Zee Bee & Bee

by David James Keaton

  “Hey, baby!” Bobby Z shouts, still talking for his dummy groom. “Ain’t got no heart, but I love you! You remember our song at the reception? The first dance? ‘Stars are dying in my chest until I see you again?’ That’s everyone’s song, baby! Wait, where are you going?”

  Bobby Z gets the Camel down and out for good with a knee in his windpipe, cartilage crackling like bubble wrap. Maybe a little more satisfying than bubble wrap, judging by Bobby’s smile (it should be noted that popping bubble wrap was pretty goddamn satisfying for our crew, especially when we got big orders of fake teeth and barbecue sauce). Then Bobby starts turning over furniture to find the bride. When he gives the Camel a heel to the temple on the way by as an afterthought, I hear a “Tisk!” from the corner and suddenly remember a certain newlywed’s familiar but annoying habit. Bobby Z seems ready to find her with the next chair he’ll flip, but he’s having a lot of trouble with one of his hands, now flapping alarmingly at the wrist. If Sour Towel Zombie was here, he of all people would understand that it’s just like Frankenstein said in Day of the Dead, the doctor not the monster, I mean, “We are them, just functioning less perfectly.”

  With some extra effort, he upends the couch, and there she is tucked behind it, squirreled under some red cushions, burrowing deep like a tick. More like a “tisk.”

  I watch her reach out to her husband broken on the floor, fingers tickling the crater in his throat, seemingly trying to coax it to inflate. Some air does hiss from him as if her fingernail finds a tire valve, and over a gurgle, he points a quivering wedding ring toward her.

  I suddenly remember that sinking feeling you always get when you find out the girl you love has a boyfriend, that feeling when you can tell something changed her mind about saving the best conversations for you, and she decides to bring up their relationship out of the blue with a sneaky, off-hand comment like, “Yeah, my boyfriend likes cold chicken and barbecue sauce, too.” It’s a feeling that spent most of your adolescence hiding in your stomach under your shirt like a dead animal you were trying to sneak into the house. And when I say I “remember” this feeling rather than feeling it, it’s because, without a pulse, I’m long past actually feeling anything.

  Then a dripping Camel starts stomping down the stairs, rifle slung over his shoulder, dragging the other dead bride behind him, her head tracing her path like the train on her wedding dress must have done the night before. I’m not sure what he did to Underwater Zombie, but it’s clear we’re losing staff pretty fast. Right as I begin to suspect I’m being watched, I suddenly notice Davey Jones sitting in the one upright chair, watching us all in amusement. He’s clapping his hands slow and sarcastic like I’m told Orson Wells did in that movie I never saw.

  “You guys did awesome,” he laughs. “By that, I mean you died awesome.”

  Fuck him, always playing disappointed dad. How many times can you disappoint someone before you begin to look forward to doing it? About nine actually.

  For no good reason, I think back to when I was looking forward to seeing the movie Species (not a zombie movie at all, despite the teaser) and how me and Sour Towel Zombie got there early in the morning on opening night. And how the movie turned out to be terrible. That was disappointing enough, but the real problem was that I already had plans to see it with a new girl later that night. So I kept it to myself that we’d gone already since I didn’t want to admit to a new girl that, much like a toddler, I couldn’t wait five fucking hours to see a movie. So I suffered though it twice. But then she liked it so much she wanted to see it again the next night. Me, her, and the boyfriend I never knew she had. And sitting there through Species for a third time, dead animal hiding in my stomach, I never stopped smiling, thinking this was the only time my punishment fit the crime.

  Davey Jones hands me an orange juice to snap me out of it. Always an orange juice with him, probably because of the alcohol shortage and all the bottles wasted on Molotov Cocktails.

  For awhile, we had even tried one of those popular Zombie Cliché Drinking Games (was that really Third Stage Zombie’s idea?), but we won't be doing it again anytime soon. Among the complications of such a game when applied to our production...

