I skipped school and went straight out to see her. “Are you infected?” I asked. She looked the same as always. But sometimes, they looked the same. Sometimes, they could even still talk.
“Of course I’m not,” she said.
I wanted to believe them so I could give up on her and mourn. “You’d say that if you were.”
That pissed her off. “You think I’m bitten? You think I’d be horrible enough to want out of here if I was? Do you think I want to be the cause of another outbreak?” She pulled off her shirt, then her pants, and unhooked her bra, all faster than I could think of a response. “See? No bites.”
She kept her underwear on. She’d whipped off her bra, but left those on. “What about on your hips?” I said.
Her face turned red, as if she suddenly realized that she was standing in front of me almost naked. “How could a zombie bite me through my underwear and not leave any marks on them?”
“Maybe it happened when you were going to the bathroom or something,” I said. I stared at her, searching for signs of the change.
“I didn’t get bit there.” She sounded close to tears.
“Prove it!”
She didn’t move.
I took a step back. She was lost. Dead. No, worse than dead—a monster. I started to walk away.
“Wait!” she shouted. “I swear, I didn’t get bitten.”
“Then prove it.”
“I was drunk.” Her voice shook. “I didn’t know what I was doing, and I’ve been saving up to get it removed.”
“What are you talking about?”
She took off her panties very slowly, then turned for my inspection.
There was no bite, but she had a tattoo that I hadn’t known about, just below the crest of her pelvis.
My name.
She was crying. Sobs this time, with painful gasping breaths between them. “I’m not infected.” Her voice was different when she was crying. I’d never heard it like that before. “I’m not!”
I didn’t know what to say to her. How could I? She was in love with me, and some tattoo artist somewhere knew it—half the school probably knew it—and I hadn’t? She was my best friend.
“Is this what happened on the Fourth of July?”
She nodded and wiped her eyes, but she refused to look at me.
“You should have told me,” I finally managed.
“What good would it have done?”
I couldn’t answer her. I just didn’t feel the same way about her and we both knew it. “I’m still looking for a way to get you out of there.”
“I love you,” she said. Her voice still sounded different.
I wanted to cry. I ran home.
The next day, she wasn’t there.
There was a dark spot in the shadows of the woods. It might have been blood. But it might not have been.
Where the Heart Was
By David J. Schow
David J. Schow’s most recent novels are Gun Work and Internecine. He is also the author of the novels The Kill Riff, The Shaft, Bullets of Rain, and Rock Breaks Scissors Cut. One of the early innovators of zombie fiction, he is the author of the notorious story “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy,” which, along with several other zombie tales, appears in the collection Zombie Jam. Schow has done a lot of work in television and film, including co-writing (with John Shirley) the screenplay for The Crow and writing teleplays for Showtime’s Masters of Horror. Schow is also generally considered to be the originator of the term “splatterpunk.”
Our lives are full of things that we wish would just go away: worries, fears, doubts. Also bills, advertisements, and enemies. And also, of course, rotting corpses. Them most of all. Alas, in the case of zombies, these things we never wanted to see again have returned, and while they may run amuck in our streets, cause our civilization to collapse, and bite and convert our neighbors and friends, at least we can be consoled by the knowledge that they can be stopped by a bullet through the brain, and that this time—dammit—they’re staying down.
It’s troubling when something you’re trying to get rid of comes back once when all the laws of reason and common sense say it can’t, but how much worse is it when that same unwanted thing keeps coming back over and over again? As children, many of us were given nightmares by a Warner Bros. cartoon in which a family goes to ever more elaborate lengths to abandon its incredibly annoying dog, only to have the dog show up at the front door again and again and again. If the cartoonists thought this sort of thing was amusing, they were wrong—it’s terrifying, a fact Stephen King well understood when he wrote his story “The Monkey,” about a cursed toy that simply cannot be disposed of. Our next story combines these two ideas. It’s bad enough when a rotting corpse comes crawling home. But what if it turns into a habit?
Victor Jacks ambled through the back door to ruin their lives on Thurs-day. Which was a pain, since Victor had been pronounced dead the pre-vious Saturday.
