Zee Bee & Bee Read online

  “Now, look close,” he went on. “They’re all wearing a hat...”

  “Uh, no they’re not,” someone laughed.

  “Well, the salt shaker is. Sort of,” someone admitted.

  “Just bear with me,” Davey Jones grinned as he patted a dusty shoudler. “In the puzzle, the ‘prisoners,’ they’re all wearing a hat. Here, if you look real close, you’ll notice I’ve grass-stained two of the Halfway Homeys green but left the other two brown. The green prisoners represent zombies, or ‘red hats.’ The brown prisoners, just pretend they have blue hats on for now. On the other side of this wall, or ‘pine cone,’ is the salt shaker, which is actually another prisoner wearing a blue hat. Even though it’s silver.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Yeah, when did they become prisoners?”

  “He means us, I think.”

  “No shit.”

  “It’s the salt shaker that’s fucking me up. I’ve never gotten past it.”

  “Now, if it was the original puzzle,” explained Davey Jones, ignoring the grumblings, “Then you’d say, ‘An executioner is gonna shoot all four of them unless a prisoner can declare with certainty what color hat he’s wearing...”

  “What hat? There are no hats!”

  “Bobby, please, get your head out of your ass,” Mags sneered. “He just told you that the green ones represent red hats, and the brown and silver hats are actually blue. So, one more time, how do they know what color hat they’re wearing?”

  “You mean the hat on their own head?”

  “Yes. Sort of. All the hats, really.”

  “You could just take off your hat and look.”

  “No. They’re tied up.”

  “I’d just shout out ‘blue’ or ‘red.’ You got a 50/50 chance.”

  “That’s not an option.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “The salt shaker mocks me.”

  “Can they talk to each other?”

  “No.”

  “Why can’t they look around?”

  “They’re tied up.”

  “That one isn’t tied up.” A finger flicked over a Halfway Homey holding a bundle of oranges. “It’s selling tiny fruit at tiny intersections to support its tiny crack habit. Look.”

  “Fuck this.”

  “Please don’t screw the lid on the shaker any tighter. The grinding of salt in metal makes me crazy.”

  “We give up.”

  “Okay! The answer is the guy second from the end because he knows that if the guy behind him doesn’t say anything, then that means that he sees one of each color hat on the guys in front of him and therefore knows by the process of elimination that his own hat is the opposite of the one he can see.”

  “Uh...pbbbht...okay?” someone said through a lip-flapping sigh, representing us all.

  “So, here’s the million-dollar question. How can we play this same game with zombies instead of all this bullshit?”

  “We can’t,” Cigarette Zombie said through her teeth, standing up tall in the light of her matchbook. “You’d still need something like a hat. That’s the only reason the puzzle works. A hat or, at the very least, something that you can see on the others but they can’t see on themselves. Like that poker game where you stick one card to your forehead.”

  “Maybe if everyone had been bitten?” Sour Towel Zombie offered, standing up, too. “Like they’re zombies but don’t know it? But, like, the others know?”

  Pause.

  “Never mind. This shit makes no sense.”

  “What if one of the guys in the line was blind?” asked...was it the Baseball Zombie?

  “Yeah! Wait, no. That doesn’t work either,” Davey Jones said, clicking his teeth impatiently.

  “You only need one prisoner or zombie or whatever tied up, right?” Cowboy Zombie asked as he tipped over the first Halfway Homey, the one with the tiny spray can and skateboard, so its face was in the dirt. “The first one can be a corpse or a zombie. Only the one with the answer, the Camel, or the prisoner, would need to be immobilized.”

  “I got it!” shouted Bobby B. “Bury them up to their necks!”

  “In the house?” asked Mags, eyebrow up.

  “Maybe,” Bobby Z went on for him, snickering now, too. “What if we rig the floor so that they fall in up to their chests and can’t turn around.”

  “Like The Money Pit!”

  “What if one of them was mute instead?” European Indian Zombie asked, quite sincerely. “You know, so they could see who’s a zombie but can’t say anything?” She reached down to make a Halfway Homey jump up and down like it had something urgent to say. It was palming a tiny basketball.

