Hungry for Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance (20 page)

“No,” she cried, “I can’t do this, I can’t!”

“But why?” My erection started to shrink.

“I...my skin, it’s too fragile. It might flake off.”

Say,

what?

That had to be the lamest excuse I’d ever heard from a girl. “I’ll be gentle, I swear,” I said.

“No!” She was crying, backing away from me, her butt moving across the bear rug. Scrabbling to dress herself.

For God’s sakes.

I’d give her the ceviche. That would do it.

I gave her my bathrobe, then wrapped myself in a towel. I calmed her down. She cried on my shoulder, telling me she’d not let a man this close to her in many years.

“How many years?” I asked.

Flustered, she said, “I don’t know. Maybe sixty.”

I laughed. She was so adorable. Sixty years. Yeah, right. “You’re like, twenty-five years old, Julia.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “Uh-huh. I meant, sixty months.”

185

I didn’t believe that, either.

But whatever, she would be mine, that was that. I would fuck her all night, she would be queen to the Brain Burger King, and Harold could make some big PR

announcement about our engagement. Not tomorrow, but soon.

I opened the crock, showed her the ceviche. She nearly fainted from joy. “My mother’s friend taught me how to make this when I was a little girl,” she said. “She was Peruvian, but we were all very poor, so my mother and her friend had to substitute rabbit brain for the alpaca and llama
brains. Rabbits were easy to come by in the French countryside, you see.”

“I can’t believe you’ve actually had this dish—in any form, actually. It’s a family secret. I never make it. And I don’t know anybody who’s ever had it.”

Julia Brainchild was obviously perfect for me. Here was a beautiful woman, sexually intoxicating, untouched by any man for years, twenty-five years old, the world’s expert on brain cooking, and she knew of the alpaca and llama ceviche!

I drank in the aroma of the ceviche: citrus and spices. I admired the perfect little wedges of brain that I’d diced for hours and hours.

We cuddled on the bed, pillows behind our backs. Her robe fell open. She didn’t notice. My towel unwrapped. She didn’t notice.

I held a spoon of ceviche to her lips.

She flicked her tongue. It dipped into the ceviche. “Ahhh...” A long sigh. She grabbed the spoon and stuck it in her mouth, chewed for what seemed like minutes, then swallowed.

“More!”

she

cried.

186

I scooped a bunch of ceviche into a bowl, gave it to her with the spoon. With her robe fully open now, her breasts bobbing as she gulped, she swallowed chunk after chunk of my special family ceviche.

And finally, a slight bluish flush rose to her cheeks. She handed the bowl and spoon back to me. Tugged the robe around her body to hide everything again.

“You have Peruvian ancestors?” she asked.

“No.” I explained that “my mother was American, but my grandfather, Julian LeBlanc, originally came from France, or so I was told. I have no Peruvian ancestors that I know of.”

“LeBlanc?” She leapt off the bed, pointed a finger at me as if accusing me of something.

“Well, yeah...so, what of it?” I hopped off the bed, grabbed her by the waist, and pressed her to me. I stared into her eyes.

“Richard, we cannot be, you and I, we cannot do this anymore.”

“Come on, we’re made for each other, Julia. You know that, and so do I. What on earth is the problem?”

“I know your recipe. But you made it incorrectly.”

“You’re breaking up with me over a recipe?” I drew back from her, stared in disbelief. This woman was crazy.

“You omitted the one essential ingredient, Dicky.”

And now she was calling me Dicky again?

“A pinch of alpaca testicles,” she said flatly. “That’s the ingredient that makes the ceviche an aphrodisiac.”

187

“And

you

know

this

how?
”

The whites of her eyes were dimming to gray. The white of her skin was beyond a pallor now, it was tinged with blue. Everywhere. The pink nipples were lavender, now purple.

What was happening to her?

“This is an ancient Inca priest recipe,” she said. “They used it as an aphrodisiac.

My mother’s friend, the Peruvian, listed the ingredients, all of them, including the alpaca testicles, over and over again. I helped my mother make the ceviche. With the rabbit brain.”

“But so what?” I yelled. “What does this have to do with you and me, and getting engaged and married on
Brain and Soul
?”

