CBTT Presents: Last Call, Last Stand (Complete, Thank You!)

[by-the-throat]

Chapter 1

It was 4:48 PM on a dull grey Friday and despite the stack of bills angrily impaled on my desk I was about ready to give up waiting on the new client my charming young secretary had penciled in for the end of the day, turn off the neon sign and get reaquainted with my good pal Drunken Stupor, with whom I had a dinner date at 5 sharp. I could hear Carmen's keyboard clicking idly, though what she was doing (at 9.50 an hour, no less; I'm too good to that woman but lets face it, my business would be even more boned without her) this close to closing time was beyond me.

The silhouette in the frosted door made me reconsider in a moment, as any good private eye always regrets his job less when seeing a curvy long haired shape through frosted glass. The knob turned, and she stepped inside, one long leg at a time. Both Carmen's and my eyes clicked to her immediately; she was definitely a sight for the sorest of ocular cavities, and as she made her slow, hesitant way to my secretary's desk, we both shared a mischevious wink. Our day was looking better already.

She was short-maybe 5'4" at the outside, with a body that pulsed with living sin. Her hair fell in dark, carefully permed ringlets that tumbled around her spa-tanned skin, and her carefully manicured fingernails were wringing nervously at a brown manilla envelope. She had a long trenchcoat on that did little to hide her curves, and a pair of sunglasses were sticking out of the pocket, but the dress that showed from beneath was raw coutre, probably with a name I couldn't pronnounce. "Mind if I smoke?" were her first words, and Carmen, god bless her, said with all the professionalism she could muster in wet panties "Not at all."

The woman pulled out a menthol and fondled it nervously, and looked around my admittedly unimpressive office. "Not quite what I expected from your website."

"Bandwidth is cheap, Mrs...." I started in, though Carmen shot me a jealous look. I came up behind her and lit her cigarette for her, close enough to feel the nervous heat rolling off that tight little body in waves. I couldn't resist grinning at my wife, who by now had retaken her seat.

"Mrs. X, but call me Serena," she replied. "I'm paying cash and I want this discrete-even from the IRS. That's why I came to you," and here she gave my dismal office a pointed glance, most notably the stacks of bills on my desk, "instead of someone more reputable-say, someone who would report his findings to the proper authorities."

"We speak the same language, Mrs. X," I said smoothly, and she finally seemed to ease up a little. She slide out of the heavy trench and plopped it across the back of her chair. I could see Carmen taking a discreet peek up her dress, and I made it a note to ask her what color her panties were as I took another rickety chair and straddled it backwards beside her. "So what can I help you with?"

"Well, it seems I'm missing a husband and...well, a trinket. A family heirloom, of no value to anyone but myself..." I could already smell trouble, but as I lit a cigarette of my own and I watched my secretary lick her red lips I decided the trouble would be worth it. "The husband can take a flying fuck into the arctic for all I care, but I need the trinket back."

"Mmmm." I dragged off the cigarette. "So you want something, presumably worthless, and you don't want it reported to the IRS?" She flinched a little, and I knew my blind toss had hit it's mark. She fidgeted some, uncrossing her legs with the whisper of silk against flesh, and I could see Carmen, the consumate minx, squirm a little in her computer chair. "Probably also need it aquired under the table, without your husband's knowledge." I licked my lips, and breathed deeply of the woman's scent as she held me pinned with those dark, glimmering blue eyes. I smelled some perfume with a name long as the Amazon and something else. Something familiar-desperation. I gave her a comforting smile. "I can probably handle both for you." Actually, the aquisition might be a problem, but I knew a group of specialist that would work for dope.

"Oh, thank you," she breathed, and I could smell the gin on her breath. Probably working up her courage all afternoon to walk into a place on this side of town. She leaned in and suddenly that red mouth was hot and slick against mine-just for a second, perhaps before she realised what she was doing. "I'll do anything...anything to get it back. Here." She pressed the envelope in my hands. "This is everything I know. Please...hurry."

