Dead Science: A Zombie Anthology Page 16

  After another few moments, I again called out: "Hello!" Then, I added, "Anybody home?"

  Nothing. Not a peep.

  Frowning, I pressed deeper into the place, driven by my aching curiosity. I had seen a dead man. His body, at least, had risen, whole and fresh, and walked among us, the living. I had to know how such a thing was possible.

  I quickly found a large expanse of darkness, a living room of sorts, furnished with a couple lumpy chairs and a wide sofa with tables in between. I took a step into the room but stopped after a moment, sensing something lurking in the shadows. I leaned forward and squinted, listening. After a moment, I backed off and suppressed a gasp. I knew at once that there were things in that room.

  Beings.

  After a fretful sigh, my eyes focused upon them---shadows, shapes, a dozen perhaps, men, women. Some were standing back against the walls; others occupied the chairs and sofa; a few more sat cross-legged on the dank carpet. Doing nothing.

  As I stepped completely into the room, there were glances my way, but none of the beings approached me. My sudden presence had been acknowledged, but that was all. Within moments, the beings returned to their silent brooding.

  Then a soft voice behind me, at the threshold of the doorway I had just entered, said: "They're zombies."

  I jumped. My heart pounded. I whirled around and saw a rather unimposing, plump little man.

  "Homeless zombies," he added.

  He introduced himself as Dr. Heinrich Hulbert; "Henry" for short. He reached out and offered a chubby, clammy handshake.

  After letting go of his hand, I asked, "Zombies? How's that?"

  "The creatures before you," he said, gesturing to the assembly of listless folk occupying the living room. "Zombies. Mindless, homeless zombies." He gazed at them with a wan expression. "Resurrected from death."

  At last, he turned to me.

  "You see," he went on, "I have let them go. Helped them escape. Brought them here."

  I thought he must be mad and cursed myself again for coming here. I could be sitting in a warm bar, washing down another shot with another beer.

  I gave the little impish man half a smile and half a sneer.

  "What are you talking about, Mister?" I pointed to the roomful of beings. "Who are these people? Mental patients?" Then I remembered that Joe Reed had walked in here.

  "I told you," he said. "Zombies. Resurrected from death. We stole their bodies from the freshest graves, dozens of them. Then we used the most advanced procedures of regenerative medicine to repair dead, damaged tissue and reanimated them, brought them back to life with a zap of electricity. And presto!" He snapped his fingers and laughed like a wizard in a magic shop. "To our astonishment, it worked! They woke up."

  Suddenly, he frowned.

  "But what woke up is what you see before you: mindless automatons, oblivious to their condition. Without a shred of memory or initiative.

  "You see" ---and now he smiled sardonically--- "each of them has awakened physically, but without a soul."

  His wide eyes formed into a deep scowl as he gazed upon the alleged zombies.

  "Because of this," he went on, more to himself than to me, "the army knew that the experiment had failed. What good would it be to resurrect a soldier but not his soul? So the project was aborted. We were sent back to the drawing board, to find a way not only to resurrect bodies, but souls as well---the essence of what the person was, had been."

  Dr. Hulbert sighed as he turned to the twenty or so subdued beings before us in the living room of the old, dark drafty house.

  "As for these poor creatures," he said, "the army ordered them destroyed. 'De-animated,' was the word they used. We had to kill them and secretly put them back into their graves"

  He looked to me again, his eyes full of distress.

  "That was something I simply could not let them do," he said. "First of all, I disagreed with the assessment they were completely soul-less. I thought I could detect a hint of something, some mental recognition of individual identity, however dim. So I helped them escape and brought them here to this old abandoned house, one of many owned in this city by my cousin, Max, that I was able to rent on the cheap. I hoped that when these zombies mixed into the general population, their souls might be reborn."

  I nodded, trying to understand what he was telling me.

  "So," I said, suddenly thinking of Joe Reed, my friend. Now resurrected. Now soul-less. "Do you think that can be done? For souls to be reborn? For them to remember who they'd been?"

