Vince looked down at his frat brother, really looked at him, and allowed Brody to pull him off the guy.
“Oh, shit,” was all he could say.
Lance was still laughing, even now, nose bloody, cheek and chin scraped and bleeding where Vince had knocked him face-first onto the tarmac, had even tried to stomp his face into the concrete, but his eyes had the bright, glittering, mindless look of hysteria, and they were tearing. His face was muddy with tears.
Vince crawled away a little distance as Brody kneeled down beside Lance. He could hear the big jock asking Lance if he was all right, telling him he needed to calm down, snap out of it, get a hold of himself. He didn’t care. He put his face in his hands and cried. When he had heard Lance laughing, a bright red murderous haze had come down over his thoughts, banging down like heavy shutters, and all he wanted to do was make his frat brother hurt, hurt like he was hurting. He wanted to make him pay.
That rage was gone now, but the hurt remained. He hurt so bad inside he almost wished the anger would come back, just so he wouldn’t have to hurt anymore. It was too much, the pain. His brain couldn’t process it.
Mary was dead.
She was lying against the Pack ‘N’ Tuck’s door, getting eaten just a few feet away. She had gotten careless, was thinking about candy bars instead of worrying about zombies, and got herself killed. She was zombie chow now, as Lance was so fond of putting it, and there was nothing he could do about it. No take-backsies on this one.
Brody helped Lance to his feet, stood him up and dusted him off. Lance had finally stopped laughing. His chest still hitched like he had a bad case of the hiccups, but at least he’d stopped laughing. Brody tried to check his face and Lance pushed the big guy’s hands away. Lance tottered away, swaying on his feet like a drunk. Brody followed, ready to step in if he tried anything crazy. Or catch him if he fell.
Vince stood up, too. Brody glanced over and then subtly positioned himself between the two, but Vince wasn’t angry anymore. He just felt numb. Dead inside. His brain couldn’t handle the pain, and like a circuit breaker that had gotten too much juice, a switch had flipped over inside his brain and cut off all power to his emotions.
“I guess we need to head back to the house,” Vince said, speaking in a monotone. He sniffed, wiped his nose on the back of his arm. The knuckles of his right hand were scraped and bloody. “It’ll be dark soon, and…”
His voice trailed off as the biker zombie went shambling away. It had come from the back of the building.
They watched as the big deadhead went shuffling across the far side of the parking lot, passed the coin-operated air compressor and drifted away on William Horton Avenue, headed away from the campus. Its stomach was grotesquely swollen.
“How did it get out?” Brody hissed.
“The back door,” Vince answered.
They walked to the back, just to see for themselves. The door was wide open, the interior of the convenience store like a dark throat. The edge of the door and its metal doorframe showed signs of being jimmied-- scrapes in the paint and dark indentations. Bloody boot prints led away from the building, fading as they receded into the distance. Vince was reminded of one of those old timey dance step charts.
“Should we…?” Brody said quietly.
“I guess we have to,” Vince answered. “Just, you know, to make sure. I can’t leave her without making sure.”
They went inside.
Yep.
She was dead.
9
On their way back they saw Rudie.
He had impaled himself on the decorative speartips of a black wrought iron fence. They knew it was Rudie and not some other naked deadhead because of the Richard Nixon mask. He was in front of the assistant dean’s house, a two story brick Antebellum with several large silk trees in the yard. He was bent over the fence, waving his peace signs around, the spears of the fence embedded in his gut. And there was a little zombie girl behind him. She was dressed in an ankle length princess type gown, the kind young girls wear to formal functions like weddings. It didn’t look like a princess’s gown anymore, ragged and black with filth, but it had been, once upon a time. The girl was wiggling her face in the cleft of Rudie’s generous ass. She must have been eating him for a while, too. She really had her head wedged in there.
They stopped on their bikes, too stunned to continue pedaling for a moment.
“No. Fucking. Way,” Lance said, eyebrows halfway to his hairline. He didn’t laugh, though. He didn’t have any laughter left in him that evening.
