The Zombie Letters

by Shoemate, Billie

  “Morning, Sam,” he said.

  “Huh?” she said as she placed a large pan into the sink. It clattered loudly, giving Nathaniel the impression that she did not quite hear him.

  “Sami-boo, Sami-boo, how are youuuuu?” He always sang that song to her. It made me wish I had someone to sing to.

  “What?” she said, turning around. Her long brunette hair was tied up in a bun at the top of her head. It had already begun to spill out of the loose hair-tie. Strands hung to the middle of her back in small sections. She would say she looked messy that morning, but I thought she looked radiant all the time. Women think they need to be all made up to be attractive. I think the time a woman is the most beautiful is when she is walking around in nothing but her man’s dress shirt, her hair all messed up and reeking of morning breath. Women have this comical quality about them in a home environment. Women . . . they are stunning, intelligent and so strong-willed. They are capable of anything. A good, respectable woman with just a hint of that sexual prowess can turn even the strongest man into a melting pile of goop in an instant. When you see them all mussed up and awkward, it is like peering into something sacred. Here you have the most powerful force of nature ever created. Woman. Woman is allowing you to see her at her most fragile, her most unprepared . . . but they were still enough to make a heart ache. That is the truest definition of raw power I have ever seen. Samantha Winters was like that.

  Nathaniel rubbed his temples harshly, trying to clear a thought from his head. “Nothing. Just being silly. Eggs smell good.” He was a brilliant man, but his thoughts were sometimes so disjointed and random . . . completely out of nowhere. It was like hearing a friend you haven’t talked to since high school. You remember their voice, but it takes a second to place it. Nate had been having little random thoughts at that point . . . he told me that they were goofy ones like calling the electric company to double-check if the bill had been paid five minutes after he got done paying it. When I first started working with him, he told me he was making love to his wife when he thought about baking gingerbread cookies. If she knew about that one, the sofa would be a permanent resting place for him. He was just one of those random guys.

  “Indeed they do,” she said happily. “Hey, stop thinking, Mister. I know how you get when you’re under pressure at work. Your mind wanders worse than usual.”

  Nathaniel sighed a bit with relief. He knew her well enough to pick up the tone of her voice. Samantha Winters loosened the tie in her hair and let it fall in tangles. She didn’t bother to re-fasten the tie or smooth it out. She was content with that kind of stuff. She knew that Nathaniel loved her in all-out ‘Woman of the Amazon’ mode, as well as all made up . . . he wanted her all sweaty from working out all morning, headache or no headache, makeup or no makeup. At that point, she started going back to school and quit the catering job. The government was paying for her schooling and she could hone in on what she really wanted to do. She wanted to be a veterinarian. Ever since she was a little girl. She had started working part-time through school placement at a local vet clinic. She seemed quite a bit happier there than at LeGrange Catering. She was always a damn good cook, though. Samantha was born and raised in Vegas, until her parents moved to Missouri for work. Her teenage years were spent in Mesquaki Lakeside Casino kitchens and restaurants. Animals were her passion, but Nate and I always though the culinary arts were her calling. She knew food.

  Sami brought her husband a nice dish of sunny-side up eggs with some green leafy shit around the sides. Cilantro? Nah. Maybe some other kind of green. That part never left Samantha. She still presented every dish like she was serving it to any high-roller in Sin City or any well-to-do country club businessman. Didn’t matter if it was a steak dinner or two fucking pop tarts. Everything had a presentation to it. That morning it was two eggs, a side of seasoned sausage, a glass of orange juice, two aspirin (gotta love a woman who has the shining and knows from the bone-creaking that her husband’s legs were sore) and a slice of grapefruit. Nathaniel took a bite of his sausage and let out a satisfactory hum as the sweet glaze she put on it nearly melted in his mouth. I know it did. I snuck a piece when Sami was cooking it. “Man . . . what a lucky man I am. You gotta teach me how to cook this well. How much you charge for lessons?”

  She smiled at Nathaniel as she sipped her coffee. That’s all she had. I remember being pretty sluggish that morning. I sat on the sofa, watching the weather channel and not saying much. Nathaniel had enough food to feed a horse, but Sami and I just had our coffee. She liked to eat the food she made as she was cooking it. Her family rarely saw her at the table, but it was a house rule that no matter what you are eating, you do it in the dining room. She ate in the kitchen as she was cooking, but she sat at the table more to keep her family company. You know, set a good example for the kids. “Oh, I don’t think you can afford me. I am a very sought-after chef, ya know. My major was in it, remember?”

