Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  A polite girl or woman, with whom you’ve never spoken of sex, suddenly telling you where to go, grabbing your hand, and sliding it between her legs, admitting that she wants to feel good—in the years after that night, such a thing wouldn’t seem like a big deal. Grown women can talk about what they want, what they need from you. But in high school, when girls are supposed to be ladies instead of human beings, hearing such things from a total hottie like Ginger Banks, when all I’d dared to dream of was first base and a decent view of second, was like looking for trace elements of fossilized bacteria on Mars and finding the Miss Hawaiian Tropic competition camped out at your landing site.

  Her skin was achingly cold.

  “You’re freezing,” I said.

  “I get goose bumps all the time.”

  She stood there with her top off while we kissed. She kept her skirt on, her socks and shoes too. Half-dressed like that, that strange combination of nudity and modesty, was an intoxicating cocktail of dream life and daily life. I’d only ever seen one or the other. In movies, they always cut from the kissing to the sex montage. In pornos, “actors” peeled off their own clothes like layers of useless, dead skin. But when Ginger lay back on a patch of hallowed earth overrun with clover, grabbed my hips, and guided me into her hidden, frozen pussy, it was as though we’d fallen into the crack between fantasy and reality, into that twilight of sensuality which you can visit once, the first time, but only in dreams thereafter.

  Plus, I’d always thought people called out each other’s names when they did it. I’ve since learned that this is seldom the case. I’ve also learned that people seldom even think of each other when they’re fucking each other. But back then, that night, I could only think of Ginger—and not even all of her, just her breasts, or her eyes, or how we tried to keep it in when we turned over so she could be on top. One thing at a time. I didn’t even know my name.

  She came when I came, because I came, I would later find out. Apparently, what I left in her was hot and anxious and she had only the chill of death to fill her insides the rest of the time. I haven’t made many women cum since then.

  “It’s so weird just sitting here,” she remarked afterwards, propped against the base of a towering, angelic grave marker. “I used to have to, you know, button up while my boyfriend defrosted the windshield so he could drop me off before curfew.” She sighed. “It’s so weird being dead. You know?”

  “Not really.”

  “You will.”

  “Thanks.”

  She smiled at me, straightened her clothes, and reached back to try and tuck her buzzed-off hair behind her ears.

  “I heard your hair keeps growing after you die,” she said. “I hope it’s true. You know—” She sounded serious all of a sudden (something else I would have to get used to, and dread—a woman getting a serious tone after a sound shag). “How do you know, for sure, that you shouldn’t be here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, think about it,” she said.

  But I didn’t have to. Already my heart started rattling in my chest like a punching bag. She meant how did I know I wasn’t dead. Did I know?

  I started talking fast. More to myself than the dead girl scrutinizing my dazed expression.

  “But I’ve gone home to my house and seen my parents and—”

  “Did they talk to you? Did they acknowledge you?”

  “No, but they usually don’t. They—”

  I stopped when I saw it. By the light of a lightning flash, I saw it staring back at me, unassuming, defiant, smug.

  “Ohmigodimdead.” I knelt in front of my grave, stared down at my name and the date underneath. July fourth. I died on Independence Day. I thought back to a firecracker nearly going off in my hand. It must have gone off too soon. I must have bled to death.

  “I’m dead?” The world went quiet. Long enough for a light to turn red too soon.

  The cool earth snuck up and cold-cocked me from behind. I was on the ground. Somewhere beneath me, I was in the ground. The transfer wasn’t a mistake. I was supposed to be here in the land of the dead, haunting my parents at night, unable to let g—

  “PSYYYYYYYYYCH!”

  The call resounded through the boneyard. Disoriented from my fall, I tried to stand, tried to use my own tombstone for balance as it crumbled into a lumpy mass of gray, standard-issue, sophomore Art Class self-hardening clay and I fell into it on my way back to Earth.

  From behind the nearest mausoleum, Art, Roland, and Missy Nefertiti leapt into the moonlight, the surprise causing my heart, my still-beating, magnificent, most all-important muscle to batter against its calcium housing, threatening to stop, but persevering nonetheless.

  “Sha-ZAAM, son!” Roland called out, laughing hysterically before Missy nearly squashed him as she doubled over in hysterics.

  “You guys are so fucking dead!” I swore to Art as he helped me to my feet. Had they been there listening to us the whole time? Did I care? No! I was alive! I was laid! It was funny, too—I’d equated those two states of being for so long, now that I got both at once, they seemed completely different.

  I grinned at the smug bastard, punched him in the shoulder as hard as I could, which wasn’t very hard. “You are so fucking DEAD!”

  “I know.”

  Nobody parties like the dead. The damned have rhythm. The entire school celebrated our victory in the cemetery that night, stamping their feet, howling at the moon loud enough to wake the dead and serve them up a tall one from the keg.

  Ginger stayed close to me, getting drunk and clingy as the night spiraled down into the rosy abyss of bad breath and good vibes. Living in Limbo, a place to which God apparently turned a blind eye, was like your folks going away for the weekend and leaving the keys in the ignition and the liquor cabinet unlocked. The idea of bashing Paul Pennybaum’s skull in was as distant and meaningless as Monday morning seen from the observation deck of Friday night.

