*Tonight, friends, thrill and shiver to a tale of the macabre from that ever-popular genre of Vaxxploitation…

Night of the Living Vaxxed!

The 2021 [TPC] Halloween Spooktacular

by Perrin “Maskless” Lovett

*Brought to you by Diet LIME CHIP! Soda – Now in Grape!!!*

 

The Old Covington Cemetery, Halloween…

As the weary sun fell behind a line of ragged pine trees, somewhere a cat yowled ominously. Two somber figures moved among the tombstones of the beloved, the dearly departed, and old what’s his name.

‘Isn’t it a little strange these Halloween stories are always set on Halloween?’ Ann asked as MB kicked ants and confetti off of a low headstone. ‘I mean, it’s not even a little original.’

‘This marker epitaph is original enough: At least he was vaccinated!’ MB said with a grunt. ‘And he was. Good thing. He died of the Detrick-Harvard Variant just last week. Like with Colin Powell, if he hadn’t been fully vaccinated something really bad might have happened.’

‘Alldead?’ Ann asked, arching her eyebrows. ‘What kind of name is that?’

 ‘Paul Alldead. Just got the stone on for him. Another happy customer who will never complain or bounce a check or leave a bad review or ever bother me again,’ MB said while admiring a chip in the granite above a misspelling. ‘Really nice fellow. Hey! There he is now! Let’s say hello.’

Ann looked and saw a stiff, partially-decayed shell of a man limping and shuffling towards them. ‘Why is he out of the grave?!’ she asked with plausibly understandable alarm.

‘Paul!’ MB unwisely called out. ‘Good to see you up and— OH. MY. GOD! He’s a zombie!’

‘Yeah, duh,’ Ann mocked.

‘RUN!!’ they both yelled. And away they did run, just as fast as their feet would take them, or as fast as one needs to run to outrun a zombie that can barely limp and shuffle. Okay, it was more of a jog. It was… C’mon, man. You know the thing.

‘Wait,’ the corpse-like character mumbled after them. ‘Sorry to bother. I’m Ned Halfdead. Paul’s cousin. I came to apologize for the bounced check. Aaand, you’re gone. Oh, my, yummy ants!’

Ned was just bending down to dine like an apologetic, half-dead aardvark when he noticed a shadow. Looking up, he saw a tattered, pale, all-dead-looking man staggering forward out of the gloom. Half in fear, half delighted, Halfdead, and half Formicidae famished, he called out: ‘Paul! I thought you were de—’

*****

In the car, as MB drove madly if nonchalantly towards town, trying to dodge all of the raccoons, missing most of them, Ann scanned the radio. Pausing on NPR, she heard a voice of calm, reason, reassurance, and constant hair-flipping. They both listened to Jen Psaki’s hasty press conference, already in progress:

… all a little concerned. But, no. The president certainly is real, he’s really the president, and he really is not a dead robot. I mean, just because he short-circuited and caught on fire while the greenscreen program crashed… It, uh, it. We’ll circle back to that.

As for the national emergency, there is nothing to be concerned about. Not much. Much at all. Maybe a little. Okay, shit, look! All the recently deceased fully vaccinated thralls are reanimating as brain-eating zombies. They say it is the ultimate ADE or VEI effect, Case Nightmare Zombie, or something. Just, um, just trust science. Maybe the sixteenth booster and those hourly pills can do something? 

Yes. I mean, no. The military is not on it – all service members themselves being lately-deceased fully vaccinated zombies who now eat brains. 

Now, I’d like to point to the success of the recent evacuation. Thanks to Empress Harr-, er, Joe Biden’s very real and legitimate and totally not fake administration, several dozen American refugees were just today airlifted into Afghanistan with the help of our Taliban partners. You, hey you! Non-binary thing from CNN! Why are you drooling like that?! My what? My brain?! Eeeeeeeeeeek!!!

As a faraway production engineer cried, ‘Oh, God,’ or possibly, ‘Mo’ sod(?),’ the signal abruptly ended. Ann turned off the radio and bowed her head. ‘Greenscreen has fallen,’ she whispered sorrowfully. 

