Match 22709 Frankenstein's Monster and The Bride (Frankenstein) vs. Zeus (Army of the Dead) and Athena The Zombie Queen

[Culwych1]

The Green Death: Chapter 7 - UNALIVE!!!

Continued from: 

• Part 1: Killer Croc vs King Shark
• Part 2: Zombie Spider-Man vs Vampire Batman
• Part 3: Brainiac vs Iron Man
• Part 4: The Tenth Doctor vs John Constantine
• Part 5: Interlude – Chaos vs Discord
• Part 6: Mordius vs Sabretooth

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When the apocalypse came, it came not from the skies or with a ranging fire as was prophesied. It came instead invisibly, transmitting from person to person, without any symptoms and without any pain until it was too late. The Green Death they called it; after the gentle hue of the skin of the infected, and our greatest minds could do nothing to stop or even slow it. 

Every mammal was infected, even the aliens. Human, Kryptonian, Amazonian, Asgardian or Mutant; they nearly all fell. It spread quicker that we could have anticipated, seeming to transmit as quickly by water as it could by air or touch. Our leaders and heroes were gone before we even knew there was a danger, and the world seemed to turn on itself. Countries blamed each other, or pointed the finger at outsiders and what the virus had not ravaged, we destroyed ourselves. Nukes, lasers, and energy blasts levelled cities, and the skies burned red with the fires of destruction.

And just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, it did. The Green Death wasn't finished with us yet. From the mass graveyards and condemned houses, the dead rose once again. They shuffled, walked and ran, driven by a primordial need to consume flesh. Mindlessly they hunted us down and dragged us kicking and screaming out of our hiding places and ripped us to shreds. 

About one in a one thousand of us was immune, and we banded together in small groups to see out this apocalypse. In the ruined husks of our great cities, we run, hide, forage, and die.

This is our life now. 

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When the apocalypse came, Frankenstein’s monster felt almost relieved.

Not happy. Never happy. Happiness seemed to be something men were born with, but not him. Relieved, yes. Because at last the world had fallen and seen the true ugliness that it has always thought was him.

The world had always hated him. Now it hated everything.

The cities were burned bones. The roads were black veins across a dead land. The sky hung low and grey, swollen with smoke from fires that had never properly gone out. In the ruins of civilisation, the dead wandered and the living hid, and the great Creature moved between both worlds as something neither side truly understood.

Beside him walked the Bride.

Tall, pale, silent, beautiful in the way lightning is beautiful when it strikes a church.

Her black hair rose in wild streaks from her head, white lightning frozen inside it. Her eyes were bright and terrible. She walked with dignity through the filth of the world, stepping over corpses as though crossing a ballroom floor.

The Green Death had not taken them. How could it? They were not alive enough to die. Nor dead enough to rise.

They were something else.

Unalive.

The Creature liked that word. He had found it painted on the side of an overturned army truck months ago, sprayed there by some survivor with a sense of humour and no future.

UNALIVE!!!

Three exclamation marks.

He had stared at it for a long time. Then he had laughed until the Bride placed one long hand on his arm and told him, without words, that enough was enough.

Now they lived in the wasteland beyond Las Vegas, where the desert had swallowed the roads and the dead shuffled beneath a sun that looked diseased.

They had made a home in an old roadside chapel. The roof was half gone, the pews smashed for firewood, and the crucifix above the altar hung sideways as though even God had lost interest. But the walls were thick, and the dead rarely came this far in numbers.

The Creature had built a gate from car doors, fencing, and the ribcage of a tour bus. The Bride had planted flowers in rusted tins.

Nothing grew.

Still, every morning she watered them. That was love, he thought. Was it?

Not the success of the growing flowers, or the beauty they held, but the attempt. That attempt, whether beauty was captured or not, was love.

On the day everything changed, the Creature was dragging a dead deer back from the highway.

It was thin and rotten, but not yet spoiled beyond use. They did not need food in the way humans had, but hunger still lived in them like an old memory. He could eat. She sometimes did. More often she watched him with faint amusement, as though he were a dog worrying at a boot.

He was halfway to the chapel when the desert went quiet.

That was the first warning.

The dead made noise. Always. Even alone, they groaned and clicked and dragged themselves across stone. The wind made noise too, scratching sand against metal, whispering through broken signs.

Now there was nothing.

The Creature dropped the deer.

He turned slowly.

Far out across the cracked highway, figures were walking toward him.

Not shuffling.

Walking.

That was wrong.

The ordinary dead had no grace. They lurched and stumbled, puppets pulled by hunger. These moved with purpose.

The first figure who approached was huge, broad-shouldered, grey-skinned, and powerful. His body was marked with scars and old wounds, yet he carried himself like a king crossing his own hall.

Beside him walked a woman.

The Creature felt the Bride appear behind him before he heard her. She had come from the chapel silently, drawn by the same unnatural stillness.

The woman approaching them was dead, but not broken. She wore the remnants of a life that had once been savage and regal. Her eyes were bright with intelligence, and something like cruelty. Her mouth curled faintly as she saw the Bride, as if recognising a rival before a word had been spoken.

The Creature rumbled deep in his chest.

The Bride placed a hand against him.

Wait.

So he waited.

The dead king stopped twenty feet away.

For a moment no one moved.

Four impossible beings stood beneath the poisoned sky. Two made by science, stitched together from corpses and lightning. Two made by infection, raised from death into something stronger and stranger than the mindless hordes.

The king looked at the chapel.  Then at the gate. Then at the Bride.

Finally he looked at the Creature and smiled. It was not a friendly smile. It was the smile of one predator finding another in his territory.

The Creature spoke first.

“Go.”

His voice was thick, heavy, rusted by disuse.

The dead king tilted his head.

The woman beside him made a sound low in her throat, almost laughter.

The Creature stepped forward.

“Go,” he said again.

The king answered with a RROOOAAAARR that rolled across the desert like thunder.

The Creature hesitated, but the Bride moved then.

Not back. Forward.

Her pale dress dragged through the dust as she came to stand beside the Creature. She looked at the dead queen, and the dead queen looked back. There was no more doubt that there would be no negotiation nor diplomacy here today.

In the remnants of a broken world plagued with unspeakable horrors, four unalive beings launched themselves at each other with nothing but death on their minds.

 

[Callisto]

Learn More About
Frankenstein's Monster
Read more about Frankenstein's Monster at Wikipedia
Official Site: Public Domain Links: Wikipedia NLM Frankenstein Exhibit Mary Shelley's Dream

The Bride (Frankenstein)
Read more about The Bride (Frankenstein) at Wikipedia
Official Site: Universal Pictures Links: Headhunter's Horror House Universal Monsters Wiki Wikipedia

Zeus (Army of the Dead)
Read more about Zeus (Army of the Dead) at Wikipedia
Official Site: Netflix Links: Wikipedia

Athena The Zombie Queen
Read more about Athena The Zombie Queen at Wikipedia
Official Site: Netflix Links: Wikipedia

[Venom 2009]

Good match. I'm voting the Frankenstein couple.

[JohnnyChany]

Incredible stuff, @Culwych1. Curious to see what you pull in next.

[Boratz]

Awesome stuff!

[Callisto]

Match Final Results

Member Ratings:
5.00 - SSJRuss
5.00 - Boratz
5.00 - Venom 2009
5.00 - JohnnyChany

FPA Calculation:
4 Total Votes cast
20.00 Total Combined Score
20.00 / 4 = 5.00 Final Rating on the match

MATCH SCORE
The Bride (Frankenstein) and Frankenstein's Monster: 5
Athena The Zombie Queen and Zeus (Army of the Dead): 0