Bubba and the Zigzaggery Zombies

by Bevill, C. L.

  “When Risley yells action, you start here,” the redhead pointed at an x scraped into the ground, “and stumble over to there.” She pointed out another x. “Drag a leg or something. Remember you took a shotgun hit to the face and some of your vertebra may be broken. You have to get to those brains. Right?”

  Right. Shotgun to the face. Broken vertebra. Brains. I think I need to pee.

  * * *

  The film making business abruptly seemed less complicated. Bubba staggered from one x to another x. He grunted because he couldn’t open his mouth. He dragged one leg and almost did the pee pee dance because he hadn’t realized he’d been sitting in the makeup chair for nearly three hours.

  Kristoph had shown up, wearing another variation of what Bubba called the Silent-Movie-Director ensemble. The beret, boots, and megaphone might have been the same as the previous days. The riding pants and wool coat were different colors of brown and gray.

  Kristoph briefly called aside Bubba and the three other zombies in the scene and repeated the redhead’s motivational speech. It was unpretentious and Bubba simplified it further in his head. “Groan, moan, and shuffle. Try not to breathe. Act. Personify. Brains.”

  Bubba wasn’t impressed.

  They did three takes, which Bubba thought was excessive and then he managed to indicate by hand gestures that he needed to use the facilities. He went inside the mansion and managed to frighten Pilar and saying sorry with his face all gummed up was difficult, but she finally realized it was Bubba.

  Once Bubba had taken care of nature, he’d come out to the kitchen and found a mug of coffee and appropriated a straw. There was a little hole in the corner of the jaw apparatus so that he could get a little fluid. It was used appropriately while Miz Adelia stared at him from the opposite of the kitchen. It dawned on him that she hadn’t immediately recognized him either.

  The housekeeper was probably grateful that Bubba couldn’t speak. It was, after all, a long time before she could speak because she was laughing so much. When she had recovered she took several pictures of him with her cell phone. “I’m sharing this on Facebook,” she said. “This is funny as all get out.”

  Bubba moaned at her.

  “I think they’re calling for you.” Miz Adelia waved toward the outside.

  Bubba saw the redhead running across the lawn and a second later he heard, “Zombie #14! We’ve got a composition shot! ZOMBIE FRICKING #14! WHERE ARE YOU? GET YOUR SHUFFLING, BRAIN-CONSUMING ASS OUT HERE, RIGHT NOW!”

  Bubba shrugged.

  Miz Adelia said, “I’ll find your dog and keep her inside so she doesn’t get into too much trouble.”

  Bubba shambled outside where the redhead was nearly shaking with extreme anxiety. She was like one of those little dogs that shake when it’s cold, or when someone looks at it, or when it’s hungry, tired, anxious, or generally when it’s awake. She led him back to where Kristoph was having a furious discussion with Risley.

  Oh, these madcap Hollywood people, Bubba thought. Then he wondered when he could get the thing off his face because Miz Adelia still had a few pancakes leftover. Precious nosed his leg and he bent to scratch behind one of her long ears. He could have Miz Adelia puree the pancakes and sip them through a straw. This had worked when his jaw had been wired shut after Willodean had hit him with a set of manacles. (The manacles hadn’t broken his mandible, but when he had fallen and hit the stone stair step with his jaw, that had done the trick.) And regardless of popular thought, not everything tasted good pureed.

  The redhead corralled the zombies like a seasoned cowboy while Kristoph said, “I’m going to do it my way, Risley!”

  “You always do it your way!” Risley yelled back.

  “And they say actors are prissy little uptight poopbags!” Kristoph bellowed. “That’s nothing on the executive staff!”

  “At least I don’t have a corncob that needs to be surgically removed!” Risley yelled.

  “These riding pants don’t have room for a corncob!”

  “That’s because the corncob is already shoved far enough up—”

  “What, not again!” a tall woman with waist length brown hair yelled as she waded into the morass. She was taller than Risley and Kristoph and her brown eyes flashed with disdain. “Does this have to happen every time you get together?”

  “Marquita, honey pookums,” Kristoph said.

