Zombie Ever After (6 page)

—and she almost immediately fell down again.

*
 
*
 
*

This time, Donovan was able to catch her before she hit anything. She was out cold. As he held her in his arms, he was struck again how lovely she was. But he was struck at the same time that her egg appeared to have grown. That the skin around it seemed exceptionally dry and cracked. As if it was, against all logic, putrefying. He leaned his head in toward hers, then jerked it back. That stink. He’d smelled it before, long ago, in chemistry class. Sulfur. Rotten eggs.

He carried her to the bed, lost in thought, and was about to lay her on top of the comforter when she opened her eyes.

And smiled.

Her green eyes filled with something that looked a lot like love. And the bump started to heal. Slowly, like a reverse-time special effect, the bump shrank. The wound healed.

“It’s gone,” he said.

“What?”

“There’s no bump. No cut. No hideously disintegrating flesh, no egg-white skull emerging from your forehead. That’s it, I am losing my mind.”

He leaned in and examined every square inch of her smooth, soft, radiant face again, from forehead to chin and back again. Twice. No wound. No bruise. No scar. In fact, no imperfections at all. His eyes drifted down from her forehead to her green eyes.

And then he kissed her.

Donovan carried Cathren to the bed and laid her down. Then he unbuttoned her blouse and tossed it to the floor. He slowly kissed her shoulders, noticing for the first time her seashell tattoo, a small pink nautilus.

“That’s nice,” he said. “What’s it mean?”

“I love the sea, that’s all. I’d like to live by it, right on top of it.”

“Good luck. Property costs for waterfront—”

“Geez, it’s just a dream, my island dream. Now, stop talking and kiss me.”

Donovan was happy to oblige. He kissed her neck first, and then the very top of her chest, just above her breast.
 

He undid her bra and dropped it to the floor. He kissed her shoulder again, then the top of one breast, and then the other. He could smell her perfume, a subtle mix of musk and honeysuckle. Her lips tasted of cherry-vanilla and her mouth cinnamon. They pulled each other closer in a stronger embrace. Their tongues still entwined, he lay on top of her, and slowly pushed his pelvis against hers. When Donovan gently pulled his tongue out of her mouth, her tongue came with it, falling onto her chest. The disembodied tongue slid down her chest until it reached the soft trap of her cleavage.

“Oh, fagh!”
she yelled, which he took to be tongueless for “Oh, fuck!”

She grabbed her tongue and her blouse and, crying, ran back to the bathroom, slamming the door loudly.

Donovan lay on the bed, his pants down by his ankles, stunned.
What the fuck?
he thought.
What the fucking fuck! What is going on with her? What’s happening to us?
He stood up and pulled his pants back on while her cries echoed down the hall. Hard stuttering gasps and sobs.

Donovan knocked gently on the bathroom door, his erection fading with the setting sun outside. “Baby?” he said. “Can I come in?”
 

“Ooo!”
Cathren said from inside the bathroom. Her meaning was clear:
“Nooo!”
 

“I think I should take you to the hospital,” Donovan said.

“Ooo!”

“Please, Cathren, open up. Let me get your tongue and put it on ice. Let me get you to the emergency room.”

He sighed and leaned against the door. She didn’t say a word or even make a sound.

“In case you’re worried,” he whispered, his lips almost touching the door, “I’ve seen a lot worse. Believe me.”
 

“Uh-uh,” she said. No tongue needed to say that.
 

“Baby, honey, this is an emergency. I don’t think you understand. This is no time to be worried about appearances.” He waited for her to respond. Nothing. “Modern doctors can do miracles these days. Hell, I bet there’s even a cosmetic surgeon who could make it look brand new again. I mean once the thing’s been successfully reattached.”
 

“No,” she said from the other side of the door. “It’s not necessary. I’m fine.”
 

Donovan stepped back from the door, surprised to hear Cathren’s normal voice again. He could hear her sniffling and blowing her nose and gently crying a bit more.
 

