Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  Betty looked offended. “Hey! Just what kind of nurse do you think I am? I’m going to hose him off and tuck him in, that’s all. Unless you’re insisting I read him a bedtime story, too? Maybe give him a kiss on the cheek? If I could hit his cheek, that is.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

  “I know what you meant. Get some rest, Elaine. You’re beat.”

  But Elaine couldn’t bear to attempt the drive home, searching the dark corners at every intersection, waiting for the shambling strangers who lived in the streets to come close enough that she could get a good look at their faces. So that she could see if their faces were torn, their eyes distant. Or if their heads were beginning to shake.

  Mark had been staying in the janitor’s apartment down in the basement, near the morgue. The janitor had been replaced by a cleaning service some time back as a cost-cutting measure. Supposedly it was to be turned into a lab, but that had never happened. Mark always said he really didn’t mind living by the morgue. He said it cut the number of drop-in visitors drastically.

  Elaine went there.

  “SO DON’T GO back,” Mark said, nibbling at her ear. He was biting too hard, and his breath bore a trace of foulness. Elaine squirmed away and climbed out of bed.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. After closing the bathroom door, she ran water into the sink so that she would be unable to hear herself pee. People reacted to crisis in different ways, she supposed. Mark’s way was to treat all problems as if they were of equal value, whether it was deciding what wattage light bulb to buy or the best way to feed a zombie.

  Elaine looked down at her legs. They’d gotten a little spongier each year; her thighs seemed to spread a little wider each time she sat down. Here and there were little lumps and depressions which seemed to move from time to time. Her belly bulged enough now that she could see only the slightest halo of dark pubic hair when she looked down like this. And the pubic hair itself wasn’t all that dark anymore. There were streaks of gray, and what had surprised and confused her, red. By her left knee a flowery pattern of broken blood vessels was darkening into a bruise. She tried to smell herself. She sometimes imagined she must smell terrible.

  It seemed she had always watched herself grow older while sitting on the toilet. Sitting on the toilet, she found she couldn’t avoid looking at her legs, her belly, her pubic hair. She couldn’t avoid smelling herself.

  She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked for scars, bruises, signs of corruption she might have missed before. She pretended her face was a patient’s, and she washed it, brushed her hair. As a child she’d pretended her face was a doll’s face, her hair a doll’s hair. She’d never trusted mirrors. They didn’t show the secrets inside.

  “I have to go back,” Elaine said coming out of the bathroom. “We’re short-handed. They count on me. And I can’t let Betty work that ward alone.”

  But Mark was busy fiddling with the VCR. “Huh? Oh yeah . . . well, you do what you think is right, honey. Hey—I got us a tape from one of the security people. The cops confiscated it two weeks ago and it’s been circulating ever since.” Elaine walked slowly around the bed and stood by Mark as he adjusted the contrast. “Pretty crudely made, but you can still make out most of it.”

  The screen was dark, with occasional lighter shadows floating through that dark. Then twin pale spots resolved out of the distortion, moving rapidly left and right, up and down. Elaine thought of headlights gone crazy, maybe a moth’s wings. Then the camera pulled back suddenly, as if startled, and she saw that it was a black man’s immobile face, but with eyes that jumped around as if they were being given some sort of electrical shock. Frightened eyes. Eyes moving no no no.

  But as the camera dwelled on this face, Elaine noticed that there was more wrong here than simple fright. The dark skin of the face looked torn all along the hairline, peeled back, and crusted a dark red. A cut bisected the left cheek; she thought she could see several tissue layers deep into the valley it made. And when the head moved, she saw a massive hole just under the chin where throat cartilage danced in open air.

  “That’s one of them,” she said in a soft voice filled with awe. “A zombie.”

  “The tape was smuggled in from somewhere down South, I hear,” Mark said distractedly, moving even closer to the screen. “Beats me how they can still get these videos into the city.”

  “But the quarantine . . .”

  “Supply and demand, honey.” As the camera moved back farther, Elaine was surprised to see live, human hands pressing down on the zombie’s shoulders. “Get a load of this,” Mark said, an anxious edge to his voice.

