“CUT!”
I stand, arms outstretched, above the open grave. It’s not really a grave, FYI. It’s a mound of endless black cookie crumbs – they work better than dirt, or so the stage hands tell me – stacked two feet high above a platform of chicken wire and cardboard.
We’re on a soundstage, a small one, but big enough to house a makeshift cemetery full of toppling headstones and partying teenagers, which is where I come in.
The Director approaches, a young guy, fairly built, sporting a hipster goatee and an ironic T-shirt that shows a glowing green zombie shuffling after a victim in running shorts and a headband. Above it a caption says, “Zombies hate fast food!” (Cute; real cute.)
His ball cap is backward, of course, on a head of long greasy hair (of course). Everyone on the set, all the humans that is, have greasy hair. I never knew this about movie people. Did you? He has a sharp nose and sharper eyes and right now his nostrils are flaring, pink on each side.
“Zed, I told you, stop looking in the camera.” His voice is nasally, and whiny, but also pointedly pissed off. His breath is warm on my face, and not entirely pleasant. It smells like coffee and more coffee.
“But it’s right there,” I say, literally almost touching it with my finger it’s so close. “Where else should I look?”
Darren – that’s the Director’s name, Darren Dark, and no I’m not making that up, though he probably is – puts his long, skinny finger to his long, pointed chin and nods. “Well, I dunno Benjy, tell me… where did you look when you rose from the grave?”
The other zombies snort. He looks at them, a blush rising to his hollow cheeks. I ignore them and try to answer in a way he’ll understand. “Darren, I came to in a plate of mashed potatoes, in the middle of my high school cafeteria, like half the other zombies who survived the second outbreak. I’m no more familiar with graves than you are.”
Wrong choice of words. I know it the minute they leave my mouth. I can kind of feel all the air being sucked out of the living crew members as they look from me to Darren Dark and back again.
They stand, just beyond the crushed cookie and chicken wire graveyard, in T-shirts and goatees and headphones and boom mikes and each one with a cup of coffee in his hand.
“Hmmm,” Darren says, mulling over his reply, which from the looks of the fire behind his bright green eyes is going to be a real barn burner, “I’d say after having directed four Zombie Groom movies, I’m fairly familiar with graves, right gang?”
The crew, about eleven rag tag souls in matching backward ball caps and greasy hair and ironic zombie T-shirts, mumbles and nods, staring daggers at the zombie in the pale blue tuxedo daring to argue with their beloved director.
“Well, sir, if I may. I mean, Zombie Groom 4: Revenge of the Bridesmaids took place entirely in a Las Vegas casino, so… not sure there was even a grave in that movie.”
There is some chuckling from the zombies behind me, and even a few crew members.
Darren’s face grows flushed, but then he cocks his head. “How… how would you even know that? I mean, you’re a zombie.”
I turn to look at my pal, Benjy, holding a rubber shovel and covered in rags to make him look “more zombie-ish.” He frowns and begs me with his eyes to “zip it.”
But I can’t. I’m angry, and not just because all zombies are always all angry.
“I wasn’t born a zombie, Mr. Dark. I was alive when I saw Zombie Groom 3, and I was alive when I saw Zombie Groom 1 and 2, too.”
“Then you should know I’m pretty familiar around a graveyard, kid.”
“I do, you’re right. I… I didn’t mean that. What I meant, was, I’ve never risen out of a grave before.”
He looks from me to the half-dozen living dead extras behind me, then back to me. “Then what are you doing here, Zed? What are any of you doing here?”
My voice is hoarse and gravelly. “Hey, you’re the one who asked us here.”
He huffs, pacing around in front of his canvas chair, the one with “Director” written on one side and his (probably fake) name, “Darren Dark,” on the other.
“Break,” he says to his assistant, Kyle, a younger, shorter, thinner but otherwise carbon copy imagine of Darren in a size medium Zombie Groom T-shirt and a set of earphones dangling around his neck. I don’t know what they’re for. I’ve never seen him use them but they’re always there. I don’t even know if they’re plugged into anything.
