Zombie Mashup

by Robert Devereaux

  *****

  Apadravya’s dead fingers rested on the boy’s face for what seemed an eternity. Then they came away, relaxed to a curve, as the holy man shook his head.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Laura warmed into her husband’s ear. Not really, he thought. Just weirded out was all she was.

  “Me too, hon,” he said, but his eyes were riveted on the woman as she came forward and wept over the boy, still on the guru’s lap. Compassion but not commiseration stood in the holy man’s eyes, a light hand falling on his wife’s shoulder.

  Then it happened. At first, Travis thought it might be simple gravity, the turn of the boy’s hand—or a brush past it by Apadravya’s hand. But then it rose and gripped the woman’s arm, and the boy’s face was up and kissing his mother, her shuddering in amazement. And then they turned as, stumbling, she rose out of obscurity: There was blood between them, slick and new, her beige sweater red-icicled about the neck and her neck now below the ruin of her face a clutch-mouthed feast for her son.

  The yoga teacher had risen and come forward, thinking clearly to separate them. But as soon as he laid his hand on the boy, it turned from its fallen mother and clung, an activated magnet, to him. Tar baby. He backpedaled. Too late. The bloodmasked dead boy was working its bloody way up the off-white cotton of his thigh.

  *****

  Famished. An aching gape of hunger. Then, eyes in a scudded night opening. Dark lean-to. She peeled off from it, turning to rise, coat shrugged away and one thick numb gash bandoleered across her bloody front. Woozy thrumble, a catch on tombstone, neither cold nor hot at issue, but a hole into infinitude where her belly used to be. Mounded plots, spear-crunched under boot, slope gradual into black wink-gleam below. She led; she followed. A thing caromed against her, tumbled her groundward, scented her, stumbled on. She rose, followed sirens, lights, and a sear of cars scouring along Côte des Neiges. Down the mountain, down, down. Hunger flared. Her journey was long.

  *****

  It happened so fast. He and Laura sat stunned, eyes on the besieged yoga instructor, who fell under the chomp of the dead boy onstage in a bloody heap. They didn’t see his corpse-mother in one motion rise and fall upon the man sitting alone in the front row. His seat wrenched. Laura leaped up and Travis followed her leftward, shoving at the backs of those blocking the way: there was rude and there was necessary. Behind, the gutted yoga instructor rose to follow the toddler to the edge of the stage and over. The swami—one panicked look toward him sitting there with his legs crossed—was undergoing a titanic struggle and it was clear to Travis that his gentler side was losing. A woman screamed in the far aisle, and a high-pitched man shouted, “Keep your hands off mmmmrrrrh—!”

  They gained the aisle. Travis glanced behind. The front-row guy was pulling himself up, bloody half-hands on his seatback. Red wattles drooped from one cheek. Jesus, why had they sat so near? The aisle ahead was jammed with panic: people shoved, fallen. To the right, a steel door with a bright red Emergency Exit sign, clogged with clever folks possessed by the same brilliant idea.

  “This way,” said Travis, gambling on the side stairs to the stage. He shotgunned up them, reaching back a hand to Laura, pulling her free of the missed grasp of a newly risen ghoul. Ahead, the holy man was uncrossing his legs, a look of terrible conviction flaring upon his face. They veered left, past black hanging curtains, counting on some stage exit. Ropes and pulleys. A sound board. There it was, the way out. They took it. Stumbled down icy stairs into a dim-lit alley, Rue Mackay ahead if he was clear on where they were. They raced past dumpsters, light-pooled doorways, rounding northward out of the alley onto Mackay and straight into a moving crowd of hungry corpses, hands on Laura, hands on him, and then the cold crunch of teeth inevitable, biting deep.

  *****

  Out the stage door, instinct shot his hand out to his wife. “What?” she said, frantic. “This way,” said Travis and veered her rightward, down the alley away from Mackay, toward Bishop. Felt safer. Halfway in, past snow-crusted dumpsters, he glimpsed backward a mass of shamblers moving past the far alley-end. “Don’t look back,” he said, panic tight there, and Laura hunched her shoulders and quickened her pace to match his. Broke free of the alley’s grasp, a clear breath on Bishop, then past the Musée des Beaux-Arts and scurrying along Sherbrooke, eyes sharp, past Montagne, one more block to Drummond—crazy as it was, if a taxi had come along, he’d have hailed it—turned north, home plate, their building in sight. A few blocks away, Travis heard a brake-squeal, impact of metal on metal, horns flaring up inside the confused weave of sirens that had followed them home.

