by Nathan Allen
He knew it was selfish to think this, and he sometimes hated himself for it, but he often felt resentful for the situation he found himself in. He was twenty-three. This was the time in his life that he should be enjoying the most. The time when you can take advantage of all the privileges that come with being an adult without being weighed down by any of the responsibilities.
Miles had almost drifted off to sleep again when he was awoken by the sound of pounding techno music coming from the lounge room. This could only mean that Amoeba, Clea’s performance artist friend, had arrived.
Amoeba had been working on an audio/visual installation he called “The Majestic Purge of Elysian Cancer” for the past few months. It featured hidden camera footage of overweight people devouring fast food meals spliced into Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films, all set to a thumping techno soundtrack. The performance piece also included the burning of real money, and would culminate with Amoeba painting a pile of roadkill in psychedelic colours. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the point of all this was, but Amoeba insisted this was his way of protesting animal cruelty.
Amoeba’s work was frequently hard to decipher. Miles once tossed a wine bottle filled with cigarette butts into the trash, unaware that it was a piece of abstract art meant to highlight environmental degradation and the billions of people living in poverty worldwide.
Amoeba was simply another in a long line of derelicts and weirdos that Clea had invited into the house and allowed them to do whatever they wanted with no consideration for anyone else. It was on days like today that Miles regretted selecting her to move in and not one of the other candidates they had interviewed.
Maybe he should have chosen that Vincent guy after all. Vincent was a thirty-nine-year-old tax specialist who dressed in a buttoned-down shirt and brown corduroy trousers. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and had the kind of sideburns not seen since 1976. He enjoyed entomology and classical music. Miles thought there was something a bit odd about Vincent that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. But he couldn’t have been that bad; after all, his previous landlord supplied a reference that described Vincent as “a nice quiet man who never caused any trouble and always paid his rent on time”.
A sharp, high-pitched scream reverberated around the house.
Miles groaned and buried his head beneath the pillow, but the commotion coming from the lounge room grew louder and louder.
And then came Clea’s desperate wail: “Miiiiles!!”
Miles fell out of bed and hurried to the lounge. He was met with a scene of comical pandemonium.
An obese, half-naked zombie waddled around the room like a giant baby, while six stoned, shrieking hippies cowered in the corner. The stereo blasted obnoxious SlamCore techno, and a projector flashed images onto the wall of fried chicken being devoured and the Third Reich marching in perfect synchronicity.
It took Miles a second to realise that this wasn’t all part of Amoeba’s forthcoming installation, and that an actual zombie had wandered into their house.
It took him another few seconds to recognise the undead intruder. It was their reclusive neighbour, the creepy voyeur with the carbohydrate-rich diet who just might be a serial killer.
“Miles!” Clea screamed again. “Do something!”
“Alright, calm down,” Miles said. “It’s just a zombie.”
“Hurry up!” Fabian said, his voice rising to a high squeal. When Miles heard the scream a minute ago, he assumed it came from one of the women. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Miles pulled the plug on the stereo and projector in an attempt to restore some order. “Could everybody please stop shouting and moving around so much,” he said. “Just stay where you are until I get back.”
Miles stepped out of the lounge room. The six nervous Zeroes remained frozen in place, afraid of making any sudden movements.
“Miles!” Clea pleaded. “Where are you going?”
“I need to find something to control him with,” he called back. “Just do what I told you and stay where you are, and you’ll be fine.”
Everyone waited and held their breath. The zombie neighbour, who appeared so worked up and agitated a moment ago, was now completely still.
Miles returned a minute later with a plastic bucket. He could have run to the laundry and made it back in half that time, but he took a degree of perverse pleasure in the fact that they all now relied on him to help them out. It was fun watching them squirm.
Clea could barely believe what she was seeing. “A bucket, Miles? How is a bucket going to stop–”
Miles calmly walked up behind the zombie and slid the bucket over its head. It was a near-perfect fit. This dude’s head was big, and now he was completely harmless.
“Okay, you–” Miles pointed to Fabian. He knew Fabian’s name, but it felt more authoritarian to refer to him using the second person pronoun. “There’s a roll of duct tape in the third drawer. Go and get it.”
Fabian dutifully scurried off to the kitchen.
Miles was beginning to enjoy this power trip. The whole time Fabian had been hanging around the house and mooching off him, he had never once done anything that Miles had asked of him.
“I can’t find it,” Fabian said from the kitchen.
“Look in the third drawer.”
“I am looking in the third drawer. It’s not in here.”
Miles took a couple of steps back and peered into the kitchen. “That’s the fourth drawer, Fabian.”
“No it’s not! Look–” Fabian counted them off. “One, two, three, yeah?”
“Third from the top. Really, who counts from the bottom up?”
Fabian found the tape and tossed the roll to Miles. He stretched out a length and wrapped it around the zombie’s wrists.
“Now do you see why we need to keep the back door shut?” Miles said as he bound the zombie’s hands together.
“Oh, so this is all my fault is it?” Clea said defensively.
“That was the general point I was trying to make, yes.”
“That’s victim-blaming, Miles.”
“No, that’s simply pointing out that if the door had been kept shut then none of this would have happened.”
