Zombies
Sophie took a drag of her American Spirit and watched a zombie take a piss between the houses across the street. Standing on Rachel’s second-story porch, she had a clear view as the undead one wagged his wiener, tucked it back into his blood-stained overalls, and ambled away down Bryant Avenue.
Dusk was just beginning to fall, and the October winds whipped dry leaves into whirling clusters. Sophie wore a striped ski jacket over her artfully torn prom dress, and her hair was teased into a messy nest that was tied atop her head with a red lace ribbon. Her fingers, holding the cigarette, were beginning to bite from the cold air.
Sophie realized she was alone on the porch; unconsciously, she’d expected Brian to follow her. Finishing her smoke, she dropped it into a soup can left on the porch railing for that purpose, took a swig of her PBR, and climbed back through the window into Rachel’s apartment.
Brian was across the room, leaning against the bookshelf and talking with some blonde girl Sophie didn’t recognize. Sophie made eye contact with Brian and walked through the dining room — where Aidan was carefully dripping stage blood from a plastic packet onto a gaping wound in John’s forehead — into the kitchen. There, she found Chris talking with Derek.
“It’s pretty great,” Chris was saying. “She wrote it in 24 hours, without sleeping. Some of it is typed, some of it is handwritten. We’re putting it out as a chapbook.”
“Ooh, fancy,” interrupted Sophie, pointing to Chris’s can of Surly Furious.
“You want one?” asked Derek, who was wearing a business suit and, on his eyes, orange contact lenses. “I brought some. They’re in the fridge.”
“Sure,” said Sophie, dropping her empty can in the sink and reaching into the fridge to pull a Surly out of its plastic ring.
“Sophie’s writing something for us too,” said Chris. Aidan had dusted Chris’s face with charcoal powder in an attempt to make him look gaunt, but she’d done an imprecise job of it, and he just looked like a zombie Pig-Pen. “A short story. Magical realism, right?”
“Maybe,” said Sophie, cracking the beer. “What kind of zombie are you supposed to be?” she asked Derek. “An executive zombie?”
“A zombie from the one percent,” agreed Derek. “It’s one of my dad’s old suits.”
“You need to be more disheveled,” said Sophie, pulling at Derek’s tie. “Like this.” She pushed the suit jacket back off his left shoulder. She tugged at Derek’s dress shirt. “Can this get dirty?”
Derek shrugged. “Sure.”
“One sec,” said Sophie, setting her tallboy down. “Don’t move.”
She walked out to the dining room; glancing across the living room, she saw that Brian was now out on the porch with John, whose face was caked with red-stained latex. Aidan and the blonde girl were out there too, leaning over the railing and calling down to someone.
Sophie found a new squib on the dining room table and popped it between her hands. Red liquid dripped from Sophie’s hands as she walked back into the kitchen.
“Here,” she said to Derek. “Pull your jacket back some more.” Derek dropped the jacket off his left arm, and Sophie pressed a bloody hand onto his white shirt, right over his left breast. She slid the other hand under the jacket on his right side and wiped the blood against the shirt there.
“Now spread your legs,” she said. Derek stood at ease, and Sophie wiped the rest of the blood on his right pant leg, rubbing her hands up and down from his calf to his thigh. “There,” she said. “That’s better.”
“Thanks,” said Derek. He wasn’t too bad-looking, Sophie thought. Kind of round in the face.
“Now you have to keep the jacket hanging off like that,” she told him. Rachel came jogging up the back stairs, and Sophie asked where she could wash her hands.
“Anywhere,” said Rachel, waving toward the kitchen sink as she grabbed a bottle of Fireball out of the freezer. “Doesn’t matter. Hey, the fire’s going now. You guys should come down. We have to leave pretty soon.”
“Cool,” said Chris, and followed Rachel down the stairs.
Derek moved to follow them, then turned back to Sophie. “Coming?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, washing her hands. “I’ll be down in a sec.” Derek nodded and walked down the stairs, obediently leaving his jacket hanging half-off.
Sophie’s makeup was making her itch. She took a long drink of her beer and set it on the kitchen counter, then walked into the bathroom and shut the door.
In the harsh light of the fluorescent bulb above the sink, she could see that her eye sockets still looked convincingly blackened — even up close. The white makeup she’d applied over the rest of her face was drying and cracking; she flexed her face to try to loosen it. Her eyes were red, irritated by the makeup. Sophie wondered if she was allergic. Having her hair up made her forehead look huge. She wondered who the blonde girl was.