“Okay,” says Kyle to the assembled crew, “you heard him everybody, that’s a break. Be back in fifteen…”
A dozen crew members in flannel shirts and battery packs mumble and shuffle toward the crafts table, which is really just a fold-down picnic table with a giant coffee machine, some paper cups and stale donuts.
I roll my eyes and duck beneath the chicken wire, crouching down until I’m out from under the makeshift grave I’ve been trying to rise out of for the last two hours.
Just offstage and to the left, away from the human crew, shuffle my undead friends from Reanimation Reform School. They have a Drama Department there, not much of one considering only half of us can talk, but still it beats spending four periods a day in PE playing zombie dodge ball.
When Scream Studios, makers of the successful Zombie Groom series, showed up one day, looking for “real zombies” to play zombie extras in their latest movie, we jumped at the chance.
Now, two weeks later, and our third day on the set, it looks like Scream Studio’s little publicity stunt to be the first movie ever to use “re-alive, reanimated persons in a motion picture under the Reanimated Re-Employment Act of 2017, allowing the living dead to be employed with only moderate supervision,” is backfiring.
“What are you doing?” whispers Benjy as the others cluster around.
He looks ridiculous in his Hollywood zombie get up of torn clothes, wrinkled cap and fake bloodstains all over his chin. If Darren Dark only knew how Benjy dressed around Reanimation Reform School, in his pajama pants and hoodie, sunglasses and man bag, he’d be shocked.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re screwing this up for us, Zed,” says Carla, looking even worse in a bedraggled wig and a moldy pink dress, which is particularly funny since she’s one of the more fashionable zombies in school.
“How? Why?” I ask, shocked that they wouldn’t want more accuracy in, you know, an actual zombie movie. Now that we’re all, you know, actual zombies. I figured they’d be cheering me on, not getting ready to chase me out of town with pitchforks and torches.
“Quit bugging the director so much,” pleads Benjy as, a few feet away, our Handlers watch uncomfortably, human hands itchy on their creaky black (stun) gun belts. Technically, we’re not supposed to gather like this; it’s illegal for more than six zombies to congregate at one time, but since we’re under such close supervision, I guess they’re letting it slide. Or waiting for someone to go grab a bazooka and wipe us out all at once, one or the other.
“Okay, okay,” I say, holding up my grayer than normally gray hands, thanks to the funky pink-haired chick in the makeup department with all the tattoos on her neck.
“Don’t you like being here?” asks Carla, taller than me; older by a good few years. “I mean, with the way your room is decorated back at school, I know you gotta love the movies.”
“I do,” I say. “Guys, I’m not trying to screw anything up. Just… don’t you want to see an accurate zombie movie for once?”
Their faces grow blank and I sniff human flesh from behind. I turn to find Darren Dark standing behind me, eyes open and curious. “Tell me, Zed, what’s so inaccurate about my movies?”
“Oh, uh, hi Mr. Dark. I didn’t… didn’t smell you standing there.”
I watch as Benjy, Carla and the others from my Drama class scurry away, back to the sidelines, back to their Handlers.
One by one, they inch off the hot set, straggling toward the cages lined behind the cemetery set where we’ve been sleeping every night. They’re
tall but thin, like the ones you see lions or tigers in at the zoo.
Suddenly, we’re alone; Darren Dark and I. Well, except for Lacy, my Handler, a 240-pound giant of a woman in the Handler uniform of khaki slacks, black sweater with her ID Badge and green beret.
Around her waist hangs a gun belt with a stun gun on either side, like an old west gunslinger. Her hair is shockingly red under her green beret, and ever since we were introduced before leaving Reanimation Reform School, I can’t help but think of Christmas every time I look at her.
