Zombie Mashup Read online

  Praise for Robert Devereaux

  “Robert Devereaux’s ‘Holy Fast, Holy Feast’ is the best literary take on the concept of infinite possibilities I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. His skill in weaving and bobbing the multiple parallel stories is stunning.”

  —Nickolas Cook

  “There is a writer of great brilliance lurking among us . . . . Robert Devereaux remains one of the ten or so best writers working in America today; if you haven't yet discovered him, by all means do so at your earliest opportunity.”

  —Robert P. Beveridge

  Also by Robert Devereaux

  Deadweight

  Walking Wounded

  Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups

  Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes

  Caliban and Other Tales

  A Flight of Storks and Angels

  Slaughterhouse High: A Tale of Love and Sacrifice

  Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

  Zombie Mashup

  by

  Robert Devereaux

  Zombie Mashup

  Copyright © 2006, 2011 by Robert Devereaux. All Rights Reserved.

  “Zombie Mashup” originally appeared as “Holy Fast, Holy Feast” in Mondo Zombie, edited by John Skipp.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  To John Skipp and Craig Spector

  for nurturing the seed

  and to Robert Coover

  whose metafictional play

  inspired the narrative weave

  Zombie Mashup

  The Voice: And what is the greatest wonder?

  Yudhishthira: Day by day, hour by hour, death strikes, and yet we live as though we will never die. That is the greatest wonder.

  —The Mahabharata

  Baby Jenny’s last breath was a quiet one. Sealed in her space-heated radiatored bedroom, wrapped and swaddled inside a pale-yellow bassinet, the three-month old preemie lay buried beneath a miasma of ammonia. Bowel and bladder had emptied hours ago, excremental bacteria colluding with urine, a neglected diaper wick white-lipped out to soak her sleepsuit and blanket her snuffled nose in deadly gas. Her limbs were listless. A long wrinkled thumb lay by one cheek, too far, too detached to move closer. Its nail bed and those of her curled fingers were tinged blue, as were her lips, sleep-sucking the sour nipple of a ghost breast, then quiescing, falling dormant, faint indraw and outflow of breath simply dropping off.

  A cold gust of wind rattled the ground-floor window, but double-reinforced glass kept the Montreal winter out. A scatter of spicular snow swirled against it like tossed sand, then fell restless to the stone sill outside. Once more. And again.

  Two minutes later, Jenny’s daddy eased open her door and reared back at the rankness of the smell.

  *****

  Travis eased open the door. The air in here was warm and close as always, but one good thing about that, Travis supposed, was that it concentrated the sweet baby smell of his daughter. He loved holding Jenny high on his chest so that he could caress her smooth pink cheeks with his nose. Now, as Laura followed him in and wrapped an arm about his waist, he contented himself with leaning over to watch his baby girl’s tiny nostrils ride the pulse of life, the odor of crushed rose-petals sweetening the air about her.

  “She’s so beautiful,” Laura said.

  “Like her mother,” said Travis, and Laura gave him a squeeze. Divorcing Carol, painful as the process had been for them both, and signing on as associate professor with McGill’s Computer Science department, had been the wisest decisions he’d ever made. Never in the two decades since his first visit to Montreal had he felt so vividly alive. And now, with Laura so passionate and bright by his side and baby Jenny shining her marvelous light into his life, a sense of all-encompassing, all-infusing vitality filled him brimful with joy.

  “Maybe I should give Marcie a call.” Fret-voice.

  “She’ll be here,” said Travis, glancing at his watch. “Seven-twenty. She’s never late.”

  “I haven’t seen her in three days. Have you?”

  “No, but that’s not—”

  “What if something happened to her? She lives alone upstairs. Brings home those strange men since Pierre got booted out. Poor guy. I really thought he was the one.”

  “We’re the one. You and I could make her very happy, and both of you know it.”

  “Shhh, you’ll wake Jenny. You’re such a tease. Come on, let’s get our coats.” Kissing a fingertip, Laura laid it lightly against the slumbering baby’s cheek.

