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Reanimated Readz
Copyright © 2015 by Rusty Fischer
ISBN: 978-1-61333-799-8
Cover art by Tibbs Designs
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Decadent Publishing Company, LLC
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Reanimated Readz
By
Rusty Fischer
Includes:
Zombie, Interrupted
Project Z
Private EyeZ
The Zombie Vote
My Brother, My Zombie
Zombie Interrupted
by
Rusty Fischer
~DEDICATION~
To my wife, Martha; the best reporter I know!!
She picks a coffee shop even after I tell her the smells will be overwhelming for me.
I can smell the fresh-ground beans from a block away and kind of slow my roll to get used to it before I even step in the door.
Well, I tend to walk pretty slowly anyway.
I get there a little early, but only because she’s so late.
It’s a few days after Halloween and the specials board is already crammed with festive holiday treats: pumpkin scones, harvest blend coffee, pecan tarts, moose berry mocha.
I get something sweet and cold and squishy—a cinnamon and hazelnut whip-a-chino—and wait for it awkwardly, aware that most of the eyes in the room are on me, as usual.
The counter girl is pretty with flawless skin and looks like your typical college freshman. She has a tattoo of a butterfly on her neck just above her green barista collar and another in the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger.
When she’s done, she puts the frozen coffee drink on the counter and backs away cautiously. I shrug and take my drink, tempted to lunge just to watch butterfly girl flinch. Bet she wouldn’t look so flawless then.
I sit in a corner booth, near a window but away from the few hipster couples pretending to stare at their cell phones instead of me.
Even though I have Public Zone clearance and it’s against the law to discriminate against the undead, that doesn’t stop lots of folks from being nasty to my kind.
Whatever. It’s fine. I’m used to it by now.
Soft jazz music plays overhead, something instrumental and old with guitars, but still vaguely cool. I watch the front door until she arrives.
She’s in full-in reporter mode, right down to the distressed leather handbag and beret. Yeah, you heard right: a beret. She has one of those sleek little voice recorder things in her hands even as she stands in line. It’s white, and she wields it proudly as if to say, Look at me, I’m gonna record something in a minute.
She ignores me, completely, while butterfly girl behind the counter smiles and gushes and says, I kid you not, “I love your beret.”
Well, Julia’s always had that effect on people.
They talk a little more, like a couple of Cheer Club spazzes, until butterfly girl hands over her coffee and Julia finally casts her eyes on me. They’re brown and cruel, and she doesn’t smile.
She looks at my booth as if to say it’s not big enough, but she can’t complain since a) she picked the place and b) all the seats are pretty much tables for two.
“Hi, Julia,” I say, watching her flinch to hear the way my new voice grinds out her name. “What took you so long?”
“Huh?” she asks, annoyed that I’d call her on it, like my time is any less valuable than hers. “Oh, the bus ran late.”
I scoff. Julia? On a bus? Not hardly.
She sits just inside the booth, one thigh off the cushion and foot pointed toward the door. My back is against the window, arm tossed lazily over the top of the booth, fingers pale at the end of my turtleneck sweater sleeve.
She takes her time pulling a notebook out of the leather bag, clicking and un-clicking a big purple pen and rolling a breath mint around her tongue.
I roll my eyes and move my hand, as if to get up and storm out. “You know, Julia, I’m doing you the favor here, right? Not the other way around?”
Her eyes get big but she doesn’t budge, at least not until I shift my foot and start to inch out of the booth for real.
She nods and says, “Okay, okay, I’m ready. Just…let me push this button here and…go.”
She points the sleek white recorder in my direction and stares at me.
“Would you like to ask me a question first?” I grunt. “Or should I just do all the work for you?”
She looks down at her notebook and nods again. “What’s your name, for the record?”
I snort and say, “Reginald Archer Addison.”
She rolls her eyes dismissively. “I meant your zombie name.”
I grit my teeth a little; she already knows all this. “Reggie 4.”
“What’s the four stand for?”
“It means I’m the fourth zombie named ‘Reggie’ in Calumet County, is what it means.”
“Is there a Reggie 5?”
“Not yet.” I sigh, peering out the window.
It’s late afternoon, but this time of year, that’s close to early evening. Traffic is light in this neighborhood. She chose the café across town so nobody would see us sitting together.
Across the tree-lined street, there is a yoga studio, a pita place, and a cupcake bakery called Mama’s Muffins. There are random cars parked at meters up and down Blythe Boulevard, and one black van.
“Reggie?” she asks, waving the white voice recorder in my face. “Come back to earth.”
There is an urgency in her voice that grates, as if she can’t stand me looking anywhere but at her.
It was the same way when we were dating, once upon a time. We had to stop going to movies because she got tweaked if I, you know, wanted to see what Jason Bourne or Iron Man or Captain America were actually doing.
