Archive of Our Own ^beta

 

 

Snoopy sat at a dinner table, his features drawn and gaunt, unusually cadaverous.  The table held a large slab of meat, unidentifiable, but clearly quite rare.  His attire was hardly fit for a black tie affair, black though it was, being more nearly a burial shroud than anything else, but then nor was the table.

Wearing something more appropriate to a crypt with he having been cast as the keeper thereof, he waved to the dusty granite table, the rotting oak chairs, the several heavy ironwork candelabra lighting things poorly, and the cobwebbed room that looked as if there might be a pipe organ entombed therein.

Some somber music played in the background, a very bass sound with an electric organ or similar in the background and a sense of someone creeping up, a man warning the listener, and all of it carrying an almost sinister Hallowe'en-like vibe.

“Don't ever laugh
   as the hearse goes by,
 for you may be
   the next to die...”

'Welcome, fiends, and thank you for attending — the weather tonight is positively... frightful. Please, have a seat. I've been... dying to... meat you. Cookies, anyone? They're made of real Ghoul Scouts!

'Tonight, Liches and germs, boos and Ghouls, we have a tale with a little... bite to it, well... fleshed-out... one that you can really... sink your teeth into. I call it “Despite the Living Dead,” and it just goes to show that one can never... axe too many questions!'

He cackled maniacally at this, a high-pitched and unhinged sound ending with a prolonged and wheezing, hacking cough.

His voice already thin and rasping, like a dramatic impression of a somewhat faucalized forced whisper by one who smokes a carton of unfiltered cigarettes per day, or as one might imagine voiced speech to sound if rasped in the normally voiceless hiss of a crocodile, it seemed now a minor miracle that he hadn't coughed up a lung.

'Drusilla!' he called out, 'Dru, see to our guests, will you?'

There was no reply, only a resounding and echoing silence filling the rotting catacombs.

'Well, doesn't that suck? Can't rely upon anyone these days. Probably off pretending to be a Succubus with that Fairy, Pibgorn, again — unless she's back to her Vampire delusion. I tell you, even a batty girl will... spike one's blood... pressure.

'You might wonder “Where will we all be, one hundred years from now?” Yes, well... that's a... tender subject, and people can go all to... pieces — I'm a bit of a... cutup, I know, but don't let it... eat at you,' he finished, waving to some already-plated meat with an electric knife, 'Another... slice, anyone?'

 

---

 

It was a dark and stormy night.

The rain pelted down so badly, and had been doing so for so long that Woodstock wasn't entirely certain anymore of where they were.  Rural, yes; Pennsylvania... probably still true.  Well, at least it was quiet; they could use some of that, he reflected, pretending to himself not to be pessimistic about the possibility of that remaining the case for long, at this point.

Well, there was no way that he'd be able to make head or tails of wherever they were, not in this weather.  Shrugging to himself, he headed back inside and down to dinner.

De re Coquinaria, Le Viandier de Taillevant, Le Ménagier de Paris, The Compleat Housewife, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, and The Joy of Cooking, all the way through Escoffier, Betty Crocker, and Julia Child, Snoopy's bookcases — just outside of the kitchen, in order to minimize moisture damage, and even then sealed away within a climate-controlled condition and crammed with desiccant packets — were packed with morsels and tidbits from all of history, ranging from the most extravagant of imperial banquet meal plans to the most humble of one-pot peasant dishes for anyone on a budget or in a bind: Japanese, Chinese, French, Mediterranean, African, South American, Polynesian, fusions... the cuisines that it didn't cover didn't exist, and he put it to good use on a regular basis.

This evening was no exception, he having pulled out all of the stops in fact.  The TV played in the background, an exception to the norm, where typically dinner involved conversation, perhaps a little light music.

“And now a word from our sponsor!” said the announcer, “Do you, too, feel fatigued by having to go places, instead of having all of your worldly goods delivered straight to your door? I know that I did, too, friends — that is, until I discovered the wonders of The Home Delivery Network⁠ ⁠! Well, my friends: now you, too, can have everything at your fingertips. Call in the next ten minutes, and everything is half-off, anything that you could possibly dream of ordering — guaranteed to arrive in just 30 minutes or less, or it's free! Anything and everything that you could possibly want, right at your fingertips, and with all of your shopping done in a heartbeat, why, there's a world of spare time to buy more, more, more⁠ ⁠! That's right friends, and if you act now, you will be signed up automatically — with no effort on your part — for our special Invisible Hand credit line!”

