Universal Monsters XII

Mummies are like molotov cocktails with feet.  They’re anointed with oil, wrapped in linen, kept away from moisture and whatever organs and things don’t get yanked out before they get entombed basically liquefies and ferments.  They’re just these fantastic little fire-bombs that moan a little here and there and explode on impact.
 
Sure, there’s the whole idea of the curse of the mummy but we live in a world where most of us have been eaten by things with wings so, you know, not a whole lot of places to go but up.

Space thought boils might have been a very real concern, and we all agreed that boils would make everything way worse, but we’ve all decided not to concern ourselves too much.  With anything.  Ever again.  

We called them “Walking Rags” and then just “Rags” or, sometimes, “Hey, Fucky!” if we were just trying to get their attention.  Because, “Mummy” just sounded way too British and fey.  And even we aren’t wild about the idea of massacring moms.  Even British moms.

We walked the water line.  We stayed close to the gulf coast because we figured that limited ambush opportunities  from land monsters and it gave us a quick way to put out any of us who found ourselves even the smallest bit on fire.

We saw our first rags on the beach, just a few miles north of MGD 64.  We recognized them pretty quickly from the movies and we all tried to remember Imhotep’s name and if mummies had any super powers.  We tried to remember if The Rock was a mummy or something else and we all agreed that Indiana Jones was a way better series.  We all agreed that we didn’t recognize The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as canon but some kind of snuff film or something.

The gulf was calm, the gulf is always calm, but the wind was strong and loud and the rags didn’t see us at all so we decided we could sneak up on them.

Lucian took point because, absent Fraction, Lucian was probably the scariest person we knew and on opening day you start your best pitcher.

There were three rags sitting in a circle, or maybe a triangle, and we couldn’t hear anything but we thought maybe they were talking and we wondered if they had tongues or brains at all.  Most of us remember stories about mummies brains being yanked out through their noses with wire-hangers or something, though none of us could remember the source of our information and some of us thought maybe we were thinking of abortions.

But there were three of them and Lucian crept as close as he could before giving up cover and then he just sprinted flat-out and some of us remembered that Lucian was a running back in college before he was a murderer and a convict.

If you’ve never seen a look of pure shock on the face of a 3000 year old mummified Egyptian corpse, believe us, it almost makes an Apocalypse worth it.

They all made this sound, like Tim Allen asking a question about metaphysics and then Lucian’s fist connected with the first rag.  He tagged it right in the back of the head and its skull deflated like he plugged a basketball with buckshot.  Lucian spun around and clotheslined the next mummy sending its head a few dozen feet away where it got stuck, eyes down, in the sand.  The third rag punched Lucian in the back and its hand snapped off at the wrist.  Lucian broke the rest of its arm off at the elbow and started stabbing the sad little bastard with his own bones.

The rest of us were supposed to be helping by this point but we couldn’t stop watching.  There hadn’t been a lot of levity in the past few days.  Even for convicts pulling a jolt these were depressing times and this was just too awesome to mess with.  If he had been in trouble I’m sure we would have stepped in but, at this point, this was the funniest a corpse had been since Weekend at Bernie’s or at least the Joan Rivers show and we weren’t gonna screw that up.

It turns out mummies don’t die when you decapitate them, which is a fact you may want to write down for future reference assuming we didn’t get them all.  But they don’t die like that, probably because they’re already dead.  The one whose head was stuck in the sand, it was just flailing wildly and, at this point, was a good eight feet from the fight, but was still going at it, punching and kicking at nothing at all, like a dead little Billy Blanks.  Lucian was still stabbing the third rag with its own ulna when the one with the four-day-old birthday-balloon-head tried to mix it up again.  Lucian dodged a couple of sad punches and then grabbed a loose bit of fabric and started running down the beach unraveling the bastard.  It looked for all the world like he was trying to fly the thing like a kite.  A few hundred yards later there was no more mummy and Space said, “God, if only we had some popcorn.”

Lucian made his way back to the kill-box he had created and mopped up.  He drop-kicked the decapitated head into the gulf and then dragged what was left of the other mummies into the water as well, where they dissolved into nothing at all.  He collected something from the triangle where they were originally sitting and strutted back to the rest of us.

“You believe this shit?” he said.  “The fucking mummies were playing Pokémon cards.  One of em had a fucking Squirtle.  Nice.”

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The Audiobook version of Chapter 12 is now available. Click here if you want to hear me read my own words far too quickly.