Zombies in Love Read online

  © 2014 Jennifer Lee Goloboy

  Cover design by Caitlin Beresford

  ch. 1

  Alioto's Pizza was tiny, occupying half of the first story of a wooden duplex, in a slowly-gentrifying neighborhood near Winthrop University. Ovens at the back of the room, counter in the middle, six small tables in the front. Lisa Alioto and her employee-- he was named Jack Kershaw, and he hadn't been working there long-- spent the day making pizza, and the dinnertime rush serving it, and when it was gone, they locked the door, and cleaned up shop. No delivery-- if you wanted Lisa's pizza, you had to go and get it yourself. She was the third generation Alioto selling pizza in the exact same spot, and she always seemed to Jack to have refined her business to a perfectly functioning machine.

  Except for her hiring process, because Jack knew that he was about to get fired, after only two weeks on the job. And he understood, he really did-- Lisa needed him, she was as tired as he was, but it was ten-fifteen, he hadn't eaten since he came in twelve hours earlier, and he was beginning to have trouble holding it together.

  Focus, Jack, he thought. You're still smart enough to mop a goddamn floor.

  He slopped the water back and forth over the faded pink and teal-swirled linoleum. His shoes were wet, because he was having trouble controlling the handle, because his arms were stiffening. And he couldn't see what he was doing, because his eyesight was beginning to fail. He was mostly navigating by sense of smell.

  He couldn't get fired. He couldn't go back to how it had been before he got this job, before he got his apartment, when he caught his own reflection in a shop window and realized that it had been at least a week since he'd showered, and even longer since he'd changed his clothes. He was going to keep this job, because he had no other choice. What was his other option? Go back to his family, show them what had happened to him? He couldn't do that. He had some self-respect.

  Besides, then he'd have to figure out what to do about his cousin Sam...

  He dipped the mop back in the bucket, squeezed it in the old-fashioned wringer, and kept mopping.

  "Hey, Jack!" called Lisa.

  "Yeth?" he said, and winced at his inability to pronounce the "s". His tongue felt swollen in his mouth. He was so hungry.

  "Come here a second," she said.

  Oh, hell, he thought, this is when she gives me my back wages and says goodbye. His smile tightened painfully across his face as he forced his stiff legs to walk up to the counter where she leaned, looming over him. She was so warm that he could feel her body heat from a foot away. He wanted to put his hand on her, warm his cold self up, but he still had enough sense to stand back like a good employee.

  There was no expression on her broad handsome face but a glitter of warmth in her dark eyes. “Go home."

  “I haven’t finished.”

  “I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. I can handle it.” She wrenched the mop from his clenched hand. “Besides, you look like death.”

  No surprise there. “I’ll go out the back door.”

  She patted him on the arm. He could feel her through his thin shirt as if she'd touched bare skin. “See you tomorrow. Fun fun fun.”

  #

  HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY thought Jack as he headed towards the supply closet where he’d stashed his duffle bag. His hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t operate the zipper, so he tore it off, which was easier, which was much easier because he was SO HUNGRY...

  And then the smell hit him, oh he could smell it even wrapped in plastic, and he was so hungry that he just bit through the plastic, through the skin and veins and muscle and oh down to the bone, which his strong teeth broke through and crunched into delicious chalky fragments, oh sweet marrow and rot and putrefaction...

  He swallowed. His head cleared, and the hunger dimmed to something recognizable, something human. He looked down at the rotting, plastic-wrapped arm that he held.

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  He unwrapped the plastic before taking another bite.

  #

  As Lisa finished mopping the floor, she wondered what in the world was wrong with Jack. He came in every morning ready to work, and by evening he was stumbling and propping himself up on his mop, his face grey, like he hadn’t slept in months. Plus he wore the weirdest cologne she’d ever smelled-- it was just like root beer-- and every night when it wore off, he smelled like something that had died under her porch. And he’d never once eaten her food, which she found kind of insulting.

  Something was definitely up. And frankly, the mystery was the main reason Jack still had his job. Lisa’s life hadn’t changed much since she was in high school; she was ready for any excitement she could get.

  She heard a clatter from the storage closet.

  Great, she thought. Another robbery. She took the cell phone from her purse and the shotgun from behind the counter.

  #

  Two giant dented cans of tomato sauce lay on the floor, on top of the cracked remains of the shelf that had supported them but not the dufflebag with the metal shovel in it. He would clean them up after he ate, decided Jack, who by now had reached the wrist, one of his least favorite parts of the body because of the disproportionate bone to muscle ratio.

  The doorknob to the room was turning. The doorknob was turning! His senses seemed to intensify, and he could smell that it was Lisa, and that she was nervous, and there was something else-- machine oil and metal? A gun? He chewed furiously, backing into the back of the closet, as the door flung open to reveal Lisa, pointing a shotgun at him.

  “Get out or I’m calling the cops!” Lisa blinked, her eyes adjusting to the darkness of the closet. “Jack, I thought you went . . . home . . . holy shit.”

  He hadn’t quite finished eating. There were still fingers sticking out of his mouth. He stepped towards her, about to say something reassuring.