“That’s… that’s just wrong,” Brody muttered.
The zombie girl heard them. She whipped around with a hiss, her little rotten fingers curled, and started running toward them.
Rudie, ass a gaping hole now, flailed his flabby legs.
“Go! Go!” Vince cried, as the little girl’s patent leather shoes pattered on the pavement.
They pedaled away.
10
“I think she knew she was going to die,” Vince said, his voice a labored croak. Vince sat on the floor of the chapter house basement, back to the wall, legs sprawled out in front of him, a bottle of Keystone Light cocked up from his straddle. As Brody, Lance and Steve eyed him nervously from the staircase, Vince laughed softly and brought the bottle to his mouth. He drained about a quarter of the beer in one swig, then belched.
“She told me this morning she dreamed about angels, ” he said. “She said they told her… just be patient. They were coming to save her. She said they were coming to save all of us. I guess God works in mysterious ways. If that’s what they meant by saving her, I think I’d rather stay unsaved.”
She’d said something else. She said that they had scared her. She said they were the most beautiful creatures she’d ever seen, but they seemed very aloof. And they had cold, black eyes. All black, with no irises or whites. Like sharks. She said she’d awakened in a cold sweat, thinking she would see them staring in the window at her, their faces like unbaked dough with raisins pressed in the center for eyes. If they were, she said, she would have screamed her head off, angels or no.
“It was probably just a dream,” Brody said. He seemed to come to some decision and descended. He came around the Ping-Pong table and sat down on the floor next to Vince. “People have strange dreams all the time. It doesn’t mean she had some kind of vision or something.”
“You think so?” Vince asked hoarsely. He was already starting to lose his voice. He throat felt as if he had swallowed several rusty razor blades. “I’m not too sure.”
“I thought you said your parents were atheists,” Lance said. He came and sat beside Vince, too. The only one who didn’t was Steve. Steve clomped to the bottom step and flopped down there, hands hanging between his knees. Steve was still in shock. He’d liked Mary. He didn’t have a crush on her or anything. It wasn’t that kind of like, but they’d gotten on fine. He’d come to think of her as a kid sister the past few months, after Vince and Mary started dating.
When the guys got back from the supply run, he’d come into the foyer, asking if everything had gone smooth, but as soon as he got a look at their faces he’d known everything had not gone smooth. He’d known things had gone in a very unsmooth fashion. When they told him what had happened, how Mary Caskill had died, he’d walked upstairs and locked himself in his room. They’d heard him crying, but no one had gone to see if he wanted to talk. Girls might do that, but guys didn’t. Not often.
It had taken the three of them two hours to come down to the basement, which had always been known as the Grotto to the brothers, and see if Vince was okay, or if he’d hung himself like Rudie. From the water pipes that crisscrossed the ceiling, maybe.
“You don’t inherit it like eye color,” Vince replied to Lance. “I don’t believe in all that religious mumbo jumbo. I think religion is just a tool psychotics use to rule the world. But I think there’s more to this life than what we can see and touch and smell. I can feel it. And I think Mary did, t
oo. I think it came to her in her dreams, told her she was going to die. Why else would it have scared her so bad?”
When he looked at the other three boys, waiting for a response, they all just gazed at him. They didn’t know what to say.
Vince looked at the candles flickering beside him on the floor. Without the candles, the Grotto would have been as lightless as a subterranean cavern.
He’d gone to a place called Ruby Falls with his parents when he was in high school. Ruby Falls was a 145-foot waterfall located in a deep underground cave in the Lookout Mountains of Chattanooga, Tennessee. To get to it, he and his parents had ridden down a thousand foot mineshaft into the mountain’s interior. Halfway through the tour, the tour guide had turned out all the lights. There, over a thousand feet below the earth, Vince had been enveloped in the most total darkness he’d ever experienced in his life. It was like a physical thing, that darkness. He had imagined he could feel it pulling on him from all directions, like a vacuum. It actually seemed to suck the air out of his lungs. It couldn’t possible do such a thing, he had known. Darkness wasn’t a thing. Darkness was just the absence of light. But it had felt like that. It felt like it wanted to do it.
