The holy trinity of bad ideas are loneliness, power, and vodka, and Frankie Stalone had all three in spades. Enough to dig himself an entire mausoleum with dirt to spare. So he wandered. Down broken hallways that smelled like war and looked like genocide, because his legs knew where to go even if he didn’t. Some primal, shambling part of his soul wanted to play God, and he had nothing better to do. He’d spit in Death’s face while he was at it. Satan too, if he could find the red bastard.
“Fucking shit!”
Frankie slipped on a pool of blood and into a revenant. The corpse toppled. It tried to catch itself but didn’t have the dexterity, so it hit the floor and bounced.
“Thought ya’ll got all the blood!” Frankie bellowed.
The revenant crawled itself back into a standing position. Its bones creaked, ready to snap. It wore grey scrubs and the remains of a white lab coat that hadn’t been white since the attack. Blood prefers brown over red. When the dead scientist resumed its hobble, its arm spun into its forehead in a poor-man’s imitation of a military salute. Frankie grinned. He saluted back.
“Good job, son. Real damn good.” He dropped his hand. “Now grab a mop and take care of the blood. You were supposed to have this all cleaned up last month.”
Instead of heading towards a janitor closet, the revenant stumbled along the hall, towards the cafeteria. Its broken arm flopped with every step.
“Fucker!” Frankie called after it. “Gave you an order!”
The zombie tripped over a broken pipe.
“Insubordinate!” Frankie roared. “That’s a demotion!”
The zombie wandered around a corner. Frankie swore again, then called out one last order. “And stay the fuck out of my kitchen!”
Frankie considered the necromancer lab and his liquor closet to be separate places, each with its own rituals and prayers, but the last few months had brought the two together. Dried vomit acted as glue. Empty bottles as trip hazards. The room was huge, cathedral-like in size and scope, but instead of murals and glass pictures, the walls were covered in tubes, racks, energy cells, bits of green stuff, and dead bodies. It had a chemical smell that Frankie couldn’t place but assumed was carcinogenic. Half the lights didn’t work; the other half were stained with blood. The monsters made a real mess when they died. Frankie made a real mess when he worked. Fair was fair.
The room ran on dead bodies. Corpses lay everywhere, the newest ones torn apart and scattered around, the oldest stacked against the left wall like they were guns ready to be picked from a rack. Their arms crossed over their chests like ancient mummies. Their eyes were gone. Decay made them all look like dry-rotted rubber, though only the mummies felt fake to the touch. The recent dead still had a human texture to them.
“Fucking hate this room,” Frankie said as he kicked parts aside, heading to the rack. “Fucking hate you, too.”
He picked one at random because after so many months alone, everything in this room was reduced to meat. The corpse was heavy, but Frankie knew how to heave and ho. He slung the body over his shoulder and walked it to the machine.
On his way there, he stepped into another pool of wet blood. All the human blood had dried up by the third day, but the monster blood remained forever wet. Frankie watched it stain his shoe. In the strange, yellow-and-green room, it almost looked like barbeque sauce.
“Hmm,” he said. He followed the blood to an alien body part. He gave it a nudge. It wiggled like fresh Jell-O, only putrid beige instead of lime green. “I’m a cook, you know.”
Frankie picked up the piece of alien meat. “Cooks need ingredients.”
The machine was a strange, twisting ball of black panels and clear, plastic tubing. It wasn’t quite circular—it had over a thousand pointy edges to it—but the effect was a circle with more circles. Cables attached it to the ceiling, most thicker than Frankie’s leg, others thinner than his fingers. They liked to take turns leaking. The smell was more of that cancer-stench mixed with grease.
The lower part of the ball had a slot for bodies, and Frankie stuck the corpse inside. He tossed the alien piece of meat in with it.
“Good enough,” he said.
Frankie walked to the computer station. He couldn’t do much with it. He was the most powerful man in the universe because the toy was his, not because he knew how to work it. All the necromancers died in the attack, and they left their manuals locked behind passwords. His gut told him green meant go, and so far, green made the machine go. If the button broke, then he’d have nothing. Just booze and boredom.
