Zombies in Love (16 page)

How long had he been at this university? 
reflected David.  And still they treated him like some kind of hick, some rural fraud who needed the guiding Brahmin hand! 

There were two zombies in his lab, a male lying face down on the floor, and the creature that had once been his wife cowering in the corner of its cage.  He would handle the toughest case first.  The others would be easy. 

“I’ll need you to tranq her,” he said to the thuggish-looking man in the too-short jumpsuit Winthrop had given him as an assistant. 
Can't be any worse than Ian. 
“Just shoot her with the gun.  I’ll handle the injection.”

The thug nodded.

“Honey, you can’t do this,” the Miriam-creature said. 

It even sounded like her, he thought, with a thrill of revulsion.  Ever since he had come to Winthrop, nothing had gone right. All his life, he’d never run out of ideas for the next experiment.  He’d kept a notepad on his bedtable to scratch down midnight inspirations.  But something about moving east seemed to dry everything up.  His good graduate students drifted off and found other advisors, leaving him with the dregs of the program.  And he was starting to hear talk about how his funding might have to be cut in favor of the scholars who were more productive, when Miriam got sick again, and this time she needed that heart transplant.  Not even Winthrop would penalize a man with a young son and a dying wife.  But he could always feel that sword hanging over his head.

And then, finally, something good happened-- he woke up to find Miriam in the kitchen “cooking breakfast for her men.”  She hadn’t been strong enough to get out of bed for weeks.  It had seemed like some kind of miracle, and Joshua’s arms couldn’t be peeled from his mother’s leg all day.  But then, after David had gone to sleep, he’d heard a strange sound downstairs.  Miriam was eating the cremains out of his father’s urn.  And then everything clicked into place, and he knew how badly things had gone wrong.

“You’re not my wife.  You only look like her.”

The Miriam-creature looked mournful.  “I’m really, really sorry, honey.” it murmured.

“Shut up, Miriam,” he said.  He turned towards his assistant.  “What are you waiting for?”

He’d forgotten the second zombie.  He heard the cage door and only then saw the creature moving fast across the room, knocking the guard out with one blow.  Before David could move away or even reach the syringe, the zombie’s hand was around his neck.

The creature sniffed him and smiled, as David gasped for air.  He tried to reach out, to push him away, but his arms felt so weak.

“What are you doing?” Miriam’s voice.  The world was getting fuzzy at the edges.

“You know what your husband needs?” asked the creature.  “A little fucking empathy.  And I could use a snack.”

David heard the crack an instant before the lights went out for good.

#

             
Raw meat!  Shoves blood right into the brain, turns a lump of cold oatmeal into a Van de Graaff generator! 

              Jack walked down the hallway, eating the arm of the man he'd just killed.  He'd been waiting for them, that great anonymous unknown them, to come after him for months.  He'd kept his head down, been careful, been very very very good, knowing that it would only hold off the inevitable.  But now that it was really happening, all he could think was
How dare they!  Put me in a cage like a hamster with a wheel and some wood chips?  Do they know who I am? 

              No, they didn't.  Of course not.

              And that was funny, actually.  He hadn't realized that when it finally happened, it would be funny, and when he figured out where Arturo and the others had gone, that would be the first thing he told them, it was all just ridiculous. 

              Kill him?  He was Jack Fucking Kershaw, the greatest hitter in baseball!  He dropped dead six times before breakfast, came back slick and shiny and sweet-smelling as a new car fresh off the lot.  Good as new. 
Better
than new.  And it came to him that he'd spent way too much time worrying about what other people thought because really, he was indestructible, and he might as well start acting like it. 

              Yes, he had to find Arturo and explain it to him, as soon as he got rid of this festering sinus infection prickling deep within his head.  He hated sinus infections, they itched in a place no one could reach, but if you gave him a dental vacuum, or maybe a sharp enough stick, he might think about giving it a try, if his face didn't shoot straight off from the terrible ballooning pressure...

              For the first time in months, Jack sneezed, a practiced hands-free runner's sneeze, and heard a sharp
PLINK
as the grey meaty blob hit the linoleum. 
Bullet fragment,
he thought, wiping his nose on his sleeve and leaving the snotwad where it had fallen.

             
Where was Arturo, anyway?

              "
Hey, dead guy!"
said a German woman's voice.

              "Hello, hallucination!" he said, smiling at the thing floating in front of him, the ghost of a sea anemone, glimmering like licked wet glass.  "Guten abend, beautiful!"  He stuck out his tongue to try to catch it like a snowflake, but it zipped up and out of reach.

              "
If you're not too busy, there's someone you should talk to over there." 
It waved its flagella down the hall.

He heard a pounding noise from an office in the direction the hallucination had indicated, and a muffled voice calling, “Let me out!”  And there was a sign on the door that read, “Prof. David Leschke.”

Sometimes you just had to smile at the ways things worked out.

The door was bolted shut, so Jack kicked it in.  Behind the door cowered a pimple-faced young man.

“Hello there,” he said.  “Tranquilizer dart kid.  I’m going to need your help.”

“Whose arm is that?”

Jack looked down at the arm he was holding.  “Someone named David Leschke.  Friend of yours?  Stupid question.  Of course you know him!  I bet you're Ian.  I met your friend Sarah.”

“Oh, God,” said the young man, stumbling backwards, fumbling for the desk behind him.

“He’s got pretty impressive muscle development for a man his age.  Check it out.”  Jack flexed the arm, showing off the bicep, round like a ripe, juicy apple.  How could he help taking a big bite?

Boy, he was just covered in blood, wasn’t he?  It was amazing how much came out of someone if you ripped off his arm, even if he was already dead when you did it.  Some kind of blood backlog, he guessed.  He was no physiologist.

