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The blue and red, the blue and red.
The blue and red, the blue and red.
The blue and red, the blue and red.
The lighter flickered orange and someone, we’ll call her Jane Lovelace, ran a needle under the welcomed change in color. “Hold on, Juan. We gotcha. We gotcha.” She rolled up her deep blue sleeve, exposing the bloodied, hanging skin. Singing the song of the executioner, her pistol was too slow to stop this mishap. Perhaps, too long on that last little whole note – sang with too much glee. As she exhaled, she plunged the needle deep into the wound.
Disease is a terrible thing.
She ran to the wreckage, the fire, and the blood. Her fellow officer, Juan, was everywhere. The bulletproofed squad car windshield, a new addition to the Malton fleet, was flawlessly shattered by the tree. There were no skid marks leading to the fated oak. What a poor, old tree it was! To be crashed into and not even see a drop of blood in recompense! As for Juan, he was not far off. There were six bodies in total when Ms. Lovelace reached the scene. And then there was Juan, who no longer could really be accounted for as a body, per se.
Disease is a terrible thing.
Being effectively drawn and quartered is worse.
Ms. Lovelace screamed. She’d seen decapitations. What she had never seen, however, was the human body made unknowable – a human body crushed, mangled, ripped, drained, and emptied into nothing but little flecks of carbon. Little pieces of material undeserving of a place in the English lexicon – those were Juan. It’s very hard to say hello to that, let alone get a meaningful response, so Ms. Lovelace, a long-time officer of the ruff-and-tumble Malton Police Department, screamed. Like a child lost in a supermarket. Oh, but Jane, sweet and stupid Jane – she didn’t even scream when the infection nearly caught up with her last month.
The red.
The blue and the red.
The blue and red, the blue and the red.
“Bon soir, mademoiselle.”
The voice came from the Juan’s car. Jane produced her pistol. Her throat-choked lips barely moved to respond. “What? What now? What is it now? What, what, what? I swear to –”
“You’ll swear to your friend there. Now he sees all too well the way of the world.”
She pulled the trigger. A hole ripped through the tree. The poor, old oak. Her hands were quaking. “What, asshole? What is it? What?”
“Your friend. Officer Mendoza. He should have, perhaps, checked this.”
A bottle of brake fluid slid from underneath the car towards Ms. Lovelace. It had a sketch of Munch’s The Scream on the side facing the officer.
“You see a similarity?” The car laughed.
The cold silence from Ms. Lovelace stopped the playful phantom. She fired another two rounds into the car.
“Oh, come on now. You need to lighten up,” the ghost replied. Ms. Lovelace looked at her lighter in her pocket. She threw it away as far as she could muster. Too many bad action movie puns.
Her rigid, shaking posture slouched, until she appeared almost calm, almost comfortable.
“Won’t you talk to me? This whole ordeal would be much more lucrative if you’d add a little back-story.”
“Back-story? What the hell’s your problem?”
“My problem is that I just don’t know what’s what these days!”
She fired another round into the car.
“Clearly,” she said, in a warm slur and smug violence.
“En garde, my dear!”
She didn’t see the pistol. She barely felt the bullet. What she did notice, however, was that her trigger and middle fingers were missing, and that there was a fair amount of deep, deep red blood coming from her hand. What she should have noticed was the rolling cloud of black cloth, with its anvil-head a floating white mask. It wrapped around her, gently bandaging the wound.
All she could manage were some primal groans and grunts.
It spoke in an ever more calculating voice.
“The thought, here, is to see what exactly this does.” He motioned to a vial of liquid that her rolling eyes failed to attempt to read.
It spoke in a fatherly voice.
“Well, now, you should know at least what you’ve injected yourself with.”
Her fading eyebrows began to slack. He drove a syringe into her arm.
“That was for the infection. Good thing you had shown me that earlier! I can’t have my zombie becoming infected, after all. It would ruin the whole experience.”
It brought her to the ground.
“Alas, alack – they simply don’t fund education like they used to,” it said while looping a lanyard around her neck. “It says, ‘Subject Iota Three. Project Kappa Alpha. Property of VM.’ Vee emm. Can you say, ‘vee emm?’ No? Oh, well, there it is. I suppose I shouldn’t even try a ‘tetrodotoxin.’”
The specter began to walk towards a two-story residence with charred, boarded-up windows.
It turned once more to face the now dead-apparent Ms. Lovelace.
“Goodnight, deary. I’ll be seeing you soon.”
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