Universal Monsters Part I
The world ended on a Tuesday like we always knew it would. Brinkmire drank tea because Brinkmire drinks tea. And, like always, when he had wrestled the last drop from his earthy, simple, ceramic mug he pried the teabag from the bottom of the cup and ate it.
This was prison, after all. We all had our bits. Our business. Little things we did to keep the even scarier, even more murdery murderers at bay. Sure, it seems silly, but if a man will eat a teabag, what won’t he eat? If he’s not hiding the fact that he likes to eat used, sticky disgusting tea and paper and yuck, then, fuck, what is he hiding?
These are fair questions.
Jackson shared a cell with Brinkmire and said his shit smelled like potpourri. Said if it was socially acceptable he’d put Brinkmires shit into little bowls and spread it throughout his house. Said he’d make decorative brooms out of it and sell them to tourists for twenty bucks a pop.
Twenty bucks a poop?
We all had get-rich-quick schemes back when money meant something.
They weren’t exclusively poo-based.
Space was trying to explain Schrödinger’s Cat to a group of freshmen when the first bombs fell.
His thing was screaming at things and then apologizing in tongues. Things like walls and head-lice. He’d shout horrible, racist things at basketballs and then apologize in what we’ve come to be pretty sure is a little known dialect of Klingon with heavy Portuguese influences.
He was telling the students that the cat was both alive and dead until the box was opened.
And everything you’ve ever heard about vampires is true. There are as many different species as there are stories. Trying to identify the type that’s coming at you is a good way to get dead, but ever since we came up with these “Vampire Bingo” cards we all do it anyway.
Lucians thing is that he’s always sick. He’s got a half dozen diseases at any given time. Right now I believe his most prominent ailment is Cushing’s Disease. None of us think Cushings’s is contagious, we held a meeting and all agreed that it’s genetic, but none of us are doctors.
And all of us, all our things are basically bicycle locks. They don’t have to be perfect, they don’t even have to be all that good, and mostly they aren’t. We just need to park next to the guy that doesn’t lock his bike at all.
None of us are too worried about the zombies. It’s the rigor mortis that makes them so slow, we’re told. But it’s the fact that they’re all half-blind that really makes them ineffectual. The soft tissue rots first, We guess. We guess eyes are pretty soft.
None of us are doctors.
Zombies are also hugely suicidal as a group. They’re like tapeworms, in a way. They get lost in the whole BRAAAAIIIIINNS thing but when they eat someone else’s melon they take on their victims consciousness for a while. There seems to be a clarity after they eat someone from what we’ve seen where they realize not only they have eaten an accountant or something but, effectively, they have just eaten themselves.
Which is pretty fucked up.
But funny.
Zombies are the best entertainment we’ve got in a world where pretty much everyone has been eaten or drank or whatever. We collect them sometimes and let them all loose in a field. It’s a lot like football but with no ball and more rotting.
But it’s funny.
Hancock’s thing is that he has AIDS. It’s pretty effective. His thing used to be that he wrote really big so you can probably see why his new thing is AIDS. Lucian gets a little pissy with Hancock sometimes for stealing his bit, but that sandbox is big enough for both of them. Especially since we’re not in prison anymore and all.
Frank’s thing is that he’s just ugly as sin. We all agree that isn’t a very nice thing to say about sin, but we had another meeting and decided that in prison accuracy is more important than pleasantries. No one could keep even a half-mast while looking at that dude. Even the vampires won’t bite him so Frank gets the coffee most days.
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