Kiss of Life

by Daniel Waters

  "Zombie," Dom finished. "Yep. A dead guy sings for us."

  Even Karen seemed intrigued by that.

  "So listen," Dom said. "I don't even know your names. How can I get you on the guest list if I don't know your names?"

  "You're playing today?" Margi asked.

  "You bet. If DeCayce and Warren manage to get our equipment there, yeah."

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  "I'm Margi Vachon." "Who's your shy friend?" "Colette Beau voir."

  Dom withdrew a small wire-bound notebook and a black pen from a pocket inside his jacket. "Hold up. Is that spelled B.E.A.U.V.O.I.R?"

  "Wow, you really do go to Yale," Karen said. "I'm Karen DeSonne. D. small e. capital S.O. double N. E."

  "French girls," Bee said, grinning.

  "I'm Italian," Karen said with a withering glare.

  "I'm Phoebe Kendall," Phoebe said. Dom looked up at her with something like interest for the first time.

  "Phoebe Kendall," he said, writing her name in the book and then flipping it closed before withdrawing a cell phone from his other pocket. "Hey, Serena?" he said into the phone. "Hey, it's Dom. I've got a few people I want you to add to the guest list for today." He read off their names, starting with Margi and ending with Phoebe. Something Serena said must have been funny because he was still laughing when he said good-bye and hung up.

  "Well, Bee," he said once the phone was away, "let's go grab a seat. Hopefully we'll be seeing you girls later today. I'm glad I met you."

  Colette peeked out of her hood to watch them swagger down to an empty pair of seats in the back, and retreated like a turtle back into her shell when Bee waved at her.

  "I've never been on a ...guest...list...before."

  "Oh, honey," Karen said, reaching over and tapping her

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  knee. "That's just because you haven't met enough people yet."

  "You're amazing, Karen," Phoebe said. "You were so confident. No wonder they were crazy about you."

  "Me?" Karen replied, and when she turned toward Phoebe, the diamonds glittered. "You didn't say a word, but you're the one who has all the boys back home chasing you."

  She knew Karen didn't mean it to hurt, but Phoebe couldn't help but feel stung. Currently there were zero boys chasing her. The one she wanted to chase her, she chased away. Actually, she'd chased both of them away.

  Karen must have sensed everything that was roiling in her mind because she gave her a gentle push.

  "Hey, I didn't mean anything by that. Nothing other than you're hot, that's all."

  The train pulled into the next station

  There was traffic on the street and sidewalk in front of the squat building where Aftermath was housed, but none of it seemed to be leading to its single door, a massive gray-green slab of metal that looked to Phoebe as though it could withstand a direct missile assault. There were only two decorations on the windowless building: a sign that hung from a metal pole recessed into the building's concrete about twelve feet off the ground bearing the name of the club, and a second sign in the same white script on a black color scheme that read, ENTER FREELY ...AND OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL. This sign was secured to the door with four heavy bolts.

  "Nice," Margi said upon reading the "welcome."

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  "It looks ...closed," Colette said. She hadn't taken her hood down the entire time they had trekked through Grand Central Station and into the street where Margi finally got a cab to stop for them. Phoebe didn't think she looked much different from many of the younger people they'd passed.

  "I hear music," Karen said.

  Phoebe listened. She may have heard a low bass throbbing, but it could have just been the breath of the city, in and out, the sounds of thousands of cars rolling on the streets, the rushing of liquids through thousands of underground pipes, the sounds of a million words being spoken at once.

  "Do we just go in?" Margi asked, looking around as though expecting a list of instructions to appear, like the menu boards of a drive-through.

  "I think we do," Karen said, tugging the handle of the blast door open. What they saw inside Aftermath was not at all what Phoebe had expected.

