Free Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth by Stephen Graham Jones

to Earth, your dad flew us there under his own power.
    My eardrums burst from the pressure and I clawed at my ankles deep enough to bleed, but I was awake the whole time. And screaming.
     
     
     
    That’s not where this scar comes from, though.
    That’d be your mom’s handiwork.
    After we cut through Earth’s puny defenses—they were all for ships and transports, not for flying lobsters with laser eyes and killer claws—we burned through the atmosphere, your father’s wings turning to ash with us five miles up.
    We made a crater when we landed, and this crater, I crawled up from it all by myself, had no clue that, on the moon, the krill had risen to witness your dad lighting off for the territories.
    Right about the time we were crashing down, the monster crabs and lobsters and shrimp were piling onto their huddled brothers and sisters.
    Until then, we thought the way they’d locked arms, one behind the next, it didn’t matter much.
    They were a disc, though.
    The krill drifted into place below them, started glowing with power. They were the engine, apparently. The battery.
    As one, twelve discs broke the surface of the lunar seas, their backs thick with giant space lobsters, with delicate interstellar crabs, and then they turned away from Earth. Never to come back.
    People wept, reached to the sky for these creatures they’d never known to worship. The usual story.
    Like I cared.
    There were endorsement deals, talk shows, new digs for a while. My name was even on a toothbrush.
    Everything dies, though.
    Except me.
    Evidently, the unregulated pressures inside a mentally-hijacked space lobster’s stomach, especially when that space lobster’s taking on its interstellar dragonfly form, they’re unique and transformative, to say the least.
    And then there was the chemical wash part of that ride, and the exposure to cosmic rays, and whatever else nobody’s been able to replicate, especially since all our gods have abandoned us.
    What did it all add up to?
    I had died in transit. I was still dead. All my measurable life processes were flatlined, but it didn’t matter. I walked up out of that crater on my own, smiled for the cameras, winked at this one cute little number in the front now.
    And, when that parade was all over months later, I went to see the queen.
    Your mom.
     
     
     
    “You,” she said, standing in the doorway, her voice sharp enough to draw blood.
    I handed her my bill.
    She laughed, wouldn’t take it.
    “I don’t traffic with the dead,” she said.
    “People pay for this bite,” I told her, snapping my teeth to show.
    “And does it work?” she said.
    I found somewhere else to look.
    We figured out how to live forever, sure. Just be dead, but walking around.
    Now that there are no more space lobsters left to hitch rides in, though—well. I’ll be at your funeral. I’ll be at all your funerals.
    “You were supposed to bring him back alive, anyway,” she said, her hand to the door like she had no time for this.
    “Bring him back so you could kill him again?” I asked.
    My skin by then was pretty decayed, I guess, so it was hard to get a good smirk going. But I tried.
    It made your mom’s hand reach up to her own face. For the wrinkles she’d pancaked over.
    They’re showing even more now, aren’t they?
    Good.
    “You can’t prove I put him up there,” she said, smoking a cigarette she’d lit herself. The atmosphere somehow not turning to fire.
    She passed the cigarette to me and I breathed deep, couldn’t even begin to feel it charring my lungs.
    “That he came back is proof,” I said, blowing smoke. “If Earth’s gravity hadn’t found him again, he’d have snipped you in half.”
    “You don’t like me very much, do you?” she said.
    “You sent me to the moon to die,” I told her, just like I’d rehearsed on the drive over. “Just to tell the house detectives you’d given it an honest effort. You’d even have a receipt to enter into evidence.”
    “I don’t