  Travis closed the door softly after them. Laura gave him a hug and he brought her in for a deep slurpy kiss, an ever-renewed appreciation for her stifling smothering lips and tongue. Luscious lips, luscious labia to match, juicy as a warm ripe peach. He kissed her earlobe, swept inside her ear, made her moan. Tenderly, jokingly, he whispered, “Fucking you was the best thing I ever did.”

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Laura said, laughter in her voice. Travis was halfway to hard now and he knew his wife was dripping. “Maybe,” she said, “we ought to try it again right now.”

  “Love to, but Marcie’ll be here any moment and we’ll be late for the swami.” Carol had been an icicle. Laura was an oven, twenty-six and Canadian-hot, with the lovely sexual openness he’d known in Montreal from so many young women in the early seventies. He’d attended satsang then offered by Shyam and Satchitananda; she’d spent a month or two in Apadravya’s makeshift ashram four years ago before the guru closed it down and returned to India. Computers and holy men had been the commonality that had brought him and Laura together into initial conversation. And now the swami, falsely rumored dead, had returned for one evening to begin an American tour, Laura’s chance to renew an old tie and Travis’s to experience the master in person.

  Laura brought his hand up under her skirt, guided his thumb, coaxed it under the thigh-elastic of her panties so that, to the knuckle, it sank into the moist clench of her vulva and grew slick. “Fuck the swami, and fuck Marcie,” she said, gyrating on his thumb.

  “I’d take you up on half your proposition,” he joked, but Laura had his belt undone and his zipper down and was tugging on his pants and briefs so that they fell to his knees and he sprang into the warm and eager caress of her hands.

  Heaven’s sakes! They must not have locked the front door nor heard Marcie’s knock, for suddenly it flew open and there she stood, legs apart, in boots and bustier and crotchless panties, a riot of red hair bushed below and a double sweep above, crimson-tinted and silken-smooth and curled in twin licks about her upjutting nipples. “Well, well,” she said, fists on hips, whip handle like a braided blacksnake erect in her right hand, “what yummies have we here?”

  *****

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Laura said, laughter in her voice. She took his hand, about to say something else when they heard the stairs to the second-floor apartments creak and a clumsy someone stagger into the hallway.

  “It’s Marcie,” he ventured.

  “Doesn’t sound like her.” She broke away. “I’d know her footsteps anywhere. More like a slow-moving cripple, somebody with a bum leg, that sound.”

  Whoever it was stopped outside the door. There were fingernail scrapings swirling chest-high. Then the handle jump-rattled once-twice as if it were being sharply yanked upward, and when
that stopped, muffled fists cottoned upon the door like distant booms of cannon fire.

  “What the hell—?”

  Laura laughed. “Remember Halloween a year ago? Her and Pierre coming down to get us for the costume party at Place des Arts?”

  He relaxed. Flashed back upon him. “They pulled the same shit: lumbering and giggling, playing ghoul’n’zombie even after we opened the door, wrestling us to the rug.”

  “Precisely, though it’s kinda morbid with Pierre gone and no giggling.” Laura gave him a look. “Get the coats, honey. I’ll let her in and give her some kind of hell for isolating herself three whole days.”

  Travis agreed. He was just at the hall closet, ready to tug it open and unhanger their long heavy fake-otterfur coats, when Laura said, “Okay, Marcie, you sick puppy of a neighbor,” and pulled open the door.

  The sight struck him and then the smell, a subliminal skirl of stench curled around the doorframe moments before and now fully bloomed into a gut-wrenching skunk-and-offal stew. It was Marcie, and yet it couldn’t be: Her yellow terrycloth robe hung loose and open like old drapes yanked back from a window onto hell. Above the bloat and sewage of her flesh, the eyes in her creamed face were dead egg-yolk eyes, and yet they moved, swimming sentient yolks in colloidal pus. Her hair hugged like wet parentheses about her head, and her hands lifted (they lifted, unspeakable act) seemingly to wrench at the draped strands. One found its foul bell-pull, but the other shot out and grabbed at Laura, gripping its puffy fingers at her nape and pulling her off-balance toward a gaping maw.

