Zombies in Love (8 page)

Ian followed Sarah through shadowed Winthrop Yard.  He was sure that Uncle Fester was long gone-- probably eating some poor freshman’s brains as he went-- but what was their other option?  Heading straight back to Prof. Leschke’s office to tell him that their zombie had run away?  Calling the Board of Overseers?

His brain seized up at the thought.

“Uncle Fester?  Uncle Fester?” he called.  And then, more quietly, “Do you think he knows that’s his name?”

No answer.  Total silence.

Ian’s tranquilizer gun drooped towards the ground as he realized that Sarah had vanished.  “Sarah, where are you?” he called. 

No answer.  Of course not.

#

When
was the last time I felt this good
? wondered Jack. 
I’m barely even hungry
.

It made sense, though.  He’d spent the months since he died trying to fill a great emptiness, which only felt like hunger.  His body was smarter than he was-- it could smell what it needed.  Slowly but steadily replacing the flawed original with something that appeared the same, but was like the difference between tree sap and amber.  And maybe every time Lisa let him taste her, he could take a little of her into him, a little of her strength and humor and honor...

Lisa was breathing steadily in his arms, nearly asleep.  One place he couldn’t follow her.  “That was nice,” she said.

He rested his hand on her warm soft gray hair.  She trailed her warm hand over his body, coming to rest on his scarred stomach.  Her breathing slowed.  Totally asleep.

That was all right.  He could lie here all night, if she wanted him. 

#

A garbage truck rumbled over the old asphalt streets, breaking the cold morning stillness.  Sarah held the business card in her shivering hand.  Alioto’s Pizza.  This was the place.  Unfortunately, it was closed.  So she couldn’t go in, order a slice and a Coke, sit there all nonchalant, and then say, “Hey, what do you people know about zombies?”

There had to be a good reason that there were Alioto’s Pizza business cards all over the place where she and Ian had found the zombie meeting.  Though it was hard to think of what it might be.  Maybe Alioto’s Pizza was made by zombies in hairnets.

What a disgusting thought.

She'd always known, ever since the terrible discovery that the experiment actually worked, that there was a possibility that she and Ian were also infected.  But she'd never really believed in it, the same way she never really thought about how most of the chemicals she worked with were toxic, or how many organic chemists died young from cancer.  Bravado was part of the game; she'd had a summer job in a drug company where the employees regularly used the same beakers they used for their experiments to cook their soup at lunch.  And scientists almost never wore goggles or lab coats, either, despite what you saw in the movies.  Real scientists had holes in their clothing and came home smelling of ether.  You forgot how dangerous your work was, and usually you got away with it, at least for a while.

She hadn't really lied to Ian.  The odds were good that they both were infected at the time of the incident, though why they hadn't zombified yet was beyond her.  Some secondary agent that they needed to be exposed to?  But the bite made it real, and if there was some kind of cure, or even some kind of palliative treatment, she needed to know what it was before she became a monster.

Zombies had always terrified her, ever since her neighbor had scared the crap out of her with a rubber mask one Halloween when she was six.  Which is why she'd wanted to try the experiment, she guessed-- to prove to herself once and for all, and to the little scaredy-cat she once had been, that there was no such thing as zombies. 
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

But the experiment had been so ridiculous!  They had to do it at a certain time, at a certain spot in the lab, and they had to draw a funny star on the floor, and they had to pour their own blood in the star-- obviously it was nonsense.  And they hadn't even taken their clothes off, which was supposed to be important, but no way was she doing that with Ian.  It would give him ideas, and the poor boy had too many ideas already.

Sarah was trying to decide whether to go home and wait until lunchtime when a door next to the main entrance opened.  It had to be the stairwell for the apartment above the restaurant.  A man came out, sorting through an overloaded key ring. 

“Excuse me--” she said.

The man looked up.  No, it wasn’t a man.  It was the zombie Ian had shot at the meeting.  She backed up a step without meaning to.  “Where’s your tranquilizer gun?” he asked.

She looked at the ground.  “I didn’t bring it.”

The zombie inhaled.  “You’re bleeding.  There’s a lot of blood.”