Frankie pressed the green button. The spaceship-sized ball of flat panels sucked the corpse up, into whatever strange world existed inside. The alien goo went with it. Lights flashed, and a headache exploded behind Frankie’s right eye. He had tried helmets and safety glasses and headphones; he had even tried pushing the button and running out of the room. No matter what he did, the machine gave him a splitting headache that made his teeth rattle.
“Fucker,” he spat.
Despite the headache though, running the machine made Frankie feel powerful. Like he could survive this shit and get out unscathed. Only God could thwart Death and make the dead rise. God and Frankie.
After a few minutes of painful thinking, the machine spat out a new revenant. It fell from the machine with no good graces, but it got back to its feet without Frankie’s help. Its empty, skull eyes turned towards him.
“Well now soldier,” Frankie barked. “I need you to grab a mop and a bucket and clean up this here place. Can you do that?”
Frankie expected the zombie to fall over or apart, but instead it tipped its head. Like a nod. Frankie cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
The zombie shuffled off, through the door and down the hallway. It hung a right at the nearest junction, towards a custodial closet. Or about a thousand other rooms. The station was huge.
Frankie shrugged. “Bet it gets stuck in a chair like the last one.”
Bored with his toy, Frankie left the necromancer lab. Next stop was the liquor closet, where he’d drink until his headache was gone or he passed out.
Frankie woke up in a stranger’s room, turned on his shoulder, and vomited. Stomach acid burned his gums, and a headache throbbed behind his eyes. His back was covered in sweat. Frankie was a sweaty drunk.
“Fucker,” Frankie said, to no one and everyone. He ran a head through what was left of his hair and pulled out a clump of it. “Fuck.”
He heaved himself out of bed and stumbled down the hall, trying to figure out where he was. It had taken him long to realize that if he passed out in other people’s rooms, he could vomit his hangovers onto the floor and not need to clean up.
Frankie was in the civilian section, a few hallways from his own room. They had all been together at first, the low-paying cogs that kept the station running while the scientists did their thing. Cook, clean, fix, mop, unclog toilets, order supplies, pay bills. The lab coats worked on their science, and the military kept everyone in line. Less ray guns, more plastic handcuffs and metal sticks. It was a four year stint where the prisoners ran the prison, but only the sections they were allowed to run. The pay was fantastic. Hard to turn down triple-digit salaries for four straight years, even if it meant living on a hunk of metal spinning a million kilometers per hour around a pulsar. All the shielding kept the cancer at bay. There were only six windows in the entire station.
Tempers didn’t flare, but they did swell as the years passed. Gambling became pissed-off gambling; drinking because pissed-off drinking. It was almost a reprieve when the first zombies showed up, the necromancers finally succeeding with their science. It made it so everyone could hate them instead of each other. That lasted a solid six months until the attack. Then it was everyone against the monsters. Then everyone was dead. Well, everyone except Frankie.
“Never thought I could ever hate a place more than Sheet-Metal Florida,” Frankie mumbled. He found the showers and washed the booze from his pores. The steam helped his headache. If that shower broke, that’s when he’d kill himself. Until then, he was holding out hope he could make it to the end of his fourth year. Another cargo ship would come to pick him up. Him and the rest of the bodies.
The station smelled different—less gore, more bleach. Frankie walked down hallways that always tripped him up with alien blood and did not stumble. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He wrinkled his wide, tired face into something of a bemused scowl. The station was clean. Well, not clean, but cleaner. Nothing could ever truly clean these hallways. Not after the attack.
“The fuck is going on now?”
He wandered into his kitchen. It was his kitchen then, but it was really his kitchen now. Brightly lit and stainless steel from top to bottom, Frankie kept it cleaner today than the day he arrived. There were few things left to savor on the station, so he picked this. His kitchen and his cooking. Stove number six with the back right burner. Powdered orange flavoring and vodka. When he ate, he chewed with his mouth open, and when he drank his morning coffee, he made sure it was hot enough to burn his tonsils. The vodka was just a bonus.
For a short five minutes, Frankie smiled big and wide, like all his problems were gone. Then the door swung open and a dead body walked inside.
