by Lori Perkins
“Richard, we cannot be, you and I, we cannot do this anymore.”
“Come on, we’re made for each other, Julia. You know that, and so do I. What on earth is the problem?”
“I know your recipe. But you made it incorrectly.”
“You’re breaking up with me over a recipe?” I drew back from her, stared in disbelief. This woman was crazy.
“You omitted the one essential ingredient, Dicky.”
And now she was calling me Dicky again?
“A pinch of alpaca testicles,” she said flatly. “That’s the ingredient that makes the ceviche an aphrodisiac.”
“And
you
know
this
how? ”
The whites of her eyes were dimming to gray. The white of her skin was beyond a pallor now, it was tinged with blue. Everywhere. The pink nipples were lavender, now purple.
What was happening to her?
“This is an ancient Inca priest recipe,” she said. “They used it as an aphrodisiac.
My mother’s friend, the Peruvian, listed the ingredients, all of them, including the alpaca testicles, over and over again. I helped my mother make the ceviche. With the rabbit brain.”
“But so what?” I yelled. “What does this have to do with you and me, and getting engaged and married on Brain and Soul?”
She laughed. I saw that her teeth were cracked and yellowing by the minute.
“We can’t get married, you silly, silly petit cerveau! You tete de linotte!”
I pulled on my pants and shirt, shoved her skirt and blouse at her. “Here, you might as well get dressed, Julia. I think you’re sick, and I mean that in a loving way.” I paused. I did love Julia Brainchild, but her mind was nuts and her body was clearly not well. I would take her to the finest doctors. Then we’d finally get on with it.
“I died in childbirth, Dicky. Long ago. A hundred years ago, in fact. Nobody knew that ceviche recipe except my mother, and both she and her friend died with the secret. It was passed down only to me.”
“And to me,” I said. Then I thought, did she just say she died a hundred years ago? What the hell?
“Don’t you get it?” She staggered toward me. Her gait was choppy, almost like a lurch. “I died, Dicky. In childbirth. Apparently, the child lived. He must have been Julian LeBlanc, your grandfather. You see, Dicky, LeBlanc was the name of the man who fathered my child!”
Psycho…
I took her elbow to lead her to the door and get her back to her apartment. She needed a good long rest, then a very good psychiatrist. But as I touched her elbow, the skin flaked off her arm.
I dropped my hand. Stared at her. “You are…?”
“I prefer to think of myself as the Living Challenged.”
“A
zombie?”
“It’s why I specialize in French brain cooking. I’ve had years to perfect my recipes. If I make love, if I let myself go too far for too long, if I let myself go all the way, I revert to the form I had when I reanimated. Hence, the blue skin. I must leave you, Dicky.”
Yeah, maybe that was a good idea. This Julia Brainchild was one whacked-out chick. Harold might force me to work with her, but beyond that…forget it.
“Dicky, I did love you. But you see,” she said, “I’m your dead great-grandmother.”
I shook my head. “You’re crazy, Julia. Come on, let me take you home and I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”
“You forget, I’m the star of that show, not you.”
And I saw the cracked yellow teeth, the gray whites of her eyes, the skin falling off her face, the breasts sagging then deflating like balloons sucked dry of air.
I saw the knife in her hand. Classico-Emerol stainless steel, model 287631A.
The blade flashed.
I grabbed her wrist. It fell off her arm, and with it, her hand and the knife.
Could I kill her, a zombie? Was it possible? How? Every zombie movie I’d ever seen showed that people could never kill them—not with fire or decapitation, not even with machine guns.
My mind was racing. I stalled for time. “Can’t we work something out?”
“Yes, Dicky, we can. You see, I do love you, Dicky.”
“We can still do the show together, I promise,” I lied.
“Yes, Dicky, we can. I know you love me, too, Dicky.”
Then she leaned and her tongue flicked out and touched my cheek. The yellow teeth nibbled. I felt the heat dribble from my cheek to my lips, and I tasted blood. She’d bitten me.
