Zombie Kong - Anthology (11 page)

(Editor’s note: It should be noted that the fire that saved the President rendered the Appalachian range––arguably one of the nation’s most beautiful––into a charred and stinking mire of burned trees, homes, people, and livestock. Efforts by Dolly Parton and Billy Ray Cyrus have already raised two million dollars for aid and reclamation, thanks in part to the release of their duet, “Monkeyshines”.)

Once past the mountains, the creature consumed an entire fleet of tour buses (nicknamed ‘Zombuses’ by All-Star Tours, and featuring ‘Tours of the Zombie Primate and Other Undead Horrors’) pausing only to pick some large clumps of tendons and muscles from its teeth with a telephone pole.

In Virginia, the thing hesitated, as if trying to get its bearings. It was unmindful of various attacks by American and UN forces, even though one lucky rocket strike took out the monster’s left eye. Unfortunately, the rogue eyeball destroyed most of the CIA headquarters in Langley, something the FBI gleefully posted on YouTube (with the caption, ‘Suck on that, spooks’) and tweeted to their fellow domestic law enforcement agencies throughout the free world.

The creature headed north, straight for Washington, D.C. Government officials decided to move the President even further down, to a sub-sub-shelter known as ‘Satan’s Rumpus Room’. Though well stocked with plenty of gourmet foods and wines (plus Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper, the President’s favorite), a private movie theater, a game room, a nine-hole golf course, and a theme park recently confiscated from the estate of a dead pop star, accommodations were more limited than they had been in Bedford Falls. Certain sacrifices had to be made.
(Editor’s note: The wisdom of leaving the Vice President and his family behind in favor of the cast of the President’s favorite sitcom,
Cheez-Heads,
is not something we will debate here.)

The colossal beast reached the nation’s capital and a curious thing happened.

It spent two entire days seemingly obsessed with manhole covers. It would see one from several blocks away and rush over––or through––several buildings to get to it (see side article:
Ape Destroys Lincoln Memorial and Most of DC’s Starbucks in Mad Rush to Manholes
). It would then pick up the manhole, examine it closely with its one remaining eye, then bite it.

“Like a feller checkin’ a silver dollar to see if t’were any good,” observed homeless squeegee jockey Donald “Gummy” Olberstein, former Western sidekick of the popular 1950s series,
The Sons of Doc Holliday
.

Unfortunately, whatever the primate was looking for was not to be found under any of the manhole covers of Washington. After biting the one hundred pound cast iron and concrete treat, the gorilla would roar and hurl the disc. This resulted in several more thousand dollars in damages (negligible in the face of the billions already run up) and the decapitation of the entire DC Jammerz street gang (see YouTube video:
Fronters Loose (sic) Heads,
posted by Li’l Diablo).

A number of D.C.’s finest, hoping to get a jump on the military and the Secret Service, filled the streets with SWAT vans and weapons confiscated from cartel minions and gang members.

A number of them, taking in the miasma that surrounded the creature, fell violently ill and collapsed in the street, where they were consumed by maggots the size of piglets dripping from the ruined eye socket of the beast.

Others, wearing gas masks, did not succumb to the foul stench of the undead thing, but found that their bullet-proof vests and heavy wool uniforms were no barrier against the questing proboscises of the giant fleas and ticks searching for fresh blood in the streets of Washington.

The creature, unmindful of the bullets, tear gas, and rocket fire, filled its putrid maw with squirming victims and its own parasites. Their screams became muffled and were soon lost in the din of battle, while partially-chewed officers rained down upon their fellows, one with a leg still kicking, and a head and torso screaming for a full five minutes before a grizzled desk sergeant put a bullet in the man’s head.

Though it was not the worst encounter with the gorilla, the D.C. police came to call it ‘The Everett Avenue Massacre’, and it was made into a TV movie with Miley Cyrus and John Stamos.

In Iowa, Doctor Emily Grange woke up in a cold sweat on her cot, shouting “Petroglyphs!” Without delay, she made a call to local law enforcement for a chopper and found that all aircraft in the area had been either stepped on or grabbed out of the air and chewed on by the creature. She eventually found a crop duster willing to take her up and over the carnival site, and perhaps beyond, if her suspicions were warranted.

