The Marijuana Chronicles (13 page)

“He was our pimp,” explained Sophia, putting a fist on her hip and tilting her chin.

“You’re
hookers?”

“Whores, yes,” Annabelle nodded. “And don’t go putting on airs, it’s not like you’re some sort of aristocrat, Zoey.”

“No. It’s not like that at all.” I didn’t remember telling her my name. “So you were hookers and your pimp named Giacomo killed you ninety years ago,” I said. “Why did he do that?”

“We stole money from him,” Birdie said. “And then he poisoned us.”

“It was a very painful death,” Sophia said.

“Can you excuse me a minute, please?” I said. “I need to pee.”

I pushed Annabelle out of the bathroom and closed the door, keeping my dog with me so they didn’t try doing weird dead-person stuff to him.

I took several deep breaths.

I had my phone in my pocket. Could I call Martin? Ask him to come back? Tell him that there were three zombie hookers in my house? Probably not.

I thought of calling my best friend, Janie, but she was two hours away, in Manhattan, and would probably be completely useless in this situation. Almost anyone would be. I peered through the bathroom door keyhole. They were still standing there. Like zombies. Staring at the bathroom door, willing me to come back out.

“We’re really hungry!” Sophia called out.

I wondered if they could see through doors.

I didn’t know what to do, so I fed them.

They ate ice cream, smoked all the pot in my Wyoming wallet, then passed out on my sleeper sofa.

As they slept, I sat in my armchair and watched them. I was fascinated, horrified.

I got up and tiptoed closer to get a better look. Birdie, bony and elegant with a sharp nose and cheekbones like knives, was lying on her back with her mouth open. Sophia, round and soft, was curled onto her side. Annabelle, the exotic, dark-haired one, lay flat on her stomach. They looked almost lovely, innocent.

I got my laptop and went back to the chair, Googled
zombies
. This yielded what you’d expect. The tongue-in-cheek Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness tips issued by the Center for Disease Control. Definitions of zombies as moaning, brain-eating monsters, spawned to popularity by George Romero. Viral ghouls that bore little resemblance to the sweetly slumbering dead hookers on my sofa.

I sent an e-mail to an acquaintance, Doon, a neuroscientist with an interest in things that science can’t easily explain.

I pointed my phone at the zombies, snapped a photo, and sent it with the e-mail. I don’t KNOW Doon very well. He’s the son of an Alzheimer’s patient I used to care for as one of my odd jobs. He would probably completely ignore my e-mail. Or maybe refer me to a mental health professional.

I wondered if my zombies were contagious. I wondered if there were more of them. If maybe dozens of dead denizens had been reanimated when the earth-moving machine had dug up that swath of land at the cemetery’s edge. Then I went to sleep.

When I woke, I had forgotten about the dead hookers. Vino was at the foot of the bed and wagged his tail when he saw I was awake. I scratched him behind the ear. He licked my nose. I was heading into the kitchen when I remembered. Mostly because there they were, on my sleeper sofa.

Fuck
.

As they started to stir I noticed they didn’t look so good. All three seemed sort of desiccated, and as Birdie unfurled herself from the sleeper sofa, I could swear I heard her bones creaking.

“I don’t feel well,” she said.

“I don’t either,” Annabelle chimed in, propping herself up on one elbow.

“I have to get coffee.”

I walked into the kitchen and flipped the switch on the coffee maker. I can’t deal with anything before coffee. Certainly not zombies.

Alexander Vinokourov was dancing in anticipation of breakfast when Birdie came hobbling into the kitchen. She looked over my shoulder when I opened the fridge to get the plastic container of Performance Dog raw meat.

“I like meat,” Birdie said.

“This is for the dog,” I replied. “It has tripe and trachea. It’s not for humans.”

“I don’t care,” Birdie insisted.

I sighed. I filled Vino’s bowl and put it on the floor. Then I took a plate from the cupboard, spooned out some meat, and handed it to Birdie.

“Let me get you a fork,” I said, but the word
fork
wasn’t even out of my mouth before she’d started using her fingers to scoop the bloody flesh into her mouth. She ate every last scrap, then, holding the plate to her face, licked it clean.

