I Kissed a Zombie, and I Liked It Read online

  We’re quiet for a few more minutes; then he says, “I’m sorry, Alley. I thought you probably knew at first. Then you were all curious about my health, so I figured out that you didn’t. And I just let you go on thinking I was just a goth or something.”

  “I was an idiot not to notice,” I say.

  “Well,” he says, “I understand if you never want to see me again. I wouldn’t blame you.”

  I look at him, and at his eyes. I’ve always heard that dead people’s eyes are kind of glazed over, but that’s not the case with Doug. His eyes are alive. He’s alive. Maybe he was dead once, but he’s alive now. He’s a little broken, but we’re all a little broken, right?

  There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen knows everything.

  Doug’s alive. And he’s mine.

  “I just have one question,” I say. “Did you ever think, when you were alive, that you would get a lot hotter if you died?”

  He looks confused for a second; then he starts to smile. Then I guess it sinks in that I’m not going to dump him, and he starts to chuckle. I can see that he’s really relieved, like a weight is off his shoulders. It must be totally stressful to have to keep a secret like that, especially from someone you like.

  And then I laugh, too, and we just sit there in his grave, laughing.

  “Like they say. Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse,” he says, when we settle down.

  “I didn’t really read the whole memorial Web page,” I say. “What was dying like? I mean, it’s cool if you don’t want to talk about it, but I’m curious.”

  “It wasn’t so bad, I guess,” he says. “I don’t really remember, though. I remember being in my car, and then there was this big noise, and the next thing I knew I was wearing a Megamart vest over this suit. I looked like an idiot.”

  “That was it?” I ask. “No white light or any of that? No frenzy after rising up?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I seem to remember there was something in between dying and rising up, and I want to say there was a green field or something, but now it’s, like, one of those dreams you can’t quite remember, you know?” He pauses. “I hope I didn’t get, like, reincarnated. Some punk toddler would be running around with my soul.”

  I chuckle. “I wouldn’t worry about it. If there’s such thing as a soul, you have one.”

  “I must have been in a frenzy to dig my way out of the grave, but I don’t remember that at all, either. You don’t really think when you’re in frenzy mode.”

  “So, your parents moved after you died?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “My parents were already planning to move to Florida. I was kind of pissed off about it. That’s why I was out driving recklessly.”

  “You didn’t want to move to Florida?”

  “I had two months before I graduated,” he says. “If I moved, in ten years, my high school reunion would have been with the people I went to school with for two months, not the people I’d known since kindergarten. And it wasn’t, like, Miami or some decent part of Florida. It was some part that’s even worse than here. The Redneck Riviera, they call it. In hindsight, I should have just suffered through it and gone to college.”

  I lean forward and brush some dirt off my back.

  “So they don’t know you’re a zombie?”

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “I mean, the Megamart guys must have snuck in and done the zombie operation right after I was buried, or I wouldn’t be in this kind of shape. But I was down here a while before it kicked in. Even if they did know, I wouldn’t really want them to see me like this.”

  “What was it like working at Megamart?”

  “Terrible. It hurt every second, having to lug boxes around. But they didn’t tell us anything. They fed us the embalming fluid every four hours. They never gave us the option of not taking it.”

  “But most of them stopped right after they got freed, right?”

  “Oh yeah. Most of them weren’t functional enough that they could come as close to living a normal life as I do.”

  “So you keep drinking the fluid.”

  He’s quiet for a minute, just staring off into space.

  “Remember how we were talking about what we thought our teenage years would be like?” he asks. “The beach, and dating, and all that? I never got to do any of that. I never had a real girlfriend. I never went to prom. So many things … I never got to be a rock star, like I always wanted to. It’s like in Our Town. I was in that play with Nat years ago. You ever see it?”

  “I read it for English class,” I say. “I don’t know it that well.”

  “Well, in the last act the main girl, Emily, is dead. And even though the other dead people tell her she shouldn’t, she goes back to relive a day, and it’s just too much, because now that she’s dead, she notices everything, like clocks ticking, and sunflowers, and coffee, and freshly ironed clothes and sleeping and all of the things that she just took for granted. And it’s so overwhelming to see it from the other side and watch everyone not even noticing it all that she can’t handle it. And right before she goes back away from the world, she turns to some other person in the graveyard and asks if anyone alive ever realizes it. Like, if they realize life. Every, every minute of it.”

  “Saints and poets. Maybe they do some,” I say, remembering and finishing the line from the play.

  He smiles.

  “That’s right,” he says. “It was like that. I mean, until you’ve been dead, you really have no idea how great it is to be alive. Even working at Megamart seemed wonderful for a minute. The feel of boxes in my hand, that Megamart odor … all that. It got old fast, but just to be working, you know? After I’m not even alive? When we got freed, I thought maybe I could hang around a while and do some of that stuff I never got to do.”

  His mouth sounds like it’s stuffed full of cotton. He opens up a backpack at the foot of the coffin, pulls out another bottle of fluid and takes another swig. His voice comes back.