  A large man was heading south toward them, confusion in his walk. “He’s too close,” Laura said. “Run,” Travis urged, and they did. He was poised to cut them off, blood glistening on his bald head. “Wait!” he shouted, a living man; “back there!” pointing in horror. “Sorry, can’t help you. We’ll call the police,” Travis said, stunned that he and Laura kept walking, diagonaling across the dusted lawn to their apartment door. They might be dooming the sorry son-of-a-bitch. No matter. Couldn’t get involved, no need for the inconvenience. Jesus, couldn’t he tell they had their own problems? Anyway, Travis really would call the cops, not that he expected they needed calling.

  Closed the sucker out. He turned away from the front door, dismayed. “We should have—” Laura said and he told her he knew. He fumbled his keys, tried the wrong one, it was strange Marcie didn’t come to the door, found it, gave it a turn, heard the click, and felt the knob wrenched out of his grasp from within.

  *****

  His eyelids eased open. Travis saw that. Glisten of dark pupils, motionless and glazed. It amazed him, a dead toddler—for of that there could be no doubt—assuming the skin tone and motion and sleepy disorientation of a living breathing three-year-old.

  Laura gasped beside him. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “But why—?”

  “I’ll explain outside.” She was already rising. The woman’s face was wet with joy, her arms flung madly around her son. Apadravya sat quiet, corpse capable of miracles, danger hair-triggered beneath calm.

  Travis followed Laura to the aisle, stupidly ducking as if to render his leaving invisible. When they had made their way to the vestibule, he asked her—buttoning up his coat as she hers—what the problem was.

  “He’s good,” she said, hitting the doorbar and moving out onto Bishop, “he’s very good.”

  “The swami?”

  “He always was a mindfucker, but this is too much.”

  “What? The boy wasn’t—?”

  “It’s why I lasted such a short time at the ashram.” He did his best to keep up with her. Crossing Sherbrooke, he had to pull her back from stepping into the path of an advancing car. “He always seems so deeply holy, and never more so than tonight, even beneath that ridiculous makeup. But there’s always trickery lurking. Aysha—or Sherri as she was known before he arrived—wasn’t the only one. So wise, so warm, the man’s a snake. Even now, he’s a lure. I can see why I was drawn back tonight.”

  He fumbled a question.

  “Almost. He almost had me. Bra undone. Exposed to him. But he let slip a look he thought I wouldn’t see, a hunger. It was enough. I gathered up my things and left. Packed without telling anybody and knocked on my sister’s door in the middle of the night.”

  Sirens whipped through the winter chill, but the bare night-time streets were magical and calm. “But Laura, I’m sure that kid was dead. How could a three-year-old—?”

  “I don’t know. Apadravya’s hypnotic sometimes.”

  Travis recalled his mind wandering into fantasies of one sort or another as he listened. Maybe she was right.

  “And dead is dead. It’s not simply breathing, skin tone, the outward signs. There’s brain damage involved. Organ damage. That child stood up there normal as could be. No, we were set up and I’m upset enough about it to call the cops. They could probably deport him on charges of drugging that little bo
y.”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “He has that effect on people.” Drummond at last. “Ah, home,” she said. “Lovely Jenny. Lovely Marcie.”

  Brief surge of Marcie’s face and form. “I love them too. You don’t suppose that tonight we might . . . ?”

  “Might what?”

  “You know,” he said. “What we talked about.”

  “Dirty old man. Now who’s the Svengali?”

  “Just say maybe, that’s all, maybe.”

  The look Laura gave him was the type he wanted to pry off, it promised such sweets beneath the lidded tin of her eyes. “Maybe,” she said coyly, and they were on their way up the walkway to the front door.

  *****

  Wet thing cooled as Marcie munched, what she craved from it escaping through her teeth. Lost interest. She let the bunched bone-loose residue floop floorward.

