Rival Angels

As promised, here's the second Haggis/WWZ crossover story.
Part of this story is based on a notion that the flu really can change our genetic makeup. Another part is based on an unfortunately true news story from a few years ago that still haunts me.

WWZ: Arena
The Mighty Haggis, Ziynet "The Turkish Delight" Memduh © Martin Evans
All Human/anthropomorphic characters © by their owners

[My interview with The Mighty Haggis continues. Today I am sitting with Ms. Wilberforce at the counter of the only functioning Starbucks in all of Southern Nevada. We are talking about her days spent wrestling in wartime Los Angeles.]

It didn't take long for us wrestlers to realize why the authorities gave us that warehouse to use as our wrestling arena. You could hear the ocean surf from the front door.
Okay, a month before I had arrived in California, the zombies had pushed deep into Southern California from the south, and then for some weird reason, a zillion of them hung a left at San Pedro and walked into the ocean. A day later, they all came ashore on Santa Catalina Island where there were 50,000 VIP refugees and the last herd of buffalo in the world. It was a total massacre. After that, it was risky to live too close to the ocean because you never knew when a few hundred of those motherbumpers would come ashore and knock on your door. The authorities took the lifeguards out of the lifeguard towers and replaced them with marksmen and Civil Defense sirens. There were heavily-armed patrols all over the place. The cops had the authority to shoot first and ask questions later. The cops were backed up by semi-volunteer Zackwackers riding in their smokers [Improvised charcoal burning vehicles].

Tell me about the Zackwackers.

Most of them were ex-gang members. Zack had turned their world upside down and shook it out as much as anybody else's. Their drug suppliers from South America and Southeast Asia were all dead. DeStRes then made it okay to grow hemp again, so the bottom fell out of the pot market. When they tried pushing the refugees around, they had their asses handed to them. They were outnumbered five thousand to one by people who had survived being chased across the country by millions of zombies screaming for their blood. The gangs never knew what hit them after the refugees formed their own gangs in return. So the only thing that these bad boys had left to do was to find a honest job digging ditches or fighting Zack for extra ration books and bragging rights. Most of them went for Zack.
It was pretty common sight to see an old pickup truck that had been converted into a smoker rolling down the street with a couple of regular army “advisors” in the cab driving and radioing with a squad of Zackwackers riding in the back carrying bats and blades and looking for payback.

Were any of the Zackwackers anthros?

Oh yeah. You should’ve seen what anthro gangbangers were like back in those days. I’m anthro and I’m pretty darn mean at times, but those guys scared the yellow shit out of me. The canine anthros were instinctive pack hunters and they could sweep through a neighborhood like a radar beam. On the other hand, the feline anthros mostly worked solo. They would sneak around in the shadows and on the rooftops and they would jump people like Batman. But the toughest ones were the Shunka Warakins who were Johnny-come-latelys who learned how to bang too.

The what?

Shunka Warakin. American hyenas. Leftovers from the Pleistocene era. There was at least one left when the Spanish Flu hit. Hyenas are nature’s bodybuilders. They‘re born overdosed on testosterone. In the wild, it’s pretty hard to tell the males from the females because the females’ naughty bits are kind of overdeveloped on account of that testosterone…uh…maybe you better do your own research about that. Watch some old Animal Planet DVDs sometime.
Shunka Warakins have muscles like you wouldn‘t believe. I’ve seen them pull stop sign posts out of the ground like they were carrots. Hardly anybody in their right mind ever disrespected them. But they never disrespected anybody in return.
After the 1918 Spanish Flu hit, there were just enough people infused with Shunka Warakin genes in this one little town in Oklahoma to maintain a population of Shunka Warakin anthros. When the Zacks started pushing everybody west, the Shunka Warakins moved over as a community to California and they learned the ropes here pretty darn quick. We were pretty lucky to have a few of them in the neighborhood, although they kept to themselves for the most part. It was like having really nice Klingons living next door to you.

What were the living conditions like?

