“The hell?!?”
I don’t quite scream, but I might as well. The room is tiny and I’m wet and it echoes, even if only through my own ears. “I’m changing here, do you mind?”
I turn my back immediately, but that only makes things worse because I’m clutching my towel at the front, and the back is open and… when I turn around he should be blushing.
He’s not. And then I see the familiar, yellow and blue triangular “Zombie Job Squad” patch sewn over the brown pocket of his tan work shirt.
“Oh,” I say, because that explains a lot. The vacant stare, the cocked head, the fact that he’s actually looking into my eyes even when I’m half-naked beneath this sorry excuse for a bath towel and dripping wet from a midday shower.
“Oh,” he says, in that hoarse way they do. And then, a few delayed seconds later, “Sorry.”
He turns to the door and looks at the knob. I know he knows what it’s for, it’s just maybe that he doesn’t know what he should do with it that’s the problem. I shake my head and slip my panties on under my towel, like the way surfers get into their baggies at the beach, then shimmy into my jeans.
By the time he turns around, scratching his head, I’m just wriggling into my Paranoia Prep School pullover. The school is really named Parnassus Preparatory Academy for Troubled Adolescents, but kids started calling it “Paranoia Prep” during the very first outbreak in 2015, and I guess it stuck. (Hey, what do you expect from a bunch of troubled adolescents, anyway?)
“Oh,” he says, upon seeing I’m dressed. “Should I still leave?”
“Yes. Absolutely. What are you doing here in the first place?”
I slide into some handy flats because I hate anyone seeing my bare feet, and crinkle-dry my hair because obviously Joe Zombie isn’t going anywhere fast and using the blow dryer, probably, would confuse him. Or maybe even startle him, and even though he’s a zombie he’s kinda cute and, even if he wasn’t, I’m major lonely.
“We… we didn’t think anyone would still be here.”
He is tall, and angular, all bones and skin under his baggy tan uniform. The hat on his head is brown; so is his hair. His eyes are gray, but not entirely scary-gross the way some of them get after awhile.
“Well, I am.”
He nods. “I see that now.”
“So leave.” I’m playing hard to get. He’s a guy. He should still pick up on that, right?
He blinks, twice. “You don’t have to be rude about it.”
He says it so gently, so genuinely, I immediately agree. “You’re right, I don’t, but… you just saw me naked, so, I’m a little emotional at the moment.”
He corrects me. “Only half-naked.”
Oh God, it’s worse than I thought. “You saw that?”
“Just a little.” He looks away, but probably not because he’s embarrassed. It’s just there’s a lot going on on Carmen’s side of the room, what with the movie posters and aromatherapy candles and bonsai trees and Christmas lights and moody red kerchiefs on every available lampshade.
“I thought you guys were supposed to be slow.”
He smirks. No, like… really smirks. I didn’t even know they could do that. Smirk, I mean. “Not that slow.”
There is a desk-slash-table thingy in our dorm room, between our single beds built into the cinderblock walls. I sit down at it, half from the shock of him – a zombie, I know, but still, a guy – seeing my bare behind and, two, to cover said behind just in case he’s formed a fixation on it.
He watches me with curious eyes while a crooked smile creaks across his face. “So… you’re staying?”
I look around the place for emphasis, the unmade bed, the half-open bag of chips on the desk, the humming laptop with the second season of Horror High all queued up and ready to go on HitFlix and say, “Yeah, pretty much.”
He scratches his head again, pushing his cap even further up his gray, unlined forehead. “Well, we’re supposed to clean the floors.”
I kick a Cheese Poof under Carla’s bed, ignore the pile of laundry I’ve been meaning to do all week and say, “It’s super clean, what are you talking about?”
He opens the door and there is a big red machine just outside, like a lawnmower only instead of a square thing with blades in front there is a circular thing with a powder puff on the bottom. “I mean, professionally clean them. While the students are away.”
“But I’m here.”
“Right, I get that, but… you’re supposed to be away. It’s Thanksgiving, you know.”
Yeah, like I need to be reminded I’m a loser, by one of the living dead no less. I wag a righteous finger righteously. “Look, zombie, I’m here and I’m not—”
“Reggie.”
“What?”
“My name’s not ‘zombie.’ It’s Reggie.”