“We’ll do the show forever, Dicky. Just you and me. And brains. And now that we are one, the same, it’s time.”
“Time?”
I
squeaked.
“Fuck me, Dicky, fuck me till I scream. You won’t care if my flesh flakes off.
Ha! And I won’t care about yours, either!”
There was no need to announce an engagement the next day, or any time soon. I was stuck with Julia Brainchild forever. We were two of a kind now. I’d fallen in love with my own great-grandmother. And as we, two rotting corpses, dished up health food to the diet-crazed Americans, we could binge on all the cream and butter and lard and fatty sauces we wanted. As long as they were simmering on brains.
Kicking the Habit
by Steven Saus
I almost didn’t hear her say hello over the guard’s screams.
He wasn’t just screaming because of me. He took a nasty header into a pit while fleeing across the construction site. His right leg was bent at an nasty angle. If you took the time to look, there was probably bone sticking out somewhere. I wasn’t looking at his leg.
My eyes locked with his as I lowered myself into the hole. Or to be honest, he looked at my eyes. I stared at the grey matter a few inches behind his. Despite the decay, my stomach rumbled and my salivary glands tried to summon a few drops.
“Hello?” she called again. Her voice echoed off an abandoned backhoe. “John?”
That got my attention. Friendly greetings were rare enough since I rose, but someone calling me by name—well, that was really odd. It was a nice change from the usual greeting of “Oh dear God, no!” or maybe “Quick, get the shotgun!”
She stood on the other side of the pit, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. The jutting forms of two cranes framed her body against the clear night sky, creating an illusory archway behind her.
That was what I recognized at first: It was Maria’s pose in an arch, just like the prom picture I’d stolen from the funeral home. Casual, relaxed. Except in the photo she was still a few hours away from being dead.
She lurched around the edge of the pit, turning as she shuffled so she kept me in sight. The moonlight shimmered on her skin. My memory filled in the soft lines of her face and edited out the patchwork of stitches and scars from the accident. Her gown billowed lightly around her arms in the breeze as if carried by the guard’s whimpering cries. I had never thought about her rising. Never considered I would see her again someday.
“Maria?” My voice was raspy and hoarse. I’d like to say it was just emotion, but part of my esophagus had rotted away a few weeks ago. “I remember you.”
It needed to be said. Too many memories slip away after death. More slide away when the hunger strikes us. I don’t remember my parents. The memories of Maria were still there and fresh. The stolen summer evenings, the times we’d meet after school, the good three years we’d spent together. And the memories after that.
The corner of her mouth lifted, a scar keeping it from becoming a full smile.
“When you left for college, I said I would always remember you.” She had given back my ring on my parents’ doorstep. Neither of us cried at the time. We couldn’t cry now.
The guard remembered his gun. He shot me a few times, the flash illuminating the rent-a-cop uniform against the red clay. As the slugs punched through my ribs, I got a good look at his face. He was young, maybe the same age as when I shot myself.
&n
bsp; His shots didn’t hurt, not like when I’d done it, but it knocked me back into the slick mud. Just annoying. I stood up, reached down, and took the gun from him. His eyes rolled back like a malfunctioning Ferris wheel. He collapsed, squelching into the bottom of the pit.
“Finally,” I croaked. I kicked him a few times to make sure he would not get up anytime soon.
I climbed out of the hole. Maria still wore the prom dress they’d buried her in.
Her hair was mostly there, though much of the cartilage around her nose was gone. And there was the half-repaired damage from when Scott drove them and a half a bottle of whiskey off the road on prom night. The angry crude stitches cut across her right wrist and forearm; her exposed collarbone glinted in the silver light.
“What happened to you?” she asked. Her hand reached for the gaping hole in the back of my head.
I shove the words through my throat. “You said you would remember me. You were gone.” My dry tongue skittered across cracked lips. “I said I would follow you.”