  “No!” he said, no air behind it. He was as paralyzed as Laura had been, half hero, half coward, and completely a shock in the shape of a man. By the time he made up his mind to move, the bloated Marcie’s teeth had scraped deep gouges in Laura’s face, nose and mouth crammed inside the creature’s jaws, her hands pushing without effect against dead breasts, her eyes a horse’s eyes in terror all teary and looking back at him. Her muffled screams grew louder and clearer as Marcie’s jaws closed and pulled and yanked away her skull-cover, front teeth crunching and crumbling into the moist chew. As Travis came on, the blood-soaked thing worked bits of his wife’s face into its cheeks, let cheek-flesh hang loose from its mouth like pizza toppings, but (surprising strength) grabbed the hand he raised to it and stuffed it gullet-deep, coming down, breaking skin and bone, turning spattered egg-yolk eyes on him as, no longer heroic, he tried to free his flesh from the mangling vise and yelled louder and more ineffectual than he’d ever done in any nightmare.

  Through his pain, he saw Madame Robichaux, groceries in hand and oblivious to what was going on, fumble her key into the inner door by the mailboxes.

  *****

  “Must be Marcie,” ventured Travis.

  “Not her usual spry step,” his wife observed.

  “Losing a lover takes a lot out of anyone,” he said, and, as if in affirmation, Marcie’s familiar rap sounded, but slower and less sprightly than usual. “I’ll get it,” he said. “Bring the coats, okay?”

  He turned the deadbolt and opened the door. Marcie stood there, one arm behind her back. Striking redhead, her love-scent clinging to his mustache from their lunch hour together, Marcie gliding the rubber Metro back here from the symphony office, flumpfing down naked, raw, and ready on her bed, crying for Pierre as Travis roused her, but he didn’t mind, not with the vulnerable taste of her sex filling his mouth and the way her coming brought his name to her lips as Marcie sheathed him, stabbing at his eyes with that voracious hunger of hers.

  “Hi, Marcie.” How obscenely normal he sounded, how hollow. Past the mailboxes, Madame Robichaux was coming through the vestibule door, juggling bulgy grocery bags.

  “Have you told her yet?” High-strung, a taut steel wire toe-gripped, every muscle working against tilt.

  “Marcie, why don’t you—?”

  “Told me what?” Laura had the coats folded over her arms like wheat sheaves. He barely glanced at her, but it was enough to see recognition glimmer and flit, denial her first impulse. Again to Marcie. Love was so complicated. He wanted both these amazing ladies, but if he were forced to choose, he preferred, truth to tell, Marcie’s passion, her quirky big-boned ways, the refreshing raft of musical friends she brought with her, a far cry from Laura’s Bell Canada dullards. But there was the baby to consider; not his idea, true, but a daughter was a daughter, no matter how you sliced it, and he—

  Marcie shot daggers at him, then turned to Laura, and he saw Madame Robichaux’s eyes widen at what Marcie’s hand gripped behind her back, even as it was coming around, the movie glint surely imagined, but it flashed by so fast and sank into Laura’s chest, right above her armload of coats, faltering blood-parabola darkening the fur as she fell and Marcie shouting, “He’s mine!”, turning then to chase down a hapless neighbor frozen in place but then bolting, her two bags of food absurdly clutched to her and slowing her down so that the knife hilting into her back sprang her arms up and open and celery stalks and egg cartons flew like birds alarmed out of the bag-rustle of her flushed life.

  *****

  In her apartment on Rue Peel, between l’Avenue des Pins and Docteur-Penfield, Aysha sat grieving by her dead son Vish. Three years old, looking hurt and bewildered in his high delirium, Vish had had his father’s dark eyes, if none of his realized serenity. Her fault, that. Her year in the ashram, becoming Rajib’s preferred wife in his last months here, had done nothing to conquer the unquenchable ego-longings in her. They still plagued her, despite her ongoing efforts to purify herself, and they’d given Vish, who deserved better coming from such seed, not the quiet mirror that suited him, but a restless, breeze-perturbed, disease-inducing, Western jitteriness. High fever, food and drink refused, all her natural remedies for naught— and all she could do was watch Vish dwindle and die, her tears for him a weakness she despised, even as she cried them.

