They had taken all the doors off the cabinets to board the windows. Mary, still in Vince’s tee-shirt, squatted down to peer beneath the sink. “They were down here last time I looked,” she said. The tee-shirt she was wearing rode up as she squatted, exposing the fetching pink globes of her ass. Everybody gawked except for Brody, who was looking at Steve, but Vince pretended not to notice Brody not looking. For someone who bragged so much about getting laid, he was curiously uninterested in girls.
“I see London, I see France, Mary wears no underpants,” Lance sang.
“Stop ogling my girlfriend, you pervs,” Vince growled, but it was a good-natured growl. He was proud of his girlfriend’s ass.
“Here they are. There’s a whole bag of them,” Mary said. She rose and made a point of pulling down the back of her tee-shirt. “Sorry about that, fellas!” she grinned. “No charge for the show.”
They went back upstairs to get poor Rudie down.
4
“Ah, fuck, he’s already starting to stink!” Lance groaned.
“Naw, that was me,” Steve drawled. “Sorry, I farted.”
“Dude!” Lance cried, waving his Platexed hand in front of his nose. “A little warning next time!”
“It was those franks. I think they were starting to go bad.”
They all laughed, squeezed into the doorway of Rudie’s closet. They were all wearing yellow latex gloves, all trying to help untie the extension cord from Rudie’s neck.
Mary asked the guys to lift their friend’s body a little higher.
“It’s tied too tight. I can’t get it undone,” Mary grunted, as Lance, Steve and Brody tried to lift the dead boy’s body without touching any skin. There was a lot of exposed skin on Rudie’s side of the equation.
They were strong young bucks, but they just couldn’t get any leverage, not with all of them trying to squeeze into the closet. They looked like those kids in the fifties, piling into an old fashioned phone booth. In short, it was what Vince’s dad would have called a real clusterfuck.
Vince stepped away and called for everyone’s attention. “Look,” he said, “we’re just going to have to cut him down. Does anyone have any wire snips, or know where there’s a sturdy pair of scissors?”
“I got a pocket knife,” Steve volunteered. “Ya think that’ll work?”
“I don’t know,” Vince replied. “Those extension cords have wire inside them. It’s braided wire, though. It might cut through it.”
Steve nodded and clomped from the room.
Brody stretched out on Rudie’s bed while they waited for their resident redneck to return. Mary sat beside Brody and placed her hand on his knee. Vince would have been jealous if not for his suspicions about the big jock. Well, that and finding gay porn on the guy’s browser history when he borrowed his laptop at the beginning of the school year. That qualified as a little more than “suspicions”. That was more like dead giveaway, but he never said anything about it. It was neither his place, nor his inclination, to “out” anyone, although he did find Brody’s hesitance to come out interesting—from a purely psychological perspective.
“Uh, guys…” Lance said, peering into the closet. His brow had furrowed beneath his floppy blond bangs. “There’s… some kind of shit coming out of his mouth now.”
Vince, Brody and Mary joined Lance at the closet door. He was right. There was some kind of shit coming out of Rudie’s mouth. It was viscous and bubbly, sort of like little kid snot, and was slowly foaming out of Rudy’s mouth. It ran down his double chins, then hung there below them, too thick to drip off, a horrid, greenish-yellow tendril with bubbles in it.
“Ew,” Mary said.
“He’s definitely infected,” Vince said. “That’s the same kind of… goop the other zombies have running out of their mouths. It’s kind of like rabies, I think, only it’s thicker… snottier.”
“It’s repulsive,” Mary amended.
“It reminds me of that stuff my mom used to buy for me when we were kids,” Lance said. “I can’t remember the name of it. Flubber or Ooze or something. Looked like a little plastic jar of green snot. It would make farting noises when you squished your fingers in it. Remember that stuff? Anybody?”
None of them remembered.
“Well, I thought it was cool,” Lance said with a shrug.
“Found muh knife!” Steve said, clomping back into the room. He was brandishing a small pocketknife, the blade open. “Dad got this for me on muh birthday. Got my initials engraved on th’ handle.”