The guard let out a soft whimper. I looked back down into the hole. The hunger was strong, and the guard—more boy than man, really—was near. Remembering to draw breath, I croaked at her, “I will share him with you,” and I swung my legs into the pit.
“No!” she cried, and I glanced back at her.
She glared at me. “You don’t have to eat him,” she said. “There is another way.”
The snarl snuck past my lips, straight from the gnawing need in my gut. She had to understand. She was like me. It didn’t matter what I thought of it. The dry heaves afterward, the days of guilt—none of it was enough to stop the hunger.
I was close enough to the guard that I could almost taste the soft texture of his brain. It was so strong I wanted to gag and drool simultaneously, though I could do neither. I dropped into the pit.
“John!” Her voice was still enough to make me pause. “There are others of us who have given it up. We’ll help you.”
I tried to concentrate. The boy moaned softly. If I still had a pulse, it would have been racing. Aware brains, afraid brains—oh, they are the best. For a brief moment the fresh neurotransmitters flood your tongue and everything else dissolves in pure ecstasy.
For a moment, you forget everything. For a moment, you forget what you were forced to become. I took a step toward the boy. The cool night air fluttered up the slit in my tux, through the hole in my skull.
“John.” She was almost pleading now. “Come with me. We’ll help you. You don’t have to feed like this. You don’t have to be alone.”
I looked to see if she had a weapon—some way that she could take advantage of me. I wanted to eat, not be eaten. When I first rose, I was out of the ground before the man buried beside me. He had worked as a first meal, even if he had been too salty for my taste. Still, Maria had never lied to me in life, no matter how much I’d wanted her to.
Not even when I begged her to on my parents’ porch, when I asked her to just lie and say she’d wait for me. I looked again at her.
Her body was in worse shape than mine, but I had only burst out the back of my skull, not shattered my whole body. She saw me hesitate, and both corners of her mouth rose. Despite the scars, her smile was still the same.
She held her hand out to me, to help me up from the pit. “I’ll wait for you this time, John.”
I looked at the boy, and looked at her. My lungs tried to take a deep breath. It just seemed the thing to do. I turned to face her, took her hand, and prepared to be hungry for quite some time.
I saw the stitching around her wrist fail a moment too late. I held her hand in both of mine, the guard a soft cushion for my undead pratfall. I looked back up at her at the top of the pit; she looked down at me. I held her severed hand up, and she wriggled it in mine, and there was nothing left to do but laugh.
That was three months ago. Now we travel through the Midwest. She has packed the gown into a bag on her shoulder. She changes clothes whenever she can find a fresh supply. She prefers to wear sundresses in the city, but changes into sweats when we’re between towns. I left my tux in a trash can somewhere outside Toledo. Instead I wear a hoodie and jeans, and rotate Tshirts from bands that were popular before we rose. I got a hat to keep the wind out of my skull. Our companions follow our example. They wear newer clothes snatched from abandoned strip malls or thrift stores.
It gives us an advantage. The clothes are often enough to avoid trouble with the locals. They are used to looking for shambling folks wearing the latest in undertaker fashion, not folks in regular clothes. Maybe they think we’re just homeless drunks. We don’t stop to ask.
We raid factory farms. I never liked the things, even when alive. But they’re good for us now. Chickens, pigs, other livestock, all caged into an amazing density of brains per square feet. It’s a deep delight to wade into a mass of beakless, terrified chickens. As our feet squish through their waste, we break their necks and crunch their skulls in our mouths. Chickens as methadone, I guess.
Sometimes it’s not enough. Bob stayed clean for nearly a month. He had taken to wearing tweed jackets, lecturing us on the hidden beauty of The Grapes of Wrath like the professor he used to be. We found Bob crunching through a little girl’s skull. He sat on the remains of her dollhouse, eyes glazed over, shoveling the grey stuff into his mouth. I had to put him down when he tried to eat Maria.
Despite the occasional relapse, we keep trying to convert others to our cause.
