Читать книгу Beach Blanket Zombie - Mark McLaughlin - Страница 6

Vulture Soup for the Soulless

Driving home, Inga began crying again. Then she glanced in the rearview mirror and wailed—she’d completely ruined the make-up she’d applied after her earlier crying jag.

She tried to wipe the tears out of her eyes, but that only rubbed in her eyeliner, turning her eye-sockets into blue-black pits around her sky-blue irises.

“Too skinny?” she had sobbed to her boss, Mrs. Blair, earlier that afternoon. “But I’m supposed to be skinny. I teach aerobics. I’m providing a good example! There isn’t an ounce of fat on me.”

Mrs. Blair, a fiftyish woman with mouse-brown hair, winced at her words. “I’m afraid that’s the problem. There really isn’t an ounce of fat on you. Frankly, you don’t look healthy. You look ... emaciated. Anorexic.”

“I eat plenty. I really do!” Inga folded her bony arms over her petite bosom. ‘You can’t discriminate against someone because of their weight.”

“Oh please. That argument only works if you’re too fat.” Mrs. Blair brushed a mousy lock out of her face. “Besides, your class only has eight people in it. All the other instructors have at least twenty in their sessions.”

That was when Inga had started to cry. She’d rushed into the women’s locker room to fix her make-up—she’d also needed to touch-up her beige foundation, which helped to conceal her pallor.

Now her face was ruined again. Fortunately, she didn’t have any stops to make on the way home.

She peeked at her reflection again. God, but she looked like a skull. But she couldn’t help it. She’d always been bony and pale. She simply couldn’t gain weight. Fatty or sugary foods just gave her diarrhea. As for a tan: any amount of sun only burned her. And when the lobster-red eventually peeled away, she’d be back to her usual chalk-white.

She felt like Hell—but at least the drive home was pretty, down a country road lined with trees. It was late October, and all the leaves had turned yellow, orange, brown and red. She rented the upper half of a married couple’s house, outside of town. Trent Graves, a high school teacher, and his wife Claire needed the extra money because they had a lot of medical bills: he had diabetes and she had some sort of odd sleep disorder. The top floor didn’t have a kitchen, so the Graves let her use theirs.

She liked the couple, but she knew she couldn’t live with them forever. Claire watched TV and generally puttered around downstairs at odd hours, and sometimes the noise woke Inga. She didn’t want to make Claire feel self-conscious by complaining about it.

What was she going to do for money now...? Well, she could always go back to the perfume counter at Hedley’s department store. All the socialites who bought those prissy, pricey fragrances were just as trim as her. But still, it wouldn’t be as much fun as aerobics. She simply loved making folks happy and being on the go.

Inga rolled down her window—the brisk autumn air felt good on her skin, and it dried her tears, too. A bright-red leaf blew into the car and landed right in her lap. It matched her hair exactly. When she was little, the other kids used to make fun of her hair, but she loved the color anyway. She picked up the leaf and tucked it over her ear. She took one more quick glance in the mirror. Now she looked like some kind of savage tree spirit, with her shadowed eyes and that bold leaf nestled in her flaming locks.

Suddenly she realized—she couldn’t show up at the Graves house with her make-up all smeared. It would be obvious she’d been crying, and she didn’t want to upset or worry Trent and Claire. Plus, the raccoon eyes would only remind Claire of how bad her eyes looked... She always had dark circles around her eyes from lack of sleep.

Inga couldn’t fix her make-up in the car—she’d need to wash off the old stuff first. Where could she go...? She didn’t want to drive all the way back to town. The Graves’ only neighbors were a bestselling author and her husband—but nobody ever saw them. The writer, Rose Tremble, had churned out some fancy self-help book called What Color Is Your Karma’s Air-Bag? Inga had looked at it in a bookstore once—pretty drippy stuff. It compared life to a car trip, and people had to decide if their life’s car had a white air-bag or a black one. Apparently it all depended on how they reacted to stress.

Inga saw the lane to the Tremble house coming up on her left. Well, she couldn’t stop there—or could she? A cardboard sign, duct-taped to a tree, declared BOOK SEMINAR in bold red letters. The lane was lined with orange balloons attached to slender black stakes.

Perfect! She’d go in, sneak into the bathroom and fix her make-up. If anybody saw her, she’d just laugh and say she’d heard a sad song on the radio. A dumb excuse, but believable. And then she’d finally get to meet the reclusive author. Heck, she’d even buy a book. Claire would love a nice perky self-help book.