  "We tried to do that, to retrain them, of course," said the doctor. He leaned against the doorway and slid down it in a sullen lump to the carpet. "We tried everything."

  He looked up at me. "Perhaps," he said, "we failed because there is no way to resurrect a soul."

  "So now what?" I asked after a time.

  "Back to the drawing board, I guess," Dr. Hurlburt said with a shrug.

  "No," I said, and nodded to the dark room where the dozen or so homeless zombies dawdled. "What about them?"

  His eyes flashed up at me.

  "They can live here," he said, then added, "roam the streets like the thousands of other mindless, homeless waifs and mental cases that populate this city, ignored by the masses. For as long as they want."

  I wondered why he had told me this, revealed his secret. He seemed more than a little nuts himself, stressed out, and perhaps just needing a friend, someone, anyone with whom he could confide and receive compassion. That someone that dark night happened to be me.

  Every night the following week, I snuck out after Betty went to bed and headed for the house in our old neighborhood where the homeless zombies lived. I said nothing to Betty about it. She already thought I was drinking too much and probably couldn't take much more of my nonsense before she left me altogether and went to live with her sister in Phoenix.

  Naturally, during those nightly visits, I sought out Joe Reed. Sometimes, he wasn't there, having himself snuck out to Harvey's to wet his whistle with his favorite brew. Dr. Hurlburt, I had learned, was well off and gave each of the twenty or so homeless zombies a small allowance for their nightly wanderings. Some of them, the dimmest ones, remained in the house, satisfied to sit in silence and darkness, while others, like Joe, were impelled to seek out the world their death had left behind.

  "Doesn't that imply something?" I asked Dr. Hurlburt one evening. "That they are aware, at least of something?"

  The doctor merely scowled and shrugged.

  "That they have a little piece of their souls in them?" I said. "Take Joe, for instance. There must be a little piece of him that remembers Harvey's, the taste of his favorite brew."

  Dr. Hurlburt grinned. "Perhaps," he said, nodding. "Perhaps."

  * * * *

  I also set about trying to help Joe Reed find his soul.

  The first thing I did was visit his older sister, Mary. At first, she didn't recognize me. But after a few minutes she was laughing over the memories of being tormented by Joe and me with toads and earthworms in the old house where they had grown up.

  "You two were holy terrors," she remembered, laughing. "Little devils!" I told her that I had stopped by because the old gang was planning a reunion and we wanted to get some photos of Joe for a scrapbook that could be fondly passed around.

  She brought out a shoe box of old pictures and leafed through them while we sat at her kitchen table. It didn't take her long to pull out a dozen or so pictures of Joe in various phases of his life. In one, he was a silly, grinning nine-year-old. There were a couple poses in his serious teenage years (one of which had me in my serious teenage years with our arms around each other's shoulders in a defiant stance). Another was from his wedding day; and, later, with his two daughters, Sandra and Kim, and wife, Judy, before the divorce. "Whore," Mary muttered as she tossed that picture aside. There was, finally, the one from the last week of his life, in which, I had to agree with Mary, he did look tired and forlorn.

  "Too much work," Mary said
as she gazed at this picture. "Too much worry."

  The last photographs she pulled from the box, almost as an afterthought, surprised me: it was of Joe and a slim girl with long, silky blonde hair, standing in front of his father's car. She was staring at him with unmistakable adoration.

  It was my Betty, of course, before her first and only date with Joe Reed.

  Joe didn't give any of the photographs a second look as I shoved them one-by-one under his heavy gaze in the back booth of Harvey's that night.

  "Hey, Joe," I said, finally showing him the one from our teenage years, "look at these dudes. Two worthless punks." I shook my head, marveling at our arrogance, our youth and our disdain for the world.

  But Joe Reed didn't flinch. His eyes held that same tedium.

