Zombies in Love (18 page)

“How are we going to get out of here?" Arturo added.  "There’s only one exit.  Do you know how many fire regulations this place breaks?”

“We could take the elevator,” said Jack.

As if on cue, the elevator signal pinged.  The two men looked at each other, and Jack picked up another tank, ready to swing it like a baseball bat.

With a rumble the doors opened.  “Don’t shoot!” Ian cried, his hands in the air.  “I’ve come to help!”

“Why?” asked Jack.

“If I do,” said Ian, “Prof. Leschke is going to let me graduate.  Can you believe it?  I’m going to be Dr. Comanor, Ph.D.!  Wait until I tell Mom!”

              When she was a teenager, Sarah Chen had mixed Clorox and Drano to see what would happen, and had woken up with aching mucus membranes and eighty per cent of her lung capacity.  She felt pretty much the same as she opened her eyes to find that she was sprawled in a chair in a wood-paneled room, with a bunch of old white guys staring at her.

              "Am I in hell?" she asked, gingerly touching what felt like a black eye.  She'd never had a black eye before.  And it would be totally okay with her if she never had one again.

              "I am Mr. Dudley, Miss Chen," said the man in the center of the ring.  "I speak for the Board of Overseers."

              She had to try it.  She had to know how far she would get if she ran.  And now she knew.  They'd caught her effortlessly, snatching her from the Greyhound bus station in New York City, while she wobbled around, drugged up on those damned grandma-baked cookies.

              "We need your assistance," said Mr. Dudley. 

              "I can't imagine why.  I'm just a grad student.  Surely there's someone more competent--"

              "Please don't insult me, Miss Chen.  You know we would never have gone to the trouble of collecting you if your services weren't required.  And I respect you enough to believe you understand that."

              She licked her dry lips.  A noiseless servant set a giant pina colada on the small table in front of her.  She looked at it but did not drink.  "I did my best, sir.  I wasn't able to synthesize the antivirus.  It's beyond my capacities as a scientist.  You'd do better to look elsewhere."

              "Prof. Leschke is dead."

              She closed her eyes.  "Ian?"

              "In any case, we didn't bring you here for your scientific services.  You've been behaving in an uncharacteristic manner, Miss Chen.  You didn't get into Winthrop by going to nightclubs.  Have you come to believe that life is short?"  A cold, thin smile passed over his plump face.   "Or perhaps, unnaturally prolonged?"

              She took a sip of her drink, her hand shaking.  That was unexpected.  They knew she was infected.  That killing her wouldn't be enough.  Not that she wanted to be a zombie, but walking around under the clear blue sky beat whatever oblivion Mr. Dudley had planned for her.

              Burning her body.  That would work.  Would she feel it?

              "Introduce me to your new friends," said Mr. Dudley.

              "Why would I talk to you?  I'm dead either way.  There's nothing you can give me."

              "Isn't there, Dr. Chen?"

              She bit the inside of her lip so hard she could taste the blood.  She was dead and gone either way.  What did it matter what he called her?  Would it matter to her parents, with their only child dead?  She knew them.  They would think that Winthrop had broken her.  The pressure, the workload.  They would think it was their fault, that they should have kept her in California.  How sorry she was for what she'd done to them, just for a stupid joke.  She wished there was some way they could know that.

              All of her chess pieces were gone, and the game was over.  Maybe.  He'd never said what happened to Ian.  Maybe that meant he didn't have Ian yet.  At least one of them was going to get out of this.  At least she could take care of him one last time.

              "Dr. Chen
and
Dr. Comanor," she said.  "Then I talk."

#

All he was doing was standing, staring vacantly, chewing on a piece of paper, and then the acid caught him in the back, and then he started to scream--

Being a ghoul wasn’t that bad,
Jack thought
, most of the time there were plenty of advantages.  All right, he had to eat people, but if you surrounded him with a pile of the hogs and cows and chickens and shrimp that had died to keep his living body motoring along-- hell, you could probably fill a football field with the chickens alone that had been murdered for his sake.  Great snowy heaps of murdered birds, miles deep, miles wide...

He carefully lifted the body of the man whose head he’d pounded into the floor and put it into the cage.  He wasn’t a medical expert, but the man’s breathing sounded awfully shallow, and there seemed to be a lot of blood leaking out of the back of the man’s head. 

