‘Fuck!’ Brock called out, summing up the feelings of the entire band of survivors as a herd of the undead turned toward them, moaning and limping from inside the coffee house to their immediate left.

He picked up a deck chair and rammed it into the forehead of the leading zombie, who by a strange and ironic coincidence was the old lady whom he had graciously offered a seat on the upper deck earlier that day. But that had been before she had turned, before the shit had hit the fan.

‘Nice one, baby,’ Lashónda complimented her husband and gave him a peck on the cheek.

‘Fuck yeah!’ Brock agreed and punched the head of the next zombie clean off before giving his knuckles a quick kiss. ‘No fuckin’ zombie’s ever gonna beat my motherfuckin’ right-hook.’

A deafening cry echoed from the direction of the stairs. A few of the zombies turned their heads for a moment at the promise of fresh human flesh, but quickly returned their lifeless gaze at the gang.

‘Oh, my God. Survivors!’ Chris yelled. ‘We need to save them!’

‘Sounded like it may have come from the upstairs discothèque, the Glitter Ball,’ Toby said. ‘We can reach it via the stairway, alternatively by taking the Southern elevator, elevator B.’

‘Oh, dear!’ Average Joe cried out, struggling pointlessly with an attacking zombie. The Brucemeister pulled it by its hair and threw it into the approaching mass of living dead.

‘Wait!’ Misty said and looked beckoningly at Toby. ‘Are you saying there’s a disco upstairs, too?’

‘Actually,’ Toby began, raising a forefinger and moistening his lips, ‘this ship is equipped with three dance locales to suit every…’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ Brock ordered him. ‘I say we head up there to check for survivors. Anything’s better than this place anyway.’ He delivered an efficient kick to the groin of another zombie, shattering not only its genitalia but also its spinal cord. ‘You’re sitting ducks down here and, besides, where there’s a disco there’s a bar and I could use a fuckin’ drink.’

Evading and or pounding the shit out of a handful of zombies, the group finally got to the elevator and climbed inside. As Celine Dion’s relaxing and heart-warming voice sounded in the background, they climbed the elevator shaft pondering the events of the evening. They had boarded the finlandsfärja, hoping to enjoy themselves, expecting nothing but laughter and casual and unprotected promiscuity with complete strangers, but it had not been meant to be.

It had all started when Helen, an overweight girl with a penchant for tight Hello Kitty clothing, had stumbled into the Happy Salmon Buffet Restaurant and drooled all over the smorgasbord, in particular onto the platter of salmon mousse, before stumbling back out again. It had not taken long for the disease to spread. Within minutes at least fifty or so of the people in the restaurant had lost interest in the salmon and focused on something much more exotic: Human flesh. Brock and his missus were lucky enough not to have sampled the mousse and got out just in the nick of time. The rest of the survivors had been picked up in other parts of the finlandsfärja by the two. But their number had greatly diminished since then…

The sound of real music grew louder and louder with each foot they ascended and finally rendered Mrs. Dion totally inaudible.

‘Let’s fucking do this,’ Brock said menacingly as Tommy fondled Misty’s soft parts at an awkward proximity to him.

The elevator doors opened and they entered the Glitter Ball Discothèque. Nothing could have prepared them for what they saw next. There was blood and guts all over the dance floor. A pile of intestines occupied the DJ booth and severed limbs lay strewn across the bar. In the center, beneath the glittering ball of the Glitter Ball Discothèque, five young girls wearing short skirts and revealing tank-tops sat huddled together on the floor, shivering.

‘Oh, my God!’ Chris exclaimed. ‘They’re just little girls, certainly no older than 17 and probably frightened like nothing else. And just look at those awful clothes that the patriarchal society has forced upon them! It’s disgusting and disheartening!’

‘As a member of the crew I feel it an obligation to tend to this matter personally,’ Toby said and headed towards the girls. ‘Are you young ladies all right?’

Suddenly one of the girls turned her head revealing a bland blankness in her bleak zombie eyes. The other girls followed suit and it became painfully clear to Toby and the others that the girls hadn’t actually been shivering out of fear, but in fact had been gnawing on the still living remains of their less attractive and slightly overweight friend. Two seconds later the fat one was left to die and one of the zombie girls thrashed her fist right into Toby’s navel, yanked out as much of his insides as her tender hand could grab a hold of and started feasting on it. And as Toby stood still, paralyzed by shock, and his fellow survivors were too far away and too late to save him, the other zombie girls lunged at his throat, biting and tearing it to pieces so that his head, still alive and conscious, bobbed back like a Zippo lid. The last thing he saw before he died was the upside-down image of a charging Brucemeister.

