Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos (2 page)

Finally, I pull my fingers free from the double helixes in the chain-link fence and stumble away. After staggering around for a while, I find a drugstore. I pull open the door and amble carefully through the orderly aisles. I try not to knock anything off the organized shelves. It’s atypical zombie behaviour but I can’t bring myself to wreck anything. I like the clean. I like the bright and inviting products standing in rows. I like the smell of the perfume in the makeup section. In the back of the drugstore, I find a fairy.

Some humans think medicine is science but it’s not. It’s part art but it’s mostly magic. Pills, for example, are a hundred percent fairy dust.

The pharmacist fairy is a short, slender, green-haired girl. Her tiny wings stick through slits in the back of her uniform, fluttering nervously. She’s gorgeous. All fairies are gorgeous but this one is especially gorgeous. It makes me feel worse. It reminds of what I am now, what I was then, and what I can never be again. I know I wouldn’t be able to see her for what she really is if I were still alive but it doesn’t make me feel any better. I stare at her wings. They’re delicate; transparent. Black lines segment them, like veins in leaves. It’s hard to imagine those flimsy things lifting her off the ground, even though she’s so slight. There’s a rectangular white badge pinned to her white uniform. There are black letters on the badge: Fairy_26.

Disgusted by myself on her behalf, acutely aware of my grossness, and self-conscious of my gnarled, senseless, grey-green hand, I push the crumpled prescription across the counter to her.

“You want me to fill this?” she stammers. Her supple hand darts out, grabs the prescription, and jerks it away.

I grunt and nod.

“Okay, you want me to fill your prescription,” she says, nodding rapidly, trying to be brave. “It’ll take a while. You can have a seat over there.” She points in a fluid but quick way at a couple of chairs arranged side-by-side at the end of a nearby aisle. She drops her hand so she’s holding both arms tight against her sides. “If you want, I mean.”

I groan. I stagger away. I fall into a smooth plastic chair.

Nowadays, zombies work in conjunction with supernatural creatures, like the fairies, with whom they’ve struck an uneasy alliance. The war between zombies and supernatural creatures occurred several thousand years ago. It’s still a sore point with supernatural creatures, though, all of whom love human beings and hate what zombies do to them. In fact, it’s rumoured there are factions of supernatural creature revolutionary groups intent on overthrowing zombies but I don’t know anything about that.

An elf saunters in as I wait for my prescription to be filled with fairy dust. The elf is dressed in a skinny black suit with an extremely tall black top hat. Without seeing me, he goes to the pharmacy counter and puts his arms on it, stretching out the back of his jacket and making it shiny. “Hey, Fairy_26,” he calls.

“Get lost,” she whispers. She’s standing partially obscured by shelves of different sized pill bottles. I can see half of her. Her head is down and she’s pouring my pink happiness onto a blue tray where she can measure it out in daily doses.

“Come on, Fair. I want to talk to you.”

She pauses. When she speaks again, it’s like she’s forgotten I’m here. “Well, I don’t want to talk to you. And besides, we don’t have anything to talk about.”

“I think we do.”

“It’s over,” she says. “Get it through your head.”

“Fairy_26.” He says her name like he’s saying, “I know you don’t mean that.” Then he says, “Come here. Please.”

Fairy_26 walks up to the counter. She glances over at me.

“Come closer, Fair. Jeez. I’m not going to bite you.”

Fairy_26 looks down, shyly, and leans closer.

The elf reaches across the counter with both hands, grabs Fairy_26 by the back of the head and pulls her to him, trying to kiss her. Both hands on his chest, Fairy_26 struggles to get away. I moan, get up, and stumble toward the elf.

He sees me, lets go of Fairy_26, and staggers away. He backs into a display. He tumbles to the ground like the bottles he knocks down and scatters across the floor. His tall black top hat falls off. Staring at me, wide-eyed, he scrambles, gets back on his feet, grabs his hat (half-crushing it in the process) and runs out of the pharmacy.

After he leaves, I make my rigid-legged and arms-outstretched way back to my chair and tumble into its smooth curved plastic.

“I’m sorry about that,” says Fairy_26.

I groan in a way that conveys it wasn’t a problem.

Even though it’s perfect, she tries to fix her bright green hair with her fingers. I stare at her warm pink-orange hands: the ease with which they bend and flex. I look at her fingernails, how flawless they are: unbroken from clawing, fighting, and killing; tearing flesh from people, eating it, loving it.

“He’s such a jerk,” she says, going back to work. “I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out.”

I moan, sympathetically.

“He cheated on me and he can’t figure out why I won’t take him back,” she scoffs. “I deserve better than that. I think more highly of myself than that, you know? I’m not some brain-dead bimbo with zero self-esteem.”

