memories is a dream that I had of a Desert Monster biting a chunk out of my mother’s head.  It’s a testament to how young I must have been that I remember there being no gore involved.  No brains.  No blood.  In fact, in the dream my mother’s head wasn’t even hollow.  When the chunk was taken out it only looked like her forehead was indented.  Kind of like taking a bite out of a solid chocolate Easter bunny. 

 So obviously this fear of ending up in the belly of the beast is something that has been with me for a while.  I also remember watching adventure movies and being freaked out when someone got caught in quick sand.  There was always that desperate hand trying to cling to a root or vine, finally disappearing into the bog.  How far would the victim ultimately sink?  All the way to China I assumed.  Eaten up by mother earth and shat out the other end.  What a way to go.

 An even worse way to go would have to be getting eaten alive.  Pythons at least have the decency to strangle you before they swallow you up.  Sharks, alligators, flesh eating bacteria, not so much.  I do go in the ocean because my love of boogie boarding trumps my fear of ending up like Quint, but mountain trails, Florida everglades and islands occupied by monitor lizards, you can count me out.  And I always keep a tube of Neosporin handy.

 And of course, no discussion of flesh eaters can be complete without bringing up the ghastly specter of cannibalism.  People eating people are the yuckiest people in the world. From the Donner Party to the Dahmer Party, cannibalism has always been fodder for sensational headlines and dark humor.  I remember reading an anecdote in the Readers Digest about a missionary who went to help the starving natives in the French Hinterlands.  They ate him.    

 I suppose if I died in a plane crash, I wouldn’t begrudge the survivors the chance to stay alive by feasting on my corpse.  Though, I think you should be able to declare this on the back of your driver’s license.  In the event of an emergency, eat me.  Check Yes or No.

 So speaking of all this eating, what’s the next big holiday on our plates?  Thanksgiving.  Inevitably we will see the story in the news about that lucky turkey who has been spared the butcher’s knife.  And inevitably along with that story will come the image of the not so lucky turkeys huddled together in the pen, looking anxiously around as if they know their fate.  We know their fate, and while many of us look forward to a nice juicy bird with all the trimmings, we can’t help but feel for them.  Those who are not already vegetarians may consider a lifestyle change.  Some may fantasize a plot to rescue the critters.  I always find myself doing this when I pass by live lobsters in the supermarket. 

 But many of us will look away, because the gravity of real terror and suffering is often too much to bear.  And if we took a moment to identify with those feelings and think about our own fragile place in the cycle of life and death, our Thanksgivings might be forever altered.

 So we will sit around the dining table and not think any more about where the turkey came from than we do the potatoes or the yams.  And after the football is over and the dishes are put away, we may find ourselves on the couch with a slice of pumpkin pie watching last Sunday’s DVR’d episode of Walking Dead.  Where the ends of the food chain meet, we find a terror we can live with.

EMINENT DOMAIN: A Zombie Revenge Story

Posted: November 1, 2011 in Short Stories (for Kindle and Personal Computers)
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Below is an excerpt from my short zombie story EMINENT DOMAIN. 

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Mitchell Leyritz couldn’t believe his luck. There was one box of green tea facial mask left in his mother’s bathroom cabinet. The last time he invaded her stash of beauty supplies to cull together a zombie ensemble, she promised if he tried it again, she’d ground him for life.

But Mom was out of town and Mitchell knew he’d have plenty of time to replace the pasty green gunk. He also knew there would be scores of kids slathered in white grease paint, fake blood and latex. Mitchell wanted to stand out. He hoped as the mask dried it would become cracked and crusty, rendering the putrescent look of decay he desired.

Mitchell had been on a college tour and missed out on the last Zombie March, the big one held each year on Halloween. If the newspaper was right and Shorefront Equities had its way, the city permit’s department would put an end to the twice-yearly tradition. In a full page editorial, Jerry Mumphries was quoted as saying, “A lot of people already think of Asbury Park as a zombie. It keeps coming back to life only to falter time and time again due to a lack of brains. We don’t need our citizens running around as reanimated corpses, reinforcing that image.”

