Episode 4: Sascha Martin's Zombie Dust

Listeners, beware.

We’ve arrived at Episode Four of Sascha Martin’s Ripping News, and here we face the slavering, ravening, grasping, gasping, moaning, groaning, cruel and drooling hordes of … girls, of altered state.

But wait, of late, without debate, it was another awful fate oppressing Landfill. Sascha’s Super Balls. What news of those? Well, Sascha’s latest Ripping News, of course - that’s Sascha Martin’s Zombie Dust, which follows in three, two, one.

Sascha Martin’s Zombie Dust was science on the fly, in the hungry darkness, after bedtime, halfway to the sky; a correction, having side effects observed along the way, and it wasn’t just the girls behaving badly, as they say.

Sascha’s Super Balls, you may recall, which managed, inter alia, to bury all of Landfill and obliterate Australia, now threatened to explode around the whole Pacific Rim.

Would they name the next extinction-level moment after him?

Though the rampage had been halted, it was only a respite.

With the dawn it would resume, so let us not forget the sight of Landfill Public School, although we couldn’t see it for the balls, piled high above the playground and the classrooms and the halls, nor yet the children and their teachers, too exhausted to remark, as they shivered on the summit, waiting rescue in the dark.

There was not a hint of brightness from the moon, behind a cloud, and the noise of empty stomachs in the night was very loud, and the hours left of darkness, not so many, after all, were the only hours Sascha had to banish every ball. So he squinted in the glow of Aggie’s booklight, commandeered, at the things he had available, some his, some volunteered.

His solution was evolving from a biro, made in France, plus the odds and ends that Luca kept in pockets of his pants, and the hairpin of a quiet girl named Ursula von Drept, who was on a list of enemies that Mary-Alice kept.

Last of all, but most important, was a battery, only there because of Aggie and her booklight, cause she always had a spare.

It was less than he could wish for, with a world to save or lose, but inventors sometimes have to work with things they wouldn’t choose. And he did, he worked for hours till, ‘Initial test!’ he called.

Hope sprang up among the Super Balls, fell down again and crawled, and met with Mary-Alice Cooper, who had put them where they were (it could all have been avoided if it hadn’t been for her).

‘Oh my God!’ she now responded. ‘Is that it? Is that your best?

‘I’ve been waiting all these hours, and you’re only up to test?’

Someone popped her with a Super Ball, a pot-shot in the dark, then another, and another, and another found its mark.

Mary-Alice was beside herself.

They got her there as well.

Then, exhausted from her screeching, she was silent for a spell.

Sascha used the moment’s quiet to convey a brief remark.

‘I should warn you, something very bright may penetrate the dark. When it happens, if it happens, but it will, of course, I mean, you’re observers, not experiment. You mustn’t intervene!’

‘Oh, we won’t,’ said all the children, and ‘Of course!’ the teachers said. ‘Oh my God!’ said Mary-Alice, who’d recovered. ‘Go ahead!’

But he hesitated, wondering if this were for the best. Then he pushed his altered biro through a Super Ball at rest.

Nothing happened.

Anticlimax.

‘Oh my God,’ said she, who must.

Then the Super Ball exploded into phosphorescent dust, lighting all the hungry faces, the exhausted bodies prone.

‘Let it settle!’ Sascha told them. ‘Leave the shiny stuff alone.’

But his words were lost in squeakings and the shriekings of delight, that had risen to the sky as Sascha’s stardust filled the night.

For the girls, who, by their nature, were enamoured of display, were embracing this distraction from a truly dreadful day, and were catching all the particles that flickered from the sky, and admiring how they flattered their appearance, with a sigh.

Sascha pleaded.

They ignored him, in their hunger to acquire, and adorn themselves, with sparkles for the others to admire.

‘Oh, it’s prettier than glitter! Such a shame to let it waste!’

Every flash of gold was captured, every glimmer carefully placed.

Just a single fleck escaped the fashionistas, and it fell upon a Super Ball.

The shadows kept it hidden very well.

Meanwhile, girls began to notice that the flecks, on hand and face, had begun to burrow inwards, and were gone without a trace.

It was really disappointing, in a fashion sense. But some wondered what effects the golden flecks might have upon them.

Um … That was answered pretty quickly when the girls began to glow, with an eerie, even ghostly luminescence, and a low, inhuman groaning came from all of them that didn’t match their size, and a dark, forbidden hunger filled their phosphorescent eyes.

There was something truly chilling in the looks they gave the boys, as they turned and crept towards them with their ghastly, groaning noise, and with a grim, unceasing stumble, neither fast nor was it slow.

