Zombies in Love (14 page)

During his sleepless nights, while he had sat on the bed in his apartment, an open book sitting unread in front of him, Jack had turned the problem over and over in his head.  How was he going to tell Lisa that he had infected her?  And at last he had figured it out. 

All he had to do was to show her that being a ghoul was actually a good thing.  Of course it wasn’t all peaches and beer, but he was happier than he had been when he was alive.  Because the truth was, if he hadn’t gotten himself killed, he would have done something equally stupid to himself by this point.  Because he had been stuck in a miserable, untenable situation, with the thing he wanted best in the world just out of reach.  Sam was right.  He never could have run the
Palmetto
, at least not the way he'd been back then
. 
What had been his response to winning?  He'd already been drinking when Sam killed him-- if Sam had showed up a half hour later, he'd have been too drunk to open the door.

It was a strange thought, how different everything would have been, then.  Different and worse.  Dying had forced him to do what he should have done in the beginning: leave Charleston, get steady work, get up every morning and live in the world until he knew what he wanted to do next. 

Maybe it would do something like that for Lisa.  Because-- and maybe he was seeing her more and more clearly now-- she wouldn’t have ended up acting so antithetically to the way she’d lived most of her life, maybe she wouldn’t have ever looked at him twice, if she hadn’t felt equally trapped. 

In fact, if he really loved her, he ought to set her restaurant on fire.  Say,
too late honey, burned to ashes, let’s get in that car of yours and see where it takes us
.  He was too much of a coward to do something like that.  But at least he’d changed her a little, set a little fire under her skin, watched it burn until she lit up from inside like a lantern...

She lay next to him on the bed, smoking a cigarette, both of them still dressed.  Not for long, if he smelled the situation right.

"Do you ever think of how strange it is that I'm here?" he asked. 

"We never would have met if you were still alive."

What a strange thing for her to say.  "I came up for the Marathon and had a good time.  I might have come back."

"Even if you came into my restaurant, you would have ordered a slice, and you would have left."

He looked into her dark, fathomless eyes.  "I might have asked for your number first.  But that's not what I meant.  I meant--"  he straightened his arm out and wiggled his fingers.  "I shouldn't be here at all.  I should be rotting in a grave in Charleston.  But here I am."

She smiled at him.  "You're getting all spooky."

He closed his hand and let it rest on the bed.  He could feel the outer corona of her warmth on the bedspread.  "It seems like a miracle.  Does it feel that way to you?"

Before she could respond, he leaned over and kissed her tobacco-scented lips.  She smiled under him and rested her cigarette in the ashtray. He began unbuttoning her shirt, soft worn cotton imperceptible under his fingertips.

“Don’t rip it.  I like this shirt.”

“No, nope.  No ripping.  I am being very, very careful.  God, you smell good.”

He had the shirt open now, and her bra too, with a little click of the clasp.  Under his hands spread the creamy expanse of her belly, soft and warm.  What a little world she was!  How many separate wonders!  He could see the fine hair, the pores, the bluish veins, and underneath, everything knitted together perfectly, how sweet--

He kissed her, starting at the breastbone, moving southwards, and she gently relaxed under him with a little sigh.  He licked over the skin by her navel, so delicious, like licking the skin of a furred peach--

He nipped her, and then a real bite.  He felt his teeth sink into her sweet flesh, and then the flavor hit him like he’d licked a car battery.  Nothing, nothing ever had matched this, this was what he’d been waiting for, not just this life, but the one before, the sweet taste of Lisa, unique.  How he loved her! as she cried out, as he chewed her soft flesh, as he tasted the blood and the skin and the succulent fat beneath.  Soon he would reach the deeper treasures, but he wanted to savor, not to rush--

And now she was loving him back!  He felt the cigarette burn through his shirt and into his skin, smelled his own burning flesh.  He looked up, dreamy with love and lust, licking the blood and meat from his lips.  “Do that again.”

She had a look of total shock on her face.  “What the fuck?  You bit me!”

Something was wrong.  He could tell that much, even though he wasn’t feeling too clear-headed at the moment.  “We were fooling around.  I thought you liked it.”

