Dead Sexy

  Chapter 14

  I limped like an old man over to Spense and Marilyn. If we all got out of this, I decided to take up Spense on his offer to get me an appointment with Greta, his favorite masseuse.

  Getting closer to the pair, I could see Marilyn leering at Spense. She was trying, without a lot of success, to catch Spense’s hand. She’d snag it every so often, but he would promptly shake her off with an irritated moan. Saliva dribbled out of the corner of her mouth, and I could see that Spense’s hand was covered with it.

  “Uhh,” Spense groaned. In that way nearly everything around me today had groaned. I sped up my pace. Geez…if something happened to Spense too…I just didn’t know if I could handle it. Not to say that I was handling things now. Just. No. Not Spense too.

  “Spense,” I shouted and he sat up. He was clearly disoriented and I had a moment of sheer unrelenting panic as his glazed eyes looked right at me without any sign of recognition.

  Then Marilyn began sucking on his fingers. “Eww, Marilyn, gross.” Spense snatched his hand back.

  I just looked up at the sky, noticing the tiny pinpricks of light through the pollution. I sent a thank you out to the universe. I had one of them back.

  The surfer dude stepped through the broken window carrying a six pack of Amstel Light still nestled in its cardboard carrier and a Styrofoam tray of uncooked steaks—they looked like fillets. He nodded towards the doctor’s patio furniture.

  I helped Spense up as the surfer put down his pilfered snacks and righted the upended poolside table. He didn’t seem at all concerned about chilling in a back yard with six, not counting the zombie still thrashing in the pool, dead bodies. So I decided not to care either. There were too many other things to worry about.

  It took me, Spense, and Marilyn a minute or two to make it across the yard. None of us were moving all that well. But we settled in around the pool, with me and Spense sitting at the patio table with the surfer and Marilyn lying on one of the plush pool loungers. She was quiet now, chewing daintily on the fillet the surfer had tossed to her.

  I stared at her for a moment. She was lit up by the cool blue light coming from the pool. It flickered over her luminous skin and turned her blond highlights aqua. My gaze drifted around the patio. The ground was dusted with shattered glass from the busted windows, glinting in the rippling blue light.

  The furniture that we weren’t using was overturned, some knocked into the pool. Where a zombie was frantically treading water while trying to capture some of the floating debris. The thing was remarkably uncoordinated as it tried, unsuccessfully, to grab something and stuff it in its mouth. I looked back to Marilyn who was curled up on the lounger, sucking some of the steak juices off her fingers.

  “Sorry I knocked you out, man.” The surfer offered Spense a beer.

  “Oh, no problem.” Spense took a glug from the bottle. He was over it. “What happened to Dr. Chatsworth?” He twisted in his chair, looking for the doctor in the backyard carnage.

  I took a long drink from my own beer. “He’s dead.”

  “Zombie get him?”

  “No.” I pointed to the surfer. “It was him.”

  “Kevin,” the surfer said by way of introduction. Spense gave him a little wave.

  “He pulled the doctor out of the tree and snapped his neck. And then he ripped the heads off all the zombies.”

  “Whoa. That’s crazy. How do you—”

  “—No.” I held out a hand to interrupt Spense. “Tell us about this serum. I’m not convinced that you can’t help Marilyn. You just launched Spense like a Nerfball, went commando on the dermatologist, and tore off some zombie heads with your bare hands.”

  Kevin shrugged, then nodded towards my bloodied arm. “She do that to you?”

  “Don’t change the subject. You said Marilyn only had 45 minutes, 40 minutes now, to live. You need to tell me about this serum.”

  “I didn’t say she had 40 minutes to live. She’s already dead, or at least not alive. You can’t come back from that.”

  “What?” I cried. “So what is going to happen to her in 40 minutes?”

  Kevin didn’t answer. At least not right away. He started picking at the corner of the paper label on his beer bottle. He rolled the corner down while looking back and forth between Spense and me. I think he was deciding how much to tell us.

  “Look, man,” Kevin said, peeling the label off and flicking it to the ground, “that was, like, an estimate. I don’t know when she’s going to turn. I honestly don’t know why she hasn’t already turned, but when she does...” He looked pointedly to the zombie thrashing, albeit a little less manically, in the pool.

  “What are you saying? That she’s going to turn into something like the pool zombie?”

  “Yep, that’s where she’s headed. And when that happens I’ll have to…” Kevin stopped. His shoulders tightened and he took a slug of beer. “I’m sorry, man. You seem like a nice guy.”

  “What’s gonna happen?” Spense glanced back and forth between Kevin and me, not following the innuendo.

  Kevin made a twisting motion with one hand and a sound like a cork popping out of a bottle of champagne.

  Spense’s eyes widened in dawning comprehension.

  I felt like I might throw up my Amstel Light.

  “I might be able to save you, though.”

  What was he talking about? I wasn’t the one who needed saving. “I don’t care about me,” I said. “What about Marilyn? Can’t you just give her some more of that serum stuff that they were hawking at the party? The doctor said that would help her. Surely he must have some more around here. We can keep her from,” I couldn’t say it. “You know...What you said.”