I nod, encouragingly.

“Listen to me ramble on,” she says. “What do you care? You have problems of your own.”

She goes back to counting pills.

When she stops talking, something happens to me. Something physical. I feel it: a sense of loss. It takes me a minute to figure out what it is: her voice. I miss her voice. Like being alive. I took it for granted when it was happening. When it disappeared, I realized how significant it was. Not necessarily good or right or true. Just significant.

Clumsily, I get up and go to the counter. Turned away and busy, Fairy_26 fails to notice. I bang my stiff hand down onto the shiny silver bell. It scoots across the counter and falls on the floor on the other side of the counter. I curse myself for my awkwardness but at least the noise gets her attention.

“Do you need something?” she asks, not afraid anymore or, at least, less afraid now.

I put my hand to my mouth and wave my fingers there.

“Oh my God,” she says, horrified. “You’re hungry?”

I shake my head emphatically. I point at her; at her mouth. I point to myself; my ears. I gesture from her mouth to my ears, from her mouth to my ears.

She frowns. “You want me to talk some more?”

I nod and nod.

“That makes you the first person I’ve ever met who wants me to talk some more,” she says, turning away, going back to work with the pills. “Most people say I never shut up. I go on and on. Normally I do it when I’m nervous but I’m nervous all the time so I go on and on all the time. That’s just the way I am. I don’t think it’s that bad but it sure annoys some people. You wouldn’t believe how upset they get when there isn’t enough silence. I don’t know what it is about the quiet they like. Maybe it’s calm like that in their minds. My mind isn’t like that. Sometimes I wish it was. Sometimes I’m glad it isn’t. I think it’d get boring. I’m sorry. I know it’s none of my business and I’m not supposed to do this but can I ask you why you’re getting this medication? Are you really depressed?” She looks at me, over her shoulder.

On the other side of the counter, I shrug.

“I thought only humans got depressed. Living humans, I mean.”

I bang my twisted hand into my chest like, “Me, too.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like being a zombie?”

I shake my head.

“Huh,” she says. She turns back to her tallying. “I always thought zombies liked being zombies. Don’t feel bad. I mean, of course you feel bad if you’re depressed, but if it makes you feel any better, and it probably won’t now that I think about it, but not all human beings like the way they are either. And supernatural creatures are no different. Mostly I like the way I am but I get pretty sad too sometimes. Sometimes I just cry and cry. I’m one of those girls. I wouldn’t say I’m depressed or anything but I’m definitely a crier. I bawl my eyes out constantly. It doesn’t take much to get me going either. Do you wish you were a human being?” She glances at me. “An alive human being?”

I nod and nod.

“Why?”

I lift my chin at my arms stuck out in front of me. I walk around in a circle with my unbending legs.

“The stiffness?”

I nod. Then I walk toward her, mock menacingly.

She freezes.

I stop and open my crooked hands as much as I can like, “don’t worry.”

“You don’t like being scary, either, huh?”

I shake my head.

“Sounds like you’re pretty down, all right.” After she fills the bottle with the right number of pills, she stuffs it in a bag, prints up the instructions and price tag, staples it to the bag, and puts the whole thing on the counter.

I give her money. She gives me change.

“I hope it helps,” she says.

I turn to go.

“Wait. Hold on.” She grabs her purse. “I think I’m going to take the rest of the day off because of the stress of you.”

My shoulders fall.

“No, that’s just my excuse,” she assures me. “I was scared at first but I didn’t know you then. I’m not scared of you anymore.” She rethinks. “Is that dumb? You’re not going to eat my brain or try to turn me into a zombie or anything, are you?

I shake my head.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m not scared of you anymore. You want to go somewhere and hang out? I don’t have any zombie friends. Do you have any fairy friends?”

I shake my head.

“Do you want a fairy friend?”

I shrug.

“Not overly enthusiastic but I’ll take it.” She smiles. She puts her hand on my outstretched arm. She looks at the point where we meet, where we touch, and then she looks up at me, happily. “Shall we?”

We walk out of the store. As soon as we turn to go down the sidewalk, I get shot in the back with an arrow.

Shocked, outraged, infuriated, Fairy_26 spins around, searching for the source. I turn, too. Fairy_26 spots him behind us, standing in front of a sporting goods store, holding a lowered bow. It’s a centaur. He has the upper half of a man and the body of a horse. His upper half, the man half, is shirtless and muscular. His lower half, the horse half, is palomino: golden-tan. “Centaur111,” yells Fairy_26. “What are you doing? You can’t go around shooting people with arrows!”

“He’s a zombie,” says Centaur111, calmly.

