Zombies v. Ninjas: Domination: Zombies v. Ninjas, #2

RECAP

On an island the size of Maryland, in the North Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophic anomaly has occurred in the food chain. Livestock have inadvertently become cannibals by introduction of their own species into animal feed. The resulting contaminated meat products, consumed by humans, have led to the recurrence of a phenomenon that hasn’t been seen since the Great Famine. The dead are reborn.

Within a day or two of normal death, humans reanimate as cold-blooded, slow-moving creatures with a poisonous bite. For the last couple of years the funeral directors have been invoking an age old custom of decapitating each corpse to prevent reanimation, but the dead are walking sooner every day and large numbers begin to escape into the wild. The truth of this is revealed when one funeral director has a nervous breakdown and discloses what has been going on to a senior psychiatrist, Dr Ruby Barnes.

Previously dead females of child-bearing age begin to reproduce by the process of parthenogenesis – spontaneous pregnancy with a gestation period of just three weeks. Their mutant offspring are a new species – mobile from birth, born with teeth, carnivorous and venomous, hyperactive and fast moving. The children of these virgin births are DNA clones of their mothers and inherit the maternal educational knowledge and abilities. Within two years they reach adulthood and then live a lifespan that has yet to be determined.

A spawning ground for the mutant offspring is being provided on the Kingsmead Castle Estate, a closed commune run by a serial killer named John Baptist. Driven by religious mania, Baptist leads the community in the worship of the mother of the first clone, Maria de Nazarene, and the adulation of her single offspring known as the Son and Father. Between them, Baptist and de Nazarene’s son are working towards a new society where the dominant species are parthenogenetic clones and humans are relegated to zombie slave labour.

In an isolated country with few weapons to hand there is only one hope to stop Baptist and de Nazarene’s son – the sword-wielding ninjas who have been tasked with taking the heads of all escaped undead. Faced with a new dominant species, the future of mankind is in their hands. Ruby Barnes and his karate colleagues take the fight to the zombie community at Kingsmead but are lucky to escape with their lives.

ESCAPE FROM KINGSMEAD

It would count as a pleasant evening under normal circumstances. An hour spent in a steaming, foamy bathtub with a large glass of red wine and my good wife in attendance. But it had taken all of those sixty minutes to drive the cold of the icy Kings River from my bones.

‘So, how did it go, your little escapade this evening?’ Mrs R asked me with a smile. ‘Get drunk and fall into the water? Did you jump or were you pushed?’

My memory of getting home was hazy.

‘Is my car outside?’

‘Lucky for you, Jerry drove it home.’

The memory was coming back to me of Jerry behind the wheel, the Range Rover’s engine roaring as we rushed through Kingsmead Forest and somehow back out to the normal world. I had been sopping wet and so was Jerry. The upholstery would be ruined. And I think there were other people in the car.

‘Alice is going to be a mother,’ I said. ‘It’s all my fault. She’s going to have a baby.’

The indulgent smile on Mrs R’s face disappeared. ‘What do you mean? You’ve been having an affair? She’s pregnant? I knew it! I let you spend too much time with that snooty bitch. Now you’re having a baby together! You’re a fecker, Ruby Barnes!’

She raised her wine glass. I expected it to be poured over my head, staining the foam bath red like the blood of The Apostles slaughtered in Kingsmead orchard, like the two hundred zombies we had beheaded in Dead Man’s Valley. But instead she drank it down in one.

‘Don’t think I’m wasting good wine on you, yer bastard.’

I took a good gulp from my own glass before trying to explain.

‘I’m not the father. She’s not even pregnant yet. I’m not having an affair. John Baptist has her and he’s going to keep her imprisoned with the other mothers to produce mutant clone babies.’

‘Have you gone stark staring mad? Alice was in the car with you, Jerry and Maggie when you came home. The four of you were soaked through.’

‘Thank God, thank God! She’s safe then?’ I said with a bit too much enthusiasm.