  "You're wasting your time," Dr. Hurlburt said. I had invited him to the bar, to see for himself what effect the photographs might have. "You don't think we tried this in our therapies?"

  I shrugged as I pulled the photograph from under Joe Reed's eyes.

  On the way back to the zombie house with Joe in tow, Dr. Hurlburt seemed to soften a little and thanked me for my efforts to revive his soul.

  In front of the place, he turned and looked up into the dark windows.

  "Maybe the army is right," he said, "in wanting to destroy them."

  I shuddered. In that moment, with Joe standing dumbly next to us, I almost agreed.

  But in the next instant, Joe turned to me.

  "Don Kaminski," he said, squinting. "Right?"

  I looked at Dr. Hurlburt. His eyes were as wide and smiling as mine.

  I worked three to eleven the next day and rather than going out with my crew for a round of drinks at Dixie's afterwards, I headed straight for the zombie house.

  But the place was a burning, roaring blaze. There were fire trucks and ambulances and police cars blocking Colton Avenue. Firemen and cops rushed around and everyone in the neighborhood was out gawking at the tragedy. I heard somebody tell a neighbor it must have been a crack house. Weird strangers coming and going. And the place always dark, sinister.

  I ran past the barricades in the middle of the street toward the house until one of the cops stopped me.

  "Hey, bud!" He was a tall, burly guy with arms as wide as branches. "Where you think you're going?"

  "I knew a guy in there," I said.

  "Sorry, bud," said the cop with a sympathetic nod, "but if he was in there, he's just a pile of ash now." I backed off and gave the house a last glance. It smoldered and stank of old burnt wood, flesh perhaps. Tomorrow, the city would come and tear it down.

  I turned and trotted the four blocks to Harvey's.

  And there he was, Joe Reed, sitting in his favorite booth in the back of the place, sipping a beer. I hurried over and slid in across from him.

  "Hey, Joe," I said, huffing from the run. "You there for the fire? What happened to that doctor guy? Hurlburt?"

  He frowned and took a sip of beer.

  "Hey, Joe," I said. "Remember me? It's Don. Don Kaminski."

  A hint of recognition filled his eyes, then a frown.

  "Yeah," he said. "Don."

  "Yeah. Don," I gushed. "So, what happened? How'd the house burn down?"

  "Bad men came," he said. "Men from the camp. I was coming here. Didn't see me."

  I guessed a platoon from the army had tracked the zombies down to Hurlburt's cousin's house and burnt the place down, thinking all of them were inside. But Joe must have been on his way to Harvey's when they raided the place.

  "Idiots," I mumbled. Joe expressed no opinion. He just took another sip of beer and waited. For what, I didn't think he even knew.

  "You'll gonna have to come with me," I told him with some urgency in my voice.

  He looked at me, but didn't seem to care. He was content, didn't have a worry in the world, and in that moment, I envied him.

  I let him finish his beer, then stood and said, "C'mon." I reached under his arm and he let me lift him out of the booth.

  * * * *

  Betty's eyes boggled when I walked into the kitchen with Joe Reed in tow. She dropped the dish she had been drying in the sink. It shattered. She wobbled away from the sink and plopped heavily onto a chair at the kitchen table.

  It took her some time to get over the shock of seeing a dead man.

  I explained everything to her, where I had been every night the last two weeks. And, finally, what just happened to the zombies and Joe Reed's good fortune at having been on his way to Harvey's when the army troops came.

  "And here I thought you had a girlfriend," Betty said with a laugh.

  "Joe needs a place to stay a while," I told her.

  Betty looked at him and nodded agreeably. And for a moment, I thought I saw something of the old desire in her eyes. I thought it looked something like the way she was looking at him in that old photograph Joe's sister, Mary, had given me of their first and only date. But a moment later, I shook my head and thought I must be going crazy. I wondered if Betty had any more desire for anything in her life.

  "Sure," she said and looked back at me. "For a little while. We got the room."

