Skeleton Army

Here’s a rough, rough draft of a little something I’ve been working on regarding how exactly an undead army operates. Enjoy!

Skeleton Army

The first thing I did when I got pulled out of the grave to be in Skeleton Army was to cough up some dust. Which another skeleton told me was really what was left of my skin and stuff. Thanks. Good way to wake up after being dead for…I don’t know. However long it takes to go from a guy made out of skin and stuff and turn into a skeleton. And maybe I’d already been a skeleton for a long time. It was hard to tell.
Some of the guys still had skin and stuff. But they mostly didn’t stick around. We’re called skeleton army because we’re skeletons, so the last thing you want to do is try and fit in with a bunch of extra skin and stuff. You just look like an asshole.
After I got out of the grave, some skeleton guy handed me a shovel and told me to start digging out other skeletons.
I wish I could tell you which skeleton it was. But seriously, if you think it’s hard to tell like a Korean guy and a Chinese guy apart, imagine telling from just skeletons. It’s impossible. Almost everyone’s got the same stuff. The teeth, you can tell from those sometimes, but that’s about it Well, until some of the skeletons started drawing eyebrows on their heads because they thought it looked meaner. But that didn’t happen for a while yet.

~

I started digging. I didn’t really know what was going on, so I figured whatever other people were doing was good.
The thing about Skeleton Army, none of us really know what we’re doing. Or why. I asked another skeleton. I said, Hey buddy, do you remember anything from being alive? He said no. Then he said t makes sense because we don’t have brains.
It took me a long time to think, Hey, but we don’t have any stuff besides bones. How can we do anything? I mean you still need a brain to figure out how you don’t need a brain, right?
The thing about Skeleton Army, you don’t ask a lot of questions. One guy kind of is in charge. Then you just do what he says.
So if you ever see a bunch of skeletons just milling around, just pull over and tell them to do something. Say, “You boneheads were supposed to be finished painting that house two hours ago.”
Make sure you call them boneheads and stuff like that because that helps skeleton army think you’re in charge. And if you make it sound evil, like “You boneheads were supposed to paint that house of evil two hours ago” nobody will ask questions.

~

After we were digging for a while some skeletons brought back these topless girls for us to sex on. That was pretty cool. You have to understand, it was a different time. You know how like, maybe your grandma uses a bad word for black people? Not the worst word, but pretty close, but everyone would just say “Well, things were different back then”?
Things were different back then. A skeleton bringing you some lady from a village where he killed her father and burned his corpse was a nice thing to do. And we had really bad words for black people. Like even worse than your grandma’s.
We took the topless village woman down to this crypt. We thought about doing sex stuff with her in the crypt, but we opened it and it wasn’t very romantic in there unless you were a spider. Mostly it was dark. And you’re not supposed to say this in skeleton army, but it was scary. There were weird stone gargoyles and stuff in there. No thanks. A snake came out of a skull’s eye! Not a sex-doing place, crypts.
We went off to the side of the crypt instead. This one skeleton grabbed the topless villager and  said, We got plans for you, girly-girl.
Then everyone kind of stopped.
See, we didn’t really think about how we didn’t have dicks anymore. Not until right then. Well, one skeleton thought about it, but he said that he thought a dick had a bone in it that made it hard, so once he saw the topless girl the dick bone would pop out. We argued for a long time about whether dicks had bones in them and if they didn’t why were they called boners, and sometime around when someone said fingernails weren’t made of nails, we realized the topless villager had escaped.
I tried to come up with a good pun about boner, like a boner being a mistake and a penis, but it took me too long and everyone dispersed by the time I came up with something.

~

We got everyone dug up. Pretty much everyone. It’s kind of hard to tell.
You’d think it would be a lot of work, but what you don’t know is that burying someone 6 feet deep wasn’t really a thing back when. Or if it was, nobody was keeping track. This one guy, he wasn’t even covered all the way. Half his leg was out in the open air. Graveyard owner was probably a sweet gig back then. It’s not like anyone would know if you were screwing around out there. I bet that 6 feet thing was something a graveyard guy invented because he didn’t want to admit he was just tossing bodies in the river. “Sure, you can dig up your old dead grandma. Just a heads up, she’s 6 feet down.” There’s nothing you could do to my grandma that could get me to dig out a hole 6 feet deep. Bury her, don’t bury her, throw her in a river, dress her in clown makeup and have sex with the corpse. You might as well bury her on the moon.
After we got dug out the word was we were going to attack a castle to get a book. That didn’t go over too well. Not a lot of readers in this crowd. Let’s just put it that way.
But the leader guy, who looked like a burned up mummy when you take the bandages off, said fine. If you don’t want to go get a book, we can go steal a magic potion or a haunted ox cart. He said if we wanted to go attack the castle to get the haunted ox cart, the one thing was we’d have to pull the cart ourselves once we killed all the people at the castle. A skeleton asked if we could kill all the people and not kill all the animals so then an ox could pull the cart. The leader said no. Then the skeleton asked if we could kill the ox ,bury his bones, and then dig him up when he was a skeleton ox, and THEN could he pull the cart. The leader said no. So we decided screw that because even skeletons don’t want to pull a cart.