We did alright.
We were terrified that Zack would show up at any moment. So instead of living inside the warehouse, we lived on top of it. The warehouse roof was strong enough to land a helicopter on, so we built a big tin shack on top to use as a commons area and then built some scrapwood shacks around it to live in. Then we fixed a section of stairs inside so we could pull it up like a drawbridge before going to bed.
One of our guys who used to be in the Peace Corps built us a solar heat collector out of 40 ounce malt liquor bottles so we could have hot water for showers. DeStRes gave us these solar ovens made from cardboard boxes so we could pasteurize our drinking water and do a little baking. But for the most part, we did almost all of our cooking over hibachis with charcoal made from bamboo that we made ourselves. Because the electricity wasn't on most of the time, we used car batteries that we charged ourselves with pedal power to augment the one windmill DeStRes gave us so we could watch a little television and maybe microwave some black market popcorn.
We had enough to eat. But we never wasted anything. Our unofficial slogan about that was courtesy of Spike Milligan: “Throw it into the curry.“
We had chicken and eggs at every meal. Sometimes somebody who was brave enough to go fishing would catch a few fish from off one of the piers. The fish would go into a big pot of gumbo that we always had cooking 24/7. We also grew a lot of our own food in homemade planters and barrels that we kept inside the old employee parking lot that was surrounded by a chainlink fence. The government had taken over all of the bakeries and we needed ration cards to get bread. They also gave us these bland chewy green noodles that were supposed to be made out of soybeans. We called that stuff, “Soylent Green”.
If we needed to get somewhere, we’d have to take a rickshaw or a pedalcab. That was one area where we furries had regular humans beat hands down. There was this one crazy ride I took to the bank with a raptor puller I’ll never forget…

Raptor? Like in Jurassic Park?

There’s a few of them. Remember, the 1918 Spanish Flu not only killed a lot of people, but it messed with the survivors’ genetic makeup by swapping out some of their old genes with new genes stolen from a previous hosts. The flu was passed from animal to animal, but only human descendants were changed into anthros. Some of the genes that were stolen from hosts were obsolete junk genes that weren’t needed anymore. We used to have this one Andre the Giant-sized anthro who was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. He came from a long line of chicken farmers, and did you know that chickens are the direct descendants of Tyrannosaurus Rex?
Nice guy too. Good with kids.

Did you ever feel you were segregated from regular humans?

Heck no. The Warehouse Wrestling League (That’s what we called ourselves) worked like a great big commune. We had men and women, regular humans and anthros, all living and working together on top of one roof. One of the few good things about the zombie war was that it made normal people forget about the 1918 Spanish flu that juggled genes and made children come out “furry“. I can understand the fear back then. Your friends and family all die of the flu, and then your kids are born with fur and fangs. That's a kind of fear that sticks with people. The weird thing though, is that people forget that even the common cold messes around with your genes. So in the end, doesn’t that make all of us a little furry?
It’s sad that we needed a zombie apocalypse to put the proper perspective on things. After it was discovered that anthros didn’t reanimate after being bitten by a zombie, we became a popular minority.

[Haggis grins a little.]

Our unofficial motto was “Every wrestler is beautiful”, and we had a lot of beautiful people living on top of that roof. There was a lot of cold nights back then, so who better than to cuddle up with than somebody who’s covered in fur? And I didn’t mind spooning up with a smooth-skinned bodybuilder when it was dark outside and we could hear shots being fired down at the beach.

How much did you charge for a show?

Nothing.

Nothing?

Nothing. We took donations instead. People were dead broke. So we took whatever we could get. We took dollars and army scrip and UNITs after they came into style. But we also accepted canned goods, dried beans, chickens, used clothing, candles, charcoal, bundles of bamboo, scrap copper, that kind of thing. We were lucky that some of our best fans were shoppers….

Shoppers?

Scavengers. Cowboy types who would make beer runs into Zack's backyard and grab whatever they could find before they got eaten. I used to get paid five hundred old dollars an hour for private wrestling sessions before the war. During the war, I'd wrestle johns all afternoon for a case of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese or a gallon of cooking oil or the ultimate prize: a jar of instant coffee.


What did you do for security?

