0. Larvae
Becoming a vampires pretty much dead-on analogous to growing up humanI mean, nobodies born dead-sexy, fast as greased lightning or strong as a Hells Angel on angel dust. Nobodie.
Face itif youd met your dream girl when she was 6 months old, oozing drool and mucus out one end and what looks like oil paint out the other, she wouldnt exactly be your dream girl any more, would she? Oh, she would? Well aint you St. Fucking Peter? Or St. Sick Fuck.
Anyway, heres how the whole thing unfolds, schematically anyway. Ill get into the details later.
First, you get dead. No other way to go about it. For most of us, you get dead by getting torn to fucking shreds and half-eaten by one of your future fellow undead. But as most of your future compatriots are out for a full and fulfilling meal, you gotta be (un)lucky enough that your shambling gourmand gets interrupted mid-gustation. Otherwise you end up as nothing more than zombie-shit. Well, no, you dont actuallyzombies dont shit, obviously. In fact, you still end up undead sorta. Youre just part of another zombie, feeding its mind, its carcass, and you dont matter for shit anymore: hence, zombie shit.
But if youre one of the blessed/doomed, your consumer ends up getting distracted, either by one of those classic feeding frenzies wherein the parties involved up forgetting what the fight started over amidst all the delectable, fresh fellow zombie meat there is lying around (yesthey eat each other as well, though only for the sensual satisfaction of it, the sensation of chewing meat of dubious quality; no nutritive content to the stuff, even for a zombie), or by the sudden juxtaposition of a shotgun blast, chainsaw or blunt instrument with your diners brains (yes, it has to be the brainshearts worth fuck all by this point, just a flaccid black balloon that does little more than feebly stir every hour or so). Dont ask me what or why, but the brain is still doing something up there, if only knocking around like the proverbial belfry bat.
If youre lucky, its not the latter that interrupts dinner. (To be honest, Im not sure if lucky is quite the right term here; bit of a stretch, actually, but its the best Ive got for the moment. Having your maker around later can be handy, but it aint exactly a Sunday picnic in the park. But again, Ill get to that later.)
Okay, so now youre dead and (possibly) buried. Good on ya. Circumstances differ depending on whether or not youre buried, so its worth going into some detail on the two possibilities.
If you checked out in one of the DMZs then youre probably lying out somewhere in the open, a smear of bloody meat and fantastically convoluted entrails in the midst of some city square, on the corner of a now-defunct red-light district, or slowly sliding down your refrigerator door. Again, circumstances vary, but you get the gist: Youre dead, lying somewhere, more or less intactand believe me, it doesnt take much for the process to occur. If youre got a brain and maybe a bit of spinal cord left, then youre good to go.
(And thats why the meal has to be interrupted. As Ill explain later, brains are fucking important here. They tend to forget that shit in the stories and the movies. Its there, yeah, and everybody still moans Braaaaaaains when theyre playing zombies and Indians, but all you ever see or read about is the cannibalism bit. The flesh-eating is important, yeah, and fun toobut its the brains that are the heart of the matter. Handily, even the most mindless of zombies leaves the brain for last. Cant say if its an instinctual thinglike the zombie flesh knows that it has to leave at least some chance of gustatio interruptus, for preservation of the species and allor if its a lingering memory of the old gourmands mantra, Save the best for last, or if its just that a skull is a fucking hard nut to crack for a drooling moron of a carcass, but its a fact.)
Good to go. Not locomotion wise, probably, but set for transformation. You die your soul/spirit/mind whatthefuckever goes drifting off into the aether, the Elysian fields, the white-lit tunnel, the fucking pearly gates and LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHTthen you are snapped back into your bodie faster than a monk can say Hail Mary after a late-night self-abuse session.
And it m o t h e r FUCKING h u r t s.
But youre back, safe as houses and spewing up the vilest stream of linguistic effluvia youve never even imagined, as if all that cursing might somehow relieve the pain, but youre back in your bodie. And glad of it too. I mean, even if you are faithful and all, death is a harrowing shitter of an experience. It might end up alright (I, obviously, would not know), but being torn from every familiar facet of experience, tossed into something you didnt even know you had to be hurtled away from everything you ever knewit doesnt matter how that ends: Its soul-shattering.
But you aint all there. No, sir, not by a long shot. Only the barest fraction of what you called you back lifetimes ago, before the Great Mindfuck, has managed to scrape itself back together from the mosquito-guts-on-the-devils-windshield you just momentarily became. Actually, fraction is a generous term: Youre an iota, an ion, a muon of the nucleus of what you used to be. Thankfully, said muon has a bit of a memory, and it knows what it was, it wants to be what it was all over againnay, it knows it can be moreand it knows just how to get there: Braaaaaaaaaaaaains!
