Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  The street by the coffee shop was blocked off. Justine parked as close as she could and walked over. Where the coffee shop had been, there was a huge, puffy white tent that wiggled in the breeze like a fat ghost, shuddering away from the metal spikes impaling each corner of it to the cement. Small crowds of people, some in neon yellow Hazmat suits, huddled near the entrance. Justine came closer. A person in a Hazmat suit emerged from the tent. Justine saw rows and rows of flaps inside, like fluttering laundry lines.

  “Excuse me,” said the Hazmat suit, in a sexless voice. “Sorry, Miss.” The suit’s mask was black, silvered with a reflective sheen. The suit put its big mitt of a hand up. “You can’t come in.”

  “What’s going on? I work here.”

  “You must return to your home and await further instructions. This town is under quarantine.”

  “Is this about Rebecca? She was sick. We called an ambulance for her last night.”

  “Oh, Rebecca,” sighed the suit. “Rebecca Norbeck is dead. We are with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You may have something very bad here. Four girls died in the night.”

  Justine shook her head. Rebecca might have been puking her guts out, but even so, she’d never looked better. She, above all, had been so pleased with her new beauty. She would come into the coffee shop and order big foofy drinks, sipping at them with a thrilled, almost cross-eyed screwball comedienne expression, except Justine knew that she was only pretending. Those drinks grew cold on the table, full to the brim. Nevertheless, in the last two weeks, Rebecca had acted like everything was delicious, especially the love-struck boys and girls who stood awkwardly at her table, trying to make conversation as she put away the vampire novels that she never finished reading anymore.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Justine. “I just saw her last night. She was sick, but not that bad.”

  “The virus works quickly. This coffee shop may be a vector. The high school is a vector. The body-piercing parlor is a vector. Anything the young people have touched is a vector. Please—go home, await further instructions. Although,” and the suit cocked its head with a loud crinkle, “You may be too old to get it. We’ve been wondering about that.”

  “I feel fine,” Justine said, distracted. “So how many girls have gotten sick?”

  “Feeling fine is one thing. Do you feel pretty?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Just go home. If you have any little high school girlfriends, please tell them to stay in their homes and call this hotline number.” The suit produced a card from its thigh pocket and handed it to Justine. “The rate of infection is growing. The virus grows ever more virulent. You must warn all of your unpopular friends as well. The beauty sickness is no longer co-morbid with popularity. It is trickling down.”

  The suit politely waved her away from the entrance. When Justine reached the roadblock, the suit was gone. In the crowds, she saw people she recognized. Lots of parental types, swarming around the tents and anyone with a clipboard. Justine turned away. She wanted to jump back in time, warn the girls as they chose door number two, the beauty prize—she would tell them that death was waiting there, don’t do it, but maybe they wouldn’t have listened. Justine called Pearl. Nobody answered. Her heart beat faster as she started her car.

  Justine pulled up in front of the high school and saw Pearl’s friend Marla standing at the curb by herself, crying. Crowds of people were working around the high school, blocking off the entrances and setting up tents around the many buildings.

  When Marla saw Justine, she waved frantically, the too-long sleeves of her hoodie flapping.

  Marla yanked the car door open and threw herself inside. “They kidnapped Pearl!” she told Justine. Some girls had followed them out of school. Marla and Pearl had waited at the front, too afraid to walk home. The girls surrounded them and dragged Pearl into their car.

  “It’s because of that blog,” said Marla, sniffling. “They were pissed. They didn’t like what Pearl said about them. I told her not to post that stuff, but she said if those bitches don’t understand that YouTube videos are on the actual Internet for everyone to see, then it’s their own fault. You have to find her.”

  “Oh boy,” sighed Justine. “I will. Just . . . don’t touch your face anymore. Don’t touch anything. You don’t want to get sick.”

  Marla shrugged. They were silent for a long time, while Justine drove to Marla’s house. A few other buildings had been encircled by the white tents, and the CDC people walked in and out, their movements softened by their awkward suits so that they looked like astronauts, not even on Earth but already in space, drifting from station to station.