Not aging, that was a good thing.  Jack knew how often he’d been able to skate along on the basis of his looks.  And every year it was a little harder to stay in shape, to keep the hair from colonizing his ears and nose...

The man’s mother was circling Logan, waiting to see her son.  But he wasn’t infected.  If Jack could infect him, maybe he’d heal.  Or he’d die before he could heal and spend eternity as a brain-damaged zombie, a sorry misery to himself. 

The last eight months since Jack had died had been like some kind of exceptionally gory Warner Brothers cartoon.  He could get mangled and beat up and warped like Wile E. Coyote, and then sprong, back he’d come, ready to chase another beeping Roadrunner.  He’d always figured that there was some way he could die, even if it wasn’t anything obvious.  And now he knew.  And he didn't want to die. 

He wanted to live, he wanted to go home, and most of all, he wanted to see Lisa again.

Last chance
, Jack thought.  He bit off his fingertip and stuck the bleeding stump into the man’s mouth until he felt his finger heal.  Then he sat back on his haunches, his hand over his mouth, and watched.  His body ached to bolt, but he made himself sit still.

My name is John Lazarus Kershaw
, he thought. 
I’m a reporter from Charleston, South Carolina.  I’m not a bad person.  I’ve always done more damage to myself than anyone else.  This isn’t me, sitting here, over a man I killed, because I was too strong, because I wasn’t paying attention, because I was selfish...

Am I too late?  Please please please...

Jack gnawed on his shaking hand until he heard a finger bone snap.  He hadn't even felt it.  Was it his imagination, or had the terrible bleeding stopped?  Was the man’s breathing deeper, did it look less like a coma, more like sleep?  He leaned over and sniffed the man’s skin.  Sassafras.  The infection was taking hold. 

“Hey,
skinny!” called Arturo.  “Help me with these doors!”

#

Lisa walked home from the parking garage, her feet aching.  She felt beaten down-- a natural reaction to spending a few hours driving around Boston-- but it was getting worse as she walked back home. 

It was dawning on her that yes, she was really infected.  And the good part of that was that she had sort of a “get out of jail free” card, and when she had the inevitable Alioto heart attack in her fifties, it wasn’t going to kill her all the way dead. 

But she was going to be a zombie.  She was going to be out there digging up graveyards along with Jack.  Not with Jack.  She’d told him to go away so clearly he wouldn't need to be told ever again.  She’d be out there with the guy who kept licking her armpit at the meeting.

Depressing.  But that was just the nighttime.  What would be the daytime?  Back at the restaurant, every day, forever. 

She couldn’t do it forever.  She could do it because her family needed her, and then she could do it in their memory, because there was a little piece of her mother and father there, but just thinking about doing it every day, forever, as the neighborhood changed around her, and all the faces got strange to her, forever and ever and ever...

It was the loneliest thought she’d ever had. 

She stopped in front of Alioto’s Pizza, and for the first time in a long time, she looked around her.  There was Alioto’s Pizza, the same old place it had always been.  And there was Stu’s spa, which hadn’t changed for as long as she could remember.  But beyond that--

A very expensive shoe store, where they looked at her funny every time she went in and asked for a size eleven until she gave up.

A vintage clothing store where nothing was larger than a six, and all the clothes looked like they’d belonged to Jackie Kennedy. 

A place where you could buy pretty good cupcakes at six dollars a pop.

A “chef-driven bistro,” the third one in the space in three years.

A place to get your nails done, at $10 a nail.

She’d lived here, right here, all her life, but it wasn’t her home anymore.  And now that she noticed, she was amazed at how long it had taken her to see it.  She shivered, and saw the short dark-haired man leaning against the side of the door to her restaurant.
Jack,
she thought, and accelerated towards him.  She wasn’t sure if she was going to kiss him, or shake him, or what--

But now that she was closer, she could see that it wasn’t him.  This man could have been his older brother-- a little less attractive, a little balder.  And he dressed just like Matlock.  She couldn’t even imagine Jack dressing like that if he lost a bet.

“Are you Miss Alioto?” the man asked.  He had Jack’s funny accent, too.

“Come on inside,” she said, pulling out the keys to the restaurant.

“I’m Jack’s cousin,” said the man in the blue seersucker Matlock suit.  “Sam Lazarus.”

Lisa shook his outstretched hand.  It felt strangely warm to her.  Normal, and she felt a moment of loneliness for cold-bodied Jack, wherever he was.  “What do you want?” she asked.

