4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (16 page)

“Wasn’t that called
Deadcorps
?”

“What? Like
Dead Corpse
? Kinda redundant, home boy.”

“No, ‘corps,’ like the military.”

“Never heard of it. There’s lots where they come up slow-mo out of the water though.”

“Or like the movie
Zombie
,” someone made the mistake of suggesting.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, that scene with the splinter through that chick’s eyeball?”

“It’s
Zombi
with an ‘I,’ not
Zombie
with an ‘I-E’” Sour Towel Zombie shouted.

“How do you know I wasn’t saying it with an ‘I’?” whoever it was asked him.

“And it’s
Zombi 2
, not
Zombie
.”

“With an ‘I,’ right?” Bobby Z taunted him. “I mean, I hate to bring it up, but you forgot to say it with the ‘I’ just now.”

“I was saying it with an ‘eye.’ Get it?”

“I can’t wait to kill you.”

“Hey, remember that cute eyeball finger monster the mad scientists made in
Bride of Re-Animator
?” I smiled, playing peacemaker. More like pacemaker.

“Don’t remember.”

“Didn’t your dad take us both to see it in Junior High?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby Z snapped. “I’m not my dad’s mom.”

And with a statement as confusing as that, the subject of eye injuries and bush-league Italian George Romero imitators was dropped for good.

But there were more problems than that with the Laser Tag Days.

For example, in the fog, it took away all the suspense of aiming at anything. You’d just line up the red line until it was touching their face, like you were slowly stretching out a tape measure to see how long you could get it before it finally collapses (the record being 23 feet, by the way), so we abandoned the whole “shooting Zombies in the head” thing forever. Plus, it made us seem more like zombies from
Return of the Living Dead
instead of the original movies.

“However, at least one of the writers of that particular parody was involved in the making of the original classic,” Sour Towel Zombie reminded us. “So maybe a shot to the brain not being enough to stop them was
always
part of a plan.”

Right then, Davey Jones kicked open the door and stepped outside onto the porch. He had the orange juice in one hand and a very real Spencer repeating rifle in the other. Later we would always mistakenly remember this weapon as an “AKA-47.”

“Whoa, boss,” Bobby B said. “You ever see
Do The Right Thing?
”

“You guys better start taking this a little more seriously.”

He let this sink in.

“Because I’m gonna hide this gun in the house. And tomorrow, if someone can find it, it’ll be fair game.”

“Uh, that is not a ‘fair game,’” Bobby B said.

But Davey Jones was done talking. He stood ominously in the background, sulking and sipping his orange juice, glaring at us occasionally, while Mags handed out paychecks and W-2s and told us not to be late tomorrow. Which is today.

Before the meeting officially adjourned, I decided to climb the antenna and check the roof for loose tiles, figuring it was safer up there anyway. The object of the game was, will be, and always has been to be on the roof come sunrise. Just like
Dawn of the Dead
, the roof was life. Never shopping malls, like reviewers, film students, and historians insist. They have always made the mistake of thinking more about those movies than the writers did. Or the zombies.

There are always some Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the game. We changed them around sometimes, but one staple is always the footlocker stenciled “U.S. Army” (my sister did the decoupage) that rattles nice and provocative, as if it contains some sort of answer. There’s just a broken TV remote inside, however, if they do manage to get it open.

Right then, we hear Amy, our Plant, in our earphones, steering them back to the subject at hand. Looking for the key.

“Remember that embarrassing night when some Camel’s kid found the porn stash in the mirror,” Cowboy Zombie whispers in my other ear.

“Found what?”

“There was a hidden recess behind an old mirror in there that had a ratty pile of old Super-8 John Holmes videos and
Oui
magazines.”

“Oh, I thought you meant porn ‘stache,’ in the mirror.” Cigarette Zombie snickers. “Like a giant mustache in the kid’s reflection? That would have scared the shit out of anybody.”

“I found my dad’s snuff porn and rape movies once,” I offer. “Mom flipped out on him.”

“What did he say?” Cowboy Zombie asks, taking the bait.

“He said, ‘Don’t worry, I hide the rough stuff much better than those, baby.’”

