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[benchilada]

        As if my overnight delivery of My brother Matthew’s Funny-As-All-Fuck FWMA submission was somehow not enough for you bastards.

        You see, ages ago, I dreamt of a properly-done version of The Legend of the Golden Vampires, aka The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula:

    In mine, we utilize classic superhero team-up rules: the Taoist priests and Shaolin monks battle Dracula, whilst Catholic priests go mano-a-mano against Chinese “hopping corpses.” Sadly, I know this is a project with severely limited appeal…after all, few people know what a hopping corpse looks like.

    This is them here:

            Unlike Western vampires, they’re generally the result of inauspicious burial, or disturbing of their graves, or general bad luck. They have enormous fingernails and don’t really drink blood, they just kill you—some say they suck your life out, but whatever. They can’t detect you if you aren’t breathing, and those yellow slips of paper on their heads are Mao-Shan sect Taoist sutras that hold them in place, even make them obey, if the corpse isn’t too strong-willed.
            Anyway, this project has bubbled in my head for years, and for right now I’m doing it as a prose version, but somewhere in my dreams, Film Workshop is already shooting. Maybe I owe them a treatment. Hell, I *know* I do.
            In any event, here are the two halves I have right now. One has been posted, in part, before.
            These are long. I find myself not giving a shit.

Cantonese, Motherfucker, Do You Speak It?

             Brother Chan Wei’s lightfoot kung-fu took him to the top of the stone stairway in three weightless steps. Even though he was the fastest of all the Shaolin monks, he could still hear his pursuer directly behind him when he reached the landing. Dipping his torso forward, he pivoted on the ball of his left foot and swung his right leg in a high arc, spinning to catch his opponent directly in the side of the head.

Wei watched as his foot passed straight through the white man’s head, which stirred briefly, as though made of smoke. A pale hand shot up with almost imperceptible speed and grabbed the monk’s ankle. Hopelessly off-balance, Wei felt himself being lifted off the stones and effortlessly cast to the side. He grabbed the railing of the balcony and pulled himself back to his feet as his assailant took to the air in a flying kick. He looks so elegant, Wei had a moment to reflect, in his impeccable black suit and his velvet-lined cape

Wei felt the man’s foot brush his cheek as he leapt to the side and into the hallway. He recovered quickly and unleashed a barrage of mantis strikes to the man’s vital points, but to no avail. Instead, the man simply dropped into a horse stance, grabbed Wei’s wrist and cast him over the balcony. He twisted in midair but was unable to completely recover before he smashed into the ground, where he felt his left arm shatter on impact. The white man walked to the center of the balcony and looked down at his foe, obviously pleased with his own performance.

“You see, monk,” he said, his thick accent dripping off of every word, “I have not hidden in this country for sixty years vithout learning a few new tricks,”

Scarcely had the words left his lips when Brother Li Fan, who had snuck down the hallway, struck the man from behind with a pair of iron cudgels. The Romanian went   tumbling over the balcony, his spine obviously broken. Fan looked down and watched the man’s body shrink and blacken just before hitting the ground.

The bat flew ten feet up and suddenly erupted into human form again. He plummeted downwards, his feet aimed at Chan Wei’s already broken arm.  His cape flapping behind him, he laughed as he fell. Wei quickly rolled to the side, breathing deeply to ignore the excruciating pain this caused. Vlad landed hard on the floor, chips of stone and a cloud of dust flying from where the monk had been laying a fraction of a second earlier.

Wei spun onto his right side, and attempted a low kick, trying to knock the Count to the floor. The kick lacked the power, however, and merely staggered his foe. Li Fan reacted quickly and leapt off the balcony towards the wall. He pulled his knees close to his chest and when he was close enough, he fired his legs out and bounced from the wall directly at the Count, both fists extended.

Vlad clapped his palms together, and with lighting speed snaked then between Li Fan’s approaching arms, driving them apart. The Count’s head thrust forward, crushing Fan’s nose and dropping him to the ground beside Wei. Vlad drew back a mighty fist to strike Fan but was blinded by a storm of yellow strips of paper, each covered in blood red symbols. He stumbled backwards until one strip stuck to his forehead, and he found himself frozen in place.

“Though you may be more refined than most, you are still but a hopping corpse to me,” said Chuang Chi, the Mao Shan Taoist Master. He drew a sword made entirely of coins from the belt of his yellow robes and pointed it at the Count, whose body had begun to shake. “Do not fight; I am here but to send you to the next world.” With that, the talisman on the Count’s head burst into flames and fell from his face.

“Old Priest,” he replied in Cantonese as he rubbed the burn on his forehead, “your pagan ways cannot undo my power.”

“Come, then, Tepes, and we shall see.”

 

 That's Part One. This is Part Two.

