He carefully unzipped the body bag embracing Team 22’s cadaver—the one that Sheri Trent had spattered with her own blood after she’d been bitten. Trent must’ve gotten her shit together when she saw the thing twitch—it too, had a deflated eye.
But, there were all those daily casual exchanges from table to table . . . and he counted two more blue sheets tagging corpses in the room . . . and the common graves where, Strothers had no doubt, the “disease” spread quietly underground and from place to place to place.
He snorted three lines of meth and joked inwardly that dismembering the bodies he was sure were infected, was essentially hackwork.
In his mind’s eye he saw the dead woman sit up and lunge, yellowed teeth bared. He saw the bloody pocket of the wound in Sheri’s arm. He cut and flensed, retching over his shoulder. Strothers picked up a surgical power saw, intent on wresting the femur from the pelvis. “For Christ’s sake,” he said aloud. He was trained to work carefully, what he was about to do was a waste. Besides, he hated the whine of the saw. If he proceeded cautiously—with precision—the bones could be articulated, he reminded himself, and used in schools and labs and hospitals.
There was a kitchen off the lounge where he could boil up the remains. Hell, if it came to it, he could cart them home in plastic garbage bags and fire up his own stove.
It was going very well, he was whistling when the lab door suddenly burst open.
He started; sure for a brief second that a mindless, shambling corpse that had once been Sheri Trent had come to gnaw his flesh.
“Security!” A female officer with blond hair advanced on him.
More cops piled into the room.
Strothers followed their gaze from the flensed bodies to the baggie spilling white powder cheerily across an empty chrome table.
“You’re under arrest!”
“You don’t understand—they’re infected!” he shouted.
He felt his arms jerked backwards, cold metal handcuffs bit into his wrists.
Outside, through the windows, Strothers could see the flashing red lights of town and state police cars.
He watched the crimson glow play over the pale skin and ruined muscles of the cadavers, giving them an unearthly vibrancy—a warmth, he was certain, that would soon return them to life.
I Waltzed with a Zombie
Ron Goulart
It was the only movie ever made starring a dead man. This was back in the late spring of 1942 and Hix, the short, feisty, and unconquerably second-rate writer of low budget B-movies, was one of the few people who knew about it. He’d hoped to turn the knowledge to his advantage. But that didn’t quite work out.
His involvement commenced on an overcast May afternoon. He was pacing, as best he could, his diminutive office in the Writers Building on the Pentagram Pictures lot in Gower Gulch.
Carrying his long-corded telephone in one hand and the receiver in the other, he was inquiring of his newest agent, “In what context did Arthur Freed use the word ‘tripe,’ Bernie?”
“He applied it to your movie treatment, the one I was foolish enough to let you cajole me into schlepping over to MGM,” replied Bernie Kupperman from the Kupperman-Sussman Talent Agency offices over in the vicinity of Sunset Boulevard. “The full sentence was, ‘How dare you inflict such a load of tripe on me, Bernie?’ ”
“That’s not so bad. He could have called it crap instead of tripe.” Hix, his frizzy hair flickering, halted just short of an unstrung mandolin that lay in his path.
“Actually, Hix, he did, but I never use that kind of language over the phone.”
Sighing, the short screenwriter set his telephone down on his wobbly desk atop a scatter of glossy photos of starlets, drafts of scripts, three old issues of Whiz Comics, and a paper plate that once had held a nutburger. “Alas, that’s the curse of being ahead of my time with my ideas.”
“Two weeks ahead isn’t that far,” suggested his agent. “Oh, and Freed, hardly using any profanity at all, did mention that he’d heard that Val Lewton is planning to do a picture with the same title over at RKO.”
“What I hear is that Lewton and his heavy-handed director Tourneur are probably both about to get the bum’s rush out of the studio before they have time to make another clinker like Cat People.” Hix gazed at a spot on the far wall where a window would’ve been if his office actually had a window. “More importantly, Bernie, Lewton’s flicker is entitled I Walked with a Zombie, while my proposed blockbuster enjoys the far superior title of I Waltzed with a Zombie.”
“Even so, Hix, we—”
“Furthermore, pal, Lewton’s movie is going to be just another trite lowbrow effort aimed chiefly at the Saturday matinee crowd, mostly pubescent boys who flock into movie palaces to eat popcorn, whistle at Rita Hayworth, and pass gas,” he pointed out. “My effort is a big budget musical, the very first horror musical comedy ever conceived by man.”
“So far nobody—”
“Face it, buddy, the concept of a Technicolor musical in the horror genre is, well, both brilliant and unique.” When Hix’s head bobbed enthusiastically, his frazzled hair fluttered. “Were I given to hyperbole, I’d dub it super-colossal.”
After a few silent seconds, his agent told him, “Estling over at Star Spangled Studios wants you for another Mr. Woo quickie.”
Hix sank down into his slightly unstable swivel chair, sighing again. “As a potential Oscar winner,” he complained, “I ought to be working for somebody who’s not as big a moron as Estling.”
“He’s offering five hundred bucks more than you got for Mr. Woo at the Wax Museum.”
“Okay, tell him I’ll write it,” said Hix. “But keep pitching I Waltzed with a Zombie.”
“Only if it doesn’t look like it’s going to result in my suffering bodily harm.”
Hix hung up and slid the phone toward the edge of his desk. “Twenty-nine smash B-movies since I came here six years ago and they still treat me like a hack.”
The telephone rang.
“Mr. Hix’s private office,” he answered in, he was quite certain, a very convincing imitation of a very polite British servant.
“Listen, Hix, I’ve got to talk to you.”
“That can be arranged, Marlys,” he assured her. “Still unhappy about how things are going for you at Paramount? You’ve only been under contract for a little over three months after all.”
“I still haven’t been cast in one darn movie, Hix,” Marlys Regal told him. “But this is something else, something maybe worse. Can you meet me in the Carioca Room at the Hotel San Andreas on Wilshire at five?”
“I can, sure. But what exactly—”
“Listen, besides writing a whole stewpot of movies that are always on the lower half of double bills, I know you’ve done some amateur detective work now and then.”
“I wouldn’t apply the word amateur to my work in the ’tec field, kid. In fact—”
“You also know a lot about spooky stuff, occult matters?”
“We’ve been keeping company for well over a month. In that time you must’ve deduced that I’m an expert in the field.”
“Particularly zombies?”
“Well, sure. My as-yet unsold epic musical is about . . . Whoa now. Are you hinting that you know something about real life zombies?”
“I am, yes, and I’m afraid I could be in trouble.”