“...so, I finally watched Day of the Dead. Way better than Land of the Dead, which is ironic since rumor has it that Day’s script resembled Land before funding was pulled...”
“...yeah, that’s a man who needs his vision limited or else he would eagerly populate any apocalypse with noble retards...”
“…you’ve seen his glasses…”
“...speaking of glasses...”
“...you’re funny...”
“..or eagerly populate his world with strange Middle Easterners being called ‘spics’...”
“...yeah, that poor Arab in the opening scene was, apparently, doing an alligator call by mistake, judging by what came running instead. ‘Hellooooooooo...’”
“...you know Gorillaz sampled that on their debut...”
“‘…is anybody there? Hellooooooooo…’”
“...Florida’s got plenty of gators, dude, so it wasn’t that strange to see one...”
“...I think you’re getting your racial slurs confused...”
“‘…hellooooooooo…’”
“...no, I think the director was, since I distinctly remember a Mexican Army sergeant calling the Middle Eastern dude a ‘spic’...”
“...and a ‘jungle bunny’ at one point...”
“...clearly he was in such a hurry to load that merry band of survivors with every race, creed, and crayon in the box that he got a little confused...”
“...no shit, I think the mad scientist was an Inuit...”
“...and that evil Sarge was screaming more than Braveheart, ‘Fuck youse, Frankenstein!’ Jump cut to drunken Irish helicopter pilot singing theme song from the Lucky Charms commercial...”
“Wait, are you trying to say that the filmmakers used these broad strokes as a short cut to characterization?”
Silence.
“Moving on...”
That’s when Bobby Z takes a swing at Sour Towel Zombie and loses his watch in the process. At least we think it’s his watch. Then someone materializes between them wearing the Steelers football helmet (Baseball Zombie? Weird.), and Bobby Z wrinkles his nose and takes a swing at that stupid logo instead. The helmet takes the blow easily, but the zombie wearing it spits out its mouthpiece to let it dangle on the guard.
“Who the fuck is in there?” Bobby Z asks, making a grab for the chinstrap. Then the helmet headbutts Bobby Z back onto his ass and into a blinking daze and blessed silence.
Up at the house, but deep in our earbuds, Amy is talking about the dog again, and everyone is moaning and groaning. Moaning and groaning more than usual, I mean. And not getting paid for it.
The dog again. Always the dog with her.
Once, Cigarette Zombie called the dog our “Sword of Damocles.” But then she called it our “Gun Over Chekov’s Fireplace” at least twice, and we all had to agree with that description instead. All except Sour Towel Zombie, who settled on “Dog Over The Fireplace,” arguing that if you ever saw a fucking dog over a fireplace in a movie, it’s got to go off.
Back in the day, Amy used to be outside. But she couldn’t narrow down her personality to just one character trait. So Davey Jones moved her to the basement and the second act. Originally, he wanted to call her Invisible Shower Zombie because of her tendency to tip her head back and run her fingers through her hair, eyes half closed, at the most inappropriate of times, but that name didn’t translate well to a horror movie, at least not the ones we preferred to pattern our lives after. It would be right at home in a De Palma credit crawl though.
When she first brought the dog into the game, it seemed like a great idea, a good one for her to focus on anyway. (“Dog Whisperer Zombie!”) But after a couple of weekends, everyone agreed that having an animal around a situation like this was just too soothing of a presence and negated the mood we were after. And while it did help to cause some of the anxiety we worked for, it was the wrong kind of anxiety. Much like the doomed canine in the novel I Am Legend (vampires that acted like zombies, even worse in the movie), it took our Camels right out of the story.
They just worried about it too much.
It was like they didn’t want the dog to think anything bad was really happening and tried to protect the animal from the thumping outside. Petting and petting and trying to distract it from the monsters that were making it shiver and pin its ears back, not unlike Life Is Beautiful, the most precious little Holocaust ever, but easily twice as annoying.
It comes down to this. It’s too emotional. A dog has no reasonable place in any self-respecting horror movie. Or our game.
