Zombies in Love Read online

  He nodded.

  Weird conversation, she thought. Weird weird weird. "How do I know you're not going to eat my customers?"

  He looked very tired. "How do I know they're not going to eat me?"

  "Because it's disgusting and wrong."

  He nodded as if she'd just proven his point. "Look, I know you have no reason to trust me. But I wish you would. I just woke up like this and now there's nothing I can do about it." He folded his arms on the table and rested his head on top. "I'm not going to sleep. I can't sleep, I haven't slept in months. Just ask me whatever it was you wanted to ask." His eyes closed.

  She looked at the limp figure in front of her. He was very still, not even breathing, and he smelled like rotting meat. Not good. "Did you bring any other food?"

  "No."

  "Jack--" she put her hand on a dry patch on the back of his shirt and shook him.

  "You're very warm. Did you know that?" His voice was slurred.

  "Do you have anything in your apartment?"

  "Sure. I can go back there. Good idea." His hands roamed over the surface of the table, but he couldn't seem to lift himself. "Give me a minute."

  #

  He leaned on her as they walked up the three flights of stairs, moving stiffly, his knees barely bending. His smell was getting harder and harder for her to take, but luckily he was a small guy, shorter and leaner than she was, so he wasn't too heavy. By the time they got the door open, she was afraid she was going to have to hand-feed him, which frankly would have been too much to ask, but the prospect of dinner seemed to reenergize him, and he managed to stumble to the fridge by himself.

  Lisa didn't want to watch, so she sat on the sofa by the coffee table, stuck a menthol cough drop in her mouth to cover up the corpsey smell, and looked around. It was pretty much what she'd expected, a sad efficiency apartment filled with cast-off furniture. But he'd kept it absolutely clean, and the coffee table had today's Globe on it, crinkled as if he'd read it then neatly folded it back together. He always did that at the pizzeria, too-- if someone left a paper, Jack folded it together and put all the sections back in, in order, a little fussy detail that had always made her smile.

  She was going to have to fire him after this. No, this was just way too weird and disgusting. And just because he hadn't tried to rip her guts out in the car, did that mean she should trust him with her customers? He was right, she didn't know him, she had no reason to trust him.

  She heard the fridge door close, and then the water in the kitchen sink started running as Jack started washing himself off, and Lisa found herself staring at the newspaper resting squarely in the middle of the coffee table. He's holding on by a thread, thought Lisa. And if he loses this job, he's lost. But it wasn't her problem, her duty was to keep the restaurant going, not to fix every sad sack who came through her door. Even if he was a good hard worker, even if she could tell he would do anything to keep this job...

  A damp Jack sat next to her, sitting straight so his back wouldn't touch the sofa. He'd scrubbed his face and hair and changed his shirt, but there was something stuck to his cheek, right by his ear.

  Is that a piece of skin or a fingernail? she wondered. She'd have to pick it off to know for sure, but she really didn't want to.

  "Thanks for bringing me home," he said, his face contracting into a nervous smile. "See you tomorrow?"

  She looked at that sad, hopeful face and she couldn't say no. She couldn't. "Sure," she said, standing up to go.

  ch. 4

  For the same reason she couldn't stand to use a neatly folded guest towel, Lisa would never have read the reassembled Boston Globe sitting on Jack's coffee table. So she didn't notice that the Globe was sitting on top of another newspaper, the Charleston Palmetto. And why would Jack go to the trouble of finding a spa-owner ("spa" = "corner store" in Boston) willing to obtain a daily copy for him?

  The Palmetto is an excellent newspaper, with a long and proud and slightly self-destructive history. In 1785, after Isaac Chestnut, first proprietor of the Charleston Palmetto, wrote an editorial critical of the mayor, whom he called a "meretricious Tory lickspittle," some unknown person threw a bag of flaming dogshit through the window, nearly burning the newspaper's offices down, with Chestnut inside. In 1860, after M. Frederick Kershaw warned in print that secession should be delayed "until such time as we have positive proof of the support of the perfidious English," he was never seen again, except for his right hand, still clutching its pen, nailed to the Palmetto's front door.