“What in the fuck?” Frankie yelped, dropping his food and reaching for a knife. His kitchen was full of weapons, but his shaking hands found a soup ladle.
The revenant swayed itself into a dizzy salute. It had a vomit-stained rag in one hand, and a blood-stained mop in the other. It left footprints so gross with dirt and gore that they were black.
“You,” Frankie said. He put his cookware down. “It’s you. From yesterday.”
The revenant tried a nod, but it moved its head too quickly and three teeth fell out.
“Well get out. This is captain’s quarters. You ain’t allowed.”
Half bowing, half falling over, the zombie shuffled out the door. It swung its mop in a wide arc, spilling dirty water all over the place.
Frankie almost swore again, until he realized what this meant. He had spat at God, and the wad had found its mark. Right in the Father’s stupid eye. Death too. He had got them both. A tired, sore-covered grin cracked across Frankie’s face, so big it almost touched his ears. The holy trinity of bad ideas watched him pour another ounce of vodka into his morning OJ.
Six hours and just as many shots of vodka later, Frankie stomped into the necromancer cathedral, a ray gun strapped to his hip like a cowboy six shooter. His first revenant stood behind him, armed with a mop. Its eyeless head stared at the machine that had brought it back to life with a slack-jawed idiocy that Frankie aimed to fix.
“Just want to talk,” he said as he scanned the ground for alien parts. There were hundreds to choose from. He chuckled. “Just need to cook first.”
One little piece of alien flesh let the dead follow orders, so what would two do? Frankie grabbed hunks of monster meat and tossed them into the machine. He then found a dead scientist. The woman—what was left of her—wasn’t much to look at. Her neck was broken, and most of her stomach and legs were scattered around the cathedral, but Frankie could strap her to a chair and make her work the computer. He didn’t need to her to move, just work.
“Come on, missie,” he said, propping her up so he could pluck her eyes out with a knife. “Get you in tip-top shape in no time.”
Like the first zombie, the god-hating sphere sucked the corpse into its Tabernacle stomach.. Lights flashed with green headache. Frankie touched the handle of his gun. He felt hot, sweaty, and gross, and also more powerful than he had ever felt in his life. He knew within the very depth of his bones that this would work. The machine finished giving Death the finger, hissed one last complaint, and spat out a body.
The first thing the zombie did was fall over. Frankie ran over and picked it up. “Come here, you,” he said. “Let’s see if you work.”
He plopped the zombie in front of the computer terminal.
“Make it work,” he said. “Captain’s orders. Help me.”
The dead scientist had no control over her neck or legs, but she could use her hands. She tapped hidden screens and menus open, entering passwords that not even Death could take from her. Soon the machine was running again, and this time without all the strange headaches. Frankie tossed more bodies in, each with bits of alien meat. First it was two chunks, then three, then four, then seven because bad ideas never take things slow.
“Troops,” Frankie said, hands behind his back, gait uneven with drink. “We are the best the army has to offer. You, me, but mostly me. Now, I want you to fix this place up! Make it work!” He turned to an engineer, someone he had hated in life but now saw as his new best friend. “And you, Private Withers. I want you to fix up the laundry machine. I’m fuckin’ sick of doing all my clothes by hand.”
With an uncanny resemblance to living people, Frankie Stalone’s platoon marched from the necromancer lab and into the wide facility beyond. They got to work. He stopped drinking at a reasonable hour, and for the first time in many months, fell asleep without the need of a blackout. But he locked his door, because the even the most foolish of Gods do not trust their creations.
Frankie never played with sober dreams, but the mind of a functional drunk runs smoother than a suicidal one. He dreamed in vivid colors, and each color was red with blood. The aliens attacked during the third year. They arrived on a chunk of space debris, what looked like a small asteroid from afar and a large, misshapen tumor from close up. It crashed into the military barracks with a shotgun-blast that rattled the entire station.
Chaos came next. Ray guns, screams, blood, death. For his part, Frankie hid in his kitchen until it was safe to come out. He had food and water and a corner for a bathroom. He hid for what felt like weeks but was probably only a few days. Time lost a lot of meaning during the attack, and it never regained its footing. Thankfully, Frankie had booze for that.
