Zombies in Love (21 page)

             
Clutching the rifle to her chest, Lisa edged her way down the dark stairwell.  She didn't want to turn on the light.  She'd bet she had a minute or two before she was followed, and she didn't want them to see her.  Any advantage she could take, because she had plenty of disadvantages.  The marble spiral staircase felt like it was made out of wet bars of Ivory soap, and God knew she didn't want to fall, because she was fifteen stories up. 

              That was a lot of marble to hit on the way down.

              Plus, she was tired and sore already, because she'd been searching for Sarah all day, and then she'd driven her car into the front of the police station, and then she'd been kidnapped.  A hell of a day.  And she was tired, because she hadn't dared sleep since they'd kidnapped her, and she was thirsty, because she wasn't dumb enough to drink anything they gave her, even if it tasted exactly like water.

              She held the gun nestled in the crick of her left arm and gripped the banister with her right and wondered if Jack was dead yet.  She wished she'd kissed him or something, because what would it have hurt, a little kiss on the cheek for good luck? 

             
Don't think about it!  Focus!

              She stopped to readjust her gun, and yes, there it was, what she'd been expecting-- the sound of a footfall a little too late to be hers.  Her heart was racing already.  Could she go any faster?  No, not in this pitch black, which come to think of it was already getting a little lighter as her eyes adjusted to the bluish predawn light seeping in from somewhere. 

              "I'll make a deal with you," she said.  "Free pizza for the rest of your life.  How does that sound?"

              No reply from upstairs. 

              Her right hand slid onto a knob.  End of the banister.  She stopped and reached ahead.  Nothing but the slick wall, as far as her hand could feel. 

              She swore she could smell them up there, above her.  Some musty human smell, cutting through the dust of the silent stairwell.  Her chest ached, and her eyes were raw with the effort to see through the grey-blue dark. 

             
You'll be okay,
she told herself. 
Keep going. 

              Her right foot found the step exactly where it should be, but her left foot found only air, and she tumbled, landing belly-down on the hard marble, sliding forward head-first, hands grappling in front of her, head instinctively arched back, legs reached out desperately to catch the walls, gun gone somewhere, falling falling falling uncontrollably until with a sudden shock of pain to her left wrist, she found herself sprawled on a landing. 

              She'd only fallen down a short flight of stairs.  It was the reason she wasn't dead, but she thought her wrist might be broken.  It hurt enough to be broken, but she couldn't see it that well, in the dawn light that trickled in through a stained-glass window next to her.

             
Click,
the light snapped on.  She could hear footsteps running towards her in the sudden painful light, but everything ached and shook.  Shock.  Was this shock?  Her body slid down into a ball, and she rolled to a sitting position, and she saw a huge man in a Winthrop University uniform barreling down at her, his gun raised.  Desperately, she lifted her gun, as something heavy hit the window next to her, a really big bird, she thought.

              She didn't look.  She kept her eyes on the man with the gun, and as he turned his head but continued to run she high-sticked him in the stomach with her rifle. The magazine shattered, dripping caustic acid all over him, as he screamed and dropped, clutching at his stomach.

              His partner, following behind him, raised his gun. 

              Now what the hell was she going to do?  She was seven or eight stories off the ground, she had no weapons, and while she might have been willing to let him shoot her, take her chances, with a normal gun, this one shot acid, and she could hear the guy screaming to her left, suffering the terrible pain he'd been about to inflict on her.

              "Better help your friend," she said.

              But the other man wasn't looking at her.  He was looking to her left, towards the window, with a look of horror on his face, as the glass shattered.

              She started to turn, but before she could see anything, something with a grip like a stone vice grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her out the window.  Multicolored glass and solder fragments falling from her body, she shrieked as she dangled through the sky, her arm screaming with pain, until the grip released, and she began to yell in earnest--

             
Seven stories up!

             
And then two hard stony hands grabbed her on either side of her rib cage. 

             
"Sorry about that.  Where would you like me to drop you off?"
said a German woman's voice.

              Lisa looked up.  The creature that held her was made of lichen-covered granite.  It had an eagle's head, with a flickering snake's tongue in it, four wings, giant breasts, and two human arms with large claw-tipped hands.  A gargoyle.  A
friendly
gargoyle. 

