Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  “Bruce Salinger is beside himself,” my mother informed us. “I understand they had quite a thing.”

  “I thought she was dating George Dickson.”

  “Hmm, not sure. She could have been dating them both, for all I know, and for all either of them would care.”

  “She took quite a reputation with her when she went. Ms. Knotsworth was talking about it in the lounge.”

  “Speaking of the lounge, that new boy Pennybaum wandered in today while I was pouring myself a cup of java. What an odd young man, so pale and quiet. I think he was rather shaken up about what happened to poor Ginger. He was just wandering around in a daze. When I asked him what was the matter, all he could say was ‘Brains.’ ”

  “I think he’s from Slovenia. Or is it Pennsylvania? Some vania or another. Which reminds me, your Aunt Ruth from Fairbanks called.”

  “Now why would Pennsylvania remind you of Fairbanks?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, it’s just one of those things. Actually, I think I was at the supermarket today and I saw this can of tuna from Fairbanks right next to . . . ”

  Listening to my folks, I felt my appetite burn up and vanish, like my stomach was made of bright, flashing magnesium. I couldn’t eat, but couldn’t excuse myself from a full plate. So I sat there and watched my parents eat, in awe of these dull, lifeless creatures.

  “I’m a nobody.

  Who are you?

  Are you a nobody too?”

  “So let me get this straight,” Art whispered from his desk. At the front of the class, Missy Nefertiti recited Emily Dickinson with all the passion and understanding of an empty Gucci shoebox. Tucked under her arm was a pearly, hand-carved jar adorned with the head of Anubis, in which she kept her brain. “You’re saying that if you were the one that found Ginger Banks’s corpse, you wouldn’t sneak a peek before you called the cops? I’m sorry—which one of us is dead again?”

  “All I’m saying is that it would depend on how gross she was,” I hushed back. “I mean, her freakin’ head was bashed in.”

  “So,” Art replied. “You’ve seen her head.”

  Missy Nefertiti finished her poem and took her seat in front of Art.

  “I heard she was already dead by the time they found her,” Art informed me as I stood to walk to the front of the class, “before her last rites could be performed. Her soul’s lost, dude! She’s totally transferring here!”

  I stood before my classmates, scanned their eyes, horns, and globules of protoplasm. I thought about Ginger Banks, and about her transferring to our school. I thought about cold pussy.

  “Death be not proud,” I began.

  “Mr. Henry,” the skeletal registrar addressed me as I waited to see Principal Grimm, “it appears that you were just dying to come back and see us.”

  “Was that supposed to be funny?” I asked from my chair.

  “Do I look like I know funny?”

  I glared at the tacky, painted skull glaring back at me with all the knowledge of the grave, then at the great wigwam of coiled, purple locks festooned on top of it.

  “So, care to explain why you’re here?”

  I thought back to Mr. Marley interrupting my poem, waving his iron-clad arms in embarrassed indignation. As I’d gone back to my desk to collect my things, Roland the gangster fetus had offered me his condolences.

  “Shit,” he’d said, holding up a tiny fist for my fist to bump. “Grimm’s secretary is scary, yo. They call ’er the muthafuckin’ Clown of Dachau. Good luck.”

  At first I’d felt apprehensive about seeing the principal on my second day of school. But when an aborted fetus feels sorry for you, you have nowhere to go but up.

  “So,” I asked the neon skull to pass the time, “how did you die?”

  There was a moment’s pause, statistically long enough for someone to die in a car accident.

  “A fanatical cultist blew himself up in the drive-thru where I worked. He was protesting the Korean War. He wasn’t even Korean.”

  I paused a moment to reflect on the suddenness of it all, at having no time to say goodbye, to leave so many things left undone.

  “Did you have to wear roller skates at work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Henry, we have a problem.”

  Principal Grimm sat behind his tidy, faux-wood desk in a brown suit with a green tie. The pinstripes of his suit were the same width as the wood grain running along his desk. My first impression was that he was growing out of his furniture.