  “No, no, no, then there’s no puzzle.” Davey Jones clicked his teeth even harder. “The last Camel in the has to be unable to answer the question because he or she sees one of each, zombie and human.”

  “Maybe we should just stick with hats,” Bobby Z laughed. “Have ones that say ‘zombie’ on them or some shit.”

  “That’s a horrible idea,” Cigarette Zombie scoffed. More like coughed. “Why not just give everyone propellers instead?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, scoffing nervously with her.

  “Maybe it’s no use. It’s just not gonna...” Mags started to say.

  “Fuckin’ forget it!” Davey Jones gathered up his toys, stood up over everyone a long second, then stampeded away.

  “Whoa, O.G.Z.,” someone snickered. “Chill.”

  “He should understand that if there’s a chance of something happening, no matter how remote, then it has already happened to someone else,” European Indian Zombie said to us all, palms out and all wise. “And if you think you have a great idea, someone is already doing it somewhere.”

  “Did Zombie Rama tell you that?” asked Bobby B, kicking dirt in her direction.

  “Zombie-O-Rama. Get it straight.”

  We all got up and followed Davey Jones up to the house. Inside, he was pouting cross-legged in front of the TV, staring at the Emergency Broadcast graphic. Seeing us, he turned off the television in disgust and stomped to the refrigerator. Thud, thud, thud, rattle.

  “You guys don’t get it!” he practically shouted. “Any of you ever see the movie Things Change? Well, things change.”

  “Uh, isn’t that a movie about a shoe shiner for the mob?” asked Sour Towel Zombie.

  “What’s your point?” Davey said, opening up some orange juice.

  “I don’t see how that applies to us. I mean, the title is cool and all, and I get what you’re trying to say, but...”

  The ‘fridge door slammed, and that shut him up. Our boss said this “Things Change” line a lot. In fact, he said it so much we expected to see it on a T-shirt some day soon. Davey Jones tipped his juice towards all of us like a disappointed dad.

  “Pulpier, people, that’s the key. Like this,” he said, holding up his O.J. “This? See this? This is us. If there’s gonna be copycat zombies everywhere playing this game like us, we’re gonna have to step it up. We’re gonna have to do it with more pulp, give them something else to chew on.”

  “What’s us?” Bobby Z laughed. “That? That ugly missing kid on the side of the carton?”

  “Exactly!” Bobby B agreed. It was the happiest we’d ever seen them, both smiling at the same time, but we still had no idea what they were talking about.

  “But that orange juice is hell on us zombies to drink,” one of them went on. “Maybe it’s a zombie’s diet of cold barbecue to stain our lips for the cameras, but the heartburn is ridiculous.”

  “Totally!” Laughter.

  “Maybe we just need weapons again,” Davey Jones said ominously. “Like the old days.”

  The room got quiet. We used to have Laser Tag gear on our chests, then some more gear on our heads. Then we moved to paintball for awhile. Then, after the incident forever referred to as The Blinding of Zombie Seventeen, a.k.a. Gamblers Anonymous Zombie, we got everybody goggles. We looked just like those
Underwater Nazi Corps in Shockwave, according to Sour Towel Zombie.

  “Wasn’t that called Deadcorps?”

  “What? Like a Dead Corpse? Kinda redundant, homey.”

  “No, ‘corps,’ like the military.”

  “Never heard of it. There’s lots of movies where they come up slow-mo out of some kinda water though.”

  “Or like the movie Zombie,” someone made the mistake of suggesting.

  “What do you mean?” Sour Towel pounced.

  “You know, that scene with the splinter through that chick’s eyeball?”

  “It’s Zombi with an ‘I,’ not Zombie with an ‘I-E,’” Sour Towel shouted.

  “How do you know I wasn’t saying it with an ‘I’?” whoever it was asked him.

  “And it’s Zombi 2, not Zombie.”

  “With an ‘I,’ right?” Bobby Z taunted him. “I mean, I hate to bring it up, but you forgot to say it with the ‘I’ just now.”

  “I was saying it with an ‘eye.’ Get it?”

  “I can’t wait to kill you.”

