Husk (17 page)

“None spring to mind.”

“Right, let's talk this out. They are looking for Sheldon Funk, right?” I nodded. “Would the police have anything connecting that name with Gary Jackson?” I thought, then shook my head no. I didn't have any
ID
under Gary's name, and I'd left all my resumés with the casting director in New York. All my Gary persona was digitized on my laptop, currently sitting unnoticed in my dressing room. I told this to Rowan. “I think we're clear then, at least for a little while. We'll keep you under wraps while the movie's being edited. Maybe we can time this to boost interest when it gets released. They want to get an early release out for Halloween, so we'll need to keep you down low for three months or so.” She tapped her head with her pen. “Anything else? What are we missing?”

“My mother—”

“We'll move her somewhere, we've got a few places where celebrities go to dry out.”

“She,” I started. “She. She may be. I don't know what happens for sure. If I bite someone.”

“You bit her?”

“It was an accident.”

“Any chance she's like . . .” She pointed at me. I shrugged. Rowan pursed her lips and hummed. “Okay, I've got a doctor, well, surgeon — I want him to take a look at you, he may have some ideas on where to put her. We'll get her out of there before the police track her down, then see what's what. No promises, Sheldon — we may have to put her down in order to keep this thing contained. You need to know this.”

I chewed on my lip while I thought this over, then stopped, aware that the flesh was no longer self-renewable. I nodded. Rowan clicked on the intercom and ordered the guards to leave, then called for a car service to come pick me up. “We'll put you up in a hotel right now, and I'll get the doc to take a look at you himself, that's the only way he'll believe this, anyway. Can I trust you not to go all zombie on him? Are we on the same page?”

I nodded. “Just two more things?” I asked. Rowan sighed, raised an eyebrow in question. “I need to eat someone. And soon.”

Rowan leaned back and pressed her palms over her eyes. “You're killing me here.”

“Believe me. I'm not happy about this.”

She threw up her hands. “Well why would you be? I've done a lot of things as an agent, a lot of underhanded things, but I've never procured dead bodies before. Alcohol, drugs, prostitutes, but no dead bodies.”

“Live would be better. But I can make do with a dog.”

“Make do with a dog?”

“For now. A live one. Medium size should do.”

“Right.” She wrote as she spoke. “One. English. Bulldog.” She dotted the final period with a flourish, pushing her pen deep into the pad. “And the second thing, dare I ask?”

“I want my cat back.”

Why always the biting?

Despite my best efforts to change it up and maybe have a salad now and then, my body does not react well to vegetable matter; it expels all foodstuffs of a non-beastie variety. I have been able to deceive my digestive system somewhat, mixing breads and the like with my daily intake, finally getting some control over my gag reflex, but my colon can't be duped, and any substance not immediately animalistic in nature is flushed through the system whole — soggy, chewed, undigested. I have few bodily fluids left, but digestive juices have stuck around.

Additionally, I can imbibe in all animals of a non-human genus, but they must be fresh — wriggling on the hook fresh. But it's not the same, and not enough. Cold processed meat does nothing for me. I cannot subsist on raw hamburger.

No, to satisfy the hankerings, it must be homo sapiens, plain, no side fries or baked potato. Not necessarily fresh, but as with all groceries, fresher is better. Rhodes is at a loss to explain this, as it makes no logical sense, but then, what does? He's prodded and inserted and removed and examined and prodded again but there is no question that I am a medical impossibility that follows none of the usual laws of nature. We have sought out answers in biology, in virology, in radiology, theology, astrology, parasitology, every -ology there is, but the fact remains, I am verifiably deceased.

And terribly famished all the time.

I think it may be psychological in origin, the hunger for human. According to voodoo folklore, zombies have historically been “raised” from the dead to serve at the pleasure of their necromancer, but based on the lack of any physiological evidence, such “zombies” are assumed to be confused individuals who have been hoodwinked by their own ideology into believing that they have joined the ranks of the undead. They are told that they have been cursed to roam the earth and serve their master and, as that is what they've always believed to be possible, they fool themselves into the role. Say someone with this belief catches a bad case of the sniffles and falls into a coma for a few days; when they awake, they may feel otherwise fine, but if told by someone that they actually died on the operating table, their psychological makeup impels them to then act the part and shamble about the countryside, moaning, scaring the bejeezus out of children and tourists, and generally making it difficult for genuine zombies to be taken seriously.