She prayed that they were not.

In Satan’s Rumpus Room, the President appeared in a mock-up of the Oval Office and assured the beleagured nation that he had “not left his post.” This claim was shown to be a rather transparent fiction when the backdrop behind him collapsed and revealed an impromptu bowling tournament between the President’s family and several well-known 80s musicians, including Hall & Oates.

Enraged, much of the population of Washington stormed the White House, not realizing that the President was safely underground in Nevada. The protesters were mowed down by the Secret Service and the police, delighted to finally have a target they could take down with bullets, tear gas, and rockets.

Though the action would later be whitewashed and the body count chalked up to the rampaging gorilla-ghoul, people would come to call it ‘The Pennsylvania Avenue Massacre’, and it would be made into a big budget Michael Bay movie with James Franco and Anne Hathaway, with WETA providing a motion-control zombie ape, played by Andy Serkis.

As bodies were piling up outside the White House Rose Garden, the gorilla took this moment to put in an appearance. By this time, the Army had mobilized Project Coconut, and had instituted an emergency draft to beef up its decimated ranks. A warhead with a low nuclear yield (called an ‘Oppenheimer Junior’) was deployed from an M1 Abrams tank and fired by Corporal Scott “Scooter” James, the President’s nephew.

The missile slammed into the creature’s mid-section and exploded, sending putrescent flesh and some of the larger undigested human bones flying. These destroyed the White House Rose Garden and made a charnel house of the Lincoln Bedroom, which, at the time, was occupied by the Vice-President and one of the docents from the midday tour.

The creature halted as its entrails spilled out in a foul, fetid mass. Its stomach acids ate through several tanks, including the M1 Abrams, where Scooter James died a messy and agonizing death.

Several hundred brave men and women closed in to finish off the creature, when five undead tapeworms, each nearly a quarter mile in length, broke free of the rotting intestines and attacked the troops. The tapeworm, generally an annoying but somewhat passive creature, had been transformed by An-775 into something like a moray eel crossed with an anaconda on meth––a really huge moray eel and anaconda, on a really huge quantity of high-grade meth.

The tapeworms strangled, poisoned, and devoured over fifty percent of the troops before the gorilla began scooping up vast mouthfuls of its own innards, parasites and hapless humans. (Editor’s note: Video of the event showed the living dead primate healing while continuing to decay, a contradiction that scientists are still investigating to this very day.)

The President and his staff were considering more extreme options (move the U.S. to an offshore territory, annex Canada, relocate to the moon) when Dr. Grange called in from Iowa. “Mr. President, I believe I have a way to lure the creature into the sea… however, we do have a bigger…”

“How do we lure it, Doctor?”

“We need to fabricate a quarter the size of a manhole cover. If you contact the mint, I’m sure…”

“Say again, you need a large mint?”

“No sir, a really big quarter… you know, the coin?”

At this point, the President hung up on her. “Crackpot,” he said to his staff, and they went back to discussing the feasibility of a space ark.

Dr. Grange, to her credit, did not give up. She contacted a cousin in the scrap metal business and he was able to create a reasonable facsimile of a twenty-two inch quarter using fenders from a 1960 Ford Galaxy. Dr. Grange was able to secure a helicopter from a local news station in Washington. Joining the pilot, she dangled the giant coin in front of the undead simian and waited.

The results, to all who were watching, were remarkable.

The creature stopped eating, fixing its one eye on the faux two bits. It let out a roar, and grabbed for the coin. The pilot, a veteran of the war in Iraq, deftly kept the coin just out of reach of the creature. In this way they led it far out into the Atlantic, where it sank and presumably drowned.

As they landed on the helipad Dr. Grange heard from the pilot of the crop-duster, Joe Kittinger.

“Mr. Kittinger, did you find anything?”

“Yes, ma’am. ’Twere at the bottom of McFarland Lake… it’s comin’ out now…”

He sent her photos from his cell phone, and Dr. Grange put in a call to the President.

