Zombie Killa Read online

  Madness:

  Chapter 1 – The Odd Couple

  Chapter 2 – Karyn Crisis In The Kremlin

  Chapter 3 – Fear And Loathing In Cleveland

  Chapter 4 – All My Texts Originate In Texas

  Chapter 5 – Florida Sucks

  Chapter 6 – Z.E.D.’s Not Dead

  Chapter 7 – Federal Case, Jr.

  Chapter 8 – Louisiana Sucks, But Not As Much As Florida

  Chapter 9 – Bad Mother Truckers

  Chapter 10 – Hack Attack

  Chapter 11 – Balloonacy

  Chapter 12 – Operation Europe

  Chapter 13 – Locked Down

  Chapter 14 – Peach Is The Word

  Chapter 15 – Victorious Secret

  Zombie Killa

  Jason Z. Christie Copyright 2011 by Jason Z. Christie

  Dedicated to the Nerdcore Hip-Hop Scene, and as always, my loving wife Johnnie Christie…

  Author’s Note: All of the rappers who appear in this novella are real people who make real music. Google them. They’re fun.

  Chapter 1 – The Odd Couple

  Myf’s alarm clock clicked on, and he was awakened to an ear-shattering blast of Brutal Truth, one of his favorite grindcore bands. He was your typical black college student: wild, impetuous, fun loving. He was actually from Sri Lanka, but he looked black, so it was easier to just self-identify as black. Things like that seemed to matter more in the U.S. Very few people were close enough for him to reveal his actual heritage.

  He reached over, eyes closed, and grabbed his pre-loaded three foot bong. His hand groped for a lighter from the nightstand, which held many upon its surface. He managed to find one, knocking several others to the carpet, and took a hit of Willy Wonka, the current favorite weed in Cleveland.

  The light from the burning butane pierced his eyelids like a supernova. Somewhat awake, he staggered to the dresser and in his stupor, applied brown shoe polish to his armpits instead of deodorant. It was April twentieth, two thousand and twelve.

  He walked into the extremely dark bedroom of his roommate, High-C. High was your typical straight-laced white guy: conservative, uptight, judgmental, and a secret crack-smoker. Myf brought the reloaded bong with him. He flicked on the light switch, jarring High awake, and dissipating his dreams of eating the pussy of some young girl or another.

  “Duuuude!” Myf yelled. “It’s four-twenty!”

  He pushed the business end of the bong into High’s mouth and flicked his Bic. Reflexively, he cleared the entire bowl in a single hit. His lungpower was legendary. High-C opened one eye and looked at the red LCD display of his cheap Wal-Mart alarm clock. It read “3:22 AM”.

  “Fucker,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m early. But I knew you’d want to sleep in. If I’d have awakened you at four-twenty, you’d have missed it. I’ll be back,” Myf said. “I’m working on a surprise.”

  High turned over to sleep, but the stash of rocks under his bed was calling to him. His drug consumption was also legendary. In fact, one of the few things he wasn’t a legend at was rapping, which was unfortunate, because he, Myf, and all of their friends were aspiring nerdcore rappers. Still, the others tolerated his efforts, and humored him.

  They were sort of irked by him at the same time, because although he was a great lyricist, he put almost no effort at all into recording tracks. Myf, by contrast, could crank out a pro-sounding track in a single take.

  He pulled out his basepipe and wrapped himself in a large American flag he’d liberated from a McDonald’s. As his black metal friend Goat once remarked, “You can’t get more American than that.” He blazed stones until four, when he put the mapp gas torch down and crafted a blendo starship. It was his greatest joint creation yet, a huge cone spliff with three joints sticking out of the end of it. It stood on his nightstand like a rocket or one of the Apollo lunar landing modules, assuming they were constructed of marijuana and paper.

  At four-fifteen, he sauntered out of his room buck naked, as was his habit. Myf was one of the few people who tolerated his antics and took him in stride.

  “Put on a robe, cocksucker,” Myf said, “Show some respect, man.”

  “I never understood why you stoners celebrated Hitler’s birthday in the first place.”

