I put the gun to another head and ask it the million-dollar question.
“Are you alive or dead?”
But I know I won’t get an answer. Remember in art class when they taught you that a person’s eyes are exactly halfway up, right down the equator of the face? Not high on the forehead like you’d expect? This helps us understand exactly how much of a head can be missing on a zombie before it can’t play the game any more. If you see that half’s gone, so is the part of the brain behind the eyes that keeps shit moving.
So I can tell already, even from behind, that I’m not getting an answer. Half is bad. Half is over. Half is halfway home. And when it comes to the brain, or even shit for brains, if you lose that much, your cup is always half empty.
We’ll need to put the “Zombie Help Wanted!” sign back in the window.
I eat some cold barbecue chicken (a.k.a. “hand in a baseball glove,” and I don’t know where the hand starts and the glove ends). This is a detail that was never accurate in the movies either. We eat anything we can, even each other.
I look around for her.
I’m thinking a little bit of swagger with my stumble might help me make a move this time. Okay, so down in the basement, maybe I didn’t “make a dead girl come” or whatever, as our song should go, but that’s setting the bar unreasonably high.
I remember the claw, wondering where it came from all over again. Maybe like the crisp husk a dead ant leaves behind, hardening into a claw is just the next stage in its evolution.
If evolution means dead.
But it couldn’t have happened to the newlywed that fast. Cigarette Zombie though? She died the same day I did.
But none of this matters because a little experience, especially with a married woman, will do wonders for your confidence when you need to grow some guts and take a chance, even more so when, instead of those guts, there’s a hole in your stomach that whistles in the fucking wind.
I won’t care what I find inside her.
Turning Sour Towel Zombie’s head toward me, I explain that the only time I agreed with him without question is when he declared the best zombie movie ending of all time as the finale of Dellamorte Dellamore.
At the end of that film, the camera pulls back, and it turns out that the hero and his idiot manservant were just tiny sculptures in a snow globe all along. It wasn’t the image of the heroes as toys and the giant plastic snowflakes coating their heads that haunted me so much as the tiny piece of broken highway rising at their feet and the edge of the cliff that dropped off into the dark. This ending always made perfect sense to me, and I never considered it a cheat, like the bullshit equivalent of it all being a dream or something.
My dad disagreed though, before he died for the last time, ejecting the movie immediately after that coda and breaking the videotape across his knee. And his knee off with it.
“How long would you last in the Zombie Apocalypse?” I once asked him.
“Eh, about the same,” he joked. For the record, the worst joke if you’re keeping track. “Fifteen minutes if I think about baseball.”
WE CLIMB ONTO THE ROOF. Tonight, there are two of us still able to walk. Because if one is left, two are left when you make someone else walk.
In the distance, the fields are full of stick figures marching across the pumpkin orange horizon. They’re a couple miles away yet, but they’re moving so slow, just like they’re supposed to. It’ll take them the rest of the day to get here.
But these zombies aren’t playing the game. They don’t seem to have any respect, or love, for their predicament. I can tell by their gait. It’s too slow, even slower than us. I can tell by those heads that hang lower than mine ever has. They want to pretend they’re us, playing the game, which isn’t the same thing at all, I swear.
I just don’t understand them. This lack of love for the genre. It’s like Romero’s last zombie pumping invisible gas for invisible cars. Why did it even bother going to work? Okay, I’ll tell you why.
It’s because this place really was a good idea, even before shit went down, when we were still pretending. Ask anybody. Then move their mouth to answer you.
I hear wood crack and pop. Splinters. A zombie’s worst enemy. Looking over the edge, I watch a dog walk through our house, straight through the wall under me as if it’s made of smoke and bad breath.
A dog. Not a zombie’s worst enemy, but certainly not our best friend.
It exits the other side, crashing through another wall weakened by a decade of pounding, moaning, and the weight of slumped, tired shoulders. The entire west side of the house explodes all around the dead animal’s path, filling the sunshine with dust and pulp and drywall snow.
We can’t rebuild that.
You ever leave a snow globe in the sun by accident? The water turns yellow, a beautiful color really, especially when the sky overflows with it.
But the dog could give a fuck about these things. It just shakes the shards and nails out of its fur without missing a step or slowing down. Then it turns to run through again.
I have no doubt it will drag us like a dog house.
