Zombies: The Recent Dead Part 15

Have I met Bud?

I'm not sure. Bud Pollard. 1959-1976. Loving son devoted student friend of the community.

Oh, yes, I remember seeing him.

He's a good guy. He's always given me helpful advice.

I'm so sorry, Jerry. What are you going to do?

They had reached a bench sheltered by a hedge planted in an arc. With every step it seemed harder for Jerry to walk properly. His gait was a rolling, teetering travesty.

Let's sit down, Jerry said, and she helped him do that.

She was seated on his left, so he was able to hold her hand properly.

Caroline put her head on his shoulder. The decay hadn't hit there yet.

We need to have a talk, Jerry said.

Okay.

They looked at each other, his dangling eye trying to get into the act, too.

You know, Caroline, you're the first girl I've kept company with since I came here. And even if I would have known that dating you would make me decompose to beat the band, I wouldn't have changed a thing, that's how much I've treasured our time together.

I feel the same way. Listen, Jerry, pretty soon what's happening to you will overtake me, too. My eyeb.a.l.l.s will go pop, toes and fingers fall off, bits and pieces eaten away. And the bugs . . .

We have this time together. We have the present, before all that happens.

Yes, isn't it wonderful?

Yes, but I'm withering away so quickly, said Jerry. I don't know how long I've got before I won't be able to go for walks, or ice skating, or anything.

Your suit still looks sharp.

I don't want to rush us, Caroline, but those are the facts. If we let the days go by thinking things will always be the way they are now, one day we'll wake up and I'll just be a pile of sludge you used to call a friend.

Oh, Jerry, please, don't talk like that.

We have to face it, Caroline. We can't deny this. He reached out for her with his rotting stump. She drew her hand away.

He gazed grimly at her. This is our future, Caroline. In a few days you're going to be afraid to even look at me.

A few remnant tears squeezed themselves from her barren ducts. I won't be afraid, Jerry. I promise.

Jerry hesitated for a moment. What I'm saying, Caroline, is that if you want us to have any sort of . . . physical relations.h.i.+p, we can't wait.

Caroline's peaceful, natural face was clouded with sadness.

I'm sorry it has to be like this, said Jerry. I know this isn't considered good dating etiquette. It's not proper to pressure a girl into intimate relations. If there was another way . . .

No, you're right, she said. We have to face this. I don't want death to be denial, too.

They sat in quiet s.p.a.ces for a time, holding hands. A nuthatch lit on an evergreen branch, then flew off when it realized it wasn't alone. Its weight disturbed the branch, sending a dusting of snow down upon the heads of the dead.

So, Caroline, Jerry said shyly, do you want to go back to my place?

Jerry's place was in bad need of a dusting.

It's not much, he said, but it's home.

I like it. It's cozy.

Are you comfortable? he asked her.

I'm just fine. It's nice to be so close to you.

Don't worry about hurting me.

I won't. Can we do something about that eye? It's sort of in the way.

Oh, sure. Hang on . . . got it. Is that better?

Much better. Now I can touch your face, all over.

He began to touch her, too.

You don't think I'm easy, Jerry, do you?

No, of course not.

Have there been other girls . . . like me?

No, only the living.

That makes me feel good.

As they began to probe and pet, and then proceed to the most private of realms, Jerry began to feel parts of himself break away, disintegrate. His fine suit slowly collapsed in upon itself, soaking up what remained of his bodily fluids.

Jerry suddenly felt disgusted, even horrified and he didn't know why.

I have very strong feelings for you, Caroline whispered to him.

I feel the same about you.

What's wrong with me? he wondered. This should be the crowning moment of my death. Why do I feel so terrible, so guilt-wracked, so . . . wrong?

Caroline sensed it, too. What's going on? Are you okay?

I'm okay, he said. I'm okay.

But he wasn't. This felt so wrong, so . . . immoral.

At the very moment they consummated their deaths, as his body rotted away to utter uselessness, a shock of awareness. .h.i.t him, as he understood what had disturbed him, why everything had felt so wrong.

And why now everything was feeling so right.

The final dating secret.

Jerry realized, as both of Caroline's eyes popped out upon her climax, and their precious ooze commingled, that if a living person has intimate relations with a dead body, it's called necrophilia.

If two dead bodies have intimate relations, it must be love.

About the Author.

David Prill is the author of the cult novels The Unnatural, Serial Killer Days, and Second Coming Attractions, and the collection Dating Secrets of the Dead. "The Last Horror Show," from the Dating Secrets collection, was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Subterranean, Cemetery Dance, and at Ellen Datlow's late, lamented SciFiction Web site. His story, "The Mask of '67," was published in the 2007 World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Salon Fantastique, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Another story, "Vivisepulture," can be found in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, edited by John Klima. He lives in a small town in the Minnesota north woods.

Story Notes.

