Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (46 page)

You’re gonna be seen from coast to coast tonight.”

She stared at him, clawing for a little more comprehension, and her fingers opened and trailed down the bars. She stared at the spot they’d been holding.

“Try to make the best of it,” he said, and left her. He had a lapel mike to clip on.

“Show time,” cal ed Bernerd from the shadows. “Look alive, folks.”

Bernerd cued the guy in the sound booth, a forever-young fel ow cal ed Deadhead, since he’d died and was then reborn in a Grateful Dead T-shirt. Deadhead’s job was to play the proper music at the proper times. He juggled several cassette tapes and managed to do a remarkable job of keeping them sorted.

The music: “Mars, Bringer of War,” throbbing with menace.

The lights: coming up from dim.

The cameras: red tal y lights winking on, lenses focusing, slack gray faces staring into the viewfinders.

The pseudo-Don Pardo: “Drop what you’re doing… it’l stil be there! Come on! Join us now for the most unpredictable hour on television…
Deaaaad Giveawaaaaay!
”

Monty cemented that huge smile across his face and came striding onstage, sharp and natty in his slacks and sports jacket. The bulge under the left sleeve was barely noticeable. Doors One, Two, and Three were at his left, and the enormous wheel of opportunity at his right. Down he went, down to the very lip of the stage as the curtain rose, the final barrier removed…

And there they were. His audience.

They sat politely, somewhere around a thousand of them, somewhere around two thousand unblinking eyes staring back at him. Some of them clapped, or tried their best, clumsy hands slapping together like pairs of gutted fish. Others cheered, sounding like contented cattle lowing gently into the night. A sea of gray faces, agate eyes.

Let me entertain you, let me make you smile.

“Right you are, this is
Dead Giveaway
, and my name’s Monty Olson. Good-looking crowd tonight, wow. Wel hey! I know you hate waiting for the fun to start about as much as I hate long monologues, so let’s just get right down to it, what do you say?”

The studio audience murmured its agreement, mottled gray heads bobbing here and there.

Monty went striding back toward the wheel, feeling more vital than he had al day. The lights, the cameras, the smel of makeup… he knew no better nourishment.

“One thing before we get started, let’s run through the rules, shal we? They’re simple enough, in keeping with most of your minds out there. Each contestant gets one spin at the wheel, where they can be an instant winner or loser. If the wheel stops on a number, they’l win one of our big prizes behind the three doors. And trust your old Uncle Monty, we’ve got some real goodies behind there tonight. Only one word of warning… just don’t commit the Big No-No. We al know what that is and what that means, don’t we, ha ha haaaa!”

As Monty patted the bulge beneath his sleeve, there came from the audience a thick rumbling that was probably laughter.

“So! Who’s our first contestant tonight?”

Deadhead began playing Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman” as the announcer introduced the shape beginning to move onstage.

“She’s a hometown career girl from mid-Manhattan, a former director of sales and training at a downtown bank. First up tonight on
Dead Giveaway
… please welcome Cynthia!”

Again, that dead-fish splatter of applause. There were several agitated moans that in The Old World might’ve been wolf whistles. Cynthia shuffled toward the wheel, tal and angular in the moldering remnants of a pin-striped business dress and jacket. Her mouth was a cruel red splash of lipstick against a white face the texture of dried-out Play Doh.

“Welcome, Cynthia, welcome,” Monty said. “Gosh, you sound like a lady who has it al together.

So tel me, what do you owe your success to?”

“Brains,” she said with a lopsided grin.

Monty dug deep and chortled out a big bel y laugh. He had her step up to the wheel, and she gripped one of the many handles circling its edge and gave it a good shove. An overhead camera flashed the spinning image onto the studio monitors. Numbers and prizes alike flicked past the marker, a blur at first, then gradual y coming into focus as the wheel lost momentum. At last the marker settled on a huge numeral 2.

“How ’bout that, a big winner first time out tonight!” Monty boomed. On went the wraparound smile. “Tel her what she’s won!”

Door Number Two eased upward to reveal a display that resembled the back room of a wel -

stocked butcher shop. Stainless-steel tables and white-cloaked gurneys were loaded nearly to the point of col apse. A groan of envy rippled through the audience.