But first youve got a fortnight or so (due to variance in levels of trauma, user experience may vary) of pure agony to lie through. Cause, yeah, all those bones and nerves and bits of gristle and ligament have all got to regrow before that muon of consciousness can even consider having the chops to seek out some fresh grey matter to gobble down. Fabulously, the sensory capacities of this iota of consciousness left to you are incredibly acute, and so you get to live through the regrowth of every millimeter, every horny layer and mucous meniscus and fascial cacheand you can feel it more robustly, more subtly and with more nuance than you ever managed to watch a sunset, swish a mouthful of Burgundy or endure an hour in the dentists chair. Imagine being able to feel your fingernails growing, then fill that experience up with the worst pain youve ever endured, and youll maybe, depending on how vivid your imagination is, have an idea of what this period is like. To return to the growing up human analogy, its like enduring every moment of the cellular mitosis that ended up as an infant you, and making it all incredibly painful.
Thankfully, your shard of consciousness cant handle all that much experience at once, so you tend to wax and wane in and out of awareness a lot at this point. Fucked up thing is that whether or not you were there, were conscious, for every moment of it, you still remember it. Vividly. Im pretty sure that primal trauma is the main reason that most of my brethren are so damn fucked up; that and the unholy hunger, of course.
Up to this point, it hasnt really mattered whether or not you were buried. If you werent, you get the added enjoyment of feeling even the slightest breeze playing across your nerve endings like an acid-soaked violin bow, the noon-day sun searing your flesh so you can smell it, and the incessant tickle of ants and flies and maggots crawling over, in and out of youbut then, if you were, you have the opportunity to revel in the same feelings performed this time by earthworms, centipedes, and whatever foul, too-many-legged submarine monstrosity the earth can conjure up etc. Plus you get the very real bonus of feeling probably sanctified earth sliding and shifting in and around your regrowing flesh. I never took a mud bath while alive, but I imagine that returning to life in hallowed earth is sort of the inverted, dreamed-up-by-Goebbels version thereof: agonizing as the mud bath is (supposedly) oddly pleasurable.
(Dont ask me why the whole sanctified earth thing makes a difference; its possible it doesnt actually, since pretty much all graveyards are blessed and there is, therefore, no control group to speak of. But Im guessing it does, because I still cant get within ten feet of a church without feeling the sudden and overwhelming urge to turn myself inside-out sea cucumber style. I know this probably sounds like Im saying there is a God and that the undead are unholy, but I really dont think thats the case. Personally I think its an issue of deep-seeded, wholly unconscious faith sucker-punching one in the nuts. I mean, even the most confirmed atheists Ive ever know have said Goddammit! when they hit their thumbs with a hammer. But what the fuck do I know, eh? Im a bloody fucking vampire.)
But once one has sufficiently regenerated to make ambulation, or at least the grossest possible facsimile thereof, possible, it makes a difference. If you went tits up aboveground, youre in luck: All you have to do now is fucking stand up. (Harder than it sounds, believe me. Attaining an upright position whilst a zombie is sorta like reenacting the evolution of man with cordwood for tendons and compressing a couple million years into, oh, say an hour. (Much like the gestation process described above, not as Hallmark-miraculous as it might sound.) And thats an hour if you werent all that damaged to begin with. Ive spent entire nights watching larvaeswhat we call emtrying to get vertical. Rather the undead version of Comedy Central, if you ask me: Sometimes funny, but mostly you just have to laugh because otherwise its too painful to watch.)
But if you were buried Shit, that is not to be envied.
First you have to get out of the coffin. And the modern coffin, as if built with the presumption of an eventual zombie uprising, even before it actually happened, is somewhat like a scale model of Fort Knox. The wood is thickunless your family went cheap and Old West and got the $19.95 pinebox and thank Jebus for thatas hell, and the latches are nothing to scoff at. Thankfully one does have not-inconsiderable strength on ones side, which strength is only boosted by the adrenalin rush (or facsimile thereof; I dont know that we have adrenalin glands anymore) one experiences upon attaining some slight shadow of awareness whilst coffin-bound. Once youre out, youve got six feet, give or take, of tightly packed and naturally depressed earth to crawl through, bloody and naked, with nothing but fingernails to use for trowels. (By the time youre topside these have generally splintered to itsy-bitsy, exquisitely scale model piano keys still lovingly attached to the cuticle.) Every inch of that earth is like sliding over carbide sandpaper under a citric acid rain in a rock-salt landslide. Fun!
And then you get to stand up.
