Neeta Lyffe, Zombie Exterminator

by Karina Fabian

  “I promise you—you have just faced the toughest challenge of this show. I guarantee this—you have not faced the toughest challenge of your career. Also, just because this was the toughest challenge, doesn’t mean someone won’t get hurt. Won’t get killed.”

  She paused. She figured they’d think she was giving them time for her words to sink in, but really, she was trying to remember how she’d phrased her next statement. By contract, she couldn’t mention Dave or the network or anything else that blew the illusion of reality. If she did, they’d have to re-shoot, and she knew darn well Dave would take that opportunity to exert his influence. She set her candle down and leaned toward the firelight. From her pocket, she withdrew six envelopes.

  “I’ve arranged for any of you to leave now. No obligations. No penalties. With twenty thousand dollars to thank you for your efforts. You can return home to a standard apprenticeship. You can start on a whole new career. All I ask is that you remember what you’ve learned these past six weeks. If that’s what you want to do, come here, pick up your contract, and throw it into the fire.”

  A moment of everyone shuffling and looking at each other. Katie pushed away from Spud, picked up her backpack and walked to Neeta. She stuck out her hand. The light reflected off her tear-streaked cheeks.

  After they watched the flames devour the envelope, Neeta stood and gave her a hug.

  “I’m sorry, Neeta,” she whispered.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

  They broke apart, and she turned to look at each of her former teammates.

  “I’m sorry,” she told them. “I want to help people. I really do. Zombie extermination is so important, but I can’t. I can’t watch another person die. I just can’t!”

  She heaved a heavy sigh, lifted her chin and strode out of the circle toward Bergie’s shrine. She kissed her fingertips and pressed them to his picture, then headed toward the waiting cars.

  “Well,” LaCenta said, “there’s one liability gone.”

  “I heard that, Placenta, you witch!”

  “Beautiful!” Dave said into their headpieces.

  * * * *

  Home once again, Roscoe leaned back in his computer chair and turned on the webcam. After checking his hair in the image projected on his screen and mashing his lips to give them more color, he set it to record. “Okay, so LaCenta said it first, and she was a totally out of line for saying it when she did, but honestly...”

  He leaned in close, sharing a secret, “...we were all thinking it.”

  He checked the file, saved it and uploaded it to his Zombie Death Extreme blog.

  “And then there were five.” He wove his fingers together and moved into a yoga stretch.

  Oh, gawd, was there any high better than surviving another episode?

  Chapter Two

  The Zombie Syndrome

  A Documentary

  By Gary Opkast

  Episode One: The Zombie Syndrome

  Opening scene: Romero-zombies lurching toward fleeing crowd (NOTE: Use actual footage from Night of the Living Dead? Ask Larry Eugene about rights issues.)

  NARRATOR: Zombies. The shambling undead of the horror films of old. They’re not a new concept. From the 1920’s, writers such as WB Seabrook and HP Lovecraft have written harrowing tales of the mindless undead, reanimated with a thirst for violence and a hunger for human flesh. (Too much? Maybe better tone it down for prime time?)

  The first, best known zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead, was criticized for being too terrifying to watch. Over time, however, the zombie genre moved from horrifying—

  Photo from movie or book cover (Not Living Dead—Re-Animator, perhaps?)

  NARRATOR: to friendly

  Scene from Disney film Hocus Pocus

  NARRATOR: to comical

  Scene from Shaun of the Dead

  NARRATOR: Cool

  Scene from Michael Jackson’s Thriller

  NARRATOR: and even classical

  Scene from movie Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

  NARRATOR: Never, however, did we believe that someday, reality would reflect literature—and it would be the nightmare stuff that once had audiences trembling in their seats.

  Movie scene of people in a theater, jumping, screaming, crying. FADE THROUGH to footage of the Superplex 20 Infestation of 2018.

  Switch to footage from expert interviews. (Note: Be sure to get Neeta in there. She’s hot!)

  * * * *

  When Gary heard the knock on the door, he called the person in with a “Yeah, yeah,” and kept typing. He had some footage of Neeta he thought might fit perfectly, though he’d have to ask her...

