62) Super Sunday, 2/19: 5:20
– 5:30 AM – “Freaky in the
Funeral Parlour!”
With Vicki’s ankle still oozing blood through the makeshift
dressing, it took awhile for her and Craig to climb down the yellow ladder into
the funeral home. Standing on the desk,
Craig lifted her off the ladder and set her down – jumped off and carried her
away to a chair…
“OK, thanks…”
Vicki allowed, “but this still doesn’t change anything
between us…”
“I’m patient,”
Craig assured her, causing the cashier to roll her eyes. “Can you stand?”
“I think… oww!…” she crumpled.
Collapsing
against Craig, they managed a stumbling tango out of the office and into one of
the showrooms and were confronted by an I. Prescott top o’ the line “eternal
rest enclosure, Extra-Large” (as a placard advised, $7,850, marked down from
$9,000); a white and gold, faux-French Provincial casket with a double lid,
detailed in silver, mother-of-pearl, and lined with sleek, white satin.
Vicki almost
forgot her ankle. “Cool!” she gushed.
But Craig shook
his head. “Do you hear something? Hide!” he motioned.
Voices were
unmistakably emanating from the front showroom.
Craig peeked around the corner… spotted five highschool
Goths in black foraging through the mortuary; leather creaking, piercings and
jangling, looted jewelry from Bling Thing jingling as they moved… three male,
two female… all heavily armed, faces daubed with what looked like blood. Two were dragging placards bearing the august
visage of Evan Augsberg – overnight Messiah to the
young, the damned and the broken-hearted...
“Don’t like this
place!” exclaimed the smallest, twitchiest of the quintet…
“Why not? It’s perfect.
Everything we could need,” exclaimed the tallest, visibly the leader of
the pack – garbed in a black, kneelength cape over
his black clothes, “…it’s all right here.
Satan has led us to this place, as a reward for our dedication… trashing
that middle school…”
“I don’t like it either,” one of the girls whined. “It’s on
fire, all around. I don’t like fire, it’s bad for my complexion.”
“But fire is the Devil’s only friend, Em…” argued the fattest
Goth. He’d greased his hair with some
sort of odoriferous pomade, probably intended to simulate Bela Lugosi but
mimicking Peter Lorre instead – if Lorre had been a none-too-successful
Viennese rockabilly crooner after too many buffet suppers – and, then, shaking
the cardboard cutout he carried, invoked the Presence that had assumed Godlike
status over the past few hours. “Evan Augsberg says so!”
“Fine! Fine! Let’s just grab some stuff and get out of
here before the whole place blows, the skinny one fidgeted, “… some of that
religious shit, and flowers, a tombstone…”
The pale girl
referred to as Em disagreed. “Grab
what? Flowers… we can get flowers anywhere. And that tombstone’s already made out to some
guy, an Everett Copeland, whoever he
is…”
“I’m not goin’ without a coffin,” the tall one decreed. “I mean, when will we ever have another chance to cop a free coffin… it’s a message
straight from Satan, dude. What would
Evan Augsberg say if he saw you wussin’
out on us like this…”
Peter Lorre chose
not to answer, having popped the cap of a can of black spraypaint
and… while the others were arguing… drew a five-pointed invocation to the Devil
across one of the funeral parlor’s gilded mirrors, then a proclamation: “Hail
Satin!”
“But coffins are heee-yeavy…” the
thin boy protested. Craig, peeking
through the door, figured that he couldn’t be any older than himself – maybe a
couple of months.
“Not when they’re
empty. Get a wooden one, not metal. You know,” Peter Lorre enthused, “…six good
men suffice to serve as pallbearers when a body’s inside. Gypsy, you’re kinda strong so that’d be four,
Emily… you can bring the other stuff. There’s ropes under the seats, we can tie it on top of the Datsun…” he nodded, confidently.
“Let’s do it,” the uber-Goth snapped his fingers. “Only other thing’d
be cooler is if we can stuff one of those dead bodies into it, the ones from
all over the liquor store…”
“A live body’d be even better…”
suggested the other, larger Goth chick… that would be Gypsy, Craig deduced with
a preternatural shiver. “Then we could
hold... like... a sacrificial celebration…”
At this, Craig turned… only to find
himself alone.
“Vicki?” he whispered…
She whispered back from the white and
gold coffin then closed the lid. “In here…”
Hearing bloodthirsty Goths rummaging through the adjoining
showroom and the banging of plundered merchandise
mori, Craig opened the upper lid, finding
Vicki… at repose… pointing downward with a fistful of artificial flowers…”
“Get in that end…” she directed him.
