Zee Bee & Bee Read online

  “Which is?”

  “Sigh. I shouldn’t even have to say it. Do I have to say it? I won’t. Okay, I will. The lawnmower scene, fuckers. If my own death came at that moment, in that film, I would be okay with it.”

  “Next time, just sigh instead of saying the word “sigh,” douche bag.”

  “Sorry, it’s hard to resist when you’re breaking the Fourth Wall with your face every weekend. And the fifth, and the sixth...”

  I try to get their attention by shuffling the wrong way in the circle, against the flow of traffic and will of the mob. They dodge me easily, mostly keeping their yawns glued open. Nothing like that summer when there was a hornets nest under the porch, angrily activated every time more than two weak-ankled feet hit the steps, an extra obstacle that made us dance around in a seriously comic, quite un-undead-like fashion. We almost changed our name to the Zee Bee & Bee & Bee & Bee & Bee as a tribute. And it took at least three smoke bombs to get rid of it for good. But every so often, a sting will still surprise a thin-skinned zombie into breaking character with a high-stepping wince at the most serious of times.

  “Hey, guys?” I whisper. “There’s a suitcase on a bed.”

  “Good,” says Bobby B. “Are they fighting over it in a beautiful passive-aggressive way?”

  “No, more like actually fighting.”

  “Sweet. What are the men up to? Have they found the key to the closet yet?”

  “No, just the nails, near as I can hear. But they may have run out already. There hasn’t been any hammering for awhile.”

  “Great. Good job,” Bobby Z says sarcastically as he grabs my shoulders. “Now turn around. You’re going the wrong way, fucknuts.”

  “But, uh, I did notice a couple things that were kind of weird...”

  “Yeah, you already said that. Something about a paper towel. Good detective work. So the Camel washes his hands too much. It’s just habit.”

  “No, it’s the female. One of them has a pair of bloody underwear soaking in the tub.”

  Everyone stops shuffling.

  “And?” Bobby Z asks, mouth working.

  “What do you mean ‘and’?!” about three zombies chime at the same time.

  “So, what? You think she’ll be more on edge? More likely to defend her personal space?” Bobby B wonders.

  “No.” I speak slow, like a child, seeing that some of them might not know what I’m getting at, or are just pretending not to. “What I’m saying is that she must still be...”

  Bobby Z shoves me over before I can finish.

  “Dude, don’t fuck this up. It’s the only job I’ve ever liked.”

  My shoes pop off, and this lightens the mood.

  “Hey, that reminds me!” Bobby B laughs. “What do you call a zombie melting in your bathtub?”

  “What?”

  “Duane! Get it?”

  Bobby Z smiles a big, blue smile and starts to stumble around next to Cigarette Zombie so he can put his arm around her. I start to grit the last of my teeth. I’ve never seen a season with so many love triangles, dead, undead, or otherwise.

  Bobby B keeps telling the jokes, trying to break the tension with oldies but goodies.

  “What do you call a zombie with no arms and no legs?”

  “Matt.”

  “What do you call that same zombie in the pool?”

  “Bob.”

  “What do you call that same zombie hanging on a meat hook?”

  “Chuck!” Bobby Z is trying hard to answer them before he finishes the set-up.

  “Or it could be ‘Art!’” Baseball Zombie interrupts it. “That works, too.”

  “Shut the fuck up and watch the house.” Bobby Z has his arm around Baseball Zombie’s now shoulders instead. “Go on,” he says, sweetly.

  “What do you call a zombie stuck under your car?”

  “Jack. Go faster.”

  “What do you call a zombie head stuck in your mailbox?”

  “Bill. Hurry up.”

  “What do you call a zombie with one leg?”

  “Eileen. Come on, don’t you have any new ones?”

  “What do you call a zombie with no arms or legs in a pile of leaves?”

  “Russell.”

  “What do you call a zombie with no feet?”

  “Neil.”

  “What do you call a zombie in the middle of a baseball field?”

  We know them all backwards and forward, but even Baseball Zombie isn’t fast enough for that one.

  “Second base!”

