The Exterminator

My father was a bug expert and an exterminator. He always said some phrase like, "Know your enemy," before swamping a house with gas for potato bugs or filling a kitchen with cockroach traps. Unfortunately for me it was a family business and me being his only child it meant that I was going to be a bug hunter too. He took me along whenever I wasn't in school, filling my developing mind with his really odd ethical justifications for his mass murder of any beast deemed not acceptable to be sharing living space with humans. As I became a teenager I fought all the time with him about not following in his footsteps but every option I gave as alternatives were slammed back in my face. I would then be told,

"Don't fight your lot in society Son, embrace it. We're exterminators, it's what we do, it's what we'll always do. You think you can escape it but you can't. It's your destiny."

It was pretty fucking depressing to be told at eighteen that your lot in life was to murder thousands upon thousands of small often defenceless creatures just because they don't come under the 'pet' banner. Anything marked icky, sticky, slimy or smelly must face the penalty of death. I planned to escape this as soon as I could. Just as soon as the old man retired I planned to sell up and getting the hell out of there. Hopefully quick enough to not see the look of disappointment on his face.

Then he died. Likely cause was overexposure to toxic poisons used in the killing of small animals. I was overjoyed, not for the loss of my Pop of course, he was a good man aside from the killing. I was overjoyed at the thought of not having to be an exterminator and not every having to see that look of disappointment in his eyes when he found out wasn't joining the family tradition. Shallow and heartless this maybe but I believe a man should get to choose his own destiny, not have it mapped out for him. Of course I was completely wrong. I was more wrong about almost everything I just said than I could have ever possibly imagined.

You see Ma wanted Pop in the house before he was buried so people could come and pay their respects. I was surprised how many people came, I guess ridding houses of 'roaches, mice and other such creatures really made him a popular person with the local community. It was early evening the day before the funeral and the last of the well-wishers, if that's the right term, had gone and Ma was out getting groceries for the guests due to arrive in the morning. I was sat watching TV, absorbing the light without taking any of the content in when a crash came from the room Pop was lying in. I got up to see what had happened, really not looking forward to having to right an upturned coffin, only to be halted by the sound of shuffling steps coming from the room. I figured Ma was back so I called out to see if she needed a hand with the groceries. No response, just more shuffling. As I went to sit back down muttering to myself the door creaked open and there was Pop. He was stood there in his best suit, the suit he'd been lying in the last couple of days, the suit he was due to be buried in tomorrow.

For a brief fleeting moment I thought it's all been a mistake he was just really tired and had been asleep all this time. Then I remembered the autopsy and how that might have maybe stopped there being such a huge sleep/death confusion. The next few moments were a bit of a blur. I know I yelled, "ZOMBIE!" I also know that I picked up the magazine rack, the most weapon like thing to hand and stoved his head in with it. Having seen many zombie films over the years I guess instinct kicked in, I wasn't about to join the ranks of the undead. I won't go into the details of the conversation I had with Ma when she came back from the store but needless to say it was two hours before the news started to back up my apparently insane tale. Zombies were appearing everywhere it seemed. I just want to add at this point, if I seem at all callous or not too bothered about the death and reanimation of my father it is because I am. I saw more things dead, dying or about to die in the first few years of my life than anyone should over the entire course of it. Death surrounded our household and lives. This combined with a probably more than healthy obsession with cheap ass horror films has probably wiped any tactful, empathetic or even normal human views on the expired and recently reanimated corpse of even a close relative. It was not long after this that, were Pop still alive, he would revel in the joy that I finally realised I was an exterminator just like he was.

You see there was no human mass extinction that you get in the movies. There were no scant groups of survivors eking out a life in remote outposts. There were no great swarms of the undead passing through cities munching on the brains of all who were in their path. There was panic, sure, who wouldn't freak the fuck out when Uncle Joe staggers back to the house after escaping the morgue and starts trying to eat the pet cat on the porch. But after a while the panic stopped and people got on with their lives albeit with the general annoyance of the continued threat of the living dead. There are a few reasons that there was no mass extinction of people and plagues of zombies everywhere. Firstly we either burn or bury our dead pretty fucking deep so it ain't that easy for them to get up and start wandering around. Which leads on to the point that we don't often have large numbers of dead bodies just lying around waiting for god knows what to happen. Next we have the fact that zombies are pretty stupid. Strike that, really stupid. I mean I know door wedges that could outsmart one of these shuffling rot bags. They don't work together, communicate or plan they just wander about without any sense of direction or thought. I saw one walk straight into a car wash once. Torn apart by those big flappy roller things. So if living people can't outsmart something with the intelligence of a piece of crockery maybe we deserve to get munched. Also, while I admit they do have an insatiable desire to eat brains, they don't just want human brains, just whatever comes their way. You're more likely to see one of these things eat a dead raccoon by the side of the road as you are a person. There are many other reasons too but aside from all these there is a massive warning whenever one is nearby, they fucking reek. They smell so bad that only people with no sense of smell could ever be snuck up on and even then the flies that accompany these stench magnets would give them away. They're corpses, all dead things smell really bad and get covered in flies, natures way of saying, "Stay the fuck away from me, I'm dead and rotting."