Snoopy clicked the remote control, turning off the TV.  It was distracting him from consuming his meal properly.  As much as he liked to take in a good play, the dance of flavors and textures demanded his attention, not a philharmonic orchestral accompaniment, and certainly not a commercial symphony of consumer greed.

Dinner itself was a symphony of flavors, but a movement segueing from one theme to another in Snoopy's day to day meal plans, playing with the recent themes and moving along to new ones.  Butternut squash bisque with shredded duck, Dungeness crab chowder (an inspired dish of his own), langostino with pearl onions and roasted chestnut sautéed in a stock from roasted shells that he had kept frozen from their previous shellfish meal and served with clarified sweet butter; raspberry coulis drizzled over brie and chèvre mushroom soufflés with shallots that had been lightly caramelized in rum and kirsch (Snoopy said nothing of the dusting of Pecorino Romano that was his secret ingredient; only just enough to give the flavor an added dimension, and no more); chiles rellenos cordon bleu flambées; salmon à la chambord, accompanied by smoked salmon tarts with lemon and cream and set off with sprinklings of Almas caviar; honey-roasted garlic confit chicken with mango habanero sauce; goose braised with apples in white wine; individual lamb Chateaubriand Wellingtons smothered with creamed Roquefort, roast beef parmigiana under a thick and crisp skin of cheese to one side and hanwoo steaks with strips of wagyū to the other, a strange shepherd's pie incorporating scalloped potatoes with lightly oil-fried prosciutto and a sauce hollandaise with capers and a little grated Swiss, stuffed onion with mozzarella atop and tomato coulis all around, buttered string beans and okra; apple and walnut salad with a salted and honeyed chardonnay vinaigrette reduction; Génoise pralinée, black cherry chocolate lava cake (a mutant hybrid with black forest gateau, in fact; he just hoped that the coffee in it didn't make the kids too energetic, or he might have to dose them all with cough medicine) with a dusting of powdered sugar and large scoops of a rich and creamy ice cream — almost a custard — and crêpes Suzette with blackberry jam and raspberries.

“Is there any rabbit?” Frieda asked, “We never have rabbit. Could you make some rabbit soon, Snoopy? I really want some rabbit! Lots of rabbit. I want to just devour them all and stuff myself to bursting!”

'Please,' Snoopy said tiredly, trying to avoid another argument over her horrific obsession, 'just eat your wagyū and hanwoo and be happy to have them. The one is a little pricey and the other can't be gotten in the United States — not legally anyway — unless you know someone... and I happen to know someone. Under the circumstances though, I think that it's a safe guess that my source might have dried up, so you might as well enjoy what you can of it before the meat goes bad or my walk-in deep freezer is depleted.'

“Is it really appropriate that everywhere we go, we see death and violence, and then we hop back in here and consume, consume, consume?” Linus asked, “The food is delicious, and prepared perfectly, and I really do mean that — thank you, Snoopy,” Snoopy nodded in acknowledgment, Linus always being very polite in such matters, and this offering him a chance to sidestep the issue of Frieda's unseemly carnivorous obsession with rabbit as Linus continued, “but who else eats like this? When did any of us ever eat like this, back home? You all devour everything like a zombie apocalypse — and I don't mean as if there were a zombie apocalypse going on around us, but that the indiscriminate nature and degree itself of your very gluttony is like unto that of one. And then afterward, we just relax and play games and watch movies. The only thing missing to make this the ultimate exercise in consumer obsession is that we can't order delivery of everything.

“Snoopy, didn't you yourself write 'While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury.'?”

'While I admire your ethics, I can't say that I, for one, have any wish to lower my standards and live under reduced means,' Snoopy replied, 'The gourmet stores are just as abandoned as everywhere else. I admit that this is inexplicable at this time, and could be unnerving to those with no spine, but I see no profit for anyone in leaving their products to rot.'

Indeed, Snoopy's opinion did seem to reflect the general consensus.

“Linus, you blockhead, we have to eat!” Lucy said, summing things up concisely and glaring him down over a butterscotch crème patisserie Napoleon coated in a chocolate mirror glaze and topped with sugar-glazed toasted crushed almond to give the upper surface the semblance of gritty large-grained sand.

