4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (12 page)

“Zee Bee & Bee?” Davey Jones mumbled. “Sounds German.”

Whether it was a new groom wanting to posture and protect his woman during a life-threatening emergency or the blushing bride wanting to demonstrate how she would, much to his surprise, bloom in an apocalyptic crisis, business was good right out of the gate.

And when they hired me (their second cousin and initiator of years of Sunday night zombie film festivals) to amp up the threat level of the scenario, word spread fast. I helped hand-pick a crew, and by the next fall, we had things up and running.

Two years after we’d started making enough money to think about our first 4:00 a.m. commercial spot, a movie popped up in the video stores called
Dead and Breakfast
. Everyone panicked a little. But, luckily, it bore no resemblance to our original idea. This movie was just another attack on a house, their storyline treating everything as if it was actually happening, something even the occasional survivalist couple rarely considered for long. Clever title though, we all had to admit.

And it was my idea to have the evening start with Mags and Davey Jones meeting two couples at the bottom of the long driveway leading up to the house. This is where they would sign the waiver. And it was also my brainstorm for the two couples to arrive about an hour apart. This gave one couple a chance to get settled a bit and locked in before the other couple came banging on the door. See, now the door was
their
door, just because of that extra hour. And there was always only one bed between the two couples to encourage competition and arguments, another good reason to keep the arrivals staggered. It was surprising how much controversy was caused by one couple getting an unfair opportunity to toss a suitcase onto a bed first. Mags chalked that up to the influence of reality television.

She eventually started profiling them carefully to choose which couple was most likely to not want to give up that bed without a fight. We were never sure how she figured this out. There was talk of Mags going through trash cans and peeking through windows of potential applicants. But she always seemed to pick the right couple to go into the house first. Sometimes I pretended she picked me.

“What the hell is going on?! Where did
you
come from?!”

Inside the house, someone is screaming, and I don’t need my earphone to hear it. It’s a Plant, not a Camel. That’s what we called the guests, “Camels.” Cigarette Zombie sort of made it up. Something about the title of Albert Camus’ short story “The Guest” being a translation of the French word “L’Hôte,” meaning both guest and host. According to her, this was “precisely” what we were asking them to be. She tried to get us to call them that for awhile, but we couldn’t pronounce it
and
we had no idea what she was talking about. But they did become “Camus” for awhile, and that made her smile. At least that’s what somebody told me. I’ve never actually seen her do this myself. Smile I mean. Then the word got changed to “Camels” for good, and she has scowled ever since. Even though we tried to convince her it was based on Aesop’s Fable about “familiarity breeding contempt,” the one where the Arabs first see a camel and are all terrified, but by the third sighting they’re putting saddles on it (because, hey, wasn’t that “precisely” what we were doing?), it didn’t matter. She never got on board with the term.

But it isn’t a Camel that’s screaming. I can tell by the level of acting ability. And it can’t be Tom. Not yet. He should still be in his locked room, waiting to be discovered if and when they find the key in the bucket of nails under the sink. For now, he should simply be happily rustling some aluminum foil, maybe scratching at the door or floor every so often, maybe making just enough noise for someone to start wondering what’s in there, mouse or monster.

For a second it’s silent, then I hear that girl, the newlywed, making her “tisk” noise at something that disgusts her. I heard her doing it an hour earlier when I was hiding in the bushes watching her new husband sign the waiver. I remember thinking that if there was some fine print in that contract that she missed and was having second thoughts about, it was too late now.

I always hated those noises, those impatient clicks and hisses people always do when they’re annoyed. I had a girlfriend once who ruined every movie by sucking her bottom lip and making a sharp snap, sorta like gum popping, whenever something dramatic happened on screen. It was especially excruciating in the theater, and I found myself taking her to more comedies than I ever wanted to see. And at a zombie movie, she would “tisk” so many times that one nearby theatergoer actually asked if she was shuffling a deck of cards. I start thinking this particular little noise might screw up our game, maybe make some other zombie out here, a zombie with less patience than me, try a little harder to make her stop, maybe by pulling her tongue out from its root slow and steady as a flower you don’t want to break off too soon.

