Chapter 1:Just a Day In The Life

Cigarette smoke and trench coat.

Two things surrounding John Constantine at the moment as he walked briskly through the London streets, a duffel bag sometimes bumping ag. Not everyone in the world had heard of John Constantine. Only the ones who knew too much. And not everyone in London knew John Constantine. Only the important ones. Or the unlucky ones.

And only the really unlucky ones knew him well.

When he came to the door of the house he wanted to get into, he rattled the handle a bit. It was locked. That was a simple enough problem.

"Right then." Constantine muttered, lightning himself another smoke. "What say we open up then?"

The door creaked a little bit. This bugger really didn't want to meet Constantine.

"I said open up." Constantine said this time putting a bit of force into his voice. The door obediently swung open. Things always went so much easier when you talked them out.

"Don't much care for demons." Constantine said calmly as he took slow and deliberate steps into the small burrow. "Not to say they're all wankers. But when you start fuckin' with me friends then I get a little edgy about you."

Chas, Constantine's best friend and personal chauffeur was not hospitalized, marked with what Constantine identified as unholy bruises and burns.

That gave Constantine a reason to make sure this demon got to know Constantine really well.
Constantine heard a his behind him and whirled around, seeing the demon jumping out at him. Constantine's fist slammed into the creature, his enchanted brass knuckles colliding with the demon's face. The demon staggered back and crashed into a table falling over.

"Why don't you just stay there, you little piece of shit?" Constantine said, and the damned creature found himself unable to move. And began swearing at Constantine at the top of his lungs.

Upon closer inspection, Constantine found that he wasn't talking to a demon at all, but a human being… a dead one actually. But he'd never seen a zombie with the ability to speak.

"Your friends pay is not even a fraction of what will happen to you, wizard!" the zombie howled. "You will watch as this entire world is made the home of the Candarian demons! The deadites! We will bathe in the blood of infants, feel the painful shudders of the women we rape, and laugh as do-gooders like yourself despair in your impotence!"

"Heard that song, bought the CD, did a cover back in the seventies." Constantine replied putting down his duffel bag and reaching into it. "Now I was going to tell you that if you didn't talk, I'd use this thing on you." Constantine pulled a chainsaw out the bag and the zombie snarled as it looked at it. Obviously, the blessings that crazy vicar had put it on it so many years ago was still intact. Constantine was told the glow that it gave off drew demons of all sorts crazy. But it looks like all you bloody want to do is talk. So instead, I'm going to listen to you scream."

Constantine pulled back the blessed chainsaw's string. As the purr of the motor began and the sound of whir deafened out the monster's insistence that Constantine's actions were futile, he moved forward.

"Fiat bloody Lux."

.---------------------------

Shotgun and polyester.

Ashley J. Williams found himself in another jam with himself surrounded on all sides by deadites, and as usual he was the only one who could stop it.

Stupid destiny.

Ash let loose the shotgun fire as deadites parts went flying around him. He felt the maniacal grin come onto his face as the carnage of justice became greater and greater.

It wasn't long before he ran out of shells in the barrel. He didn't have enough time to reload. That left his right hand, which by convenient coincidence happened to be a chainsaw now. Pulling the string back in a way that Ash just knew screamed 'So much more awesome than you' he charged into the mass of Deadites right hand first. "YEE-HAW!"

Ash was no stranger to the deadites. If it weren't for them, he'd still be in his lousy job back at the S-mart in Dearborn, Michigan. He also wouldn't have been sucked into the past to fight an army of zombies. He also wouldn't have found out he was the chosen one, destined to hack these undead screwheads into itty bits while traveling from dimension to dimension. He also wouldn't have fought a world filled with superheroes that had infected with some zombie virus, or had to fight the crazy zombie-making re-animator Dr. Herbert West.

Stupid, stupid destiny.

Well, if you're going to be some destined chosen guy, there's no reason not to be badass.

And Ash knew the only he could look so badass in a polyester shirt.

Ash didn't really keep track of time, but eventually he cut a path right through all the demons there were, and his chainsaw died down with a familiar put-put-put.

"Another world saved." Ash said casually. "Groovy." Looking around the wasteland of bodies and bodily fluids, Ash decided to wind down with a certain someone.

"Kristy?" he called. "We're all finally done here. Where are ya?" His heart skipped a beat when no answer was given. He began running, stepping over the all the undead bodies, searching for her. "Kristy! Hey, Kristen, where are ya?"

