Zombies in Love (6 page)

Lucky she was wearing heels.  She was getting ready to try again when the doctor spoke.

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor, “but-- Mr. Kershaw?-- are you all right?  You don’t look at all well.  Your skin is cyanotic, and your breathing...”

For a moment Jack looked surprised.  Then he clutched his chest.  “My heart!” he gasped.  He rolled his eyes back in his head and dropped bonelessly to the floor.

Thunk!  Reporter down!  Everyone, including the doctor, started pushing his way through the crowd to the stricken man.

Plan B,
thought Lisa, as she picked up her satchel.

If the first thing a physician learns is to do no harm, the first thing an academic learns is never to lie.  Your career can survive plagiarism, ineptitude, and a complete disinterest in teaching, but fraud will kill you every time. 

What Prof. Sonia Thal had done wasn’t fraud, exactly.  She had never actually said that she had discovered the first novel written by an enslaved African-American man.  She had said that she had found a document that IF VERIFIED WOULD BE the first novel written by an enslaved African-American man.  She had pointed out that while many of the details in the manuscript APPEARED TO BE based on verifiable fact, they might be pure coincidence.

What she had not said, of course, is that she had written the entire thing herself, first on her computer, and then on a stack of antique paper she’d purchased on eBay, then hidden the manuscript in her attic for six months so it got good and dusty, before springing it on the world.  It was a good novel, too, and it revealed the tensions of race and gender and class in the 1820s so well that if it wasn’t authentic, it deserved to be.  She had even thought of abandoning her original plans and printing the book as fiction, but you didn’t do that kind of thing before getting tenure, especially at Winthrop. 

Fiction is for liars and amateurs.  Real books have footnotes.
[1]

The thing was, she didn’t have a choice.  Associate professors never got tenure at Winthrop-- you gave them seven years of your life, and you got a line on your CV and a swift boot to one of the University of North Dakota’s satellite campuses.  But Sonia had a house, and a cat, and furniture, and a favorite coffeehouse where they didn’t play the music too loud, and she wasn’t leaving Boston for anybody.  So she had to find something pretty spectacular...

The problem was that she had gotten greedy.  No American was writing good novels in the 1820s, unless you counted James Fenimore Cooper, and Sonia certainly didn’t, except for, maybe,
maybe, The Pioneers
(1823)
.
If she’d set it twenty years later with the Transcendentalists and Hawthorne, she would have had a better chance.  But as it was, it felt like every English professor was out to get her. 

In the end, it was the agricultural historians who brought her down.  It turned out that the climactic scene with the McCormick reaper in the background was totally anachronistic.  And then the gun nuts weighed in, and she’d given a minor character a Winchester rifle to hold, which was, unfortunately, completely impossible. 

And her timing had been terrible, too.  In the same year, a couple of historians had been found to have falsified data-- one of them had supposedly found probate inventories which didn’t exist because they had burned up, dramatically enough, in the San Francisco earthquake of 1909.  And another man had interleaved his histories of the Vietnam War with personal reminiscences of the conflict, when he’d spent his whole stint as a professor at West Point.  Reporters like when things come in threes, and Sonia became the perfect capstone to their articles. 

When the investigation was completed, Sonia was pretty sure that she wouldn’t be teaching at Winthrop come fall.  But she was surprised when the outside investigator, a friendly guy from Brown who kept showing pictures of his baby daughter to everyone, leaned in and whispered in her ear that the report was coming out on Monday and she should leave town before then.  “Don’t bring your stuff,” he said.  “Just leave it.  Just go.”

Of course she hadn’t listened.  She’d play this out, she’d collect her last paycheck, and then she’d figure out what to do with the rest of her life. 

She had never thought about doing anything else.
The life so short, the craft so hard to learn...

Holding her engraved summons from the Board of Overseers in her left hand, Sonia scanned the list of names apparently engraved on the slate wall.  There it was.  SONIA THAL.
  She touched the name and it melted under her fingertip into nothingness.  One of the slate panels slid back, revealing an ancient elevator.  There was no one inside.  Apparently it was waiting for her.