 Stupid Pagans and Their Stupid Arrrrrggghh!!!

            The villagers had told Father Louis Byron, in their grubby peasant accents, where he could find the “trapped unclean bodies.” Every time he thought this wretched little pagan land couldn’t get any worse, he came across stories like this.

            There were three of them, the locals had said, who had continued to walk after death. Two were buried in contrary positions to Feng Shui and Taoist traditions, they explained, and a third had been murdered by a jealous brother, who was still at large. Since their local…“priest”…had been unable to properly subdue them, the village had managed to corner and restrain them in a cave near the Daoshui River. The people had refused to tell the priest what that meant.

            As he walked down the sloping hillside, he couldn’t help but notice what a beautiful land China was. On the other side of the water, a tiny old man used a dog and a stick to move a half-dozen pigs across the grass. Upstream, a young girl was poling her way down the river, loudly singing a folk song about Yu Boya. If they stopped serving things like fried kidney and white fungus, he could almost picture himself settling down here to teach the Word of The Christ. He would take a native wife, and they would raise their son a Christian, to carry on the Word when he himself passed on.

            The Father’s interlude was interrupted by his discovery of a large Buddha statue. Its face was weathered, giving it a sort of anonymous dignity. Just beyond his vine-covered stomach was the opening to a cave. A few goats were tied to a wooden post outside of it, presumably as offerings. He grimaced at the local customs, and opening his leather satchel, went into the cave.

            It was damp, but not cold, and the reflection of the sun off the nearby water was enough to give the cave a dim light.. Before long, he knew what they had meant when they said “trapped.” In a central room were three piles of massive stones, each rock at least twenty pounds. Around the edges, bits of dark cloth were sticking out. It was time for Father Byron to see how true the local superstitions were. He checked the pulse of each body, stunned to find that their skin temperatures appeared to be lower than that of the air around them. He began to remove stones from around their faces, studying the strange slips of paper that were draped across each one’s face—yellow paper, with modified Chinese characters written in what appeared to be blood. Each sheet was affixed to the corpse’s forehead through some unknown means.

            After checking their teeth and fingernails, he knew what he had to do. He went to the smallest of the three first. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and death had given his skin an unnatural blue pallor. Father Byron reached into his bag and withdrew a thin piece of oak and a furniture-maker’s mallet, intended for pounding dovetail joints into place.

            Placing the shaft of wood over the center of the young man’s chest, the Father puffed out his own as he inhaled deeply.

            “Tu autem effugare, diabole, appropinquabit enim judicium Dei!” he cried, and brought the hammer down upon the end of his stake. It easily slid into place, finding it’s sheath in what was once a beating, loving heart. Then the priest leapt back in surprise as the body didn’t crumble into so much ash.

            He fumbled for a metal phial of holy water and sprinkled it across the body. While it sizzled where it hit, it certainly didn’t seem to be doing as much damage as it should have. Indeed, when he uncovered part of a second one—this time a man clearly in his eighties—and pressed his crucifix against the palm of its hand…there was no reaction at all.

            Something was wrong here…were their devilish rites somehow protecting these dead from Judgment? There could be no other answer. He tore apart the red threads that were wrapped about the old man’s body and kicked at the mound of dry rice that he alone had been laid atop. As a final gesture, he spat upon and tore apart the yellow paper that had been mysteriously adhered across the man’s countenance.

            Stones flew across the room, several knocking Byron to the ground, as the old body leapt from its supine position straight into an upright stand. It sniffed at the air, glanced briefly at its two companions, then raised its arms directly in front of itself. It began leaping towards the priest, its feet staying firmly together, most of its joints frozen in rigor mortis.

            While not a young man, Louis’s savate was still accurate, and he unleashed a few chassé bas at the hopping corpse’s legs. Each kick landed squarely on his opponents thighs, kicking up a cloud of dust, but neither seemed to have any noticeable effect. A fierce croisé tête to the old man’s face managed to knock him to the ground, but as Father Byron leapt to crush him with his feet, the body once again fired into an upright position, knocking the priest to the ground.

            There were the sounds of small explosions, and Louis noticed that the others had struggled free of their bonds, the yellow slips of paper now blowing in the breeze around them. They were between him and the entrance, but that mattered little, for he knew that both of his legs were broken.

            “Suicide is a sin, you horrible things, so you won't get that satisfaction out of me! Know ye this—as I die, that burning you feel is the rage of the Lord in my veins!” he screamed, as the hopping corpses fell on him as one.

            If they felt any burning, they didn’t mention it.

b

Current Music: “Syndir Guðs (Live)” – Sigur Ros
Last Book I Read a Page of: The Third Policeman, Flan O’Brian
Last Movie: Serenity (2005, USA, Science Fiction)
Next Movie: Sansho the Bailiff (1956, Japan, Historical Drama)