Joel has reassured me that, after everything I’ve done to and for him this year, he would be quite pleased to have the honor of shooting me in the head if it becomes necessary. I had to prod very insistently for the “only if it’s necessary” clause.
So, before we engage in the procedure, the ghost doc and one of the living docs and I have agreed that there’s a whole bunch of stuff I need to make public record, things I’ve kept locked down since last year. The world needs to know what happened to Pete, where the zombies went, what happened to me…
Being given the zombie repellent formula was less of an accident than originally thought. The Haitian I used to buy my vetiver from had tracked me down specifically, though I didn’t know it at the time. He had often told me if I weren’t so scattered and American I’d make a great houngan, and he had been transferring that information to me in bits and pieces, in interesting conversations couched in flirtation so I wouldn’t realize I was being taught. My grasp of the occult is much like other people’s grasp of mathematics: I just happen to be really good at it. He was so good at it he was being tracked by the Vatican and the Vatican was being tracked by the HSA, and in the mix I wound up being tracked, especially after last year’s trial for pitching a priest off a building.1
Here’s something no one really talked about: those zombies that didn’t get hacked to bits, they were still around on June 14th last year. Mike was one of them, and since his family was completely unprepared for zombie care, it fell to me. Although Pete and Vatican personnel offered me a nice safe place in the Alps, I said no – first, because I really don’t want to have “convert to Catholicism” conversations every day for the rest of my life, second because I’d like to have sex again someday, and third because I refuse to live anywhere I can’t have a pizza delivered without paying for airfare.
So, since Joel’s family was decimated and he was one of my only close friends who had experienced serious loss, we found a place we could afford in Minneapolis that was basically in the ‘hood and settled in together. We tied up Mike in the backyard Shaun of the Dead style, and tried to go about rebuilding our lives.
And I started getting sick, sicker than I ever was before the last apocalypse. I was staggering across the street daily for anti-nausea medications, Vicodin, Percoset, anything to numb my head. Then, just before Thanksgiving, Pete showed up.
There are two things I can be assured of after Pete’s visit: bad sex really is worse than no sex, and don’t leave your new lover in the backyard alone with your zombie boyfriend. Apparently zombies are conscious enough to get jealous. Ultimately, I had to shoot them both and bury them in the backyard. I also dosed Joel for the first time that day – at this point, he’s remembering many incidents that now qualify me as a serial killer. It changes his view of me as a moral compass for the both of us, and it makes me sad, but I really thought he was better off not knowing how we were really living.
It seems that something had happened to Pete before he ever got exposed to Mike – something that worked differently than the whole undead metaphysical fiasco of 2007. I’m not sure I fully understand the details, but within a month I was swarmed by Homeland Security Agents who knew damn well I’d hidden Pete’s body and were more concerned that I’d slept with him than that I’d killed him. Apparently I’d saved them the hassle of doing it themselves. I got dragged in for testing, and Joel got dosed again. Now that I think about it, I should tell Joel to get checked out for organ damage.
Although no bodily fluids were exchanged, etheric fluids are always exchanged during sex and there is no contraceptive for that. Whatever Pete carried, I now have, buried in my aura and battling with my blood. For some reason, the same thing that would make me a good houngan makes me an especially dangerous carrier of this infection. One tip of the virus in the wrong direction, and suddenly I’m leading the brains brigade. Since I’m a carrier for both fast zombie and slow zombie, the results would be particularly unpredictable. We’ve suppressed it by suppressing my physical and psychic immune system: they are connected, and they are weak.
The doctors are going to flush my system (yeah, this will be humiliating on the roof and nowhere near a toilet) and we’re going to get the drugs out of me and turn my metaphysical self loose. God, I hope I don’t have to kill anymore people – at least, not today.
I started getting even sicker after that, and showing bizarre symptoms: wild needs for raw meat and fresh organs, a distaste for my own formulas. I had to force myself to touch rock salt, and I have to make Joel handle the aesfotida.
References- If I’d pitched off a homeless person, no one would have cared. But slap a white collar and a cross on a guy and people get all upset. [↩]
