George Washington Zombie Slayer (21 page)

Chapter 52

Springtime in Valley Forge

General Washington made plans to move his 11 remaining soldiers out for
march in the springtime campaign that he knew was coming, and made preparations for the surrender of his army, which was really just a formality at this point.

The warm breath of spring gently kissed
the countryside of Valley Forge this day and found a depressed George Washington smoking weed on a rocking chair outside his headquarters with his aide Reebock. There was perhaps a small tear in George Washington’s eye.

“Well, we fought da good fight, mon,” Reebock said before taking a long, slow drag on his blunt. “The odds were too great against us.”

“Yes,” Washington admitted. “Perhaps so.”  Reebock handed him the extra-large, hand rolled blunt and Washington, too, took a long slow inhalation of his finest home grown marijuana.  “This shit does help a bit, I have to admit,” said the General.

At
that moment, the chief surgeon of his command, Dr. B.F. Pierce, came out of one of the medical tents and ran immediately to General Washington.

“It’s astounding,” Dr
. Pierce said, “simply astounding!”

“What’s up, Doc
?” Washington asked.

“Our sick soldiers,” Dr. Pierce explained. “Nearly all 2,500
who were sick are now active and fit for duty! It must be the recent stretch of warm weather, coupled with my prescribed regimen of regular bleeding that has acted as a restorative.”

From across the compound of V
alley Forge, soldiers by the hundreds began emerging from their tents and cabins, warming themselves in the delicious, spring sunlight as they dressed in their uniforms.

“God be praised!” Washington nearly shouted. He knelt on one knee, unsheathing his sword and held it point down as he silently said a prayer of thanks. Just then, Washington w
as alerted to some problem by the barking of Lord Buster Farnsworth, who had just now come out of hiding in the woods. The small terrier and army mascot was barking and cavorting furiously.

“What has
Lord Farnsworth so agitated?” Washington asked.

Reebock had already
grabbed the telescopic spyglass and was peering across the horizon.

“Look at this, m
on!” Reebock exclaimed as he looked through the glass again and then handed it to his Commander. Washington grabbed the spyglass and his heart leapt for joy as he peered through it. On the horizon, as far as the eye could see, were hundreds and thousands of American troops, all converging upon Valley Forge!

These were the soldiers who ha
d deserted during the intolerable winter conditions at Valley Forge. But with the coming of Spring, these men headed back to army, and back to the command of George Washington. They were returning and re-joining the Continental Army.

So, too, there came newly enlisted soldiers
, boys and men who had previously sat upon the sidelines of history but had now decided to join the battle for freedom and independence. For days and weeks they came to Valley Forge, from all the states, building and rebuilding the strength of this Continental Army, until at last there were nearly 13.000 troops fit for duty under George Washington’s command.

With this influx of soldiers, Washington knew that there was still hope for victory in the Revolutionary War.

Chapter 53

A
Death in the General’s Family

Washington sent his wife Martha home with thanks for her assistance, while his
son John-Poopy remained with the army, still sick and unable to serve. Washington was now a busy man and occupied every waking hour with plans for his offensive against Cornwallis and the British. But as summer approached, the army physician Dr. Pierce again came to speak with the General.

“Please come with me, Sir
,” said the Doctor in all seriousness. He walked Washington to a small log cabin across the camp and stood outside with the General for a moment before going in.

“It’s your son, General Washington,” Dr. Pierce explained
. “He is gravely ill.”

“With constipation
, still?” asked Washington.

“No, Sir,” replied the Doctor. “I’m afraid it’s much more serious than that.”

“Diarrhea?  Dysentery?” asked the General.

“No, Sir,” replied Dr. Pierce. “I’m afraid John-Poopy Washington has been…bitten.”

“Bitten?” exclaimed Washington in surprise. “By a zombie?” he asked.

“I’m afraid so, Sir,” Dr. Pierce replied. “It happened during the Battle of White Marsh in December. It was a small bite and we hoped he might pull through.”