  When he looked up to see the actual Neeta walking in with Ted by her side, however, he yelped and slammed the lid of his laptop down.

  “Are we...interrupting something?” she asked.

  “No!” his voice rose and cracked for the first time since high school. He cleared and tried again. “No, nooo. Not at all. Something I can help you with?”

  Neeta set a greasy paper bag and a 40-ounce cup on the long table and leaned back against it. Los Angeles was experiencing a record high summer, and all of the studio’s AC credits were being used to keep Studio G cool for the filming of Global Warming/Global Winter. In deference to the heat, Neeta wore a tan tank top and cut off denim shorts. Just looking at the sheen on her skin made the temperature in the room rise another five degrees in Gary’s mind. Not like he had a chance with her, considering all the barfing he’d done over the past month. Would she ever see past that?

  On the bright side, he had lost the writer’s belly that came from too little exercise and too much BICHOK.

  “Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

  He glanced down at his keyboard. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Why?”

  She traded a glance with Ted then reached into her bag, pulling out the thickest pastrami sandwich he’d ever seen. She bit into it, chewing slowly as she regarded him with narrowed eyes. He was being weighed; he knew it, yet all he could think of was how good she made the simple act of chewing look.

  Yep, he’d been without a girlfriend for too long. He vowed to trawl the Internet that night and get himself signed up as a guest speaker at the next reality TV convention he could attend.

  She followed up the bite with a long sip of her drink. “All right. I’ve got a problem with the plebes. They know how the tools work, but they don’t believe in them.”

  “You mean like the chemical stuff?” He felt his spirits lift when she smiled and nodded. Maybe he didn’t have to look like such a dufus in her eyes. “Well, what if we reintroduced the stuff in a different label? Told them it was improved—”

  When she pinched her nose in that annoyed way of hers, he knew he’d missed the mark.

  “Gary, that won’t help them—and it doesn’t help anyone else. People need to understand that if a zombie invades their home, their best line of defense isn’t the butcher knife on the counter, but the cleanser under the sink. I mean, that’s part of what we want to do, educate people, right?”

  He thought about his documentary, hidden in his folded laptop. He wondered if she would say that again for him on camera. “I want that. I really do.”

  She dropped her hands, relaxing again now she knew he was on board. “Good, because I’ve been thinking. There’s a research and training center out east near Palm Desert. Very under-the-radar because they’re afraid of community outcry, but I have connections, and I think I can get a small crew in if we keep any identifying factors edited out. They have a small captive zombie population there. Our people—and the viewers—can see things like window cleaner and political handbills in action. Problem is, I’m not sure it’s exciting enough for Director Dave.”

  “You want my help convincing him?” Political handbills? Those really work? Thought that was urban legend.

  “Ted here has some ideas for some visuals, and if we can add your input on the script...”

  I could do a segment on that
for my documentary... Zombie Defense: Legend and Fact... and the people I’ll meet—real front-line experts...

  “Gary?”

  “Sorry?” He pulled himself back to their conversation.

  Neeta leaned forward and peered at him closely. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  He forced his eyes not to stray from her face. “Yep. Fine. Why?”

  “This hasn’t been an easy show for you.”

  She noticed! Sheesh, how could she not? He thought of bluffing, but decided she’d respect the honest approach. “Well, true. There won’t be any...eviscerations...or that kind of grossness, will there?”

  “Some of their stock has been there a long time. You’ll see varying levels of decay. I can’t make any promises about their experiments. I don’t think you’re eating well. Do you sleep?”

  “Like a baby.” A colicky one, but she didn’t need to know that. He swallowed down the bile the mere word “decay” had produced. “I’m your man.”

  “Yeah? Prove it.” She tossed her lunch bag on his desk.

  He looked at it, confused.

  “There’s half a pastrami sandwich in there, from the best pastrami place you’ll find on this coast. Let’s talk shop while you finish it off.”

  “You want me to eat it? Your sandwich?” Which your lips have touched...

