Anything But Zombies (3 page)

Meanwhile, some miles away, the troops were on the march in a massive counterstrike against the rampaging erotic companions. They were being led by County Sheriff Bob Cobb, aka “Big Cobb.” He was marshaling his forces for a massive thrust that would bring the army of animated sex dolls to their knees where, as he told one reporter, they belonged. They had put down no less than twenty-six of them in the past hour or so, and they were just warming up.

“We're making pretty good progress,” he said. “God knows where all these things are coming from, but we're putting 'em down and sending 'em back. There's no way in hell we're going to knuckle under to a bunch of Sexie Sadies and Mary Lou Bend-and-Screws. Just no goddamn way.”

Deputies and militiamen were moving everywhere, trucks unloading fresh troops and supplies. It was war to the teeth now.

“What's the best way to deal with these things?” the reporter asked.

Sheriff Cobb considered that. “Nail guns with compressor backpacks. That way, a trooper has mobility and serious firepower. The nails put the dolls down every time. We were using guns at first . . . but, well, that didn't work so good. The bullets tend to pass right through the dolls and kill men on the other side. We lost five boys that way already.”

“Tell me, Sheriff, would I have a chance with four or five of these things?”

“Hell yes. They're more than willing to please.”

“No, no, Sheriff, I mean if I had some of them attacking me.”

“Oh . . . um . . . sure. Maybe. Nail gun is the thing. Pop 'em and drop 'em.”

Three men came in, dragging a struggling sex doll with them. She was bound tightly, thrashing like an animal. Her golden curls were bouncing, her obscenely large breasts bobbing.

“We got another one,” Deputy Strafe said.

The sheriff nodded. This was serious business. “Put her in the back of the van for interrogation. See what you can get out of her or what she can get out of you.”

“Yes sir.”

“Wait a minute!” another deputy said. “How come he gets to interrogate them all? I haven't got to interrogate a single one all day.”

Strafe rolled his eyes.

Sheriff Cobb sighed. “Okay, Roy. You take her. But watch it.”

As the media pushed in to follow, Cobb's troopers held them back and out of harm's way. “Sorry, people,” Deputy Strafe said. “This is official police business. Only highly trained, highly motivated law enforcement professionals dare get in the back of the shaggin' wagon with one of those things.”

“Or somebody real stupid and real horny,” one of the reporters said.

Deputy Roy heard that and waved as he pushed his perp into the back of the van.

After that, there was no more time for answering questions and entertaining the media. Sheriff Cobb got his forces moving and they began to comb the surrounding fields, woods, and farmyards, searching for malevolent sex dolls. It didn't take long before they found a dozen or so and put them down as fast as they could drill nails into them. After that, there was only the hissing sound of escaping air that chilled every man to the bone.

“Sheriff!” Deputy Strafe called out. “Another one coming out of that henhouse yonder!”

“All right,” Big Cobb said. “This one's mine.”

He went to meet the horror on neutral ground like some Old West marshal preparing to face down a black-hatted gunfighter. No one spoke as the sex doll emerged through the thickets and Big Cobb went out to meet her, fire in his blood and steel in his eye. The only one who dared get close to the action was Deputy Strafe. If worse came to worse, he knew he just might have to pull the doll off the sheriff . . . or maybe the sheriff off the doll.

“Show yourself already,” Sheriff Cobb said.

The doll did. She walked out of the enshrouding evergreens like a woman from a rock video . . . all she lacked was a big fan to blow her hair back. She was tall and leggy, shapely and well-proportioned, her midnight-black hair sweeping down one shoulder and gathering between her cleavage. Her crystal-blue eyes stared seductively at the sheriff.

Big Cobb mopped sweat from his brow with a hankie. He gasped and trembled. “Sasha?” he said. “Dear God, not you too . . .”

“What's that, Sheriff?” Strafe asked.

“Oh . . . ah, nothing.”

“Thought you called her Sasha or some such thing.”

“No, I just sneezed.”

“Here she comes,” Strafe said, sounding nervous. “You better shoot quick!”

