October 6, 2015
I was half-asleep, unsure of what time it was. The only glimpse of light came when Alien Jones opened his glow in the dark eyes or when VGRF moved around while holding the space phone.
She had it on speaker.
“Hello!” came an automated message. “You have reached the Pentagon! If you are a terrorist, please stay on the line and an operator will be on shortly to take your location so we can blow you up and shit.”
“Ugh,” VGRF said. “You can never get a real person on the line anymore.”
“You’re being silly, babe,” I said. “You really think the Army is going to bother to help us? All they’re going to do is keep the town under containment. They’re not going to send a unit into an area teaming with zombies just to save a few people.”
“Oh please,” VGRF said. “You just want to keep this insanity going so you can up the hits on your precious blog.”
“VGRF! How dare you imply I’d ever do such a thing?”
(I was totally doing such a thing. 10.5 readers, here I come!)
“This is a rare occasion where I concur with BQB,” Alien Jones said. “I’d prefer to keep the government out of this as much as possible. One look at me and they’ll cart me off to Area 51.”
“Area 51’s real?” VGRF asked.
“I’ve said too much,” Alien Jones answered.
The Esteemed Brainy One
“Grab another hat and some sunglasses and we’ll tell them you’re our kid,” VGRF said. “Or you can just poof yourself out of here.”
Alien Jones did have the ability to teleport himself away at any second. It was a true sign of his support that he didn’t do just that and leave the rest of us hanging.
The Pentagon’s automated voice message system was back.
“If you are a United States citizen under attack, press one now!”
VGRF pressed one.
“Please state the nature of the attack.”
“Zombies.”
“I heard, ‘Taylor Swift wielding a club!’ If that’s correct, please press one. If incorrect, press two.”
“How could this machine have possibly gotten that out of ‘zombies?'” VGRF asked as she pressed two.
“Machines screw with humans all the time,” Alien Jones said. “They test your patience and take notes regarding your responses for the purposes of planning their inevitable takeover. Same thing happened to the Moloklaxons.”
“Please state the nature of the attack again.”
“Zombies! We’re being attacked by zombies!”
“I heard, ‘Rob Lowe is ordering a chicken to peck your eyes out!’ If that is correct, press one…”
“ARRRRGGGGH!!”
It was a VGRF’s turn to flip out.
“Just hang up,” I said. “Leave it to the zombie authors. They’ll get us through this. The government will just screw everything up.”
“Please state the nature of the attack again…”
“Operator!” VGRF said. “I want to talk to a person.”
“You have requested to speak to an operator. Please hold.”
Elevator muzak.
“It’s catchy,” Alien Jones said.
“You do realize Dr. Hugo did this on purpose, don’t you?” VGRF asked me.
Dr. Hugo Von Science – incompetent hack, or cunning mad scientist hell bent on world domination?
“What?”
“He’s always been bitter that scientists aren’t as beloved as celebrities,” VGRF said. “He turned those reality TV stars into monsters to start an apocalypse and spread chaos.”
“Get out of here,” I said. “Dr. Hugo’s just a tad scatterbrained. So he didn’t adjust his invention properly. Cut the guy some slack. Sure, he might be borderline incompetent but he means well and he’d never do anything like this on purpose.”
“That’s just his schtick,” VGRF said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. Haven’t you read his columns?”
“Not really.”
“They’re on YOUR blog. You should be reading everything on it. Dr. Hugo is always listing his inventions, then ‘accidentally’ mentioning one invention that sounds like it could be used to take over the world.”
“Listen,” I said. “I get you’re upset, but I can’t sit back and allow you to tarnish the good name of the great Dr. Hugo Von Science.”
“She’s right,” Alien Jones said.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Video Game Rack Fighter is astute in her assessment,” Alien Jones said. “I read Dr. Hugo’s mind during the demonstration. He fully intended to start a zombie apocalypse. He plans to blackmail the government into turning over a hundred billion dollars in exchange for the zombie cure.”
“There’s a zombie cure?” I asked.
“There’s a cure for everything,” Alien Jones said. “Had your human scientists spent less time developing erection medication and more time on other inflictions, they’d of realized this long ago.”