Perhaps it's the same with me. Raised from an early age on a steady pop culture diet of late-night B-movies on cable television, I have always believed the classic zombie to be obsessed with the cannibalistic consumption of human flesh. So following the path of logic, I eat people because, subconsciously, I believe I am
supposed
to.

Of course, even if true, does it help explain the appetites of the others? Aren't there good odds that at least one of my disciples should have grown up in a pop-cultureless household? Shouldn't one of them, a person who never believed or even knew of all the nonsense, be able to subsist solely on a diet of cauliflower?

There was something in my eye.

Fuck. Worst possible time for this.

I thought it was a flake of skin, another toboggan of cells making a luge run for freedom down my once-proud tanned and tightened countenance. Despite Doc Rhodes' best efforts, my disintegration had slowed but not halted; I had to be careful I didn't move too quickly, no sudden movements, or his work might be revealed as the excellent-under-the-circumstances-but-for-all-intents-and-purposes-patchwork job it really was.

The fragment of dermis, discomfortingly bulky, clung to my left lens, direct center. I cautiously closed and opened my eyes a few times to dislodge it.

Not skin. Worse, under the circumstances.

Pancake. A splinter of slightly hardened pancake makeup, scraping up against my lens. The protective blinking acted with much the same effect as a window wiper does to a dead locust pulverized into mush against a windshield. The motion smeared the grit across my vision, my lack of tears allowing the bugbear to get its hooks in and coat every scratch with powdery Caucasian flesh-tone. I had worried about just this sort of thing happening, but the producers insisted that I not wear my goggles, “because of the glare, you understand.” Rowan had a different take on the matter, fearing that the dark protruding eyeshields would only serve to make me seem even more alien to the audience. So, no goggles, not in prime time.

This was to be a different demographic; up until that point my public persona had been primarily confined to select print media. My lovely face graced the smarty-pants pages of
Scientific American
;
Time
and
Newsweek
interviews were set for the following week. But now a far different segment of the population would be studying me, one that demanded that anything odd or unusual must be packaged in as pleasing a wrapping as possible to avoid upset. A more ideologically conservative audience. The genus of gawkers that feared the unknown and demonized anything that could shatter their own personal mythos of how the universe operated.

At least they allowed me a pair of tinted aviator glasses heisted off a nearby teamster to lessen the impact of my whitening orbs to the viewing audience. Without the darkened lenses (probably not
UV
safe, not an area of concern anymore), the glare of the floodlights twinkled happily off my many corneal abrasions and left me snowblind. Sunglasses on, everyone was hazy but recognizable, washed in friendly yellow. The glasses also furnished me the look of a particularly haggard Robert Evans after one hell of a bender — not an effect I was going for. The layers of pancake caulked into my wrinkles didn't help. The studio makeup artist was unprepared for the challenges a skull of dead skin offered — Rhodes had done what he could, even going so far as to once pierce the skin with needles and squirt food coloring into the subcutaneous layers of my cheeks and forehead, trying to tone down the gray and achieve a more lifelike skin tone, the result being a physiognomy of ashen pallor with unsettling deposits of scarlet located haphazardly about the terrain, a corpse with measles — and chose to shelter the whole magilla with as much base and rouge as she could get her hands on. It may not have been entirely her fault; her hands trembled noticeably as she hastily troweled the goop over me. She had the fear-shakes. When I finally looked at myself in the mirror, expecting my old complexion and instead finding a waaaay-past-his-prime man-whore, I let my guard down and loosed a dark, blood-dried chuckle from deep within my gullet that sent the woman fleeing out of the building and into the safety of the New York night. The intent was to make me look lifelike; I looked like an undertaker's practice dummy, a cautionary example funeral directors could use to frighten their apprentices.
This is how bad they could
look if you don't concentrate on your job!

The face paint now fully coated my left eye, reducing my field of vision down even further from its usual cataracted view. Dimly, I could hear the director laying down final instructions for the night through the cameraman's headphones. I reached up to rub my eye, but remembered that I shouldn't touch my face. The artist, Jimmy she was called, Jimmy had warned me not to touch my face until the show was over.
Hell
, I thought,
I couldn't look worse anyway
, and poked a finger
underneath the glasses and directly against my cornea, dabbing, trying to wipe away the mote. This only smeared it further; the world was now bathed in pink. I took a bottle of eye drops out of my pocket and leaned my head back to plop a few synthetic tears in, moistening the desert plains. I blinked, and the liquid bonded with the cosmetic and transformed the dust into sticky oatmeal, glazing my lens with sickly coral.