  “You know, sir,” I began casually, with just a hint of condescension. I’ve always found the best way to deal with authority figures is to talk to them like they’re delivering your pizza. “I’m sorry if the poem offended anyone. I thought it was apropos.”

  Of course I knew perfectly well that my poem might offend the teacher. That was the point—the point of the poem and of high school in general, it seemed: Four years of sailing as fast as we could toward the edge of the earth to see if it was round.

  “There’s no need for an insincere apology, Mr. Henry. That’s not what I need from you.” Mr. Grimm gripped the surface of his desk and wheeled his rolling chair around to my side as all sense of subtle mockery was wrung from my guts like a sponge full of blood. I stared down his lower half, or lack thereof: His brown blazer ended in a bloody tangle of bone, sinew, and strips of torn flesh. Averting my gaze to let the nausea pass, I looked up at the surfboard mounted on the wall behind him. An elliptical path of two-hundred-some-odd teeth marks ran up the middle of the board where a massive chunk was missing. “You see, the same clerical error which was responsible for your transfer here, transferred one of our students to your old school, and apparently, there’s been some sort of incident.”

  I recalled poor Ginger Banks and her bashed-in brains.

  “Is she coming here?” I asked, perhaps a little too eagerly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Ginger Banks. Is she transferring here, now that she’s, you know, dead?”

  Mr. Grimm’s face looked somewhere far off, as though called by a bell only his ears could hear.

  “I really couldn’t say,” he began tentatively. “What I can say is this: you can’t go back to your old school while Mr. Pennybaum is enrolled there. However, if he were to somehow meet an untimely end in your world, perhaps through the sudden rupture of his cranial cavity, you would be able to resume your place at your former alma mater.”

  “You’re saying I have to kill this guy to go back to my old school?”

  “Well, technically, he can’t be killed, per se, because he already died. He’s undead. A zombie, in the popular nomenclature.”

  “You want me to kill this guy?”

  Mr. Grimm sighed and wiped a layer of ectoplasm from his perspiring brow.

  “As of . . . ” Mr. Grimm looked at his watch, held up an index finger. He opened his mouth, made ready to bring his hand down, then paused, and spoke quietly to his watch. “What are you waiting fo— NOW! Paul Pennybaum has killed three more of your former classmates.”

  “So you want me to stop him before he kills again.”

  “Mr. Henry, with deaths so sudden, the victims are bound to end up here. If this continues, our student-to-teacher ratio will be drastically upset. We’re underfunded as it is. Lockers, desks, and food will start to run low.”

  I looked up at a corkboard mounted under the surfboard. This month’s cafeteria menu was pinned to it by a single black thumbtack. I perused today’s menu.

  “So you want me to stop him before you run out of meatloaf?”

  A long pause. Long enough for someone to realize that someone else has loved them all along.

  “Yes,” the principal nodded, rolled back behind his desk. His stomach rumbled. Behind the desk a dripping noise pricked the momentary silence. “That sounds about right.”

  When I left Mr. Grimm’s office she was there, standing in profile, looking down at her new class schedule, just as I had done nearly twenty-four hours earlier, wi
th equal amounts of disbelief and anger. I imagine it sucks finding out you’re dead, especially when you were so popular. Ginger Banks was tiny, pale, her head shaved where they’d cleaned up the wound for her autopsy. She wore the cheerleader’s uniform in which she’d died. Long, dark blood stains ran down the back of her white top.

  I approached and opened my mouth to say something clever or sarcastic to the secretary to show Ginger how funny I was, how alive and breathing I was. But when I got close and felt all the boy in me flare up my front in a wave of campfire warmth, the speech centers of my brain stalled out. I tried to talk, to say something casual yet enigmatic. But I couldn’t form a coherent sound, frozen in a mute, awkward panic, mouth open and eyes wide, like a wax museum dummy getting molested by a lonely security guard.

  I came to my senses when she turned toward me and reflexively drew a wave of nonexistent hair behind her ear. She’d been crying. Watercolor veins of tear-diluted eye shadow ran down her cheeks. I closed my mouth, kept staring.