  First off, “Do A Shot When Arm Reaches Through Window” was problematic because it makes lightweights hesitate to push through the glass when they needed to. Next, “Knock Drink Out Of Nearest Knobby Hand If Martyrdom Slows Down Flick” caused too many instances of fights, brooding, then more fights, not to mention wasted booze. Oh, yeah, “Shotgun Beer If/When Motherfucker in Uniform Pulls Double-Cross, Shotgun Two If Motherfucker Is Carrying Shotgun”? That rule included Army and Navy T-shirts, so we were pretty much ‘faced as soon as the Bobbys punched the time clock.

  And by “punched it,” I mean punched it. Mags was on her third.

  And, of course, “Claim Beer of Closest Corpse if Character Shows Confusion About Living or Dead Status Of Approaching Loved One” just caused severe depression as we pondered our own situation. Oh, yeah, there was “Drink Ninety Beers If Hero Displays Cowardice Or Some Pussy Saves The Day,” too, but no one ever does that, so don’t worry. Crazy shit like that only happened in the movies.

  And who knew we were asking for trouble with the staple “Drink Nonstop For Duration of Tom Savini Cameos?” Well, try it when the man himself visits one weekend with a cease-and-desist order about copyright infringement.

  That night, we were so hammered after chugging until he stumbled off our property that we almost had to change everyone's name to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Zombie in the morning.

  “IT’S A TANGLED WEB YOU WEAVE,” someone in a book or a movie or a song once sang. Maybe it was “wove.” Still weaving? Whatever. That was the night I learned never to stray far from the zombie genre again. In fact, not to simplify things too much, but me and Cigarette Zombie still watch one together every night. In front of our own TVs though, miles apart. Synchronized start times are exactly 9:00. Even though, as of today, it was likely we had finally seen them all, I was hoping we could just start over at the beginning of the pile.

  It was the perfect way to watch them, hundreds of videotapes we’d stockpiled from every dusty, out-of-business video store in the state, cover art bleached white by decades of sunlight cooking them through the windows, not a single title left legible. We didn’t have to talk about the movie before, during, or after either. It was enough just to know that she was watching the movie at the same time I was so I could imagine what parts would make her laugh.

  I was sure she laughed a lot when there was no one there to verify it.

  Still weaving my way through corpses, I see a zombie wearing the brown-rimmed, crusty football helmet again, stiff-arming everyone in its path. Picking up speed, it lowers a shoulder and puts Mike, a.k.a. American Indian Zombie, backwards through a boarded-up window before he can react. Then it dips his head, crashes through a door and is gone, leaving behind a piece of shredded tube sock and skin in the teeth of the door frame like the worst dreamcatcher ever.

  Suddenly surrounded by unfamiliar faces, pink and blue alike, I recklessly reach to grab someone where I shouldn’t, even though I know this would break the rules and normally end the game. Mags sits next to Davey Jones, and I notice both her feet are facing the wrong way, thinking, “Hey, that’s my job!” She’s singing the Rolling Stones and giggling.

  “You make a dead man come...”

  American Indian Zombie, a.k.a. Mike, is sobbing and climbing inside, then back outside. I turn to offer a sympathetic hand, and he shoves me away. He points to the clutter of the room as if to explain that’s why he’s crying. “The pollution of the White (Eye) Zombie,” he mutters like that goofy old commercial right before the Camel’s next shot brings him down, ragged jawbone and pinwheeling ear riding the bullet and half his turquoise necklace out the door.

  “Control ‘Z’ and ‘Z’,” he screamed the last time he took a shot that bad, thinking it was like clicking “undo.”

  Then the Camel squeezes an e
ye to take aim at me, and I hold up my hands desperately in surrender.

  “Whoa, hey, wait a second,” I say as he opens his squint. “Uh, so, did you know there are zombies in the Bible?”

  He cocks the rifle, ejecting a shell. I keep trying to distract him as I back up.

  “I mean, besides Jesus? I see you’re skeptical, but listen, I’m telling you, it’s true. Hey, where’s Matt? He’s the dead asshole with the flashlight. He’ll tell ya. Okay, I can’t remember the exact passage. Let me go find a Bible. Should be easy to locate. This is a hotel, right?”

  The Camel lowers the rifle, eager to debate.