  Blam.

  ch. 2

  Walk fifteen minutes towards the Charles River from Alioto's Pizza and all the streets merge together into a great knot of asphalt-covered brick. Abruptly the wooden three-deckers give way to a collection of buildings, scattered as if from the hand of a giant. At the very center is a grassy yard, crisscrossed with sidewalks. If you stand there long enough, a tourist will come up to you and ask-- “Where is Winthrop University?”

  “You’re standing in it,” you will say, and the tourist will look disappointed. Winthrop University does not look like the most powerful university in America. There’s no sign, no impressive monument, only a statue of John Winthrop, labeled "Founder, 1638." Any student will tell you that this is the statue of Three Lies:

  1. The date on the pediment is wrong.

  2. It is not actually a depiction of John Winthrop, but instead a very good-looking nineteenth-century student. There are no surviving images of Winthrop.

  3. John Winthrop was not the university’s founder, as the statue’s pediment incorrectly says. He donated his library to the university, and the grateful founders renamed the school after him.

  Student knowledge is erroneous. The statue was, at one point, an excellent likeness, and Winthrop’s generosity to the university went far beyond any simple gift.

  No tourist ever sees John Winthrop’s true monument.

  In Memorial Hall, at the edge of Winthrop Yard, on the third floor, two unhappy young chemists were hard at work. When was it, Ian Comanor wondered, that he should have realized that he’d made a serious error in his choice of graduate schools? Could he have known when they flew him out to campus? No-- Prof. Leschke had been perfectly friendly. And the other graduate students had been great.

  Why would he have taken it seriously when one of them slipped him a note just as he was leaving that said, “Don’t come here!” You didn’t say no when Wint
hrop University accepted you. A Winthrop University PhD-- you could write your own ticket! Anything you wanted! Obviously the other student had just been trying to knock out the competition, so Ian crumpled up the note and threw it away.

  No, it was only after he’d come to Winthrop that he realized his advisor Prof. Leschke, the man who decided when and if Ian was going to graduate, was completely nuts. On Ian’s first day on campus, Prof. Leschke took someone’s entire apparatus and hurled it across the lab, shattering it into a mosaic of glass and metal rods and vile-smelling toxic chemicals. That guy-- what was his name? Ted?-- had crawled away from Winthrop with only an M.S. for his eight years of work. Poor sap. Then was that other guy-- Sanjiv-- who Prof. Leschke stopped giving any projects until he gave up and lost his green card and went home to work in his uncle’s meatpacking plant.

  That was not going to happen to Ian. No way, no how. He would not leave Winthrop without his PhD, and he was willing to endure anything to get it, from sleep deprivation to poverty to outright humiliation. Anything. Because after he graduated, he would crush the whole world under his Adidas.

  And there was one important compensation. Sarah Chen, who shared his lab, who he worked next to every day, and who was way, way out of his league. He watched her long black hair, black like ink, black like the unluckiest cat in the world, as she rinsed out her glassware and hung it on the rack.

  “Big plans for tonight?” she asked.

  “Watching this thing.” He gestured at the small flask with its spinneret churning in the bottom. “You?”

  “A bottle of cheap wine, a bag of Cheetos, and a DVD.”

  "Night of the Living Dead again?"

  "Of course."

  Ian reflected that Sarah had seen that movie far too many times for someone who was scared of zombies. But then again, Sarah was a "face your fears" kind of person. He wondered if there was any way that he could get Sarah to invite him over to watch the movie with her, lean back, wrap his arm around her shoulders, when the door to the lab slammed open. Ian nearly fell off his stool. He knew who it was, and there was no way this visit from his advisor would be good news.

  Prof. Leschke strode into the lab, his white coat flapping, his beefy hands clenched into fists. He looked a Viking in a lab coat, thought Ian. You could picture him skewering some slow-moving grad student on his mighty broadsword, Man-Biter.

  "Where is it?” Prof. Leschke snarled. He opened the drawer where Sarah kept her pencils, glared into it, and then slammed the drawer shut.

  “Where is what?” asked Sarah.

  Ian was impressed. At the moment, he couldn’t even remember how to talk.

  "The old notebook," snarled Prof. Leschke. "The one that you stole from my office. Where is it?"

  Okay, Ian thought. We don’t know for sure that he knows what we tried. Keep cool. Keep cool.

  Anyway, how could he know what they had done? The experiment didn’t even work!

  It couldn't work. It wasn't possible. If someone had discovered the secret to raising the dead, would he have written it in a notebook and hidden it in an office at Winthrop University? No, he would have founded a pharmaceutical company and made millions!

  He and Sarah had only tried it as a joke. So why were they getting in trouble for it now?

  Prof. Leschke stood right in front of Sarah, his hands on his hips. “Don’t be so damn cute,” he said, spit flying from his mouth. “Give me the notebook.”

  She shrank back and wiped her face with her hand. A look of horror and realization passed over her face.

  What was Sarah thinking? She was always ahead of Ian, always.

  Quickly, Sarah yanked out the drawer that Prof. Leschke had been fumbling with and set it on the floor. She reached into the open space that was left behind. An old, well-worn leather lab book sat in her hand. "It was only for fun," she mumbled.

