Deadcore: 4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas

by et al. Edward M. Erdelac

  “It’s like that movie …”

  Bobby Z quickly closes another throat before Sour Towel Zombie can finish.

  “Enough with the Dead of the Dead of the Dead movies, motherfucker.”

  “Wow, that’s the original title for Diary of the Dead, actually,” Sour Towel Zombie squeaks, then, “Sorry.”

  “You’re not allowed to talk the rest of the day, S.F.B.”

  Sour Towel Zombie’s fingers tighten around the handle of his cleaver, then relax. He’d long since grown used to Bobby Z laying hands on him daily. Most of us had. And that’s what we used to call him, by the way, the “S.F.B.T.,” as in “Sour Fucking Bath (Towel),” previously “Serial Finger Banger,” to mock the limit of his sexual experience.

  “You know how most people comb their hair before a date?” Bobby Z would ask everyone real loud. “Well, he clips his fingernails.”

  I’d like to say he deserved the endless abuse, but Bobby had attacked all of us at least once by the time we were picking those nicknames. And whenever Mags would tell Sour Towel Zombie that he was “this close” (fingers about an inch apart) from being fired because of his mouth, I thought about my first lunch with Sour Towel Zombie (a.k.a. S.F.B., a.k.a. S.T.Z., formally Sushi Chef Zombie, officially Josh) and his finest moment.

  It was when we both were working at that video store and he went back to Burger King to complain about there being no crust on his Hershey’s pie. They gave him a whole one, a whole goddamn pie, not just the little chocolate sliver in the triangle box you usually got, and he happily shared that pie with me. When I asked him why he did it, he said, simply, “The crust is the best part.” He was right, and he felt like a friend of mine that day.

  But it’s been all downhill from there.

  * * * *

  The thing people forget about taking off your jacket before a fight is that you’re not doing it because it’s a throwback to an 18th Century duel or something. It’s simply because it makes it far easier to punch someone in the face.

  At the end of the night, with all the zombies winding down behind the barn, things always seemed so calm and content. No one ever anticipates that bloody jackets are going to be dramatically removed before our shift is over. And it happens every goddamn time. Even Sour Towel Zombie’s endless movie trivia seems oddly soothing at these moments.

  “So, I finally watched Day of the Dead. Way better than Land, which is ironic since rumor has it that Day’s script resembles Land before the funding was pulled …”

  “… yeah, that’s a man who needs his vision limited or else he would eagerly populate any apocalypse with noble retards …”

  “… speaking of …”

  “… you’re funny …”

  “… or 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 anyway. Helloooooooo …”

  “… you know Gorillaz sampled that on their debut …”

  “… Florida’s got plenty of gators, dude, so it wasn’t that strange to see one …”

  “… think you’re getting your racial slurs confused …”

  “… 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 crayon in the box, 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!’ 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, and Bobby Z wrinkles his nose and takes a swing at the logo instead. The helmet takes the blow easily, but the zombie wearing it spits out its mouthpiece to let it dangle on the guard anyway.

  “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 into a blinking daze and blessed silence.

  In our ears, Amy is talking about the dog and everyone is groaning. Groaning more than usual, I mean, and not getting paid for it. The dog again. Always the dog with her. Once, Cigarette Zombie called that dog our “Sword of Damocles,” then called it our “Gun Over Chekov’s Fireplace” twice, and we all had to agree with that description. 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, that would be even more of a bomb waiting 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 instead. 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 didn’t translate well to a horror movie, at least not the ones we preferred to pattern our lives after. So, when she first brought the dog into the game, it seemed like a great idea, a good one for her to focus on anyway. Maybe Dog Whisperer Zombie? But after a couple of weekends, everyone agreed that having an animal around a situation like this negated the mood we were after. And while it did help cause some of the anxiety we worked toward, it was the wrong kind. Much like the doomed canine in the novel I Am Legend (vampires that acted like zombies), it took our Camels 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 that was making it shiver and pinning its ears back. It comes down to this. It’s too emotional. A dog has no reasonable place in any self-respecting horror movie. Or this game. It just never seemed like the end of the world around one.