I sigh and turn back to her, not sure why I agreed to all this.
“Well, ask better questions,” I blurt. “You could have gotten all this crap off the Reanimation Relocation website, Julia.”
She makes that fake smile of hers and says, “Yeah, but this way I get to say I interviewed a real zombie, you know?”
I flinch; she ignores it. I remind her, “You know we prefer the term ‘cranially challenged,’ Julia.”
“Yeah, like the Hillcrest High Gazette is going to print that.”
I cock my head, feeling the tendons tighten around my throat. “Are you sure they’re going to print any of this? I mean, just because they let me back into school doesn’t mean they’re going to let you write about me. And even if they do, they may want to wait until my probationary period is over next month.”
She gives me her know-it-all face and waves away my self-doubt. “I’m Editor-in-Chief. They have to print it.”
Before I can ask “Print what?” she settles back into the booth and gets a
predatory gleam in her eye.
“So, Reggie, take me back to that night. What was it like to lose your whole family and survive?”
I glower at her, clenching my fists atop the tiny black table. I take a sip of my frothy, sugary drink to put my rage on pause. My counselor at the Relocation Camp says I’m going to have problems with rage control for the next few months. I guess this is one of those times.
The sugar helps a little. We can’t eat human food anymore since we can’t digest stuff in our dead stomachs, but for some reason straight sugar—and a little caffeine never hurts—makes me feel less dead.
“You said we weren’t going to talk about that,” I remind her. “That’s the whole reason I decided to do this in the first place. You said it would just be a ‘fluff piece’ about what it’s like to eat a human brain or never have to sleep again. You said it would help you get an A in Journalism this semester, maybe even help you get into State next year. Now you’re pulling this? That’s the thanks I get?”
She waves her hand in my face. “Like you said, Reggie, I can get all that off the website. What I want to know, what other kids want to know, is what happened that night.”
I peg her with my eyes and squint a little. I’ve practiced the look in the mirror at the Relocation Center, so I know that with my black eyes and the furrowed brow, it’s pretty intense.
Most mortal chicks would be quaking in their berets.
Julia?
Nothing. Not so much as a flinch.
I guess I forgot how heartless she is. I thought I remembered from the way she broke up with me. I guess not.
I guess I wanted to forget. I guess that’s the real reason I’m here. Not to help her get her story published or have another “clip” for her college applications or even extra credit in her Journalism class.
After all that’s happened, after how cruel she’s been, I guess I just wanted to sit with her again, together, like the old days. In a coffee shop, staring at her eyes, the cheekbones I would kiss, the lips that made me melt.
She’s waiting on me, and I’m angry now, so I tell her the unpolished version. “You wanna know what happened, Julia? Now you wanna know? I’m just saying, when I found out what I was, when the town found out, and I woke up in the Relocation Camp with the rest of the zombies, you never once asked about what happened then. Of course, you would have had to come see me to ask me, but since you didn’t, here’s what happened: I’m in my room, texting you, probably, listening to music, when I hear some grumbling downstairs. I don’t think much of it. I figure it’s the neighbor’s dog. But it’s not. It’s the neighbor, Mr. Croft, growling like a dog. And I see, in his eyes, in his walk, all the things they tell you to look for in a zombie: the shuffling walk, the gray skin, the dead eyes. Oh, and the human elbow in his mouth didn’t hurt.
“So I yell down to Dad, to tell him to bolt the door and call the Zombie Relief Squad before Mr. Croft can get in, but it’s too late. By the time I get downstairs he’s already in, chomping on my mom, Dad lying in a pool of his own blood, foot still jerking.
“I go to help him and, well, I don’t know who bit me. Mr. Croft, or my mom, maybe even my dad. But when I turned, when the hunger came over me, I still had enough of me left in me to get revenge. I took one bite out of Mr. Croft, and didn’t stop until he was in pieces, lying on the floor at my feet. I did, Julia. I ripped that dude apart. After that, my eyes go dark and that’s the last thing I remember before waking up in Quarantine.”
Julia is smiling that little self-satisfied smile again. I shake my head. “Don’t you want to hear what happened next? About my first bite of human brain? About life in the camps? About what it’s like to live among a hundred zombies? I thought that’s what you—”
She smirks, clicking off the little white recorder. “Nope. I got what I wanted.”
“Which is what, the gory details?”
“No, your confession.”
I pause, a little road flare of rage swelling up inside my chest.
“W-w-what confession?” I stammer.
“Just now, when you told me what really happened that night.”
What really happened?
I sit back, a little stunned. What is she on about?
