BEST SERVED COLD

       BEST SERVED COLD

             Justine Musk

Locking the girl in the closet sounded bad, Thad knew, but it’s not like it was a cramped little coffin of a closet, or even what a typical person thought of when a typical person thought ‘closet’: it was a freaking room, lined with his three thousand dollar suits and five hundred dollar custom shirts, also his more casual wear, his organic cotton and denim and cashmere, also his rows on rows of Ferragamo shoes, his cowboy boots, his sneaks.   There was a rack just for all his leather jackets, because a person could never have too many leather jackets, and push them aside and you’d find his built-in safe, where he kept some cash and a few prized video tapes and a stash of cocaine that would make Scarface proud. 

He was taking the girl on a tour of the house, separating her from the little herd of friends she’d come with.   He wasn’t exactly sure when they had arrived.  Navaid had sent them, knowing how reluctant Thad was to step out of the house ever since he’d walked in on a burglary, been tied up naked and thrown in the back of a car and dumped at the bottom of the hill, where he’d had to hop across the road at 2 am and pound on the door of the Bel Air Security guardhouse.  

The delivery of attractive females was a service Navaid provided for a few select friends: he owned the club Tasty, and he would round up cute girls and put them on a shuttle bus and send them to a house in the hills for a private party.  They weren’t prostitutes or anything, just sweet young things from the Valley or the O.C.  who wanted the buzz of being around wealth and fame -- even if it was B-level fame, or notoriety, as in Thad’s case.  Thad did remember checking their driver’s licenses before allowing them into his private residence, he had to be mindful of such things now, and besides, it was a good excuse to turn away the fat-for-LA one and the one with the sour look on her face.  

This girl – her name was Andrea -- was an actress or model of some kind (big surprise, in this town) but had a classy look to her, which he liked, and she was a little bit more archaeological than what he usually went for, she was at least twenty-five, and he liked that too, at least once in a while.

So.  Up the curving staircase and through the hall, here’s the bathroom with the dark Italian marble, the Jacuzzi nestled against the corner windows overlooking the drop of Bel Air valley below – oh look at the hawk surfing the treetops, nature is so wonderful -- and into the bedroom with the big platform bed right in the center heaped with zebra-print pillows -- oh look at the African masks on the walls, African art is so wonderful -- and then, see this amazing closet, and he guided her inside and went to his safe and chopped up some lines on the back of a framed Picasso drawing that someone, not him, had set on the center island for precisely this purpose, and then they were making out. 

When he had his tongue in her mouth and his hand on his breast he realized she was yielding and open and he could fuck her right here right now. 

Which wasn’t exactly what he’d been intending but he’d been chubby and shy as a kid, the son that his father had labeled a loser, and so the fact that he was now that guy who had girls practically throwing blowjobs at him, assuming of course that a blowjob was a thing you could throw, which it wasn’t, never ceased to amaze him.  Not that he would admit that to anybody.  But somehow it made it impossible to ever turn down the opportunity for sex, assuming the girl was even remotely attractive, because saying no to sex was all broken mirrors and black cats and the number 666.  It didn’t matter if it was good, or if he was good,  if he was too coked up to perform the deed for long or even at all.  So long as sex was on offer, all was right with the world, that horrible personal catastrophe he always sensed dangling over his head like the sword of Damocles prevented yet again from plunging down into his skull.  All thanks to the magical ritualistic power of fucking.

So they were getting it on and he had just slipped his fingers inside the white lace of her panties when something tossed itself against the closet door, yipping and scrabbling, and he cursed into the girl’s neck. 

“What is that?” she said.  Andrea, her name was Andrea, he wasn’t some sleazebag who couldn’t even remember a chick’s name.  Most of them, anyway.  “Is that a dog?”

“No,” he said, “it’s a ferret.”

“It’s a ferret?”

“It’s a platypus, it’s an aardvark, it’s one of those hairless creepy cats, of course it’s a canine, it’s the highly annoying little canine that belongs to the female personage who calls herself my girlfriend so would you hunker here for a few minutes between Mr Gucci and Mr Paul Smith and save us some drama?  It’s appreciated,” and he shoved her away from him – but it was a gentle shove, more of a push, not really a push so much as a nudge – and opened the door and scooped up the barking creature with one arm and shut and locked the closet door with the other.   He didn’t have locks on all his doors, he wasn’t paranoid, just the places where he tended to keep certain possessions that society in all its underwhelming wisdom liked to label “illegal”.

