The Serpent Dust Devil of Mars NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona2012-03-07
I wonder if the dust devils on Mars are thick and gritty.
I also wonder,
if you were on Mars and a Devil pounced on you, would it fill your mouth and nose and lungs with Mars’ rust colored flesh in one heartbeat or two?
And after it moved on, would it leave you under a mountain of dust?
Or would the Devil scoop up the little tiny bits of you that it blasted away from your bones and would it take you sailing through an alien sky that turns from from blue to butterscotch to pinkish red and would those little bits of you sparkle like falling stars when it dropped you and let you go?
I’ll tell you a secret about Zombies, if you promise to not pass it around.
Promise? Okay. I’m trusting you. So here we go:
Let’s just pretend, for a few minutes
that it is possible to travel to a house made of bones or cobbled together with rusty nails and dark black wood that smells a little bit burnt hair
and that the person living in that house
can brew a potion and create a powder that will shrivel the soul of someone that has done you wrong.
Part of the deal, but not one that is well known, is that it’s your job to dig the person who has done you wrong and whose soul is now a shrived husk that sits in their chest like a dead rat trapped between the walls in an attic stuffed full of moldy clothes and rotting boxes of toys and curtain and bedsheets.
You should probably know that it is your job to wake them from the sleep of death and that it is your breath on their face that will send them into a nightmare that they will never be able to scream themselves out of and they will exists in a place where the only voice they can hear and the only face they will ever see is yours?
Conventional wisdom says that these people are Zombies- and that they are something we should be afraid of. They feed on our flesh, they eat our brains and some of them are skilled at warfare and martial arts.
But don’t worry about that part of Zombie lore, I think conventional wisdom is wrong in this case.
In the Monster Universe, I’m not afraid of Zombies. I’m not even afraid of the people who ask to have one created for them. Nobody should be afraid of Zombies.
Be terrified of the person who can talk someone into traveling to a house made of bone and convince them to create a monster that they will are willing to dig up from the grave and convince them to put their face close enough to that corpses face to breathe air into their nose and eyes and bring them up from the ground like a weed that sprouts up from between chunks of concrete overnight.
Zombies aren’t the monsters here- but I think that is how this all works.
