Zee Bee & Bee Read online

  Zee Bee & Bee

  (a.k.a. Propeller Hats For The Dead)

  Praise for Zee Bee & Bee

  “Keaton combines smart, subversive high-mindedness with flat-out genre thrills like no one working today, and Zee Bee & Bee pulls off that balance about as well as you could hope for. It works just as well as an odd, slightly silly, weirdly romantic horror comedy, a heartfelt love letter to the width and breadth of zombie culture, and a wild and witty deconstruction of everything that's come before it.”

  -David Tallerman – Writing On The Moon

  “Zee Bee & Bee (a.k.a. Propeller Hats for the Dead) by David James Keaton offers an insightful riff on trend horror and contemporary pop culture very much akin that of early-’90s Wes Craven.”

  -Fangoria Magazine – Michael Compton

  “Take warning before you crack the cover on this novel. Plan. I mean, figure that three, four, five hours after you read sentence one, you will stagger to your feet and hurry for the bathroom because you've been holding off the urgent need to pee for at least an hour. You'll need a big glug of water because you're dehydrated from mouth breathing fast for hours. You'll need a quart of Visine because your eyes will be burning. Yes. It moves just that fast…”

  “Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get into the writing style…”

  -Fatally Yours – Sarah Jahier

  “The writing here is sharp as a six thousand dollar suit. Tailor made. Keaton's voice rings out with an air of genuine American authenticity that is surprisingly lacking in a lot of contemporary commercial fiction. The plot functions perfectly, but it's Keaton's style, voice, and artful wording that keep me reading sentence after sentence. A great man once said, in regard to writing well: Write every sentence. Keaton does just that.”

  -Jason Stuart – Author of Raise A Holler

  “…there is some pretty clever dialogue that horror fans will appreciate though.”

  -Fatally Yours – Sarah Jahier

  “…it's pretty much every damn zombie (don’t use that word I said!) story and movie and history and reference and Theodore Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood and Dead Kurt V's Harrison Bergeron, Welcome To The Monkey House and Catch-22 and Frankenstein -- Doctor and Monster, both -- and, oh, gee, about a billion other references that will suddenly tumble into your mind an hour or a day or, hell, for all I know, a lifetime later. And…oh, for gosh sake, buy it and read it. I'm running out of space and time and body parts.”

  -A.J. Hayes

  “David James Keaton gnaws his tongue-in-cheek to a bloody stump in Zee Bee & Bee, a slick stream-of-consciousness (consciousness? zombies?) tale. On its surface, the snarky narrative seems almost too clever, but read beyond the obvious genre affection and surprisingly heartfelt details of everyday life and you come away with a strange nostalgia and fear for a self-absorbed culture’s obsession with their next slice of entertainment.”

  -Page Horrific – Walt Hicks

  “Calling all zombiephiles! (is that a word? who better to ask?) This is one zombie experience you don't want to wait until you're dead to have. Get your “Z” Love on. D.J.K. is the Zombie Man.”

  -Randy Chandler – Author of Daemon of the Dark Wood and Dime Detective

  “B-B-B-Bollocks!”

  -King George VI

  Zee Bee & Bee (a.k.a. Propeller Hats For The Dead)

  David James Keaton

  Published by Bunyip Books

  Copyright 2011 David James Keaton

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The information contained in this book is not intended to serve as a replacement for professional medical advice. Any use of the information in this book is at the reader's discretion. The author and publisher specifically disclaim any and all liability arising directly or indirectly from the use or application of any information contained in this book. A health care professional should be consulted regarding your specific situation.

  Substantially shorter version originally published in Deadcore: 4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas, Comet Press, 2010

  Foreword Copyright © 2011, David Tallerman

  Cover Art Copyright © 2011, Daniel Stripp (hideous sketch on the last page is the author’s fault)

  In-text artwork © 2011 David James Keaton

  Photography Copyright © 2011, Nathan Lamoreau

  Send More Paramedics Drinking Game © 2011, Nathan Lamoreau

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Preface: “SCARE QUOTES AND COFFIN RIDES”

  Foreword By David Tallerman: “LOOK BUSY!”

