Love Goes Through the Stomach

The scream bit into the night, tearing through the peace like teeth through flesh.

Travis Wells lurched awake; silk sheets pooled around him, revealing his well-toned abs. His heart – strong and resilient – throbbed inside his chest, but it did not gallop. Even when he woke up to a damsel in distress calling out for help, he woke up calm and collected. And that had been a damsel in distress – or, rather, the damsel in distress. It was Winona Chavez who rented the apartment two doors down the corridor. Travis wasted no time. He was out of bed before the shrieks had finished reverberating around the courtyard. Travis dressed whilst moving, picking up the blue jeans where they lay and sliding into them. His iconic leather jacket – with his name emblazoned on the back in sequins – hung on its hanger. He pulled it on over his naked, tanned, and sweaty (but in a sexy way) upper half. He did this in one motion whilst grabbing the essential tool from the shelf: THE TRAVISINATOR.

The feminine wails (somehow, you could hear her curves) rose in pitch. They became something altogether more desperate. ‘TRAVIS!’ she shrieked. ‘WHERE ARE YOU? I NEED YOU AND ONLY YOU!’

Travis’s heart gave a tiny tha-thump – he might be cool as a cucumber, but he was only a human male – and his eyes narrowed. She needed him, damn it, and he, Travis Wells, had never been one to refuse the call. Nor was he the type to cower in the face of danger. Even though it was midnight, he snatched his Ray-Bans from the counter and donned them with a flick of his wrist. ‘Hold on, baby,’ he growled to the still of his apartment in his usual whiskey-flavoured tones. ‘Papa’s comin’.’

Nightfall had painted the hallway in dusky eighties purple and green. It was like some vampire B-movie that later achieved cult status. Only this was no vampire flick. Three zombies stood at her door, their funeral clothes torn from crawling out of the grave. They banged their open palms against the door’s splintering wood. Their skin was a deathly grey in this neon twilight, and their groans were a choir of the dead.

Travis curled his upper lip in disgust. Somehow, he’d always known that this night would come. He spat and wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand. ‘Zombies,’ he snarled, ‘I shoulda known.’

At the sound of his voice, the three undead amigos staggered around to face him. Their vacant eyes rolled in their sockets. Their faces, etched in a permanent mask of mournful stupidity, twitched. Open jaws dangled like cows chewing the cud. Their ghastly moans halted as they surveyed this hunk of a man in their midst, come to spoil their good fun. Then, the groans resumed. They reached for him with hands with soil caught beneath the broken fingernails.

He grunted. So this was it. Showtime. Travis scratched a match across the sole of his boot and used it to light his last cigarette. He inhaled and then sent a lazy smoke ring floating towards the ceiling as he exhaled with a whoosh. ‘Sorry to crash the party, boys.’

The zombies came for him, all ragged nails, decaying breath, and teeth with skin caught in the gaps. Their collective sigh became a predatory growl.

Travis cleared his mind, and a chilled metallic sheen overtook his senses. It felt like bombing into a lake of clear water. It shocked you and stole your breath but left you sober and sharp as a switchblade. He sidestepped to the left and avoided the clumsy reach of the outer zombie’s arms. He swung THE TRAVISINATOR – a baseball bat that he’d kept for emergencies such as this – at the dead man’s head.

The strike split the zombie’s skull into pieces that flew through the dimness. His jaw and several teeth scattered one way. His upper dome, fractured beyond repair, toppled the other. His slimy, rotted brain squirted from its casing like a fish squirming free from human hands. Only its purple, waggling tongue was the prominent facial feature for a second. And then the zombie collapsed, nothing but dressed-up bones without its command centre.

He gagged (only for a split-second, mind you; he was, after all, a man’s man) at the sight of the gore. He’d pulverised the fellow’s head. ‘I know that was a good swing, but I didn’t think it was that jaw-dropping, my man,’ he said to the fallen zombie.

The middle undead, now only one of two remaining, laid a cold, dead hand on Travis’s shoulder. He gasped a death rattle of rancid breath down his neck.

Travis lurched and spun, swinging the baseball bat – now painted with blood – in an upward arc from low to high. ‘Not today, creepazoid!’

THE TRAVISINATOR collided with this second guy’s jaw from a different angle. There was a CLOCK! as the dead man’s set row of teeth clacked together against the upper row with force. But the momentum didn’t stop there. The zombie’s head detached from its shoulders and soared for the ceiling. Its spinal column followed it out of the sagging corpse like a tail. The head thunked into the wall, leaving a bloody splatter, and slid down to the floor. The zombie remained upright, hand still on Travis’s shoulder. As though they were two old chums down the pub having a chinwag. And then the body seemed to realise it had lost its head and folded down onto the linoleum with a sigh.

