Subject: Romero is a pain

The Sage thought to himself this was an odd way to entitle an email from a sub-tropical island paradise. “Well it is from Rupert…he is that much of miserable sod.”

The Sage continued reading the email and started to understand what the hell Rupert was on about. Andrew desperately attempted not to laugh at the plight of his friend, but oh it was hard. Claire noticed The Sage snickering and inquired. By this time, Eden had her ears up and was glaring at her master.

The Sage responded trying to hide his amusement. “Its from…heh…Rupert…heh…and he is um surrounded by er hostile not-dead. Ah…they are besieging him.”

“What? Is he in trouble?…What has got into you Andrew?” spluttered Claire.

“No…er, yes, he is in trouble, but not really. Er…”

“Why is it funny?” Claire asked confused and not a bit miffed.

“I will have to read it to you…or you can read it for yourself…I promise you, its hilarious. Well, if you prefer, it has its funny side.”

Clare sat down and began to read Rupert’s e-mail.

“Sage: I have got myself into a bit of a bloody bother here in Narita. I am holed up in a cabin on a hill surrounded by a bunch of undead. Yes, I know there are no such thing. But these fools think they are undead because of some idiot rumour started by some stoned idiot fan of Romero films. He got them all into the genre and now they are all convinced they are zombies.

They have convinced themselves that they are zombies and I am the only person left alive, so naturally, they have to kill me.

Of course, since the idiots are not undead I can’t shoot the bastards with the small armoury I have here, enough to kill them all several times over. But if I kill them all, I will probably be tossed away in prison for longer than Cthulhu has been in Ry’leth.

The dumb buggers occasional take attempts to break in but because they are not zombies they keep hurting themselves and having to withdraw. Course as they’re braindead zombies…er non-zombies they are not apparently onto any clever ways to kill me.

So, I sit here with lots of food, drink, satellite, internet connection and shed-loads of weaponry unable to do a thing.

The fools are sleeping during the day and not eating, so they will eventually weaken and maybe (really) die. Of course, I need to find a way of not getting killed and or not getting everyone killed on the island.

At this rate, I wish the Deep Ones would show up and kill these dolts…Get me out of this shit. Could you arrange that?

Oh no…that would be bad, because I don’t have a handy Elder Sign.

I am in a bit of a freaking bind…any smart-arse solutions? Er I mean solutions? I would suggest nuking the place by accident but I am guessing Claire would get mad at me for dying.

What the hell do I do?…They are going to drive me nuts and I’m going to start picking off their sorry dumb-arses one by one. I could even put out a few web-cams and play it live as a zombie flick. Probably make millions before I got jailed for killing non-zombies.

Claire did not find it as funny as the Sage but did show some sign of laughter lines.

“I suppose we need to figure out what the hell we can do for him.”

“Yes. Quite. We could send the Coast Guard in but then they would not be too pleased to have to lug a trunk of books up to the helicopter.” The Sage dryly responded

“Oh yes, his light reading material…”

“Yes, that problem.”

“Well, you have to respond with something. After all, he is asking for our help.”

“Wonder if we could knock em’ out with some sort of gas,” suggested the trying-to-be-serious Sage.

“We could go rescue him but that might take a while.”

“Well naturally and I would have to tell our various friends with planes what we were doing…” Replied the Sage.

“Hrm…So what are we going to do then?”

“Well, I vote for letting the idiots starve to death and letting him get off by himself.”

“Yes, but then he would be blamed for letting them die by relevant authorities, whoever those might be.

“Which is who btw?” Replied Claire.

“I think it might be the Dutch…”

“Oh crap, you mean the same people who handled the Natalie Holloway thing in Aruba?”

The Sage turned back to the computer and replied; “Well yes.”

“Yeah, he is well and truly stuffed then.”

“Well, he has got himself out of worse scrapes than this…” replied the Sage. “Let’s let him get on with it…We can get him back if the Dutch grab him.”

“I can’t wait to hear how gets himself out of this one…” Claire said. “I suppose I should write back to him…stroke his ego and tell him we have faith in him.”

“Yeah, that might be best I think. Tell him we will try to figure out something.”

The Sage got up and let Claire at the computer again. “I really can’t to see how he deals with non-monsters acting like monsters…”

“Yeah me too…” She said as she hit send. “Sure is outside my experience. I am not sorry for that. Rupert, just what have you gotten yourself into!”