So people survived and, for them most part got on with their lives. There was no need for armies or marshal law. I mean, there were a few changes we had to get used to. A picnic in the park was less often ruined my midges and ants and more likely ruined by a stinky zombie turning up uninvited. There was also the odd idiot who would take the risk showing off around one and get bitten. This of course was fatal but it took a couple of weeks to bring someone down. Probably not an easy thing to deal with as a family but then don't go fucking around things that have the sole purpose of eating you. Survival of the fittest, or least idiotic and all.

It was in this new society that this family career that for so long I'd tried to avoid became the best job I could have had. All I had to do was add zombies to the list of things I would willingly kill to make your home a better place. At first business was good, almost too good. I would get seven of eight calls a day, I was getting calls from all over not just the town but the whole county. I was the zombie exterminator king. After a year or so it was like I had become a local celebrity. I was on local TV, radio, people would stop to get a picture of me in the street if I was in my overalls. Life was great. The job itself was a piece of cake. Stinking, rotting zombie cake. Most calls were from families who, upon leaving the house, would find a corpsey wanderer scraping at the door. They call, I show up, BANG, dead undead, family go to work/school/church, money in pocket. Sometime one of the bastards would get into the crawl space under the house and get wedged in and I'd have to dig the stinker out. I learnt very quickly to dispatch these swines first before trying to work them free. Even with gloves and thick overalls these things are a bit too bity to handle. It was always nice when the cops or some other rescue crew would call, usually to some road accident but every now and then a crime scene, where the victims had suddenly got up and start wandering about. You see I had a licence for this, cops, regardless of guns, didn't. Also if they shoot it they have to write a report, dispose of it etc. or call me, who does it all neatly for a very small fee. Life was good.

Of course this was all fleeting. Regulations surrounding the disposal of the not yet reanimated became far more stringent to help resolve the zombie problem and the frequency of the living dead on loose became a nothing figure. I was back to doing bugs and rodents. I was still liked, if not as popular in the community but there was something much less fun about killing things had hadn't already died. I found myself thinking about selling up yet again.

Then came Rick's Zombie Dispatch, exterminator of all things dead or undead. Now given the lack of work one zombie pest controller had I struggled to believe the town or even county would have enough have two staying afloat financially. I took a trip to his office, caught him just as he was leaving. I told him of the lack of work, explained that he might want to expand his pest list or even change the line of work entirely. He told me business was good, then just to rub my face in it a little produced his invoice list. Over two weeks he had one hundred and forty calls. That was more per day than I had had in my busiest ever period. Where were these stinkers roaming in from and why was he getting all the calls? I did my best to tail him undercover, difficult when your pick-up has a five foot plastic 'roach fastened to the roof.

I watched him show up at Old Man Peters's place. Sure enough, outside the porch is a walking worm farm staggering from window to window. Rick walked up with this pole with a noose attached to it, fastens said noose around the shuffler's neck and dragged him to a box on the his van and threw him in. He then collected his money and drove off. I marched up to Peters and ask him why he never called me to get the stinking zombie off his porch. He came back with this story of how he'd only just received a card from Rick's Zombie Dispatch the day before and thought he'd try the new guy out, you know to see what he's like. Peters also let slip, none too casual either that he was cheaper and didn't stink of corpse when he turned up. I decide not to rough up the old man for his very unsubtle dig at my personal hygiene. Just to clarify, when you spend all day hacking and smashing up puss filled stench bags all day I challenge you to smell like a deodorant salesman. But this got me thinking, why did Ricky-boy not stink? He's supposed to be doing more ghoul dispatching than I ever did, yet still smells fresh. Things didn't add up.

I followed that jerk about for three days. Each time he left he did a neat little route to his call outs, lock 'em up and move on. I had to stay back due to my extremely spotible vehicle but I always caught him up just as he was walking another one away from some house with a cheque in hand and a smile on his face that said 'suckers'. My suspicions were risen enough to make me think this sham of an exterminator was committing the worse crime someone in our ethically dubious career could do. He was catching and planting. He had to be, it was the only solution. This would occasionally happen when someone wanted to try and get in on the action when Pop ran the show a few years before. What these lowlifes would do is fly-tip a whole area with their ads and then release all manner of pests though peoples doors and windows a night and wait for the calls to come rolling in. Then, here's the real sneaky bit, they'd use humane traps, catch back what they released in the first place and then do the whole thing again further up the road. As I said, lowest of the low. And this had to be what Ricky-boy was doing. I aimed to put a stop to this quick smart.