The President took the call, intent on making her quick thinking part of his re-election campaign.

“Dr. Grange, I’d like to present you with the Medal of Honor, just as soon as the White House is habitable again.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. President, but we have a bigger problem.”

The President chuckled. “Bigger than a fifty-foot zombie gorilla? I seriously doubt that.”

“It’s not a gorilla, Mr. President, it’s a capuchin monkey… The tail was a big giveaway. And its been spotted on Roanoke Island.”

“Monkey, ape, aren’t we just splitting hairs here?”

“Sir, the red ‘tent’ we found was no tent… it was an enormous cap and vest…”

“I don’t…”

“The Anubis gas reanimated and enlarged a trained monkey - an organ grinder monkey. Not only is that monkey still alive… um, undead, but…”

“Out with it, Doctor!” the President barked.

“At this moment, a one hundred and fifty foot organ grinder monkey is making his way to Washington.”

In the background of her call, the President could hear the first strains of “The Beer Barrel Polka.”

And screams; lots of screams.

GUSTAVO BONDONI

Shadow of the Gorilla

For a moment, Verstappen found himself believing that, just maybe, Conrad had been right about the place. Night seemed darker here than anywhere the Belgian freighter captain had ever been in his life, despite the life he could feel buzzing and flittering just beyond the reach of the electric lights. The illumination was weak, as if it knew it didn’t belong.

The
Étoile Ostend
didn’t belong there, either. If it had been entirely up to its captain, the ship would have left Verstappen and his men to fend for themselves in the jungles of Congo––or was that Zaire, now? Mugabe’s soldiers would have little doubt about what to do with a group of white men unaligned with any of the major power blocs.

The captain’s attitude was understandable; the cargo hold was almost completely laden: copper from the inland mines––the supposed reason for their trip––and a container-full of chemical drums lifted out of South Africa just before a UN inspection, which were to be dumped in the middle of the ocean for a tidy profit. But the money would only be paid if they managed the operation unobserved. If they left now, all of them could retire as wealthy men, but if the American or Belgian special force troops that seemed to be so prevalent since about 1965 spotted them, they would likely spend the rest of their penniless lives in prison.

What the captain didn’t know was that the final piece of cargo had a price tag that made the South African money seem like pocket change. If he’d known that, he wouldn’t have been so anxious to leave, but he would certainly have demanded a cut.

Finally, the truck, a twenty-year-old Saab, turned onto the potholed loading dock, right under the only functioning crane in the entire port of Matadi. Thierry, the driver, climbed out of the cab and made a beeline for Verstappen.

“I swear, if we hadn’t been through three wars together, I’d beat you to a pulp.”

Verstappen grinned. “Tough trip?”

“I can’t believe they call these things roads. Even the paved parts look like they’ve been bombed.”

A shrug. “They probably have. How is the cargo?”

“It woke up a few hours ago. Dented the container.” Thierry pointed to a massive bulge on the side of the ribbed box. “We just opened a hatch and hit it with elephant tranquilizers until it shut up. If it’s dead, it’s dead.”

“Unlikely.”

“Yeah, I heard. The chief made me pay a huge blood price. He says he lost half his village squeezing that thing into the container.”

“It’s peanuts, Thierry. We’ll be rich men when we get back to Brussels. But I’m still amazed that they managed to get it in at all.”

“It’s a pretty tough squeeze, but anything much bigger than a forty-foot container was going to look suspicious when we unloaded. We made it a little wider and a little longer. Let’s just hope no one measures the thing.”

“We’ll worry about that when we get there. Just get it loaded. The sooner I get out of Congo, the happier I’ll be.”

* * *

Carolina checked her phone and smiled: a dancing iguana figure with tropical music blaring told her whom the message was from with no room for doubt. Felipe might be unreliable and capricious, but he was totally worth it, especially in bed. And the fact that he’d actually come all the way down to Tapera to see her––a bit of a hitch-hike from the center of Florianopolis––meant that she’d actually managed to get far enough through his armor to avoid becoming the latest in his series of one-night tourist girls.