If he blew out those candles, he thought, it would be just like Ruby Falls again. The basement of the Epsilon Omega house had no exterior windows, so there wouldn’t even be the anemic light of the stars to temper the sucking darkness. The dark would be absolute. If he blew out those candles, they would all die. They would die of explosive decompression.
“I hope you’re right,” Brody said after a few minutes. “I hope there is something more than this world.”
They all looked at him.
“I think I got the Phage,” he said.
11
So it was airborne. Brody hadn’t been bitten either. Vince knew that wasn’t good news—not good news at all—but even after the big jock began to sicken, none of them wanted to speak about it.
A fraternity was defined as a mutual aid society, and that’s what they did. They aided one another-- by not talking about it. It wasn’t the healthiest thing to do, psychologically, but it helped them get through the next few days. Besides, Vince thought, human beings live in denial of death their entire lives. They rarely face their own mortality, not until death is just a few breaths away, not until it’s staring them in the face every morning in the bathroom mirror, eyes and cheeks sunken in by cancer or AIDS or just old age. It was the only recourse of the self-aware mind. Deny it or go insane. God was a real practical joker.
So they played Hearts and Rummy and even Go Fish. They played tag like kids in the big empty house. They dug an old Monopoly box out of a storage room and spent an entire evening rolling the dice and walking their game pieces around the big square board. Lance found Sorry and Scrabble in the attic the following day, the boxes yellow with age. Scrabble was abandoned after only one game. Lance and Brody were nearly illiterate. But they had a lot of fun playing Sorry. It was a game that encouraged assholery. Being boys, and especially being frats, they excelled at assholery. It had always been an intrinsic part of Greek life.
And, of course, they drank.
Beer, mostly, but harder stuff, too. Mad Dog. Vodka. Jim and Coke. It was easier to deal with death when you were half-lit. It was easier to laugh at it, easier to deny.
Brody didn’t decline quickly, not like some people, who were shuffling around all zombified within hours of spiking a temp. It took nearly a week for the Phage to do him in. It was probably due to his physical conditioning. He had been an all-star athlete his entire life, destined for the pros. He was, in short, built like a brick shithouse, and had an immune system to match.
For several days, all he suffered from was a low-grade fever. Muscle aches. Itchy, watery eyes. Sore throat and runny nose. He might have thought it was just a cold, he said, if it were not for the violent impulses.
Despite playing football since his grade school years, he told Vince, as they played a game of checkers down in the Grotto, he had never really had any violent tendencies.
He liked the sport of football, he said. The violence was just part of the game, something he had never particularly enjoyed.
“But I keep having these… weird mood swings,” Brody confessed. He said it low, leaning across the table toward Vince, as if he were too ashamed to let the others overhear. Lance and Brody were on the other side of the room playing beer pong. Brody watched Steve from the corner of his eyes for a moment, then went on. “Sometimes, Lance will crack a joke, or laugh that stupid donkey laugh of his, and I just want to…” He looked at his curled fingers, put them in his lap with a guilty scowl. “I just want to rip his throat out,” he whispered. “With my teeth.”
Vince looked at the giant sitting across the chess stand from him. He looked like a dad sitting at his daughter’s toy tea table. He imagined the kind of damage a guy as big as Brody could do to someone like him, who was just a hair shy of 5’7” and topped the scales at one-fifty… what he could to do all of them.
“Maybe we should start locking you in your room at night,” Vince said. “You know, just to be safe. In case you change while we’re all sleeping.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” Brody said after a moment of thought, and then he grinned a very disturbing grin. His eyes were red-rimmed and gummy.
12
The day before he died, Brody came to Vince’s room.