We’re suddenly distracted by another scuffle behind us. It’s the Bobbys, of course. One of them is yelling something about a difference in the paychecks we got the night before. Cowboy Zombie doesn’t even bother to break them up anymore, but Cigarette Zombie always
always
tries real hard to make the peace, especially when a certain Swaggering Cowboy Zombie was watching her, sometimes a Baseball Zombie, often just a Forearm Flexing Zombie.

Not necessarily a Nervous Cough Zombie like myself, of course. Sounds like a lot of zombies, doesn’t it? It is.

“See, you Bobbys are frustrated because, back home somewhere, you each have a brother who acts just like the other Bobby,” she explains, eyes uncharacteristically wide. Arms, too.

“One more time, Psychoanalysis Zombie?” Bobby B mutters, back-peddling from Bobby Z.

“Hey, one semester of psychology is no joke. But it’s just like my step-brother situation,” Cigarette Zombie goes on. “I’m the same age as the one that acts like my older brother, my blood brother, and he’s the same age as a step-brother that acts just like me. But we were forced to pair off because of our age, and we always wished we could switch until we realized, guess what, it makes perfect sense.”

“What’s your point?” Bobby Z asks, five fingers now around Bobby B’s throat, the other five fluttering near his mouth, still adding up taxes deducted from his check.

“It’s because you’re
brothers
,” Cigarette Zombie huffs. “You were meant to argue like this. Think about it, stupid.”

“It’s like that movie …”

Bobby Z quickly closes another throat before Sour Towel Zombie can finish.

“Enough with the
Dead of the Dead of the Dead
movies, motherfucker.”

“Wow, that’s the original title for
Diary of the Dead
, actually,” Sour Towel Zombie squeaks, then, “Sorry.”

“You’re not allowed to talk the rest of the day, S.F.B.”

Sour Towel Zombie’s fingers tighten around the handle of his cleaver, then relax. He’d long since grown used to Bobby Z laying hands on him daily. Most of us had. And that’s what we used to call him, by the way, the “S.F.B.T.,” as in “Sour Fucking Bath (Towel),” previously “Serial Finger Banger,” to mock the limit of his sexual experience.

“You know how most people comb their hair before a date?” Bobby Z would ask everyone real loud. “Well, he clips his fingernails.”

I’d like to say he deserved the endless abuse, but Bobby had attacked all of us at least once by the time we were picking those nicknames. And whenever Mags would tell Sour Towel Zombie that he was “this close” (fingers about an inch apart) from being fired because of his mouth, I thought about my first lunch with Sour Towel Zombie (a.k.a. S.F.B., a.k.a. S.T.Z., formally Sushi Chef Zombie, officially Josh) and his finest moment.

It was when we both were working at that video store and he went back to Burger King to complain about there being no crust on his Hershey’s pie. They gave him a whole one, a whole goddamn pie, not just the little chocolate sliver in the triangle box you usually got, and he happily shared that pie with me. When I asked him why he did it, he said, simply, “The crust is the best part.” He was right, and he felt like a friend of mine that day.

But it’s been all downhill from there.

The thing people forget about taking off your jacket before a fight is that you’re not doing it because it’s a throwback to an 18th Century duel or something. It’s simply because it makes it far easier to punch someone in the face.

At the end of the night, with all the zombies winding down behind the barn, things always seemed so calm and content. No one ever anticipates that bloody jackets are going to be dramatically removed before our shift is over. And it happens every goddamn time. Even Sour Towel Zombie’s endless movie trivia seems oddly soothing at these moments.

“So, I finally watched
Day of the Dead.
Way better than
Land,
which is ironic since rumor has it that
Day’s
script resembles
Land
before the funding was pulled …”

“… yeah, that’s a man who needs his vision limited or else he would eagerly populate any apocalypse with noble retards …”

“… speaking of …”

“… you’re funny …”

“… or populate his world with strange Middle Easterners being called ‘spics’ …”

“… yeah, that poor Arab in the opening scene was, apparently, doing an alligator call by mistake, judging by what came running anyway. Helloooooooo …”

“… you know Gorillaz sampled that on their debut …”

“… Florida’s got plenty of gators, dude, so it wasn’t that strange to see one …”

