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Holidays blow.
And if you work retail, holidays blow on a whole new special level reserved for those forced to deal with jackass customers, stupid temp workers, and a muzak mix that shoves reindeer and silver bells and sleighs up your ass for over a month. There's nothing good about them.
It's the same old crap for Ash day after day, and there are only so many stories he can tell the newbies before they start thinking he's crazy and fleeing the back room when they see him coming.
Tonight's particularly crappy in the land of S-Mart. They're trying to close up, but some old bat's trying to get a blender half off with a coupon from 1993, the new snot-nosed kid with glasses they hired keeps giving him attitude, and…
Oh, yeah, a she-witch from hell just ripped out a man's throat near the toasters. That's gonna be a bitch to clean up.
Shit. He dives beneath the counter for his shotgun. He used to not hide his gun underneath the gift-wrap, but then he used to have two hands with actual skin. Things change.
Granny's still counting out her pennies as a deadite launches itself through the window. She gets a face full of bones and he's pretty sure someone at the old folks' home is going to get a new roommate.
He's running along the wet linoleum, where they just mopped up a bucket of puke from their drunken Santa Claus (never hire someone who's willing to be paid with two bottles of Thunderbird). Of course, he's not going to be ho-ho-hoing anymore. The hag that ripped him apart is the one getting the jollies now instead of him.
It's Bing Crosby on the loudspeakers dreaming of a white Christmas and he's blasting at three deadites going after the kid in the snack bar, who's hiding behind the Slushie machine.
The kid's scared shitless and there's another mess someone's going to have to clean up. But if the kid survives, it's a good lesson: you don't know how shitty life can really get until a walking corpse in a yellow jumpsuit tries to beat you to death with Santa's arm.
Yeah, Ash should probably get a degree in Getting Fucked Over By The Universe. He knows he's put in the experience for it.
The three deadites go down and he's reloading when he another one comes out fast at him. It's apparently been snacking on one of the greeters and it's got a bit of tinsel in its hair. It's right in his face and shit, that's bad. Really bad.
It's going to be close – the deadite's reaching for him and he needs more time. Where's a chainsaw when you need one?
Right. Hardware. Aisle 12.
Damn it.
And that's when the hot girl in the health and beauty section rounds the corner, braces herself, and hauls out her own shotgun to blast it right between the eyes.
"Nice shot, baby," he says, and he finishes reloading his shotgun. He stomps on the head until it's dust.
Sheila smiles back at him and reloads. "I've been practicing."
"Well, I can think of some other stuff we can practice tonight, if I ever get out of this hellhole."
It's couples night in S-Mart tonight and there's a deadite in the Sporting Goods section that won't know what hit it until a double barreled 12 gauge shotgun with 2/34 buckshot ammo knocks into the hell it came from.
Things are looking up now. He's got his gun, he's got his ammo, he's got his best girl at his side packing heat as well.
"Come get some."
All right. Let's go back in time a little…
Whoa. Not that far. Just a year or so, when he's just wiped out a shitload of skeletons and he's getting ready to get his ass home.
It's a bitch saying goodbye to her, but hey, it's what the hero does. Save the day, kiss the girl, ride off into the sunset, sleep for several hundred years…
Okay, the last part's all him, but it's not like it would have worked out. They're from two different worlds, and yeah, he came back, but he's not going to stay here.
Ash keeps saying this to himself as he doesn't look back. He doesn't want to see her face.
So he said the words (mostly), drank the drops (he's pretty sure it was 6), and went to sleep until the time was right. And he woke up in the right time, in the cave, and it wasn't going to be easy getting back home, but he'd find a way….
Then he'd realized that she was there, too.
Normally, waking up to a hot girl curled up next to your side would be one of the top three things he'd like to see in the morning. But when that hot girl followed you back from medieval times…
Sheila opens her eyes. She smiles
She's here. In the twentieth century. With him.
Really here.
She hugs him tightly and Ash isn't sure whether to hug her back or check for signs of demonic hallucinations or something weird like that.
"You're here?"
She pulls back as he disentangles her arms. He doesn't want to be a dick, but he needs a little space to figure out what the hell is going on.
"I asked the wise man to let me accompany thee uponst thine return to thine world. He didst find the way for my own journey."
"How did you find me?"
"He is a man of magic and great wisdom. And he knew where thou wast sleeping. And when thou wouldst be awake."
Great. It's the old man's fault. He should have known better than to trust a guy who didn't even let you know that if you said one tiny little syllable wrong, a whole army of undead including the evil twin you shot and buried would rise up and try to rip you apart before taking over the world.