‘Best fake president we ever had,’ MB hacked, gagging on a Tic-Tac.

*****

Around the old downtown square, a line of double-masked, plastic-wrapped, CRT-indoctrinated, futureless children stumped along. One to another, they sang cautiously, ‘One, two, Fauci’s coming for you. Three, four, lock the bathhouse door…’

Once again this year, they missed him, as he hid in the dark, fingering his sledgehammer. ‘Imma get that statue tonight,’ the Chairman growled to himself.

Kayla looked down from the balcony of TPC Headquarters, perplexed. ‘What a sad fool,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t he know they already changed the statue? What’s he gonna do? Knock down the new Bankroll Fresh Memorial?’

‘Shhhh, woman,’ Da shushed. ‘Was that another ambulance?’

‘I don’t know about you, but I’d love a gurney full of some Halloween candy! It’s a shame MB lost the petty cash box,’ Kayla mused.

‘I mean, what is there to stop these white militias from getting nuclear weapons?’ Da asked the evening air.

‘Sir, any given day, it’s about twelve Marines and a chain-link fence,’ said a pleasant if unknown voice. Da didn’t notice.

‘Who the hell are you?!’ Kayla asked in candy-starved fright.

‘Hello, ma’am,’ the pleasant, unknown young man said. ‘I’m Abner Snickdowl. The filler character that Mr. Lovett added. You know, with Bess and Ryan and Fred being a little scarce these days.’

Though Da still strained his ear for a siren that never called, Abner and Kayla nearly jumped out of their skin. The shrill, screaming, crying, wailing, greatly-alarmed, desperate-to-flee screaming wail of a cry from the Chairman echoed around the square: ‘Great Lawd Yemaya, SAVE US!!!!!’ They turned in time to see him bolt as if the very foul spirits of the recently be-vaxxed were after him. Down the street he fled, screaming, and never to be seen again. Until sometime later, of course. And, of course, when he did reappear, he was re-elected. His sledgehammer clattered to rest in a pothole he’d promised several times to fix but predictably never got around to.

The moans and groans then drew their attention to the other side of the square. Around the corner, came a slow-moving legion of Vaxx Zombies!™ Now and again, as they inched forward, they let forth the nearly-indecipherable cant, ‘brains.’ Or, honestly, it could have been ‘veins’ or ‘lanes.’ It was maybe just a little south of nearly indecipherable. 

‘Now I’ll never review that candy for the Corner,’ Kayla said, fighting back tears. ‘ZOMBIES!!!’

‘Trust science,’ Da mumbled as he leaned over the railing in his vain search of auditory ambulatory greeting.

‘I have a horrible feeling that I know how this ends,’ Abner muttered dejectedly.

‘Hey!’ Kayla said, completely over her zombie scare. ‘Why do your hands stick out of your shoulders like that? Not to be rude, it’s just…’

‘It’s okay, ma’am,’ Abner said sweetly, flapping his little hands, ‘Mama was a good lady. She trusted science, Thalidomide, and all. Pa trusted science too. The Vioxx got him. My uncle in England trusted science. He died trying to kill bugs with Amiton. Shucks, I trust that science myself! Who wouldn’t, with such a great track record?’

‘Yeah, I didn’t need the whole life story,’ Kayla said dismissively.

Just then, Ann and MB sped into sight. They dodged a few of the foremost zombies, hit the sledgehammer-holding pothole, careened violently, and came to a stop below the balcony. In a moment, they huffed up the stairs and out to join the oddly-paired trio.

‘Some politician needs to promise to fix that damned pothole!’ MB bellowed. 

‘Well, looks like the zombies are here!’ Ann said with surprising and rather misplaced cheer.

‘They just came out of nowhere,’ Abner said, waving one small hand from beneath his sloppily-cut sleeve.

‘Who in the blue blazes are you?’ Ann and MB asked at the same time.

‘I’m Abner Sni—’

‘He’s some dolt ringer or something,’ Kayla said. ‘DO NOT ask about his little hands.’

