Paper cut leads to zombie invasion

By Brian S. Argood

Staff Brains Writer

SHADOW CITY -- A mutant, who was enjoying impersonations by The Thing last night at the Thing-A-Ding Ding Piano Bar on the Sun-Never-Rises Strip, cut his finger on a death notice he received from a young zombie at the bar, and his luck only got worse as the night unfolded.

He put a napkin on the cut to soak up the blood, and all seemed well.

“But then I had to go to the mutant bathroom,” the mutant said, “so I got up and walked to the restroom for mutants, and of all things I could bump, I bumped my mutant finger on the piano and opened the cut right back up.”

Then, a little later, he was tying his mutant shoe, and his mutant hand slipped and caught the paper cut on that little plastic end piece of his mutant lace, and he cut the paper cut wider.

Then he caught the wound on a table, on a doorway and on a few walls, and later he split it open even wider and longer when he’d forgotten about it and decided to lift a box of mutant supplies into a mutant truck for another mutant doing mutant-type things.

“I’ve never bumped that finger in my whole mutant life,” the mutant said. “And all of a sudden I’m bumping it, scraping it and ripping it open at every mutant turn.”

Meanwhile, according to sources, the mutant was leaving a tasty trail of fresh, potent mutant blood behind him wherever he went.

“When the hordes of zombies finally found him, there was enough blood on the ground to use as ketchup for his brains,” said Shadow City Det. Al Waysmonday, who had heard of a growing horde earlier in the evening.

Waysmonday was on his way to the Press Club on Hard Luck Lane for a beverage or two (or three or four or five) when he got the call about zombies gathering. He was put on a case last month to watch for zombies plotting to take over city government, which, according to Waysmonday, was kinda ridiculous because zombies have no brains, other than the ones they’re eating, so he was ready to jump into action.

“First I needed a drink,” Waysmonday said. “That’s when I saw the zombies grouping up and heading in one direction. “All of a sudden it all seemed very likely that they could take over the city. In a matter of weeks, I knew this place could be a ghost town. Now, I’m all for ghost towns and mass mutilation and whatnot, but all in moderation. These zombies are gluttons and just never stop. So I had to stop them. But first I had to stop and get another drink.”

Next, Waysmonday called for backup, and by 2 a.m. this morning, he and the force had taken down the whole army with more “head shots” than the studios get in a month.

“In the end,” Waysmonday said, “we learned that the zombies had no intention of taking over the city. I guess they know their place after all. They were merely on a scent of blood from that mutant’s paper cut and wanted, you know, brains. Well, they got them. And I got them. Another case closed and another beverage at the Press Club for me.”

With that additional beverage for Waysmonday came a death notice from a young zombie at the bar, and with the opening of that paper notice came a paper cut, and with that paper cut . . .