They were all stuffed, by this point, so stuffed in fact that they could only barely finish their third servings with enough space left over for the dessert courses.

Peppermint Patty, however, could still feel a nagging sense of that certain spot not quite having been hit.

“Hey Marcie,” she said, turning to the girl leaning against her, and giving her a little nudge beneath their shared comforter, “make me a tuna fish sandwich.”

“Yes, sir!” Marcie replied, hustling to comply.  She had no need to ask after the details, knowing precisely how Peppermint Patty liked them, having been nudged out of bed¹ many a time to make a midnight run on the kitchen for her: baguette stuffed with tuna made with mayonnaise and smoked paprika and onion chopped larger than a Macédoine but not quite Parmentier and plenty of thin-sliced celery and just a dash of capers to make it pop, an extra-heavy schmear of garlic and herb cream cheese, and a big glass of not-too-cold milk with which to wash it all down.

“Tuna fish? You do know that tuna is already a fish, and that therefore saying the word 'fish⁠ ⁠' is redundant, right?” Linus asked.

“Don't start, Linus,” Peppermint Patty replied, ignoring him otherwise, focusing instead upon the movie playing out on the large screen television and thinking of her goody to come.

Lucy just gave him the fish eye.

Afterward, they all fell asleep to movies while popping down cheese puffs and assorted macarons, and grazing over a deli platter of sliced meats and cheeses and chunks of fruit.  None had the energy to play games or any interest in conversation.

The next to last thing that anyone consciously heard as sleep claimed them was Peppermint Patty asking “Did everyone brush their teeth?”

The very last thing that they heard for the night was someone's indistinct and unidentifiable mumble retorting “What is this, a commercial?”

Linus had declined to partake in the Bacchanal, taking only enough to be polite and tide him over while he returned to his studies.  He'd found a few volumes on magical rings, and he hoped to find out more about the one that he'd found at their hometown's radio station, KLA2.²  He'd been watching his ring, tracking its changes as it went through its paces, and he was sure that they had entered some new region of horror.

Each time that they encountered something new, the ring had presented some simple ideogram, and he dreaded discovering whatever it foretold of their adventure and what the next day might hold for them: this time, the ideogram was one of jagged teeth in blackness.

 

They stared in disbelief at the outskirts of the town in shambles, cars smashed into each other and driven into storefronts, an ambulance on its side and gutted from fire, and all around lay in silence.

No bodies.

No sound.

“What in Heck even happened here?” Linus wondered aloud.

“I don't know — I'm just glad that we missed it is all,” Lucy replied, “This place looks dead though, so, at least for once, we won't have to deal with whatever it was.”

'If anyone sees a Costco or Sam's Club, I need to know. There are some things that we need, and this would be the perfect opportunity to lay on a few dozen pallets of supplies,' Snoopy remarked.

Only minutes later, someone had indeed spotted a bulk sales food store.

It was situated next to a cemetery, because of course it would be.

“Is it just me, or do those people over there look like they've been to an all-night party that didn't go well?” Lucy asked as they stood on the loading dock.

Everyone glanced over at the abandoned lot on the far side of the parking lot.

The figures' clothing was torn, everything stained dark, and many of them even looked misshapen, as if something had taken bites out of them.

“It's not polite to stare!” Frieda replied, “They've probably had a hard time with whatever happened in this town, and are just a little dazed.”

'Ahh, I can just smell the fresh produce now,' Snoopy remarked cheerfully, ignoring the irrelevant chatter of the others as he pried the already cracked-open loading gate up enough to enter the building, 'Tomatoes, apples, bananas....'

They stared in shock at what stood before them.

Someone had spilled gallons of tomato ketchup everywhere that they could see, long enough ago that it was now thick and gooey and sticky.  Several poorly chopped pork roasts lay strewn about, intermixed with strips of bacon.  There were even a few inexplicably skinny uncured bone-in ham hocks in the mess.

It looked as if someone had at least attempted to clean it up a little, sweeping it with their hands, their finger trails quite visible here and there, as well as a few handprints on the nearby wall and shelving.