“Do you have any more tea?” Sophia had wandered into the kitchen now. She was wearing my fuzzy slippers and a dingy white T-shirt. She was naked from the waist down.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “You guys smoked all my pot. And ate all my ice cream,” I added, a little resentfully.

Birdie and Sophia both looked at me like I had broken some law of basic decency by bemoaning their consumption of petty, replaceable things like weed and a one-gallon tub of butter pecan ice cream.

“We need tea,” Sophia said.

“I don’t have any more.”
You weed-hogging dead hooker houseguest from hell
, I thought. “And it’s illegal.”

“It makes us feel better,” Sophia said.

“It does,” Birdie concurred.

“It makes lots of people feel better,” I said. “But I don’t have any more. You smoked my entire stash. If you want more weed, you’ll have to go turn some tricks or something.”

“What?” Annabelle joined in, her delicate face pinched.

I was pretty sure I was going to have a nervous breakdown.

Instead, I decided to walk my dog, leaving the zombies in my apartment. Putting on my huge sunglasses so the world couldn’t see me.

Alexander Vinokourov and I had been walking for a while and were making our way up Warren Street, the main drag, when his ear shot straight up in the air and he started pulling on the leash.

He led me right over to the front of the drugstore where I saw none other than Sophia, leaning on a parking meter, smoking a cigarette. She was batting her eyelashes at a very large man who was grinning, showing off a gold-tooth grill. She was dressed in my clothes. A pair of jeans that clung to her, a button-down white shirt kittenishly knotted above her belly button, and, incongruously, my black combat boots that were clearly too big and made her look like a child.

Vino went right up to Sophia and licked her hand. As Sophia went to scratch Vino behind the ear, I reached for her elbow and started trying to lead her away.

“Hey!” the guy with the tooth grill said. “We were talking.”

“Too bad,” I said.

I dug my fingers into Sophia’s upper arm and pulled her away from the guy.

“You can’t do that, Sophia,” I said, when we’d gone half a block. “The minute you open your mouth, people are going to think you’re insane and they’re going to take advantage of you.”

“You told us to go turn tricks,” Sophia said.

Two passersby heard Sophia and their heads swiveled in our direction.

I smiled at them.

“I was joking, Sophia. You were complaining about needing more weed. I can’t afford to keep you three stoned for however long it is you plan to hang around. And, by the way, how long is that? Don’t you have anywhere to go?”

“Go? Where the hell would we go? Back to the cemetery? We have no one. No friends. No relatives. No one. We’ve been dead for ninety years, remember?”

I sighed. “Right.”

I’d barely closed the door to my apartment before Sophia kicked off the combat boots and started peeling off her clothing. Then, leaving the clothes in a pile by the front door, she tromped into the bathroom where I heard her start running a bath.

Annabelle and Birdie weren’t feeling that ambitious. Both were lying on the sofa bed, looking piqued.

“Something is wrong with us,” Annabelle said. Her eyes were puffy and her lips were cracked.

“Yes,” I said. “You think you’ve been dead for ninety years.”

“You don’t believe us?” Birdie asked. “After all this?”

“After all what? It’s not like you guys have walked through walls or started melting when sunlight hits your skin.”

Annabelle seemed vexed. Birdie ignored me.

By ten a.m., their faces were the color of skim milk. They didn’t have the strength to clamor, but were weakly begging for weed. I finally broke down and went around the corner to see Jeremy, my occasional supplier, the skate-punk kid who lives in a garage on Rope Alley.

“Whoa,” he said, pushing his white-person dreadlocks out of his eyes. “You’re really smoking it up, Zoey.”

“I have houseguests.”

“Oh yeah?” His eyes opened a little. “Female houseguests?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. I was out the door with my new stash of weed before he had a chance to ask more.

I got the ladies good and stoned, and they did appear plumper and pinker after smoking. Then it was nearly noon and I had to go to one of my odd jobs, teaching yoga to developmentally disabled adults.

I changed into yoga pants and a tank top then washed my face and hands so I wouldn’t reek of pot. I hadn’t even smoked, but the zombies had exhaled all over me.

“You guys please stay inside the apartment and don’t let anyone in. You can watch TV,” I said, flicking on the television, which had initially scared the hell out of them, but now seemed to soothe them.