“AJ,” I said. “I’ve never believed that you can read minds. I’m calling BS on that one.”
“VGRF is disgusted by the amount of time you spend on “Buttstravaganza.com” every day,” Alien Jones said.
I felt my face burn with embarrassment.
“That’s…that’s absurd…I’ve never…”
VGRF confirmed it.
“All I’m saying is you’d think that when an intergalactic despot is threatening to take over the world if your writing career doesn’t take off, you might spend less time on the ‘Butt of the Day’ and more time on your novel. Or at least respect me enough to erase your browser history!”
“That’s…that’s inconclusive,” I said to AJ. “That could be anyone looking at those butts. You just guessed that.”
“You despise it when Video Game Rack Fighter clips her toe nails in the living room,” Alien Jones said.
VGRF glared at me.
“Wrong,” I said. “There is absolutely nothing that this enchantress could ever do to upset me and OH MY GOD yes it’s so disgusting!”
“BQB!” VGRF shouted.
“If you won’t do it in the bathroom like a normal person, would it kill you to at least do it over a trash can? Meet me half-way here, woman!”
“I always pick them all up!”
“You THINK you pick them all up but then I always step on one. And it’s usually the big toenail, the friggin’ big daddy of them all!”
“Humans, please,” Alien Jones said. “It was not my intention to cause turmoil in your relationship. I simply needed to prove my mind reading capabilities so as to make it clear to you that Dr. Hugo was indeed the culprit in this sordid affair.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “Dr. Hugo Von Science. My mentor. The greatest scientific mind the world has ever known. A columnist on my website a wanton criminal.”
“I’m sorry I had to be the one to break it to you,” VGRF said.
“I have no idea who to trust now,” I said.
“Pentagon Operator, how may I direct your call?”
“Hello,” VGRF said. “My friends and I are trapped in the middle of the East Randomtown Zombie Apocalypse.”
“Ma’am, it is a serious offense to file a false report with the Federal government…”
“Does this sound false to you?” VGRF asked as she walked closer to the gate so that the phone would pick up all the zombie snarls and growls.
“Hold on,” the operator said.
We waited a few minutes.
You’re stuck in the middle of what now?
“Ma’am, I’m told we’ve set up a special hotline for all reports stemming from the East Randomtown Zombie Apocalypse. If you give me your number I’ll text it to you.”
“Oh for the love of…fine!”
VGRF made the same mistake I did, trying to read Alien Jones’ phone number off the screen.
“I think there’s three pyramids…”
She covered the receiver and showed the screen to Alien Jones.
“Is that a cat with a syringe?”
“It’s the sign of the Omnosphar Contingent,” Alien Jones said. “But that’s no matter. Hang up, for I have already read the minds of your government’s officials and they have no intention of helping you.”
“Really?” VGRF asked.
“Really,” the Esteemed Brainy one said. “They’ve determined that it is better to quarantine East Randomtown rather than allow any survivors to leave. It is their hope that the zombies will just devour everyone and then each other until there is no sustenance left and they all die…again.”
VGRF’s face took a depressed turn. She hanged up the phone.
“We’re doomed.”
“Not necessarily,” Alien Jones said. “I will do all I can to get this group to safety. The Mighty Potentate will expect nothing less.”
I grabbed the space phone.
“I need to consult one of the world’s preeminent zombie scholars about this.”
BQB EDITORIAL NOTE: 3.5 readers, you have no idea how many hilarious porn site names I thought up in order to write this post, checked to see if they’re real or not (for research purposes only, of course) only to discover the porn industry has no shame when it comes to using hilarious sounding names. “Buttstravaganza.com” was the first one I came up with that does not exist, and thus it was used for fictional purposes in the story above.
Future reader of this post, if somewhere out there, at some date in the future, some pornographers start up a site called “Buttstravaganza.com,” please know it did not exist when I wrote this.
I of course never frequent such horrible sites. VGRF may be my soulmate, but she’s also a liar, liar pants on fire. It’s all WordPress and Wall Street Journal for me.
Bookshelf Battle 