  ZEE BEE & BEE (a.k.a. Propeller Hats For The Dead)

  SEND MORE PARAMEDICS: The Zombie Movie (or novella) Drinking Game

  Author’s Preface:

  Scare Quotes And Coffin Rides

  So…Amy’s friend Jen was flying in from Memphis that day, and she wanted to hit all the Pittsburgh landmarks like the Duquesne Incline (insert picture of the worst ride at any theme park), that crazy church they turned into a bar (insert picture of weeping Jesus and Church Brew Works), the overrated Primanti Brothers (insert picture of inspired truck driver jamming an entire meal into a sandwich so he can deliver that Coors, the site of Roethisberger’s near decapitation (insert picture of headless stone statue), etc., etc. Also, despite being like two foot two, Jen apparently thinks of herself as some sort of competitive eater because she engulfed an omelet bigger than a hubcap and then wanted to hit up the Atomic Hot Wings Challenge at Quaker Steak and Lube (most deceptive restaurant title ever) before I was barely out of bed.

  But it was already a big day. That morning, I’d just gotten word that my zombie story, “Zee Bee & Bee,” a tale that had gotten out of hand and expanded way past the point of publishability and was already being chopped into more anthology-friendly pieces, was being published in its entirety (at the time, as you’ll see it’s even longer now) in the new Comet Press 250-pound anthology, Deadcore: 4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas. So to celebrate we decided to check out “Monroeville Zombies” a.k.a. “The Mysterious New Zombie Museum at the Monroeville Mall I Kept Hearing About At Work, hidden shrine for George Romero’s orginal masterpiece Dawn of the Dead. “Maybe Jen could add this to her Pac-Man tour,” I begged? “We’ll eat something weird, I promise! Pleeeeease?”

  This was easier said than done. First off, it was getting late in the day, and we were still dealing with Chicken Wing Hiroshima, or The Day We Do Not Speak Of.

  Jen had signed a waiver before she started eating those nuclear wings, but where was my waiver? Because the boneless wings with the “mild” sauce that I ordered (translation “for pussies”) were barely friggin’ edible at all. Amy was filming Jen’s valiant, red-faced attempt to get down that last wing Cool Hand Luke style (more like Burning Hand Luke after you touched the suckers) but I kept trying to turn her camera phone on my desperate attempts to penetrate a boneless wing with a plastic fork. “Wing,” my ass. Try “flipper”). It was impossible. See, this was the true challenge they did not advertise. Luckily, there were wrenches and screwdrivers glued to the walls because, hey, it’s a theme joint. But I have to assume those are really there in case of a rubber-chicken penetration emergency and not for the kitsch factor.

  So, while I was still whining about my meal, Jen ate that last toxic fin, er, wing, grabbed her awesome “trophy” (a.k.a. “crappy bumper sticker”) and we ran out the door to meet my friend Nate at the mall before the exhibit closed. See, Nate’s kind of a zombie connoisseur and the type of guy who takes his apocalyptic scenarios more seriously than most, so I figured he’d dig this “museu
m” we’d somehow missed.

  (By the way, there will be more scare quotes than usual in this adventure. You know, the ones they used in newspaper headlines to be sly? Apologies. I mean, “sorry.”)

  Okay, so there we were. It’s like 5:15, and the internet was telling us the Zombie Museum closed at 6:00. So we come flying in the Barnes & Noble side of the mall at Mach 2, and we (me) immediately get distracted by zombie anthologies and DVDs on an encap. So by the time we get into the mall itself to claw at the directory, it’s 5:30. And, of course, there’s no listing for anything containing the word “zombie” or “museum.”

  Amy tries asking some employees at a jewelry store and gets back an audible scoff in return. Nope, no idea what she’s talking about. So Amy and Jen wander off to get some ice cream, sort of giving up (and Jen needs ice cream to wash the delicious atomic chemicals out of her mouth) but Nate and I are still hopeful. We notice a GameStop out of the corner of our eye, (“Gotta be movie geeks in there, right, right?!”) and we run inside.