“Okay?” I glared at Annabelle.

She looked up at me, all dreamy and stoned. “Okay.” she said in a faraway voice.

My dog was curled up next to Sophia, who was raptly staring at a talk show hosted by people wearing surgical scrubs.

The rec room where I teach the yoga class smelled like cabbage. Katie, a cheerful sixtyish woman, came bounding in.

“I brought you something!” she said brightly.

It was a dinosaur book. She had given me a dinosaur book the previous week too.

“Thank you, Katie.”

Will, a tall man with a vacant stare, told me his back was hurting and he wanted me to arrange him into a restorative pose. I did.

The class went smoothly until one of the men peed his pants. I had to go find an aide who took him to get changed.

On the way home, I stopped at the coffee store, Swallow, and bought two pounds of coffee. That was another thing. The zombies liked their coffee.

As I let myself back into the apartment, I heard a male voice. My heart sank. Had Sophia gone out and found her friend with the tooth grill and brought him home?

The voices were coming from the kitchen. I walked in and nearly walked back out. What I was seeing was too fucking weird.

Doon, the neuroscientist acquaintance I’d e-mailed the previous night, was sitting across the kitchen table from Sophia, apparently drawing her blood. Doon, as far as I knew, lived in Pennsylvania and was not in possession of my street address.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I came as soon as I got your e-mail,” he said.

“Isn’t that enough blood?” Sophia asked Doon.

I stared at the blood swirling around inside the syringe’s cylinder. It was dark red, like any other blood.

“Almost,” Doon said.

“What are you doing to Sophia?” I was feeling protective.

“Just drawing blood.” Doon finally glanced up at me. “Hi, Zoey.”

“Yeah. Hi,” I said back.

Doon looked exactly as he had four years earlier when I’d helped look after his father: amiable, short brown hair, square jaw, deep-set black eyes, tidy clothing.

He started pumping the ladies for information. “What do you remember?” He was drooling in his eagerness to learn more about them.

Sophia was shaking her head, clearly not remembering anything, and Annabelle couldn’t do much better, her earliest memory of her new life going back only as far as awakening inside her coffin as it was being split apart by the earth-moving machine.

“What are you going to test their blood for?” I asked.

“Anything that deviates from the norm,” Doon said. “Ditto with their genetic material.” He pointed at a kit containing giant Q-tips and glass slides.

I didn’t like it. But the zombies were going along with it all. Presumably they were as eager as Doon to understand what they were.

It wasn’t until he’d taken off, nearly two hours later, that I discovered Doon had given the ladies the creeps.

“The minute you left the room he asked questions that had nothing to do with being dead,” Birdie said. “Questions about life as a hooker. Dirty, nasty stuff.”

Birdie was about as prudish as an undead hooker could be. Even one from 1924.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Can we smoke now?” Sophia asked. “I don’t feel well.”

“Did you tell Doon that weed makes you feel better?”

“No,” Birdie answered. “You said it’s illegal.”

“Right,” I said.

I handed over my bag of weed.

My phone chirped early the next morning.

“Zoey,” Doon said, “I’m assembling a team and we’re coming up there. Your friends are most certainly over a hundred years old!”

“Really?” I mustered. I hadn’t had coffee yet.

“Really
. We will be up this afternoon. And we’ll take over.”

“Take over?
We?”

“We’re going to take your friends to the lab at Penn State.”

“The lab? They’re not rats, Doon. Not that rats should be in a lab either. But these are people. Or … something.”

“We’ll treat them respectfully and give them comfortable accommodations.”

“What if they don’t want to go?”

“What else are they going to do? Live on your couch forever?”

“I don’t know, Doon, but I’m not sure they want to be experimented on.”

“Zoey, this could be huge. If we can figure out what brought them back to life and what is sustaining their lives, well, imagine the implications!”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I’ll see you later,” Doon said, hanging up before I could protest.

I stared at my phone.

Alexander Vinokourov lifted his head, sniffed the air, then looked at me.

“They want to take them away,” I said.

Vino blinked.

I tiptoed into the living room. They were still sleeping. I went into the kitchen, fed Vino, and put coffee on. Eventually, Birdie came into the kitchen and I offered her a few spoonfuls of Vino’s meat.