“Let’s cut him down,” Vince said.
They squeezed into the closet doorway again.
“We need to hurry,” Vince said as Steve reached over him and began to saw through the extension cord. “There’s goop coming out of his mouth now. He could come back any moment.”
“Just let him fall, guys,” Mary said. “He’s dead. It doesn’t matter. We’ll drag him out by his legs when we have him down.”
Brody, Lance and Vince got out of the way. Steve stepped in closer and sawed. His eyes narrowed and his tongue poked from the corner of his mouth, like Rudie.
“Fuck, I saw him move!” Lance exclaimed.
“Steve’s just making him jiggle,” Mary said. “Chill out.”
Rudie dropped with a thud. Everyone yelped and jumped back as the corpse hit the floor of the closet. It slowly unfolded until it was lying flat, legs poking out into the room. A low, duck-like farting sound emanated from the corpse’s posterior. Escaping gas. All five college students retreated with shrill laughs of horror and disgust, then slowly returned. They gazed down at him like kids examining a dead woodchuck in the schoolyard.
“Dudes, being dead is fucking disgusting,” Lance said. He started to wipe his mouth and realized he was still wearing the Platex gloves—and that he would have smeared Rudie’s germs all over his mouth if he had. He dropped his hands, little splotches of red forming on his cheeks and forehead.
“Can you make one statement without using the word ‘fuck’?” Mary asked.
“Fuck no,” Lance replied. He didn’t laugh when he said it though, and no one else did either.
“So what do we do with him?” Brody asked. “Should we cut off his head or something? So he doesn’t come back? We could shoot him in the forehead if we had a gun…”
“We should get some guns,” Steve said. “I bet we could find some at the Wal-Mart.”
“Yeah, and about two thousand zombies wandering around the parking lot,” Vince said. He looked up at his frat brothers. “I’m not chopping his head off. Let’s just do what we did with the other guys. Put him on the porch and let him wander off when he comes back.”
Brody and Vince took up Rudie’s legs, grasping them at the ankles. They pulled him from the closet, his bare flesh catching on the hardwood floor and making high-pitched squeaking sounds.
“Why did he take off all his clothes before he hung himself?” Lance asked, following alongside the naked boy. “That’s just nasty!”
“Some kind of fetish, maybe,” Vince said. “I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with the whole birth-death thing. We come out of the womb naked. Maybe he was symbolically preparing himself for his rebirth. He knew he was infected, that he was probably coming back.”
It sounded kind of weak, even to Vince. Truth was, people did weird things, and sometimes there wasn’t really a good reason for the things they did. Vince’s mother had been in and out of mental health facilities for years. Her formal diagnosis was bipolar affective disorder, but her craziness went even deeper than that. Once, she had decorated all the trees in the yard with Christmas lights—in July. Another time she’d become convinced his dad of trying to poison her, said he was putting arsenic in her coffee. It’s part of the reason he’d decided to major in psychology, he supposed. He had an irrational fear of going crazy, thought, maybe, if he were a trained psychologist, he’d have a firmer grip on reality. Would be able to recognize if his grasp on it ever began to loosen.
&nbs
p; They pulled Rudie across the room. His back and buttocks squealed across the glossy tongue-and-groove flooring. Squee-squee-squee-squee-squee!
“Can we put a blanket or something under him so he slides better?”
They could.
It was easier then. Vince and Brody glided the corpse into the second floor corridor, then down the hallway to the stairs. “This is going to be bad,” Vince said, looking at the staircase, and then they began to drag the dead boy down the stairs. Rudie’s head fell back on each riser as they descended—Thud! Thud! Thud!—like an angry giant pounding on a door.
“Who’s there?” Lance trilled.
Mary giggled.
