Page 84 of 10 Things I Hate About Zombies

Nick

Somehow, in spite of it all – the potential zombification and the poor ergonomics of the beanbag – Nick must have dozed off from pure exhaustion, for he found himself blinking at the morning light filtering in through Ainsley’s curtainless windows. (Nick would never get used to the antagonistic relationship that Portland locals had with window coverings. In his experience, only San Francisco was as willing to lay it all out for the world to see.)

He exhaled slowly, his breath wavering.

Well, he’d made it through the night. Was he … a zombie? Although it seemed that even asking the question was enough to prove that he wasn’t, in the same way that fretting about your own competency meant that you were free from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

He glanced down at his hands. They were their usual colour, with nary a green tinge to be seen. But perhaps that was how the world looked to zombies. Was he craving brains any more than usual? No, the thought still revulsed him – the squishiness! How about chomping? Did chomping on someone sound good?

He reached for Alice, who snuggled into his arms. No, he only wanted to bury his face in her fur, and in a nice way. Alice snuggled back, which was a good sign.

All right, so his desire for brains and chomping was at baseline. What about lurching? Was he a lurcher?

(Yes, he was taking his sweet time with this morning routine. But he was worried about what he might find in Zoey’s room.)

Nick dropped to the floor to bust out a few push-ups – ouch, his bad shoulder still bothered him – then got to his feet to do some jumping jacks. Other than a bit of pins and needles in one leg, everything there seemed normal.

Now he just needed to make sure that his brain was firing on all cylinders.

Aha, the punk-rock cryptic crossword from the zine he’d bought from Sticky a few days back. That would separate the zombie brain from a regularly functioning one. He reached for a pen and gave it a shot. One down was something about slip-on shoes stomping hard into Denny’s and transposing the situation. Well, that made no sense.

No, wait. Keds Dennardys – Dead Kennedys. Nice!

A quarter of an hour later, he was only seven answers through, but this was in line with his usual cryptic-crossword performance.

He squared his shoulders. All right, so at least one half of their duo wasn’t a zombie. This was a good start. And if he’d made it through the night without any escalation of symptoms, then perhaps Zoey was back to normal as well.

There was no more procrastinating. He had to go see Zoey.

‘What do you say, girl?’ he asked Alice, running a hand over her soft ears.

Alice whined softly.

‘Good point. We’ll feed you, and then we’ll check on Zoey.’

All right, just a little more procrastinating.

He slowly filled the bowl Zoey had taken to keeping for Alice in the kitchen.

The floorboards squeaked, and he glanced up to see Peta emerging from her mysterious den. She was wearing a SpongeBob onesie and a turban, which made for a slightly surreal vibe. Arms folded, she looked at Nick in a way that suggested he was about to get an earful.

‘So, Nick. About this whole door-locking thing. Like, if it’s a kink thing you guys are exploring on a consensual basis, then we’re cool. But if you’re, like, interfering with Zoey’s coming and going, then maybe we should all have a kitchen roundtable. I’m not saying that it’s definitely problematic, but it’s probably problematic. And if you just locked her in there without her consent, that’s not cool.’

‘It’s not like that,’ Nick began. It wasn’t like any of what Peta had suggested, actually. But how did he begin to explain the situation? He didn’t know Peta well enough to start blathering about zombies. ‘She’s really not herself right now—’

He glanced towards Zoey’s room, stiffening when he saw that the door was cracked. ‘Wait, where is she?’

‘I unlocked the door when I came home from a late-night storage-unit-party thing. I heard footsteps at some point – I guess she left sometime between then and now.’

Zoey, gone?

Nick moved faster than he’d moved in his life. He shoved Zoey’s heavily decorated door fully open, hoping that Peta was wrong.

She was not. The room was empty. Zoey’s bed was rumpled, and the stack of books on the nightstand was skewwhiff. The window hung wide open, but the room smelled … foetid. And not in a deliberate way from artisanal candles with strange names or from the dire body fragrances sold at the boutique next to the vegan supermarket on SE 12th. It smelled awful in a zombie-had-spent-the-night kind of way.

Nick hurried to the fridge, checking to see if any of Winslow’s plastic-wrapped brains remained. Last night there had been three leftover packages, and he’d cooked up one for Zoey. Now there were two left, and the one at the front had a large chomp taken from it. All right, so hopefully Zoey wasn’t starving right now, and didn’t pose a threat to Portland’s hands-free cyclists and park Pilates aficionados.

Or the other zombies. Were zombies a threat to each other? Everything he knew about zombies came from film and TV, and the lore varied.