When the words "zombie romance" started being flung around a couple of years back, all I could think was: A zom-rom-com cla.s.sic was already published back in ought-two! Okay, so maybe it's not s.e.xy enough for today's market and the new-style zombie love is just not going to take decomposition into account. But Prill manages to pull off a combination of Booth Tarkington, those health cla.s.s films and brochures that were out of date even when I was a teenager, laugh-aloud dark humor, adolescent psychology commentary, and a poignant story of first-albeit post-mortem-love. It even ends happily. I mean, as happily as it can . . . under the circ.u.mstances.

Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed.

Steve Duffy.

It was a night trip, and the thing to remember is: no one's looking for surprises on a night trip. You ride at anchor, out where it's nice and quiet; kick back, chill out, talk rubbish till sunup. No surprises.

Back when Danny had the Katie Mae, we often used to take her out of Beuno's Cove at ten, eleven pm, and head for the banks off Puffin Island, near the southeast tip of Anglesey; we being Danny, who owned the boat, Jack, who crewed on a regular basis, and me. Jack was a great big grinning party-monster who'd do anything for anyone; anything, that is, except resist temptation when it offered itself, as it seemed to on a regular basis. Any other owner but Danny would probably have sacked him, no matter how good he was with boats: the reason Danny didn't would never have been clear to an outsider, really. Claire, who was always quick to pick up on that sort of thing, reckoned that Jack-Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky-represented something that Danny-Mr. Plodder-had probably always dreamed of being himself, but had never quite worked up the nerve to go for. It was a cla.s.sic case of vicarious wish-fulfilment, apparently.

"And I'll tell you something else about Danny," she'd added, "I bet once you get past that Big-I-Am act he puts on, it's Jack who does all the hard grafting-am I right? It's the same with you: if you didn't sort out all his tax returns and VAT for him, they'd probably have taken that boat off him by now. He likes to think he's running the show, but he'd be sunk without the pair of you. It's quite funny, really." I remember her whispering all this in my ear as we watched Jack and Danny playing pool in the bas.e.m.e.nt bar of the Toad Hall, not long after we'd first started dating.

That was the summer of '95: on dry land it was banging, hammering heat wave all the way, long sun-drenched days and sticky muggy nighttimes. Out at sea, though, you got the breeze, cool and wonderful, and whenever the next day's bookings sheet was blank Danny needed little enough persuading to pick up a tray or two of Red Stripe and take the Katie Mae out for the night. Jack would turn up with a bag of Bangor hydroponic and we'd make the run out to the fis.h.i.+ng banks west of the Conwy estuary; we'd lie out on the deck drinking, smoking, chatting about nothing in particular, or maybe go below to pursue the Great and Never-Ending Backgammon Marathon, in which stupendous, entirely fictional sums of money would change hands over the course of a season's fis.h.i.+ng. Good times; easy, untroubled. I look back now and think how sweet we had it then.

One night in early August Claire said she wanted to go out with us. I can't really say why I was resistant to the idea. Part of it, if I'm honest, was probably to do with keeping her well away from Jack until I was a bit more confident in the relations.h.i.+p. Remember I told you about Jack and temptation? Well, if I'd gone on to mention me and insecurity, that would've given you the whole of the picture. Over and above that . . . I honestly don't know. Nothing like a premonition, nothing that dramatic or well-defined. Just the feeling, somewhere under my scalp, that things might be on the cusp; might be changing, one way or another, and changing irrevocably. The fact was I always made an excuse, put her off; until that particular night when it had all the potential to turn into an argument, which would have been our first. Fine, I said, yeah, come along, no problem.

It had been another scorcher. Walking down the hill to the harbor you could feel the pavement underfoot giving out the last of the day's heat to the baking breathless night; under the cotton of her tee-s.h.i.+rt the small of Claire's back was slick with sweat where my hand rested. Danny was waiting for us on the Katie Mae, and Jack came by soon after; he'd been away for the weekend at a festival, got back only that morning, slept till nine pm, and now here he was ready for action again, invincible. It was just gone half-eleven when we fired up the engine and cast off; I remember Claire squeezed my hand in excitement.

The last of the sunset was gone out of the sky, and it was very dark, very quiet, a still, calm night with just a sliver of the waning moon swinging round behind the headland. The beacon winked one, two, three as we eased out beyond the end of the breakwater, Claire and I sitting out on the foredeck, Danny and Jack in the wheelhouse. As always when we were putting out on a night trip, I felt that little kick of expectation: I'd get it in the daytime, too, but at night particularly. There was a magic to it, some song of the sea, pitched between shanties and sirens. "It's the ocean, innit?" Jack once said; "you never know what it's going to throw at you," and soon enough I learned this to be true. Tongue in cheek, I told the same thing to Claire as we rounded the Trwyn y Ddraig and pulled away from the coast.

