Page 83 of 10 Things I Hate About Zombies

But then, as he helped her settle in, tucking the blankets and throw pillows around her until she was but a dazed-looking head among a Michelin Man mountain of duvets …

‘Ow! Jeez!’

She’d bitten him! And not even in a sexy way! (Nick wasn’t the biggest fan of biting, but he could see the appeal of a little nip. However, breaking the skin was just not on. He’d gone through a whole rabies-shot thing after a fly-by situation with a bat as a teen, and it had been less than fun.)

Zoey gazed at him with lowered, bedroom eyes. No, not gazed. Stared. And not with bedroom eyes. With … undead eyes.

Oh shit, thought Nick. Oh shit, oh shit.

He’d been right. Reba had been right. Joaquin had been right (when they’d veered off the topic of cryptids).

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

Nick scuttled backwards like a crab.

‘Brains,’ Zoey whispered through cracked lips. She held her arms out to him as though seeking a hug. The bandage around her wrist had loosened, revealing an angry red welt on her arm. Well, not red so much. It was green-tinged around its edges, and a series of angry dark lines raced up through her veins.

There was no denying it now, was there? There was no arguing that brains were just fashionable, the way oxtails had been last year, and bone broth the year before that. That green undertones were the hot new makeup trend. That the frontal- cortex-obsessed slam poets and the popularity of the Ramones’ ‘My Brain is Hanging Upside Down’ were merely a product of the zeitgeist. That everyone was shuffling about because they just refused to listen to their grandmas’ demands to Pick up your feet, you ruffians!

Nick could make jokes about the parallels between modernity and Shaun of the Dead no longer. His rational, science-minded self, which had guffawed when Bozo had earnestly tried to tell him about a Bigfoot sighting, and which had mentally put Reba on a watchlist after she’d made those strange comments about murderous coffee shops and funeral home switcheroos, began to sweat. Because as bizarre as it was, it was clear what was going on.

Zombies. They were dealing with zombies.

But how? What was causing all of this?

Nick clenched and unclenched his throbbing hand. Well, that was a problem for tomorrow’s Nick, assuming he still had his faculties by dawn. If he was running about demanding some brains to chomp on, well, that was someone else’s issue. He really hoped he’d turned the stove off, though.

Exhaling slowly, Nick gently took Zoey by the wrists.

‘All right, babe,’ he said, keeping his tone warm and non-threatening. ‘You rest up while I fetch you some brains. I’ll cook them up the way you like. Or I suppose we could do raw. What’s a prion or two between lovers?’

He closed the bedroom door, sinking down on the kitchen floor. Alice came over to him, licking his hand.

‘Now what, girl?’ If a bite had turned Zoey into a zombie, then wouldn’t the gnash mark she’d just added to his own flesh do the same to him? Were they fated to become zombie lovers, slowly lurching across Portland in search of organic grey matter until they collapsed into a pile of bones and tendons at a silent disco at Laurelhurst Park? Would they shamble through the rose gardens or Saint John’s Waterfront holding hands until their remaining flesh could take it no longer? Would they whisper brains at an underground slam-poetry reading until an audience member who’d had enough sloughed off their heads and handed them in to OMSI in the name of science?

None of Zoey’s roommates were home – actually, Winslow could have climbed back in through his bedroom window, but who knew, really – so Nick spent a sleepless night on a giant beanbag in Ainsley’s empty room, waiting for the symptoms to overtake him the way they had his beloved Zoey. His heart thrummed at a rate it hadn’t since the Beep Test during high- school PE, and his blood pressure performed a percussion solo in his ears.

Alice curled up next to him, one eye half-open as she tried to figure out this strange sleeping situation. Her nose twitched the way it did when she scented a bunny, and Nick fretted that perhaps his scent was changing. Was he turning? How much longer did he have until he was the intellectual equivalent of an internet comments section?

Outside, an endless train of shopping carts rattled past, giving Nick flashbacks of joking around with Zoey in his truck as the Spite Train of Milwaukie and 12th held up traffic for a solid fifteen minutes at a time.

They were so good together. It couldn’t end like this.

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Zoey

Brains.

Braiinnsss.

Braiiinnnssss.

Mrow?

I HATE THE WAY THEY HUNT ME DOWN

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