Before the zombies could react to his lightning-fast attack, Brock picked up Toby by his thin, boyish calves and swung him around like a meat wheelbarrow, Toby’s head bobbing about freakishly. Bits of Toby were distributed evenly across the dance floor as Brock whooped the girls’ already decomposing asses with his newfound and somewhat unconventional choice of weaponry. To everybody’s relief, one of the girls got catapulted into the DJ booth by Toby’s fast approaching torso, not only incapacitating her permanently but also changing the song to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”. At the same time, Brock planted a kick in the groin of an incoming zombie girl, propelling her, head first, into the glitter ball above, so that when she landed again moments later she was wearing it. Toby’s eyes suddenly opened and before he could even utter his first low-pitched zombified growl Brock Brucemeister snapped him in twine like a wishbone and used both halves of him to dispose of two girls at the same time, crushing one’s cranium with the left side and decapitating the other with the right. Besides the glitter ball wearing zombie girl, who slipped on a piece of her unattractive and half-eaten friend and fell to the floor beside her, only one girl remained.

‘Yeah, kick her ass, baby!’ Lashónda applauded next to her stunned, shocked and awed new acquaintances.

‘Fuckin’ right I am,’ Brock responded coldly, stating the obvious, and knocked all the zombie’s teeth out with a left hook before grabbing hold of her jaws with his hands and splitting open her cranium with one swift move.

‘Hey look, she’s still alive!’ Misty cried out and pointed at glitter ball girl, whose arms were flailing about above her.

The Brucemeister sighed and helped her up to her feet like a proper gentleman before treating her to a roundhouse kick to her glitter ball-bestowed head, sending it rolling across the floor to Chris’ feet. Chris, in turn, picked up the ball and looked terrified at the hundreds of tiny reflections of her in it.

‘How’s that for a patriarchal society, bitch?’ Brock whispered to himself as he walked up to the bar and grabbed a bottle of Jack.

Emptying it in one large gulp, he noticed with some dismay the unattractive and slightly overweight zombie still twitching in the mess of her friends’ remains.

‘That’s it. I’ve had it with these motherfucking zombies on this motherfucking finlandsfärja,’ Brock Brucemeister snarled and grabbed two more bottles of Jack, one of which he stuffed into his jacket pocket for later in case he’d get thirsty.

With a confident swagger he approached the final foe and emptied the bottle in his hand onto her twitching carcass. From his trouser pocket he retrieved a box of matches, lit one of them between his thumb and forefinger and dropped it on his unsuspecting victim who growled in horror and pain.

‘Can we go now?’ Misty asked.

‘M-hm, I think my baby’s done here,’ Lashónda interjected.

‘Unless misogynous Goliath over there has any better suggestions, we could try the bridge,’ Chris suggested. ‘The crew might be held up there and I saw some capable looking stewardesses when I boarded.’

‘What do you say, baby?’ Lashónda asked and received only a nod from her loving hulk of a husband.

Halfway to the bridge the stroll the gang had intended to take turned into a run for their lives as a horde of zombies caught up with them. Dashing down the narrow corridor they quickly found themselves cornered against the door to the bridge, which was locked from the inside.

‘Great idea, you guys,’ Tommy said sarcastically, delivering his first line since he had joined the band.

‘Oh, my God, we’re all gonna die!’ Average Joe cried out from the far back, standing the closest to the incoming army of undead and turning to face them, pale with fright.

‘Unlock this motherfucker!’ Brock Brucemeister commanded and put some dents in the door, whereupon it was opened by the captain of the finlandsfärja.

Average Joe, his back turned to the bridge, didn’t see his friends enter it and shrieked to high heaven as the zombies came ever closer.

‘C’mon, boy, you can make it!’ The captain shouted at him.

But it was too late.

As Joe turned around and saw his would-be savior, the zombie army grabbed him from behind and pulled him into their bloodthirsty, jumbled mess.

‘Damn!’ The captain cursed and slapped his thigh exasperatedly.

‘Tell Cindy I love h…’

Brock slammed the door shut before Average Joe had finished his sentence.

‘Who the fuck is Cindy?’

‘Christ, we lost Joe,’ Lashónda observed.

‘Huh, we what who now?’ Misty.

The captain slowly and somberly walked up to the front of the bridge, picked up a fire axe and continued what seemed to be an attempt to turn his first mate into a 3000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

‘Sir, are you perchance the captain of this vessel?’ Chris asked him in a take-charge tone of voice.

The captain withdrew the pipe from the corner of his mouth and looked at her through grim eyes.

‘What was that, young man? Oh, yes. Yes, I am.’

Chris quietly retreated to the back of the group.

‘Do you have any idea what’s going on here, captain?’ Lashónda asked.

‘Well, I have some ideas about what’s not going on,’ he replied.

‘Who gives a shit?’ Brock asked rhetorically. ‘Let’s just get the fuck outta here.’

‘God is punishing us,’ Misty speculated. ‘We’ve sinned and now it’s time to pay the piper. When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will… take the finlandsfärja.’

‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard all my life, and I’m from Mississippi, goddamn it!’

‘I have a pretty good idea about all this,’ Chris began. ‘This is precisely the kind of thing one can expect from the counterproductive male oriented structure of society. This wasn’t an act of God. There is no doubt in my mind that if anyone is to be held responsible for this, then it’s going to be a man.’