  Kevin got a second beer from the cardboard carton and twisted off the spiky top with his bare hand. I shuddered.

  “Look. It’s complicated.” He paused, maybe fumbling for a word that Spense and I could understand, like he wasn’t used to explaining this to people. “Basically, your wife got injected with a prion.”

  It didn’t work. I still didn’t get it.

  “The prion—let’s call it a rogue protein—is attaching to other proteins in her body and inducing them to refold, essentially replicating the rogue protein and causing the aggressive anti-aging you can observe in your wife.”

  We all looked at Marilyn to observe her aggressive anti-aging. She was just chilling in the lounge chair. Besides occasionally twitching, she looked pretty normal (or better than normal), except for the discarded piece of fillet mignon in her lap. That was just like her. You buy her an expensive meal and she never finished it.

  “Look, do you really need the technical explanation?” he groused. Kevin’s accent and manner had changed. He seemed less chill, more scientific, more with it. Apparently, he was some kind of scientist in his spare time, which I guess if you were an immortal zombie you had a lot of that.

  “It took me forever to figure out how this stuff worked. If you take the serum, the one your dermatologist obtained through underhanded means and shot into people without knowing what the hell he was doing, it’ll stop the aging process—”

  Spense breathed out a long soft “whoaaaa.”

  “—well, in the sense that it kills you,” Kevin backtracked. “But then you live forever. You wake up beautiful, strong, and indestructible. Of course, you’re also drooling, vacant, and hungry for brains.”

  He reached into one of the velcroed pockets on his shorts and pulled out a small vial and a capped syringe. He held up the vial between his thumb and forefinger. “What your dermatologist didn’t know is that if you take a second compound, one that can inhibit the prion, the rogue protein, and establish the proper equilibrium between the normal and for the sake of this conversation let's call it the ‘zombie’ protein, you end up like me.”

  Spense said, “So, it’s like Botox. Toxic but good?”

  I scratched my head. “What’s Bow-tox?”

  “Botox,” Spense repeated, “You inject Botuli
sm...Botulinum toxin into your face and it paralyzes your muscles.”

  Leave it to Spense to know the scientific name for Botox.

  “Dude, that’s messed up. Why would anyone do that?”

  “Because it smooths out your wrinkles,” Spense said. “Trust me, people do some mad crazy stuff to get rid of wrinkles.” Trust Spense to know about that.

  Well, I mean, I knew that too. My wife had been sneaking around behind my back accepting non-FDA approved skincare treatments from a shady dermatologist, and it had turned her into a freaking zombie.

  Had Dr. Chatsworth given Marilyn the same sales pitch he’d made at his party, right before we let the other zombies out of the basement? I guess those were his previous test subjects. This guy had created half a dozen zombies and only then had he given his serum to my wife.

  A red haze was creeping into my vision. I felt hot. And violent.

  “This is way more than wrinkles. I’ve been taking this serum for 300 and …” Kevin started counting on his fingers. “What year is this? I always lose track of the decade.” He continued to do the math, then seemed to give up. “Whatever, you get the point. I’m really flippin’ old.”

  I lifted the bottle to my lips, thinking the cold beer would cool me off. But I got a whiff of it as I brought it closer to my face. It smelled gross. Weird. It had smelled fine before.

  “Aside from the eternal youth and beauty, this thing can be a drag.” Kevin was rolling his little vial around on the table. “If you ever miss a dose of the inhibitor,” he snapped his fingers, “that’s the end. You can’t get rid of the zombie protein once it has been produced. You have to keep it in check in the first place. That’s what happened to my friend Dominique.”

  Spense’s eyes had been getting wider and wider as Kevin described this stuff. He was leaning forward, his arms pressed against the table. He couldn’t have gotten any closer to Kevin without vaulting the table and dropping into the guy’s lap.

  “So there are others?” he asked, a little breathless. He was real subtle.

  “A few. It’s rare stuff—hard to get—I don’t hand it out to just anybody. It usually just ends up being a hassle for me. Like now.” He gave us a look that clearly said, yeah, I’m talking about you. “I hooked Nikki up back in the 60s.”

  I wondered if he meant the 1960s or the 1860s.

  “We weren’t together or anything, but we were friends. I made sure she was always well stocked—just in case. Well, I’d been off on a surf trip to Costa Rica, and the next time I swung by her place she was bouncing off the walls trying to chew her way out of her condo in Cabo. All her supplies were missing. I couldn’t figure out why she missed a dose, until I heard that this doctor had been sniffing around her. He was pretty loose with his name, the famous LA dermatologist Dr. Chatsworth.”

  He trailed off with a grimace. I thought maybe he was imagining popping the doc’s head off. After a minute he shrugged it off and said, “So I made my way up here. He wasn’t hard to find, what with his face on the all those billboards along Wilshire Boulevard. Then I hear he’s hawking some 'miracle serum.’ He must have stolen her stash, tried to reproduce it. Idiot didn’t know what he was doing. All I can figure is he must have mixed the serum and the inhibitor to cause such a delay in zombification. But the proportion was still off.”

