One of my minions quickly approached us. “Well now, who’s this?” asked Glenn, the eldest of the humans and my frequent right hand (and left hand) man. He eyed the newcomer suspiciously, then did the same to me. “You’ve never let one of them in before.” He said it with disdain. I couldn’t rightly blame him.
I stopped and sighed. It was and will always be a forced gesture on my part. After all, it wasn’t like I needed to inhale or exhale. Still, it felt like the right thing to do. “Guess it’s about time then, Glenn.”
He looked from me to the zombie and then back my way. The slightest of grins rose northward on his wizened face. “The T-shirt says it all, you know.” The smile widened. “My company isn’t enough for you, Creature?”
I shrugged as best I could. “Not the same, Glenn, is it?”
He closed the gap between us and placed his hand on my shoulder. Most humans never touched me, never touched one of us. Our association, for the most part, was simply out of necessity. Glenn, however, saw beyond what I’d become. He’d been a friend to me, of sorts. And that is what he was at that very moment when he told me to stay where I was, that he’d be back in a few minutes.
And so I stood in the middle of the barren parking lot staring at the undead stranger, everything silent save for the peripheral groans. His hair blew in the warm breeze, highlights catching the sun, but, apart from that, he didn’t so much as budge. It was just him and me, me and him, a swarm of undead butterflies taking wing inside my belly.
“Please forgive me for what I’m about to do,” I whispered his way. I then turned, watching as Glenn raced back to us. In his hand he held a funnel. It was how the salt was administered. One full funnel equaled a one-week’s dosage. Miss the dose and we’d quickly revert back.
“Ready?” he asked, winded but smiling just the same.
I nodded. “Head tilted back,” I commanded the zombie. “Mouth open.”
He did as I instructed, with difficulty, of course, seeing as he’d obviously done neither in a very long time, but his head did eventually tilt and his mouth did pry open. Glenn placed the funnel inside, the tip down the zombie’s throat, and then poured the salt inside. I watched as the white crystals slowly drained through the plastic—like sands through the hourglass, so were the days of our unlives—then I stared at the stranger, waiting for the inevitable result once the funnel was removed.
A minute ticked by, two. It felt like hours. And then, all of a sudden, blink.
“Here it comes,” said Glenn, sounding giddy as he stood by my side.
Again I nodded. “Yep.” Then blink, blink. Blink, blink, cough. “Hello?” I managed to croak out. “Can you hear me?”
Cough, blink, blink. “Yes,” the stranger replied, slowly, his voice sounding jagged, creaky, like a rusted hinge. “What . . . happened?”
I turned to Glenn. He turned to me. It was a hard question to answer. I mean, how do you tell someone that they’re a zombie and have been for decades, that their family is long dead, or undead, that all he knew was gone, that this factory we stood outside of was all that remained? I remembered what it was like, the realization of what I’d become, even all those years later. Which is why I’d begged his forgiveness to begin with.
“You’re safe,” I replied, simply. It was the best I could do for the time being.
He looked down at his purpled, vein-riddled hands, then at my own. “Safe . . . from . . . what?”
Glenn’s smile disappeared. He moved in and gently helped the stranger turn around. “From them, son,” he replied as soothingly as possible. “From every last one of them.”
***
That was just about three hundred years ago. Hard to know exactly. Not like we had calendars anymore. Nope, all we had were the humans, who came and went, generation after generation, Glenn was replaced by a son, a grandson, and on and on and on, while we zombies stayed the same, locked in time, locked inside a fence.
Though things had indeed changed after the stranger came into my life.
Hard to think of him that way now, a stranger, to remember how I’d found him, my Dara Licked. Yes, his drag name. Because, thank goodness, I had indeed picked well that day so long ago. Guess it took one to know one, right?
Dara, I simply called him—well her, really, because even after all those centuries, I still hadn’t got my pronouns right. I mean, come on, how do you call someone named Dara a him? Anyway, she had in fact become my soul mate, my raison d’etre, even when I had little reason to etre left in me. And if you think one drag queen put a spring into those zombie’s steps, you should’ve seen what two did. Though, yes, spring might’ve been pushing it when it came to likes of them, but at least it was a far better cry than staring at a rusted fence year in and year out.
“I wish we could do something for them,” Dara said to me that particularly fateful afternoon as we stared at the milling horde. We strolled hand in hand, him and I, side by side. He’d become the yang to my yin—and, yes, he had one mighty fine yang as it turned out. Like I said, I certainly knew how to pick them.