  Prof. Leschke snatched the lab book from Sarah’s palm. “I should throw you both out right now,” he said, shaking the notebook at them. “Today.”

  “What do you mean?" asked Ian. "It didn't work."

  His advisor snarled. “It worked, all right. And now, you’re going to make this right. As of now, this is your only project. Do you understand?”

  "We raised the dead?" asked Ian. "Sweet!"

  Prof. Leschke whacked him over the head with the notebook.

  ch. 3

  What Lisa should do was call the cops. What she needed to do was call the cops. She probably even knew the guys who would show up. So all she needed to do was call and say that she’d shot her employee because she thought he was a thief breaking in...

  Because he’d been eating a hand, an actual hand, and he’d moved towards her and then her finger had tightened on the trigger. . .

  She’d never forget the sight of his headless body dropping to the floor.

  His mostly headless body.

  She bent over the shotgun, rocking back and forth, her ears ringing painfully, the scent of the cordite and blood still in her nose.

  Now she was going to have to clean up in there. She guessed the police would take the body away, and some of the bigger chunks of the head, but she'd have to clean up the blood and brains and skull and hair of someone she'd actually thought was a pretty good guy, a reliable hard-working guy, until she'd caught him eating a human hand in the supply closet where she stored all the nonperishables like canned tomatoes and flour, oh God, there was probably blood and brains all over the food, she'd have to dump everything, in case there was even a fragment of Jack seeping into the flour sacks, turning the white dust to red, baking into her pizza--

  A sudden cramp of nausea gripped her and she nearly dropped the shotgun.

  So you wanted excitement? she thought. You idiot!

  She heard something moving. Footsteps. A man’s footsteps, walking slowly towards her.

  Her head popped up and her hand gripped the barrel of the gun. One shell left. Maybe next time, it would be easier to shoot.

  Jack came out of the dimly lit back hallway. He had a head. That was good. He had a head. You need a head to get ahead need a head to get ahead...

  “You’re all right,” she said. “Oh, thank God, thank God. I’ve never even fired this thing before.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, setting a torn duffle bag on the floor with a clank. He spread his hands like he was showing her there was nothing in them. Closer now. His face and hair were clean, but his shirt was soaking wet and stained blood-red.

  No. She couldn't be seeing this.

  “Your head shattered,” she said. “I killed you. I saw it. Am I crazy?”

  He dropped his hands. “I’m just going to go.”

  She stood up and cocked the other barrel of the shotgun.

  “Jesus, Lisa. You already shot me once. Why don't we call it a night?” He bent down to pick up the bag, and she walked closer to him, a shotgun's length away.

  Why was she so doing this? She should let him go. She didn’t have to know. The sensible thing to do...

  She didn’t feel sensible. "How did you do that?" she asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said, his mouth twitching nervously. “You don’t want to ask me. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  She poked him in the stomach with the gun. He flinched. “Whose hand was that?”

  “Edward Genovese. That’s what his tombstone said. He was in a cemetery in Waltham. Did you know him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Good.”

  “Why were you eating a hand?” she asked.

  “Look, Lisa--”

  Okay, he was a charmer, but she was not interested in charm. For so many years her life had stood still, and now she had her own genuine mystery, right at the point of her shotgun. Poke, poke. “I let you work for me. I let you feed my friends. Now you’d damn well better tell me what’s wrong with you.”

  He smiled like his face muscles had tightened beyond his control. “I don’t know. But I don’t have a choice.”
<
br />   “Have you always been like this?”

  He shook his head. “Ever since I died.”

  Dead? Well, of course, she’d just shot his head off. Most of his head. But before? She moved closer to him. The lighting in the restaurant made everyone look like a walking corpse-- she’d always meant to fix that-- but if she got really close she could see that something wasn’t right. His skin looked faintly purple-blue. He wasn’t blinking, or breathing, until she got even closer and he inhaled like he couldn’t help it. He licked his lips.

  “You going to eat me?” she asked.

  “You still owe me my last paycheck,” he said.

  She laughed and backed up a step. "So you're dead and you eat people. You're a zombie. Wow."

  "Call me anything you want." He rubbed his hand roughly through his graying black hair. “May I sit down?” he asked. “It’s been a hell of a day.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed.

  He sat down and rested his face in his hands. She kept her gun pointed at his face for a moment. And then felt silly. Was he going anywhere? No. He looked like he might never move again.

  She pulled out the chair opposite him and set the shotgun beside her. There he was. Her very own monster. She felt like she was looking at one of those old fashioned picture puzzles: now it's a little girl, now it's an old lady. Or to put it another way: here's your average guy. Now here's a zombie.

  This was the weirdest thing that she'd done in a very long time. No, ever.

  "How did this happen to you?" she asked.

  He slouched back in his chair. "I have no idea. It was a surprise, I'll tell you that."

  "Never pissed off a voodoo priest..."

  He smirked. "Never got bitten, never fell in a vat of toxic waste."

  "Okay," she said, leaning back. "What do you know? How long have you been like this?"

  "About six months."

  "You've been dead six months."