It repeated its hiss of warning.
“Fuck off, puss!” I said, in a friendly tone.
Apparently, it didn’t like bad language because, with that, it reared up on its hind legs and made a standing vertical leap for my face.
I weaved backwards and, in any event, it didn’t quite reach the height of my face but, as it dropped back to the ground, it caught its claws in my thigh and clung there. Naturally, it sank its teeth into my flesh as hard as it could and, muffled by its mouthful, growled menacingly.
There was pain, considerable pain. One or two of the assembled zombies made noises that sounded suspiciously like laughter. (Do zombies have a sense of humour? If so, I didn’t think much of it.)
I grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and peeled it off my leg – there was an audible sound of my skin tearing, ever so slightly, beneath my jeans.
I held the cat before my eyes – it was still growling and spitting but temporarily immobilised by the same ‘hold’ that its mother had once used on it when it was a kitten.
I shaped to hurl the little monster far away from me – but, as I did so, I noticed the zombies, as one, abruptly stared at me. So, I stopped in mid-throw.
Did these zombies really care what I did with an apparently feral – and certainly out of control - cat?
David stepped towards me and gently lifted the cat from my grip. The cat instantly calmed down. The fucking thing started purring as he held it! Another of the zombies came forward and seemingly begged David to pass it over.
“Gween,” it groaned and David duly handed the tortoiseshell feline over.
‘Gween’? Was this a word? Was this the cat’s name?
Can’t say – I never did hear a zombie, any zombie, utter another syllable.
I was having trouble getting my head around the situation: I was in a fetid den with a bunch of zombies – many of whom had, no doubt, recently slaughtered and eaten their fellow students – and now they were fussing over this rotten cat just like so many old women!
The Catholic Church almost exterminated the domestic cat in Europe during the Middle Ages – on the basis that it was the servant of the Devil or some such. What a load of superstitious nonsense, eh? Eh?
Despite the coolness of our welcome, David seemed intent on spending the night among his fellows – and amid the rank, decaying filth that lay all about.
“Nice little place you got here, Fellas,” I said. “I like the way you’ve decorated it?”
No response. Zombies apparently have no sense of irony.
But I knew I would be safe here – and nowhere else but where David was. So, I stayed.
But I didn’t actually get any sleep. You might think I was nervous about one of my co-residents suddenly requiring a midnight snack. But no! I was now quite certain that David’s presence protected me absolutely from zombie attack. What kept me awake was that friggin’ tortoiseshell cat.
It parked itself in the opposite corner of the room and kept me under constant observation. I could see its wide green eyes glowing in the dark. Whenever I chanced to close my own eyes, it was on the move, creeping ever closer to me. When I opened them again, it retreated.
“This is ridiculous,” I thought. “It’s just a little pussy cat. You need some sleep, Pete.”
So I covered my head with my clothes but, sure enough, with a minute I had a growling, snarling fur-ball attached (by very sharp claws) to the back of my head.
By employing, once again, the ‘mother-cat’ hold, I managed to peel it off without incurring too much disapproval from the ‘owners’ of this charming ‘pet’ but I didn’t sleep another wink that night.
CHAPTER 4
A DAY AT THE CARLTON BUGHOUSE.
Morning couldn’t come quick enough.
“Come on, Dave. I’m hungry,” I said. “I need to find some food fit for living folk.”
Dave seemed content to remain where he was. Apparently, he was not hungry. I wondered idly how often a major predator needed a feed. Once a week? Wasn’t that how often lions needed to kill? But lions aren’t dead.
“How often,” I asked myself, “would a lion need to eat if it were dead?”
With that, I started to wonder about the declining nature of my current thought processes.
I needed to eat and eat now. So, I kicked David and he growled at me. (The ever-present cat chimed in with a supportive hiss.)
I seized David’s hand and hauled him to his feet. He emitted an unhappy rumble but seemed willing to come with me.
We emerged from Union House into the morning daylight. Didn’t I read somewhere that zombies were supposed to be unable to come out in the daylight? Well, that’s not true. There were numerous zombies milling about in the Eastern quadrangle (whose official name I forget) – in broad daylight just as there had been since the initial onslaught.
Zombies are fine with daylight – but do they get a decent tan?
As we walked through the quadrangle, David’s hand still somewhat unwillingly in mine, I cast my eye about the scattered corpses. Nothing fresh here. I guessed they all dated from Day One.
Why did some victims reanimate – like David – and others not?
A tentative answer was not too hard to guess at. The corpses that remained lying about were, almost uniformly, quite incomplete. Indeed, some of the ‘corpses’ were actually just ‘bits’. So, it seemed there needed to be enough of the victim still hanging together before reanimation was possible.
(Poor Meryl was definitely not going to make a re-appearance – but she was a girl anyway and, as you will recall, girls don’t become zombies.)