She headed up the lane. The house was huge—about three times bigger than the Graves place. She noticed that all the vehicles parked around the place were luxury cars. Most were red or black and all had tinted windows. There were several hearses, too. Maybe they were part of some Halloween-oriented publicity stunt for whatever book Rose Tremble was promoting these days.

She parked, got out of the car and half-hid her face behind a handkerchief as she walked inside. She was no more than a few feet into the house when a tall, middle-aged woman stepped up to her.

“Welcome! Thank you for coming!” The woman was a vision of pink, yellow and lots of gold. Pink foundation and rose-pink lipstick, yellow hair, dark golden eyes, gold jewelry, a gold silk dress with thin yellow and pink stripes. She had a square-jawed face, a too-wide mouth, and practically reeked of rose-scented perfume.

She stared at Inga, her thick lips stretched into an enormous smile. “My word, look who we have here! Outstanding!”

Inga didn’t know how to respond to that, so she said, “Oh, thanks. I try! I’m Inga. I stay with the Graves.”

The golden woman laughed. “Of course you do! I’m Rose Tremble. You’re just in time! Right this way.”

Inga followed the golden woman down a hallway, past gilt-framed oil paintings and little statues on cherrywood tables. They were walking too fast for her to get a good look at any of the artwork, but she did notice that most seemed to depict creatures out of various mythologies. Nymphs, griffins, satyrs, centaurs, mermaids—and zombies. Were zombies part of some mythology? Maybe Haitian lore.

She wasn’t sure what to do about her face. It was a complete mess. She’d only wanted to use the bathroom, buy a book, chat for a minute and leave. Now it seemed she was going to have to sit through a whole seminar. She followed Rose into a large room, took a quick glance at all the seated people and—

People?

Oh, no. These weren’t people.

People were flesh-colored.

People were made of living tissue.

People were more or less symmetrical...

Inga wanted to run screaming, but the sight before her was so bizarre—so hideously compelling—that she simply couldn’t move. She had to just stand there and absorb this grotesque vision.

The things seated in the chairs had humanoid bodies, shapewise—but their tissue, which could hardly be considered living, came in a variety of inhuman colors. Navy blue. Lime green. Magenta. Purple.

Most of them were clearly rotten. Bugs and all. The room stank like a combination of a busy outhouse and the dumpster behind a butcher shop. But even so, the audience members were moving, jostling in their seats, whispering gurgly little phrases to each other. As for symmetry... Based on what she was seeing, it was clear that decay was a terribly uneven process.

Rose walked up to a lectern at the front of the room and cleared her throat. The grotesque horde immediately fell silent. She then looked toward Inga, who was still standing.

Inga found an empty seat next to a noseless blue creature with a gaptoothed grin.

“First, I’d like to thank all of you for showing up,” Rose said. “I know that for most of you, travel is something of an ordeal.”

Amused murmurs and warbles sounded throughout the room. Strangely enough, the more Inga looked at the creatures around her, the less they frightened her. At least they were behaving. And for some reason, they seemed to accept her presence completely.

“I thought I was on top of the world after the publication of my first book,” the golden woman stated. “It made me a ton of money. I got to be on a lot of talk-shows. I became an overnight celebrity. But you know what?” She leaned forward and cocked her head to one side. “I wasn’t happy. I had my problems, but I was sugar-coating them. And worse of all, I was ignoring my inner monster.”

Most of the audience members nodded what roughly corresponded to heads.

“Then,” Rose said, “I found out that my husband, who was also my literary agent, had been having an affair—spending my money on a waitress whose bust-size was higher than her I.Q. That was about the time I started workshopping my rage ... addressing my own deep-down needs. My first book, with all its happy-crappy philosophy—what a waste of paper! I finally realized I’d been in complete denial when I’d written that. Eventually, my husband hired his sweetie’s drug-addict brother to run me down with a rusted-out Camaro.”

Low moans of pity echoed through the room.

The hideous blue creature next to Inga turned toward her. “My husband tossed the hair-dryer in my bath water,” it whispered.

Before Inga could respond, Rose Tremble continued with her story. “Oh, sure, I could have just thrown in the towel after that Camaro hit me. But you know what? I’ve never been a quitter.” The golden woman pounded the lectern with her fist. “I wasn’t about to let some low-life just run over me and get away with it. He stopped the car to steal the jewelry off my corpse, and that’s when I got back on my own two feet—and ripped out his throat with my teeth!”

The audience greeted this statement with wild clapping and bubbly cheers of approval. The clapping raised a small cloud of dust. One especially desiccated cadaver clapped so eagerly that a couple of its fingers flew off.