Becoming a vampires pretty much dead-on analogous to growing up humanI mean, nobodies born dead-sexy, fast as greased lightning or strong as a Hells Angel on angel dust. Nobodie.
Face itif youd met your dream girl when she was 6 months old, oozing drool and mucus out one end and what looks like oil paint out the other, she wouldnt exactly be your dream girl any more, would she? Oh, she would? Well aint you St. Fucking Peter? Or St. Sick Fuck.
Anyway, heres how the whole thing unfolds, schematically anyway. Ill get into the details later.
First, you get dead. No other way to go about it. For most of us, you get dead by getting torn to fucking shreds and half-eaten by one of your future fellow undead. But as most of your future compatriots are out for a full and fulfilling meal, you gotta be (un)lucky enough that your shambling gourmand gets interrupted mid-gustation. Otherwise you end up as nothing more than zombie-shit. Well, no, you dont actuallyzombies dont shit, obviously. In fact, you still end up undead sorta. Youre just part of another zombie, feeding its mind, its carcass, and you dont matter for shit anymore: hence, zombie shit.
But if youre one of the blessed/doomed, your consumer ends up getting distracted, either by one of those classic feeding frenzies wherein the parties involved up forgetting what the fight started over amidst all the delectable, fresh fellow zombie meat there is lying around (yesthey eat each other as well, though only for the sensual satisfaction of it, the sensation of chewing meat of dubious quality; no nutritive content to the stuff, even for a zombie), or by the sudden juxtaposition of a shotgun blast, chainsaw or blunt instrument with your diners brains (yes, it has to be the brainshearts worth fuck all by this point, just a flaccid black balloon that does little more than feebly stir every hour or so). Dont ask me what or why, but the brain is still doing something up there, if only knocking around like the proverbial belfry bat.
If youre lucky, its not the latter that interrupts dinner. (To be honest, Im not sure if lucky is quite the right term here; bit of a stretch, actually, but its the best Ive got for the moment. Having your maker around later can be handy, but it aint exactly a Sunday picnic in the park. But again, Ill get to that later.)
Okay, so now youre dead and (possibly) buried. Good on ya. Circumstances differ depending on whether or not youre buried, so its worth going into some detail on the two possibilities.
If you checked out in one of the DMZs then youre probably lying out somewhere in the open, a smear of bloody meat and fantastically convoluted entrails in the midst of some city square, on the corner of a now-defunct red-light district, or slowly sliding down your refrigerator door. Again, circumstances vary, but you get the gist: Youre dead, lying somewhere, more or less intactand believe me, it doesnt take much for the process to occur. If youre got a brain and maybe a bit of spinal cord left, then youre good to go.
(And thats why the meal has to be interrupted. As Ill explain later, brains are fucking important here. They tend to forget that shit in the stories and the movies. Its there, yeah, and everybody still moans Braaaaaaains when theyre playing zombies and Indians, but all you ever see or read about is the cannibalism bit. The flesh-eating is important, yeah, and fun toobut its the brains that are the heart of the matter. Handily, even the most mindless of zombies leaves the brain for last. Cant say if its an instinctual thinglike the zombie flesh knows that it has to leave at least some chance of gustatio interruptus, for preservation of the species and allor if its a lingering memory of the old gourmands mantra, Save the best for last, or if its just that a skull is a fucking hard nut to crack for a drooling moron of a carcass, but its a fact.)
Good to go. Not locomotion wise, probably, but set for transformation. You die your soul/spirit/mind whatthefuckever goes drifting off into the aether, the Elysian fields, the white-lit tunnel, the fucking pearly gates and LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHTthen you are snapped back into your bodie faster than a monk can say Hail Mary after a late-night self-abuse session.
And it m o t h e r FUCKING h u r t s.
But youre back, safe as houses and spewing up the vilest stream of linguistic effluvia youve never even imagined, as if all that cursing might somehow relieve the pain, but youre back in your bodie. And glad of it too. I mean, even if you are faithful and all, death is a harrowing shitter of an experience. It might end up alright (I, obviously, would not know), but being torn from every familiar facet of experience, tossed into something you didnt even know you had to be hurtled away from everything you ever knewit doesnt matter how that ends: Its soul-shattering.
But you aint all there. No, sir, not by a long shot. Only the barest fraction of what you called you back lifetimes ago, before the Great Mindfuck, has managed to scrape itself back together from the mosquito-guts-on-the-devils-windshield you just momentarily became. Actually, fraction is a generous term: Youre an iota, an ion, a muon of the nucleus of what you used to be. Thankfully, said muon has a bit of a memory, and it knows what it was, it wants to be what it was all over againnay, it knows it can be moreand it knows just how to get there: Braaaaaaaaaaaaains!