“… think you’re getting your racial slurs confused …”

“… no, I think the director was since I distinctly remember a Mexican Army sergeant calling the Middle Eastern dude a ‘spic’ …”

“… and a ‘jungle bunny’ at one point …”

“… clearly he was in such a hurry to load that merry band of survivors with every crayon in the box, he got a little confused …”

“… no shit, I think the mad scientist was an Inuit …”

“… and that evil Sarge was screaming more than
Braveheart
, ‘Fuck youse, Frankenstein!’ cut to drunken Irish helicopter pilot singing theme song from the Lucky Charms commercial …”

“Wait, are you trying to say that the filmmakers used these broad strokes as a short cut to characterization?”

Silence.

“Moving on …”

That’s when Bobby Z takes a swing at Sour Towel Zombie and loses his watch in the process. At least we think it’s his watch. Then someone materializes between them wearing the Steelers football helmet, and Bobby Z wrinkles his nose and takes a swing at the logo instead. The helmet takes the blow easily, but the zombie wearing it spits out its mouthpiece to let it dangle on the guard anyway.

“Who the fuck is in there?” Bobby Z asks, making a grab for the chinstrap. Then the helmet headbutts Bobby Z back onto his ass into a blinking daze and blessed silence.

In our ears, Amy is talking about the dog and everyone is groaning. Groaning more than usual, I mean, and not getting paid for it. The dog again. Always the dog with her. Once, Cigarette Zombie called that dog our “Sword of Damocles,” then called it our “Gun Over Chekov’s Fireplace” twice, and we all had to agree with that description. All except Sour Towel Zombie who settled on “Dog Over The Fireplace,” arguing that if you ever saw a fucking dog over a fireplace in a movie, that would be even more of a bomb waiting to go off.

Back in the day, Amy used to be outside, but she couldn’t narrow down her personality to just one character trait. So Davey Jones moved her to the basement instead. Originally, he wanted to call her Invisible Shower Zombie because of her tendency to tip her head back and run her fingers through her hair, eyes half closed, at the most inappropriate of times, but that didn’t translate well to a horror movie, at least not the ones we preferred to pattern our lives after. So, when she first brought the dog into the game, it seemed like a great idea, a good one for her to focus on anyway. Maybe Dog Whisperer Zombie? But after a couple of weekends, everyone agreed that having an animal around a situation like this negated the mood we were after. And while it
did
help cause some of the anxiety we worked toward, it was the wrong kind. Much like the doomed canine in the novel
I Am Legend
(vampires that acted like zombies)
,
it took our Camels out of the story.

They just worried about it too much.

It was like they didn’t want the dog to think anything bad was really happening and tried to protect the animal from the thumping outside that was making it shiver and pinning its ears back. It comes down to this. It’s too emotional. A dog has no reasonable place in any self-respecting horror movie. Or this game. It just never seemed like the end of the world around one.

I can hear Amy barking in my ear. Mags is real close to her, so we can all hear what’s happening clearly. Amy is telling a somber tale of how the dog was cruelly trained to fight by using battleship chains on its collar, how it made its head and neck so strong that it could walk through walls without flinching.

Then, between sobs, she’s suddenly comparing the dog to Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” a story that is
not
about zombies, making it a completely unacceptable tangent. Amy’s weeping sounds more authentic than usual, and the Bobbys stop putting shredded leather jackets over shredded arms so they can listen, too.

“… then it ate one of the nails, and Matt tried to coax the nail through its body and out its ass with a powerful magnet, resulting in a perforation of the groin, then the bucket of tools upended, and nails peppered the makeshift operating table between its legs, narrowly missing everything but the testicles, of course …”

Mags must have started glaring at her, because she trails off, then adds cheerfully:

“But that’s a whole other movie! Don’t worry. The dog’s fine and much happier living with my uncle. He’s got a farm where he can run and dig. But some say that dog still roams these woods …”

“That is the worst ghost story I have ever heard in my life.”

It’ll be the last time we will hear Amy’s voice, a ridiculously sentimental but fitting moment.

“I’ve got it!” Sour Towel Zombie bleats from behind me. “The last name of a zombie movie that hasn’t been used yet.”

“And what is it?”