Handlers are like armed escorts. By law, every zombie working among humans has to have one, all the time, everywhere they go. It’s a new law, and since the government, i.e. the taxpayers, has to pay for them not a very popular one, but for now it’s the only way I could ever be in a zombie movie, so I suppose I should be grateful for her.
Too bad she’d like nothing more than to re-kill me.
“I’m waiting,” says Darren Dark, crossing his arms over his chest. There is a tattoo on his left bicep of a broken heart. I wonder who broke it. Probably himself, since that’s who he seems to be in love with.
“Oh, well, I just mean… I thought since you hired real zombies to work on your latest Zombie Groom movie, you actually wanted our opinions about how to make the zombie action more, you know… accurate.”
Darren looks at Lacy and both of them chuckle. “What, kid? You think anybody who lived through the first outbreak, let alone the second, doesn’t know what a little ‘zombie action’ looks like?”
His look is so smug, his tone so righteous, I can’t even try to bite my tongue. “Yeah, well, try being one, Mr. Dark.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Zed?”
“It’s supposed to mean that zombies got attacked once, too, you know? We know what it’s like before and after someone you love turns you into one of the living dead.”
Darren nods absently. “The one thing you’re missing, Zed, is what happens in between, while you’re in the angry place, before you’ve fed. That’s where you and your friends have a big blind spot.”
I nod. He’s right. There’s that time, that span, when a zombie has bitten you and you become one yourself, where you’re blacked out, zonked, with no idea what you’re doing or who you’re doing it to. Humans call it the Angry Phase; scientists do, too. They’ve discovered that, if certain zombies eat fresh, live, living brains before the angry phase ends, they’ll retain more of their human qualities; be able to talk, for instance, or read and possibly even write, like most of us back at Reanimation Reform School.
But those who go beyond that 24-48 hours of the Angry Phase without eating, who don’t feed when their reanimated body needs it the most, when their brains are still receptive to life and re-living, are doomed to forever be the classic horror movie zombie; restless, angry all the time, hungry all the time, unable to reason beyond how and where to find food, not talking save for the most rudimentary grunts or hand signals.
Forever dead, but still forever alive.
That’s what the Handlers are for. While scientists have proven that any zombie who can talk is “safe,” the government doesn’t quite buy it. So while they passed the Reanimation Re-Employment Act by a narrow margin, they tacked on a law that stated our Handlers must be with us at all times, just in case we turn back into regular, horror movie zombies.
“But you’re not making a movie about the in between time,” I remind Darren Dark. “You’re making a movie about a Zombie Groom who’s been slashed, burned, drawn and quartered, melted in acid AND tossed into a wood chipper and yet miraculously lives to continue to torture his poor, human bride for a fifth time.”
Darren Dark offers a rare smile. “I knew it; you’re a closet fan of these movies.”
“There’s nothing closet about it, Mr. Dark. I am a fan of these movies. The only posters on my wall back at school are Zombie Groom posters, so… I’m saying all this as a fan, for real.”
He regards me suspiciously. From just beyond the graveyard set, complete with fiberglass tombstones and putting green grass, we hear the creak of my Handler, Lacy, sitting in one of the crew chairs.
We both look at her, fleetingly, then back at each other. “So if you’re a fan, Zed, why are you working so hard to derail this movie?”
“I’m not.” I pace, in tight circles, creaking over the Astroturf beneath my feet. The powder blue tux is loose and goofy on my long, lanky, fat-free zombie body. “I just… don’t you want to make it better?”
He closes his eyes dramatically, shakes his head, puts his finger to his chin, then down again. “By all means, Zed, please enlighten me how I could make one of the most popular B-movie zombie series ever even better than it already is.”
I stare, slack-jawed at him. “You’re serious?”
He paces a little, as if asking himself the very same question. “Yes, absolutely, of course. Why wouldn’t I want a real zombie’s input on a zombie movie?”
I sniff the air, wishing I could smell sarcasm. “For real? And you won’t fire me if I say something you don’t like?”