  Hint of sound back where she’d come from re-roused a need, same urgency, her bewilderment at the moist thing’s inability to satisfy displaced by the monotonic pounding of I-want in her brain. She retraced her lurch out into brightness, hallway, food photos, crimson twin in mirror, key-jiggle at the door, turn, snick of deadbolt. Caught the slippery knob, crimped it, instinctual twist and tug, quick swing open: the meat, corpus animus, bi-fold. She hooked at heads, her hands thrilling to the warm vibrancy of neckmeat; but her grip held fast and the roaring faces came closer as her neck went sideways like a lover coming in for a kiss and she shoved them, despite a bonetooth of resistance, deep inside her mouth—two ripe breasts vying for the same insistent D-cup.

  *****

  “Home early, I see.” That smile. It made Travis’s heart do backflips.

  “You know how it goes,” he said, following Laura’s terse uh-huh inside. “A certain lovely lady got fed up with a certain guru’s sleight of hand and—”

  “And here we are,” said Laura, paused with a hanger. “How was the little one?”

  “Fine, fine. Slept all this time, not a whimper. I checked on her maybe half an hour ago. Dry as a bone.”

  Inside, he was feathers in wind. “How about a glass of wine and some conversation before you go?”

  “Why not?”

  “Let me get it,” Laura offered, giving him a look he wished he could read. “White okay?” she asked, moving to the kitchen door, passing through it at their yeses.

  Now, he thought, now. He considered coming up behind her, surprising her with a waistwrap. But she turned from the kitchen and there were those warm inviting eyes again. He held their gaze, opening to her as he approached, needs there yes, but also his naked integrity and his generosity toward her, his longing to comfort and embrace and incite her, to foment riots in her, to bubble her over and watch her glow and explode under his touch.

  “What are you doing?” asked Marcie, and then her lips were there full and warm under his, and her amazingly lush body welled up beneath the press of textile. Peeling back off the kiss, he drifted to her ear, whispering there.

  “You want me to?” she asked.

  “She’s ready.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Go on, you’ll see.”

  She stepped away, stopped. “You’d better be right or you’re dead meat,” she said, then moved off.

  “Don’t I know it.” Travis watched her go through the kitchen door. All he had, riding on this. Would she have the nerve to try? Or would they spar about one another as they pretended otherwise, chicken out, watch the evening’s possibilities fade? It was awfully quiet in there. Corks not popping, no plash of wine on glass, no murmur of small talk, nothing. Outside, the window-dimmed keen of sirens; inside, the beating of his heart.

  He closed on the kitchen door, went in, turning right around the leather-tan shine of the fridge. His chest was thick with dread and wonder. And there they stood, corked bottle forgotten on the counter, Laura’s tight blond frame lovingly enfolded in Marcie’s embrace. Familiar kisses in murmur there before him, his wife’s yum-give-me-more under lips that still tingled at his.

  Travis went to them, nice unhurried drift into female warmth that opened up to triangulate him. He kissed Laura long and deep, mirrored and modified it on Marcie’s mouth; cupped buttocks—flank of filly and mare—as the two women shared the moist secrets he’d pressed into their lips.

  “Let’s go to the bedroom,” he suggested, voice husky as heated flannel.

  “Honey? Shouldn’t we check on the baby?” Still shy, even now; and not a little woozy, as if the wine had found its way out of the bottle to her head.

  “Not now,” he assured. “Time enough later.”

  Then they moved off, riding the dream.

  *****

  Aysha glowed, uncertain if she were awake or asleep. Rajib had concluded satsang quickly and she supposed she ought to feel guilt, but there was the fact of her living son, once dead and meatlike, now quick and warm, and Vish made all the rest of it inconsequential.

  In the car, Rajib’s young countryman driving, she had reached past Vish’s thumbsuck to touch Rajib’s hand. Ooze of warm unguent, tingling as if irradiated. “Stay with us tonight,” she said, “with me and Vish.” Rajib’s awareness flitted over his eyes like a long-legged fly over stagnant pond-water. Then he spoke to his driver and Aysha offered directions.

  She made tea, carrying the tray in to where Vish sat, thumb in mouth, staring at his father and nodding his head to any question. The tea lay untouched in its pot, steam from the thick spout dying down. Aysha walked Vish to his bed, tucked him in, kissed him, tore herself away with the greatest reluctance. Rajib sat precisely where she’d left him. She took his hand, clasped it palm to palm, pressing the dark back of it against her cheek—a faint sweet smell and a hint of foul. Four years rolled back. His goodness seemed ever daunting, but he had never stopped her—and he didn’t do so now—from initiating intimacy. Aysha’s knees dimpled the sofa cushion beside him. In the soft light of the oil lamp, he seemed almost alive.

