Punk Rock Drummer of the Living Dead By Matthew Vaughn

Punk Rock Drummer of the Living Dead

By  Matthew Vaughn

Now...

I love watching bands play, it gets me hyped to get up there and start jamming out. The band before us, an all chick zombie, hardcore punk band, called Rotten Vaginas, were killing it. The crowd was loving it as they tore through a set of fast, nasty songs. The undead in the pit in front of the stage were throwing around a zombie with no legs and only one arm. I saw another zombie, this one pretty decayed, get shoved up on stage. The lead singer kicked him in the face and most of his rotten flesh slid off and flew through the air. It was awesome!

The Rotten Vaginas were gonna be a tough act to follow, but I was ready. The bands were all sharing gear, so when they were done we didn't have to haul a bunch of shit on stage. It was nice too that there wouldn't be much down time between bands. As we got on stage the crowd was already moaning and starting to lose interest. That changed when Steve strummed that first power chord. You could see Riktor almost transform as the guitar notes sustained then began turning into a quiet feedback. I counted off and we jumped straight into “Drenched in Warmie Blood”, a super fast, three chord power house. Riktor just went insane on the mic.

He had told me about being in a band before. He was a guitar player though, not a singer, in some zombie metal band. I guess he really missed it. He jumped off the stage and was slamming into zombies while he sang.

“Drenched in warmie blood!

Oh Ooh Oh!

I'm drenched in warmie blood!

Whoa ooh oh!”

We were nailing song after song. Riktor had picked up the one zombies face that the singer of Rotten Vaginas had kicked off and was wearing it around while he screamed.

“A face wrapped in warmie guts!

Can't seem to eat enough!

Crushed and dismembered meat!

The whole fucking human race I'll eat!”

The crowd was just loving it too. Zombies needed something to focus themselves on, or else we began to wander aimlessly, food our only controlling factor. This concert, not just our band but the others too, was exactly what this group of undead needed.

About one week ago...

I didn't realize how bad I was scratching at my arm until I looked down and saw what was left of the nails on my fingers were scraping bone. I stopped immediately but it didn't matter. When I looked up they were looking at me and I knew they knew my secret.

“Shit man, how long have you been using?” Riktor asked me. My first instinct was to lie, it was a reflex anymore.

“About as long as I've been undead, maybe a couple of years,” I admitted to him. Steve shook his head, I knew they were pissed.

When the two of them shambled into this town looking for a drummer for a horror punk band, they said their one stipulation was no Alive junkies. Alive was a drug crafted by Demons using human, or warmies as we called them, blood. Most zombies injected it, some snorted it, and some cut their rotted flesh and poured the drug into their wounds to get the Alive to hit them faster. I couldn't remember a time when I wasn't using. So, when they came looking for a drummer, I lied like I always do. But now, after playing together for a little while, I didn't want it to end.

“I want to get clean, I swear,” I tell them. I realize I'm scratching my bone again. “That's why I'm like this, I haven't used in a week.”

Riktor and Steve looked at each other and shared a moment.

“Riktor,” Steve said. “Let's sidebar for a minute.”

“What?” Riktor asked.

“Sidebar. You know, walk over there and talk for a moment.” Steve said pointing across the room.

Riktor followed Steve to a corner on the other side of the room from me. I hoped they weren't going to let me go. For the first time in a long time I chose honesty, cause I really want this to work out.

“Okay,” Riktor said, walking back over to me once they were done talking. “I'll give you a chance. It's really just me, cause Steve hasn't dealt too much with junkies, but I have. So don't fuck this up. We really want to play this weekend.”

“Awesome man, I won't let you down,” I tell him, genuinely happy they're gonna trust me to stay clean.

“Okay then,” Steve said. “Let's jam out Human Brain Pie one more time.”

I counted off with my sticks and we blasted into one of our sonic power-houses, and I was able to lose myself for a while.

The days leading up to the weekend were brutal. Riktor and Steve hung out with me to help keep me occupied. They helped keep my mind off the Alive.

We ate a lot of brain tacos during that time. Well mainly them, I was having a difficult time eating anything. Being the cool guys that they were they wanted to help me with that too.

The day before our concert the three of us left the relative safety of our town and went searching for warmies. The theory is that food, like brain tacos, don't digest properly in a zombie's body that's full of Alive. But warm bodied people do. So we were going to try to find a warmie for me to eat in hopes that it would flush the last of the Alive out of my system and then I'd be ready for the concert.

There were known areas outside of the cities and towns that warmies tend to stick to. Recently it was getting worse with warmies trying to kill off us zombies and take back the once populated burg's, but for now they mainly stayed where they felt safe.

It took a bit of stealthy walking, and we're zombies so we don't do stealthy very well, before we found a warmie. It was a female, by herself, in a dense forest. She was bathing in a pond, why she was all alone was anyone's guess, but we didn't knock it.

As she washed herself, her back to us, I quietly walked out from behind the tree line and made my way to the water. She made a move as I entered the water, but she submerged herself and I abandoned stealth to get into deeper water fast.

I easily sunk and practically walked on the floor of the pond. I saw her raise her body back up to the surface, her legs the only parts of her still submerged.

As I walked, the pond floor began to rise. I had to lay and crawl through the water. I was a few feet away when the woman lowered herself into the water again. Her naked ass plopped down inches away from me. That's when I struck.

I jumped from the water and grabbed her around the arms and chest. She screamed. She was slippery and the water had made my dead skin slimy. She managed to slide out of my arms before I could bite into her flesh.

When she slid out of my grasp she submerged into the water. My reflexes being slow from Alive withdrawal and rigor, the best thing I could think to do was fall forward, which pinned her under me when I did. She tried to fight me off, but I was too heavy. We laid in the water like that until her movements slowed. She still jerked but wasn't so much fighting me anymore.

I rose from the water, I couldn't help but wonder if Riktor and Steve thought I looked cool. I had my hand wrapped with the woman's hair. I lifted her lifeless body from the pond. She wasn't dead, I could see her chest slowly rising, then falling. I didn't give her an opportunity to revive and fight me some more. I noticed she had round, firm breasts. Holding her up I lowered my head down and bit into the left one. It was a big, hearty bite. I had a little less than half of her breast in my mouth when I chomped down. She woke and let out a blood curdling scream as my teeth tore through her meat until they clacked together.

She began flailing her arms and legs, wildly hitting at me. I simply ducked her back under water and watched as her blood mixed with the murky pond as I stood there chewing. She continued to flail her arms and legs, kicking up waves around me. I lifted her again, this time grabbing her chin with my other hand. I tore into her neck, ripping out her throat. Her fighting ceased then as her hands quickly went to the wound on her neck that was pouring blood. Those hands did no good though, nothing was stopping that massive blood flow.

She was as good as dead at that point so I let her go. She fell back into the water with a decent splash. She didn't even try to swim away or anything. Her eyes were vacant, staring off far away. I leaned down and ripped off the rest of her mangled breast with my blood stained teeth. As she died I ate her stomach, hollowing it out and pulling up long strands of rope like intestines. It seemed like the theory was correct, the more I ate of the woman, the better I felt. The Alive cravings were gone, the withdrawal symptoms too.

I turned from the fresh corpse of the naked woman as she sank under water. Her brain was still intact so I knew she would rise as a zombie before too long. If she survives maybe I'll run into her again.

Riktor and Steve stood at the tree line as I walked out of the pond. Again I couldn't help but wonder how cool I looked, the water pouring off of me as my undead ass strolled powerfully out of the water. If they thought it they sure didn't say anything.

“You ready to jam out now or what?” Riktor asked.

“Fuck yeah man!” I told him. We then began the trek back to our practice spot.

Now...

It's funny. Here I was, an undead, maggot filled pus bag. Yet I felt more alive now than I had since I died, and it's all because I kicked the drug Alive. I was pounding the fuck out of these drums while the crowd of zombies were going ape-shit, aided by Riktor bouncing into them and practically fighting them like the looney toons character he was.

Without warning the doors to the club flew open. Every zombie in the room turned and saw them. Warmies. I'd been been hearing a lot about how ballsy they were getting anymore, and coming in here was pretty damn ballsy.

We quit playing and the warmies stared at us in disbelief.

“What the hell is going on here?” one of them said.

Riktor turned around and walked over to my kit.

“Let's play I'll See You Warmies in Hell!” he said.

“Uh, they're getting ready to start killing us. We should be running,” Steve said.

“Dude, trust me,” Riktor said and turned back towards the warmies and zombies facing off with each other. I did as he asked and did a four count on my sticks. “I'll See You Warmies in Hell” was probably one of our fastest songs. As soon as the music hit, Riktor started screaming the lyrics.

“Rip you apart, rip off your head

eating you alive you wish you were dead

tearing out your throat while you're trying to yell

I'll see you warmies in hell!”

It was like a switch was flipped. The warmies were dumbfounded from being assaulted by our aggressive punk rock. The zombies in the crowd pounced on them. It was like the music had them in a trance, a jacked up, slaughtering trance.

I watched from behind the kit as the warmies were massacred. The zombies were ripping them apart. Limbs were being torn from bodies and stomachs were ripped open so that the organs were exposed. Then those organs were rendered from the bodies, all while the warmie screamed until it died. The zombies chewed on the organs, the rendered limbs, and the large hunks of meat wrenched from flailing people.

While still screaming into the mic, Riktor leapt from the stage and joined the horde of zombies. He rolled through the gore that covered the floor, rubbing it on his body. He picked up a severed head and shoved his mic into the bloody stump that protruded from under the chin. Carrying the head upside down, Riktor ran around the room screaming into the mic.

I don't remember what it was like to be alive. I don't even know if I played drums or even gave a fuck about punk rock back then but this was the best I had ever felt since I died. Better than any Alive trip. I pounded away on the drum kit while Riktor ran around with all the bloody zombies in the crowd and Steve hammered on his guitar. This felt like the start of us becoming undead legends!

See more of Matthew Vaughn's work here: https://mcvaughn.wordpress.com/