  The camera jerked back suddenly to show the zombie pressed against gray wooden planks—the side of a barn or some other farm building. The zombie was naked: large wounds covered much of its body. Like a decoration, an angry red scar ran the length of the dangling, slightly paler penis. Six or seven large men in jeans and old shirts—work clothes—were pushing the zombie flat against the gray wood, moving their rough hands around to avoid its snapping teeth. The more they avoided its teeth, the more manic the zombie became, jerking its head like a striking snake, twisting its head side to side and snapping its mouth.

  An eighth man—fat, florid, baggy tits hanging around each side of his bib overalls—carried a bucket full of hammers onto the scene and handed one to each of the men restraining the zombie. Then the fat man reached deeper into the bucket and came out with a handful of ten-penny nails, which he also distributed to the men.

  Mark held his breath as the men proceeded to drive the nails through the body of the zombie—through shoulders, arms, hands, ankles—pinning it like a squirming lizard on the boards.

  The zombie showed no pain, but struggled against the nails, tearing wider holes. Little or no blood dripped from these holes, but Elaine did think she could detect a clear, glistening fluid around each wound.

  The men stared at the zombie for a moment. A couple of them giggled like adolescent girls, but for the most part they looked dissatisfied.

  One of the men nailed the zombie’s ears to the wall. Another used several nails to pin the penis and scrotum; several more nails severed it. The zombie pelvis did a little gyration above the spot where the genitals had become a trophy on the barn wall.

  The zombie seemed not to notice the difference. The men laughed and pointed.

  There were no screams on this sound track. Just laughter and animalistic zombie grunts.

  “Jesus, Mark.” Elaine turned away from the TV, ashamed of herself for having watched that long. “Jesus.” She absentmindedly stroked his hair, running her hand down his face, vaguely wondering how she could get him away from the TV, or at least to turn it off.

  “Damn. Look, they’re bringing out the ax and the sickle,” Mark said.

  “I don’t want to look,” she said, on the verge of tears. “I don’t want you to look either. It’s crazy, it’s . . . pornographic.”

  “Hey, I know this is pretty sick stuff, but I think it tells us something about the way things are out there. Christ, they won’t show it to us on the news. Not the way it really is. We need to know things like this exist.”

  “I know goddamn well they exist! I don’t need it rubbed in my face!”

  Elaine climbed into bed and turned her back on him. She tried to ignore the static-filled moans and giggles coming from the TV. She pretended she was sick in a hospital bed, that she had no idea what was going on in the world and never could. A minute or two later Mark turned off the TV. She imagined the image of the zombie’s head fading, finally just its startled eyes showing, then nothing.

  She felt Mark’s hands gently rubbing her back. Then he lay down on the bed, half on top of her, still rubbing her tight flesh.

  “They’re not in Denver,” he said softly. “There’s still been no sightings. No zombies here, ma’am.” The rubbing moved to her thighs. She tried to ignore it.

  “If there were, would people here a
ct like those rednecks in your damn video? Jesus, Mark. Nobody should be allowed to behave that way.”

  He stopped rubbing. She could hear him breathing. “People do strange things sometimes,” he finally said. “Especially in strange times. Especially groups of people. They get scared and they lose control.” He resumed rubbing her shoulders, then moved to her neck. “There are no zombies in Denver, honey. No sightings. All the news types keep telling us that. You know that; you’re always watching them.”

  “Maybe they won’t look the same.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe they won’t look the same here as they do everywhere else. Maybe it’ll take a different form, and we won’t know what to look for. They think it’s a virus—well, viruses mutate, they have different forms. Maybe the doctors and the Health Department and all those reporters aren’t as smart as they think they are. Christ, it might even be some form of venereal disease.”

  “Hey. That’s not funny.”

  “You think I intended it to be?” She could feel her anger bunching up the shoulder muscles beneath his hands. She could feel all this beginning to change her; no way would she be the same after it all stopped. If it ever stopped.

