Breathers (11 page)

Some nights when I'm having trouble falling asleep, I can still hear my mother's voice, shaky and high-pitched, as she stood in the doorway to the wine cellar the day they brought me home, a towel held over her mouth and nose.

“What … what do you want, Andy?”

I want my life back, that's what I want. I want everything I used to have that's been taken away. I want everything I'm not allowed to do anymore. But mostly, I want someone I can share this with. Someone who can understand me. Someone who can hold me and comfort me late at night when the emptiness and the loss and the grief surround me like the walls of a coffin. Someone like Rita.

Before I can continue to justify my romantic interest in someone other than my dead wife, a woman screams.

When a Breather screams, there's not much to it other than throat and lungs. The primal force has been diluted. It's like a tea kettle at the end of its life. The scream of a zombie, on the other hand, sounds like the shriek of a raccoon mating, except the raccoon is on crack and weighs about 150 pounds.

This was a zombie scream.

The scream came from in front of me and to my left. I'd seen Naomi's lighter flare up off to my right a few minutes earlier and Helen stayed back at the mausoleum, which left Rita.

Another scream, followed by the sound of Rita struggling and Breathers laughing, then Tom's voice, loud and demanding, traveling through the darkness.

“Hey, leave her alone.”

I move as fast as I can toward Tom and Rita, but I'm still getting lapped by banana slugs. As I shuffle past the headstones, accompanied by the approaching voices of the other members of the group, Tom shouts out again, this time in despair.

“Get off him!” yells Rita. “Get off … !”

Her words are cut short by the sound of impact, of wood against flesh.

By the time I reach them, Tom is on the ground getting attacked by two young male Breathers in sweatshirts and jeans. A third Breather is keeping lookout while holding Rita at bay with a baseball bat and a pair of suture removers.

I want to help Rita and Tom, but there's not much I can do with a bum arm and a broken ankle. If I were a superhero, my name would be something like the Undead Gimp. Or Useless Zombie.

All I can think to do is let out a shriek.

“Hurry up, you guys!” says the lookout, his voice full of adrenaline as he brandishes the suture remover at me.

Tom lets out a final, struggling shout as one of the Breathers pulls his right arm free and slaps Tom in the face with his own disembodied hand. Then the three Breathers are scrambling away, whooping and laughing, waving Tom's right arm at us as they run off.

Carl and Jerry race past and chase after the Breathers. If not for my broken ankle, I'd be running alongside them. Instead, I shuffle over to see how Rita is as Naomi and Helen arrive.

“What happened?” asks Naomi, helping Tom to his feet.

“I heard Rita scream and saw these three Breathers pin her to the ground,” says Tom. “I tried to scare them off and the next thing I know, they're on top of me cutting at my stitches.”

“Fraternity boys,” says Rita. Her hair is tousled, thick strands hanging over her face. Otherwise, she appears unharmed. “I got this off one of their sweatshirts.”

She holds out her hand, revealing a silver pin of the Greek letters ΣX.

“I've heard of this,” says Helen. “It's some kind of pledge initiation. They have to steal a body part from the living dead.”

“They weren't trying to steal any body parts from me,” says Rita, the insinuation in her voice unmistakable.

This time, instead of a shriek, I let out a growl.

“Breathers are so disgusting,” says Naomi as she puts out her cigarette in her empty eye socket.

A few minutes later, Carl and Jerry return empty-handed.

Carl leans against a headstone. “They had a car waiting,” he says. “We couldn't reach them in time.”

Tom sighs and sits down, his left hand over his face.

“Sorry about your arm, dude,” says Jerry.

“Did you get a license plate number?” asks Naomi.

Carl shakes his head. “It was too dark.”

“What does it matter?” says Rita. “It's not like anyone's going to help us.”

She's right. The police would want to know what we were doing in the cemetery. The college would take the side of the fraternity. And the executive council for Sigma Chi would protect its members. If we presented the pledge pin as evidence, we would likely be accused of stealing it. No lawyer would take our case. No witnesses would back our claim. No court of public opinion would be in our favor. Even Amnesty International wouldn't intervene. After all, technically, we're not human.

Since we're no longer alive, any crimes committed against us are misdemeanors at worst. Most of the time, they're not even considered crimes. So we have no legal protection. No public advocate. No recourse for the abuse and humiliation that we endure from a society that reviles us.