We begged DeStRes for some solar self-recharging automatic light/motion sensors like the ones they used to have at the Wal-Mart and Home Depot stores so we could see at night because there weren't any streetlights anymore, but there weren't any of them left to give away to anybody. So instead, we hung up these long strings of empty food cans all over the place and hoped some bum wouldn‘t come along and recycle them. Then we got ahold of every worn out tire we could find, tied them all together and laid them on the ground surrounded the warehouse with them. Zombies have a real hard time walking and a tire moat slows them down considerably. We always had at least one person on guard all night long as per the law too of course. Our guards were armed with cheap Saturday Night Specials and a M1 carbine that was a prop used in the original Planet of the Apes movies. DeStRes didn’t have enough brand new guns to pass out, so they got them from wherever they could find them: pawn shops, private collections, and Hollywood prop houses. That carbine saw a lot of use the first few years we were open.
But sometimes Zack walked in through the front door and under the radar no matter what we or anybody else did.
There was this one time when we were doing a midweek show. One of our regulars was a sleazoid Mexican guy we nicknamed "Spider" because he always wore a Spiderman t-shirt. We heard that he was making a lot of change as a middleman in the bamboo market. He came in every week with a different girl. They would sit in the front row and they would neck like nobody's business. The only reason we noticed Spider at all was because he would hickey his dates to death. Between belltime and closing, Spider would leave dozens of hickeys on his girlfriends' necks. A plant that we had sitting next to him once waiting for her cue to act in a bit swore to us that Spider was actually growling like an animal as he necked. We used to wonder when the head of one of his dates was going to fall off.
One night I was playing referee because I had a really bad head cold that I didn't want to give it to anybody else. Spider had come in with another new girl who could barely walk down the aisle. I watched them as they came in and wondered for a moment if Spider was maybe using roofies on his dates, but we had a show to do and I pushed that thought out of my little mind. The last match of the night was a bareknuckle brawl between Jenny “Miss Murder” Crow and Misty Mountains. Jenny was a busty blonde bombshell who was a regular human, and Misty was a busty mouse anthro from Texas. It was a scripted match because all the shoot fighting was wearing us all down, but it was damn fun to watch from where I was at least. Well, towards the end of their match, Misty had Jenny hung upside-down in the corner and was busy hammering away at her belly, making Jenny's big ole boobies bounce up and down. Jenny was winning an Oscar begging for mercy from our big mousie when all of the sudden, Misty stops punching her, steps away and starts sniffing the air. Jenny waited for Misty to continue with the punching and the hitting before she got tired of the waiting and yanked herself loose from the ropes. After she gets back up on her feet, Jenny goes over and asks Misty what the f’n hell was going on. Misty told her to hush up and kept on sniffing the air. I had that cold so I had no idea what Misty smelled. I was wondering if maybe the place was on fire when Misty turns around to face Jenny and me and mouths the "Z" word.
Jenny Crow has a very fair complexion. Once in awhile we would make albino jokes about her. But after Misty said what she said, Jenny damn near turned transparent. I hollered at our bouncers to get their asses over to the ring. I told them to start looking around for Zack. I took the ringside microphone and told the audience to remain calm and to stay in their seats. We had all of thirty seconds of peace before all Hell broke loose.
Spider's girlfriend du jour shrieked and lost control of her bowels. She must’ve been holding it in all week. Spider jumps up and starts wiping the shit that was on his hands off on our nice clean ring apron. Then the girlfriend leans backwards, closes her eyes, and starts drumming her heels. She then cuts loose with a death rattle that you could hear all the way back to the locker rooms. I didn't need to smell anything to know what was coming up next.
It took the girlfriend all of five minutes to open her eyes again. The little drops of blood that were oozing from out of her hickeys turned into that black goo that everybody calls zomboleum now. Miss Zombie girlfriend then looks me square in the eyes and gives out this loud moan that I still hear in my nightmares. That’s when our audience made a run for it. If we didn't have those big warehouse doors, some of the fans would've been trampled to death running out of the building.
For some weird reason, Spider's zombie girlfriend ignores him and comes straight for me as fast as any zombie I've ever seen. It begins to climb into the ring, but before it could get through the ropes, Jenny pushes me out of the way and dropkicks the girlfriend right in the face with those big heavy boots of her's. The girlfriend falls off of the ring apron and lands in the front row. A few moments later, a bunch of howling mad Zackwackers come charging in through the front door and they turn Spider's girlfriend into a greasy spot on the concrete floor.