  Marla burst into tears again. “I hate Pearl. I’m all alone now.” Her face was blotchy, her eyes like slits in an overripe fruit. “I’m going to be the only one.”

  Justine didn’t need to ask what she meant.

  On the lawn in front of Pearl’s house, six girls stood in a circle. Justine recognized some of them from the coffee shop and the YouTube video. Deanna and Katie were cheerleaders, and with them were Khadija and Nora, who were, respectively, president and activities coordinator of the school manga and anime interest club. The other two girls Justine didn’t recognize.

  The suit had said that beauty was no longer co-morbid with popularity. It was true. Weeks ago, these girls had started out in different social worlds, but you couldn’t even tell by their clothes anymore. As they changed, they had all started wearing older-brother-style sweatshirts and gym shorts and huge flannel shirts and flip-flops, as if the normal world of normal-looking people had lost all interest to them. They had stopped grabbing at beauty; now they swam in it; they breathed it in and out.

  Justine got out of her car. The girls, even the ones who’d been muscular or rounded or stocky, were now all equally spindly. She could take them. But as she walked past them to Pearl’s front door, she was afraid. They looked as still and perfect as mannequins. It was scarier than dealing with something that seemed alive. They were like girl-shaped landmines.

  She banged on the door and rang the doorbell. “Pearl,” she shouted. “Pearl! Let me in!” No one answered. She turned around to face the girls.

  “What did you do with her?” she said. Deanna shrugged. They all did, their lips curling up at the edges like burning paper.

  “This is serious. People are dying. You’re all in danger.” As Justine spoke, she knew how weak and lame she sounded.

  The girls shrugged again. Justine wanted to pull the sidewalk out from under them, to knock them over like bowling pins. Anything to plow through the total brick wall of teenage stoicism.

  Justine said, “Where are her parents?”

  “They’re all at that big meeting for parents,” said Nora. “It’s too late, though.”

  “What’s too late?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nora. “Stuff.”

  They laughed. They glided closer, moving to surround Justine. She was nervous. They were so damn tall, and their faces blocked out the world around her in a circle of horrible loveliness, creating an alien ecosystem in which Justine—imperfect, spotted, human—could not breathe.

  “Pearl doesn’t want to talk to you,” said Deanna. “She doesn’t feel well.”

  “Don’t lie to me. You’re not her friends.”

  “Like you are. How old are you again? Fifty billion?”

  “It’s creepy you want to be Pearl’s friend,” said Khadija, in a lilting, lispy voice. Iths creepy you wanna be Pearlth fren.

  “Fuck off,” said Justine. “Get out of here, or I’m calling the police.”

  “Fine,” one of them said. “Do it.”

  They stood there, pushing their sleeves up. Justine was afraid again—these girls didn’t seem sick, no, they were fierce and wicked. She pushed Nora, but realized her mistake as soon as she felt Nora’s shoulder, all tendon and bone like a pig knuckle. Nora fell onto Khadija, and Khadija stumbled into another girl. They screamed like normal girls. Nora
stood up and pulled down the neck of her sweatshirt over her shoulder. She already had a bruise as big as an apple, a deep red one that seemed to pulse and grow more vivid as they looked.

  “Look what you did!”

  “Holy shit,” gasped Justine. There was no way. She hadn’t done anything. Perhaps something lurking beneath her surface was capable of punching a teenage girl, but she had only pushed a little. “It was an accident.”

  “We’re calling the police on you,” yelled Deanna.

  “Nora, you need to go to the hospital,” said Justine. “This isn’t normal.” Justine reached into her pockets to find the card that the suit had given her, but then the girls stepped even closer.

  “You’re not normal, bitch,” said Nora.

  Khadija lifted a fist, and her T-shirt sleeve shifted to reveal an evil bruise blossoming right where Nora had bumped into her.

  Justine kept saying, “Sorry, I’m sorry,” and ran to her car. She drove away in a panic, as the girls rubbed their wounds and screamed swear words at the retreating car.