  Those exciting days of journalism were long gone. Today the worst thing an American newspaperman confronts is not the angry, armed reader, but the constant problem of money, as young readers disappear, and older readers believe that they should be able to read the paper for free on the internet. And so Sam Lazarus, Jack's cousin, spent most of his days at the office looking for ways to raise revenue, or trim staff in ways that wouldn't be noticed. Anything to hold off the day when the proudly independent Palmetto would finally have to be sold to a syndicate.

  It wasn’t what you’d call fun, but someone needed to do it, and Sam was always the man who did what needed to be done.

  Sam looked out of his office door in time to see the private detective walk into Uncle Cheves's office. He sighed. Another waste of money. It was always the same story. They could trace Jack up to Baltimore, where he'd sold his car for cash, but he hadn't used his credit card or gotten a job since. Aside for checking the hospitals and morgues, that left very little for the private eyes to do. But Jack's parents kept trying, hoping they'd find someone with some new angle, something they'd forgotten to think about. Pawn shops? Jewelry? Did he bring his watch with him? Anything?

  Sam had tried to tell his uncle and aunt many times that he was sure Jack would turn up, but only when he was ready. He'd probably started drinking again, he said, and Jack just didn't want them to see it. When he was ready, he'd come back, they could send him to rehab again, and it would all be back to normal. And then Uncle Cheves would say that he was an old man, and they didn't have forever. And then there was nothing for Sam to say, was there? He couldn't offer to take over as the Palmetto's publisher, even on a temporary basis until Jack returned, because then they'd believe what Jack had said about him was true, even though there was no proof.

  When Sam had killed Jack and dumped his body in the bay, he thought he was finally done with his cousin for good. A lifetime of always being the reliable one, always cleaning up his cousin’s messes, and always getting second-best for it, finally finished.

  No such luck.

  But what really bothered him is that the detectives always, always said that Jack had made it up to Baltimore in November, which was impossible, because his body had been rotting in the bay for a couple of months by that point. Sam knew it for a fact. He'd watched his cousin's dead-eyed body sink, for as long as he could see it through the murky water. Even if the stab wounds hadn't killed him, he had to have drowned.

  Obviously the detectives were wrong. But why were they wrong the same way, again and again and again?

  Could Jack somehow have survived?

  #

  Sarah watched as Ian gingerly opened the bottle of cadaverine and droppered it over the pork chop they had rescued from the dumpster behind Star Market. "Ugh," he said. "Do rotting bodies really smell like this?"

  "I can't imagine they smell worse," she said, holding her nose.

  "Do you think this will fool a zombie?" He screwed the cap back on the bottle.

  "Now how am I supposed to know that, Ian?"

  He shrugged. As far as he was concerned, Sarah knew everything. She was the one who came up with their whole strategy. All he did was fish the pork chops out of the dumpster, saving them the $3.95 they'd budgeted for hamburger.

  "Stand back," she said, undoing the C-clamp acting as a safety on the bear trap. The sharp spikes on it made it even more lethal-looking, and Ian found that he was unconsciously backing away from it, and the stinky pork chop lying
on its trigger.

  "Hope this works," said Ian.

  Sarah shook her finger at the grass-covered graves all around them. "You hear that, guys! Ian says, rise and shine!"

  ch. 5

  "Hey, Jack, could you help me with something in the storage closet?" Lisa called down the hallway.

  "Sure," he said, and followed her inside. "What do you need?"

  A very strange smile passed over her face as she reached past him to close and lock the door.

  "What's going on?" he asked.

  Lisa knelt in front of him, a wicked look in her dark brown eyes. "I thought you were supposed to be smart," she said, as he felt her warm hand unzip--

  Clonk. Jack's shovel hit a rock and he realized that once again, he'd been fantasizing about his boss. He didn't mean to, he reflected, as he dug more of the dirt out of the grave he was standing in. But now that he'd started, he couldn't seem to stop.

  In some ways it was a relief that everything worked the way it was supposed to, more or less. His skin was numb, which was a problem, but he felt heat perfectly well, and he had realized that if Lisa was that warm on the surface of her body, she'd be even warmer inside-- and the way she smelled, oh Jesus...