Then Kimmie was in his face, taking the dog from him and nuzzling -- hell, practically chewing on the creature’s neck, “you’re so yummy, I could eat you up,” -- and telling him that the girl’s friends were downstairs and of course they didn’t know the gate code that would release them from the property.  He said, “You mean they’re still here?” and she said, “Where were they supposed to go?” and he had no answer for that.

As he pressed the numbers of the gate code into the device beside his front door – he refused to give his code to anybody, despite the inconvenience it tended to cause him --  something struck him as wrong.  He couldn’t figure out what it was, but it burrowed beneath the skin of his soul -- if you believed in souls, which he sort of mostly did – and remained there.  “Thaddy?” Kimmie said, and she came up to him, and something she saw in his face or his body language made her wrap her arms around him.   She smelled like vanilla.  She was a cleancut, fresh-faced nineteen year old from some nothing place in one of the flyover states, where he had never been and knew he’d never go.   “Thaddy, baby, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said.  He couldn’t possibly explain it.  Just this empty feeling that washed over him, triggered by something – something – that he could never quite figure out but knew he would later, probably, at some point, when it would crash him low and blue all over again.

It was almost eleven am. He hadn’t really slept since the night before the night before and was giving a dinner party in some number of hours. He asked Kimmie to lie down with him for a while, just to hold him, and she liked that.  It made her think he had a sensitive streak somewhere deep inside him.  Somewhere really really deep.  He lay there on the wide slouchy leather couch in the living room, feeling the warmth of her lanky-limbed  nineteen year old body, and he waited to feel okay again.  His eyes wide, his mind racing.

At one point she said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

She meant the thing that had happened to him.  The incident.  The burglary.  The tied-up naked romp along the bottom of Bel Air Road. 

He felt again the cold steel press of the barrel at his temple, the rasp of the rope around his wrists and ankles. “No,” he said .

Somehow time passed.  The drycleaning came – his gray Paul Smith suit -- which reminded him that a shower and change of clothes was in order.  Why not wear the suit?  He kept on his rumpled white t-shirt, his Converse sneakers.  For that decadent, cracked-out look.  Something was nagging at him.  Something he’d forgotten about, but Thad was used to forgetting things, he did it all the time.  Kimmie went away and came back again, the little dog dancing at her heels.  The chef arrived, the servers, one of them so good-looking he could be a male model in an underwear ad, proving once again that some of the most beautiful people in this town were giving you stuff to drink and eat.  The house filled with the smell of roasting flesh. Something was still nagging at him, but he took some business calls and did more lines and the underwear model put a glass of Opus One in his hand.  Then his guests arrived.

Conversation buzzed.  The fresh human presences streaming through the door made him feel better, more relaxed, or at least as relaxed as it was possible for him to be.  It was a good mix, he thought.  The Hollywood types you would expect – an agent, an independent film producer – but there was also some kind of Internet dude.  Rayne Betancourt was there, the socialite who’d gotten famous for being best friends with a socialite famous for being famous.  The camera crew from her reality show – When It Raynes It Pours – came up behind her, like faithful Sherpas, and everybody pretended to ignore them while greeting Rayne with extra doses of enthusiasm to get the cameras swinging in their direction.   There were a couple of wives or girlfriends, whose names nobody would remember (except Thad) and who would spend the evening chatting quietly with each other or listening to the men.  And Z was there.  His real name was Zachariah Fields, and he’d been composing and producing music for longer than Thad was alive.  He was so famous he rarely ventured out of his house.  The world came to him, usually in a limousine or town car.  He was Thad’s neighbor, or, more accurately, several of Thad’s neighbors, since he owned three of the five properties on the gated Bel Air cul-de-sac in which Thad had been living for close to six years now.  “Baby,” Z said, in his booming, throaty voice, “hey baby,” and he pulled Thad into his trademark bear hug, both men competing to see who could slap backs the hardest.