  High went to his room and returned in a fuzzy pink bathrobe.

  “What?” he said to Myf, who hadn’t said anything in the first place. “Much like the practice that originated among New York pimps of calling each other ‘baby’ and the like, a man secure in his sexuality can, say, wear a fuzzy pink bathrobe.”

  “I didn’t say anything in the first place,” Myf said. “But I’ll thank you not to lecture me on black American culture, sir.”

  “Oh, shit. I’m as black as you are, Sri Lankan motherfucker.”

  “I disagree, white boy. Years of identifying with black people and being treated like one has effectively made me black. Something you’ll never be.” “I’m as black as Tracey Morrow,” High countered.

  “Nope,” Myf said.

  “Will Smith?”

  “Mmm, maybe. Then again, he cheated on his wife. You don’t even have a girlfriend.”

  “That’s because I labor under the misconception imposed by Julie Brown in the 1984 non-classic classic Earth Girls Are Easy.”

  “It stands to reason, sir, that after twenty-eight years of the same folly, you’d readjust your tactics.”

  High-C was determined to disprove one man’s working definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. He threw great fistfuls of ham and bacon into a cast iron skillet.

  “No time for cop eating, bruh. Spark that ell. It’s four twentaaay!”

  High pulled out his Starship Titanic or whatever he called his latest art piece.

  “We have two minutes. What’s your new project?” He nodded toward a large object covered with a sheet that sat along one wall of the living room.

  “Your timing sucks. Light that motherfucker. Then we’ll smoke a joint and talk about it.”

  “Whitney Houston, we’re go for liftoff in ten…nine…”

  “One,” Myf said, snatching it from his hand. “It’ll take a whole minute to get this monstrosity lit.”

  He put fire to the three legs and began puffing. To his surprise, all three lit and started burning. He passed it to High-C.

  “What’s in this motherfucker?” Myf asked.

  “The legs are Skunk #1, Willie Wonka, and Chocolate Thai. The body itself is pure B.C. Bud from Vancouver, Canada.”

  “Nursehella weed, eh?”

  “Better yet, smuggled here in her own sweet pussy.”

  “Ultraklystron?” Myf asked, and they both giggled.

  At four-twenty, Myf’s alarm clock went off again, and they let the metal blast away as they smoked. By the time they had burned the legs down, Myf begged off. High continued to hit Nursie’s pussyweed, blowing smoke rings. He fancied himself a dragon.

  Myf pulled the sheet off with a flourish.

  “Endtroducing the Mythril Nazgulator Nine Thousand,” he said.

  It was a two-seated wooden bench with a high back that extended up into a box with two holes in the bottom. There were speaker wires running into the left and right sides of the top part.

  “What is it?” High asked. “An electric chair built for two? A very impractical park bench? The city of Cleveland would love it.”

  “Its the ultimate smoking accessory. You get in the speakers, man! There’s lights and-“

  There was a loud knock at the door. The downstairs neighbor, an actual black American, had called the police over the music. Myf peered through the peephole as High continued to puff away at the cone.

  “Shit, it’s a cop!�
��

  Cleveland cops were notorious assholes, especially when it came to weed. High-C just kept toking.

  “You didn’t use the agreed upon code phrase for a cop at the door,” he said.

  “Fuck!” Myf said. “Put it out. Cereal!”

  “Nope,” High said defiantly.

  “Okay, okay,” Myf said. “Damn! Five-oh, Ice!”

  “That’s better.”

  High spat into his hand and extinguished the remainder of the spliff, putting it behind his ear.

  Chapter 2 – Karyn Crisis In The Kremlin

  YTCracker had hacked NASA again. This time, he grabbed a PDF of a pre-release draft edition of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. He scanned it, not really taking it all in.

  “Hot shit,” he said.

  He was such a pimp-ass hacker, his PC was a La-Z-Boy recliner. All he had to do was lay back and close his eyes and he was jacked in. That put him at least four generations ahead of the rest of the nerdcore hip-hop clique.

