ZOMBIE LOVE

I looked carefully at my new husband and thanked heaven above that I had been so blessed. His strong hands gripped the steering wheel and his keen eyes watched the road ahead.  He was so handsome. I could hardly wait to feel his arms around me tonight when we finally got to make love.  No more frustration and having to stop when things started to feel good. Our strong moral values had led us to making a pact to not have sex before we married and now the wait was over.  I was now Mrs. Warren McBride.  Our lives would be perfect.  I just knew it.  We were  spending the  first night of our married life in New Orleans and boarding  the ship for a two week  honeymoon cruise the next morning.  Two beautiful weeks of sun and shopping and making love any time we wanted to.  I could hardly wait.  If it had been left up to me, we’d have driven straight from the church to the No-tell Motel, but my sensible hubby  wanted the lovely dinner and the right setting.  He would do everything in his power to make it perfect for me.  I loved him for his thoughtfulness and didn’t want to shock him with my wanton behavior so soon in our new life together.

 It had been a very busy week with all the wedding activities and visiting with friends and relatives.  My  eyes closed and I let the hum of the tires lull me right to sleep.  That is probably the reason I never remembered the eighteen-wheeler that hit us head on.  I imagine that my dear husband fell asleep too and crossed over to the wrong lane.     There was no way that truck-driver could  stop fast enough or move far enough to avoid hitting us in our new hybrid vehicle although I am sure he must have tried. The chemicals he carried were strong and flammable.  He went up in flames and we were smashed into a tiny hybrid accordion.   I somehow knew it took the rescue unit several hours to pry the little car open enough to get us out.  Maybe  we should have heeded mom’s advice about keeping the SUV, but we were adults and wanted to think for ourselves.

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I was awake.  I couldn’t move but my mind was awake and curious. I opened my eyes and saw a white cloth over my entire body including my face.  I didn’t feel anything but I heard the elevator music on the radio and I smelled formaldehyde.  I know that odor from biology lab when we had to dissect a cat. I hated the smell.  I hated the idea of the cats being dead.  I was in what I assumed was a morgue and I was the one on the table.  Someone, a masculine voice,  said that it was a shame.  Someone else agreed. They said the car we were in looked like a squashed beer can.  That was annoying.  That car got over forty miles to a gallon of fuel and had cost us more than the luxury car we had been considering.  We wanted to be kind to Mother Earth and so we had done the responsible thing.  How dare that person compare it to a beer can.  Anything that collided head-on  with a big truck would look the same.  Wouldn’t it?  They said that  our relatives had been notified and would make arrangements for us to be picked up and delivered back to Lafayette.  Then it hit me.  We were dead.  We never got to have sex and now we were dead.  We waited all that time  and denied ourselves the pleasure and now we’d never get to do it.  If I had been able to, I would have cried.

The lights stayed on all night.  I lay there wondering if Warren was in the same predicament as me. Just about the time I was convinced that the elevator music was making me crazy,  I heard  the shuffle of steps coming in the door and walking  and stopping in front of me.  My table was moved until it bumped into something else.  My sheet was pulled down, leaving me naked and exposed on the table.  My sense of modesty was offended.  It was eerie and I began to be afraid. I opened my eyes and was able to see.  A tall black man in dreadlocks was chanting and waving his arms around.  He pointed to another  man who began to dust Warren’s body with  some kind of powder and poured some of it into his mouth.  Warren opened his eyes and looked straight at me.  The love in his expression made me very sad.   I saw a movie once about Zombies and these guys were behaving exactly like the Bokars or Sorcerers in the movie. They moved over to my table and began the chants again and then poured the gritty powder into my mouth. It felt like sand and had a bitter taste.  Warren and I both sat up to look around.  The bokar spoke.  He looked at us both.

          “My children.  You now belong to me.  I have a job for you to do and you careful. You are not immortal.” Then he told us the awful things he actually expected us to do for him.

          Warren and I listened. I knew there was no way that we could do the things that we were ordered to do.  They were vile things.  They were sinful things. He wanted us to kill and steal.