Kimmie went in and out of his vision, the little dog at her heels, hard to say which of them was cuter.  “The chef,” she reported, “is looking kind of greenish.  You think he might be sick?  Should he be, like, handling our food and stuff?”

“What?”

“The chef.”

“Who?”

“The chef.”

“Stop talking to me,” Thad said, and wandered into the bathroom.  He did another bump off the glass of a handheld mirror and wandered back out.

And then suddenly they were at the table, a grand oak affair that had been especially designed for Thad’s dining room.  A raised planter ran down the center and sprouted grass.  It was the one act by his interior designer that Thad tended to seriously question.  The guests peered at each other over the little green stalks.  Thad heard himself talking and his guests laughing appreciatively and then suddenly they were halfway through the fish dish.  The fish was dry, which struck Thad as pretty damn careless for a chef this expensive, this new chef he was trying out for the first time because someone had recommended the chef to someone who had recommended the chef to Thad, but no one seemed to really mind about the fish and Thad didn’t have much appetite anyway.

He realized that Rayne was talking to him.  Apparently she had asked him a question because she seemed to be expecting an answer.  Then a crew member stepped up to Rayne and whispered in her ear.  Rayne stood, and there was some happy male ogling as she and the crewperson fiddled with the mike pack taped  above the low rise of her jeans.  Then Rayne sat down and said, as if she was saying it for the first time, which Thad suspected she was not,  “You and Sabine are friends now, right?”

“You know Sabine?” someone said.

Sabine was one of his ex-girlfriends.

“Not really.” Rayne waved a hand.  “But we move in some of the same circles.”

“The beautiful people circles,” someone said.

“Those are small circles.”

“Unfortunately so.”

Sabine.  With the flowing red hair that had first caught Thad’s eye, because he hadn’t done a redhead in a long time, and the sharp green eyes that had become maybe a little too sharp for his liking.  Sabine, with her cultivated air of mystery and all those charms and amulets and shit.  There was this thing that had happened, this incident concerning a certain video that had somehow found its way onto the web, a video featuring Sabine in rather a range of compromising positions, and she appeared to be less than happy about this.  She also appeared to blame Thad.

Thad said,  “Friend?  How would you define ‘friend’?  If you define ‘friend’ as somebody with whom you generate consistent mutual positive regard then I would say ‘no’.”  This sounded somewhat more polite than: I hate that bitch.   “I would definitely say no.  No.  So in other words – no.”

“She said she sent you something.  Special delivery.”

Which is when he remembered the girl in his closet.

“Shit,” he half-hollered, and pushed back his chair.

“Thaddy?”

“Right back!” he yelled over his shoulder.  “Don’t go anywhere!”

He took the stairs two at a time.   What had he been thinking?  No, what had that girl been thinking, and why the hell hadn’t she done anything – screamed, pounded, thrown shoes at the door – to attract his attention to the fact that she had been locked in the fucking closet for hours and hours?   What kind of idiot was she, and more importantly, was she going to sue him?  Did she have legitimate cause?  He made a mental note to ask his lawyer.

But as he wound through his darkened bedroom to the closet these initial questions subsided as another rose up to replace them:  Was she okay?  Could she have O.D.’d -- not on anything he’d given her, of course not -- but something she maybe took before she got to his house, maybe Navaid had given her?  He cursed Navaid.  He would have to speak to Navaid.

Because how would that look, if there was a dead girl in his –

He yanked open the door.

Silence. 

Shadows.

His shirts and pants, his jackets, his shoes, formed vague jumbled shapes in the near-darkness. 

“Andrea,” he said.  He cleared his throat.  “Andrea.”

He heard, then, a soft scrape, a rustle from the far corner. 

Heard an intake of breath, then a low grunting exhale. 

She was alive.  Thank Christ. 

“You’re alive!” he yelped.  “Thank Christ!”

He actually felt weak in the knees.

Except wait.

Should her breathing sound quite so…quite so…bubbly?  Like she was dragging air through her own….through….was ‘blood’ the word he wanted?  No.  Not.  Surely not.   And why, exactly, was he continuing to stand in the goddamn dark?  What was wrong with him -- besides that he hadn’t slept in days, was sort of afraid to leave his own house since the whole burglary incident less than a month ago, and the drugs?

