by Lori Perkins
And, of course, it wasn’t long before you saw mixed-mortality couples openly kissing and holding hands on the streets. For some girls, dating a zombie was the perfect way to upset Daddy, far more shocking than running around with the big, black quarterback on the college football team could ever be. I didn’t see the attraction myself, although a couple of my friends enthused about the unique delights of lying in the arms of the undead. They claimed that once you’d tried it, you would never go back, but I wasn’t even a little bit zombie-curious.
Then one cold February evening, I was serving the last couple of customers before the coffee shop shut for the night when a familiar figure shuffled slowly through the door. My heart fluttered up into my throat for a moment as I realized I was looking at Mark—or, rather, what had once been Mark. His formerly glossy brown hair was dull and lifeless and his skin had a distinct greenish tinge, but despite the fact that he was clearly dead, he was still undeniably handsome.
When the zombies first started returning, I must admit I had wondered what would happen if someone I had known was among them, but I had been thinking more of a dead relative than the man whom I would always consider the one who got away. Mark and I had been one of those couples everyone had said was destined to be together, but it had just never happened. When I had been single, he had been in a relationship, or the other way around. He had gone to college on the West Coast, while I had stayed on the East. And then, just when we were both single, available and living in the same city once more, with seemingly nothing to stop us having a long and happy life together, Mark literally dropped down dead in the street one evening, killed by a heart condition no one had known he had. I was devastated, sobbing all the way through the funeral and grieving for months afterwards, but in time I had recovered and accepted I was simply never going to see Mark again.
Until now, as he was standing at the counter asking for a large sour-milk cappuccino.
“Mark!” I exclaimed stupidly, aware that my voice was too loud, too forced in the quiet surroundings of the shop. “How’ve you been?”
“Oh, you know,” he said, his voice slower and more guttural than when he had been alive, “not too bad, considering I’ve been dead for—what, four years?”
“Yeah, time really flies. So, are you working?”
“Yup, I got my old job back at the bookstore over on Twenty-third. I think they were kind of glad to see me back—once they’d got over the shock.”
“Well, it is good to see you,” I said, surprising myself by how sincerely I meant this. Looking at Mark was stirring up feelings I thought had been buried along with him.
“Maybe we should go out sometime, catch up on everything that we’ve…oh, you know what I mean.”
“Sure, that’d be nice.” He picked up his coffee, started sloping over to a vacant table, then turned—a process that took him a little while, as though he still wasn’t totally in control of his limbs. “Tell me, Millie, are you seeing someone at the moment?”
“Yes, I am,” I admitted. And as I watched him shuffle off to drink his coffee in a secluded corner, I wondered whether I should tell that someone about my unexpected encounter with Mark, and about the feelings I now realized I still so clearly had for him.
So later that night, as I lay in bed with Brody, I came clean. Brody was the best thing that had happened in my life since Mark had gone. I’d met him at the point when I’d finally decided I had to spend time around people who hadn’t known Mark, who hadn’t hung out in the same places he had and who could help me to move on. Someone had invited me to a gallery opening in the East Village, and that’s where I had got talking to Brody. Lanky and blond, with eyes the cool blue of a mountain lake, he couldn’t have looked more different than Mark, but that was part of the initial attraction—it meant I couldn’t easily make comparisons. Not only was Brody cute, he was intelligent and well read, qualities I’ve always admired in a man. He worked for a small publishing house who specialized mostly in academic publications, but had ambitions to one day write a novel. By the end of the week we were an item, and a couple of months after that we moved in together. Of course, I never forgot about Mark entirely, but being with someone as clearly besotted with me as Brody was helped to ease the pain.
I dropped a gentle kiss on his forehead. “The strangest thing happened today,” I said. “Mark came in for a coffee.”
Brody looked at me, startled. “Mark? You mean he’s..?”