  There are two employees working. One a very athletic-looking young man who’s not doing much of anything. The other a slovenly, disheveled, basement-dweller type who is furiously helping some screeching family buy games for their Wii. I choose poorly. The sporty kid doesn’t seem to understand anything I’m saying, let alone where this mysterious “museum” is. But then, like a chorus of angels, Mr. Disheveled tips his head towards us, never even looking up from his transaction, to explain within the duration of his weary sigh:

  “Take a right out of the store, take a left by the escalators, a left where they used to sell snowmobiles, a right where Old Man Witherspoon’s barn used to be, a right near the creek, a left near the Hurricane Booth, and there you’ll find a toy store. It’s in the back of the toy store.”

  Holy shit, we’re back in business. 5:53 and counting. As me and Nate run out and grab Jen and Amy like a couple of footballs, I swear I see Disheveled mutter into his watch just like those creepy skeletal undercover aliens in They Live:

  “I’m sending down four.”

  And there it is. Buried in the back, a converted storeroom entrance in the shadows of this toy store reads, “Zombie Museum.” And it apparently doesn’t close any time soon. None of this “open till 6:00″ bullshit like it warned us on the website. And there’s no one in here at all. Just some punk on his laptop messing with Facebook who doesn’t even stop Jen and Amy from bringing in ice cream.

  But for a museum, hell, it’s not bad! Small but heartfelt. Sad but earnest. Among the attractions: full-size replicas of the Nazi Zombie from Shockwave, poor, doomed Flyboy and pint-sized Roger from the original Dawn of the Dead (Flyboy is in his tragic limp-necked final state, of course), the barrel with the Army stamp and phone number from Return of the Living Dead (yeah, “don’t dial down the center,” dude, unless you want a mushroom cloud), authentic severed-limb props from the original trilogy with blood bladders and tubes still attached, a TV running the special features off the ‘78 Dawn of the Dead DVD (I think), an actual framed newspaper headline from Day of the Dead screaming, “The Dead Walk!” but, thank Christ, with none of those insincere quotation marks to ruin it, and…

  The coffin ride.

  Wh-What? Well, there’s this full-size coffin being guarded by that first zombie from Night of the Living Dead. But he’s holding up a sign that reads:

  “Sorry! Coffin Ride Out Of Order.”

  But there’s nothing at all to indicate that this is a “ride.” Just a coffin. And a small milk crate step to climb up and flop on in. No electrical cords, no lights, no controls of any kind. Just the coffin. We start to suspect that this “coffin ride” might be, uh, death? If it wasn’t out of order, maybe you would pay your dollar and…get shot in the face? It raises all sorts of questions. At first, we think maybe it sort of vibrates like those lame vehicles outside a K-Mart, but the more we talk about it, the more we’re sure it means that, yes, you will be killed. We don’t dare ask the punk at the counter ’cause I learned my lesson earlier when I foolishly tried to get an extra large T-shirt that said “Monroeville Zombies” on it. I only saw small and mediums hanging, and Spacebook mumbled, “No, those are the most popular, so we never have ‘em.”

  Very Yogi Berra. Like saying, “Yeah, no one goes to that restaurant anymore because it’s too crowded.”

  So, anyway, that’s about it. What else did we do. We watched the TV cycling the special features off the Day of the Dead DVD so I could point out that all the zombie extras were also munching on hot wings during those movies (apparently because it most resembled delicious human flesh), we got some cool snapshots of the scale-model dollhouse replica of the Monroeville Mall of the ’70s (ice rink?!), even snuck some bubblgum machine Homies onto the teeny escalators to pose for some pics with the zombie toys (security was quite lax, remember? “No Shirt, No Shoes, Bad Service”), and when other people started to wander on in, we wandered on out.

  But at the door, there was this one little brat who seemed to be making fun of the meager attractions, and Nate surprised us all by cornering him away from his parents and hissing:

  “Listen, kid, when I was your age, zombies were real!”

  And get this, it turned out this “Hurricane Booth” actually existed, too. But, sadly, it was as broken as the coffin ride. It promised “200 mile per hour winds!” and we quickly bullied Amy inside (the only one of us wearing a skirt), and I desperately tried to get it to take my dollar. Nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. The second the glass door closed, a crowd magically appeared, expectant looks on their faces, as if that’s what the dollar paid for.