Mrs R stood to leave. ‘I’ll be keeping my eyes on you and that Alice.’ She did the thing with the two fingers pointed at her eyes and then stabbed towards me. ‘Watching you closely, Ruby Barnes. Watching you closely.’

~

We met at the dojo early the next morning. I had cancelled my patient clinics – the mental health of the county could take second place to the future of the planet. Detective Inspector Andy McAuliffe and my neurologist colleague Dr Alice McArdle joined us at the karate club for the first time. Alice of I didn’t get her pregnant fame.

‘So this is where it all goes on,’ McAuliffe said, wandering across the thickly padded, sprung floor.

‘Shoes!’ Maggie shouted at him and the D.I. scurried off the mats to remove his footwear.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered.

‘What happened to you yesterday, Andy?’ I asked McAuliffe.

‘What happened to me? I’ll tell you what happened. The flashing blade there’ – McAuliffe pointed at Jerry – ‘looked at his phone, jumped into the Range Rover and drove off, leaving me in the forest.’

‘Ah, yes,’ our best swordsman said, ‘about that. I had the text from Ruby and just reacted. There was no time to waste – the weapons were in the car – and I couldn’t see you around. Somewhere in the bushes I guess, having a cigarette.’

‘You were probably better off out of it,’ Maggie said. ‘We took quite a beating. Those are some tough kids.’

‘And your man, whatever his name was,’ Jerry said. ‘He was like lightning, anticipated every move I made. Couldn’t touch him with the sword.’

‘The Apostles,’ McAuliffe said, looking at the mugshots on our dojo wall of the nineteen missing fabled GAA footballers from Ballymoon. ‘Did you put any of them out of action?’

Maggie took a black marker pen and, in consultation with Jerry, began to draw thick X’s on the photos. ‘Seven. We took seven of their heads off their shoulders.’

I laughed and they all turned to me.

‘What’s so funny?’ Alice asked, then looked again at the photos on the wall. ‘Ah, I get it. The Twelve Apostles remain.’

‘And John Baptist,’ I added. ‘Which makes Maria Attracta de Nazarene’s son...’

‘You-know-who,’ Maggie finished for me.

‘A load of nonsense,’ McAuliffe said.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but I think that is how they see themselves. Baptist is a maniac, of course, and the others are following.’

‘So which one of these twelve is our Judas zombie?’ Jerry asked.

‘I don’t think it works like that,’ I said.

‘And what about the big fella you mentioned?’ McAuliffe asked. ‘Tell me more about him.’

‘The autopsy on Maria Attracta de Nazarene’s exhumed body confirmed that she gave birth about four years ago, just before she died,’ Alice said. ‘She may even have died in childbirth. I think this Son and Father character is her offspring."

‘He sounds very tall for a four-year-old,’ McAuliffe said.

‘Strictly speaking, he’s not human,’ Alice continued. ‘His mother was the first to reproduce by parthenogenesis. And the only live mother to do so, as far as we know. All the other parthenogenesis mothers are undead. The gestation period is only three weeks and Agnieska said they mature very quickly. It’s possible that he’s reached his prime in four years.’

‘Whoa there, wait just a minute,’ McAuliffe said. ‘Even if what you say is true, and I honestly think my boss would have me sent to the funny farm if I tried to explain it to him, then what do we have on Baptist or the other fella or any of them?’

‘Kidnapping, assault, attempted murder,’ Alice said. ‘Baptist tried to drown Ruby and turn him into a zombie.’

‘I don’t see that looking good in writing when I ask the judge for a warrant,’ McAuliffe replied. ‘Plus you attacked their community members and beheaded seven of them with your swords.’

‘But they were The Apostles,’ Jerry said. ‘They were undead. We had your permission.’

‘In a court of law...’ McAuliffe shook his head.

‘They kidnapped Grainne Moncrieff,’ Maggie suggested.

‘Agnieska said Mrs Moncrieff went to Kingsmead of her own free will,’ McAuliffe countered. ‘Was Grainne Moncrieff a ward of the State?’

