Daily Necromancer

“Hey, you alive in there?”

I was roused from my morning stupor by the clear voice the man beside me, looking up from his work for just enough time to mock me. I looked into his eyes and saw a manic gleam that could only be caused by caffeine. I refused to believe that people can be this active before noon by natural methods.

“God damn it, Rich, those jokes were never funny. I thought you’d get tired of death jokes after a year of being here.”

His shit-eating grin shined out from under the cowl of his cloak, and I couldn’t help but allow a smile to spread across my face as well. To be honest, I didn’t think I could have lasted as long as I had in this job if it weren’t for Rich’s terrible sense of humor and my ability to cope with it. The atmosphere was a bit dreary, which I suppose is to be expected from a necromantic cultist camp, but it honestly wasn’t a bad place to work if you don’t mind being around the undead. I had a hard time imagining how old necromancers could stand working with the horrible abominations that existed before the regime change in the monster kingdom. They’re still rotting corpses whose animation spits in the face of nature and its God, sure, but they’re a bit easier on the eyes now at least.

My thoughts were interrupted by Rich yet again as he turned back towards the table he was working at. “You know you love it. By the way, did you get the memo that went out this morning? Apparently they’re changing the name of the organization.”

“Can you even change the name of a cult? I thought that sort of thing got decided at the beginning, and then they’re stuck with it.”

He shrugged. “Well, you know how Tryamor is; she’s always coming up with new ideas and ditching them halfway through. We have been getting a lot less initiates lately, but personally, I think it’s because her brain’s finally starting to rot.” Rich glanced a bit to the side over his shoulder, and his fears were assuaged by the lack of any of our zombie coworkers in the immediate area. That didn’t rule out ghosts, of course, but we both hoped that they’d have better things to do than make sure that we were actually working. I assumed that Rich was just trying to make himself look like he was doing work, as usual. “Anyways, get a load of the name she settled on: The Wight Supremacy Movement.”

I stared at my mocha-skinned friend in absolute bafflement, with my mouth slightly agape as I attempted to comprehend. He let out a short sigh, grabbed a piece of paper, and wrote the name out. The blood-stained paper (we were always hard-pressed to find any equipment that didn’t have some sort of gore on it) did little to settle my concerns, so I made them known. “Really? Who thought this was a good idea?”

Rich turned from the workbench again and shot me a condescending glance. “We’re a group of cultists and the undead, working to undo all of humanity’s progress by raping and slaughtering entire towns at a time to convert them to our army of the damned. We’re literally establishing the supremacy of the Wights. I don’t think changing our name is going to do much to sway the public opinion on that.”

“Why do we even have a PR department, then? I know we aren’t exactly picky about who we take in, but those guys are garbage at their jobs.”

“Actually,” Rich continued as he grabbed some sort of scalpel from the shelf next to him and stabbed it vigorously into the body in front of him, “there was a lot of downsizing in public relations recently. Everyone’s been turned except for Bob, so I guess he’s the one who came up with it.”

“Fucking Bob.” Bob was just the sort of asshole who would come up with a name like that. Sweet Ryus on a riverboat, I hated his guts. I hoped that he’d be raped by some shit-tier monster, like a slug or something. Were there even slug monster girls? I hoped that if there weren’t, Bob would be the first to discover them, preferably by falling into some sort of horrific slug mating pit.

Rich made a curt nod in agreement. “Fucking Bob.”

My hatred for Bob abated for just enough time for me to think about the fates of the other, slightly less terrible members of the public relations team. “Hey Rich, what do you think being a zombie is like?”

“Hell if I know. Rapey, I guess? It’d be pretty cool to not have to breathe any more, though.”

“You really haven’t thought about it before? It’s a pretty big occupational risk.” I only got a shrug in response, so I went on. “It’s a lot different than it was in the old days, too. Now, turning into a girl is part of the deal.” I paused for a moment in thought, which went unnoticed by Rich as he used a syringe for something. It looked like he really was doing work after all.

“Rich, why DO we raise all of our undead as sexy girls anyways?”

He stopped just short of injecting a viscous purple fluid into the cadaver before him, and turned to me with an incredulous look. “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“Humor me here. What if, instead of making all of the zombies or whatever we’re making that day into spooky rape machines, we just made normal zombies to kill people instead?”

Rich raised an eyebrow in response. “That doesn’t make any sense. How can we expect people to have sex with them if they’re not like that?”