He reached for the wall switch. 

She was on the floor by his wool-and-cashmere overcoat – a shame he could rarely wear that in LA, such a gorgeous coat – her miniskirt hiked up her thighs, her legs splayed across the carpet in a way that seemed…uncomfortable.  Her head was hanging down,  long blonde hair falling over her face.  

And again, that breathing:  the long, bubbling inhale, the thick grunting exhale.  

He said, “Uh, sweetie?  Sweetheart? You okay there?”

He noticed her hands clawing at the carpet:  the fingers rigid, the skin an odd, marbled white. 

“I’m….”  Thad said.

She lifted her head.

“….sorry about this,” Thad muttered.

Through the lanks of tangled hair, he could see her eyes.  The gaping whites of her eyes.   Her face was contorted,  her lipstick-smeared lips pulled in a weird rictus grin. 

She was whispering something. 

She began to drag herself toward him, still whispering. 

“Nice….nice girl,” Thad said.  “Good little girl.”

She wasn’t whispering actual words.  It was gibberish, like she was speaking in tongues or something.  He wished at the very least that she would shut up. This wasn’t really happening to him.  He’d had much the same feeling when he’d walked in on the burglary.  There’d been a moment when he could have bolted back out through the front door, except everything had gone flat and surreal, like he’d been dropped into a television show.  Except it hadn’t been a show, any more than this was,  and the knowledge busted through him just as the girl got on her hands and knees and seemed to be gathering herself, pulling in that ragged, bubbling breath, and he saw the discoloration in her cheeks and throat and cleavage and realized she was rotting, that the smell in the closet was the smell of rotting flesh.

She launched herself at him, head down, blonde hair flying.

Thad stepped back.  He shut the door just as her face came so close he could see the pupils roiling in the great dead white of her eyes.

There was a heavy thumping sound as she slammed against the door and again as she dropped to the ground.

Thad stood there.

He listened.

Nothing.  No sound.

He opened the door just a crack and peered inside.  Saw the girl’s limp form on the floor.  She wasn’t whispering anything anymore.  He might have thought she was dead, except for the wretched thing that was her breathing.  Before he could think about what he was doing, he leaped over her.  Two strides and he was at his safe, hands shaking as he worked out the combination, then he was grabbing the vials, the bag of cocaine, shoving them in the pockets of his jacket.  Then he was vaulting over the girl, and did he maybe feel her fingers brush his pant leg, hear again that hoarse senseless whisper or was it his imagination, as if it even mattered, just shut the door and backpedal, stumbling, watching the door, as if she was about to tear through it like the Terminator or something. 

Thad sat down on the bed.  He did some thinking.  He did more coke.  He did more thinking.  Then he went back downstairs.

It seemed best to give it to them straight.

“There’s a zombie in my closet,” Thad said. 

He picked up the linen napkin and unfolded it across his lap.

His guests were looking at him.  The grass was sticking up along the center length of the dining room table.  He really needed to talk to his interior designer about that.  Fucking grass.  His guests were still looking at him.  He felt the need to keep on talking.  “This girl, she’s been in my closet for many hours, “ he babbled, “and I just went upstairs to let her out, right, except she was on the floor in this really weird position and she looked up at me like this –“  He contorted his own face to demonstrate.  “ – and then she came at me like this –“  He got out of his chair to show them, then sat down again and picked up his napkin from where it had fallen on the floor.  “—and I realized that somehow between the time she got locked in there and now, she turned into this really annoying zombie.  Anybody have any thoughts on this?”

He looked around the table. 

Eyes met his for the briefest moments before sliding away.  There was a silence, interrupted only by the shuffling of one of the servers and the sliding of ice in the pitcher as he went around refilling water glasses.  He missed his aim with one, water splashing and dripping off the edge of the table, but no one except Thad seemed to notice.   There was a loud thunk as a camera man dropped his camera.  He picked it up with a sheepish grin on his face.  It was a strange kind of grin, Thad thought.  Kind of frozen.

“Baby,” said Z, his voice booming the length of the room.  He slapped his hands together.  “A zombie!  That’s wonderful!”

“It isn’t,” Thad said.  “It really isn’t.”

