This Contest is Haunted Tie-Breaker

Tallying up the votes for this contest has been like watching an epic horse race between Man O' War, Secretariat, and Seabiscuit (minus Toby Maguire who obviously ruins everything). What? You've never been obsessed with books about racehorses?  Forgive the reference and contribute to the ultimate tie-breaker. There is a three-way tie and only two prizes. I need you to vote for your number one favorite out of these three. Please vote in the comments. The top two take all.


1)

2) The Godforsaken

Denver’s annual zombie crawl is upon us once again. Last year was my first encounter with this disturbing phenomenon, having just moved to the city from Wyoming a few weeks before All Hallows’ Eve. I’ve since discovered that the living dead are drawn toward urban areas as there are just far greater opportunities for feasting on human flesh than out in the sticks. I had never before encountered so many fucking zombies in my entire life.

Sure, you have your enterprising ones disguised as traveling salesmen or delivery drivers come to the ranch every so often, but being loners, these specimens are easily dealt with, relatively. You can spot them by their jaunty walk, and occasionally then have scars of gaping wounds, but they usually know enough to cover those up. Three guns are necessary. At least a twelve-gauge rifle, the biggest shotgun you can get your hands on, and a pistol with a decent kick. An initial shotgun blast to the midsection slows them down as they approach—don’t wait to see what they’re selling, to be sure, they’re peddling your goddamn demise—after the first shot, they’ll be dazed but don’t think you’re done. As they’re staggering and screaming all fucked up like—faking pain is a tactic they employ—you have to run up, getting as close as possible, and sink the rifle shot into the cranium. The pistol is for back up at close range only. And you better hope to Christ you don’t have to use it. Once they’ve stopped moving, you have about twenty minutes to sever the legs and arms, and what’s left of the head. If you wait too long, they will reanimate on your ass. This is the worst part because the smell is horrendous, and contrary to popular lore, those limbs do not easily separate from the body. Each part must then be buried at least 7 feet below ground and not within a fifty-yard radius of any of the other parts, neither from that particular zombie, nor from any others you’ve previously buried. Each spot must be clearly marked.

I was shitting dynamite when I discovered Denver’s substantial zombie population and the lack of adequate land to dispose the fuckers in. And on top of that, realizing that amazingly, I’m one of the only people in the city who knows how to properly kill and dispose of a zombie, I damn near called it quits and moved back home. But I stayed, if only for lack of money.

A year has passed, and tonight those godforsaken bastards will erupt from the ground like a gonorrheic discharge upon the streets of Denver, and they won’t leave until they’ve had their fill of human flesh. Knowing I can’t possibly eliminate the entire zombie population from Denver has been disheartening as all hell. I’m just one fucking guy after all. But that’s not stopping me from doing my damndest for the protection of the human race. A zombie infestation can get out of control faster than a Wyoming cop’ll have their hand up your ass under the pretense of a narcotics crackdown. For shit’s sake, I’m not going to let that happen.

Dressed in full camouflage, I carry a golf bag with my guns, a hacksaw, some beef jerky for fuel, and a water canteen, to the alley next to Dos Locos, a major stop-off on the zombies’ annual prowl. I hide behind a dumpster roughly twenty-five feet back from the street. A Dia de los Muertos celebration is in full swing. The playful mariachi music falls on my ears in stark contrast to the unsavory task at hand.

My plan is to pick a large male out of a pack as they pass by the entrance to the alley on their way to devour their unsuspecting victims. I’m hoping the first kill will be sufficient to scare many of the zombies back to their graves, because I just don’t have the man power or the space to sever and place more than one or two of them. If this fails, the vile, rapacious fucks will surely tear me limb from limb.

The first batch to pass is no good. Mostly females and skinny ones at that. Hard to shoot and won’t spook any of the others. Just’ll piss them off. I wait for another twenty minutes or so with no good shots. I get hungry and break into the beef jerky. Just as I’m taking a swig off my canteen the perfect specimen appears. Tall and wide, surrounded by a group of about ten other zombies and a few people dressed up for the Day of the Dead fiesta who don’t know any better. Luckily the idiot humans are on the periphery of the bunch. I drop my canteen and grab the rifle; the shotgun would probably hit the humans at this range. I aim and fire. The big sonofabitch goes down. No stagger at all. Everyone else is screaming and running away like I planned. The big one is on its back writhing. I reload and run up, center the barrel’s end near the temple. The mariachi band has stopped. The whole fucking restaurant is deserted save for two guys peaking around the corner of the building watching me. I fire again to end it. The decayed brains splatter my hands and face. The two guys look scared. One of them turns and vomits. I wipe my face with my sleeve and yell to them that everything is OK. It’s dead, I say, and the others have fled back to their graves. We are safe for another year! They run. It’s an understandable reaction from someone who’s never seen a zombie killing. I figure they’ll be fine, and set to work quickly sawing the limbs off. In the approaching distance, sirens blare, and I know everything is going to be alright.