So, this one’s got an attitude, huh? That’d be a first. Most of the Zombie Job Squad just roam around the halls in the morning, picking their cold, gray noses with one hand while pushing their maintenance carts with the other. Which I think says more about their boredom level than their IQ level.
“Is that insubordination I hear in your voice… Reggie?”
He frowns. “Does that word mean what I think it probably means?”
“Yeah, probably.”
“No, it isn’t. You’re not hearing anything in my voice other than my name.”
I flare my nostrils in response, because… what do you say to that? It’s zombie logic, but it’s still logic.
I sigh. Dude seems legit. I mean, he is with the Zombie Job Squad, and that is a giant floor cleaner powder puff thingy sitting there, and the floor is pretty grody. I could go to the library, I guess, if it’s even open during Thanksgiving break. I could grab a soda and go watch my Horror High marathon in the quad, but that would be so pathetic. I’d feel like the last girl on earth. I could—
“You could help,” he offers, eyes a little wider, voice a little less hoarse.
“What, like… do work? Physical work.”
His eyes go back down an inch. “Yeah, like work.”
I shake my head automatically, but that actually doesn’t sound that bad. I mean, I’ve been meaning to get some exercise all week, but the weather’s been so crappy, to say nothing of my mood, and I’ve skipped it. Altogether.
“It wouldn’t take long,” he says, “with the two of us.”
“What about your zombie friends? Aren’t they supposed to help?”
He shrugs. “You know how many rooms there are in this building?”
I roll my eyes, a personal specialty. “Aren’t there, like 200 of you zombie job corps guys?”
He rolls his eyes back at me, but it takes awhile. “There are nine of us. There used to be ten, but Simpson had… an incident… last month and they haven’t replaced him yet.”
Yeah, they do that; have “incidents,” from time to time. That’s why ever since they ratified the Zombie Right to Work Amendment in 2018, they also installed a glass cased axe box next to every fire extinguisher, trash can and water fountain in the school.
We haven’t had to use them yet, but… you never know.
“Do I get paid or anything?”
He bites his gray bottom lip with big, yellow teeth. “No.”
I don’t say anything to that. Then he gets a kind of light bulb moment and says, “But we’re having a party later, for Thanksgiving, you could come to that.”
“And that represents payment… how?”
He looks personally hurt. “Well, there’ll be food.”
“Zombie food?”
“Not just zombie food. Our supervisor will be there, and the secretary lady. They eat human food.”
“Is that because they’re still human?” I ask hopefully.
He nods, but looks like he resents having to answer.
I shrug, and finally stand. “All right, let’s do this thing.”
“Really?” He sounds like I used to when, after six straight hours of begging,
Mom would break down and actually let me open one present on Christmas Eve.
“Yeah, really. Is this good, what I’m wearing I mean?”
He looks at me for a long time. “Yeah, that’ll be fine.”
He doesn’t say anything after that, just reaches for Carmen’s chair and carries it into the hall. I grab mine and drag it into the hall. He makes a sour face at the dragging sound, then points at the scuff marks on the floor.
“Nice,” is all he says, and I don’t drag anything for the rest of the day. Like I said, it’s hard to argue with zombie logic.
We pile the stuff from the top of the desk-slash-table onto my bed, and carry that out into the hall. It’s easier than it sounds, because really it’s just two small desks pressed together, back to back. He takes the heavy end, with the drawers, and even walks backward so I don’t have to. I like that in a guy, even one who eats brain nuggets for a midnight snack.
He’s pretty diligent, too. Like Carmen and I both have these closets, with little green and pink curtains in front, and when he starts moving my shoes and stuff off the floor I say, “It’s okay, you can just clean around that.”
He shakes his head and says, “I have to clean the whole floor.”
That’s the thing about zombies, some of them can get pretty literal.
So we have to move the shoes, and the six pack of beer I was saving to drown my sorrows later that night, which he wrinkles his nose at. “I should confiscate this,” he says.
“But?” I prod. “I hear a ‘but’ in there somewhere.”
He’s holding the beers, looking at them fondly. A lot more fondly than he did my half-backside earlier, I’ll give you that much. “But… I won’t if you’ll let me have one with you later.”
I cock one eyebrow at that. “I didn’t know you could drink beer.”
