Miles awoke mid-morning with a devastating hangover. He staggered out of his bedroom and went straight for the kitchen. With his bloodshot eyes, rancid breath and lumbering gait, he didn’t look all that different from the creatures he caught for a living. He was in dire need of a shower, but food and caffeine remained his number one priority. He’d forgotten to eat last night, and his stomach was now on the verge of cannibalising itself. Drinking on an empty stomach would explain why he was feeling so awful this morning. Drinking two days after giving blood wasn’t all that smart either, and he ended up paying for it. One minute he was knocking back shots and having a great time, the next he was on his hands and knees puking in a back alley.
The kitchen was again in a state of disarray. A mountain of dirty pots, pans, plates and cutlery were tossed haphazardly into the sink. The rubbish bin was overflowing. The stovetop was caked in brown gunk. It was the same scenario playing out over and over; Miles would wake up to find the house in a complete mess, then clean it all up, only to discover it in the exact same state the next morning. He often wondered what would happen if he just left it all and didn’t do any cleaning, but he already knew the answer to that – it would keep piling up for weeks and weeks, until he finally caved in and did it all himself.
He once asked Clea if she wouldn’t mind helping out with the washing up every now and then. That suggestion went down like a whore on the Titanic – Clea went ballistic, calling Miles a chauvinist and accusing him of having outdated sexist views regarding the gender roles of women and housework.
The only thing they did manage to clean out quite comprehensively was the refrigerator and the cupboards. True to her word, Clea had replaced all the food she and her friends had eaten the other night. And once again, it had vanished as soon as Miles wanted some. All that was left in the refrigerator was a small block of cheese, half a tomato, a can of whipped cream and a jar of pickles, while the cupboards contained only a jar of jam and an open packet of peanuts. He briefly considered concocting some experimental Frankenstein dish from these few ingredients – in his hungover state, it would probably taste as good as just about anything else – but he eventually decided that his churning stomach would require something a little more substantial to make it through the day.
He trudged out to the garage, where they kept their emergency supply of food. He was scraping the bottom of the culinary barrel by resorting to this.
Stacked on the shelves at the far end of the garage, behind the makeshift weapons they had once fashioned out of brooms and rakes to fight off the zombie onslaught (but only ended up using to scare off looting teenagers) were rows and rows of tinned corn, tinned spaghetti, tinned soup, tinned potatoes and tinned tuna. This was a constant reminder of the panic buying they all succumbed to in the early days of the outbreak, and the fact that they could fall for the exaggerated media hype as easily as anyone.
Miles and his family hoarded all the non-perishable food they could get their hands on and bunkered down for the long haul. Now, almost three years later, two thirds of the food remained uneaten. It wasn’t that they didn’t try to use it all up. It was just that there was only so much tuna and spaghetti you could eat before getting sick of it. It didn’t take long for this to happen to Miles. Just looking at these tins of food made him feel queasy.
It was a normal Thursday morning about two-and-a-half years ago when Miles received a hysterical phone call from Shae. He couldn’t decipher much of what she was saying over all the sobbing, but he soon came to understand that zombies were on their property, and the possibility existed that one or more family members had been bitten.
Miles told Shae to get to a safe place, then borrowed a friend’s car and made the three hour journey back home in less than two. He prepared himself for the worst when he arrived – but he soon came to realise he had no idea of just how bad the worst could be.
In the backyard he found not one, but four zombies. Or what was left of them.
It was his father, his mother, and their two neighbours, the Parkers. Their identity wasn’t immediately obvious to Miles. They had all been bludgeoned to death, then doused in petrol and set alight. They were now nothing more than four piles of putrid, smoldering remains; two under the clothes line, one in the garden bed, and one in the garage. The words “DIE ZOMBIE SCUM” were smeared across the walls in blood.
The police never did track down those responsible, but it was unlikely they even bothered looking for the culprits. In those days, few charges were ever brought against anyone accused of zombicide, and successful convictions were even rarer.
The events of that one day in August played over and over in Miles’ head ever since. For a long time he harboured a great deal of anger and resentment. It was such a stupid and careless way to go. They’d survived the worst of it during the initial outbreak, but they let their guard down just the one time and paid the ultimate price.