  “I like it better when Davey Jones does them,” says Cigarette Zombie. “He’s always so serious about it.”

  She’s right. He used to fire them off as a sort of calisthenics before the game, something to get our minds right, get us down to that “just...one...thing” he was always babbling about. I actually overheard him tell Mags once in a weird, gravelly voice that this place is “no less than my Lord of the Flies.”

  Rumor had it that Davey tried to be one of us way back when, back when it all started. Supposedly he would attack the house all by himself. And he was a miserable failure. Refunds were demanded. But that didn't stop us from calling him "The O.G.Z." sometimes to fuck with him a little.

  It’s quiet for a while, until Bobby B starts cracking knuckles for another troop surge. I point to the Camels’ car at the bottom of the hill, still trying to initiate my discussion.

  “Look at that. What kind of vanity plate says MARCH-7?”

  “Is that today’s date? How tempting would it be to fuck with that car if that was today?”

  “Did anything important happen on that day? I mean, besides...”

  “We all know what happened on that day.”

  “It’s telling us what to do!” Bobby Z yells, shoving me again, and suddenly we’re all running toward the house. “It says ‘get moving!’ That’s a fucking order, soldier!”

  Ironically, it’s hard to be a good zombie in Pittsburgh with all the hills. But tonight in Toledo, Ohio, even though it is much flatter, it is still much too tempting to run.

  Yeah, we relocated to T-Town awhile ago. No shame in it. It’s cheaper and those lazy bastards film all the new movies in Canada for tax purposes anyway.

  Cigarette Zombie is originally from Pittsburgh, and she once said the only reason she smoked was because the coughing reminded her of home, all the brick buildings still stained black from the dying factories. One afternoon, when we were the first two to get to work, she swore to me that there was a “little bit of Steeltown in all of us now.”

  Then she turned and spit a little splash of black onto a nearby butterfly.

  It was beautiful.

  “And one more thing!” Bobby Z trumpets, running harder to get in front of Bobby B. “No one says the word again tonight! We’re over the limit! Now march!”

  What word? March? I snicker. March 7th?

  Sour Towel Zombie pushes himself and catches up with Bobby Z a lucky thirteen steps before the porch.

  “You know,” he snorts. “I thought I was watching a zombie movie the other night, but it just turned out to be a documentary about some lame-ass rapper getting shot nine times. But he’s got to be a zombie, right? Ain’t everybody at this point?”

  “Fuck him,” Bobby B answers him before Bobby Z can get mad about such egregious use of the holy word. “That guy’s a pussy. All rappers get shot. Doesn’t mean shit. Bullet holes? Please. It takes more than that to prove you’re a tough guy. You can’t even see a bullet hole. You usually just have to take their word for it, especially when they tattoo over them. Now, if he’d been shot with nine arrows, that would be a different story. That would be impressive. Can you imagine it? Him stumbling past the DJ, crashing through the turntable at the party, nine arrows sticking out of his body like a porcupine? Maybe one in his face? Now that’s tough.”

  The house is about five feet away, and we can hear the hammers again. They can probably hear us, too, and we still aren’t in character. Davey Jones would flip out
, but we can’t help it. Our music, book, or movie conversations usually keep going until someone is definitively proven wrong. With as much ridicule as possible.

  “Less like a rapper,” I offer. “And more like the cowboy in the western who stumbles into the camp fire after an ambush with an arrow in his...”

  That’s when Bobby Z punches me in the mouth, and I feel my two bottom teeth tip a little toward my tongue. Amazingly, I jab him in the throat before I can talk myself out of it, and we both tumble onto the porch. The other zombies dogpile on us to pull us apart just as Davey Jones’ furious mug appears from behind a cracked flap of wood in the doorway.

  “What the hell?” he barks. “Knock that shit off! And why the fuck were you guys running? Real zombies don’t run! Wrong movie, assholes!”

  “And then I saw his face...” Bobby Z sings. “...now I’m a believer.”

  “Wrong Davey Jones, asshole,” someone giggles. Our boss hates that band.

