The Undeath of Rob Zombie
By William Young
Copyright 2011 William Young
Norman, Oklahoma - Day 199
Robert Sebastian Colfax had been thirty-four-years old the day Marguerite Rosario Del Rio bit him on the calf. She had been undead for almost sixteen weeks at that point, a janitorial team member who cleaned the Catlett Music Hall on the University of Oklahoma campus five days a week until she had been bitten by John Kennedy Creighton, an undergraduate student with an undecided major but a more than a passing interest in the oboe. Marguerite had bled to death after stumbling away from Creighton and hiding in a janitorial supply closet.
Creighton had been killed a minute later by a state trooper. John Creighton’s body had been burned with hundreds of others in a pit dug in the football field. In the confusion of the battle for the campus, nobody had thought to look for the third-generation Mexican woman, and she had undied in the closet and awoken to living death. She had no concept of time in the closet, sitting there against the wall in complete darkness, never making a single move to stand up and explore the oven-hot room she was in.
And then the door opened and Rob Colfax and Claire Benoit shined a flashlight into the room, neither of them concerned there might be an undead third-generation Mexican janitor waiting patiently for the opportunity to taste living flesh. So unconcerned about the prospect of a zombie janitor in the closet were Rob and Claire that Rob stepped into the closet and shined the light up, above the undead body of Marguerite, playing the beam across the shelves of cleaning supplies.
“Shit, nothing,” Rob said.
And then he felt the pair of hands grab his right calf followed quickly by the bite of teeth. He yelled.
“What the fuck!”
He shined the beam down on Marguerite as she shook her head back-and-forth like a thresher shark tearing at a fish, biting flesh, blood trickling down his leg and foaming around Marguerite’s lips. Marguerite’s undead life ended seconds later, as Rob quickly pulled his Smith & Wesson .357 revolver from its holster and squeezed a round into her skull, splitting it open and spattering brain matter everywhere. The sound of the shot deafened both Rob and Claire.
Rob stumbled backward out of the closet and into Claire, who had her hands up over her ears too late to muffle the sound of the pistol and just in time for her to lose her balance and fall down when Rob bumbled into her. She hit the ground hard, grimacing as she landed on her tailbone. She stared at the bloody bite on Rob’s right calf muscle and then looked past him into the dark closet. Rob looked down at Claire and then turned the beam of the flashlight back into the closet, where the deathless, lifeless corpse of Marguerite Rosario Del Rio lay on its back, a pool of long-since dried blood blackening the floor around her body. Rob worked the beam up to the un-living woman’s body and trained it on her split-open head, one of her eyeballs having been blown out of her skull and hanging by fibers to the socket, the contents of her skull moist.
Rob looked down at Claire, holstered his pistol and extended his arm. “Come on, let me help you up.”
Instead of taking his hand, Claire pointed to the bite indentation on Rob’s calf: it was deep, the flesh torn and seeping blood, but the zombie hadn’t actually bitten anything out of him. Rob eyed the bite for a few seconds before shrugging off his backpack and rustling through it for a bottle of tincture of iodine, which he unscrewed and began dribbling over the wound. There was a rumor making its way through the town that not everyone bitten became infected and that iodine could help. Nobody knew anyone who had tried, but nearly everyone still alive carried some sort of iodine solution or pills.
“What the fuck was she doing in there?” Rob said as he pasted a large square Band-Aid brand bandage to his wound. “I mean, what the fucking fuck was a fucking zombie doing just waiting in a supply closet? That fucking doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
Rob shook his head in total disbelief. He wanted to cry at the unfairness of it all: he was careful when out scavenging and didn’t make “rookie” mistakes. There was no reason for a zombie to be sitting in a closet waiting for someone to open it. None. That’s not what zombies did.
“You okay to walk?” Claire asked.
Rob nodded. “Yeah, it’s not that bad. It looks worse than it feels.”
“I think we should call this a day and head back.”
Rob muttered a small, plaintive laugh.
“What?” Claire asked.
“I can’t go back. Not now, not with this.”