  “I mean, you really can’t imagine how awesome coffee tastes, or how awesome it is to hear music, to hear idiots talking … I mean, it hurts. Everything hurts. But everything in the world is so awesome that sometimes I just can’t stand it. And that was just what I thought before I met you.”

  I kiss him so hard I’m a little afraid he might fall apart or something, then pull back.

  “Do you think I realize life? Like, at all?”

  “No offense, but hell no,” he says. “No one does. Not even saints and poets, if you want to know the truth of it. But you come closer than most people. I can tell because you listen to music. You let songs get to you. Almost no one does that. There are songs that make you cry, right?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “When you’re dead, everything in the world is like a song that makes you cry.”

  We sit and stare at each other for a bit, and I try to notice all the little things of life. I feel the dirt against my back, the sun on my nose, and the song in my head. I feel like I’m close to “realizing” it. But Doug’s probably right. Unless you’ve been away from something, you never really see it. I remember my English teacher saying The Great Gatsby is the greatest book about America ever—or at least the greatest that had been written up to the time it came out—and F. Scott Fitzgerald had to leave the country to be able to write it.

  Then I think of a line in a Tom Waits song: “Never saw my hometown till I stayed away too long.”

  I guess you never can see life until you’re dead. It makes sense.

  I’m so excited to have a boyfriend, I can’t imagine what it’s like for Doug to have a girlfriend. It must be even more overwhelming for him.

  “So, let’s talk,” I say. “I don’t want to, like, rush you into anything, but if we’re going to be an official item, we should work some stuff out first. I need to know what you’re capable of.”

  “I’m afraid I won’t be much of a dancer at prom,” he says. “I can still move
around if I have enough fluid in me, but I never could dance.”

  “I don’t care,” I say. “But I need us to make a list of what we can and can’t do, okay?”

  And for a few minutes that should be pretty embarrassing but are actually pretty comfortable and even a little clinical, I run through a list of various activities, like holding hands, slow dancing and stuff like that, that most couples do. I’m a bit disappointed that most of the things I’d like to do eventually are probably impossible for him, but there’s plenty of stuff we can still do. Enough, anyway.

  Eventually, we have a sort of menu of stuff you can do with a zombie boyfriend.

  There are still a few things I want to know, but I’m afraid to ask. Like, would moving out of Iowa be really hard, or flat-out impossible?

  But I don’t have to go to Seattle. I got into Drake, too, which is all of fifteen minutes from my house—and only about five minutes from Doug’s grave. It was my safety school. I can’t believe I’m even thinking of not going to Seattle, but I am.

  “So,” he says. “We’re official now?”

  “I guess so,” I say. “Are you still supposed to give me your pin or something? Is there paperwork we have to get notarized?”

  We have a bit of a laugh.

  “What kind of pin?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “A class pin, or something? Do they still make those?”

  “Maybe we just have to make some public appearance,” he says. “So people know.”

  “They know. It’s all over school. Will already knew about us on Saturday,” I say. “Do all the post-humans belong to the same club?”

  “Not exactly,” he says. “But word gets around. I know all the vampires and werewolves in town. Not that there are very many. I mean, Des Moines isn’t the most diverse city in the world. But you know about your guidance counselor being a vampire, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “She wants me to break up with you. Or kill myself. Whichever.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. She doesn’t really approve of mixed relationships.”

  “A lot of vampires don’t,” he says. “I mean, I owe them big for getting those laws passed, but I don’t like them much, personally. None of them that I’ve met, anyway. I think being alive as long as they have without sleeping or anything kinda messes with their brains.”

  We sit there for a second.

  “So, how worried should I be?” I ask. “I mean, I heard that any zombie can go into a frenzy for brains if they don’t get their fluid.”

  He looks at me very seriously. “Listen to me carefully, Gonk,” he says. “If you ever see me starting to go brain crazy, I want you to immediately go to the nearest convenience store and buy a slushee.”

  “A slushee?” I ask.

  He nods. “’Cause if I’m brain crazy, I won’t be thinking right. I won’t be thinking about anything except getting fresh brains. But if you shark down a slushee, you can get brain freeze. I won’t go after a frozen brain.”

  I look at him for a second, and then his serious face turns into a smile, and then he starts laughing again. He was putting me on!

  “You dick!”

  “Sorry!” he says. “But I totally had you going, didn’t I?”

  “Yes!” I admit.

  He laughs. “Actually,” he says, “if I don’t get any fluid for four hours, I start to dry up. I’ve never gotten to the six-hour mark, but at that point you do go into like, a frenzy for brains. But you’re so dried up that you can’t really even move, let alone overpower anyone and crack their head open. If a zombie on a brains frenzy catches you, you probably deserve to die.”

  “So I would have deserved it if those guys caught me just now?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t mean that,” says Doug. “For one thing, you were surrounded. For another, those were new zombies. The whole reason you stay underground is to build up all this energy and strength so you’re strong enough to break out. For those first few hours, zombies are a lot more powerful than they’ll ever be again. The ones who get made into zombies after their brains are rotten stay like that, only the frenzy thing calms down. They still just amble around going ‘Brraains’ all the time. I can’t stand that kind of zombie. It’s like hanging out with the biggest idiots on the football team.”

