Hungry for Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance (35 page)

I laughed. "Angie."

"Angie. Nice. Angie, I'm Ian, and I'm very pleased to meet you." He stuck his hand between us. I shook it, admiring the strength and size of his fingers. I've always liked men with big hands.

"Ian's a nice name too." I played with his fingers, gently running my fingers up and down each one.

"And that feels nice..."

"Mmm..."

He kissed me then. Slowly, deliberately, warm tongue tangling with mine as he explored my lips and mouth. Fingers found nerve endings on my ear, my neck, the inside of my elbows and the backs of my knees. I felt his cock growing hard again where it lay against my thigh so I reached down and cradled his balls in one hand, using the other to stroke his penis from shaft to tip, up and down with a firm grip and steady rhythm that had him groaning with desire.

"Do you want to fuck me?" I murmured against his mouth, nipping at his lower lip as I continued my ministrations.

321

Ian growled again, a predatory sound that sent a fresh coil of heat from my belly straight into my clit. He suddenly seized my wrists and yanked my arms over my head.

Pinning them there, he drove into me in one strong, deep thrust, at the same time plunging his tongue into my mouth. I would have screamed with pleasure if I'd been able.

As it was, I let the waves of yet another orgasm wash over and through me, nearly mindless with pleasure. Little aftershocks rippled through me as Ian thrust his way to his own climax a few minutes later.

Once again we lay in each other's arms. Ian flipped me over so I was on top of him and I rested my head on his chest, letting the sound of his heartbeat fill my senses.

Steady. Soothing.

Except...

"What's

that?"

An irregular pounding overrode the sound of Ian's heartbeat.

We both lifted our heads and stared at the elevator.

Ian looked at me. "Is that your date?"

"It must be."

The pounding faded, followed by the sound of the elevator descending.

"Do you think he's turned into one of them?"

I briefly wondered how I'd become the expert on zombie physiology, but let it go.

"I don't know. Do we want to find out?" I hoped Ian would help make some decisions.

While I appreciate a man who doesn’t try to go all macho alpha male on me twenty-four/seven, I didn't want to be responsible for everything that happened here.

322

Ian thought for a moment. "If he hasn't turned, we need to help him. If he has...he'll keep riding the damn elevator and thumping on the door. I don't know about you, but that will put me right off lovemaking."

I smiled and not just because he'd made a decision. He'd said “love-making”

instead of “sex.” That revealed the soul of a romantic. I liked that.

"We can call the elevator up here," I said. "We just need to be prepared for whatever comes out of there."

We put our clothes back on. As I pulled my boots on, the elevator motor hummed as the car rode back up to the fourth floor, along with its passenger.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

"Barry?"

A feral, guttural sound emanated from the closed doors.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

I looked at Ian. "He's turned."

I retrieved the crowbar from the floor. Ian picked up a chair. He nodded at me as I stood by the elevator call button. I nodded back and pressed it. Seconds later the doors slid open and an undead Barry lunged out into the lobby.

Ian swung first, bashing Barry on the side of the head with the chair. It was plastic so it didn't do much damage, but it did throw Barry off balance, giving me a chance to take good aim with my crowbar.

Thwack
.

Once. Then again.

Barry knees buckled and he stumbled to the floor.

323

I raised the crowbar over my head and brought it down one more time with skull-crushing force.

Barry fell face-forward to the ground, well and truly dead.

We dragged his corpse back into the elevator. I hit the down button and quickly stepped back into the fourth-floor lobby before the doors slid shut.

Ian put his arms around me. "You okay?"

"I think so." And I was, considering we were in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. I'd just had the best sex of my life and suspected I'd met someone who might actually qualify for a long-term relationship. Just goes to show online dating is nothing compared to real life experience when it comes to
really
testing compatibility.

