“You turned me,” he said. “That much I know. I was like them and now I’m like you.” Again his lip quivered. “Well, mostly like you. In any case, if you turned me then you can keep me, uh, turned, right?”
I looked at Dara and she looked at me, and we both knew what our answer had to be. Because, if the situation was reversed, we would’ve tried anything to make sure that we didn’t turn back. So, I replied, “Yes, we can keep you like . . . like us.” Give or take.
“We even have extra wigs and gowns and makeup back on the island.”
He coughed. “Um, pass. But I will help. If I can. And you keep me, well, me.”
“But can you help us?” Dara asked. “Do you remember someone else like Creature here, someone who issued commands to you?”
Ricky scrunched his eyes closed, which wasn’t at all easy to do, let me tell you. Clearly, he was trying to remember something, anything that could help us. When he opened his eyes again, he was still frowning, but not nearly as much. “Ugh.”
I nodded. “Yeah, we get a lot of that. Comes with the zombie territory. But, exactly, ugh what?”
“Ugh,” he replied, “I think I might have helped to kill, killed or witnessed some killings recently. I don’t know. It’s just flashes across my mind, blips on the radar, there one second and gone the next.”
“Humans?” I asked. “Were these people humans that were killed?”
He nodded. “I believe so. They look, in my mind, pink and not gray, so, yeah, must’ve been humans.”
“With lots of makeup and fabulous clothes?” asked Dara.
Ricky nodded. “I . . . I think so. Like I said, it’s just fleeting images, like I’m watching a movie that keeps blacking out.”
“But why were you there? How did you get there? Who commanded you to go?” I tried, reeling off the questions as fast as my mind could think of them.
Again his eyes squinted shut. I stared at him. He was a nice-looking man. Or at least had been at one time. He was six feet tall or so, thick, black, wavy hair, with the remnants of what must’ve been green eyes, nice features, all locked in place if not a bit more gaunt and grayed, but there just the same, if you looked beyond the death mask we all wore. When he again opened his eyes, he replied, “I see a woman.”
“A zombie woman?” I asked. “A man dressed as a woman? Or a real woman?”
He shrugged. “Not like I saw her uterus or anything, so it’s hard to tell, but I do see a woman in my head. She gathered us, I think, loaded us onto a boat. I can feel the waves, smell the ocean. She told us to kill. I can hear the words. Then I see the killings, see the blood, taste it, hear the screams.”
“And yet you’re still, for lack of a better word, alive,” Dara commented.
“The humans fought back. I must’ve got pushed in reverse. Eventually, I could smell the ocean again, feel the waves again. After that, I went back to roaming the streets. I don’t remember seeing the woman after that, don’t know if there were more zombie survivors. It’s all black.” He pointed to his head. “Up here.” He shrugged. “I think I followed her command and that was the end of it. Until you two found me, that is.”
I looked at Dara. “So maybe he’s the only crumb. Maybe that’s why he was all we could find.”
“Crumb?” he asked.
“Sorry, the only zombie that can lead us back to this woman you saw. If we find her, then perhaps we can stop any future killings.”
And still he shrugged. Or perhaps he got locked like that. Hard to tell. Zombies lock a lot, after all. “What’s the point, though? Why keep the remaining humans alive? Why not just eat them and be done with it?”
“To quote you, ugh,” I replied. “Besides, it’s a symbiotic relationship. We need them to keep us, uh, turned, to help us manage our day to day routines, to lift us up and down stairs and do our hair and makeup, to dress us and give us dust bathes. On the flip side, we in turn protect them. In other words: no humans, no us, and vice-versa.”
Dara nodded. “Besides, though it sometimes hurts to see them, that they remind us of what we’ve lost, at least we have them as a reminder, that we still have a connection to what we once were, a bridge to our pasts.”
His shrug remained. It was definitely a lock. I’d have to help him with that. “Okay, fine, I’ll have to take your words for it, seeing as I’ve only been back for less than ten minutes, but now what? How do we find this mystery person?”
“Well,” I replied. “If you are, as we say, a crumb, maybe you didn’t fall off the loaf too far from the bakery.”
He looked at Dara. “Does she always talk like this?”
Dara shook her head. “This bakery kick is a new thing of hers. You’re lucky, though. For a hundred years or so she was doing nothing but talking in country music lyrics.” She paused and frowned. “With a twang.”
Then he paused. I think we were confusing him. Par for the course, I suppose. “In any case, what Creature here is getting at, I think, is that this king or queen might still be somewhat near the place where I was found. If we return back there, perhaps he or she, most probably it, might be there. Right?”