  Bubba blinked. The tall woman didn’t really seem liked a honey pookums. But wait, dint Simone say that Kristoph is married to a Marquita? So the tall woman is his wife. They didn’t seem to go together. Marquita might have been in her fifties and was taller than her husband. (Bubba took note of the four inch heels.) But she possessed an eternal beauty that would carry with her until she died. (Just like Willodean Gray.)

  “Mar,” Risley said immediately after Kristoph spoke.

  Marquita stamped her four- inch heel.

  “Love Moschino boots,” said the redhead. “God, I love those.”

  “He wants to do an artsy-fartsy shot,” Kristoph said. “We’re on a budget.” He tapped his watch. “And we’re three days behind. The studio is going to come down on my head like a pile of bricks.”

  “Do you want to do a half-rate, bloody gore fest or do you want to do something that can grab attention?” Risley asked.

  “I want to get through this so I can do the indie film I really want to do,” Kristoph snapped back.

  “Always in a hurry, always rushing around.” Risley rolled his eyes. “Not looking at the bigger picture.”

  “Haha. That gets funnier every time you repeat it.”

  Do they always fight like this? Bubba wanted to ask but he remembered that he had a thing on his jaw and he couldn’t actually speak.

  “They always fight like this,” the redhead said. “Just keep your zombified head down and it’ll all be over in a few minutes.”

  “Better to beg forgiveness than ask for permission!” Risley shouted.

  “And where is the money coming from?” Kristoph bellowed.

  Marquita stamped her foot again. “Stop this before I snatch you both a new hole!”

  Kristoph scuffed his feet on the ground. “He started it.”

  Risley threw his hands in the air. “I’d already be done if the little man-boy would just let the megaphone go for a minute.”

  Marquita slapped her husband in the back of the head and knocked the beret off. Then she didn’t hesitate as she did the same thing to Risley. He didn’t have a beret, but it did muss his receding salt and pepper hairline. “Ris, shoot your shot before I change my mind,” Marquita said. “Kris,” she added, “have you had too much caffeine this morning?”

  “The lady inside the mansion makes the best cup of coffee,” Kristoph protested. “It would have been a crime not to drink it.”

  The redhead sighed. “Kristoph becomes a monster when he’s had too much caffeine.”

  Marquita gently shooed her husband off the set and waved frantically at Risley as she prodded Kristoph along. “You just need some organic juice,” she said. “I picked up a bag of oranges at the local farmer’s market.”

  What local farmer’s market? Bubba would have frowned but he was actually prevented from doing so. He hoped that Marquita wasn’t talking about the limited amount of produce provided at Bufford’s Gas and Grocery. There was every chance that any fresh food there had been stolen from orphans or picked out of the CDC’s testing waste.

  Bubba would have sighed but he couldn’t do that either. He just needed to get through the day and figure out what his mother and Miz Adelia were up to and how it was going to impact him and then he would need to figure out how to get Willodean alone again sans zombies or anything else that would keep him from saying four little words to her.

  There. That wouldn’t be so hard.

  Right.

  Chapter 5

  Bubba and Pernicious Problems

  Saturday, March 9th

  The shot really didn’t take long. Risley’s direction involved B
ubba and the other zombies looking pensive. Then they were directed to look contemplative. Risley then asked Bubba to brood. He didn’t know exactly how to make his face broody when he couldn’t move it, but he did his best. The assistant director looked happy enough with the end result.

  After the shoot ended, the redhead said to Bubba, “All right, Zombie #14, you can go home now. Go by makeup and have Simone take the prosthesis off. Don’t forget about the contacts.” She handed him a sheet of paper. “This is where you need to be tomorrow. Make sure you have the same clothing. Simone will mark the clothing and bag it, but be our good bud and make certain it’s the same when you put it on tomorrow in the wardrobe/makeup tent.”

  Bubba moaned. It was a real moan. This whole thing had taken hours and he was starving. Also he had a headache. He stumbled over to the makeup tent and Simone got right to work on him. Fortunately it didn’t take that long to get the gory fake jaw off his face. It took a lot longer to get the glue and plastic off the other parts of his skin.

  Bubba rubbed his jaw in appreciation of its newfound freedom. Then Simone rapidly and efficiently popped the lens out of his eyes, putting them in a special case.