“Back, yes. I know, I can hardly get my head around it. And because I promised I’d never keep any secrets from you, I have to tell you the weirdest part.” I took a deep breath. “As soon as I saw him, I knew I was still attracted to him.”
“Seriously? You’ve always said you’d never be one of those girls who went chasing after a dead guy.”
But Mark’s not a dead guy, I wanted to tell him, he’s the dead guy. Brody, however, didn’t give me the chance to say anything. He pressed his lips to mine, kissing me passionately.
“What would you rather feel?” he asked. “Warm lips like mine”—he kissed me again, to emphasise the point—“or Mark’s cold ones?” His hand moved down between my legs, parting the lips of my pussy so he could tease my clit. “Fingers that know how to take you to the edge of ecstasy, or ones that aren’t properly under control?”
He straddled my body, and I spread my thighs eagerly as his cock head nudged at the opening of my sex. “And, most importantly, do you want this cock inside you?”
“Yes, Brody, yes!” I almost screamed, as he plunged up into me with his hot, virile length. Mark would never be capable of fucking me as hard as Brody could, of filling me with his fertile seed, but as the first fierce sparks of orgasm shot through me, I knew I still really wanted to find out what sex with Mark would be like.
A publishing convention was taking Brody to Chicago for a couple of days, so in his absence I arranged to have dinner with Mark. He’d chosen a zombie-friendly trattoria close to his apartment, and when I arrived he was already seated at a discreet corner booth, well away from the undead couple having a blazing row at a table near the door. It was a little hard to make out what was being said, given that the pair of them were rather more decomposed than most and her jawbone didn’t seem to be properly connected, but the gist was obvious: he was dumping her. Seemed like relationships didn’t get any easier even after you were dead.
I ordered a bowl of linguini, and Mark went for what was described as the charnelhouse special: a plate of sloppy meat with what looked uncomfortably like a piece of windpipe sticking out of it. Vaguely repelled by the whole scene, I asked myself what on Earth I thought I was doing here, and then Mark looked at me with his dark, rheumy eyes and my reservations melted away. So many times I had dreamed of sharing a romantic candlelit dinner with him, and now here we were, clinking wineglasses in a toast to each other and chatting together companionably.
As we ate, I filled Mark in on everything that had happened while he had been out of my life, telling him about friends we had known who’d got married, or had started raising a family. He told me he was aiming to raise money so he could go traveling, though he aimed to stay well away from Britain, given the country’s less-than-welcoming attitude to the undead.
Soon, it felt as though no time at all had passed since the afternoon I had made plans to go for a dinner like this with Mark, only to receive a phone call a couple of hours later to let me know he was dead. It didn’t matter that one of us was alive and the other not. At this moment, we were just two really good friends on the cusp of becoming lovers.
There was, of course, the small matter of Brody standing in the way. Mark insisted on being told all about him, and I obliged. “You should meet him,” I said.
“You’d really like him.”
“Do you love him?” Mark asked
“Yes. Yes, I do.” I drained the last of my coffee. “He’s bright, he’s funny, he’s an amazing lover. He’s all the things I’ve ever wanted.” All the things I know you would hav
e been, I almost added.
“But you’re still sitting there, thinking of what it would be like if we were together.” Mark put his hand on top of mine. It was the first time I’d ever been touched by a zombie and, remarkably, I didn’t immediately recoil. “You know if you come home with me it will change everything forever, don’t you?”
I nodded, prepared for anything which might be about to happen. Nothing more needed to be said. We paid the bill and made the short walk to Mark’s apartment. It took a while, as we were moving at Mark’s pace, but with his big arm wrapped around my shoulders I was completely comfortable. We got the odd scandalized look from people who still weren’t happy with the idea of mixed-mortality couples, but I didn’t care. Let them think what they wanted; I had been given a second chance with Mark, and if I didn’t take it, I knew I would always regret what might have been.