  “Again?”

  “Hey, remember that cute finger/eyeball monster the mad scientists made in Bride of Re-Animator?” I offered, playing peacemaker. “Did you guys see that movie?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  A punch caught me in the chest. Peacemaker, my ass, I thought. More like a pacemaker.

  “Didn’t your dad take us both to see that in Junior High?”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby Z snapped. “I’m not my dad’s mom.”

  And with a statement as confusing as that, the subject of eye injuries and bush-league Italian George Romero imitators was dropped for good that day.

  But there were more problems than that with the Laser Tag legacy. For example, in the fog, it took away all the suspense of aiming at anything. You’d just gently line up the glowing red stripe until it was touching their face, kind of like you were slowly stretching out a tape measure to see how long you could lead it before it finally collapsed (the record will always remain 23 feet, by the way, tape measure, not a laser), so we abandoned the whole “shooting Zombies in the head” thing forever. Plus, it made us seem more like zombies from the Return of the Living Deads instead of the original Holy Trinity. This was always a dilemma.

  “However, at least one of the writers of that particular parody was involved in the making of the original classic,” Sour Towel Zombie reminded us like a schoolmaster. “So maybe a shot to the brain not being enough to stop them was always part of the plan.”

  Right then, Davey Jones kicked open the door and stepped outside onto the porch. He had the orange juice in one hand and a very real Spencer repeating rifle in the other. Later we would always mistakenly remember this weapon as an “AKA-47.”

  “Whoa, boss,” Bobby B said. “You ever see Do The Right Thing?”

  “You guys better start taking this a little more seriously,” the armed man said.

  He let this sink in.

  “Because I’m gonna hide this gun in the house. And tomorrow, if someone can find it, it’ll be fair game.”

  “Uh, that is not a fair game,” Bobby B said.

  But Davey Jones was done talking. He loomed like doom in the background, sulking and sipping his orange juice, glaring at us occasionally, while Mags pursed her lips and handed out paychecks and W-2s and told us not to be late tomorrow.

  Which is today.

  But before that meeting officially adjourned, I decided to climb the antenna and check the roof for loose tiles, figuring it was safer up there anyway.

  The object of the game was, will be, and always has been to be on the roof come sunrise. Just like Dawn of the Dead, the roof was hope. The roof was life. Never shopping malls, like reviewers, film students, and historians insist.

  They have always made the mistake of thinking more about those movies than the zombies in them.

  THERE ARE ALWAYS SOME EASTER EGGS sprinkled throughout the game. We changed them around sometimes, but one staple is the footlocker stenciled “U.S. Army” (my sister did the decoupage) that rattles nice and provocative, as if it contains some answers. It turns out to be more like a broken television remote than a solution, however, if they ever do manage to get it open.

  “What’s in the box?!”

  In my right ear, I hear one smart-ass Camel imitating the movie Se7en for the benefit of his new bride as he shakes the footlocker like a bartender.

  “I never understood that movie,” his wife is saying. “After the first killing, I thought we were gonna find out a sloth was doing the killing, and doing it real slow. What a disappointment.”

  Her comment causes at least three of us (Cowboy and Cigarette Zombie, too, I think) to stop scratching the window sills and stifle laughter. Then we hear Amy, our Plant, back in our ears, steering them back to the subject at hand. Looking for the key.

  “Remember that embarrassing night when some Camel’s kid found that old porn stash hidden in the mirror?” Cowboy Zombie whispers in my left ear.

  “Found what?”

  “There was a hidden recess behind an old mirror that had a ratty pile of old Super-8 John Holmes videos and Oui magazines.”

  “Oh, I thought you meant a porn ‘stache’ in the mirror,” Cigarette Zombie snickers. “Like a giant mustache in the kid’s reflection? That would have scared the shit out of anybody.”

  “I found my dad’s snuff porn and rape movies once,” I offer. “Mom flipped out on him.”

  “What did he say?” Cowboy Zombie asks, taking the bait.

  “He said, ‘Don’t worry, I hide the rough stuff much better than those, baby.’”