Then she opened the door, wiping her eyes. Her eyelids were streaked with smudged mascara as if someone ran an ink-covered rag across her eyes. Her lip gloss was smeared from kissing, and her chin was red from where his stubble had irritated it. To Donovan, she looked absolutely stunning.

“I’m fine, really,” she sniffed, wiping a finger under her nose. “See?” She stuck out her tongue.”

“I don’t know what’s going on. What’s happening to you?”
 

“I don’t know,” she said as they walked back to the living room. “I’m scared, Don. I’m real scared.”
 

He picked up her hand; that is, he simply put her hand in his. Her hand, for now at least, was still attached to her arm and her arm to her body. He led her to the couch.

“I can’t deal with this right now,” she sobbed. “I just can’t.” She let go of his hand. “I need to leave. I—I’m sorry.”
 

“No, not at all,” Donovan said, following her to the door. He desperately wanted to hold her. But he knew it would not help, would not make anything right for her.

“Well, if you need a friend, or whatever,” he said, sounding helpless. He leaned in to kiss her, but she turned her lips away from him and he ended up kissing her ear. “Just call me,” he whispered. “Please.”

She left, closing the door behind her.
 

Donovan wasn’t sure how long he stared at that door, but it was long enough for his apartment to grow dark, so much so that he almost couldn’t see.
 

Night had fallen, and so had Donovan Codell.

Welcome back. I’m Zoë Krant. We’re talking with Alena Portanova, scientist and trusted colleague of Burkhart Egesa. So, Dr. Portanova, exactly what went wrong on this noble quest for life and immortality?
 

Well, we had signs of brain activity in a previously dead monkey brain. But they were abnormal readings. Something was wrong. We need to do more research, more tests. Of course, we celebrated at first; we were only human. We wanted to celebrate our success, our moment in the sun. But we knew it was really no success at all. We just weren’t willing to admit the truth.

Why not?

Egesa wouldn’t have it. He overruled all objections, blinded by our initial victory. A dead brain made living again! He said that now was the time for the human tests. No more delays. No more research. He called us worried, little people. But some disagreed with what he wanted to do. Vehemently. So they quit, just walked out. But others stayed.

Why did they stay?

Because this was it. The big moment. The moment we’d been working for all those years.

What do you mean?

Egesa decided it was time to unfreeze a celebrity brain at last. To drop it in the bathwater. To run the electrical processes through it. The same processes we ran on the chimp brain. ATELIC was going to do something even God couldn’t do: bring a human being back from the dead.

Donovan stood in the early morning San Francisco fog, on the corner of Powell and Pine, with no idea what to do next. He shuffled aimlessly up the block, looking for a coffee place that had a good supply of bottled water. A cuppa joe to clear the cobwebs. That would help.

He had spent the last two days trying to find her again, track her down. Idiot.

He’d never gotten her new phone number. She was not listed with 411. She’d never given him her address or even told him what town she lived in now. All that he knew about her from before was wrong and useless. Wrong phone number, wrong address, wrong email. Wrong everything. It was like she no longer existed, the Cathren he used to know.

He roamed around downtown, randomly making lefts and rights, trying to think like her. Would she go shopping? No way, she was too distraught. Out of town, to her parents’ place maybe? Wherever the hell that was. Most likely, she was holed up with a girlfriend, getting sicker, hiding from ATELIC.

As Donovan walked along, he was suddenly aware that anyone watching him would be hoping he would lead them to Cathren. It struck Donovan that he was being paranoid. But then again, after all he’d been through recently, it was better to be ready for anything. Because
something
was going to happen.
 

He would go everywhere that, to his mind, Cathren would not go. He didn’t know her well enough to know her habits and her usual haunts. But he figured, she was a woman and might know people who work at boutiques. Easy to stay away from those. Home furnishing places, too. Sephora. The Gap. What else? Damn, probably coffee shops. Like the very one he was about to enter.

Now that the grossly sick, or the walking dead, or whatever they were, had evidently moved on, people were beginning to emerge from the buildings. They all looked frightened and shell-shocked, but at least they were outside again. Donovan looked up and noticed helicopters high overhead, approaching from the east.
 