“I can’t drink a whole one. It would make me sick, but… I’d like to taste one, just for old time’s sake.”
I slug his arm. He’s rolled up his sleeve somewhere along the line, and his biceps are all stringy and veiny, but solid and fat-free, like the dudes on the wrestling team.
“What, you were a big beer drinker in your Before Life?”
I’m joking, but he puts the beer on the top shelf with care, almost reverently. “I was a lot of things in my Before Life,” he says without looking at me.
Suddenly, I’m interested. “Yeah, like what?”
He starts to say something, closes his mouth tight, then says something else. “I was like… like… you.”
I snort. “A girl?”
He blinks twice. “No… normal.”
Wow, smooth talker. No guy’s called me normal in, like, forever.
I put my back into it after that, kind of eager to get on with it so maybe we can find a quiet moment at the zombie Thanksgiving shindig to maybe talk about how normal he was before the lights turned out and came back on. One beer for him still means five left for me, and after that he should be looking pretty normal, indeed.
The floor buffer thingy machine is loud and I stand out in the hallway while he runs it over the now bare floor. The room looks so big without any furniture in it, and his arms look strong as they wrangle the machine around the floor.
He goes in circles, from left to right, very methodically, very slowly. I get bored watching him, even with the trembling biceps and broad shoulders and his hat pushed back. The hallway is empty, which is weird. Didn’t Reggie say the whole Zombie Job Corps was on floor detail?
The humming stops and I watch him circle the cord around his arm before hanging it off the side of the machine. My stepfather used to do that, too.
He tips the floor lawnmower back and there are little wheels on the bottom so he can roll it out into the hall smoothly. He puts it to one side of the door, then helps me move everything back in.
It feels wrong to leave the Cheesy Puffs and laptop on my unmade bed, and without saying anything we both kind of set about straightening the room, from top to bottom and back down again.
He’s pretty good, too. Not rough or careless. He puts the books back on the shelf according to size, and squares away the laptop next to the note pad next to the pencil holder, like he’s staging a display in a furniture store showroom or something.
The room is quiet when we’re done. I think it’s the longest I’ve ever gone without music in my life.
He turns to me, rolling down his sleeves. “You ready?”
“That’s it? No more rooms. I was just getting into the swing of things.”
I only half-mean it. Okay, maybe more than half.
He looks away again. I guess that’s his version of blushing. When he turns back, he admits, “I kind of saved your room for last.”
“Yeah, why?”
He shrugs. “It gets lonely in the Corps. Zombies aren’t exactly, stimulating people you know?”
“Oh, and I am?”
Another shrug. I’ll take that as a blush. Or a confession. It gets a little awkward after that, the way it will when a guy says you’re “stimulating” and neither of you can tell if it’s a compliment or not.
“So,” I say, just to kill the awkward silence, “when is this big Thanksgiving shindig going down?”
“What time is it now?”
I yank the phone out of my back pocket, realizing I haven’t used it in… forever… and check. “4:29.”
“Oh, it’s been going on for awhile now.”
We walk down the hall side by side. He doesn’t move as slow as when he first came in, and I wonder if it’s because he’s limber from working or we’re just late.
He opens the door at the end of the hall for me, the one that leads out onto the quad. It’s empty, like it’s been since Monday when everyone started heading home early. Classes were canceled by Tuesday and I’ve been here, alone I guess except for the Zombie Job Corps, ever since.
The air is brisk and the sky is gray and, I dunno, it just looks like Thanksgiving. Quiet, empty, a little sad, like the big table in the dining room after all the plates have been put away and everyone’s gone home.
He fiddles with his hat as we approach the Zombie Job Corps headquarters, which is really just a double-wide trailer out behind the cafeteria. The windows are dark, though, and when he tries the knob it won’t open.
I don’t hear any music, or any of that thumping sound that always comes when more than one person walks across a trailer floor. “When did the party start, yesterday?” I ask knowingly as he stands, one leg on the ground, the other on the top step of the trailer.
He kind of nods. “I guess… I guess I forgot they gave the Job Corps today off.”
Now it’s my turn to blush. I can’t remember the last time a guy ran the whole “hey, let’s go to a party, oh, dang, there really wasn’t a party after all, but… wanna hang out anyway” gag.
“So, what now?” I sigh, like this majorly sucks or something.
