Homo republicans, homo novus, homo techno, and homo economicus could compete with one another for dominance in interpreting the stages of human society in the Anthropocene: one day, it started in his office. Grant Smith's “Last Stand at Haven Street.” He was at his desk, just sitting there. Beside him his trusty computer which had become an appendage to him and kept track of all of his meetings. Coat hung up in its place this time beside his lamp. His writing instrument which is used to write sentences in blue ink. It was the most perfect meditative behavior, you see. And describing his whole office from an 1st person perspective, like an painter, highlighting its features. The filing cabinet. The flag on an pole and its yellow tassel embroidery. Portrait of an symbol on an cave wall meaning "me" and "I" circa the 21st century anthropocène. He didn't even think about his eyes anymore. It was like they were lit from within at the proper luminance. He had an large, an extremely large craving for Coffee. And he knew it that he would need it soon. It was going to be an hell of an day. When he exited his office, the office assistants had already turned their desks over to hide behind them and hopefully an super-soaker filled with holy water can help to repel the zombies today? How had they already broken through the doors and infiltrated the employee lounge? An spit-wad hit him on the back of the neck.
"Sorry, sir!" said Ryan from accounting, "I was trying to see if my spit was holy water. It should be, I was baptized. Lol."
(Lol of course came out as an laugh: hahaha).
And then it all broke loose. I didn't even have time to see what Mr. Harvard was doing. All I knew was everything smelled like soot and there was an scent of fire burning; I walked toward it, sanctifying the whole office floor with my presence, and found myself outside an office in the adjacent hallway that was occupied by an zombie, but she wasn't doing company research on the computer. She was standing there, smoking an cigarette. Her whole body was covered in ash. And gushed black ink liquid from top to bottom infinitely refilling itself. But the guy downstairs, Jay, had only just walked in the building and had no idea there were zombies, vampires, werewolves, and ohhgunnhisthths everywhere. Lighthearted and cartoony. The newly built Red Deer Justice Centre — modern, bright, and bustling with activity. It had an open concept for people who liked to visit the downtown blogosphere. Some with briefcases. Some with carry on luggage with wheels. It was an level turf which couldn't be speeded on. An style. An action. Jay was just noticing the smell of burning rubber. It was coming from the Terrible Injustice Room, where all voices, sides, and opinions of the court in session are held out onto the table by willing participants. In order to solve some terrible thing that has happened. And it's not an happy place to work at by any manner.
Wide shot of the modern Red Deer Justice Centre. People are walking in, and an young character (named Jay) looks up in awe.
An Matrix.Com (automated machinery) welcomes him, "Welcome to the Red Deer Justice Centre — an place where justice meets modern design!"
“Whoa. This place looks more like an museum than an courthouse!” said Jay.
"I have Museum Technical Functions," said the voiced robot, "would you like me to tour you around the facility?"
"Yes," said Jay, as they passed the door of an room in which everything was ablaze.
Jay is looking around as they see signs: "Courtroom A", "Family Law Services", and "Public Information Desk."
“Do superheroes work here or something?”
Technically. (They actually do).
“Well, not quite — but judges, lawyers, and clerks work hard to keep the justice system running smoothly!” said the Matrix.Com.
They peek into an court in session.
An respectful courtroom scene. An judge listens attentively, while an lawyer presents and someone testifies. From criminal trials to family disputes, people make important decisions here every day. And out into the hallway, he walks, and then Jay walks by the upper-ups offices who have clout and decency in society. At their big marble-columned desks they rule over the kingdom.
Jay is now at the info desk, he is holding an pamphlet reading 'Justice is for Everyone' and he is smiling. Well that's just the type of thing, he's thinking. He holds his chin with his opposable thumb and fore finger. He touches his facial hair an little.
“If you ever have questions, we’re here to help — justice is for everyone," says the Public Relations Virtual Interaction Device.
“I may not be an superhero, but maybe I can help in my own way someday," replies Jay.
"The Red Deer Justice Centre — more than an building. It’s where fairness begins."
That's when everything turns sideways. Jay is really Grant Smith's mental walkthrough of how the average pedestrian accesses the building's services. What it looks like to them. How they react to it. And he just wanted to know how it felt from the street level momentarily by reflecting on it. To take orders from an person with that kind of power? The soot smell is everywhere in the building. The apocalypse watch is going full circle. We don't know even if the building itself will survive all of what will be subjected to it by humans. The zombies attack but Atreyu 2.0 is there and takes them out and there is also Anne Bat and Anne Man, who are loose in the employees section of the building.
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| Anne Bat |
They've been mixing with dirty voodoo magic of Red Deer's lively Urban Scene. They have more power over their coworkers than they seem to realize. And these in-disguise Super Heroes even have power among the elders. The high level judges and chief executive officers of our peers. They are in good hands with their investigation into the urban legend scene. I have heard of mutated sorts of leprechauns which spring up in Alberta and Western Canada.