A SHADOW WILL BE MOVING CLOSER without me having to tug on it, and I will block the sunrise with my good hand to see. As usual, I won’t know who it is, but I will decide it’s her this time.
Even at the end of everything again, both together on the roof like we’re supposed to be, I will clear my throat to ask her a question.
“Let’s just wait and see what happens,” she will tell me.
I will sigh and take this to mean that, apparently, another dead man with a better character trait than my nervous cough could be shuffling down the hill any second.
“Let’s take things slow,” she will say.
“Any slower and we’ll stop,” I will laugh, helping her move her jaw on the word “slow,” so I know she means it. I will move in close to her lips and remember when she reminisced about a game called Zombie Kisses she played back in junior high. It was just like Spin The Bottle except when she was slouching in their circle instead of ours, she was hiding an ice cube under her tongue.
Scattered across a piss yellow ocean of dead grass, I won’t be able to tell if they’re moving anymore. Even the sun moves faster than us these days, so they may never arrive. Plenty of time to clean up, maybe play another game before the world ends again.
Then everyone will be coming out of the house, cheers and applause if they’re able, squinting up high at our life raft to see who won, not even bothering to gather up any parts of themselves that they will lose again and again. Then they will start to walk in that tired orbit if they can, talking about movies, hands and heads be damned. I will turn to her.
I bite.
“And when he was entered into a boat,
his disciples followed him.”
-Nervous Cough Zombie 6:06-6:09 a.m.
(Use with novellas illegal in seven states)
-take one drink when the movie is in black-and-white
-take someone else’s drink when the movie is colorized
-take two drinks when a zombie first appears
-take one drink when a character says “zombie”
-take one drink when a character is first killed by a zombie
-take one drink when the origin of the zombies is explained
-take one drink when the zombies are revealed to be other than animate corpses
-take one drink when any rule for zombie survival is first explained
-take one drink when the means to destroy a zombie is explained
-take two drinks when the means to destroy a zombie is explained by demonstration
-take one drinks when a zombie is first shot in the head
-take two drinks when bullets are wasted on a zombie’s torso or limbs
-take three drinks when a zombie catches fire, explodes, or gets hit by a vehicle
-take one drink when a zombie carries a disembodied limb
-take one drink when a zombie without l
egs crawls along the ground
-take one drink when a zombie emerges from under water
-take one drink when a zombie performs its living vocation
-take one drink when a zombie demonstrates the ability to reason
-stop drinking immediately when a zombie says 'brains' or any other intelligible words
-take two drink when a zombie animal or zombie child first appears
-take three drinks when an abnormally powerful zombie first appears
-take one drink when a zombie fights an air, sea or land animal
-take one drink when a zombie wearing a Nazi uniform first appears
-take one drink when a zombie is not shown for ten minutes
-take two drinks when a character is in denial about the situation
-take one drink when a character enters a cemetery
-take one drink of water when water appears as an obstacle
-take two drinks of water when water provides safety for a character
-drink for the duration of an ironic song or light-hearted montage
-take two drinks and turn off the TV when a character ignores an ominous newspaper, radio, or television report
-take three drinks when the characters make it clear they have never seen a zombie film
-take one drink when a character runs out of ammunition, misfires, or loses a weapon
-take one drink when a character uses a non-weapon item to destroy a zombie
-take one drink when a character destroys a zombie in the process of committing suicide
-take one drink when a character goes down into a basement, underground garage, tunnel, or cave
-take two drinks when a character seeks a rooftop or climbs any structure for safety
-drink for the duration of any hammering
-take one drink when a character shows inexplicable mastery of weapons or combat
-take one drink when a character hides a zombie bite from another character
-take one drink when a loved one returns as a zombie
-take two drinks when a character is unable to kill an infected loved one
-take one drink when a security guard, police officer, soldier, or other authority figure first appears
-take two drinks when a security guard, police officer, soldier, or other authority figure is killed
-take one drink when a character commits suicide rather than being eaten
-take two drinks when, in the process of committing suicide, a character destroys zombies
-female participants take one drink when a male character becomes nude, two drinks when it is a zombie
