Zombies versus Aliens versus Vampires versus Dinosaurs

  ZOMBIES VERSUS ALIENS VERSUS

  VAMPIRES VERSUS DINOSAURS

  by Jeff Abugov

  Zombies versus Aliens versus Vampires versus Dinosaurs

  Jeff Abugov

  Copyright © 2015 by Jeff Abugov

  J-Stroke Productions, November 2015

  2015 Electronic Edition

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, character, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Cover design by Will Kleist

  Formatted by Polgarus Studio

  Author Website

  jeffabugov.com

  J-Stroke Productions

  Los Angeles, California

  Contents

  PART ONE

  The Good, the Bad and the Gorgeous

  PART TWO

  War

  PART THREE

  The Cavalry Undead

  PART FOUR

  Extermination Complete

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  THE GOOD, THE BAD

  AND THE GORGEOUS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Alma’s Bar and Grill was the most popular bar and grill in all of Heartsoot Creek because it was the only bar or grill in town. It was where smatterings of local farmers and ranch-hands would come for breakfast, or lunch, or to drown their sorrows Monday through Thursday nights. (It was closed on Sundays because of Jesus.)

  But this was Friday night. Everyone in town had just been paid or received their welfare checks, and the joint was a’hoppin’. Johnny Cash, Toby Keith, Taylor Swift and Tammy Wynette blasted from the souped-up jukebox as Alma’s patrons danced, drank and even brawled the night away. It was a Friday night like any other Friday night, at least that’s how it seemed.

  Julius sat alone at the bar. That is to say that he had no company as of yet. Crowding him on his left was Bobby Joe Mackelroy who was putting the moves on Candy Mae Swinson, and not getting very far. Crowding him on his right were Mikey Johnson and Lenny “Ponyboy” Webster who were arguing the merits of President Addison’s new economic plan even though neither of them really understood it, and it was only a matter of time till their debate devolved into fisticuffs. It was a Friday night like any other Friday night, and Julius was bored.

  He could get any woman he wanted—he barely remembered a time when he didn’t have that skill. He could also get any guy he wanted for that matter but he far preferred women these days. He was a good-looking man, movie-star good-looking. Early thirties and fit with jet-black hair, sleek, alabaster skin and dark, hypnotic eyes, he was the coolest dude in the joint right down to his Stetson hat, cowboy boots and tatts. He also owned the sprawling Long Tooth Ranch, making him one of the richest men in southeast Georgia.

  He scoured the dance floor for a prospective mate for the evening, but nothing appealed to him. They all danced the same slutty moves that they had learned from television, wore the same kind of trashy outfits, each girl virtually indistinguishable from the other. He had wanted something special. The only question now was whether he would settle for ordinary or go home unfulfilled.

  Then he saw her. At a small ice cream table in the far corner of the packed space sat a petite little waif of a girl. She had blonde, curly hair, a cute little button nose, and she was all alone. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, Julius thought, probably less, but there was something so ridiculously sweet about her that he didn’t care. She wore a fancy evening gown and sipped on a colorful umbrella drink. She was so out of place, so didn’t belong, Julius simply had to have her.

  She was looking around everywhere in wonderment, taking it all in, when she caught Julius’s gaze upon her, caught his killer smile, so warm, so hot. She smiled back instinctively then quickly turned away as a good girl would, must. But she couldn’t stop herself from turning back to him to find his sultry, dark eyes still upon her, his killer smile now bigger, warmer, hotter. She blushed as she turned away once more, then back again to find him gone.

  She sighed in disappointment only to realize that he was standing right next to her, his hand held out for her to take, his fantastic smile showering her with a sense of love that she couldn’t remember ever having felt.

  “What?” she asked, referring to his hand, as if she didn’t know.

  “Come,” was all he said in return.

  She blushed, smiled coyly, then took his hand and let him lead her out of the joint. She never had a chance.

  *****

  Her name was Mary, and she was living up to everything Julius had wanted for the evening. They walked along the empty street swinging their hands like little kids as she dodged one of his questions after another, too shy to talk about herself, fascinated to learn more about him. She spoke with a strange accent that Julius couldn’t quite place—and he had been to most everywhere in the world at one point or another. The mystery surrounding her was a massive turn-on.

  He agreed to take her to one of his favorite places so he led her off the road and headed into the Heartsoot Creek Cemetery. It was so quiet at night, he explained, so romantically dark with the only illumination sourcing from the moonlight. The Georgia grass was always perfectly groomed and sweet smelling, and one could truly lose themselves in the peacefulness. But Mary found it amusing.

  “You take I to graveyard?” she said through a small laugh. “Not usual place for to seduce young girl, no?”

  Julius laughed back. He was busted, and he was so rarely busted. This girl was more than special. As much as he was enjoying the seduction, he didn’t know how much longer he could wait before he took her.