In my earpiece, I can hear the honeymooners talking about a shower curtain. They are exchanging the kinds of details you’d guess should have already surfaced before their marriage.

“… well,
my
dad used to flip out if we messed up the bathroom. With two boys, it got real messy real quick …”

“See, I told you it wasn’t blood. Somebody dyed their hair in here recently, that’s all.”

“… and then when my little sister came along, she was one of those vacation babies by the way, that’s why there’s that age gap, she’d trash the place and dad never said peep. She’d change her hair from black to red to green and get it all over the walls and he’d just sigh …”

“This sure looks like blood though.”

“… and when I tried to tell her how he used to lose his mind if we got one drop of urine behind the toilet seat, she wouldn’t believe us. I mean, a little yellow on the toilet is a lot more understandable than a green bathtub …”

“You know what? If they try too hard to scare us, I might call their bluff.”

Bad things happen sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. It comes with the territory when things really start rolling and the emotions spike: Overly aggressive behavior, minor theft and vandalism, a general disrespect for the situation. But to discourage these shenanigans, we discovered early on a few simple things we could do. We didn’t want to hurt anyone, but we did need to convince people we were really trying to get a hold of them.

So Davey Jones told us to always go for the meat.

“Avoid the bones,” he said. “If you look for spots that an actual zombie would prefer to bite into and instead grab with your fingers, you will usually hit a spot less likely to inflict pain.”

He was right. The skulls and elbows and knees were a lot of trouble in our hands, just as they would disappoint a hungry mouth. But nothing caused as much trouble as an agitated Camel. Therefore, in the wavier, it clearly stated that they could be expelled from the house by any staff or Camel (“For the sake of the human race!” our Plants would declare to the rest of the survivors) the minute they crossed that line into purposeful injury or, as described more explicitly in the contract, “catching a zombie’s finger under your hammer more than three times.”

That part was easiest to remember. Three fingers and they were out.

And it wasn’t fun to get kicked out. Since they would have already turned in their car keys, they’d quickly understand that they could either sit in a ditch all night and watch their girl or boyfriend have all the fun
or
they could allow themselves to be gently steered along the path of our reasonable and satisfying story line. However, if they were really ornery (like that little fucker last fall with the cherry bombs), they would be held down and forced to take a slathering of blue paint to the face and, if they wanted to, attack the house with the rest of our staff. We called it “getting bit,” and it always surprised us how many decided to join in on the pounding. Probably because it was a choice between either punching a door or walking aimlessly around the woods, two things a real zombie would probably be doing with his Saturday night anyway.

“Why the need to give everyone advice all the time? You get that from your uncle.”

“Just trying to help you make the most of that wood. And why bring my uncle into …”

“Tell everyone the advice he gave you the first time you got on the bus to Kindergarten.”

“He said, ‘Be careful.’”

“Uh, no. What else did he say?”

“Yeah, tell us.”

“He said, ‘If you stick your hand down a girl’s pants and it feels like you’re feeding a horse, you’re in trouble.’”

Tell “everyone?” Yep, between laughter, hammer strikes, and another “tisk,” I finally recognize the voices of our Plants and that old joke. It’s our Irritable Couple Hiding In The Basement, Jeff and Amy. Apparently, they were forced to join the game early since the Plants already opened their door. They seem to be ad-libbing a little more than usual to fill the gaps and expected questions. I cup my ear, listening to the banter. The rest of the zombies would be doing the same thing. After another couple seconds of listening, we could safely assume the couple haven’t seen the injured daughter yet and we should stick to the plan. Up until a couple seasons ago, this particular stage of the game would have been alerted by barking because the injured daughter had been an injured Blue Labrador (more hairless than “blue” really) for awhile instead, a wonderfully irritating, half-domesticated, very snappy little monster we referred to as “shark dog.” Now we just use the earphones to synchronize the plot without animal noises.