Someone asked if we could storm a castle to get an enchanted sword or a dagger or something. An evil hammer.

We decided to go after the potion. Why not, right? At least a potion does something. You drink it, then some shit happens. Or it doesn’t, but at least you drank a potion, which isn’t too bad for a Saturday.
We had to recruit an undead wizard to go get the potion because wizards are the only ones who know what to do with potions. Even I know that because when I was a kid we used to make potions out of stuff around the house. Whatever liquids and worms and stuff like that. Then you would have the dog drink it. Most of the time nothing happened, but one time the dog did transform from a dog into a dead version of a dog. Our potions didn’t work, but that’s because we weren’t wizards.

Can I tell you something? I hate wizards. They’re real pieces of shit.
Wizards are pricks. Most of them I’m pretty sure don’t do magic. They just look into a picture frame wit no picture in it and say it’s a mystical viewing portal and they can see battles happening and stuff. “Yes, I’ll manipulate the weather now so it rains fire on the enemy castle.” Meanwhile all the guys are getting their asses kicked, but the king doesn’t know because he’s like a hundred days of walking away from the battle, so by the time he figures out they lost and nobody ever helped with fire or a dragon, the wizard is long gone because he used a vanishing spell, which is what he calls a bunch of curtains tied together to make a long rope so he can get down out of the castle.
The first wizard didn’t even have a walking staff. Or a penis staff because she was a girl. A girl wizard. Can you imagine?
The biggest problem wasn’t that she was a girl. It was that she was correcting people all the time. Like if you said, “I’m doing good” she would say, “No, you’re doing well.” Nobody said either of those things because we’re in Skeleton Army and this sucks, but it’s just an example of the stuff she would say.
Four of us skeletons sat at a table and the wizards would come in and answer questions. The lady wizard, she was all sass. It was almost like she didn’t even want to do wizard stuff. She just wanted to hurt our feelings. So we made her go away and said it was because her hair sucked.
The next wizard had a cloak on with moons and stars and stuff. It was a little closer, but he didn’t have a walking staff either. The first question we always asked was if the wizard had a walking staff, and if he didn’t would he be willing to get one.
Guys, it’s not that hard. A walking staff is just a piece off an old tree. Just go get up in a tree and kick a bunch of branches down. Then glue a rock on the top that’s your Mystical Gem Of All-Seeing and everything’s golden.
The last wizard had a walking staff, so we took him right away.
There were some other wizards waiting for their turn, and we told them they had to leave. We said they could stay if they wanted to be turned into bones and be in Skeleton Army, but they all left. It would have been nice if they’d at least made it seem like a hard choice. I mean, we’re skeletons, and when we asked if they wanted to be skeletons with us, they didn’t even pretend for one second.