She sat up and wadded the sheet over her bleeding stomach.  “No, I don’t like having chunks of skin bitten off!  That really, really hurt, you jerk!”

She didn’t like that?  No, of course she didn’t.  It wasn’t going to grow right back, not like for him.   How had he forgotten that?  “I’m sorry, Lisa.”  It sounded stupid, even as he said it.

"Don't apologize!  What good does that do?"

"How bad is it?  Are you all right?"  He tried to peel the sheet back.

She swatted him away.  “What the hell were you trying to do?  Infect me?”

At least he could reassure her.  “No.  You’re already infected.”

“WHAT?”

Oh, fuck
.

“When the hell did this happen?”

He could feel his face tighten into a horrible, fake grin.  “I don’t know.  I only figured out when Sarah was here.  I didn’t know what it smelled like until then.”

“That was two days ago!  And you didn’t tell me?  You knew you were contagious and didn’t tell me?”

And that was the crux of it, wasn’t it?  He wished, for a moment, that he was still dating stupid women.  “I didn’t want to tell you until I knew you’d be happy about it.  I wanted to make you happy about it.”

“Happy?  I run a restaurant.  Most of my customers are people I’ve known my whole life.  What if you’re infecting them, too?”

“I can’t be contagious.  Not that contagious.  If we were really contagious, this town would be full of zombies by now.”  It sounded stupid to him even as it came out of his mouth. 

“You don’t know anything ‘cause you don’t want to know,” she said, peeking at the wound under the sheet.  “What is wrong with you?”

“I love you, Lisa,” he said.

She held up her bloody hand.  “No, you don’t.  So get out of here and leave me alone.”

Lisa listened to the noises of the neighborhood waking up. 
Garbage truck.  Mr. Colapinto and his yippy little dog.  School bus. 

Thank God it’s Monday. 

The worst part was not that Jack had bitten her.  In fact, thinking clearly about the whole thing, it was inevitable.  You get a zombie excited, and what is he going to do?  At least he hadn’t bitten off anything essential.  At least she’d been able to get him off of her, before he gnawed the whole way through.  Though that look on his face, she wasn’t going to forget that anytime soon.  Like she wasn’t even in the room...

And the worst part wasn’t that he’d lied to her.  Because she knew that he was a liar, she’d figured that out already.  He was the kind of guy who ran from his problems.  And maybe the charm and the brains and fun and the looks made up for it, as long as times were good, but what happened when they weren’t?

No, the worst thing was something she’d figured out in the middle of the night, the illuminated numbers of her alarm clock burning back at her.  If he was contagious, why wasn’t she?  In fact, maybe she was even more contagious than he was.  She had no way of knowing.  And if there was any way she was going to infect her customers, she couldn’t open the restaurant.  Which is why she was glad it was Monday, the day the restaurant was closed.  Because it kept her from having to figure out what to do.

What was she going to do if she was contagious?  Because she could never work at the restaurant again if her spit, her blood, any little kitchen accident bore the risk of zombifying her clientele.  Or her breath, what if it was in her breath?  Then what was she going to do?

She was going to have to call Tina back, swallow her pride, and sell out.  But what would happen after that?

That was had kept her awake through the slow dreary hours until you could call it morning.  What did a nearly forty-year-old woman with no talents and hardly any education do with the rest of her life, once she’d lost everything?  All the security that her parents and grandparents had spent their lives giving her, thrown away because she got stupid about a man?

She was so ashamed.

Now that the sun was shining and it actually looked like morning, things seemed a bit better.  Lisa remembered that Sarah I’m-Not-A-Bad-Person Chen had come out in public infected.  So either that meant that they weren’t contagious, or that Sarah didn’t care if they were, or that Sarah had never even tried to find out.  In any case, Lisa knew who she needed to talk to. 

Any minute, yes any minute now, she would get off the couch, brush off the cookie crumbs, throw away the empty box of Nilla wafers, and head right to the phone.  But right now she was feeling too sad to move.