So, how much was enough? Yes, I’ll admit it was a macabre question to ponder – but a question that seemed not out of place as we approached the Swanston Street exit of the Uni campus.
I stood on the footpath, still holding David’s clammy hand.
“Which way shall we go, Mate?” I asked. “Into the city or shall we go into Carlton?”
He grunted. Maybe he understood the question but his grunted answer was unhelpful. (Hey, he was still male – I think.) So, we headed off to Lygon Street, Carlton.
Nowadays, there’s lovely big supermarket in the main street – but not in the early 1970’s.
As we walked down Faraday Street, I saw the familiar sight of the Carlton Movie-house – the ‘Bug House’, as it was then called. But this was not the establishment I needed – that was next door: “Genevieve’s”. (Café? Restaurant? Can’t recall what it called itself. It was always just “Genevieve’s” – named after an old cinematic car, as I recall.)
“Fancy a cappuccino, Dave?” I asked. “I’m dying for a caffeine fix.”
David seemed uninterested. Do zombies like a strong coffee? They look like they need it. No matter.In any event, I couldn’t get the cappuccino machine up and running and had to make do with ‘instant’ – yuk!
Genevieve’s was an institution then: a typical student dive with chromium and laminex tables, cheerful staff and a menu with a whole bunch of fairly tasty but unhealthy food. It was the place to go whether you were going to the movies next door or simply skipping classes. Kids in the U.S. might reasonably have mistaken it for a diner or a 1950’s drugstore – but it wasn’t actually either. It was just “Genevieve’s”.
As I entered, I noted that Genevieve’s was deserted but there were the usual signs that the Zombie Apocalypse had called by. Upturned tables, shattered crockery and coagulated blood on the floor – but no actual corpses. That was a pleasant change.
The lights were still on and, as it turned out, the fridges were still operating. The sight that this particular starving man beheld upon opening the main fridge door was blissful. It was fully stocked with all the treats that Genevieve’s customarily served to its youthful crowd.
“Pancakes and ice-cream it is!” I said.
I heated a skillet on the stove and made a bowl of pancake mix. A bit of oil in the pan, a minute or two on a medium flame, flip the pancakes near the
end and voila! Pancakes.
Load the resulting ‘stack’ with maple syrup and several scoops of ice-cream and you have a starving man’s salvation.
I offered some to David – seated at a nearby table – but he seemed repelled at the very idea of eating living-folks’ food. So, I ate it all myself while he watched me with his dead eyes.
I shouldn’t have eaten so much food nor food so rich in sugar because, truth be told, I really had been starving, clinically so. I hadn’t eaten a solid meal since the initial onslaught – just a few packs of snack-food from the vending machines in the library.
So, yes, I threw up – you don’t need the details but I imagined the David was thinking “I told you so!”
After I composed myself, I realised that we had the rest of the day to fill in. I’m sure David would happily have gone back to the Hell-hole at Union House – so that he could lounge around with his zombie mates. But I was not going to cross swords again with bitch-face “Gween” if I could possibly help it.
o0o
“Hey, Dave! I’ve got a treat for you,” I exclaimed suddenly. “I’m going to take you to the movies.”
I gave him no choice and firmly herded him out of Genevieve’s and into the Bug House. I had no idea if he still remembered what a movie was but I didn’t care. David was going with me to the movies whether he like it or not.
The shabby foyer of the Bug House was relatively untouched. There must have been no-one in it when the Apocalypse passed through. Did it happen at mid-day or thereabouts? No ‘session time’ then, I suppose – not during the week at a small single-screen suburban theatre. (Can you remember what one of those was?)
I walked up the narrow staircase to the projection room. Now, you might think I would have no chance of getting the projector operating so that we could view a movie. But that’s where you’d be wrong. Dead wrong.
This was in the days before video recorders, well before DVD’s, Blue-Ray and so on. So, school teachers needed to know how to operate simple movie projectors to show educational films to their classes. I was no teacher – but my Dad was!
Dad had done a proper Bell and Howell course and come out with a proper projectionist certificate – very pretty, very impressive. I asked him to bring the school projector home and show me how it worked. He obliged my demands and thus I knew the rudiments of the projectionist’s craft.
That said, the projectors (there were 2) that confronted me in the projection room of the Carlton Movie House were very different to the one that Dad had brought home from school. A lot bigger. A lot more buttons and levers.
No matter, I got one of them working in under half an hour (but I think I might have, sort of, broken the other one – sorry, Mr Projectionist.)
I consulted David on the choice of movie to watch. There were five cans of 35mm reels held in the projection room – all of current or near-current movies. I was not particularly attracted to any of them.
David seemed untroubled and, apparently, left the choice to me. So, I went back down the narrow stairs and hunted around in the manager’s office – to see if there were any other cans of film about. Yes, there were indeed two other cans of film, lurking there under a layer of dust. One was a 1950’s movie called ‘The Man Who Never Was’. I’d never heard of it - then. So, I rejected it out of hand.
