Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Excerpt from CHRISTIAN ZOMBIE: A TALE OF SIN AND REDEMPTION



By this time there are sirens winding down, red lights flashing out front, and a bunch of cops and first-responder ambulance types charging through the front door. I don’t need to tell you that this is one real mystery unfolding for anyone who wasn’t in Hair of the Dog Saloon over the last hour. It’s almost like a stage play—bartender doing what bartenders do, a guy (me) sitting at the end of the bar, a few customers scattered around tables, bar girls taking some drinks out, kitchen shoving a big plate of cheese fries up on the delivery shelf under the hot lamps. And, of course, this disemboweled and dismembered carcass without a face, drying blood and small intestines all over the floor, and that Glock lying right there in the middle of it all. I won’t bore you with a detailed description of the next hour at Hair of the Dog, except to say that it involved a lot of interesting discussion. Some time when he has a break, the bartender brings me my refill.
“We’re going out after closing,” he says; “you’re welcome to join us.”
Of course I joined them. I’m not sure there’s much literature on werewolf packs, so perhaps this unsavory time of my life represents an opportunity to provide information to whomever might need it in the future: law enforcement agencies, teen paranormal romance writers, Hollywood wannabes, and anyone else who might have more than a passing interest in extreme evil for the sake of evil. If you think one 230 pound, 6’ 3”, beast with razor-sharp, two-inch canine teeth can wreak havoc, try a dozen of these bad boys all hell-bent on complete destruction of anything and everything in their path. The trouble is, there’s not much happening in Omaha after 2:00AM and the last call for alcohol, so the pack has to go cruising for 24-hour places like certain pharmacies and grocery stores. My advice to the average reader: don’t go to Heartland out on west Dodge after two in the morning. In fact, even if you don’t live in Omaha, I recommend getting all your normal business done before bar closing time. Yes, there are werewolf packs all over the country, and probably throughout the world, too.
You’d think that high-ranking elected officials, especially in the United States, would figure this out, but in general they’re so stupid they can’t even understand evolution and global climate change, so why would anyone expect them to appreciate the finer attributes of a werewolf pack hiding right there under their noses? Anyone wouldn’t, of course; the average person on the street still believes in angels and that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, but come to think of it, such individuals ought to be sitting ducks for a werewolf pack. I suspect there’s some group dynamics at work here: it’s okay to believe that an American President is not a citizen of this country because you get told that a thousand times a day by some fat jerk with a cigar in his mouth spouting it out over our common authority for all things, namely, television. So maybe if these kinds of idiots started blaming your everyday problems on a pack of werewolves, then 56% of the American public would come to believe it. Well, I’m here to tell you the truth, that yes indeed, many of your common problems are, indeed, caused by a pack of wolves.
Back in those days, before I joined the pack, I honestly believed that the main function of a werewolf was to instill terror in the human mind. What I discovered as a result of that fateful evening in Hair of the Dog, was that there is a form of evil that goes well beyond physical destruction. Trust me on this one: you see it almost every day in the affairs of nations, the truly stupid conclusion based only on belief (try “weapons of mass destruction” for starters, or if that hits too close to your patriotic home, try “Let’s bundle these sub-prime mortgages and sell the bundles as derivatives, then sell options on the derivatives.”) I will admit to being a very naïve wolf in my solitary days. What I learned from the pack, and especially the bartender—I’ll call him “Claude,” a very unlikely name for such a role model—was that the words Shakespeare put into Mark Antony’s mouth were right on target, and that if you really wanted to generate some evil that lives after you, then you start by messing with the minds of those proverbial people on the street. In other words, instead of killing them, you kill their ability to think rationally.

The complete e-book, CHRISTIAN ZOMBIE: A TALE OF SIN AND REDEMPTION, is available on kindle and from smashwords.com.

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