Ghola
Ned backed away, sweat beading at his brow. He held out his hands, as if to stop the advancing Simpsons and their friends.
"So Ned, what's this all about?" Jessica asked.
"Now, l-look fellas, you're not saying that you believe that fibbin fiend now…I mean, its me Ned! Who're yer gonna believe."
"I say we kill him!"
"Cool it Homer!" Bart growled. "So, neighbour, what did he promise you? Wealth? Power? That when we were all dead you'd get all our stuff?"
Ned stopped.
"You don't understand…" he said in a fierce whisper, "Burns is too powerful! He can't be destroyed!"
"Who said? Burns? Ned-" Marge tried to explain.
"SHUT-UP! Damn you all! You made me do this! You annoying, two-faced, lying jackas! You took all that I had from me! All that mattered!"
"And doing the same to us makes it up?" Homer asked.
Ned's eyes flashed. He drew his pistol. The others did the same.
"You…of all people…you're the one who killed Maude! You idiot! You stupid, stupid idiot!"
"Now Ned…" Homer said nervously. Ned's gun was trained on him. "What would God think?"
"There is no God!"
"Gasp!"
"For Maude…" He set his finger on the trigger. Everyone made ready to fire. Homer gulped.
Blam. Ned fell to the ground without so much as a whimper. A single hole dripped blood and grey matter from his skull.
"Nice shot, Pauli."
"Thus die all traitors."
They buried Ned's body in the cemetery, next to his wife's grave. Lisa noticed that Maude's grave looked disturbed, as though someone had tried to dig her up. Probably exhumed for something. A day doesn't go by that the city council doesn't end with digging someone up.
"So Maude was the motivation…poor Mr. Flanders," Lisa sighed.
"Poor Ned never got over her death…" Marge said.
"It seems hardly enough reason to work for Burns. Sure, its reason enough to kill me, hey, everyone has wanted me dead at one time or another, but no one's allied with the soulless UnDead to do it, especially 'Mr. Goody-Two-Shoes-I'm-So-Good-And-Christian'!"
"Homer!"
"What? He's dead, its alright to talk about him!"
"Hrrrmmm…"
Sideshow Bob had left the group by the grave to make a phone call.
"Yes, yes. Thank you, Professor." He hung up and walked over to the others.
"I just spoke with the Professor. He discovered something interesting."
They drove from the cemetery and into the grimy innercity. While they were stopped at a red light, several tough gang members crossed the street, leering and making violent gestures at the Simpsons. Homer pressed the button for the door locks as soon as they were looking away. The sound of the locks made them spin around and brandish their guns.
"Drive! Drive!" Marge screamed. They escaped with a few bullets in their back fender. They met the others at an abandoned crematory. Prof. Frink was with them.
"The other day I was touring the pawn shops of the downtown for one of those old violet ray machines. Once used as a cure for common warts, no longer used as it was ineffective at best and at worst was carcinogenic, I needed one for my new death ray, with the zapping, and the killing. Anyhoo, I stopped at the Kwik-E-Mart, and who should I see, purrny'oy, but Dr. Nick. He paid for his case of beer and got in the car-with Waylon Smithers!"
"Goodness! Do you know what this means?"
"Dr. Nick is gay?"
"No! Nick is working with Burns!"
"I still don't see why you brought us to this old crematorium, though I have a gut feeling I soon will," Lisa reasoned.
"And that you will. I was going through the read-outs from the tracking devices. The one in Eric went straight to the mansion, where it stayed, but the tracker bullet went to the mansion, came here, and then returned to the mansion. That, and my noticing of smoke coming from its chimneys, lead me to conclude this is another Burns hideout."
"Could Burns have been bluffing?" Brian asked.
"We'll soon find out," Professor Frink said, walking back to the car and opening the trunk. He pulled out a large, unwieldly gun, and aimed it at the padlocked door of the crematorium. A pale violet beam shot forth. The door shuddered, then burst into flames and collapsed inward like a burning leaf.
"Cool!" Bart exclaimed.
"Why not just use that on the vampires?" Millhouse asked.
"Because it doesn't work. Also, it uses ten car batteries in one shot."
They entered the dark and musty building. Death hung in the air like dust.
"I don't like this," Marge murmured.
After some searching, they found a the door to the basement.