But he saw the aliens before he hid. They were creatures made of mouths and teeth, the color of inflamed gums and pissed off at anything alive. They walked like apes, with two large forearms that looked more at home on a praying mantis. Each arm split down the middle, and inside was a mouth, complete with fangs and a tongue. They had no heads, but their torsos found room for more mouths. If they had eyes, Frankie never saw them.
“Again,” Frankie said to the half-woman/half-zombie at the computer. “I think we got it this time.”
He was dressed in his normal scrubs but wearing an admiral’s hat, which he found in the admiral’s quarters after the resurrected corpse let him in. The admiral was a tall, skinny man, and his clothing did not fit. The hat would have to do.
The revenant waved an affirmative. The more alien parts in them, the more the dead acted like living people. Too little and they were like the woman, capable of obeying orders and nodding yes or no. Too much and they returned to their alien nature. They howled and thrashed until their bodies exploded with mouths and teeth that had no business on a human body. Frankie had to vaporize four in the last few months of experimenting, and he had the scars to prove it. The aliens liked to bite.
This next one though, it would be the sweet spot. He had done the math, or rather, he had made a reanimated scientist do the math for him. Numbers do not lie, and neither do the dead. Frankie trusted his soldiers. This next one, it would work.
“I won’t be alone no more,” Frankie said.
He waved a dead mechanic to his bidding. The revenant picked up a fresh corpse, this one a young scientist with most of his body intact. The missing pieces could be plugged with medical putty. Frankie wanted someone he could talk to, a necromancer that knew the proper theory as well as he did. They could drink and be best friends, and they could swap stories on thwarting Death and God until a ship came to save them both.
“I won’t be alone no more,” Frankie repeated.
The revenant propped the body into the machine, along with a precise amount of alien matter, weighed on a gram scale. Frankie nodded to his mangled secretary, and she nodded back. It was like talking but not quite. This would be the real deal.
Time passes in fits and starts for the nervous, and so Frankie waited with alcohol on his breath and a thudding in his heart. The machine worked the corpse. Green lights flashed on the outskirts of his vision, and the thicker tubes leaked with fluids that smelled like cancer mixed with grease. The revenants watched and waited.
Just as the machine was winding down, it occurred to Frankie that he forgot to pluck out the zombie’s eyes.
“Aw fuck,” he said, reaching for his gun. “Aw stupid, shit, fuck!”
The dead woman nodded in agreement.
“Well you shoulda told me before ya hit start!”
She nodded again.
“Fucking idiot. See if you ever get promoted in this man’s army.”
Well, best case nothing happened. Worst case, Frankie had to vaporize another zombie into dust. They’d try again. There were more alien bits all around. Plenty of ingredients, the flesh still jiggly, the blood still wet.
The revenant fell from the machine like the others, landing on its knees. It didn’t look any different. Mangled, scrawny, uncoordinated. Instead of crawling to its feet, it slammed its head into the ground and pounded at the floor with its fists like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Then it screamed.
“It can talk!” Frankie shouted. He whooped with victory. The zombie woman with no legs nodded. “It can talk!”
The revenant’s scream was human, or close enough. It had a light voice, small and thin like its body. It sparked a twinge of a headache behind Frankie’s left eye. He ran over to great his newest creation, to welcome it to the world. The zombie, meanwhile, beat at the floor until its hands bled.
“There, there son,” Frankie said. He picked the zombie up into a big, bear hug. The zombie gargled something halfway between a curse and a shriek, and Frankie patted it on the back. He tried to make the gesture feel like a military admiral and a worried father all in one. His breath smelled like whiskey. “It’ll be okay. Just a little tense is all.”
“You!” the zombie said.
“Yes!” Frankie roared in its face. “Yes it worked!”
Reanimation had given the revenant’s features a strange once-over. It tightened every muscle into what had once been a fairly normal corpse now looked like a thousand rounds of plastic surgery gone wrong. Its eyes were green with necromancer magic, and its lips were a bloodless grey. The corners of its mouth stretched all the way to its ears.
