“Why should you be ashamed of it? It’s who you are.”
Brody shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve just always been ashamed of it. I think because of my dad. He was a real homophobe, always saying faggot this and faggot that, but I loved him. Wanted him to be proud of me. Not hate me because of, you know, how I was. I’m a virgin, too. Did you know that?”
Vince shook his head, genuinely surprised. “I would never have thought that. I figured you had been with, I don’t know… someone.”
“Oh, I’ve been with girls. I like girls okay. No, I mean with guys. I’ve never been with a guy. I always wanted to… you know. And now I never will. Because I was too chicken to try. And now the world’s ended. Stupid, huh? It sucks to know you’re going to die with regrets. I’m too young to die with regrets, but there it is. I’m just a great big cowardly queer.”
“Well, I’d help you out, but… the Phage,” Vince said with a laugh.
Brody laughed, too. “Sorry, man, you’re not my type. Now, Steve, on the other hand—“
“So that’s why you don’t want him to help!”
Brody guffawed. “I’m afraid I’ll get a boner if he starts putting a tutu and makeup on me!”
That broke Vince up, but it felt good to laugh. It always felt good to laugh, even in the face of death.
Brody laughed, too—until he started coughing. He turned away, apologizing in a strangled voice, stumbled into the corridor. Vince waited as he stood in the hallway, bent forward at the waist, but he couldn’t stop coughing. He just kept barking and barking, phlegm rattling in his lungs like ball bearings.
“You okay, man?” Vince said, coming to the doorway. He wanted to go to his friend, beat on his back, but… the Phage.
Brody nodded and waved his hand, still coughing. Then he fell to his knees.
Vince forgot his fear. He ran to Brody, yelling, “GUUYYYSS!”
13
If anyone had told him that he would one day be leaning over a dying frat brother’s bed, putting his dead girlfriend’s makeup on the guy in preparation for his death, Vince Gorman would have laughed in their face. He had done some pretty crazy things at Epsilon Omega, especially during Hell Week. He had eaten vomelets—omelets made out of eggs and vomit—had his bare ass paddled, he and his fellow pledges had been forced to masturbate into a blue plastic kiddie pool in the Grotto while all the brothers screamed hateful epithets at them, after which they had been “baptized” in the pool, which was sloshing over with not only their collective semen but a profane brew of piss, shit, vomit, alcohol and god only knew what else. But this, Vince thought, was probably the most awful. This was unbearable.
It was just so… sad.
“Am I pretty, Vince?” Brody said with a wry smile. He looked like a deaths head, flesh yellow-green and glazed over with some kind of oleaginous biofilm. His brow jutted out over the caves of his eye sockets in which milky eyes floated like disembodied spirits. His teeth looked too big for his mouth when he grinned. “Make sure… I’m pretty,” he wheezed.
Vince chuckled. He plucked his girlfriend’s lipstick from the mattress, fumbling a little because of the rubber gloves. “You just tell me if you have any impulses to bite, okay?” he said.
“No biting,” Brody said, shaking his head weakly. Vince had already put blush and eye shadow on the boy’s face. He’d really caked it on, too, so it would be extra gaudy. The football player looked like a six-and-a-half-foot tall drag queen, a super buff Divine.
Vince had already helped Brody into his outfit-- pink tights, frilly pink tutu and hot pink panties. He’d worn the get up at their Hallowiener Carnival, the fraternity’s annual Halloween bash, only for the Carnival all the guys (and some of the gals, too) had sported giant, lifelike rubber dongs bobbing from the crotches of their costumes. Hence, the alternate spelling Hallowiener. Rudie’s Nixon had stumbled drunkenly around the party, dick swinging from the fly of his three-piece suit, proclaiming, “I am not a cock!” at the top of his lungs. Vince and Mary had gone as a doctor and nurse team. Doctor Love and Nurse Tranny, both sporting white medical uniforms with matching giant phalluses.
After the bash, three sheets to the wind, they’d used the dongs on one another during a bout of passionate lovemaking. Vince had enjoyed it enough to be ashamed of himself, though his sphincter still twinged painfully at the memory.
