Zombies: The Recent Dead (35 page)

A cold wind rustled through the cemetery, a parent checking up on their child after lights-out. It found us and we huddled together. Ginger’s skin made me even colder, but I didn’t want to let go.

“I should get to bed,” she said at last, and lowered herself into the empty grave beside us. Once in, she paused and peered up at me. Her head just barely came up above ground level. “Will you tuck me in?”

“Sure,” I replied, and got down on my knees. As I worked the dirt into her grave, I thought about the times my father would wake me up and tell me I was having a nightmare. I never remembered having a bad dream, but I believed him and felt better with him there.

“When you’re done,” Ginger said before I covered her face, “you have to go.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t spend the night here, or you can never leave again.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know, I just know. It’s just one of the rules. Your parents are probably worried sick.”

“But I wan—”

“Nobody worries about me anymore,” she interrupted.

She leaned forward, crawled her fingers through the hair on the back of my head, kissed me, then fell back to the dark earth, the dirt around her body caving in as she fell. Behind me, I could already hear the black bus idling at the side of the road.

“Where have you been?”

“Have you been drinking?”

“We’ve been so worried!”

“You have no idea!”

It’s funny how quickly relief can turn to anger. It’s like we keep both emotions spring-loaded inside the same little tin can inside our chests and when we let one feeling out, the other must inevitably follow.

“Did you drive drunk?” my father demanded to know, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Who have you been out with?”

“Zombies.”

“Zombies? What is that, some kind of gang?” The old man inquired, exasperated from running every drug overdose and child-kidnapping scenario imaginable through his head while waiting to hear my key in the door. “Are you in a fucking gang now?”

My father rarely cussed at me. It was one of those rare glimpses I ever caught of his non-father personality. I rarely liked what I saw.

“Oh my God.” My mother sat down at the table, her face in her hands. She looked up at her jailbird son. “Are you dealing drugs?”

I wanted to tell them to get real, to remember that the best lessons they ever learned was from the mistakes they made, that the first step in becoming your own person is to make a conscious decision
not
to become your parents.

But I didn’t know how to say all that, to articulate what I would only learn years later when I yelled at my own kids, because the only way to grow old is to forget what it’s like to be young. And besides, they didn’t
deserve
a response, or so I believed. They’d never been this mad before, never talked to me like this. It made all their love, all their kind words and tender moments seem totally and unforgivably conditional.

“Yeah,” I replied coldly. If they needed to blame everything on changes in the world outside, instead of changes in their son, I wouldn’t stand in their way. “That’s it.” I started up to my room, spoke over my shoulder, let my words tumble down the stairs behind me. “The big bad wolf made me do it.”

“That must be his supplier,” I heard my father explain to my mother. “They all have nicknames. It’s all—”

The door SLAMMED! on his words, caught them and held them like fingers in a car door.

I collapsed on my bed, listened to my parents fighting downstairs, turned on the ten o’clock news. Channel 4 was running an exposé on the deaths at my old high school. A young, statuesque, serious-minded telejournalist reported that students were living in a state of mourning, that grief had struck the school “like a brick through a stained-glass window.” As she said this, a man with a clipboard stepped behind her, into frame, and waved off the mob of students mooning the camera and flashing middle fingers and gang signs.

“Excuse me, young man.” The reporter snared a passerby and aimed the camera at him. It was Paul Pennybaum, lurching to class. Flies orbited his tilted head, alighting on his rotten fruit face and taking off again. His clothes were tattered and sullied from his time in the grave. His eyes looked at the world like a retarded monkey would look at a banana painted on a brick wall.

“Young man,” the reporter began again, “how does it feel going to school under the shadow of Death?”

“Brains,” Paul droned, with great effort, as he stared straight through the reporter.

“Yes,” the reporter responded, “the victims have all suffered severe trauma to their craniums. How does that make you feel?”

“Feel . . .  dead.”

The reporter turned back to the camera.

“As you can see, some of the students here already consider themselves future victims. Back to you, Bob and Alice.”

I changed the channel, tried to pick up some scrambled porn, but nothing was on. So I sat there in the dark, weighing the gravity of so much death against the weight of Ginger’s body on top of mine. I supposed it was partially my fault. If I whacked Paul, got rid of him somehow, the killing would stop. But I would never see Ginger again. Thus, the combination of my lust for her and my loathing for my former classmates was enough to persuade me, before I whacked off and fell asleep, that most of them were better off dead anyway. Paul Pennybaum was by no means the only zombie at San Los Pleasovale High.

By the following Saturday, five more students and three teachers were dead at school. My parents spoke as though I was one of them. Good riddance. And don’t give me that look, either. How many times have you looked around a room and, however fleetingly, wished half of them would just disappear?

At the table that morning, my father spoke of days gone by, when he and I would barbecue burgers in the backyard and play catch. My mother made no reply. Tears welled up in her eyes as she hid them behind that day’s crossword. Sitting between them at the table, I wanted to remind my father that he was a vegetarian, and that we had played catch once. Neither of us liked it. We both hated sports. And while I couldn’t claim to like the jocks at my school, I couldn’t blame them for being what they were. After all, if I had the choice between being a moderately clever writer, amusing himself alone at his computer, or being a Neanderthal in a football jersey at a blowjob buffet (or so I have to imagine them), I’d have to think about it.

Leaning over his bowl of cereal, my father flipped to the business section, exposing the front page to the rest of the table. The headline read that both the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been called in to investigate the series of deaths at my old high school.