  “There you go,” Simone said. “Try Noxzema to get the rest off tonight, although I’m going to cover it all up again tomorrow so don’t peel your skin off.” She directed him back to a changing room with a plastic bag. “Put your wardrobe in the bag. See, it’s marked Zombie #14/Farmboy.”

  Bubba grunted. It was a little difficult to move his jaw. He didn’t know if it was because it had been closed for hours or because it had been broken. It didn’t matter much.

  Bubba almost tripped over McGeorge, the assistant who had been irritated with them the day before in the cemetery. She pushed him to one side, muttering, “I hate directors. Give them one stupid award and they think they’re Spike Jones and Orson Welles’ love child.” She stopped to glare at Bubba. “You. From the cemetery. What are you doing here?”

  Simone laughed. “He just finished his scenes, McGeorge. What crawled up your ass?”

  “I’m looking for her grace, the star of the film,” McGeorge snarled. “The royal RV is empty.”

  “Toking up behind the barn with the best boys,” Simone said.

  Bubba moaned again. It was really hard to get his mouth open.

  “Bubba?”

  Bubba’s head shot up. The glorious sparkle of the light moment of sun’s light just before it set scattered into a thousand iridescent beams of brilliance, touching everything in its path with a glimmer of warmth.

  Willodean smiled crookedly at him.

  “Bubba?” McGeorge repeated. “His name can’t really be…Bubba. That’s like naming a Dalmatian dog…Spot.” She shook her head, eying the sheriff’s department patch on Willodean’s shoulder and absently rubbing the index finger that Willodean had bent backward. “Simone was joking about the toking. Hey, I made a rhyme. I’ll go find Tandy. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “Better bring the eye drops,” Simone called after her as McGeorge strode off, nearly skipping as she hurried along.

  Bubba waved at Simone and offered an arm to Willodean. She took it with another one of her lustrous smiles.

  Willodean looked at him. “A zombie? Really?”

  Bubba shrugged. He rubbed his jaw and said, “Majawstug.”

  “I didn’t get that.”

  “Ma jaw eh stug.”

  “Is that makeup on your face?”

  “Um.”

  “You know,” Willodean said as they threaded their way through tents and stepped across electrical cables, “I might have been a little, oh, pushy yesterday. When I said something about kids.”

  Bubba tripped on an errant bloody arm. A film crew member snatched it up and glared at him as if Bubba had done it on purpose.

  “I kind of sprung it on you,” Willodean added quickly, completely ignoring the errant bloody arm and the crew member cradling it in his own arms. “I wasn’t trying to push you into anything. I suppose children have been on my mind lately. But it’s not like my biological clock is ticking and ticking and about to explode, or something like that.”

  “Mmm?”

  “I’m not sure how to explain it,” Willodean went on.

  “Urmg?”

  “We’ve been dating and I was just curious what you thought about children.” Willodean looked away and appeared to study a skeletal zombie sipping Coca Cola from a straw struck in the can. Her free hand sketched a nervous pattern in the air. “With Brownie being around and sometimes Janie, although they’re not exactly children, are they? More like some sort of warped offspring of karma or the like. I’m just blathering on and on. I mean, you choked on your chicken when I said it and I feel just awful about it. I should just shut up now.” She closed her perfectly formed mouth and Bubba was dumbstruck for a moment.

  Speak. Say something, dumbie. Quick. She’s goin’ to get away.

  “Eh nah tha,” Bubba said, unpleasantly surprised that he couldn’t speak when he desperately wanted to. He looked around as if that would somehow miraculously aid him. Two zombies were playing volleyball in the front yard. Miz Demetrice was on the veranda chatting with Marquita Thaddeus. She held one of Alfonzo and Pilar’s children and Marquita was tickling the toddler’s stomach. Another pair of zombies was smoking by the line of vans. Not toking. Smoking cigarettes.

  Here was a prime opportunity. Bubba knew he should take advantage of it but it was impossible because the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth and he couldn’t make them come out of his mouth no matter how hard he tried. “Wahdee, woo oo mah meh?”