             
Might as well answer the lady. 
"Alioto's Pizza?  In Somerville?" she said.

              The creature's tongue flicked the air like a lizard's. 
"Oh, yes.  You do a fine slice."

             
Lisa stifled a laugh.  "I'm sorry.  Have I see you before?  You'd think I'd remember you."

              The gargoyle's beak creaked into a friendly smile. 
"Long story,"
she said.

#

              Things Ian had never wanted to see: zombies eating each other.  And it wasn't any better with his eyes closed, because he could still hear them.  CHOMP SLURP RIP SLURP CHOMP

              "Zombies can't live on other zombies," said Ian.  "It violates the second law of thermodynamics."

              "You should tell them that," said the redheaded Winthrop guard, rubbing the back of his head like he was amazed it was still on. "They'd probably listen to you."

#

Jack regained consciousness with a half-devoured leg in his mouth.  And this wouldn’t have been a problem if the leg hadn’t tasted disgusting.  Like rotten eggs, actually, and not in a good way.  Sulfurous.

He pulled the leg out of his mouth and looked at it.  It was definitely human-like, but it was covered in moldy-looking fur, and it had a hoof at the end.  He dropped it on the slab of black stone that he’d been leaning on, wiped his mouth, and pulled himself to a stand.

He had fallen through the ceiling of a very strange room that looked like it had been scooped from the dirt a very long time earlier.  On the walls torches gave off a light so dim that he was thankful for his unnaturally acute vision.  But his ghoulish sense of smell, heightened in his exhaustion, wasn’t doing him any favors.  Every instinct in his body cried out Bad!  Wrong!  Run!  He wanted to crawl home to his apartment and wash for a week.

He was so tired.  If he could run he would run, but he was so tired.  He braced himself up with his stiff-feeling arms and continued to scan the room.

On the high stone table--
altar
-- was most of a very strange-looking body.  It was ten feet tall and man-shaped, but it had goat’s horns and goat’s legs.  Whatever it was looked like it had been dead at least a century-- every bit of juice had dried from the desiccated flesh.  The lips peeled back to reveal a horrible yellowish smile.

Oh look.  It’s the devil.  Or a devil.  And I’ve been eating it. 

He had a really high threshold for nausea, but for the first time since he died, he nearly vomited.  No, it wasn't nausea, it was a horrible screaming pain from his empty stomach as it contracted endlessly into itself, and he grappled with the rough slate, trying to hold himself upright, until his legs collapsed under him and he found himself sprawled over the altar again, over the horrible monstrous body.  He’d burned out everything in him with that last leap, and he hadn’t had much to spare, he hadn’t eaten anything but that arm in hours.  Why hadn’t he taken that other arm when he had the chance?  And a leg.  A nice juicy human leg, not this horrible furry ancient thing, this hellhound's chew toy...

He was so tired that he just put his head down on top of the corpse.  He'd gone through the stiff stage so quickly, just broken through, and now he was through the even worse stage, where everything was rotting and detaching from each other.  He was glad to see it didn't hurt.  Luckily he was having too much trouble concentrating for him to hurt, because he could smell himself now and he'd gone from the bad meat stage to something more like dirt.  So it wouldn't be bad at all, what was going to happen next, he was just going to softly and quietly rot away.  Fifteen stories, that was dumb, but he'd never once never once said he was smart.

He felt something fall out of his ear and hoped it was the last bullet fragment.

Something poked him in the nose. 
Wake up, asshole,
it said.

He opened his mouth to explain that he forgot how to sleep, he was just dying, thanks, when the thing poked something in his mouth.  A pinch of foul sulfurous meat.  It sat there.

Something else slapped him and he remembered to chew, swallow. Disgusting, but it reminded him of something, and he wanted to know what it reminded him of, so he kept eating until he was strong enough to open his working eye.

There were two spiders looking back at him.  One waved a forefinger at him.  No, not spiders, his own hairy hands (
God, I'm hairy)
, which seemed to have detached themselves from his arms.  They were both trailing shreds of skin and veins behind them.