Sometimes they’re people we knew. Recognition helps us then, but often they’re perfect strangers. Humor breaks through the slow mental fog of the undead. We have a routine down. “Need a helping hand?” I yell, and toss Maria’s hand to them. Every time we get another one clean, her eyes shine—a little bit with the preservative we spray on each other, but also with the memory. Maybe my eyes shine too.
The addiction is still there. The monkey—like us—never dies. We cope with that as best we can. Maria takes my hand when I get the shakes. I press the remains of my lips against hers when she keens into the night. We make do.
Tonight, it’s another chicken farm. The farmer’s family is holed up in the basement, their tempting brains safely out of reach. Our family shambles into the pens to feast on avian brains. Maria is beside me. We look into each other’s eyes, chickens clucking in panic around us, and smiles crinkle our stiff flesh. I can’t be away from her any more. I need her. If we’re apart, I feel the hurt deep inside of me. Her hand slides into mine and gives it a squeeze. I know she feels the same way.
I know we’ve really only traded one kind of hunger for another.
And that is enough for us.
Zombified
by Isabel Roman
Yum.
There was no other word for it. Mr. Tall, Delicious, and Doctor-fied had just introduced himself as her co-inheritor of a no-doubt ramshackle former plantation on Martinique. At least this trip wouldn’t be as boring as Rebecca Davis originally imagined six months ago when her lawyer called her with the news.
Through some convoluted distant family connection, she and the gorgeous man before her were now on their way to the Caribbean. It was Rebecca’s first real vacation in two years, and she’d originally been annoyed she had to share it with a stranger.
Now, with Griffin Stoddard, Doctor Griffin Stoddard, standing before her, she changed her mind.
Visions of the two of them in a very private hotel room overlooking a picturesque vista rather than traipsing to wherever the mansion was located entered her thoughts.
Yum, indeed.
“A pleasure to meet you in the flesh, Dr. Stoddard.” Rebecca smiled. Her smile felt a little like the cat who ate, or was about to eat, the canary. She didn’t care.
Too many pleasurable things to count flashed through her mind in the time between spotting the handsome doctor and now. How many, she wondered, could they accomplish before leaving Martinique? And did they really need to see the old mansion?
“Griffin, pleas
e,” he said.
His hand was large and warm against hers, firm as he shook it. He looked slightly old-fashioned with his blond hair and bright blue eyes. She half expected him to kiss the back of her hand.
He didn’t. She found herself slightly disappointed with that. Still, Rebecca’s palm tingled long after he released her hand. They stood before their gate at Baltimore/Washington International Airport, the bright fall sunlight angling across the floor as other travelers mingled around them.
Just then, the boarding announcement echoed over the speakers, and Griffin gestured for her to precede him.
Once inside the plane, he hoisted his large black duffel into the overhead compartment at their first-class seats. Unable to resist, she watched his arm muscles, how his shirt stretched across his chest. Distracted, she didn’t realize he’d sat next to her until he leaned in.
“Quite the adventure we’re in for,” he whispered as the first class flight attendant made his way toward them.
“Is that so?” she asked, the wicked glint in her eye leaving no doubt about her interest.
“Absolutely.” His answer was quick, as if he’d been thinking the same thing. But then he smiled, relaxed beside her. “Receiving a letter from a French Lawyer about an inheritance that isn’t an Internet scam or in Nigeria is an adventure in my book.”
It was his wink that almost had her forgetting their extremely public setting. The fact that her FBI credentials would probably not prevent them from being kicked off the plane should she jump the delicious doctor next to her had her forcibly buckling the flimsy airplane seatbelt.
Rebecca forced herself to keep her hands in her lap as the male flight attendant took their drink orders. Oh, but how fun it would be to lick some gooey tropical concoction off the doctor’s chest.
“Your room or mine?”
Instead of verbally answering, Griffin picked her up. Her legs wrapped around his waist as he carried her across the floor. Rebecca barely noticed the view before he placed her on the bed. Quickly rising to her knees as he stepped back, taking his addicting scent with him, she ignored everything but Griffin and pulled him down.