  His eyes tracked her. As she neared his face, slowly drifting in, she remembered how deep he got. Exponential. Asymptotic. But where once there had been joys unbearable and intense, orgasms of eye and nose to presage the sexual delights to come, now the joys were darkly tinged. In his gaze was the daunt of a hurricane eye. Upon his lips, she tasted bitter forbiddenness. She pressed deeper, his cool tongue flexing in familiar response as she probed. At the taut tease of his bite, micro-struggle at jaw-hinge, Aysha withdrew, rose, took his hand, led him to her bedroom.

  *****

  Beneath the accordion-shuttered window, upon the slap and sploosh of their waterbed, Travis and Laura took their new beloved first. Marcie melted under their happy chore, her hands idling nicely upon strokable flesh as they found their lingual ways into her hot spots. She gushed and she swelled—and her release, a cataclysmic upheaval of seized and frenzied womanhood, delighted Travis to the depths.

  Unlike Laura, who dishragged into limpness for a time after orgasm, Marcie tigered up supercharged from hers and dove for the sweet loins of his wife. Laura’s giggle soon gave way to her yummy lip-gnawing sounds, woven with wind-howls from outside and the rattle of glass above. He gave her a deep kiss, asked her, mid-squinch, if she was having a good time, took her nostril-wheezy devour of a kiss as a positive response, and that then turned into an inhalation presaging the luff and buffet of her coming.

  His ear teased him. He thought he heard the scrunch, slow and covered by woman-delight, of snow outside, almost as if someone were approaching the window. Then, shatters to scare the shit out of him, as the wood-slatted shutters angle-arced open over him like twinned jib-swings, booming right and left to let in a stinging spray of glass, abrupt waves of waspish pain carried in on unspeakable stench and winter cold. Marcie’s back welled crimson under triangles of glass. Laura was screaming, trying to gain her balance on the waterbed, trying to cast off the cracked glaze that coated her torso. But then invader-stench hooked Travis’s nose, and through the misted ache of his
unblinded eye, he saw the jag-torso’d dead woman crawl through the window to lay claim to their lives.

  *****

  Aysha undressed. She unwrapped her lover beside her bed, oil-lit dark skin oily and cool beneath her fingers, his clothing slick with savory-smelling unguent. Decades of hatha yoga had slimmed and toned his body, reminding her always, and especially now, of Jesus on the cross.

  “I’ve missed you, Rajib,” she said softly.

  “It is good to be with you,” came his reply.

  She put her arms around him, standing there, and felt his hands lightly slat above the small of her back. White skin to brown, blond hair to black. Lovely naked embrace, full body. He was soft below where she remembered whippet hardness, thin sickle of dogtail roused. Her fondling did nothing. She fell to her knees, kissing a quiescent chest and abdomen, no breath there, just aromatic sheens of ooze like ancient spices preserving a corpse. Dark pubic wire. The small retired wrinkle of Rajib’s penis. Aysha took it in like a second tongue, all of it, bathing it with saliva but to no avail. It had a subtle sweetness about it, like salt-sweet taffy, and the tip oozed drops of liquid manna, rolled like honeyed wine on her tongue before sliding down her throat.

  “No blood,” Rajib said, resting his hands on her bare shoulders. “No hardening. Lie down. And I will pleasure you.”

  She obeyed, settling on the cool blanket and watching the dark form of her husband part her thighs with bonelike steady hands, blessing her womanhood with his eyes. Lower he went, half on the bed, half off, until his lips touched her labia and his nose and forehead settled into a beloved pattern of duck and rise. She watched him as the feelings began, connecting with his eyes as in the old days, but in them, there cowered that dead thing she’d first noticed on the stage. It gleamed in oil-light. It thrilled, mingled there with his kindness. No breath on her yoni, no coming up for air, just movement and steady rise, soft sly tongue on her clitoris, then teeth, something new, upper teeth to lower trapping the wet nub, slick of cool tongue traveling to and fro, but the stiff enamel pressure crossed the line from pleasure to pain.