324

Later

by Michael Marshall Smith

I remember standing in the bedroom before we went out, fiddling with my tie and fretting mildly about the time. As yet we had plenty, but that was nothing to be complacent about. The minutes had a way of disappearing when Rachel was getting ready, early starts culminating in a breathless search for a taxi. It was a party we were going to, so it didn’t really matter what time we left, but I tend to be a little dull about time. I used to, anyway.

When I had the tie as close to a tidy knot as I was able, I turned away from the mirror and opened my mouth to call out to Rachel. But then I caught sight of what was on the bed, and closed it again. For a moment I just stood and looked, then walked over towards it.

It wasn’t anything very spectacular, just a dress made of sheeny white material. A few years ago, when we started going out together, Rachel used to make a lot of her clothes. She didn’t do it because she had to, but because she enjoyed it. She used to haul me endlessly round dressmaking shops, browsing patterns and asking my opinion on a million different fabrics, while I halfheartedly protested and moaned.

On impulse I leaned down and felt the material, and found I could remember touching it for the first time in the shop on Mill Road, could recall surfacing up through contented boredom to say yes, I liked this one. On that recommendation she’d bought it and made this dress, and as a reward for traipsing around after her she’d bought me 325

dinner too. We were poorer then, so the meal was cheap, but there was lots and it was good.

The strange thing was, I didn’t even really mind the dress shops. You know how sometimes, when you’re just walking around, living your life, you’ll see someone on the street and fall hopelessly in love with them? How something in the way they look, the way they are, makes you stop dead in your tracks and stare, and how for that instant you’re convinced that if you could just meet them, you’d be able to love them forever?

Wild schemes and unlikely chance meetings pass through your head, yet as they stand on the other side of the street or the room, talking to someone else, they haven’t the faintest idea of what’s going through your mind. Something has clicked, but only inside your head. You know you’ll never speak to them, that they’ll never know what you’re feeling and that they’ll never want to. But something about them forces you to keep looking, until you wish they’d leave so you could be free.

The first time I saw Rachel was like that, and now she was in my bath. I didn’t call out to hurry her along. I decided it didn’t really matter.

A few minutes later a protracted squawking noise announced the letting out of the bathwater, and Rachel wafted into the bedroom swaddled in thick towels and glowing high spirits. Suddenly I lost all interest in going to the party, punctually or otherwise. She marched up to me, set her head at a silly angle to kiss me on the lips and jerked my tie vigorously in about three different directions. When I looked in the mirror I saw that somehow, as always, she’d turned it into a perfect knot.

Half an hour later we left the flat, still in plenty of time. If anything, I’d held her up.

326

“Later,” she’d said, smiling in the way that showed she meant it. “Later, and for a long time, my man.”

I turned from locking the door to see her standing on the pavement outside the house, looking perfect in her white dress, looking happy. As I walked smiling down the steps towards her she skipped backwards into the road, laughing for no reason, laughing because she was with me.

“Come on,” she said, holding out her hand like a dancer, and a yellow van came round the corner and smashed into her.

She span backwards as if tugged on a rope, rebounded off a parked car, and toppled into the road. As I stood cold on the bottom step she half sat up and looked at me, an expression of wordless surprise on her face, and then she fell back again.

By the time I reached her, blood was already pulsing up into the white of her dress and welling out of her mouth. It ran out over her makeup and I saw she’d been right: she hadn’t quite blended the colors above her eyes. I’d told her it didn’t matter.

She tried to move her head again and there was a sticky sound as it almost left the tarmac and then slumped back. Her hair fell back from around her face, but not as it usually did. There was a faint flicker in her eyelids, and then she died.

I knelt there in the road beside her, holding her hand as the blood dried a little. I heard every word the small crowd said, but I don’t know what they were muttering about.

All I could think was that there wasn’t going to be a later, not to kiss her some more, not for anything.

Later was gone.

* * * *

327

When I got home from the hospital I phoned her mother. I did it as soon as I got back, though I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to tell anyone, didn’t want to make it official.