  “You said it wasn’t porn, remember? I thought your dad was just embarrassed about his zombie movie collection.”

  We’re suddenly distracted by another scuffle behind us. It’s the Bobbys, of course. One of them is yelling something about a difference in the paychecks we got the night before. Cowboy Zombie doesn’t even bother to break them up anymore, but Cigarette Zombie always, always tries real hard to make the peace, especially when a certain Swaggering Cowboy Zombie is watching her, or sometimes a Baseball Zombie, both indistinguishable Forearm Flexing Zombie when she’s around.

  Never a Nervous Cough Zombie like myself.

  Sounds like a lot of zombies, doesn’t it? It isn’t.

  “See, you Bobbys are frustrated because, back home somewhere, you each have a brother who acts just like the other Bobby,” she explains, eyes uncharacteristically wide. Arms, too.

  “So why can’t we switch brothers so there’s no arguments? Huh, Psychoanalysis Zombie?” Bobby B mutters, back-peddling from Bobby Z.

  “Hey, one semester of psychology is no joke,” Cigarette Zombie goes on.“It’s just like my step-brother situation. I’m the same age as the one that acts like my older brother, my blood brother, and he’s the same age as a step-brother that acts just like me. But we were forced to pair off because of our age, and we always wished we could switch until we realized, guess what, it makes perfect sense.”

  “What’s your point?” Bobby Z asks, five fingers now around Bobby B’s throat, the other five fluttering near his mouth, still adding up the extra taxes deducted from his check.

  “It’s because you’re brothers,” Cigarette Zombie huffs. “You were meant to argue like this. Think about it, stupid.”

  “It’s like that movie...” a new voice offers.

  Bobby Z quickly closes another throat before Sour Towel Zombie can finish.

  “Enough with the Dead of the Dead of the Dead movies, motherfucker.”

  “Wow. That’s the original title for Diary of the Dead, actually! Well done!” Sour Towel Zombie squawks. Then, “Sorry.”

  “You’re not allowed to talk the rest of the day, S.F.B.”

  Sour Towel Zombie’s fingers drum the handle of the cleaver in his holster, then they relax. He’d long since grown used to Bobby Z laying hands on him on a daily basis. Most of us had. And that’s what we used to call him, by
the way, the “S.F.B.(T.),” as in “Sour Fucking Bath (Towel),” previously “Serial Finger Banger,” in order to mock the limits of his sexual experience.

  “You know how most people comb their hair before a date?” Bobby Z would ask everyone real loud. “Well, he clips his fingernails.”

  But it never fazed him. He owned his endless tales of finger blasting. So we just went back to talking about his towels. I’d like to say he deserved the endless abuse, but Bobby had attacked all of us at least once by the time we were picking nicknames. And whenever Mags would tell Sour Towel Zombie that he was “this close” (fingers about an inch apart) from being fired because of his mouth, I thought about my first lunch with Sour Towel (a.k.a. S.F.B., a.k.a. S.T.Z., formally Sushi Chef Zombie, officially Josh Something Something) and his finest moment.

  It was when we were both working at that video store, back before the Netflix and Red Boxes and movies on your milk cartons, and he went back to Burger King to complain about there being no crust on his Hershey’s pie. They gave him a whole one, a whole goddamn pie, not just another one of those chocolate slivers in the triangle box that you usually got, and he happily shared that whole pie with me. When I asked him why he did it, he said, simply, “The crust is the best part.” He was right, and he felt like a friend of mine that day.

  But just like the old topographic challenges of Pittsburgh fucking up our commitment to stagger correctly and not need to bolt...

  It’s been downhill ever since.

  THE THING PEOPLE FORGET about taking off your jacket before a fight is that you’re not doing it because it’s a throwback to an 18th Century duel or something. It’s simply because it makes it a lot easier to punch someone in the face.

  At the end of the night, with all the zombies winding down behind the barn, things always seemed so calm and content. No one ever anticipates that bloody jackets are going to be dramatically removed before our shift is over. And yet it happens every goddamn time.

  Even Sour Towel Zombie’s endless movie trivia seems oddly soothing at these moments, the quiet before the Idiot Storm.