Aftertaste

by Kevin J. Anderson

  It bit him. That means it’s only a matter of time now.

  In the movies, the people who’d been bitten usually lasted a couple of hours before they changed.

  But who knew how long it took in real life?

  “Here, lemme help you up.” Elmer pulled Charlie to his feet. “Since you busted the damn sour mash, what else ya got?”

  “Got some grain under the sink,” Charlie said.

  “Get it. I’ll clean this mess.”

  Elmer waited until Charlie’s back was turned.

  Sorry, old friend.

  He fired the remaining round, scattering pieces of Charlie’s skull across the cabinets and windows. Charlie’s body landed next to the zombie’s. Elmer racked another two rounds into the gun, just in case there were more undead things walking around, and then decided he needed a drink before doing anything else.

  “Guess you won’t be needin’ this no more.” Elmer opened the cabinet. “Sonovabitch,” he muttered, spotting a second bottle of sour mash next to the moonshine. “He was gonna hold out on me after I saved his life. Figgers.”

  Elmer tipped the bottle up and took a long swallow. He was contemplating what to do with the bodies when the wail of a police siren sounded outside. A moment later, a car door slammed and Sheriff Roy Biggins came in, his pistol out and his eyes dancing back and forth.

  “Holy shit, Elmer! What the hell happened? Your kid told me some kinda bullshit about zombies.”

  “You better sit down, Roy. It’s all true.”

  Biggins shook his head. “I ain’t got time for bullshit, Elmer. Got a big emergency on Route Forty. Goddamn busload of tourists headin’ from Atlanta to Nashville smashed into a semi loaded with bug spray. I got ten dead and about thirty Russkies missing.”

  “Russkies? What the hell you talkin’ about?”

  “Russians, you idjit. Some kinda tourist thing. Can’t imagine why we’re lettin’ those red bastards into the country, prob’ly gonna blow somethin’ up.”

  A nasty feeling set Elmer’s belly to rumbling. Route Forty was just to the other side of Charlie’s property. Right past the woods where the zombies had come from.

  He thought of the dead bodies littering Charlie’s field. One, maybe two corpses wouldn’t be so bad. Roy could cover those up as hunting accidents. But more than twenty?

  That spelled electric chair in Elmer’s book.

  Only one thing to do.

  “Shit, Roy, look out behind you!”

  Biggins turned and Elmer fired the shotgun. He felt a moment’s remorse at killing an innocent man, but better one more dead than being arrested for murder.

  “Now I can blame the whole thing on Charlie. Say he went nuts, talkin’ about zombies, and started killin’ all those people. Forced me to drive the truck. When he shot Biggins, I had to kill him. I can still be a hero.”

  He had to make it look right, though. That meant moving the bodies and putting a gun in Charlie’s hands. He knelt on the floor to grab Biggins’s legs, felt a sharp pain in his hand.

  “Goddamn!” He’d cut himself on a piece of broken glass. A good slice, too. Bleeding like a stuck pig. He put his mouth over the cut as he stood up, then paused at a noise from outside.

  “Who’s there?” The last thing he needed was another cop walkin’ in.

  But it was Delbert and Nate who entered the kitchen, still breathin’ hard after runnin’ back from town. Nate’s eyes went wide and he pointed at Elmer.

  “Holy Jesus, Del, your pa’s a zombie!”

  “Shit!” Delbert raised his hands, and for a moment Elmer thought the boy was gonna throw something at him.

  Until he saw that Delbert had a rifle in his hands.

  “Del, no, I—”

  There was an explosion, and Elmer had time to wish he’d finished the last of the mash.

  Then everything disappeared.

  Dating After the Apocalypse

  STEPHEN DORATO

  Until the moment when she dug her nails into the skin behind her ear and pulled back her flesh to reveal a skull gleaming with dripping green ichor, Malcolm had thought the date was going well.

