Love, Lust, and Zombies

by Mitzi Szereto

  “And why did you ask me out? Do you like librarians, in general?” There, I’ve boldly asked the question I need to have the answer to. I try to hide my shakiness.

  “Actually, yes.” He grins widely. “Very astute of you. I do like librarians. I like them a lot.” He pauses. “Vanilla is my favorite flavor,” he adds, his teeth flashing, lunging at me as I’m enveloped by him and the darkness all around, and I understand that once he licks my vanilla clean, I will be a librarian no more.

  IN THE RED LIGHT

  A. M. Hartnett

  Some days Robbie seemed normal. Today was not one of those days.

  Deanna stood silently in front of the window. The other side of the glass was a mirror; he didn’t know she was there. He was statue-like on his cot, facing the wall.

  She looked to the guard. Abel Knox sat back in his chair before a console of controls and video screens. His entire attention was focused on the paperback in his hands. Most of the guards at Walker Mountain had no personalities, or maybe they reserved their humanity for when the day was done and they could forget about what was left of the world. Knox had his books. He always had a new one. She wondered where he managed to find them all. It’s not like he could pop down to Barnes & Noble after work.

  “Did he eat?” she asked him.

  “I don’t think he’s in the mood.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  He shook his head. His gaze never left the page.

  Most preferred to limit their interaction with Robbie. Knox could be detached when the job called for it, but when he spoke to Robbie he didn’t change his tone or his attitude. Knox spoke to Robbie like he was a person.

  She let herself out of the booth and returned a few minutes later with a cup of instant coffee and a turkey sandwich wrapped in plastic.

  Knox looked up and shook his head. “I don’t know why you bother.”

  Deanna placed her hand on the metal door handle. After a moment, the light above the door went from red to green and she pushed. She repeated the same routine in the elevator-sized space between the booth and Robbie’s cell.

  The room was a white box: it held a plastic table with plastic chairs, a toilet and sink behind a partition and a cot that barely accommodated his width.

  He had told her he didn’t mind the room. It was bigger than the cell he had lived in before this, he’d said. She knew he was lying, at least about not minding the cell. He didn’t look her in the eye when he said it, and so she knew he hated the room and always had. In the early stages of the experiment, she had given him a box of crayons and he had drawn happy scribbles all over the walls. When he could speak again, he asked her to have his artwork cleaned off. There wasn’t even a smudge of his early frustration left, but Deanna knew it lingered. He was tired of being a prisoner.

  She set the sandwich and coffee on the table and pulled out a chair to sit.

  He needs his hair cut.

  Still, it was better than shaved, which was how it had been when he was alive. There were tattoos on his scalp under his hair. She had seen his corpse when it had been brought to Walker Mountain.

  “Are you just going to ignore me?” she asked.

  He tucked his big feet against his bottom. It was a throwback to those early days, one of the things he did when he was upset. He curled up. He tried to disappear.

  Not there. Not there. Not there.

  “Come have a sandwich. There’s real sugar in the coffee, not sweetener. It’s too bad the coffee isn’t drip.”

  After another moment of being blocked out, Deanna got up and approached the cot.

  Beneath the corner of his pillow was a paperback.

  Knox, you softy.

  Her attention was next drawn to the red stain on his shirt. Just a few drops, but they were enough to tell her what had gone on that afternoon and why he was so quiet.

  She reached for the hem of his shirt, but his hand clamped down on her wrist. The strength in him was terrifying, and it took every bit of restraint to keep from crying out.

  “If you don’t let me go I’ll have to scream and Knox will raise the alarm.” Even as tears burned behind her eyes, her voice remained calm.

  He turned his head to look at her and she could see the wrongness in his eyes. Like his skin, they were just a little off color, and filled with a pain she could never understand.

  “Please, Robbie. Let go.”

  He released her. She cradled her hand against her stomach as he sat up and turned his back on her, blocking her out once more.

  Not there. Not there. Not there.

  A voice came over the speaker. “Everything all right in there?” “Everything’s fine.”

  Knox didn’t say anything else. He knew. He just wouldn’t make a move until he was sure she was in danger.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and reached for him again. “Robbie, let me look.”

  He turned his head slightly and his lips barely moved as he spoke. “It’s not like it will kill me.”

  Deanna pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pocket. “You may not care, but I do. I don’t want to look at you if you’re bleeding all over the place.”

  His thick brows came together and that firm line of a mouth softened just a little. He pulled away from her, and then stripped off his shirt. His arms were huge and laced with the tattoos he’d accumulated in his life. Stripped to the waist, he sat with his back straight and his hands on his knees.

  He said nothing as she looked over the expanse of his chest and along his abdomen. One of his ribs was out of place. She tried not to think of how it had gotten that way, and followed the tail of the new scar until it disappeared beneath the waistline of his sweatpants.

  “You may need a stronger antibiotic,” she said. “Take it easy until that starts to heal, okay? You’ll feel better if you eat something.”

  As he wriggled back into his shirt, Deanna disposed of the gloves and pulled the plastic wrap off the sandwich. With a quiet sigh, Robbie moved from the bed and took his seat across from her.