“So what?”

“It’s okay to shoot zombies with arrows.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody had to tell me that. It’s common knowledge.”

I look down at the tip of the arrow. It’s poking out of my chest. It doesn’t hurt. Zombies don’t feel much of anything, especially not physically. I yank the stick straight through my chest and drop it on the ground.

“Well, you can’t go around shooting people with arrows,” insists Fairy_26.

“You can if they’re zombies,” assures Centaur111.

“Zombies used to be human beings!”

“But they’re not anymore. That’s kind of my point.”

“So what if they aren’t anymore? So what?”

“Zombies eat people,” says Centaur111. “For food,” he clarifies.

“They have to. Otherwise they’ll starve to death and die.”

“You mean they’ll die again. Zombies are already dead.”

“They’re undead.”

“It’s okay to shoot dead people with arrows. Okay, not all dead people,” he admits. “But if they get up and walk around after they die, then it’s okay to shoot them with arrows. Definitely.”

“You can’t shoot the undead with arrows!”

“Sure you can. Ask anybody. You can even shoot them with a rifle. Here. I’ll show you.” He trots off into the sporting goods store to get a rifle.

“We’d better get out of here,” says Fairy_26, getting in front of me, taking both my hands in hers. “You’re safe with me.” She says it in that reassuring voice your parents used when they told you everything was going to be okay and you believed them. Then she lifts me into the sky. In the sudden rush of wind, acceleration, and surprise, I feel so good I could die. Even though I can’t. Even though I’m not. I feel alive.

I, Buck Burger, depressed zombie, unhappy husband and failed father, hereby resolve and vow to never harm Fairy_26. In addition, I swear to protect her from those who would and could do her harm, specifically in the form of turning her from what she is now, an incredibly beautiful, kind, and carefree winged sprite, into an entirely earthbound, plodding, inflexibly self-interested zombie such as I, unfortunately, and eternally, am. Right now, Fairy_26 is holding my undead claw of a hand and pulling me—looking ahead and then back at me—happily, through the hall, leading to her apartment in a branch of a tree in downtown Fairyland.

I don’t know how we got to Fairyland. It was a blur. I was so excited. We were moving so fast. Knowing how to get to Fairyland would be invaluable to zombies. Zombies would mount an attack, hoping to massacre all the supernatural creatures, even though we’d never be able to. Supernatural creatures outmatch us in every way except one: they’re compassionate. Compassion is a terrible weakness. It’s what we, the zombies, exploit to survive.

Supernatural creatures love living people. They play tricks on them sometimes but they love them. I understand why they love them now. I didn’t before I became depressed, but now that I do, I never want to forget.

Love of living people is what led to the tentative truce between zombies and supernatural creatures. The tentative truce continues to this day, in the form of an uneasy alliance. We, the zombies, only infect living people who, unmistakeably, embrace the zombie life. In exchange, supernatural creatures hide zombies—until it’s too late—from, it should be said, most living people, as well as most signs of zombie behaviour, including but not limited to, concert hall massacres, shopping mall massacres, airport massacres—all your conventional massacres—along with general destructive behaviour on both the small personal scale and the large institutional scale. I say supernatural creatures hide zombies and signs of zombie behaviour from most living people because there’s a small percentage of living people who learn or recognize the horrible truth and can, thereafter, see us for what we, unfortunately, are. These living people are few and far between and, I’m afraid, very afraid.

Reportedly, there was a time when the vast majority of the living embraced the supernatural creature life over the zombie life. That time, it seems, has passed. These days, almost all our young become zombies.

Some blame the education system; others organized religion. A few don’t see the difference.

In any event, now supernatural creatures do the hard work of cleaning up after zombie rampages: they fix what we break, pick up what knock down, and organize what we disorder. They usually get most of the blood. They keep us from completely destroying ourselves. We, the zombies, tell ourselves, telepathically, supernatural creatures do it because we’re so much more powerful than they are and we control them. But we know, down deep inside, that they only do it because they love people: non-undead people. They want to hide the horror from them. They hate us: zombies. Or so I mindlessly thought.

Once we’re both inside Fairy_26’s apartment, she closes the door, locks it, and leans back against it, smiling at me. “We made it,” she says. Her hands are flat against the door.

I groan in agreement.

“Why don’t you wait for me in the living room? I’m going to take a quick shower.” Still beaming at me, she unbuttons her drugstore uniform top. She takes it off right in front of me. I stare at her small, perky, warm, and alive breasts. When she turns and hangs the garment up in the open closet next to the front door, I stare at her little wings and where they emerge from her wound-free back. They sprout lightly from between her shoulder blades, which jut out in a strong and angular way in comparison.