“But I didn’t know,” Washington said. “I thought—“

“He didn’t want you to know,” admitted the doctor. “He said you had enough to worry about already. And there was nothing you could do, in any case.
He’s inside this cabin, Sir, but he hasn’t long to live.”

There were times in his stepson’s life when George Washington was frustrated and angered with John Poopy. But none of that seemed to matter
now. Washington had watched John grow from an inappropriately crapping small child into an inappropriately crapping young adult officer in the Continental Army. And although John was only his stepson, and therefore not loved as much as a biological child would be, Washington still cared deeply for this ever-shitting crapstorm of a young man.

Washington was shocked when he saw the condition of his stepson
as he entered the cabin. John was pale and emaciated, much as Washington’s own father had been after being bitten so many years ago.

“Father, I’m sorry,” John said to the General as he entered.

“Oh nonsense, John, my brave soldier,” Washington replied. “Any one of us could have been bitten.”

“No, not that,”
John whispered. “I mean about the constant crapping. “

“Oh, that,” Washington said. “Well,
I know you can’t help it, son. I remember our slave Beyonce once told me… How did she put it? I think she said that your constant uncontrolled defecation is caused by irritable bowel syndrome as a result of a genetic predisposition and is nearly impossible to treat prior to the advent of modern pharmaceuticals,” Washington said as he lovingly held his son’s pale, cold hand.

“Thank you for understanding, father,” John replied.  “It’s so hard to hold it in
, and especially when sick. I feel even now like shitting myself.”

“Well, my son,” said Washington smiling.
“Perhaps just this once, it would be all right if you... um…did that here.”

In just a few seconds, General George Washington could hear and smell that the dying stepson he called John-Poopy had once again crapped himself, this time on his own deathbed. And although repulsive and offensive in the highest degree, it seemed somehow appropriate and fitting for his stepson’s last act on earth.

“My goodness but that smells extraordinarily offensive,” Washington noted, laughing, waving his free hand in the air in the feeble effort dissipate the noxious odor. 

“It’s good that we can still laugh about it,” John-Poopy said laughing weakly with a smile.  “Don’t cry, father,” he said, noticing tears streaming down his stepfather’s face.

“No, I’m only crying because of the horrible stink,” George Washington said still laughing and gagging while waving his hand in the air.

“It is a fitting end for me,
father,” John-Poopy replied. And then he slowly closed his eyes, stopped breathing, and passed away. Mercifully, as he was no longer breathing, the noxious ordeal was over for him. John-Poopy Washington, stepson of George, had crapped his last crap.

Dr. Pierce entered the cabin just after John-Poopy had expired and gagged slightly from the stench. Per Washington’s previous instructions, Dr. Pierce knew, as did all the Doctors of the Continental Army, how to prevent a “zombie bitten” patient who died from becoming a re-animated zombie himself. Pierce made certain that John Poopy was truly deceased, then grabbed a bayonet and thrust it repeatedly into the young lad’s skull, spraying both himself and the General with a liberal spattering of blood.

“OK, OK,” Washington said after the ninth bayonet thrust. “I believe we’re safe now.”

“Just making sure, General,” replied the doctor. “I can’t tell you how many times we thought one of these was dead before it hopped up back to life
.”

Washington was forced to flee the enclosed cabin lest he be overcome by the
fecal fumes, but he found himself surprisingly grief-stricken by the loss of his stepson. Washington ordered the body of his stepson cleaned (by a British prisoner) and shipped back home for burial.

General George Washington
later walked to the edge of camp with his son’s flag covered casket and watched it carefully loaded on the wagon for the journey to Virginia. There he saw a sight which made his heart heavy with sadness. In the field lay thousands of flag covered caskets, representing over 2000 as yet unburied dead from the Valley Forge winter.

Hundreds of Washington’s soldiers were busily at work, di
gging the mass graves in the now-thawed Pennsylvania soil which would become the final resting place of these American warrior heroes. Unlike the British, who used their deceased as zombies in defiance of the laws of man and God, the Americans would still stand proud and bury their dead.

