1. Zombie Princess
So that’s me — lying here in some secret facility in a glass coffin with tubes and kabelsalat sticking out of me. You might have a hard time telling, but I’m only sixteen — yep, that’s too-young-to-die sixteen, beauty-queen sixteen, really-just-a-kid sixteen, daddy’s-little-princess sixteen. And perhaps that’s where I should start explaining my predicament and suspicions. If I die, I want someone to go to jail for murder. My evil stepmother, perhaps? The evil Ms. Claudia is high on my list of suspects.
But allow me to start at the beginning — I have plenty of time now. The days are long and full of dread and nights are no better — I no longer sleep. And there’s not much for me to do. I went from daddy’s-little-princess to zombie princess in a matter of a few days. Or is hours? Mind you, I’m trying to keep up my good spirits about it all, but that’s probably because I’m so ignorant of my own prognosis. Although by the looks of my dad — he’s been crying, crying! — and by hidden evil eyes-only smiles Ms. Claudia throws my way, my life expectancy isn’t too good. But I digress — easy to do when there’s nothing to hold my mind from wandering about…
So back to the beginning. My mom died when I was just a toddler — yep I’m an orphan! Like in all good Disney fairy tales, the heroine loses her parent (one or two, depending on how the writers feel that day) early in life. My dad raised me. It was a good arrangement. Happy childhood and all that — ballet classes with pink tutus, ice cream cones in the park, shopping trips in New York City, vacations in London, Rome, Paris — you know, the usual. It was a year ago in Paris that we met Claudia. I told my dad that he should have bought an expensive red car or something to deal with his mid-life crisis, but he chose her — twenty-two years his junior, Ms. Evil Queen, a fako-artist.
And here now, I’m in some lab…sorry, as I said, my mind wonders. I no longer see things in a linear way. My life just sort of jumps at me all at once. I wonder what drugs they have me on? Oh, what would I give for the Café des 2 Moulins’ Venti, sugar-free, non-fat, vanilla soy, double shot, decaf, no foam, extra hot, Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with light whip and extra syrup… Okay, enough of that. I will try to stick to some semblance of a story for you.
Claudia Elisabeth von Reichenstein — pretentious, isn’t it? I wonder if it’s even her real name… Ms. Claudia — she hates it when I call her that, she prefers “mom”, can you believe it? She is almost six feet, Nordic blond-bombshell of epic proportions. Ms. Claudia stands out. I think her real job is to look good. And it worked. She had my dad in under a week. What can I say? Men are easy pray for women like that. And I know she slew quite a few. Her first husband, for instance, was Dr. Tom Blake. He was a winner of App/le Genius Award — he developed some sort of cool molecule augmented with a computer code when he was just a junior in high school. Or was it computer code augmented with a molecule? Cyber biology has never been my thing. The main point of his invention was to make it easier for people with physical disabilities to communicate with the outside world and live fuller lives…in cyberspace. For this, Tom got scholarships to every university known to men and tons of publicity. And in every newspaper article photo, there was Ms. Claudia, standing next to this gangly nerd. They were married just a year and thousands of photo-ups after that award — as soon as Tom was of a legal age to do so. Somehow, she managed to take Tom’s genius and turn it into her personal PR machine. The Evil One is not without talent — social engineering is her specialty.
Ms. Claudia left Tom when he wasn’t propelling her to fame as fast as she wanted. I think the poor guy still doesn’t understand what happened. Here he is, a twenty-nine-year-old molecular cyber-physicist — or was that physical cyber-moleculist? — with a ten-year-old son, Bartholomew Blake — she did give him that — and a nasty divorce. At least she didn’t snare Tom for too long — in and out, that’s her motto.
Bartholomew is a cool kid. I call him Doc — more his dad than his mom. He and his munchkin friends have been very helpful… Alas, I jump ahead. But I do want to say that Tom and Doc have been the best part of my dad’s marriage experiment. And if I’m ever to survive my current zombie-affliction, it would be because those guys did something… I know they’ve been both somewhere close by. I can feel it. Smell it? My senses are so muddled now. And my thoughts are like over-cooked spaghetti — mushy, confused, and lacking any structure. I think I’ll just give you a chronology of events that got me here, in my crystal sarcophagus.