"Can you talk?" he mumbled, and the one that hadn't waved stuffed another lump of devil corpse into his mouth. 

No, you're just hallucinating
, said the unencumbered hand.

We took a vote,
said the one that had just fed him. 
The brain lost.  The body wants to live.

Lazy brain
, said the other hand, breaking off a new hunk of foul flesh.
 

"Do you need help?"

One of the hands slapped him. 
Don't talk.  Just eat. 

That made sense.  So he would just rest and let his body do the work (good body, he was glad he'd always taken such good care of it) and now as he could feel his brain reconnect itself, and the memories were all fitting together like a big spiderweb, and he was back in his childhood bed in Charleston.  His mother was not the maternal type, but every time he got sick she would make him soup out of chicken stock from a cube and minute rice and undercooked carrots and sulfurous hard-boiled eggs, a special soup which apparently would cure anything, and if he was really sick, she would spoon-feed it to him, slowly, never spilling a drop on the blue checked sheets, and he would eat it, even though it tasted terrible, because he wanted to get well.

Spring comes eventually, even to Cambridge, and the sun beat warmly on the side of Memorial Hall, making Sonia feel as relaxed as a cat in a sunbeam.  Of course her colleagues assured her that each season had its pleasures-- even winter’s sleet could be refreshingly brisk, when you could feel the heat of the ancient radiators on your interior surface.  And fall, every academic’s favorite season, when the world seems ripe with possibility.

Sonia was happy.  Of course, there had been an adjustment period, but really, it was awfully nice being a brick.  No grants to pursue-- no need to worry about tenure.  She was here for good, and she had colleagues like she had always dreamed of.  Below and to the left of her was M. A. Mortensen, the man who rediscovered Melville.  Unbelievable!  Back in the McCarthy era, Winthrop had tossed him out a window for being a gay communist.  And here he was, sharp as a tack, and always up for a nice chat with Sonia.  Her other neighbors were less famous but equally astute.  On three of her other sides, Ten-Brick Bob, student rabblerouser and William Blake fan-- they’d gotten him by slipping him some bad LSD.  On her last side, a very shy Victorian-era medievalist and secret pyromaniac.

And when she was done talking with those gentlemen, there was always the ivy, poking into her body, streaming with the thoughts of the other bricks around her, and with the merest touch she was welcomed into the arguments of the greatest minds of Winthrop’s history.  And since she was new, and current, they all wanted to talk with her.  The life of the mind, just as she had always dreamed of.  More or less.

Hadn’t someone said that hell had all the best musicians?  Maybe Winthrop’s transgressors had all the best thoughts.

And when life as a brick really got to her, she could always borrow a gargoyle again and go visit the English departmental meeting.  She could see it now-- crashing through the window, soaring away with the plate of chocolate chip cookies, while her colleagues leapt like giant corpulent toads for their escaping treats...

“Don’t you agree, Sonia?” asked M.A.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I missed the question.”

“Don’t you believe the Puritans were the cornerstone of American culture?”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said.  “They were a penny-ante religious cult.  We’ve written far too much about them, because they’re so well-documented, and because they were so close to Winthrop.  It’s a different matter in England, of course, but the American Puritans were nothing.  And do we really have to be Puritans on such a pretty day?"

Mortensen laughed.  She felt a rush of pleasure as she heard applause ripple up and down the ivy.
One point to Dr. Thal
, she thought.

When even the bricks are happy, can the university be far behind? 

On the lawn nearby, a little freshman who had not gone back to Fargo after all, leaned and loafed at her ease, regarding a blade of grass.

#

             
"I came about the advertisement for a bassist?" said the skinny, pasty-skinned guy.  He was unhealthy-looking, even for a bassist, but the band had seen worse.  "You can call me Fester.  This is my girl, Sloane?"

              Sloane felt the rest of the band turn to look at her, in her tight leather dress and her bright blue hair.  She smiled at them and gave them a friendly little wiggle.  "Wow," said the singer.  "Is this a package deal?"

#

              Arturo sat at his kitchen table, eating the foot he'd been keeping in the back of the fridge for a rough morning like this one.  His dachshund, Curly, watched him and begged. 