Yes, of course that was what he needed to do. Yet, memory stayed his hand. Sasha. The name was like perfume, like exotic spices and rare oils rubbed over trembling flesh. He thought of intimate dinners for two, moonlit walks on the beach, midnight swims, and long sweaty, rubbery, squeaky nights of lovemaking.

“Sheriff! Jesus, she's almost on you!”

His heart broken, Big Cobb pulled the trigger and put six nails into her. She fell right away, hissing and making a sort of saddened cooing sound as she deflated there on the ground.

Sheriff Cobb felt his breath catch in his chest. “Dear God,” he said. “Forgive me . . . Sasha.”

“Sheriff, you all right?”

“Yes, son.” He swallowed. “Just got something in my eye.”

Back at the farmhouse, Chic and Barbara went right out the front door. Her idea was to sneak out the back way, but Chic wouldn't have it. If there was one thing the inflatable ladies of XXX knew about it was the backdoor. That would be playing into their malicious little silicone hands.

Together then, Chic and Barbara crossed the porch in full view of the gathered intimate companions, who watched them with more than casual interest.

“Make no sudden movements,” he warned. “No sense in spooking them. They can be very unpredictable.”

“Love dolls?”

“Yes.”

Chic's XXX van was waiting for them down the drive, but the problem was that there were about twenty companions mulling around it. They didn't seem to have any interest in leaving. A dozen more were moving up the drive. Getting to the van would be a very dicey proposition at best. Used to thinking on his feet, Chic came up with a plan. Barbara didn't like it at all, but there was no other way. They went back into the house. Twenty minutes later, they came back out.

“I feel perfectly ridiculous,” Barbara admitted.

“Yeah, but you look . . . hot,” Chic told her.

She was stripped down to her bra and panties, red lipstick smeared over her mouth, brilliant blue eye shadow around her eyes, garish red blots of rouge on her cheeks. Her skin was oiled and gleaming to give it the look of fine plastic. It was a good thing Kasey carried her makeup bag with her wherever she went. Chic was stripped down and oiled, too. He wore black socks with calf garters, white boxer shorts with large red hearts on them. The Johnny Jump-and-Pump 3000 was strapped to his groin, aimed stiffly down the road like the leg of an English pointer. It knew the way they must go.

“Remember,” Chic said. “Try not to blink a lot and keep your mouth puckered.”

Together, they started down the road, moving with the peculiar side-to-side gait of the sex dolls. They looked much like penguins as they moved toward the van, waddling absurdly. The other love dolls stopped as they passed. They stared at them with painted-on eyes, the puckered holes of their mouths ready to please. To Barbara, they all looked vaguely surprised, with their wide eyes and mouths that seemed to be saying, “OH!” or possibly “OOOOOHHHH!” She mimicked their appearance as Chic and she intermingled with them. The ruse was working. It was really working.

“Careful now,” he whispered. “This is the tricky part.”

They passed through the doll ranks and waddled about at the rear of the van as if they had no set purpose in mind. Then Chic moved toward the rear door. The vanity license plate read KREME4U. Breathing hard, he opened the door. Several of the dolls stayed close to him. Two of them flanked Barbara. The back of the van with its red dome light was a sex shop on wheels. Everything from inflatable intimate companions hanging like coats to rows of vibrators and dangling chains of anal beads and cock rings. She wasn't sure whether to be offended or excited.

“Jesus,” she said when she saw it.

The dolls to either side of her pressed their faces in close as if to say, “OH?” Again, Barbara mimicked them. “OH,” she said. They turned away. That was close. She almost gave the entire game away.

Chic pulled out a black box, snapped it open, and extended an antenna. He flicked a few switches and dialed the frequency in. “Authenticating parameters,” he said under his breath. “Activating field grid . . . engaging autodeflate . . . now.”

There was a blinding flash of light and a smell of burning wires and he was tossed backward into the wall of love dolls, who bounced him right back at Barbara. He slammed into her, the snout of the Johnny Jump-and-Pump sliding between her bare thighs. “OH!” she said for real this time, blushing.

“It's malfunctioning!” Chic cried. “God only knows what the result will be!”