Carmen quietly inserted herself in that moment, stepping beside us and wiping up the lipstick with her little pink bandanna. She kissed me as well and said "Don't forget your hat," she said, warmly and wickedly. "I'll have Serena stay here for now, so I can get the relevant case details out of her." Which was as good as code for 'I'll have her panties off by the time you get back, sucker, and you have to go to work.' I guess I lost that round, but really, I don't call that losing. Besides, I had bills to pay.

As I reached over behind my desk for my sawn-off 870, seeing Serena's blush as she realized that Carmen and I were an item, I couldn't help but chuckle to myself. Looks like it was going to be an interesting case, and if I played my cards right, I might not even lose money this time.

Naturally, I'd never even mentioned price.

If you like this story, please vote for "The Crystal Menage" above.

[by-the-throat]

The fall air was crisp and cold when I opened my eyes for the first time. Bare dark branches threaded across a brilliant blue sky above me. I sucked frigid air with my first breath, spat frigid air and turgid liquid with my first cough. The surface I was lying on was warm and cushiony, with a sleek, pleasant texture but a musty smell. Some hidden coda in my brain fired synapses that gave these images meaning-branch, air, tree, sky, silk, coffin though I had never seen these things before.

Another word fired up there too, with no visual association: abomination. At the time, I did not know why.

I saw your face far above me then; blurry at first, just a vague splotch of white with startling grey eyes and hair. At that point you did the kindest thing that anyone had ever done for me; you leaned in with a saline dropper and moistened my eyes. Relief from a sensation I had not known was agony flooded over me; it was practically orgasmic, and even as I was blinking away warm salty droplets I think I started to fall for you.

You didn't know that, did you? Don't worry, I know you can't answer with the lower half of your jaw missing. It's all right.

My world came into focus abruptly, the vague glowing nimbus of cloudless sky and leafless branch becoming a sharp, high resolution image instead. I opened my mouth and rasped something, gratitude maybe, but all that came out was a rumblerumblewhumpfssssst like a stale broccoli fart. You made a face at me and I jumped at the chance to study it in detail. God, you were beautiful then, weren't you? A wide, mischevious grin below and alert, sparkling grey eyes above. Long grey hair pulled back into a ponytail. Aristocratic nose, high cheekbones, weathered skin with a vaguely olive texture-everything about you drew me up out of the coffin as much as whatever the hell it was you did to me that day.

New words and phrases were rising like cream in my brain. Woman was the first of them. Beautiful the second. What the fuck? was the third, and I admit now that it might have been a little irreverent for a newborn.

"Good morning, Adam," you said, in that rich contralto of yours. For a moment I merely admired my name, turning in it this way and that like a girl spinning in her mother's wedding dress in front of the mirror. I tried it out on my tongue, and just ended up spitting up that cloudy, bitter gunk again. For a moment, concern knitted itself on your weathered features. "Formaldahyde, darling. Here." I felt warmth suddenly flood through my armpits as you reached down and picked me up, with a grunt of strain. My world inverted; I felt the wood of the coffin's edge bite into my chest, and I was looking at a brown patch of dead grass with a scattering of plastic flowers for a brief moment. "Bring it all up, dear," you said.

Even had I been inclined to disobey, you didn't allow it-you never do, do you? Soon you were pounding on my back, which I heard more than felt. I started coughing up gunk, clear and bitter and with a distinctive awful smell. It came and came and came until there were reddish black chunks in it and the ragged breaths I was drawing came easier. I had very little sense of time, but it couldn't have taken that long, could it?

"You don't have to worry about breathing, you know," you said conversationally as you kept pounding on my back. Thinking back, your voice was a little distracted and a lot nervous. "Your breathing now is a reflex. But you don't really need to breathe unless you need to talk." I was in no condition to reply; I was simply hanging doubled over my own coffin spitting up formaldahyde. "But breathe deep for now; we need to purge that embalming fluid. I thought I'd drained it all..."

