A Pointless Story

Justine Larbalestier, who I suspect was my tutor for some course I had at university, has a thing about zombies (she likes them) and another thing about unicorns (she doesn't like them). For no reason at all other than I'm a bit bored, here's a story that will either piss her off or not piss her off.

Once upon a time it was night. Sure, that's not a very imaginative opening to this story, since it's night lots of the time, but for the purposes of this story, it's got to be night, okay? So anyway, it was night and in the middle of a graveyard, because a graveyard is where these things happen, and an old man called Norris was wandering around in the moonlight. Norris was just some guy the producers Civic Cemetery Authorities paid to wander around with a shovel. Occasionally he would stop and say "Ooh, arrrgh, Oy be garrrrgh!" in a Somersetshire accent. The authorities didn't pay him to do that, that was just him ad-libbing. All of a sudden it burst out of the ground - the decaying, putrefying yet strangely elegant and unearthly form of

THE UNICORN ZOMBIE OF DEATH (and associated acts of destruction and brain-sucking).

Norris gave up a melancholy "Ooh arrrgh!" as the malevolent zombie-steed leapt upon him, and, piercing his skull with its evil but weirdly beautiful horn, proceeded to feast upon his cerebral organ beneath the cold, cold moon.

Over the next few weeks, this malicious zombie-steed wreaked havoc on the Kingdom of Og, galloping from one corner of the kingdom to the other and feasting on the brains of all of the goodly citizens of Og. At first the citizens thought it was the tax inspector, but then realised it wasn't taxing season (And besides, even though the Labor Party, who were in power at the time, were pretty fond of this sort of thing, even they wouldn't go this far). The entire Kingdom of Og was held in the grip of a reign of terror by this wicked yet eerily sublime zombie-unicorn. Finally, they all gathered together in the Castle of Og to figure out what to do, or at least get a drink out of it.
It was then that an old man piped up and said,
"I say we FIGHT back against these Injuns! It's either fight back or..."
Once they had bundled him out the door to mutter about Injuns and General Custer to the moon, they got to talking again about the Killer Zombie-Unicorn.
"There be some that say," said Siegmund Glouch, of the Greenhill Glouches, "That this zombie-unicorn can only be caught by a virgin maiden, or, if that be impossible, any old girl will do."
"Ooh!" said one citizen.
"Aaargh!" said another citizen.
Which I guess was their way of agreeing with him. I don't know, I'm just writing this down, it's not as if I can speak foreign languages like Somerset, or anything.

But as it turned out, the only person they could find to catch the zombie-unicorn was Old Mad Sal, who lived in a cave on her own and didn't talk much, just had a disturbing laugh (or possibly that was her emphysema). She wasn't too happy about doing it, either, but the housing minister threatened to demolish her cave if she didn't agree. Anyway, just to be on the safe side, she secretly took a virgin pledge on the side with the local Baptist Minister, who was happy to oblige, since she promised to come to church every Sunday.
Everybody in the town thought it was going to be the end of Old Mad Sal, but as it turned out, Sal got along quite well with the zombie-unicorn, so much so that they both decided to take over the kingdom of Og.

And Old Mad Sal galloped to and fro across the Kingdom of Og on the demonic palfrey, who gored hither and thither and yon with his horrendous but hypnotic horn. And the two held the Kingdom of Og in the grip of terror for a thousand and one years. The end.