  There. He had said it! HE HAD SAID IT! But hellfire and damnation, it didn’t sound like he’d said it. He could be asking about the weather, or whether she’d like to go to Taco Bell for lunch, or whether she thought he wore boxers or briefs.

  Willodean glanced at him anxiously. “Your jaw is a little swollen, Bubba. Did that stuff they put on you do something? Or…oh, God, was it from when I broke your jaw?” She jerked her hand out of his arm and touched her face. It appeared as though she was afraid to touch his, in case it exploded or something equally awful. “Maybe we should take you to Doc Goodjoint?”

  Bubba shook his head. “Ehh wa tha mahut,” he tried to tell her.

  Willodean appeared horrified. She took a step away from him. “Is this some sort of weird rejection? You’re afraid to tell me that I pushed a little too hard?”

  Bubba shook his head frantically. How could this have gone so wrong, so quickly? Oh, that is a stupid question. This is my life. Just when things were going well, something came around and slapped him right upside the face. “Na tha,” he said urgently. “Na tha!”

  Willodean didn’t look too convinced. “I’m going to talk to your mother now. We can talk later when you can talk.”

  Bubba watched her walk away with a miserable feeling deep in his soul. She hadn’t even paused to kiss him on a cheek or given him a chance to buss her on hers. He silently said a few swear words. Then he laid his head against the side of one of the vans and thought seriously about banging it a few times just to see if that would make a difference. Unconsciousness might help him considerably.

  When Bubba raised his head, he saw his mother talking to Willodean on the veranda. Willodean had clearly put Bubba in the back of her mind and she stood facing away from him. Miz Demetrice still held one of the toddlers. He couldn’t tell if it was Blanca or Carlotta, but the baby was waving arms and legs keenly. His mother put the child down and she stood on her two feet with her tiny little arms wrapped around Miz Demetrice’s legs.

  Willodean knelt next to the child and clucked the little girl on the chin. The child moved around to the back of Miz Demetrice’s legs, clearly apprehensive of Willodean. Maybe it was the uniform.

  Bubba frowned and then didn’t frown because he couldn’t frown. Alfonzo and Pilar spoke like they had lived in the United States for a long time. It might mean they were here legally, (Both Alfonzo and Pilar sounded
like folks who had grown up in Southern Texas along the border of Mexico.) but their association with Miz Demetrice and Miz Adelia meant something was afoot. They might not like being around figures of authority because they had been ill-treated by them. Even the baby cottoned to that.

  Kids. Bubba mentally frowned harder. Are kids on Willodean’s mind because she’s in the whatever game that’s happening with Ma and Miz Adelia? That would be something that Miz Demetrice was more than capable of doing. After all, Willodean was involved in the Pegramville Women’s Club’s activities, and Willodean had helped his mother out before. They had illegally searched the sheriff’s office once because Miz Demetrice suspected that there was an important clue there. Willodean had been the one to let them into the sheriff’s department. It was part of the reason he liked Willodean so much. When the going got tough, she didn’t pull out a rule book and quote verbatim. Instead, she was more likely to shriek, “To hell with the rule book!”

  Bubba eyed the side of the van. It wasn’t too late to pound his head against it. If there was a dent in the van that resulted then he knew just the right people to fix it. He’d actually said the words (garbled the words was more like it) and Willodean hadn’t understood him.

  Damn.

  Ignoring the two zombies who watched him, Bubba stumbled back to the makeup tent. Simone was cleaning up and repackaging multicolored tubes of everything a happy little cosmetologist could want.

  “Bubba,” she said and giggled. “I can’t get over that. Did you mother really name you Bubba? I mean, does it say that on your birth certificate?”

  Bubba pointed at his jaw and asked, “Wha uh ooh ta ma yah?”

  Simone stopped smiling. “Oh, it’s a little numb?”

  He nodded.

  “That’ll wear off in a few hours. We use a glue that has an analgesic in it so people won’t mess with the prostheses too much.” She touched his jaw. “I see a little swelling. Remind me not to use that glue on you tomorrow.” She turned away and dug in a portable refrigerator. “Water. Water. Hey, who hid my Red Bull in here?” Simone made a triumphant noise. “There we go. A gel pack.” She stood up and handed it to him. “You can still breathe, right?”