  “Your accent is killin’ me, m’darlin’,” he said in his light Southern drawl.

  “No, my accent is bad,” she said, now deadly serious. “But I work hard for it. On it. I work hard on it. One day it will be gone, all gone.”

  “Don’t worry too much about your future, Mary,” he said good-naturedly. “You don’t have one.”

  And with that, he opened his mouth to reveal his long, sharp fangs. He hissed as he grabbed her by the shoulders and bit hard into her neck, devouring her luscious red blood.

  She screamed wretched yelps of shock and agony that only made the vampire’s meal all the more satisfying when, all of a sudden, her girly cries morphed into a hideous, otherworld growl. Her delicious, red blood turned to a slimy, green pus on which the vampire began to gag. She shed her taut, teen body like a trick suit to reveal a terrifying, bug-eyed, insect-like creature within, then grabbed the vampire’s head and snapped it hard across its neck. CRACK! Julius dropped to the ground like a bag of nails.

  She tried to regain her composure but she was in too much pain, and she knew that her wound would have to be treated. Aware that her assignment was now blown, she tapped on alien-symbols on a keypad strapped to her insect-forearm. The ground shook. A tall, black oval roughly the size of a phone booth suddenly materialized beside her. Clut
ching her gushing wound with one hand and dragging her human-skin costume with the other, she limped into the wormhole, and it snapped shut behind her.

  Barely a moment later, Julius opened one eye to make sure she was gone. He sat up and sighed, thoroughly dumbstruck. Close to three thousand years old, he had never seen anything like this before.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Ding! Ding! Ding!” sounded the alert on a never-ending loop.

  Jean-François dropped his Maxim magazine and leapt up from his chair, knocking over his Angelina Jolie coffee mug and drenching his pants as he raced to his underling’s terminal, barely aware of the intense burn to his thigh.

  “Jeff! It’s another one!” shouted Lance.

  “I know, I know,” he answered, running. “This makes what since he last said no? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

  They were the only two working the Astronomy Wing of NASA’s Johnson Space Center at this late hour, not counting security and janitorial staff. Jean-François, midforties, bald, chubby, the brilliant French-Jewish astrophysicist laughed out of the EU for his overly bold theories and now relegated to the Houston graveyard shift as punishment for being smarter than most of his superiors, and also for being French, or Jewish, but probably French; and Lance, the twenty-six-year-old geek whiz kid along for the ride because after selling his app to Google for an ungodly sum of money five years prior, he wanted to do something historically special with his life, and Jean-François’s controversial papers had blown him away.

  (Lance was the creator of the No-More-Crash app, the one that detects and warns users of impending computer crashes early enough for the user to take the steps necessary to avoid crashing entirely. You probably have one.)

  “This makes twenty,” Lance told his adopted mentor as he stared at his monitor and calculated their exorbitant wormhole data. “It’s a perfect match. Again. Dead-on perfect! Less than a minute ago for the one here on Earth, and it’s absolutely identical to the one that’s five-point-three light-years away.”

  “All right then,” Jean-François said as he sighed the kind of sigh one sighs as they embark upon political suicide. “Let’s get the big guy in.”

  “He can’t say no again,” Lance said with certainty. “Not with the data we’ve got.”

  “He can,” answered the Frenchman. “Let’s just hope he doesn’t.”

  INTERLUDE

  Montana. One hundred million years ago, give or take.

  It was an egg. A large egg but not the kind we’re used to seeing because its shell boasted every color of the spectrum. A rainbow egg, one might say, surrounded by three other rainbow eggs of equal size in a very large nest. But this egg was the first of the four to shake, and with the shaking came a small pecking from within.

  The mother of the eggs lay in the nest snoozing, but she lurched her massive head right up the moment she heard the pecking. She was a proud Deinonychus mother (pronounced “die-NON-ih-kiss”), a colorful, feathered, highly intelligent biped, roughly five feet tall, ten feet long, with three six-inch claws on each of her front paws and hind legs. (The Deinonychus was the real inspiration of Jurassic Park’s Velociraptor which was actually a rather small dinosaur albeit with a much cooler name.) To her new offspring she would be “ma” even though the Deinonychus lacked speech or even the concept of words, but like all animals they recognized each other’s individuality from their actions, their appearance, their smells, their very essence. So for the sake of narrative simplicity, let us call this one Dinah.

  Dinah beamed as her firstborn struggled out of his egg. She instinctively knew not to help him for that would only weaken him to the later struggles of life. She watched as he shook his little feathered body to rid himself of the shell remnants that clung to him, then she looked up to the sky and shrieked as if announcing to the world the blessed event. The hatchling, already tuckered out, laid down and cuddled against his mother who tenderly licked the top of his plume when a second egg began to shake.