  There had been odd silences (okay, she hadn’t spoken much at all near the end, had mostly made ambiguous slurping noises he took for assent), the meal had disappointed (the damn waiter had vanished on them), and they had been plagued by flies the entire date. But Malcolm had long learned to overlook that kind of thing.

  But now, as she straddled him, the green fluid from her face beginning to drip on his stomach and groin, he knew this was too ugly to continue.

  “Jessica,” he said quietly, scooting back from beneath her and taking the Taser from the nightstand, “this just isn’t working out.”

  The Taser made her glow a faint emerald that was almost pretty in the dim bedroom light.

  She froze, her lidless eyes locked on his, then fell backward. He checked her pulse, the nightstick close by. Out cold. “Good,” he said out loud, the tension draining from him in one long exhalation. You couldn’t always tell; the Taser didn’t always knock them out. And sometimes they would pretend to be unconscious, then grab your ankle as you walked by.

  Malcolm left her in the hall, covered with an old blanket (more for the neighbors, he had to admit, than for her), and late that night he heard quite a commotion, a lot of screaming and even a couple gunshots. He hoped she’d gotten away; she had been one of the better ones.

  “Hey, hey,” Brad said, standing at the entrance to his cube. “How’d it go Friday night?”

  “The usual,” Malcolm said.

  “As in she wouldn’t put out?”

  “No, the other usual.”

  “Oh.” Brad made a face. “Sorry, man.”

  “It’s okay.” Malcolm shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The green stuff had dried and washed away easily enough, but the whole area down there was red and unhappy. And it also made him uncomfortable when Brad talked that way. He wasn’t looking for a woman who put out; that wasn’t the point. He wanted someone to share his life with. “Look, Brad, I gotta work.”

  The company firewall blocked his personal e-mail, which was probably a good thing since all Malcolm wanted to do was check if any of the other fifteen dates he had lined up had written him.

  The phone rang and Malcolm squinted at the blinding red sunlight of a new morning.

  “You never call,” said a familiar voice.

  “I called last week, Mom.”

  “You called last month. For all I know you could be dead! It happens these days, you know.”

  Malcolm would never hang up on his mother, or interrupt one of her tirades, but right now he wished it were possible to talk and sleep at the same time. His mother was droning on about something, and he had already lost the thread, which was a dangerous thing.

  “You’re not listening.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “I asked if you were seeing that girl.”

  For a moment he paused, trying to figure out which girl that girl would have been. “I’m seeing lots of girls these days.”

  “I hope you’re using protection.”

  He sat up and squinted at the red sky outside. “I am not going to have this conversation, Mom.”

  “Your cousin Eddie had his thing torn off. Do you want that to happen to you?”

  “Yes.”

  He took Arlene out to watch the baseball game, though they did it with a pair of binoculars from the relative safety of an elevated highway four blocks away. Fenway had been hit the worst, which made it both a dangerous place to go and an interesting place to see. YouTube was full of videos by people much braver than Malcolm who had taped the games that went on there these days. Baseball with heads.

  “This is nice,” she said.

  And it was. It was nearly perfect.

  Had it not been so nearly perfect, had Arlene been a lousy kisser or less well proportioned, or had they taken the first—or the second or third—train that passed through the station, things mi
ght have gone better and there might have been a second date. Malcolm broke off from a particularly long kiss, blinked up at the grainy fluorescent lights, and wondered how much time had passed.

  Two things happened, pretty much simultaneously.

  The tunnel behind them glowed with the lights from an approaching train, the walls echoing with the shriek of brakes as it turned into the station.

  And they heard the roar of the crowd coming down the stairs.

  Too much time had passed.

  They almost made it, had even made it on board the train when Arlene stumbled, her purse or something dropped back to the platform, and she went to retrieve it just as the red warning lights on either side of the door lit and the crowd swarmed toward the train. There wasn’t even time for Malcolm to scream “leave it” before the automatic defense systems cut in and the steel-toothed doors cut Arlene nearly in half. He was left with her legs while the crowd got the rest.

  And the date wasn’t as perfect anymore.