He fumbles with the front of his pants and I’m thinking “Whoa, Nelly, not so fast there, Reggie” but he comes up with keys. “This one opens the cafeteria.”
“Jackpot!”
It’s silent and dark and everything echoes. He finds the light switch in the kitchen and I open the walk-in cooler. For whatever reason I crave milk most of all, and I grab a gallon. And cheese, a wedge of cheese. And bread, a loaf of bread. I see a box marked “Brains” on the way out and slide it on top, even though just grabbing it gives me the creepies.
He smiles to see it, and moves a little faster to grab it from the stack. “Do you mind if… if… I eat this over there?”
He points to the dishwashing area, which is kind of in the corner. “Okay, it’s a little rude, but… whatevs.”
Then I see why. Or rather, hear why. Dude tears open the box, barely rips open some plastic and… dives right in. It sounds like a stampede, a stampede of teeth. And gnashing and tearing, like what I imagine the cavemen sounded like at dinner time, eight or ten of them tearing into a nice, roast saber tooth
tiger without the aid of knives or forks or a Miss Manners guide written on stone tablets. Then comes the grunting, so loud and fierce, I can’t imagine he knows he’s doing it, otherwise he’d stop.
I busy myself making a grilled cheese sandwich in a giant, industrial size frying pan that looks more like a platter for an XXL cheese pizza when the grunting suddenly stops.
“Shhh!” he demands, as if I’m the one who’s been making wonka-wonka internet porn sounds since we walked in. “Do you hear that?”
Now that’s hilarious. “You mean, do I hear you?”
“No, not me, something… something else.”
His face is so serious, it makes me stop what I’m doing and look out the small window next to the sink. “Oh, it’s just your friends,” I snort, turning back to my grilled cheese.
“My friends are gone,” he insists, creeping up behind me. I can smell the fresh brains on his breath, in his teeth, and I almost gag. It smells like dark meat and rust and copper.
“Those… those aren’t my friends.” I look up, at him first, to see his jaws clenched, teeth gritted. Then out the window, where three zombies walk, side by side, toward the cafeteria.
They’re not in uniform. They’re in civilian clothes, bloody civilian clothes. And they shuffle, like the old zombies, before they found the Cure. The Cure that makes them semi-human, like Reggie, and not cannibalistic inhuman, like… like these three.
My heart is hammering, like it did the first time I faced zombies, and the second and the third. No matter how many times you do it, you never get used to it.
“What now?” I ask, just because listening to them stalk among the grass outside the cafeteria is freaking me out.
He looks at me, then out the window. They’re getting closer, with every shuffle. “Here,” he says, taking off his shirt. “Put this on.”
I don’t argue, because he’s a zombie and I’m not. I start to put it on over my hoodie and he says, “No, trade.”
Oh, I see now. I take off my prep school hoodie and hand it over. We both have tank tops underneath. I slip into his shirt while wriggling out of my jeans. He has on those kind of longish boxer briefs, the kind that hit guys mid-thigh. He looks like he’s on the swim team, lean and bony and all sinews and hard angles.
I slip into his dark brown uniform pants, and while they’re loose in the thighs they’re long at the ankles. I roll them up once, then twice, as we switch shoes. His ankles stick out of the back of my flats, but they kind of look like flip flops once his long, gray feet are inside. The jeans are a little short, but he yanks them down at the waist so they don’t look entirely like floods.
The door is rattling, pounding, but it’s not locked; they’re just kinda stupid. “Hat,” he says, handing his over. I scoop up my hair into the back and slide it on.
He sniffs the air, inches closer and sniffs me. “You smell too human,” he says. The pounding increases at the door. I look at the sandwich, still grilling in the giant pan. I can hear it sizzling and turn the heat way up.
“Give it a sec,” I say.
He says, “We don’t have one.”
And that’s when the door bursts open. They are big and angry, they haven’t lost their muscle mass yet. They look fresh and my first thought is, “Oh great, another infestation. Happy Zombie Thanksgiving!”
But I can’t worry about where my roommate Carmen is right now, or my Mom or any of my classmates at Paranoia Prep. This is real and this is now and I’m alone, pretty much.
Reggie stands by the door, looking at the zombies. I stand near the frying pan, hoping the smell of burnt cheese is enough to mask my human odors.