It took them all day to gather the necessary resources, but eventually Snoopy's doghouse was restocked to overflowing.  The walk-in deep freezer, the meat locker, the walk-in freezer, the smokehouse, the root cellar, the vegetable crisper room, the restaurant-scale refrigerator, the larder, the cabinets and shelving for canned goods and dry goods and packaged goodies, pallets of water in the storage rooms... everywhere and everything was packed to the gills.  The greens, the fruit, all of the things that would soon go bad would surely need to be cured or preserved or brined or smoked or dried, but all in good time.

Throughout their shopping trip, however, there had been the most unnerving thumping sound.  It had come and gone, and they hadn't been able to place it.  It had held no obvious menace as such, as if some murderous maniac were trying to force his way in, no, but had still been quite disturbing to hear, almost as if... as if something were swinging in the wind — except that, of course, there was no wind within the store — and that while swinging in the wind and dangling from whatever held it aloft, a rope or some such, it was thrashing about like some feral beast, held at bay but struggling to reach them.

They were so spooked by it all, in fact, that at their insistence, Snoopy reviewed the security footage, courtesy of Lucy's home video equipment that he and she had installed preparatory to escaping their home town.

Nothing.  Oh, a few crows here and there; quite a few of those, in fact.  A few shambling and misshapen people wandering randomly in the nearby cemetery — more than there had been before, to be sure.  Probably just some quaint custom in this backward town.  A few more passing by at either end of the loading alley, but luckily none had come to investigate their little shopping trip.

“When did Spike and Olaf and Andy get here?” Charlie Brown asked, wandering into the security room, “How did they even get here?”

'Don't you remember anything?' Snoopy asked, 'Olaf and Andy got lost somewhere with a bunch of inbred cannibals living in the hills of Nevada, and Spike and his pet tumbleweed and his friend, Joe Cactus, got lost and found themselves no longer in Needles, California, and they all ran for their lives when someone in Texas started chasing them with a chainsaw, trying to massacre them.'⁠ ⁠³

“Guys? Some of the locals are stumbling our way,” Linus interrupted, pointing to the video feeds.

“They're moving the way grown-ups do sometimes when they've been to a party,” Lucy observed.

Snoopy nodded sagely.  He knew, from his years at college, how wild parties could get when the root beer flowed freely.

“They're coming to get you, Frieda,” Lucy snickered.

“Stop it. You're ignorant,” Frieda replied nervously.

“They're coming for you, Frieda,” Lucy persisted.

“Stop it! You're acting like a child!”

“They're coming for you! Look, there comes one of them, now!”

“Why is that man wearing a hospital gown?” Sally asked, “And why is he trailing a string of sausages?”

It was an unsettling sight indeed, but no one had any answers.

“Maybe we should get moving — start up the little red wagon and get away from here. Park in the cemetery and hide there, for now. There are a lot fewer people in there than there are out here, and they seem to be dressed better,” Charlie Brown said.

“Charlie Brown is right,” Linus said, “Whatever is going on here, it doesn't seem to be affecting the cemetery.”

The rest of the gang, however vetoed this.

'I think azaleas would work,' Snoopy mused, ignoring the others' talk and the mysterious strangers' mysterious behavior, 'A little landscaping would really spruce-up this old doghouse.'

The moon was full, the air was still.

All of a sudden they felt a chill.

“But... why are so many of the ones on the streets missing arms and legs, and have their throats ripped out and stuff?” Lucy asked, “I thought that zombies ate brains.”

“That's a common fallacy in the genre. Technically, a zombi — or other etymologically similar term depending upon language, though this can be misleading due to overlap with tangentially related concepts — is a corpse reanimated through alchemy and pharmakeía, the walking dead, if you will, and controlled by a priest or sorcerer, often called a witch or sorcerer, though they'd actually qualify as wizards rather than sorcerers, to do their bidding, and it might or might not eat the living. In some games, the necromancer raises the dead using verbal, somatic, and material ingredients via arcane, infernal, or other magical manipulation of negative energy, whereas in overall popular culture today, the link with magic — and even corpses — has grown tenuous to the point that a corpse might be reanimated by chemicals such as 2-4-5 trioxin or nanobots or radiation from space or any number of other possibilities, and might not even be dead, having instead been turned into something like a rabid person. The obsession with brains is a misconception brought about by a series of comedy-horrors, having little to no bearing on the larger genre as a whole.”

Lucy's look said it all, but she felt the need to drive it home.

“Thank you, Brainy Smurf, but have you paid any attention around this place? Those aren't rabid gender-Oidĭ́pous-eulogies out there. They're real live dead people, and they're trying to eat us!”