  Carrie was a no-go nearly from the get-go. She was a small-framed, mousy girl with light brown hair and a quiet voice, but as the date progressed (Italian at Marenno’s in East Boston, Malcolm’s standard for a first date since it had good lighting and easily accessible exits), it seemed harder and harder to see her or hear what she was saying.

  “Your hair,” he said, “it seems darker.”

  She looked embarrassed and muttered something. Or just moved her lips; it was hard to tell.

  By now her hair was an absolute black.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  He poured her more wine, and as she reached for the glass he noticed that the shadow her arm made against the tablecloth lingered for a moment after her arm had gone. Her eyes, too, had been hazel and now were dark as his dreams and did not reflect the candlelight.

  “I think I should ask for the check,” he said, but the words sounded funny. Too quiet, like he was speaking underwater. He cleared his throat and tried again. Nothing. He could barely see her face now, except it was a lighter gray against the rest of her, and there were streaks of darkness coming from her eyes. Tears, he supposed.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  At that point the waiter came, and he didn’t hesitate before calling over to the bar for a shotgun, but by then Carrie was running across the restaurant, a black smear that left ashy high-heeled footprints behind. She did not open the door so much as pass through it, leaving a Carrie-shaped hole behind.

  “You’re paying for that,” the owner said.

  Malcolm was too broke to date for a while after that, which was probably a good thing. He needed time to collect his thoughts, watch a couple bad movies, ponder a brief solitary life.

  It went well for a few nights, as long as he worked hard at the office (fielding Brad’s inquiries with “I’m on the DL, dude”) and came home too exhausted to think. He even reupped his membership at the corporate gym, though that was a mixed blessing. He found himself checking out any woman who came through the door, it didn’t matter how ugly or married or otherwise deformed.

  But you didn’t sleep where you worked, or something like that, and besides, Malcolm knew that once he tried to go out with one coworker, all of the rules would be broken, all the barriers gone. A single date was one thing, a minor brush with death, perhaps, but the next morning you counted your fingers and toes and moved on. But dating here was a different story, a disaster with long-term consequences.

  He tried to distract himself by using the machines at the front of the room, looking through the windows at the common and the feral squirrels that would occasionally launch themselves at passersby. He would come in the morning, the sky a beautiful mauve, the low sun a bruised purple that hurt to look at.

  And then his mom called him for supper.

  “You’re my beautiful boy. Look at you, nothing changed.”

  “Would you like me to disrobe? You could check the whole package.”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  They ate with the TV buzzing in the background, while his mother told him how a girl he’d gone to school with had burst into flame the other day, taking the bakery department of the supermarket with her. “And she was such a nice girl, so pretty; I always liked her.”

  “Cheryl did always enjoy her baked goods,” he said.

  “I think I know someone you’d like,” Brad told him.

  Malcolm thought that was unlikely, since he didn’t even like Brad, and they’d worked in adjacent cubes for nearly three years now. There were days he wished someone would give Brad an enema with the giant statue of Godzilla he kept beside his desk.

  “Um, no.”

  “Just like that, you don’t even want to know who she is?”

  “Considering the source—no.”

  “Hang on a sec,” Brad said, rummaging through a desk drawer. “I’ve got a picture here somewhere.”

  Malcolm returned to his work and didn’t look back when he felt Brad standing beside him. A photograph popped into view, too close to focus on. Malcolm snarled and grabbed the photo from him, held it at arm’s length.

  A girl of maybe twelve, her long blond hair in a braid.

  “Um . . .” Malcolm said, and since he was at work it was probably a good thing he didn’t say what he wanted to say.

  “Sorry, I didn’t have a recent photo. That was when we were kids. Note the sun.”

  There it was, reflected in a window in the corner of the picture, something bright and white. “Oh. Right.” For a moment he ached to be back there with that girl, in the world with that sun, but it passed.

  “Her husband died,” Brad said.

  Malcolm knew it would be impolite to ask for details, but he wanted to ask, Did she eat him?