  “So they’re all really dangerous at first?”

  Doug shakes his head.

  “No. Like I said, whoever made these ones did it wrong. Gave them too much energy or something. If you do it right, they’re supposed to be all worn out by the time they’ve broken through the coffin and climbed above-ground. That takes a lot of effort. Once they get out, they should still be in frenzy mode but not have enough energy left to get anyone’s brain. But if you’re in trouble, you can always get in my grave. Post-humans can’t go into other people’s graves. Not even vampires can. Most people don’t know that.”

  “What’s the deal with brains, anyway?” I ask. “Are they that much better than fluid?”

  “Brains are way better than fluid,” he says. “They won’t keep you alive, but they take the pain away. But even if you can find them, it’s dangerous to eat them. You can get hooked. Brains for a zombie are like heroin for people. It’s better not to even get started.”

  “Who do you think made those zombies that attacked me?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Megamart again?” I suggest. You’d think the huge lawsuit and expensive settlement would have put them off post-human slavery, but everyone knows they’ll break any law or moral code to keep prices low.

  “I wouldn’t put it past them. New ones usually lurch toward whoever created them. There’s probably a Megamart in the general direction they were heading.”

  “They weren’t heading in any direction,” I say. “They were surrounding me.”

  “Well, you sort of distracted them. You know. Having a brain and all.”

  I shudder a bit.

  “Do you know how it works? Like, how they made them?”

  He moves his head back and forth a little bit. “I know how to do it, yeah,” he says. “I picked it up while I was working at Megamart. I don’t know why some rise up faster. Maybe Lutherans have some kind of food that they like to eat more than other people. It’s been driving me nuts trying to figure it out. You aren’t a Lutheran, are you?”

  I shake my head. “Jewish,” I say.

  “Huh,” he says. I can see he’s a bit surprised.

  I snicker a little. “Is that a problem?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “It’s just …”

  “I don’t look Jewish?”

  “I guess I just didn’t know Rhodes was a Jewish name.”

  “I’m a protestant on my dad’s side,” I say. “But my mom’s Jewish, which is what counts. If your mom is a Jew, that makes you one.”

  “Huh,” he says. “I didn’t know that.”

  I’m not offended that he seems surprised I’m Jewish or anything. I mean, there are probably more post-humans than Jews in Des Moines. Sadie and I are about the only ones in school.

  I just shrug.

  “Can you date people who aren’t Jewish?” Doug asks.

  “I already am, aren’t I?”

  We kiss a little more. After a while, he pulls back. “I wish I could get a new suit for prom,” he says. “I mean, I got a bunch of money from Megamart in the settlement. It’s how I got my car and the DVD player and stuff. But it won’t last forever. I have to be really careful with it. Before I met you I was thinking I’d just stay alive till the money ran out.”

  “Well,” I say, “I know a way we can make you some more cash.”

  “No one’s hiring zombies, you know,” he says.

  “Forget that,” I say. “I’m not one of those girls who expects her boyfriend to work some crappy job just so he can buy her things. But I said I was going to make you a star, and I am.”

  I pull out my laptop from my backpack and open up a music program. The lap
top has a built-in microphone.

  “We,” I say, “are going to start recording your demo tape right now. Sing.”

  He looks at me. “With no music?”

  “We can overdub it later,” I say. “This is just a demo, anyway.”

  I set the program to play a basic 4/4 rock drumbeat and hit Record.

  “Go ahead. Sing.”

  He smiles, then takes another sip of the fluid from his bottle. He starts to sing “I Get a Kick out of You” to the rhythm of the beats. His version. Just him and the drums sound so much better than he did with the Sorry Marios. Watching him sing is the sexiest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. Later on, when we find the right musicians for him, we can overdub their parts without too much trouble.

  Besides the lack of music, there are two things different from the version he did at The Cage.

  Number one: This time, I can tell that the third verse, the one he rewrote, really does go “I get no kick eating brains/one little taste, and the rest goes to waste.” Clever.

  Number two: This time, I can tell that he’s singing to someone.

  Me.

  And unlike the woman the guy in the song is supposed to be singing to, I get a kick out of him, too.

  “Is it possible to turn Jews into zombies?” I ask when he’s finished singing.

  “You can turn anyone into one,” he says. “Why? You want to be one?”

  This is too much to think about. But if Doug and I are going to be a long-term item, I’ll probably have to become one sooner or later, won’t I?

  “Let’s just say it’s on the table,” I say. “Maybe.”

  “I’d never ask you to do that,” he says. “Never.”

  “But if I wanted to?”

  He smiles. “I’m sure it can be arranged.”

  9

  It doesn’t take as long as you might think to get used to the fact that you’re dating a dead guy. By Wednesday, I’m pretty much cool with it. After all, he’s a better kisser than any of the living guys I’ve kissed. That whole thing about “noticing” life makes him very … attentive … in his kissing, which is nice.