  Some of the hieroglyphics were unfamiliar to him, and he definitely didn’t trust NASA’s translation, so he forwarded the document to Magitek, some of his Orlando homeboys, for an in-depth analysis. Then he went back to pimpin’ Nightelves in World of Warcraft. High-C had him gold-farming for some nutty simulator idea.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Zealous1 was busting serious caps on the west coast. A Piru Blood as well as a nerdcore MC, he stood astride two worlds, suffocating them. He was a big dude. Like, he ate Boo-Yah Tribe big.

  “I sense an upcoming disturbance in the force,” he told his WOW familiar, Salem the Cat from Sabrina the Teenage Witch. “Probably something to do with that buster-ass fake crab High-C.”

  High and Zealous had been on the outs ever since some Babylon Five chatroom flame war had gotten out of hand. Just for shits and giggles he executed a script that turned everyone in the vicinity into High-C avatars. Then he entered berserker mode and scattered body parts for miles. He drop kicked High-C’s head through the gates of Isendor, which technically shouldn’t have been present in Azeroth. He was a boss hacker himself.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  MC Router ran the Dallas nerdcore branch with an iron fist. She had discarded the velvet glove entirely, having first wiped her fucking ass with it. She took no shit from anyone. Well, she took High-C’s head once, and he was a shithead, so that was debatable. Generally speaking, however, she took no shit off of anyone. She was still a little upset about Vegas.

  She was wearing her German beerhall disguise, bugging Doc Popular for a new instrumental, and playtesting games for Praxis Software. Router was the reigning queen of nerdcore. Or, at least she was until Nursehella popped up, totally sucking High-C in with her Rush and Evil Dead references. He was such a pushover.

  Eventually, they settled their differences, dividing the U.S. evenly down the middle. Which was hardly fair, as Nursie was Canadian. Still, they weren’t about to share anything with that brat Veeps.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Quick-thinking Myf switched on the ceiling fan to dissipate the clouds in the room and sprayed some Pam cooking spray, since they didn’t seem to own any air freshener. Then he wondered why in the fuck they had Pam cooking spray. Apparently High had bought it on eBay. He spent much of his disposable income on kitsch.

  High refused to remove the cone roach from behind his ear, so Myf finally slapped it away and stomped on it. Ever the businessman, High-C said, “You owe me thirty bucks,” and opened the door.

  The cop was there on a simple noise complaint, and he really didn’t care about pot, either. Plus his nose was packed to the gills with cocaine, so he couldn’t smell much anyway.

  “What’s goin’ on, fellas?” he asked them cordially.

  “Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing is going on, sir,” High said. He fairly well coasted the word “sir” with venom.

  “Can you boys please turn the music down?”

  Myf and High-C looked at each other with disbelief. In their haste to cover up the pot odor, they had forgotten to shut the bone-rattling noise off.

  “No,” High said. “It’s my motherfuckin’ right to blast music during normal business hours. I pay my taxes.”

  “Yes, sir,” Myf said, and went to turn down his custom-rigged alarm clock.

  “Guy,” the cop said, “It’s not even five a.m. yet.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what time it is,” High told him. The epithet “pig” was millimeters from his lips. “Taxes,” he said instead.

  “If you’re trying to say you pay my salary, I’m a dollar a year reserve officer, so you’re probably right.”

  “Ha! I don’t pay no fuckin’ taxes. Pig!”

  “Now you’re just being hurtful,” the cop said.

  “I apologize for my roommate’s brash, impetuous nature, sir,” Myf said upon his return. Years of being more-or-less black had taught him how to address law enforcement officers properly.

  “It’s no problem, personally. I like the punk rock, dontchaknow.”

  Ohio had never made it to death metal, so anything beyond Bob Seger was “punk rock”.

  “Again, I’m sorry, sir,” Myf said. “I can assure you that it won’t happen again.”

  “Hey, what’s that?” the cop asked, indicating the smoke box. High-C was frying his pork products again.

  “It’s, uh, a gay sex thing. You wouldn’t be interested,” Myf told him.

  “Oh, no?” the cop said, stepping inside. “Try me…”

  “You have to be handcuffed,” High said over the sizzle of the frying pan. To their amazement, the cop actually cuffed himself.