He resented the Parkers, who were probably bitten by a stray but didn’t take the necessary precautions to protect anyone else when they inevitably turned. He resented his father for recklessly getting bitten after that – he was apparently trying to remove the two zombies from the property rather than call in the professionals – and his mother for not leaving with Shae when she had the chance.
Most of all, Miles’ fuming anger was directed at the nameless cowards who tipped off the vigilantes. It had to have been somebody living in their street; it was quite likely that they lived within a couple of houses either side of him.
Ever since that day, Miles viewed all of his neighbours with suspicion. In all likelihood he would never find out who it was, but he probably saw them on a regular basis. They’ve probably said hello to him dozens of times since and acted as if nothing was wrong.
Miles stared at the big black burn mark in the centre of the garage, the location where his mother was beaten and cremated. He’d scrubbed at that spot over and over, but he had never been able to get rid of it completely. It served as something of a metaphor for his ever-present rage; no matter how much he wanted to move on and let go of all the resentment building up inside him, he could never quite do it. It was a stain on his life that he was unable to fully wash away. He worried what effect all this repressed anger was having on him, and feared that one day he might just erupt. A few weeks ago, at Stacey’s barbecue, he felt the overwhelming urge to knock Alistair’s teeth out when he made the comment about putting a bullet into every one of the zombies. And then last week, Miles was in a café when he heard a news item on the radio about vigilantes in South America caught massacring hundreds of zombies. Another customer loudly applauded this news and let everyone know that this was the best possible course of action. Miles quickly left the premises in case he did something he might later regret.
Miles gave up on the idea of food and went back to bed in the hope of getting a couple of hours more sleep before work. That didn’t happen. Instead, he stared at the wall and counted all the blu-tack residue leftover from the posters he’d had up during his teenage years. It sometimes felt weird that, at twenty-three, he was still sleeping in the same bedroom he’d had since he was six. It made him feel like he still hadn’t properly grown up. On the other hand, he had to grow up pretty damn fast when he was forced to take responsibility for Shae.
He moved back home after his parents were killed. Shae was thirteen and Miles was twenty-one (with their eight year age difference, Miles never hesitated to remind Shae that she was a mistake), and so he was old enough to be granted legal guardianship. The change in his lifestyle was immense; one minute he was extending his adolescence during his gap year (which had blown out to three years by that point), the next he had a whole world of adult responsibilities thrust upon him. Partying and travelling took a back seat to paying utility bills and keeping the house out of reach from the bank. He initially wanted to sell the house and rent somewhere smaller, since the loan repayments were surprisingly hefty, but he ended up staying for Shae’s sake. She had been through enough trauma alre
ady without having to deal with the upheaval associated with moving to a new place. Besides, this house was now the scene of a gruesome quadruple zombicide. Its value plummeted, and if they sold it now they wouldn’t come close to covering the outstanding mortgage.
Like his Dead Rite job, Miles thought moving back home would be a temporary arrangement. He had planned on finally commencing his long-delayed commerce degree when the new semester began six months later. But six months turned into a year, which then became two years, and was now two-and-a-half and counting. In that time he had seen all of his friends graduate and start their careers while he was trapped in a dead-end, go-nowhere job, watching the plans he’d had for his own life grow more and more distant by the day.
He knew it was selfish to think this, and he sometimes hated himself for it, but he often felt resentful for the situation he found himself in. He was twenty-three. This was the time in his life that he should be enjoying the most. The time when you can take advantage of all the privileges that come with being an adult without being weighed down by any of the responsibilities.
Miles had almost drifted off to sleep again when he was awoken by the sound of pounding techno music coming from the lounge room. This could only mean that Amoeba, Clea’s performance artist friend, had arrived.
Amoeba had been working on an audio/visual installation he called “The Majestic Purge of Elysian Cancer” for the past few months. It featured hidden camera footage of overweight people devouring fast food meals spliced into Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films, all set to a thumping techno soundtrack. The performance piece also included the burning of real money, and would culminate with Amoeba painting a pile of roadkill in psychedelic colours. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the point of all this was, but Amoeba insisted this was his way of protesting animal cruelty.
Amoeba’s work was frequently hard to decipher. Miles once tossed a wine bottle filled with cigarette butts into the trash, unaware that it was a piece of abstract art meant to highlight environmental degradation and the billions of people living in poverty worldwide.