‘More ambulances by the day,’ Da said with a shrug.

‘What a weird night,’ MB said, holding his lighter between his teeth and poking it with a cigarette. ‘First zombies. Now, this pleasant but unknown character. And all those oversized anthropomorphic raccoons on the streets!’

‘Raccoons?’ Da asked as if coming out of a trance.

‘Yeah, big, man-sized raccoons, a lot of them wearing saggy pants and basketball jerseys,’ Ann explained. ‘All over the place, coming out of all these new apartments. Making odd gestures and signs with their hands, paws. They’re all headed west, it seems. All of them talking about how DAT Raccoon tha Kang! Or, something similar they were saying, maybe.’

‘What’s up with that? Where were all the raccoons going?’ Kayla asked, happy some other strangeness had momentarily displaced the terror of the be-jabbed dead. Everyone shrugged their shoulders. Everyone except Abner. Because, uh…

‘I know,’ he said helpfully; ‘They must be headed to Atlanta to cheer for that giant raccoon that escaped and climbed up the Georgia-Pacific Tower. Took some woman hostage. Y’all hear about that?’

Ignoring Abner – a scenario to which he was well accustomed – they all looked down to the lurching, moaning pack of zombies. The reanimated fully-vaxxed had congregated in the street beneath the balcony. Pathetically, they all extended their hands and arms upward (and one can imagine Abner’s resentment) as if to climb the air itself to dine upon the brains of our beloved TPC staff (and Abner, poor thing). Fortunately for the gang, the particular mRNA poison at issue did not grant the deceased the power of levitation or flight. Still, they were trapped. As more and more victims of the worst hoax and war crime in history stumbled and staggered into the square, the stranded group grew nervous. But then, they heard a sound. It grew louder by the second, a great roaring, grinding noise mixed with notes of modified techno-rock parody music.

And, around the corner and into the square came the racket: speeding along, crushing everything in its path, an Abrams tank roared into full view. Over the whine of the engine and the grumble of the tracks, from two speakers poorly rigged on the turret, “It’s Time To Go” by Boomer Patrol blasted away. The great weapon of war rolled over the back end of MB’s car and proceeded to crush the leading ranks of the zombies. Slowing to a crawl, it abruptly turned and did a short series of donuts in the street. Zombie heads and zombie limbs and zombie bodies and an assortment of ill-fitting clothing that sleepy next of kin had thought appropriate for burial shredded and flew about.

The mechanical beast came to rest, its turbine idling. The music stopped, time paused, and the balcony brigade looked on with interest. After a few moments, the turret began to rotate from the rear-facing position. With a whir, it swung around towards the new memorial. The main gun rose. And, in a deafening flash, Bankroll Fresh’s image joined Robert E. Lee, Jesus Christ, Christopher Columbus, Sacagawea, Hiawatha, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, The Old Pioneer Woman, Abraham Lincoln, Frank Rizzo, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Frederick Douglass, The Bird Girl, and all the other lately-deposed “racist” Confederate Generals in the dustbin of dystopia. As chunks of obliterated statue rained down among the mindless zombies (the vaxx victims, not the voters), the top hatch opened, a fragrant column of smoke arose, and a voice sarcastically called out from inside, ‘there’s your social justice, bastards. Big guns matter.’

And then, from out the hatch, there emerged, like a knight in cigar-reeking armor, the hero!

‘Perrin, old man!’ MB called out exuberantly.

‘You’ve come to save us!’ Kayla called.

‘Could have warned us about our ears,’ Ann said.

‘Abner on duty, sir!’

‘Did you pass many ambulances?’

‘Yeah, great and whatever,’ Perrin said as he sat up straight in the commander’s perch and jimmied the machine gun. ‘Gimme a second. Ears? Yeah, most uncomfortable vehicle ever.’ 