  Goddamn it, there he went again! He had to remember that he had serious family troubles to deal with, or at least hide from indefinitely. And that he was a reanimated corpse who ate people. Sexy!

  On the other hand, here he was, alone in a cemetery in the middle of the night, and once he finished digging up tomorrow's corpse, what Lisa didn't know wouldn't hurt her. He could even duck down in the grave if he wanted a little privacy...

  Crunch. The corner of Jack’s shovel broke through the top of the coffin. With practiced skill, Jack drove his shovel into the hole and cracked the lid in half.

  “Smells like a ripe one,” said a man’s voice behind him.

  Jack yelped and swung his shovel around until the sharp end pricked the man’s chin.

  “Take it easy, guy,” said the man. Or-- there was something strange here. He smelled wrong, with that peculiar crushed-sassafras scent that permeated Jack’s own body.

  Jack dropped the shovel to the ground. “You’re a ghoul,” he said. “Like me.”

  In the six months since he died, he’d never encountered another one. And whenever he imagined what another ghoul might be like, he'd pictured another skinny, jumpy, hungry-looking fellow, not a pot-bellied guy with a friendly, open salesman's smile. It was the constant mystery, always somewhere at the back of his mind-- why had what he'd done to Sam turned him into a monster? Maybe this man knew something he didn't.

  And then he heard his grandfather's voice saying, Let him tell his story in his own time. People always tell you more if you let them do it their own way.

  “Yeah, zombie, ghoul, whatever,” said the man. “I’m Arturo Rodriguez. Good to meet you.”

  “Jack Kershaw.” The two dead men shook hands. Jack was starving, as always, but it would be bad manners to devour the rotting corpse all by himself. “Are you hungry?” He knelt down and broke off part of the coffin lid. Purple-brown scent flooded the night air.

  “I could eat,” said Arturo. “You mind if I take something?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Arturo reached into the grave and ripped off a foot. He carefully pulled off the shoe. It was a delicate business, because the skin had become fused with the sock. Eventually he gave up and slowly peeled the sock back, eating the foot like a muffin stuck to its wrapper. “Oh, that’s good,” he said. “You can’t beat a foot. You know? A nice, rubbery callus, and some little crunchy bones.”

  Meanwhile, Jack had pulled off an arm. The two men sat, their legs dangling into the open grave. “I’m an arm guy myself,” said Jack. “More muscle.”

  “True,” said Arturo, spitting a toenail into the open grave. “The flavor’s in the muscles. When they start to rot and everything just slides apart.”

  “Like good barbecue.”

  “Exactly. But still. It’s the crunch I really like.”

  “To each his own,” said Jack, sucking out the marrow from the humerus.

  “You know,” said Arturo, “I don’t think I’ve seen you at any of our meetings.”

  Jack winced. His entire life, people had tried to get him to join something. It wasn’t that he was antisocial-- it was just that he didn’t like it when other people were in charge, and he didn’t like to take the trouble of leading people himself. Besides, dead people shouldn’t have to be joiners.

  But he’d missed the important part. Focus, Jack. “There are more of us?”

  “Fifty or sixty that I know of in Boston.”

  “Jesus,” whispered Jack. He needed something to help him deal with news like this. He bent down into the coffin and ripped off the other arm. “Do you know why this happened to us?”

  “Not a clue,” said Arturo. “As far as we can tell, none of us has anything in common. I had a heart attack. What about you?”

  “I was mugged,” Jack mumbled through a slippery mouthful of skin.

  “And I bet you didn’t die anywhere near here, either.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well,” said Arturo. “I’ll expect to see you at Mount Auburn Cemetery next Wednesday at midnight.”

  Before Jack could say anything, Arturo cut him off. Like a friendly, polite bulldozer. I bet he sells insurance, thought Jack.

  “You’d like it. We’re starting a softball league, and a bunch of us went to the Charlton Heston retrospective at the Brattle. Besides, I think it would be a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  Arturo tossed the empty sock back into the open grave. “One of us has gone missing.”

