Zombies in Love (7 page)

He ripped an ear off the nearest corpse and took a big bite out of it. 

That was a mistake.  He'd never had any meat without formaldehyde before, and it was like the difference between canned green beans and the real thing, fresh from the garden, uncooked, warm with the heat of the sun, covered with fine clear stiff hair.  Crunching softly in his mouth, giving up its sweetness.  His hand twitched to take more, but he restrained himself.

He could handle this.  He'd had this problem before.  Back when he'd been alive, he'd had a weakness for potato chips.  He'd buy a family-sized bag, and it would be gone the next day, and since he lived alone, it must have been him who ate them, right?  Solution: don't buy potato chips.

Or to put it another way,
Let go of the corpse, Jack! 

He snatched his hand away and gripped the sheet tightly.  “I’ve met at least forty more just like me in Boston,” he added.

“Why?” she asked.  “What happened?”

Hell if I know
, he thought. 
And I've spent a lot of time thinking about it.  But you go on and chase that wild goose, lady.  It'll distract you from me. 
“You’re the real reporter.  I’m just the lazy hack.  You figure it out.”

“What do I get?” she asked.

“All the help I can give you,” he said, “if you keep my name out of it, and make us look good.”  He grinned.  “Come on, Donna.  This is the big one.”

“Zombies are real,” she said, distantly.

“Pulitzer Prize, here you come.”

#

As soon as the doorbell rang, Lisa bolted down the stairs to let Jack in.  It was only when she was halfway down that she remembered,
he has a key, idiot,
and saw that there was a woman standing there instead, someone she didn't recognize.  She was slim, dark-haired, about Lisa's age, but expensively groomed, her eyebrows plucked to perfect arches, a neat cap of hair, a thick gold chain around her neck.  It was only when Lisa actually had her hand on the doorknob that she realized who she was looking at: Tina Gallagher.  The old friend she'd been dodging for weeks.

She opened the door.  "Hi, Tina," she said.

"Look at you!" said Tina.  "You haven't changed a bit!"

She couldn't say the same.  Last time she'd seen Tina, she'd been wearing a white T-shirt, an oversized vest, jean shorts, and Dwayne Wayne glasses.  Some kind of high school graduation party about twenty years earlier.  "You look great," said Lisa. 

"I never seem to catch you on the phone, so I thought I'd stop by," Tina said.  "May I come in?"

"I know what this is about," said Lisa.  "This building isn't for sale."

Tina rested her hand on the doorframe.  "You don't have to give up the business.  Everyone loves your pizza.  You can buy elsewhere.  Start fresh."

"I like it here."

"You know and I know this isn't the neighborhood it used to be..."

Lisa cut her off and took the door in a firm grip.  "Good night, Tina."  Tina snatched her hand away as Lisa slammed the door shut.

As Lisa walked upstairs, she could still hear Tina yelling something at the shut door.  It sounded like, "Nancy thinks it's a good idea."

#

             
Kelly, the man who'd picked up Jack's car for the dealer, had obviously talked to one too many representatives of the Kershaw and Lazarus families.  "Like I told the other ten guys who asked," he told Sam, "it was a guy who looked just like you.  I only remember him because he sold us a Beemer, and we don't see too many of them.  And he was staying in a crappy hotel, which was weird for a guy with a car like that."

              "But you bought it?" asked Sam.

              "Of course we did.  He had title and ID.  Anything else?"

              Sam didn't have anything else, and he suspected that this was where every other investigator had stalled out, too, though they might drag out their time on the family payroll.  This was what they all said: Jack was alive, he didn't want to be found, and he'd managed to successfully hide for over half a year. 

              Sam rubbed his thumb over Jack's wristwatch, safe in his pocket for the duration of the trip.  When he'd unrolled the tarp in his trunk and revealed his cousin's limp body, there'd been so much blood under him.  And when the body went down, he'd seen no air bubbles, not a single one.

              Had Jack somehow survived?  It was impossible.  But maybe it was true.

              Goddamn it, now he was going to have to kill his asshole cousin all over again.

