Zombies in Love (3 page)

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 him 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.

             
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. 

              Not one of his girlfriends had understood.  He still remembered the last things his latest ex-girlfriend, Torrey, had said to him.  "You'll never grow up, will you?" and "You're going to live alone, you're going to die alone, and that stupid little dog of yours is going to eat your body before anyone finds you."

              In retrospect, it was hard for him to understand what he'd seen in Torrey.

              But despite the sneers of people like her, Arturo loved the idea of a world beyond the tedious real one, a world of power and romance and excitement.  One of the great disappointments of his adulthood was the slow realization that there were no real superheroes, no secret identities, and the world was full of plain old Clark Kents.  He would never wake up with some new mutant superpower, aliens would never give him a magic ring, and all a spider bite had would ever give him was an itchy welt.

              And he didn't want to be a lone wolf like Batman.  He wanted to be an Avenger.  He wanted a whole team of people, each with his own skill and talent, banded together to be a force for good in the world.  They would have a bricked-over warehouse turned secret command center-- maybe somewhere in South Boston?-- with giant computer screens and a holographic exercise room and an underground helipad. 

              He'd even made some sketches, hidden safely where Torrey and her ilk could never find them.

              So when Arturo woke up after his fatal heart attack, sprawled on the living room floor, with his little dog Curly gnawing the flesh from his arm, his first thought was,
Wow, this is exactly the way Torrey said I was going to go
, a thought that didn't actually make him feel any kindlier towards his sharp-tongued ex-girlfriend.  And his second thought, as he watched his arm heal itself, and Curly ran yipping and howling for his kennel, was
This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me.

             
Of course there was a cost.  There was always a cost.  Did Bruce Banner always like being the Hulk?  No.  But usually, probably... it was an entrance to the new world.
 

#

              "You're going, right?" asked Lisa. 

              Jack stopped wiping down the table.  "Are you serious?"

              Yes, she was.  She'd gotten another CALL ME, URGENT text from Tina Gallagher, and that was the last thing she wanted to deal with.  She'd rather think about Jack's stupid problems than her own.  She shrugged at him.

              "First of all, Arturo had no idea why this happened to us, so I'm not going to learn anything.  Second, if anyone finds out there are giant meetings of people like me, out come the shotguns."

              "Now you're being paranoid."

              "No, just a guy who watches movies.  Besides, can you think of a more depressing way to spend an evening?"

              "You spend every night alone in a cemetery digging up a body."

              He grinned at her.  "It's more fun than you'd think.  Very meditative."

              Well, she'd brought it up. 
Yuck. 

              He dropped his soggy rag in the laundry basket and leaned on the counter opposite her, like he was about to buy a slice.  "You want me to go tonight.  God knows why.  Talk me into it."

              "You're smarter than they are," she said, and a little light in his bright blue eyes showed her she was on the right track.

              When Jack was alive, he'd probably gotten more attention for his looks than his brains.  He was actually a handsome guy, with that lean runner's body, and that beautiful thick black hair and clever blue eyes, and that sharp wolfish smile.  She found herself checking him out sometimes, especially when he was wearing his tiny little jogging shorts, stretching before a workout.  And
that
was a direction she really didn't want her mind to go.

              Since when did zombies need to stretch, anyway?

              "Maybe you can figure out why this happened to all of you," she continued.  "And once you know that, maybe you can find a cure."

              "That's optimistic."

              "I just think if there's a chance, you should take it.  And it's not going to happen if you don't meet any other zombies."

              He sighed.  "All right.  I'll go."

              Lisa didn't have a lot of vices left, but she'd held on to curiosity.  "Need a ride?" she asked.

#

              Prof. Leschke was been a terrible teacher in a lot of ways, reflected Ian, but he sure did know how to run a classroom.  He only gave introductory lecture courses, so that he could use the course notes he'd developed years earlier, when he'd started teaching, and there was no real need to update them.  He taught the courses at 7:30 in the morning-- attendance mandatory, no exceptions.  He informed students on the first day that he would not be grading on a curve, and that fifty percent of their grade would be determined by pop quizzes administered at random throughout the course including-- oh why not-- say today?  Why haven't you read chapter one yet, students?   The book isn't in the bookstore yet?  That's no excuse.  Ian, Sarah, pass the quizzes out immediately!

              On day one of the course three hundred students had been enrolled; on day two, only fifty die-hards remained.  And since sectioning had been determined before the course started, Ian and Sarah would each get paid for teaching five sections, none of which had more than six students. 

              You really had to admire the guy, thought Ian, you really did.  Show those obnoxious undergrads who's boss!

              There was only one problem; Prof. Leschke was never around, but Ian and Sarah were. 
Office hours,
thought Ian. 
When every student who's mad at Prof. Leschke gets to yell at me instead. 
Of course, he wasn't looking forward to the end of office hours, either, because he'd have to go check on the zombie. 

              Raising the dead wasn't nearly as much fun as you'd think.

              He heard a squeak as someone sat down in the chair opposite him.  "Prof. Comanor?" she said.