It was a bad phone call, very, very bad. Then I sat in the flat, looking at the drawers she’d left open, at the towels on the floor, at the party invitation on the dressing table, feeling my stomach crawl.

I was back at the flat, as if we’d come back home from the party. I should have been making coffee while Rachel had yet another bath, coffee we’d drink on the sofa in front of the fire. But the fire was off and the bath was empty. So what was I supposed to do?

I sat for an hour, feeling as if somehow I’d slipped too far forward in time and left Rachel behind, as if I could turn and see her desperately running to try to catch me up.

When it felt as if my throat was going to burst, I called my parents and they came and took me home. My mother gently made me change my clothes, but she didn’t wash them.

Not until I was asleep, anyway. When I came down and saw them clean I hated her, but I knew she was right and the hate went away. There wouldn’t have been much point in just keeping them in a drawer.

The funeral was short. I guess they all are, really, but there’s no point in them being any longer. Nothing more would be said. I was a little better by then, and not crying so much, though I did before we went to the church because I couldn’t get my tie to sit right.

Rachel was buried near her grandparents, which she would have liked. Her parents gave me her dress afterwards because I’d asked for it. It had been thoroughly cleaned and large patches had lost their sheen and died, looking as much unlike Rachel’s 328

dress as the cloth had on the roll in the shop where she’d bought it. I’d almost have preferred the bloodstains still to have been there; at least that way I could had believed the cloth still sparkled beneath them. But they were right in their way, as my mother was.

Some people seem to have pragmatic, accepting souls, an ability with death.

I don’t, I’m afraid. I don’t understand it at all.

Afterwards I stood at the graveside for a while, but not for long because I knew my parents were waiting at the car. As I stood by the mound of earth that lay on top of her I tried to concentrate, to send some final thought to her, some final love, but the world kept pressing in on me through the sound of cars on the road and some bird that was cawing up in a tree. I couldn’t shut it out. I couldn’t believe I was noticing how cold it was; I couldn’t believe that somewhere lives were being led and televisions being watched, that the inside of my parents’ car would smell the same as it always had. I wanted to feel something, wanted to sense her presence, but I couldn’t. All I could feel was the world round me, the same old world. But it wasn’t a world that had been there a week ago, and I couldn’t understand how it could look so much the same.

It was the same because nothing had changed, I supposed, and I turned and walked to the car.

The wake was worse than the funeral, much worse, and I stood with a tuna sandwich feeling something very cold building up inside. Rachel’s oldest friend, Lisa, held court with her old school friends, swiftly running the range of emotions from stoic resilience to trembling incoherence.

“I’ve just realized,” she sobbed to me, “Rachel’s not going to be at my wedding.”

329

“She’s not going to be at mine either,” I said numbly, and immediately hated myself for it.

I went and stood by the window, out of harm’s way. I couldn’t react properly. I knew why everyone was standing here, that in some ways it was like a wedding. Instead of gathering together to bear witness to a bond, they were here to prove she was dead. In the weeks to come they’d know they’d stood together in a room, and eaten crisps, and would be able to accept she was gone. I couldn’t.

I said goodbye to Rachel’s parents before I left. We looked at each other oddly, and shook hands, as if we were just strangers again. Then I went back to the flat and changed into some old clothes. My “Someday” clothes, Rachel used to call them, as in,

“Someday you must throw those away.” Then I made a cup of tea and stared out of the window for a while. I knew damn well what I was going to do, and it was a relief to give in to it.

That night I went back to the cemetery and I dug her up.

* * * *

It was hard work, and it took a lot longer than I expected, but in another way it was surprisingly easy. I mean yes, it was creepy, and yes, I felt like a lunatic, but after the shovel had gone in once the second time seemed less strange. It was like waking up in the mornings after the accident. The first time I clutched at myself and couldn’t understand, but after that I knew what to expect. There were no cracks of thunder, there was no web of lightning, and I actually felt very calm. There was just me and, beneath the earth, my friend. I simply wanted to find her.