[Waves her hands in the air in front of her face.]

But just when we thought it was all over, Misty started sniffing the air again. Misty climbs out of the ring and follows her nose straight to the source: Spider.
That poor greasy son-of-a-bitch had gotten himself infected chewing on his new girlfriend‘s neck. She had somehow sneaked into the safe zone from Mexico without getting herself checked first for Zack like everybody else was supposed to. It turned out that she was the sole "survivor" from out of a mob of hundreds of Mexicans that got ate up running through the ruins of San Diego trying to get to Los Angeles. She had gotten infected after a zombie bit her on the ass or something. The Zackwackers could only shake their heads and apologize as they took Spider outside. A few minutes later, we heard the mercy shot from one of their army advisor's pistol.
There was some other crap. There always was. But people always came to see our shows because they needed live entertainment and to see other people and cut loose.
You understand?

I heard something about a wrestler named "Ziynet"?

You mean Zee? She was my big discovery. She was my baby. Zee was a nurse that came and saw our show one night and got hooked on wrestling. Zee was a camel anthro. She was cute enough so that humans would ask her out on a date, but she could never pass as fully human with that big head and long neck of her's. We called Zee the "Turkish Delight" because she was such a sweet little thing. She was an easy teach too, but she had some surprises for us. We had this eagle anthro who was too short to wrestle with the other guys. Hell, the top of his head wouldn't touch the bottom of Cowlossus’ big rack.

Cowlossus?

Holly Holstein was her real name. Her stage name was Cowlossus. Cowlossus was this Amazonian anthro who used to be a florist of all things. She was big even for a bovine. She was a lot of fun, but when she was horny, no one was safe. Her idea of foreplay was to throw her boyfriend through a wall.
Anyway, we asked Zee if she was up for some intergender action with eagle boy and Zee flatly refused. We asked her why and she told us: She was raised Muslim.
Okay, there are furries of all faiths. But Muslim anthros aren't all that common because anthros and Islam usually mix about as well as oil and water. In some Muslim communities, anthro babies were considered abominations and killed on the spot. But Zee came from a anthro Muslim community that was based in New Jersey before the war. Zee wasn't devout, but I'm a fallen Catholic and I still don't eat meat on Fridays if you get what I mean. So we let eagle boy pass and let Ziynet wrestle Bitsy.

Bitsy?

The one and only Black Widow. She used to live in New York City. Her husband stayed in New York to fight Zack while Bitsy and her son played hobo and rode the rails to get to California. I lost track of her after the war. Bitsy used to have hardcore matches in the alley across from the warehouse. The losers got tossed into the dumpsters and have the lid slammed down on top of them. Our neighbors always made a fuss about the noise.

Back to Zee?