"The most logical hiding place for vampires during the day," Alucard said.
"Be ready," Bob warned. He kicked the door open.
"Hi everybody!"
"Hi Dr. Nick!"
"Dr. Nick! What are you doing down here?" Lisa asked.
"Good question little girl. You see, I heard that someone wanted some of my blood! When I saw the add in the paper, I thought it was asking for the blood I drain from my patients while they're in surgery, not my own blood! Next thing I knew, I was involved with a terrible Satanic ritual, and was being attacked by a vampire, Mr. Burns! When I came to, he told me that he had resuscitated me by restoring my cells to life with nanobots."
"Wait, one glavin minute here, that sounds very much like my process for creating ghola, patent pen-ding!"
"Ghola?"
"A re-animated corpse," Lisa murmured.
"Like a zombie?" Bart asked.
"No, Bart," Robert said, "A zombie is merely an altered form of a once human life, caused by a virus. Ghola, the name coming from that of similar creatures in Frank Herbert's Dune saga, are the bodies of human beings, once dead, brought back to life. More like Frankenstein's monster."
"That's right, Sideshow Bob, I am a Frankenstein!"
Nick showed them his 'practice': the filthy basement of the crematory, filled with dormant vampyr, many of them wounded from the night before, and either lying dormant on bloody operating tables or floating in tanks of blood. Marge looked at one of the vampires, a look of disgust in her eyes. She fired her pulse rifle, shattering the tall, blood-filled cylinders. They burst, spilling their pale, limps contents to the cement floor. Marge blasted them, hot streams of flying silver obliterating their faces and rending their flesh. Homer decided to follow Marge's example. He took his axe and beheaded a vampire on a nearby stretcher. Bob took his stake and hammer, and drove the sharp silver tip into one of the UnDead's hearts. Within minutes, the basement floor was covered with several inches of blood. Fr. O'Flaherty took out a bottle of holy water, and poured it into the churlish red pool. The blood began to froth and boil where the holy water was poured. The churning and bubbling spread, and the red liquid began to steam and hiss. In seconds, what had been blood was water.
"There's something else I have to show you," Nick told them. He led them through a door and into another room. The room was filled with the electric glow of countless electronic devices and computer drives. A large vertical cylinder stretched from cylinder filled with strange green fluid stretched from ceiling to floor. Inside floated the naked corpse of Maude Flanders.
"Dear God…" Fr. Molloy gasped. Millhouse took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
"What in the world is this?"
"A ghola tank, silly! The same one Burns put me in to reanimate my cells and restore any cell death after he drained me of all my blood!"
"And Maude…"
"He said it was a present for his secret spy in your midst…"
"Oh, Ned!"
"So this is how Burns was able to bend to will of a moral man to his evil," Brian said.
"Did Burns come by last night?"
"No. But I did get a call this morning from Mr. Smithers telling me to patch up all the vampires I wanted then go home. He fired me! Can you believe it!"
"Did he say where he was headed?"
"Transylvania, with Mr. Burns!" the enthusiastic doctor replied.
The hunters huddled around Bob.
"Burns is headed towards Transylvania with Maggie and Eric. He needs Dracula's corpse to resurrect him, so he'll have go to Caslte Dracula. There, we'll stop him."
"But how?" Marge asked. "He may wait for weeks before going to the castle, and he could already be halfway there!"
"No," Alucard corrected Marge, "He has to go there before Halloween. The ritual will be performed this Friday, at midnight. It is the one time that Halloween falls on a Friday with a full moon this century."
"I'll tell the boss," Legs said, referring to Fat Tony, "We have a jet, but we won't be able to take all of ya."
"Okay, one group will take the mafia staff jet, the other will by a direct flight to London. The mafia plane will head for Paris, then Budapest. The second group will go from London to Greece, and north from there to Romania. Whatever path Burns takes, we'll get him."
They started to leave.
"What about Mrs. Flanders?" Lisa asked. The group paused. They looked at the naked body floating in the eerie green goo, then to Fr. O'Flaherty. He sighed, and furrowed his brow.
"Its not like a clone, a new life that is genetically identical to another human…"
"Does it have a…soul?" Brian asked.
"No. No, I'm certain." He frowned and shook his head. "Get the poor lass out of there and give her a proper burial."