Sonia stepped inside and could feel the elevator bounce downwards slightly.  But the door didn’t close.  Then she realized that it was one of those ancient elevators that only worked when the inner metal cage snapped into place.  She closed the creaking metal cage, the outer door shut, and without Sonia even pressing a button, the elevator began to move downwards.  Could this be right?  But there was no button for her to press.

The door opened on an ancient hallway hewn from slate walls.  She had never been anywhere this old in the university, and there was something claustrophobic about the place, like it had been built by a smaller generation of men.  And it smelled strange, like ancient dirt, the sort of dirt that reminds you that every piece of soil in the world was once part of an animal or a plant, and most of the world has been dead a very long time.

“What’s going on?” she said, to the portly man in the grey pinstripe suit, mopping his face with a white linen handkerchief.  Mr. Dudley.  That was his name.  Head of the Board of Overseers.  She'd seen him once or twice at faculty events, and he'd sent her a personal note when she won the James Russell Lowell Prize.

Perhaps she should be more polite to him, but her nerves were on edge.

“Dr. Thal,” said Mr. Dudley.  “You’ve been of some embarrassment to our university.”

Dr., not Professor.  “
I don’t expect to continue my employment--” she said.

“I assume you read your entire contract before you signed it?” he interrupted.

She shook her head.  “Why would I?”

He smiled at her.  “No one ever does.  Except for the Law School.  They’re something of a problem for us, as you might imagine.  Oh, well.  No need to disturb you further, Dr. Thal.”

She felt something hard and heavy at the small of her back.  “Just walk this way, doctor,” said a man behind her. 

No, this wasn't right.  This was Winthrop, and there weren't guns here.  Didn't they even have signs in the Square that read, "Violence-Free Zone?" "That can't be a gun," she said, and started to turn around to look.

She heard the safety click off, a sound even she could recognize.

She shouldn’t have gotten into the elevator.  She should have run, like the guy from Brown said.  She should have--

The man shoved her into a room that suddenly zoomed up to twenty feet high, but still had the same ancient slate and dirt smell.  Torches in each corner, burning something she couldn’t see.  A large piece of slate, roughly hewn into something like a bed.  She heard a metal door clang shut behind her.  But she could not turn her head. 

Before her stood an enormous figure of a man.  It looked like the statue of John Winthrop, if he had been ten feet high, with giant horns, and legs like a goat’s.  And if he’d been dead so long that his face had desiccated into paper, like some terrible saint in a religion Sonia didn’t care to understand.

She stood there, gaping at this gigantic creature.

“Dr. Thal,” it said.  “Love your work.”  And it reached out a grey-clawed hand...

Two days later, her cat, Hutchinson, having realized that food was not forthcoming, escaped through a cellar window, and made his way to the house of a neighbor who was moving west.  Renamed Beatnik, he had a very happy life in San Francisco, even though he never succeeded in catching a single seagull.

#

Jack lay comfortably on the metal table, a sheet over his face, a tag on his toe, reflecting that he hadn’t done badly at all at the press conference.  Not badly at all.  If the doctor hadn’t noticed that he looked like a walking corpse-- oh, if he hadn’t been a doctor, Jack would have shucked him like an oyster.

Maybe there was a way back.  Not to all of his old life, of course, but maybe he could find some scrubby little newspaper in Boston that might hire him, or at least let him freelance now and then... Why not?  Why couldn’t he?  Surely he had enough talent to get a little work.

Because there was a reason he was working under the table, and not at a newspaper.  Because using his own name in his own chosen profession was the quickest way for him to be found. 

He wasn't ready for them to find him yet.  He knew that much, even if he didn't really know what ready would look like.  How was he going to say,
Sam killed me, but I deserved to die? 
And he had no idea, absolutely none, what should happen to both of them, or to the
Palmetto
, whenever he did go home.  So it was better to wait until he did know, until it all came clear. 

