“I know, hon, I know,” I said in return. “But to what avail? The more zombies we allow inside here, the more there will be out there to take their place. It would, I’m afraid, be a Sisyphean task.” We’d had this talk before. It never changed. After all, how could it?
He giggled, as best as any zombie could. “I used to know a drag queen named Sisyphus.” He scratched beneath his platinum blonde wig: a treasure from a recent foray into the city. “No, wait, it was Syphilis.” Then he leaned his head on my shoulder. “Anyway, it’s still awfully sad to think of them all that way.” He pointed at the distant groaning throng, a hot breeze washing over us all the while.
I squeezed his hand firmer in my own. “Just their destiny, hon.” I kissed his bewigged head. “And ours, sad to say.”
Though ours, and theirs, really, was about to take one hell of an unexpected turn.
Dead Ringers
The humans heard it first. I suppose their hearing was better than ours, that their synapses relayed faster or something along those lines. In any case, they went running out of the factory before us, their faces all pointed to the cloudless sky, hands placed over their eyes like makeshift visors. Me, I ambled out a moment later, the only one among the throng to recognize the sound. I was stunned—a gross understatement—to actually be hearing it.
Another of my zombie kind, one that had been with me from the beginning, just like all the others on our side of the fence, made his way from a different building, standing behind me not two minutes later, several others a few seconds after that. He pointed to the fast-approaching object, his mouth agape—which, for a zombie, was pretty much par for the course anyway, but this time it was certainly well-deserved. “Plane.”
The word was repeated, round and round she goes, until it was on everyone’s lips, both zombie and human alike. I turned around just as Dara appeared by my side. Yes, our faces were pretty much locked in whatever expression was on them when we died—usually terror—but, even still, I could detect something else there all of a sudden: surprise. And even I found it ironic that one gross understatement was followed with an even grosser one. Because surprise couldn’t even begin to cut the Grey Poupon right about then.
“But how?” asked my partner.
I squinted into the sky, the plane almost directly overhead, flying low. And, suddenly, it felt like I’d been sucker-punched. And to feel anything, let me tell you, was tantamount to a miracle. Like finding a life-partner in a sea of death or surviving(ish) a solar apocalypse. And since those two miracles had in fact occurred, I was inclined to believe that this one was doing the same, that it wasn’t just some sort of mirage we were all witnessing.
“How indeed,” I croaked out. I turned to Dara and placed my hand on her shoulder, her eyes of blue offset by the shimmering green she was wearing on her generally gray-tinged eyelids, blonde wig flowing in the breeze. “I . . . I think I know that plane.”
She stared at me and then at the plane in question as it banked and flew back in the opposite direction, clearly looking for a place to land, which, also clearly, had to be within the fence. Otherwise, it’d be landing on top of a whole lot of groaning, stinking zombies. “How, exactly, do you know that plane, dearest?” she asked.
I gulped. Or, that is to say, my brain told my throat to gulp and my throat promptly ignored the transmission, as per usual. “I believe that it’s the same one my friends left in before heading to New York.”
“But they’re—”
“Dead.” I finished her train of thought. “Obviously. But the plane is still very much, shall we say, alive”
She nodded. “And landing.”
Which wasn’t as difficult as it sounded. The plane was a private number, perhaps six seats at most, and the factory parking lot inside the gates was fairly long and devoid of cars along the perimeter of the fence. In other words, it’d be tight, but not impossible. Especially since, given that several hundred years had passed since last I’d seen it, in the realm of possibilities, landing was more likely than seeing the damned thing in the first place.
Again Dara turned my way. “You’re looking awfully pale, Creature.”
My eyes further squinted. “I’m dead, Dara.” And, yes, gross understatements always travel in threes.
Again she nodded. “Paler, then. Like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
I pointed to the plane as it finished its landing, the engines temporarily drowning out the constant groaning hum of the surrounding undead multitudes. “Perhaps I have, Dara,” I replied. “Perhaps I have.”
But would that be a literal statement? Could my friends—Destiny St. James, Blondella Bombshell and Kit Kat—somehow have survived? They were, after all, still human when last I’d seen them. Could they have turned in the interim? And, if so, why the three hundred plus year gap since that time?
In any case, I didn’t have all that long to wait for the answers to those questions. The plane was now taxiing our way, all eyes and ears and gaping mouths faced its way. It came to a stop a dozen feet away, the engines cut, the enveloping silence, minus the ever-peripheral groan, very nearly deafening.
“Should we have brought a fruit basket?” asked Dara, her hand suddenly in mine.
“Sweetie,” I replied, “ain’t no bigger fruits than us for miles and miles around.”
Or so we thought.