“Stubborn sumbitch.” Renny reached under the bed for the ballbat. He was on hands and knees, forced to paw around until it finally came out with dustballs and hair kitties chasing it. Renny, who was allergic to animal dander, sneezed ear-poppingly. This trebled his rage.
Renny’s life was one that Victor’s back-from-the-dead encore was designed to ruin. Barb’s was the other. Just now she was backed into a corner, shrieking like an ingenue in a fifty-year-old horror film. Unlike those World War II heroines, she was naked. Renny still had his socks on. Apart from his Timex, he was garbless, but for the baseball bat. This, he refused to yield in the name of mere modesty.
Victor looked a bit shaggy, having been deceased for the better part of the work week. His shoulder blades, butt and legs down to the heels were blue-black with dependent lividity. His eyes were so crusty that one was welded shut. His hair was lank and wild, the most alive thing about him; his skin tone hung somewhere between catgut and bottled pig’s knuckle.
He crackled as he moved. That would be rigor.
He had obviously been walking for some time. At each of his joints the dry flesh had split into gummy wounds with chafed and elevated flaps. The distance from the morgue to Barb’s bedroom was about twelve pedestrian miles.
Provided, that is, Victor had come here directly, after sitting up on his slab and deciding to ruin their lives, Renny thought. And that pissed him off even more.
Renny’s next explosive sneeze spoiled his aim. He wiped his nose with his forearm. Barb kept screaming, totally out of character for her, and Renny wished in a mean flash that she would either faint or die.
Enough.
At the crack point it was the batting that mattered, not the invec-tive. The bulb end of the bat smashed Victor’s dead left ear deep into the dead left hemisphere of his dead brain. Victor wobbled and missed his zombie grab for Renny. He didn’t have a chance.
Renny was foaming and lunatic, swinging and connecting, swinging and connecting, making pulp. It was what he had ached to do to Victor all along. What he had fantasized about doing to Victor just last week, when Victor was still alive. His yelling finally drowned out Barb, who was still shrunken fetally into her corner, her eyes seeking the deep retreat of trauma.
Renny’s eyes were pink with rage. Flecks of froth dotted the corners of his mouth. He kept bashing away with the bat, pausing only to sneeze and wipe. Victor put up as good a fight as a dead person could, which is to say, not much.
While the Renny on the outside was cussing and bludgeoning, the Renny on the inside was smirking about several things. Number one—zombie movies. In the movies, reanimated corpses boogied back from the dead with all kinds of strength and powers. What a bagload. Cadav-ers had all the tensile strength of twice-cooked pasta. Even in the mov-ies, you could put them down with a headshot. What threat, where?
Deeper down, Renny was enjoying himself. He thought Barb watched too much cable. When he had first proposed murdering Victor—just as a hoot, mind you, nothing serious—she burdened him with probable cause and airtight ali
bis and where-were-you-on-the-night-of. Ridiculous, in a world where people simply dropped off the planet on a daily basis, never again a peep. You break his neck, you dump him in the first available manhole, the sewer is a disposal system, end of story.
Barb had wanted to play faithful and loving right up to the climax of the drama. Loving, hah. Faithful, not since she’d met Renny.
In the end it hadn’t come down to murder, but right now Barb sure was reaping some drama.
Things were so lively right now that Renny had busted a workout sweat and Barb’s vocal cords were rawing. He finally turned around and told her to shut up while what was left of Victor Jacks twitched in a pile on the floor. The business end of the bat was a real mess.
“Is he dead?” said Barb, cowering.
“I don’t think he’s gonna move no more right now.” Renny would have wiped his be-gored hands on his pants; his pants had been off since just after dinnertime. He let his hands hang in the air as he looked around, uselessly. He said sheeeit, slow and weary. It didn’t help.
“How? How did he? He…we…I don’t…it just.” Barb was still having a bit of trouble being coherent.
“Victor was always a stubborn sumbitch, you know that one, babe.”
Barb stood up and risked moving a little closer to what was left of Victor. “Maybe he, you know, didn’t really die. Went into a coma or some-thing.”
