zombies & other monsters

by: Q. Random

(Minneapolis, circa 1995?)

 

I hear that someone is picking up girls downtown, killing them and dumping the bodies.

Somebody who's seen a lot of tv, i'd guess, cause they're torching the bodies when they dump them. They obviously know that other folk engaged in their sport have been bagged by advanced forensic techniques, many of which rely on evidence which would likely be destroyed by a fire.

Despite living in a "metropolitan area" of 3 million, I was surprised to hear this. I had thought Minneapolis too midwestern, too rich, and too cold in the winter to support the kind of underworld culture where the monster stalks prey who've strayed too far from the herd -- the emotionally or at least socially wounded, girls who may already be given up for dead by their families, who are so hungry that the promise of a few dollars will overcome their natural fear and entice them to get into a stranger's van. Such an underworld here, if it existed at all, should be too small, too inter-connected by virtue of its six-month indoor nature, to allow the monster to take a victim unnoticed.

When I heard that police thought the killer had picked up prostitutes I thought, "How did he know where to find a hooker? I've never seen one in Minneapolis." Presumably it would look just like it looks in New York and D.C. -- a young girl with too much makeup wearing clothes just a bit beyond the normal racy that young girls wear, standing just far enough apart that they are clearly not together, on a street corner with lots of cars and taxi cabs driving by, slowly, sometimes stopped with a girl leaning in the passenger side window. Basically what you see on tv, only lacking entirely glamour and bravado.

Sometimes, in the manufacturing of the industrial zombie, subtle errors in copying transpire. We have now manufactured a new breed of uber-psycho -- one armed not only with a non-descript cover life, and higher than average intelligence, but also with relatively advanced knowledge about the methods of those who try to protect the innocent and the guilty alike from the torturous grip of a sociopath.

A few weeks ago, they found a man, a transvestite, in the same, dead way. Probably a mistake, the analysts said. The monster normally has a very narrow range of taste in preferred victims -- a taste which seldom crosses hair color, let alone gender.

We really ought to take better care of our invisible people. Some of these girls, and maybe the transvestite, too, had parents who loved them, somewhere, friends who miss them, cats or fish to feed. Almost certainly, they were among the least fortunate, the most helpless. The odds of an invisible person dying from a treatable illness, gunshot, malnutrition, stabbing, drug overdose, domestic abuse, or AIDS are probably higher than the odds of any one of those taking even one member of my entire high school class.

As one of another new breed, the techno-industrial zombie, clinging to the over-world, it is unlikely that I'll ever be the victim of one of these monsters in human form. The most serious problem I've faced lately is that accounting doesn't process expense reports very quickly and I'm always, therefore, loaning money to my employer at zero-percent interest.

I really have no problems, by comparison.