The zombie rocked back and forth in a corner of its cage.  Sarah could barely remember the way it looked when they had captured it-- now it smelled unbelievably foul, and she could see parts of its skull where it had pulled the skin away and eaten it. 

Here was the problem-- once you’d put the monster in the cage, there was no way to get it out.  It had seen their faces, it probably knew where it was, and if they’d let it go when it was still coherent, someone would have found out what she and Ian had done.  Goodbye Stanford, goodbye new start. So they had to let the game run to its necessary end. 

But now she felt sorry for the poor creature, and even sorrier that she’d even started this thing.  It had all been a joke.  They didn't actually think it would work.  “It’s gotten worse,” she said to Ian.

“He’s already dead,” Ian replied.  “How can he get worse?"

She sighed and loaded the syringe.  “This is going to make all the pain go away,” she murmured.

Uncle Fester tried to say something, but it hissed out through a hole in his throat.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.  “Just tranq him, Ian.”

Ian shot the creature.  It sagged to the bottom of the cage.  While Ian reloaded his gun, Sarah opened the door to the cage and went inside.

The monster sprang to its feet, lifted Sarah by her armpits, and crushed her to the side of the cage.  Her feet dangled off the floor.  Before she could react, before she could even speak, the creature bit her flailing arm.  So much pain, so much blood that she could not even think, but now she had fallen to the floor and the zombie was running out of the cage running past Ian running out the door.

“He bit me, Ian,” she said.

Ian shot her.

#

All the peace that had come over Jack in the morgue was gone.  Even though he was jogging back to Lisa’s apartment-- and getting some strange looks because he was wearing a set of scrubs and a pair of flip-flops he’d liberated from the hospital-- he felt a terrible restlessness.  Like he couldn’t be still, ever again.

No, that wasn’t it-- he felt the sort of prickly awareness of a mouse being watched by a owl.  It felt as though something was after him, something with a stride matching his own, something that reached out with a pale cold hand...

He reached the door of Lisa’s apartment, thudded up the stairs, and pounded at the closed door.  She opened it like she’d been waiting next to it for hours.  Out the door came the rosy scent of her body, the heat of her, and in the center of the candle flame, Lisa’s beautiful daredevil smile.

“You're back!  How'd it go?  I dropped off the satchel, just like we planned, and the guy seemed to know exactly what it was for,” she said.  He followed her in.  “I’ve never done anything like that in my life.  Wasn’t that crazy, wasn’t that wild?”

“Stick with me, honey,” he said.  “We’ll have fun.”

She smiled and squeezed his bare upper arm roughly enough for him to feel it.  Heat seared his cold skin.  “And tomorrow, we go back to work, and I know I’m going to be standing there, giving people their pizza and thinking, ‘All you people, you don’t know a damn thing about me, you don’t know what I’ve been up to.’  Me and my secret life.” 

And then it all made sense.  He knew what he wanted.  He reached up and kissed her.  For a moment she seemed surprised, but then she pressed closer to him, and he became aware of how thin his scrubs were, and that her body heat flew through them as if he were naked.  And the way her mouth tasted!  He could feel it over his tongue, the unique taste of her body, as if it was sinking into his body, changing all of his cells, drawing a little of her into him, forever...

“You smell like lilacs,” he said, “did I ever tell you that?  Like lilacs and cinnamon.  And you’re so warm.”

“Wow,” said Lisa, sounding dizzy.  “I wasn’t sure you were still into that kind of thing.  I mean-- God, I think you just sucked my brain out.”

He grinned at her.  His mind had never been clearer.

“So,” she said, tugging on the front of his scrubs.  “Want to play doctor?”

#

Ian gripped his gun.  Blood leaked out through Sarah’s clenched fingers and trailed all over the floor. 

On the plus side, he’d captured another zombie.  On the minus side, everything else in the world had gone wrong.  Because Prof. Leschke wasn’t going to care, as long as there was a zombie in the cage, who it once had been.  And if it came to a choice between getting his degree and letting Sarah go-- what was he going to do?

Eight years lost forever.  He couldn't leave without his PhD.  He couldn't.  Even if it meant killing Sarah...