  “I think both vet and cook talents come in handy,” Nathaniel said with his mouth full. “You can just learn how to cook dogs and cats.”

  Sami threw her head back and laughed, giving his shin a small kick under the table. “You brat! That’s disgusting! Gross . . . don’t wanna make me lose my breakfast. Hey Darin!” she shouted over the table at me. “We got a comedian here!” She turned her look back to her husband and pointed a butter knife in his direction. “Keep it up and you’ll be learning to cook outta books. I won’t help you a bit, mister. But yeah . . .” she said. She took another large gulp of coffee and patted Nathaniel on the hand that was resting near the plate. The one with the cock-eyed pinkie. “I’ll teach you if you want to learn. Just like learning anything else. You wanna get good at it? You wanna get to the World Series, baby-doll? Practice.”

  He ate as much as someone could a couple days after Thanksgiving. We were all still feeling that turkey. In between residual gobbler-pheromones and the coffee coursing through my system, I knew it would be time to deploy the troops in about fifteen minutes. Take the Cosby kids to the pool. Take the Browns to the Superbowl. How did Dad say it all the time? Oh, yeah. File some shit-tickets. Turkey does that to me . . . that, and Sami’s mashed potatoes. Mix them together and they move out quicker than Taco Bell. They like to make everything else move out quickly for about a week after that. The shits were a small price to pay for how good her cooking was. It was old school. Everything was butter . . . nothing low-cal or low fat. I’m talking the real-deal cooking, man. Grease, those old iron skillets that you’re never supposed to wash, cooking lard, bacon on everything and white wine to go with dessert.

  Samantha finished her wake-up juice, got up with an empty coffee mug in her hand and kissed her husband on the forehead as she passed to toss it into the sink. She whistled as she tossed it in, purposefully hitting a higher note when the mug ponked into the stainless steel basin. That was the morning Nathaniel and I would relax and maybe do a little poking around in a new book we were co-writing together. We were not good at science fiction writing, but it was a fun little hobby. We wanted to publish independently, because we were making enough damn money. We just wanted to see a book in print. When Sami got off work that day, we were all going to do some more light Christmas shopping. Sami had to be at the Southtown Veterinarian Clinic and the whole crew had the weekend off. Nathaniel’s beautiful wife could be heard rummaging around upstairs, getting ready to leave the men all alone in their bathrobes to smoke a few cigars, work on the new book (if any good ideas crept up), maybe crack open the scotch and eventually have dinner ready for her when she came home . . . her feet hurting and smelling like dog. Nathaniel always did that on the weekends. He would always have food waiting for her.

  Come to think of it, Nathaniel wasn’t a bad cook either.

  She was upstairs for only a minute or two when Nathan plopped down on the couch with a fresh new Steven Grimes novel in his hands. I kicked back in a recliner to read the first chapter of the book we were writing. We only had about twenty pages printed out a
nd bound up in one of those three-ring binders, but it would make for some light morning reading. I miss writing for fun. Our book . . . the title escapes me now. I don’t even remember what it was about. I always imagined myself as a novelist. It always seemed like a cool line of work for me . . . to do it full-time. I’m sure there is a lot of bullshit that goes along with it like every other job, but artistic things like that would be so appealing to me. I always wanted to write a book about a haunted place. Like that place out in Tennessee. Or was it Kentucky? You know, that place you always hear about on those Ghost Hunter shows and Unsolved Mysteries and stuff? That trailer where that rich kid vacationed with his friends from school . . . remember hearing about that on the news? Yeah . . . sad story. Some young guy freaked out, killed all his friends and two cops. Said that a ghost did it. Blamed it on this serial killer that died years before. Rodger Leary. I remember reading about himin the papers. That guy that killed all his friends . . . his accomplice never got caught, either. That’s why some people believe his story. Personally, I think its bullshit. What they dug up on that kid was pretty bad. He was messed up from the get-go, I think. But still . . . would be a neat story. Trailer in the middle of nowhere, a ghost running around and at the end, there’s no evidence. The kid is blamed for everything and eventually OD’s on his meds at the loony bin. Would be a cool movie.