While the balcony birds lamented not covering their ears and while more zombies shuffled over the remnants of their crushed comrades, flattened like the curve of those two weeks that never ended, Perrin checked the feed on the Ma Deuce. Then, he proceeded to sweep the street, cutting zombies into pieces while cackling like a crackpot conspiracy theorist at play in the all-too-common position of being dead right all along while spraying zombies with .50-caliber BMG rounds from a tank in one of those patented run-on sentences that really does and, yes, on a Halloween evening, as cliche as that might be, or something, etc; and I’ll just stop this one right here, and now, the end. After a hundred or so rounds, or maybe a few more, he stopped, fully climbed out, stood still, and addressed the team.

‘I’m going to enjoy a delicious, cold Diet Lime Chip® soda! It’s better because it’s now available in this great GRAPE flava, er, flavor,’ he said as if delivering a cheap advertising pitch and while unscrewing the bottle top. He paused and read, mostly to himself, the side label: ‘Grape! Purpa Drank! *Skittahz and sizzurp “sold” separately. Big Floyd’s ghost, these idiots pander harder than the cucks in the GOP.’ With that, he took a healthy swallow. And … he immediately began spitting and spewing, hacking and gasping. Throwing the bottle, which hit one of the masked, miserable kids who had hung around and who you’d probably forgotten all about, he staggered to the edge of the turret and vomited all over a zombie below. Still wheezing and spluttering, he leaned down and grabbed the towel-like turban off the head of another zombie, who in life, had been much more American than you, and wiped his mouth – all the while uttering curses too vile to print here.

‘Horrible!’ he yelled in a blind rage. ‘Almost as bad as the original!’ As he continued to rant and pant angrily, he dropped down to the gun again and blasted a few more we’re all in WHAT NOW?! together walking corpses. Finally, he once more stood up and turned to face the bewildered crowd who were still on the balcony, still stranded, and still suffering from painful ringing ears.

‘Nice night, huh?’ Perrin asked with a smirk.

‘Where did you get the tank?’ Ann asked.

‘Well, with the Army all gone and turned into ghouls, the stuff is free for the taking. Of course, it never was that difficult to appropriate their equipment anyway. Armories wide open, coast to coast. Hell, even libertarians did it,’ Perrin said with a gleam in his eye.

‘Oh, no!’ Da cried. ‘I hope nobody gets any assault rifles!!!’

At that, Perrin laughed out loud. ‘Yeah, can’t have that!’ he said while glancing down at the 65-ton main battle tank that he’d just strolled up to, cranked, and driven away in. ‘Anyway, with those dozen Marines out of the way, I’ve got my boys down at Kings Bay picking up the good stuff!’ He leaned down and casually fired off a few more rounds without bothering to aim or look or think – just like Alec Baldwin.

‘Liberty!’ MB said with pride; ‘Legalize Columbia! Democrats racist like tomatoes.’

‘Damn right,’ Da huffed. Perrin fired one last shot while cocking a mildly concerned eyebrow at the balcony.

‘Why’s that bloody rope trailing behind the tow hitch,’ Kayla asked.

‘The whu?’ Perrin mumbled as he looked at incoming Trident II launch system codes on his phone. ‘Oh, crap! That was Laughing Albert from the drug company.’

‘The CEO of—’ Marshall started to ask.

‘Former CEO. And war criminal. I wanted to interrogate him so I tied him up. Forgot about him like the family dog in the vacation movie. Ah well, one torture’s as good as another,’ Perrin said. He suddenly laughed nonstop, just the way Albert had always laughed on television whenever he was asked if he took the death jab his evil company developed in conjunction with the other luciferians. Whereas he had been able to eventually cough out a rough “no,” Perrin concluded his fit, saying, ‘hey, at least he’s in hell with his father, the devil. Good riddance! Now to hunt down the rest…’

‘Why are all the zombies still under the balcony and not gathering around you?’ Kayla inquired smartly.

‘Why? Because they only eat their own. I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for a specialized military operation and take poison from people who have openly stated they want everyone dead, and that the inventor said no human should ever take, and which had a 100% fatality rate in all animal trials, all because of overinflated numbers in a hoax based around weaponized perceptions of the common cold and flu designed to cover up the world economic collapse, at best, and at worst to usher in a new age of international globalist satanic slavery. I mean, really, who could be that retarded?’ Perrin said somewhat smugly, absolutely correctly, and to the chagrin of at least one member of his audience.