She laughed. I saw that her teeth were cracked and yellowing by the minute.

“We can’t get married, you silly
,
silly
petit cerveau
! You
tete de linotte
!”

I pulled on my pants and shirt, shoved her skirt and blouse at her. “Here, you might as well get dressed, Julia. I think you’re sick, and I mean that in a loving way.” I paused. I did love Julia Brainchild, but her mind was nuts and her body was clearly not well. I would take her to the finest doctors. Then we’d finally get on with it.

“I died in childbirth, Dicky. Long ago. A hundred years ago, in fact. Nobody knew that ceviche recipe except my mother, and both she and her friend died with the secret. It was passed down only to me.”

“And to me,” I said. Then I thought,
did she just say she died a hundred years
ago? What the hell?

188

“Don’t you get it?” She staggered toward me. Her gait was choppy, almost like a lurch. “I
died
, Dicky. In childbirth. Apparently, the child lived. He must have been Julian LeBlanc, your grandfather. You see, Dicky, LeBlanc was the name of the man who fathered my child!”

Psycho...

I took her elbow to lead her to the door and get her back to her apartment. She needed a good long rest, then a very good psychiatrist. But as I touched her elbow, the skin flaked off her arm.

I dropped my hand. Stared at her. “You are...?”

“I prefer to think of myself as the Living Challenged.”

“A

zombie?”

“It’s why I specialize in French brain cooking. I’ve had years to perfect my recipes. If I make love, if I let myself go too far for too long, if I let myself go all the way, I revert to the form I had when I reanimated. Hence, the blue skin. I must leave you, Dicky.”

Yeah, maybe that was a good idea. This Julia Brainchild was one whacked-out chick. Harold might force me to work with her, but beyond that...forget it.

“Dicky, I did love you. But you see,” she said, “I’m your dead great-grandmother.”

I shook my head. “You’re crazy, Julia. Come on, let me take you home and I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

“You forget, I’m the star of that show, not you.”

189

And I saw the cracked yellow teeth, the gray whites of her eyes, the skin falling off her face, the breasts sagging then deflating like balloons sucked dry of air.

I saw the knife in her hand. Classico-Emerol stainless steel, model 287631A.

The blade flashed.

I grabbed her wrist. It fell off her arm, and with it, her hand and the knife.

Could I kill her, a zombie? Was it possible? How? Every zombie movie I’d ever seen showed that people could never kill them—not with fire or decapitation, not even with machine guns.

My mind was racing. I stalled for time. “Can’t we work something out?”

“Yes, Dicky, we can. You see, I do love you, Dicky.”

“We can still do the show together, I promise,” I lied.

“Yes, Dicky, we can. I know you love me, too, Dicky.”

Then she leaned and her tongue flicked out and touched my cheek. The yellow teeth nibbled. I felt the heat dribble from my cheek to my lips, and I tasted blood.
She’d
bitten me.

“We’ll do the show forever, Dicky. Just you and me. And brains. And now that we are one, the same, it’s time.”

“Time?”

I

squeaked.

“Fuck me, Dicky, fuck me till I scream. You won’t care if my flesh flakes off.

Ha! And I won’t care about yours, either!”

There was no need to announce an engagement the next day, or any time soon. I was stuck with Julia Brainchild forever. We were two of a kind now. I’d fallen in love with my own great-grandmother. And as we, two rotting corpses, dished up health food 190

to the diet-crazed Americans, we could binge on all the cream and butter and lard and fatty sauces we wanted. As long as they were simmering on brains.

191

Kicking the Habit

by Steven Saus

I almost didn't hear her say hello over the guard's screams.

He wasn't just screaming because of me. He took a nasty header into a pit while fleeing across the construction site. His right leg was bent at an nasty angle. If you took the time to look, there was probably bone sticking out somewhere. I wasn't looking at his leg.

My eyes locked with his as I lowered myself into the hole. Or to be honest, he looked at my eyes. I stared at the grey matter a few inches behind his. Despite the decay, my stomach rumbled and my salivary glands tried to summon a few drops.

"Hello?" she called again. Her voice echoed off an abandoned backhoe. "John?"