“You always surprise me, Thad,” Z went on.  “I said to myself – didn’t I, honey –“  turning to the raven-haired woman next to him  “—I said to myself, ‘What surprises will Thad have in store for us tonight?’  There’s always something!  Usually it’s some little honey slashing your tires or throwing wine in your face, but this – this is priceless.”

“I’m not joking,” Thad said.  “There is a zombie in my closet.”

Another silence. 

His guests looked at him, looked at each other, looked at him again. 

“Thad,” Kimmie said tentatively, “are you okay?  You’ve been under so much stress and – you’re still recovering from the, from the, you know, the incident -- and you’ve been partying kind of hard, and –“

“Zombie!”  Thad said, and slammed his fist on the table.  Silverware jumped and clattered.  

He became aware of the server maneuvering behind him.  It was the underwear model.  One long thin arm extended with the water pitcher, and Thad noticed the red paper wristband.  It had TASTY printed all over it.  It was one of those VIP things that Navaid gave out at his club.  Thad also noticed the bluish-white tinge to the skin, and the way it seemed to just drape off the bone.  He rocked back in his chair and glanced up at the man.  The server’s eyes seemed dull, but that could be from the banality of the task at hand, or maybe his customary expression.  Still, Thad could feel his mind struggling to make a connection, one he felt he should probably share with his guests. 

But voices were floating around the table, distracting him.  “….if there really is a girl, and she’s sick or something, maybe we should get her to a doctor.”

“She doesn’t need a doctor,” Thad said.  “She would eat the doctor.”

“Thaddy, why is there a girl in your closet?”

“Zombies aren’t sexy like vampires. Would you ever want to fuck a zombie?”

“Of course not.  Zombies are the walking undead.”
            “But so are vampires.”

“Thaddy, why is there a girl in your closet?”

“Actually,” said the agent, who tended to be a bit of a know-it-all, “zombies don’t technically qualify as the undead.  What appears to be death is actually a brief coma.  They seem to be rising from the dead --  ‘reanimating’ if you will -- when really they’re only waking up.   It’s a virus , not death, that transforms them.”

“I thought it was some kind of voodoo thing.  Haitian zombie powder.”

“Like protein powder.  Only not.”

“That was the old zombie,” the agent’s boyfriend, who was a manager, informed them.  He sipped his wine.  “Now there’s the new zombie.”

“I get it.  Like the old face.  But now there’s the new face.”

“And by the time I’m old enough to need it, we’ll have the new new face.”

“They’d better hurry up.  You’re almost twenty-eight.  Sweetie, don’t throw the bread at me.  I said don’t throw –“

 “There’s this absolutely fabulous urban legend going around – one of my writers and I jumped all over it, fleshed out a treatment that sold to Warner just this morning—“

There were murmured congratulations, a few of which might have been sincere.

“—about a drug.   It was supposed to be this new fabulous club drug, right, keep you up all night, keep you moving.  Like Ecstasy, only better –“

“I never got the whole E thing.  Coke is so much better.”

“It’s a generational thing.”
            “It is not a generational thing!  Everybody does coke!”

“I never do coke.”

“You’re such a liar.  That’s one of the two big lies that women at the clubs will always tell you.  ‘I never do coke.’”

“What’s the other one?”

“It –“

“It’s like cocaine invents other people just for you, so you can go to their parties and talk about yourself.”

 “Some genius was developing it in his parents’ basement in Palo Alto –“

“I lived in Palo Alto during the dot.com boom.  God, the parking.   You could never find parking.  And then I could never remember where I parked, so I’d end up wandering the streets, like some homeless, carless person.”

“Or a pedestrian.”

“Only what he came up with instead was this substance that had some highly questionable side effects –“

“Constipation?”

“Once it gets into your blood it acts like a virus, a kind of flesh-eating virus,” the manager said, “that infects your skin, your muscles and your brain.  It is also contagious.  You understand?  You can slip this thing to someone – “

“Zombie roofie!”

“– infect them, and then watch that infection spread in a very short time.”

“My kid’s birthday party is going to have a zombie theme.”

“You want to turn your kids into zombies?”

“No.  I said a zombie theme.”

“I want to turn his kids into zombies.”

