HMTL Original Series: The Dead Life – #18
Day 17
By the time Dani’s cart had clattered onto the asphalt her forearms were aching from having avoided the cart spilling down the grass and dirt embankment. She rolled the cart forward and bit and pried her hands from the handle. A rush of blood began to circulate in her now slack arms and she nearly yelped from the sudden pain.
“Damn it.”
Edgar was idling nearby, having turned the car around. He rolled down the driver’s side window and leaned out. “You two start going. We’ll ride behind you and give you some cover.”
Dani glanced at Jimmy. He had already begun to push the cart down the street, which rattled terribly. The siren was long gone, so the loudest things around were the shopping carts and the Cadillac.
Dani grimaced and pushed her cart forward, with enough speed to catch up to Jimmy. He began to pick up the pace, not quite a jog, but close enough. Dani picked up her pace too. Edgar pulled the car out of park and it began to roll forward, slowly.
Dani glanced behind her, just past the Cadillac, towards Esplanade. Sure enough, dozens of ghouls had begun to converge on their position, their hellish moans carrying on rotting, stinking wind. She nearly gagged at the smell.
They had cleared about half of the block when the ghouls had caught up to the Cadillac. The car bought Edgar and the women protection, but greasy, shredded fingertips would slap and break on contact with the body.
Dani and Jimmy were pushing as quickly as they could, but the ghouls were surprisingly fast now, as though the stimulation whipped them into a frenzy.
Edgar glanced into the rearview mirror, past the exhausted Mary and her daughter out to the street behind him. The bulk of the ghouls were far enough behind it wouldn’t be a problem. The ghouls that had cut across the parking lot, however, had managed to stumble onto a shortcut. By Edgar’s count, he had about four ghouls right on top of his car. They couldn’t get in, and the windows were rolled up. They were fine – but until he could lose them he didn’t want to risk them coming close to the shopping carts.
Edgar dug around with a free hand at the back of his pants and drew the Glock he had hidden on him. He hadn’t separated from it since he and Jimmy had joined the group at the storage yard. He wouldn’t give up his gun for anything.
He placed the Glock on the passenger seat and glanced back. The girl – Alicia, was it? – she hadn’t noticed, warily eying the rear passenger window. She flinched when an oozing palm slapped at the glass.
He would need to pick them off, somehow, but he couldn’t drive and shoot. He looked through the rearview mirror and watched two of the ghouls fall to the ground. Now there were three.
He laughed a bit and turned his attention back to Dani and Jimmy ahead of him. Out of impulse, he scanned the area, a habit from driving back when the world had traffic.
Dani and Jimmy had passed an access road. A narrow lane between a building and a mobile home park with cracked asphalt full of potholes. Edgar glanced down the lane and saw a pair of ghouls stumble out – Dani and Jimmy hadn’t seen them. The ghouls took lurching steps toward the Cadillac.
“God damn it,” Edgar muttered.
The Dead Life is a Haunted MTL original fiction series.
Somehow I came across an older Midnight Panther comic book, Feudal Fantasy #2 from the late 1990s to be precise, and I thought I’d reappropriate it into a new story as a collage. Anyway, this is what evolved. Honestly there wasn’t a lot of content to work with, but that isn’t surprising seeing as how that wasn’t really the point of the original… And sorry, I saved the erotic bits for another project, though even that was pretty tame in this one – just a bunch of boobies.
Images: Black and white line drawings of wide-eyed anime women and men in various states of undress, looking cute, being coyly pensive, and hack ‘n slashing.
Text reads: I like… men who are dying. We ought to just kill everyone involved. The scent of blood!! I never see his face, he always wears a mask. What a waste of time. I don’t like this. The horny bastard. What a pig!! -Slash- Sounds like it could be fun.
Images: More black and white line drawings of wide-eyed anime women and men kissing and hack ‘n slashing.
Text reads: Mercenaries of glorious Edo, if you can make the flowers that bloom along the rivers during spring drop their petals, then do so. I’m the Ferryman of the River Styx. Whssh.
OK, OK – here are some boobies since you stuck with this so long. And here’s a link to some more of my comic book collages, in case you are interested.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
Black Friday.
You can’t beat the deals. So many of us. Waiting. Readying. Checking the time. Counting down the seconds. You better believe I earned my place at the start of the line. I’ve been camping out here since late Wednesday. Yeah, yeah, the holiday was yesterday. Whatever, I had my family’s full endorsement.
Because that new high-definition television beckons. The best in zoning out technology. All channel access. Cutting edge entertainment. Bleeding edge. That blade is sharp, baby. Like a razor.
But this kind of escapism is costly. A reality check says it’s not in my family’s budget. We don’t make that kind of money, and so here I am. Among all the others vying for the same prize.
Only one will get there first. Only one available. Must have TV. Must have T.V. Must. Have. T. V.
An employee approaches the door. Nobody noteworthy. A soon-to-be-casualty. No more. No less.
We rise and lurch into place. Ready…
On your mark.
Get set.
Go!
Original images generated with Nightcafe AI art generator.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website. Or if you just want more zombies, might I recommend either Elvis or the Fashionistas?
This time on Nightmarish Nature, in honor of Thanksgiving, we’re exploring scads of scat! And not just because of the aftermath of all that eating we’re going to be doing, given that everything that goes in must come out eventually. But because turkeys are weird.
But, how weird?
Apparently, the shape and size of a turkey’s poop can tell you the sex and age of the bird. Male and female birds poop different shaped turds, and bigger ones with age. Your poop can’t do that, we’re pretty sure. And no, we don’t want to check, even if it does come in a whole host of rainbow colors with all the dyes in our food nowadays. Keep your weird quirks to yourself.
Fecal Fetishes
Vultures have very acidic scat that helps to keep their feet and food clean of bacteria from hopping in and around dead things. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a step up to us, but I guess if you’re a carrion crawler you take what you can get. At least you’d know where it’s been I suppose, and that’s more than you can say for some of your long dead food sources…
Rabbits must process their food twice in order to break down the grassy matter they digest (like cows chewing cud). And so they eat their own partially digested matter, the cecotropes they produce after the first digestion. This isn’t true poop per se, that fecal matter comes after second digestion, but it does work its way through the same way.
And that brings us to koalas. They are one of only a few mammals that can eat eucalyptus leaves (and are closely related to wombats, one of the other two). Koala offspring eat their mother’s pap, which is a specialized form of poop that allows the baby to transition from nursing milk to eating solid leaves. It is green, smeary, mushy, and can get everywhere. Just like you’d expect.
We aren’t exempt.
For all that we have learned to be poop averse, a lot of animals eat others’ scat and glean a lot of nutritional value from their detritus. It’s not just your dog raiding the cat litter box and then licking you in the face. And we humans have even fought wars over rights to seabird guano, which was used as a form of fertilizer in the late 1800s.
Anyway, that’s the scoop on poop for now. Maybe we’ll revisit this load later on, seeing as how there’s still plenty of content here.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
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Original Creations4 days agoBonus Black Friday story: Zombie Apocalypse by Jennifer Weigel
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Book Reviews6 days ago
We Kept Her in the Cellar: a Lovecraftian Cinderella retelling.
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Book Reviews4 days ago
Lucy Undying is the Lesbian Dracula Retelling We Needed
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Original Creations2 days ago
The Scent of Blood: Comic Book Art by Jennifer Weigel