His fears were confirmed when he saw the head a cute blonde disconnected from the rest of her body.

"Aw, Kristy… baby."

Ash was also no stranger to women dying on him. Linda, the first girl he met had died, after he had been forced to chop her zombie version up. Then there was Sheila who had become the queen of his evil self. Ash could have gone on all day with this.

Dames… The nice ones kept dying and the hot ones kept turning evil.

The all-too-common tragedy reminded Ash why he was here.

The Necronomicon Ex Mortis. The book of the dead. The source of the deadites' powers.

Klaatu Verata Nikto… Klaatu Verata Nikto…Don't forget it.

The book was, of course, on top of a dramatic looking pedestal. Ooooh, spooky. Ash was shaking in his worn, S-mart bought hiking boots.

Coming up to the pedestal, Ash looked at the grotesque face on the cover of the Necronomicon, and prepared himself to say those magic words that would eternally vanquish the deadites.

"I will devour your soul, Ashley J. Williams!" The book yelled at him before "You may have defeated me here, but there are other worlds! Other worlds I can infest! You will be defeated, I swear it!"

"Bite me." Ash replied.

The book obliged him.

"Ow! Ow!" Ash snarled, shaking the book, trying to get it off his good hand. "Klaatu Verata Nikta! Klaatu Verata Necktie! Klaatu Verata-"

Before he could say anymore, Ash felt the familiar sensation of being sucked into another dimension.

Stupid stupid stupid destiny.

.---------------------

As a rule Constantine didn't much like violence but he felt alright chopping that zombie up. However, it had filled his head with lots of unsettling questions. The zombies had mentioned a lot of uncomfortably familiar names. Necronomicon being chief among them.

But what the bloody hell was a deadite.

Constantine had been doing this magic thing for over three decades and knew almost every name there was to know on this shithole called Earth. And if some new name was coming in, that didn't sit well with Constantine at all.

He'd show these deadites (bloody stupid name if you asked him) just how expensive a London vacation could be when your tour guide was one of the most feared wizards in all of the planet.

But he'd need some preparations and he'd need some allies. Tim Hunter, the boy destined to become the most powerful magician in all history. Another was Alec Holland., the swamp thing. Morpheus, the king of dreams was another but bugger all if he was going to get involved and Constantine certainly didn't want to involve those wankers at the JL of effin' A. Well, maybe Zatanna…

But he'd also need to do research. Find out what he could about these deadite freaks, hit all the magical names in town, call in all the favors he needed to. If this was a zombie invasion, there'd have to be some heavy preparation for such an event.

Constantine quickly wondered where Chas was, then remembered that the whole reason he had found out about this shit was because that zombie had decided it had wanted to fuck with Constantine by attacking his friends.

Constantine's paced quickened. He felt bad that he wasn't getting back to his friend right now, but things were a bit too important for a social call to take precedence.

Magic, Constantine mused. It could get a guy killed.

.------------------

When Ash came to, he raised his head, realizing that he was in a dumpster. "Eeew." Ash said as he climbed out the dumpster. "The least they could do is teleport me into a nice bed or something.

Peering out into the street, he saw London. Not the frightful decimated London taken over by deadites he had once seen, but a bustling non-zombie London. For now anyways.

Realizing a guy with a chainsaw hand would probably attract a bit too much attention, Ash crawled back into the alley and reach into his bag, taking out metallic, normal-looking gauntlet hand. He attached it to his wrist in place of the chainsaw and put a glove over it to hide that it was metal.

"Hope nobody thinks I'm tryin' to copy Michael Jackson, if there even is a Michael Jackson in this world."

With a seemingly normal hand and a stupid, stupid mission to do, as well as with the hopes of scoring a hot babe or two along the way, Ash set out.

Weird. There didn't seem to be any deadites going around. Just normal London, filled with people who had screwy teeth and weird ways of talking.

"Freeze right where you are!" he heard a gruff voice calling out to him.

Ash jumped, seeing a cop pointing at him. A split second later, he realized his shotgun was pointing out of his duffel bag.
This was so not cool…

"Stupid British laws…" Ash muttered. "With their don't have any guns around so the deadites can just come along and kill us. Let's see how much they like their stupid no-boomstick laws when a bunch of deadites come knocking on their door for lunch. Then we'll see whose-"

Ash had been running and ranting for so long that he bumped into someone.

Someone with blonde hair and a trench coat. And someone who had dropped his cigarette. And someone who had the same reaction he did.

"Who the hell are you?"