“I want you to help me find my cousin.”

Since she didn’t know this man-- even if he was obviously related to Jack-- her first instinct was not to help him.  “I don’t know where he is.”

“Stu down the street said Jack worked here.”

“
Did
work here.  I fired him a week ago.”

Sam sighed and rubbed his forehead.  “He disappeared more than half a year ago.  Left no word with his family.  And-- I don’t know what Jack told you before you hired him-- this wouldn’t be completely out of character.  I heard that a former employee of ours spotted him in Boston a couple of weeks ago.  But she didn't know anything else.  You know how I tracked him down?  He still gets the
Palmetto
.  Or he did, through Stu's corner store over there.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He looked directly at her, and again those bright blue eyes, a strange vivid blue, reminded her of Jack.  “I want you to get a sense of how important it is to me to find my cousin, Miss Alioto.  I’m not doing this lightly.  His father is dying, and he needs to come home.”

She chewed on her lip.  “Does he know?”

“I don’t see how he could,” said Sam.  “As far as I can tell, he hasn’t spoken with anyone since the day he disappeared.”

Disappeared
, thought Lisa.
They don’t have any idea what happened, do they?
She’d always wondered how Jack left it-- a bloodstained suit of clothes on the floor of his house?  No, he was a smart man, smart enough to make it look like he’d bolted, not like he’d been stabbed to death by whoever had killed him.  Which would be better for his parents, she wondered?  “How much time does he have?”

Sam shook his head.  “We don’t know.  Not much.”

“I’ve got Jack's cell number.”

“I’ve got it, too.  He doesn’t answer, and the mailbox is full.”

Was she going to help this guy?  Put it another way.  Did she believe this guy?  “I can drive you over to his apartment.  He’s across the river, over in Everett.”

Sam smiled at her.  For a moment, he looked like Jack.

#

Sloane walked along the Charles River, trying to figure out what to do next.  She'd had a great semester, but it was all falling apart.  It had been fun pretending to be the only daughter of wealthy flour-mill heirs, and all the parties at Locke-Ober had been great, but now there were six messages on her cell phone from the president of the Jubilee Club, wanting to talk to Sloane, in her position as treasurer.  She could hear the question even if it wasn't exactly stated-- "Where did all the money go, Sloane?  We started the semester with twenty thousand dollars, and it's all gone, and where did it all go?"

And what was she going to say?  "You'd be surprised what a really good party costs?"

Plus she was failing all of her classes, assuming she did show up to the final exams.  There went the scholarship.  There went Winthrop.  What was she going to do next? 

She spotted something under a bush close to her-- a guy, a little older than she and dressed like a bike messenger, lying flat on the ground, staring up at the sky.

Was he dead?  If he was, she ought to call the police. 

He turned towards her, propping himself up on an elbow, and smiled.  "Hi, beautiful."

Sloane liked it when people called her beautiful.  She came a little closer.

#

“If it makes any difference,” Lisa said as she drove, “I always told him he should go back home.  Or at least call.  You know?  Let everyone know he was all right.”

“I’m sure you did,” said Sam, looking out the window.  She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but he didn’t look impressed by what he saw.

Maybe it was just the way he got after a lot of traveling, and his uncle being so sick, but this guy was a little hard to read.  Distant, unfocused.  Maybe it was just that in her head she was trying to make him more like Jack, who noticed everything, and who couldn’t drive anywhere without finding six places he wanted to check out next time he was in the area.  An interesting church, or a used bookstore, or just a cemetery with a low-slung fence.  Compared to his cousin, Sam seemed a little flattened out. 

She could make him talk.  “Are you a reporter, too?”

Sam shook his head.  “He told you he was a reporter?”

“I had to drag it out of him.”

He looked straight at her.  “His parents publish the
Palmetto
.”

She kept driving.

“I guess you don’t know what that means.  They own the newspaper.”

She smiled sweetly at him.  “I own my own restaurant.  That means I do every dirty job there is, from cleaning the toilet, to checking the rat traps.  And I cook the pizza, too.”

“I’m sure it’s excellent, ma’am.” 

Was she too sensitive, or did she hear something patronizing in Sam’s voice?  Hell, no.  This man was a snob.

He’d have to pay for his own goddamned slice if he wanted one.

She soldiered on.  “But Jack was working as a reporter when he disappeared, right?  Is there any chance he wrote something that made someone want to kill him?" 
Something he wouldn't want to tell me about?