Today’s rally of the pretend undead was intended as a giant “fuck you” to Mumphries and all the developers who were wielding a sledge hammer of change in the community, with little regard for anything other than lining their pockets. What better way for the restless and politically conscious youth to rain on the asshole’s parade, than to lurch their way through his ribbon cutting ceremony. Because the organizers had been denied permission to assemble and were already threatened with hefty fines, word of the march spread off-line, via text messages and breathless cell phone calls.

The small but enthusiastic group, maybe one hundred total, gathered in the morning chill on a beach just north of the Asbury city line. Like Mitchell, they arrived in various states of decomposition. There would be no special makeovers today, no vendors or brain eating contests.  Not even a Thriller dance. Today’s mission was simple: disrupt and dismay the powers that be.

Chad Hiller, the lead zombie marcher, addressed his fellow ghouls. “We’ll stay on the beach, cut underneath Convention Hall and access the boardwalk on the other side. If we run into any rent-a-cops, just shamble on by them and try to get as close as you can to the ceremony. ”

Chad’s girlfriend Amy raised a prosthetic limb and asked, “And if we run into any real cops?”

“Eat their brains!” someone yelled from the back.

Chad and Amy were superstars in the world of zombie marchers. Chad had given Mitchell the idea of burying his clothes in the backyard for four days prior to a walk in order to give his costume an authentic risen-from-the-grave aroma. Mitchell made sure he was in the front of the crowd so he could walk beside the couple or at least be as near as possible.

“If a real cop stops you, follow their orders,” Chad advised. “There’s a difference between undead and real dead. We don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

Convention Hall loomed ahead as the march kicked off. While the zombie marchers knew there was a specific goal set forth for them today, most were happy just oozing their synthetic body fluids and flaunting their rubber wounds. A few found staying in character a bit challenging. Being a zombie on asphalt and concrete was one thing, but trying to lurch with realism in the sand was another.

“That’s weird,” Mitchell overheard Chad say to Amy. “I thought they’d have at least a few security guards patrolling the boards.”

Chad was looking toward the boardwalk, where it intersected with the south entrance of Convention Hall’s arcade. Even with the arcade closed for the ceremony, normally there would at least be people from the condos walking their dogs or taking in the ocean view. There wasn’t a living soul in sight to greet them as the parade of zombie marchers advanced through the sand.

Mitchell cleared his throat and offered, “Maybe Gifted Zelda and friends are kicking up a shit storm on the other side of the Hall, and the cops needed all units to respond.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Chad said, glancing over. “Nice job with the mud.”

Mitchell’s heart leapt in his chest.

“Next time, add some maggots or a couple of worms.”

“Thanks, I will!” Mitchell envisioned himself hanging out with Chad and Amy at the after party. He quickly edited the fantasy to include a girlfriend for himself. Maybe if he had one before the next zombie march, it could actually happen. If there was a next zombie march.

“What the hell is that?” Amy asked, pointing her limb toward the arcade entrance.

Mitchell and Chad looked over and saw a figure standing in an open doorway. From a distance, it looked like a tall naked man wearing a red cap.

A middle-aged zombie marcher standing behind Chad shouted, “Looks like someone’s trying to bring back streaking!”

Chad shrugged, “Whatever,” and gestured for everyone to follow him. Abandoning their lumbering gait, the group moved quickly from the sand and onto the boardwalk.

As they got closer, Mitchell could see the man in the doorway wasn’t just sans apparel.  It appeared he was missing all of his skin as well. What Mitchell thought was a red cap on the man’s head, now had the definite appearance of an exposed brain.

Chad called out to the skinned man, “Dude, if we were having a best effects contest, you’d so totally win.”

Jealous, but none-the-less impressed, Mitchell muttered, “How did he do that?”

“I don’t think he’s one of us,” Amy said with caution in her voice. “I mean, how did he get inside the Hall? And where is security?”

“I don’t know,” Chad said, a huge grin cracking the pancake make-up on his cheeks.  “But that is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

The skinned man stepped back from the doorway and let the zombie walkers through.  The participants bringing up the rear tried the other doors, but found they were locked. The sun was out, but the late March breeze was icy and they longed for a respite from the elements.  Patiently, they waited to enter the arcade single file.

