Reanimated Readz
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Reanimated Readz
Copyright © 2015 by Rusty Fischer
ISBN: 978-1-61333-799-8
Cover art by Tibbs Designs
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Decadent Publishing Company, LLC
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Reanimated Readz
By
Rusty Fischer
Includes:
by
Rusty Fischer
~DEDICATION~
To my wife, Martha; the best reporter I know
!!
She picks a coffee shop even after I tell her the smells will be overwhelming for me.
I can smell the fresh-ground beans from a block away and kind of slow my roll to get used to it before I even step in the door.
Well, I tend to walk pretty slowly anyway.
I get there a little early, but only because she’s so late.
It’s a few days after Halloween and the specials board is already crammed with festive holiday treats: pumpkin scones, harvest blend coffee, pecan tarts, moose berry mocha.
I get something sweet and cold and squishy—a cinnamon and hazelnut whip-a-chino—and wait for it awkwardly, aware that most of the eyes in the room are on me, as usual.
The counter girl is pretty with flawless skin and looks like your typical college freshman. She has a tattoo of a butterfly on her neck just above her green barista collar and another in the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger.
When she’s done, she puts the frozen coffee drink on the counter and backs away cautiously. I shrug and take my drink, tempted to lunge just to watch butterfly girl flinch. Bet she wouldn’t look so flawless then.
I sit in a corner booth, near a window but away from the few hipster couples pretending to stare at their cell phones instead of me.
Even though I have Public Zone clearance and it’s against the law to discriminate against the undead, that doesn’t stop lots of folks from being nasty to my kind.
Whatever. It’s fine. I’m used to it by now.
Soft jazz music plays overhead, something instrumental and old with guitars, but still vaguely cool. I watch the front door until she arrives.
She’s in full-in reporter mode, right down to the distressed leather handbag and beret. Yeah, you heard right: a beret. She has one of those sleek little voice recorder things in her hands even as she stands in line. It’s white, and she wields it proudly as if to say,
Look at me, I’m gonna record something in a minute
.
She ignores me, completely, while butterfly girl behind the counter smiles and gushes and says, I kid you not, “I
love
your beret.”
Well, Julia’s always had that effect on people.
They talk a little more, like a couple of Cheer Club spazzes, until butterfly girl hands over her coffee and Julia finally casts her eyes on me. They’re brown and cruel, and she doesn’t smile.
She looks at my booth as if to say it’s not big enough, but she can’t complain since a) she picked the place and b) all the seats are pretty much tables for two.
“Hi, Julia,” I say, watching her flinch to hear the way my new voice grinds out her name. “What took you so long?”
“Huh?” she asks, annoyed that I’d call her on it, like my time is any less valuable than hers. “Oh, the bus ran late.”
I scoff. Julia? On a bus? Not hardly.
She sits just inside the booth, one thigh off the cushion and foot pointed toward the door. My back is against the window, arm tossed lazily over the top of the booth, fingers pale at the end of my turtleneck sweater sleeve.
She takes her time pulling a notebook out of the leather bag, clicking and un-clicking a big purple pen and rolling a breath mint around her tongue.
I roll my eyes and move my hand, as if to get up and storm out. “You know, Julia, I’m doing you the favor here, right? Not the other way around?”
Her eyes get big but she doesn’t budge, at least not until I shift my foot and start to inch out of the booth for real.
She nods and says, “Okay, okay, I’m ready. Just…let me push this button here and…go.”
She points the sleek white recorder in my direction and stares at me.
“Would you like to ask me a question first?” I grunt. “Or should I just do
all
the work for you?”
She looks down at her notebook and nods again. “What’s your name, for the record?”
I snort and say, “Reginald Archer Addison.”
She rolls her eyes dismissively. “I meant your zombie name.”
I grit my teeth a little; she already knows all this. “Reggie 4.”
“What’s the four stand for?”
“It means I’m the fourth zombie named ‘Reggie’ in Calumet County, is what it means.”
“Is there a Reggie 5?”
“Not yet.” I sigh, peering out the window.
It’s late afternoon, but this time of year, that’s close to early evening. Traffic is light in this neighborhood. She chose the café across town so nobody would see us sitting together.
Across the tree-lined street, there is a yoga studio, a pita place, and a cupcake bakery called Mama’s Muffins. There are random cars parked at meters up and down Blythe Boulevard, and one black van.
“Reggie?” she asks, waving the white voice recorder in my face. “Come back to earth.”
There is an urgency in her voice that grates, as if she can’t stand me looking anywhere but at her.