~
The potion thing was a disaster. We kind of figured it would be, but it was even more disaster than we thought.
For one thing, nobody really thought about how to get in a castle. Sure, we’ve all seen the castle movies where there’s a big huge fight outside. But it always seems like they send people to outside and then everyone just fights.
When we got to the potion castle, they just stayed inside. They didn’t come out to fight at all.  That was a problem because, and this is another thing about castles, it was big and made out of rocks, so we couldn’t just kick down the back door and go inside.
The first plan we had was called Fuck it, we’ll just wait. For that plan, we would just wait outside until they ran out of food and water and stuff. Skeleton Army doesn’t eat anything except once in a while when somebody eats something on a dare or to be funny. But you can only eat so many rocks before you chip a tooth, and when you don’t have lips a missing tooth is really hard to hide. So we try to keep it cool.
It turned out they had a well inside the potion castle and they even had a little farm. So they had enough food and water for, not for forever, but for an amount of time that was long enough we all got bored.
Then we moved onto phase two of the plan, which was called walk around the castle and push on the walls and see if any of the rocks were loose.
Exactly none rocks were loose. This plan also did not work like we hoped.
We spent a lot of time on our next plan, Who The Hell Had That Stupid Loose Rock Plan And Let’s Kick His Ass(Bone) before we settled on the fact that finding out wouldn’t get us any closer to the potion. So we merely selected a scapegoat at random, beat him up a little and then moved onto the next plan.
The next one was pretty good. We decided to knock down a big tree and sharpen it like a pencil and then use it as a battering ram.
What lumberjacks don’t tell you, those sneaky fuckers, is that cutting down a tree is really easy. It takes like five minutes, and you know what? Wood? Not even that strong, it turns out. That’s why they make castles out of stones. Cut down a stone castle in five minutes. I dare you.
The hard part is where you drag a huge log out of the woods. It’s impossible. The first tree we picked was in the middle of the woods because it was this huge perfect tree. But we couldn’t get it out so we took one from the edge of the forest and then we carried it back to the camp.
That should probably tell you right there that the second one was too small. Like three guys carried it. It was barely even a tree. It was more like a pretty big stick.
So then we went back to the first tree and cut down a bunch of other trees in the way so we could just carry it out. Which was taking forever, which explains why we ended up having to go to a totally different forest after we burned down the first forest. We kind of figured we could burn a path, but we didn’t think about how maybe when the forest burned it would burn our battering ram log too.
We found a better forest where the big trees were closer to the edge and also everything wasn’t all burned up. It was going well. We chopped down the tree in like five minutes, and we even got smart enough to roll the log back instead of carrying it back, which was way better. We fit some wheels on the bastard and it was time to storm a castle. Is what we thought.
This is a really important tip for medieval battles, so pay attention here.
We rolled the battering ram towards the castle. It was pointy, it was heavy  as hell, and it was going to break a door down like a door had never been broked down before.
There were maybe a dozen of us pushing the giant log. We had it going pretty fast. Let’s be serious, it took goddamn forever to make this thing. We were pretty over the idea and just wanted to get inside.
Have you ever pushed a car before when it’s dead? Hard, right? Now imagine you’re pushing a car that’s solid wood, and imagine you’re trying to push it into a parking space a good half mile away.
And now, and this is where it gets real problematic, imagine that your car has zero steering. It cannot be steered because the wheels are also wood and don’t have any kind of steering.
As you approach the parking spot with your heavy-ass wood car that can steer, and as you see that you’re going to hit the parking garage wall instead of the parking spot, how do you turn your car? Or is it even possible?
These are questions we did not answer.
Turns out, you pretty much have to aim a battering ram from WAY back, and you have to do it perfect. Otherwise, you just, I don’t know, maybe crash into the side of a castle, have the castle people laugh at you a bunch, and then you have to decide whether to push the thing back and try again orstart all over.
Like I said, we were pretty sick of doing lumberjack stuff, so we pushed it back. The good news is that the way back was easier because it was downhill. The bad news is it got a lot easier and started pretty much rolling by itself until we couldn’t run fast enough to keep up and it smashed right through a bunch of the skeletons who were sitting around playing bones (which is poker but we call it bones because we’re skeletons).
We took another crack at the castle. We got closer by everyone pushing from one side. About the amount closer if you hold out your longest finger bone. That’s how much further the new scuff on the castle wall was.
That’s when we figured out how to break the door down.
We went back to the woods and we built 20 battering rams. It took a really long time. You could tell some of the teams who were supposed to build the battering rams were slacking off because their battering rams were pretty small. One was just a tree with wheels. They cut down a Christmas tree kind of tree and they figured it was already pointy.
My team built a regular kind except there was a part dug out on the top where one skeleton could ride inside. He said it would help because he could guide us from high up, but I think mostly he thought that if he was doing a ride, he wouldn’t have to push. We called him lazybones, which was the best skeleton burn of the whole day.
We lined up all our battering rams just below the castle. Up and down the line there were some very terrible battering rams. Really, just bad bad bad. I was just hoping that from far away you couldn’t tell as much.
Then we ran our rams at the castle. We figured one of them would have to hit the door. And we were right. Our battering ram, the one with the guy riding in the top, smashed right through the castle door. HAHA! We were in!
About eight different skeletons ran in and said something like, “The potion is ours!” or “Die mortals!” or stuff like that.
There was only one guy inside. Their wizard. And he had the potion in his hand.
He said, “So, this is how it ends, is it?”
We didn’t know about that part. Everyone looked for our wizard, but he wasn’t around. The bastard.
So a skeleton walked to the wizard. Just as he was about to stab a sword in him, the wizard opened the potion and poured it out on the ground.
He said, “There, no NO ONE will have this evil power.”
That one hurt. That one stung. How nobody thought about we did all this work and then this asshole just pours the potion on the ground? That’s the kind of thing that stays with you.
“Damn it,” one skeleton said. “Okay. So, do we kill him now?”
We argued for a little bit.
“I think we have to,” another skeleton said. “I’m big on closure.”
“That’s a bunch of bullshit!” another one said. “Closure. That’s just the word people use to have sex with their girlfriend one more time after they already broke up.”
We decided on a compromise. We made the wizard eat a bunch of handfuls of dirt from off the floor. If he died, then that was what happened. If he lived, cool too. So it was sort of like we maybe killed him, sort of not.
We learned three really important things from our first battle.
1. Castles are a very good idea and someone deserves a lot of credit for that one.
2. Aim is everything with a battering ram.
3. Wizards can’t be trusted ever, at all.
~