3) THE HAUNTED HOUSE (or, DEUCE NUMM-BERTEW GETS HIS FIRST PUBE)

Not so very long ago and not so far away, an unsuspecting new family moved into the spooky, decrepit fixer-upper on the corner of Bones Blvd. and Skeleton Street. The old-fashioned piss-yellow Victorian was obviously haunted yet inexplicably appealing to the merry-go-round of buyers who, like clockwork, moved in and then out, always screaming and frazzled when they turned over the keys back into the hands of Dolores Doodie, the neighborhood real estate agent. Year after year, Dolores would do a little Annette Bening-in-“American Beauty” routine in the newly cleaned, empty house, giving herself a pep talk along the lines of “I will sell this house today!” despite the moaning and groaning soundtrack continuously provided by the floorboards and walls of the home. And year after year, an attractive new family would swoop the place up, high on the dreamy hopes of fixing the place up and reviving its full potential as a neighborhood cornerstone.

SPOOKY MUSIC

And so, not so very long ago and not so far away, the Numm-Bertew clan pulled into the driveway of the old haunted house on the corner of Bones & Skeleton, their blood-red Previa minivan sparkling in the moonlight (they had driven all day from their former hometown and arrived at their new home only once the sun had long set).

SPOOKY MUSIC
The family battled cobwebs and the lack of a porch light before reaching the front door, toward which little brother Deuce was extending his open hand when the thing clicked, croaked, and screeched open without any damn body turning the knob. Deuce’s two older sisters gasped in terror at the haunted house cliché, clinging to each other for protection in an inexplicably sexy way, with both sisters’ visibly pert nipples standing at serious attention in matching tight tank tops as the moonlight cast down upon nothing else but their boobs. Little Deuce paid no heed to his super sexpot teen sisters, of course, owing to his lack of pubes and the fact that, until kids get pubes, haunted houses are still cooler than boobs.

As usual, mom and dad were suddenly nowhere to be seen. Deuce Numm-Bertew and his wet hot American teen twin sisters were technically orphans, you see, but the ghosts of their dearly departed parents were so concerned for preserving the virginal purity of their should-be porn star daughters that they manifest themselves physically in a blood-red Previa whenever the twins were about to lose it to a football team and whisked them away, along with little Deuce, to a whole new hometown and a whole new life.

Just then, a BLACK CAT/JOLT OF SPOOKY MUSIC jumped down from nowhere and scared the shit out of the twins, literally. Deuce rolled his eyes, mumbled “typical” under his breath, and pushed the front door all the way open, revealing a dark gaping expanse into which he bravely stepped. Faced with the classic dilemma of whether to remain on the scary front porch where you and your hot twin just sharted in unison or follow your little bro into an even scarier haunted house, the girls opted to chillax with their poop on the porch and pray for a football team to come along and deflower them in the moonlight.

Inside, Deuce groped pathetically in the cobwebby darkness with the hope of finding a light switch. Little fool was too young to know what everybody does by the time they get pubes: that haunted houses don’t have light switches, and that the place is only illuminated when the demonic powers that be are damn good and ready to light a bitch up. Just then, JOLT OF SPOOKY MUSIC/LET THERE BE LIGHT!!! All at once, the haunted house was ablaze with jack-o-lanterns, hundreds of carved pumpkins lit from within by candlelight, each and every last one of them bearing a strained, constipated expression that was neither sinister nor intimidating yet also not sad or even ironically dopey.

JOLT UPON JOLT OF SPOOKY MUSIC as the house itself begins to shake, quake, even, with the bizarrely straining pumpkin faces becoming even more bizarrely strained with every passing moment. Little Deuce wasn’t scared, though, because having spent all eight of his living years with twin teen hottie sisters with severe sharting anxiety, Little Deuce recognized the nature of these expressions almost immediately.

Without hesitating, Deuce became a man: he grabbed an axe from the nearest place where axes are kept and ran for the nearest mainline pipe. With one fell swoop, as the house was groaning and moaning and heaving and hoeing all around him, hundreds, no, thousands, of groaning, moaning, heaving and hoeing jack-o-lantern faces aglow with the look that only backlogged feces can be blamed for, Little Deuce slammed the axe into the sewer pipe as hard as he could, freeing his new home of her lifelong suffering with one valiant gesture, the act that made Little Deuce just plain Deuce.

And so at that very moment, when the most infamous haunted house on Bones/Skeleton burst from within to flood the entire neighborhood with decades worth of pent up poop and pee, Deuce got his very first pube, becoming a man. As for the house, well, it was no longer haunted at all, freed of the ghosts of feces past and allowed to breathe and be free at long last. With the first rain came a little less poop on the streets, then the second rain and so on, and by the time several years worth of torrentially rainy winters had passed, the formerly haunted house (and the three or so square miles immediately surrounding it) looked good as new.

And so Deuce Numm-Bertew lived happily ever after, with lots of pubes and a poopy twins fetish as his main companions, plus the annual Christmas card he sent to the realtor Dolores Doodie, thanking her for another year in the house she sold his ghost parents.
ORCHESTRAL CLIMAX!!!

THE END