Oh yeah. Sorry about that.
A few months later, it's the middle of the night and Zee is knocking on our front door and screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs. After we do a fast Zack check we let her inside. Zee is all messed up and her pants are soaked in blood. Our first thought was that Zee had just gotten Zacked-up. But Zee told us that she had been raped instead, and that she had to find another place to live.
Back then, there wasn't much you could do if you were raped. We were under constant attack by an enemy that wanted to kill and eat us while we were alive and kicking. Rape victims just weren't much of a priority back then. Nobody was making rape kits anymore, or doing DNA tests because there weren‘t the available resources. But then again, public lynchings of suspected rapists had made a big comeback.
We took Zee upstairs and put her in one of the better shacks. She was in bed for weeks. If she didn't have antibiotics in the bottom of her little black bag, she would've been a goner for sure.
A year goes by. Everybody is getting their act together; the army pushes Zack out of San Diego and makes a stand at the border. The power is on sometimes on all week long. And Zee is one of our big draws even though she still won't do intergender. Things are looking up for the first time in a long time.
One afternoon, it's business as usual. Zee and Jenny are tagging against Misty and me. We're halfway through the match when this big male camel anthro who's about Zee's age and dressed to the nines walks up to our ring and begins hollering at Zee in a language I didn‘t know. Zee looks at him and turns white as a sheet. She then hops out of the ring sobbing and runs upstairs. I jump out of the ring and I grab “Joe Camel” by the front of his pants with both hands and I yank them up as high as they can go to get his undivided attention. While the referee calmed the audience down, the girls and I take Joe out in back and we have a long talk with him.
We find out that Joe is Zee's kid brother and that his sister has been missing for over a year. We discovered that Zee was no nurse practitioner. She was a fully qualified general practitioner that had run away from home. The brother told us that she had dishonored her family by holding a strange boy's hand in public, and after she was punished, she had fled from the family household just like the little whore she always was.
I wanted to wring some more information out of him, maybe his neck too, but we weren't the cops and we didn't want to be put on the chain gang for holding this guy against his will, so we had to let him go. We then went upstairs to talk to Zee.
Zee pretty much told us the same story as her brother. But then she added some details like how her father treated her like garbage despite her being a doctor. At the same time he treated her kid brother like he was the Prince of Persia. Her father denied his son nothing despite the fact the little mook couldn’t even hold a job which was really kind of illegal back in those days. When we got to the night when Zee came to us all beaten up and bloodied, she came clean: Her father and some of his cronies had "circumcised" her.

Female circumcision?

When Zee came home that night after a double shift at the hospital, her father and her buddies were sitting at the kitchen table playing dominoes. They didn’t even look up as Zee let herself in. But after she went upstairs to her bedroom and went to bed, her father and his friends rushed into her bedroom. Some of them held her down and some of them started cutting her.
The bastards didn’t even use scalpels or painkillers. They used old rusty kitchen knives that they tossed back into the sink when they were done with her.
Zee started talking a mile a minute after that. She told us that her father had threatened her with an honor killing if she didn't kowtow to his beliefs. Zee told us that she was going to have to run away again now that her family knew where she was. That maybe she could follow the army as it was going south or maybe she could try for the Pacific Continent or volunteer for garrison duty in Zack country. So many maybes.
We told her to stay put. That this was her home and we were her family now and we would watch her back.
Zee didn't do any public shows after that. But then she started being a doctor again. After checking her medical credentials, DeStRes helped her put together a little bare bones clinic in the back of the warehouse in one of the empty storerooms. For a long time we were truly blessed by having our very own doctor on the premises.
One night, after the fans had gone home and we were getting ready to go to bed, we hear the Civil Defense sirens going off and a lot of shots being fired outside. Our guard on the roof called down to us and told us that Zack was coming ashore bigtime. Not hundreds of zombies, but thousands of zombies. Maybe more. All of them bloated and mushy and looking for takeout.
Everybody starts running upstairs and I go to grab Zee. But as I run into the clinic, I see that Zee is duct taped to an office chair and that her brother, and an older guy whom I found out later was Zee's father, were standing over her gloating like Saturday morning cartoon bad guys. The older guy was holding an old rusty butcher knife. But before they could do anything, I took a giant step forward and gave both of them a good old-fashioned Moe Howard forked-fingered poke in the eyes with either hand, the same way that I had poked at the eyes of a newbie tag team last week to let them know that they were in for a fight. Then while those two big dummies were stumbling and falling all over the place, I grabbed the back of the chair that Zee was taped into and started wheeling her towards the stairs.
As I wheeled Zee across the floor, we passed by the backdoor that her father and brother had jimmied open to get inside. A rotting half-skeleton thing stumbled in through the door just at the moment we were going pass it. The zombie in the doorway saw Zee and me and gave out a loud moan. A heartbeat later, a whole lot of other zombies started moaning too. Zee and I turned our heads looked and saw that bloody bones in the doorway had brought along all of his buddies with him. The alley outside the open door was packed shoulder to shoulder with zombies that were already were eating whatever they could catch crawling around in our garbage cans.
I could not have pushed Zee any faster even if I had a bottle of nitrous oxide shoved up my tuchis. But about halfway to the stairs, one of the cheap plastic wheels on the office chair broke and both Zee and I went splat on the floor. I kipped up and I started tearing at the duct tape holding Zee. I finally got Zee loose and we both barely got to our feet before the zombies reached us. We saw that the zombies were between us and the stairs, and there was only one place left that Zee and I could run to: The wrestling ring.
Earlier that evening, Cowlossus and Bitsy were busy busting each other open during the evening’s main event inside our homemade steel cage. We left the steel cage where it was after the show was over. Zee and I ran over to the steel cage and locked ourselves inside. There was a barrel full of hardcore match props left sitting in the middle of the ring. I helped myself to a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire while Zee picked up a hockey stick, and then we both stood back-to-back waiting for the zombies to start banging on the steel cage.
Then we heard Zee's father and brother screaming for their lives after the zombies caught up to them.
You know why zombies always go for the neck?