  Anyway, Samantha came down after getting ready. Five minutes and forty-three seconds. A new record. Samantha always thought it silly to time herself getting ready, but she was always playful at heart. Men always bitch about women taking forever to get ready to do anything. That was true for the most part . . . Samantha liked to look pretty, but sometimes it was fun to haul ass just for the personal satisfaction.

  When she walked out the front door, Nathaniel and I were already asleep. I slept for about three and a half hours and woke up to find that Amy, Nathaniel’s fourteen year-old had put makeup on me while I slept. Rouge . . . lipstick . . . eye shadow . . . the whole deal. Their son Michael had painted my toenails and actually did a hell of a job. I didn’t care. I thought it was funny and took it in good spirit.

  After all, I was family.

  III

  You probably want to hear how this all happened now. Sorry I got into all that. I just . . . miss them.

  I worked there, you know. I know a lot more than what people give me credit for. Trust me. I wish I didn’t know shit. I never realized how blissful ignorance was until now. My boss and best friend . . . Doctor Nathaniel Winters was a brilliant scientist. Our team was doing some groundbreaking work in the medical field. Changed the world once. For the longest time, we thought we saved it. I remember the day Doctor Winters came back to the facility with that thing; a strange green bulb in a ceramic pot. It was no bigger than a football, but even with the exotic-looking yellow flowers all around its base, it still looked intimidating. I remember asking Nate that out of all the wonderful, culturally beautiful souvenirs to buy in Japan, why the hell he came back with that ugly plant.

  “Pretty neat, eh?” he said, pointing at the plant like a kid with a new toy.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.” I said something to that effect, anyway.

  “Actually, no one has. This plant was thought to be extinct. It’s actually prehistoric. Archaeamphora. I named it Archie,” he said with a laugh. I miss his laugh. “It was one of the first . . . if not the first carnivorous plant. See the resemblance to the Venus flytrap? This thing was more than likely its granddaddy.”

  “Oh . . . what, is there a Little Shop of Horrors there or something?” I said.

  “Funny. Some of these were recently discovered in the thickest areas of a dense forest at the base of Mount Fuji. The government over there considered it a protected area . . . some kind of historical site . . . but when rumors start floating around local hikers and amateur climbers that notice massive vines with bird-eating bulbs on them in parts of the forest so thick, that the canopy blocks out the sun? An American and Japanese joint exploration was launched and viola. Meet Archie, my friend. Leftovers from the cretaceous period. Alive and well.”

  “We are not botanists, archaeologists or anthropologists. I don’t see a connection other than you bringing back bug-ugly shit whenever you go on vacation. You have an eye for tacky. If they are so important and apparently rare, how the living hell did you end up with one of ‘em?”

  Nathaniel explained. “No, listen. Japan had the resources, the labor force and the cheap manpower. America already had a Locke laboratory there, the money and knew how to keep quiet. Kinda sad that our country was chosen because we are so good at covering up stuff with bullshit. Japan kept it a secret for about four years so America could study it with labs better suited for plant biogenetic study. Aside from it being ancient, the scientists who secretly studied it overseas found that it held no more mysteries. So, I decided to take a crack at it.”

  No more mysteries.

  Nathaniel brought it from a joint American-Japanese lab out near the area. Even on vacation, he always found a way to get to work. That lab . . . Locke. Named after one of the scientists who worked on the team that discovered the Polio vaccine. Nate was intrigued by it because the big cheese at the lab told him that the plant was legendary to ancient people. They used the plant to live incredibly long lives. It had some kind of magic healing property to them. Nathaniel told me he just liked it because he had a thing for Venus flytraps and this one was massive. I didn’t know this at the time, but the reason he took a ‘vacation’ in Japan was because our government wanted him to go there and study it. The Japanese facility lacked the equipment to do a really in-depth study. The facility over there just gave him one of the bulbs. Poor guy didn’t even know what he had. Apparently, neither did anyone at the airport. They didn’t even hold him up at the terminal, to my knowledge. I think everything was set up by your people so he wouldn’t be.