That got my attention. Friendly greetings were rare enough since I rose, but someone calling me by name—well, that was really odd. It was a nice change from the usual greeting of "Oh dear God, no!" or maybe "Quick, get the shotgun!"

She stood on the other side of the pit, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. The jutting forms of two cranes framed her body against the clear night sky, creating an illusory archway behind her.

That was what I recognized at first: It was Maria's pose in an arch, just like the prom picture I'd stolen from the funeral home. Casual, relaxed. Except in the photo she was still a few hours away from being dead.

She lurched around the edge of the pit, turning as she shuffled so she kept me in sight. The moonlight shimmered on her skin. My memory filled in the soft lines of her 192

face and edited out the patchwork of stitches and scars from the accident. Her gown billowed lightly around her arms in the breeze as if carried by the guard's whimpering cries. I had never thought about her rising. Never considered I would see her again someday.

"Maria?" My voice was raspy and hoarse. I'd like to say it was just emotion, but part of my esophagus had rotted away a few weeks ago. "I remember you."

It needed to be said. Too many memories slip away after death. More slide away when the hunger strikes us. I don't remember my parents. The memories of Maria were still there and fresh. The stolen summer evenings, the times we'd meet after school, the good three years we'd spent together. And the memories after that.

The corner of her mouth lifted, a scar keeping it from becoming a full smile.

"When you left for college, I said I would always remember you." She had given back my ring on my parents’ doorstep. Neither of us cried at the time. We couldn't cry now.

The guard remembered his gun. He shot me a few times, the flash illuminating the rent-a-cop uniform against the red clay. As the slugs punched through my ribs, I got a good look at his face. He was young, maybe the same age as when I shot myself.

His shots didn't hurt, not like when I'd done it, but it knocked me back into the slick mud. Just annoying. I stood up, reached down, and took the gun from him. His eyes rolled back like a malfunctioning Ferris wheel. He collapsed, squelching into the bottom of the pit.

"Finally," I croaked. I kicked him a few times to make sure he would not get up anytime soon.

193

I climbed out of the hole. Maria still wore the prom dress they'd buried her in.

Her hair was mostly there, though much of the cartilage around her nose was gone. And there was the half-repaired damage from when Scott drove them and a half a bottle of whiskey off the road on prom night. The angry crude stitches cut across her right wrist and forearm; her exposed collarbone glinted in the silver light.

"What happened to you?" she asked. Her hand reached for the gaping hole in the back of my head.

I shove the words through my throat. "You said you would remember me. You were gone." My dry tongue skittered across cracked lips. "I said I would follow you."

The guard let out a soft whimper. I looked back down into the hole. The hunger was strong, and the guard—more boy than man, really—was near. Remembering to draw breath, I croaked at her, "I will share him with you," and I swung my legs into the pit.

"No!" she cried, and I glanced back at her.

She glared at me. "You don't have to eat him," she said. "There is another way."

The snarl snuck past my lips, straight from the gnawing need in my gut. She had to understand. She was like me. It didn't matter what I thought of it. The dry heaves afterward, the days of guilt—none of it was enough to stop the hunger.

I was close enough to the guard that I could almost taste the soft texture of his brain. It was so strong I wanted to gag and drool simultaneously, though I could do neither. I dropped into the pit.

"John!" Her voice was still enough to make me pause. "There are others of us who have given it up. We'll help you."

194

I tried to concentrate. The boy moaned softly. If I still had a pulse, it would have been racing. Aware brains, afraid brains—oh, they are the best. For a brief moment the fresh neurotransmitters flood your tongue and everything else dissolves in pure ecstasy.

For a moment, you forget everything. For a moment, you forget what you were forced to become. I took a step toward the boy. The cool night air fluttered up the slit in my tux, through the hole in my skull.

"John." She was almost pleading now. "Come with me. We'll help you. You don't have to feed like this. You don't have to be alone."

I looked to see if she had a weapon—some way that she could take advantage of me. I wanted to eat, not be eaten. When I first rose, I was out of the ground before the man buried beside me. He had worked as a first meal, even if he had been too salty for my taste. Still, Maria had never lied to me in life, no matter how much I'd wanted her to.