I got up to leave when I heard my bus arrive to take me to the Homecoming pep rally and game. We’d been prepping for it all week—hanging streamers in the hallways at school, pinning up signs so parents and alums wouldn’t get lost when they arrived for the game from their various planes of existence. I’d stayed late every day to help decorate and then fuck my girlfriend. Every day was Christmas. Then I would come home and see my parents asleep on the couch, in the armchair, at the kitchen table, dreaming in uncomfortable positions. First I’d be mad. Then I’d be sorry. Then I’d go to sleep feeling mad that they made me feel sorry.

I paused for a second at the door, looked back at my parents looking down at their papers and plates, not so much looking at these items of interest as not looking at me.

For all they know, I
am
in a gang. This could be the last time they see me, and they don’t care.
They
wouldn’t care if I was next.

Going out the door, I thought about what Ginger said every night when I tucked her into her grave and I always asked to stay a little longer.
If you stay,
she’d invariably warn me,
you can never go home.

I thought about that as I got onto the bus, and about how little home felt like home anymore.

Well, maybe I
will
be next.

As we pulled away, I looked back at the house I’d grown up in. It felt like I hadn’t been there in years, as though it had been sold long ago and that I’d only just returned for nostalgia’s sake, but had changed my mind when I drew close, and decided to keep driving.

“Where are they?”

“They’ll be here.”

The air was cold and electrified, the sky black. It was two minutes till game time and the opposing team still had yet to show, as had their fans. The bleachers opposite ours were bare, the sidelines equally so.

“If they don’t show, do they forfeit?”

“They’ll show.”

I sat in the top row of bleachers with Art and Roland.

“I need a smoke,” Roland said. He and Art, along with the rest of the hushed crowd, watched the field intently. The players on our side had already made their big entrance and were sitting on their benches, waiting and watching the field. “Wish I could hold a cigarette.”

That afternoon, the pep rally had proceeded as all such events do—cheering, clapping, yelling, clapping some more and yelling louder, followed by more cheering, and, time permitting, more yelling and clapping. All throughout, however, there had been something in the air between the fans and the players, something in their distant smiles that made our good wishes sound almost mournful—some unacknowledged dread, as though our boys were going off to war, that we might not ever see them again.

“But if they don’t show up,” I repeated.

“They’ll show up.”

My breath came out as a fog. Nobody else’s did.

“But if they d—”

A sound rang out from On High—a lone trumpet echoing down from the cloud cover. I looked up at the sky, as did everyone, and felt fear choke my heart. The horn sounded once more, like a distant cavalry charge. As it did so, a solitary ray of golden light, no wider than a child’s arm, pierced the clouds and focused on the fifty-yard line. A third time the trumpet sounded. My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to hide, to cover my face, so terrible was this sound that said
your dreams are over
, a sound that told you, convinced you, that
everything you thought you would become you will never become; all the plans you have laid for yourself, will never come to pass.
It was the bang of an unseen gun pointed at your heart. It was the sound of The End.

The fourth time the horn sounded it was joined by a chorus of bellicose brass, horns of war that wrung all will to resist from my body as the tiny spotlight that shone down on our home field widened suddenly, split the sky like a knife ripping open a wound, flooding the terrain with a rapturous, unflinching blaze as a host of seraphim in gold and white football jerseys poured down from the break in the clouds and stormed the field, a beautiful, thunderous stampede of infallible athletic ability with the greatest record of any school in the history of the universe. These were our opponents. This was Paradise High.

“We have to fight
Heaven
in our Homecoming Game?” I asked, totally flabbergasted. Across the field, a glowing body of halos and white robes filled the opposing stands.

“They’ve never been defeated,” Art said and bit into a corndog.

“Why am I not surprised?”

“It ain’t that bad, son,” Roland offered. “It’s like, this one doesn’t count, you know?”

“Doesn’t count?”

“Yeah, you know,” Art said. “They can’t be beat. Nobody’s ever even scored on these guys. When God’s sitting in the other team’s bleachers, the bookies take the day off.”

“Is that Genghis Khan looking through their playbook?”

“He’s their head coach.”

“But wasn’t he, like, a bloodthirsty conqueror?”

“And a strategic genius.”

“But wasn’t he, like, a
bloodthirsty conqueror?
”

“Did the first-string linebackers at Harvard score 1600s on their SATs?” Roland asked.

I stared blankly down at the fetus.

“I don’t
think
so,” he answered as the whistle rang out for the kickoff.

I left when the scorekeeper lost count. The hometown crowd hadn’t made a peep for the better part of three quarters. Whether we were too sorry to cheer for Middle Plain or too guilty to root against Heaven I couldn’t say, but I supposed it didn’t matter. My mind hadn’t been on the game anyway.

I wandered back to the cemetery. Every grave was empty. Everyone had shown up to see their team get clobbered. I wondered why.

“You know, you’re quite a unique young man.”

I whirled around, surprised. I was going to school in the land of the dead, but a strange voice in the middle of a cemetery was still mildly alarming.

Ms. Needlemeyer, the Clown of Dachau, leaned against the wall of a mausoleum, trying to light a cigarette without the ability to inhale.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“You’re a very unique young man,” she reiterated. “You are, after all, the only one who’s ever been unhappy.”

“Wha . . . huh? I don’t get it.”

“That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”

I stopped, looked at her with her painted skull and fallen stockings. She looked like a hooker who’d died propped against a lamppost and no one had noticed while she wasted away to nothing but bleached bones and a low-cut dress.

“No,” I replied, softly.

“Here,” she held out the as-yet unlit cigarette. “Little help?”

I plopped down on the tombstone beside her, lit her cigarette, handed it back.

“So what
do
you want to hear?”

I thought about that question, tried to look past the immediate thoughts of fame, money, sex. I thought about Ginger, and my ’rents. Most of all I thought about how everyone on the planet seemed to kind of suck, in a general way, while I, clearly the only one who didn’t suck, seemed to be the only one that was unhappy.

“I want someone to tell me it’s going to be all right.”