  Justine’s mother was sitting on the couch. “Justine,” she shouted, as if she was throwing a surprise party. She hugged her daughter so swiftly that Justine’s teeth clacked together. “I was so worried about you.” Her mother kept talking as she held her, her voice echoing against Justine’s skull. She hadn’t gone to work after all. The roads out of town were blocked. “They just told me about this disease that all the young girls were getting. I thought you had gotten sick, or you were trapped somewhere. . . .”

  “I’m not young anymore, Mom.”

  “Things can still happen to you,” her mother said. “Not young, my ass.”

  “I’m not in high school. I’ll be fine.” Justine tried to wiggle out of her grasp. Weren’t mothers supposed to be the ones with motherly bosoms? But her mother was small and flat-chested, and also quite buff ever since she’d started taking Cardio Powerlifting at the local gym. You must have gotten your father’s boobs, her mother would say, sometimes enviously, sometimes not.

  Her mother brushed back Justine’s hair. “You don’t look any different,” she said. Justine felt disappointed in a small and distant way. “Thank god for that. Be quiet. I’m allowed to worry. When you’re a million years old, I’ll still be a million-and-thirty-three.”

  “Dang.”

  “I know.” Her mother stepped back. “I should go wash my hands now.”

  “Mom! Are you serious? I’m not sick.” Then she remembered her fight with the girls, and how easily Nora had folded under her hands. “I guess you should.”

  “I wish we at least had those masks,” her mother fretted. “Those SARS masks.”

  “Sit down, Mom,” said Justine. “Relax. I’ll start dinner.”

  “Dinner? Sure you’re feeling well?” Her mother didn’t smile. She snapped the living room window curtains shut before sitting down again. “Poor girls,” she said. “It seems so much worse that they get beautiful before it happens.”

  The next day, Justine’s mother went out to attend some community meetings. Justine stayed home, doing research without knowing what she was looking for or why, except for the fear that Pearl too might be in trouble. Her mother had been relieved. “Good idea,” she said. “Stay inside. Forever if you can.”

  Pearl’s blog was still up, but all the old posts had been deleted. The only thing left on the page was a video, embedded without commentary. Justine clicked on it. The video was an edited clip of an old movie from 1933, Footlight Parade. James Cagney’s character raced around town, trying to think up a concept for his new theatrical extravaganza. Suddenly he stopped, struck by the sight of some black kids playing in the street around a gushing fire hydrant, and grew excited, ecstatic. “Look at that!” he shouted. “That’s what the prologue needs—a mountain waterfall splashing on beautiful white bodies!” From there, the scene cut straight to the big Busby Berkeley number: rows of scantily clad young women sliding down an artificial waterfall, bodies gleaming white in stark contrast against the pitch-dark water. The women wore rubber caps molded into the shapes of hairstyles. They writhed in synchronized frenzy, grinning through wet lipstick. Then they joined arms in two long lines, and interwove their legs to form the shape of a zipper, which opened and closed itself up again in the path of a single swimmer traveling up and down the line of interlocking leg-teeth.

  Justine had to stop watching. She hit pause and took a few breaths. Then she clicked through to YouTube and searched for the videos of the local girls. Once again, she looked at the girls looking at her. The low-quality resolution washed them out, simplifying and deepening their features until they looked less like girls and more like drawings of girls. She couldn’t stop watching them. Neither could everyone else. The view count was up to twenty million.

  Modeling agencies were sending representatives to her town. Justine scrolled through pages and pages of “I wish it were me” and “Lucky girls” and “Put that in a syringe and stick it into me!” from all varieties of girls and women and boys and men. Others wanted in, too: movie directors, talent agents, pharmaceutical giants, fundamentalists, cosmetics companies, Disney, journalists, perverts. There was some big-ass money at stake here. If only there were a way to prevent the dying.

  Though even with the dying, surely they could work something out.

  Outside the living room window, Justine saw that a few other houses on the street had been covered with bloated white tents, houses like spongy funguses, puffballs growing into the shapes of houses. These were houses that girls had lived in.