I turn away, uncomfortable. Somehow her wings and where they meet her skin are more intimate than her breasts. I stumble toward the living room.

“Turn on some music if you want,” she calls after me.

I don’t know if this world is bigger than mine, if we shrank, or if it’s a bit of both. The carpet is spongy green moss. The walls are flowers: two walls are covered with white daisies; one wall is covered with red daisies. Every other exposed surface is warm brown wood; it has a fresh cut smell but I know it hasn’t been cut; it’s still alive. Like Fairy_26.

If I turn back right now, I know I’ll see her take off the rest of her clothes. It’s cruel. Is she doing this intentionally? To hurt me? To rub what she has—life, warmth, ease, and flexibility—in my face? Or is she just so completely unaware of what it means to me?

Whether she knows it or not, there’s a stark element of viciousness to this: her beauty and how liberal she is with it. On the other hand, if she were conservative and shy, she’d probably just inflame, frustrate, and maybe even infuriate me. There’s no winning with her. And me. I’ve never spent much time thinking about how beautiful supernatural creatures should act. It must be impossible. If you come right out and say, “Look I just want to be your friend,” you seem egotistical and presumptuous but if you don’t lay out the ground-rules, you might wind up leading someone on. Maybe beautiful supernatural creatures don’t have it as easy as I assumed.

I don’t turn on any music. I just fall onto her sofa and wait for her. The sofa is dark brown wood that flows out from the walls so fluidly it seems more like a thing of water. Its cushions are thick. They’re the same spongy green moss that covers the floor. The light is bright. It pours in through an apartment-wide, floor-to-ceiling window. The whole apartment is cut off on one side. It’s not a cross-sectional cut. It’s right at the edge. The wall that looks like it should be there isn’t but the apartment is so comfortable it doesn’t feel like anything is missing. The apartment just ends and the sky begins. The sunlight flooding into the side of the tree, into the side of me, into the room where I am, sitting on soft moss that smells of freshness and life, everything I’m not, while waiting for a fairy to shower, is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It’s not the perfection of its brightness: it’s neither glaring nor dim. It’s not the perfection of its temperature: it’s neither too warm nor too cool. It’s the perfection of it. It’s impossible. Yet I see it and feel it and know it can’t be but I don’t care. Can light be happy? I think this light is happy. It’s not burning unimaginably in the cold dark of space and sometimes reaching out, with a flare, for something it can never touch.

I feel worse than I did before. Even though I want to be here and, if the word makes any sense coming from me, I think I’m “glad” to be here, because someone who’s so everything-I-want-to-be has seen me and reacted with something other than unmistakable visceral revulsion . . . but how can a starving man, left alone with a feast, not want a bite?

I can hear the water running in the shower. She’s singing a song I don’t know. I’m trying to not to think of her warm smooth body moving under a spray of clear-but-strangely-white water. I’m trying not to think of her doing what I tried to do yesterday when I took a shower: getting clean. I’m trying not to imagine this:

I get up. I stagger, slowly, toward the bathroom door. With my deformed-by-death hand, I try the smooth wooden doorknob. I do it as quietly as I can. It’s unlocked. I open the door. Steam enshrouds me, ghosting out into the cool behind me. I see her through the shower curtain of hanging and dripping weeping willow branches but she doesn’t see me. She’s lit by the bright sky pouring through the skylight. I look at her slender naked body. If I had a normal heart, it’d beat faster, harder. If I had regular blood, it’d course. It’d surge. If I could breathe like a human being, I couldn’t breathe. I stumble toward the dangling willow branches. I yank them to the side. She screams. What good does screaming do? She slips, falls, gets up, backs up, away from me, slapping at my arms, which are always reaching out and which now reach out for her. The water hits me but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything but my cold hunger-lust. She’s shaking her head from side to side crazily, screaming and screaming. I grab her and yank her close to me. With my mouth wide-open and my jagged broken teeth shining, I bite and tear a chunk of flesh from her neck. Blood spurts from her in a rhythmically pulsing geyser of red juice. The scream changes. It becomes a thing of pain and knowing, rather than of fear and wonder. I try to drag her from the shower but I lose my grip on her and she falls. On the mossy floor, she kicks her legs insanely. She tries in vain to staunch the colour squirting from her neck. In the shower water pooling on the green moss, her blood tries to fashion a pink outfit to cover her nakedness but it fails and swirls, reluctantly, down the tree drain. I consume her. I eat all the lovely healthy youthful parts of her. I do it so I can remain. So I can stay. Undead. I won’t make her like me. She won’t become a zombie. There won’t be enough of her left when I’m done. It’s a mercy to repay her kindness. Besides, I’m so hungry. I don’t take pleasure in devouring her. I need to do it; I must. I don’t do it because I want to do it; I hate it. I’m forced, through a biological imperative, to do all this, to sustain my miserable life, to prolong the monotony: the toil, the routine, the hassle. The strain. I do it because this is what everyone expects from me. I do it because this is what I have to do to be considered normal. My wife says, “Everyone has to do things they don’t want to do, Buck.”