-male participants take one drink when a female character becomes nude, no drinks when it is a zombie
-when the nightmare is within a nightmare, take two drinks for each level
-offer food and/or concern to the drunkest participant when a doctor or scientist first appears
-take one drink when a character displays uncharacteristic courage or cowardice
-take one drink away from any female participants when a female character exaggerates her toughness
-take three drinks when a character is inevitably betrayed by an authority figure
-take one drink when a character mistakes a living animal or living human for a zombie
-take one drink when a character shoots a living animal or living human
-shotgun a beer when the first shotgun appears
-take one drink when a religious figure first appears
-drink red wine when a religious figure is killed
-take one drink when a character uses a zombie for sport or play
-take one drink when a character wakes from a zombie-themed nightmare
-take two drinks when a character mistakenly shoots a living human
-take one drink when a structure is fortified against a zombie attack
-take one drink when an armed stand-off between living characters occurs
-take one drink when an armored homemade vehicle first appears
-take two drinks when an armored homemade vehicle is shown being constructed
-take one drink when an aircraft or watercraft is used as a means of escape
-take one drink when the movie is filmed in black & white
-take one drink when the zombies run instead of walk toward living humans
-pour one drink on the floor when an ethnic character is killed
-take one drink when Simon Pegg makes a cameo
-take two drinks when Ken Foree makes a cameo
-take three drinks when Tom Savini makes a cameo
-finish your drink when George Romero makes a cameo
-take one drink when the movie occurs in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
-stop drinking when the movie claims to depict Pittsburgh and is filmed in Canada instead
-finish all available alcohol when the authorities enact a containment protocol (for example, detonate a nuclear bomb)
-when participants claim to be extras during filming and it can’t be verified with a phone call, they must drink until death
*send paramedics if the game lasts longer than the movie
Original brainstorm (brainstorm? delicious!) copyright © Nathan Lamoreau
(recreational drinker, prospector, skull collector, apocalypse connoisseur), 2010
Contributors
David James Keaton's fiction has appeared in horror anthologies such as Deadcore, Dark Highlands, and The Death Panel, as well as in Dark Sky, Burnt Bridge, Pulp Metal, Shotgun Honey, Pulp Pusher, Dirty Noir, Big Pulp, and Thuglit, among others. He also has stories forthcoming in Needle: A Magazine of Noir and Pulp Modern, and his coach killing contribution to Plots With Guns #10 was named a Notable Story Of 2010 by StorySouth. He received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Flywheel Magazine (which currently contains fewer flies and wheels than he’d prefer). He has written three screenplays; a prison movie, a thriller, and a western, while simultaneously adapting them into novels. He realizes this method is probably backwards. Today at 12:01, he just completed his first novel for which he is seeking representation. He can be contacted at [email protected] and eventually found at davidjameskeaton.com (but right now there might just be a picture of a frog lifting weights).
David Tallerman's horror, fantasy and science fiction short stories have appeared in over thirty markets, including Lightspeed, Bull Spec, Flash Fiction Online and John Joseph Adams's zombie best-of anthology The Living Dead. Amongst other projects, he's also published poetry (in Chiaroscuro), various film reviews and articles, and comic scripts through the award-winning British Futurequake Press. Tallerman's first novel, comic fantasy adventure Giant Thief, will be published in early 2012 by UK publisher Angry Robot, to be closely followed by two sequels. He can be found online at davidtallerman.net and davidtallerman.blogspot.com.
Nathan Lamoreau is a Level Three Curmudgeon with a penchant for skullduggery. By day, he trains call center representatives to beleaguer customers. By night, he combs bones out of his beard. He has named his cacti but not his cats. When not cautiously looking over his shoulder he may be found taking photos.
D.W. Stripp is from Western Pennsylvania and now resides in Eastern Pennsylvania. When he isn’t doing things, he can be found doing stuff.
“Listen, kid, when I was your age, zombies were real!”
-Third Stage Zombie, Monroeville Mall, Monroeville, Pennsylvania, March 7, 2010
Table of Contents
Author’s Preface: “SCARE QUOTES AND COFFIN RIDES”
Unnamed
Foreword By David Tallerman: “LOOK BUSY!”
Unnamed
ZEE BEE & BEE (a.k.a. Propeller Hats For The Dead)
Unnamed
SEND MORE PARAMEDICS: The Zombie Movie (or novella) Drinking Game
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Zee Bee & Bee Page 10