  Pearl had texted her once during those two days.

  The text read: still ugly.

  Justine texted her back immediately but got no response.

  She went online again, and saw that people were comparing the situation to a video game, a movie, a comic, a TV show, and, much less frequently, a book.

  On the night of the third day, Justine received another text from Pearl. It read: come over. A few seconds later, her phone beeped again. The next text read: at gregs apt. will explain.

  This didn’t upset Justine. At least not in the way she thought it would. Greg was not hers and she did not want him.

  Only, she did begin to feel worried for him. She refused to think any more about this.

  Her mother was asleep. Justine shut the door carefully behind her. She wore a pair of knit wool gloves, to put some kind of barrier between her and the rest of the world. Now she wished that they did have SARS masks. For one wild moment, she thought about wrapping a long piece of toilet paper around her face.

  She decided to walk to Greg’s apartment to avoid being stopped by officials. Without the thin hard shell of her car, she felt like a kind of forest creature darting around in the woods, the billowing white tents like fairy tale houses, filled with the same ominous promises.

  She felt fifteen again, and it wasn’t just because she didn’t have a car.

  One of the tents had a long, jagged rip down the front. Justine saw it out of the corner of her eye, and automatically sped up her steps. By the time she got to Greg’s apartment, she was almost running. Her feet hurt. Someone buzzed her into the building and she took the stairs two at a time. About to knock on Greg’s door, she got a funny feeling, a sense of unutterable wrongness. Her armpits went damp. She tried the doorknob instead. The door opened.

  Pearl was slumped at the kitchen table, facedown, her head resting on her arms. She was very still.

  “Hello,” said Justine.

  Pearl lifted her head. She was wearing a fake nose attached to a mustache, bushy eyebrows, and black-framed eyeglasses, a Groucho Marx-type thing.

  “Yo,” she said.

  Justine sat down at the table across from her. “Why aren’t you at home?”

  “I ran away. I didn’t want the disease nerds to bother me.”

  “They could have helped you.”

  “Doubt it.” Pearl sat up and stared at Justine. There was something different about Pearl. Pearl was tall
er. Something had taken her neck and waist and gently yanked them longer. And her boobs, her boobs . . . . “Stop looking at me,” Pearl said. “I think you should know—I’m not doing Greg or anything. He’s just letting me stay here.”

  “It’s fine with me if you’re doing Greg.”

  “He’s still obsessed with you. All he does is ask about you.”

  “Don’t tell me that. We’re not together. It doesn’t matter. How are you?”

  “Me? I’m beautiful now.” Pearl adjusted her eyeglasses with a poke of her finger.

  “Can I see?”

  “No, you can’t see. I’m turning into a fucking white girl. It’s annoying. It’s like, even this stupid disease has Western-influenced ideas of beauty. Big eyes, pale skin, whatever. I grew six inches. Look, my nose bridge got taller too! I could never wear glasses before, they were always slipping off my face. It’s bullshit. But I am hot stuff.” Pearl reached across the table and tapped Justine on the arm in a friendly, off-hand way. “How are you feeling? You look like you feel like shit.”

  “I’m fine. I’m always fine. I’ve been telling everyone that I’m fine. Ask me a new fucking question,” said Justine. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “Hmm. Are you acting like a major bitch right now?”

  Justine relaxed a bit. “Sure,” she said. “Nice to see you too.”

  They both smiled. It was the best they could do.

  “Justine, please don’t worry,” Pearl said. “Check out my new rack! It’s okay, you can look. I’m great. I’ve never been better.”

  “Except you’re turning into a white girl,” said Justine.

  “See, that’s why I had to run away,” said Pearl. “What if my parents checked up on me? They pull back the covers on my bed only to find this bee-yoo-tiful white child!” Pearl started laughing. “You know what’s fucked? They’d like me better this way. I bet Sarah Anderson’s parents loved it when she caught the disease and went all double-lidded and six feet tall, like them. From now on they’ll never have to admit she’s adopted!” Laughing, laughing.