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(an excerpt)
"I’ve got a question for you guys,” I yelled. Heads popped up over cubicle walls like the prairie dogs or gophers or whatever those nasty little rodents are that you whack on the head with a foam mallet in that arcade game. "Since when do gas station attendants talk?”
"They don’t,” shouted thirteen voices in unison. I shoved my finger into my ear. "Well, they’re not supposed to,” someone called from the back of the room.
I squinted to see over the sea of fluorescent-lit faces. "Markham?”
"Yo.”
Everybody in the room was hanging over the tops of their cubicles now, our conversation obviously far more interesting than whatever grunt-work they’d been doing before I took center stage. No wonder we never got the paper to press on time; we all had the attention spans of retarded gerbils whenever something entertaining came around. I dug my thumb against the corner of my eye. “Are you telling me they can talk, they’re just not supposed—”
“That doesn’t sound like reporting! Where the fuck is today’s copy?” A plastic hockey stick slammed against a plexiglass window and everyone dropped back down like a shot had been fired over their heads. I ducked between two rows of carpeted faux-wall and shed my coat, flinging it into my own square as I scuttled past so that if the boss came out, he wouldn’t see me still wearing my coat and know that I’d been late getting in again.
Markham had rolled his chair to the opening of his cubicle. I pushed my foot against the base and sent him rolling back into the partitions, then followed him in.
“One of them seriously talked to you?” His eyes darted from side to side. Maybe more like a hamster than a prairie dog. A fat hamster with a broken exercise wheel.
“Yeah, a new girl at my favorite gas station.” I patted my shirt pocket, then grimaced when I realized the cigarettes were still in my coat.
“Oh, wow!” His face split apart in a grin and he shoved his hair back out of his eyes. “That’s incredible, we’ve been hoping more of them would come forward—”
I held up my hand. “We,” I said. “Who the hell is we?”
He didn’t answer, just spun around in his chair and started scribbling something down on a piece of paper. “Markham,” I said, but he held up one finger and I closed my mouth. Markham was one of those little turds that seemed to be at every job I’d ever held. He wasn’t overweight, exactly, but he was some kind of shape that didn’t really occur in nature—kind of looked like a triangle, actually, with shoulders like a linebacker, but a little girly waist and legs that wouldn’t be out of place on a prima ballerina.
“Here.” He shoved a scrap of paper into my hand and closed my fingers around it, his palms leaving a clammy residue on my skin. I tried hard not to make a face. “I can’t talk about it here,” he said hoarsely. “But come to the place at the time and you’ll see what I mean by ‘we.’”
“The place at the—what the hell are you talking about?”
He pressed a finger to his glistening lips and flicked his eyes toward the ceiling. “The cubicles have ears,” he hissed.
I stepped backwards, holding my hands up in front of me. “Whatever, Markham. See you at … the place at the time.”
“It’ll be good to have you,” he said, and went back to his computer.
I tried not to give Markham any more thought. He was the kind of reporter who probably would’ve done better at The Weekly World News instead of The Post-Standard. He had a nodding acquaintance with factual information, but that was about as close as his relationship with reality got. In conversations with him, it was a good idea to remember that he carried a fuzzy picture of Big Foot in his wallet.
I ducked out of work early and drove north out of the city, bored but not eager to go home. My cable had gone out the night before and when I’d called the company the automated voice on the other end had assured me that they would send a zombie to repair it ‘in the next four to six days.’ I suddenly found myself with no social life to speak of, short of harassing Purnima, so I drove to her Mobil station. There weren’t any cars at the pumps and the zombie was squatting against the side of the building, and when I got out of my car I saw she was smoking a cigarette.
“I didn’t think zombies breathed,” I said, tucking my hands into the pockets of my jacket and rocking back on my heels. She raised an eyebrow at me and flicked the ash off her cigarette. “Didn’t think they talked, either, but I guess you proved that one wrong.”
The zombie shrugged, and it was such a human movement that for a moment I forgot that she wasn’t actually alive. Christ, it was like seeing a statue I’d walked past every day in the park suddenly start giving the St. Crispin’s Day speech. “It’s not like there’s anything worth talking about,” she said lazily, leaning her head against the concrete wall. I’d half-expected her voice to sound rusty, unused, but there wasn’t anything odd about it. “It’s not like we care about politics or gas prices or the weather.”
“Good point.” Smelling the smoke from her cigarette kick-started a nicotine craving that jumped up and down on my nerve endings, and I yanked a Marlboro out of the pack I’d bought that morning. It was already more than half-empty. So much for quitting. The zombie watched me as I flicked my lighter, and I couldn’t get over how normal she seemed. She kind of looked like a science teacher I’d had back in middle school, probably not even thirty years old, all dark hair and lanky arms and legs and a skinny torso that her Mobil uniform shirt hung on awkwardly. There wasn’t any kind of name tag on the zombie’s shirt, and suddenly I was extremely curious about everything. “What’s your name?” I asked.
She raised both eyebrows at me this time. “What makes you think I remember?”
I flung my arms out to my sides in a helpless gesture. “Look, you’re talking to me, I kinda figure you’re not the everyday run-of-the-mill zombie, you know?” I didn’t exactly think that she would remember—because really, why should she, if everything worked the way it was supposed to? It was the same end we were all headed for: kick the bucket, get a mind-wipe,
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