The June Featured Writer is Bruce Memblatt
Please feel free to contact Bruce at: bmemblatt@aol.com
THE ZOMBIE READER
by Bruce Memblatt
Jersey had just finished reading his one-hundred-and-forty-ninth zombie novel. He stared at the wall and placed the book down on the kitchen table. Then, like a mother caressing a child, he picked up his revolver from the table and nestled it in his hands.
The last glimpse of moonlight seeped through the window over the sink while the faucet dripped sporadically over what appeared to be a mountain of dirty dishes. They had been trying for years to get out of this rut but they never seemed to get a break.
A strange sheen appeared in his eyes. Sudden as a bat, he raised his head and he drew the gun. Then he took a shot out the window, just clipping a few plates on the top of the monster pile of dishes. He let out a cackle, one just like the shrieks his mother used to call his Song of the Lunatics.
“Get the hell back in bed,” Raylene cried from the darkness of the small room just off the kitchen.
“No! I think we’re under attack,” Jersey said, playing with the gun in his hands like he was a school boy and not a grown, married man at the ripe old age of twenty-seven.
“I have had enough of this bullshit for one night. Put the god-damned gun down and get back to this bed and fuck me.”
Sometimes Raylene was a little too country even for his tastes. He couldn’t do her now; there were zombies out there, real honest-to-God, not living, but breathing zombies out there. He wasn’t joking around. It was true.
He stood up from the table and fingered the revolver again. Cautiously, he paced toward the sink. He cocked the gun and then fired through the torn screening that braced the window above the sink. The rustle of leaves and the sudden sound of wings flapping in the sky followed the shots.
All worked up at the prospect of single-handedly fending off the imminent zombie invasion, he was about to cock the handle back again and take another shot, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
It was Raylene, armed with wad of chewing gum dangling from her mouth, a can of Miller in her hand, and what appeared to be a pound of cold cream on her face.
“Now put down that gun and use your other gun on me, tiger,” she whispered in a sultry drawl, releasing a bubble from her lips as she placed her hands over the barrel of the revolver and winked at Jersey.
“I said I wasn’t joking, Raylene. This is the real deal. There are real zombies waiting for us in the dark out there.”
Raylene began laughing so hard that Jersey thought she might burst into a thousand pieces of confetti. She said, “The only thing waiting for you in the dark out there are little men in little white suits to take you to the booby hatch, Jersey Summers. Now come back to bed and give me the once over.”
“You look like you’ve already had it at least twice, Raylene. Now I’m serious, listen to me. Did you hear that?”
“Yup, that’s the sound of your mind cracking.”
Jersey put his foot down and he cried, “No, listen harder. Look out there!”
They both stared out the window. There was a man walking casually up the driveway to the house next door. They watched intently as he maneuvered his feet around the old tires that were lying on the gravel.
Raylene put her hands on her hips. “Jersey, what on this green earth are you talking about? That’s just Stan from next door!”
“Maybe it used to be Stan, but if you read My Zombie Neighbor, you’d sing a different tune. Look at how he’s walking all awkward-like,” Jersey said and he pulled the gun up and aimed it out the window.
“Now you cut this out. You’re starting to frighten me! Stan is walking awkward because he always does. He has a bum leg, you know that, Jersey, and with him walking around all those old tires and so early in the morning…”
Jersey was in no mood for Raylene’s poor excuses for Stan’s behavior. This was no time for hesitation. They were in danger. I only have a few seconds to act, he thought, as he pulled the trigger. He saw Stan fall to the ground.
Raylene grabbed her chest. The can of Miller went flying out of her hand, spraying across the linoleum like an old bottle rocket, and she cried, “Oh my God! You shot Stan! You’re going to fry in the chair!”
But Jersey had other things on his mind, bigger fish to fry. He took the gun and he pressed it in his pocket, and then he moved towards the kitchen door.
“What are you doing? Where the hell are you going, Jersey? We have to lay low and think!”
“There is no time for thinking now. Thank god I read a lot of instruction manuals about zombies. That’s why I know I have to burn his body. It’s the only way to get rid of them. Haven’t you read Zombie Town? They pile all the bodies in the square and burn them because zombies don’t stay dead. Some books say a shot in the head will do, but fire is the only real way. They make a big old bonfire in Zombie Town. It’s glorious!”
“You can’t burn the body. You crazy son of a bitch, you killed Stan! You actually killed someone. Don’t you even realize what you have done?”
He walked out the door, his wife following. “Raylene, he wasn’t Stan any longer. He was something else.”
But just as Jersey mouthed those words, for the tiniest of moments, what Raylene said sank in. For that moment, the enormity of what he’d done hit him like all the weight of the world. He felt a sick sinking feeling in his stomach that was just like the feeling that overcame him when his boss at the Chevy Dealership told him he was fired the year before. Could it be that he really killed a human being, and not a zombie at all?
Then, in the distance, he heard a distinct rustling sound. He knew it meant that thousands of zombies were making their way towards his and Raylene’s home town in Buford, South Carolina. He felt his self confidence surge. Once again he realized that he was on a mission to save the world. He was a hero. The book The Zombies are Coming told him so.
He began to step onto the growth of weeds that he studiously mowed every Saturday morning and referred to as their lawn. He reached into his back pockets, and then into his front pockets, and then into his shirt pocket. But no matter where he reached, a matchbook was nowhere to be found.