The studio monitors and home viewers were then treated to stock newsreel footage of a suburban neighborhood reduced to the apparent aftermath of a war zone. Weeping rescue workers crawled past mounds of burning rubble, extracting victims whole and in part from wreckage twisted beyond recognition.

“Who’l ever forget last May twenty-third?” said the announcer, as cheerful and bouncy as ever.

“Flight nine-oh-one out of O’Hare Airport? It crashed a minute after takeoff, but the nation’s third-worst airline disaster is
your
gain, Cynthia. Direct to you from cold storage in the Cook County Morgue, it’s the last of flight nine-oh-one! Courtesy of
Dead Giveaway
.”

Whatever remained of Cynthia’s professional composure was abandoned where she stood. She went lurching toward Door Two in a stiff-legged hobble, fal ing toward the nearest table and overturning it in an avalanche of assorted parts. Two cameras zoomed in and caught her delight… the sweet taste of victory.

The next contestant was a trim lady wearing a tattered dress belted around the waist and a string of pearls. Earrings showed through the matted filth of once-careful y coiffed hair. Her name was June, a housewife from May-field, Ohio, and she lumbered away an instant winner, the proud owner of the thigh and lower leg of what the announcer said had been a marathon runner.

A Brooklyn construction laborer named Carl was up next, entering to the strains of “Born in the U.S.A.” His blue workshirt was stained in numerous places where it puckered into the flesh of his bel y and chest, and his shoulders looked as broad as a freezer door.

“Whoa, Carl, let’s be careful, okay?” Monty said, laughing. “That wheel’s gotta last us the rest of the night, you know.”

Carl grunted, and a low moan escaped the crowd as he clutched the handle, lurching when he spun the wheel. Then, with the sound of a large, half-rotten carrot snapping in two, the zombie’s arm parted company with his shoulder. The arm slithered out of its sleeve like a great gray worm, the hand stil holding fast to the wheel. Carl watched in dumbfounded surprise as his arm spun in broad circles, like the last remnant of a child desperate to remain aboard a merry-go-round. Carl looked up, mouth agape, eyes bovine in their stupidity.

Silence, save for the clattering of the marker.

Then a red beacon, and the sound of a buzzer ripsawing through the studio.

“Uh-oh, that’s it! The Big No-No!” cried Monty. “Self-dismemberment
is
grounds for automatic disqualification!” He reached inside his jacket and pul ed out a long-barreled .38, leveling it at the zombie’s head. “Too bad, Carl. That was a good spin, too.”

The audience uttered a mournful groan at the gunshot, at the mushrooming of the back of Carl’s head into gray and maroon, at the thud of his body on the soundstage floor. A pair of stagehands shuffled out to drag the remains away; one licked his fingers when the job was done.

Monty reholstered the .38 and grinned broadly and hunched his shoulders. Always a laff-a-minute here on
Dead Giveaway
.

And on and on it went, a constant, plodding parade of the undead coming to claim their prizes.

Shawn, the California beach bum who stil had shards of a surfboard sticking from his chest, walked away with a four-pack of heads of various network executives Bernerd hadn’t liked.

Mil icent, who’d been kil ed shortly after her debutante coming-out party, won the massive arm of a weightlifter and wore it around her neck like a fine fur. And on and on…

Until, at last, the final contestant.

“Looks like the old clock on the wal says we’re just about out of time,” Monty said. “But hey, let’s squeeze in one more, what do you say? Who’s up next?”

“Wel , Monty, he comes to us from the lower east side, and his interests are slam-dancing and graffiti. Six-foot-two, hair of blue, just cal him Fang!”

An imposingly tal figure emerged from oifstage, made even tal er by the blue spikes of hair exploding from his head at al angles. Beneath a loose black-mesh shirt, his sunken chest was crisscrossed with chains. His upper lip was eaten away entirely up to his nose, giving him a perpetual snarl. Fang took his place at the wheel.

“Last spin of the night, Fang,” Monty said. “Let’s give ’em a good one.”

And good it was. The wheel spun forever, slowing at last with a clattering of the marker blade.

Final y it came to rest on a large 3, and the crowd broke into a smattering of applause.

“Whoa ho ho ho, what luck!” Monty roared; the best he could tel , Fang was grinning. “Another big winner! What have we got for him?”

“They’re young! They’re nubile! They’re fresh from Hol ywood! And they’re al yours, Fang! The entire female cast of last spring’s drive-in theater epic,
Cheerleader Party Massacre
!”