“Barb, Victor was dead. He was dead last week and he was still dead when he walked in on us. He is the deadest thing I ever saw.”
“You knocked his head off,” she said, dully.
“Stopped him, didn’t it?”
“What’re we gonna do, Renny? He’s all…ehh.”
“Shush. What we’re gonna do is call the morgue and tell them some pervert snatched the body and mutilated it, and dumped it here as a joke. Some old boyfriend of yours. You can make up a description. Nobody’ll bug us.”
“What makes you so smart?”
Renny had to stop a moment to ponder a good answer to that one.
“I mean, you think they’ll buy it?” There she went again. Barb was one of those people who strolled through life obliviously, thinking a call to the police would sling her free of any sort of trouble. Now she was just as convinced that the Authorities—capital A—would swoop down at any moment to point j’accuse.
“Babe, just dream up a good description. Say he was a Mexican in a green windbreaker.”
“But Renny, I’d never go out with no Mexican, and how come I have to say he’s my old boyfriend? I mean—”
Renny sighed, held her by the shoulders, met her eyes. “We’ll deal. Trust me. Please.” He forced a smile for her. It was like jamming a finger down his throat to chuck up an emotion. He needed to divert her, to say something that would get her mind off police procedure, so he said, “Uh—got any towels?”
Renny mopped off. Barb brought a big Hefty bag. Renny stuck the bat back under the bed. Touching it again made him re-experience the sheer satisfaction of pounding ole Victor right back into death, and this gifted him with a healthy and urgent erection.
Barb glimpsed what was coming up, and managed to finish him off before the police came knocking. Once again she told Renny that she’d never done that with Victor, and Renny smiled and stroked her head, keeping to himself the private notion that Barb could probably suck the stitches off a hardball through a flexi-straw. Victor Jacks would never have hung with a china doll. Renny would never have been tempted by one, either.
Then the Authorities arrived, and Renny and Barb set about making up stories.
Funerals never were much of a hoot. Neither Barb nor Renny had RSVPed many in their combined forty-odd years, but this time they dutifully duded up in basic black, and held hands, and dabbed at crocodile tears as the rearranged remains of Victor Jacks were boxed up and de-livered six feet closer to Hell.
Half an hour after the services, both of them were naked and neither of them was very depressed.
Most annoying of Barb’s bed-play habits was her wont of lighting off to the toilet as soon as…well, right after. Renny had once joked about it: “I make all that effort to give you something, babe, and you just go piss it away.” Barb had made a face. Crude, her face told him. Not funny. Then hi-de-ho, off to the can again.
Fine. Renny grunted manfully and rolled to his right side, his fa-vored side for dozing. Swell.
In the bathroom, Barb watched herself in the mirror for a long time, not quite sure what her surveillance was in quest of. Victor had hit her in this bathroom. He’d also done it to her, same day, in the tub, which was too small for love. Victor’s tendency to boil over all at once was fright-ening, a pit bull on a very iffy leash, thought Barb. Whether it got hos-tile, life-threatening, might depend on a dozen factors. When it last ate. Whether it was pissed off. Whether it liked you. Whether it liked your smell. Victor Jacks had been like that.
But when Victor got to the part where he put his big hands all over her, large, powerful, warm hands, unbuttoning and unzipping her, mak-ing her naked and telling her she was wanted, touching her in places only she touched—curve of ass, inside of thigh, underside of breast, smooth-shaven armpit—oh, my. He made her moist, filled her up; she would practically hallucinate and she had always slept gorgeously af-terward. The sex was never violent between them; only the occasional backhand was.
Barb knew she would never get around to enjoying the way men apologized, every time, after they smacked her.
When she had met Victor Jacks, she was a waitress-newly-turned--exotic-dancer. Petite-chested, with good hips and sturdy, if not long, legs, she figured it was virtually the same aggravation for better tips and weirder hours; she fancied she needed more weird in her life. She got Victor. All he lacked was a puff of smoke to appear in.