  Sour Towel steps up behind me and sarcastically flexes where his bicep would have been, an ironic tattoo of the character Tattoo from “Fantasy Island” renting the space instead.

  “The Original Gangsta Zombie has spoken,” he whispers.

  But Davey Jones is right. We’ve always chosen to emulate the shambling, drunken interpretations of the walking dead and never subscribed to the latest, more popular, run-amok versions in, for example, 28 Days, Weeks, and Months Later and the last five Dawn of the Dead remakes. And we usually followed this code religiously. But sometimes we had to remind a few extra-excitable staff (like our very first, now-deceased-for-real Cowboy Zombie) not to howl “Brains!” the war cry first heard in Return of the Living Dead. It was almost irresistible sometimes, but mostly we could successfully fight this urge.

  Mostly.

  The angry face of our boss is gone before we can respond. I stand up without any help, wiggle a tooth, wipe a nose, and turn to find a Bobby scratching at the door, already forgetting what he did to me. I join him reluctantly.

  Yes, “no running” was an old rule, but a necessary one. First, there’s the indisputable fact that when it’s dark, trees are a real danger. Like Sour Towel Zombie always says, “Run too fast through the trees and you can lose your virginity!” (like that poor girl who was spread-eagled and penetrated by a stop-motion spruce in Evil Dead). But the biggest problem was it also got people too excited about crashing into the house by the time they got to it. Tempers were always too short when people moved too fast. That’s why the walking dead could boast such a snowball of new memberships every weekend the world ended.

  I scratch harder even though it’s all wood instead of windows now, and at least three splinters slip under my fingernails.

  I count each one as it goes in and feel nothing.

  MOST OF THE GAME NEVER CHANGES.

  The hammer is under the sink. They usually don’t find it right away. And when the windows run out of glass from our fists, there’s a stack of replacement plywood and wooden doors for them to find upstairs, to give the impression of an interrupted renovation. And under the other sink, of course, the bucket of nails. But to get the power going, they have to use the car battery in the cupboard.

  And like scientists in the movies will tell you, things change quickly when any creature starts using tools.

  So, when the television is up and running, they’ll see our eight-hour videotape of fake news broadcasts (a VCR hides in the wall looking like a fuse box, its cable looking like cable since nobody notices those octopi anymore). First on the screen is the newscaster in denial, expertly played by my father. Then comes the interview with the scientist, Mags’ uncle Mark actually. Finally, my sister interrupts the broadcast with her creepy Casio keyboard rendition of an Emergency Broadcast Signal. It was spot-on, but she cried when I said she couldn’t do the theme for the news, too. “Sometimes too much music ruins a movie,” I said. To plead her case, she cited Shaun of the Dead as a film that showed the necessary reverence for any random stack of LPs. She insisted that it didn’t matter what songs were referenced, just as long as there were plenty of pop-culture references. I told her, if she thought hard enough, she’d remember that it wasn’t that random, that there was a lot of Prince in that collection. I said, “And, sure, maybe the Batman Soundtrack ended up splintered in someone’s eye, but that movie was a parody and doesn’t count anyway, especially with all the blunt objects as weapons. There’s been few things less satisfying than a cricket bat substituted for an ax.”

  “How I sit on the roof and do, like, a soundtrack?” she peeped, all excited.

  “Too much music,” I had to repeat.

  “How about too many movies?” she said through her teeth and stomped off.

  Once the real arguing starts in the house, there are two choices:

  Basement or roof.

  Okay, three, actually. There’s always that mysterious locked door and whatever’s scratching and rustling inside. But one of our Plants, usually Mags, will argue hard for the basement. ‘Cause the basement is doom. The basement has always meant doom, and not just when we were scared of the dark as kids. And if the couple chooses the basement, come morning, everyone in the house will greet them at the basement door all zombied up with a resounding, “You lose!” Translation, Time to eat your fucking faces.” Kidding.

