[Nexus] Stories etc

[Lord Magtok]

Black Friday

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"Bill, just because your father tried to eat you, does that mean we all have to be unhappy? Forever?" -Mrs. Robinson, Fido (2006)

Man, it's been a long year. A long, wild, crazy year. Did you know they have some sort of Christmas analogue here in the Nexus? They do, and it's as stupid as the real thing. It's just...it's all so hypocritical, isn't it? These cadavers giving other cadavers presents, people pretending to care about each other. I mean, five days ago, you just stabbed an old lady in the throat for the last Magstation 3D-Lux, and you've got the nerve to tell me this is the season of giving and good will to others? Do you really think your nephew Jimmy's not gonna notice those elf blood stains all over his new console?

****, life was so much easier before I got dumped here. I was master of the universe, ruler of the world, god and king and badass survivor incarnate. When the zombies came to Crystal City, when everyone else was running around in circles, refusing to use the z-word, and holing up in shopping malls, do you know what I was doing? When everyone was being eaten, robbed, shot, or some combination of the three, what was I doing to stop myself from meeting the same fate?

My friend, I was winning. So many cadavers trying to find their daughters, save their wives, hold onto this car or that photo album. Trying to pretend the world still made sense, that if you just denied it all as hard as you could, you could go back to living things like before brain-eating ghouls showed up. Fleeing on yachts off the island, as if the rest of the world wasn't as choked up with the ****ing cannibal plague as we were.

I still remember my mom's face in her last moments. She was smashing at the windshield with her fists, screaming something about love, ingratitude, and hellfire. The usual sort of mom rant, though this one seemed a bit more frantic than the ones before. Might have had something to do with all the walking dead around. Like hell I was letting her in, though. Firewood and ammo was going to be a commodity in the new world, and I could always get a new mother.

Life was pretty much the best for the next few months, before I got ripped off and dumped in the Nexus. Raiding abandoned stores, sleeping in five-star hotels every night, watching every pre-z movie I could find. Setting people on fire, zombies on fire, buildings on fire...it was great. I mean sure, you could always just shoot a guy, but I always got more satisfaction from the ol' Promethean contraband. Watching those flames lick every inch of them, dancing and exploding and smoking...I never thought I'd turn out to be a pyromaniac, but man...

You have to understand, though. I'm not a bad person. I didn't go out of my way to be cruel to others. I was...I'm just a realist, is all. The end of the world came, and it was every man for itself out there. It was Black Friday, every day. Monsters took over the world, and there was only so much ammunition and fire to go around. That doesn't make me bad, right? Just better than everyone else at not dying. They'd do the same in my shoes, after all. Just look at what happens every year, the second day of Thanksmas.

A little something for the holiday season from the Nexus's own James Dalton, a human supremacist and arsonist.