One thing he was sure of was that he wasn’t sure of anything. He was exhausted, hungry, and disoriented. To the point of where he was nearly hallucinating. Forget it. He’d head back home. There was simply nothing else he could do.
 

The place was just as it was the night Cathren had run out and disappeared. He straightened out the coffee table, picked up the melted icepack and the towel that were still on the floor, and considered the place good to go.

He went to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer and a package of deli meat. Then, slowly, he collapsed onto the couch. His head was still spinning, but not as badly now. Felt more like a hangover, something with which he had a long, love-hate relationship. In fact, out of desperation and an attempt to get his life on the right track, he was sipping an O’Doul’s. No chance of a hangover developing from indulging in non-alcoholic beer.
 

Donovan didn’t care that she was sick; they’d get through it together. He was, he suddenly realized, in love. At least, if this was what love felt like (because he’d never felt it before), then this was what he was in. Donovan hoped she felt the same.

He put his feet up on the coffee table and closed his eyes. He started to drift off when he imagined that Cathren, as if in a dream, stood in the room before him. He knew it was impossible, but he smiled at the thought of her being there anyway. There was something about that girl. He smiled, and then, eyes still closed, took another sip of his alcohol-free, flavor-free beer. He shook his head slowly back and forth as he began to fall asleep, chuckling softly but out loud.

“What is so damn funny?”
 

Donovan opened his eyes and there she stood. He closed his eyes again, took a deep breath, and opened his eyes once more.

Cathren, like an angel, seemed to hover there before him.

“Yeah, I’m real,” Cathren said, a smile escaping her lips, her strawberry blonde hair flowing like a bright cloud over her shoulders. She looked into Donovan’s eyes, then looked away, her eyelids closing halfway.

“Well,” Donovan said, trying to catch the breath Cathren’s sexy look had seduced out of him. “Looks like we have a lot to talk about!” He gave Cathren his winningest smile. Donovan’s head was spinning, from love he’d like to think. But he knew it was partly because of the hallucinogenic, waking nightmare of the past forty-eight hours.

“Don’t talk,” she said, throwing her purse on the coffee table. They kissed in a rare pool of warm, fleeting sunshine. When they pulled apart, they just looked at each other and smiled.

“Donovan, I—”
 

She fell into his arms, blood running from the corner of her mouth.

“Cathren!” Donovan shouted, falling to his knees with her in his arms. Her eyes slowly shut, and her skin chilled in that warm California sun.

*
 
*
 
*

Her facial wound had returned, and worse than before. Now, half her face was peeling off, as if she’d been sprayed with Napalm or a flamethrower. One of her eyes was starting to fall out of her skull, and there was something oozing out of her left ear. Donovan could see straight through one side of her cheek to her molars. She was missing a clump of hair in the middle of her head. Cathren stared at Donovan with hollow eyes.

“Holy shit.”
 

There was a sudden knock on the door. “Yo, what’s up?”

Donovan recognized Rudra’s voice.

“Hold on.” He looked at Cathren. Her skin was going gray and she appeared to be losing weight. Her breasts, once so full and round, had shrunk. Her full lips were now shriveled, her hair thinning. Donovan bit his thumbnail and stood up to let Rudra in.

Rudra stepped in and immediately pointed to Cathren lying on the floor.

“What the hell happened to her?” He put his hands up defensively. “She looks like a fuckin’ corpse.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know,” Donovan said. “She just fell like that. One minute she was Cathren, then the next minute—
that.
” Shame filled his stomach like lead over being repulsed by Cathren, the girl he thought he really loved. Could he be so shallow? She was still the same girl, only something terrible was happening to her. “I think she just needs to rest,” he said to Rudra. “Help me put her on the couch.”

“Hell, no!” Rudra stepped forward. “She has to go to the hospital. Like
now.
”

Donovan looked at Cathren. She was fading away before his eyes.

“You’re right, of course,” he said. Tears stung his eyes and a great sadness weighed on his heart.
 

Only he couldn’t say if it was for Cathren, or for himself.

Please, go on, Dr. Portanova.