Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  The turducken is delicious. The mashed potatoes are just right. The rolls are great. And the homemade pecan pie is the perfect way to end the meal.

  You go to your usual place on the far right-hand side of the sofa and watch the tree lights blink, watch the banked fire blaze, watch Jimmy Stewart run through dark streets. You pick up one of the photo albums and open to a random page. That was you, once. That was your family, once.

  The pain is getting pretty bad. You’ve been sticking with the Demerol for the last couple of days because you wanted to be lucid enough in case something happened—a word, a gesture, a touch, something, anything.

  The rest of the family take their traditional places. You look out the window and see that it’s begun to snow. Good God, could there ever be a more perfect Norman Rockwell-type of Christmas scene?

  You make yourself an eggnog and Pepsi. Everyone used to say how disgusting that sounded, so when you’d make the drink for your friends and family when all were still alive, you’d never tell them what it was until after they’d tasted it. Once tasted, everyone loved it. Your legacy. Could do worse.

  Afraid I’m not feeling too well, folks. Haven’t been taking my meds like I should.

  Isn’t anyone going to scold me for that?

  You stare at the unopened Christmas presents under the tree. It’s been so long since you’ve wrapped them you’ve forgotten what’s in any of the boxes, only that they were gifts you gave a lot of thought to, hoping that they’d make everyone smile.

  You go into the kitchen and remove several 4 mg vials of Dilauded from the refrigerator, make yourself another eggnog and Pepsi, and grab the bottles of Percocet and Demerol.

  Back in the living room, in your traditional place, you lay out everything, then discard the Percocet and Demerol because they seem like overkill. Overkill. Funny-sounding word, that. Considering.

  You draw the vials of Dilauded into the syringe until it is full. You almost tap it to clear any air bubbles, then realize what a silly thing that would be.

  This has been a nice Christmas, hasn’t it?

  It really means a lot to me, that you still come here and help with all the decorating.

  You look at the television. Jimmy Stewart is now back in the real world, and everyone in town is dumping money on his table. Donna Reed smiles that incredibly gorgeous smile that no other actress has ever managed to match.

  Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” begins to play. The perfect song to end the day. To end on. To end. You slip the needle into your arm but do not yet sink the plunger. There is a passing moment of brief regret that you threw out the gun, because you know what that’s going to mean. But maybe you won’t remember, and, in not remembering, there will be no caring, no hurt, no regret or loneliness.

  You look at each of your family members one more time. None return your gaze. They look either at the tree or the fire or at the snow outside.

  Merry Christmas, everyone, you say.

  You slowly sink the plunger. If your research has been correct, once the syringe has been emptied, you will have at best ninety seconds of consciousness remaining, but you can already feel yourself slipping down toward darkness before the plunger has hit bottom. But that’s all right.

  You have enough time to pull the needle from your arm and lay back your head.

  Bach fades away, and is followed by “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” You’re surprised to feel a single tear forming in your right eye.

  Do you like . . . like the music, Dad?

  Shadows cross your face, obscuring the lights of the tree. You blink, still slipping downward, and see that your family is surrounding you. Looking at you. At you.

  You reach out one of your hands. It takes everything that remains of you to do this.

  . . . , you say.

  . . . , they reply.

  And your family, with the light of recognition in their eyes, as if they have missed their son and brother for all of these years, takes hold of you, enfolding you in their arms, and the best Christmas you’ve ever known is completed.

  About the Author

  Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of the acclaimed Cedar Hill series of stories and novels, which includes In Silent Graves, Coffin County, Far Dark Fields, and the forthcoming A Cracked and Broken Path. His work had garnered five Bram Stoker Awards, as well as an International Horror Guild Award. He lives in Worthington, Ohio with his wife, author Lucy A. Snyder, and five cats that don’t hesitate to draw blood if he fails to feed them in time. He has been rumored to sing along with Broadway show tunes, but no recorded evidence of this exists or has yet to be found.

  Story Notes

  Although Braunbeck hints there are dangers to humans from zombies—his protagonist’s disease makes him immune to the “awakening” and unpalatable to zombies—it appears “offstage.” And, despite the zombie family’s apparent lack of recognition of their still-human relation, something draws them back, year after year, to their home. He leaves it to the reader to decide what.

  Farewell, My Zombie

  Francesca Lia Block

  They call a male P.I. a private Dick. So what would they call me? Not the C word or the V word, that would be much too offensive. There are plenty of Dicks but no Vaginas walking around. That just wouldn’t be right, now would it? Maybe my title would be Jane. Private Jane. Dick and Jane. Makes you wonder why Jane hasn’t been used as a nickname for female genitalia before. Better than a lot of them. Men have a nicer selection.

  It was one of those warm L.A. autumn days when you felt guilty if you were at the beach while other people were working or freezing their asses off somewhere, and even more guilty if you were sitting in an office letting your life slip away. That’s what I was doing. Sitting in my office with my black-booted feet up on the table (even though it was too hot for boots), staring at the window, wondering why I wasn’t at the beach. But I knew why. The beach made me think of Max.