“Motherfuck.”

“Is there a problem, sir?” The voice crackled in my ear. Rowan gave me a glance, but she was busy texting and couldn't be bothered to see what was up. Franklin gave no indication he had heard me, but even if his earpiece was malfunctioning, his seating arrangement three feet to my right put him in prime hearing range. Rhodes definitely overheard the remark, and didn't bother to stifle his snicker.

“Sorry, I forgot there's. Someone listening,” I said, fumbling at the portable microphone attached to my shirt collar. The amplified
thumpity-thump-thump
of my fingers against the mic filled my ear. Rowan, Franklin, and Rhodes all winced and shot dirty looks my way, and a few curses loudly emanated from the sound booth.

“That's quite all right, sir. Can we help you? We've got two minutes.”

Rowan leaned in close. “Could you stop fidgeting? What's the problem, nerves?”

“There's a. There's makeup in my eye. Sorry.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake,” Rowan said. She pulled her collar close to her mouth and spoke into her mic. “Could we get a little help for Mr. Funk, he's got makeup in his eye, please.”

“We'll send someone out right away,” the director intoned.

A young woman, not the traumatized Jimmy, rushed over excitedly with a makeup kit. She lifted my glasses and peered in. “Can I wipe, I mean, can I actually touch your eye?” she asked. There was a gleam in her eyes, an edge to her smile that I was becoming more and more familiar with.

“Feel free,” I said, steeling my appetite for the brush of her fingertips against my skin.

Expertly, she draped a tissue over her right index finger and, propping my eyelid open with her fingers, gracefully polished the exterior of my cornea, returning the world to its customary dull white murkiness.

“Much obliged,” I said, keeping my voice low and modulated.

“No problem, sir,” she said, and then leaned in quickly, past the mic, putting her lips directly in my ear. “I'm a big fan,” she whispered, and nimbly dropped a card into my front pocket. “Call me, 'kay? If you want.” She threw me an alluring wink and scurried away.

I smiled out of politeness, wishing I could heave a great sigh of annoyance. Corpsers. I had already garnered more than a few websites devoted to how hot I looked for an undead dude. A loose movement was quickly spreading over the grid, people calling themselves, among other labels, “corpsers,” “undeadites,” “necrofanatics,” and most disturbingly, “Twihards,” unhinged
Twilight
fans looking for another dreamy dead dude to tempt out their nascent necrophilia. I dug the card out and handed it to Rowan. “Another for. The pile, I guess.” Rowan slipped it into her pocket.

“Okay, people, we are good to go,” the director announced. “Camera one on Franklin, two and three on guests, let's do this, we are live in five, four, three.” Two fingers were held up, then one, and then a point to the host, go.

I watched the monitor from the corner of my eye, trying not to look like I was actually watching myself but helpless to stop. The curse of the actor, always trying to ensure the camera caught his best side. Luckily the glasses disguised the direction of my eyes, although my optic spheres were by then so whitened with nicks that the pupil was only faintly visible. The camera was pulled out into a wide sweep of the set, capturing the desk, the logo, the green screen behind the host, and the four participants in the night's program: Doctor Igör Rhodes, plastic surgeon to the stars and my agency-appointed physician; me, representing myself, spokesperson for the rights of the undead, I supposed; Rowan, representing Masters Talent; and past her, Franklin Pilato, respected newsman, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, and Emmy-nominated host of
Speaking Frankly
, television's third-highest-rated news-related talk show, just behind O'Reilly and Maddow.

I had tried to speak to Franklin before airtime; the man was an institution, after all. I received in return a shoulder so cold I could see ice crystals coating his walrus moustache.

As the show logo faded, a movement to my right, past Franklin's opposite shoulder. A familiar-looking woman clad in a fashionable pinstriped suit hurried in and sat down, fidgeting with an earpiece. Her eyes were disturbingly bright; I put this to her improbably tiny corneas, discs of pale azure floating in a vast white sea. She was also cosmeticized to a degree that made me feel far less conspicuous. The woman inserted the earpiece and smoothed her hair over it, gifting Franklin with a brief smile of acknowledgment before turning her glacial gaze to me and fixing me with a scowl of fabulous loathing.

