Zombie President

Zombie President

by

Daniel Cubias

and

Kristan Ginther

Zombie President

Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Cubias and Kristan Ginther

Cover design by Dan Sipple

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN-13:

978-1543243246

ISBN-10:

154324324X

Angry Cherub Publishing

Los Angeles, CA

For Zakary Orion

Acknowledgements

Dan thanks his mom, for watching zombie movies with him when he was a kid. He also thanks the Cubias/Román crazies and his sister Margie Williams.

Kristan thanks stupid politicians everywhere for inspiring this novel.

Part One

Ashes to Ashes

Dust to

Inhuman Undead Hell Spawn

1.

No one took the virus seriously at first.

Yes, a few anonymous citizens keeled over, spewing blood and vomiting bile, in Middle America and the Deep South. But how upset could anyone get over that?

People didn’t really pay attention until the virus nailed its first (sort of, kind of) celebrity casualty — a large-breasted woman who garnered 47 million views on YouTube for her attempt to French kiss a schnauzer. She wasn’t much in the way of fame, but the woman could be Googled, and this was all that mattered.

As such, President Tomosen addressed the Grubram virus mere days later, during the State of the Union address. She didn’t want to repeat Ronald Reagan’s error of ignoring the AIDS crisis until it erupted into a full-scale epidemic. She was going to be ahead of this one.

Unfortunately, her personal commitment to fighting the virus took on a ghastly irony a few months later, when she collapsed, bleeding from every orifice, during a photo-op to promote literacy in underprivileged children. The kids scattered as the president hit the floor, a convulsing mess of fluids, with Dr. Seuss’ Oh, The Places You’ll Go still clenched in her rigid fingers. She was dead, of course, inside of five minutes.

The vice president went in the same manner. He was sworn in on a Tuesday, and dead that Saturday, the shortest administration in history to that point. Of course, they only got shorter after that, as the virus worked its way through the executive branch. The secretary of commerce, for example, lasted just one day — time enough to give a speech on how they were going to beat the Grubram virus, attend a meeting on the topic, and then become one of the thousands who more or less imploded to death. His advisors were quick to point out that he at least had the decency to die far away from the television cameras.

By the time the line of succession plummeted to the secretary of transportation, Mason Fremont (fourteenth in line for the presidency), a full quarantine of the nation’s leaders had been implemented. This prevented the latest chief executive from spontaneously melting. And so Fremont — a man few Americans could have named months previously and who had never received a vote for anything, much less president — was in charge of stopping the worst plague that Americans had ever endured. His administration responded by coming up with the Fremont Plan. It was a startling piece of idiocy.

Fortunately, the plan was never implemented, and Fremont didn’t have to do anything, because the virus dissipated soon after, never to be seen again. Fremont, naturally, took all the credit.

The Grubram virus’ last high-profile victim was Samuel Tilden, the opposition party’s candidate for president. He died during a campaign stop in Phoenix, shortly after delivering a fiery speech in which he insisted that President Fremont was an incompetent interloper in the Oval Office who compared, rather unfavorably, to a spastic armadillo with halitosis. That evening, Tilden bled out in his sleep at his hotel, leaving a surprisingly intact corpse.

President Tomosen and her cabinet had been cremated, more out of medical necessity than religious preference. Tomosen’s critics claimed this was her final act of pandering to anti-American wimps who despised patriotic values such as being planted six feet under.

Tilden, however, was buried.

This was soon going to be a problem.

2.

The town of Brewerville stood on the low hills of southern Wisconsin, a lonesome area so relentlessly rural, so absolutely quiet, that every hour felt like a freaking eternity. In this part of the country, deer amused themselves by abruptly materializing in front of speeding cars in the dead of night, and the stillness of the afternoon was broken up only by the occasional shotgun blast of a hunter blowing away some luckless pheasant.

On this frigid September morning, Helga Tilden drove her behemoth of a gas-guzzler through the small town’s cemetery gates. Helga was ancient, and shouldn’t have been driving, but she had stated more than once that the bastards would have to pull the car keys from her cold, dead hands (or rather, her cold, dead hand — because the other hand would hold the traditional gun, which would, of course, also have to pried from her cold, dead hand… probably the left one).

In any case, she parked the sputtering monster near a plain and unassuming tombstone. The inscription read,

Samuel Tilden, Jr.

Ten-time Presidential Candidate

Great Patriot, Mighty Leader, and More Manly Than You on Your Very Best Day

Helga approached the tombstone and kneeled before it. She avoided the melodramatic, de rigueur sigh, and instead opted for a perfunctory Damn, this shithole is depressing.

She didn’t speak for another minute or so, and she thought about how this day — the fourth anniversary of her husband’s death — was the bitterest commemoration yet.