Leaning against the sink, Sophie closed her eyes and hung her head. Her brain tingled. That click, she thought, remembering a Tennessee Williams play Brian had taken her to. Waiting, just waiting for that click.
Sophie opened her eyes, opened the bathroom door, and went looking for Brian. She found him in the dining room, where Aidan was rubbing a green splotch onto his face.
“Come do a shot with me,” she said to Brian.
“Okay,” he said. He turned to Aidan. “Look good?”
“Yeah,” she said, snapping the makeup case shut. It didn’t, thought Sophie. It didn’t look good.
“Thanks,” said Brian, standing up. “Want to do a shot?” he asked Aidan. “Or…do nuns prefer holy wine?”
Aidan, who was a zombie nun, said, “Actually, we like Angry Balls. Do you know where the Fireball is?”
“Rachel has it down in the backyard,” volunteered Sophie.
“Cool,” said Aidan, pulling a can of Angry Orchard out of the fridge. “I’m going down there, then.”
“Okay, we’ll be down in a minute,” said Brian. Aidan jogged down the stairs, and Brian and Sophie were left alone in the apartment.
“What do they have for shots up in this bitch?” asked Sophie. She opened the freezer, and found the dregs of a bottle of Svedka. “This’ll work. Get glasses.”
Brian found two McDonald’s souvenir juice glasses in the cupboard. “You want Grimace, or Hamburglar?”
“I’ll take Grimace.” Sophie split the vodka between the glasses and tossed the empty bottle, frosted with condensation, into a brown bag on the floor. “That’ll be recycling.”
“Cheers,” said Brian, raising the Hamburglar glass and grinning. “To two years.”
“Uh-huh,” said Sophie, clinking her glass against his and drinking her vodka in three quick swallows. She gasped and slammed the glass on the table. Brian was sipping slowly. “Do your shot!” she said.
“I am,” replied Brian. He was a zombie rabbit, the soft gray ears flopping over his thick black hair. He wore a gray sweatsuit that was too tight for him, and Sophie looked down to see if he was hard. He wasn’t.
“Who was that blonde girl?” she asked.
“I don’t remember her name,” Brian replied, taking another sip. “We met at a party a while ago, I guess.”
“Does she know Rachel?”
“I guess. Do you have to work tomorrow?”
“Of course,” said Sophie. “Fucking brunch.”
“Brunch is the worst.” Brian looked down into his glass, then drained the vodka.
“We should go out to the fire,” said Sophie. “Don’t want to be rude.” She turned and descended the back stairs, and she could hear Brian tromping behind her with his heavy footsteps.
In the backyard, picnic table benches and lawn chairs had been pulled around Rachel’s battered metal fire pit. Sophie dropped onto a bench next to Chris, and Brian went looking for a chair.
“Chris was just telling us about your story,” Rachel said to Sophie, tossing a cigarette butt into the fire. “Magical realism, he says?”
“I don’t know if it’s that,” said Sophie, pulling her cigarettes out and reaching for a stick that was half-extended from the fire. “Maybe it’s more like…surrealism.”
“There’s a talking dog,” explained Chris.
“Yep,” murmured Sophie with her mouth half-clamped on a cigarette that she was lighting with the smoldering end of the stick. “It’s about a girl and a talking dog.” She took the cigarette out of her mouth, tossed the stick back into the fire, and blew smoke into the air.
“Like, a little girl?” asked Rachel, gesturing to Aidan to pass the Fireball.
“No,” said Sophie. “Like, a woman.” She took a drink of the sticky-sweet cinnamon whiskey as it passed, and continued. “She finds this stray dog and brings it home, and she starts talking to it. One day, it starts talking back. She doesn’t really question why. So then, she starts…um, telling it all about her life, about what she does every day.”
“It turns out,” contributed Chris, “she doesn’t do a lot.”
“Well, no,” said Sophie, “but the dog doesn’t know that. This girl comes home every day and tells the dog about all these adventures she has at her glamorous job in…fashion marketing. She says she’s working with all these models and photographers and designers, and she says she has her own fashion line that people are interested in. She says she’s just waiting for a big order to come in, and then she and the dog can move to this big house with a huge yard and whatever.”
“But she’s not doing those things?” asked Rachel.
“No,” said Sophie. “Not really.” She reached under the bench for her beer, but she couldn’t put her hand on it, and gave up. “She just works at a shitty dry cleaner in the fashion district.”