But first youve got a fortnight or so (due to variance in levels of trauma, user experience may vary) of pure agony to lie through. Cause, yeah, all those bones and nerves and bits of gristle and ligament have all got to regrow before that muon of consciousness can even consider having the chops to seek out some fresh grey matter to gobble down. Fabulously, the sensory capacities of this iota of consciousness left to you are incredibly acute, and so you get to live through the regrowth of every millimeter, every horny layer and mucous meniscus and fascial cacheand you can feel it more robustly, more subtly and with more nuance than you ever managed to watch a sunset, swish a mouthful of Burgundy or endure an hour in the dentists chair. Imagine being able to feel your fingernails growing, then fill that experience up with the worst pain youve ever endured, and youll maybe, depending on how vivid your imagination is, have an idea of what this period is like. To return to the growing up human analogy, its like enduring every moment of the cellular mitosis that ended up as an infant you, and making it all incredibly painful.
Thankfully, your shard of consciousness cant handle all that much experience at once, so you tend to wax and wane in and out of awareness a lot at this point. Fucked up thing is that whether or not you were there, were conscious, for every moment of it, you still remember it. Vividly. Im pretty sure that primal trauma is the main reason that most of my brethren are so damn fucked up; that and the unholy hunger, of course.
Up to this point, it hasnt really mattered whether or not you were buried. If you werent, you get the added enjoyment of feeling even the slightest breeze playing across your nerve endings like an acid-soaked violin bow, the noon-day sun searing your flesh so you can smell it, and the incessant tickle of ants and flies and maggots crawling over, in and out of youbut then, if you were, you have the opportunity to revel in the same feelings performed this time by earthworms, centipedes, and whatever foul, too-many-legged submarine monstrosity the earth can conjure up etc. Plus you get the very real bonus of feeling probably sanctified earth sliding and shifting in and around your regrowing flesh. I never took a mud bath while alive, but I imagine that returning to life in hallowed earth is sort of the inverted, dreamed-up-by-Goebbels version thereof: agonizing as the mud bath is (supposedly) oddly pleasurable.
(Dont ask me why the whole sanctified earth thing makes a difference; its possible it doesnt actually, since pretty much all graveyards are blessed and there is, therefore, no control group to speak of. But Im guessing it does, because I still cant get within ten feet of a church without feeling the sudden and overwhelming urge to turn myself inside-out sea cucumber style. I know this probably sounds like Im saying there is a God and that the undead are unholy, but I really dont think thats the case. Personally I think its an issue of deep-seeded, wholly unconscious faith sucker-punching one in the nuts. I mean, even the most confirmed atheists Ive ever know have said Goddammit! when they hit their thumbs with a hammer. But what the fuck do I know, eh? Im a bloody fucking vampire.)
But once one has sufficiently regenerated to make ambulation, or at least the grossest possible facsimile thereof, possible, it makes a difference. If you went tits up aboveground, youre in luck: All you have to do now is fucking stand up. (Harder than it sounds, believe me. Attaining an upright position whilst a zombie is sorta like reenacting the evolution of man with cordwood for tendons and compressing a couple million years into, oh, say an hour. (Much like the gestation process described above, not as Hallmark-miraculous as it might sound.) And thats an hour if you werent all that damaged to begin with. Ive spent entire nights watching larvaeswhat we call emtrying to get vertical. Rather the undead version of Comedy Central, if you ask me: Sometimes funny, but mostly you just have to laugh because otherwise its too painful to watch.)
But if you were buried Shit, that is not to be envied.
First you have to get out of the coffin. And the modern coffin, as if built with the presumption of an eventual zombie uprising, even before it actually happened, is somewhat like a scale model of Fort Knox. The wood is thickunless your family went cheap and Old West and got the $19.95 pinebox and thank Jebus for thatas hell, and the latches are nothing to scoff at. Thankfully one does have not-inconsiderable strength on ones side, which strength is only boosted by the adrenalin rush (or facsimile thereof; I dont know that we have adrenalin glands anymore) one experiences upon attaining some slight shadow of awareness whilst coffin-bound. Once youre out, youve got six feet, give or take, of tightly packed and naturally depressed earth to crawl through, bloody and naked, with nothing but fingernails to use for trowels. (By the time youre topside these have generally splintered to itsy-bitsy, exquisitely scale model piano keys still lovingly attached to the cuticle.) Every inch of that earth is like sliding over carbide sandpaper under a citric acid rain in a rock-salt landslide. Fun!
And then you get to stand up.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
di_xia:
thanks
unida:
thanks for your sweet comment on bryophyta!