Thud-thud-thud, down the stairs. Vince and Brody paused in the foyer to catch their breath. They stood panting beneath the big polished oak Epsilon Omega symbols suspended from the ceiling. Photographs of the fraternity’s alumni surrounded them, stared at them, some grinning, others—the older alumni mostly—scowling sternly like crotchety old school principles. Below the fraternity’s motto, which was painted on the wall beneath the second floor landing-- “Not for wealth or honor, but for personal worth and character.”—was a statue of their mythological patron, the god Apollo, the fraternity’s flag, the U. S. flag and a large plaque detailing the fraternity’s history and most accomplished alumni. The floor of the foyer was littered with garbage-- mostly beer bottles-- and several empty kegs. Their bikes leaned against the side of the staircase. Lance had defaced the statue of Apollo by painting its lips red and hair green, like the Joker from the Batman comics. Even the pubes around its modest marble penis.
Vince wondered if the oracular deity had seen that coming.
“Should we say somethin’?” Steve asked, staring down at Rudie.
“Does anybody here know any prayers?” Vince asked the group. “My parents were atheists. All I know is a few lines from the Lord’s Prayer. And I’m not really sure about that, to be honest.”
“Maybe we should duct tape his mouth shut,” Mary said. When everyone looked at her with puzzled expressions, she said, “So he doesn’t bite anyone after he comes back! Duh!”
“That’s a really good idea,” Vince said, and Mary smiled at him.
“I have better one!” Lance cried, and he went pelting up the staircase.
5
He returned a few minutes later, a large cardboard box cradled in his arms. It must have been the same cardboard box Rudie had availed himself to make his infected sign because one of the flaps was torn off. On the side of the box were the words: SUNDRY SHIT. It was written in Lance’s nigh illegible print. Mary, Vince, Brody and Steve glanced at one another as Lance descended the stairs, muttering to himself happily and pushing through the contents of the box with one hand.
“Whatcha up to, slick?” Steve asked as Lance joined them on the foyer floor.
“Don’t know. Whatchoo up to, Rodeo?”
They had nicknamed Steve “Rodeo” because he had competed a bit when he was in high school. It never really stuck. Only Lance called him that sometimes.
Lance set the box down beside Rudie and lifted out a rubber Richard Nixon mask. He grinned at the others as if he expected them to understand.
“What is that for?” Mary asked.
Lance turned the mask toward himself, holding it like a puppet. “What is that for?” he echoed, talking to Tricky Dicky. “You believe that, Tricky? What is that for! It’s a mask, silly! Rudie wore it during our Hallowiener Bash. Don’t you remember? He thought he was being funny, him being a gov maj. It wasn’t funny then, but it’s fucking hilarious now!”
“I don’t get it,” Vince said. “What are you planning to do with it?”
“Put it ON him!” Lance cried. “Don’t you see how droll it is? There’s going to be a deadhead out there wandering around in a Richard Nixon mask. We can even tape his fingers down so he makes those peace signs.”
“Why would you want to do that?” Mary cried, that whine coming into her voice, the one she got whenever she was upset or tired.
“To laugh in the face of death!” Lance answered.
He almost shouted it, his eyes lit up with desperate glee. He looked like he was on the verge of cackling or shrieking. It could have went either way. But once he’d put his thoughts to words, the minds of all five kids seized on the idea. They knew they were likely going to die. So far as they could tell, they were the last living souls in the entire town of Westland. Maybe even the world. If death was coming for them, why not spit in its eye? The idea had a certain nihilistic attractiveness. It was almost… romantic, in a way.
“Let’s do this!” Steve said, clapping his hands.
“If I get infected, I want you guys to dress me as a slutty nurse,” Mary said.
“Oh my god, I’m going in drag!” Brody exclaimed. “Can you guys imagine? Me? Big as I am?”
Lance brayed laughter. “Oh, Jem! That would be so fucking outrageous! I’m doing it, man! You get the brain munchies and I’m definitely dressing you up in drag!”
Even Vince had caught the fever. “Steve Martin,” he said, smirking. They looked at him and he said, “I have one of those Steve Martin arrows in my closet upstairs. I always thought he was funny. I got some bug-eye glasses, too. The kind where the eyeballs pop out on springs. I want you guys to do me like Steve Martin if I get the Phage. Put me in some boxers with my pants around my ankles, arrow through my head…”
“Okay! Great!” Lance said, nodding.