  “Listen!” Ginger said to me over the music sometime after midnight. She was sweaty from dancing and talked right into my face with a boozy lack of depth perception. “I don’t want you to think I’m a slut or anything because we fucked!”

  “But aren’t you kind of a slut?!” I howled and lit a cigarette.

  “Well, yeah, but I don’t want you to think of me that way!”

  “I don’t!”

  “Good!” she proclaimed, then climbed on top of a broad, flat grave marker, took off her shirt, and started to dance. It was at that moment that I knew I was falling in love.

  Just before dawn, things started to slow down, and my new girlfriend started to cry.

  “I was sooooooo fucking popular!” she lamented, tears streaming down her face. The moon was down and all was dark. All around us, drunken kids and bilious abominations stumbled back to their graves. “I was about to get my license! And just ’cause that dumb-ass zombie ate my brains I wound up here. I should totally be in Heaven!”

  “At least you didn’t wind up in Hell.”

  “My cell phone doesn’t get any reception here!” she shouted to the black sky. “I am in Hell!”

  She sobbed. I held her close. Her nipples were hard under her shirt. Her tears were cold.

  “What the fuck is a last rite anyway? Is that like, the directions to Heaven? They couldn’t give me directions before I died, so I got lost and ended up here? I don’t even believe in God!”

  I struggled to find the right thing to say that would either make her feel better or at least make her stop crying.

  “Yeah, but, you know, He believes in you.”

  “Really?” she asked, teary-eyed and hopeful. “You think so?”

  “Um . . . not really. Sorry. I just said that to make you feel better. I stopped believing in God before I stopped believing in Santa Claus.”

  In the next plot down, Brutus Forte, our school’s star quarterback, slid down into his grave, drunk with victory, beer, adoration of the masses. Peering over the lip of his grave, I watched him
fluff up the dirt where his head would rest, then reach up to the surface, and in a single, sweeping motion draw a pile of loose earth on top of him as he fell back, already sound asleep before his head touched the cool, wormy terra firma.

  “Do you love me?”

  “Huh?” I turned back to Ginger. She propped herself against a headstone, watching me like a mirror while she wiped away her smeared eye shadow. Dead leaves clung to her scalp and clothes. The last of the alcohol had left her body, leaving her more sober than she was before she started drinking, the way you get when you’ve stayed up late enough for the booze to find its way back out, temporarily flushing out the drunkenness of everyday self-denial.

  “I know they want you to kill Paul Pennybaum,” she continued. “If you do, you won’t ever come back.”

  “Well, I could come back,” I swallowed. “I mean . . . I’d have to do it like Art di—”

  “But you wouldn’t.” She looked up at the moon, saw herself in it, pursed her lips, drew a finger around them to erase a smudge. “You’re not that kind of person.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re the kind of person that makes good decisions. That’s why girls don’t like you—as more than a friend I mean.” She sighed, eyes focused on a leaf stuck in the front clasp of her bra. “You’ll never break my heart,” she said. She sounded a little surprised, and a little disappointed.

  She looked up at me, caught my expression.

  “I’m not stupid,” she replied to my thoughts. “Girls understand boys. It’s just that most of the time, we don’t have to, or we don’t want to.”

  “I don’t wanna kill Paul. I want to keep coming to see you.”

  “Then don’t kill him,” she pleaded softly. “He’ll probably get killed some other way, anyway. People die all the time. Look at me.”

  A cold wind rustled through the cemetery, a parent checking up on their child after lights-out. It found us and we huddled together. Ginger’s skin made me even colder, but I didn’t want to let go.

  “I should get to bed,” she said at last, and lowered herself into the empty grave beside us. Once in, she paused and peered up at me. Her head just barely came up above ground level. “Will you tuck me in?”

  “Sure,” I replied, and got down on my knees. As I worked the dirt into her grave, I thought about the times my father would wake me up and tell me I was having a nightmare. I never remembered having a bad dream, but I believed him and felt better with him there.

  “When you’re done,” Ginger said before I covered her face, “you have to go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t spend the night here, or you can never leave again.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know, I just know. It’s just one of the rules. Your parents are probably worried sick.”

  “But I wan—”

  “Nobody worries about me anymore,” she interrupted.

  She leaned forward, crawled her fingers through the hair on the back of my head, kissed me, then fell back to the dark earth, the dirt around her body caving in as she fell. Behind me, I could already hear the black bus idling at the side of the road.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “We’ve been so worried!”

  “You have no idea!”

  It’s funny how quickly relief can turn to anger. It’s like we keep both emotions spring-loaded inside the same little tin can inside our chests and when we let one feeling out, the other must inevitably follow.

  “Did you drive drunk?” my father demanded to know, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Who have you been out with?”

  “Zombies.”

  “Zombies? What is that, some kind of gang?” The old man inquired, exasperated from running every drug overdose and child-kidnapping scenario imaginable through his head while waiting to hear my key in the door. “Are you in a fucking gang now?”

  My father rarely cussed at me. It was one of those rare glimpses I ever caught of his non-father personality. I rarely liked what I saw.