He smirks. “Technically, you’re not actually getting paid so, I can’t really fire you.”
I roll up the sleeves of my blue tux jacket. He holds up a finger. “Wait,” he says to me, then he walks over to Lacy. She shakes her head, twice, and then stands. Abruptly. I keep waiting for her to switch on one of her stun guns and jab it in the director’s throat, like she did to me the other day when I wouldn’t get in my cage, but instead she just looks at me, hawks a big loogie on the ground and storms off the set.
“Isn’t that illegal?” I ask him when he comes back.
He scratches his goatee absently. “What, spitting on the set?”
“No, sending my Handler away like that?”
He shrugs. “Probably.”
I listen to her slamming doors and stomping away. “She’s pretty by the book,” I say, touching the small stun gun holes she left on the back of my neck the other day. “What’d you tell her?”
“I told her I can’t fire you, but I can fire her. She’ll be back in fifteen minutes, so… let’s make this quick.”
He sits down in his director’s chair, grabbing the cup of coffee from the little holder in the armrest. He winces and I figure it must be cold. I walk between a few headstones, smirking, and pour him a fresh, hot cup. But when I come back and hand it to him, he puts it in the empty arm rest. “Uh, thanks, but… I think I’ll just drink this for now.”
Oh, so it’s like that, huh? I get it. He doesn’t want to drink zombie-made coffee. That’s cool. I thought maybe, since he had agreed to listen to me, he wasn’t gonna be like that but it’s cool. Now that I know he actually is just another zombie-hating dick bag, well… the gloves are off.
“So,” he sighs, crossing his legs as I lean on a tombstone. “I’m waiting.”
I’d take a deep breath if I could. Instead I just shrug and begin. “Let’s take the whole Zombie Groom concept. Now, the first one was a classic.”
“Thank you.”
I cock my head. “But, you didn’t direct that one.”
His nostrils flare a little as the color inches toward his hollow, stubble covered cheeks. “Well, you’re technically right but I was assistant to the assistant director, so… I was intimately involved.”
“Okay, sure, but you have to admit, and I think the fans will back me up on this one, Zombie Groom 1: Revenge of the Living Bride was the strongest in the series. Why? Because it had a plot.”
He sits up. “Now wait just a minute—”
“You promised to listen,” I remind him.
He sits back, goes to sip his coffee, remembers it’s cold, looks at the steaming cup I’ve brought him, and drinks the old sludge anyway. (Dick. Bag. Confirmed.)
“Now, in the first one, Zombie Groom is a good guy. Yes, there’s a zombie invasion during his wedding reception, yes, a zombie groomsman bites him on the shoulder and turns him, but he spends the entire movie trying t
o save his bride from the outbreak. Now that’s a good plot. Sure, the effects were cheesy and low budget, but nobody cared because we got caught up in the story. Then, in Zombie Groom 2: Revenge of the Zombie Groomsman, suddenly, Zombie Groom is a bad guy?”
Darren shrugs. “Zed, think about it. How are you going to make Zombie Groom – a groom who is a zombie – a good guy?”
“Okay, I get it. I kinda dug it when the living bride rejects him at the end of Zombie Groom and I get his motivation but… the whole movie is suddenly about the epic battle between Zombie Groom and the Zombie Groomsman who bit him in the first place.”
“Yes, I don’t see your point?”
“Well, Mr. Dark. I only saw the movie a few times but even I remember that the Zombie Groomsman gets torn to pieces in the first movie.”
He scratches his head. “No one else seemed to notice. Besides, back then, no one really believed zombies existed.”
I nod. He has a point. “Moving on. Zombie Groom 3: Revenge of the Caterer? Come on; that’s just silly.”
“Hey, it made over twelve million theatrical and another twenty mil on DVD, you can’t argue with the fans.”
“But that’s just it; you could have made twice that much if you just tried to make a good movie.”
His voice is deep and, actually, pretty dark. “That’s what we’re trying to do here, Zed.” He stands, paces, puts down his cold coffee, picks it back up, puts it down.