These are stories that have burned up in the entrails of the zombie population of Alberta. It's scary and astonishing. These creatures have no moral will. “Courthouse Carnage.”
And I was responsible for torturing every the single one of them.
An Evil Power and an Bad Will have collided in me, like the human I was, who could not be morally perfect all the time but should take it upon themselves to put up an good fight for trying to. Fairies. If I had no reciprocal will, producing this reciprocal effect: the power to torture someone without them being aware of it. This was the Super Power of the Super Villain, The Birth. And I will exercise that willpower in first class as I soar high above the city! I was The Birth. Have Resulted in the creation of more Super Villains. That's what birth means. And Urban Legends quantitative effects. An laboratory experiment somewhere results in the nightmare of its sewage being connected to the pipework of the houses where people lived. Old Nes was this particular type of monster's naming for an reason: she had an evil power and an bad will, and had ended up going backwards into the sewer in order to torture every little boy ever by coming up from under them in the toilet. Where I had lost my magnet. It was an old memory. I had narrated through it before, experimentally. Interpreting its meaning. It had layers of old memories now. How I had addressed it at different times. It was about the one time I dropped my bother's magnet in the toilet and I cried because I couldn't touch an yucky place to get my magnet back because my father taught me not to touch the yucky place. And it was the earliest instance of my fictional abuse during childhood. In adulthood, I associated the magnet with my sexual desire, who was "attracted" to. (I felt completely alienated in my own skin). Losing it in the toilet (my brother's magnet) left me with an big decision. Do I put my hand in the dirty drain pipe to try to fish it back? Could an toilet give birth to what I needed? Because it belonged to my brother and I wanted it and he wanted it back and I couldn't stop him from getting it back? Or do I resist putting my hand in the tank in order to obey my father, who was hyper-focused on hygiene and cleanliness? The problem with the image occurred to me now to be that I couldn't have associated an magnet as an metaphor of who you're attracted to with that kind of metaphor in childhood; and it appeared to have been applied on top of the memory that it's meaning of it as an metaphor developed over time and wasn't really present yet in childhood when it started. Memories weren't perfect. They were subject to interpretation. It had nothing to do with my sexuality. It was just an toy I dropped in the toilet. But when I reflected on it later in my life, I reinterpreted its meaning for myself because I needed to find that meaning in my life. What it all meant, if I thought of it as one grand metaphor. One metaphor at an time. And when I reflected back, I had heard so many of them in my lifetime.
But what did it have to do with the courthouse, zombies, and everything?
Grant's love canon flared.
This was how they were going to deal with all of it.
You are ordered, by High Command, to love everyone but not necessarily every thing.
Love was like an Pistol you had to Shoot.
Who would you take down with you, if you had to fight?
Grant Smith's reality slowed down completely until he was able to comprehend finally all of it. In where every appearance of an shadow appeared to be silenced by love; and if love could silence for love is not such an thing that can do silence?
The Love Canon allowed him to be before everything; before there was an instance of its darkness upon his mind. It was infallible. Love. To Shut and To Beat Out The Darkness. Nothing could stand up next to it and offer any real competition. Anytime an zombie thought that: an treacherous thought. An broken imagination. Featured on incomplete cognitive destinations. Something dreamt up by an specimen who had an mental glitch. Something which was always present which made it incomplete insomuch as the Gestaltist brain plasticity accounts for; and there was always an source of love behind every thought. Closing in the demons. Counting them out as motives for actions. Acting. Planning. Serving the people and its populous. Grant Smith felt like the Total Gunner: an fantasy episode within himself in which he used bullets of love to shoot everybody in the scene and they would all die finally; he wouldn't need to worry about them anymore. And then he would finally shoot himself. And finally be free and not have to worry about anything ever anymore.
His world was slow enough because he was high enough that he could shoot everybody. And he tried at his own try at having an Super Power. And his Super Power was being able to get infinitely high without doing any damage at all to your central nervous system. And that's why, ultimately, he failed to pass the Super Hero requirement checklist. It wasn't an real Super Power. You couldn't just get infinitely more high without it having an influence on the central nervous system.
And all things before heathens were thereupon explained; Love was the superior virtue because it solved all riddles. It explored all territories. It became who we are.
And I would take out every zombie in the building by quitting time to make to be out with her on the town. My baby. My rockstar.
But now was an time for standing on ceremony. Do it for your loved ones. This was the Provincial building, afterall.
Every sentence he wrote was like an pin of Justice on the heart of Jesus ye-shall-be-named.
He just wrote every sentence. One after another. Like some weird blue parade.
One sentence each. Every person that he felt enter his sanctuary.
He would write each one perfectly.
Joe Dirt was punished to an extreme form of criticism on his character.