 “This is not what the kid wanted.  He just wanted to party.  Get laid –“

“Ah, the priorities of youth!”

“And middle age.”

“Your middle age.  Some of us become responsible.”

“Calling your girlfriend to make sure she got home okay because you threw her out naked in the pouring rain when your wife got back early does not quality as ‘responsible’.”

“She wasn’t naked.”

“But he thought hey, I’ve got this thing, maybe I can sell it to the military.  You know, for biological warfare or something–“

“It’s like the swine flu.  Only not.”

“So he goes to a friend of the family for advice, and the friend knows someone who knows someone, and so to make a long story short this drug ends up in the hands of a profoundly well-heeled, connected and…esoteric….few –“

“At least it wasn’t the Scientologists.”

“Or the gay mafia.”

“I like the gay mafia.”

“ --who start experimenting with it for their own personal use.  And that,” the manager said triumphantly, “is where our screenplay begins.”

“You’re saying this is an urban legend?  I haven’t heard it.”

“It’s just starting to get passed around.  Actors, mostly.  You know how they are.  But like I said, we jumped on it.”

“How much did the treatment sell for?”

“A lot,” the agent said, and he and his boyfriend exchanged smug little smiles.

A pounding from upstairs.

Repeated thumps so strong and loud that Thad imagined he could hear – or maybe he actually could, his senses seemed so heightened – the closet door rattling in its frame. 

“That’s her,” he said.  “I guess she wants out.”

 “….great scene at the end when all these zombies invade Bel Air, swarming through West Gate and up along Bellagio –“

Thad arranged two lines of cocaine beside his plate, lowered his nostrils and hoovered it all off the tablecloth.  As the pounding sounded again, he sniffed and rubbed his nose and tipped his head back.  He blinked repeatedly.  The light from the chandelier was rather dazzling.

“…don’t know what’s going on,” someone was muttering, “but somebody should maybe do something.”

“Oh, hell, I’ll do it,” Thad said. He got up, misjudging the distance between chair and table, and banged his knee. “I’m the host.  It falls to me.”

“Thaddy?  Why is there a girl in your closet?”

He loped up the stairs, ducked into the bathroom and shut the door.  He dug his cell phone from his pocket.  Why is there a girl in your closet?  Why, indeed?  It seemed to Thad an excellent question.  Before that girl, Andrea, had somehow gotten herself into the closet , she had gotten herself into his house, and how exactly had that transpired?  Special delivery. 

He called Sabine’s number.  He was good with girls’ numbers, just like he was good with their names.   Most of them, anyway.

He got voicemail.  He left a message that he thought was admirably succinct.  He put some cocaine on the edge of his credit card, lifted it to his nostrils, snorted.  Which was when he noticed the silence.

The pounding had stopped.

Footsteps in the hall beyond the bathroom door.

Shuffling, dragging footsteps.

Thad was no idiot.  He knew who that was.

And it occurred to Thad that possibly, very possibly, in his rush to get away from the zombie girl -- and possibly to do another line of coke -- he had forgotten to lock the closet door.

He said, “Oh shit.”

He considered the situation. 

Tried to consider the situation.  He was aware that the level of his thinking was not at its finest.   In fact, it seemed to be getting fuzzier by the minute.  He felt surprisingly good, though.  Strong.  Invincible. And a little hungry.  Although his knee hurt from where he’d banged it against the coffee table.  He hitched up his pant leg.  The bruise was bigger than he would have expected,  a splotch of blue-black spreading just beneath his kneecap.  But he had to focus.  The problem was not the bruise on his leg.  The problem was the zombie currently on its way downstairs to greet his dinner guests.

And yet.

He was still sharp enough to know what he was not hearing. 

He was not hearing screams and sounds of mayhem. 

Somehow another minute passed.  Then he splashed water on his face.  He examined his bloodshot eyes in the mirror.  He wasn’t maybe looking all that great.  Who could blame him, there was a fucking zombie in his house. 

Except…

From downstairs, he heard conversation, even laughter. 

Was it possible he’d gotten it wrong?  Maybe the zombie stuff was all in his head?  Or someone was playing a joke?  Or it was a stunt they were pulling for Rayne’s reality show, because Rayne’s tits just weren’t entertaining enough?