Brody’s ballerina outfit didn’t have a dong now. After the bash, they’d taken all the dildos to the Alpha Theta sorority house and thrown them onto the porch, each tied with a pretty pink bow. That was about two days before the Phage really rolled up its sleeves and got busy in the town of Westland, while the lights were still on and the TVs still worked and the evening news was still saying a virulent new strain of the flu was going around, not a zombie virus. Not the end of the world.
Vince was grateful for that, at least. The dildo would have elevated putting makeup on his secretly bisexual frat brother to far greater heights of awkwardness.
“He needs some pigtails,” Lance said, leaning through the doorway. He grinned, a shag of blond hair hanging over his pimply brow. “That would be hilarious.”
“Yeah,” Brody agreed, looking from Lance to Vince and back. “Yeah, that would be… funny.”
“I don’t think your hair’s long enough,” Vince said. “I’ll try, though. Will you go in my room and see if Mary left any rubber bands on the stand in front of the mirror?”
“Sure!” Lance cried, and disappeared from the doorway.
Steve looked after Lance, then turned back. He stood leaning against the doorframe, arms and ankles crossed. Vince could see why Brody might have a crush on the guy. He was very handsome in an all-American Clint Black kind of way, even with the scruff of beard on his upper lip and chin, not quite thick enough to call a goatee. “I don’t really know what I’m gonna do,” he said. “You guys got any idears?”
“Cowboy outfit… and assless chaps,” Brody said—a little too quickly.
Vince laughed.
“I don’t have any chaps,” Steve said, totally serious, and Vince laughed even harder.
“What?” Lance said, returning. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Vince chuckled. “You find any rubber bands?”
“Yeah.” Lance said, coming inside. Vince held a hand out and Lance dropped the rubber bands into his palm.
Vince tried to put the rubber bands in Brody’s hair, but he couldn’t do it with the rubber gloves on. As he tried to give his dying buddy pigtails, Lance and Steve stood talking in the doorway. Steve told Lance he didn’t know what he was going to do to Die Laughing, which is how they’d begun to refer to it. Lance told him there were a lot of costumes still lying around from the Hallowiener Carnival, and that he’d help him come up with something. Brody stared at Steve as Vince fumbled with his hair. Finally, cursing, Vince jerked off the rubber gloves and did it with his bare hands. Steve and Lance wandered off to find the redneck a Die Laughing outfit, and Brody turned his filmy eyes toward Vince.
“Don’t die with regrets,” he said. “Promise me that, G. If there’s something you want to do before, you know, your time comes, just fucking do it. Don’t be scared.”
“All right,” Vince said. “I’m going to need you to roll on your stomach and pull your panties down.”
Brody laughed. “I mean it, G.”
“I know you do.”
Vince finished putting Brody’s hair in pigtails, thinking about his regrets. What were his regrets? What were the things he wanted to do but never had? What was his bucket list?
He had always wanted to have a threesome. He often fantasized about two girls making a Vince sandwich out of him, but sexual fantasies didn’t really count, did they? You couldn’t consider them a real regret, because things like that were sort of out of your hands. Things like that either happened, if you were really, really, really lucky, or they didn’t. He wanted to be a psychologist, get married, have kids. He wanted to be wealthy, respected, and live to the ri
pe old age of ninety. But those things, too, were not really fully in a person’s control. You could work toward your goals, apply yourself to them, but all the effort in the world wouldn’t stop a guy from getting creamed by a bus crossing the street, or developing a nice big malignant cancer tumor in the brain. Regrets were things you could have done but didn’t, and he didn’t really have any of those, because he had usually done the things he’d wanted to do.
Then he realized. When he was ten, his mother and father had taken him to the Beech Bend Amusement Park and Splash Lagoon in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He had wanted to ride a monstrous looking roller coaster called the Hellraiser. After standing in line for over an hour, right before it was time to climb into one of the carts and ride the ride, he had chickened out. He had seen some older boy getting off the ride, vomit on his shirt and in his hair, looking like he’d rather die than walk the gauntlet of amused and disgusted onlookers lined along the exit ramp, and Vince had decided, right there and then, that the Hellraiser wasn’t the amusement park ride for him. Not if it could make an older boy upchuck all over himself and the people behind him.