More intimate companions were pushing in. The banks of lights on the MagnaBlow 4500 were flashing. The unit was making frenzied beeping sounds, sparking and smoking. There was a crackling charge of static electricity in the air and then it happened. The MagnaBlow was not deflating the dolls, it was inflating them. All the flaccid units hanging on the hooks in the back of the van. They were filling with perverse life, blue eyes and green eyes opening with vapid stares, lips swelling, mouths rounding out and hissing, “OOOOOHHHHH!”

Chic was out of his mind by this point.

His nerve had completely broken.

“ALIVE!” he shrieked. “THEY'RE ALIVE! ALIVE! ALIVE! ALIVE! YAHHHH! YAHHHH! GAHHHHHHH!”

He was beyond hope and Barbara knew it. The dolls converged and buried him alive in their numbers. He squealed and screamed, but it was too late. They had sniffed him out for who and what he was: their creator. The very one that had denied them true life and now they were taking his.

Anguished over the loss of Chic and the Johnny Jump-and-Pump, Barbara valiantly stayed on her feet as she fought tooth and claw through the ranks of the living sex dolls, besieged on all sides by the cream of the XXX crop—Backdoor Betties and Dreamy Reamies, Candy Coxes and Pippi SchlongSuckings, as well as fantasy figures like Princess Lay-ya and, for the fans of
Downton Abbey
, dressed out in crotchless riding breeches, whip, and equestrian cap, Lady Kathleen Cumbersnatch.

Finally, beaten, whipped, and violated, Barbara crawled back up onto the porch and through the door.

And the siege began.

It was sex doll hell on earth.

They came by the dozens and then what seemed hundreds. As Bill and Kasey and Barbara fastened windows and doors, nailing planks over them, the dolls attacked with ferocity. The sobbing man sobbed and Kasey screamed. It sounded like thousands of hands were beating against the outside of the house.

“We don't stand a chance!” Bill cried out. “All is lost!”

Regardless, they fought on. Availing themselves of a fine set of cutlery from the kitchen, they counterattacked with carving knives and butcher's knives, roasting forks and skewers. For every one they popped or drove back, five replaced it. The boards were wrenched from the windows, the doors bursting open.

Kasey went down first, beaten to the ground and then lost in a sea of writhing intimate companions.

The sobbing man sobbed even louder as a pair of little gray Area 51 Probe-Masters dragged him off into the night where his sobbing was heard to echo with great volume as he was taken for a more intensive examination.

Finally, good old stalwart Bill was pulled out the door and Barbara was alone. But to her credit, roasting fork in one hand and skewer in the other, she impaled dozens as she fought a rearguard action up the steps and locked herself in a room. After a time, hysterical and shaking, the pounding on the door lessened and the erotic companions filed back out into the night.

Finally, after a long and hellish night, dawn arrived.

The sun came up and she stumbled down the stairs, still holding her weapons. She heard voices. Out the broken window, she saw men with nail guns dropping sex dolls by the dozen.

When the battle had died down, she stepped out onto the porch.

The men pointed nail guns at her.

“OH!” she cried.

“Careful, Sheriff,” Deputy Roy said. “She's armed.”

Sheriff Cobb studied her there in her underwear and bra, her gaudy painted face, shiny skin and weapons.

“I'm not one of them!” she said.

“You hear that?” Deputy Roy said. “Maybe I should interrogate her.”

“Please!” she said.

Deputy Strafe shook his head. “I don't know, Sheriff. Never did hear one speak before.”

Big Cobb brought up his nail gun, his heart still burning from putting down a close and intimate friend. “See? That's the beginning of the end, ain't it? First they start to walk, then they start to speak. Once they get liberated, they'll start using their mouths for things other than God intended.”

He fired his nail gun and dropped Barbara on the porch.

“That's a wrap,” he said.

“They aren't zombies, you idiot. Zombies are created by voodoo powers in Haiti by a dark shaman, who controls the mind of the person and forces them to do his bidding,” Vinnie was saying loudly. Way too loudly. Barry was waiting for the rest of his thinning hair to fall out with all the excitement and wild hand gestures he was doing. Definitely an Italian.

“You're calling me an idiot? You're the one who's just admitted how stupid you are. When was the last time you saw a Haitian voodoo guy walking around Cleveland? I know they wouldn't be caught dead at an Indians game,” Melanie, the too-skinny annoying vegan, was saying.