Karoshi
Zombi jaguar hero's journey
Tezcat the jaguar was out in the jungle on his own one day, minding their own business, when he was suddenly surrounded by zombies who threw a net over him and shot him with a tranquilizer dart, then fell into unconsciousness. When he woke up in a graveyard over his own open grave, he couldn't tell how much time had passed, he couldn't tell whether he was awake or dreaming, and he saw a horse in a white tuxedo and top hat with a cruel smile on his face standing over him. The horse began to speak, and the jaguar found that he was hanging onto his every word, and had nothing to say to him in response. He could only listen in rapt attention, so that when the horse ordered him to follow him, to walk into a cage, to lock it and to throw the key away, he just couldn't come up with a compelling reason not to obey his every word to the letter. It seemed to make perfect sense for him to have done so at the time, and no part of him seemed to have been resisting it.
Cabal the equine bokor and chief executive officer rules over the world's largest corporate empire, and his employees' company loyalty is without compare, since he's maximized the efficiency of the humanoid animals employed in all of his workplaces by turning them all into zombies. Cabal is actually not from the continent himself, he stole magic that was forbidden by houngans to use it against their people, and the poppets that he uses to control people aren't voodoo at all, but a continuation of a preexisting tradition of poppet-based remote control from his own homeland beyond the sea. Tezcat became one more of the myriad of cogs in his seemingly unassailable corporate empire.
Cabal sends Tezcat to the bayou to kill some of the toads and frogs that he uses to create the poison that he injects into living humanoid animals to turn them into zombies. The bayou is protected by a gator witch doctor who, even as Tezcat is killing him, manages to shoot Tezcat with a rock salt gun and to make him come to his senses. He's still undead, but no longer under the bokor's control. With his dying breath, the gator witch doctor gives his rock salt gun to the jaguar, tells him that Cabal's imprisoned Tezcat's parrot wife who he's intending to sacrifice because he sees her power over saltwater as a threat to his corporation, and gives the jaguar the Manikin scepter which transmits the gator witch doctor's powers to him for his journey. His last words to Tezcat are "You were not born to be anyone's beasts of burdens! Even as zombies, you are nzambi, you are gods - you are still wild animals...!"
In the sugar cane plantation, lizard zombies throw their arms, legs and tails at the jaguar, or take one of them off to try to hit him with it at close range before reattaching it. They spit poison at him that would turn him back into a zombie if it hit him, and try to claw him with claws that are coated in the same poison. They use the same sickles that they use to cut the sugar cane to cut some of his limbs off, but being undead as well, he can simply reattach them so he can keep fighting the lizard zombies anyway. Using the gator witch doctor's magic, he can strike the ground with his palm to create directed shockwaves that knock them off their feet, to make them temporarily hold still while he shoots them with his rock salt gun.
In the subway station, red cape/leather jacket-wearing, nose-pierced bull zombies wield branding irons that they use to burn the same marks into each other and into passersby that they use on the large advertisement signs that they're also in charge of branding. They wield cattle prods so that they can literally cattle prod each other and passersby onto wagons. They wield lassos to pull those of them that fall on the rails off before the subways come, as well as to capture passersby so that they can be turned into zombies by their poisoned horns as well. They usually march in herd formation, breaking it only to run into each other or into passersby who come within range for no apparent reason. He uses the gator witch doctor's Manikin scepter's power over thunder to electrify himself, thus becoming invulnerable to the cattle prods and repelling the bull zombies.
In the sweatshops, spider zombies stand in front of conveyor belts, weaving the same weaves over and over, even though when they were alive none of their webs would ever look the same as any other web they'd ever woven. They weave clothes that Cabal gets to sell for dirt cheap without paying them anything, they weave the nets that are thrown onto the living humanoid animals who he wants to turn into zombies, and they weave the cloth poppets he uses to control his employees and hurt his company's competitors from a distance. They have strings attached to all 8 of their limbs, either hanging from the ceiling or connected to two crisscrossing wooden boards as though they were puppets to be manipulated by a giant's fingers. Cabal also uses substances the spider zombies secrete to make the poison that creates more zombies. When they tie up Tezcat with their strings, he uses the obsidian knife that sprouts from his forehead to cut himself loose.
In the giant, 3-dimensional beehive, bee zombies, without any sense of individuality to impair their work ethic, work themselves to death creating the wax that Cabal uses to make the candles that he uses to perform rituals, the wax poppets that he uses to hurt or control people from afar, and to oil the subway rails and the machines in his spider sweatshop. They not only have stingers as tails, wield needles in their hands and throw them like darts, but they have needles all over their bodies like poppets tend to have, all of them coated in the poison that would turn the jaguar back into a zombie. Using the gator witch doctor's powers, he can blow at the bee zombies to create gusts of wind that throw they off their flight paths, throw off their darts' trajectories or push the bee zombies away from him when their body needles get too close to him.
In the office skyscraper, Tezcat runs and vaults over cubicles and uses them for cover in his shootout against tie-wearing, chewed bone club-wielding and throwing dog zombies in business suits, who'd never even think of questioning their fanatical devotion to their cruel lord and master. They swing around suitcases with blades coming out of them, they bark to deafen him and they try to bite him with their frothing jaws to infect him with zombie sickness all over again. He throws smoke bombs at them to obscure their view and incapacitate their sense of smell, and conjures up obsidian mirrors on the ceiling so that he can still see where they are, even though it doesn't occur to them to look up (they are after all zombies).
In the jailhouse, Tezcat confronts the boar zombie warden in blue, who tries to gore him with his poisoned tusks, to hit him with his nightstick, and who climbs chains, hangs from chains by his arms or legs, swings from chains across the room and swings chains around himself to try to entangle the jaguar's legs, arms or torso with them. When the boar zombie finally closes his shackles around his wrists behind his back, Tezcat turns one of his legs into a snake who wraps his coils around the boar's body and who uses his fangs to take the keys off the warden's belt so that the jaguar can use them to open the shackles and to free his parrot wife from the cell that she was being kept in before she was to have been sacrificed.
When the jaguar and his parrot wife both confront Cabal in his office together, Tezcat becomes incandescent like the sun to set fire to all of his poppets so that he loses control over all the people who they were controlling. His parrot wife summons down salty rain from the sky and summons huge waves of saltwater from all the coasts to wash over the continent, so that the salt makes all of his zombie employees come to their senses. The enraged horse goes up to try to kill the jaguar and parrot with his bare hands, and they use the same acrobatic kicks that the capoeiristas used to escape from and defeat their slave owners to hand his ass to him. A boss without employees at his service is no longer a boss.
Work makes zombies of us all, and I can only wish that there could be enough salt in the world to free us all from our bokors' holds on us.
Story Notes: http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/236117.html