After our letdown with the potion, we decided to try and go after the haunted book. We figured that a wizard couldn’t just dump it out or whatever. I guess he could eat the pages, but that would take forever and be horrible, so that works.
We prepared for battle. This was mostly about finding some armor  because our leader guy said that maybe we wouldn’t get skeleton killed so easily if we had some kind of protection over our bones.
Now, I know you’ve seen a lot of movies and read a lot, and it probably seems like armor is goddamn everywhere in old times. But it’s not. It’s totally not. You have to either buy that shit or take it from someone else, and most people don’t even have any.
We divided into a few different camps on the idea of armor.
There was a group that thought we should start a farm, make some money, and then trade that money for armor, or maybe even trade some of the crops we raised for armor. We could work all night and never sleep because, you know, skeletons.
But the problem with that idea is it involved work. Actual, real work in a field with tools that farmers have. And who was going to eat wheat that came from a skeleton?
Then there was a group who decided to just make some alternative kind of armor. They tried wood, which kind of worked but it looked really fucking stupid, plus some of the wood was filled with ants. If you’re a skeleton and you get covered with ants, those fuckers stay.
After wood they tried just making it out of paper folded funny, and then they painted it to look like real armor. Which our leader approved of because he didn’t know it was paper.
Then a guy showed up. Like a guy, a human guy. It turned out it was one of us, a skeleton, who killed a guy and put on his skin as like an armor. He told us all this by putting his thumb in his mouth, under his top teeth, and then he pushed the top of the head and the face back off his head. It was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen. Seriously, it was insane.
I went with just regular clothes, but like lots of layers. Hey, ten pairs of pants is probably better than just naked, right? Eh? Eh, who cares.

~

The next preparation step was to create some new types of troops for our invasion.  This came from the guy who had the ants all over him. He was horribly tortured and couldn’t even think because of all the sensations in his body. He went slowly insane and he spent most of his time logrolling up and down this really big hill near our camp. And that’s when one of the skeletons got a great idea and we built up our new warriors.

Beeletons: Skeletons with beehives hanging in their rib cages. These skeletons pretty much fought like normal, except when they started to move around a lot a bunch of bees would come out and start attacking like crazy. Bee stings don’t really do much to skeletons, so it was perfect.

Really Hotletons: Skeleton whose bones are heated up to be way hot. Like have you ever eaten ribs where the bones are so super hot? Like that. We figured maybe we could burn some dudes with hot bones, although the only way we could figure out how to heat up bones was this kind of hot tub thing, and the skeletons who were the Really Hotletons insisted they pretty much had to sit in the hot tub all the time to maintain their heat. And then they didn’t do much of anything else except try to invent a thing to go around a beer to keep it from getting warm. And even that they just decided to drink the beers fast and then it was solved.

Acidletons: Skeletons covered in acid so when a man touched them, they’d have acid on them. Which seemed good until we figured out how the acid melted bones too and didn’t help us very much. In fact, instead of creating a super soldier, we created just a melted skeleton.

Giant Steam-Powered Battle Spider: A few skeletons got this idea to have an enormous, steam-powered battle spider we could use to simply walk over the castle walls and destroy the whole place. It sounded really awesome and like a good idea, and they said the easiest way to think about it was in the hot tub with the Really Hotletons, and they sat in there all day and really thought very hard about how to do it, but sadly we never got our giant battle spider somehow.

~

Our leader decided to set the battle date with the good guy leader.

I call them the good guys and us the bad guys, by the way. I know who I am. I’m a goddamn skeleton with a sword, they’re human men, some of whom are pretty handsome. I think it’s pretty clear who’s the good guys and the bad guys.