“But we need to get Rudie done up now. He could come back any second,” Vince said.
“I’ll get the duct tape!” Mary cried, racing toward the kitchen. “I saw some under the sink when I got the gloves.”
“I’ll fix his sign,” Lance said, brandishing a Sharpie and kneeling beside the dead boy. He lifted Rudie’s head by the hair and slipped the infected sign off. He placed the cardboard flap on a thigh. “I… am… not… a… crook,” he mumbled, scribbling with the marker. “There!” he said, and put the sign back around Rudie’s neck. Rudie’s head thumped against the floor when he released it. The chubby young man stared up at the ceiling, tongue protruding, goop oozing from mouth.
“Here’s the tape,” Mary said, returning. “I guess we don’t need to tape his mouth. He’ll have the mask on.”
“We might better,” Steve said. “Just in case he comes back while we’re fixin’ him up.”
Nodding, Mary kneeled. She grabbed a wad of tissue that was lying in one of the garbage drifts near the front door and wiped the viscous zombie ichor from Rudie’s mouth and chin.
“So gross,” she murmured, tossing the wad of tissue aside.
She took the roll of duct tape and started trying to peel the end of it up, but she couldn’t get ahold of it with the rubber gloves on her hands.
“Dudes, I saw him twitch again!” Lance cried, jumping to his feet.
“Oh, yer imagining things,” Steve dismissed.
“No, for real this time!”
“I saw it, too,” Mary said distractedly. Her hands were trembling. She tried one more time to peel up the end of the duct tape roll and hissed, “Ah, screw it!” She brought the fingers of the Platex glove on her right hand to her mouth. Biting the tip of the middle finger, she pulled the glove off her hand and threw it aside. “Lift his head up,” she said, and then she began to wrap the tape around his lower face. It made a scronking sound as she went around and around with it.
“There! Got it!” she said, tearing off the tape and jumping back. She held her hands in the air as she rose, like a contestant in a calf roping competition. “You guys can finish him off.”
“I’ll do the mask,” Lance said, eyeing the corpse suspiciously.
She passed the tape to Lance.
“Here. You should tape the mask around his neck. So he doesn’t pull it off.”
“Okay.”
Steve jerked and took a step back. “He did move!” he cried.
Lance dropped and wriggled the Richard Nixon mask onto Rudie’s s
wollen head. He adjusted it, making sure it was on straight, then took the tape and tried to peel the edge up. The end of the tape had re-adhered.
“Here, let me,” Mary said, holding out her hand.
He handed her the tape and she peeled it back. She returned it carefully but it immediately got stuck to his glove. “Damn!” Lance shouted, shaking his hand. He yanked off the glove, peeled the tape off the fingers, then leaned forward and started strapping the mask around Rudie’s neck.
The corpse shuddered and all five of them jumped back with a cry.
“The fingers!” Vince shouted, pointing at Rudie’s slowly flexing hands. “Do the fingers!”
Breathing heavily, Lance whipped off the other Platex glove and set about taping Rudie’s thumb and two outside fingers down, giving the ginger lad peace sign hands. As he reached for Rudie’s left hand, the chubby freshman’s legs spasmed, heels thumping on the floor. A muffled moaning sound drifted out of the Nixon mask.
“Done!” Lance said, scrambling away.
“Get him outside!”
“Check for zombies first! Make sure there’s no zombies in the yard!”
Mary turned from the peephole of the door. “It’s clear! It’s clear!”
Steve opened the door and Vince and Brody grabbed Rudie’s ankles. They turned him in a circle and dragged him toward the porch. Outside, it was a bright, clear, sunny November afternoon, the streets clear of zombies, the world silent but for the twitter of birds and the scrape of windborne litter scuttling down the gutters. Winter didn’t really get down to business in Southern Illinois until late December or early January, but the air had a bit of a nip to it, a promise that colder weather was on the way.
Die Laughing (The Fearlanders) Page 2