But even worse than this is the fact that a dog puts everyone in a perpetually good mood. It just never seems like the end of the world around one, especially when it keeps wanting you to play fetch with its favorite squeak toy. Ours was a rubber mailman that it had long since chewed the legs off that Mags dubbed “Lieutenant Dan.” They still keep the toy in the house, even though Shark Dog is long gone. It fits in good with our crippled crew. But even the memory of a dog long gone can be more effective than the real thing. In fact, in case a Camel rips my pants off during the game, I keep a picture of the toy in my wallet. A spooky caption, supposed to bring back memories of the Y2K scare, the second-to-last worldwide crisis, reads:
“Here, our dearly departed Lieutenant Dan scoffs at strange “New Year” celebrations of another successful orbit of the sun. This soldier considers the Earth flat, so he has two reasons not to chase it.”
I can hear Amy barking in my ear again. Mags is real close to her, so we can all clearly hear what’s happening. Amy is telling a somber tale of how the dog was cruelly trained to fight by using battleship chains on its collar, how this made its head and neck so strong that it could even walk through walls without flinching. Then, between sobs, she’s suddenly comparing the dog to Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” a story that is not about zombies, making it a completely unacceptable tangent for anyone but us. Amy’s weeping sounds more authentic than usual tonight, and the Bobbys stop pulling shredded leather jackets back over shredded arms so they can listen, too.
“...then it ate one of the nails, and Matt tried to coax the nail through its body out the hind end with a powerful magnet, which caused, sniffle, a tragic perforation of the groin. Then the bucket of tools upended, and nails peppered the makeshift operating table between its legs, narrowly missing everything but the testicles, and...”
Mags must have started glaring at her, because she trails off, then adds cheerfully:
“But that’s a whole ‘nother movie!”
“Whole ‘another’?” Mags mocks.
“ Don’t worry though,” Amy goes on. “The dog’s fine and much happier living with my uncle. He’s got a farm where he can run and dig. But remember when it ate that spider? Sniffle. And all those ants? Everyone joked that the dog just loves to stop hearts. And I’m sure it’s still stopping hearts somewhere, but in a different way, you know? With love. Sniffle. Some people say that dog still roams these woods...”
“That is the worst ghost story I have ever heard in my life.”
It’ll be the last time we’ll hear Amy’s voice, a ridiculously romantic but fitting eulogy.
But Mags will sneak in one more line before it’s over.
“I’ve got it!” Sour Towel Zombie bleats from behind me. “The name of a zombie movie that hasn’t been used yet!”
“What is it?”
“The Dog of the Dead.”
“Already been done. Pet Semetary. I’m saying that with an ‘S,’ by the way.”
“Hey, is Weekend At Bernie’s technically a zombie movie?”
“Nope!” Sour Towel Zombie is an inch away from Cowboy Zombie’s nose, mouth wide and working around his answer. “Well, to be technical, he really was a zombie in the second one. Remember? The sequel with the voodoo music?”
I’m pulling back a strip of particle board to peek inside the house when I smell a sour towel breathing down my neck instead.
“You got your earph
one in?” the Towel asks. “Come on, what’s going on in there?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “But they’re clearly having way too much fun. Look at that. Are they playing Twister or what?”
“Dude, zombies would dominate at Twister.”
“Listen, what is that they’re singing?”
“They’re singing along with a videotape. One of the Camels must have brought it. Shit, they found the VCR. Hmm, looks like porn.”
“I’ve seen this one! It’s called the Wild Naked Latina Sing-Along Wrestling Fun Party.” Awkward silence. “Uh, that’s what I heard anyway.”
“And what the hell is that goulash of a title supposed to mean?”
“It’s a bad translation. In Portuguese, the title actually reads much more accurately as The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.”
“Now that’s a movie.”
“So, what are they singing now? Translator?”
“‘In the widening gyration, the falcon cannot hear the karaoke…’”
Sour Towel Zombie stops breathing down necks and suddenly stands up straight.