So as I caught him up for the eighth or ninth job of his day I make no attempt to hide my arrival. Sure enough there he is, about to lasso some stinker while the helpless family look on from behind the window. He gets the noose on and urges the family out to admire his handy work and collect his bill. That was when I took my chance. I admit my language may have been a tad colourful for the kids in that family but what I said had to be said, especially before them poor deluded people handed their money to this con artist. Of course he argued against this, suggesting I was a lunatic and he knew nothing about my rantings. It was about this point when I suggested he wasn't even an exterminator, more a catcher and that his truck was full of live squirming brain munchers ready for release on some other unsuspecting house of fools. After this last accusation he flew at me a bit, almost let go of the confused dead thing at the end of his pole. In retrospect I wished he had of as that would have saved me an heap of embarrassment.

He flung the keys of his truck at me, told me to go open it, see for myself. So, still thinking I am right as right, I march up and open up that sucker prepared as I am for some horrorshow of undead creepies in there. This however is not what I find at all. Before I can fully check what I found I puked, a lot. The smell that hit me from inside that box on the back of his truck was like a kick to the balls. I'd never smelt a dead thing that bad before, or since come to mention it. Once I regained some control and was able to clear the puke tears from my eyes I saw that there was the biggest pile of zombie mush I had ever seen, nothing alive or undead, just mush. As I tried to come to terms with what I had just seen and smelt Rick strolled up with his latest catch chucks it in and closes the lid. It's then that I hear the crunching, squelching sounds of a corpse being trash compacted. I then had to listen to this jerkoff tell explain to me, in front of pretty much the whole neighbourhood by this point, what I had already figured out. Although he did point out that he was so damn cheap because the mushed up zombies made the best fertilizer the world had ever known and he made more money off that alone than he'd make in five years of just exterminating. This was a low point for me.

I started to just refer the few calls I still got on to Rick and his one man zombie slaying factory with added fertilizer shop, he'd won. I would have gone to tell him this but the bastard put a restraining order on me after my outburst at him. Now a normal person would have moved on, found something else to do, left it at that. However, as I should have established by now I am not a normal person. I decided, restraining order or not I want that chump to know what I thought of him and his machine. I had loved my job, I might have been somewhat random with my choice of tools and techniques but I was damn good at busting up the skulls of the undead. It didn't matter if I used a putter, a shovel or a baseball bat I got the job done. It took the best part of a bottle of bourbon before I was able to so eloquently compose a note which read, "Fuck you Rick, and your fucking machine and your fucking fertilizer. You are a dick Rick." Proud of my ode to that which I loathed I stumbled over to his office to plant my words upon his desk.

When I got to the office I broke in rather heavy handedly setting off a few alarms. I decided to quickly set the note down and leave before the cops showed up. It was about this time that I decide to take a nap the chair next to the desk in order to be rested up for my escape. I am not a wise drunk.

I woke up in the cell the next day, I felt sick and remembered nothing past the note planting and chair dozing. An officer stepped up to the bars, "The Judge will see you now, you sick bastard." Before I had risen he stopped me, "Not you rummy, the other zombie killing schmuck." I watched as from the other side of the cell Rick got up and was walked away. This would turn out to be the last time I saw him except in a newspaper or magazine article.

Later that day I got off with a warning for my breaking and entering. This might sound like it was a light sentence but given the circumstances it was deemed fair by all in court. You see Rick was right, there was a lot of money to be made in zombie fertiliser. A lot. So much in fact that when the zombies in his home town dried up because of careful corpse handling he got a might frustrated. So he moved away in the hope of finding another hotspot. He didn't, it seemed everyone had gotten on top of the situation. He had to come up with something, and he did the sick little puppy. Seems like Ricky caught onto the idea that if he kept one dead muncher in his cellar and got a bunch of homeless guys around every few days he'd end up with lots of zombies to turn into fertiliser. He also figured that if he just kept showing up at the farming wholesale place with no real reason for the heap of dead things he'd got questions would be raised. So he'd get them turned, drop them off around the town and round them up the next day. It was all going so well until some drunk idiot set off the alarms to his place and fell asleep there. Right in front of a cage of hobos halfway to becoming pre-mushed fertiliser. Poor Rick turned just as the cops were putting it all together. Rick now has a special little room where people only look at him through a tiny window and post his food through a slot in the door. I believe his next opportunity for parole is in 367 years time. If he behaves.

And me? I still get the odd undead pest to destroy and the fertiliser line has supplemented my income quite a bit. Of course not as much at the TV interviews and book deals I got for exposing the Zombie Hobo Farm. I might be part time but whenever someone asks, "What do you do?" I always reply, "I'm an exterminator, just like my Pop."