  “I know. I know,” he said. “This is hard on all of us.” Then he started kissing her. Uncharitably, she wondered if it was because he’d run out of things to say to her. But she found her body responding, even though her head was sick with him and all his easy answers and explanations.

  His kisses ran down her neck and over her breasts like a warm liquid. And her body welcomed it, had felt so cold before. “Turn out the light, please, Mark,” she said, grudgingly giving in to the body, hating the body for it. He left silently to turn out the light, then was back again, kissing her, touching her, warming her one ribbon of flesh at a time.

  In the darkness she could not see her own body. She could imagine away the blemishes, the ugly, drifting spots, the dry patches of skin, the small corruptions patterning death. And she could imagine that his breath was always sweet smelling. She could imagine his hair dark and full. She could imagine the image of the zombie’s destroyed penis out of her head when Mark made love to her. And in this darkness she could almost imagine that Mark would never die.

  His body continued to fondle her after she knew his head had gone to sleep.

  MARK’S KISS WOKE her up the next morning. “Last night was wonderful,” he whispered. “Glad you finally got over whatever was bothering you.” That last comment made her angry, and she tried to tell him that, but she was too sleepy and he’d already left. And then she was sorry he was gone and wished he would come back so his touch would make her body feel beautiful again.

  She stared at the dead gray eye of the TV, then glanced at the VCR. Apparently Mark had taken his video with him. She was relieved, and a little ashamed of herself. She turned the TV on. The eye filled with static, but she could hear the female newscaster’s flat, almost apathetic voice.

  “. . . the federal government has reported increased progress with the so-called ‘zombie’ epidemic . . .” Then this grainy, washed-out bit of stock footage came on the screen: men in hunters’ clothing and surplus fatigues shooting zombies in the head from a safe distance. Shooting them and then moving along calmly down a dirt road. The newscaster appeared on the screen again: silent, emotionless, makeup perfect, her head rolling up into the top of the cabinet.

  It was after four in the morning. Betty had handled the ward by herself all night and would need some relief. Elaine dressed quickly and headed upstairs.

  Betty wasn’t at the nurse’s station. Elaine started down the dim-lit corridor, peeking into each room. In the beds dark shadows shook and moved their heads no no no, even in their dreams. But no sign of Betty.

  The last room was Tom’s, and he wasn’t there. She could hear a steady padding of feet up ahead, in the dark tunnel that led to the new wing. She tried the light switch, but apparently it wasn’t connected. Out of her pocket she pulled the penlight that she used for making chart notations in patients’ darkened rooms. It made a small, distorted circle of illumination. She started down the darkened tunnel, flashing her small light now and then on the uncompleted ceiling, the holes in the walls where they’d run electrical conduit, the tile floor streaked white with plaster dust, littered with wire, pipe, and lumber.

  She came out into a giant open area that hadn’t yet been divided into rooms. Cable snaked out of large holes in the ceiling, dangled by her face. Streetlight filtered through the tall, narrow windows, striping piles of ceiling tile, paint cans, and metal posts. They were supposed to be finished with all this by next month. She wondered if they would even bother, given how things were in the city. The wing looked more like a structure they were stripping, demolishing, than one they were constructing. Like a building under autopsy, she thought. She could no longer hear the other footsteps ahead of her. She heard her own steps, crunching the grit under foot, and her own ragged breath.

  She flashed her light overhead, and something flashed back. A couple of cameras projected from a metal beam. Blind, their wires wrapped uselessly around the beam. She walked on, following the connections with her light. There were a series of blank television monitors, their enormous gray eyes staring down at her.

  Someone cried softly in the darkness ahead. Elaine aimed her light there, but all she could see were crates, paneling leaned against the wall and stacked on the floor, metal supports and crosspieces. A tangle of sharp angles. But then there was that cry again. “Betty? Tom?”

  A pale face loomed into the blurred, yellowed beam. A soft shake of the face, side to side. The eyes were too white, and had a distant stare.

  “Betty?” The face shook and shook again. Betty stumbled out of a jumble of cardboard boxes, construction and stored medical supplies breaking beneath her stumbling feet.