Behind Mark’s closed front door, I surrendered to my desires. His skin was cold to the touch, but no colder than the night air outside. All the comparisons Brody had made the night he’d fucked me in the ways he said Mark never could came flooding back, but I was so caught up in the thrill of finally being with Mark after all this time that it really didn’t matter. He pleasured me with all the skill he could muster, everything slow, everything measured, and my body opened for him willingly.
Afterwards, I knew I had crossed the line. Cheating on Brody with anyone was something I had never planned to do, but with Mark? How would I explain that? And if I didn’t tell him and he somehow found out, would he make me choose between the two of them?
If I covered my tracks carefully enough, I thought, Brody need never know. I could keep on seeing Mark whenever he was away and it would just be our dirty little secret. But Brody and I had built a relationship on being honest with each other, and in the end I just couldn’t lie to him. When he got back from Chicago, I sat him down and told him I’d been for dinner with Mark. The expression on my face let him fill in the blanks.
Strangely, he didn’t react the way I’d expected. There was no row like the one I’d witnessed between the couple in the restaurant, no threats to leave or flat-out declaration that everything was over between us. Instead, he asked me to invite Mark over to our apartment one evening. “I want to meet him,” Brody declared. “I want to see what a dead guy could possibly have that I don’t. God, talk about the living envying the dead.”
What could I do but agree to his request? Brody could tell I was upset by everything that had happened, and he took me in his arms, kissing my tears away.
Gradually, the kisses grew more intense, until we were peeling off our clothes, suddenly hungry for each other. Brody threw me down on the bed and buried his head between my legs, licking the petals of my sex until they blossomed, allowing him to enter me with his strong, hard cock.
As he fucked me with long, powerful strokes, my legs wrapped tightly around the small of his back so I could pull him further into me, I knew I couldn’t break up with him. What we had was just too good to throw away. I needed Brody, but I was sure I needed Mark, too. Maybe a meeting between the two men would be for the best; it might help to clear up some of the confusion I felt.
Mark came over to our apartment a couple of nights later, bringing a bottle of red wine. He had on the same grey suit I’d seen him wearing at each of our previous meetings; like all zombies, he didn’t seem to be comfortable in anything other than the clothes he’d been buried in. I introduced Brody to Mark, then went to the kitchen to find glasses and put the kettle on. I’d left a jug of milk out overnight to go sour, just in case Mark fancied a cup of coffee.
The three of us sat a little awkwardly making small talk in the living room, Brody and Mark eyeing each other up like a couple of prize fighters.
When Brody started talking about the latest manuscript he was editing, Mark chipped in, “So how much do you enjoy your job then, Brody?”
“Well, obviously it’s not as satisfying as working on my own book would be, but…”
“You see,” Mark said, “this is why you and I, and Millie, too, for that matter, really aren’t so different from each other. I serve people in the shop every day, people who look down on me because they’re alive and I’m—I’m like this. But all those people who aren’t really doing the job they love, or work for a boss they can’t stand or are stuck in a relationship that’s gone sour—well, every day they die a little bit more on the inside.
And in the end, they aren’t any better off than me, after all.”
Brody looked at Mark with something approaching respect. “You know, I think I’m beginning to realize what Millie sees in you. And it’s obvious you’re in love with him, Millie. Just the way you look at him tells me that. But I have no intention of giving you up without a fight. I’ll do whatever it takes to be with you, so what the hell do we do to sort this out?”
I looked at Brody, then Mark. How could I choose between the living and the dead? I loved Brody’s passion and vitality, but I had tasted dark, forbidden pleasures with Mark and I didn’t want to give them up. If there was only some way I could walk on the dark side with Brody—and that’s when the answer hit me, elegant in its simplicity.
Brody died a week ago tonight. It was a beautiful death. He swallowed a quantity of sleeping pills, washed down with the bottle of champagne he’d been saving for the day I accepted his marriage proposal, and I held him in my arms as he quietly slipped away.
