Date of the Dead

by John DeBellis

  The Good News

  The doc told us the news. “The bad news is that he’s miserable and suffering and probably wishes he weren’t dead. The good news is that hives are living cells and so whatever this solution is doing, it’s converting dead cells into living ones-- extra itchy ones and not attractive even on a zombie—oh, and I didn’t kill him yet. He may end up as one giant hive, but he’d be alive.” Then he started shouting. “It’s alive. It’s alive!”

  We all looked at him. “Sorry, in the last fifteen minutes I’ve become obsessed with Young Frankenstein. Remember the scene where--”

  I interrupted him. “Doc, what does that mean?”

  “Gene Wilder was Dr. Frankenstein and he”

  “No, what does this mean for us, now!

  The doc stopped, scratched an itch on the roof of his mouth and spoke. “It means that his zombie half is producing living tissue, other than that I’m stumped.”

  Laura Lee jumped in. “Doc, is there any possibility that you could induce cells to grow that aren’t hives?” “If I knew what the hell I was doing, sure, absolutely. But since I’m basically a quack and had to cheat to pass my medical exams, and have been sued for malpractice by the few surviving relatives of patients, before they contracted incurable diseases from my germ infested office, we’d have to get lucky—very, very lucky. Is it too late to buy a lottery ticket? I’ve got my numbers right here in--”

  Skim Milk shouted at him. “Doc, forget the damn lottery. You need to keep trying -- find some other stuff to stick in him. What do we have to lose?”

  “Of course you’re right. I’ll fill this bastard with so much fluid his insides will float out his mouth.”

  Laura Lee almost turned my way when she said. “We should keep our things close so we can gather them up quickly, maybe even have a fast garage sale. If Dr. Quack can somehow cure him, we should be ready to roll. Maybe we’ll be able to spread the cure. If it works fast enough, there’s so many zombies out there, maybe one of them is actually not on Match.com.” That’s when she turned to me and spit in my face, several times.

  I just let it go, I figured she was just overcome with emotion and couldn’t verbalize it. Sure, I wanted to spit back, or ask her, Skim Milk and Maria if they wanted to do threesome plus one, but I’m not a man to take advantage of a damsel in distress unless she was too drunk and high on psychotropic drugs to know what’s she’s doing.”

  We split up, except for Klaus and his zombie half, all of us gathering our own stuff; my new porno collection was the first thing I boxed up. I had become very attached to those DVD’s, in some cases literally; I’m not one to waste paper products. It was the closest I’d ever get to love at first sight. I looked back at that visit to the porno store, and finding the sections on Brazilian Barbarian Broads Bang Gay Gynecologists Gone Comatose, Medieval Masonry Moms with Big Wet Asses, or Self-flagellating Slutty Saints in Penis Penance, as one of my fondest memories from those turbulent days. For the first time, my feelings of absolute doom changed for the better to just plain hopelessness. There was a ray of light, but the glare still blocked my vision of the future, which probably came from sitting too close to the screen.

  While I obsessed about my fate: shrimp organized his work force, Laura Lee stood in front of a mirror playing charades and losing (although she won’t admit it), Skim Milk and Maria helped Dr. Bliffover find stuff to inject into Klaus, JO debated with himself on whether or not to put the “e” back in his name, and the zombies formed a horde that was about to welcome us to the neighborhood.

  Maybe if we were playing closer attention to the zombies only a few of us would have died, but on the other hand maybe that’s what saved the human race and left me with the most difficult decision of my life without a Ouija board. Because of the sounds of glass shattering and the nerve biting screams coming from the lobby, Dr. Bliffover and Skim Milk were forced to stop filling Klaus with liquids and pack up—that was when dumb luck saved mankind. We didn’t know the exact mixture of the serum until later – Skim Milk had taken detail notes, but encrypted it with a little known cypher that was used to keep the ring sizes of the rich and famous secret during the Second World War. When she heard the roar of the horde of zombies, a sound exactly like heavy metal harmonies, she panicked and misplaced the key code inside a box of vanilla wafers that she had also misplaced inside a large box of recycled heterosexual lesbian greeting cards that she had found inside a huge vat of Canadian trail mix – the Edmonton blend.

 

  The Zombies are Coming!

  The change in Klaus happened in phases, his rash unexplainably turned to letters in the Greek alphabet, then to names and addresses of all the members of Tea Party arranged by their IQs, which started at 63 and ended at 65, morphing into Jesus going through stages of the cross wading through Hollandaise sauce, finally becoming one huge blotch that burst open sending out flakes of dried blood mixed with lavender and mauve shapes of famous Korean War battleship nurses like a blizzard of Valentine’s Day and D-day confetti. When it settled and the air was clear, Klaus was now all human, who I wound up hating despite the fact that he saved the mankind. He was the most superstitious person I’d ever met. In fact he had become half-zombie because he was bitten by a man, who hadn’t fully turned into a zombie, who was also trying to avoid stepping on cracks while walking around a ladder to circumvent a black cat in his path. When Klaus spoke for the first time he had an annoying whiney voice that sounded like the air being let out of stretched balloon. I wanted to kill him and turn him back into a mouthless zombie.