              "Just call me Ian," he said, smoothly flipping his notebook shut so she couldn't read his brainstorming notes on how to exterminate zombies.  (1. Fire?  2. Acid?)  And then his heart stopped for a moment.  The student was absolutely gorgeous.  She had long blond hair, and lovely patrician features, and she was wearing the tightest white tanktop he'd ever seen in his entire life.  Even though it was early May, he found himself thinking it was a little cold for a tank top, especially one that thin.

              Most of the graduate student lifestyle was okay with Ian-- he had no trouble with poverty and obedience-- but the chastity part was really getting to him.  He tried desperately to remember all the things that they'd taught him in orientation about not fraternizing with undergraduates, especially not ones you were teaching, or might teach.  They'd even showed him videos about it. 
You're going to lose your scholarship!  Or get shipped back home to Mom!  Won't she be thrilled!

              "I'm Sloane, Sloane Pannapacker," she said, smiling at him, and leaning forward a little, so he got a peek down her shirt. 
Scholarship!  Mom! 
"Remember me from section?"

              "Um, no," said Ian.  Why didn't he remember this woman?  Surely he would remember if he'd seen her before.  He had to look up from his lecture notes more often.

              She tossed her hair, triggering a ripple of motion through her torso that made poor Ian's brain seize up again.  "I have a little problem," she said.

              "I'm here to help," said Ian, trying to sound suave.

              "I have a family wedding I need to go to, and my dad bought the tickets, and I'm going to miss the midterm.  Is there any way I can take a makeup exam?"

              "Sure," said Ian.  "We do that.  I mean, if it's an emergency.  Sure.  No problem."  Okay, they'd never done it before, but it wasn't a problem.  He'd write the exam himself if he had to.  No problem.  Nope.

              "You're so sweet," she said, standing up.  She reached over and rested her hand on his.  "Maybe you'll give it to me personally?  Just email me and tell me when?"

              Ian swallowed and watched her sashay out the door. 
She seems nice
, he thought. 
Glad I could help her out.

#

When he came home from the
Palmetto,
Sam Lazarus followed his wife Lacey up to their bedroom.  She had her shopping bags at the foot of their bed, like she always did.  This is how it would work: Sam would sit in the antique wingback chair, drinking the water with fresh lemon she’d set out for him, and admire the day’s purchases. 

Item one: a pillow with some kind of floral pattern.  “Won’t this look pretty in the sunroom?  On the love seat?”

“It sure will,” he said, trying to sound excited.  He’d learned that lack of enthusiasm made Lacey cry.  Then she’d call herself a bad wife, promise to return everything, and lock herself in the bathroom for the rest of the evening.

It wasn’t worth it.

Item two: a scarf with big blotchy roses.  Not Lacey’s style as far as he knew, so he watched her, trying to suss out an appropriate reaction.

“Aunt Julia’s birthday is next week.”

He nodded.  This one was necessary, at least.  “She’ll love it.  Nice work.”

Lacey carefully refolded the scarf, not looking at him.  “Have they said anything yet?”

“Not yet,” he said.  They hadn’t made a decision yet, which meant that they hadn’t said no yet, but there were a lot of things it wasn’t worthwhile to tell Lacey.  Like the new private investigator he'd spotted going into Uncle Cheves's office.  Yet another one.  And while in a disinterested light his uncle's optimism was admirable, it just made Sam tired.

How long had everything in the family revolved around Jack?  Jack had a new plan.  Jack was going to carry it through this time, he just needed a little help and a little money.  Oh no, Jack is drinking again.  And now we have to ship him off to rehab, his half-built construct never to be finished, looming over the family like some skeletal reminder never to get sucked in again.  He was never going to get it right, he was never going to grow up, and he was never ever going to amount to anything.

It was hard being the good cousin, because you always ended up shunted to the rear teat.  But Sam had thought at least he could have the
Palmetto.
You’d have to be delusional to hand off the family enterprise to Jack.  Or so partial and blinded that you’d automatically favor your lazy screw-up of a son over his diligent, hardworking, and competent cousin . . . and apparently Cheves and Julia were.

“And I got you a new sport coat!” said Lacey, holding up a jacket that Sam wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing, but would have, actually, been just right for flashy old Jack.  “Put it on, put it on!”

Sam put on a smile and slipped the slick-looking thing on.  He wanted to make his wife happy, and what made her happiest?  Spending money they didn’t have for clothes he wouldn’t wear on a bet.  He couldn't talk about money with Lacey.  It just made her cry, and then spend more, but only for things on sale, so she felt like she was getting bargains.

He thought he could fix her when he married her, she was so sad and fragile and aching for rescue, but now that he'd rescued her, she was just going to spend the rest of her life bringing him down and down and down...

“Oh, honey,” she said, clapping her hands and grinning.  “Don’t you look handsome!  I don’t know why you always have to dress the way you do.  You dress like an old man, and it makes you look old.”

If she didn’t get it, it wasn’t worth trying to explain.   He looked at himself in the mirror.  Yes, the resemblance was more pronounced this way, especially if he took off his wilting bow tie and left the shirt open.  They could have been brothers, and maybe with Jack gone, he stood for the both of them.  Maybe he would drift to center with the counterweight missing.