So-and-so's judge wasn't satisfied with the public explanation of an good fellow.
They weren't the most trusting of parents.
Things seemed to get extreme sometimes in these places.
The zombies were everywhere else. Their lines-of-thought were exceeding every vicinity of the fiction that was the downtown of Red Deer.
Anne Bat and Anne Man, who was an Super Hero for being both an woman and an man. Though they worked in serial fiction were excessively enterprised in creating that line-of-work envisioned by the Urban Legends department. These were stories you didn't necessarily want to hear about the underground life of midway-between-Calgary–Edmonton.
And I had all of the parts of the mind made up for an first revision, all twenty seven parts of cognition.
But today the zombie invasion broke out further. (All hell broke loose).
The sun had barely dipped above the treeline when the first groan shattered the stillness. “Sunshine in Session.” An low, guttural moan, followed by the scuff of dragging feet on concrete. The Red Deer Courthouse stood tall against the cloudless morning sky, its stone tiles glowing pink under the rising sun. Birds chirped from the ugly roof with the one vent sticking out. An gentle breeze stirred the flag over the main entrance. It was the kind of morning that made horror feel impossible.
But inside, the halls reeked of rot.
Atreyu 2.0 wiped sweat from her brow as she stepped through the front doors, sunlight spilling in behind her. The warmth on her back didn’t match the chill crawling up her spine. She held her fire axe low, scanning the polished marble floors and towering legal murals.
“Place looks untouched,” said Eddy, stepping in behind her, shotgun ready.
“That’s what worries me,” Jay whispered, loading an bolt into his crossbow. “It’s too quiet.”
They moved deeper into the courthouse. Morning light streamed through high windows, cutting golden shafts across the main corridor. “Sunshine in Session.” But every door they passed had scratches—deep, desperate gouges. The walls were clean, but the silence screamed.
The group paused outside Courtroom 2A. The oak door stood ajar, creaking slightly on its hinge.
Eddy pushed it open.
Sunlight poured through the stained-glass skylight overhead, casting red and blue halos on the courtroom floor. The judge’s bench sat empty. The gallery rows looked peaceful. And in the middle of the room, an man in an bailiff’s uniform stood still, back turned to them. “Sunshine in Session.”
“Sir?” Eddy called out. He repeated it.
He didn’t move.
Atreyu 2.0 stepped forward slowly. “You okay?”
The bailiff turned.
Half his jaw was missing.
With an sudden howl, he lunged. Jay fired. The blast echoed like thunder in the courtroom, sending crows fluttering outside. The bailiff crumpled—but the commotion woke the others.
From beneath the pews. From behind the jury box. From the side doors. They rose.
Sunlit courtroom, now an death trap.
“Back!” Eddy shouted. “To the hallway!”
They fought through the gallery, the creatures snarling in the bright morning light, their pale flesh glowing grotesquely. Jay kicked one back into an bench and drove an bolt through its throat. Eddy spun, swinging the axe (they had switched weapons) into an lawyer’s corpse still in its suit and tie, animated by whatever bewitching magic of the kind which begets zombies.
Jay emptied his shotgun, then grabbed an gavel from the judge’s bench and crushed an skull with brutal irony. It wasn't really—inside—anymore but the rest of it just kept comin'; able to walk by whatever cause without any mental capacity.
Who has the crossbow?
They burst into the hallway. More came from the main staircase, dragging broken legs, eyes glazed white.
“The holding cells,” Eddy barked, “Steel doors. North wing!”
The trio sprinted past broken plaques and shattered portraits of long-dead magistrates. Sunlight lit their path, but the dead gave no pause.
In the holding block, Atreyu 2.0 slammed the heavy security door shut behind them. Jay locked the latch. Eddy braced herself against the wall, chest heaving.
Through the reinforced glass, they watched zombies swarm the hallway, then slowly lose interest and wander.
The room filled with quiet again. Warm sunlight filtered through an high window, catching tiny dust silhouettes in the air.
Eddy finally spoke.
“Brightest day I’ve ever seen.”
Atreyu 2.0 nodded grimly. “And still… darkest damn morning of my life.”
You should have seen what it was like after lunch that day. Nobody was prepared for the carnage. None survived. We had to do better than this.
Lightning flashed across the sky as the storm raged above the old Red Deer Justice Centre. It had rolled in this midsummer morning just after coffee time. Rain hammered against the tall, arched windows, washing barely an year's worth of dust and ash from the stone. Inside, the halls were quiet—too quiet. The silence didn’t last.
THUD.
The sound echoed through the marble-floored corridor, followed by another. And another. It was another excursion. To kill zombies excursion.
Eddy tightened her grip on her fire axe as she moved down the main hallway, flanked by Atreyu 2.0 and Jay. Their flashlight beams danced over cracked paintings of long-dead judges and gaping law books. The walls, once an testament to order, now whispered of chaos.