The thought of soiling himself in such a manner, to lose control, like his mother so often lost control, was too terrifying. To his credit, his father hadn’t blown his stack or tried to pressure him into riding. “All right, kiddo, if you’ve changed your mind, let’s get out of this line and let someone else take our place,” he’d said. Vince had trudged down the exit ramp with his head hanging in shame, because being afraid to do something was a form of losing control, too. But it beat puking all over himself. It beat making a spectacle of himself, as his mother so often did.
So, that was his regret. He regretted not riding the Hellraiser at the Beech Bend Amusement Park and Splash Lagoon.
Vince thought he could live with it.
They had made a pallet for Brody down in the foyer. They had discussed it and decided it would be easier if he died down there, near the door, so they wouldn’t have to drag him across the frat house. Brody was a big man, nearly seven feet tall and just shy of three hundred pounds, most of which was pure muscle. Vince, Lance and Steve were all smaller guys, average size at best. Brody had agreed, so after Vince had finished putting his frat brother in drag, he helped the football player sit up, then called the other guys in to help him escort the giant to his death pallet.
Lance started cackling the moment he saw Brody in tutu and makeup, hair sticking up in little pigtails.
“Funny?” Brody asked, chuckling breathlessly.
“Oh, yeah,” Lance snorted, nodding his head.
“Fucking hilarious, big guy,” Steve agreed, giving him a thumbs up.
“Okay,” Brody gasped. “Good. Up yours, Death.”
They helped him stand, turning their faces from the hot gusts of breath he exhaled. His body radiated heat like a furnace, and Vince could feel the guy trembling all over.
“Grab the candles, Lance,” Vince said.
“Sure.”
Brody farted as they stood there, waiting for him to get his balance. It was a moist little blat of noise, and Brody apologized.
“S’okay, dude, just don’t, you know, shit yourself, too,” Lance said.
“I’m not making any promises,” Brody chuckled. “Not feeling too good here.”
“I heard tell most people shit when they die,” Steve said.
“Rudie didn’t shit,” Vince replied.
“Yeah,” Steve said thoughtfully. “I guess most people are stupid.”
They followed Brody as he stumbled across the room. He dipped a little out in the corridor, his knees buckling for an instant, but he managed to stay upright, and tottered down the hall to the stairs.
“This is going to be tough,” Brody said, eyeing the two dozen or so steps that slanted down to the foyer. This from a guy who had once intercepted a pass and ran the entire length of a football field for a touchdown, three players from the opposing team hanging from his body for the last thirty yards.
“Just take your time,” Vince said.
They made it down to the ground floor, laid Brody on his pallet, covered him generously with blankets. Even though his skin was blazing hot, he claimed he was freezing. His muscles jittered like a strong electric current was running through his body. His teeth chattered.
Steve fetched the roll of duct tape. “Do we do it now?” he asked.
“Ah, man, you’re going to cover up my lipstick,” Brody groaned.
“Don’t worry, man,” Lance said, “I got a red Sharpie around here somewhere. I’ll draw a nice pair of cocksucker lips on it after you die. Make you look like fucking Angelina Jolie.”
“All right,” Brody laughed. “Go ahead and do it then. I don’t want to bite anyone.”
Steve kneeled down beside the big jock, stretching the tape out from the roll. He wasn’t wearing gloves. None of them were, now.
“Any last words, bro?”
Brody gazed up at Steve.
He didn’t say anything. Just shook his head.
“All right,” Steve said, and he began to run the tape around Brody’s lower face.
14
Watching Brody’s death throes was excruciating. Vince could only imagine what it felt like to experience them first hand.
The big jock did not go gently into that good night.