“Can we talk?” he asked. He had the rumbling phlegmatic voice of someone with a very bad cold. Vince glanced up at him and winced a little. The guy looked bad. Like, walking around dead bad. His skin was jaundiced, like someone with hepatitis, with a faint green cast to his lips and eyelids. His eyes were hollow sockets, his hair brittle and falling out. He looked like someone who had been in a concentration camp for months, not a man who had been hale and hearty just six days before.
“Of course,” Vince said, putting aside a medical text he had been perusing. He had taken the book from a frat brother’s room, had been reading about infectious diseases. “Just, you know…” He smiled apologetically.
“I know. I won’t touch you,” Brody said, coming in. “I’ll go outside in the hall if I think I’m going to cough or sneeze or something.”
“Thanks.”
They had had a secret meeting about that—Vince, Lance and Steve. About whether to isolate Brody, or put him out of the house. They’d gone down to the Grotto while Brody was sleeping. The debate had gotten a little heated when Lance suggested just killing him and putting him out of his misery. Lance had only been half-serious, but that was the problem: the half part. In the end, they had decided to do nothing. They knew next to nothing about the Phage, how it was transmitted, and what, if anything, they could do to avoid catching it. Most likely, they had already been exposed. They’d either catch it or they wouldn’t. There was no need to be inhumane. Inhumanity wasn’t going to save them.
“What do you want to talk about?” Vince asked, trying to sound as upbeat as possible.
“I want to know if you’ll do me,” Brody said.
Vince blinked. “What?”
“Fix me up. You know. Like how we did Rudie. We talked about it in the foyer that day. You said you wanted to be done up like Steve Martin, with an arrow through your head.”
“Oh, yeah!” Vince said. “Yeah, I forgot about that.”
He had been very absent-minded lately, walking into rooms and forgetting why he had gone in there, losing his train of thought, blanking when he was reading. Seeing your girlfriend get beaten to death and partially eaten will do that to a fellow, he supposed. He still couldn’t get the image of it out of his head. They had gone inside the Pack ‘N’ Tuck, even though it was the last thing any of them wanted to do, but they had to make sure. They had to make sure she was dead. They didn’t want to leave her if she was still alive, let her suffer. If there was even a chance she was alive and her life could be saved… But she had been quite thoroughly dead. The biker zombie had beaten her face
in, then chewed the left side of it off, exposing her eyeball and teeth like some kind of three dimensional anatomy chart. The zombie had devoured most of her throat, her left shoulder, her left upper arm and her breast. She was nearly unrecognizable, had been turned into a gory horror movie prop.
For the first three days after it happened, he saw her like that every time he closed his eyes. He went to sleep and dreamed of her. Dead. Eaten. Then he had found one of his frat brother’s Ativans, and started popping those. That had helped a lot. That took the edge off things, though he worried about mixing them with the beer. He didn’t want to pull a Heath Ledger—though it was a comfort to know that he could pull a Heath Ledger if things got much worse. If the thought of living became more frightening than dying.
“Lance said it’s like laughing in the face of death,” Brody went on. He sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve. “I like that idea. Giving death the finger. It’s better than being scared.”
“Sure, I’ll do it. When do you want to get dressed up.”
“Oh… tonight,” Brody said. He wiped the sweat from his face with a trembling hand. “I don’t think I’m going to last much longer.”
“And you just want me to help?” Vince asked.
“Yeeeaaahhh…” Brody said. He grinned like an egg-sucking dog, ashamed but not remorseful. “I’d feel weird if the other guys helped. They’re not like you, G. They don’t understand things like you do.”
“You mean about you being gay?”
“I’m not gay,” Brody said quickly, as if it were a reflex. He peeked out into the corridor to make sure the other boys weren’t around, then turned back to Vince. “I’m bisexual,” he said in a low voice. He let out his breath in a gust, grinning with relief. “Wow! I’ve never told anybody that. It feels good! Like a big weight has been lifted. But, uh, don’t tell the other guys, okay?”
Die Laughing (The Fearlanders) Page 4