We should be wrapping up your reelection campaign, she said to her husband’s grave. Not have you stuck in the ground because of some stupid virus. I bet it was a dirty immigrant who sneezed on you.

Four years ago, Samuel Tilden had been way ahead of Mason Fremont in the polls. After nine failed campaigns, Tilden was finally going to clutch the big prize. He and Helga were, at long last, going to take America back. At that point, the only way Tilden could lose was if he grew a Hitler moustache and burned a bible while screaming racial slurs and masturbating on the Statue of Liberty.

Or if he died — he could lose that way as well.

Helga stared at her husband’s grave and said, Samuel, you can’t believe what that damn President Fremont is doing to this fine nation of ours. The children are running wild. The economy is plummeting. And the gays… they aren’t even hiding anymore!

She brushed his tombstone and said, I miss you so much. I miss the nights when you put a saddle on me and call me your little pony of love… but I drift.

Helga went quiet, partly out of respect for the dead and partly because she was reminiscing about that pony-of-love stuff. At last, she stood and adjusted her dress, shaking Wisconsin dirt from her hem.

She said, Goodbye, Samuel. If you can do anything from the Great Beyond, send somebody to make this country great again. It’s an election year, damn it!

Helga walked back to her car and revved up an engine that dumped a metric ton of CO2 into the atmosphere before she even shifted into drive. As she drove out of the cemetery, dark clouds rolled in, and thunder rumbled in the background.

The effect was all ominous and shit.

An hour later, a black van pulled into the cemetery. The vehicle circled the grounds for several minutes before stopping, and its headlights went out. And then it just sat there, with the wind blowing leaves and twigs around, and darkness falling upon it.

3.

Knut Alvarado despised having his concentration broken. And it had just been shattered into tiny pieces.

The cause was a sharp, alarming backfire from Helga’s beastly car, repeated twice more as she drove past the Alvarado home, located on a lonely stretch of country road. The sound burst into Knut’s bedroom, causing him to jump up and look out his window. All he saw was a dark metal box receding into the night.

Knut went back to his computer desk and its dual-monitor setup. One screen displayed molecular structures and organic chemistry equations. The other showed girl-on-girl porn.

Knut couldn’t focus on either stimulus. He thought again of how he couldn’t wait to graduate and get out of this town.

His animosity toward Brewerville had been sealed on his first day of high school, three years ago. Moments after Knut walked through the school’s doors that morning, an enormous senior known as Master Blaster approached him.

Master Blaster pushed Knut and said, Border Patrol. Let’s see some ID, wetback. Master Blaster laughed with the shrill, self-satisfied glee of the culturally secure. His hangers-on did the same.

Knut’s family had lived in the tiny rural enclave for less than a week. His parents had dragged him there in their quest for small-town innocence and civility. So this was an inauspicious, incongruent start.

Knut — friendless and scrawny — calmly looked at Master Blaster and said, Don’t ever do that again. Thank you.

When Master Blaster kick-started Knut’s second day of high school with the same exchange, Knut nodded, walked to his locker, and retrieved a small vial. Nobody noticed the anonymous freshman leave the building and walk briskly through the school parking lot. Knut didn’t stop until he reached Master Blaster’s car, a 1999 refurbished Camaro that the local boys called the Pussy Wagon. Knut popped the hood and worked on the engine for a moment. He then loosened the gas cap and poured the vial’s contents into the gas line. Knut slammed the hood and walked back into the building, where he was seven minutes late for his AP chemistry class and earned the first of his many detentions.

After the final bell rang that afternoon, Knut walked into the parking lot and watched as Master Blaster jumped into his car, revved the engine, and roared away… or at least roared twenty feet away, after which the Camaro slammed into a shuddering stop as if receiving a blow from the fist of God. The car ejaculated flames from under the hood, and after several long minutes of stupefied staring, Master Blaster realized that he needed to get the hell out of the Pussy Wagon, or he would wind up a charred corpse.

Master Blaster and his crew gathered together, a safe distance away, and watched as fire consumed the Pussy Wagon. Each was more dumbfounded than he had ever been (astonishing for boys whose lives had been filled with innumerable moments of dumbfoundedness). Hundreds of exiting students swelled the parking lot to see the Pussy Wagon melt into the asphalt, and over their gasping and laughing and pointing and videotaping for internet consumption, a shrill wail emerged. This was the sound of Master Blaster crying.

At that moment, Knut walked up to Master Blaster, who stared at the freshman with perplexed, reddened eyes. Knut leaned in and whispered, Thanks for listening to what I said.

Knut turned and walked away, just as the windshield of the Pussy Wagon shattered from the heat, and Master Blaster dropped to his knees in fresh tears.