“Son,” Frankie said. “You’re the best damned thing I’ve ever seen. Or at least, in the last year.”
“You hurt me,” the revenant said. It eyed Frankie up and down. “Hurt every organ I have.”
Frankie gave it another pat on the back. “That’s called being alive! We just spat in God’s face. Death too. You want a drink?” Frankie gestured at the table behind him. “It’ll make the hurt go away.”
The zombie rolled its neck, its shoulders. Frankie could hear its muscles threatening to rip. “No,” it said. “I want the hurt to stay.”
“Yeah?” Frankie blinked. “Well, if you insist.” Then he laughed, because it had been over a year since he had talked to anyone but himself, and it felt so good to not be alone.
With a movement too precise to be human, the zombie ripped at its torn scrubs, revealing missing pieces of skin and bone underneath. A monster had gotten it good. Ripped a chunk right out of its ribs.
“I can see everything wrong with me,” the revenant said. “There’s so much.” It turned to Frankie. “I can see everything wrong with you, too. There’s even more.”
“Hey now!” Frankie said, his hand turning into an angry point. “You watch yourself. I brought you back. You should be grateful.”
The revenant shook its head. “I was never gone. You just hurt me.” It laughed. The sound was of aliens tearing each other to pieces. “You weren’t supposed to spit in Death’s face, Frankie. Only God can do that.”
Frankie took a step back. A touch of fear worked its way through the booze in his system. It made his blood feel cold. “How’d you know my name?”
“I know everything,” the revenant said. “I see everything.”
“Yeah.” Frankie shrugged in apology. “I forgot to take your eyes first. Like a rule or something.”
The zombie looked Frankie up and down in the same way Frankie might examine a mediocre piece of meat. Sure it was edible, but he could do better. But that was back in Sheet-Metal Florida. On the station, any meat was gift, a cause to celebrate. Frankie laughed and hollered, but the zombie did not. Children don’t know how to be grateful. Neither does the Devil.
“Come here,” Frankie said. He grabbed the revenant by the hand and tugged. “Let’s have a drink. I haven’t had a drink with another living person in almost a year.”
The zombie lurched forward but did not fall. Its tight face burst into an evil smile, one with too many teeth. It waited until Frankie was mid pour before it spoke: “Frankie. It’s been three years.”
“What?”
Before the attack, that kind of statement would have seen Frankie drop the bottle, but muscle memory knew what to do. Frankie poured himself a stiff drink.
“You’ve been here for three years, alone,” the zombie said.
Frankie shook his head. “Nope. Signed up for four years. Spent two before the monsters showed up, then another year alone. Got one more left.” He took a swig and delighted as the raw bourbon burned his mouth. He had found that bottle in the admiral’s quarters—for special occasions only. Like today. “Aw fuck,” he said. He looked around in a quick panic. “Only brought the one glass.”
“We can share,” the zombie said. “I do not mind.”
“Okay!”
Frankie handed it the glass, and the zombie took a careful taste. Bourbon dribbled out a hole in its mouth, where a stray alien tooth and aimed for its jugular and missed.
“It is good,” the zombie said. He raised the glass. “To God.”
Instead of taking it back, Frankie grabbed the bottle. They clinked glass.
“To me,” Frankie said.
The zombie shook its head. “Not you, Frankie. You are further from God than I am, and right now, I am a monster.”
“Hey!” Frankie turned his spare hand back into an angry point. “You got a real attitude, you know?” He pointed to the military hat on his head. “You see this? You know what this means, son?”
The zombie laughed. It was not a kind sound. “That you are a thief.”
“I’m the captain!”
“And the president,” the zombie said. It took a drink, which spilled down its neck. “A king, a sultan, a warlord. You are the last human in the universe. But you are not a God, Frankie, and Death is very, very mad at you for trying.”
“What?”
“Follow me.”
When Frankie didn’t move, the zombie snatched the bottle from his hands. Frankie yelped, because the zombie moved too fast. Like it was a monster and not a corpse. The strained skin on its hands looked ready to burst, and underneath wouldn’t be muscle and bone but mouths with teeth.