“Your naïvety-ness is mind-boggling,” Linus replied, then implored “Snoopy, please, as a world famous orthopedic surgeon, is it your professional opinion that people can walk around with their hearts missing and their throats torn out?”

'Medicine is more of an art than a science, and miracle cures happen all of the time. I'm sure that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. Have you noticed that not one of them is wearing a copper bracelet? That's the problem. A copper bracelet would cure all of their maladies and symptoms.'

“Well, whatever they are, they're getting closer!” Sally shouted, drawing everyone's attention back to the displays.

She was right, and behind them were even more, a small stream of them pouring into the loading zone, continually adding to the gathering mob bearing down on the doghouse.

A moment later, Snoopy was at the wheel and pulling out fast.

 

Snoopy had driven for hours into the night, following quiet and empty streets, meandering roads through residential zones, broad avenues down the center of town, and everywhere were shambling forms in the shadows, the moonlight warping them beyond recognizability.

He had pulled into a copse deep within a park when he could drive no further, not safely.

When the sun rose, they found before them a mall not far from the base of the rise where they were parked, fairly far from anything else, the parking lot mostly empty of vehicles, and only a few dozen figures wandering through it haphazardly.

“It looks as if the place hadn't yet opened for the day when... whatever happened began,” Linus said, watching the vehicles for any sign of life.  The gates below were closed, but the fencing enclosed only some sections near the road.  The vehicles though, while they showed movement in some, appeared to be devoid of actual life, those within only going through the movements, discolored echoes of who they once had been.  A few of the other vehicles, those without any movement within, usually had smashed-in windows and sprays of ketchup all over, with occasional chunks of meat rotting in the morning sun.

It was decided, awaiting only someone to voice it: this mall seemed like a safe place to be.  It had walls.  It had supplies.  Surely there were only a few early-hour employees within, and they might even be alive!

The bunny hutch in the small playground by the entrance was torn open and empty, but for a few small and lonely tufts of fur here and there, and what appeared to be pools and splashes of ketchup.

The smell of death was all around.

Linus spotted a newspaper vending machine nearby.  The lead story was a boring piece about a space probe, Omega 6.  In the corner of the page was an ad for XYZ Pest Control, at 1 (800) 555-6784 and 1 (800) 555-2545; presumably the local newspaper's sponsor or something.  Nothing at all to shed any light on the situation before them.

“These papers. They're all dated to twenty eight days ago,” Linus said, a sense of foreboding coming over them all as the sun was overswept by dark storm clouds, heavy, black, and pendulous, toward which they had been driving.⁴

“Hey guys?” came Charlie Brown's tremulous voice, “We're about to have company, and I don't think they're friendly!”

Everyone turned to look and found what looked like a crowd of hundreds of people bearing down on them, many clearly wounded as if not-so-fresh from a battle, their wounds gaping but no longer bleeding, important parts missing entirely or hanging useless.

“Everyone, stand behind me!” Franklin ordered, pulling his Nerf pop-gun, “Roy, Shermy — give me cover fire!”

Taking careful aim at the nearest stranger, he warned him away, but the stranger kept coming, the white of his eyes offering no target to gauge, given their absence along with half of his face.

His hands shaking, Franklin pulled the trigger, but it did no good.  The Nerf bullet dangled at the end of the limp cord, the popping sound neither loud nor menacing.

The ravenous horde continued to close in around them.

“What are they doing? Why did they come here?”

“He's got a good question, Burt.”

“Who's Burt?”

The questions and lack of answers arose in a clamor.

“Some kind of instinct,” Linus guessed, “A memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

'These shambling monsters have come from der Schwarzwald, I'm sure of it,' Snoopy asserted, 'During my travels behind the line, I collected intelligence on Vampires and such things finding their way out, and even of sinister experiments that ended with whole regiments disappearing forever, never to be heard from again.'

Their only hope now was the mall itself, its doors right behind them.

With the horde right on their heels, they had no chance to throw the security bolts, running instead pell-mell for any hiding place, any weapon, any chance at survival, at last seeking safety in the back room of a Burger Queen, only to make a startling discovery.

Spreading out immediately, they looked through the place to find whatever might improve their chances of survival.

“You're holding my hand, Chuck!”

At this, he released Peppermint Patty's hand.