She tried to get away from him but he already had her by the hand and was pushing up her coat sleeve.  The bandage was saturated in drying blood.  She was afraid to see what was underneath.

“You should be at a hospital,” he said. 

“I can’t.  I was bitten by one of you.”

“I can smell that.”  When he was alive, the zombie must have been a very good-looking man.  But now, especially at this distance, in the harsh morning light, he looked
wrong
.  There was a dark blue cast to his skin, and his blue eyes had a glassy dead-fish shine.  She could smell the candy-shop safrole stink of his body.  Plus he was staring at her bandage like it was the last cookie on the plate.  It was creepy, but she didn’t want to pull away.  Because she was looking at her future.

“I need help,” she said.  “I’m infected.  I’m going to turn into a zombie.  I don’t know what to do.”

He slid the sleeve back and let go of her hand.  “Excuse me.  I have to get to work.”

“You don’t understand!” she cried.  “It’s going to hurt, isn’t it?  I’m so scared.”

The zombie searched through the keys until he found the one he was looking for.  “Go to a hospital, kid.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and tried one more time.  “Do you like walking around and pretending to be alive and whatever else it is you’re doing?  Then you’d better talk to me.  Because you don’t know it yet, but we’re all in trouble.  And I can help.”

             
At seven in the morning, most of the university was still sleeping, except for one stooped figure dressed in a worn tweed packet with elbow patches.  If he had been born fifty years earlier, and had been a professor during the McCarthy Era, Prof. Edward Underhill would have been a hero.  Underhill was a proud Marxist, who still had his students read
Das Kapital
, and who still waited for the coming revolution of the proletariat.  Outside Winthrop's iron gates, enemies awaited, and he warned his students against them all: he boldly spoke out against Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Ed Meese, and he kept a Ronald Reagan doormat at the entrance to his office, so that his students could wipe their feet on the Gipper.

              Only in the shelter of academia would Underhill have been able to ignore that both he and his enemies were aging or dead, and that his great war was nearly over.  His students looked confused when he cursed Oliver North or Jeane Kirkpatrick.  And even his natural allies, the lefties of today, were embarrassed when he praised Castro's socialist paradise.  Every generation wants to have its own opinions; to his younger colleagues, Underhill had begun to seem provincial, judging the world by an old, European synthesis, unable to think from the perspectives of non-Western nations.  And his views of women were frankly, embarrassing.  But Underhill flourished at Winthrop, the Establishment's idea of a provocateur, the sort of court jester that every university needs. 

              Underhill didn't know he was irrelevant.  From Underhill's viewpoint, everyone else had sold out.  He remembered when young men were full of fire, staying up all night talking about Gramsci, and the coeds looked at them with warm, admiring eyes.  The youth of today were born nursing at the plastic teat of capitalism!  Where was the purity of purpose that had characterized his younger days?  Certainly not in the graduate student he was planning to examine tomorrow, who had once said that he thought the nuclear arms race was the fault of the Soviets as well as the Americans, because Stalin was a power-mad dictator.  He ought to fail the boy on principle!

              And as Underhill walked through Winthrop Yard, considering whether he ought to allow the boy to take the exam before failing him, a horrible-smelling figure leapt from a bush and on top of Underhill, knocking the old professor to the ground.  Our friend Uncle Fester.

              For the professor's sake, let's hope it ended quickly.

#

Sarah Chen sat engulfed in one of Lisa’s armchairs, drinking a cup of tea and shivering.  Jack thought she looked like a scared whippet in the rain.  Every time he got near her, she shied away like he was rotting on her.  But nothing could ruin his mood this morning. What he'd turned into, it wasn't so bad, after all.  He felt good.  Numb, hungry for the flesh of the living, all right, but he could feel his waiting strength pooling under his skin.  Like when he was in training for a marathon, but all the time. 

And the ten-second refractory period was a real plus.

He felt less like a monster than he had in months.  He could live with this curse, he really could, he thought, drinking his flavorless tea, for the sake of feeling its warmth spread through him. 

“This looks awful.  What did you do?” asked Lisa, examining Sarah's injury.  “Wrap gauze around a dirty wound?”