  The door opened into a sort of lounge area that had been covered floor to ceiling with vibrant swirls of color: a bright, kaleidoscopic display that was a far cry from the featureless dank warehouse Phoebe had been expecting. She followed a flaring curve of yellow ribbon that began somewhere on the plush shag carpet up one wall and then onto the ceiling, where its varying thickness gave it the illusion of undulating over their heads before curving down the opposite wall. There were symmetrical bursts of multiple colors atop some of the curving bands; they looked like tie-dye designs pressed onto the wall. The riot of color distracted her, momentarily, from the dozen or

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  so people in the room, some of whom were sunk into formless plush furniture that floated like giant amoebas on the swirling sea of color.

  Phoebe looked at Colette, a dark black blot against the brightness of the walls. She watched her lower her hood, and then she watched as the color seemed to flow into her rapidly blinking eyes. Her look of astonishment morphed into a wide smile.

  "Welcome to Aftermath," a dead girl said, hopping up from a counter near the door in a way that reminded Phoebe of the baristas at the local coffee franchise whenever a quiet customer disturbs their study time--half-embarrassed, half dutiful, and trying their best not to look wholly annoyed. "We have a ... ten dollar ...cover charge."

  Phoebe was already opening her purse when Karen stepped forward and said she thought that they were on the guest list.

  The dead girl gave a fair approximation of a smile. Her hair was stylishly cut, a soft-looking blond that had been chemically enhanced, probably to hide the gray streaks that were sometimes a natural consequence of death. Colette's hair had been streaked with gray for quite a while, but was now closer to the dark brown it had been when she was alive. The dead girl was wearing a white tank top with the Aftermath logo in black, black jeans, and boots. Her bare arms were pale and smooth.

  "Let me check ...the list," she said. While she was checking, Phoebe took a quick scan of the people hanging out in the lounge. There were a couple of zombies, two boys, playing

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  one of those fantasy card games across a glass table with silver legs. Phoebe never quite grasped how to play beyond the basic concept that whoever could afford the most cards usually won. A girl sitting beside one of the gamers on the pillowy futon gave a bemused whoop when her companion played a card, flipping it with decisive vigor. His zombie opponent leaned back in his seat and gazed up at the Technicolor ceiling, his mouth open and gray-pink tongue lolling out in a half comical reenaction of his death.

  "Are you ...Karen?" the zombie hostess was saying.

  Karen said she was, and then she introduced the other girls, adding, "I really like your belt."

  The girl looked down, as though surprised by the strip of silver studded leather around her waist.

  "Thank you ...Karen DeSonne," she said, extending a hand that ended in long white fingernails. "I'm Emily."

  She's pretty, Phoebe thought, watching them shake hands. Colette and Margi drifted toward the hallway where the music would periodically blast forth as people opened the glass door.

  "There are ...lockers ... in the locker room," Emily said. "For your ...coats and ...things. Five dollars ... to rent. Dancing, down the main hall." She pointed with both arms as she gave the directions, like she was trying to bring an airplane into the gate. "There is a ...snack bar ...and vending machines ...upstairs ...next to the gift shop," she said, giving a final wave at a garish lavender stairwell. "The bathrooms ...are down the hall ...past the locker room. Have ...fun."

  "I need to use the restroom. Thanks, Emily." Phoebe said.

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  "I'll go with," Karen said. Phoebe didn't realize it, but she must have given her a funny look because a moment later Karen added "to check my makeup, silly!"

  "
Oh," Phoebe said, feeling foolish. "I'll see if the girls want me to put anything in the lockers."

  She came back with Margi's coat and ten-pound purse and Colette's black hoodie.

  "We're going to need two lockers," Karen said. She nodded back over Phoebe's shoulder. "Look how happy Colette is."

  Phoebe looked back. Colette and Margi were on the periphery of an animated discussion occurring at the entrance of the hallway that led to the dance floor. One of the zombies was waving his hands in the air in front of his face to illustrate his point. His left hand was not as obedient as the right. Regardless, one of his companions, a trad boy holding a bottle of energy drink, laughed loud enough for them to hear even over the hivelike buzz of music and conversation.

  "Just look at her ...smile," Karen said. "Could you hear what they're talking about?"

  "Books," Phoebe said.

  "Books?" Karen shook her head. "Cool."