And that’s exactly why I
don’t
do it. Because I have to. I need to. But I refuse. I won’t be my hunger. I won’t do what zombies say I should do. I’m still sitting on the couch. Fairy_26 is still, safely, in the shower. While I wait for her to finish, I make a telepathic call to my wife. She’s probably worried.

“Buck? Where are you? You’re late. You said you’d take me to get groceries, remember? What’d the doctor say?”

I never know where to start with my wife. That’s part of the problem. We’re always in the middle of something. Nothing ever starts or stops. It’s always the middle.

“The doctor said I’m depressed, Chi.”

“Depressed? What do you have to be depressed about? You have everything anyone could possibly want. You have a great job; you have a great house; you have a wife who loves you . . . wait. Is that it? Are you depressed because of me? Should we go to counselling? Barry and Deepah are going to counselling. Deepah says it’s done wonders for them. She says they’re like teenagers again. Are you coming home now? You said you’d take me to get groceries, remember?”

“I remember. I’ll take you to get groceries. I’m just going to be a little late.”

“Why? What’s wrong? What’s going on, Buck? Are you okay?”

“No I’m not okay, Chi. I’m depressed.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. I just found out I’m depressed.”

“Damn it. I should’ve gone to the doctor with you. I knew I should’ve gone to the doctor with you. Didn’t I tell you? There are all these things going on and I’m just finding out now. It’s so. Damn it. Why don’t you talk to me, Buck? You never tell me anything. Sometimes I feel like we’re strangers. I think we should go to counselling like Barry and Deepah. I really do.”

“The idea of going to counselling depresses the hell out of me,” I say.

“We really need groceries, Buck. There’s nobody in the house to eat. And we’re just about out of saliva. You know what I’m like when I don’t have saliva for my morning coffee. I don’t think either of us wants to go through another scene like that.”

“If I have to go to counselling, I’ll throw myself into some kind of really big grinder.”

“A grinder, Buck? Really? Where are you going to find a big grinder? It sounds to me like you just don’t want to go to counselling and you’re using your depression as an excuse. What’d the doctor say you should do?”

“He gave me a prescription.”

“A prescription? Oh God, Buck. A prescription makes it seem so much more real. Now I’m worried. I need a prescription, too. The fact that you’re depressed and I love you so much and I try so hard to make you happy just makes me want to cry. I don’t know what to do, Buck. I really don’t. What’d you have for lunch?”

“I got an arm from the vending machine,” I lie.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Neither do I, but I say, “I’ll be home in a little while and we’ll go get groceries.”

I end the telepathic call. If my wife wasn’t already dead, I’d probably kill her. That’s what I realize after I talk to her. I don’t know why I stay with her. She loves me. I know that. I love her too, but I also hate her. I don’t know if I love her more than I hate her or if I hate her more than I love her. I just know I hate her. When I say “I love you” to my wife when we go to bed at night or when I leave for work in the morning, I’m telling the truth. But I don’t say, “I also hate you. Possibly as much as I love you. Perhaps even more.” When I say “I love you” I’m telling the truth, just not the whole truth. So help me, God, okay?

Zombies believe God is a supernatural creature. If God
weren’t
a supernatural creature, so the zombie thinking goes, God would help us lay waste to supernatural creatures and infect the living people they protect but God won’t. However, God doesn’t seem to really help supernatural creatures and the living people they protect too much, either. Sure, supernatural creatures have all kinds of amazing magic powers, and, yes, living people get to die, which is nice, but living people suffer terribly pretty much the whole time they’re alive. Zombie philosophers argue that the pain—spiritual, physical, or both—that living people experience while alive only makes the good feeling of death feel even better later. Otherwise, God would be a real jerk. The zombie philosophers aren’t too sure why God set up the world like this in the first place but they’re sure God has a good reason. Most of them. Pretty sure.

I hear Fairy_26 turn off the shower. I imagine her stepping out, grabbing a warm fluffy towel, and drying herself just as I imagined killing her and eating her. In my mind, there’s no difference. Does she dry her wings with a towel? Or does she air-dry them by fluttering them? She probably uses a towel. Otherwise she’d get water all over the bathroom. I don’t know for sure. I can’t ask.