“There wasn’t time to clean it,” said Sarah.  “And it looked a lot worse last night.  That’s how I knew I was infected.  I’d get a papercut, or a little burn, and the next day it would be totally gone.”  She looked up at him, then looked away quickly.  “Maybe it was that way for you, too.”

“No,” he said.  Then he shook his head.  “That’s not right.  I had knee surgery.  They told me it would take two months to recover.  But it only took one."  And if that was the case, he’d been infected for at least two years before he died.

How had that happened?   And what, exactly, did she mean by
infected
?  He'd slipped into her terminology unconsciously, and maybe it was just that he wasn't a scientifically minded person, but he'd never thought of what had happened to him as a disease, but rather some kind of well-deserved supernatural curse.  The mechanism was irrelevant.  He already knew why he had come back.  It was simple.  He was a monster because he'd behaved like a monster to Sam.

Did Sarah know something he didn't?

Sarah set her tea down. “When it happened, when you became a zombie, did it happen all of a sudden?  Or was it, you know, bit by bit?  How did you know it was happening?”

He stared at her, unsmiling.  “First you tell me how this started.  Then I tell you what I know.”

She fidgeted in her chair.  “One day Ian and I were in the lab. I shouldn’t say ‘one day.’ We’d been there pretty much nonstop for three days, running an experiment. And we got bored, so we started poking around the lab. And we found a really old lab manual, in my advisor's office.  It had the craziest experiments in there. One of them was ‘How to raise the dead.’”

“And you tried it?” asked Lisa.

“We thought it was a joke,” said Sarah.  “And we ran the experiment, but I accidentally dropped the flask out the window.”

“How?” asked Jack.

“Well, we were joking that we needed some test subjects, and there were a bunch of tourists outside, and you know, I was just holding the flask out of the window, and my hand was kind of wet...”

“Four years ago?” asked Jack. 

Sarah flinched.  “Yes.”

“You’re saying, the reason that I’m-- whatever it is I am-- is because of a stupid college prank?”

Sarah smiled weakly at him.

He sprang to his feet and started pacing as Sarah shrank back into the chair.  Not something supernatural after all.  Just an experiment gone very strange. 

He'd misunderstood everything, hadn't he?  This wasn't a punishment for the way he'd been, for what he'd done to Sam.  Say he'd kept his mouth shut, gone home, drunk himself to sleep, woken up the next day with the world open to him.  Say he'd called his friend with the startup who wanted a media relations guy, and said,
hey, when can I start? 
He could have had a heart attack jogging on the Battery in his forties, or liver failure in his sixties, or died in his bed surrounded by twenty-seven crying grandchildren, and the result would have been the same.  Zombie City, only fatter and with less hair.  And if it was just dumb luck, and not some kind of retribution for his sins, that changed everything, didn't it? 

Maybe he hadn't been as bad as he thought.  Maybe he could even go home.

But he was getting lost in his own thoughts again, the way he always did.  “Why did you and your friend shoot me with a tranquilizer dart?”

“A couple of months ago, Prof. Leschke-- he’s my advisor-- came into our office. He was furious. He made us show him the lab manual. And then he took it from us. I haven’t seen it since.  He put us to work.  Synthesizing antivirals, to stop the infection.  We had to find a test subject, to inject him with them, to see if, you know, he stopped being a zombie..."  She trailed off, clutching her tea.

Jack wondered what had happened to their guinea pig, and whether he had something to do with the bite on Sarah's arm.  “Can I assume he wasn’t a volunteer?”

“I’m not a bad person, Mr. Kershaw!” she snapped.  “I’m just a grad student.  And I need to stop this as much as you do.  Ian and our advisor are still working on a cure for our condition.  You know what that means?  We’re going to die, and we’re going to stay dead!  But I can help you.  I can make sure they never find the cure.  I can destroy the old notebook.  If you help me.”

"Why are they looking for a cure?" asked Lisa.  "No one knows the zombies exist.  So why not just keep it quiet?"

"Have you heard of the Board of Overseers?"

Lisa shook her head.

"I wish I'd never come to Winthrop."  Sarah looked at Jack.  "I wouldn't have caught that zombie on my own.  I wouldn't have tried to create an antivirus.  Okay, we had an incident.  We raised the dead.  Live and let whatever.  I caught that zombie and I worked on the antivirus because I was afraid.  If the Board finds out about you, about what we did, they will destroy us all, in the most terrible way possible, so that no one will ever try it again."  She closed her eyes.  "I didn't say that.  You didn't hear me.  Can you help me?"