  “Can you handle it?”

  He opened the bag, pulled out the half-wrapped thing. A strip of meat escaped and spilled onto his lap. He could see the half-moon indentation where her teeth had nibbled...She asked about my health. She shared with me her food.

  He bit down hard, his eyes rolling with pleasure.

  “See? Good stuff, right?” Satisfied, Neeta leaned back against the table. “So, I figure we have to start the usual way, with me explaining where we’re going and why...”

  * * * *

  In the studio mixing room, Dave leaned over the technician’s shoulder as he put together the personality segment on LaCenta for the next episode. The screens around them displayed news footage of the fire that destroyed her home and stock footage of zombies as they leered and shambled. They also showed bits of LaCenta from previous episodes, usually sneering, but sometimes in action, running the obstacle course with a spray gun or slicing an artificial tree with the chainsaw.

  In a corner, Sharon had her head bowed and eyes focused on her DoDroid, which played a children’s documentary about a free-range rabbit farm. Alberts had taken her aside and told her people had noticed her “change in behavior” this season. He’d offered to check her in at the Lindsey Lohan clinic, but she’d promised to find a better coping mechanism. So, bunny videos. Bunnies were cute and soft and only went for the throat in Monty Python movies. And they were so fuzzy!

  Occasionally, her coos caused the technician to glance back with annoyance.

  Dave grunted. “Okay, let’s see that last clip again.”

  LaCenta gave the camera her best “Do I really have to deal with you?” pout and tossed her cornrow braids. “Hey, I stand by what I said. Katie was a liability. All that sniffling and screeching. Probably gonna blow that twenty grand on tissues! I mean, Neeta told us often enough—you want to do this job, you’ve gotta be tough.”

  “Good!” Dave said. “Now, let’s move to the flashback...”

  The camera panned a low-income housing neighborhood in the depths of east LA. Small houses, irregularly kept; the camera focused in on one whose stucco chipped in spots and which boasted sheets for curtains, but whose yard was mowed and weed-free. Lights shown through the sheets, revealing music notes and faded silhouettes of a long-gone pop star. In the background, traffic sounds competed with the clear voice of a woman yelling for her kids to get themselves ready for bed. On the screen flashed the words “Dramatic Re-creation.”

  In the control booth, Dave said, “Cue narrator...”

  “Twilight, and the Dane family prepares for bed. Monique, single mother of three, has had a long string of bad relationships, but never has that interfered with her devotion to her children or her pride in keeping a well-run home.”

  A lovely thirty-something black woman washed the face of a grubby boy of ten and called out math help to her six-year-old son, while her older daughter set lunches into their bags. LaCenta’s voice spoke over.

  “I don’t even remember my daddy. None of us do. The ‘uncles’ she brought home—those that didn’t hurt us still weren’t worth much anyway. It was always us and Momma. She wasn’t smart about men, no lie there, but that don’t mean she was dumb, neither.”

  Unnoticed by the family, a slow-moving shadow lurched across the window.

  The narrator intoned, “That night, however, one of Momma’s ‘bad choices’ came back—in a most unexpected way.”

  The kitchen door crashed in, and a tall, black zombie with a dreadlock-laden scalp half hanging off its head staggered in. The children screamed and rushed behind their mother. They pelted it with everything they could find—knives, lunchboxes, math book. Monique dashed for the refrigerator. She shouted instructions to her children as she grabbed something. Her youngest son, Moe, grabbed the bottle of roach kill from the shelf and started spraying the air around them. Jamal, her older son, dug through the drawers and tossed her a pack of cigarettes. She threw it and the large ball of meat she’d pulled from the refrigerator into the small closet off the kitchen. When the zombie stumbled in after them, she locked the door while her son shoved a chair under the knob. LaCenta twisted dials on the stove. Meanwhile, the narrator explained.

  “LaVon Butler, 32 at the time of his death six months prior. He’d left their home in a fit of temper and had been killed in a bar fight later that evening. Now, some instinct had brought him back to the last home he’d had.

