Ella, Queen of the Damned

This is the third chapter of The ShambElla Saga, where we follow an old fella and a young lady navigating a strange post-apocalyptic world.

Chapter One:

Chapter Zero (an interlude):

And now, leeches and germs, boils and ghouls, for chapter 2:

Ella, Queen of the Damned

Ella and the man folks called Shamblin’ Sam were foraging in the city. It was slow work because caution was required. The old cities were abandoned by those who remained because there were so many dangers that couldn’t be accounted for: busted underground gas lines, buildings infested with mold, tainted water, toxic chemicals from industrial sites no longer maintained that could randomly combine to create anything from deadly gas to sudden fires to massive explosions.

That’s just the obvious stuff. The not so obvious stuff always came as a surprise to Ella. Being of a younger and somewhat irreverent generation, she did not countenance what she used to think of as superstition until her travels with Sam; but Sam told her he’d always believed in demons and other ethereal entities because his ma, who was a Catholic, had demonstrated to him in his youth that such things existed in the form of an unseen effect on the irreligious.

They were having just such a discussion as they walked streets cratered with rubble and littered with trash.

“Ma always said she wasn’t fond of the Church because it harbored bad elements among the priests, especially the higher up you go. On the other hand, she’d say, there were so many good people on the ground, among the congregation, there was still a—what’d she call it—an aggregation? Yeah, an aggregation of sincere belief in the power of good to overcome evil, and this could act as a ward for those who knew not to be too trusting of the priests.”

“I remember the scandals. Were all the priests bad?” Ella asked.

“No, I don’t think so. I think they were just people, like us, and the Church was just an organization, nothing holy about it. Like Ma, I think holiness is in the heart of the believer, even if it’s misplaced onto icons and symbols. If there’s a sincere belief in the power of good to overcome evil, it can happen. But sometimes evil is stronger, as with those men I was travelling with, the ones who attacked you.” Sam looked perturbed. He knew he’d done the right thing, but it still hurt his heart.

“They were your neighbors, you said.”

“Yeah. They had wives and kids of their own, just like me! Daughters, even! How could they? But that’s the rub. They had been hardened into strict survivalists by their trials and had lost sight of the—searching for another one of Ma’s words here—the in… intransient? No. No! It was intrinsic. The intrinsic good, she used to call it!” Sam was visibly pleased with himself. Approaching sixty-seven, he could still remember Ma’s lessons.

“The good within,” Ella replied softly, smiling. She was no slouch at vocabulary. She had a feeling she would have loved Sam’s Ma as much as he did.

“Yeah. You got it, kid. Hold onto that tighter than anything, except maybe your pistol in a firefight. It’ll come in handy.”

They stopped before a building standing alone in a weedy parking lot. The Rusty Barrel, the sign said.

“Hey, I’ve never seen this place before,” Ella said. “Might be some vittles in there for us, Sam. It looks like a bar. Though, judging from the broken windows, somebody probably cleared out all the liquor by now.”

“Most certainly, young ward!” Sam replied. “We’ve not been this far into the city yet, but as I recall, this place was advertised a lot on my Facebook feed. A local dive bar where they did a lot of metal and punk shows. Let’s be cautious. You wanna cover me this time or should I cover you?”

“It’s your turn to go first, I think, as we agreed. Even Steven, remember?”

Sam smiled. “Equal Ella.”

Ella groaned and rolled her eyes, but she smiled too.

Sam drew his nine and shambled slowly forward. Ella drew her own, taking cover behind an old car. Sam stood at the doorway with his flashlight in his left hand, shining it into the room. He looked around a long time, then motioned her over.

When she got to his side, he just said: “Look.”

The flashlight was for the corners of the room, but the sunlight through the windows showed enough of the scene to make out a floor riddled with decomposed bodies, skeletons with dusty husks of skin still stretched over various places, but not much else. Most of them wore tattered t-shirts with depictions of gruesome monsters and mayhem beneath band names scrawled in a design decidedly eldritch and just as illegible.

“I don’t think they’ll bother us, Sam. Let’s look around.” As they walked to the back of the room, they were careful to step over the bodies. They kept their guns drawn. Ella walked behind the bar. “Yup. They cleaned this place out, Sam. No whiskey for us.”

“Just as well,” he replied.