  “Um, have a seat, I guess,” Myf said.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Magitek, three NCHH MC’s representing an amalgam of science, music and magic, received the PDF of The Book of the Dead - Egyptian edition from YT in Colorado. He’d gone back to digging through the records of the Denver airport, looking for something to confirm or deny High-C’s kook claims of “something ooky” going on.

  There was an electronic Post-It attached: “Hot shit – YT.”

  The boys printed three copies, along with a pirated Egyptian Hieroglyphics for Non-Dummies ebook, and got to work translating it.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Doc Popular had succumbed to Router’s numerous charms, and was composing a new backing track for her. His only stipulation was that she open the track by saying, “My new mania is motorcars!”

  Doc Pop was so fly, he composed the entire thing by banging on a Speak-N-Spell with a yo-yo. It took him all of four minutes, and the track was five minutes long. Tres Cool from the movie Hackers was largely based on studying his droppings. He didn’t smoke pot, instead favoring hipster martinis, which was a martini glass full of Pabst Blue Ribbon with a cherry in it. But he had a feeling he’d probably need a joint soon himself.

  Chapter 3 – Fear And Loathing In Cleveland

  When the cop, now handcuffed, sat in the chair on the right of Myf’s contraption, High got his Glock .9mm from a box under his bed. He was sure they were popped, and that the cop’s performance was a ruse to stall them while he waited for back-up. Perhaps it was the freebase, maybe it was the ghost of Ayn Rand.

  He put the gun against the box containing the cop’s head. “You may hear a slight noise. That’s Alderaan. Fuck Alderaan.”

  To Myf’s amazement and horror, he pulled the trigger, scattering the cop’s blood and brains onto the opposite wall.

  “Don’t take any guff from these swine,” he said casually to Myf.

  “You crazy, stupid motherfucker!” Myf yelled.

  “What? I really, really don’t like jail. I can’t have another misdemeanor on my record, either. Doesn’t look good to the kids.”

  He scooped a fleck of gray matter from the wall and tasted it. “Braaains!”

  Myf threw up.

  “We’re really going to catch hell getting our cleaning deposit back,” High-C said.

  Unable to think of any other course of action, he dialed E.P.P.
in Florida. Betty Rebel answered.

  “B.R., we need an out. High-C’s gone crazy!”

  “So what else is new? That’s all he ever does.”

  “He shot a cop in the head.”

  “Oh,” Betty said quietly. “Well, that’s a new one. Ok, y’all can hide out here. But you have to promise to help me on my solo album, ok?”

  “Are you serious?” Myf said.

  “Very. I have a lot of ideas I’d like to explore. Want to drop sixteen bars for me?”

  “Betts. We’re in serious, ass-pounding prison trouble, here.”

  “Yeah, well I need producers.”

  “Ok, ok! This is silly.”

  “Fine. Bring yo’ asses on, then.”

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Emergency Pizza Party were, characteristically, eating pizza and generally partying. There was no real emergency, but they were recording a new track with Patri Friedman about the myth of Keynesian economics for some bizarre reason, when Betty Rebel broke into tears.

  “Fucking High-C’s coming back,” she said. Lady Down began sharpening her steeliest knives.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Beefy, the Beefster, Captain Beefheart, sat in a hot tub smoking a cigar, the scene marred only by the fact that he did so with his shirt on. There was no dialogue, because he was alone, and talking to himself would have been weird. Nevertheless, he chuckled and said, “Excellent.”

  A lot of his power stemmed from the fact that he was alone. If only he could cure himself of his chronic porn addiction.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Myf scrambled around the apartment gathering various mementos and keepsakes, throwing things into an Adidas duffle bag and trying to make rash judgments on what he could leave behind. Suddenly the value of everything seemed skewed, and he realized that most of his really important things were stored online, anyway. High-C ate two big-ass bacon and ham sandwiches, blasé to the dead cop in his living room.

  “It’s a shame to lose the prototype,” he said to a distraught Myf. “But I think we can build a better one. Let’s put 3D displays in the next one, maybe.”

  “Let’s roll,” Myf said.