“So this goes on for years,” said Chris.
“Yeah, years.” Sophie looked over the fire pit. Brian had found a chair, and set it next to the blonde girl.
“And then one day,” explained Chris, “the dog calls her out.”
“Yeah, basically,” said Sophie. “The dog is like, ‘Listen, you’re full of shit. You tell me about all this stuff you’re doing, but you’re not doing any of it. You don’t have a fashion line. No big order is coming in. We’re never going to leave this shithole apartment.”
The blonde girl wasn’t even anything. She wasn’t any kind of zombie. She wasn’t wearing anything special.
“So what does this woman do then?” asked Rachel, raising her chin and carefully scratching at her freshly slit throat.
“She opens the door,” said Sophie, “and she says, ‘Okay, dog, you can go if you want. Go find another owner. Go find a bigger house. You’re just…you’re just mocking me.’”
“But the dog doesn’t go,” said Chris.
“No,” agreed Sophie. “The dog doesn’t go. He says, ‘I’m staying here. Another owner would be…would just be too boring.’”
“Okay,” said Rachel. “So that’s the end?”
“I don’t know,” said Sophie. “Maybe.” She laughed awkwardly, and felt the bench sag as Derek sat down next to her, sandwiching her between himself and Chris.
“Hey,” Derek said to Sophie as Chris turned and continued to explain to Rachel about his new publishing venture.
“Hey,” said Sophie, flicking some ash off her cigarette. She looked into the fire. She wondered if they were all going to try to put that fire out when they left, or just let it burn.
“So some friends of mine are getting together after the pub crawl,” he said. “At a warehouse space in Northeast. They just moved in; it’s kind of an art space. Anyway, I’m going up there, and you should come. I might not stay for Girl Talk.”
“Yeah,” said Sophie. “Maybe.”
“You can get some more blood on me,” said Derek, grinning.
Sophie looked over at Derek’s wide smile. His teeth were perfect, too perfect for a zombie. “I think you have enough on your suit,” she said. “What you need is some blood in your mouth.”
Derek nodded. “Yeah. Totally.”
Sophie stood up quickly, and had a head rush. Brian was gone. She turned around and saw him disappearing inside the back door. Sophie threw her cigarette into the fire and stepped over Derek’s legs. She wavered as one leg left the ground, and Derek grabbed her hips to steady her.
Saying nothing, Sophie pulled away from Derek and followed Brian into the house. “We should take off in ten minutes,” called Rachel from behind her. “Tell anyone who you see up there.”
Sophie stumbled on an empty bottle as she took the back stairs two at a time. At the top of the stairs, she found Brian in the kitchen. He turned around in surprise.
“Come with me,” Sophie said, grabbing Brian’s hand and walking into the apartment’s interior hallway. Rachel’s bedroom was to the right; Sophie turned left to pull Brian into the second bedroom, which served as Rachel’s painting studio.
Once she got Brian into the studio, Sophie slammed the door shut behind them. In the adjacent bathroom, she could hear the toilet flush. Outside, the sun had almost completely set, and the orange glow of a sodium streetlight shining through the window provided what illumination there was in the studio. For furniture there was an easel, and a table, and a low stool.
Sophie reached under her dress, yanked at her underwear, and let the Hanes panties fall to the floor. Brian had been with her when she’d bought them at Target, and she wondered if he would remember. It had been a multicolor six-pack, and these were the blue pair.
Sitting down on the stool, Sophie looked up at Brian and spread her legs. “Don’t fuck that blonde girl,” she said. “Fuck me.”
The room was silent. Outside, Sophie could hear the zombies laughing. For a few long seconds, Brian just stood there. Then, he cleared his throat.
“I came up here,” he started, then paused. “I came up here,” he said again, “to…to use the bathroom. One…one second.” Turning and opening the studio door, Brian walked down the hall to the bathroom, and in a moment, Sophie could hear his piss gurgling loudly into the toilet.
Suddenly, Sophie felt nauseous. She stood up and pulled her underwear back on, and walked quickly out of the room. In the kitchen she found John, who was eating a slice of cold pizza and digging in a drawer.
“You know where the bottle opener is?” John asked.
“No,” Sophie said, and started down the stairs, then stopped and called back over her shoulder. “We’re going in ten minutes!” Opening the door, Sophie was hit with the autumn chill. She stuffed her hands into her pockets and walked toward the fire.