Door Number Three was up by now, and behind it sat a cage fil ed with aspiring starlets in identical red-and-white suits. What a shame, to have spent years hoping and dreaming for the big break, that shot on prime-time TV… and to miss it due to Thorazine. It had kicked in hard and heavy, leaving them about as excited as a basket of vegetables. Except for…

The audience was in, for them, a frenzy of excitement. Some were standing, arms waving like stalks of wheat in a summer breeze. Others stomped their feet to no apparent rhythm.

Deadhead started some new music, angry guitars and shrieking vocals. Old Blue Eyes it wasn’t.

The Dead Kennedys, maybe?

Except for
…

Fang was in a frenzy of his own, twitching in time with the music like a spastic during a seizure.

His head bristled like a mace. Several of the earlier contestants wandered back onstage for the party atmosphere of the closing credits. Cynthia, with a good deal of Flight 901 smeared across her face. Shawn and his cooler of heads. Mil icent, modeling her new arm. Fang twitched and slammed himself into Cynthia; an ear went sailing across the soundstage like a crinkled little Frisbee.

And yet Monty found himself unable to tear his eyes away from the girl he’d spoken to before the show. She clung to the front of the cage, swimming upstream against the current of a Thorazine haze while the rest of the starlets slumped in catatonic heaps. Her knuckles showed white against the steel bars.

She’s not supposed to do that! She’s supposed to be out of it!

She looked thin, painful y so, and no doubt it had been a good long while since her hair had been washed. Her lips trembled, and her eyes loomed huge against the pale of her face. Eyes that fixed, eyes that accused.

Eyes that started rearranging those internal switches. Off went the smile, off went the juice.

“Help me, please,” she said, though over the racket on the stage he couldn’t hear her, could only read her lips. “Everybody’s got a price, what’s yours? Is it this?”

And then, in a pathetic attempt at seduction, the girl fumbled with one side of her sweater and tugged it down. Ragged fingernails left red streaks on her skin. And there she stayed, holding the bar in one hand and her sweater in the other. Gauging his price.

Monty suddenly wanted to be sick. Not entirely from the prospect of her inevitable fate… but from the quick glimpse at just what it was that he was made of.

Everybody’s got a price, what’s yours
…

In the absurd simplicity of her offer, she’d somehow managed to show him a truth that had always eluded him before: Greed is the one thing death can’t conquer. Love can succumb before it, and loyalty. Friendship and honor. Morality and dignity and even humanity. But not greed, oh no. Greed has an indefinite lifespan al its own, and thrives in the stony soil that can kil the rest.

He gave her the first genuine smile he’d given in years.

Monty reached beneath his jacket to finger the grip of the .38.
At least it’d be the merciful way
out. And then a bul et for me, maybe?

He pul ed the gun out, letting his arm hang by his side. The girl saw, and understood. And in pul ing her sweater back up, accepted. Her glazed eyes shut and her face tilted slightly toward an unseen sky.
Make it quick
, she seemed to be saying.

And then a bul et for me? No, I can’t do that, can’t do that at al . Because Heaven help me, I need
this stage more
.

Make it quick? Okay, that much he could do.

Except that by the time he got the gun halfway up, it was plucked cleanly from his hand.

Monty hadn’t noticed that Brad Bernerd had sidled over beside him. But now they stood face to rotten face. Bernerd was smarter than he looked, Monty knew that. Apparently he was stronger and quicker, as wel .

Before Monty could move, Bernerd pointed the revolver’s muzzle at his lower thigh and pul ed the trigger.

The thunderclap of gunpowder aside, the effect was much like getting clubbed with a concrete block. Monty felt his leg suddenly swatted out from beneath him, and the next thing he knew he was on his side on the floor, tasting dust.

The gunshot brought everything to a halt… the announcer’s closing voice-over, Fang’s slam-dancing, Mil icent’s preening. Even Deadhead kil ed the music. Everything stopped except the silent scrol ing of the credits on the monitors. Once again, Monty was the center of undivided attention. At the bottom of a sea of staring eyes.

He propped himself up on one elbow, grunting, chil y sweat trickling from his scalp. The lights didn’t feel quite so warm anymore. He gazed up into Bernerd’s runny eyes.