Date of the Dead Read online

Leaving the Basement

  The next thing we had to do was the biggest risk of all --raising the door and hoping there wasn’t a mob of zombies waiting to greet us. I wasn’t expecting a marching band, although at one point in my life I thought about being a musical arranger for a local organist, but lost the opportunity by the sudden death of his monkey. Soon after, I joined a marching band, but that was short lived because my short leg would cause me lean over and knock a row of my fellow band members to the ground. I was my high school track team’s lap counter so it was only natural I turned to running numbers for the local Buddhist crime syndicate. They’d just moved in from a poor black neighborhood in Martha’s Vineyard and were a rough crew who collected debts, not just by breaking bones, they also gouged out welchers’ middle eyes.

  The Buddhist enforcers were a gruesome bunch. The sound of breaking bones did not drown out their horrific chanting, which sounded like a mix of a homeless broad’s nails on a chalkboard and a yodeler’s falsetto played backwards. Their chanting when hitting a pitch not only broke glass but splintered Tupperware. It also pierced both my eardrums and rendered me deaf, dumb, blind, and in a coma for three and half seconds. It was actually one second, but the doctors induced the coma for another two and half because they wanted to reduce the swelling in my brain, but soon realized my brain could actually use a few more inches. I never witnessed a middle eye being torn out by the Buddhist muscle, but heard stories of followers who spent their entire lives unable to meditate and grew deathly ill from sweat and rain pouring through the holes in their foreheads.

  I hit the button, the door rose, and as luck would have it there wasn’t a zombie in sight, but there was a marching band and a female group of Iranian ululation wedding singers, whose sound was probably responsible for keeping the zombies away. That led us to another problem; what were we going to do with the marching band and the ululation vocalists (whose voices could match any helium breathing Apache raiding party)? Laura Lee, who not only saw the glass half-empty, she saw it being shattered over her head, had an idea.

  “Why don’t we have the screech sisters and the band play and march before our car? That, and feeding the zombies the majorettes, would keep the zombies off us until we couldn’t stand their playing and run them over.” She screamed the suggestion, but not loud enough that we could hear it over the band’s heavy brass version of “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

  We loaded up the car and the band and the ululation singers played on and on and on and on and on like a badly scratched record—zombies fleeing in every direction. Those that had their ears torn off earlier in the day and didn’t run, we fed majorettes to.

  In the vehicle we turned the radio up, to block out the band and singers, and to listen for reports of any camps, forts or cheap motels full of survivors. There was one report about a group survivors that had fortified a co-op building, but the requirements for getting in were stiff – let’s face it they had their pick. We knew, especially with a half-zombie, half-person we never get even the most liberal board’s approval. Skim suggested that we threw the half-breed out, but the doctor reminded us that he might be the key to a cure. My dating problems prior to the human race turning into deceased flesh eaters was bad enough. The only head to be gotten now would be mine and if there wasn’t a cure, I’d probably find myself looking for a zombie hooker without teeth. This thought gave me an idea of setting up a brothel full of good-looking zombie women who still had most of their insides, then pulling out their teeth, and starting my own dead chicken ranch. It was just a dream--the kind of dream that kept hope alive and made me feel closer to God.