In the swath of sunlight beaming down from the windows above, Chad stood in front of the skinnedman and looked him up and down. Pointing at the scrotumless testicles dangling like earrings from either side of the skinned man’s penis, Chad laughed and marveled, “That’s some pretty sick attention to detail.”

The skinned man lunged forward and grabbed Chad’s head with both hands. “What the fuck?” Chad protested, still half laughing.

The expression on the skinned man’s face remained unchanged. His glassy eyes stared ahead, and the raw muscles and tendons on his cheeks and jaw line remained frozen in place. The bony tips of his fingers dug into Chad’s skin, instantly drawing blood. Chad screamed in pain. The onlookers realized this wasn’t a joke.

Frightened and confused, Mitchell stood motionless and watched as Amy rushed to Chad’s side. Two zombie marchers flew past him and tried to help her free Chad from the skinned man’s grip. Chad continued to scream as he watched real
blood drip to the floor.

From the shadows along the rows of closed storefronts, two shapes emerged. One was a man in a police uniform, looking at the crowd of zombie marchers with the same blank expression as the creature yanking on Chad’s head. Beneath the bloody tatters of the blue uniform pants, large sections of flesh were torn from the policeman’s calf and thigh.

The second figure was the baseball player from the Objects in Motion exhibit. With the baseball still in his hand, he walked gracefully on legs streaked with blood. But the baseball player wasn’t bleeding. The blood dripped from chunks of fresh meat stuffed into the spaces where his own tissue had been removed. The patched holes seemed to match the wounds on the policeman’s legs.

Still, the baseball player remained less than whole. One large section of muscle, four inches wide and two inches deep, was conspicuously missing from his left glute. Letting go of the baseball, he grabbed one of the zombie marchers and tore at his left butt cheek.

The policeman went for the legs of Chad’s other would-be rescuer, using fingernails and teeth to cut through layers of skin and fat to get to a thick, fibrous thigh muscle.

Still unable to move, Mitchell saw out of the corner of his eye the rush of zombie marchers retreating for the door. Only they couldn’t get through, because the zombie marchers who were still on the boardwalk were pushing to get in.

Mitchell’s thoughts were sluggish. He wondered why they would be trying to get inside where people were screaming. Then he saw through the window. The zombie marchers outside were also being attacked — by three men wearing Safe and Sound security guard uniforms.

One guard was missing an ear. He was clawing at heads.

Another had an open hole where his kidney had been. He was reaching for mid-sections.

The third guard, who had strands of dangling sinew instead of a jaw, tackled the middle-aged zombie marcher who was trying to flee to the beach and tore the bottom of his face off in one robust stroke.

Standing on the boardwalk behind the crowd, passively observing the chaos and horror, were three more specimens from the Objects in Motion exhibit. The well-endowed football player stood holding a warm kidney in his hand. The gelatinous
obese woman from the Endocrine Room was trying to attach the security guard’s jaw to her featureless face. The Maestro looked partially restored with a tattered ear placed over the small hole where his own ear had been.

Inside the arcade, Mitchell’s state of shock deepened as he watched a pattern emerge around him. As the zombie marchers succumbed to their injuries, they immediately reanimated and attacked the nearest living zombie marcher in range. The focus of attack was always on the body part where the deceased zombie marcher had been wounded.

Mitchell was so transfixed, he didn’t notice the slutty woman from the Reproduction Room dragging Amy, kicking and screaming, into a darkened alcove. It was Chad’s final cry for help that got Mitchell’s attention. Turning toward the entrance to the concert arena, Mitchell saw the skinned man still holding Chad by the head, bashing Chad’s skull against a brass stanchion post. Blood began to spurt from Chad’s forehead, creating a spontaneous red carpet at their feet.

Mitchell felt something rise in his throat, but before he could vomit, everything went dark and he fell in a heap on the floor.

 

Copyright 2011 by Lori Bonfitto.  All rights reserved.

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“Eminent Domain” is available for download to read on your computer or Kindle here.  (For Nook and other devices coming soon)

You can also download these other short horror stories that take place in Asbury Park and read them on your computer, or your Kindle:

“Wonderful Pinto” by Lori Bonfitto – read on your computer or Kindle  (for Nook and other devices coming soon)

“Harbinger” by Lori Bonfitto — read it on your computer or Kindle (for Nook and other devices coming soon)