  They started toward the locker room, the swirl of colors abruptly ending at the mouth of a long gray corridor lined with framed posters.

  "The guy talking said the best thing about being dead was that he had tons of time to read. He said the worst thing was that the dead can't get library cards."

  "That's pretty funny," Karen said. "So is that."

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  She pointed at the first of the posters, which was for Night of the Living Dead. Facing it across the hall was one for Dawn of the Dead, beside it the grinning skull from the first Evil Dead movie

  "Wow," Phoebe said. The next one in line was a promo for a video game entitled Zombie Apocalypse, which depicted a man wading into a mob of zombies with a chainsaw. A severed arm went skyward in a spray of dark, ocher-hued "blood."

  "You don't find it offensive?"

  Karen shook her head. "I like irony. Oh, look, Return of the Living Dead. That was always my favorite." She started singing. "Do you wanna paaaaaarty? It's party time! Remember that scene?"

  Phoebe blushed. She remembered. "That's a 45 Grave song."

  Karen was less interested in music trivia. "How could I get offended by this?" she said, pointing at a pair of greenish zombies, the male Mohawked and skeletal and wearing a dog collar, standing over a gravestone, with the movie title being sprayed on it in red by a third zombie burrowing up from the ground beneath. "It's like the music you listen to, right? Zombies and monsters and whatever else, being hunted down by you trads?"

  "The monsters usually win in the songs I listen to," Phoebe said. The last poster was the front cover of And the Graves Give Up Their Dead, by Reverend Nathan Mathers. The girls stopped and looked at it a moment, and at the photo inset of the author whose severe ice-blue eye gazed at them without pity.

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  "As long as they don't win in real life," Karen said. "Speaking of...monsters."

  The zombie staffing the locker room gave them a bored wave as they entered.

  "You'll ...need ...two," he said, looking at the mound of stuff in Phoebe's arms. He'd had a weight problem in life that had followed him into death, the stool he was perched upon creaked in protest as he leaned over to pluck two keys from the Peg-Board with his stubby fingers.

  "Ten ...bucks," he said. "Or ... no lock ...and take your ...chances."

  "Thanks," Karen said, handing him the money and a bright smile. "I'm Karen."

  "B ...Billy," he said.

  "Thanks, Billy," she said, taking the keys, and leading Phoebe through the numbered rows of lockers.

  "Let me give you some money for the lockers," Phoebe said, once their coats and bags were stowed.

  "Don't worry about it," Karen said. "I've got that highly lucrative second job at the mall. I'm flush." On their way out she favored Billy with another killer smile. "Bye, Billy!"

  Farther down the hall they found the bathrooms. There were four doors, two on the left that said "Boys" and two on the right that said "Girls." The word "Dead" was above one of each, and the word "Trad" was above the other two.

  "More irony?" Phoebe said.

  "At least I didn't have to sit in the back of the train." They pushed their respective doors open, and stepped into

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  the same room. There were a row of stalls and a row of sinks. A dead girl was applying lip gloss from a black tube that had the distinctive Z logo that appeared on almost all of the Slydellco Zombie cosmetic products.

  "Hi," the girl said, looking at them in the mirror. Phoebe thought that maybe she stared at her a beat too long, and it made her uncomfortable as she went into one of the stalls. She heard Karen ask her a question about the lip gloss.

  "'Kiss of Life,'" the girl replied. "Sometimes ...Skip is ...so corny."

  Phoebe heard the dead girls' laughter echoing in the tiled room.

  When they returned to the lounge, Margi and Colette were nowhere to be seen.

  "Probably burning up the dance floor," Karen said. "Let's

  Go

  "The sound hit them like a physical force when they stepped into the club proper, as did the assault of color and light strobing and flashing.

  "I'm glad I don't have epilepsy," Phoebe said, blinking against a red strobe that seemed to be aimed directly at her retinas.

