Daily Sketch

The Zombie children were playing dodgeball. Like children of shallow means everywhere, they made do with what they could - in this case, instead of a regulation dodgeball court, they had only a muddy and mine strewn demilitarized zone, although you can bet your corpus callosum that every Zombie child knew exactly where the lines were as if they had been painted fresh last week. And instead of a regulation dodgeball, the Zombie children made do with a fairly freshly decapitated head. 

The Zombie children did not know that this particular head used to belong to a tough as nails ex marine who used to brag that if you didn’t kill six zombies before breakfast you deserved to have your brains eaten. Her words were somewhat prophetic in that on this particular day, she’d taken a breather after Zombie number four and never managed to eat breakfast. Although the Zombie did. Not on her brains, per se - there had been an awful scuffle with a cunning adversary in which both zombies’ wounds became a bit more weepy and ragged and the head in question ricocheted off of the balcony and into the demilitarized zone.

You’ve never played dodgeball until you’ve played Zombie children dodgeball inside an actual demilitarized zone. In addition to all the usual thrills and adrenaline rushes involved with pelting your friends with painfully accurate and brutally speedy missiles whilst avoiding getting pelted yourself, there’s the added danger of possibly activating one of the main anti-personnel mines buried just below the surface. 

It was always a blow when the resultant explosion destroyed the ball, but sometimes you got a spare, depending. Zombie heads weren’t as good, all of the children agreed, since they tended to squelch like a rotten orange when they hit. Plus, the kid who had to become the ball was often a real poor sport about everything, and sometimes would shout out its bearer's position out of sheer spite.

But only one thing ended a game of dodgeball even faster than an exploding mine. That was if the ball landed in the yard of Headless Chet Chilson. You know there’s always that one mean old man on every block who can’t stand the sound of children laughing, and will sic his dogs on you sooner than let you have your ball back. This was Headless Chet Chilson, only he was twice as ornery and four times as vindictive. 

The punishment for being the one to throw the ball into Headless Chet Chilson’s yard was written in stone in the Zombie Children’s bylaws. The offender had to get the ball back from Headless Chet... or die trying!

Such a fate now awaited the hapless Zeke. He’d been aiming at Cassie - a nice, solid hit! - but she’d stumbled at the last second and the ex-marine’s head went long. Right into Headless Chet’s yard.

“Dance, Zeke, Dance!” The children chanted over and over. This was always the chant, and with good reason. Headless Chet’s yard made the DMZ look like a field of bubble wrap. He had bear traps, razor wire, sharpened stakes, and there were even rumors of a carefully disguised pit that opened all the way down a fault line straight into magma. 

Rumor has it there was only ever one kid who made it out of Headless Chet’s yard with the ball alive. That kid was Zeke’s big sister Becca. Man could she dance! She put regular old human ballerinas to shame. True, what with certain breaks in her arms and legs she was something like quintuple jointed, but you should have seen her float through old Headless Chet’s yard and back with the ball without the homicidal grump ever the wiser. 

Becca never got the chance to show Zeke how she did it. She was taken out not a week later. Ironically, by the woman whose very head Zeke was after now. Becca was number four on the woman’s pre-breakfast daily constitutional that day.

But Zeke had no choice but to dance the dance. Those were the rules. He hopped, He skipped. He windmilled his arms wildly as he backpedaled. Then hopped again. He slid and he dove and he shimmied and he shook, and he ducked right under a swinging meat hook. 

And finally, there was the head. Still solid as a watermelon. He hucked it back into the DMZ, but that was his mistake. The ground he was on only looked solid. Zeke jogged on nothing but air for several moments before gravity got a hold of him. But he didn’t have far to go. Nothing broke. Leastways, nothing broke in a way that would be much of a bother to a young zombie. 

He was in some kind of a metal bowl buried some three or four feet into the dirt. He could see the bowl was attached to some kind of long, wooden thing. If he listened faintly he could hear the tiny scritching of gears ratcheting. Zeke looked up and could just see Headless Chet Chilson approaching the lip of the hole. 

FLIIIIINNNNGGG. Zeke catapulted out of the hole and right into Headless Chet. The two of them rocketed over the palisade of barbed wire, broken glass bottles and moldering skulls and straight into the middle of the game of dodgeball. 

Zeke struggled for a moment to get to his feet. He was so tangled up in the remains of Headless Chet, that it was difficult to tell which bits were Zeke’s and which bits were Chet’s. It was certainly too much for a stumble of zombie kids brought up to fear the headless leer of Chet’s torso. They all scattered.

Zeke chuckled to himself. The other kids were never going to believe him.