  “Besides,” Brad said, “you were always flitting from woman to woman; I wasn’t sure you’d be good for her. You can be kind of a creep sometimes.”

  He laughed, and Malcolm laughed back, but neither of them smiled.

  Julie. Her name was Julie.

  They met for coffee the first time, in the Starbucks near Government Center. Malcolm was so nervous he almost walked into a person trap shaped like a Starbucks; it was only as he stood on the threshold, about to open the front door, that he noticed that none of the people seated at the couches inside was actually alive, and that the scent of roasting coffee was tinged with something sweet that made his head buzz. He stepped back just as twin shutters flapped into place in front of him, catching the edge of his scarf.

  He would buy another scarf.

  He found the real Starbucks two blocks away on the other side of city hall. This one didn’t smell nearly as nice, but the door was open and real, live people were milling about inside. Malcolm spotted her right away, seated at a small table near the front. Her face had not changed so much in thirteen years or so, and her tentative smile reminded him of the sun in the picture Brad had shown him. “Hi, Julie. I’m Malcolm. I work with your brother.”

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” she said a little sadly.

  “I almost didn’t make it,” he said. “Starbucks plant.”

  She grunted, and they traded details. It felt awkward, talking to her in the clear white light of the coffee shop, but he let himself relax after the first grande mocha whateverthehellitwas.

  Julie seemed to be a regular, ordinary girl—a bit reserved, but who wasn’t these days? Near the end of the date she took his hand and smiled. “You’re nicer than I expected.”

  “Why, what has Brad told you?”

  “Nothing you need to hear.”

  But he let himself enjoy the touch of her hand, and the fact that it didn’t make his skin burn, and that it was so . . . normal. The last normal girl he had dated had been before the change (he tried not to think of Arlene), and after the change it seemed that even Malcolm himself was different.

  “Can we do this again?” he asked as the store around them began to close up. Real night was approaching, and nobody stayed on the city streets at nigh
t.

  “Yes, I hope so,” she replied, and touched his hand again and gave him a smile that was even better than a kiss would have been, and he went home with a lightness in his heart that even the nighttime screams outside couldn’t touch.

  Malcolm took it slow. He could tell that Julie didn’t want to rush into anything, and to be honest, he was none too eager to change his lifestyle either. These days, the series of locks on his front door seemed less for keeping the crazies out than for keeping Malcolm’s world whole. It felt comfortable, when he knew that he could break his self-imposed exile with a single phone call.

  He felt connected, and at the same time, himself.

  And then Julie slept over.

  They had sex, slowly, tentatively, Malcolm able to manage an erection though he kept thinking of the last woman who’d been in this bed, the mattress he’d had to replace, the greenish fluid he’d had to mop from the floor. Even now, in the middle of the pitch-black night, he could see a faint glow from what remained between the floorboards.

  And yet it was good, so good that after those first few moments all he could think of was Julie, the warmth from their skin touching, the feel of her breath on his neck. Afterward she turned on her side and he held her, and they lay in silence, hearing the sounds of the night.

  “You’re the first man I’ve slept with since Dan,” she said.

  He wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he held her tighter. “You must have loved him very much.”

  “All I can remember now is how scared I was,” she said, her voice low and quiet. “Every night, he went out on patrol with those friends of his. ‘Cleaning up the city,’ he called it, but it always seemed stupid to me. They would drive around in Dan’s SUV and bring all their guns, looking for solo banshees and the night changers. So I knew it was just a matter of time before he didn’t come back.”

  Malcolm, who could barely imagine stepping outside his apartment building after dark, said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Better not,” she replied, and kissed his hand.

  He had never thought he would miss this apartment, the metal grilles over the windows, the welded and rewelded front and rear doors. Your man cave, Julie called it, and in a way it was true. This was where he hid from the world, kept himself safe from the world, amid his books and videos and his posters from college. But he could bring that with him, those and the scarred Louisville Slugger his father had given him after the change. Her place was better—better fortified, part of a gated community with electric fences. A better kitchen and a shower that didn’t leak.