Although he seemed to accept his death in the end psychologically, his body, apparently, had other ideas. A couple hours after lying down in the foyer, as his three frat brothers sat with him, talking casually, Brody’s muscles began to spasm violently. His back arched up from the floor three or four times as he exhaled explosively from his nose, his face turning red, the veins in his temples and neck standing out. Vince and Steve tried to hold him down as he convulsed, but the much larger man flung them away. Lance scooted on his butt until his back came against the wall, watching with wide, horrified eyes, hands and knees drawn to his chin. Brody flopped and thudded on the floor, bubbles of snot swelling and bursting from his nostrils. His massive fists slammed down hard enough to make the floor tremble. He drummed his heels. It went on and on and on. Finally, he arched up from the floor one last time, making a muffled growling sound, his vertebrae popping, and then he collapsed. Urine darkened the crotch of his pink panties. Lance began to giggle.
“Is he dead?” Steve said in the sudden stillness.
“Yes,” Vince said. “I think so.”
“Dead as a dog turd,” Lance said, and then he began to giggle even more shrilly.
Annoyed, Vince said, “Draw the fucking lips on him so we can put him on the porch.”
15
He came back much quicker than Rudie had. Again, probably because of his physical conditioning.
Lance had just finished drawing a pair of cartoonish red lips on the duct tape encircling his mouth when Brody’s massive body began to twitch all over. Thinking the reanimation process would be slow, like Rudie’s had been, Lance didn’t abandon the task. Instead, he finished drawing the lips, smiling and singing some pop song called “Bootylicious” under his breath. “Move, groove, prove you can hang with me. By the looks I got you shook up and scared of me…” Just as he drew back the marker, cocking his head to one side to critique his handiwork, Brody lunged at him.
“Aiiieee! He’s got me!” Lance howled. He tried to push away, but Brody had seized ahold of him by the upper arms. Before Vince and Steve could intercede, the big jock thrust his jaws toward Lance’s throat. Luckily, his lower face was wrapped in several layers of gray duct tape, and he couldn’t sink his teeth in. Instead, it looked like a very large drag queen with cartoon lips was trying to give the frat boy a hickey.
“Let him go!” Steve yelled, trying to pry the jock’s fingers from Lance’s arms.
Brody snarled and swung his arm at the boy, knocking him sprawling across the foyer.
Steve crashed into their bikes, which promptly fell over on top of him, along with a half dozen framed photos of Epsilon Omega alumni. He didn’
t get back up.
“Vince, help!” Lance wailed, as Brody grabbed a handful of blond hair and yanked his head to one side. He might not be able to maul Lance to death with his teeth, but his hands were still free, and the powerful athlete was strong enough to kill with his hands just as easily as his teeth—more easily, probably. Vince didn’t know how Lance’s neck didn’t just snap in two, the way the jock was yanking his head around.
Vince lobbed a kick into the jock’s broad back, swinging his leg with all his might, but it hurt his foot worse than it seemed to hurt the zombie. Favoring his right leg—felt like he’d broke a toe or two—Vince bent and grabbed the edge of the blankets the boy had used as a pallet.
Brody was heavy, but Vince had about a gallon of adrenaline barreling through his veins. Grunting, he began to haul Brody, and the struggling Lance, toward the front door of the frat house.
“Let me GO!” Lance snarled, and somehow he managed to wriggle free of the zombie’s fingers. He crawled away on his hands and knees as Vince dragged Brody across the floor.
Brody hadn’t stood up yet. He looked around in confusion as he slid backwards across the floor, swinging his arms like a bad impression of Frankenstein’s monster. Vince turned and flung open the door, praying there were no deadheads sloping around on the porch or front yard, and hauled Brody outside. The jock grabbed the door as he slid through the doorway, pulled it shut with a clap.
Rather than try to leap past his zombified frat brother, risk the jock getting those hamhock-sized mitts on him, Vince turned and raced down the porch.
The porch of E.O.’s chapter house ran the length of the building’s façade and about half the length of the sides. Vince turned the corner as Brody was clambering to his feet and raced down the east side of the house. He leapt the balustrade, rolled in the shin high grass, and lunged toward the privacy fence that encircled the back lawn.
Die Laughing (The Fearlanders) Page 5