Frankie reached for his gun. “I’ll kill you before you kill me,” he said. “My soldiers will help. This is my ship.”
The zombie smiled, and its smile went all the way to its ears. Its teeth were jagged and sharp, like a monster’s. “Watch this,” it said.
Frankie still had his spare hand in a point, so the zombie mimicked it. It pointed at each revenant in the room. One by one, Frankie’s small army of dead bodies crumpled back to Death.
“I can see how they work,” the revenant said. “I can see everything.”
The muscle memory in Frankie’s hand finally went out, and he dropped his glass. It hit the ground and shattered. The smell of bourbon filled his small corner of the room, just thick enough to mask the cancer and grease, but not the blood. They had spent hours cleaning, but it would take a lifetime to remove all the blood.
“Now follow me.”
Frankie still had his gun, but he didn’t see much choice in the matter. He followed his zombie through the ship, down broken hallways that used to smell like war and look like genocide. The blood was gone; the ghosts were gone too. Lights flickered off as they went. The temperature in the facility began to drop.
The station had an observatory of sorts, but it was never used because no one actually wanted to view the pulsar. It flashed too fast, burned the eyes too much. Even with all the shielding in place, the neutron star hurt more than it inspired wondered. Frankie hadn’t been there since his third or fourth day on the station. That was almost three years ago. Or over six. Time had lost all meaning during the attack, and it never regained its footing. The zombie lied, but so did vodka.
Frankie slipped in a pool of wet blood. The revenant caught him.
“Almost there.”
They entered a room that was once so bright it caused instant sun burns. Now it was black. Frankie felt his legs go loose. His cracked, tired face turned into a horrified grimace. Everything was gone. The pulsar, the stars, everything.
“Here,” the zombie said, handing Frankie the bottle. “It’ll help.”
Frankie took a gulp. The bourbon burned at his gums. He ran his hand through his hair and pulled out more. It was greasy and smelled like old sweat.
“Why?” Frankie asked.
The zombie shrugged. “You played God, and you spat in Death’s face. They got mad. So they called me.”
“You?” Frankie blinked. “Who are you?”
Now the zombie grinned. “You know. I think you’ve always known, Frankie. And now I’m here to make a deal, because that’s what I do.
“You can die right here, right now. I’ll make it swift and only a little painful. I deserve some fun too. Or I can leave. I’ll take this bottle with me, and you can spend the next two years alone until the cancer takes you.”
Frankie looked at the bottle, at the zombie. He remembered he had his gun, and drew it on the zombie. “What about this?”
“That’s option two.”
“Can I have the bottle back?”
The Devil thought, shrugged, nodded. “I like you, Frankie. I hate you, but I like you too. I think you’re the right kind of human. Stupid. Sad. So spiteful it’s like a drug. But you went to places you weren’t supposed to go. You found a bad idea, and you grabbed it with both hands and yanked.”
Frankie took a swig. The alcohol warmed the fear in his blood. “I don’t want to be alone,” he said. “You didn’t have to kill everyone.”
Now the Devil grinned. “I didn’t, but I wanted to. We forgot you. Would have kept forgetting you, but you spat where you shouldn’t. God’s pissed. Death is too. Now I’m here, and this is your deal. What will you pick?”
Frankie blinked a drunk’s blink—slow and thoughtful with no thought behind it. “What’s death like?”
“Horrible.”
Frankie sagged. Outside, the universe was nothing. Empty. So cold and quiet it hurt to look at. “Worse than being alone?”
“It’s about the same,” the Devil said.
Frankie jiggled his bottle. “Maybe this will kill me first, before the cancer.”
The Devil nodded. “Is that your answer?”
“Yeah.”
“Then shoot me.”
Frankie shook his head. “I don’t wanna.”
The Devil knelt. He put a hand on Frankie’s shoulder. It was the last comforting hand Frankie would ever feel.
“That’s not how the deal goes, Frankie. You shoot me, or I eat you. Now pick.”
“No!”
“Pick!”
Frankie tightened his hand on the half-empty bottle of bourbon. Then he fired his gun.
Nonsense 