  I tried to distract myself by poking around some paranormal activity Web sites on the iMac. There was an extended family in the Midwest who ghost hunted together. They had a disclaimer on their site that they could turn down any job that felt too dangerous. The woman kept spelling the word “were” like “where” and “You’re” like “your.” That happened so much online I wondered if someone had officially changed it and not told me.

  That was when I got the call.

  “Merritt,” I said.

  “Jane Merritt?” the caller asked.

  “Speaking.”

  “Sorry, I . . . I need some help.”

  “That’s what we’re here for. You’ll just need to come in and fill out some forms.”

  There was a silence on the line and for a second I thought the call had dropped.

  “Hello?”

  “Uh, yeah. Thanks. Sorry”

  “So when would you like to come in? Everything perfectly confidential, of course.”

  “Thanks. Sorry. It’s about my father.”

  “I see. Yes.”

  “He’s a monster.”

  I waited for the giggling on the other end. She was obviously very young. I got calls like this all the time. Curious teens with too much time on their hands.

  No giggling.

  “I mean really,” she said. “A real monster.”

  Then she hung up.

  No one else called that day. Business had been slow. I left the office early and stopped at the West L.A. Trader Joe’s for a few groceries. Bagels, cream cheese, apples, celery, the cheapest Pinot Noir I could find, and a tub of cat cookies, plus a can of food for David. I wanted to buy myself flowers because that’s what all the women’s magazines tell you to do when you haven’t been fucked in too long, but I decided not to waste the money.

  There was big bouquet of fourteen white roses with a pink cast. They looked pretty good but I knew they’d blow up in a few days in this weather, petals loosening from their cluster and drifting to the floor. Besides, roses were another thing that reminded me of Max.
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  I went home and watched CNN while David and I ate dinner. Bad news as usual. The economy, disasters, war. Not to mention global warming and assorted acts of violence. It was like a horror movie, really. I drank the whole bottle of wine. Then I took a bath and went to bed. I had really weird dreams about letting Max go by himself on a train at night and then realizing what I had done and not being able to get anyone to understand why I was so upset when he didn’t come home. Dreams are cruel; they won’t let you forget.

  Coco Hart came to see me about a week later. She was a beautiful girl in a private school uniform skirt and blouse and a ratty sweatshirt that was too hot for the weather. Her long hair up in a ponytail and makeup so lightly and carefully applied that only the most discerning eyes would notice it. She looked perfectly well adjusted but her fingernails were bitten down so far that it hurt to look at them.

  “I called you,” she said after she’d introduced herself. Her eyes darted around the room trying to find clues. I don’t have any in this tiny, dingy office. Not even a photo of Max. I had to hide it in a drawer.

  “About your father?”

  She nodded.

  “Is he hurting you?”

  “No,” she said. “Sorry. It’s not that.”

  “You can tell me. I’m here to help.”

  “Thank you. You were the only woman I could find. Well except that one who tries to entrap the guys by wearing wigs in their favorite color.”

  People always mention her when they come to see me. I’m nothing like that Amazon. Just cause we are both Janes.

  “So why not her?”

  “I heard that interview with you.”

  There’s only been one. It was in conjunction with the new X-Files movie. The local news compared me to Fox Mulder because of my interest in the paranormal. I expected business to boom after that but it didn’t. In L.A. you have to look like a movie star with big tits or be a guy to make it big in this business. I’m neither.

  In the interview I talked a little about some weird, dark stuff, the kind of thing teenagers and X-Files fans eat up. But most teens aren’t going around hiring a P.I. and the X-Files fans would rather watch David Duchovny reruns. Like the famous female P.I. who wears the wigs he has a lot more sex appeal than I do.

  Coco put her hand to her mouth as if she were about to chew on what was left of her nails, then thought better of it and folded her hands tightly in her plaid-skirted lap. She looked out at the sunny fall day. The leaves of the tree outside my window looked like they were on fire. I didn’t know what kind of tree it was. I wondered why Coco was here and not at some mall with her friends or something.

  She took some crumpled bills out of her sweatshirt pocket and put them on the table.

  “That’s all I have,” she said. “But I’ll get more.”

  “And you want me to do what exactly?”

  “Oh. Uh. Sorry.” She hesitated. “Do you believe in zombies?” she said, finally.

  Fuck.

  Sorry but I am not going to pretend to you that I am normal. I am not normal in any way. Yes I shop at Trader Joe’s and watch CNN, get my hair cut on a regular basis, shower, and use deodorant. I wear my dark hair scraped back in a tight bun like I did on the force, and dress in flat-front black trousers and white-stretch button down shirts from the Limited and black heels or flats or boots from Macy’s and lightweight trench coats. But that’s the only normal stuff.

  First of all I am a female P.I. Second of all I live in a silver Airstream trailer in my ex-husband’s backyard in Mar Vista. I walk or bike everywhere because I’m afraid that even driving a little will make more holes in the ozone. I wear black Converse and keep my heels in my backpack. I smoke cigarettes even though I know they are bad for me but I take vitamins and won’t eat anything with hydrogenated oils or wash my hair with shampoo that has sodium laurel sulfate because I heard it is a carcinogen. I don’t know why I really care; it must be left over from being a mom and the thing that happened—although I don’t believe that was really the cause.