“That’s the thing; instead of making meat puppets for our dicks, we could just raise zombies how they look like already. They can still kill people like that, we can still take over towns for the glory of the kingdom of death, and we don’t waste energy on adding extra girly bits. For fuck’s sake, we’re putting tits on skeletons!”

I motioned towards the operating table next to Rich, where he was actually in the process of sewing a breast onto a skeleton. He looked down to the skeleton, whose subsequent shrug almost loosed the stitching on her other boob, and he looked back at me.
“Well, yeah. All skeletons have tits.”

“No, Rich, not all skeletons have tits” I managed to mumble through the palm that I had instinctively brought over my face. “Guys have skeletons too. YOU have a skeleton inside of you with no tits at all.”

He looked up in alarm. “Dude, that’s really spooky.” His concerns were quickly replaced, however. “Wait, if I have a skeleton inside of me, and I want to fuck that skeleton, does that make me gay?”

Before I could manage a response, our philosophical debate was interrupted by a nasally voice wheezing from behind us.
“Hey guys, you look DEAD on your feet! Ha ha, how’s it going?”

“How about you mind your own business, Bob?” The volume of my response was probably inappropriate for a work environment, bordering on yelling. It was reflexive.

“I really think that this conversation has nothing to do with you, BOB.” Rich’s voice was decidedly more composed than my own, but grew more stringent with each word so that by the time he reached Bob’s name he was screeching like a harpy in heat. I was proud to call this man my friend.

Bob’s eyes rapidly shot between the two of us, twitching in a mix of incomprehension and fear. He laughed nervously and backed away.
Rich and I glanced at each other. “Fucking Bob” was muttered between us, and I was sure that I heard at least one raspy undead voice join in. Not even the dead knew peace from dealing with guys like that.

After a few moments, I turned back again to Rich to observe him sewing a third breast onto the skeleton, much to her protest. He was always one of those creative types. Sensing my eyes on him, he said “Hey, I think I remember answer to what you were complaining about before. We have to make our zombies beautiful, bodacious babes because the new demon lord outlawed any other type of necromancy as a part of her new regime. If for some unholy reason we made guy zombies,” Rich, shuddering at the thought, continued, “they’d probably just kill us and convert whatever we made to the normal models. Besides, they don’t teach the old ways of necromancy anymore.”

“They were supposed to teach us? I just picked up a pamphlet when I saw it in the dumpster I was trying to find leftover deli meats in.”

This elicited another shrug from Rich. “I took a class on monster biology once, so I figure it’s the same thing. You just need to remember which bone goes in each orifice.”

I decided not to correct him, because that would be presumptuous thing for a person who had never taken a course on monster biology to do. The work day continued fairly normally, with Rich indiscriminately attaching different body to zombies and being corrected by the zombies that he was operating on, and with me drinking whiskey from the flask I had snuck into the compound and playing with a ball and cup that I had managed to fashion from a skeleton’s hand and one of the many excess breasts that Rich had lying around.

As the sun set, tinged a beautiful shade of violet by the dense and choking miasma that was always present amongst the cult’s tents, I reclined on the foam mat that had come with the robes I was given upon signing up. Just as sleep began to pull on my lids I heard the flutter of my tent’s door flaps and looked to see a diminutive lich, flanked by two notably larger zombies, blocking the light of the lanterns outside. Worry began to creep into my expression as the chilling drone of the lich’s voice, sounding completely foreign to the body of the young girl from which it emanated, pierced the thick night air.

“Acolyte, it has come to our attention that you have been entertaining some thoughts that are regarded as, shall we say, incompatible with the intentions of our organization.”

Her lips moved with the minimal amount of effort required to make her words clear, but the rest of the face was frozen in a pallid mask of death. It was to be expected from one who had been parted from her natural life long ago, especially from this particular kind of undead. This was some small comfort to me in the face of this lich, however, and I noticed in the periphery of my vision that the zombies were shuffling noiselessly closer.

The lich, wearing only an open cloak much more tattered than my own and undulating as if of its own volition, continued without any sort of malice, or even sarcasm. “I’m afraid that Lady Tryamor has requested a private audience with you. Please be so kind as to let us escort you to her immediately.”

I was given no chance to give permission or protest as I was lifted by the rotting hands that grasped my arms like vices and pushed me towards the lights outside.