“That can’t be true, Mr. Dark.”
He stops, whips around and inches closer. “Why you little…”
Then he remembers who he’s talking to. Or, specifically, what he’s talking to. He looks away, toward where Lacy was sitting, only to suddenly remember that he’s the one who sent her away.
When he looks back, I’m smiling. “What’s the matter, Mr. Dark? You don’t like my feedback?”
He takes a step or two back. He’s taller than me, by at least a couple of inches, but anyone who’s lived through an outbreak, let alone two, knows a zombie’s size can be deceiving.
As I recall it was a puny freshman who bit me, and I used to be a linebacker for the varsity football team.
“No, no,” he says, more quietly now, sitting back down. “Please, it’s very… enlightening.”
I can tell the word tastes like copper crossing his lips, and I feel kind of bad. It’s not a crime to make crappy zombie movies but, now that I’m a zombie, I guess I just want better crappy zombie movies.
I mean, I have the rest of my afterlife to watch them. Hundreds of years, by some estimates. That’s a lot of crappy zombie movies. Is seeing a better class of crappy zombie movie too much to ask?
“Okay, well, let’s talk about this movie. From what I’ve read of the script, Zombie Groom rises up out of the grave. Again—”
He starts to talk but I hold up a threatening finger, pushing him back into his chair. “Feedback is feedback, Mr. Dark. You asked for it, you got it.”
He scratches his goatee nervously and looks stage left, to see if my Handler is anywhere close. I can tell, just by the lack of her over perfumed smell, she isn’t.
“So, he rises again. That’s fine. Maybe somehow between the time he got thrown into a wood chipper at the end of Zombie Groom 5: Revenge of the Honeymooners and the beginning of this one, zombies somehow learned to knit their bodies back together. Fine, whatever. Tell it to my friend Ace back at Reanimation Reform School, who lost a thumb in the first outbreak and can’t review movies anymore, but whatever…”
I give him a minute to laugh at my joke, even if just to be polite, but I guess that’s not in his nature. “Moving on. Now, let’s get to the basics of the plot. As I understand it, once Zombie Groom rises from the grave, somehow miraculously after knitting himself together between movies, he goes to find Zombie Bride. Who isn’t a zombie, yet anyway. And so, miraculously, since his finger got thinner in between movies, his wedding ring, which he still has, after five movies, being hacked apart, blown to bits, burned down to bone, a nuclear bomb tied to his neck AND being mowed down by one of those giant wrecking balls, miraculously, he finds his wedding ring in the bottom of the coffin.”
“Yeah, so?” Even fearful, Darren Dark is still indignant.
“Oh, it’s not the wedding ring part that’s so ridiculous. It’s that somehow, with forethought before they got married, Zombie Groom and Living Bride put their address inside the ring so, five movies later Zombie Groom can pick it up, look confused and find his wife’s address.”
Now Darren Dark is smiling. “That was my idea. I love it!”
“Okay,” I admit. “It is sort of clever, but… you actually expect people to believe that after being stalked through all those previous movies the Living Bride is still going to be living in the same house? Wouldn’t she have gone underground or something? Joined the Resistance? The Zombie Witness Protection Program? Anything to get away from Zombie Groom?”
He scratches his chin, then shakes his head. “Okay, it’s a little convenient but I don’t think it’s too big a deal.”
I nod, ironically, but he thinks I’m nodding in agreement. “Okay, fine, again, this is all just feedback. So, then, immediately after rising from the grave, for no apparent reason other than to have something behind the opening credits of a movie called Zombie Groom 6: Revenge of the Zombie Groom, the Zombie Groom stumbles into a group of teenagers partying in a graveyard at midnight.”
He shifts in his chair uncomfortably. “Right, well, the studio felt our audience was skewing old, so they wanted us to work in something that would appeal to a younger demographic.”