The tallest zombie is in front, he’s wide like a trucker and dressed like a lumberjack. There is something hanging from his teeth, like a flap of skin. He grabs Reggie by the shoulders and sniffs him, grunting all the while. Reggie pushes him back and says one word: “Same.”
The zombie cocks his head, sniffs some more. Reggie is thin and wiry, but strong. The big zombie still pushes him aside, and the others stumble past. Reggie stands from the floor, looking at me as the big one heads over.
He sniffs me, grabs me, his fingers cold on my shoulders. “Same,” I say, in a low voice, but he shakes his head.
I quiver and know this won’t work. It was stupid, stupid to think it would. The other zombies are behind him, like a kind of formation, never coming much closer. I see the flap of skin hanging from his teeth and wince.
His eyes are black, pure black, like they are in this phase. He looks fresh, he smells rotting, and immediately I know these aren’t the only three zombies I’ll face this Thanksgiving weekend.
But I won’t face any if I don’t make it through this. The three ignore Reggie, even as he creeps up behind them. The big one eyeballs me, shoving me, sniffing me, but now the sandwich is burning and I can barely smell them.
A smaller one, a woman, wiry but gaunt, gray and bloody, sniffs behind her, finds the big box of brains from the cooler. She opens it, eats one while a few spare brains drop to the floor with a squishy flop, flop sound before bouncing to a stop.
The second one turns, grabs a brain off the floor, eats it. The big one sniffs, turns, grabs two, eats one, hands me the other.
“Eat,” he says, mouth dark like a cave, breath stank enough to blow me over even with the burning cheese in the sizzling pan.
I flick my eyes to Reggie, who nods. I take the brain. Oh God, it’s jiggly, both fleshy and firm and soft and squishy at the same time. And cold, so cold. I hold it up to my mouth and smell that dark meat and rusty copper scent again, the one on Reggie’s breath after he grunted through one or two of them.
I press it to my mouth, my trembling mouth. I gag. The big guy sees me and starts to reach out a hand, either to snatch the brain away or yank my neck off, I don’t know which.
I take a sudden bite, just to shut him up. I tear it off, it’s hard, to get a chunk off. Blood comes out, cold across my lips, and finally the piece tears away. It’s thick and coppery inside my mouth, slimy like leather and chewy like gristle and I can’t help myself, every Cheesy Poof and Mallow Mar and Cocoa Pie and Choco Taco I’ve eaten since school let out for the holiday goes gushing forth, onto Big Guy’s face and down his lumberjack shirt.
I turn, reaching for the stove, knowing my goose is cooked, and grabbing the sizzling skillet by the handle. I launch it at the big guy’s face, splashing him with hot grease as the sizzling cheese goes flying and fuses with his left cheek like some special effect in a cheesy B-horror movie.
He howls and reaches for it and I slam him again with the pot, chopping off two fingers that go flying, black goo gushing in place of blood. He knocks the pan out of my hand and reaches for me, giant hands with cracked nails and blood all over his palms, but slips on my gelatinous projectile puke. He goes down, hard, hitting his head on the red hot burner and sloshing around helplessly in my vomit puddle.
I turn to find Reggie tearing limbs from the other two. I mean it, limbs. An arm goes flying, tendons waving like tentacles at the end, still squirming, just past my head.
“Come on,” I beg him, running for the door. “We’ve got to get back to the dorms. There are weapons there, things we can fight back with.”
I open the door and hear more grunting, groaning, and not just from behind us. There are scattered zombies here and there, shuffling around, chewing on limbs, blood oozing from their mouths, and not their own blood, either.
Reggie joins me, grabs my hand.
“I know a place,” he says, turning from the crowd, running back behind the school. It’s narrower back here, big air conditioning units and Dempsey dumpsters and giant trash compactors lining a gross but, for the moment, safe alley I’ve never seen before.
“They built a bunker, after the third outbreak,” he tells me, dragging me along. “For the faculty and staff. We had to stock it with potted meat and bottled water, then just last week we had to deliver an order of sterile pillowcases, so…”
He turns, fast, and by the time I catch up to him he’s shoved his fist through a skinny zombie’s chest. It comes out the other end, covered in black goo, and he yanks it out and just. Keeps. Running.