When Victor had met Barb, he was comfortably into pharmaceutical dexedrine pops and on the cusp of crystal meth. He made do with the odd frame-weld for RUBs—Rich Urban Bikers—and bashed big-blocks for muscle-car meatheads with too much leisure cash. He paid Barb to table-dance and made her sit, just sit, while he looked at her. Manage-ment did not approve. Victor did not make a scene. He merely smiled and showed Barb’s bosses more money. To Barb, whose concept of fore-play was someone bigger than her saying shut up and lay down, this was romance with a big R indeed. After a week of this bizarre courtship, she went out with him…and he stayed in with her.
When Renny Boone had met Barb, he was so chemical-free you could almost see his halo. To Barb, by this time shell shocked by two years of biker-speed tantrums and eight-ball insomnia, Renny’s well-cut bod and addictionless turn smelled like that myth come true, the Better Life.
“You look like you could use a rest,” Renny had told her, and so tell-ing her, he took her straight away to bed.
Five days later the two of them were still trying to dope out some rationalization that might convince, say, a jury that she, Barb, and he, Renny, were Meant To Be. But Barb lacked the heart to dump someone as spontaneous and romantic as Victor Jacks.
Truth was, Renny preferred Barb as a rental. And that Victor wasn’t such a bad dude. He’d even nailed the chronic carburetor wheeze suf-fered by Butch, Renny’s black ’66 Impala.
Truth was, Barb preferred Victor’s flash-fire spats to shaking her ass for the beery swine who bellied up to the runway at Nasty Tramps.
So Truth held sway, and Victor stayed ignorant, dangerous and sexy. Barb had Renny for the topics she could never broach to Victor. And Renny had Barb, the way cowboys have spittoons. And they all lived happily ever after for about two more weeks, until Victor came back to the house, unannounced, to fetch his set of Allen wrenches, and…
…well, you can imagine.
The “tool excuse” had been Victor’s cover story. That afternoon, un-beknownst to Renny and Barb, Victor had fallen in love again—this time, with a smokable amphetamine called ice. He was pretty saturated, on top of his morning fistful of vitamins, and when he walked through his front door and caught Ren
ny and Barb doing the bone dance on his sofa bed, the speed made his anger instantaneous; his reaction time, zero.
Victor had snarled. Literally snarled, lip curling. He came for his betrayers, his face bright crimson, the sclera of his eyes pinking. Two steps closer he stopped, stiffened, pawed at his left arm, and fell stone dead of the most concussive goddamned heart attack his mesomorphic build could contain. Victor’s fulsome, romantic-if-crazy heart shut down like a phone sex line with no callers, and all that remained was for the coroner to scribble death by chemical misadventure into the appropriate box…while Victor himself was trucked away to fill up another appropri-ate box.
Which brings us back to Barb, in the bathroom.
She flushed the toilet. Flushed, then blushed, in a match-head flare of anger as she remembered Renny’s idiotic joke about her having to urinate after sex. She would never forget it. Crude, Renny could be so crude. Maybe dumb, too—dumb enough never to have heard of Honeymooner’s Cystitis, an inflammation of the bladder that was easy to get when you had too much foreign juice rammed up your tubes. And perhaps uncaring, as well—maybe Renny didn’t give a big manly damn what havoc forty-five minutes of the missionary position could wreak on even a healthy girl’s poor need to pee.
In her mirror, by nightlight, she spotted a hickey on her neck. Crude.
But she loved the way Renny liked to chew on her, just nibble and bite and suck all the right places, as though he was desperately hungry for her, physically starving. She always orgasmed first, even when she tried to outlast him, and once she was coitally zoned, she really did want him to leave marks. Little ones she’d see in the morning, when she felt the delicious residual ache of their workout.
She liked to tease Renny about all the women he must have learned his bag of tricks from. If she had a headache or a rotten mood, Renny could bang it right out of her. Victor would never even touch her at her time of the month; Renny did not have that particular cultural problem. He made her feel more desirable on her doggiest days, and feeling desir-able made Barb feel womanly indeed. Renny even understood about her having to go back to work at Nasty Tramps, now that Victor was no longer winning the bread. In fact, Renny had suggested Barb rejoin the working world. What a guy.
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