Determined to get to the bottom of this, Thad stalked out of the bathroom and returned to the dining room. 

“Where is it?” he demanded.  “Did a zombie pass by here?”

“Thad,” Kimmie said gently, “sit down.  Take it easy.”

She came up beside him, took his arm and tugged him toward his chair.  He shook her off.  “The zombie,” he said again.  “Where is it?”

“Thaddy!  There’s just some girl who’s, like, really sick, and seriously about to upchuck,and you are embarrassing me.”  Her voice was a hiss.  “Why was she in your closet, Thad?”

“Ashley and Jessica took her into the bathroom,”  Z announced.  “Jesus lord in heaven, Thad my man, what did you do to that little honey?”

Thad pulled in breath and tipped his head back.  He addressed the ceiling.  “SHE’S A FUCKING ZOMBIE.”

“Sit,” Kimmie snapped, and her voice was so authoritative, so unlike her usual kitten self, that Thad found himself abruptly sitting. 

It appeared that dessert had been served.  It was molten chocolate cake.  The hunger stirred again, deep inside him, sending a strange rippling sensation through his gut and groin.  His guests were talking, maybe they were even talking to him, but their words had turned into a strange kind of gibberish.  His entire being was focused on the cake.  Attuned to the cake.  He was one with the cake.  He picked up his fork, and dropped it, and picked it up again.  A little hard to hold this fork in his fingers, something was obviously wrong with it, he’d have to speak to somebody about that, but in the meantime he could manage.  He sent the edge of the fork slicing down through the dessert and dark viscous liquid oozed over the cake and pooled onto the plate.  Voices moved up and down the table and got a little louder, a little agitated.  Someone might have given a little shriek, Thad wasn’t entirely sure, he was so intent on the sauce in his mouth, the thick salty satisfaction of it.  It wasn’t like any chocolate sauce he’d ever had, there was a coppery aftertaste to it, but it was….good.  The cake, too, had a kind of….meatiness…to it, but it was also….good.   He ate all the cake and lifted the plate and licked off all the sauce.  He noticed the sauce on his fingers and hands and licked that off too.  The hunger churned and boiled inside him.  It seemed to have deepened.  The cake was not enough to satisfy.  He wanted more.

“Thad.”

More. 

Kimmie’s face swam in front of him.  There was a trembling in her voice.  “Is this a joke?” 

“What?”

“The cake,” she said.

“What?”

“The cake,” she was yelling now, “the cake, the cake!  Is this a joke?”

His gaze shifted beyond her to the other faces at the table.  But they had all gone kind of blurred, were overlapping with one another, he could no longer pick them apart and didn’t care.  He felt a vibrating in his pocket.  His cell. 

“Stop talking to me,” he said to Kimmie.  His tongue felt like a dead fish inside his mouth, but the words were clear enough.  “Excuse me,” he said to the blurred, meaty-smelling mass that ranged around the table, “I need to take this.” 

Raised chatter behind him.  He tuned it out, because for some reason it was taking an unusual amount of concentration just to put one foot in front of the other.   He didn’t think he could manage the stairs so he headed for the study at the back.  On the way he passed a bathroom.  There were sounds from inside.  Now these sounds, unlike the babble at the table, were interesting to him.  They were wet, crunching, ripping sounds.  He flung his hand against the door and when no one answered he said, “Hello?”  The door wasn’t locked.  He pushed it a little bit open and peered inside.

The zombie girl was crouched on the floor.  Bits of grey matter clung to her lips.  There was blood on her chin and her clothes and the floor and the walls.  Sprawled in front of her were two of his female guests.  He couldn’t put names to them because the faces were mutilated beyond recognition.  The zombie girl reached for one of the bodies and appeared to be doing something to the spinal cord.  Then she lifted her head and looked toward Thad.  She was chewing loudly.

Thad closed the door.

He went into the study.  He pressed the phone to his ear. 

“I want to make sure I understand this,” Sabine was saying.  “You think I sent you some kind of…clubgirl zombie?”