Travis grinned a perfect-toothed grin. ‘Thought you could get ahead of me, eh? No such luck!’

The third zombie stumbled over the slain corpse of his companion. It reached for Travis with the demanding ‘gimme-gimme’ hands of a toddler. It staggered, one foot caught on the body in the way.

Travis only needed one opportunity. He’d done a horizontal swing. He’d swung from low to high. Time for something new. He raised THE TRAVISINATOR high above his head like Excalibur. ‘You shoulda stayed in the ground, pal!’

The baseball bat came down on top of the man’s skull with a crack, splintering the bone down the middle. But the bat followed through and completed its swing. It crushed the walking corpse, squishing him down into the linoleum. For a second, the zombie started doing the splits. But then its stiffened body refused to bend further, and the splits continued up the middle. The crack unzipped him all the way up to his damaged noggin, then ripped his head in two, along with his brains.

Travis slung his gore-slaked baseball bat over one shoulder and sneered. ‘Why don’t you make like a banana and split?’

The door to Winona Chavez’s apartment swung open, basking Travis in the soft glow from within. Winona stood in a vintage fifties dress with her hands clasped. She wore her hair up in the post-WW2 style and painted her lips an enticing red. She stood up on tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek. ‘Oh, Travis! You saved me! I always knew you were my hero, you and nobody else.’

Travis pitched his cigarette off to the side. ‘Ain’t no big thing, dollface.’

And then Winona did kiss him, reaching up because he was so tall.

Travis did not smile – real men never smiled – but he gave her a self-assured wink. ‘C’mon,’ he said, ‘we’ll take my Harley.’

Winona, already wearing a pink helmet, jumped for joy and giggled. ‘Okay! Whatever you say, sailor!’

And then he took her on his bike and rode her out of the city to the countryside. Everyone else would be heading into the city because of the army and the hospitals. But he was wiser than them because he knew they had to escape the population centres. Winona admired him and told him how smart he was. And then, because they’d ridden all day and the lady was getting tired, they stopped in the middle of nowhere. He made a campfire from scratch and caught rabbits with engineered traps made out of twigs. He made a delicious meal to prove his love to her because everybody knew that love goes through the stomach. And then they made sweet, sweet love under a canopy of stars for several hours nonstop, and—

The scream bit into the night, tearing through the peace like teeth through flesh.

Travis Wells lurched awake with a yip, like the sound from a kicked dog. His cotton sheets wrapped around his gut, sticking to his skin via sweat. His heart hammered in his chest, making him fear that he was having some cardiac episode. He hadn’t recognised the scream – they all sounded the same to him now. But what stung right now were the cold, hard facts of daylight: it had all been a dream. A beautiful, wonderful, implausible dream. He had no six-pack. For two reasons, his jeans did not lie in a puddle by the side of his bed. One, he’d hung them on a hanger. And two, they didn’t exist – Travis wore almost only slacks.

He also did not – nor had he ever – own a leather jacket. And if he had, he would never have had the courage to adorn it with his name. Ditto for the baseball bat, too. The closest he’d come to sport was walking past the bar that showed live football on his way home from work. And he’d never gone inside because the usual clientele would be able to sniff out that he didn’t belong. It would be high school all over again. And the only sunglasses he wore were prescription. And smoking made him feel nauseous. And the thought of him on a motorcycle was laughable. Travis couldn’t even ride a bicycle because he was too afraid of falling off. No, his unspoken crush on his neighbour, Winona Chavez, was the only genuine part of the dream. And, due to his cowardice, she was three weeks in her grave. Or not, as the case was, due to this unfortunate apocalypse. Travis rolled out of bed and staggered to the courtyard balcony.

Something was going down whilst the sun rose again, pooling red light in the courtyard like blood. A human – a living, as-of-yet-but-soon-to-be-infected human – was struggling through a smattering of undead. One of the zombies, a young woman many had lusted after and who’d not once worn a fifties dress, grasped the man’s arm. The lad fought and struggled but could not break free of the vicelike grip on his arm. As he grappled with his cannibalistic admirer, more silhouettes shambled towards the scene.

Travis could not suppress the second sigh that wept out of him, like his soul leaving his body. He finally had the epiphany that if you wanted something, you should go after it no matter your terror. If you didn’t, someone else was bound to come along and eat your lunch. Or, in Travis’s case, they’d come along and eat your longed-after love interest. Travis watched with puppy-dog eyes as the woman he’d yearned for latched onto another man.

And then she took a bite out of his neck.