             
What the hell,
thought Arturo, and tossed him a toe.

#

Joshua Leschke was on his third pancake of the morning, and he was chattering away with his mother, but David wasn’t listening.  Suddenly he was bursting with ideas again, and he wanted to write them all down before he forgot a single detail.

He had so much to do that he wanted to do it all as soon as possible.  All his lab benches were going to be filled.  Winthrop had better give him some good graduate students this September, and an exemption from teaching, or he was going to track down the dean and eat him.

The pencil tip snapped, but before he could get up to sharpen it, Miriam whisked his broken pencil away and gave him a new one.

The only thing troubling him was that he'd forgotten something.  What could it be? 

Well, he was sure it wasn't important.

#

In Memorial Hall, in the romantically named Lecture Hall A, sat the fifty undergraduates who had been taking Chemistry 101 with Prof. Leschke, one of whom had the Winthrop University charter in his lap. 

"Here it is," he said.  "If a professor schedules a final exam, and fails to give the exam during the period aforementioned, then all students present will be considered to have demonstrated their skills to the satisfaction of the university, and shall be permitted to graze their sheep upon Winthrop Yard for the period of one year after the exam date."

"A's for everyone!" said another student, as the others broke into cheers.

#

Mr. Dudley was reflecting that June meant graduation, and graduation meant Reunion, and that perhaps it was time he went to J. Press and purchased a new boater for the event, in case any of his classmates' widows were in attendance, especially Mrs. Edith Livermore Hollis. 
Yowza! 
But none of the other members of the Board seemed to share his optimism.  It was his duty, as always, to clarify their path.

“I agree that our demise-- technical though it may be- and the loss of our patron, Mr. Winthrop, will have effects upon our great university.  On the other hand,” Mr. Dudley remarked, “Winthrop has survived for so many years because it has been able to turn apparent disadvantages to its own ends.”

“Has the staff been watering down the drinks again?” asked his colleague Mr. Hoar, glaring at his gin and tonic.  “This is utterly flavorless.”

Mr. Dudley beckoned to one of the servants.  “Please tell the representative from the Student Grievances Committee we will see him now.”

Mr. Hoar smiled.

#

Ian and Sarah walked through the shadows of Winthrop Yard.  She didn’t look different to him-- at least not in this light-- but her voice sounded like she’d been gargling razor blades.  Also she smelled like a root beer float.  The whole package was pretty darn sexy, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.  Especially since she was probably mad at him because he was still alive.  Total dumb luck on his part, plus they’d had the foresight to buy high-quality zombie cages. 
Note to self-- you get what you pay for.

But anyway, she still looked good.  Really good.  And she’d pulled a diploma out of her bra, with his own name on it, and she’d given him a sad little smile...

“This was not how I pictured my graduation,” she said. "I can't go on the job market like this.  No one's going to hire an undead candidate.  They're going to say that I can't identify with the concerns of the students."

Job? 
thought Ian. 
That's right.  I graduated.  So now I need to get a job. 

Shit.

"Maybe I can get a postdoc," she said, softly.  "A few postdocs.  And when they get used to me, and they see I'm not going to eat anyone, then I can give it a try.  Do you think that will work?"

Was she actually asking him for his opinion?  Wow.  Had that ever happened before?  Not that he could remember.

He'd never seen Sarah look so miserable.  For as long as he'd known her, she'd always known the next step in her life.  Now she seemed lost.  And if he hadn't loved her so much, he would have told her, well hey, join the club, we're all lost here, but he did love her, and he always would.

How could he cheer her up?  What would make her happy?

"I have something for you, too."  He pulled the old lab book, the one that had caused all the trouble, out of his coat pocket and held it out to her.  "Or I can just get rid of it."

“Heck no,” she said, brightening as she took it from him and began flipping through the pages.  “We haven’t tried half of them yet.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said, as he snuck his arm around her waist. 

And suddenly Ian got a glimpse of their future.  The two of them in Sarah’s apartment, a bowl of popcorn on his lap, a bowl of salted, roasted finger bones on hers, watching
Night of the Living Dead
yet again, for the fifty-third time.

He could live with that.