  “Did you know that the reliability of the Bible rests on 5,300 manuscripts, source material, and eye-witness accounts?” he asks me. “Therefore, if discrediting the Good Book is your goal, there are more facts behind it than any other classic history or literature, including Homer and Aristotle.”

  “Dude,” I shrug. “Zombies in the Bible though. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

  The barrel of the gun taps the floor as he considers this, and it gives me enough time to get out of the room. Behind me, I hear the rifle shot, and I know without looking back that European Indian Zombie, a.k.a. Second-Year Cultural Studies Drop-Out Zombie, a.k.a. Rachel, has just taken a bullet through the red dot on her forehead. Right where it belongs.

  And at this time, I make the mistake of running for the basement door.

  THE STAIRS TURN LEFT AT THE BOTTOM. So, in theory, you could stand on the top step and not be seen by anyone hiding in the dark. So that’s where I wait, counting to a hundred. I think back to the one time I shared an apartment with a girl and how I used to come home late from work and stand outside my own door, key in my hand, waiting forever to go in. I had no logical reason for my actions that I could reasonably explain to anyone if they were to walk up and see me frozen there, especially if she were to open the door before I did. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t face her sometimes. I think that must be it. I think I just needed to be alone on the steps for as long as I could. Plenty of time for that now.

  Five hours on the steps was the record, but I don’t break it tonight. I count to one hundred and one, one hundred and two tops.

  Cigarette Zombie is sprawled out on the basement floor, her eyeglasses two jagged hoops of blood and shards. Seeing this is worse than seeing her shattered skull because I’m reminded of a story she once told me about her father first realizing she couldn’t see clearly. She had been skiing with her dad, and they were standing at the snack counter between slopes. He asked her what she wanted, and she couldn’t see any of the choices on the giant menu behind the clerk’s head. Cigarette Zombie confessed to me that she had tried to be sly and get her dad to read the menu for her, trying to make a joke out of it. But he saw right through the ruse and took her to the eye doctor soon after. She said she was ashamed of her lie until she wore the Coke bottles to school and the kids started picking on her, just like she knew they would. She said she’d rather lie, or stumble around blind and bumping into things any day of the week, instead of reliving that first day of 3rd grade. And when she saw the call for zombies in the Help Wanted pages decades later, well, that had nothing to do with anything. Except maybe the getting-paid-to-stumble part.

  “The job just sounded hilarious,” she swore.

  Reaching for her broken glasses, I see another Camel curled up against the far basement wall, another bride, doll’s eyes watching me close.

  How many fucking brides are there around here anyway? I wondered. The house is infested. Mags should put I bride strips.

  I must have looked past her when I first came down, possibly mistaking her for part of the structure, something that used to happen to Cigarette Zombie all the time back in school. She claimed she couldn’t see anybody at all until the second or third day of class, even after she got her glasses.

  The Camel in the corner found the car battery at some point, but I can see she didn’t use it to power the portable radio like she was supposed to. From the looks of things, she seems to have been trying to cook the chicken we stored down there for fake human entrails. Either that or bring a chicken back to life (I’ve seen that on a farm actually, a dead frozen chick discarded under a heat lamp running amok an hour later). I imagine her down here in the dark before she died, sparking the jumper cables over a pile of barbecue. Sour Towel Zombie would have loved that shit. But he definitely would have warned her of the dangers of zombie poultry, as detailed in the buddy-cop zombie film Dead Heat. Then he would have warned her to watch her feet because of the horrific consequences of reanimating anything more than once, as demonstrated in the same terrible film.

  And reenacted here every weekend for about 300 bucks a head.

  I creep closer and raise her chin out of the shadows. She allows me to do this, and I see that she is striking. I knew a girl once who defined love at first sight as, simply, "The Whoosh,” something about the rush of blood from the brain to the places on your body were you need it worse (she admitted this didn't translate as well out loud from the sound in her head).

  I remember Sour Towel Zombie scoping this girl out on the driveway when she was signing the waiver months ago, but I guess I forgot to really look at her until now. The End of Days will do that to you every time.