“If anyone’s at fault, it’s you for not fixing the fence when I told you to.”
“When did you tell me to fix the fence?”
“Uh, last Friday?”
“You told me the fence was broken. You didn’t ask me to fix it.”
“Why do you think I told you? Because I wanted you to fix it!”
“Why should I have to fix the fence? It was you and your friends that broke it.”
“It’s your responsibility to fix things around the house.”
“Clea, you appear to have outdated sexist views regarding the gender roles of men and manual tasks.”
“No, I mean it’s your responsibility because you’re the landlord.”
“I’m the landlord?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“I own half of the house, but I’m not sure that makes me the landlord.”
“Yes it does!”
“Shae owns half of the house, too. Does that make her the landlady?”
The zombie was effectively restrained, and Miles guided him out the front door and towards Clea’s hatchback. He then faced the daunting task of wedging the zeppelin-sized former human into the back of this tiny vehicle. It was hard enough for a regular-sized and still-living human to crawl over the front seat and squeeze into the compact car. But trying to force a sweaty, obese, shirtless zombie with a bucket over its head to do the same was another challenge entirely.
The industry term for a massively overweight zombie like this was “orca”.
Clea agreed to let Miles borrow her car so he could deliver the zombie to the processing centre. He asked her if she wanted to drive, but she made it clear there was no way she was getting into a small car with that grotesque decaying creature lurking just a few inches behind her.
Miles climb
ed behind the wheel and reversed out of the driveway. He attracted plenty of odd looks and double-takes from fellow motorists and pedestrians on his journey to the processing centre.
A feeling of slight melancholy came over Miles as he neared the centre. Even though he didn’t know his neighbour at all – he didn’t even know his name – he was going to miss having him there. Miles thought of him as an almost perfect neighbour. He didn’t play loud music or host wild parties. The only noise he ever heard coming out of the house was his early-morning smoker’s cough, and his occasional late night, off-key drunken renditions of Neil Diamond songs. He had no pets, so he never had to worry about barking dogs or screeching cats waking him in the middle of the night.
Best of all, the neighbour appeared to dislike meaningless social interaction and inane chit-chat as much as Miles did. The two of them seemed to have an understanding regarding this. One of the rare occasions where they crossed paths was just a few days ago, when the neighbour was collecting the mail from his letterbox at the same time Miles was leaving for work. The neighbour pretended to be talking on his phone so that he and Miles wouldn’t be forced to acknowledge one another. Miles was grateful that he had put on this charade for their mutual benefit.
But given what he knew about his neighbour, the events of today didn’t really add up. He couldn’t work out why the neighbour had wandered into the house. Once people turned, they usually carried on doing whatever they would normally be doing if they were still living. They typically stuck to familiar habitats. It didn’t make sense that he would come inside his house, since he’d never set foot on their property before. Or had he? Maybe Clea was right; maybe he was a Peeping Tom.
Miles showed his ID to the guard at the processing centre and was waved on through. After unloading the zombie from Clea’s hatchback – which was even more of an ordeal than getting him in there, despite two centre staffers lending a hand – he completed the requisite paperwork and was handed his $500 payment.
He felt a slight pang of guilt for doing a job off the books like this. There was a gentleman’s agreement among UMC workers that you would only take on work through your employer and not do any other jobs on the side. This was fair enough, too. Dead Rite had invested time and money into having Miles trained and obtaining his UMC accreditation. He justified it by telling himself this was a one-off. The job had basically fallen into his lap, so it didn’t count. It wasn’t like he was out there actively seeking extra work on the down-low. Some of the more unscrupulous Z-Pro staff were known to have friends and family contact them if they saw or heard of any zombies on the loose. This practise could be quite lucrative – it would allow the worker to keep the whole $500, minus a small percentage for the tip-off, rather than have to share it with Z-Pro.
Miles stopped off at a hardware store on his way back. He used a few hundred dollars from his payment to purchase materials to fix the broken fence. He then bought an ice cream and a can of Red Bull from a convenience store in an attempt to subdue his unrelenting hangover. He ate the ice cream as he drove home, holding the cold can against the side of his head and steering with his knees.
He returned Clea’s car, then showered and headed off to work. He was feeling even worse now than when he woke up that morning.
The neighbour’s real name was Phil Lewellyn. He was a forty-eight-year-old financial consultant and father of two, and had moved into the neighbouring property following his recent divorce.
In the upcoming federal election he had intended on voting for Bernard Marlowe. He had been won over by Marlowe’s uncompromising stand on undead issues, and supported moves to have the NEVADA law repealed.
Chapter 12
Elliott drove a nail into a piece of timber at a slightly crooked angle. “I’m close to getting some money out of that Nigerian guy,” he said.
“Oh, come on Elliott,” Miles said wearily. “You’re not still communicating with that scammer, are you?”
“Relax, baby. You sound just like Amy. She doesn’t think I can do it either.”
“Well then maybe you should listen to us both. It’s a really bad idea.”
“I’m telling you, I’m almost there. I told him that I can get the twelve hundred dollars for the admin fees as soon as I sell my car. The only problem is my car’s been impounded for unpaid parking fines, and I just need to borrow two hundred dollars to get it out.”