“‘Perry, I’ve been keeping track of the lights,’” S.T.Z. tells us, voice cracking a bit as he attempts to be creepy. “‘The way I calculate it, when you turned off the upstairs light, that left the house completely dark.’”
No one looks at him. He’s done this before.
“Come on! Nobody? No one recognizes that?! It’s from the original home invasion story. No, not Night of the Living Dead, like everybody thinks. We’re talkin’ In Cold Blood, haters! That’s really where it all began.”
“I’m sure there were plenty of home invasions before that one.”
“Yeah, wasn’t that James Caan movie Thief based on a book called The Home Invaders? Hmm, I wonder what that was about,” ponders Cowboy Zombie, hat brim tipped sarcastically.
“You’re all wrong. William Seabrook’s 1926 classic about Haiti, The Magic Island, had a chapter entitled, ‘Dead Men Working In The Cane Fields.’ They dug up some poor fuckers and resurrected their sorry asses for cheap labor.”
“Just like us!”
“Voodoo zombies shouldn’t count, fuckface.”
“Come on, no one can deny our proud heritage began on a summer day in 1932 with White Zombie.”
“Whoa, ‘white zombies?’ Fuckin’ racist...”
“Nope, sorry. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West: Reanimator” serial was written way earlier than Seabrook’s union-busting manifesto. It was completed at 5:37 a.m., six days before Christmas during the strangely warm winter of 1921. Approximately.”
“Speaking of racists, you ever read that thing? Holy balls…”
“Enough already!” Cigarette Zombie bellows triumphantly. “The first zombie was certainly Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster, I mean, not the doctor. 1818, bitches.”
“Don’t you mean, Frankenstein (a.k.a. The Modern Polyphemus)?”
Someone sniffles.
“Patient Zero,” someone else says, serious as a “hard” attack, and there’s a moment.
“Okay, if it wasn’t the first, it was sure the worst.”
I look around, suddenly worried.
Whoever was wearing the football helmet has vanished into the dark, and the Bobbys suddenly remember they need to fight and go back to dramatically taking off their jackets again.
But the snakeskin of their forearms sloughs off completely with their sleeves this time, so they put them right back on.
IF AND WHEN THEY OPEN THE DOOR to the upstairs closet, if they’ve done things in a certain order that is, there will be a man hiding in there who is afraid to come out.
He might have a stash of beer and some delicious, honeymoon-type foods, or maybe some wine, cheese and fruit, or, hell, maybe even a vending machine bag of pork rinds and Sterno. It all depends on Mags’ profiling earlier in the week. But once they let him out, he’ll happily lead everyone up through a hole in the attic, up onto the roof, and they’ll watch the sunrise while bouncing apple cores and beer cans off our heads below.
So when we stand back and look up to the top of the B & B and see nothing but crows, we know the Camels are still doing it wrong.
“You know what I wish?” Sour Towel Zombie asks us. “I wish this house would take off into the sky at the end of our game. Like in Bad Taste. Remember that? When P.J. was one of us?”
He won’t stop talking, and Bobby Z gives him a grunt and a Hurts Doughnut to get him back into character. But this time, he resists harder than usual. It’s that kind of night.
“In fact,” he goes on, “I wish we could have a guy stuffing shit back into his skull after his brains fall out. That was the best part of the movie. The zombies themselves were kind of lame, but the guy literally with shit for brains sort of reminded me of...”
Bobby Z holds up a finger to stop S.T.Z.’s mouth, then starts taking off his jacket again, as sloppy and Weekend With Bernie-like as he can in case a Camel is watching. I look for signs of life between the boarded-up windows, listening for any fake screams.
Now, if they’ve done things in the wrong order, as we hope, hope, hope they have tonight, the man inside that closet will have stuck the Hillbilly Heaven-brand bubble-gum machine teeth into his mouth and milky contact lenses into his eyes and will proceed to scare the living shit out of them when they open the door.
Yes, the living shit.
And if they’ve done things really wrong, as we suspect, or if Mags or Davey Jones are just feeling spiteful, the Plant in the closet will be wearing a police uniform. This is because everyone, everyone, even those with just a passing knowledge of the films, everyone knows you never trust police, fireman, security guards, military (especially the military), or any authority figure for that matter, during a garden-variety siege of the undead.