And the boys were looking suddenly for somewhere else to go, upon this mountain made of Super Balls, all sliding in the night.

And they tried to run away but fell and tumbled in their fright, because the balls rolled underneath them in their gruelling, pooling whirls, and relentlessly behind them came the zombie, drooling girls.

Mary-Alice leapt at Sascha with her features taut and gnarled, snapping all her gappy teeth that she was bearing as she snarled, and saliva oozed and dangled from her floppy bottom lip.

Sascha dodged her with a whimper, and a stumble and a slip. But he couldn’t seem to lose her, with her ghostly, horrid light, so he dived beneath the Super Balls, and hoped with all his might that they’d conceal him from the monster who was moaning overhead … and he struggled not to tremble in his terror and his dread.

But the groaning noise of Mary-Alice Cooper filled his ear, and he felt the balls displacing as the zombie girl drew near, ever nearer, creeping closer, and there wasn’t any doubt! She was sniffing at the Super Balls!

But could she sniff him out?

She could.

A hand shot in and grabbed him, little talons gripping tight, and the zombie Mary-Alice hoisted Sascha in the night.

She observed him for a moment, full of groans and zombie sighs, and he couldn’t help but notice something moving in her eyes.

It was Zombie Dust, and Sascha followed every golden fleck.

Then Mary-Alice plunged her little choppers in his neck.

Now, a single fleck of Zombie Dust had landed, you’ll recall, and was sitting, all unnoticed, on a sleeping Super Ball.

As the girls turned into zombies, it was burrowing inside, where it sparked a new reaction, making particles collide.

Not a soul observed it happen.

No one sensed the change at all, just as no one saw a line of light emerging from the ball, like the light you see escaping through a door that swings ajar.

Then the Super Ball went nova, hurling stardust, like a star.

As the force of the explosion hit the Super Balls nearby, they erupted like volcanoes, spitting their dust in the sky, and a host of other Super Balls ripped open with a roar, shooting stardust at their neighbours, which blew up and blasted more.

What a light show they provided, all those phosphorescent flecks, and they lit the zombies’ upturned little faces and their necks.

And with all those gaping, girly ghouls in thrall to the display, Sascha found himself discarded on the mountain, where he lay.

If the boys could run, they’d surely do it now, and wouldn’t you?

But the stardust had impacted them, and they were zombies, too.

Still the Super Balls exploded in their chain-reacting blast, and the mountain made of Super Balls was disappearing fast, as the not-so-human Sascha turned his zombie eyes to feast on a band of light, now strengthening and rising in the east.

Then the dawning sun’s corona touched the bottom of the sky, and the zombies, touched by sunlight, fell unconscious in reply.

They awoke some hours later, not as zombies any more, in a landscape they remembered from a little while before.

Landfill Public School was new again, scrubbed clean and full of light, every peeling wall restored and every window clear and bright.

Had it really only been a day?

How time had seemed to fly, since the first of Sascha’s Super Balls had thought to multiply.

Balls had given way to Zombie Dust, two nightmares in a day.

And the nightmare isn’t over.

Well, at least, that’s what they say.

Because there must have been some Zombie Dust, the scientists agree, that descended to the darkness at the bottom of the sea, where the sunlight never reaches and exotic creatures glide.

So it’s worrying to wonder what the ocean depths may hide.

Are there blind but savage zombie fish, and other malcontents?

Zombie microbes now evolving in the hydrothermal vents?

Zombie giant squid and octopi?

And little zombie prawns, drifting hungry in the night to where the zombie coral spawns?

Zombie starfish, zombie urchins at the bottom of the bay?

Zombie sharks and zombie dolphins?

Zombie mermaids, who can say?

But it’s all just speculation, food for other people’s thought.

Sascha’s busy with the project he should probably abort.

It’s disgusting, uncontainable, and doesn’t decompose.

But its most endearing feature is it gobbles and it grows.

Well, we know what happened there.

It’s in the teasers, one, two, three, when our heroes landed naked in the snotty yellow sea.

I know, we have to circle back to end that snotty tale of woe.

But next episode, we won’t, because we’ve somewhen else to go.

It’s a blip from Sascha’s holidays, when time was there to kill, and his innocent inventing met his not-friend’s iron will, to build a legend that the uninformed still misconstrue a lot.

Cause they say it’s like their Christmas, but the locals say it’s not.

The end.

All Mary-Alice wanted was attention, and a really stunning selfie, but now she’s on the worst trip ever!

People she doesn’t even know are calling her names, and her new best friend has really sunk the claws in.

Next week, join our feisty little hero on the ride of a lifetime … of many lifetimes in fact, in Sascha Martin’s Pitchy Witch.