“Sure you can.”
“No. I can’t. They’ll put me in the quarantine yard and wait me out, and if I turn into a zombie, they’ll kill me.”
Claire tucked some strands of hair behind each ear. “Yeah. If you become a zombie. Do you want to become a zombie and have us not kill you?”
Rob laughed a chuckle of genuine mirth at that. He smiled. “I don’t want to become a zombie and I don’t want anyone to kill me either way, to be honest with you.”
“Maybe the iodine will kill the infecting agent?” Claire said unconvincingly.
Rob shrugged. “Maybe. But I’m going to stay here for the next day or two and wait it out. I’ve got a couple of Power Bars and some water, so I’ll be okay. If I turn, well, I won’t turn in the yard, so I’ll be out here and you can hunt me down like free-range zombie. If I don’t turn, I’ll just show up in a couple of days and knock on the door.”
“They’ll still put you in the yard,” Claire said matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, sure, but if I don’t turn dead in the next day or so, I won’t turn dead, then, either, so I won’t have to be out in the yard wondering about my fate.”
Claire stared at him for a long moment and Rob looked down at the bite wound. Nobody had ever recovered. They’d both heard stories, rumors really, of people who’d been bitten and not transformed, but neither they nor anyone they knew had ever known such a person. In the world of the undead, being bitten meant becoming one of the living dead.
“Go, I’ll be okay,” Rob said. “I’m sure the iodine will help.”
Claire nodded sadly, looked him in the eyes, a look Rob interpreted as farewell, and she backed a few steps away from him, trying to smile confidently. Rob nodded his head and shouldered his backpack, all the while watching as Claire made her way down the hall to the stairwell. He had to watch her, she was armed with a 9 mm Colt Defender and he knew from shooting with her that she’d be able to plug him in the skull from inside 15 yards with ease.
After the door had creaked shut, Rob slid down against the wall and put his head in his hands, tears of disbelief finally welling in his eyes. Fucking zombies. Why the fuck was a zombie chick hiding in a closet in the music hall? What the fuck did her zombie brain think it was doing? It made no sense, and the unfairness of it all bewildered Rob into a teary rage of whimpers, shouts and weeping. He didn’t want to become a zombie. He wanted to go back to the house, open a basement-cold beer and make love to Barbara Zane, his girlfriend of two months since he and Claire had rescued her from the overnight lock-up in the Norman Police Department. She’d been arrested for DUI the night before police had been ordered to the outskirts of town with various fire departments and the nearby National Guard unit to form a skirmish line against a horde of undead coming down North Flood Avenue from Oklahoma City. That was three months ago.
After a while, he got hold of himself, wiped his eyes dry and blew his nose out on the floor, wiping it with the back of his hand and then onto the seat of his shorts. Why hadn’t he worn jeans today? It was only 104 Fahrenheit outside, and a dry heat at that. He shook his head and made his way out of the building and along the sidewalk runn
ing parallel to College Avenue, strolling beneath the shade trees and turning absent-mindedly onto West Boyd Street, past a series of cars frozen in a multiple rear-end car crash. He crossed the empty street and almost forgot that he needed to be aware of zombies - this area was frequently overrun with them (former students turned undead, Rob and others figured they came back to campus out of habit) - and walked up to the carcass of The Library, a once-popular bar and restaurant that had been ransacked and looted months ago. It was full of broken glass and overturned tables now, the front doors long-ago pried off, the windows broken. Rob missed the quiet comfort of the place on a weeknight in the summer, when there were fewer students to deal with and it was easier to get a seat at the bar and watch television over a beer.
Zombies. Why were there even zombies in the first place? How was that even possible? Why didn’t the re-animated dead bodies continue to deteriorate and become dust in the wind? What made them walk and seek out living humans? And why? Zombies were like mosquitoes in that they seemed to serve no observable purpose in the ecosystem except to feed and spread disease: the world would miss neither if either suddenly blinked out of existence.
“Why?” Rob shouted up into the sky at the cumulus clouds