  Half an hour later, she emerged from the cell. Robbie had gone back to his cot, where he stretched on his back and read from the paperback.

  Knox was waiting for her. “If he does that again—”

  “I shouldn’t have just reached out like that when I know he’s on edge.”

  “You forget what he is, Dr. Greer.”

  “It’s easy to forget.”

  “I don’t forget. I know you’ve never seen him when they take him upstairs, but I have. They turn him off. They don’t put him out, they turn him off.” He tapped his temple. “They hook him up to a machine and give him a shot. He changes. He’s like the others.”

  “They have to turn him off. They can’t put him out. It might kill him all over again, and if they leave him like he is he’ll feel everything—”

  “He does feel it and you know it. Every second…” Knox slid his book aside and wiped his hand over his mouth. His words seemed to bother him. “You should see him. He looks like a man now, but when it happens he becomes a thing. Almost took a bite out of Dr. Stewart, and you could see on his face that he couldn’t wait to get a second chance.”

  “I know what he is, Knox.”

  “I don’t think you do. The other ones scare the hell out of you, and you’d feel the same way about Robbie if he ever looked at you like lunch, and it could happen in an instant. We just don’t know for sure when something could go wrong.”

  “It’s never going to happen. Robbie is the first. Robbie is the one.”

  She’d meant it, but she was cold all over. She knew that without that thing in his head and the chemicals they pumped into him, he’d be just like the rest of them: rotting, ravenous flesh and bone.

  Then again, without the safety of Walker Mountain, every single survivor would be in the same boat.

  She took the underground walkway to the dormitory. No one traveled outdoors unless they had to. The smell was revolting, and the sound of those things on the other side
of the wall could drive a person mad.

  It was the middle of the day. Sunshine probed through the slatted blinds that lined one wall of her apartment, but Deanna preferred the artificial light. She was only six floors from the ground and her apartment faced the field beyond the wall. From her window she could see those things shambling on the other side of the fence.

  She’d observed the ones that had been collected and caged. She’d experienced the terror of having one rushing at her with agonizing hunger in its dead eyes. Seeing those things reminded her that Robbie wasn’t alive after all, just reanimated.

  She didn’t want to think of the man she knew in such terms. She had talked to him for hours, seen him fight back tears after he’d been ripped in half for the sake of what could be learned from him, had laughed at him and made him laugh.

  He was still human. He just needed help.

  Robert Christian Willis had been on death row when the outbreak happened. He had been in and out of youth facilities throughout his adolescence, and at nineteen, he was imprisoned for robbing a gas station. At twenty-two, he was back in prison for assaulting a guy in the parking lot of a pool hall. At twenty-six, he and two of his buddies attempted to rob the Republic Bank. Someone’s cell phone had gone off and, startled, Robbie had shot and killed the teller he had been pointing his pistol at. He got away, but was picked up sixteen hours later at his girlfriend’s apartment. His appeals were denied and he was due to die by lethal injection shortly after his thirty-second birthday.

  Then all hell broke loose and no one gave a shit about the killer on death row. The infection had been at first contained in the penitentiary, but it couldn’t last forever.

  When Robbie could speak, he told Deanna about what happened in the prison. The warden opened the doors and let the things swarm the cell blocks to gorge themselves while he and the guards escaped. Robbie was bitten while trying to lock himself back up. A few hours later, the military arrived, and with them was Dr. John Fleming, in search for the perfect specimen. Shortly after he succumbed to the bite, Robbie’s skull was opened up and a device seventy years in the making was implanted.

  At this time, Deanna was recruited to the secret project by Dr. Fleming. She had been brought to Walker Mountain as a survivor of the Saint Louis Massacre, had been counseling other survivors, and had been relieved of these duties after she developed an addiction to pills. In spite of her sketchy background, she was recruited to rehabilitate the severely damaged Robbie.

  He was her only chance at redemption in a world gone mad.

  When she first entered his empty cell, he was cowering in the corner and unable to comprehend anything but terror. She ordered a cot and a blanket put in. When she returned, he was in his own safe world underneath the blanket. Deanna spoke to him, but he remained determined to pretend she simply didn’t exist.

  Not there, his silence told her. Not there. Not there. Not there.

  She waited. She kept coming, and eventually his curiosity got the best of him. She brought games and toys. She brought books and puzzles. She studied his development and reported every stride he made. He began to speak, to think, and then he remembered. She urged him to work harder, and not fight when they came to take him away. He was important, she told him. He was the first. He had taught them so much. He was a small, crucial step to stopping this hell that had been unleashed on earth.

  She didn’t know then about the experiments. When she found out, she fought hard to put a stop to them. Dr. Fleming overruled her, and so she worked with Robbie to minimize the trauma.

  After Robbie, she knew she didn’t need pills anymore. He was more than a subject to be observed. He was her only friend, and she was his.

  She would fix him, even if it—or he—killed her.

  Robbie turned his spoon over and let the slimy contents plop back onto the paper plate. Canned spaghetti shaped like zoo animals. He usually shoveled his food into his mouth and asked for more, but today he had no appetite.

