Zombie Spaceship Wasteland Read online

  “You think he’s going to go up on her roof, try to attack us from there?”

  Mike says, “He’s not going on the roof.”

  And then he starts wrecking the fort.

  I can’t think of anything to say. It’s the greatest fort we’ve ever built and he’s tearing it apart. I sit in one of the two command chairs we made out of snow and watch him kick the walls outward in pieces, saving the escape slide for last.

  I realize he’s under the control of the cyborgs and I let him run out his destructo program. When he’s done he starts laughing and since we know Mike’s brother isn’t home we go to Mike’s house and steal his VHS of The Warriors and watch it on the VCR. Mike’s dad comes in when the Warriors are fighting the roller-skating guys in the subway, but he doesn’t come in to say hi or tell us a joke. And when we get to the part where the guy says, “Warriors, come out to plaaaaa-aaaay!” Mike doesn’t talk along with the movie like he usually does, which is weird ’cause it’s his favorite part of any movie. Then I get out the huge box where Mike’s got all these different Legos from different sets, and we start working on the snow sled. Mike starts working on the escape pod first and then gets frustrated because he makes it huge, bigger than the snow sled’s ever going to be, ’cause he’s using up all the pieces, and he says, “I want a huge escape pod.” I say fine, but we’d better get the Warriors tape back to his brother’s room, but Mike says who cares. And I say, “Well, when he comes home he’ll start a fight and then your mom and dad’ll get pissed,” and Mike says fine. And he’s acting really weird, and so I say I’m going to go and I go walking in the snow, but now everyone’s been out and there’s less and less places where I can leave fresh footprints and break a smooth surface. So then I go home and draw cyborgs.

  Later, in the summer, Mike and I are at the pool. My dad dropped us off and on the way there was an Eagles song on the radio, where the singer said, “They had one thing in common, they were good in bed . . . ,” which didn’t make sense to me. And my dad laughed and said, “There’s things you don’t understand yet.”

  Mike’s mom told him Mrs. Jeskyne is getting divorced from her husband.

  “Some of the water in this pool was probably part of our snow fort,” says Mike. But we’re playing Shark Hunters now, and I don’t understand what he’s trying to say until much later in my life.

  FULL DISCLOSURE

  Stuff I did on the Internet while writing this chapter:

  Downloaded Bill Withers’s Just as I Am from iTunes

  Watched three pwnage compilations on YouTube

  Prelude to

  “The Song of Ulvaak”

  Dungeons and Dragons was the game I played. All through middle school and the first couple years of high school—until the possibility of sex hove into view. Before that, sex seemed like something for tall people who could run fast.

  And here’s how you played Dungeons and Dragons:

  You got a sheet of paper. You got a pencil. You got three six-sided dice. On the sheet of paper you wrote, in a list, these six attributes: strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, and charisma.

  Got it?

  You picked up the three dice, and you rolled ’em six times. One throw of the three dice for each attribute. Eighteen was the highest. Three was the lowest.

  These six attribute scores became your “character.” How strong, smart, wise, healthy, quick, and good-looking you were was all based on the roll of three dice.

  Then you chose a race. And not black or white. An actual genus—human, dwarf, elf, halfling, half elf. Each race had advantages and liabilities. Dwarves were superhealthy and resistant to poisons. They were also ugly. Elves were more intelligent and graceful but were fragile. Halflings were small but quick and quiet.

  I wonder if people realize how, simultaneously, Dungeons and Dragons was wildly progressive and archaic. Human beings were no longer black and white, male and female. We were all one, sharing the world, equal against the elves and halflings.

  Of course, dwarves weren’t human.

  Then you chose a “class.” That’d be your profession. Fighter, wizard, priest, or thief. There were subclasses— illusionist for wizards, ranger for fighters, for example.

  Your attributes and your race determined what would be the perfect profession for your character. Dwarves made sturdy fighters but were clumsy with magic. Half-lings made excellent thieves. Elves were the best magic users. Humans could pretty much do anything. Dungeons and Dragons was very egalitarian when it came to the human race. And seriously—what’s with those sissy elves? Am I right?

  An 18 strength meant you were a nigh-indestructible bruiser, able to bend bars, lift gates, and twist the head off of any foe who dared stand against you. An 18 intelligence meant that, as a wizard, you could memorize more spells, speak more languages, perhaps identify artifacts. An 18 dexterity made for a thief who could pick pockets and locks, climb walls, and backstab like a wicked finger of darkness.

  One of your friends acted as Dungeon Master—he’d design the adventure and stock a subterranean keep with fabulous wealth, powerful magical items, and deadly monsters guarding them. You and your other friends—and their characters—would venture into an imaginary hole in the crust of a pretend world and defeat fantasy beasts to gain possession of unspendable gold, jewels, and gems, as well as claim the right to wield magic rings, enchanted swords, blessed armor and artifacts, and scrolls that, when read, unleashed wonders that could change reality.

  None of it changed our reality, of course. But winning a fantasy baseball league doesn’t prevent you from having to go back to your stultifying tech job Monday morning, and there’s no VIP champagne celebration waiting for you at the end of a fantasy Super Bowl. If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness.

