When We Were Zombies

The walk. The dead eyes. The hunger.

The taste of brains.

But now, years after all that, our victims walk the streets again, you see them wearing beanie hats or business suits or cute wide trousers from hip Scandinavian designers, some of them even pushing babies in strollers down Seventh Avenue. 

Kiefer and Beasley and me.

The Night of the Living Dead, which we all saw, separately, when we were thirteen, started it. Beasley, now Sophie, said she already felt more zombie than human. Maybe our path was inevitable.

We were dead, of course, by the time we met. No infection for us, proper voodoo old skool death and half-awakening. Kiefer’s parents killed him, slowly and incrementally, with injections of poison so subtle even they were often unaware they were administering them. They didn’t even notice when his face, with its soft veil of acne, began to slide off his skull.

Beasley was killed in the ninth grade by a pack of cheerleaders who stabbed her with eyeliner pencils and posted it on Instagram. The post was much liked, cooly filtered and with the moody, plaintive backing track favored by cruel attractive girls. She bled out in the girls’ changing room after sixth period.

I froze to death unnoticed and in solitude in the corner of Algebra 2, chunks of my ass then rotting as the frostbite thawed.

The irony - is it Irony? What remained of my ability to focus was centred, in English, on the living girls - is that the three of us might not have died if we’d met each other earlier.

By the time were assigned, randomly it seemed, the off-campus apartment at college we had each, in our decaying bodies, found a way to sustain the lifestyle. Beasley could get herself made-up like a goth-doll and head to frat parties, where after enough Island Punch from the Tiki bowl she could lure some poor jock or Poly Sci major back to her room where beneath a string of soft fairy lights she could adeptly knock his skull on the bedhead and gnaw through his admittedly mediocre brain.

Kiefer and I started a business selling strong weed. We’d get our clientele high enough that small gobbets of brain could be siphoned out through their ears as they sucked like feeding puppies on the bong or droned on about the merits of heavy metal bassists. These dudes died gradually over the term, and aside from our always needing to cultivate new customers, we thought about them little.

The three of us, though, Kief and Beasley and I, loved each other. Each of us felt this love in secret, a little suspicious that such tenderness could persist as we lumbered and bled and ate from the craniums of the campus.

It seemed logical to find a place together after graduation. We did surprisingly well academically, considering. Maybe our diet helped.

Beasley got work as a proofreader of bootleg doctoral theses, shedding bits of scab on the keyboard as she typed with chalky fingers. I tended bar at an after hours club on Christopher Street where the boys, mostly off their heads, never mentioned the suppurating crater where my left ear had been. 

Kiefer worked with kids at a youth club, a job so deep in Queens and so underpaid they had no problem with his smell. The kids were desperate enough for attention they didn’t care if it came from a zombie, and he never once succumbed to the taste of fresh youthful brain. That was probably a sign things were changing. Then he brought a girlfriend home, a rake thin person who chain-smoked and said little, not a zombie but some kind of wraith, with long fine hair and a tattoo of a wolf on her shoulder. They’d have sex in his box-room, which made me believe his cock must have resurrected.

Then Beasley sold a story to a feminist horror ‘zine, then a piece to D & D Adventurer. Soon after this on a a grey day she removed her dark glasses as she walked through Tompkins Square Park. She seemed to walk wrong too, not stiff like we were used to, not like zombies do, rhythmically tottering side-to-side. I felt betrayed.

A few weeks later - spring was coming early and the NYU students were vaping in dark clumps in Washington Square - I was in the alley behind the club feasting on the brains of a big-bellied bearish guy in a plaid shirt who I had managed to lure with suggestion of quick fellatio. I was feeling the slight tristesse that came when I was nearly sated but my victim was still warm when I had a startling and queasy sensation. I was hankering for a pizza.

What was pizza to me? That cardboardy combo that fed the lumpen livestock of humanity" Pizza had nothing to do with me. Did it? But as if on a questionable dare I found myself walking to Tivoli’s on Hudson Street and buying a six buck slice. I almost shook as I loaded it with flaked chilis and oregano from sticky canisters.

The texture was a shock to my teeth (the flavour less so, which was not entirely dissimilar to my recent mouthfull from the cranium of hefty boy.)Still, it was frighteningly satisfying. I chowed down another with an extra large Diet Coke, ravenous but mystified in the garden of St Luke In The Fields.

The progress - or regression - was inevitable. Beasley called us into her room one evening to ask over wine - not blood! - to tell us we could always call her Beasley but from now on, out on the streets she would be Sophie Ann, the name on her stories. Kiefer left Mott Street and moved in with the skinny girl, who was revealed, somewhat disappointingly, to be called Sarah and was training as an occupational therapist. I now manage an independent coffee shop and vegan bakery and am aghast to find how much I enjoy it, and I date burly men not unlike my late unfortunate lumberjack from the Night of the First Pizza.

Kiefer is now in charge of the youth club in Queens and looks, in fact, quite fit, if young fit men are your thing. Beasly and I were walking behind him the other night, a hot night in Tribeca when he wore a thin t-shirt. We both noticed it - slight protrusions beyond his scapula beginning to poke through. She shot me a glance, and I knew she too was thinking how strange it would be if they were the beginning, just, of the emergence of angels wings.