Craig sighed but,
hearing more noise, lifted the lower lid and crawled in, letting his butt
absorb the noise and impact of the closing lid.
Vicki pulled down her end of the Extra-Large casket slowly as the five
intruders burst into the showroom…
“Now that’s a coffin!” Craig recognized the
voice of Peter Lorre…
“I want to take
it home…” the leader proposed, greedily…
“Your mother
would kill you…” objected the skinny
Goth…
“Not if I killed
her first…”
Gypsy spoke for
the majority. “Let’s snatch it and go!”
Inside, Craig
buried his nose in Vicki’s crotch until she kneed him in the side. In the distance, a burst of automatic gunfire
briefly overlaid the ambient chaos as the casket began to totter…
“Whatsamatter, Nathaniel,
can’t shoulder your load?” Craig heard the leader taunting, then felt his
sanctuary shivering.
“I’m Lord fuckin’ Nekron, dammit…” protested the runt, “and this is way, way heavy,
worse than the bronze one, even. And I hear people outside, people with guns…”
“They got guns,
we got guns. You’re just weak. Gyp, come over and give Nathaniel a hand…”
But they only
succeed in dislodging the casket from its pedestal; it tumbled to the floor and
rolled a full 360 º… the top lid bouncing open.
Vicki, shutting her eyes, held the plastic flowers tightly against her
breast…
“Sonofabitch,
there’s a dead girl in there, Master…” Peter Lorre gaped. “And some spare parts… legs!”
“Too cool! Let’s take the chick and the coffin down to
the river and have a Viking funeral…” the leader proposed…
But the greasy
Goth had already kicked open the lower lid.
“An’na guy
down here, a live guy, eatin’ corpse pussy…”
“Gross!” Emily
frowned.
Craig looked up,
with what he hoped was an intimidating smirk.
“Whatsamatter, never done it
in a coffin before, losers?”
But, as Vicki
opened her eyes and favoured the intruders with a
deep, lustful zombie-moan, the fat girl, Gypsy, went berserk with envy, or
jealousy. “Waste ‘em!” she
screeched. “Waste ‘em both!”
While the others
looked towards their leader, waiting for his decision… and the tall Goth stared
at Craig, trying to figure out what was going down… a chorus of gunshots and angry
voices from the showroom outside distracted the teenaged “Satinists”
from their task. The timid Goth,
Nathaniel, darted outside, then pitched back as yet another round of gunfire
punched a dozen holes in his chest. He
slumped against the wall, muttering…
“It’s the Tribe…”
The tall one. Master, hoisted his shotgun. “Fuckin’ Tribe… let’s get ‘em! Augsberg rocks!”
“Augsberg rocks!” echoed Peter Lorre and the Goths rushed
from the showroom, leaving Craig and Vicki struggling to extricate themselves
from the “eternal rest enclosure, Extra-Large” and, then, hopefully, crawl
under the barrage of gunfire back to the office, above which the yellow
staircase loomed, invitingly. Within
less than a minute, however, the funeral parlour fell
silent, and Craig ventured outside, peeking around the door.
On the floor
between Gyp and Emily, Lord Nekron looked up weakly…
blood dribbling from his mouth, nose and ears.
“It’s not like they say,” he gasped, betrayal in his eyes behind their
fluttering, mascara’d lashes. “Getting’ killed sucks!”…
“I hear you,”
Craig agreed, eyes scanning the mall for the shotgun-totin’
Master – but he’d escaped, leaving his companions behind, Lorre crawling away
from another dog and a posse of fluorescent rats. Nathaniel coughed, spit and
was gone, so he called out to Vicki.
“It’s alright. We can make it
outside to the parking lot. You can lean
on me…”
“No way, Jose…”
Vicki had picked
up one of the Evan Augsberg placards dropped by his
acolytes, pressed it into service as a crutch after folding it in half and
ripping away the poster of the mad newscaster, and hopped out, behind Craig,
into the showroom, full of dead and dying Goths, gangbangers and loser looters. She poked at the shattered door and it
creaked open, allowing them to emerge out into the parking lot.
“Just ‘cause we… ‘cause… it still doesn’t mean
anything…” she aimed her crutch at Craig.
“Yeah. But, since we don’t have jobs anymore, hows about you and I catching that new Aflac Duck movie at Cinema 39… say Tuesday, Wednesday? Wait over here, I’ll get my car…”
¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾
VISIT THESE OTHER GENERISIS SERIAL ABOMINATIONS…
THE GOLDEN DAWN BLACK HELICOPTERS