I glanced at Rowan, shrugging. Rowan had straightened in her seat as the woman had entered, and her lips were now pursed together, her fists clenched, knuckles white with tension.

The five of us filled the screen under the logo. Four warm-blooded people and a corpse with aspirations of humanity. Guess which one stood out. My being unaware that my mouth was dangling loosely open was a dead giveaway. I slowly swung it shut, my joints grinding together.

The camera pushed in tighter, sliding the guests off and filling the screen with Franklin's confidence. He kept his eyes on his papers until the move was completed, and then looked up into the teleprompter.

“Death. Until very recently, it was the ultimate finality of life, an experience shared by every species of animal on this planet. Since man's forebears first grasped the concept of mortality, humankind has attempted to contextualize death in myriad forms. As a definite end. As the final extinguishment of a spark. As a stepping stone to another dimension of being. As a necessary stage in the ascendance of the soul immaterial to realms either heavenly or chaotic. But aside from those few persons who argue that they have had ‘life after death' experiences, a highly debatable notion to both scientists and theologians alike, there has been no way to effectively quantify what, if anything, happens to what we will refer to here for the sake of brevity as the ‘soul' once our fragile bodies have ceased to function.”

I covered my mic with my hand and leaned in to Rowan. “Laying it on a. Little thick, you think?” I said, struggling to clearly form the words in a whisper. It was a skill I had not yet mastered, my words clearly picked up by her microphone and broadcast to millions of viewers. Rowan stiffened and shushed me with a look.

Franklin paused at the interruption, cleared his throat, and continued.

“But now, humanity may be closer to an answer than ever before. Before very recent events, my guest's most prominent public appearance was still to come: a lead role in the upcoming horror movie
Basement
, under the acting alias of Gary Jackson. Since then, astonishing evidence has arisen that Mr. Jackson is, in fact, Sheldon Funk, a Canadian actor who disappeared from public view late last year. But the real story, far more fantastical than anything Hollywood could ever devise, was yet to come. Mr. Funk was actually discovered dead on a bus en route from New York to Toronto, and was admitted to the morgue as a John Doe. There, video evidence verifies that during his autopsy, during which his chest was opened and his heart physically removed, Mr. Funk rose from his examination table, attacked an attendant and then fled the hospital, disappearing for months until finally contacting medical authorities and revealing his condition to the public. Mr. Funk has been exhaustively examined by medical experts, including an independent panel of doctors hired by this network, and all have verified that he is, by all standard presumptions of the word, dead. And yet, he sits with us here tonight. The workings of the world as we understand them have been twisted out of shape since Mr. Funk's first appearance on newsstands a month ago. Many are calling this an elaborate hoax. Some have labeled Mr. Funk a medical marvel, or the next pure step in human evolution. Some call him a religious miracle, a claim he himself strenuously denies. One thing is certain; he has captured the attention of the world. Is he a man? Does he still retain the rights and freedoms we in our innocence often take for granted? Or is he, as one of our guests contends, a fraud, or worse, a blasphemy? Our Speaking Frankly religion correspondent Julianne Staenky has prepared this report.

“Death,” a female voice intoned in my earpiece as the live feed switched to tape. “It comes in many disguises, but until now, the end result was always the same . . .”

“And we're clear,” the director announced. “Four minutes until live.” Franklin stood up and hurriedly walked off-stage, an assistant following him with a pack of cigarettes. The woman began texting something on her phone.

“Those sons of bitches,” Rowan cursed in a whisper, covering her mic with her hand. “We've been played, Shel.” She shook her head; there was a healthy undercurrent of admiration in her tone.

“What the fuck. Is this all about?” I asked her, not bothering to cover my own microphone. “I wanted to protect myself, not. Have a debate on the moral issues. Of my existence. And who is that woman?”

“This is how you play the game, love,” Rowan said, placing a warm hand over mine on the desktop. “You have to trust me. This was inevitably going to happen, so better now than later, when people have had a chance to form their own opinions. We can't have that. This is a setback, but if we keep our heads about us, we will prevail. They have rattled our cage to see if we'd bite, but that's it.” She motioned at the woman. “That bitch over there” Rowan uncovered her microphone for the phrase, then covered it back up; the woman looked up, face puckered in a grimace, clearly catching the insult “is Pauline Kud.
Senator
Kud from Montana. She's a tight-assed republican mouthpiece who has had you in her sights for weeks.”