  And that was Dungeons and Dragons. Six years of my young life. Roll abilities, pick a race, pick a profession, fight monsters, gain glory. All on paper, chronicled in graphite lead.

  There were, of course, endless variations on this theme. I’m giving you the basics. This is how I was first introduced to the game, and despite a brief flirtation with an adult group of players in my late thirties—perhaps the most gentle, sedentary midlife crisis ever on record— this is how I remember it. You were supposed to “play” your character—a fighter who wasn’t too smart and was prone to walking into danger; a thief who might not be very honest and loyal; a priest who, though able to heal and banish the undead, might come into conflict with the edicts of his god. But it really came down to a casino-like game of numbers—your attributes and skills against any monsters you might encounter.

  You rolled those dice one last time to determine your hit points—the amount of damage you could take before you were dead. The monsters had their own hit points. And when you met, your axe or sword or lightning-bolt spell dealt out so much damage, and you absorbed so much damage from the swipe of a goblin’s mace, the touch of a ghoul, or the breath of a dragon. You rolled more dice (a meteorlike twenty-sided die to determine if you’d scored a hit, an eight- or ten-sided die to determine damage) and your fate was decided by which side faced up when the dice came to rest. Gamblers at three a.m. live on the internal rush and collapse that come from the flip of a card, a ball falling into a slot, dice resting on felt. My friends and I, in basements and kitchens and in the cafeteria of Seneca Ridge Middle School on a Wednesday afternoon, rolled dice and heard, in our heads, the sound of orc skulls being split—or, oftentimes, the gurgling groan of our mighty fighter falling on the blood-soaked stones of a mossy crypt, ten feet away from a pile of gold and vorpal sword.

  People committed suicide because of Dungeons and Dragons. Or plotted to kill one another. These were exceptions that proved the rule—Dungeons and Dragons was harmless fun (unless you counted all the snacks and soda poured into developing youngsters who were aggressively immobile). Someone twisted enough to take a game of paper, pencils, and pret
end to a terminal extreme would have found a reason to end their life or deal out death in a Family Circus comic. Or the Bible.

  Still, I wonder about all my past characters—Raphael the Thief, Delgath the Sorcerer, and Stumphammer, my profane, drunken dwarf warrior.

  And most of all Ulvaak, the half-orc assassin (with his sentient sword, Bloodgusher—no, really). This was the last “character” I played before the gun of hormones fired me headlong into forever pursuing sex, and it shows.

  Ulvaak was strength and violence incarnate. I was so addled with confusion, loneliness, and lust that I was in danger of falling out of the class-clown clique I normally hung with. Reciting Monty Python bits, paraphrasing Saturday Night Live sketches, trying to make Richard Pryor and George Carlin routines fit our everyday conversations—only now, puberty was a bag of cement lashed to my ankle. At least conversationally. Everything I thought and said now had this burning undercurrent of “How’s this going to get me laid?” And wit can’t have an agenda. So I clammed up, and I spent the summer between sophomore and junior years swimming, lifting weights, eating salad and fish, and clumsily trying to reroll the sorry stats I’d been given at birth.

  So Ulvaak became my proxy during my clamp-jawed sophomore year. But he never made it past that summer.

  18 Strength. He could punch through walls if I wanted him to. I all but bullied my Dungeon Master into giving him Gauntlets of Hill Giant Strength, upping his Strength stat to 19.

  18 Constitution. He could take the sting of a cockatrice tail, endure the deadly vapors of a green dragon’s breath, or absorb a stab from one of his own envenomed daggers (worn in bandoliers across his blast-furnace chest) and shrug it off like a mild cold.

  18 Dexterity. Fast—two-handed attacks, thrown knives always finding their mark, dodging an enemy’s blows like an oiled serpent.

  I fudged some of these rolls, by the way . . .

  And, finally—3 Charisma.

  Three.

  Repellent. Frightening. Not only did I conceive of Ulvaak as physically ugly—eyes crookedly set, a sneering maw full of gray teeth, horribly scarred from a slime monster attack—but also obnoxious and unpleasant. Cruel jokes, quick to anger, slow to calm—he was comfortable being everything that, in life, I wished I wasn’t. Even at my politest, with my braces and cystic acne and snowman torso, no one wanted anything to do with me. So I created a fantasy character who had the strength, speed, and guts to back up every awkward remark I spent my days apologizing for. My comfort during the loneliest days of my adolescence was happy nihilism, which carried an ebony sword.

  I left the hideous, confident bastard on a demon-fueled plane of existence. I remember it exactly—me and three other friends at our fourth friend’s house. In the dining room. Sitting around the table—paper, pencils, dice, and lead figures to represent our characters.

  The Dungeon Master had taken my figure off the table, to the side, to represent how he’d gone through a hell portal to a different plane of existence, where the sky was roiling blood and the ground was the scabbed-over corpse of a dead god. Ulvaak stood, in dragon-hide armor and a tattered cloak, holding Bloodgusher one-handed. The demon who ruled this hell plane—I forget his name— parlayed with Ulvaak, offering to send him back to the material plane of existence if he’d act as the demon’s messenger and assassin.