  #

  On the third floor of Memorial Hall, Ian and Sarah were hard at work. “I was this close to graduating,” said Ian, holding his thumb and index finger close together.

  “He told you that?” asked Sarah, dubiously.

  “Not directly. But he was being a lot more friendly. You know. He’d nod when he saw me, instead of pretending I wasn’t there. Like he was picturing me as a future colleague.”

  “Well, he’s paying us plenty of attention now. I wish he’d go to a conference or something.”

  “Remember when he had a conference in Sydney, and he was gone for two weeks?”

  “And we went to a movie?” sighed Sarah. “That was amazing. I think it's done. Do you want to grab it?"

  “Sure,” said Ian. He reached into the fume hood, turned off the heat, removed the ball flask from the apparatus, and covered it with a rubber stopper.

  Ian never liked going in the basement under the best of circumstances. It was noisy. The ceiling was lined with gas lines and water lines and vent lines nearly big enough for a man to fit through, and since the whole thing had been retrofitted for science labs in a hurry after Sputnik, and maintained by a university whose primary focus was watering the flowerbeds outside the business school and polishing the antlers in the undergraduate dining hall, and not, say, fixing the structural flaws in the science buildings, they all clonked and thudded like they were filled with angry poltergeists. Some misguided person forty years earlier had attempted to cheer up the grey concrete walls with jolly painted arrows indicating the location of the men’s room, the utility closet, and the elevator. Ian had never checked what lay at the end of the red arrow pointing directly downwards, and he didn’t really want to know.

  At a school like Winthrop, there were a lot of questions you were better off not asking.

  The third door from the left held Prof. Leschke’s overflow laboratory, and since the professor was unaccountably low on graduate students, it was supposed to be empty. In reality, it now held several large gorilla cages. One of which held a real, live zombie.

  For the two days the monster had been in the basement, Ian had alternated between two thoughts: I can’t believe the experiment actually worked! and I will never go down to the basement without Sarah. Even the tranquilizer gun he held gave h
im less confidence than Sarah’s presence beside him.

  As soon as they entered the room, the zombie-- a young male, about Ian’s age in appearance, dressed like a bike messenger-- started to talk. Uncle Fester-- that’s what Ian and Sarah had named him-- was a lot more chatty than Ian had expected.

  “Thank God you’re back,” said Uncle Fester. “You’ve got to let me out of here.”

  Sarah didn’t speak to the monster. Ian and Sarah had learned, through experiment, that talking to Uncle Fester was a bad idea. He just went on and on, and he never said anything new, just that he was starving but he promised he wouldn't hurt them if they would only let him go. Right. Sarah continued to draw the new formula into the syringe.

  “What is that?” asked the monster. “What are you doing?”

  Sarah squirted the excess liquid back into the flask.

  “You don’t understand,” said the zombie. “I don’t want-- I’m just so hungry, and you’ve got to let me out!” He grabbed onto the bars and started to shake them. Were they coming loose from the frame? Holy crap, he’s strong!

  Ian shot the zombie with the tranquilizer gun. The creature dropped to the ground.

  “Took you long enough,” said Sarah. She took the limp arm in her hand and injected the creature. She looked at it closely.

  “Did it work?” asked Ian. But even as he spoke, he could see the monster’s leg twitch.

  “No,” said Sarah.

  ch. 6

  Arturo Rodriguez: possibly the happiest zombie in Boston. Many a zombie, peacefully noshing away in a cemetery or morgue or funeral home, had wondered how he had come to be listening to this eerily cheerful person, and why on earth he was signing up for the Zombie Support Group, when all he wanted was to get back to his meal, was that so much to ask? And many of the fresher-brained had wondered, Why is he doing this, and what does he get out of it?

  And no one would have guessed the truth. Ever since Arturo was a child, he'd loved comic books with the sort of enthusiasm that many people give to their religion. He knew every hero, every costume, every personal flaw; every plotline, every variant, every reboot. He had boxes and boxes of plastic-bagged comics carefully organized and tucked under his bed. Under the bed, because this was a love that had to keep quiet, not if a guy wanted to live peacefully in the world.