The hard part about setting up a battle date is deciding when is a time that everyone can make it, and also when there’s an open field area. See, there’s lots of sword battles happening right now. It seemed like nobody did it forever, now everyone is into it. We tried to get this one field, this great spot with big pointy mountains in the background. But there was a battle with dwarves and orcs scheduled for the same day. I don’t know what an orc is, but I found out their schedule is really full. They fight a lot and there’s no girl orcs, so basically they fight more than normal, and that’s before you even find out that they don’t do sex. So you can imagine.

We tried another date, no dice. Men versus giants. Which seems stupid to me. What’s the different between men and giants except one is a really big man? And if a guy is real big, like let’s say he’s 8 feet tall, does he fight on giants or men? There’s an answer, it turns out, and it’s that both people would kill him to be safe. That’s one thing men and giants agree on.

The third date we tried said gnomes versus pegasus. We tried to see if we could get the field on that day because if it was one pegasus, does that fight need a whole field? Maybe they’d just use part, or they could be done early and then we could do a late afternoon thing. But a pegasus is hard to get in touch with. We couldn’t even find out if there was more than one pegasus. No one knew the plural way to say pegasus.

After we tried to hard, we tried to settle on a different field. They weren’t as nice. The background on one was pretty plain, and nobody had mowed this other one for a really long time so the grass was kinda tall.

What we decided at the end was to go ahead and attack the human castle. We didn’t have great luck with that before, but this time we weren’t screwing around with wizards. Plus, we had a few tricks up our sleeves. Skeleton tricks, that is. Up our sleeves we didn’t wear. Because we were skeletons.

~

The day of the battle, we made the long walk to the castle. I was more confident than ever until that day. I’d been practicing swordskeletonship. It was hard as hell. Swords are cool and everything, but goddamn are they hard to fight with. And heavy. There’s this one skeleton who just fought with these two knives, and that always confused me until I he told me that he didn’t really fight with the knives. He just hung back until someone got killed and then he took that guy’s sword. That way he didn’t have to walk across a whole cursed land or magical forest with a stupid sword. He said sometimes he didn’t even bring the knives if he didn’t feel like it.

I liked knife skeleton until I figured out how he was following me a lot, and then I got nervous because I thought he was following me so he could use my sword when I got killed. Which was fair, but I told him that I’d practiced and showed him some of my moves, and then he said, “Oh, cool. Well, definitely need to pick someone else to follow” and then he kept right on following me.

My confidence was blown, but most of the other skeletons seemed pretty happy. It was a nice day. And we got to take a little walk, which is something we didn’t make much time for. It’s funny how when you’re an inhuman monster, you forget that it’s okay to do some stuff for you sometimes, that you can take a walk or like enjoy sitting on an old log out in nature somewhere. You feel like you have to be always doing something evil, but you can just, you know, watch butterflies fuck on a leaf or something. Or dragonflies. Man, dragonflies fuck all the time.

Even with knife skeleton following me, I figured we had pretty good chances. We got to the battle and lined up in this little spot with some dead trees.

One skeleton piped up right away. “Hey. Are we close to that castle? Or is that like a giant castle and we’re still really far away?”

We all looked. It was hard to tell. There wasn’t anything else around except this big ass castle. There was nothing to compare it to.

The leader guy, he picked out the one who spoke up. “You. Walk up to the castle so we can tell how tall it is.

We watched this skeleton walk and walk and walk and it took forever. Someone yelled “Are you far or are you just walking slow?” and the skeleton heard him so he turned around and gave him the swear finger.

We watched him for a little while, and then you could pretty much tell we were still way far away from the castle. Which I think motivated everyone even more because it was like, goddamn it, these dudes told us that their castle was right near us, and now we have to walk this whole way.

~

I won’t bore you with the walk. It was boring. I was already bored with it, and why make you suffer through that too? Plus, it was so boring, it would make me even more bored to tell you about it. It was that kind of boring. Serious shit.

Let’s just leave it at we walked for goddamn forever, and the other thing you need to know is that it was really long and I saw more and more skeletons leave their swords and stuff behind. Every little bit, you’d see a skeleton look around to see where the leader was, and then he’d kneel down and set his sword int he tall grass like he had to fix his leg bone or something, and then when he stood up, no sword.

I kept mine for a while, but it was just too warm and the castle, it was like every step we took barely got us any closer. Seriously, we walked the whole night and just barely got there.

When it was dark, I decided to abandon my sword too. I hung back a little until I found knife skeleton, who was still behind me.

“Hey,” I said. “Gimme one of those knives.”

“What for?” he said.

“Because I want a sword AND a knife,” I said.

He handed over one of the knives, and then I dropped my sword right away.

“Hey!” he said. “You better pick that up!”

I said, “No.”