“I found a whole pallet of Twinkies! These things will last us forever!”

“Does anyone know where Marcie and Peppermint Patty are?”

“What do you mean? I thought that they were still with us! I could swear that I saw them just a moment ago.”

Frieda stood there, turning slowly, her mouth agape.

“Why are there so many axes in here?” she asked at last, looking nervously at the rows and shelves stacked high, “That can't be safe!”

It was a bit of an obvious question, but still one that begged to be asked.  This was followed by a cascade of further questions.

“Do you think that we could use them against the zombies? Are there any small ones available — or lighter ones?”

There weren't any smaller or lighter, nor safer unless one counted those that were handle-only, sans head.  That was alright with Frieda though; she couldn't quite wrap her head around why, but there was something entirely too-lethal seeming about the fully assembled axes.  She could imagine only too well just how much it might hurt to stub a toe on one!

Shivering, she turned away from those and selected one of hundreds of identical hickory handles, waving it around like a baseball bat to get a sense of its heft.

“Maybe we should look for something safer to use than axes? Or maybe more dangerous? I'm not sure that this would stop a corpse.”

Looking around further, nothing safer nor more dangerous presented.

“Alright!” Lucy barked at her, “Enough! You ask too many questions! The dead don't walk! Those are just some very sick and upset people, and we don't need any axes — or axe handles⁠ ⁠!”

Linus, busy at the sink but overhearing it all, was taken aback by this, she having so recently argued to the contrary that these were, in fact, zombies.  Then again, Lucy was... Lucy.

Frieda ignored all of this, clutching her axe handle protectively.

“And Linus! Stop drinking the water from that faucet!”

Linus, parched, looked startled at this.

“I'm using my hand — there aren't any cups here.”

“That's not the problem. Don't you know that the water that goes down the drain comes back out at the top? That water is filthy!”

Linus's jaw dropped.  He couldn't even begin to guess how in the world Lucy had ever reached such a conclusion, nor could he envision any scenario where his explaining how pipes and municipal water supplies actually worked didn't end with his getting clobbered.

He shut off the tap.

“If you get sick and give us your germs, we're all going to be in big trouble!” she finished.

“Trouble? In a world where the dead are returning to life, the word trouble loses much of its meaning.”

It was then, at these fateful words, as is so often the case, that trouble struck.

A slow, ominous creaking could be heard, no one point easily identifiable as the source, this sound instead seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Then it happened.

One of the shelving units collapsed.

As if in slow motion, upon one of the bolts snapping, missed by every safety inspection before, if ever any such had even occurred, an uppermost shelf slipped from its mooring, the last of its rust giving way in the face of people pushing and pulling at things, torquing its already feeble structure.

The axes stored there slid sideways, piling up against the frame and torturing the metal still further.

With a sudden cracking sound, the whole seemed to give way at every part in a single instant, the axes floating there before remembering that gravity would have its way.

Scores and scores of axes clattered to the ground, Frieda dancing nimbly between them as they bounced and skittered, but at last all was silent.

As silent as a tomb.

“Well, I'm glad that's over!” Charlotte Braun exclaimed, wiping her brow as she leaned against the next unit.

A single axe, shoved halfway into it from the collapse, teetered above her as everyone watched, too terrified to breathe, every muscle frozen in fear.

When it seemed to stabilize, everyone released the breath that they hadn't realized they'd been holding.

“Hey, what are you guys staring at, anyway?” she asked, shifting in place.

As if this were the straw that broke the camel's back, time stretched out impossibly, the axe tipping with the glacial slowness of an avalanche when a single mass shifts by that first centimeter.

A moment later, they all stood aghast, the axe blade buried in her head as she lay on the floor before them.

“I'm beginning to think that if we don't get out of here soon, I might never make it,” Frieda whispered.

A zombie apocalypse.

These words haunted Linus, remembering his thoughts of so recently.

“You know, we keep driving all over the place and running into trouble. When we get out of here, maybe we should just fly. It would be a lot safer.”

“That's ridiculous!” Lucy replied in irritation, “It's a doghouse — how is Snoopy supposed to fly it anywhere? It's not as if the clouds have road signs or anything. So thusly, I say that we—”

“Hence.”

“What?”