‘Actually, you may have a point there,’ Tommy interposed. ‘You guys are gonna laugh when you hear this.’ He chuckled lightly to himself as he said this. ‘You see, I met this woman… Well, women actually, but there was this one in particular. A deaf chick. Man, she had some tits on her.’ Tommy searched for signs of male bonding in Brock’s cold and chiseled features to no avail. ‘Anyway, so we go back to my cabin, right? And we do it. Aw, yeah, we do it. And she’s into the kinky stuff, so by means of looks and what I took for sign language she had me tie her to the bed. It was awesome. So, we’re doing it, and what with her being deaf and all, she’s makin’ all these noises like you wouldn’t believe. She’s sounding off like a drownin’ Dutchman in a vat o’ honey, and, boy, if she ain’t loving it! Oooo-weee!’

‘Are you going anywhere with this?’ Chris interrupted him.

‘So,’ Tommy continued, ‘we’re doing it, but then I get to thinking her moanin’ and groanin’ has taken on a different tone than before. She’s sounding more and more like she’s in pain or whatnot. And it strikes me. Right then and there. The hooker…’

‘The hooker?’ Lashónda asked confoundedly.

‘Right, I completely forgot that part of the story,’ Tommy went on. ‘So, a few weeks back, right? I’m in Irkutsk and I’m with this hooker, right? And I think I may have caught something from her, cos ever since my balls’ve been itching like crazy. And, so, it struck me as I was fucking this deaf chick what it was, cos she was showing the same symptoms as what the hooker did.’

‘Oh, my God…’

‘Shit, you screwed her into a zombie!’

‘Dear me.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ!’

The captain was the only person who didn’t seem affected by Tommy’s confession. Instead, he made an intermission in his chopping and pounding and started to scratch his arm.

‘What happened next?’ Lashónda wondered.

‘So,’ Tommy continued, ‘I finish off bonking this chick, right?’

‘Ugh, that’s so…’ Misty said, but began to feel sick to her stomach at the mere thought of Tommy humping a zombie before she could finish her sentence.

‘So, I zip up and thank her good and plenty and then I walk away.’

‘With her still tied to the bed?’ Chris demanded to know.

‘Well, yeah.’

‘Oh, my God, chauvinism knows no boundaries.’

‘Listen, man,’ Lashónda set off. ‘Now, I want you to be perfectly honest with me now. Did you stick it to any other women on this here finlandsfärja?’

Tommy gazed around the bridge with an indiscernible look on his face before walking up to Brock and raising his right hand in preparation of treating the Brucemeister to a royal high-five.

‘Heeeeell, yeah!’ He beamed.

Before anyone knew what had happened, Tommy’s right arm was skidding across the bloody floor away from him. He turned around and faced the captain, who was holding the bloody axe above his head.

‘Dude, what the f…’

With one swift motion the captain cleft Tommy’s head and both halves of it fell down with a collective thud before the rest of him caught up to them on the floor. Brock immediately disarmed the captain and lobbed the axe into a nearby wall before taking a chokehold on him from behind, with his massive arm around his neck.

‘The fuck did you do that for, old man?’

The captain struggled to free himself, but was no match for the Brucemeister, and in doing so revealed a bite mark on his arm and thus also the answer to Brock’s question.

‘Shit, he’s gonna turn into one o’ them!’ Misty cried out, and immediately after she had uttered this sentence he did.

Brock didn’t mind, though, as the captain’s head popped right off after he flexed his bicep. As the captain’s body fell to the floor, they admired the view of the Stockholmian archipelago in front of them.

‘Look! Land!’

‘About fucking time’, Brock said and laid in a collision course with the nearest island, before beating the shit out of the dashboard. ‘Quick! To the lifeboats!’

Brock picked up the axe and the remaining survivors made their way towards the lifeboats. Along the way Brock had ample opportunity to chop his adversaries to bits in what Chris defined as a brutal assault on female rights and an affirmation of the chauvinist values of our flawed society.

Within five minutes, the three of them were in a lifeboat, watching the simultaneously exploding and sinking finlandsfärja from a safe distance. Brock Brucemeister, arms akimbo in the middle of the lifeboat, looked like a slightly more masculine and impressive version of the Colossus of Rhode as he witnessed the result of what happens when you put zombies on a finlandsfärja… with Brock Brucemeister.

‘Even though you’re a male chauvinist pig, and a man, I must admit your display of stereotypical and patriarchal values has left me quite aroused and, eh, has reminded me of my desire to spawn.’

‘Hell,’ Lashónda said, ‘my baby’s more of a man than any woman can handle at any one time, including myself, so I don’t mind sharing.’

‘I think you’d have a hard time trying to stop us, Lashónda,’ chuckled Misty, perceiving the end credits to be just around the corner.

‘Well Brock,’ Brock Brucemeister said to himself, ‘looks like your work here isn’t done quite yet.’ He turned to the others. ‘Ladies, don’t get too comfy. It’s a long way to Stockholm.’