‘Wait. Then why do you keep shooting them?’ Ann asked.

‘I mean, why not?’ he answered. The crowd found great wisdom in his simple logic.

‘So, they’re just after us?’ Kayla sought to clarify.

 ‘Oh, yeah,’ Perrin rejoined. ‘One of you must be vaxxed. They can smell it.’

‘I knew it!’ screamed Da, suddenly coming to life. ‘It’s this Abner! He’s come to lead us all to our brain-devoured deaths!’ With that and with a surprising show of strength, Da seized the pleasant, previously unknown, armless character and hoisted him overhead.

While Abner begged for mercy and Perrin retouched the foot of his cigar, the others chanted, ‘Vaxx he azz! Vaxx he azz!’ Then, as one might expect, Da hurled Abner from the balcony. The doomed filler character landed in a heap among the zombies. 

‘My legs! I can’t feel my legs!’ Abner screamed before fading away just as he had feared, having previously read the script, unlike the others. But, interestingly, he neither reanimated nor was of any interest to the science-trusting former TV news watchers. All dead (uh, of the lively deceased, not Mr. Alldead) arms again raised and pawed towards the balcony.

‘Well, crud,’ Da said, slouching guiltily. 

‘Whadda kill my ringer fer?! Whadda kill my ringer fer?!’ Perrin yelled.

‘You mean it’s one of us?’ MB said with a shutter.

‘Looks like it, you Abner-cidal maniacs,’ Perrin said as he lowered back into the turret. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have a new Christian monarchy to govern. Enjoy the mess you made. You’re on your own!’

‘Wait!’ they all called, as the zombies bobbed and belched below. ‘Save us!’

As he closed the hatch, he called, ‘Read the Constitution to them! Better yet, vote! Vote hard.’

Finally realizing the political futility of their predicament, they sobbed and cursed. But it was too late. They watched sadly as the turret returned to the transport configuration. Then the tank, now sans the Day of the Pillow(!) justice tunes, turned about and drove away down the street. They watched it as it reached an intersection. And, then… They all jumped as an enormous clawed white reptilian foot stomped down with enough force to completely crush the pavement several feet into the ground. Perrin deftly swerved aside just in time. The Piedmonteers looked on in sheer terror as he overcorrected and drove straight through the local CBD store, utterly destroying it. A grievous injury! But their collective gasps and wails were silenced, drowned in a sea of noise from the clouds. Those silly kids had thought the boom of the old 120 was loud. Now, smashing down from above, there came a rolling, undulating roar of defiance and rage. Ears split, windows shattered, and the earth itself shook. Most unexpectedly, several out-of-sequence Japanese people ran around among the zombies, screaming, ‘Ritezilla! Ritezilla!’

Over them loomed a ridiculously tall white lizard, likely a giant albino Iguana or some other very large white lizard. Except this one was beyond very large. Enormous? Gargantuan? L-A-R-G-E. And white. With another roar, the beast picked up a bus and threw it back down. Then it waded through the buildings, moving generally towards A-town.

Having forgotten the now trivial zombies below, the gang stood rooted in fear. At last, MB broke the silence: ‘I wonder if that thing is going after the giant raccoon in Atlanta? That’d be a heck of a fight. Clash of the titans, so to speak. Battle of the monsters: Kang Koo—’ His words temporarily ended when, in a final parting lash, the monster’s tail reduced TPC headquarters to rubble. As the hapless gang dug themselves to safety, far away, carrying on the wind, they thought they heard a tune…

*Now, you’re probably thinking the tune they heard was one of Perrin’s pitiful parodies, perhaps a cheap takeoff on “Godzilla” by BOC. You’d be wrong (for once in a Halloween). They might have heard THIS.

**As originally written for (and about) TPC – where they can no longer be bothered to publish such things. This is, in fact, the final edition. Deo Vindice