Amoeba was simply another in a long line of derelicts and weirdos that Clea had invited into the house and allowed them to do whatever they wanted with no consideration for anyone else. It was on days like today that Miles regretted selecting her to move in and not one of the other candidates they had interviewed.
Maybe he should have chosen that Vincent guy after all. Vincent was a thirty-nine-year-old tax specialist who dressed in a buttoned-down shirt and brown corduroy trousers. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and had the kind of sideburns not seen since 1976. He enjoyed entomology and classical music. Miles thought there was something a bit odd about Vincent that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. But he couldn’t have been that bad; after all, his previous landlord supplied a reference that described Vincent as “a nice quiet man who never caused any trouble and always paid his rent on time”.
A sharp, high-pitched scream reverberated around the house.
Miles groaned and buried his head beneath the pillow, but the commotion coming from the lounge room grew louder and louder.
And then came Clea’s desperate wail: “Miiiiles!!”
Miles fell out of bed and hurried to the lounge. He was met with a scene of comical pandemonium.
An obese, half-naked zombie waddled around the room like a giant baby, while six stoned, shrieking hippies cowered in the corner. The stereo blasted obnoxious SlamCore techno, and a projector flashed images onto the wall of fried chicken being devoured and the Third Reich marching in perfect synchronicity.
It took Miles a second to realise that this wasn’t all part of Amoeba’s forthcoming installation, and that an actual zombie had wandered into their house.
It took him another few seconds to recognise the undead intruder. It was their reclusive neighbour, the creepy voyeur with the carbohydrate-rich diet who just might be a serial killer.
“Miles!” Clea screamed again. “Do something!”
“Alright, calm down,” Miles said. “It’s just a zombie.”
“Hurry up!” Fabian said, his voice rising to a high squeal. When Miles heard the scream a minute ago, he assumed it came from one of the women. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Miles pulled the plug on the stereo and projector in an attempt to restore some order. “Could everybody please stop shouting and moving around so much,” he said. “Just stay where you are until I get back.”
Miles stepped out of the lounge room. The six nervous Zeroes remained frozen in place, afraid of making any sudden movements.
“Miles!” Clea pleaded. “Where are you going?”
“I need to find something to control him with,” he called back. “Just do what I told you and stay where you are, and you’ll be fine.”
Everyone waited and held their breath. The zombie neighbour, who appeared so worked up and agitated a moment ago, was now completely still.
Miles returned a minute later with a plastic bucket. He could have run to the laundry and made it back in half that time, but he took a degree of perverse pleasure in the fact that they all now relied on him to help them out. It was fun watching them squirm.
Clea could barely believe what she was seeing. “A bucket, Miles? How is a bucket going to stop–”
Miles calmly walked up behind the zombie and slid the bucket over its head. It was a near-perfect fit. This dude’s head was big, and now he was completely harmless.
“Okay, you–” Miles pointed to Fabian. He knew Fabian’s name, but it felt more authoritarian to refer to him using the second person pronoun. “There’s a roll of duct tape in the third drawer. Go and get it.”
Fabian dutifully scurried off to the kitchen.
Miles was beginning to enjoy this power trip. The whole time Fabian had been hanging around the house and mooching off him, he had never once done anything that Miles had asked of him.
“I can’t find it,” Fabian said from the kitchen.
“Look in the third drawer.”
“I am looking in the third drawer. It’s not in here.”
Miles took a couple of steps back and peered into the kitchen. “That’s the fourth drawer, Fabian.”
“No it’s not! Look–” Fabian counted them off. “One, two, three, yeah?”
“Third from the top. Really, who counts from the bottom up?”
Fabian found the tape and tossed the roll to Miles. He stretched out a length and wrapped it around the zombie’s wrists.
“Now do you see why we need to keep the back door shut?” Miles said as he bound the zombie’s hands together.
“Oh, so this is all my fault is it?” Clea said defensively.
“That was the general point I was trying to make, yes.”
“That’s victim-blaming, Miles.”
“No, that’s simply pointing out that if the door had been kept shut then none of this would have happened.”
“If anyone’s at fault, it’s you for not fixing the fence when I told you to.”
“When did you tell me to fix the fence?”
“Uh, last Friday?”
“You told me the fence was broken. You didn’t ask me to fix it.”
“Why do you think I told you? Because I wanted you to fix it!”
