Preview

A few pages from The Lonely Zombie. I have a backlog of stories to finish and post. This is the first one. Stay tuned for it.

The Lonely Zombie

By Kevin Lindsey

“Oh honey, you should have seen this guy at the bar. He was all rubbing up against me and trying to talk me into going home with him. and I wouldn’t give him shit,” Glenda purred into the phone, talking to Wendi in accounting.

As she spoke one of her  perfectly manicured hands with their glitter-speckled nails reached out to shuffle the papers on her desk  to make it look like she was actually working.

“Oh, yeah, I made him buy me drinks,” Glenda  laughed. “That’s the minimum you have to pay just to talk to me.”

She tossed her raven-colored hair from one side to the other and saw something she definitely didn’t like over the top of her cubicle. “Shit, I gotta go,” she said hanging up the phone with a quick slam.

Walking her way was her boss. He had that set, focused look on his face that accentuated his double chin. He obviously had actual work in mind for her.

Without a word he strode into her cubicle and dumped the paperwork on her desk and quickly left.

Glenda looked down and saw why he wasn’t going to chat her up like he did last night at the bar == she had to run this down to shipping.

“FUUUUUUU” she said softly to the cubicle walls and reached into her desk drawer for her air freshener.

Placing the little pine tree on a string around her neck like a talisman, she got up and grabbed the paperwork.

The massive freight elevator door slammed down and the lift lurched into life, descending down into the bowels of Millhouse Paper Co. With a thud and a shudder it came to a stop at the basement floor where the shipping department was.

First the outer doors went up and then the inside metal grating flew up with a grating noise. Glenda looked out at the long corridor in front of her and she thought that she could already smell it.

The faded yellow paint of the hallway seemed greasy with years of neglect and maybe, in her mind, putrefaction. She stepped out onto the curling linoleum floor and her footsteps echoed out ahead of her.

She clutched the shipping orders close to her breasts and pulled the air freshener to her face and took a big whiff.  She jumped a little when the elevator doors closed with a grinding thud of finality behind her. As they did one of the overhead fluorescent lights that bathed the corridor with unflatteringly white light began to flicker.

“Oh great, I’m in a fucking horror film,” she whispered out loud as she headed towards the end of the hallway.

At the end of that hallway was a door with a shelf on it. It wasn’t a scary door; it was a wood door. The paint was peeling a little around the hinges and there was one more interesting thing about it – it was split in half so the upper part opened independently of the bottom half. On the backside of the door, which appeared to be the front side, since it was open, was a large sign that read “Shipping Department”.

The counter showed obvious signs of wear, but not badly so. On it were two large stamps sitting on ink pads and two wire baskets marked “in” and “out”. There was also a small bell.

Yet, as Glenda slowly approached the mostly normal door, her dread increased. She began holding out the air freshener in front of her, somehow hoping that it’s magical freshening powers could stop what was going to happen. She was sure she could smell it now. Rotten pork. That was the smell her brain told her she should expect. Her morning eggs threatened to make a return visit to her mouth, but she held it down.

It felt like time had slowed, but in truth she was just walking really slow. She reached the door just as her fear reached fever pitch. A little pee escaped her bladder’s control. She didn’t notice.

She placed the paperwork on the counter and her hand reached out to ring the bell when it happened.

A ghastly ghoul popped up from the other side of the door. Glenda screamed a little. It was like a whispered scream. She was so frightened that her vocal cords had mostly locked up.

The man-like thing was tall and very pale. The skin around its eyes was black and slightly sunken, making it look like a skull. The lips thin and colorless stretched tight over its massive teeth.

It grabbed the paperwork and with the devil’s speed grabbed the top sheets and stamped them with one stamp, then it stamped the bottom sheets with the other stamp and shoved them at Glenda.

Her startled, frightened face just looked at the skeletal hands with their ragged nails. It shoved the papers closer and she recoiled. It looked deep into her sparkling dark eyes with its slightly milky green ones and the colorless lips parted as it grimaced at her.

The teeth were large, brown and irregular. Some were jagged where they had broken. A little bit of spit began to drool down the right side of the mouth and the thing grunted at her.

Her mind began to work again and she grabbed the paperwork being offered by the dead thing.

She said a fear-filled “Thhhhhankyou,” and ran away back down the hallway. The entire ride back up to the first floor she dry heaved.

Brian the zombie stood at the counter and watched her run. He thought his smile wasn’t all that effective; he would have to work on his people skills.

Memory loss was one of the biggest problems for zombies. Sure being an animated corpse with a hankering for brains was a real bitch, but with the right training, drugs and a steady supply of animal brains it was manageable.

The biggest problem was recovering  all of the mental abilities you had when you were living. You see dying involves a certain amount of brain damage.

Brian remembered how to speak, he just couldn’t quite find the right pathway in his brain to link up the speech centers of the brain to the mouth. Brian wasn’t his real name, it was just something people called him because the only thing he could say clearly right now was “Braiiiiinnnnss.” Brian guessed that they thought it was funny to twist around brain into brian and use it as his name.

He wondered if he was that cruel to zombies when he was alive. Probably, he thought. It sounded right in his head.

Speech would come in time and with hard work, Zombie Jesus willing, he thought to himself as he sat back down at his desk in the shipping and receiving department.