He moved a little closer.  She swallowed and burrowed deeper into the chair.  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

“How did you know it was happening?  When did you-- you know-- turn into a zombie."

He smiled at her.  “I have good news for you, kid.  You're not a zombie yet.  It didn't happen to me until I died.  I didn't even know I was infected until then.  So if I were you--” he gently tapped her arm and she wilted-- “I’d get myself to the hospital.”

#

Sonia reflected, for the thousandth time, that she should have read her entire contract before signing.  How had she missed the section that said that hereafter Winthrop had total possession of her soul through all eternity?  If she had, she’d like to think she would have at least reflected a bit before taking the job.

Of course, you didn’t turn down Winthrop.  You just didn’t.

The huge and demonic John Winthrop had been very polite, and had explained that her new job would be to energize the intellectual environment of the university, and then he had eviscerated her on top of the altar.  And when she came to, her soul or spirit or consciousness or whatever you wanted to call it was trapped in a brick on the outside of Memorial Hall. 

One stupid brick.  She didn’t even get two bricks because the hippie next to her seemed awfully vague and out of focus until she started spreading towards one of his ten (ten!) bricks, and then he’d flick her right back.  It felt like being snapped with a rubber band, only worse.

Now it all made sense.  Why was Winthrop the most powerful university in America?  Because John Winthrop had sold his soul to the devil, and in his new demonic form, continued to sleep in his airless crypt under Memorial Hall until he was needed to take care of some problematic faculty member. 

Maybe she should have taken that job at Texas Tech instead.  Even if she had to live in Lubbock.  Buddy Holly was from Lubbock.  How bad could it be?

And what exactly did "energize the intellectual environment" mean?  She could see (though she couldn't have said how, since she didn't have eyes, because bricks don't have eyes) the students walking around campus, clutching their books to themselves.  She didn't know why they bothered.  She'd taught there long enough to know that the students never read the books.  They read SparkNotes and watched the movie, because real novels contained a deadly poison that would kill you if you read them, especially if they were by Henry James.  Sonia used to hate the students for it, but now she'd changed her mind. 
Good for you, kids! 
she thought. 
Wouldn't want to end up like me, would you?  One stupid brick!  Don't study!  Flunk out!  Go home!

A little blonde freshman suddenly dropped her books and ran towards the dorms, sobbing.

Have fun back in Fargo!
thought Sonia.

#

Part of being a good reporter, reflected Donna, was the ability to know what editors did and didn't like.  Did editors like stories about supernatural creatures haunting the city? 
Hahaha! 

On the other hand, spotting Jack Kershaw, the
Palmetto’s
prodigal son, that was interesting.  She remembered her first day at the
Palmetto
-- her first job out of college.  Her guide, Sam Lazarus, had shown her the twin offices of the publishers, Cheves and Julia Kershaw.  And far, far down at the other end of the hallway, was the office of their son, Jack.  As Donna walked by the closed door, she could hear the peculiarly nasty sound of someone vomiting his lungs out into a metal garbage can.  She had not been introduced.

She had seen Jack around the offices only rarely, and when he was there, he was usually “napping” on his office couch.  He never wrote or published a single article, as far as she knew.  But she was surprised to hear that at one point he was an extremely productive writer.  When she pressed the person who told her, he clammed up instantly.  And the funny thing was, there were no articles by Jack in the paper’s morgue.  It bothered her, a mystery like this.  So she went to the local library to find back copies of the
Palmetto
.  The librarian told her that the relevant copies had been out for microfilming for five years-- and there was no sign they would be returned any time soon.

She was impressed at the Kershaws’ pull, especially when she found a pink slip on her desk the following morning.  So powerful, they’d even bent the local librarians to their will.

But she doubted they’d gotten to the Boston Public Library. 

#

             
"Professor Ian?" said Sloane, knocking on the open door of the conference room, wearing something thin and skimpy.

              He sighed.   It was office hours.  He guessed he had to talk to her.  "How's your grandmother?"