An animal is sorely missed though. Having one around changed the way we all acted. Critters never doubt the sincerity of our acting, not for one second. But any twist on the timeless Zombie Attack story usually turned out to be a mistake, and this was no exception. There was a reason they kept dogs out of most of those movies. And what happened to our dog was something we zombies rarely talk about. And, as always, we worried Amy would bring up the incident by the end of the night.

I’m pulling at a window frame when someone nicks some skin off the side of my thumb with the claw end of the hammer. It’s the same set of eyes from earlier. I frown and count “strike two” in my head.

At least Jeff is laughing tonight, having more fun. See, back in the day, Jeff used to date Amy. Davey Jones encouraged this, thinking it would be great motivation since he’d puff out a little more around her, and maybe that would help sell his role to the Camels. And he let them keep their real names to help stay in character, too.

It worked for awhile.

The problem was that it quickly made some emotions bleed over into real life in increasingly dangerous ways. It didn’t help that one season Amy cheated on Jeff with Jerry, a.k.a. “Baseball Zombie.” That made Jeff target the big number 3 on Jerry’s back a bit too aggressively sometimes. During one seemingly endless barrage, Jeff broke character and mercilessly ridiculed Amy for liking athletes, even though Jerry had never thrown a pitch or hit a ball in his life. This, in return, caused Jerry to punch one Camel in the face last year (“barely a swat,” he finally admitted), a very solid and unundead-looking right hook that plowed through some bottom teeth like the Garden Weasel and cost the equivalent of a dozen of them (not cheap, we used one after each attack to fix the landscaping), plus shipping and handling, to settle out of court. A lot of “dead baby mama drama,” Mags called it. Now, Tom, our military Plant, and part of our locked room mystery during the climax, was very quick to freestyle through the awkwardness of any bloody nose by coming up with his own story off the cuff about their platoon reporting zombies imitating what they’d seen on the screen at a drive-in
Rocky
festival (“could happen,” he shrugged) then stood humming nervously in a dogpile of corpses as he held a toy phone over his head desperately searching for a signal.

But besides that recent love triangle, this year there was also a new power struggle in our ranks. The two Bobbys, Bobby Z and Bobby B, had both developed a strange impulse to lead us on the attack at all times. Each of them wanted to be the head zombie, standing on point, the first to use tools, first to snarl, et cetera, sort of like the “Gas” character in
Land of the Dead
. You know, leading assaults, making decisions, very slowly of course, it all became quite a nuisance, more and more important to each of them every siege. It made for low, slurring but serious arguments over cold barbecue chicken, over who broke what window. And even though we all guessed it was mostly because they had the bad luck of both being named “Bobby,” there was also some talk about one of them wanting to be the first zombie to drive a Camel’s car. This was inexcusable. Not just because it wasn’t in the contract, but because this would be a scene that is not in
any
of the movies, remakes included.

But tonight they are just fighting about that helmet nonstop.

“I don’t know why you even like the Steelers. It goes against our philosophy.”

“The fuck you talking about?”

“That Polamalu-malu-lu’s girly-ass hair would be a serious liability during a zombie uprising. I can’t believe none of the announcers ever bring that up, to be honest.”

“No, he’s way too fast to get caught.”

“Maybe with a ball in his hands. Without it, he’s lunch. In fact, I saw him take a hit so hard once that the ref yelled, ‘Fatality!’ instead of ‘Offsides’ …”

“Bullshit.”

“… got hit so hard he left his multiplication tables on the 50 yard line, along with memories of three Christmases ago …”

“Never happened.”

“… so hard his helmet rolled into the end zone and his head was still in it.”

“Unlikely.”

“I was there, man. And I couldn’t believe they played such an inappropriate song in the stadium while they gathered up the pieces. If he ever did wake up, he’d have thought he was in Maroon 5 …”

“A level of exaggeration I’ve sadly grown accustomed to …”

“Shhh!” A zombie tries to get them to keep it down.

“Anyway. You owe me a helmet, asshole.”