  The shutters accordioned over his window rattled as a gust of wind shook the glass. The oil lamp’s flame danced in its glass chimney, then settled. It reassured her, as it always did when she meditated on it—not the pasteboard reassurance of the material world, but a true soothe from her inner depths. Surely, it said, Vish’s dying, arriving as it did on the day of Rajib’s return, was an irrefutable unmistakable sign. And that was particularly so given the report, six months past, of his death and burial in India, and now the rumors that he had returned, like Christ long ago, from the grave. If that were true, these rumors of resurrection, it might well be that Rajib would pass his hand over the boy, his unknown son, and flood the breath back into his airless lungs. It might well be that Vish would once again unlid his eyes and, in the calm depth of his father’s love, find his way swiftly to nirvana.

  Aysha raised the old watch she’d put away years ago, held it close to the light, saw that soon they would need to be on their way.

  *****

  He turned the deadbolt and opened the door. Marcie stood there, one arm behind her back.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said.

  “Hello, you two,” she said, bouncing in behind a huge grin and whipping out a wrapped gift. “A little something for my two favorite people in the world.” Juggling a pair of grocery bags, Madame Robichaux finagled her way through the vestibule door.

  Laura came up with the coats. “Jeez, you didn’t have to do that.” Her eyes bubbled and brimmed. Lovely Laura, the Canada Dry of his life. “Open it, Travis,” she said.

  “Okay, okay. Hardly guess what it is.” Marcie gave his shoulder a playful punch as he unribboned the telltale rectangular shape and husked the wrapping paper off.

  “My boss’s latest.” Maestro Dutoit’s face, a skilled musician and an engaging personality from the brief hello they’d shared with him at the opening night reception that fall.

  “Tchaikovsky’s Sixth,” Laura read aloud.

  Marcie nodded. “Good crying music,” she said.

  A raw twist to her tossed-off words gave his heart a twinge. “Come here, Marcie love,�
�� he said, gathering his upstairs neighbor’s big-boned body to him. Laura let fall the coats in a floomph to the floor and joined in a three-way hug. “You’re so sweet and good and giving, the world owes you a good long cry-free zone, and if you can’t find that upstairs, you just come down here any time. It’ll be waiting right here.”

  Marcie’s eyes were moist. “I love you both so much,” she said, planting a huge soft kiss on his cheek and then dipping down to cover half of Laura’s petite face with her lips. What a turn-on these two women were. If he weren’t blessed with dear Laura, he would surely, he thought, make a play for Marcie. Passionate thing. He fancied she’d be the sort to take the initiative more frequently than Laura did, surprising him with silky nothings, stripping for his delectation to sultry music, cherrying those luscious lips about his arousal and deepening downward.

  Laura broke the embrace first, a fluster in her ways. Madame Robichaux went past on the way to her apartment, an odd look on her rubbery face. “Bonjour, Henriette,” Laura sang out and after a pause, the woman’s answering “‘jour,” clipped and suspicious, came floating back.

  *****

  Travis placed the jewelbox on a small drop-down table near the door and rustled up the coats from the floor. He held Laura’s for her, then shouldered his own on, as Laura jabbered inanely about where things were, how often Marcie was to look in on Jenny, how late they thought they’d be, where (for God’s sakes yet again) the diapers and the pins and the formula and the bottles were. For some reason, he could not catch her eyes as she gabbled. Overprotective, hyper, even paranoid—that’s the way Laura had been about Jenny from the first, dressing her too warmly, leaving the thermostat on way too high, fussing interminably over her face and clothes when she held her. But something beyond nervousness was working at Laura now. And when he tested his puzzlement on Marcie, the flat plane of her gaze told him she knew what it was, that they were both holding back from him, and that Laura was ready to spill something that made Marcie at least mildly uncomfortable.