A Steampunk Guide to Hunting Monsters 6 | Page 13

“Oh, but I will be. You see, when you are dead and turned, you shall be my zombies and shall obey my every command, fulfill my every wish, and hasten to my every desire. It is something I picked up during my dreadful stay on that awful, overheated oven of a plantation in Haiti. I needed a change in climate and so we came out here.” The biters grabbed for Sir Hammerhorn at the very moment that Percy's flamethrower exploded to life, flames enveloping a whole row of the undead! The biters caught fire, allowing Mister to push off her attacker, and we all fled to the edge of the graveyard. To our great despair, it turned out that the graveyard was built on a cliff face. Percy kept the flames burning and the zombies at bay but there was nowhere to go! His fuel was running out! A pile of charred corpses lay in a half-circle at our feet, the approaching zombies stumbling over the burning heap. Clothilde Vandenklamp appeared once more, facing off against us, perpendicular to the cliff, as the undead pushed us closer to the edge. Grotesque limbs reached for us, rotting body parts and bones! “The long dead are mindless drones,” Mrs. Vandenklamp boasted, “but my biters are special. Their kiss turns you slowly, giving me time to turn you into my own little pets! And it matters not if we do it at the top, or meet you at the bottom! Behold!” The zombie of her own relation,Mr.Vandenklamp, shambled through the crowd, bumping into one of the walking dead, looking strangely disoriented, and then bumping into another. Zombie Mr. Vandenklamp was so bewildered that he tripped over the flaming pile, stumbling into a zombie who dumbly grabbed onto the next, and since each zombie's rot and ribs and bones caught on each other, a domino effect followed. They all started to fall. Zombie Mr. Vandenklamp whirled about, knocking his wife over. She was caught on the pile of the dead as they slid right off the edge of the cliff !