  All the words were starting to fade into a steady buzz in my ear. Kevin had said something important. Something that could help Marilyn.

  “Like Marilyn!” I interjected, reminding him of who else had been hurt by Dr. Chatsworth.

  Kevin waved toward the pile of headless zombies on the lawn. “Her and quite a few others. I’m just saying, man. I’m sorry about your girl. At least you don’t have to take care of her yourself, like I had to with Nikki.”

  What was it that I needed to say?

  “So how long does it usually take to go full pool zombie?” Spense asked. “We were here earlier, and those others were hidden in a basement. I couldn’t tell you for certain but it sure seemed like they had already changed.”

  Kevin paused, considering. “It usually doesn’t take any time at all. I mean they die and they wake up all moaning and stumbling.”

  “Like Marilyn,” I repeated.

  Spense elbowed me, like we’d just shared a joke. He mouthed, “Shambling, dude.”

  Kevin didn’t notice. “There was this time in New Orleans—1843—no 1853. This guy got his hands on the serum and went all voodoo witch doctor with it. Bam! Zombies all over Louisiana.”

  “Whoa.” Spense was clearly impressed. “How’d he get it?” It was hard to tell if Spense was trying to steer the conversation, or if he was really caught up in Kevin’s story.

  Kevin added reluctantly, “I might’ve lost the serum in a card game. They didn’t have cable TV back then and only the Polynesians knew about surfing.”

  I needed to get things back on track, including my brain. Maybe I’d had too much beer. “Like...Marilyn.”

  Both Kevin and Spense turned to look at me. “Hey, buddy, are you feeling alright?” Spense asked.

  “Like M—” I started to say. My mouth was stuck on repeat. I shook myself trying to dislodge my brain. I felt light-headed. Maybe it was what hope felt like. “—Yeah. So we just need to give Marilyn a big dose of that inhibitor stuff.” Right, that was it. Why was I the only one to think of that?

  Kevin looked uncomfortable and turned away from me. He put his forearms on his knees and looked at the ground, examining a tear in the sole of one his flip-flops. Kevin didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who knew how to handle his conflicts with words.

  “Look, man. I’m sorry, but the inhibitor only maintains. It keeps you where you are. It can’t bring back what’s gone. It doesn’t bring folks back from the dead and it doesn’t heal fried zombie brains.”

  “But Marilyn’s different. You said so yourself. So if you give her the inhibitor—”

  Kevin shook his head. “—I’m not going to do that. You two need to accept that the woman you knew is gone.”

  Spense and I exchanged a look, which was a little bit more difficult than normal because there were two of him. He deliberately avoided answering that question, my look said. Yeah, I think you’re right, both the Spenses said.

  “Look, she might not be as aggressive but she’s still biting folks, and she’s contagious. The inhibitor might freeze her—and I say might because I’ve never heard of this working before—but it’s not going to bring her back. And I’m not going to waste stash on something that I’ll have to babysit till Armageddon. She continues to bite people and you’ve got the start of zombie apocalypse.”

  “So, Kevin,” Spense said, “Does that mean if you bite me…”

  “Not a chance, man.” Kevin took the opportunity to scoot his chair away from the two Spenses.

  I chose to ignore him calling Marilyn a “something.” Zombie or not, she was still Marilyn to me. Raw chicken wings couldn’t stand in the way of real love. Come to think of it, chicken wings didn’t sound half bad right now.

  “But you,” Kevin pointed at me, reclaiming my attention, “you can still be saved.” He pulled out the robe-check boy’s cell phone and fiddled with the cracked screen. “I’d give you another twenty minutes before you have pain knifing through your stomach, and another ten before you keel over dead. But,” he added brightly, “if you take my inhibitor before then, you’ll be like me!”

  I didn’t say anything. The buzz was back. It had turned into ringing, or not ringing exactly, something that repeated Mar-i-lyn, Mar-i-lyn, Mar-i-lyn.

  Kevin must have taken my silence as a no.

  “Come on, man. We’ve just had a beer together. I don’t want to pop your head off. Because that is what’s going to happen. You’re going to die and wake up a pool zombie. And I can’t let you wander around like that. You seem to care a lot for your wife, so I’ll assume she was a cool girl. Would she want you to die, needlessly? I can’t help her. But with enough of the inhibitor we can c
ounteract the doctor’s jacked up stuff that’s dripping out of your wife’s mouth and festering in your arm.”

  “Dude,” Spence said. “Festering doesn’t sound good. If anyone is going to live forever and have great skin—I mean—I’d rather it be you than anyone else.” Spense looked pointedly at Kevin. “If it can’t be me, of course.”

  Mar-i-lyn, Mar-i-lyn, Mar-i-lyn.

  Kevin seemed pretty oblivious when he wanted to be. He didn’t even bat an eyelash at Spense. “It is pretty sweet,” he agreed.

  I didn’t respond to that, because instead I fell out of my chair and started convulsing.