If you've never seen someone get his arm torn out of his socket by a gang of drunk college fraternity boys who slapped him in the face with his own hand, then you probably wouldn't understand.

'm sitting home, in my wine cellar studio, writing a letter to my representative.

It's a petition, really. A sort of a cease-and-desist request. Nothing outlandish. Nothing unreasonable. I'm simply asking the government to give the undead back their unalienable rights, not the least of which is the right to not get dismembered and to not have your arm stolen as part of a fraternity initiation.

I think that's in the Constitution somewhere, right after the amendment repealing Prohibition.

For the first few months after reanimating, I led a fairly sheltered zombie existence in my parents’ wine cellar. Sure, I've been verbally abused by everyone from prepubescents to octogenarians, and I've heard horror stories about the atrocities committed against zombies. I've even been threatened with zombie zoos and medical research labs and Cadaver College (all by my father). But I hadn't experienced the dangers of being one of the undead until I witnessed the attacks on Walter and Tom.

While the dismemberment of Walter opened my eyes, the stealing of Tom's arm hit me on a more personal level. Maybe
it's because I was standing right there and looked into the eyes of the Breathers who attacked him. Maybe it's because they attacked Rita, as well. Or maybe it's because Tom is my friend and I know how embarrassing this is for him.

You have to understand about Tom.

First of all, he lives with his mother. Sure, so do I, but Tom was living with his mother
before
the pair of Presa Canarios tore into him like Mike Tyson going after Evander Holyfield's earlobe.

Second, Tom is what Jerry would call a Magoo. A doofus. Sweet and naive. The kind of person others would have made fun of even when he was a Breather. Chances are pretty good that Tom was the kid in your high school who wore corduroy and plaid, who ate lunch by himself, and who routinely had his clothes stolen from his gym locker. The phrase
atomic wedgie
comes to mind.

Third, even among zombies, Tom is self-conscious. Sure, we all finger our stitches and our wounds or play with little knobs of exposed bone, but Tom obsesses with his loose flaps of skin as though he either can't get used to the idea that they're real or he thinks he can somehow make them go away.

Now his right arm is gone. Stolen. As a prank. Without any regard to his feelings or his sense of equilibrium. And that's just not right. Something has to change. Something has to be done. To paraphrase George Herbert Walker Bush:
This aggression will not stand.

So I'm writing my letter. My petition. My Constitutional request. Specifically, I'm addressing the First Section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which more or less says:
No State shall enforce any law which abridges the privileges of its citizens, nor deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process, nor deny any person equal protection of the law.

The problem I'm running into involves the definition of
citizens
or
persons
, which is the language in which the Fourteenth Amendment and the rest of the Constitution is written. It's a little jargony and difficult to follow at times, with vague references to persons and no mention of zombies. The whole life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness thing? The self-evident truth that all men are created equal, even if they're un-dead men? That's in the Declaration of Independence, which doesn't really stand up to Constitutional interpretation. It's a nice idea, though. Just not realistic when actually put into practice. More of a guideline than a truth.

What is self-evident is that nothing's going to change for us unless we do something to affect our nonhuman status. Unless we can change the way we're perceived by Breathers. It's not as though zombies are a social issue that just popped up over night. It's not like we haven't been a recognized par t of the culture for most of the past century.

During the Great Depression, we blended in with the homeless and stood in bread lines with the unemployed—which didn't go over well, since we were taking handouts from the living. The only thing more unpopular than zombies in the early 1930s was Herbert Hoover.

World War II provided us with the chance to contribute to society as most of the male zombie population enlisted to serve our country. But our participation was kept secret by the government and our contributions edited from history. Breathers don't want to know that the first troops to land at Normandy were the American undead.

While the 1950s brought the beginning of the civil rights movement for African Americans, zombies became increasingly targeted for discrimination and violence. Public lynchings were common, and you didn't have to be a card-carrying member of the KKK to enjoy one.
Happy Days
my ass.

During the 1960s, some of us escaped to either Vietnam or
Haight-Ashbury. But once the war and the acid trips ended, we returned to the same reality we'd left behind. Except for the public lynchings. And disco.

Thirty years later, nothing much has changed.

I think it's about time we remedy that.

t's amazing how much perfectly good food Breathers waste.