Besides, his family deserved a break from him and all his craziness.  He knew that much for certain.

It was very peaceful here in the morgue.  Lying flat out on the table with a sheet over his body reminded him of getting a massage.  Still, he supposed that he should get back to Lisa before someone decided it was time to autopsy him.  Or before someone figured out that there was no Jack Kershaw working for any Memphis paper, but there was a man of that name-- Yes, it was definitely time to go.

Except now someone was coming.  He could smell a young woman walking slowly between the bodies, checking out the toe tags. 
Lie still.  Look dead. 

He felt the sheet pull back from over his face, and was suddenly aware that he was naked under the sheet.  Dead men weren’t supposed to feel shy. 

“Huh,” said a woman’s voice.  “It
is
you.  And someone in Memphis gave you a job.  That’s shocking.  Remember that time you were supposed to cover the city council meeting, but you didn’t go, because you were passed out in the bathroom?  They sent me instead.  Even though I had a date.”

Did he remember this woman?  She didn’t smell familiar, but there was something about her tinny Yankee voice that he thought he recalled.  Which meant-- oh, God, maybe he had known her before he died.

Her hot minty breath seared his face.  “Here’s what I always wanted to say to you.  You’re a lazy hack, and you never would have written for the
Palmetto
if your parents hadn’t owned it.  And one more thing--”  He heard a rustle, and smelled her hot hand close to his face.  “Say cheese.”

He sat up and struck the camera out of her hand.  It fell to the floor with a crash.  The woman stared at him in speechless shock.  A skinny redhead with her hair pulled into a ponytail tight enough to yank the skin backwards.

“I remember you,” he said.  “You’re Donna.  Donna Chillingworth.  You worked for us.”

“You’re dead!” she squeaked, frozen in place. 

“Do I look dead?”

She backed up, but he grabbed her by the forearm.  He felt like the core of his body had dropped twenty degrees, like he was filling with ice water. “You’re not going to tell anyone you saw me here.”

“You can't stop me.  I don’t work for the
Palmetto
anymore.”

He squeezed her arm tighter and she gasped in pain.  Could he do it?  Could he hurt her, if it kept him safe?  Because he was so much stronger than she was now, she wouldn’t stand a chance--

She pulled something out of her pocket.  A cell phone. 
Click.

“This’ll be good enough,” she smirked.  She pulled free and bolted for the door.

He leapt easily from the slab, leaving the sheet behind him, landing right next to her, and snatched the phone from her.

“I told you not to do that,” he said, and crushed the phone in his hand.  He dropped the fragments to the floor.

Donna looked him levelly in the eye.  “You owe me three hundred dollars.”

“I don’t have it on me.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” she said, her eyes bobbing down for a moment.  “So.  Why won’t you let me take your picture?”

She just didn’t stop, did she?  Lisa, he thought, would have loved this little image.  Here he was, buck naked, scars totally visible, being harangued by this No. 2 pencil of a woman. 
Why can’t you take my picture?
he thought. 
Because the man you knew is dead, and I don’t want to be him anymore. 

But then again
, he reflected,
maybe there’s a smarter way to handle this.

“You’re determined,” he said.  “I admire that.”  He bit off his own index finger and swallowed it. 

Your own body never tasted as good as you'd think.  Too chalky.

“Oh, my God!” she shrieked, but did not move.

“If you want to know, you have to watch,” he said, holding out the bleeding stump of his finger.  Tiny blood vessels flailed around a projecting bone fragment, like vines around a growing tree, Spanish moss on a bough.  A creeping sheet of skin covered the peeled thing.  A fingernail protruded from the flesh.  Good as new.

“How the hell did you do that?” asked Donna, staring at the finger.  She gingerly touched it.  “Cold.”

He picked up the sheet that he’d dropped and wrapped it around himself.  “I was in a bar,” he said.  “I had a dispute with someone, and he took me outside and killed me.”  He smiled at her.  “Surprised?”

“No.”

“Neither was I.  I wasn’t surprised, until I woke up afterwards.  Hungry.”