After a time I was producing nothing with my coughs and you ordered me to stop. I did so gratefully. The ground in front of me, which had looked rather interesting, was now signifigantly less so-it was a putrid mass of reeking mud and little pieces of me. I felt your arm under me again and took my first vertical view of the world.

"Do you remember who you are?" you said to me, as I looked over a veritable forest of elaborate rocks (gravestones turned up in my mind like a bad penny) and I managed to shake my head. There were a few wet, slither pops inside me as my joints realigned.

"I didn't expect you to," she continued. "You've been dead a long time." I was taken by an unbearable urge to stretch, and did so with a satisfying symphony of crunchSCHLOCKcrunchcrunch. I felt control returning slowly to my limbs, enough that I could stagger forward a single step. My foot squelched in my own embalming fluid, gunk oozing up around the treads of my white prom shoes. "Stand up straight then, love, and let me get a look at you."

If you liked this story, please vote for "Adam & Evelyn" in the poll above.

[by-the-throat]

Once, in the long ago time before TEOTWAWKI, all men were rabbits.

They lived in a great warren they called called "The United States of EFRAFA" and as the days wound on, they watched from their burrows as men fought a great and terrible war among themselves. No one, not even the eldest among rabbits, remembered the cause-but they remembered the effects well enough. The frightened rabbits on the high hill watched them all as the men called down thunder and terrible killing rains and foul winds that blew unspeakable pestilences far and wide across their own lands. When those things had done their work, they continued with killing sticks and shiny steel teeth; in the mud and ash and ruin of their very lives, they gouged and butted at one another for control of the land.

And in the end, men called down the very fires of the sun to fight their wars, sealing their damnation and blocking the very eye of Frith with eternal clouds of rust and sickness that hung low above the fields and forests, eternally churning and occasionally belching man's debris back to earth with the rain. Rabbits named this terrible new blanket the Maelstrom. The dawn of the Maelstrom was the dawn of the Rust Age, and the tribe of rabbits watched from their high hill while the grass and trees slowly browned, starved of the holy light of Frith.

For long and longer they stayed in their warren, chewing and re chewing pellets until the grisly spectre of starvation loomed too close. As the last hearthfires of Efrafa burned out and the tribe of Man dwindled to almost nothing, the rabbits discussed many plans for their continued survival, for they knew that times had changed and they had to change with them or die.

The strongest among them said "Let us find the Tribe of Man and punish them for what they have done to us," and many agreed, but the wisest of them said "For our warren to venture forth and slay the last men and still die ourselves would be no victory."

The swiftest among them said "Let us venture forth from the warren and flee across the land, away from the horrors that men have wrought here, to a glorious rabbit paradise with no elil and no men" and many agreed, but the wisest of them said "We have no way of knowing where, or even if, the destruction wrought here has an end-and I will not take my people questing after a fool's paradise that may or may not be real."

The most devout among them said "Pray for deliverance, make a great sacrifice to bring the sun back," and many agreed. But the wisest of them said "No sacrifice will appease Frith-on-the-Hills; he gives us breath and free will and all the gifts of rabbithood, and after that, there is no bargain. What is, is what must be."

Then the cleverest of the rabbits spoke up with a mischevious twinkle in his eye. "The faith of our people has always been in tricks; it is a trick that will save us now." And, their interest piqued, the other rabbits crowded around him to hear his proposal, but he would speak only to the wisest, and in private. What they said to one another in the dark of the warren, no one knows-only that when it was done, the cleverest of the rabbits set out on a journey into the wastelands.

For nine days and nights the other rabbits waited in the warren. The times were hard. Cold was setting in and the forage was growing steadily worse as the poisons man spewed in his wroth killed more and more of the food. The rabbits chewed pellets, played bob-stones, told tales and riddles, and on the morning of the tenth day they were awakened by the thump of footsteps outside. All of the rabbits rushed to the entrace hole.