“Well, why not just have Zombie Groom stumble into a sorority house full of half-naked cheerleaders then? Or a high school locker room and smack his victims on the butt with a towel?”
“Now, Zed, listen…”
“And we don’t even get to the Living Bride until, like, the last twenty pages of the script? I just don’t understand.”
“Our latest data reveals that, frankly, audiences don’t care for the Living Bride.”
“So why make a movie about her?”
“Well, as you know, Zombie Groom finally turns her at the end of this film so, in the next chapter, we can reboot the whole series with a spinoff called Zombie Bride: Revenge of the Spinster.”
I shake my head. “So why not just have Zombie Groom bite her in the beginning of this movie? Cut out all the whole Zombie Groom versus the Random Multicultural Teenagers in the Graveyard business and make it what it always should have been: Zombie Groom versus Living Bride. That I’d pay to see.”
He knits his brow, like this is potentially actually a possibility. “But how, Zed? I mean, how do you start the movie that way? Why would Living Bride come to see this guy she hates? Who’s tried to kill her for five straight movies?”
I shrug. I’m real good at shrugging. “I dunno, maybe she feels bad, for the marriage that could have been. They were kind of likeable together in the first movie, before he becomes a zombie. Maybe instead of Zombie Groom rising from the grave in the opening credits, you have a montage of happier times between the happy couple. The wedding, photographs, you could even do scratchy old VHS film and have wedding guests talking about what a great couple they are. Then cut to Living Bride at Zombie Groom’s graveside, weeping, laying a photo album or something, and as she puts it down on the ground, his hand rises from the grave and—”
He rises, pacing suddenly. “But we’ve already shot the credit sequence, and the actress playing Living Bride is only budgeted for three days’ work. Plus, we hired you guys to be the teenagers, so… no, no, it’ll never work.”
But his eyes are glazed over, he’s mumbling with the possibilities. I can see it in his energy, the cracking of his knuckles as he paces, back and forth. I’m so hyped by the idea, I overstep. “Listen, I know this is low budget city but, maybe if you take me to the studio, let me pitch the idea to the producers, then we can—”
He chuckles, softly at first. Then he turns,
eyes wide and wild, laughing. Loudly. “We?”
I grovel. My big break, talking to the director of my favorite movies and I blew it. “Well, obviously I don’t mean ‘we.’ I mean, Zombie Groom is your baby. I’m just saying, if you took me we could convince them. You. I mean, you could convince them.”
“Take you? Kid, don’t you get it? This is it for you. I’m humoring you until your Handler gets back, and the minute she does you’re off my set, for good. The closest you’ll ever come to being in a Zombie Groom movie is seeing it in theaters. That is, if they ever let your type back into theaters.”
Offstage, still yards away, I smell Lacy ambling back. I inch closer and say, “My type?”
But he’s no longer afraid. He senses he’s about to be rescued, so he’s bolder now. Cockier. “Yeah, sure, you know. Shufflers. Zombies. Cannibals. Degenerates. Killers. You know… your type.”
I growl and he steps back, but in doing so he sees Lacy and he smiles. “Forget it, kid. Your little Hollywood fantasy about the perfect zombie movie is done, over, kaput—”
I put my hand on his throat, if only to stop the flow of air and, thus, the flow of nasty, ugly words in his high, whiny, hipster voice. Lacy sees it, reaches for both stun guns and I say, “Follow me.”
“Zed, listen…” Her voice is firm, and she reaches me quickly, but I still have a human’s throat in my hand and no stun gun, no Handler, in the world is fast enough to stop me from yanking out his entire spine if I want.
I use my best zombie voice, which is pretty scary-ific if I do say so myself. “Follow. Me. Handler.”
We go to Darren Dark’s trailer. A few of the cast members are milling out behind the set, smoking, and I grab the director around the shoulder. “Wave,” I order. “Wave like we’re the best of zombie friends.”
He does. His assistant, Kyle, looks troubled. I say, “Tell him, tell him we’re cool, Darren.”