The other was a real relic from the 30’s: “The White Zombie”. I’d never heard of that one either but, hey, with a name like that, what choice did I have?
Synchronicity!
I seated David in the theatre – in the rarefied heights of the ‘Dress Circle’, of course – though, in truth, it was just as shabby as the rest of the theatre. (The red velour seating had taken a real pounding at the hands of the students – they did tend to get a bit boisterous in the action scenes.)
Then I ducked back into the projection room to start up the first reel.
Okay, it was a pretty corny, old movie but it passed the time – and was a lot better than either being besieged by zombies in the Baillieu or living with them (and their rotten cat) in the basement of the Union building.
By the end of the movie, David had lapsed into a catatonic state – voluntarily, I think.
What a critic!
So, I left him to his Dress Circle catatonia (if that’s the right word) and grabbed one of the other movies and watched that one, too.
Hey! A double feature (with a large packet of jaffas stolen from the snack bar.)
Who could ask for more?
CHAPTER 5
MELBOURNE GENERAL CEMETERY.
All good things come to an end and I decided to leave the cinema when David was showing signs of boredom. After all, there’s only so much colour and movement that a dead-eyed zombie can take, isn’t there?
I’m not sure how much of the movies David actually saw – most of the time he seemed quite inert but, then again, I was concentrating on the screen. They say that the movie industry booms in depression times. Well, the movies were a big hit with me that day – they took my mind right off the horrors I’d seen in the preceding days.
David had had enough and, it seemed, wanted to move along. Presumably, he wanted to go back to that lovely, cosy basement with all his zombie mates. No thanks, Dave. Uh, uh!
So, I needed to distract him.
We took a stroll along the main Lygon Street shopping strip – lots of Italian cafes and restaurants in those days and alternative/crafty-type places where I bought my hippy-style clothing and odd toys.
(Yes, I dressed like a hippy in those days – and I had such a lovely, big afro hairdo – though there was not a lot of afro blood in my veins).
We strolled past ‘The Poppyshop’, purveyor of fine hand-made wombats (a perfect gift for the one you love –if you were a hippy. They sold pretty good paper flowers as well in those days –also an essential item for the latter-day flower child.
We entered ‘Tamani’s’ – good, cheap Italian tucker (the prices were always quoted in lire) – but it was the usual scene of devastation and mayhem, with numerous customers apparently massacred in mid-lasagna or mid-lungo nero, as the case may be.
I decided not to raid their food cupboards – the stench of the place made me a little squeamish.
Just down the road, the University Café (not as popular as Tamani’s) was in better shape and so I cheerfully got into their cupboards and fridge to stock up on essential items. I took mainly stuff that was in tins and cans so that it would last. They had a stock of tinned hams and plum puddings, apparently left over from Christmas. Fine by me – so I took as many as I could carry in the back-pack I retrieved along the way. Don’t ask me who was wearing it at the time – they weren’t going to need it again, I promise you.)
I tried to encourage David to share the load with me – I even found another back-pack for him. But he was having none of it. Apparently, zombies don’t do the beast-of-burden thing. (A fact well worth remembering, I’m sure.)
In any event, David was getting twitchy again. At first, I thought it must have been hunger (oh no!) but he was just bored.
I offered him an apple that I had just swiped from the University Café. He snatched at it and threw it away in disgust. (What had I been thinking? Fruit? For a zombie?)
So, I selected another from a nearby basket and bit into it. It wasn’t that fresh – it had been sitting around for over a week – but it was okay (and, unlike the pancakes, it didn’t make me throw up.)
How to avoid going back to Union House – that was the pressing problem. Where else would any self-respecting zombie prefer to go – other than a charnel house full of a bunch of zombies (and one psychopathic cat)?
Then it struck me:
“Hey, Dave! Wanna go to the cemetery? You know, the big one that’s just near here?”
He stopped twitching. That was a good sign. But did he know what I was talking about? Possibly, he did. Zombie intelligence is not an easy thing to understand – and, in David’s case it was complicated by the fact (as I
knew) that he could tap into my own mind to boost whatever wit he had been left with following his death.
I was like a poorly connected external hard-drive, I suppose (though hard drives, external or otherwise, were unheard of at that time.)
Did that make him, comparatively, a mental giant among zombies? Possibly. Not sure. But, contrary to popular belief, this particular zombie, my twin brother, had a discernible intelligence. He was no mere automaton, driven by some base instincts alone. That said, he was not about to win any awards for higher learning – nor for philanthropy (unless, by philanthropy, you mean someone who loves the taste of other men.)
In any event, the suggestion of going to the cemetery had struck some chord deep within David’s psyche. He put out his hand and placed it in mine. I took this to mean he wanted to be taken there. So, we turned around and headed North along Lygon Street. Melbourne General Cemetery was, maybe, 10 to 15 minutes’ gentle stroll away.
Brother Mine, Zombie. Page 3