  I can hear Amy barking in my ear. Mags is real close to her, so we can all hear what’s happening clearly. Amy is telling a somber tale of how the dog was cruelly trained to fight by using battleship chains on its collar, how it made its head and neck so strong that it could 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. Amy’s weeping sounds more authentic than usual, and the Bobbys stop putting shredded leather jackets 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 and out its ass with a powerful magnet, resulting in a 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, of course …”

  Mags must have started glaring at her, because she trails off, then adds cheerfully:

  “But that’s a whole other movie! Don’t worry. The dog’s fine and much happier living with my uncle. He’s got a farm where he can run and dig. But some 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 will hear Amy’s voice, a ridiculously sentimental but fitting moment.

  “I’ve got it!” Sour Towel Zombie bleats from behind me. “The last name of a zombie movie that hasn’t been used yet.”

  “And what is it?”

  “The Dog of the Dead.”

  “Already been done. Pet Semetary. I’m saying th
at 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 before he even closes his mouth.

  “Well, 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 earphone in?” the Towel asks. “What’s going on in there?”

  “I don’t know,” I whisper. “But they’re clearly having way too much fun. Look in there. Are they playing Twister or what?”

  “Dude, zombies would dominate at Twister.”

  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, no, no, not Night of the Living Dead, like everybody thinks, we’re talkin’ In Cold Blood. That’s where it all began.”

  “I’m sure there were plenty of home invasions or zombies before that one.”

  “Sure. William Seabrook’s 1926 classic on 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.”

  “Stop. No one can deny our proud heritage began 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 …”

  “Enough already!” Cigarette Zombie bellows. “The first zombie was, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster, I mean. 1818, bitches.”

  “Don’t you mean, Frankenstein (a.k.a. The Modern Polyphemus)?”

  Someone sniffles.

  “Okay, maybe it wasn’t the first, but 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 skin of their forearms sloughs completely off with their sleeves this time, so they put them right back on.

  * * * *

  If and when they open the upstairs closet door, if they’ve done things in a certain order, 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 or 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 through a hole in the attic, up onto the roof, and watch the sunrise while bouncing apple cores and beer cans off our heads below.

  So when we stand back and look to the top of the B&B and see nothing but crows, we know the Camels are doing it wrong.

  See, if they’ve done things in the wrong order, as we suspect 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, 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, 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 who played one of our first Plants ever. 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. 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 come on. 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. He’s 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.”

  As we watch, Sour Towel Zombie begins to wind down, creaky foot over foot over foot like a weary toy robot. 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 said once when she was sticking up for him. That his nonstop movie references were just 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 seemed 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 to quote one final movie before his arms hang limp like balloon strings a week after your 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 the 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, as most of theirs had, too. But seeing the real news, hearing it out loud, as well as all of us pounding on each other instead of the walls, must have empowered them to accept everything as real enough to finally fight for the house.

  But I am still convinced that one of the Camels has a pulse, that one of them came into our game alive as hell. I’m sure of this. The towel he dropped when he compulsively avoided the door handle was my first clue. And now, judging by the gasping and bubbling in my ear, this man is 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 again. Just like I did. We loved that flick to death though, huge fans of the tasteless ending where hapless victims were forced to hide in ovens to escape.

  To my right, Bobby Z has broken into the living room, and now he’s choking out one of the other Cam
els 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 bridge gets low and tries to hide.

  “Hey, baby!” Bobby Z shouts. “Ain’t got no heart, but I love you! You ever hear that song that goes ‘Stars are dying in my chest until I see you again?’ That’s our song! Wait, where are you going?”

  Bobby Z gets the Camel down and out for good with a knee in his windpipe, cartilage crackling kinda like bubble wrap, but maybe a little more satisfying, judging by Bobby’s smile. And 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 as an afterthought, I hear a “Tisk!” from the corner and suddenly remember that 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’d tell him:

  “It’s just like Dr. Frankenstein said in Day of the Dead, ‘We are them, just functioning less perfectly.’”

  With some extra effort he upends the couch, and there she is tucked behind it, deep under some red cushions, burrowing like a tick. More like a “tisk.” I watch her reach out to her husband on the floor, fingers tickling the knee-shaped crater in his throat, seemingly trying to coax it to inflate. Some air hisses 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 a girl you’re into has a boyfriend, that feeling when you can tell something changed her mind about having the best conversation with you, and they decide 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.” A feeling that spent most of your adolescence hidden in your stomach under your shirt like a dead animal you were trying to sneak into the house.

  When I say I “remember” this feeling rather than feeling it, it’s because, without a pulse, I’m long past actually feeling anything.