I shook my head. ‘No, she was a recent psychiatric admission and hadn’t yet been made a ward of the State. But I do have something you can use for your warrant.’

‘Go on,’ the D.I. said.

I smiled. ‘Sheep rustling.’

~

It had been a week since the Ballymoon team bus plunged into the River Suir at Fiddown, drowning all twenty of the nationally famous GAA football squad, known as The Apostles. Only the driver had left the bus alive. The cold dead body of their star player Legs Lacey was pulled from the wreckage by divers. The other nineteen players had left the bus in a state of carnivorous undeadness and then hijacked a meat lorry. We hunted them across the Kilkenny countryside.

Nineteen fit young men in their prime, reanimated after death like every other person who had died intact over the last couple of years. The funeral directors of the county had been suppressing the phenomenon by decapitating cadavers before they stood up, which was typically after two days. But something was changing. The dead were walking sooner than ever before.

We had finally tracked down The Apostles to Kingsmead Castle Estate, where they enjoyed the protection of John Baptist’s bizarre religious community and were put to work, performing basic labour tasks. Someone there seemed to have the ability to control them and convert the slobbering, stumbling undead footballers into useful field hands. Maggie and Jerry had taken the heads of seven Apostles before the community had overwhelmed them.

The Apostles who did the dead-foot-shuffle away from the coach crash hadn’t been certified dead by my friend Tarquin Murphy, the Registrar. They had wandered off before death could be pronounced. The only explanation we had for their rapid animation was the team’s over-consumption of food products provided by their sponsor Maudlin Meats. The not very scientific explanation put forward by my medical and karate colleagues was contamination of the food chain. Cattle had been inadvertently made cannibals by feeding them with meal containing beef, causing a mutation. Legs Lacey had been a vegetarian and that might have explained his bona fide deadness.

Fact or fiction, food chain or evolution, it didn’t matter. The reality was the dead were walking and it was our adopted duty to find them and finish off what nature intended by removing heads from bodies. Over two hundred walkers had been separated at the neck so far, all of them geriatric with the exception of one – Siobhan Morgan.

One of my former mental patients, Siobhan had been just as troublesome when dead as alive. Kingsmead kept all the undead women of childbearing age within the commune but Siobhan had absconded. She put up quite a fight, injuring one of the club members in her final death throes.

We learned three things about the undead from Siobhan. First – their bite was poisonous. Second – the women were reproducing by parthenogenesis. Siobhan had been pregnant when she was put to the ninja sword. Third – John Baptist’s community were prepared to avenge the death of an undead mother and her offspring, to the tune of ten human lives. Their chosen victims were the funeral directors and assistants, which was making the task of adequately processing the county’s dead even more of a challenge.

~

Jobs pages in the local papers were full of ads, for a change. A highly rewarding career for customer-centric individuals willing to learn an ancient trade. Ancient was right – people had been dying since the first of us fell out of the trees. What the ads failed to mention was that the funeral parlour business had become a war zone.

Four funeral directors and three assistants had been murdered in the past week. Another undertaker had fled the country in terror and a sixth was languishing in St Canice’s mental health facility, under my care, after having a total nervous breakdown. Seven dead versus the Kingsmead threat of ten lives for Siobhan Morgan’s. So I wasn’t too surprised when McAuliffe gave us the news, just before our return to Kingsmead under armed escort.

‘Neville’s funeral parlour was hit last night,’ he said. ‘Old Aaron Neville, his wife Anne and son Fionn. Same as the others.’

Which meant they had been decapitated whilst still alive. Neville had been the caretaker of Siobhan Morgan when she first died, before she had become pregnant as a clone mother. If Neville hadn’t been so careless as to let her wander off then this spree of tit-for-tat killings might not have occurred. Whatever about that, the Neville family didn’t deserve to be wiped out. Nevertheless, I felt a strange gratitude towards the logic of the Kingsmead killers, for it was surely John Baptist and his cohorts who had committed this series of atrocities. They had targeted the funeral business and hadn’t touched the innocent public walking the streets of