“You don’t really mean that,” Ella quipped.

Sam laughed. “Trying to console myself.”

Then the lights kicked on.

A sound, like a bomb being dropped by a jet, swelled to a crescendo.

The skeletons rose from the floor, standing like statues.

As the high whine gave way to a deep, guttural explosion, a classic thrash metal riff ripped through the air. A whipcrack snare drove the song like an apocalyptic horseman applying the lash.

The skeletons came to life, throwing their arms and legs about, ramming into each other with ferocity and mutual disregard, banging their heads as they formed a turbulent, violent circle.

Ella and Sam stood transfixed behind the bar. It was a fucking undead mosh pit. If the music wasn’t so blisteringly loud, Sam would have heard Ella say this can’t be real.

But it was real. The question of where the electricity came from to power the system was secondary to the fact that somehow or another, it also animated the dead.

On her left, Ella could see a portable digital device docked on a stand, the screen lit up with a picture of Siamese Twins tangled together. The song was Bonded by Blood by Exodus.

After a few minutes, the song abruptly ended and there was complete silence.

The lights stayed on. The skeletal thrashers ceased their irreverent slam dance. For a minute they just stood there, looking like typical stoners in their faded jeans and concert tees. Then, one by one, they turned their empty eye-sockets toward their uninvited guests.

Sam lifted his gun to start shooting, but Ella grabbed his arm. She shushed his look of alarm and said, “Trust me. They won’t hurt us. Something… the good within, Sam… just trust me.”

Sam nodded and lowered his nine.

Ella felt something here, an energy sizzling through her whole being, and it drew her to the little device. She picked it up.

It wasn’t a brand she recognized. The emblem on the back was a wagon wheel, but it was made of bone. Eight femurs acted as spokes radiating from a skull in the center, encased in a circle made of miscellaneous bones.

EYEGOONS, it said beneath the wheel.

The last crowd at The Rusty Barrel looked on with sightless eyes as Ella turned the EYEGOONS back over to the screen. Some of the bar hoppers had just enough flesh on the jawbone so that it seemed mouths were agape in eager anticipation, but it’s hard to be sure, because they also kind of just hang open sometimes.

Ella found the EYEGOONS easy to navigate. There was only one playlist, and it was a touchscreen.

“You sure you know what you’re doing with that thing, kiddo?” Sam said, not taking his eyes off the decrepit slam-dancers longer than it took to glance over. They stood, slightly swaying, all of them focused on Ella now.

“Yeah, Sam. These are ours now.”

“What?”

“They’re ours. They’ll follow us. This was left here… for us.”

“By who? For what?”

“That’s the mystery we have to unravel, my dear friend.” The song that was queued up next was Dust N’ Bones by Guns N’ Roses. She pressed play.

All the lights went out, all the electricity with it. The EYEGOONS remained lit, however, and the music still played.

Out of the whirling shadows cast by the shifting hues of dying sunlight emerged in perfect unison skeletal hands saluting their new masters in the time-tested, traditional Heavy Metal way, index and pinky fingers extended, thumb over the middle two. The Horns.

When the song was over, the Goons ended their salute, and stood, waiting for their destiny to unfold.

“The song said something about 65. I think it meant highway 65.”

After the undead mosh army, Sam wasn’t going to question this insanity. What else did he have to do? “North or south?”

“Signs point to south, don’t you think?”

“I was afraid you’d say that, but yeah, south it is. South on 65. Best way from here is to continue west, then pick up 65 from this street. A few miles.”

They walked around the bar, and tentatively walked right into the crowd. Ella put her hand on Sam’s chest. “This is an act of faith, Sam. Stand here with me. Show them we mean them no harm.”

“What are you? Ella, Queen of the Damned?” Sam chuckled, but he was nervous.

As they stood there among the remnants of this forsaken scene, Ella could feel the disappointment of the revelers. They were not evil, just low, too low on society’s ladder to care about anything but each other, so they all died here immersed in the music they loved. Devil music? What did it matter? There was intrinsic good here, if not chaotic good.

“Not damned forever. We are their redemption.”

Ella then moved and Sam shambled after.

Then the goons followed, all of them feeling that a remark about walking off into the sunset would be so cliché that it shouldn’t even be made.

***** * *****

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