Mark was there, too, to bite him as he faded into unconsciousness. It’s the one sure way, the doctors say, to turn someone into a zombie. Given Brody’s powerful desire to be with me, whatever it takes, I know it won’t be too long before he’s pushing up through the dirt they so recently shovelled over his coffin and knocking on the door of this apartment, ready to join Mark and me in the most unusual of threesomes.
I’ll admit I don’t know exactly what the future will bring, but I’m dying to find out.
Through Death To Love
by S. M. Cross
“It’s a good strategy,” she says. “You just have to make it your own, put your mark on it. We all use fillers to maintain our turn, to signal interest and attention.
Frankly I’ve never heard that particular one put to such elegant use.”
It’s a bit disconcerting actually; a hunger sound slowed and softened, an
‘mmmmmmm’ with the slightest breath in front, an oddly appealing mix of rampant desire and precarious restraint. Fear and anticipation flutter against her stomach walls, a delicious feeling she hasn’t had since high school.
The fear isn’t surprising since it hasn’t been that long since zombies and humans were predator and prey. The world has changed a lot in ten years, economic necessity turning the lemons of a near depression into the lemonade of a miraculous global economic recovery, all thanks to ex-consumers who no longer are dead but not ex-.
No, the fear she gets. It’s the anticipation that startles her, a delicious frisson sweeping over her, something akin to reading a horror story late at night all alone, hearing a thump and a bump, and the accompanying mix of dread, despair, hope, wanting and not wanting, tumbling together. And isn’t that the essence of attraction, the fear of ends, the dread of them, the despair at all that has passed and yet, when confronted with the promise of what could be, the hunger rising, the risk you’re willing—no, forced—to take?
“Now let’s see how you are doing with your oral motor exercises.” These are drudgery; there’s no way around it, but critical if he’s to keep his speech intelligibility, not to mention a prosody that’s more music than growl. Speech therapy for zombies is all about compensatory strategies, blurring the lines between dead and living so we can all just get along.
As he goes through the exercises, following each with production of the target sound in a word and phrase, she carefully observes the pursing and retraction of his lips, the movement and accuracy of his tongue, the lovely, miraculous dance of speech, one motion following on the heels of another, future sounds shapin
g the present, molding the memory of the past. He’s so fluid it’s startling, nearly human in rate and rhythm. Shows you what’s possible with money, opportunity, and force of will. One thing you have to admire about zombies is their single-mindedness. They may not get points for imagination, but for sheer stick-to-it-tiveness, they can’t be beat.
Yes, he’s had every opportunity and it shows. Beyond a slight hesitation now and again, a gesture that seems more appreciation than inability, as if he chooses to linger as opposed to being forced to it, his speech is nearly human. There’s not an ounce of self-consciousness in his attempts; even his mistakes seem delightfully purposeful, designed to enchant. You’ve gotta love a man with this much aplomb, even a dead man.
“You’re doing wonderfully.”
“Mis-s-s-stakes,” he sighs.
He’s so hard on himself, another zombie trait she can’t help but admire. It pushes him toward excellence, being all he can be, resolving to do better next time, always sure there will be a next time which, because he’s a zombie and already dead, is a pretty much guaranteed. No they don’t give up and they never take no for an answer. If at first they don’t succeed, they try and try and try again. She finds herself blushing at where this thought leads, watching his tongue dart forward for production of a ”t”, then disappear for an open vowel, only to emerge slightly thrust between perfect teeth, capped to hide deterioration, giving him a killer smile. Who would have thought the word ‘tooth’ could be so damn sexy?
She shakes her head to get back on track. This is therapy, not a date. She hears him focus on an “s”, try and miss it, an almost that only her trained ear can discern, and of course his more exacting one. Sibilants are always going to be trouble for him; they require motor planning that takes a toll on a system past tense instead of present. The lips want to retract, the death’s head grin, distorting his “s”’s, making them sound more last gasp than full of life. And therapy three times a week can slow the loss but never stem it.