"Listen, I don't care what it throws at me," she said, arching like a cat in the first stirrings of a sea-breeze, "just so long as it's this temperature or below. Oh, that's good. That's the coolest I've been all day." She stretched out on the foredeck, head propped up in my lap as I sat cross-legged behind her, absently ruffling her hair with my fingers.

At this stage you probably need to know a bit about the layout of the boat. The Katie Mae was thirteen meters stem-to-stern, pretty roomy for a standard fis.h.i.+ng vessel, with reasonably poky diesels (in need of an overhaul, but fine so long as you didn't try and race them straight from cold). The wheelhouse was amids.h.i.+ps, the centre of the boat; behind that, on the aft deck, were the gear lockers, the bilge pump, the engine hatch. Up towards the stem, there was the foredeck and the Samson post. In the wheelhouse we had VHF s.h.i.+p-to-sh.o.r.e, GPS, radar, and also the "fish-finder," the sonar that not only showed the sea-bottom but tracked the shoals. Down below, bench seats followed the shape of the hull for'ard of the wheelhouse above, curving with the prow around a drop-down table where we kept the beer and the backgammon set. Hurricane lights hung from the bulkheads between the portholes, posters of mermaids were tacked up on the ceiling: all snug as a bug in a rug. And outside, where Claire and I were, you had the best air-conditioning in all North Wales, entirely free and gratis.

Claire snuggled her head in my lap, enjoying the cool breeze of our pa.s.sage. "This is nice," she said, letting the last word stretch to its full extent. "Just like you to keep it all to yourself-typical greedy pig bloke."

I dodged her playful backward punches, one for every slur. "Keep what to myself? A bunch of sweaty geezers sitting round getting smashed and talking garbage all night? You should've said-I'd have taken you down the rugby club, back in town."

"Getting smashed and talking garbage? Is that all there is to it? It's got to be a bit more cerebral than that, surely-big smart boys like you, university types and all?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Danny had joined us on the foredeck. "Well, you'd be wrong. No culture on this here tub."

"If it's culture you want," I pointed out, moving over to make room, "I believe P&O do some very nice cruises this time of year."

"Do you want the guided tour then, Claire?" Danny settled himself alongside us. That's Llandudno-see the lights round the West Sh.o.r.e?-and that's the marina at Deganwy over there."

Not to be outdone, I chipped in my own bit of local color. "This stretch here is where the lost land of Helig used to be, before the sea came in and covered it all."

"Helig ap Glannog, aye," Danny amplified in his amusingly nit-picking way, at pains to remind Claire just who was the captain on this boat, and who was the guy who helped out now and then. Danny's dad had fished these waters since the 1940s; he'd been delighted when his eldest dropped out of Bangor Uni and picked up a charter boat of his own. Since then, Danny had been busy proving Jack's adage that you could take the boy out of university, but you couldn't take university out of the boy. It was just a way he had. You couldn't let it get to you.

"Helig ap what?" Claire seemed slightly amused herself-remember, I told you she'd already got Danny figured out.

"Way back," Danny explained, "sixth century AD. There was a curse on the family, and a big tide came and covered all their lands, and everybody died except for one harpist on the hill there crying woe is me, woe is me, some s.h.i.+t or other. And nowadays hardly anyone moors a boat out there-"

"Except for Danny," I chipped in, "because he's big and hard and don't take no s.h.i.+t from no one, innit, Danny lad?" He tried to punch me in a painful place, but I rolled over just in time. "Who's steering this tub, anyway?"

"Jack," said Danny, waiting till I'd resumed my former position before trying, and failing once more, to hit me where it hurt. "We'll keep going for a bit," he went on, ignoring my stifled laughter, "till we're out of everyone's way. Then we'll drop anchor and get down to business." He rubbed his hands together in antic.i.p.ation of the night's entertainment. "So, do you play backgammon then, Claire?"

Claire smiled sweetly, her blond hair blowing back into my face. "Well, I know the rules," she said, and nudged me surrept.i.tiously.

Several hours later, Claire owned, in theory at least, the Katie Mae, the papers on Danny's house and fifty percent of both Jack's and mine earnings through to the year 2015. Down below Danny and Jack were skinning up and arguing over who was most in debt to who; Claire and I were up in the wheelhouse, enjoying a little quality relations.h.i.+p time with the lights out.

"Mmmm," she said, into my left ear. "That was easy enough."

"What?" I said. "Me? I'm dead easy, me. You should know that by now."

"Oh, I do," she said, "I do. No-I meant those two downstairs."

"Down below," I reminded her, in Danny's pedantic voice. "What-you mean you get up to this sort of thing with those two as well? I'm crushed."

She chuckled, and moved her hand a little. "There-is that better? Didn't mean to crush you. Are they always that dozy?"

"Well, you had an unfair advantage."

"What?"

"You were distracting them all the time."