Why?

If you're human and they can rip your head off before you die, and your brain reanimates, the rest of your body remains edible to them. We anthros don‘t reanimate, but the zombies will still rip your head off anyway. Old habits die hard, I guess. The bad thing about having your head ripped off is that you have maybe five minutes to think about what you’re going to tell Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates before your brain dies from the lack of oxygen.
I saw Zee's father's head lying in the middle of the floor, looking over at the zombies who were chowing down on the rest of his skinny carcass. Zee’s dad was looking kind of emo until this one zombie shuffles by, picks him up, and then walks out the warehouse door with him.
It didn’t take too long for the zombies to turn Zee’s dad and brother into leftovers. And it didn’t take them too much longer after that for them to notice the two of us inside the steel cage. The zombies started banging and pulling at the cage. We had built that steel cage to be strong enough to hold our entire wrestling stable inside, but we never thought to make the thing zombie proof. Our cage was slowly being pulled apart. The rivets holding it together were popping one by one.
Then we heard growling and snarling outside. It wasn’t the zombies making that noise. Zombies can’t make that kind of noise. It sounded like pieces of sheet metal being ripped in half.
A male Shunka Warakin steps in through the open back door like Conan the Barbarian on a ‘roid rage looking to save his girlfriend from the evil sorcerer. He was waving around a sledgehammer in each hand like they were pom poms. Then another Shunka Warakin comes in with a stop sign that he had just happened to find outside. The two Shunka Warakins started swinging away at the zombies and sent a whole bunch of them flying each time they connected. But then a heartbeat later, a female Shunka Warakin, who was clearly a head taller and 100 pounds heavier than the first guy enters our warehouse. She was wearing some kind of homemade chainmail made from coat hanger wire and carrying an iron bar longer than I was tall.
She hollered an apology over at us for being late because she tripped over some tires in the parking lot. Then she takes command of the other two and the three of them form a skirmish line. The Shunka Warakins then begin to slowly walk around the arena floor, like they were combines harvesting wheat, grinding every zombie in the house into paste. It took me a second to recognize them.
They were our neighbors.
Zee and I would’ve cheered and applauded the Shunka Warakins if we weren‘t both scared out of our minds. When all of the zombies had been put out of our misery, that first Shunka Warakin that came to our rescue simply walked over to that cage door and easily broke the padlock off with one hand to let us out.
As we were being led out of the cage, I put my arms around that big guy’s waist and I told him that anything that was mine was his for the asking.
And I meant anything.

[Pauses.]

Why are all the good ones either married or gay?

What happened after that?

Zee got out of Dodge the next day. We never found out where she went. It’s better that way. Her brother and father were dead, but she still had plenty of other dishonored male family members who wanted to know at which restaurant Zee ate onion rings at.

Then what?

It was another year before the United Nations said the Word, and I joined the army shortly after winning the Warehouse Wrestling League’s Hardcore Championship Belt.

Haven't you ever heard the phrase "Always leave them wanting more"? You may have the ideas, but that doesn't mean you should post them so soon after one another. Stretch those releases, build the anticipation.

Pretty cool, though.

You haven't seen what's up my sleeve yet

Glad you liked it.

I bet! Looking forward to more