“We’re cool, Kyle!” he shouts, making Kyle smile uncertainly. “Zed here is, well, he’s just gonna give me some notes on the third act plot structure. Give us a few minutes and we’ll set up for the next shot, k?”
He opens the trailer door with a key, fumbling to the point where I know, I just know, Kyle and the others will pick up on it. Finally, the door swings open and we rush in. I lock it behind me.
Lacy stands, stun guns at the ready. I stand, fingers clutching either side of Darren’s throat. I can feel the blood pulsing through his veins beneath my fingertips. “Drop them,” I say to her.
She refuses, flicking them instead. Little lightning bolts of electricity ping between the fang-shaped bolts at the tip of each gun. My nostrils flare at the sudden whiff of ozone in the air. “Drop. Them.”
She smirks, mimicking. “Make. Me.”
Darren’s blood pulses beneath my fingers, faster now with the stress, the tension in the room. I know she’s bluffing, testing me, but I don’t care. She may be a Handler, trained in a three week course at the government’s new underground, zombie proof facility, but I’ve been a zombie since the second outbreak and there’s nothing the government can teach her that I didn’t know on my first day as one of the living dead.
Case in point: there’s a spot midway up the back of her neck where the skin is the softest, where the muscles the weakest, where the spine is the most exposed it’s ever going to be on the human body. Smiling, I use my free hand to reach out and punch it, dead center.
She falls with the smirk still frozen on her face, and I suddenly smell Darren’s pores opening, the sweat and fear filling the tiny camper that is his dressing room slash office slash casting couch between takes.
“So much for my Handler,” I tell him. “Now, grab your phone.”
He digs deep in one of the pockets on the side of his pants until he pulls up his smart phone. “Dial the studio.”
Even through his fear, he manages a smile. “You’re crazy,” he gasps, and I can feel the vibrations of his vocal chords through my fingers. “They’ll never go for it.”
I pinch tighter, so that he gurgles just a bit. “Do you like talking? Do you like speaking to other human beings? Would you like to keep doing so?”
He tries to speak, and can’t. I smile. “Just nod if you do.”
He nods, three times, fast.
I release his throat and shove him into the front seat, which swivels so you can drive or just sit there and be menaced by a zombie in a blue tuxedo costume, your choice.
“One call, that’s all I ask and you get to keep your vocal chords, Mr. Dark.”
He dials, fingers trembling, and clears his throat. Though the phone’s not on speaker, I hear the stilted voice of a receptionist say, “Silent Scream Studios, how may I direct your call?”
He is silent for a moment, looking up at me, desperate, angry, mad, sad. I inch forward and he croaks, “Sally, it’s Darren Dark. Can you put me through to Phil?”
“Mr. Armbruster is in an investor’s meeting, Mr. Dark. Can I give him your message?”
He covers the phone with his trembling hand and gives me “wtf” face. “What do I do now, Zed?”
“Tell them, Darren,” I bark, the inner rage seeping into my dead, dehydrated cells. “Tell them you’re scouting a new location and won’t be back for a couple of days. Tell them it’s necessary, for the ‘authenticity’ of your beloved movie.”
Darren trembles in his pleather driver’s seat. “The studio… the studio will never believe that.”
I look down at my Handler, so tempting, warm and full of fresh, vital brains. I look away before something… happens. “Make them believe it, Darren, or you’ll join my friend on the floor there.”
He smiles as he talks to Sally, as he pretends to play nice, all while my hand rests uneasy on his vibrating shoulder. It’s so warm, so soft under my cold, dead hands. How I’d love to pierce the flesh, lick the warm, thick blood off my fingers as I reach in and crunch through his ear to get to the soft, meaty brain inside.
But there’s something bigger going on here. An opportunity beyond the chance to eat an extra brain. Besides, I’ve been fed plenty this week. That’s what Handlers do, after all; make sure we’re fed and docile and easy to manage.