She opens her leather sack and pulls out a file. I recognize it from the Camp. We each have one, all the new zombies. “In here it says you didn’t retaliate that night, that you didn’t bite anyone else. The neighbor’s death was put down as ‘undetermined,’ but just now, on tape, you said, and I quote, you ‘ripped that dude apart.’ So, my job is done.”
“Job?” I ask.
And that’s when I stop to look around the café. It’s empty. All the couples who’d been sitting there, texting each other when I arrived, gone. Butterfly girl: gone. Her assistant manager, the one with the goatee: gone.
I turn to find Julia standing, file in her bag, bag on her shoulder, smile wider than ever.
“Bye, Reggie,” she says with a little wave of her short, stubby fingers. “I won’t be seeing you around school anymore, I guess. After all, with your confession, you’ll be expunged from the Relocation Camp and taken to the National Center for Violent Offen—”
“Why?” I ask, standing up.
There is movement from behind the counter and out of the corner of my eye I spot a Relocator, clad all in black, carrying one of those long metal poles with a leash at the end, like the dog catchers used to.
That is, before the zombies ate all the dogs.
I inch closer and another one emerges from the bathroom, this time with a stun gun.
She holds up a hand to still them and looks up at me, eyes like slits and mouth pinched with revulsion. “Why, Reggie? Why do you think? I go to sleep one night with a boyfriend, the next morning I hear he’s a…a…zombie? I know some kids at school think it’s cool you have no heartbeat and eat brains for lunch, and I know it’s all legal ever since the Reanimation Act of 2014. I know you’re supposed to be ‘safe’ once your brain intake is regulated by the government, but let’s face it—you’re gross, Reggie. An abomination and, frankly, I’m tired of looking at you. This way, you’re gone, done for. I never have to see you again. Nobody ever does.”
She starts to walk away. Her shoes squeak on the empty café tiles.
I turn. The two Relocators are now standing next to each other, eager for the takedown. I look past them to find a third team member stop Julia at the door, take the white recorder, and escort her to the back of the black van that’s been parked across the street this whole time. Probably to debrief her, get the story before they listen to the tape, see if it all matches up.
Good. That could be good.
I turn back to the Relocators and hold out my hand. “I guess you’ve got me, then.”
The one with the dog leash smiles. “Reggie 4, you are hereby charged with one count of violent assault while zombie, one count of lying to Relocation Camp officials and two counts of applying for re-entry to school on false records.”
He steps forward and I stand, perfectly still.
The other picks up where the first left off. “You’ll be taken to the National Center for Violent Offenders and sentenced for your crimes. From there, you’ll be given an Extermination Date and held until such time. Do you understand the severity of your crimes?”
I don’t answer. I don’t speak. I watch. The noose is in the air, quivering at the end of the long, metal pole. I’ve watched them use it in the Camp, when a zombie goes rogue after falling off his regular brain regimen. I’ve also watched the men who use it. Whatever happens, they always go for the head, meaning they ignore the hands, and especially the feet.
I wait until the noose is over my head before ducking, turning and kicking out at the first Relocator’s knee; it snaps with a sickening thwack-crack-snap sound, sending him down to the ground and his pole clattering beside him.
I pick it up and point it at his partner, who smiles cockily. I know what he’s thinking. A Relocator with a stun gun beats
a zombie with a leash around his neck any day.
Okay, usually, but not today. I swing the pole at his stun gun, knocking it to the floor. It clatters with a deadening weight, sliding harmlessly under the barista’s counter and landing against the cappuccino machine stand.
I slip out of the noose and turn it around, holding it by the rubber grip on the business end.
Now he looks panicked, running for the door to get his partner to help. I bring the noose down over his neck, yank on the handle, and tighten the clear plastic strap until his face is pink and he’s lying, gasping, on the floor next to his friend.
I stand over them, grinning. I don’t know why they always send humans for this kind of thing. They should train zombies to do this instead. It’d be a much fairer fight. But then, what do the humans know? They’ve only had a few years to deal with us, ever since that first outbreak in 2014.
It will take time, I suppose, until they figure out that camps and extermination are only driving us—zombies and humans, I mean—further and further apart.
I step behind the counter and reach down for the stun gun. I’ve never held one before, though I see them used often enough in the Camp.
I turn back to the men and look down at them.
They squirm, but don’t try to run anymore.
“Did she know?” I ask, cocking my head in the general direction of the black van still parked across the street.
The one with the leash around his throat looks confused. It could be from lack of oxygen. I roll my eyes and loosen it, just a little. But even after I do, he still seems clueless. Who knows, maybe they’re not used to zombies fighting back.
Maybe they should be.
I glance at the other one and ask, “Did she know? The girl?”
“About what?” he spits.
“About the Extermination? Did she know I’d be put to death?”
“Did she know?” He chuckles. “She wanted it in writing before she set up this interview.”
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