In the hazy light they saw the shape of man approaching. He carried a killing stick across his chest, and a white stick burned in his mouth below a broad, floppy brimmed hat. All the rabbits startled, preparing to bolt, save for the strongest among them, who coiled his limbs and snarled a curse, but the wisest scratched him reproachfully on the ears and said "No, no, fool of a hare! Look closer!"

And the rabbits did as their elder bid, though they could scarce see why, and when they did they saw the face of the clever one, his nose twitching, his whiskers bunched, and that same mischevious grin on his face. A great roar came up among the rabbits then. They flitted around him madly, sniffing his new hempen clothes, his new leather boots, the fire stick and the floppy hat. And he laughed, how the clever rabbit laughed!

"To survive in this Age of Rust," the wisest rabbit said, "we must take the form of men, use the weapons and tools of men, band together as the tribes of men. But we must avoid the sins of men if we are to use this lesson properly."

Whether they avoided these sins for long no man can know. But what is known is that they are their kin formed their own holdfasts, loved, quarreled, sinned and killed. And the terrible children of the first tribes of men, who sinned these terrible sins and unleashed their horrors on their own kind, each was sealed in a great stone tomb and buried alive there. And soon the rabbits were so like men that they spoke the speech of men, sang the songs of men, and even fought with the weapons of men-but in their hearts they remained rabbits, swift and cunning and full of tricks.

If you liked this piece please vote for "Codex Kalachnikova Preview" above-but remember you're getting this one eventually anyway.

[by-the-throat]

Headed out on a two day mock bugout, so ya'll have fun without me.

See, this is the difference between me and some other ZS scribblers. In addition to coming here to pimp my shit, I actually do prep stuff

Have a good week, guys.

[by-the-throat]

Looks like Crystal Menage is going to emerge the winner.

You jerks would pick the one story that is most likely to get me a banhammer

Poll will close @ midnight tonight (04/22) and the first chapter will go up after that.

Thanks for voting & reading.

[DannusMaximus]

Really enjoyed the Mackey story, BTT. Thanks for sticking with it and giving the moar zombies an ending to enjoy!

Voted for the Watership Down PAW redux. Any story featuring bunnies gets a thumbs up from me!

[by-the-throat]

Really enjoyed the Mackey story, BTT. Thanks for sticking with it and giving the moar zombies an ending to enjoy!

Voted for the Watership Down PAW redux. Any story featuring bunnies gets a thumbs up from me!

Dannus, thanks for reading. We should collab sometime; I think we'd have a blast.

That said, Codex Kalachnikova is not about bunnies all the time; perhaps I was being disingenous by posting that particular section for a preview. It is a (well, not exactly typical) PAW story about Feudal American Lords where the primary religion is centered on Watership Down along with some other leftover pop culture artifacts. The bit you were reading was actually the first chapter of the PAW Bible. What, you thought I was going to write a story without volume-discount swear words?

Looks like TCM has come out the winner so I'm closing the polls. Thanks for everyone who read, shared & commented on this story. I hope you'll enjoy the next one.

[ShieldWolf]

I am bumping this thread to the top so I can find it later tonight when I want to read. Looks like an interesting read too.

Oh yeah, Fuck the Kenyan

[Omega Storm]

Love this story.

[IronKnuckles]

Great read. A little light on zombies tho.

[Ten Eight]

Awesome read. Just finished it a second time.

[by-the-throat]

I appreciate the love this story is still getting and I hope you guys are enjoying the new story as well.

I honestly expected to get banned, or at least the story itself locked for content, before either story was completed. (I was even all ready with a "TOO HOT FOR ZS" tag to put on these stories when I posted them on the blog instead ) So getting nothing but positive comments on them has both surprised and delighted me.

Thanks for reading everyone.