  I’m not kidding. It was like bam. Suddenly there was a crowd watching me fumble with my soggy dollar and Amy scratch at the glass like she was on “broil.” I swear some of these bystanders must have rappelled out of the ceiling at the prospect of seeing some possible nudity. But much to their disappointment, we let Amy back out of the booth, never knowing what the booth really did, if anything (had to be a microwave). But now I wonder if its function is to imitate a hurricane by doing nothing except taking money until it finally spits out a small piece of paper that states:

  “Now you’re homeless.”

  Oh, yeah, there really was a creek, too. No joke. More like a stagnant little pond right outside the store with a tiny bridge going across it, but, still, there was a river in this mall. A stern sign nearby warned, “Don’t feed the fish!” and it was packed full of those bloated, sluggish mutant koi (koys?) that you see at the zoo. Remember those abominations and those horrific ponds? Talk about an aquarium of the undead.

  And this creek was also full of money. So, apparently, you couldn’t feed the beasts because that’s cruel, but you could whip coins (koins?) at their bulbous heads. One of the big ones even had this big, nasty black hole in its side, right near the gills. Clearly the result of a child’s wish gone wrong. What did the little cherub say before those lethal pennies were launched? “I hope these fishies are happy!” Smack. “I wuv you!” Thud.

  As we were leaving, we did consider trying to “rescue” the injured one for a good minute or so. Translation: “Grab the struggling, diseased, foot-long monster and bumble out the door, chased by security the whole way, so it can probably die in my car.”

  Coffin ride indeed.

  Anyway, to make a long story longer and to celebrate this new, expanded, even nuttier version of “Zee Bee & Bee” you now hold in your hands, our intrepid crew will be heading back to Pittsburgh tonight to tackle that ride again! I mean, tonight! Or…tonight, depending on when exactly you threw down your dollar to buy this thing.

  And you know what? It’s no accident that coffin rides, hurricane booths, and zombie novellas are all a buck. A buck is all you need. Also, in an attempt to entice readers who may be familiar with this story’s early incarnation, besides the re-insertion of more disturbing elements and a reckless indulgence of some narrative dead-ends, I’ve attempted to add even more Bang For Your Buck than this endless intro. So
if you flip to the end of the thing (you may need to use a button, but, fuck it, it’s still your thumb, right?), you will find, finally compiled in its glorious entirety, Send More Paramedics: The Zombie Movie (Or Novella) Drinking Game. I would have put it up here before you started reading the story so you could drink and play along, but we tried that with some volunteers just last night.

  Yeah, it was fatal.

  Okay, hit the button with every thumb you got, even the ones you were saving for lunch. And thank you sincerely for reading my stuff.

  David James Keaton

  July 4th, 2011

  Louisville, Kentucky

  Look Busy!

  Foreword by David Tallerman

  David James Keaton is going to be famous as hell.

  I mean, as much as he's been carving himself a more-than-respectable niche in the small press over the last couple of years, it's tough to imagine that those achievements are more than the lighting of the touchpaper on his rise to stratospheric fame. After all, the wider publishing world can only stay blind to what this guy's up to for so long. Maybe history is full of tales of talent going unnoticed until it was too late to do said talent any good, but this is the 21st century, damn it, news travels fast. Surely it can only be a matter of time before the right editor gets fried with a thousand volts of Keatonesque pulp-literary goodness?

  So depending on when you read this, me saying, "David James Keaton is going to be famous" might not be much of a prediction. Maybe you're skimming through this and his first novel is already out and winning awards and getting all sorts of praise from all sorts of people and you just finished watching him talk up a storm with Letterman or shaking hands with the President and you found yourself wondering what else this David James Keaton dude had done. Maybe the thought that there was a time when he laboured in obscurity was just so damn tough to wrap your head around that you figured you'd better hunt up some of his early work. In which case ... welcome, visitor from the future. Take care to strap that Steelers helmet on tight before the bodily fluids starts flying.