He said, “Yes. Yes! You’d better. Or else I’m taking my knife back.”

I said, “I don’t even want this knife. I just don’t want to carry a sword the whole way, and I don’t want to get in trouble. I’m a knife skeleton now too.”

He said, “But who’s sword am I going to take when you get killed?”

We argued like this forever, and we kicked dirt at each other and then even kind of tried to work out a rope thing where I could drag the sword behind me, but that didn’t work either. Then we thought we could do an exchange, but I didn’t trust original knife skeleton very much because all his plans involved waiting for me to die.

It was morning again when we finished our argument. I told him that what we should do is get next to someone with a horse and hope THEY die and then we could get swords AND horses. Which was a pretty good plan, except by the time I came up with that, everyone was gone.

~

Everyone left us behind while we argued. I didn’t notice, and most of the time if skeletons argue, the other skeletons stick around to tell them stuff like “You guys should fight” or “Fight Fight Fight” or stuff like that. But I guess nobody noticed our fight, and then they were gone and we were all alone.

“Shit,” I said. “You’re gonna make us late to the battle!”

He said, “That’s not my fault! You’re the one who didn’t want to carry a sword!”

We were so far behind we left the sword, and then he looked and me and dropped his knife and I dropped my knife and we ran towards the castle to catch up.

~

We ran for forever, or it felt like forever. It was still dark and I couldn’t see shit, which is probably why I ran right into skeleton on a horse, full speed. They were stopped a little ways from the castle, and the leader was doing a speech that gave us enough time to catch up before they started. I always thought a speech was to make everyone excited to bust up the castle or whatever, but the speech our leader gave, it was really long and he talked about the economy and stuff a lot, and I kind of wonder if it was just so everyone could catch up and rest for a little bit because we walked so far.

Then the leader told us the battle plan. What the plan was, we were supposed to face towards the castle, and then we would run towards the castle, then be inside the castle and fight all the guys and get the book back.

I know that sounds like a stupid plan, and I bet you think I just wasn’t paying attention and blew it when I told you. But no. Those were the exact words, and it was a stupid plan. I mean, it was fine, but I don’t know if I’d call that a plan. Usually a plan is like, you have someone inside the castle who’s going to lower the gate, or you have a flying machine that’ll get us over the wall. But no, it was just let’s go to the castle and take it over.

Well, okay, there was one other part.

We talked forever about battering rams before. We never figured those out, but what we DID figure out is you can just hire some dwarves to make a battering ram that worked, dress in skeleton costumes, and battering ram down the door for us.

We paid them in gold. Except they told us it was fool’s gold, which then our leader was all, “Well, just pay fools for some stuff. If they don’t know the difference.” The dwarves looked at each other, and they kinda admitted he had a point there.

So the dwarves ran at the door with a pretty awesome battering ram while we ran at the side of the castle for a distraction. The battle was afoot!

~

Oh, yeah. I still didn’t have a sword or anything. I don’t know where knife skeleton went. he maybe ran past me or something when I crashed into that horse. The important thing is he was gone, and I still didn’t have a sword or a knife or anything. All I could find was an arrow that someone dropped, so I picked it up and I hoped that in the dark it looked like a really little spear or something.

We ran at the castle.

This time we knew the door would come down, but the people in the castle were ready for us. Holy shit.

First they shot all these arrows at us. Which isn’t a big deal for skeletons most of the time. What’s an arrow gonna do?

But these arrows were different. They would hit a guy, he would laugh and high five his buddies, and then the thing would explode. Like BOOM, big explosion, bones everywhere, that dude was just gone.

That was not something we planned for. Because it didn’t really exist yet. I tell you what, if I could still take shits, I would have shit right then. Just right there, I would have squatted to shit. That’s how shocked I was. I even kind of felt like I had to take a shit, but I didn’t stop and try because I thought what if I did take a shit? That would just be even another crazy thing on top of the crazy explosion arrows. I just decided instead I would crawl on the ground because maybe it would look like I was dead. Like more dead. On the ground kind of dead where there wasn’t any point to shoot me with an arrow anymore.

Then they launched these huge explosion things. I don’t know what the fuck they were, but they were like the arrows except a hundred times as bigger. They blew up and then there was just a hole, a black dirt hole wherever it landed.

Just think about the first time you saw magic. Maybe it made you feel like you had to ghost shit, maybe not. But just remember that surprise and then you’ll know kind of how I felt. Explosions everywhere.

Oh yeah, and a bunch of skeletons were exploded too. Which should maybe be sad. I don’t know. We were kind of abominations to begin with, so I don’t know how sad it was when we exploded. Most of us were jerks too.