  I have a dog named David who is like my son. When spell check tells me to write “that” instead of “who” while referring to my dog I get angry. He is a mutt and he likes to roam the neighborhood and bring back presents. Sometimes he brings me pigeons and I thank him but then I scold him. Once on Easter he came to the door of the trailer holding a fully cooked ham proudly in his jaws. I didn’t scold him for that although some nice family must have had a gaping hole in their dinner menu. David likes me to hold him like a baby with his round tummy sticking out and his front paws draped over my arm like little hands. Sometimes I forget that he is a dog.

  I had a real son once. His name was Max. Now he’s gone but I don’t want to talk about it. I was a cop and I got kicked off the force after what happened. I had what they call a breakdown and Max’s dad who is also a cop divorced me and married a kickboxing instructor named Kimmy. When I got out of the hospital they let me live in the trailer in the backyard of what used to be my home. I can see my old house through the trailer window. It is a long, low structure painted avocado green. My ex and I were always planning on repainting it but we never got around to that. Then Kimmy came and picked the green. It looks nasty, even monstrous in certain lights. I planted the roses in the garden but I’ve stopped trying to take care of them. Once Kimmy came out while I was watering and weeding. I said, “Sorry,” and scuttled back into my trailer. The roses remind me.

  At night I stay up watching the windows of my old bedroom until the lights go out.

  I went into this work because I didn’t know what else to do. I thought it would help me forget to get up every day and go to my little office on Washington. It helps me forget that I was ever Max’s mom but it makes me remember the hospital and the doctor’s face, as I sit here waiting for someone who really needs me to come in.

  I mostly just follow cheating husbands and wives. Once I followed a woman who was engaged to two men at the same time. The guy who hired me was so upset he started crying in my office. Then he wanted me to dress up like her and fuck him. That was the most eventful case I’d handled so far. But the thing that happened with Max made me open to the possibility of stuff that wasn’t so easy to understand.

  Coco told me that her father had been behaving very strangely. She’d seen him eating flesh in big, gross, salivating bites and it didn’t look like cow, pig, goat, lamb, chicken, or turkey. Let’s just say that. And he never spoke anymore. After his stroke he shambled around the house with these heavy steps just staring at the floor. He grumbled and grimaced and that was all. His skin was a weird shade of greenish white and once when he was asleep she’d felt for a pulse and there wasn’t one there. He smelled bad, too.

  I said, “Sorry but I have to ask you something. What makes you think he’s one of the undead though? I mean, how do you think this could have happened?”

  Coco’s father was a car salesman in Van Nuys. He’d done pretty well for himself selling SUVs until people stopped being able to afford gas at almost five dollars a gallon. The stress was too much for him. While waiting for the electric car to return he’d had a stroke and almost died. Well, according to Coco there was no “almost” involved.

  “When he came back from the hospital,” Coco said. “He just wasn’t the same.”

  “What was he like before?” I asked.

  “Well, kind of like now. Except I recognized the meat he ate and he had better skin tone and a pulse. And . . . sorry, but . . . he didn’t smell so bad.”

  I tried not to say, “Ouch. Harsh.” I was trying to behave with some decorum.

  “You sound very angry at your father,” I said, recalling a psych class I’d taken in junior college.

  “Sorry. My father is all right. Well, he was. Before he turned into a monster. I mean, he’s a Republican. He voted for George W. And he’s against women’s right to choose. He still supports the war. But he’d never lay a hand on me, you know. But I’m worried about what he’s doing to other people. Where he
like, gets his dinner and that kind of thing.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” I asked.”

  “Um, I think you know why. Sorry . . .”

  “So you came to me.”

  “Well,” she said, “Not everyone’s kid gets stolen by zombies. I mean, I saw it on YouTube.”

  Okay, sorry it’s true. The thing I’m known for is about Max and the zombies. I wasn’t really interviewed by the local news. I made a video for YouTube and posted it talking about what happened. That’s how Coco had found me. Not the guy whose fiancée was cheating on him; he got my name out of the phone book.

  See, people think my kid got sick and died but I know better. No one wants to talk about it because they’re afraid everyone will think they are crazy. Or maybe because they’re afraid of even worse consequences.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked Coco.

  “Would you please pretend you’re a customer and check him out?” she asked. “They have really good deals on Escalades now,” she added.

  “I ride a bike.”

  I borrowed Daniel’s car and went to the car dealership where Coco’s dad worked. They hired him back part time after the stroke. It was night and the cars glowed surreally in the fluorescent lights. The air smelled obscenely of flowers and motor oil.

  Mr. Hart lumbered out toward me, tucking his shirt into his pants. He had a large belly and stiff legs and arms. His skin did have an unhealthy sheen to it.

  “How can I help you, young lady?” he groaned. A foul, sulfur smell emitted itself from his body. “We have some great deals on SUVs tonight. What are you driving?”

  “A bike,” I said.

  He looked at me dully. “Thinking of upgrading then?”

  “You don’t sell any electric cars?” I asked.

  “No. Why? You do a lot of driving?”

  “Not so much. I’m concerned about the environment.”