  But they should know this if they’ve seen any movies. Remember, Day of the Dead was just one big basement. And that movie should have taught them all they needed to know. Wait, maybe that was Alien 3. Which movie was it where someone said, “This whole place is a basement” and the hero smirks in response, “It’s a metaphor” as the writer rears his ugly head in the middle of a perfectly good script? Sour Towel Zombie tried to argue that this line was from the movie Dog Soldiers and that was the film that said it best when the token girl reveals to the platoon stranded in the deserted farmhouse that the monsters were never in the barn as we assumed, but simply hiding in the basement the whole time.

  “They were always here,” she explains as her foster family of werewolves slowly rises up behind her. “I just unlocked the door. And it’s that time of the month.”

  Overhearing this theory, Davey Jones grabbed Sour Towel Zombie by his damp, wrinkled collar, the maddest we’d seen him up till then, which was no joke. Must have had something to do with that dog we had.

  Always the dog.

  “You’re not werewolves, you fools!” he spat. “You can never change back.”

  But before those basement debates begin, there’s the TV. One time, I saw a scowling newlywed click past our fake news and click on the real news instead. It was just for a second, right before a Plant slapped his hand away, but long enough to catch the real news anchor sniffling:

  “They’re calling it the end of...”

  You could see the question in his eyes. The end of what? The end of something, anything. That’s all anyone needs to know.

  Then the show was back on with my dad in the anchor seat, reading his script in his best solemn smirk, but still accidentally correcting the real news that he couldn’t help but sneak glances at off-camera.

  “Actually, they’re calling it Judgment Day, not to be confused with Judgment Night, a fine film and cautionary tale about a siege on a mobile home...”

  The evening of that scare, I slumped down by the gas meter to ponder through our break, and one of the dead (I thought it was Cowboy Zombie at the time, although later he denied the whole conversation) plopped down wearily next to me. He was wearing the Pittsburgh Steelers helmet, which was crushing his ten-gallon hat, a direct violation of the “one characteristic” rule that shadowed his face more than usual. I noticed he had one of his shoes off and a bloody fish hook stuck in the ball of his foot.

  He wiggled it free and held it up in the moonlight.

  “Can you imagine what this must look like to one of them?” he asked me in a voice unfamiliar. “That wiggling bait with the line stretching up to infinity, catching the sun every so often like a lightning b
olt? If you were swimming by, you would know something was wrong, but there is just no way you could resist taking a bite.”

  THE PUZZLE IS CALLED “The Executioner And The Four Hats,” and it’s new this year.

  Apparently, Mags got it from a kids’ book, a bush-league knockoff of Encyclopedia Brown’s Mysteries series called Dictionary Blue’s Bafflers. A day earlier, Mags and Davey Jones had us all get together for a brainstorming session on how to apply it to our job. We started the meeting in the house on our loosely-screwed, breakaway dining room table, but we all felt so creatively stagnant in there that we moved the meeting to our home away from home away from home, the Joshua Bush.

  Our bosses told us they wanted to “kick things up a notch” because the state of the economy and the housing bubble and global warming and all that had them worried this might be our last season. At the table, Mags had ineffectually tried to explain this complicated puzzle with a pen, paper, and a saltshaker, but we’d just stared at her, mouths agape, of course, but more agape than usual. But outside huddled around the Bush, when Davey Jones tried acting everything out with some Halfway Homeys (imitations of the popular but racially-insensitive Hispanic bubblegum machine toys, costing half as much as the actual Homies and coming with feeding-and-caring instructions for when the child took one into their home, a.k.a. their Halfway House, a.k.a. their “Halfway Homey Home”), that was when the puzzle finally made sense and the ideas started flying much easier. At least we closed our mouths a little more.

  “See, we got three little dudes in a line and a fourth one behind a wall no one can see.”

  Luckily, he used the bigger Halfway Homeys (the ones from the 75-cent machines, almost a Whole Homey!) for his demonstration or class would have been ridiculous (the ones that cost a dime would have been way too small to see, just torsos really, literally Half a Halfway Homey). According to the boss, Halfway Homeys represented the infiltration of the fake Hispanic gang members into the gigantic, beautiful mall of Dawn, the pivotal '78 film, since those actors' faces were spray-painted brown instead of blue, making them “a much more serious threat to the heroes.” Or something.