  “Am I alive,” Klaus whined and then started thanking every possible lucky star.

  He was cut off by the doc. “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

  I swore to myself, if we lived, I’d never watch Young Frankenstein again, unless there was a porno version.

  The zombies, by their shear mass, had pushed their way through a locked revolving door. At first they just spun completely around and walked back out into the street, until a few finally just pushed through the glass. The guard at the entrance had put on a doorman’s outfit that caused him to take his job too seriously. Instead of alerting us right away he kept yelling at zombies asking them who they wanted to see. It was only after he realized that their roar was not a German dialect that he remembered they were zombies and he’d never been to doorman’s boot camp. He caught the elevator in time for the doors to close on the zombies before he was tempted to ask what floor they wanted.

  I was the first person he saw and he started yelling. “The zombies are coming. The zombies are coming.”

  At first I thought he was joking especially after I heard him say, “I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner, I thought they were German tourists who were furious because they accidentally went to the holocaust museum. Anybody could have made that mistake, especially when you saw the expressions on their faces.”

  By then I was laughing and didn’t stop till I heard their collective roar from down stairs. There was no mistaking that sound, not even for a slowed down version Van Morrison singing “Listen to the Lion.” I ran through the 3rd floor telling everyone that (what better way is there to say it) “The zombies are coming.” They must have heard the zombie team chant, and the cries of guards trying to block the stairwells being digested because everyone started to scramble for their gear and makeshift weapons. Laura Lee yelled, “Please, don’t kill the cute ones.”

  Jo or Joe (I’m not sure how his inner debate ended) and Shrimp were prepared. They pushed a handcuffed Mander, whose mouth was covered with duct tape, out in front of them. For an ugly broad she looked good in duct tape.

  I ran up to them and ripped a strip of tape off of Mander’s mouth, tearing part of her tongue loose so it hung out of her mouth twisted like mildewed red licorice. “You’re covering up her disgusting mouth and her crooked teeth.” Truth be told her teeth weren’t crooked just misshaped and swollen so they look
ed more like a mouth full of arthritic feet.

  “Thank you,” she said, although it came out more like “Twank Boo,” because a piece of tape had stuck to her bottom teeth and tongue.

  “Now my hands please,” which came out more like “Na-U myeeee anterss bulleeteeeeeeeezzzzz.” I’m not sure of the exact spelling of what she said, but promised if we lived through this that someday I’d find out. Somehow it didn’t calm her nerves, but fortunately for us the tape got lodged in her throat and she had to use most of her energy just to breathe.

  The big dumb newspaper-man, who Laura Lee had humiliated earlier, said as he counted on his fingers, “We sealed the doors on the uh...uh...second floor,”

  Shrimp turned to us “Put Mander in the elevator and press lobby. When the doors open they’ll run away from her, which should give us enough time to escape.” He saw the look of concern on my face. “Don’t worry she’ll be fine. You’ve seen the putrid mug of hers enough to know they won’t touch her. I promise we’ll come back and get the ugly broad.”

  “And go where?” I said. That question wasn’t one that Shrimp had an answer for, so he said tentatively, “Kansas?”

  “This isn’t the Wizard of Oz!” I shouted.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Skim Milk yelled. “Although I’d love to go roller skating or maybe even scuba diving, if I had a parachute I could sky dive off the roof, well maybe not this roof, but…”

  Maria and Doc arrived with Klaus at his side. “Ski…” Dr. Bliffover got out before he was interrupted.

  “Yes, I love to ski but we’d have to—“

  “No….I was not talking about skiing. I was saying Skim, if you let me finish!” Doc yelled. “It was bad enough when AMA barged into the operating room took the Swiss Army knife scalpel, bottle opener and compass out of my hands and moved my patient to the mortuary.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted. Do I have any ear hairs?” Dr. Bliffover asked, turning to show us his ears.

  Laure Lee walked in and said, “No, I wish you did, then I could dye them. I love dying ear hairs.”

  “Guys, I think we can talk facial hair later” I said, turning so Laura Lee could get a good look at my ear locks.

  Shrimp nodded, standing on a chair and spinning so he could display his ear hair. “We’ve already lost ten people and have a few thousand zombies down stairs waiting to chew our ears off.”

  “You’re right.” The Doc spit out. “Ear hair is nothing to be taken lightly. Another time perhaps.”

  “What the Doc wants to say is that he has a cure ready now.” Klaus’ words leaked out of his mouth like a rusty hinge, as he made the sign of the cross with crossed fingers and then prayed to Allah.