But some people don’t know the movies at all, and most people don’t know them as well as they think they do. Just like that guy we hired who played one of our very first Plants. He insisted on yelling, “It’s the end of the world” with an exaggerated Irish accent, quoting the drunk in the diner from Hitchcock’s classic The Birds by mistake. Mags was like, “Dude, birds aren’t zombies. Even those birds.” Okay, it was an end of the world movie, sure, and maybe Tippi Hedren had a look in her eyes by the end that most corpses would find familiar and comforting, but the soothing Technicolor of those scenes just never projected the correct level of dread. So, yeah, they had to start jamming fake rotten teeth in the Closet Plant’s mouth to discourage any more creativity.
All of a sudden, Sour Towel Zombie is grumbling and sputtering like he’s never done before, showing a level of commitment to his role that we’ve never seen, and some of us are getting nervous. Bobby Z starts putting his jacket on again, more skin flaking off his arms, leaving a nasty pink halo around his shoes. If he does this one more time, I’m convinced his arms will stay in the sleeves forever.
“What’s up, Halfway Homey?” Bobby Z belches. “You trying for an Oscar?”
Bobby B lurches closer to get a better look, too, and his eyes widen.
“Hey, I think he’s really hurt.”
We all stumble over and suddenly notice a red dot over his fluttering left eye.
“Uh, I think he’s been shot.”
“What?”
“Are you serious?”
“I didn’t hear nothin’. What the fuck.”
“What the hell is this?” Baseball Zombie shouts. “There ain’t no zombies in Deliverance!”
As we watch, Sour Towel Zombie begins to wind down, creaky foot over foot over foot like a weary robot desk toy. Then one knee is on the ground. Then the other. Then he’s clutching a handful of grass like it’s the answer.
I remember something Cigarette Zombie once said when she was sticking up for him, something about endless movie references just being his way of hanging on by his fingernails to a world long gone.
Maybe she was right, and we all did it, too. But no one ever se
emed to need a savage headlock as often as he did.
He looks up to us all one last time, his left eye now closed completely, the other one dilated 8-ball black, as red fingers of brain and burger spiderweb down the side of his neck. He points up to his beloved European Indian Zombie, the only one in our crew he ever dated, to quote one final movie before his arms hang limp as balloon strings a week after a birthday.
“It should have been you,” he croaks.
His face hits the ground so hard it disappears up to the ears.
“OUR HEARTS HAVE STOPPED,” the news anchor sighs. “But our brains just keep going.”
Right before we break through all their half-ass defenses and into the house for good, I hear a strange voice on the television. One I’m not related to. A Camel must have found the real news broadcast and left it on. They would have already known that hearts were stopping everywhere, of course, and theirs should have, too. But seeing the real news, hearing it out loud, as well as hearing all of us pounding on each other instead of the walls, this may have empowered them to accept everything as real enough to finally fight for the house.
But even though no one wanted to hear it, I am still convinced that one of the Camels has a pulse. That at least one of them came into our game alive as hell, I am now certain.
The towel he dropped when he compulsively avoided the door handle was my first clue. I tried to tell the staff, but denial runs rampant. And now, judging by the gasping and bubbling in my ear, he’s probably upstairs with Underwater Zombie’s head in the toilet, trying in vain to drown him. I already miss Sour Towel Zombie. At a moment like this, he would name-drop the Nazi Zombie movie Shock Waves, the one with the aquatic undead army. Like I did just now. We both loved that flick to death, huge fans of the tasteless ending where hapless victims are forced to hide in ovens (ovens!) to escape.
To my right, Bobby Z has broken into the living room, and now he’s choking out one of the other Camels who’s trying desperately to warn his new bride through coughs and sputters. When his eyes roll back, Bobby Z helpfully moves the Camel’s mouth and plays ventriloquist as the bride gets low and tries to hide.
Zee Bee & Bee Page 7