#

             
Ian, looking through the doorway of the lab, saw Prof. Leschke flipping through Ian's own (private, he had thought) lab manual, watching a reaction that he was running on Ian's bench.

              There was a sign of how bad things had gotten: Prof. Leschke getting his hands dirty like a grad student.

              "Have you heard the office gossip yet?" Prof. Leschke asked, "Or are you uninformed again?"

              Was there a good answer to that? 
Probably not,
reflected Ian.

              "I spent yesterday morning with the Board of Overseers."

              Ian's heart froze. 
They know
, he thought.  Too late to run now.  Yet another reason why he should have listened to Sarah. 

              Prof. Leschke continued.  "They suggested that we attack our zombie problem with a bit more urgency." 

             
Which explains why you're here, instead of waiting for us to fix it,
thought Ian.

              "Would you like to know what you idiots have been doing wrong?" asked the professor, sipping black coffee from a beaker.

             
Oh, yes, please!
Ian wearily set his backpack down.

              "It's right here," said the professor, stubbing a thick finger against Ian's scribble.  "You're getting the wrong enantiomer.  Plus you forgot about daylight savings time, so your pentagram is misaligned.  I've been here all night, getting it right.  Where have you been?"

              "Rocking back and forth in my bathroom and sobbing," said Ian.  "Sometimes throwing up a little."

              Leschke snorted.  "And has Sarah turned up?"

              "She's disappeared.  She was always smarter than me."

              The professor scowled at him.  "Where'd you get that smart mouth?"

              Smart mouth?  Ian was too tired to be smart, too tired to feel much of anything.  Except one last piece of idle curiosity, one thing he'd forgotten to ask Sarah before she left him in the disco, looking at him like he'd finally disappointed her in a way he could never make good.

              "Professor?  How did you know we'd stolen the book?"

              Leschke turned his bloodshot eyes to look at him.

              Ian continued.  "Back when all this started.  How did you know?"

              "You never figured it out?  You two idiots zombified my wife."

              A chill crept through Ian's heart.  It had all been a joke.  It had really all been a joke.  They never would have done it if they'd thought it would work.

              Now he knew why his advisor was so angry.  And he'd been justified.

              Ian had never thought of Prof. Leschke as a human being: a man with a wife, a child, a life outside Winthrop.  He had been like a kid who thought his teacher slept on the floor of the classroom.  Because Leschke-- thinking of him by his first name, like he was a real person, was impossible even now-- had so much control over Ian's life, to think of him as a fallible human being was a truly frightening thing. 

              As one man to another, he'd done David Leschke a terrible, unforgivable wrong.

              "I'm sorry," mumbled Ian.

              Prof. Leschke growled at him, and Ian could see his point.  Did an apology make it all better?  Not by a long shot.

              Poor Mrs. Leschke.  And didn't they have a kid?  A little boy?  He couldn't even bring himself to ask about the boy.  How, exactly, had the professor learned his wife was a zombie?  If she'd done anything to the kid...

              But his mind was trying to call his attention to something important, even more important than the Leschkes' domestic concerns. 
 
He felt his heart judder in his chest like it was trying to burrow deeper inside.  He was never going to graduate.  He would never get his PhD.  Because Prof. Leschke would have to sign off on his dissertation, and Ian and Sarah had done something so terrible that they could never be forgiven.  He was all done.  Ian Comanor, M.S.

              And Sarah had figured this all out on the day the professor had come storming into the lab, demanding the book back.  The very first day, she had known they were done with Winthrop, and she'd been looking for a way out.

              And she'd just offered to bring him with her, and he'd been so stupid that he'd actually turned her down.  There was Opportunity, taking the bus back home to California, all by herself.

              He was so goddamned stupid!

              And now it was too late to run after her, because Winthrop knew.  The University knew everything.  So the stakes had changed.  Now he wasn't playing to earn his PhD.  Now, if he was lucky, they wouldn't turn him into something horrible and wish him into the cornfield.

              The professor turned off the gas under the reaction.  "They need us in the basement.  Get moving."

              "Which basement?" asked Ian.  "Not the one under the tower?"

              "Not yet," said the professor.  "Aren't we lucky?"