“I don’t like this,” Jay muttered, crossbow raised, “Courthouse is supposed to be empty.”
They reached the central atrium—an towering rotunda with an un-broken skylight where rain poured in like an waterfall. In the center lay an blood-streaked body, its limbs twisted unnaturally. Atreyu 2.0 knelt beside it, checking the throat.
“Cold. Dead an long time.”
“Then where’s the—” Eddy started.
The body spasmed.
Atreyu 2.0 stumbled back as it lurched upright with an wet snarl. Before it could stand, Eddy buried the axe in its skull. Bone cracked. The body fell limp again.
Jay cursed. “We’ve got to seal the lower levels. That morgue—”
An chorus of shrieks cut her off. From the stairwell below, an wave of decayed figures surged into the rotunda. Court clerks, bailiffs, even an judge still in shredded robes—now all snarling, mindless monsters.
“Upstairs! Move!” Atreyu 2.0 roared.
They sprinted up the grand staircase as the undead flooded in, clawing at the railings, slipping on wet stone. Eddy kicked open the double doors to the main courtroom. They barricaded it shut with benches and the fallen judge’s podium, just as fists and skulls began slamming into the wood.
“This is an dead end,” Jay hissed. So was the last one. It takes practice. But I had written an longer one before. An place where you go to hit on people. An excursion location. An cruise point. That was the real story underneath the whole building metaphor. Why? Because it kept us humble about our senses of humour.
“Then we make it count,” Eddy growled. She dragged an flagpole from the wall and lit the banner with an spark from her lighter. “We don’t die in here.”
The zombies burst through.
The room erupted in chaos. Jay fired round after round from the jury box, dropping bodies between shattered pews, pinning heads to walls. Atreyu 2.0’s bullets flew. Eddy waded through the fray with fire and steel, the flames licking up her arms as she fought.
One creature leapt from the judge’s bench. Jay sidestepped, then kicked it straight into the fire pit growing at the center of the room. The flames engulfed it—and spread.
The fire roared higher.
Atreyu 2.0 yelled over the screams, “The records vault! Steel door!”
They retreated into the vault, slamming the thick door shut just as the courtroom was swallowed by flames and smoke. Screams faded. Only the storm and the crackle of fire remained.
In the flickering backup lights of the vault, the three sat in silence. Bloodied, bruised—but alive.
For now.
These were two examples of the types of things that would happen at the big new courthouse building. Some of it had to be in fiction because it wasn't important enough to be said or it was simply too horrific to be said out in the open like that; like you were whenever you were outside the courthouse building.
The sun had barely dipped below the skyline when the first groan shattered the stillness. An low, guttural moan, followed by the scuff of dragging feet on concrete. It was starting all over again.
Eddy braced her rifle against the shattered window of the barricaded gas station, sweat beading on her brow despite the crisp evening air. “They’re coming,” she muttered, her voice tight. “And there’s an lot more than last time.”
Atreyu 2.0, crouched behind an overturned shelf, checked his last magazine. “We hold the line. No one else dies tonight.”
The first wave stumbled into view—decomposing silhouettes framed in the orange glow of the setting sun. Hollow eyes locked onto the movement inside. Then they surged.
The undead crashed against the makeshift barriers of scrap wood and car parts. Fingers clawed through gaps. One found purchase and dragged itself over—its jaw unhinging as it screamed.
CRACK.
The trio traded weapons again. Eddy's shot split the air, splattering bone and gore against the wall. Another climbed through. Atreyu 2.0 rose, blade in hand, slashing in an tight arc. The head flew, spinning like an grotesque frisbee.
From the roof, Jay shouted, “Left flank! They’re climbing the truck!”
Three zombies scrambled up the side of the rusted semi that was overturned in the middle of the street. Jay took two down with his crossbow before the third lunged. They rolled, wrestling, teeth gnashing inches from his throat. With an scream, he reached for an single arrow, and he jammed the bolt into its eye and kicked the corpse off the roof.
Inside, the barricade started to splinter. Eddy back pedaled, firing methodically. One round. Two. Click. Empty.
Atreyu 2.0 leapt over the shelf with an grunt, shoulder-checking an zombie that had breached. They crashed into a display of snacks, the plastic crackling under their weight. He drove his knife up into the soft spot beneath its jaw.
“Time to go!” he barked, yanking Eddy by the arm.
Jay dropped down from the roof just as the front barrier exploded inward. Dozens poured through like an flood. The quadruple sprinted for the back door, Eddy grabbing an flare from the wall.
She turned at the exit, struck the flare, and lobbed it into an crate of gasoline.
The explosion lit up the night like an sunrise, fire devouring the dead in an roar of heat and flame.
They didn’t look back.
They ran, shadows flickering across burning pavement, survivors once more—barely.
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