“Hence; it means 'therefore.' Thus means 'in this fashion,' not 'therefore,' and since it's already an adverbial form, it doesn't get the *-L-Y suffix appended to it. Also, even if 'thus⁠ ⁠' did mean 'therefore,' it would then serve the same purpose in that sentence as your use of the word 'so,' which in this context takes the place of 'therefore,' and hence would be oh-so-redundant to also use that misuse of the word 'thus⁠ ⁠'.”

“Linus, you so-and-so, it would probably be 'redundant⁠ ⁠' to clobber you and then clobber you again, but I'm willing to test that out.”

 

One by one, the gang fell to zombie mall cops, zombie store managers and stockers — the stockers were the worst, wearing dark sunglasses and dressed like teenagers who thought that they owned the store — and even a zombie early-bird senior citizen jogger.  Some had fallen to bullets and poorly improvised traps from the hunting and sporting goods store, others to falls over the railing.

Charlotte remained dead though, the axe having cleaved her skull.

At last Frieda had found Marcie and Peppermint Patty, but too late.  They'd been in the closet the whole time, both covered in bite marks as if they'd eaten each other to death.  That really is such a shame, Frieda had thought at the time, they were really good friends.

Looking around, she could see everyone in the crowd of zombies that surrounded her.

She had made a dash for the back door and made it, but she'd never get the door open, drive through, and shut the door again before the others caught up to her, their gnashing teeth hungry for her, their arms crushing her beneath them all.

She hurled the axe handle at them in frustration, but missed every one of them.

The clatter that it made behind them drew their attention however, and in a flash, she threw open the door and drove out before they could turn back to her.

Their dead eyes followed her every move now as they flailed uselessly at the glass, shambling along to the side as she turned along the path.

Zombies.  She had to get someplace safe, maybe a deserted island, where the zombies couldn't get to them — or somewhere cold, some place where the zombies would just freeze up all solid and leave her in peace.

Looking over the map that she'd taken from Olaf's body before it had begun twitching, Frieda found that she couldn't make heads or tails of it; it was just patches of color, all orange and green and blue, and covered in squares and dots and lines and numbers and names.  There was also a picture of dog food in the corner, for some reason.  Probably the map's commercial sponsor, or maybe there was a dog food factory located at that spot.

The only part that made any sense was the sideways arrow marked “Z,” and even that didn't make any sense.  What could it possibly mean?

Zouth?

Zombies?  She'd had enough of zombies already, no need to go anywhere else for more of them.

She couldn't even ask for help with the map: everyone else was dead... or undead, anyway.

Sighing, she set her shoulders stolidly as she set out for the duck pond in the park behind the mall.  She wasn't about to settle for some dirty, smelly, underground military bunker, waiting to get devoured!  She was going to spend her days in the sun.

Maybe she could find a nice little isle with rabbits all over it.  That would be nice: everyone had been beginning to really look the part of a ragamuffin, and certainly all the more so now; why, if she were going to look it, then she might as well be one, and run around a nice tropical island like a castaway!  She recalled Sally having said something about all bodies of water being connected, so even if there weren't a rabbit island in the pond, it was bound to lead somewhere with rabbits!

Speaking of rabbit, she was famished — it felt as if she hadn't eaten dinner in the longest time!  Somehow though, she wasn't exactly in the mood for any of those long pork sausages that she'd been eyeing earlier (there was even some leftover boudin blanc, but it failed to tempt her), nor even a simple rare roast beef sandwich, red with juices.

Then she remembered the tongue.  Snoopy had been going to make that for dinner, insisting that they would love it.  It still sat there in the refrigerator, huge and lolling, covered in taste buds....

She shivered at that image, firming in her resolve for Hasenpfeffer as her naturally curly hair flounced around her, beagle or no beagle; much more civilized — more refined — than some nasty cow tongue.

Without giving a single thought to the advisability of such an endeavor, she drove the doghouse straight into the pond, the water rising around the little red wagon in which it was seated.  Luckily for her, things worked out as she'd assumed, and the whole stayed afloat as she motored ever onward, the rest of the gang hammering on the glass wall of the mall's rotunda behind her, with Snoopy leading the pack.

The sun was low, and the afternoon warm.

Life was good, and she was more relaxed now, relieved to have escaped with her life.

Unaware of the irony — un-self-aware — she nodded to herself: she'd hunt down those rabbits and have Hasenpfeffer that very night, despite the living dead.⁵