~

I decided to change plans. There was a group of us who were supposed to follow  the dwarves with the battering ram because our leader was all, “The fools. They won’t be getting their fool’s gold at all, and they’re fools if they think they will. Destroy them.”

Our leader was good with those orders. He had a million of them. Seize Them, See That They Don’t Return, See That They Get What They Deserve, stuff like that.

I figured I might as well make my way to the front, and instead of being part of the distraction, I could be part of the murder team. I hadn’t thought it through before, but it turned out that being part of the distraction totally sucked. What you’re distracting is exploding arrows, and how you distract them is you get hit with them and then explode. If anyone ever tells you to be a distraction, or even worse, to create a diversion, just nod and listen and then use the time where they explain your job to decide how you’re gonna get the fuck outta there.

It was a long crawl to the castle gate, but I made it, and the dwarves were there in skeleton costumes and their battering ram. They kept smashing the front of it into the door, and it looked like maybe it was about to break. With one last run, they broke the door, then they turned around to run away. That was always they deal. They’d break the door, but no fighting. Fighting costed way extra, and fuck that shit. Although we should have thought about it more, honestly. At least the dwarves knew what the fuck they were doing.

All six of them ran back over the bridge and scattered. One of them ran right towards me, and I raised my hand to hit him. I still didn’t have a sword or anything. He ran past me and high-fived me. “Good luck, brother,” he said. Nobody ever high-fived me like that. He was pretty cool. How could I murder the only person who ever high-fived me. Also, seriously, how could I murder him? He was like a hundred times better at war than me and I had no weapons. So I said, “Thanks to you back, brother!” Which sounded really fucking stupid and then I thought maybe I SHOULD kill him so he wouldn’t tell anybody, but there wasn’t any time.

A tide of skeletons swept into the castle. They ran all over, stabbing stuff and cutting ropes. There were all kinds of ropes that held stuff up, bags of dirt or hay or whatever, and we just cut everything we saw. Which was dumb because some of the ropes is how we were supposed to get up to the top floors. But I guess when you start cutting stuff, it’s kind of hard to turn it off, you know?

That’s when this thing burst out of some doors. I don’t know what it was. It was this thing, and it was loud and fast, and there was a guy driving it. It had these spinning things on the front, like a big ass windmill, and he was just chopping dudes up with it like crazy.

Can I tell you something? I’ve read some books. Some pretty good ones too. Legal thrillers, steamy romances. All this shit. And I know some people who are real high and mighty about books. They’d die for freedom to read and all that bullshit.

But I’ll tell you right now, that’s not me. When I saw that thing driving all around the middle part of the castle, and when it creamed like 20 dudes, I was outta there. No way in hell. Books are awesome and everything, but I know now that my limit for what I’ll do for books is somewhere before getting destroyed by a weird giant windmill mounted to a thing that’s faster than anything I’ve ever seen. Somewhere before that happens, I give up and say fuck this book.

~

The escape from the castle was pretty easy. At first. Everyone was having this fight over a book, so if you were the one dude who ran away, nobody gave a shit.

It was pretty easy until these OTHER dudes came over the hill. Other guys who weren’t even at the fight before, well now they were, and they were kicking skeleton ass too.

I thought I was fucked. There were dudes all around me. A war machine I didn’t even understand. Oh, and also, I forgot to mention that SOME ASSHOLE BLEW UP OUR LEADER. Yeah, he used one of those explosion things, launched him way the hell up in the air and blew him to pieces of bones. PIECES OF OUR LEADER RAINED DOWN ON TOP OF ME. Little tip, that’s a sure sign that you are fucked and need to forget the fight part of this whole thing and get the hell out.

There were all these side rooms in the castle, and I ran into one where a skeleton had his foot in this dead guy’s mouth. “Hey,” he said, “dude, help me get in here.”

I said, “Are you serious? Inside a dead guy?”

“Yeah!” he said. “It’s the perfect disguise. No one will even know I’m a skeleton until I’m gone.

Only problem, Dum-Dum didn’t even know if you want to get inside someone, first you have to pull out HIS skeleton. He really though his skeleton would fit in there too. What a jackoff.

Then some guys busted in and attacked him with swords. I mean, I don’t blame them. This fuckin’ guy had a bloody skeleton foot inside some dude’s mouth, and he was holding his lips like he could pull the guy’s skin on like a pair of pants. It was pretty goddamn disgusting.