This can't end well. Nothing in his life ever does.
It's not that he doesn't want her here, it's that it's not right. There's got to be some law of the universe or sci-fi movies that says you can't be with someone from a different time, or you end up marrying your grandma or killing your grandpa or the world ending because you guys somehow killed a butterfly when you did it. Something like that.
Yeah, he loves her and he fought an entire army of dead people for her, but that doesn't mean that he can ever hope to have a healthy relationship. He's not allowed to.
Ash steels himself. She still looks happy to see him. That won't last after he says this.
"Look, baby, it's not like I'm mad to see you or anything, but you know this won't work out. You've got your place, I've got mine. We're gonna have to figure out a way to get you back home where you belong." He's never had to break up with a girl from the Middle Ages before, but he's pretty sure the "it's not you, it's me" speech is one that everybody uses in their life.
He braces himself. She'll probably cry and that'll make him feel like even more of a jackass who breaks the heart of a woman that left everything to be with him.
Sheila's face is turning red. He's wondering if that's that what it looks like when— and he's knocked back on the floor, holding one hand to his eye. In the other eye, he can still see her left arm held out, her hand clenched into a fist.
He opens his mouth. She raises her foot and it looks like she's getting ready to kick him.
He's actually turned on by this.
And that's that. He closes his mouth.
If she doesn't want to go back, she doesn't have to.
Screw the universe. The butterflies will have to save their own asses.
It's not easy at first, but they don't expect it to be.
Yeah, they both speak English, but he speaks good old American and she speaks some sort of British-Shakespeare-old crap stuff that every now and then throws him off. She picks up slang pretty quickly from the television after she stops screaming at it when she sees her first used car commercial.
It's kind of fun introducing her to modern appliances. It makes going to S-Mart a fun date out with the woman of your dreams rather than a place where you're haunted by the memories of all that has died at your hand.
He might still have a few things to work out.
Ash gets his job back. Yeah, he's been missing for a couple of weeks, but after S-Mart fired half the store in the great "get rid of anyone who looks at Larry funny" purge a few months back, they're a little short on staff.
He gets a job in Housewares. He would have like Hardware better, but they claim people get a little nervous when they see a metal hand next to anything with the potential to cut limbs off.
Sheila gets a job in S-Mart as well. It helps that the manager keeps looking at her breasts the entire time he interviews her (one day, Ash will have to kill him) and doesn't think to ask about things like references or past jobs or people's identifications that are 100 percent fake.
He's a little nervous at first about how she'll do. She's never worked retail (or any job of any kind), she's barely gotten out of the "thees" and "thous" phase, and the washer still spooks her.
As the days go by, he realizes he has nothing to worry about. She just stands there, greets the customers, tells people where to find the hair dye and what lipstick will make them look pretty, and before he knows it, it's like she's always worked there.
The day she swears she will wreak her vengeance upon the person who spilled three bottles of conditioner in the aisle is the day he knows she's going to be just fine.
He could have stayed there. They would have made him king.
Arthur and Henry both seemed cool with the idea and hell, he probably would have gotten a statue of himself. Plus, maybe years from now kids would be reading books about King Ash and the amazing amount of ass he kicked and got.
Yeah, it would have been frickin' sweet.
And he and Sheila could have had like a dozen kids that all grew up to be kick-ass princes and princesses while he taught people how to read and be scientific and invent toilets so he doesn't have to keep going outside in a whole in the middle of winter.
He could have led them to glory, or at least to indoor plumbing a few centuries early.
But there's no Elvis in medieval times.
There's only one shotgun, one Oldsmobile, one copy of Fangoria he's already read cover to cover, but there are a million ways to die from some disease that's been cured back in his time
In the end, he goes home.
And even better, he gets to take the best thing about that time back with him.
Yeah, he can be a king here.
Except six months down the road and he's wondering how he's possibly going to live up to everything that's come before.
There, he's a freaking god with an Oldsmobile for a chariot and a sawed-off shotgun for his sword. It's kicking ass and taking off heads and it's damn legendary shit to do. He saved her life, her kingdom, hell, the entire world for all he knows.
Here, he works at S-mart and clocks in every morning wearing a nametag and a shit-eating grin on his face. He's not a knight here; he's a guy who has to suck it up before he beats the crap out of the guy who's taken an hour to decide that he doesn't want a microwave after all.
And she gets to watch it all from behind the perfume display until one day, she realizes that Ash isn't meant to love someone.