Many days later, a lonely and
grieving Martha Washington wept inconsolably as she buried her last surviving child, her only son, in the family plot just a short walk from the main house at Mount Vernon.

It should be noted that for many years
, even after the Revolutionary War, John-Poopy Washington’s grave was marked by a simple wooden cross. George Washington could never quite think of an appropriate inscription for his stepson’s gravestone until his slave, Oprah, gave him a suggestion which was later carved upon the marker. Thus, even to this day, visitors to the Mount Vernon estate can still find the grave of Washington’s only stepson, capped with a marble gravestone that bears the inscription: “Here lies John Washington, Lovingly Called Poopy, Who Gave a Shit for American Independence.”

Chapter 54

The British Treat Their Gravely Sick and Wounded

Lord General Cornwallis walked with a smile int
o the camp hospital where nearly two thousand British troops lay sick and dying. The soldiers housed here were the worst of the worst, seriously ill or wounded soldiers that had little or no chance of recovery. As in the American Army, illness and disease had ravaged the British troops over the harsh winter. Cornwallis had been angrily lamenting the large numbers of sick and wounded that were draining his army of valuable resources. He could think of no solution to the great numbers of those unfit for duty, until this morning, when he had formulated what he regarded as one of his most brilliant ideas.

The large bay doors of the hospital complex burst open just aft
er the arrival of Cornwallis and hundreds of British soldiers marched in, each bearing one leashed zombie. Each Redcoat walked his zombie over to a wounded soldier, and allowed the zombie to deeply bite the bedbound patient, despite the patient’s screams and cries for mercy.

Again and again, the process was repeated until the screams of thousands
of British soldiers echoed throughout the hospital. Before long, it was over. Every sick and wounded man had been bitten. British General Cornwallis had devised a plan to rid his entire army of sick and wounded by turning them all into zombies! Within hours and days, every single wounded British soldier would die and become reborn as a zombie.

“You are a genius, General,” said his aide Smithers. “You have rid the entire army of our sick and wounded in one fell swoop!”

“It was rather a stroke of genius,” Cornwallis said unabashedly.

“And the best part is,” Smithers continued, “we shan’t have any further casualties from this lot, as they’re already dead.
I shall see that these new zombies are quickly transported to our Zombie Camp in Virginia for immediate training and development. They will most certainly have a positive effect upon our success against the Colonials.”

“A great leader finds the means to convert negative
hardships into positive opportunities,” Cornwallis said proudly.  “In Washington’s army, those many thousands of his sick and wounded simply died. But that is why we British are superior. Instead of just letting our soldiers languish and perish, as the colonials do, we harvest our sick and dying as a resource which can be used for productive purposes. It is why we British shall most certainly prevail in this conflict.”

“You are an exemplar of British tenacity and innovation,” Smithers said.
“I thank God for your bold leadership, General.”

“Yes, to
those whom God has given great skill,” Cornwallis reflected haughtily, “much is expected. I can only be pleased that my abilities may be so gainfully employed, at this turbulent time in history, for the defense of King and Country.”

“And your plans for the upcoming campaign?” Smithers asked.

“As we discussed before,” Cornwallis explained, “I shall now attack the colonials on multiple fronts, especially in the Carolinas, away from the direct command of Washington.”

“It’s a brilliant plan of attack,” Smithers stated soundly. “One destined to preserve your name in the annals of British history.”

“History will no doubt smile affectionately upon me,” Cornwallis boasted. “Especially since we now have an additional 2,500 fresh, zombie troops that are ready to be trained,” Cornwallis added. “This gives us an even larger numerical advantage over the colonials.”

“Truly remarkable, General,” Smithers added as Cornwallis watched his own formerly wounded soldiers begin the transformation into zombies. Cornwallis inhaled deeply
the smell of decaying flesh through his nose and smiled broadly as he watched the transformations.

“I love the smell of zombies in the morning,” Cornwallis said at last. “Smells like…victory.”