I ran into another side room, and this time there was a skeleton who had these drum sticks and he was playing his rib cage like a xylophone. He was surrounded by a bunch of guys with swords, and he said, “Whoa, fellas. I’m not one of these battle skeletons. I’m just a humble, ordinary…Xylabones!” Then he played a little tune, just a few notes that were like, See? Good joke, huh?

They killed that  guy too, and I ran into the next room. In there, there was this skeleton fighting a bunch of guys. He was all, “Please, I don’t want to hurt anyone.” And then they attacked him so he cut a rope and a chandelier fell on a bunch of guys.

“Dude,” I said. “That was awesome!”

The skeleton was horrified. “I didn’t mean to kill them!” He said. “I just wanted to, you know, stop them for a minute, maybe pass them out.”

I got closer to the guys under the chandelier. “Well, they’re super dead. This guy doesn’t even have a head anymore. Not really.”

The skeleton fell to his kneesbones. He said, “No. No, I…”

I said, “Hey. Come on. You dropped an iron chandelier on these guys from like, a hundred feet. Did you really think they’d just be sort of hurt and sort of okay?”

He was quiet, and he didn’t say anything else, so I ran to the next room without him. Which is where I finally got the chance to make my escape.

~

Here’s a tip if you ever need to escape a castle.

Every castle has a guy who lives there, and he’s like a kooky inventor guy. He makes a bunch of shit that should be totally amazing, but the king always walks through and he’s like, “Ugh, failure, failure. What’s this thing do? Failure.” Because a king always wants some machine that’ll make him famous or give his daughter beauty or something.

And every one of these castle kooks, every last one makes some kind of a gyrocopter machine.

I ran into a room full of beakers that had bubbles and weird colors of water in them, and there was a rocket of some kind, and then there was a weird abomination, affront against god kind of thing laying on a table (that’s another one they always have too), and there, near a huge window, was a gyrocopter. Of course.

There were a couple guys right behind me, so I hid near the scientist’s bookshelves. Because what’s more boring than that?

When the two dudes ran in, they looked around, and then the one was like “Hey. While we’re up here, let’s kill that weird monster thing on the table.” The other guy agreed, and they picked up a bunch of different bottles of stuff and smashed them on the monster. They said “Oops” every time so it was like an accident if anyone asked, and then they lit the monster on fire and ran away.

The burning death of an absolute abomination is always my cue to escape.

I got on the gyrocopter, and thank fuck it was one with some kind of steam power or crystals or some shit instead of a pedal one. These jackoffs keep trying to make a pedal gyrocopter, which is so fuckin stupid. What’s the use if I’m just gonna have to work that hard? I’d rather walk, or stay home.

I pull a big lever, and nothing happens, then another lever, then another one, and I’m starting to worry that maybe this weird castle science guy didn’t make a gyrocopter at all and instead made a fake one just to get his castle science job, but then the last level I pull makes the gyrocopter slam forward, through the window, and out into the night sky.

~

THE END?

~

Haha, I always wanted to end a story like that.

Well, okay. Here’s another tip. You can escape from a castle on a gyrocopter. That’s a known fact. But how good of an escape, that’s a little more up in the air.

Pun.

The thing is, this castle scientist, he made a gyrocopter sort of, but he didn’t make a great way to land or steer or do anything besides shoot out of a window and be really super high up in the air and be scared as fuck.

There was a seatbelt. That was something. I could be belted into this thing while it crashed in a death spiral. Or I could just fall out. It’s really a matter of personal choice.

I chose to ride it for a while, then I bailed.

I figured I was a goner, for sure. How would anything save me?

Then, you’re not gonna believe this, but as I fell, I saw a shooting star. I’d never seen one in my whole life. Far as I knew, anyway. While I fell, I made a wish that I could live on. Just a little longer, just to see what happened.

And wouldn’t you know it. I fell on the group of dwarves as they ran away. Yes, dwarves. You might not know this, but dwarves are fat. Sloppy, really. I shouldn’t be mean about it because they saved my life, but they would REALLY increase their lifespans if they took better care of themselves.

And then? I ran off into the night. And I just sort of kept going and going because, you know, that’s how it works. I ran until I found an abandoned house with a cloak, and there was a barn with a sickle in it. Which was perfect, it turned out, because I looked just like the goddamn grim reaper.

Which is how I lived happily ever after. Okay, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes a dude comes along and I have to kill him. Or sometimes kids come around my house and they think it’s candy, and then I kill them and pretty much have to plan on some asshole woodsman coming along for revenge. Why are woodsmen so into revenge? It’s like, didn’t you move to the woods so you wouldn’t have to deal with this shit anymore? Because you didn’t like people? But whatever, you know. It’s the price you pay for a little peace and quiet.

~

FIN