“I think.”  Fighting to form his mouth around the words.  “I think you sent me a girl infected with…with…zombie roofie.  I just want to know.”  Indeed, his only reason at this point seemed to be sheer curiosity.  Maybe because he was so tired.  He could hear – and it seemed to be coming from very far away – some kind of ruckus coming from the direction of the dining room.   “Just want to know,” Thad said again.  It came out: juswannaknow.  “Yes or no?”  Yezzzorno?

Sabine was laughing.  The sound hurt his eardrums.  He held the phone away from his head, waited a moment,  pressed it back to his ear.  She was still laughing, but now there was a wild, hysterical ring to it. 

“I’m sorry,” she said finally.  “I’m sorry.  It’s just so…I mean…Thad, do you have any idea how bizarre that sounds?  Zombie roofie?”

“That is not the point.”

“I mean, if you’re so strung out you can’t distinguish between a normal person and a –“

“This person,” Thad said, “is currently eating two of my guests.”

There was a pause. 

The pause went on for a very long time. 

When she still didn’t say anything, Thad said, “There’s a drug, right?  Some zombie virus roofie thing?  And you got it, right?  One of your weird rich friends hooked you up?”

“Are you smoking crack, Thad?  Are you insane?” 

“Yes or no!  Yes or no!  These are not difficult questions!”

“I didn’t send you the girl. “

“I don’t believe you!”  Donbleeveyou.

 “Whatever.”  She sighed.  “I sent you the chef.”

“The chef,” he said blankly.

“And the servers.  And Rayne’s new camera crew.  I did not send you that girl.  She got infected all on her own.  You got her all on your own.   Fuck it, I should have known it would turn out like this.  You’re so predictable.   But you know what this means, Thad?  It means it’s been spreading.  Already.  That was not supposed to happen.  That was not in the plan.  But this could be the end of the world, and all because you’re an asshole.”

Thad said, “I’m not the one who—“

She hung up.

Elsewhere in the house, someone was screaming.  He heard pounding footsteps, thumping, more screaming.  Something crashed and splintered.  A dog was yipping right outside his door, then there was a kind of squashing sound and the dog wasn’t barking anymore.  He was so tired.  A man was yelling, his voice starting out low and spiraling up through the octaves into some unrecognizable high-pitched keening and then he, too, wasn’t barking anymore.   Thad thought he should probably take a nap.  The cacophony outside the door was only growing, getting on his nerves, so he turned on the stereo and turned up the volume.  Hits from the ‘80s.  Duran Duran was singing about girls on film.

He lay down on the floor, the white shag rug, and closed his eyes.

As he drifted off he thought again of the girl.  Andrea.  He remembered, now, what had bothered him when he let her so-called friends out of the house: none of them had asked after her.  They had abandoned her to him, a stranger with a notorious reputation, the date-rape scandals, the thing with the underage girl.  Maybe they had noticed something wrong with her.  Maybe she had creeped them out.  Maybe they had known her for all of three hours.  But it didn’t seem like the right thing to do.  It was an unusual thought for him to have.  It seemed connected somehow to his memory of being locked inside the foul-smelling trunk of the car, bound and gagged and convinced he was about to die alone, with no one who would remember him for long, or care.  The thought flickered like a candle flame and went out.  And now he was back in the closet with the girl, breathmint taste of her mouth and tongue, the faint tang of tequila, and the cigarette smoke in her hair.  And maybe there had been something strange about her, the limp, sluggish weight of her, but he hadn’t paid much attention at the time.  What he had noticed was the feel of the breast in his hand, the firmness of her thighs, the roundness of that ass, and it was all melting into the others, so many others, sweet young yummy flesh, the warmth and musk and tenderness that he believed could somehow save him, sucking it all up between his teeth, bodies writhing and opening beneath him, and he plunged inside one after the other after the other,  and somehow it wasn’t enough, not yet, he needed more,  he was digging himself into their flesh,  he was opening them up,  he was cracking their bones to get at their marrow.  He was burying himself alive in blood and meat and bone and hungry, so hungry, so hungry –

He opened his eyes.

            The world had gone all jittery.   Shapes and colors came in at him at weird angles.  But he could smell the spilled blood and chunks of meat scattered through the rest of the house and that was all the direction he needed.  He stood up.  He took a moment to orient himself as best he could. 

Then it shambled out to see what the others had left it.