  It sat on a shelf in that pot for a year and a half. Then, one day, a fire broke out in the cafeteria. Some dickhead left a rag on top of the stove and forgot that one of the burners was still on. In the chaos of trying to put the thing out, Brian O’Reilly – a member of our staff, knocked the plant over and killed it with the heel of his shoe. He was running to the hallway outside the cafeteria to grab an extinguisher and bumped into the shelf . . . stepped right on the damn thing. Bye bye, cretaceous era relic of history. Cracked the bulb right in half. Brian had burned one of his hands attempting to put out the fire. As soon as we rendered a brand new facility kitchen into a room full of smoke and ash, Brian picked up the plant by the bulb. He covered himself with a milky white liquid that was seeping out of the crack his shoe made.

  In the following days, something strange happened. O’Reilly, already a man in his sixties, seemed to be changing. His burn healed within days. That was odd enough, considering it was a third-degree with absolutely no leftover scarring. The little crow’s feet on the corners of his eyes were fading. When I first noticed, I tied to give him shit for wearing makeup, but even a week later? Not only those eye-wrinkles, but ones he had on his forehead and wrinkles that lined his mouth were blending into his skin. It was almost as if the flesh itself were tightening. I am a doctor before I am a scientist and as I sit here, that was no facelift. A heavy smoker too, Brian eventually stopped that smoker’s hack that those old timers seem to have. Christ, even his teeth were whiter. Even after another month had passed, he had stopped wearing his reading glasses. Keep in mind that the differences were still subtle. He hadn’t transformed overnight and didn’t overwhelmingly change his appearance. To a group of people that saw the man everyday, though . . . we were astounded. I decided to take him to Nathaniel’s office one day while I was out taking my daily walk in the University Park. I saw Brian out there at the courts, playing basketball. I watched that sixty-one year-old man run up and down that court for two hours.

  He didn’t miss one shot.

  Needless to say, Doctor Winters and I were on the phones for three d
ays to negotiate bringing back another specimen. Nathaniel told the Japanese Locke facility the story and suggested that he would like to take a crack at examining it further. He didn’t mention Brian. He simply said that the lab caught fire and destroyed the first one we had. He told them he wanted to keep studying it and even if he didn’t find anything, Archie was good at keeping flies out of the kitchen.

  At least I got myself a trip to Japan out of the deal.

  It was immediately studied when I came back with it. My ass usually stayed at the lab nights. Yours truly was a widow of business. I chose it. Never got married . . . no kids. Nada. Just me, my work and Brucie. Sometimes I took Brucie home with me when I felt lonely. Ol’ Brucie. He was kind of the lab’s mascot. That big, beautiful, slobbery, stupid boxer would always be right there in the lab all day. Everyday. He would just be chilling out in his doggy bed and occasionally going outside to fertilize the lawn or knock over the Dean’s trash can. The man ate lobster like they were going extinct. About twice a week, Brucie would sneak out of the dog-door and help himself to some still-warm lobster tails. He had to knock over the trash can to do it . . . amazing for a fourteen year-old boxer who was half blind and suffering from arthritis in his hips. Dean Goldsboro always got pissed, but never really did anything besides cuss at Brucie and toss newspapers at him when he spilled the trash everywhere. I guess the Dean figured out the old dog could enjoy a few good meals before kicking it. To this day, I think Goldsboro placed those tails neatly on top of the trash on purpose.

  The plant. A true leftover of the cretaceous, like Nathaniel said. When studied, we all found what we were looking for; what none of the other scientists even bothered to check. A rare chemical called PQP. You don’t want to know the full name. Doesn’t fucking matter, anyway. PQP is commonly found in human breast milk as well as some other plant species. The team, all fifteen of us successfully managed to synthesize it using the prehistoric extraction as a template. Why was the prehistoric PQP so important? All we had to do was look at Brian’s blood. His cells were repairing themselves using extremely high amounts of PQP in his system as fuel. Everyone knows you could drink one hundred gallons of pure PQP-laden human breast milk (the most potent source of it on earth before we found that plant) and the only thing you would get is an upset stomach. The stuff inside Archie was unlike anything we had ever dreamed of seeing. Here we had a compound that predated man . . . a compound that could rejuvenate cell mitochondria at an incredible rate. Alzheimer’s, cancer, degenerative bone diseases . . . every disease now a thing of the past.