Linda found that out. Annie found it out, too.
And hey, once you cut up your possessed first girlfriend near the cabin you meant to sleep with her in, and your second possible girlfriend ends up getting stabbed by a tree branch while saving your life, you kind of get the feeling the universe thinks your perfect match is a bottle of lotion and a box of Kleenex.
Not that he can do much with a metal hand. He's horny, but he's not a complete moron. Still, it doesn't help that he sees her every day and every night and it just makes it that much worse that he's actually doing something smart and not trying to get into her pants.
Ash isn't pushing it with her because the last time that happened, there was a Book of the Dead and everyone almost died and she did die.
That she came back normal is something he didn't think the universe would ever let him have. So he's not going to test his luck.
And it's not going to last anyway.
He's not the same cowering wimp he used to be, but let's face it. It's going to get a lot harder to impress her once she figures out at heart he's just some schmuck who got lucky enough to not get permanently killed or possessed.
So one day turns into another day turns into a week of nobody doing anything but sweet smiles and pleasant talk and he's going to snap soon if something doesn't happen.
Something happens.
Ash has had a lousy day. The manager's shown up to make his dick look bigger than anyone else's', he's had to work three graveyard shifts in a row, and he's finally getting home five hours after she claimed she had to go home early because of a family emergency.
Given that her entire family has been a pile of bones for a few centuries, he has no idea what she's up to.
It can't be good, he thinks, and opens their front door.
"Hey, honey, I'm—"
She's standing before him, wearing nothing but something he swears he saw on a mannequin that caused him to take a very long bathroom break. It's been a very lonely three months.
And then she takes it off.
"Groovy."
That's all it takes, it turns out to make everything right again. That she's the one pushing him down makes it even better.
Damn. He doesn't know where she learned how to do that thing she just did with her tongue but he's going to have to either kill it or buy it a case of beer.
(Later on, he'll find out she's been reading the Cosmos her co-workers gave her after she broke down and asked them some really awkward questions. And even later on, they'll have a talk about how some things in those magazines can be really helpful and great, but many things in them should never ever be done anywhere near a certain area, for the love of God. And then he lies down with an icepack and another trauma is born.)
For now, the metal hand gets in the way a little, but not everything's going to be perfect, and it doesn't have to be.
Because, baby, he's still the king.
Holidays really blow.
The only reason he's even here in this mall on his day off, with the screaming hordes of kids and parents and every jackass who's ever lived, is standing next to him staring at an inflatable Santa.
They've been here for over an hour and he can't figure out what to get her as a gift. He can't just get her nothing, even if she hasn't learned yet how many holidays seem to need crap from Hallmark.
He thinks maybe he should get her a ring.
Yeah, it's sentimental, but when you get a girl who comes back from the dead, travels through time, and undergoes the horrific pain that occurs when medieval teeth meet modern dentistry, all just for you, you know you've got a keeper.
It's just… it itches at him. He knows some guys get their girlfriends jewelry - and then those girlfriends end up as dead psychos who you have to decapitate with a shovel. He's been that guy and he's sure he doesn't want to do it again.
So he's standing there, eyeing the jewelry window and wincing at the price tags when he hears a bloodcurdling scream and the sound of breaking glass.
"Ah, crap."
He's hoping for some sort of robbery or maybe someone having a heart attack, but he knows he doesn't have good luck like that.
Santa Claus may be coming' to town somewhere filled with peace and love, but in the mall, it's an army of the dead. And they don't care who's naughty or nice.
There are at least twenty of them in the mall now. People are panicking, children are crying, and the security guards need a higher caliber if they're going to do any sort of damage. He reflexively reaches for the shotgun that's not there. Double crap.
"Ash, one question?"
He looks over at Sheila. She doesn't seem to be that shocked, but after you've been a soul-sucking succubus from hell and ridden in a Yugo, it's hard to be scared.
"Yeah?"
"You did say the words right?"
"Mostly."
She gives him a look – it's the same one she gave him when she first met him and it's a good thing she doesn't have more rocks or he'd been running right now. It softens and he's surprised to see she's smiling.
"Can we defeat them?"
Ash looks over. Past the skeletons invading the food court and the corpses underneath the mistletoe, there's a sporting goods store. He's thinking she might look good with a crossbow.
"Let's do it."
They start to run.
And it's ass-kicking and flying skulls and somewhere down the line Ash thinks that someone very special's getting her very own double-barreled shotgun under the tree.
Screw jewelry.
That's true love, right there.