“Cup of tea Martha?” asked Thora.

For some reason Martha seemed to be screaming in terror more than usual.

“Whatever is the matter with you Martha? You seem a little pale?” Thora asked, placing one of her scabby decomposing arms on the woman’s shoulder.

Ah, she thought to herself, that could explain it… Yes… indeed… when she looked down she could clearly see she had burst from some form of grave. It explained why Martha was holding flowers instead of her usual Woman’s Own with an important article circled in red felt tip and why dirt had become trapped underneath her dentures despite her distinctly remembering applying a fresh layer of Fixodent.

“Martha dear, please stop screaming, I have an awful headache and what will the neighbours think?”

 “BRAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNSSS…” replied the neighbours. Martha lost control of something somewhere under the layers of beige.

 “Now you stop being a fussy pants and go fetch the village bobby, it’s not safe for all these undead to be walking about, they could cause a fire-hazard if they decided to congregate in the aisles of the cinema…”

Not that that didn’t happen already in today’s faceless multiplexes thought Thora, shaking her head and looking for a biscuit to dunk. In the old days they had proper cinemas… ones that you could get a nice roast to take in with you and that shone blinding spotlights on the back rows to prevent any of that “unpleasantness” going on in the back rows.

 For some reason Martha had chosen to hug one of the zombies, the wrinkly old man chewing her hair in a most affectionate manner. Martha had always been a reet little whore, thought Thora, she secretly hoped the bitch got up the stick. Nothing taught these people morality better than having to go see Mr McGregor the fishmonger and his rusty knitting needle. It’s not like she could rely on her Frank to push her down the stairs any more, he’d had the good sense to run away with that woman from number 42… ‘course, thought Thora, they’re all dead now… oh wait, she had a quick check round, her mistake.

 “BRAIIIIIIIINSSSSS.” said Frank.

 “Hello Frank,” said Thora, “I hate to seem ever so bothersome, but that slapper of a wife of yours is at it with what appears to be the mangled remains of Mr Patel from round the corner… Of course it’s none of my business… behind closed doors and all that… but look, he’s got her leg off now… that’s how it all starts… he’ll be feeling up her thing-y-mes through her cardigan in a minute… you know what they’re like. Of course I was all for giving them what for at Rourke’s Drift but there were too many of them you see… our boys just didn’t have enough bullets… terrible shame really… would you like a Jaffa?”

Thora fumbled for the remote that activated her reclining coffin. Thank god she’d made those Stanna bastards sign long-term contracts. With a grating of gears she achieved verticality. She reached for the button that turned on the vibration function and achieved both a brief thrill and a little relief from her lumbago.

 “BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAIINNNSS…”

Oh no, thought Thora, it was the ghost of Compo… she thought she’d seen the last of that little perv when he’d suffered that heart attack while attempting to give her one in her caravan on set… little bugger had been insatiable… Of course the studio had hushed it all up… made it look like natural causes… but eee by’gum, there was nothing natural about what he’d been trying. T’whippet was still traumatised.

She hurriedly fiddled with the remote until, with a reassuring clunk, the coffin’s wheels engaged and she was able to roll away from him before his scruffy corpse could get any ideas. With reluctance she pressed the additional button that engaged the giant metal scythes that Stanna had told her were not really necessary but she had insisted upon… the egg was on their faces now. She couldn’t quite remember if Peter Silas was dead before, but he was definitely dead by the time the various bits of him hit the ground. Shame though, he always had such a nice line in flat-caps.

 “BRAAAAAAAA…”

Rod Hull offered little in the way of resistance to the spring-loaded axe that she had claimed was vital ornamentation and, once again, those stair-lift schilling bastards had complained endlessly about. As she trundled away Emu crawled over and nuzzled his master’s bisected corpse like that ewok did in return of the jedi.

 “Oh, this really is ever so much fuss and bother… I’m terribly sorry, but I really need to go see my doctor, I have this twitch in my peculiars…” Thora apologised as she rapidly approached pretty much the entire undead cast of Dad’s Army… “You stupid boy and all that… hilarious… but my twitch and all… terribly sorry…”

She sympathised as she used the coffin’s twin .50 calibre machine guns to clear a path… she’d had to hold her breath to get those fitted in the contract negotiations… literally. It had taken them four hours to get her heart going again afterwards, but it had been worth it.

 “Now you lot, I’m really not too bothered about… terrible noise… all that hip swinging… mocking those of us who had to rely on meccano joints… didn’t know you were born… we ate people like you during the war you know… said it was the Germans we did…” muttered Thora angrily as she squirted jets of acid onto two of the Beatles before dispatching them with headshots from the Colt .44 Python revolver she had demanded be laid across her chest when she was buried, along with a Confederate flag and the head of her manservant.

Somewhere a fan club miserably deleted the newsletter it had spent the last ten minutes excitedly writing. As Thora trundled out of the gates of the cemetery the charred and bullet-ridden corpses of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr hit the ground with a dull thud.

 “Imagine all the BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINNNNNNNS…” muttered Lennon as he tucked into Paul’s rubbery Quorn-based cerebellum. He purposefully ignored Ringo in death as everyone else had in life.

 “These speed bumps are a nightmare…” said Thora as, for the second time, she hit the tarmac with a bump and her head fell off and rolled into the gutter. She chewed the remote until the coffin’s head-retrieval arm fished her out from amongst the discarded special brew tins and relocated her on top of her neck. Stanna had tried to fob her off with a grab-rail for her bathroom when she’d asked for that one… Sure, a few times she’d fallen in the bath and not been able to get up, but it all paid off now…

 “Doctor? I have this awful twitch amongst my Woman’s Realms…” she said as she crashed through the wall of the GP’s surgery, firing masonry in all directions and doing the practice’s cat a terrible mischief. “… I need unguent you here me? UNGUENT.”

 “SWEET JESUS…” screamed Doctor Potempkin, making the sign of the cross before flinging penicillin at her head in great handfuls which, she thought smugly to herself, summed up the way these quacks worked these days… no wonder the health service was bankrupt and we all had the ebola…

 “Fine… be that way… contrary to what you think, YOU will be first against the wall when the revolution comes comrade…”

Thora mowed him down with all the ceremony he deserved, the spiked monster truck tyres making short work of the startled Russian. “Come over here to take our bananas and such… and to think, I fought in Nam to defeat you people… five long years in that tiger cage… neck deep in swamp… you killed Bert, Skipper, and Big Hoss… but you left me alive… THAT was your last mistake… lived on grubs and bark I did… snapping necks with my bare hands… knitting my own napalm… trained an army of monkeys… forced to watch them mown down when I set them on that machine-gun nest of yours… Bobo, Mungo, Mr Fuzzy Ears, you cut them all down in their prime…” Thora noticed she’d burst through another wall and was now in the cheese aisle of Safeway. She picked up some mild cheddar because it was on special offer and didn’t disagree with her workings.

 

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