          The bokar sent us on our mission but did not follow. We walked. Our legs did not work as well as they did when we were truly alive so we were slow and awkward.  We stopped to ask a policeman what to do about our situation but he began screaming and running to his car and then slammed the door and locked himself inside. We tried to tell him that we needed his help but he would not listen. Our reflections in the window of the squad car showed a pair of pale faces with messy hair and dark bruises under our eyes. We didn’t look our best, for sure, but I didn’t think he should be afraid. Surely a policeman had seen accident victims before.  He got on his radio and spoke to someone and then quickly drove away, leaving us standing there.  Although it was difficult, we limped to a convenience store and tried to get the man behind the counter to call the police for us, but he screamed and pulled out a shotgun and fired at us both with bird shot. A customer pulled out a concealed weapon and shot us both with large caliber bullets. It didn’t hurt at all, but it did a lot of damage . Warren almost lost an arm and my left hip was not working as well as before. It might have helped our cause if we were dressed. Being naked seemed to work against us but neither had thought about that before we left the morgue. We tried again to explain and the counter man  and the customer ran from the store.  Nobody was able to understand us.  Nobody tried. 

          As we progressed down the street we saw the people come out to stare and then run away as we got closer. Several whacked at us with brooms and another man shot at us but missed. A Butcher chased Warren with a big knife and we barely managed to get away by going down an alley. We huddled together in the darkness and listened as the crowd went past the opening. The sounds grew faint and we relaxed a bit. 

                   My sweet husband touched my cheek and the tears began to flow. It was our wedding day and instead of making love on crisp clean sheets in a lovely hotel, we were dead  and sent on a mission of unspeakable horrors. The bokar said we had no choice but obey, but neither of us wanted to kill the doctor who pronounced us dead or to bring his brain to the bokar as a tribute.  Doctors help people.  Bokars, well, I didn’t know what they were supposed to do.

              Warren tried to kiss me but our skin was quickly drying out and when his nose brushed mine, it cracked and bent to one side. Mine cracked and bent in the opposite direction and fell off to the concrete below. It left a gaping hole.   He ran his fingers through my hair and brought away a handful of dull blond tresses. We were falling apart  and the dawn was beginning to paint the sky with streaks of color. We had to get away or go back and do the deed.  We didn’t want to kill the doctor but the longer we waited the more our bodies deteriorated. We also wanted to hold together for a little while longer for another reason. We couldn’t go on to whatever comes next without making love.  That just wasn’t right.

          We managed to sneak back to the morgue and even caught the door when a cleaning person took out the bags of trash,.  The elevator music was still playing and the good doctor was gathering up his laptop computer and shedding his white coat. He was ready to go home.  He passed our hiding place on his way out and neither of us had the courage to whack him with the big stick we’d found outside the door. I knew we’d failed in our mission and wondered what punishment the bokar would dish out that could be worse than what we’d experienced already.                                 -----------------------------------------------------

                   Warren pulled under the canopy of the hotel in New Orleans and  reached over to touch my hand. 

“Wake up, sleeping Beauty, he crooned.  I shook myself awake and looked into his big blue eyes and smiled.

“We’re here.  You just get your purse and I will take care of the car and have our luggage brought up.  I will meet you at the front desk, Ok?”

“Warren, you are alive?”  I reached out to touch him and was glad to see his handsome nose was just as straight as I remembered.

“Well, I am not dead yet… but I am pretty tired.  The sooner we get to our room the sooner we can get some rest.  Ok, sugar?  Let’s go. We have a honeymoon to start. ”

 While checking in, we ordered some dinner to be sent up to the room and kissed in the elevator on the way up. The annoying elevator music playing in the hallway was hauntingly familiar to me but I was so glad to be alive that I ignored it as much as possible.

After our showers we sat on the bed eating pizza and drinking red wine and kissing a lot.  We looked at the TV guide for a movie to watch and  found the only one we hadn’t seen was The Night Of the Zombies.  I tried to explain that I had dreamed about zombies while I was napping in the car, but Warren wasn’t really interested.  He  finished his pizza slices and then said he was interested in dessert. Somehow I got the impression that he was not referring to the raspberry swirl cheesecake we’d ordered.  I found that I liked dessert even more than the pizza and even asked for seconds.   After waiting so long, I was happy to finally know what all the fuss was about.  For years, I had read romantic stories and wondered if it would really be that good.  Now I know.  It was better.  Warren seemed to be glad that I enjoyed the physical part of marriage and I thought about the three years we had wasted. 

 We watched the Zombie movie or at least a part of it. I told him again about my dream of us becoming zombies and he invented a game that we still play to this day.  He comes out of the bathroom waving his arms and moaning and I can’t help but giggle.   For our first anniversary, he gave me a set of zombie salt and pepper shakers that he found in a thrift shop. The next year he gave me a framed sketch of a zombie that was done by a local artist. Every year brought a new piece of zombie memorabilia. I have a growing collection of Zombies. Our children think it is weird.  We think it is cool and are always looking for new pieces.