  “Check her out,” he’d whispered. “A sable hat? What, is she Russian or something? ‘Cause if she is, I’d fuck her all the way to Gorky Park...”

  “You do that,” I’d said.

  “...we could watch Red Dawn while holding hands...”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “...I’d leave a stain on her head like Gorbachev...”

  “Sounds more threatening than romantic.”

  “...she’d call my cock Glasnost...” and on and on and on until someone finally told him that “Glasnost” wasn’t the name of the movie he was thinking of.

  “You need more salt,” the Camel bride whispers to me, dead eyes bloody milk and staring right through me.

  “The chicken needs more salt?” I ask her.

  “No, the driveway,” she answers softly. “We almost slipped when we ran up to the house. There was nothing about that in the contract. We could sue you, you know.”

  “You know what you can use instead of salt? Kitty litter.”

  “Does that mean instead of kitty litter you can use salt?” she smiles, maybe seeing me now, maybe not.

  “Yeah, try it. If you want your cat to poof out like a pine cone and run around with a red ass,” I smile back.

  “More salt.” She’s looking past me again. “Just tell someone you need more salt. Someone could slip.” She punctuates this with one weary “tisk” then slumps. I put my head to her chest. No heartbeat. Nothing. Doesn’t mean a thing. You have to check when they’re talking.

  As I pull her arm up to my mouth, I fight the urge to tell her that she already slipped, and that we don’t need salt. We don’t need anything.

  She’ll taste perfect just the way she is. And blood on your wedding night is expected.

  I grab both her feet in one hand and raise them high, crossing her legs at the ankles and holding them above my head. With my other hand, I pull off her jeans. I imagine her lifting up to make it easier. I look around the basement nervously, knowing that, these days, being surrounded by an audience of the dead doesn’t necessarily mean you’re alone. Greedily burying my nose like a puppy in its first bowl, I root around for any other sign of life. It’s all very scientific. And I find it, something I noticed earlier when I tried desperately to convince everyone there was someone alive playing our game tonight instead of just corpses pretending they were married.

  A white string trails from between her legs, and I think of the tiny strip that pops the batteries out of a remote control. This makes me worry. I sure as hell don’t want four double-A’s flying out of her crotch and bouncing off my nose. Without batteries, there was no chance that she would move for me again.

  But I pull the st
ring out with my teeth anyway, looking for a ring on the end with my tongue, hoping it activates her like a doll. But all I hear is a hiss, and I don’t know which end it’s coming from. The tip of the string is stained red, bright red, the kind of red they warn you about in First Aid class, full of oxygen, close to the heart, in need of immediate attention. I’ll give it.

  Coming right up.

  I bury my nose deeper, work the last of my teeth, drink her deep. Alive. The blood is delicious, but we knew that already. But it’s alive, that sharp copper and electric charge like tonguing a 9-volt, like sucking a handful of pennies when you’re a child, almost crying because you can’t bite down. Except these pennies let you chew them, let you split them red and open like hard candy.

  An urge to cough builds in my chest, and I swallow her some more, thick and soothing nectar rolling down my throat, convincing me that I’ve finally suppressed my nervous hack forever, this barking reflex that once ruined the mood when I last tried this in high school, a sneeze even thrown in that night with the coughing to guarantee disgrace. A reflex actually diagnosed as a reflux, now, of course, worsened by our diet of too much orange juice and barbecue chicken. Yes, always chicken. Yes, chicken looks like blood and skin, and we gobble that shit for the sake of the game. But don’t believe what they always say. Only chicken tastes like chicken. Not this.

  And, yeah, blood looks like barbecue, too, but it isn’t.

  I drink deeper.

  Blood is the goddamn cure for anything. I know I will never cough again.

  Cough gone, confidence building, I move up to solve a mystery. I don’t even glance around this time, as I know this bride is utterly mine. I’ve earned her. Hell, in most countries, technically we’d be married at this point. Blood this bright is legally binding. That’s what Leviticus tells us anyway, right?

  I push some skin back with my cleanest fingernail and watch it creep out of her and into the light. Not a bean or a grain of rice or a tiny gold BB like they always claimed. No, it’s a claw.