  “No . . .” Betty’s mouth moved as if in slow-motion. Her lipstick looked too bright, her mascara too dark. “No,” she said again, and something dark dripped out of her eyes as her head began to shake.

  Elaine’s light picked up a glint in Betty’s right hand. “Betty?” Betty stumbled forward and fell, keeping that right hand out in front of her. Elaine stepped closer thinking to help Betty up, but then saw that Betty’s right arm was swinging slowly side to side, a scalpel clutched tightly in her hand. “Betty! Let me help you!”

  “No!” Betty screamed. Her head began to thrash back and forth on the litter-covered floor. Her cheeks rolled again and again over broken glass. Blood welled, smeared, and stained her face as her head moved no no no. She struggled to control the hand holding the scalpel. Then she suddenly plunged it into her throat. Her left hand came up jerkily and helped her pull the scalpel through muscle and skin.

  Elaine fell to her knees, grabbed paper and cloth, anything at hand to dam the dark flow from Betty’s throat. After a minute or two she stopped and turned away.

  There were more noises off in the darkness. At the back of the room where she’d first seen Betty, Elaine found a doorless passage to another room. Her light now had a vague reddish tinge. She wondered hazily if there was blood on the flashlight lens, or blood in her eyes. But the light still showed the way. She followed it, hearing a harsh, wet sound. For just a moment she thought that maybe Betty might still be alive. She started to go back when she heard it again; it was definitely in the room ahead of her.

  She tried not to think of Betty as she made her way through the darkness. That wasn’t Betty. That was just her body. Elaine’s mother used to babble things like that to her all the time. Spiritual things. Elaine didn’t know what she herself felt. Someone dies, you don’t know them anymore. You can’t imagine what they might be thinking.

  The room had the sharp smell of fresh paint. Drop cloths had been piled in the center of the floor. The windows were crisscrossed by long stretches of masking tape, and outside lights left odd patterns like angular spiderwebs on all the objects in the room.

  A heavy cord dropped o
ut of the ceiling to a small switch box on the floor, which was in turn connected to a large mercury lamp the construction crew must have been using. Elaine bent over and flipped the switch.

  The light was like an explosion. It created strange, skeletal shadows in the drop cloths, as if she were suddenly seeing through them. She walked steadily toward the pile, keeping an eye on those shadows.

  Elaine reached out her hand and several of the cloths flew away.

  My god, Betty killed him! Betty killed him and cut off that awful, shaking head! The head was a small, sad mound by the boy’s filthy, naked body. A soft whispering seemed to enter Elaine’s ear, which brought her attention back to that head.

  She stopped to feel the draft, but there was no draft, even though she could hear it rising in her head, whistling through her hair and making it grow longer, making it grow white, making her older.

  Because of a trick of the light the boy’s—Tom’s—eyes looked open in his severed head. Because of a trick of the light the eyes blinked several times as if trying to adjust to that light.

  He had a soft, confused stare, like a stuffed toy’s. His mouth moved like a baby’s. Then his naked, headless body sat up on the floor. Then the headless body struggled to its feet, weaving unsteadily. No inner ear for balance, Elaine thought, and almost laughed. She felt crazed, capable of anything.

  The body stood motionless, staring at Elaine. Staring at her. The nipples looked darker than normal and seemed to track her as she moved sideways across the room. The hairless breasts gave the body’s new eyes a slight bulge. The navel was flat and neutral, but Elaine wondered if the body could smell her with it. The penis—the tongue—curled in and out of the bearded mouth of the body’s new face. The body moved stiffly, puppet-like, toward its former head.

  The body picked up its head with one hand and threw it out into a darkened corner of the room. It made a sound like a wet mop slapping the linoleum floor. Elaine heard a soft whimpering that soon ceased. She could hear ugly, moist noises coming from the body’s new bearded mouth. She could hear skin splitting, she could see blood dripping to the dusty floor as the body’s new mouth widened and brought new lips up out of the meaty darkness inside.