Until, you know; we’re not anymore.
I look down at mine. She was okay, as Handlers go. They’re not supposed to be nice; that’s what makes them good Handlers. Should I have snapped her neck like that? Probably not. Should she have shocked me six extra times with her cattle prod this morning just because I finally told her her head looked like a Christmas tree? Probably not.
Are we even? I’d say I’m one up on her but, that’s what she gets for underestimating the living dead. Darren gets off the phone. He looks pale; paler than usual. He’s about to get six shades paler; permanently.
“Fine, good, I’ve done what you asked. Now what—”
I kick out his legs and follow him to the floor, tearing open his stupid zombie T-shirt and gnawing into the soft flesh under his armpit. It tastes fragrant, like some fancy imported deodorant, but with a harsh chemical aftertaste that ruins the fresh jolt of blood that hits the back of my throat like a geyser. I eat a little of his soft flesh, but not much, because I want his arm to look normal under a T-shirt.
I stop. I force myself to stop, and sit back up as he spasms, legs kicking against a cabinet across from where he lies. I wipe the blood from my face, looking at it glistening and maroon on my marble pale skin. Shadows form on the wall across from me as I sit, patiently, watching his body grow still and calm as the virus shuts him down, struggling to take over his own cells and systems before shutting them down for good.
It will take a few hours for him to “reboot,” for the virus to take over, and when he wakes up he’ll find fresh brains, fresh food, lying right in front of him to help him avoid the raging hunger that separates the unfed from the undead.
Once he’s fed, and if I keep him fed, if I become his Handler, then he’ll be calm, he’ll be Darren Dark again, just better. And by
better, I mean a better director. Imagine, a zombie movie directed by… a zombie.
Now that’ll make headlines! But first, a little detour. There is a knock on the door, a gentle tug, then something more insistent. I drag his body in the back, then the Handler’s, bunching them close and pulling the curtain tight behind me. I hear footsteps circle the trailer, and then someone asking, “Doesn’t anyone have a key? How can no one have a key?”
Darren’s assistant, Kyle, reminds the first speaker, “You know how secretive Daren is, he had the only key. He wouldn’t even give me one.”
“Probably schtooping young actresses in there between shots,” says the other voice, pausing just outside the back window.
Kyle sounds a little jealous. “Darren would never do that. He just… he was afraid of the script getting into the wrong hands and leaked to the internet, you know?”
The other voice chuckles, skeptically. “Sure, kid. Whatever you say. So… what now?”
Kyle sounds dubious, but resigned. “I just got a call from the studio saying Darren was going location scouting, which is weird because I thought we’d already handled all that. Anyway, he’s not answering his phone, we can’t get in his trailer and, frankly, I’m beat. How about you?”
The other voice whistles. “You kidding? We been working nonstop for two weeks. I could use a break.”
“Well, he won’t be back on set until Monday, so… I guess we take the weekend off for a change.”
“What do we do with the zombies?”
Kyle chuckles. “I guess they go back into the cages until Darren returns.”
There is an awkward pause until the other voice, the burly one, chuckles. “How about that zombie punk in the blue tux that Darren walked off set?”
I grimace. Punk? Really? Punk? Is that the best you can do?
Kyle’s voice grows ominous and brusque. “I’m sure his Handler took care of him. That is, if Darren didn’t first…”
The voices keep talking, about future projects, about zombies, about bringing in some extra lights from the soundstage, but they grow distant as two pairs of human feet walk briskly away from the director’s trailer.
I watch Darren grow pale as the sun sets beyond the closed window shades. He will rise soon, and be hungry. But after a full serving of brains, he won’t want much more flesh beyond a spare shoulder or ribcage, maybe a thigh or bicep.
I can snack on my ex-Handler a little, just a little, until then. I mean, Darren will be so happy to be re-alive, to have a feast simply waiting for him, he won’t hardly miss a finger, toe or femur, now will he?