She clambered up, her bare feet finding purchase in the wall of earth. Then, exhausted from this effort, she fell belly-first in the grass. She looked dead. Alexander Vinokourov went over to sniff the air around her. I was about to nudge her with my foot when she rolled over and sat up.
“Are you all right?” I asked, squinting at her.
There was mud caked in her eyelashes.
“No,” she said simply. Again, she tried passing the joint back to me.
I looked all around. The woman was, after all, at least half-naked and totally covered in mud and we were just a few feet away from Newman Road, the street that skirts one side of the cemetery and leads to the dump. Some guy in a pickup truck was bound to drive by at any moment, get turned on at the sight of my muddy friend, and come running over.
There was no one around though. The road was quiet and my lust for the joint outweighed any concern about contagion. I took another hit and felt a little calmer.
“Do you want me to walk you over to the hospital?” I asked. If I took her to the cops, they’d eventually pack her off to the psych ward anyway. It would be kinder to just take her there directly.
“But I’m not ill, I’m dead. Or was dead.” She said it with a straight face.
“Ah.”
“You don’t believe me. But it’s true. I was dead. Buried. Then, two days ago, I woke. There were sounds. Earth-moving machines. Digging us up, digging up the pine boxes that we were buried in. In 1924.”
I sighed. I looked at my dog. My dog looked at me. “I’m sorry. I can walk you to the hospital if you’d like, but that’s all I can do.”
“Noooo,” she shook her head. Her muddy hair moved.
“Then I can’t help you.” I turned my back, even as she called out to me.
“My name is Annabelle,” she said, trying to humanize herself, imprint herself on me.
I ignored her, though I could feel her eyes on my back as I retreated.
I got home, took Vino’s leash off, then immediately smoked another joint. I usually don’t smoke at home for fear of attracting neighbors wanting to bum weed off me. But after you’ve had an encounter with a woman who claims to be dead, it is sometimes necessary to smoke at home.
I was hungry. I walked into the kitchen with its bright yellow linoleum tiles, relentlessly cheerful, even at night. I opened the fridge. There was meat for Vino, but not much for me. A shrunken head of lettuce. A pear. A jar of almond butter. Maybe I’d walk over to the tortilla truck on Warren Street.
I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the full-length mirror. My black T-shirt and jeans were covered in mud and dog hair. My own hair, well past my shoulders, was in nests. I leaned over the big porcelain sink and threw water on my face. I ran my fingers through my hair. I put on lip gloss.
I was looking at myself in the mirror when suddenly Annabelle appeared there, standing right behind me.
I screamed, reached for the nearest object, and pointed it at her. It was a hairbrush.
“How did you get in here?” I shoved the hairbrush, bristles-first, into Annabelle’s stomach.
“Ouch!” She looked like I’d hurt her feelings more than her physical vessel. You left me there, left all of us there,” she said. Her eyebrows moved like muddy caterpillars as she motioned beyond the bathroom.
I craned my neck and saw two more muddy women behind her. I screamed again.
Vino barked.
“Get the fuck out of my house!” I attacked Annabelle with my hairbrush, backing her against the sink.
“Shhh, please, hush,” Annabelle said.
“I will not hush. You hush. And get out of my house.”
She didn’t move and the other two just stood there too, staring.
I felt nauseous. “What are you doing here?” I asked Annabelle. “You followed me?” I was having trouble breathing.
“We need help,” Annabelle said. “We’re hungry. Me and Birdie and Sophia.” She motioned at her compatriots. Birdie was tall and skinny, Sophia short and curvy. They were both covered in mud just like Annabelle. How they had walked through downtown Hudson without getting arrested or raped, I wasn’t sure. It’s a laissez-faire town, but not that laissez.
“And what, I look like a fucking soup kitchen?”
“Please help us.” This entreaty came from Sophia, the shortest of the women.
“Please get out of my house.”
Vino barked again but it’s not as if he did anything useful, like look menacing for example.
Now, Birdie, the tall one, started talking in an excited high voice telling me that all three of them had been murdered some ninety years earlier by a man named Giacomo.
“Giacomo?” I said numbly.
“He was our pimp,” explained Sophia, putting a fist on her hip and tilting her chin.
“You’re hookers?”
“Whores, yes,” Annabelle nodded. “And don’t go putting on airs, it’s not like you’re some sort of aristocrat, Zoey.”
“No. It’s not like that at all.” I didn’t remember telling her my name. “So you were hookers and your pimp named Giacomo killed you ninety years ago,” I said. “Why did he do that?”
“We stole money from him,” Birdie said. “And then he poisoned us.”
“It was a very painful death,” Sophia said.
“Can you excuse me a minute, please?” I said. “I need to pee.”
I pushed Annabelle out of the bathroom and closed the door, keeping my dog with me so they didn’t try doing weird dead-person stuff to him.
I took several deep breaths.
I had my phone in my pocket. Could I call Martin? Ask him to come back? Tell him that there were three zombie hookers in my house? Probably not.
I thought of calling my best friend, Janie, but she was two hours away, in Manhattan, and would probably be completely useless in this situation. Almost anyone would be. I peered through the bathroom door keyhole. They were still standing there. Like zombies. Staring at the bathroom door, willing me to come back out.
“We’re really hungry!” Sophia called out.
I wondered if they could see through doors.
I didn’t know what to do, so I fed them.
They ate ice cream, smoked all the pot in my Wyoming wallet, then passed out on my sleeper sofa.
As they slept, I sat in my armchair and watched them. I was fascinated, horrified.
I got up and tiptoed closer to get a better look. Birdie, bony and elegant with a sharp nose and cheekbones like knives, was lying on her back with her mouth open. Sophia, round and soft, was curled onto her side. Annabelle, the exotic, dark-haired one, lay flat on her stomach. They looked almost lovely, innocent.
I got my laptop and went back to the chair, Googled zombies. This yielded what you’d expect. The tongue-in-cheek Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness tips issued by the Center for Disease Control. Definitions of zombies as moaning, brain-eating monsters, spawned to popularity by George Romero. Viral ghouls that bore little resemblance to the sweetly slumbering dead hookers on my sofa.
I sent an e-mail to an acquaintance, Doon, a neuroscientist with an interest in things that science can’t easily explain.
I pointed my phone at the zombies, snapped a photo, and sent it with the e-mail. I don’t KNOW Doon very well. He’s the son of an Alzheimer’s patient I used to care for as one of my odd jobs. He would probably completely ignore my e-mail. Or maybe refer me to a mental health professional.
I wondered if my zombies were contagious. I wondered if there were more of them. If maybe dozens of dead denizens had been reanimated when the earth-moving machine had dug up that swath of land at the cemetery’s edge. Then I went to sleep.
When I woke, I had forgotten about the dead hookers. Vino was at the foot of the bed and wagged his tail when he saw I was awake. I scratched him behind the ear. He licked my nose. I was heading into the kitchen when I remembered. Mostly because there they were, on my sleeper sofa.
Fuck.
As they started to stir I noticed they didn’t look so good. All three seemed sort of desiccated, and as Birdie unfurled herself from the sleeper sofa, I could swear I heard her bones creaking.