  Ulvaak served no man, monster, or demon. Knowing that slaying the demon lord would, in effect, destroy the hell plane he now stood on (it being a manifestation of the demon’s ambition and avarice), he slung Bloodgusher like a burning shard from a graveyard explosion. It sliced the demon from shoulder to belly, and Ulvaak, the Black Blade of Gamotia, laughed as nameless damnation disintegrated beneath him and a sky of blood swallowed him whole.

  Then I went to a pool party—the first one I was skinny enough to swim at without my shirt. I made out with a girl, and the curve of her hip and the soft jut of shoulder blades in a bikini forever trumped the imagined sensation of a sword pommel or spell book.

  Sorry, Ulvaak. Will an epic poem make up for it?

  The Song of Ulvaak

  With a poisoned blade and a list of names

  I stabbed and slashed and made my fame

  For gold, I took lives free of blame

  In the city of Gamotia

  Gamotia! Teeming, dreaming jewel

  Streets alive and quick and cruel

  Fighter, warlock, priest, and fool

  Could scheme for gold and glory

  Each of us born, three dice thrown

  Our strength, our brains, our fates alone

  The sky gods chose our path—unknown

  To even them, our story

  Ringed with dungeons, breathing hell

  Filled with weapon, wealth, and spell

  And few who ventured lived to tell

  But those who did—lived well

  My sword was keen, my armor thick

  No fighter’s thrust or wizard’s trick

  Or curse from priest, or thieving pick

  Could pierce my heart of stone

  So off one day I rode and rode

  Into a dungeon’s maw I strode

  Some beast to worry, bait, and goad

  Then kill, to claim a bounty

  Then down a crooked hallway crept

  Across a spiked canyon leapt

  Into a chamber, phantom-swept

  There sat my newest prey

  A hissing demon made of bone

  A rotted tunic, eyes that shone

  Regal, sat on silver throne

  A zombie king, I reckoned

  It made no difference—I’d been paid

  A killer’s contract had been made

  This ghoul’s head, severed, would be laid

  On my retainer’s table

  Then up he sprang and drew a scroll

  And with a voice dry-dark as coal

  Began a chant that pierced my soul

  And froze me where I stood

  I wore two rings—one carved from jade

  And one of mithril—Elvish made

  The first one caused all magic to fade

  The second made me swift

  Not swift enough, or so it seemed

  The ghoul’s eyes, sockets, yet still gleamed

  And then drew close, and grave mist steamed

  Out of his hinge-y jaw

  “Your contract’s null, yet you will live

  I’m not the one your death to give

  That fate awaits—but, like a sieve,

  Your time is running short.”

  He said, “There’s worlds above our own

  We are but fancies, proxies thrown

  Into a dream—not flesh and bone

  We are but dice and paper.”

  I’d long since learned—ignore the dead

  The eldritch legions deal in dread

  And riddles, hexes, teasing, led

  The foolish to their doom

  But he’d touched something long suspected

  And my confidence infected

  Weakened, shook—his words projected

  Louder in that room

  “We’re hero figures for the weak

  Who aren’t yet confident to speak

  To girls, or claim the life they seek,”

  The ghoul said with a sigh

  “And so we wade through blood and gore

  Claim a treasure, bed a whore

  Accomplish deeds beyond a door

  The ‘gods’ have not yet opened.”

  Then all his matter turned to dust

  Away he flew upon a gust

  Of death-fed wind; my body-rust

  Was, all at once, no more

  Back in Gamotia, suddenly

  (Or had it always bothered me?) I sensed a subtle falsity

  In every face I spied

  Their skills and defects, will and wit

  Seemed paper-thin and counterfeit

  Their fates the same and long pre-writ

  Off in some far-o
ff sky

  The sky! I noticed, seemed to be

  Of crumpled foolscap, torn—and me

  No longer was I a killer free

  To guide my own life’s path

  I sensed, somewhere outside the land,

  A soft and inexperienced hand

  That knew no steel and claimed no land

  Had brought me into being

  And so decided, in a flash

  I’d not be tossed away like trash

  My sword would rend and gnaw and lash

  Against a pudgy god

  [At this point “The Song of Ulvaak” suddenly stops and is replaced by the transcribed lyrics of Phil Collins’s “One More Night,” followed by an embarrassing and desperate love note.]

  On a Street

  in New Orleans

  Peter Runfola

  My uncle Pete was insane.

  I know there was a proper medical term, a specific diagnosis, for what he had. A sort of schizophrenia or something. But that knowledge died with my grandfather, who took care of Pete for most of his sixty or so years.* Pete died a few years before Grandfather, which was just as well. Grandpa Runfola was attuned to Pete’s moods and rhythms. He could fend off an angry spell, quell daylight demons, and guide Pete through foggy fugues instinctively. They lived together—a divorcée and his huge, shaggy, bachelor son, in College Park, Maryland. Their house was just blocks away from the house that Pete, his two brothers and one sister (my mom), and, at the time, my still-married grandfather and grandmother grew up in.