  “This time, however, Monique was not going to take him in. Thinking fast, she lured Butler into the pantry with the hamburger she was defrosting for the next day’s dinner and a packet of cigarettes. LaCenta, meanwhile, turned on their gas stove. Grabbing a rag and a bottle of rum as she hustled her children out the broken door, Monique fashioned a makeshift Molotov cocktail and set her own house on fire to destroy the contagion within.”

  The scene faded out as the family stood on the sidewalk, watching their house go up in flames, then faded in to a clip of LaCenta, 21, talking to Neeta at her audition.

  “They say, ‘You can’t take it with you,’ but Uncle LaVon always insisted he would. Damn fool did it, too. So, yeah, I got what it takes to exterminate these vermin. Rather do it right, before someone has to burn their house down, too, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Dave watched as the technician did a digital close up on LaCenta’s face. He slapped his shoulder.

  “Brilliant. Well done. Sharon, baby!” He snapped his fingers.

  Sharon ran to his side, eyes on the ground, muttering, “Pretty bunnies. Fuzzy, fuzzy.” Once she’d crossed the room to him, her eyes snapped up to his face, clear and focused. She hovered her stylus over her DoDroid. “Sir?”

  “We’re sure Uncle LaVon was destroyed in that fire? No chance of his coming back?”

  “None, sir.”

  Dave sighed. “Shame. Would have made a hell of an episode.”

  * * * *

  The main story of the morning news was the opening speeches of the latest UN Conference. A well-groomed man of nondescript heritage in an expensive suit and artificially whitened smile slammed his fist onto the podium and spoke with measured passion.

  “We can no longer afford to ignore the detrimental effect of Man’s unchallenged industrial development. Our struggling world, unbalanced into a repetitive cycle of Global Warming/Global Cooling...That itself is not enough, rather the poisons that developed nations have poured into our skies, our water, and our ground have sparked an unprecedented devolution! A species-wide threat with immediate ramifications to our continued survival.

  “Too long have we dug among the sediments of international politics and burrowed deeper into the intricacies of text and the minu
tiae of fine detail. Clearly, we must, as my predecessor once said, ‘soar above the ever-widening disconnect between an opaque and seemingly remote multi-lateral negotiation and the challenge at hand.’”

  The picture shrunk and moved to the right side of the screen revealing an anchorman with an artificial tan and equally artificial smile.

  “With these strong words, the Umm Durman Environmental Rescue Conference began, with the radical goal of stabilizing the temperature of the Earth and reducing carbon emissions and industrial waste by half by the end of 2050. Among the list are phosphates, various chlorines, and—”

  Neeta switched off the TV with a snarl. Once again, people who thought they were helping eliminate the zombie threat were going to make it harder for her to eliminate the zombie threat. Here she was, forced to play in a reality TV show in order to pay off her debts and stay in business, hopefully training up a couple of apprentice exterminators while she was at it. Still, what good were a half-dozen exterminators against the might of well-meaning nations? It was enough to drive the average man to drink.

  “Good thing I’m neither a man nor average,” Neeta answered the thought. Still, she had to do something before she threw her remote at the television. She glanced at the clock. She had an hour or so before the field trip. She threw on some grubby shorts and went to her workout room.

  The workout room had a weights set and an elliptical in one corner, but Neeta ignored them. She needed more vigorous exercise than that if she wanted to burn off her emotional funk.

  A control panel hung from a wire just past the equipment. She flipped the switch, and the lights came on across the large gymnasium with a satisfying series of heavy-duty clunks. Some typed commands, and the lighting began to flash and darken randomly. Heavy metal music and undead groaning camouflaged the sound of gears and pistons moving the zombie targets in their programmed pattern.

  Neeta fitted the special covering over her chainsaw blade. Rather than chew through the zombie dummies, it would mark them with self-dissolving ink. She could check her accuracy after the workout and the next day have clean targets to start again. She couldn’t help but grin. The special effects guys had done an excellent job preparing this for the third-week challenge, and she’d made sure she got to keep it after the filming. They’d even returned afterwards to add a few “special touches” just for her.