  I love watching people cry. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do, and I’ve done nothing to change.

  Still, I wanted to say something nice, something cool yet empathetic. But the problem was that I’m none of those things, really. Well, maybe I’m nice, but I’m too selfish to call myself a nice person and still be honest. Either way, I wanted to make her feel better about being dead. But how?

  Say something, I thought to myself. Make it good. Show some insight into the human condition that will lessen the blow of eternity rolling out before her.

  “Hey, at least now you can eat all you want and never get fat.”

  “Excuse me?” Ginger sniffed, wiped her nose on her bare forearm.

  Oh God, just keep going you idiot. Don’t stop till you can end on something good.

  “Uh . . . you’ll never get a pimple again?” Never mind. Stop now. “And you can smoke all you want.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Plus, you died when you were still totally hot.” Please stop. For you own good. “Just let that little nugget sink in.”

  For the love all that’s holy . . . STOP!

  She paused. Let it all sink in. More mad. Less sad. I have that effect on women.

  “What are you, kidding?” she replied. “I’m freakin’ bald, you moron!”

  From behind the counter, Ms. Needlemeyer, the Clown of Dachau, cleared her throat.

  “Mr. Henry—”

  I held up a single index finger, finally feeling the residual ire of Principal Grimm’s admission that my transfer here had been a clerical error.

  “Can it. rollerball,” I snapped, still locking eyes with Ginger, who flinched a little and smiled. Now that I’d made a complete fool of myself and had no chance of her being attracted to me, I could actually relax, be myself, and say something interesting. “Look Ginger, the most popular kid in school is an aborted fetus. I think bald’s gonna work.”

  “Are you like, retarded or something?” Missy Nefertiti asked. Roland sat on her lap, leaning back against her tightly wrapped midriff. Missy took a jiggly bite of blood-flavored Jell-O.

  “No doubt, son,” Roland concurred. “You gotta be outta your goddamn mind.”

  “Whatever,” I said absently. Across the cafeteria, Ginger ate alone at her table. “She looks alive.”

  “She dead, son,” Roland said.

  “So are you.”

  “But you’re not,” Art chimed in. “There are like, laws against that shit. Not like, don’t smoke pot laws, but, you know, real ones.”

  I thought back to the previous day, to the lightning that had struck me when I suggested Art return with me to the land of the living. My arm was still a faded shade of aquamarine, and twitched when I tried to make a fist. What would become of my soul if I made it with Ginger Banks? Would it turn blue and feel fuzzy for a week? I could live with that.

  “There’s more than one high school for people like us, dude.”

  I glanced up at Art.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean stick around for the football game after school.”

  “Football game? Who the hell are we playing?”

  Roland, Art, and Missy exchanged a look. Across the cafeteria, a pair of she-devils from the Spirit Squad sat down at Ginger’s table and said something that made her smile.

  “Why isn’t anybody cheering?”

  “What’s the point?” Art asked. “It won’t make any difference.”

  Even the cheerleaders sat on the sidelines watching the slaughter in total silence.

  “The sun ain’t even set yet, son.”

  I looked down at Roland sitting between me and Missy on the decrepit wooden bleacher. All around us the students and faculty made polite conversation in the packed stands, rarely watching the game as our hometown boys, the Middle Plain Lost Souls, were taken to school by the Inferno High Horsemen. Our players, a group of small, unassuming squirts with all the fighting spirit of a euthanized tree sloth were squaring off against the greatest generals of Satan’s Legions. On the opposing sidelines, the Dark One himself sat in the bleachers, a great swirling mass of flame and agony contained in an old ratty letterman’s jacket.

  The grassy plain before us looked like a minefield in which every bomb had been detonated, so many times had our poor, brave lads been driven face-first into the sod. The score was thirty-six to zero. The opposing team had already rushed five hundred yards. A buzzer rang out to end the first quarter as the surrounding hills slurped down the last rays of sunlight. I edged my way to the stairs and stepped down to the sidelines where Ginger sat with the Spirit Squad.