  A male Deinonychus, just slightly larger than Dinah, came running out from the woods and leapt into the nest beside her, as if answering his mate’s call. Let’s call this one Claw even though, of course, again, he didn’t really have a name either. Claw dropped to all fours to get a better look at his newly hatched son, then shrieked out a cry of his own. Dinah nestled her sixteen-inch head upon her male’s shoulder and cooed. Claw cooed back as their second hatchling pecked her way out of her shell and entered the world.

  An early American family.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Julius stood alone atop the Heartsoot Creek Observatory. The three-minutes-for-fifty-cents-telescopes were useless for his quest, which is why he had brought his own—a super high-powered thing he had bought for fun years ago only because he had more money than he knew what to do with. Still, it was rendering no more results than the touristy crap.

  “What nature of beast are you, my friend?” he asked unto the heavens in his real voice that still had a tiny trace of Brit-German accent. “From where do you come, Mary? What is your purpose? And why can I not see you?”

  He then noticed a lovely young couple in love walking the pathway below, and it reminded him of how hungry he was. Mary’s thrashing had taken so much out of him that it was no longer about the delight of a great meal. Now it was just about sustenance, nutrition.

  “Hey, y’all! Wanna see somethin’ cool?” he shouted out in his best redneck.

  “You talking to us?” asked the young man.

  “Check it out, man!” Julius answered. “It’ll blow your mind!”

  The young couple looked at each other and shrugged—yet another future memory of their wonderful early days together. Why not?

  They climbed the tiny mound as Julius savored his next boring yet nutritious meal. “What is it?” the young man asked.

  “I dunno,” Julius answered. “Just look at it. Maybe y’all can tell me.”

  The young man smiled then looked into the vampire’s telescope. “I don’t see anything. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

  Then in one crazy-fast, fluid motion, Julius jutted out his right arm to grab the young woman by the throat to hold her in place while simultaneously ripping his fangs into the young man’s neck to suck him dry of all his blood. And even though the young woman opened her mouth to scream for help, not a sound came out of her.

  With the young man’s body depleted of all its vampire nourishment, Julius let him drop to the ground like a deflated blow-up doll, then sucked the life out of the young woman, letting her fall to her demise in the same manner.

  Julius burped. A boring meal, but still, maybe he overdid it. Then he returned to his telescope, the true mission at hand, as if nothing of importance had just happened. Still, he saw nothing in the skies.

  “What nature of beast are you, my friend?” he repeated towards the heavens.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was one of the most lavish fund-raisers the Watergate Hotel had ever showcased, and President Michael Addison was eating it up. A former governor of Montana, forty-five years old with a Kennedy-like sex appeal, a Reagan-like geniality, and the political instincts of FDR, he had the billionaires right where he wanted them. No way was he going to be a one-term president.

  The superrich barraged him with their questions, trying to pin him down to precise answers, but everyone knew it was an idle exercise. They were going to give Michael everything he asked for—they had to. The thought of his opponent taking the White House was unacceptable, and the consequences of being the only billionaire who didn’t contribute were even more daunting. All Michael had to do was not offend any of them.

  “But which side are you on, Mr. President?” pleaded a corporate demigod.

  Michael knew the answer they wanted but he also knew what the voters wanted, and he had learned long ago never to say something to one group you didn’t want another to hear—not in this day and age of social media and tiny cameras. Far too easy to get Romney’d.

  “It’s a fallac
ious debate, Charlie,” he told the demigod. “It’s not a question of big or small government. It’s a question of how to grow big and small businesses while still tending to the lowliest of our citizens so that they too can become proud, productive members of the greatest country on Earth.”

  “And to get the answer to that question,” piped in the stunningly charming forty-year-old woman on his arm, “Just ask him. But I wouldn’t ’cause he’ll tell you.”

  The crowd laughed, just as the First Lady intended. Laurel Addison, dressed to the nines in a fabulous evening gown, subtle diamond earrings, and a sparkling silver crucifix necklace that drew the eye to just a hint of cleavage, was the perfect asset to her husband’s career. Laurel could lighten any mood when Michael seemed too calculating or wonky, good-naturedly teasing the great man, bringing him back down to Earth, and reminding the nation that the Addisons were the couple you wanted at your home barbecue. The most beloved First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, she had the ability to make you feel like she truly cared about you—because she did! In fact, the worst her detractors could ever say about her was that she was a bit of a social butterfly, shallow when it came to affairs of state, a college dropout who could never quite finish any project she started. Frivolous. A lightweight. This was all true, of course, but she was so warm and decent that no one really seemed to mind, not even her detractors.

  But if Laurel was the President’s greatest asset, not too far away stood his greatest liability.