“Listen,” said Jack, waving the arm at the greenish young man.  “I need to find where the other ghouls are.  Where should I look?”

“The basement?” whispered the young man.

“And what’s the quickest way down there?”

The young man pointed a shaking finger at the stairwell.

“Thanks.  I appreciate your help.  Sorry for the interruption.”  He carefully set the splintered door back within its frame and walked away.

#

Lisa drove back towards Winthrop Square, feeling annoyed at the whole general world.  She’d called the cops about Sarah’s disappearance, but the guy they sent to talk to her was more interested in figuring out why Lisa cared than tracking down where the girl had gone. 

Adults have the right to disappear any time they want, Ms. Alioto. And how do you know Ms. Chen?  She was a customer?  Was she a frequent customer?  Then how did you decide to visit her apartment?

Sometimes, Lisa wished she were a better liar.

So she had a new plan.  Lisa was going to try to track down the office where Sarah worked.  Maybe she could find the other guy Sarah had talked about-- what was his name?  Ian?

But as she drove up Massachusetts Avenue, her windshield wipers squeaking against the glass, she came up to a cop in a raincoat stopping cars in front of an orange-striped barricade.  She opened the window.  "What's wrong?" she asked, leaning into her collar so she didn't breathe on him. 

"Parade," he said.  "Winthrop's totally blocked off until ten tonight."

“Thanks,” said Lisa.  Was she getting paranoid, or did that sound suspicious?  No, this wasn't paranoia.  A parade, in this downpour?  Who were they kidding?  Something weird was definitely going on.

And where the heck was that girl?

#

Maybe this was good news, thought Ian.  If Prof. Leschke was dead, he would get a new, sane advisor!  That would be great!  Someone who could finally nurture him and put him on a good project and help him graduate and get him a great job with lots of money and not too heavy a teaching load...

Only now he was trapped in Prof. Leschke’s office, in a building filled with rampaging zombies.  He couldn’t jump out the window-- he was too high up.  And if he tried to escape through the corridors, he’d probably get eaten before he made it outside.

Plus he was beginning to suspect that he was the sort of person who could only be brave for a short period of time, because if the Board of Overseers found out that he'd disobeyed orders and refused to inject Mrs. Leschke, something unimaginably horrible was going to happen to him. 

He'd heard there was an underground lake filled with blind albino alligators under the main library, the descendents of a pair brought back to Winthrop by Agassiz himself-- but that couldn't be true, could it?  Would Winthrop really keep a pack of albino alligators to eat library thieves and recalcitrant grad students?  Okay, maybe that was a little unlikely. 

Or maybe that's just what they wanted him to think!

He wished Sarah were here, because she would know what to do.

The door fell off its hinges and crashed to the door.  Behind it was not, as Ian had expected, a team of angry Winthrop guards, ready to haul him off to the bad basement, but the crazy zombie from before, which wasn't any kind of improvement.  His hands and face were clean, but his shirt didn’t look any less blood-stained than it had last time.  At least he'd finished eating the arm.

“Oh, good,” said the zombie.  “You’re still here.”

“Where would I go?” asked Ian, from on top of Prof. Leschke’s desk.

“Out the window.”

“We’re three stories up!” said Ian, his hands waving frantically.

The zombie shrugged.  “Lucky you stayed.  Listen, I need another favor.”

“Are you going to eat me?”

The zombie looked him up and down and grinned.  “No thanks.  Do you have an extra lab coat?”

Ian pointed towards the coat rack.

“Fantastic,” said the zombie, and put the coat on.  When it was buttoned to the top, it hid most of the blood.  The zombie fixed his hair in the mirror on the wall, then nodded, apparently satisfied.  “Don’t look so nervous, kid.  Do you have any weapons?”

“Are you kidding?  This is an office!  We’re scientists!”

“Ooh, look at that.”  The zombie had found an old-fashioned fire axe in a glass cabinet.  He shoved his hand through the glass, shattering it, and took the axe out.  “It’s got a beautiful balance.”  He held it out to Ian.  “Want to try?”

“Not really,” said Ian. 

The zombie tucked the axe in his belt, pulling the lab coat over it. 

“Let’s get going,” said the zombie.  “We’ve got to get the other ghouls out before they get really hungry.”

Ian’s hands involuntarily clamped onto the edge of the desk.  “What do you mean, we?”

“You think they’ll believe me if I come in by myself?  Not a chance,” said the zombie.  He looked in the mirror again, examining his cheek.  “Still blue.  How dead do I look?  I’m okay, right?”

Ian couldn’t figure out how to answer that one.  The zombie took him by the upper arm and gently pulled him off the desk.  “It’ll be fun.  Call me Jack.  Did I have your name right?  You're Ian?”

“Uh-huh."

“You’re not going to scream now, Ian?  ‘Cause that’ll really bollix things up.”

“Nope!” said Ian.  “Too scared!”

“Good man,” said Jack the zombie.  He slung his arm around Ian’s shoulders.  “Tell me, Ian, do you think people can change?”

“What?” Ian had lost control of the conversation, and probably his immediate future. 
Do what the crazy man says!
he thought. 
Maybe you won’t die and get eaten!  In either order! 

“I’ve been giving this some serious thought, and really, I think we are what we are.  I mean, I tried my damndest, and I could only keep her fooled for about two months.  So what the hell, right?  I might as well do what I like.”

“Please don’t eat me,” mumbled Ian.

“I told you, I’m not going to eat you.”

“You ate Prof. Leschke.”

“Just his arm.  Why, I bet he’s even grown himself a nice new one by now.”

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
thought Ian. 
This is why we should never have done the experiment!  Now the zombies are here, and they’re going to make us pay for all the horrible things we did!  And I’m too young to die!