We turn a corner and there’s a door, gun metal gray, marked “No Admittance.” If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was just another utility shed or janitor’s closet. He fumbles with his keys, smashes the glass axe box by the sign with his elbow.
“Here,” he says. “You know what to do.”
I hold it, tight, like my stepdad trained me to do three years ago during the first outbreak. He hadn’t made it through that one, but I had. Thanks to him, mostly.
And here I am, an axe in my hand again. And I thought, I thought we were done with all this. The government said, with the Cure, there was no chance of another outbreak. So much for trusting the guy in the New White House.
A zombie is shuffling forward, a kid, my age, his eyes black, his mouth open, his nose gone. He looks like he’s fallen into a garbage disposal and come back again, without all of his original parts.
I hear my own whimpering over the sound of his one sneaker shuffling through the gravel. “Hurry,” I whimper to Reggie, who is fumbling with the keys. “Stop,” I whimper to the missing shoe zombie, who doesn’t, of course.
He keeps shuffling forward, mouth open, gaping, arms outstretched, covered in gore, nails broken, fingers broken. He looks at me, then through me, and I close my eyes and start swinging. Swinging, swinging, the axe handle feeling familiar in my hands, even the blood on my fingers feels familiar. When I open them again, the zombie’s in pieces on the gravel in front of me, black gooey blood draining into the cracks.
I feel a hand on my shoulder, whir, and Reggie knocks the axe out of my hand. “We’ll need it,” I say in a strange voice, half breathless, half demanding. “When they get inside.”
He shoves me in, shuts the door, twists about a dozen locks, bolts and finally a wheel that slams them all into place. “They won’t get in here. Trust me.”
I do. Amazingly, I do.
There are cots, bolted into the side walls, six to a wall. There is a table, and chairs, in the middle of the room, the fold up kind Mom would always use, under a nice tablecloth, of course, on Thanksgiving. There are stacks of boxes marked “potted meat” and “soup” and “crackers” and “bottled water.”
I whir and see more potted meat, stacked to the ceiling. And crackers, right next to them. “But… what will you eat?”
He shakes his head, avoiding my eyes. “It wasn’t designed for zombies, just against zombies.”
“Yeah, but… what will you eat?”
He looks back at me, eyes open and gray and hopeful. “Don’t worry, we’ll be rescued before… before I get hungry.”
I nod my head, not entirely sure. It took two weeks for the government to come find us during the last outbreak, and that was after having learned a ton of lessons in the first few. I heard zombies can go about a week, not much more, before the Cure starts to wear off and they must feed before turning back into one of them, one of the Shufflers.
He looks at me, a faraway expression on his face. I’m wondering if he’s wondering if I know that. I choose to forget it. I look down at my hands and see blood, lots of it.
He brings me a bottle of water, shows me a drain in the middle of the floor. He pours the water on my hands; they’re still trembling. He dries them off with a paper towel from a stack by the mirror over the sink in the corner.
Sits me down on a bed, sits next to me, stills my hands with his own. They’re cold, but not as cold as the big guy’s in the cafeteria.
“Hey,” I blurt, apropos of nothing. “We never had that beer.”
He smirks, pulls a six pack from under the bed. “The principal insisted on it,” he explains with a slow, measured wink that takes forever. “There’s cases of the stuff in here.”
I look and there are only four cans left in the little plastic holder. “My supervisor would sneak in here for a quick sip now and again,” he confesses, as if it’s his fault
I nod and he hands me one. I open it, my hands feeling a little better.
He opens his, practically yanking off the little tab in his long, gray fingers. I clink the top of his can with mine, looking into his eyes. “Happy Thanksgiving, Reggie.”
“Happy Thanksgiving…” His voice trails off. I realize, suddenly, I never told him my name. Then he says, all by himself, “… Cassie.”
“But how… how did you know?”
He smirks, taking a sip of his beer. He smiles, then takes one more, sets it down on the ground. He’s had enough. “I guess now is as good a time as any to tell you I’ve kind of been stalking you…”
I spurt out some beer foam onto the floor, then wipe my lips with the back of my hand. “Now you tell me,” I huff, but it’s kind of hard to be mad at the creep who just saved your life.
* * * * *
Story # 13:
Zombies Don’t Eat Popcorn