Needless to say, nobody ever fucked with Knut Alvarado again.

Knut sat at his desk now and smiled at the memory, which he knew was wrong, but he did it anyway. And then he heard a revving muffler-free engine boom past his bedroom window, and he knew by sound alone the imbecile who was driving past. Knut sighed anew.

I gotta get out of this town, he muttered.

4.

Lenny Scphultzen was thinking about the Pussy Wagon as he drove past Knut’s house. Lenny had been a freshman, the same as Knut, when Master Blaster’s car had met its fiery demise three years ago. But now Lenny was the senior alpha male, and he often wondered if Knut would target his ride — a cherry-red 2009 Dodge Challenger — for destruction, just because the dweeb, you know, hated bitchin’ cars owned by guys way cooler than him.

But Lenny dismissed the thought — just as he dismissed any thought that was remotely disturbing, complex, or needlessly taxing — and concentrated on taking Rollercoaster Road’s curves as fast as possible. He floored it partly because he loved speeding on the twisting country road under the full moonlight, and partly because he was rushing to get laid.

A few miles out of town, Lenny crossed the double-yellow line to pass a black van. The van maintained its reasonable, steady speed even as Lenny swerved around it. By the time Lenny got to Shelby’s house, he had forgotten all about the van. And once again embracing his gift for forgetting nagging details, Lenny erased his mental observation that the van had no license plates.

Lenny was out of the car and at Shelby’s front door in seconds. He was very much a man of action — as long as that action was focused on cars, beer, or female genitalia. Otherwise, Lenny could not be bothered to stop playing Call of Duty.

Shelby answered before Lenny even knocked. To say Shelby was smoking hot was a disservice, as it implied her hotness were a mere physical attribute. No, her 10-out-of-10 status permeated her psyche, so that her every comment, gesture, or thought was filtered through the prism of how a hot girl should act. It was both who she was and what she was. And she was fine with that, because her good looks were going to last forever (she just knew it).

As a couple, Lenny and Shelby were the common Wisconsin mix of German, Irish, and Polish. Sometimes, Shelby tried to exoticize herself up by claiming she was part Chippewa (she wasn’t). Their families went back generations in the area, and sometimes Lenny and Shelby wondered if they were distantly related (they were).

Shelby kissed Lenny and said, Let’s get out of here before —

Yeah, Lenny said and turned to his car.

Before Shelby and Lenny could leave the porch, however, the booming voice of Big Jake Larssen startled them both.

Lenny! Please come in.

The teenagers froze and grimaced as one. They turned to walk back into the house and face Shelby’s father.

Big Jake was only five foot, six inches. And his real name wasn’t Jake. It was Wallace. Nobody — including Big Jake himself — could ascertain why or when people started calling him Big Jake. Everyone had written off the nickname’s origins as a mystery best left to the sages to ponder.

Big Jake was also Brewerville’s sheriff. This position of authority consisted of breaking up the occasional domestic disturbance and ticketing teenagers driving three MPH over the speed limit. But it gave Big Jake a certain measure of intimidation, which he used to great effect on his daughter’s suitors.

Where are you kids off to tonight? Big Jake said.

Oh, nowhere special, Lenny said. Just taking Shelby out for a good time.

And what’s your definition of a ‘good time,’ Lenny? Big Jake asked.

Daddy, why do we always have to go through this bullshit just so I can go out? Shelby snapped.

Honey, friendly conversation isn’t bullshit, Big Jake said. We’ve discussed this.

Mr. Larssen, my definition of a good time is taking Shelby into town, buying us a wholesome yogurt shake, and then walking around Brewerville and looking at the stars, Lenny said.

And then maybe boning my daughter in a cornfield? Big Jake said.

Daddy! Shelby screamed.

Well, yeah, Lenny said. Maybe that too.

Lenny! What the fuck? Shelby yelled.

Big Jake laughed over his daughter’s anger and Lenny’s shoulder-shrugging imbecility.

Sweetie, use the prophylactics I bought you for Christmas, Big Jake said. You don’t know what this creature might be carrying.

Can we go now? Shelby said, so furious with both men that she looked at neither.

Have a good time, kids, Big Jake said.

Shelby stormed out of the house, and Lenny (still flummoxed over his master plan’s revelation) followed her.

Big Jake smirked and shut the door behind them. He was proud of himself yet again.

5.

The ground beneath Brewerville shuddered. The tremor was imperceptible (to all those above ground, anyway). Then all was still once more.

6.

Lenny’s left hand was affixed to Shelby’s right boob, and his other hand moved into position. The teens were making out on the grave of Samuel Tilden, Jr. However, the location was not out of any deep appreciation for the man’s political agenda or philosophical ideals. It was just a convenient