“He wasn’t working on a story.  He wasn’t a reporter.  Jack disappeared the night his parents told the staff of the
Palmetto
that they had chosen him to be the next publisher.”

“Jesus,” said Lisa. 

“Typical,” said Sam.  “That man could piss anything away.”

“You don’t like your cousin,” she said.

“My cousin wears me out.  But you must know what I mean.  You fired him.”

“That was personal,” she said.

He looked her up and down, pausing at her stomach.  “Is there something else I’m going to have to deal with here?”

No, she did not like this man.  She did not like him at all, which is why she pulled over to the side of the road.  “Get out of my car,” she said.

“What?”

“There’s a T stop five blocks back.  You can take the subway back to Logan.  I’ll track down Jack, I’ll tell him about his father, and I bet I’ll do it nicer than you will, so why don’t you get going, Bubba Joe.”

To her total shock, he drew a gun on her.  “I don’t think so, Lisa.”

Oh Jesus,
she thought.
He’s going to kill me.
Which meant-- and now she knew the whole thing, knew it in a flash-- he’d killed his cousin, too.  And then he'd gotten away too quickly to see Jack come back.  Now she was sitting in a car with the man who’d killed Jack, and as soon as she showed him where Jack’s apartment was, he was going to kill her.

She was such a goddamn idiot.

She pulled the car back into the line of traffic.  What was she going to do?  She tried to think about all the mystery novels she’d read.  Maybe there was some kind of clue there.  Some kind of hint.  What to do if trapped in the car with a murderer: first, don't get in the car.

“Are we nearly there?” 

“Nearly,” she said.  “So guess what?  You get to shoot me soon.  Aren’t you excited?  Won’t that be fun?”

“I’ll shoot you only if you make me do it.”

“Oh, don’t lie to me.  Once you drew the gun you had to shoot me.  Guy like you?  Can’t be threatening honest business owners.  So I have to disappear first.”

He didn’t disagree with her.

“But there’s something you don’t know about me.”

He snorted.  “You’re connected.  Mobbed up.”

Could she like this guy any less?  “Yeah, me and Whitey Bulger. We're best buds. No, asshole.  I’m immortal.  I can’t die.”

She could almost hear the wheels turning in Sam’s head, as he began to consider whether he’d actually heard what she just said.

“Well, I will die,” she continued.  “And then I’ll come back as a zombie, cursed to walk the earth forever, eating only the flesh of the living.  And you’ll be in deep shit, because when I come back, I’m going to be hungry, and I’m going to
eat your face
.”

He reached for the door handle and she accelerated.  Her little Toyota skipped over the top of the hill and landed on the other side with a thump. 
Good girl.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said, holding the gun firmly pointed at her chest.  “I don’t believe you’re crazy.”

“I’m not crazy.  There are zombies all over Boston.  They meet in Mount Auburn Cemetery, right near where they buried Mary Baker Eddy.  Once a week, five bucks if you want hors d’oeuvres.”

She thought she could hear a little quaver in his voice.  “I have this gun for my own protection.  My cousin’s gotten mixed up with all kinds of people before.  I don’t plan to kill anyone.”

“What, you don’t believe me?  I can prove it to you. Shoot me.  It’ll be funny.”  She sped up a little faster, swerving around a parked delivery truck, so the tires squealed.

Now he sounded outright scared.  If he shot her at this speed, who could tell what would happen?  “Why don’t we just--”

“Oh, I’ve got another way to prove it to you.  I've got super-healing.  Jack bit me on the stomach two days ago, and now it’s just a scar.  Check it out,” and she yanked up her shirt, high enough to show her bra.

He looked.

She accelerated and yanked the wheel to the right, crashing into the brick face of a building.  She felt her head whip forward and back, as the airbags punched her back, back into the chair.  A horrible burned latex smell filled her nose.

The two of them sat there, stunned and breathing hard, for a moment.

“Jesus,” said Sam, bending forward and reaching for the gun he’d dropped in the wheel well.  “What is wrong with you?”  He picked up the gun and pointed it back at her.  “Get out of the car.  Leave the keys.”

Lisa leaned on the horn until she saw the door to the building open. 

Sam cocked the gun.

“Listen, asshole,” she said.  “We just crashed into the front of the Everett Police Department.  See all the guys in the pretty blue uniforms?  No matter how much trouble you’re in, it’s only going to get worse if you shoot me.”