He contemplated the emptiness of a world without Sarah Chen in it.

“Please let me out, Ian,” she begged.

“I’ve seen this movie before,” he said.  “I know what’s going to happen.”

“Yes!  I’m going to bleed to death!”

Was this just a trick to get him to open the cage?  Well, she was bleeding a lot.  He spotted an ancient first aid kit on one of the lab benches.  Inside was a container of gauze.  Probably there were about a hundred different ways it could be converted into a deadly weapon, but he doubted that Sarah knew any of them.  He tossed her the gauze, and she began to wind it around her wound.

He wondered when he was going to start to see her change.  “I suppose I should test the anti-virus on you,” he said.

“I’m still alive!”

“For now.  Next thing I know, you’ll be after my brain.”

“What brain?” she snarled.  “I can’t believe he fucking bit me.”

“Sarah!  You’re swearing!”  He’d never seen her swear before, not even the time she accidently set her shirt on fire.

“Swearing?  I’ve just been bitten by a fucking zombie, and now my fucking friend won’t let me out of the fucking cage because he thinks I’m going to fucking eat him!”

“I’m not being irrational.  You’re probably infected.”

She tied off the gauze and glared at him.  “Ian, don’t you get it?  We were there four years ago.  We inhaled more of the virus than anybody.  We’re already infected, you dolt.  That means you, too.”

She was right.  And why had Ian never thought of this before?  Because she was a lot smarter than he was.  “Fuck,” he said.

She stood up, a bit wobbly, but looking determined.  “Now do you want to look for Uncle Fester alone, or do you want me to help?”

#

Lisa stumbled backwards into her bedroom, pulling Jack by his shirtfront.  She broke away from him for a moment to breathe.  "Bourbon," she gasped.  "You've been drinking?"

"No," he said, and licked his lips, "And no bourbon since I died.  Night I died."

"Weird," she said.

"Very," he agreed, and he kissed her again.  His skin felt cool against her, and what was even stranger was the way his mouth felt cool on the inside.  And the way his body smelled, it wasn't quite like root beer, but it was close, sweet and strange.

She liked it.  She liked it so much she started to unbutton her blouse one-handed, letting it fall open as she leaned back onto the bed.  She wished she'd at least made the bed first, but what the hell, it had obviously been way too long for both of them, and she was getting the sense that Jack had once been a little wild, in the same way she'd been a little wild, a long time ago, and maybe again right now.

Her bra was somewhere behind them on the floor, and he was running his cool hands over her breasts.  "You are so beautiful," he said, and inhaled the scent of her neck.  His back felt wonderful under her hands, lean, firm, and muscular, but as she started to pull his shirt over his head, she touched a rough spot at his side, and he gasped and pulled away. 

"What?" she said.

"Give me a second," he said.  He paused, as if he was steeling himself, and then he took his shirt off.  He leaned back so she could see.  The left half of his stomach was
ruined
-- covered in raw-looking red scars, as if he'd almost healed, but not quite.

"Oh, my God," she said.  "Do they hurt?"

"Only when I haven't had enough to eat.  They look worse than they are."

"How did it happen?"

He looked down at the scars.  "Went jogging in the wrong neighborhood.  Crazy guy with a knife."

She knew she was being a buzzkill, but she couldn't stop.  "
That's
how you died?"

He lifted his head, a confused look on his face.  "You didn't know?"

"You never said.  I thought you just woke up like this one day."

"That'd be a hell of a way to wake up."

"Well, yeah."

The mood in the room had changed.  He looked like he was ready to put his shirt back on and go home.  And that would be that, she guessed.  They'd just go on as they were, for as long as he worked for her, until he found his way back to where he really belonged.  They'd never find out what they might have had between them.

Well, screw
that. 

Slowly, giving him the chance to move away, she rested her hand on his scars.  He leaned back and exhaled, his eyes half-closed and dreamy.  She ran her index finger back and forth across the biggest one.  "How's that?" she asked.

"Please don't stop."

"Wasn't going to," she said, and smiled.