Jersey spat on the ground and said, “Raylene, we’re going back to the house and we’re going to find some matches and burn Stan’s body before he wakes up. Do you understand?”
And he ground his teeth and clenched his hands around Raylene’s robe and he began to drag her back to the house. She dug her heels into the weeds as he pulled her but it was no use. She was no match for his strength, particularly when Jersey was all wound up about something, and at that moment he was wound up tight as a drum.
His breathing became louder as he continued to maneuver Raylene across the lawn. They were nearing the side of the house. The kitchen door was only a few yards away. And in the sky, the morning sun grew brighter.
Sounds of creatures waking began to fill the air, and Jersey silently prayed that the zombie mob was still far enough away. But in the back of his mind, a thought remained: a thought that shimmered with the truth about the so-called zombies, a thought that years of stress and thousands of pages of zombie novels had rendered impotent. He pushed that thought away. He had to focus on the task at hand.
Jersey loosened his grip on Raylene and she fell to the linoleum kitchen floor. He stared down at her, all pissed, like a vein was about to pop out of his head and said, “For the very last time, there is real danger out there and there are real zombies out there! Now if I were a match, where would I be?”
His wife remained sitting on the floor while Jersey raced over to a drawer and began rumaging through it. His hands turned over knives, forks, thumbtacks, old screws, and bottle tops. Raylene got up to sit at the kitchen table, chewed gum and said, “There isn’t a match in the house, so there, Jersey Summers.”
“There has got to be, because we have to burn that zombie’s carcass out there! The fate of the world may rest on one match!” he cried, and then stormed out of the room and headed into their small bedroom just adjacent to the kitchen.
As he made his way past the bed and over to the top drawer of their dresser, he told himself he would make it up to Raylene when this was all over and the zombies were defeated, but at that moment he had to keep focused. He had to keep his mission clear just like Jimmy Warren in The Zombie Slayer.
Then, just as he was pulling one of Raylene’s bras out of the drawer, something caught his attention. At first, he couldn’t believe his eyes because Raylene had insisted that there wasn’t a single match to be found in their house. But there they were: a full book of matches hidden right beneath Raylene’s bra and next to a package of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum.
Raylene had lied. She had been hiding the matches. Jersey knew what that meant.
She screamed when Jersey come rushing into the kitchen, waving a gun in his hand. And the barrel of his revolver was the last thing that Raylene Summers saw.
After he blew a hole between her eyes, he leaned over to give Raylene one last kiss, even though he knew it was too late, because she had been a zombie all along. Just like Stan.
Still, he thought of My Zombie Lover and tears filled his eyes at the sad irony of it all.
Jersey stood and stared at Raylene’s body on the kitchen floor for what seemed like hours. His thoughts went from frenzied, to panicked, to resolute, and finally to bewilderment. How was he going to single-handedly fend off the impending zombie invasion?
There was only one thing left for him to do, and with those thoughts, he opened the refrigerator door and reached for the remaining six pack of Miller beer.
He carried the beer into the bedroom and sat on the bed. He popped the first can open and slugged it all down. Then he popped open the second can and he slugged it all down as well. He simply wanted to sleep in these early morning hours before tackling the problem of saving the world once the sun was completely overhead.
After the forth can he began to sing a tortured rendition of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down before he passed out on Raylene’s rayon pillow.
Hours later when Jersey woke up, there was no doubt in his mind that Raylene should have reanimated and joined the others in the final assault by then, but it seemed strangely quiet both inside and outside of the house.
And as he passed through the kitchen door, he saw his wife’s body still lying on the linoleum. He didn’t know what to make of it. “Raylene, what in Sam Hill is going on? Why haven’t you joined your other zombie friends?”
Then he braced his hand behind her head and he kept shaking her, but to his amazement Raylene’s eyes wouldn’t open. Obviously Raylene had turned into some different kind of zombie, or maybe enough time hadn’t passed…sure, that was it!
He laid Raylene’s head back on the floor and then he remembered Stan. He jolted for the window. As he peered through the screen, he noticed that Stan was still lying on the ground too.
Jersey stared out the window like he had undergone shock treatments when suddenly that long-hibernating thought…the one hidden under a memory—the thought that had survived thousands of pages of zombie novels—opened in his mind like an umbrella.
And then he knew.
He knew zombies were just things that lived in books and on movie screens. He turned around, and his hands shook.
Bruce Memblatt is a native New Yorker and a member of the Horror Writers Association. He has also studied Business Administration at Pace University. In addition to writing, he runs a website devoted to theater composer Stephen Sondheim, which he’s lovingly maintained since 1996.
His stories have been featured in such publications as Aphelion, Post Mortem Press, Dark Moon Books, Short Story Me!, Bewildering Stories, The Dark Fiction Spotlight, Bending Spoons, Strange Weird and Wonderful Magazine, Static Movement, Danse Macabre, SNM Horror Magazine, The Piker Press, Pill Hill Publishing, Eastown Fiction, 69 Flavors of Paranoia, Necrology Shorts, Suspense Magazine, Gypsy Shadow Publishing, Black Lantern Publishing, Death Head Grin, The Cynic Online The Feathertale Review, Yellow Mama and many more as well as in numerous anthology books.
His collection of previously published short stories titled The Dark Jar is currently available HERE.