It was the same way when we were dating, once upon a time. We had to stop going to movies because she got tweaked if I, you know, wanted to see what Jason Bourne or Iron Man or Captain America were actually
doing
.
I sigh and turn back to her, not sure why I agreed to all this.
“Well, ask better questions,” I blurt. “You could have gotten all this crap off the Reanimation Relocation website, Julia.”
She makes that fake smile of hers and says, “Yeah, but this way I get to say I interviewed a real zombie, you know?”
I flinch; she ignores it. I remind her, “You know we prefer the term ‘cranially challenged,’ Julia.”
“Yeah, like the Hillcrest High
Gazette
is going to print
that
.”
I cock my head, feeling the tendons tighten around my throat. “Are you sure they’re going to print any of this? I mean, just because they let me back into school doesn’t mean they’re going to let you write about me. And even if they do, they may want to wait until my probationary period is over next month.”
She gives me her know-it-all face and waves away my self-doubt. “I’m Editor-in-Chief. They have to print it.”
Before I can ask “Print what?” she settles back into the booth and gets a predatory gleam in her eye.
“So, Reggie, take me back to that night. What was it like to lose your whole family and survive?”
I glower at her, clenching my fists atop the tiny black table. I take a sip of my frothy, sugary drink to put my rage on pause. My counselor at the Relocation Camp says I’m going to have problems with rage control for the next few months. I guess this is one of those times.
The sugar helps a little. We can’t eat human food anymore since we can’t digest stuff in our dead stomachs, but for some reason straight sugar—and a little caffeine never hurts—makes me feel less dead.
“You said we weren’t going to talk about that,” I remind her. “That’s the whole reason I decided to do this in the first place. You said it would just be a ‘fluff piece’ about what it’s like to eat a human brain or never have to sleep again. You said it would help you get an A in Journalism this semester, maybe even help you get into State next year. Now you’re pulling this? That’s the thanks I get?”
She waves her hand in my face. “Like you said, Reggie, I can get all that off the website. What I want to know, what other kids want to know, is what happened that night.”
I peg her with my eyes and squint a little. I’ve practiced the look in the mirror at the Relocation Center, so I know that with my black eyes and the furrowed brow, it’s pretty intense.
Most mortal chicks would be quaking in their berets.
Julia?
Nothing. Not so much as a flinch.
I guess I forgot how heartless she is. I thought I remembered from the way she broke up with me. I guess not.
I guess I wanted to forget. I guess that’s the real reason I’m here. Not to help her get her story published or have another “clip” for her college applications or even extra credit in her Journalism class.
After all that’s happened, after how cruel she’s been, I guess I just wanted to sit with her again, together, like the old days. In a coffee shop, staring at her eyes, the cheekbones I would kiss, the lips that made me melt.
She’s waiting on me, and I’m angry now, so I tell her the unpolished version. “You wanna know what happened, Julia? Now you wanna know? I’m just saying, when I found out what I was, when the town found out, and I woke up in the Relocation Camp with the rest of the zombies, you never once asked about what happened then. Of course, you would have had to come see me to ask me, but since you didn’t, here’s what happened: I’m in my room, texting you, probably, listening to music, when I hear some grumbling downstairs. I don’t think much of it. I figure it’s the neighbor’s dog. But it’s not. It’s the neighbor, Mr. Croft, growling like a dog. And I see, in his eyes, in his walk, all the things they tell you to look for in a zombie: the shuffling walk, the gray skin, the dead eyes. Oh, and the human elbow in his mouth didn’t hurt.
“So I yell down to Dad, to tell him to bolt the door and call the Zombie Relief Squad before Mr. Croft can get in, but it’s too late. By the time I get downstairs he’s already in, chomping on my mom, Dad lying in a pool of his own blood, foot still jerking.
“I go to help him and, well, I don’t know who bit me. Mr. Croft, or my mom, maybe even my dad. But when I turned, when the hunger came over me, I still had enough of me left in me to get revenge. I took one bite out of Mr. Croft, and didn’t stop until he was in pieces, lying on the floor at my feet. I did, Julia. I ripped that dude apart. After that, my eyes go dark and that’s the last thing I remember before waking up in Quarantine.”
Julia is smiling that little self-satisfied smile again. I shake my head. “Don’t you want to hear what happened next? About my first bite of human brain? About life in the camps? About what it’s like to live among a hundred zombies? I thought that’s what you—”
She smirks, clicking off the little white recorder. “Nope. I got what I wanted.”
“Which is what, the gory details?”
“No, your confession.”
I pause, a little road flare of rage swelling up inside my chest.