“I came straight home after that,” Rose said. “And, my husband and his little sweetie were here. Up in the bedroom. Since they enjoyed each other’s company so much, I took care of them both at the same time. After that, I put them in the freezer for a few months. This morning they were in the oven, and later, when we have our cocktails—and of course, the book signing!—you’ll find what’s left of them on the hors d’oeuvre trays.”

Next to the lectern was a table covered with stacks of thick books bound in black leather. Rose picked up one of the books. “I’ll be reading to you from my latest work, Vulture Soup For The Soulless, published by Abomination Press. Plenty of copies here for everyone! But before I start reading, I think we’d all like to hear a few words from a surprise guest we have in the audience.”

She then pointed straight at Inga. Everyone turned to stare at the aerobics instructor.

“I’ve never met a vampire before,” Rose enthused, “but I’ve read all the ancient texts—research for the book!—and so I know one when I see one!”

Everyone oooohed and aaaaahed.

When Inga stood to say something—she had no idea what—some of the creatures began to clap. Again their clapping raised soft billows of dust, and a swirl of it drifted across Inga’s face.

And she sneezed.

And coughed.

“Oh, dear!” the golden woman said in a tone that was low to the point of ominous. “It would seem I was mistaken. Just listen to those lungs! Apparently we have a breather on our hands.”

“A breather! I should have guessed!” cried a lumpy horror behind Inga. “She doesn’t have any stink on her!”

The audience members began to snarl. A feral red glow sprang up in their eyes.

“We don’t like being deceived!” Rose thundered. “Or—spied upon!”

“Now wait a minute!” Inga cried. “I just came in to buy your book. You’re the one who led me in here.”

The creatures turned toward Rose.

“Well, that’s true...” the writer admitted.

“In a lot of ways, I’m in the same boat as you folks,” Inga said. “Look at me. Ninety-one pounds. Pale as a sheet. Hair as red as an apple. People have made fun of me my whole life. They’ve called me Stringbean, Scrawny, Goth-Chick, Skeleton Girl, and lots of worse things, too. But I can’t pick up weight. I just can’t. And I can’t tan. I don’t go out much because...” She sighed. “I don’t get that many offers. I’m scared of most guys anyway. They’re so much bigger than me. I don’t want to go out with somebody who might crush me if he sat on me by accident in a dark movie theatre.”

“Do you have brittle bones?” said the cadaver who had lost the fingers.

“No, my bones are okay. In fact, I’ve always been pretty athletic. But my boss fired me today because I look too scary to teach aerobics.”

“Nonsense!” bellowed a burly corpse across the room. “You’re not scary at all. Actually, you’re pretty cute!”

“Adorable!” another stiff squealed.

All of the audience members grunted or hooted in agreement.

“Oh! Thank you!” Inga said. “But I’m afraid my boss was right. Living people have a problem with me. My class isn’t even big enough to pay my salary. It’s a pity you folks don’t need an aerobics instructor.”

“Exercise doesn’t agree with us,” Rose said. “We try to avoid excessive movement. And sunlight.”

“And animals,” a one-legged green atrocity said. “A dog ran off with part of me last week.”

Soon all the audience members were talking about their various inconveniences—the trials of trying to exist in secret, in a world of unsympathetic living beings.

“Flies!” one mushy heap exclaimed. “Do you know how hard it is to keep the flies off? And don’t get me started about maggots!”

“I’ve got plenty of money,” the burly corpse said, “but how am I supposed to go shopping? I can’t go walking around the mall!”

“I can pass for living,” Rose said, “but how long is that going to last? Make-up and perfume can only go so far! And I simply can’t go out on hot days. It would be nice to have someone to help with the touch-up work ... and the maintenance ... but who can I trust?”

Then the noseless creature said,” Yeah, it’s not like there’s some living person we could pay to help us out on a regular basis.”

A thoughtful silence settled over the room.

Then heads slowly began to turn—all toward Inga.

“I’d pay cash!” the lumpy horror said.

“I’ve got gold coins! So many pretty gold coins!” creaked an especially withered she-thing.

“Would you like a new car?” one dapper cadaver offered. “I bought a lovely red sports car about two weeks before I died. Why, it even matches your hair!”

“You could move in here, if you like,” Rose said. “I don’t use most of the house, so you’d have the run of the place. Say, can you type? I’m thinking of writing another book, but I’m starting to get CDS—Carpal Decay Syndrome.”

Inga wasn’t even worried when new tears—of happiness—began to flow down her cheeks. Her make-up was already ruined, and her generous new friends didn’t care how she looked anyway.