Stealing Propeller Hats from the Dead by David James Keaton

Author:David James Keaton [Keaton, David James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing
Published: 2015-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE WORLD’S SECOND SHORTEST ZOMBIE STORY

The foreman dragged his ladder over to the sign, unhooking the “7” and dropping it to the factory floor. He left a zero swinging above “ . . . Days Since Our Last Work-Related Fatality.” The next morning, the foreman dragged out the ladder again, hands shaking as he hung the “7” back up.

THE BALL PIT

(or children under 5 eat free!)

“Build a wall with the bodies of the dead and you’re saved.”

—Accept, “Balls to the Wall”

11:11 a.m., November 11th, 2011

His watch stopped again, but that was okay since the calendars had stopped, too. He spun the smaller hand on the watch face until it rested on a good time, then the smallest hand until it rested on a good day, one of those easy-to-remember junctures where he used to make a wish when he was a kid, so it would always be like a birthday whenever he looked down and he could imagine the planets lining up right along numbers. Then he wound the watch back up tight and kept on winding.

His name was Ralph, pronounced “Rafe,” so he’d always gone by “Raff” instead. And today, Raff was working his way through a toy store because most reasonable people refused to set foot in one, even now that things had died down a bit. He crept along, kicking empty boxes and discarded assembly instructions out of his way. From outside the building, there’d been some signs that this Toys “Я” Us had been a shelter for some time, some of the signs more subtle than others. First off, someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to climb up on the roof and turn both backwards “Rs” around to form their own distress call. But what they chose to spell with the remaining letters wasn’t a typical cry for help.

“Yours Rots,” the message read, a huge, multi-colored ransom note looming over his head. Raff tried not to look at it too long.

The remaining clues were a bit more optimistic. Blacked-out, taped-up windows, rows of empty bottles and rain buckets peeking out along the edge of the roof, crude peepholes drilled into the steel freight doors. And surrounding the building, trucks parked at all sorts of strategic, glass-obscuring angles.

Except for the one door that was wide open.

He hesitated, looking up at the store’s wide-eyed mascot for help, but he could only picture his grandfather’s trophy-hunter magazines, particularly the page where a man had wrapped a limp giraffe’s neck over his shoulders like a python, tongue lolling. In high school, the kids had called Raff “G. Raff” to harass him, of course, instead of the much cooler “Riffraff” nickname he’d always hoped for. He actually missed the giraffe taunts and infantile locker graffiti sometimes, but not today.

Raff shouldered the metal door aside, heart hammering at the crinkling rainbow of candy wrappers and crêpe paper that billowed over his shoes and out of his way like a snow drift. A lone maple seed helicoptered down onto his shoulder, and his brain said “spider” even as his eyes proved it wrong.

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