  The dance hall was smaller than she expected, but only because every other dance she'd ever been to was in a school gymnasium. The dance floor here was far smaller, it looked like a sheet of opaque white plastic beneath which lights of green, yellow, blue, and red glowed with muted color. Margi and Colette were indeed burning up the dance floor, moving in

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  rapid time with the Guy Who Can't Get a Library Card and his friends.

  The floor was packed. There had to be thirty people on it, jumping and swaying with the music. Karen leaned over Phoebe's shoulder, her breath cool on her ear.

  "We're here to dance, right?" she said, taking her by the hand and leading her down the carpeted steps to the floor. Colette gave an off-note cheer as they joined them, and Phoebe laughed when the eyes of both the deads and the trads bugged out as Karen twitched her short leather skirt.

  The smell of Z hung heavy on the air as spotlights from above raked the crowd. Phoebe gave herself into the music, a heavy industrial song by a band she liked called the Seraphim. Then the lights cut all at once, plunging the hall into total darkness for a moment before hot white strobes flickered from all sides. Phoebe couldn't tell who was living or dead in that light; the rapid flashing made everyone's movements appear stiff and jerky. The room went dark again and then the floor lights returned, as well as the overhead spots. Lifting her arms above her head and laughing as Margi executed a few gypsy-like steps, she saw that some of the lights playing on walls and skin were butterflies, or flowers or stars.

  She realized a zombie boy was mumbling something at her.

  "What?" she yelled.

  "I said," he screamed back, "loud enough for you?" Looking closer she realized he wasn't dead after all, he just had bad skin. She nodded and spun away.

  The machine-heavy track segued into a crunky rap song

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  that Phoebe didn't recognize but could understand instinctively, the bass and drum wash infusing her limbs with their energy.

  Is this what it's like for them? she thought, feeling the rush and watching Colette laugh at something the Library Card Guy said. She found that she could use music as fuel, like a candy bar or an apple. Without the latter two options, was sound what the dead needed to power them? She thought of Kevin and his jerky scarecrow dancing at the homecoming dance. Here, even the most sluggish of zombies in the room appeared to be moving at normal speeds.

  Above the dance floor was a sort of catwalk that led to a perimeter of booths with more of the pillowy blue furniture that was scattered around the club. There were dozens of people loitering around, many watching either the dancers or the pretty colored lights that played across them. There was a DJ in an enclosed booth at the far end of the catwalk, and below that was a platform raised up from the rest of the dance floor that had a
drum set and a few stacks of amplifiers. There was a yellow smiley skull--a giant emoticon--on the bass drumhead with the words "Skeleton Crew" written in letters made out of bones.

  "Oh, man." Margi slumped onto a futon after a third extended club remix song ended. "I'm all out of breath."

  "Me too," Colette said. The people that could hear her over the music thought that was pretty funny.

  Margi led a haphazard parade up to a ring of couches on the catwalk. She and Colette introduced Karen and Phoebe to some of their new friends.

  "I can't believe how many people are here," Phoebe said.

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  "How many dead people, you mean?" the boy on her left said. This was Trent, the Library Card Guy.

  "No, just people," she said, not sure if he was trying to be confrontational or if he just wanted to start conversation. "We thought the club was closed when we first got here."

  "Ah."

  Colette said that it was sort of overwhelming, being around this many zombies. "I think the most we've ever had at the Haunted House was twenty-three," she said.

  Phoebe turned toward the dance floor. She spotted one of the zombies out there looking as though he'd just crawled out of a three-year-old grave; his clothes were shredded and stained and the skin on the side of his head looked like it was flaking off. He was the only old-school zombie she'd seen, the only one that would not have looked out of place on one of the posters in the hall by the restrooms. Like George.

  When she turned back, everyone was leaning in their chairs a little closer to Colette.

  "The Haunted House?" Trent asked.

  "Um ...yeah," she said. "That's just ...just what ... we call this house we ...hang out...at."

  "Where did you say ...you were from?"

  "Connecticut?" she said, like she was being quizzed. "Oakvale?"

  "No way!" Trent said, excited now. "Tommy Williams? Mysocalledundeath.com ?"