“Why should I have to fix the fence? It was you and your friends that broke it.”
“It’s your responsibility to fix things around the house.”
“Clea, you appear to have outdated sexist views regarding the gender roles of men and manual tasks.”
“No, I mean it’s your responsibility because you’re the landlord.”
“I’m the landlord?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“I own half of the house, but I’m not sure that makes me the landlord.”
“Yes it does!”
“Shae owns half of the house, too. Does that make her the landlady?”
The zombie was effectively restrained, and Miles guided him out the front door and towards
Clea’s hatchback. He then faced the daunting task of wedging the zeppelin-sized former human into the back of this tiny vehicle. It was hard enough for a regular-sized and still-living human to crawl over the front seat and squeeze into the compact car. But trying to force a sweaty, obese, shirtless zombie with a bucket over its head to do the same was another challenge entirely.
The industry term for a massively overweight zombie like this was “orca”.
Clea agreed to let Miles borrow her car so he could deliver the zombie to the processing centre. He asked her if she wanted to drive, but she made it clear there was no way she was getting into a small car with that grotesque decaying creature lurking just a few inches behind her.
Miles climbed behind the wheel and reversed out of the driveway. He attracted plenty of odd looks and double-takes from fellow motorists and pedestrians on his journey to the processing centre.
A feeling of slight melancholy came over Miles as he neared the centre. Even though he didn’t know his neighbour at all – he didn’t even know his name – he was going to miss having him there. Miles thought of him as an almost perfect neighbour. He didn’t play loud music or host wild parties. The only noise he ever heard coming out of the house was his early-morning smoker’s cough, and his occasional late night, off-key drunken renditions of Neil Diamond songs. He had no pets, so he never had to worry about barking dogs or screeching cats waking him in the middle of the night.
Best of all, the neighbour appeared to dislike meaningless social interaction and inane chit-chat as much as Miles did. The two of them seemed to have an understanding regarding this. One of the rare occasions where they crossed paths was just a few days ago, when the neighbour was collecting the mail from his letterbox at the same time Miles was leaving for work. The neighbour pretended to be talking on his phone so that he and Miles wouldn’t be forced to acknowledge one another. Miles was grateful that he had put on this charade for their mutual benefit.
But given what he knew about his neighbour, the events of today didn’t really add up. He couldn’t work out why the neighbour had wandered into the house. Once people turned, they usually carried on doing whatever they would normally be doing if they were still living. They typically stuck to familiar habitats. It didn’t make sense that he would come inside his house, since he’d never set foot on their property before. Or had he? Maybe Clea was right; maybe he was a Peeping Tom.
Miles showed his ID to the guard at the processing centre and was waved on through. After unloading the zombie from Clea’s hatchback – which was even more of an ordeal than getting him in there, despite two centre staffers lending a hand – he completed the requisite paperwork and was handed his $500 payment.
He felt a slight pang of guilt for doing a job off the books like this. There was a gentleman’s agreement among UMC workers that you would only take on work through your employer and not do any other jobs on the side. This was fair enough, too. Dead Rite had invested time and money into having Miles trained and obtaining his UMC accreditation. He justified it by telling himself this was a one-off. The job had basically fallen into his lap, so it didn’t count. It wasn’t like he was out there actively seeking extra work on the down-low. Some of the more unscrupulous Z-Pro staff were known to have friends and family contact them if they saw or heard of any zombies on the loose. This practise could be quite lucrative – it would allow the worker to keep the whole $500, minus a small percentage for the tip-off, rather than have to share it with Z-Pro.
Miles stopped off at a hardware store on his way back. He used a few hundred dollars from his payment to purchase materials to fix the broken fence. He then bought an ice cream and a can of Red Bull from a convenience store in an attempt to subdue his unrelenting hangover. He ate the ice cream as he drove home, holding the cold can against the side of his head and steering with his knees.
He returned Clea’s car, then showered and headed off to work. He was feeling even worse now than when he woke up that morning.
The neighbour’s real name was Phil Lewellyn. He was a forty-eight-year-old financial consultant and father of two, and had moved into the neighbouring property following his recent divorce.
In the upcoming federal election he had intended on voting for Bernard Marlowe. He had been won over by Marlowe’s uncompromising stand on undead issues, and supported moves to have the NEVADA law repealed.
Chapter 12