  She was worried. It wasn’t as though he would waste away. If he refused to eat, he would be nourished artificially. It had been two days since he’d last been taken out of the cell. In those two days, he had read his book or just sat and stared. Occasionally he would reach up and his fingers would disappear into his black hair to rub the outline of the device under the skin.

  Beneath the table, Deanna’s shoe hung anxiously off the bridge of her toes as she shook her foot. When she left him, she would be escorted into the other facility. She would observe one or two of the others being put through their paces. They’d be given puzzles and books, but unlike Robbie they’d just shuffle about. After two years, she hadn’t seen a single one exhibit more than the most rudimentary understanding of anything that didn’t involve feeding. The chemicals would keep them from decaying, but only the implant would give them their lives back.

  Robbie shoved his plate away and sat back. “I’m tired of eating crap.”

  “You asked for it.”

  “Because it’s better than dry bread and instant potatoes.”

  “There’s a shipment coming in at the end of the month. How does roast beef sound? It comes in a bag and is microwaved, but if you haven’t had it in a while it’s practically gourmet.”

  “Fuck your roast beef in a bag, and fuck you.”

  She said nothing for a moment. “Are you experiencing any changes in your appetite?”

  Blue eyes made pale by his condition cut to her. “Why don’t you just come right out and ask me if I feel like taking a bite out of you?”

  “Do you?”

  Robbie was perfectly still for a moment. Deanna waited, heat prickling along the back of her neck.

  He leaned forward and his nostrils flared. “Don’t ask me that again.”

  Deanna went on without apology. “I was told that you threatened Dr. Fleming when he came to see you yesterday.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” His scowl turned into a nasty smirk. “I think I scared him. Told him that the next time he turned me off I’d crack his head open like a cantaloupe.”

  “And stuff yourself on what’s inside.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Your behavior is a growing concern.”

  “Then maybe they should have picked a Boy Scout to be their science experiment.”

  Beneath her cool façade, desperation ate at her. Deanna leaned forward on her elbows. “Aren’t you the least bit grateful for this opportunity? You were on death row.”

  His nostrils flared. “That was an accident. How many times have I told you?”

  “Regardless, when they found you, you agreed—”

  “I was dying. They were telling me they could bring me back, make me normal again. What did I know? I didn’t want this.”

  “And you’d rather be like the others?”

  “I am like the others!”

  “No, you’re not. You can think beyond your hunger. You can feel. You’re smart and—”

  “Stop talking about me like I’m a fucking rat in a maze!”

  He got to his feet and the table jerked forward, jabbing into her ribs. That eerie gaze stopped the words she was going to speak to him. “Are you there when they do it to me?”

  The hatred in his voice startled her. She was finding it harder and harder to remain calm. Robbie was spiraling, and he was taking her with him.

  “No. I’m just here to talk to you. That has nothing to do with me.”

  “Doesn’t it? Aren’t you supposed to report how I feel? Well, I’ll tell you how I feel.” He pulled his shirt over his head, then hunched over the table. His finger followed the pattern of stitches over his chest. “I feel like once or twice a month I’m cut into pieces and put back together again. They send you in here to ask me how I feel and you make me feel, but I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to feel what they do to me.”

  “Robbie, it will be over one day.”

  “You’re fucking right. They’ll put me down like a wild animal, and I can’t wait. I know I
used to be nothing, but no one deserves this, not even me.”

  His chest heaved as he glared down at her. Deanna opened her mouth to speak, but found her tongue stuck and useless. Robbie’s fury was breathtaking.

  He spun away from her, displaying a broad, mountainous back crisscrossed with the same grotesque scars. “I miss everything, Dr. Greer. I miss peanut butter cups and cold beer. Hell, I miss having to shovel my piece-of-shit car out of the driveway in the winter.”

  Deanna pushed her foot back into her shoe and stood. “Those things don’t exist anymore, not for you, not for any of us. They may never exist again.”

  “What’s the point, then? Why am I here?”

  “You can change it all, that’s why. I’ve seen your strength. I know what they’re doing to you is working. How long do you think it would take to cut through a wall of those things if there was a whole army just like you?”

  Robbie twisted his head around. “An army of unstoppable killers with free will? No, I can’t see how that could possibly go wrong. Face it: I’m just the guinea pig. You think they can torture me for a year and then trust me not to turn on them? I don’t trust any of them. I don’t even trust you.”

  No matter how much she tried to keep the wall up between them, the sting punctured through her skin and dug into the bone. “You know you can trust me.”

  “The hell I do. I don’t believe for one second they didn’t choose you to pick my brain because you look like a fucking treat all the time. You’re here to soften me up so I’ll play nice.”

  He took a step back and ran his hands through his hair. His fists grabbed handfuls and he seemed to Deanna to be fighting madness.

  “You know what I miss the most, Deanna? I miss that thing that makes a man. God, do I miss being between a woman’s legs. Some nights I get so hard I can’t stand it.”

  Deanna’s modesty made her turn her gaze away as he closed his eyes. No one talked sex anymore. It had almost become a taboo subject, some frivolous thing people did on the sly.