#

              Sonia Thal was angry.  So angry that if a passerby had happened to set his hand on her brick, he would have come away with a blistering burn. 

              If you didn't count the fraud-- and Sonia didn't-- she'd done everything right.  She'd gotten her PhD from a top-tier university, and with glowing recommendations and a trendy project, she'd landed the sweetest plum on the tree-- Winthrop.  But she hadn't stopped there.  She'd worked on every committee they'd assigned to her, taught every line of Freshman English the tenured members of the department hadn't cared to teach, and acted grateful for it, published acceptably provocative essays in several academic journals (though never in the popular press, because that might scare her colleagues), as well as two (
two!)
books, feigned an interest in both the undergraduates and graduate students, and maintained a total lack of a personal life, if you didn't count her cat.

              She'd done everything right.  And
this
was how she ended up?  This was how Winthrop used her?  Where was the beautiful office?  Where was the sinecure with a low teaching load?  Where was the life of leisure, the life of the mind she'd been promised? 

              And the worst, the very worst, was that when she looked back on her life's work, she could see nothing of herself in it.  She'd yipped and bayed after every trendy idea like an excitable Jack Russell terrier after a juicy little mouse.  All of it would be pulled from the library shelves, pulped and forgotten, within ten years.

              Except for maybe her novel, her Jewel Bundren, her sin-born child.

             
"I hate this place,"
she said.

             
"What are you going to do?"
said the hippie with ten bricks. 
"You can't fight the Man." 

              Maybe not.  But she wouldn't know unless she tried, would she?

              She pulled and yanked her body from the enclosing brick, slowly uprooting it, tendril by tendril, until she dangled, flailing at open air with her flagella on the inside of the building, bobbing up and down.  She couldn't free herself.  One solitary tendril was still caught inside, and she ran thousands of spirit-fingers up the wall, feeling where it disappeared into the plaster.

              She wasn't giving up that easily.  She pressed all her little tendrils against the wall, and, with a sharp and painful tear, the recalcitrant tendril ripped in half.  Her light little body zipped across the room, an amoeba caught in a rush of water, until it bounced off the wall and spun to a stop, the ache in her tendril already fading as it healed.

              She could see in all directions and feel the soft air conditioning on her dry, spiky self.  It was pleasant, but a little unnerving-- like a hermit crab, she longed to return to her shell. 

             
Fat chance of that,
thought Sonia, who could hear the thrum of the elevator descending to the basement.  Which left the shaft temporarily empty.

#

              There were two men in white jumpsuits waiting for them: a tall, skinny Irish redhead, and a stocky Eastern European man who looked like he ate nails for breakfast.  Ian had seen men just like them around campus, fixing the furnace, patching cement, replacing weatherstripping, that kind of thing.  Working-class men, the body of Winthrop, so guys like Ian could be the brain...

              In a way, their presence was reassuring.  There was nothing supernatural about them at all.  So nothing spooky was going to happen to Ian.

              On the other hand, they were carrying guns, which wasn't reassuring at all.

              "You've got a specimen for us?" asked Prof. Leschke.  "I don't see it."

              "In the box," said the Slav.  "It's not whole, but it's the best we could do."

              On the bench was a metal box.  Ian and the Professor moved closer to it.  Inside was a dead-looking arm, a woman's, with a metal hoop tightly clamped around the wrist and fused to the metal box.  The arm had fresh polish on its fingernails, bright red, and Ian found himself looking at it, as if some smart corner of his brain was trying to say something to the rest of him.

              "It's dead," said Prof. Leschke, and shook the box sharply to demonstrate.

              The hand flailed wildly backward, the stump of the arm shaking left and right, as if it were trying to lever itself free.

              Prof. Leschke jumped backwards, and the two Winthrop men laughed.

              Leschke glared at them.  "Ian, load the syringe.  You'll be performing the injection."

              "What will you be doing?" asked Ian, watching the fingers twitch. 

              "I'll be supervising you," said the professor.

             
Do zombies wear nail polish?  How fresh is this arm?  Did Winthrop zombify an arm so I could test this antivirus on it?