  * * * *

  We put Joe Reed up in one of bedrooms that was for the kid we never had when we bought the house twenty years ago. Somehow, after a couple of days, we got used to having him around.

  I went back to work at Ford, and Betty went back to being housebound. Still, it bothered me the two of them were home alone all day. During my shift, I started imagining them making love in his bedroom. All over the house, for that matter. That would certainly go a long way to waking up his soul.

  Three or four days after Joe Reed had moved in with us, I confessed my concerns to Betty. She blushed momentarily, and waved a hand at me.

  "Don't be silly," she said. "All he does all day long is sit in the living room, drink beer and watch TV." She laughed. "Just like you when you come home."

  But I didn't buy it. There seemed something different about Joe after only three days. He seemed more alert, playing at being dumb instead of being dumb.

  My fears were confirmed the next day. When I came straight home from work (I wasn't even stopping at Dixie's after my shift anymore), the house was empty. Betty and Joe were gone. And all Betty's clothes and toiletries and romance novels were gone, too.

  After rushing around the house like a madman, I found a note pinned to the pillow on my side of the bed, in Betty's neat handwriting:

  Dear Donald,

  As you should have figured out by now, I left with Joe Reed. It's really for the best. You have to believe that. Maybe it was always meant to be that I would end up with him, even after he died. It was as if my soul was as dead as his when you brought him home. Now, maybe, we can resurrect our lives and start all over again. Even you. I don't think you really ever loved me. That's why you drank so much. Maybe now you will stop drinking and find someone who can make you happy like I never could.

  So don't be sad. This change will be good for both of us, for all of us. I feel confident, I really do, that we are going to find our souls.

  Love,

  Betty

  I read the note a couple more times then let it drop to the bed. What a weird way life has in getting us what we always wanted. I now know Betty had always wanted Joe and I had been the consolation prize.

  Incessant banging shook me out of my head. Someone was at my front door. A moment later, they crashed through. When I ran out to the living room, I was tackled by a couple skinny army privates.

  "Hold him down!" urged a red-faced, granite-headed sergeant.

  Within moments, a few other privates were reporting that the rest of the house was secure. The sergeant scowled and gestured to the sofa.

  "Sit him there!" he barked.

  The privates dragged me over to the sofa, and held me down.

  The sergeant leaned his granite face into mine. "Where is he?"

  "Who?"

  "The zombie!"

  I shrugged and al
most laughed. It was funny to have to tell him that the "zombie" had run off with my wife.

  * * * *

  Dr. Hurlburt came to see me after a few days. I had been whisked off to some secret army base and questioned for hours at a time by several mean-spirited agents who seemed to doubt every essence of my being. Some of them got impatient and shouted I was a traitor. Others used the kind approach, trying to be my buddy. Others used threats.

  I told them all the same thing: the truth. I didn't know where that zombie, Joe Reed, was. He had run off with my wife.

  "They are never gonna believe that story," said Dr. Hurlburt. He was beaming with a kind smile, as if he were innocent in all of this.

  "But it's true," I told him.

  "They can't believe a zombie could ever fall in love," he said.

  That hurt. Joe Reed and Betty in love.

  "But, it's true, I tell you," I said. "It's true."

  Dr. Hurlburt sighed. "So," he said, "they do have souls."

  I nodded. I had found out the hard way.

  "But they're still homeless," I told him. "I guess."

  Dr. Hurlburt looked at me and smiled. "Aren't we all," he told me with a wink.

  * * * *

  The Valace Standard

  by

  Ryan C. Thomas

  NOW

  The windows in my living room overlook the courtyard, a large square of green grass synthed from silk and monofilament so soft it's like walking on cotton balls. In the center, four marble fish leaping from a marble wave spit water into a small reflecting pool. Surrounding this are paved footpaths and wrought iron benches, rhododendrons and hydrangea. A koi pond resides near the community garden, which sits against the South Tower. It truly is a serene courtyard, a postcard-perfect recreation of a pristine suburban American park.