  “Oh my God.” My mother sat down at the table, her face in her hands. She looked up at her jailbird son. “Are you dealing drugs?”

  I wanted to tell them to get real, to remember that the best lessons they ever learned was from the mistakes they made, that the first step in becoming your own person is to make a conscious decision not to become your parents.

  But I didn’t know how to say all that, to articulate what I would only learn years later when I yelled at my own kids, because the only way to grow old is to forget what it’s like to be young. And besides, they didn’t deserve a response, or so I believed. They’d never been this mad before, never talked to me like this. It made all their love, all their kind words and tender moments seem totally and unforgivably conditional.

  “Yeah,” I replied coldly. If they needed to blame everything on changes in the world outside, instead of changes in their son, I wouldn’t stand in their way. “That’s it.” I started up to my room, spoke over my shoulder, let my words tumble down the stairs behind me. “The big bad wolf made me do it.”

  “That must be his supplier,” I heard my father explain to my mother. “They all have nicknames. It’s all—”

  The door SLAMMED! on his words, caught them and held them like fingers in a car door.

  I collapsed on my bed, listened to my parents fighting downstairs, turned on the ten o’clock news. Channel 4 was running an exposé on the deaths at my old high school. A young, statuesque, serious-minded telejournalist reported that students were living in a state of mourning, that grief had struck the school “like a brick through a stained-glass window.” As she said this, a man with a clipboard stepped behind her, into frame, and waved off the mob of students mooning the camera and flashing middle fingers and gang signs.

  “Excuse me, young man.” The reporter snared a passerby and aimed the camera at him. It was Paul Pennybaum, lurching to class. Flies orbited his tilted head, alighting on his rotten fruit face and taking off again. His clothes were tattered and sullied from his time in the grave. His eyes looked at the world like a retarded monkey would look at a banana painted on a brick wall.

  “Young man,” the reporter began again, “how does it feel going to school under the shadow of Death?”

  “Brains,” Paul droned, with great effort, as he stared straight through the reporter.

  “Yes,” the reporter responded, “the victims have all suffered severe trauma to their craniums. How does that make you feel?”

  “Feel . . . dead.”

  The reporter turned back to the camera.

  “As you can see, some of the students here already consider themselves future victims. Back to you, Bob and Alice.”

  I changed the channel, tried to pick up some scrambled porn, but nothing was on. So I sat there in the dark, weighing the gravity of so much death against the weight of Ginger’s body on top of mine. I supposed it was partially my fault. If I whacked Paul, got rid of him somehow, the killing would stop. But I would never see Ginger again. Thus, the combination of my lust for her and my loathing for my former classmates was enough to persuade me, before I whacked off and fell asleep, that most of them were better off dead anyway. Paul Pennybaum was by no means the only zombie at San Los Pleasovale High.

  By the following Saturday, five more students and three teachers were dead at school. My parents spoke as though I was one of them. Good riddance. And don’t give me that look, either. How many times have you looked around a room and, however fleetingly, wished half of them would just disappear?

  At the table that morning, my father spoke of days gone by, when he and I would barbecue burgers in the backyard and play catch. My mother made no reply. Tears welled up in her eyes as she hid them behind that day’s crossword. Sitting between them at the table, I wanted to remind my father that he was a vegetarian, and that we had played catch once. Neither of us liked it. We both hated sports. And
while I couldn’t claim to like the jocks at my school, I couldn’t blame them for being what they were. After all, if I had the choice between being a moderately clever writer, amusing himself alone at his computer, or being a Neanderthal in a football jersey at a blowjob buffet (or so I have to imagine them), I’d have to think about it.

  Leaning over his bowl of cereal, my father flipped to the business section, exposing the front page to the rest of the table. The headline read that both the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been called in to investigate the series of deaths at my old high school.

  I got up to leave when I heard my bus arrive to take me to the Homecoming pep rally and game. We’d been prepping for it all week—hanging streamers in the hallways at school, pinning up signs so parents and alums wouldn’t get lost when they arrived for the game from their various planes of existence. I’d stayed late every day to help decorate and then fuck my girlfriend. Every day was Christmas. Then I would come home and see my parents asleep on the couch, in the armchair, at the kitchen table, dreaming in uncomfortable positions. First I’d be mad. Then I’d be sorry. Then I’d go to sleep feeling mad that they made me feel sorry.

  I paused for a second at the door, looked back at my parents looking down at their papers and plates, not so much looking at these items of interest as not looking at me.

  For all they know, I am in a gang. This could be the last time they see me, and they don’t care. They wouldn’t care if I was next.

  Going out the door, I thought about what Ginger said every night when I tucked her into her grave and I always asked to stay a little longer. If you stay, she’d invariably warn me, you can never go home.

  I thought about that as I got onto the bus, and about how little home felt like home anymore.

  Well, maybe I will be next.

  As we pulled away, I looked back at the house I’d grown up in. It felt like I hadn’t been there in years, as though it had been sold long ago and that I’d only just returned for nostalgia’s sake, but had changed my mind when I drew close, and decided to keep driving.

  “Where are they?”

  “They’ll be here.”