Miles wanted to remind Elliott, yet again, that he had no hope of ever seeing any money from this supposed scheme of his, and that Nigerian cyber criminals were not the sort of people he should be jerking around. But Elliott refused to listen. He had been talking about this for weeks now, and he was convinced he was about to swindle a swindler. Once an idea had buried itself into Elliott’s head, nothing could dislodge it.
Elliott had dropped by Miles’ place this Wednesday morning to help fix his broken fence – the one that collapsed a couple of weeks back when Amoeba and seven others used it as a makeshift stage for one of his performances, and which later allowed his undead neighbour to walk onto his property unimpeded.
“So how did you get stuck with this job?” Elliott said. “Shouldn’t it be Clea’s responsibility to fix it, since it was her friends that broke it?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Miles replied, biting down on his tongue.
“Good morning, Clive.” They both looked up to see Mrs. Jensen at the other fence, feeding her leftovers to Squealer the Tattooed Pig. “Hello, Elliott.”
“Morning, Mrs. Jensen,” they replied in unison.
“Lovely morning, isn’t it?” Elliott added.
Miles was irked slightly that Mrs. Jensen could always remember Elliott’s name and never his, despite only having met Elliott on a handful of occasions.
“Shocking news about your neighbour, wasn’t it Clive?” she said.
“It was a shock,” Miles replied. “That’s why we always have to remain vigilant.”
“He was a bit of a strange one though. He never really said a lot. Now we know why.”
Miles didn’t know quite what to make of Mrs. Jensen’s last comment. Did she believe the neighbour was a zombie all along and had been hiding it from everybody? Perhaps she was still a bit confused about this whole zombie business. After all, she wasn’t quite as sharp as she once was. She often called the police to report crimes she had witnessed on fictional television shows.
“It’s a good thing you boys are fixing that fence. You have a wife to look after now, Clive. It’s your responsibility to keep her safe.”
Mrs. Jensen scraped her plate clean, and Squealer grunted his gratitude.
“What was that about your wife?” Elliott asked once Mrs. Jensen had returned inside.
“She thinks Clea and I are married,” Miles replied. “It doesn’t matter how many times I tell her we’re not, it never sinks in.”
“You can’t blame her for thinking that though, can you?” Elliott smirked. “The two of you do bicker like an old married couple.”
“Hey, if you had to put up with what I have to put up with, you’d lose it every now and then too.”
“No arguments there. I don’t think I’ve ever met a more objectionable woman than Clea.”
“You’ve obviously never met Adam’s ex-wife, then.”
Elliott almost nailed his hand to the fence. “Wait, Adam was married?”
“Yep.”
“You mean to an actual woman?”
“That’s correct. They met in their theatre group. They were both in a performance of Cabaret.”
“And she still couldn’t figure it out?”
“Apparently not. She turns up every now and again to cause trouble, demanding alimony or threatening to sue for fraud and whatnot.”
Elliott struggled to arrange his thoughts and words into coherent sentences. “What ... how is that even possible?”
“I don’t know,” Miles shrugged. “It happens sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“But Adam’s gayer that a Glee! c
onvention. She’d have to be Helen Keller or Liza Minnelli not to see that.”
Miles took a step back to evaluate the fence. It was a bit uneven, and obviously an amateurish patch-up job, but it would do for now.
“I guess sometimes people don’t see the blindingly obvious, even when it’s right under their nose,” he said.
Elliott laughed and shook his head in disbelief. He had no idea how anyone could miss something so blatant.
In less than an hour’s time, he would discover just how prescient Miles’ words were.
Miles knocked on the door to Steve’s office. “Come in,” he heard Steve say.
He found Steve behind his cluttered desk, typing away with a vexed expression on his face. “Hey Miles,” he said, without taking his eyes from the screen. Steve was either buried up to his ears in work, or he wanted to give Miles the impression that he was.
“I’m just checking to see if this week’s pay has gone through yet,” Miles said in a way that almost sounded like an apology. Steve could have this effect on people, like he was doing them a favour by paying them for the work they did.
“We’ve just had some sort of technical glitch,” Steve said. “Sorry about the hold up. It should be in your account by tomorrow.”
Miles nodded, even if he didn’t find Steve’s explanation all that convincing. These “technical glitches” had become more and more common as of late, coinciding with Dead Rite’s perpetual cash flow problems. They didn’t really have any excuse for not paying them this week though, since that huge job from a few days ago should have replenished their coffers quite significantly.
Any guilt Miles may have felt over not telling them about the zombie neighbour of his quickly evaporated. He wondered if the job offer from Z-Pro was still on the table. There was plenty wrong with Z-Pro, but at least their staff always got paid on time.
He didn’t know why he had to be so rude towards Jack Houston the other night. It was partly due to being drunk, and partly out of loyalty to Steve and Adam. But mostly it was because he didn’t want to be a UMC worker the rest of his life. This job was only meant to be a temporary thing while he sorted some stuff out before starting his degree. Accepting the Z-Pro job would have legitimised him; it would have given him a career, and that was the last thing he wanted.