  “Hey, Zack!” She waved me over and scooched to make room for me on the bench. That one gesture made my heart beat so fast that every Christmas morning, every birthday I’d ever had, was instantly put to shame and forgotten. My whole life added up to that little space on the bench next to her teeny-tiny skirt.

  “This is Misty and Twisty.” Ginger waved to the two devils I’d seen in the cafeteria. The twins gave an upward half-nod that meant they’d seen me before, had scraped me off their shoe, and kept walking.

  “Can you believe this game?” Ginger said.

  “Yeah, I know. Why aren’t you guys cheering?”

  From the other side of the bench, Misty and Twisty sighed and rolled their eyes.

  Ginger shrugged and bunched up her shoulders in a chilly gesture, leaning into me. She rubbed her hands up and down my bicep for warmth. Casually, I looked over my shoulder at Art, who studiously ignored me as the moon slowly hoisted itself over the field and the buzzer for the second quarter sounded.

  “Come on, Ginger.” Misty and Twisty stood with the rest of the squad and led Ginger before the crowd. I suddenly noticed that I was the only spectator still sitting. The entire crowd began to stamp and holler. The cheerleaders twirled and spun and ground their palms into their hips, spinning their heads around 360 degrees, whipping their hair in every direction. Too bad the crowd wasn’t looking at them. All eyes were on the field as the home team broke their huddle, newly transformed into a raving band of howling wolflike demons. Matted black fur bristled through every seam in their uniforms. They howled up at the full moon blazing down on them.

  The Middle Plain Lost Souls scored seven touchdowns in six minutes, plus seven two-point conversions, chewing their way through the opposing line until Inferno High didn’t have enough players on the field to continue.

  Ginger never stopped looking at me while she cheered. When it was all over I sought her out before the lightless vacuum of victory and popularity sucked her down for the rest of the evening. Misty and Twisty glared at me, my social ostracism forming a hideous, invisible hunch on my back which only they could see.

  “Hey, can I walk you to your grave?”

  Ginger stood at the stands, smiling broadly, out of breath. The air must have been gloriously thin at the top of a cheeramid. I imagined that when it dispersed and Ginger fell from the top and was caught, it must have been like th
e whole world was reaching out for you, wanting to make sure you’re safe.

  “Sure.” Ginger’s dead, glassy eyes caught the light of the full moon and swallowed it. Behind her, the other cheerleaders scratched behind the victorious players’ ears. The crowd began to disperse.

  As we left the field, Ginger put her arm around mine and put her head on my shoulder. I felt her cheek muscles tense with a smile.

  “You’re so warm,” she said.

  I looked back at the stands, at my friends studiously ignoring me, at Principal Grimm shaking his head. Across the field, someone else watched me. Though I didn’t dare look back, I could feel a dark smile fix on me from the opposing sidelines, as the visiting team was carried off the field in defeat.

  “I’m surprised you remember me, from when you were alive.”

  Ginger and I walked side by side through the rows of tombstones, fingers intertwined.

  “Of course I remember you. Just ’cause you weren’t popular doesn’t mean you weren’t cute.” Ginger spoke to the moon, to the dead leaves at her feet.

  “But I’m still not popular.”

  “So what?”

  “So why do you like me?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not in the slightest. Just wondering why aren’t you ignoring me now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe vampires and ghosts don’t have like, pheromones or something. And besides, you’re way cuter than an aborted fetus.”

  “Awe shucks,” I replied. “You’re too good to me.”

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, honey.”

  I could tell she’d said it before, with other guys, and that she recycled the phrase because she knew it was sexy. And it was sexy.

  For a second, before her cold, dead tongue slid between my teeth, I thought, maybe this isn’t a good idea. What about the rules of Heaven and Earth? But then my hand slid under her shirt, cupped her firm, icy breast, and I didn’t care.

  Let me tell you something you already know: