It was a gut-wrenching scream that shook Jake's toughguy persona to his boots. He stood frozen with the three churchmen watching him as if withholding harsh judgment.

Her second scream set him in motion. He spun on his heels and ran back into the brick barbecue joint with the Magnum up like a steel b.o.n.e.r and ready to rock.

Amanda was crouched in a corner, using a chair like a lion tamer to fend off the biggest, scariest zombie Jake had ever seen. The ghoul was a ginormous nightmare, going on seven feet tall in his stocking feet (with several fungus-encrusted toes sticking out of a hole in his sock) and with well over three hundred pounds filling out his stout bloodstained overalls.

Then Jake saw what had ripped the terrible screams from Amanda. Her boyfriend's head rested in a plate of leftover barbecue pork, while his body lay on the floor on the other side of the table, blood still leaking from the stump of his neck. Todd's left eye looked at Jake over the mushy pile of red-sauced pork.

It blinked.

Whether it was a knowing wink or a dying reflex, Jake didn't take time to contemplate. He yelled, "Hey!" and put a .357 slug in the center of the giant zombie's face, making a crooked-toothed mush of his mouth, as well as taking off the tip of his long nose. The back of his head came off and decorated the wall behind his hulking bulk with brain bits and skull chips and black blood.

Amanda took advantage of the zomboid giant's distraction and dashed from the corner to the doorway, where she stopped and turned to see what would happen next.

Jake fired again and took out the monster's right eyeball. Even though his mouth was no longer much of a threat, he was big enough to crush Jake in a bear hug and obviously strong enough to tear off his head (as evidenced by Exibit A, Todd's bodiless noggin), but if Jake blinded the sonofab.i.t.c.h, they could avoid his clutches and disable his arms and legs at their leisure. Or just leave him to go b.u.mp in the eternal night.

Jake put the gun's muzzle in the zombie's face and blew out the other eyeball, taking off most of the rest of the back of the head and turning the wall behind him into as fine a piece of zombie art as could be found anywhere, in Jake's less than humble opinion.

The mammoth zombie shambled and shuffled with arms outstretched as if in a bizarre burlesque of Karloff's most famous monster. Now he was about as scary as a slow-moving mummy in one of those old black & white flicks from the 1940s.

Jake left him to his blind ramble and escorted Amanda outside.

"Sorry about your boyfriend," he said with his arm around her shoulder.

"He wasn't really my boyfriend."

"Yeah, well ..."

Jake removed the empty sh.e.l.ls from the Magnum's cylinder and replaced them with live rounds as he addressed the three men in suits. "He's big but I blinded him and blew out his mouth. You could chop him down with an axe or cut him down to size with a chain-saw, if you're of a mind to. Me and the lady here are heading out for Savannah, Georgia. Good luck to you." Just like that it was decided. What the h.e.l.l, he couldn't let her go alone, could he?

"We heard pilgrims were gathering in Savannah," said the short churchman, getting a sour look on his face. "Something about a female savior?"

"Something wrong with that?" Amanda said with her hands on her hips and fire in her eyes. Jake was glad to see the flash of angry defiance in her. She was going to need that kind of fire to get through what was coming. They all would.

"Uh, no ma'am," said Shorty, casting an uneasy glance up at the mystic eye in the sky.

"There ya go," Jake said, saluting them with the Magnum's muzzle. Then he holstered it and offered Amanda his arm.

"Miss Amanda," he said.

She locked her arm in his and they walked with as much dignity as they could muster to the waiting Mustang.

"G.o.dspeed," somebody said.

Jake opened the pa.s.senger door for her and said, "Whatever the world's got waiting for us, we'll greet it with a grin and a big G.o.d-d.a.m.n gun. And if that ain't good enough, then f.u.c.k it. We'll go out in a blaze."

Amanda said, "Amen, Jake Moon Snake."

Jake said, "Amen."

"My G.o.d, look at that!"

Jake turned to see the three churchmen looking up, the tall one pointing to the sky.

Jake looked up in time to see the great eye blink again.

Then it winked out, leaving only the big empty sky.

ZEE BEE & BEE.

(a.k.a. Propeller Hats For The Dead).

By David James Keaton.

David James Keaton's short fiction has recently appeared in the Comet Press dark crime anthology The Death Panel, as well as Plots With Guns, Thuglit, Espresso Stories, Big Pulp, Six Sentences, Pulp Pusher, and Crooked. He is a contributor to The College Rag and the University of Pittsburgh's online journal Hot Metal Bridge. A graduate student in the MFA program at Pitt, he is also a full-time closed captioner and the ill-fated founder of a Bed & Breakfast where staff would be encouraged to attack the guests. Investors balked. He considers apocalyptic survival scenarios more than most, hopefully.

"Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead."

-Matt 8:22.

We aren't supposed to start moaning and pounding on the house until the sun goes down, but we're taking our jobs real serious these days. Over by the fake gas pump, I can see a shadow crouching down, and know he's finally going to s.h.i.t in the football helmet. I can just make out the Steelers logo as I watch him fill it up to the ear holes. There is no chance of it being worn this time, even if it's hosed out again.

Another shadow takes a swat at the one squatting, but the first shadow just hunches over and keeps concentrating, kind of like a cat still trying to get the ham off someone's sandwich after it's been busted. He just gets lower and lower and lower with each blow, but never moves to pull up his pants. I hear the second shadow demanding an explanation, and I sigh. I don't have to see their faces to know who they are. We've played this game too many times already.

"It's my love letter to the city that gave birth to us," the first shadow explains, now deciding it's a good time to run.

Our instructions were to display precisely one character trait. This, we were told, was because it is both the most efficient way to make a memory in the allotted time, and because it was so hysterical in Dawn of the Dead when they wandered over the hill inexplicably wearing baseball uniforms and ballerina outfits. Most of the boys just want to wear their favorite jersey though, and that means there's almost always too many sports fans to be b.u.mping shoulders among our small band of the undead.

"I'm just saying," the first shadow laughs as it backpedals and falls down under a rain of backhands and elbows, "If we already have a Baseball Zombie, we probably don't need a Football Zombie. But we definitely don't need two Football Zombies."

"Said the Football Zombie."

The fight escalates and someone hustles them behind the shed and out of sight. Tonight, everyone's tired of them already, but I have to admit one thing. The first shadow was right. Pittsburgh was the city that started it all, and it was the reason we were here, if you got right down to it. But it was also hard to see any love in that gesture, and it wasn't even my helmet. As handy as one of those might be during an actual siege, two helmets were obviously one helmet too many.

"Why would that one be wearing a catcher's mitt?" we used to complain during our end-of-season, zombie-movie marathon. "Come on, did he get bit during a game?" But our previous Baseball Zombie was ready to defend any criticism: "It's not that complicated, man. He put the glove on later, just like me, right after he died. He's just pretending."

"Then why can't I have roller skates with this catcher's mitt?"

Because we were told very sternly by our employers never to mix and match. You couldn't wear a cowboy hat and carry a hockey stick, for example. You couldn't wear a Hawaiian shirt and a Santa Claus cap. You couldn't fumble around with a book while wearing a KKK cloak, not just because books are like Kryptonite to the Klan, but because, obviously, what the f.u.c.k would a Library Zombie wield? And you couldn't stand outside a window slowly and comically figuring out how to aim your gun all over again if you were a Face-Painted Big Game Zombie. Yes, it would be hard with a giant foam finger anyway, but that was the Cop Zombie's job, always would be. This rule was particularly hard to follow for our own Cop Zombie, since it was always so tempting for him to make fun of my nervous cough, something I've been afflicted with all my life, but also a trait that makes little sense for him or me.

Especially me, the Truck Zombie.

"Shouldn't it be 'Hit-By-A-Truck Zombie?'" someone's always asking.

At one morning meeting, I tried to explain that it was a result of the impact of the grill of that imaginary 18-wheeler that crushed my chest. I even showed them the cookie-cutter impression, Jesus on the cross, that I'd pressed deep into my skin to simulate a hood ornament. But everyone just scoffed and said that coughing was for the Cigarette Zombie, not me, and I should just continue to hold mine in. As if I could.

I suppress my first cough of the day as my earphone informs me the first couple is already heading for the bas.e.m.e.nt. This means that they will be confronting our first "plant," the hysterical yet tyrannical businessman, followed soon after by a reveal of his wife and their injured daughter. This is about an hour ahead of schedule. The sun isn't even down yet.

I pound harder, furious that they've never seen Night of the Living Dead, or the hundreds of imitators like us, or they would know that running to the bas.e.m.e.nt always means doom. At the very least, they should remember that the trip to the bas.e.m.e.nt comes at the end of the G.o.dd.a.m.n movie. Even Day of the Dead, despite that deceptive t.i.tle, only displays approximately nine minutes and seventeen seconds of total sunlight throughout its entire running time. Almost that whole movie takes place in a bas.e.m.e.nt. It's no accident that it's considered the logical end of the series.

I let my legs give out, start crawling toward the next open window, then snap back up. Sometimes I play it like my legs are broken. Sometimes I even put my pants and shoes on backwards to pretend my body has been turned around completely below the waist from some sort of ma.s.sive impact. But tonight I decide that backwards shoes won't be enough of a hindrance. I turn them back around when no one is looking.

Here's some trivia. I actually knew the actor who got hit by the truck in the '90s remake of Night of the Living Dead. Okay, he was a friend of a friend, but I heard that he had no sweat glands and, legend has it, had to smear chap stick all over his head if he was stuck out in the sun too long during filming. I wish he could play this game with us, because, with that kind of dedication, I know he would probably take it just as seriously as I do, maybe even shame me into turning my shoes back around for good.

I punch through the window and everyone squints as gla.s.s showers faces, forearms, and chests. Cowboy Zombie stops moaning for a second to hold the eye up off his cheek and glare at me. Then he flicks a gla.s.s shard from behind a sticky blue ear and starts to pound again, face slack, all business. Baseball Zombie shakes his head, brushes his jersey with his catcher's mitt, and waits patiently for me to notice him. Then he gives me a shrug under his perpetual slouch, jaw still swinging, but the a.s.sault momentarily forgotten. I shrug back, then turn away to grab a pink and panicked hand before the wood covers the hole and a deafening burst of hammering finally displays some respect for their situation.

Beyond the hand, I catch a glimpse of some weary eyes inside the house, and I'm glad to see they're finally realizing how long this game might last.

They got the idea by trying to be the last bed and breakfast in the phone book. Mags came up with the name "Z B & B" specifically to trump Youngstown's Country Inn. And it was this name and the meaningless "Z" that started her boyfriend, now husband, Davey Jones, thinking about zombies, of course. Soon after, as an experiment, they were involved in an altercation at an Italian dinner theater/fake wedding combo that was touring the Midwest, "Tony Baloney's Reception." It was a gimmick that Mags called, "vaguely racist bulls.h.i.t," although she did eventually admit that getting shoved into a ten-tier cake while Mafioso caricatures staged a fist fight might be a good story to tell a party after enough time had pa.s.sed.

"Tragedy plus time equals comedy and all that," she reminded Davey the morning after his headfirst Pete Rose cake slide.

"But wait!" he exploded over corn flakes, b.l.o.o.d.y twist of toilet paper popping from his nostril. "What if zombies were trashing the s.h.i.t out of that wedding reception? Would you pay to see that? I'd pay to see that! h.e.l.l, I'd pay to do that." And pow! they suddenly found themselves with an untapped gold mine of couples who would rather spend the night of their honeymoons pretending they were hiding from zombies instead of tapping gla.s.ses with forks to encourage some failed actors to stage a kiss.

"Zee Bee & Bee?" Davey Jones mumbled. "Sounds German."

Whether it was a new groom wanting to posture and protect his woman during a life-threatening emergency or the blushing bride wanting to demonstrate how she would, much to his surprise, bloom in an apocalyptic crisis, business was good right out of the gate.

And when they hired me (their second cousin and initiator of years of Sunday night zombie film festivals) to amp up the threat level of the scenario, word spread fast. I helped hand-pick a crew, and by the next fall, we had things up and running.

Two years after we'd started making enough money to think about our first 4:00 a.m. commercial spot, a movie popped up in the video stores called Dead and Breakfast. Everyone panicked a little. But, luckily, it bore no resemblance to our original idea. This movie was just another attack on a house, their storyline treating everything as if it was actually happening, something even the occasional survivalist couple rarely considered for long. Clever t.i.tle though, we all had to admit.

And it was my idea to have the evening start with Mags and Davey Jones meeting two couples at the bottom of the long driveway leading up to the house. This is where they would sign the waiver. And it was also my brainstorm for the two couples to arrive about an hour apart. This gave one couple a chance to get settled a bit and locked in before the other couple came banging on the door. See, now the door was their door, just because of that extra hour. And there was always only one bed between the two couples to encourage compet.i.tion and arguments, another good reason to keep the arrivals staggered. It was surprising how much controversy was caused by one couple getting an unfair opportunity to toss a suitcase onto a bed first. Mags chalked that up to the influence of reality television.

She eventually started profiling them carefully to choose which couple was most likely to not want to give up that bed without a fight. We were never sure how she figured this out. There was talk of Mags going through trash cans and peeking through windows of potential applicants. But she always seemed to pick the right couple to go into the house first. Sometimes I pretended she picked me.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on?! Where did you come from?!"

Inside the house, someone is screaming, and I don't need my earphone to hear it. It's a Plant, not a Camel. That's what we called the guests, "Camels." Cigarette Zombie sort of made it up. Something about the t.i.tle of Albert Camus' short story "The Guest" being a translation of the French word "L'Hote," meaning both guest and host. According to her, this was "precisely" what we were asking them to be. She tried to get us to call them that for awhile, but we couldn't p.r.o.nounce it and we had no idea what she was talking about. But they did become "Camus" for awhile, and that made her smile. At least that's what somebody told me. I've never actually seen her do this myself. Smile I mean. Then the word got changed to "Camels" for good, and she has scowled ever since. Even though we tried to convince her it was based on Aesop's Fable about "familiarity breeding contempt," the one where the Arabs first see a camel and are all terrified, but by the third sighting they're putting saddles on it (because, hey, wasn't that "precisely" what we were doing?), it didn't matter. She never got on board with the term.

But it isn't a Camel that's screaming. I can tell by the level of acting ability. And it can't be Tom. Not yet. He should still be in his locked room, waiting to be discovered if and when they find the key in the bucket of nails under the sink. For now, he should simply be happily rustling some aluminum foil, maybe scratching at the door or floor every so often, maybe making just enough noise for someone to start wondering what's in there, mouse or monster.

For a second it's silent, then I hear that girl, the newlywed, making her "tisk" noise at something that disgusts her. I heard her doing it an hour earlier when I was hiding in the bushes watching her new husband sign the waiver. I remember thinking that if there was some fine print in that contract that she missed and was having second thoughts about, it was too late now.

I always hated those noises, those impatient clicks and hisses people always do when they're annoyed. I had a girlfriend once who ruined every movie by sucking her bottom lip and making a sharp snap, sorta like gum popping, whenever something dramatic happened on screen. It was especially excruciating in the theater, and I found myself taking her to more comedies than I ever wanted to see. And at a zombie movie, she would "tisk" so many times that one nearby theatergoer actually asked if she was shuffling a deck of cards. I start thinking this particular little noise might screw up our game, maybe make some other zombie out here, a zombie with less patience than me, try a little harder to make her stop, maybe by pulling her tongue out from its root slow and steady as a flower you don't want to break off too soon.

In my earpiece, I can hear the honeymooners talking about a shower curtain. They are exchanging the kinds of details you'd guess should have already surfaced before their marriage.

"... well, my dad used to flip out if we messed up the bathroom. With two boys, it got real messy real quick ..."

"See, I told you it wasn't blood. Somebody dyed their hair in here recently, that's all."

"... and then when my little sister came along, she was one of those vacation babies by the way, that's why there's that age gap, she'd trash the place and dad never said peep. She'd change her hair from black to red to green and get it all over the walls and he'd just sigh ..."

"This sure looks like blood though."

"... and when I tried to tell her how he used to lose his mind if we got one drop of urine behind the toilet seat, she wouldn't believe us. I mean, a little yellow on the toilet is a lot more understandable than a green bathtub ..."

"You know what? If they try too hard to scare us, I might call their bluff."

Bad things happen sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. It comes with the territory when things really start rolling and the emotions spike: Overly aggressive behavior, minor theft and vandalism, a general disrespect for the situation. But to discourage these shenanigans, we discovered early on a few simple things we could do. We didn't want to hurt anyone, but we did need to convince people we were really trying to get a hold of them.

So Davey Jones told us to always go for the meat.

"Avoid the bones," he said. "If you look for spots that an actual zombie would prefer to bite into and instead grab with your fingers, you will usually hit a spot less likely to inflict pain."

He was right. The skulls and elbows and knees were a lot of trouble in our hands, just as they would disappoint a hungry mouth. But nothing caused as much trouble as an agitated Camel. Therefore, in the wavier, it clearly stated that they could be expelled from the house by any staff or Camel ("For the sake of the human race!" our Plants would declare to the rest of the survivors) the minute they crossed that line into purposeful injury or, as described more explicitly in the contract, "catching a zombie's finger under your hammer more than three times."

That part was easiest to remember. Three fingers and they were out.

And it wasn't fun to get kicked out. Since they would have already turned in their car keys, they'd quickly understand that they could either sit in a ditch all night and watch their girl or boyfriend have all the fun or they could allow themselves to be gently steered along the path of our reasonable and satisfying story line. However, if they were really ornery (like that little f.u.c.ker last fall with the cherry bombs), they would be held down and forced to take a slathering of blue paint to the face and, if they wanted to, attack the house with the rest of our staff. We called it "getting bit," and it always surprised us how many decided to join in on the pounding. Probably because it was a choice between either punching a door or walking aimlessly around the woods, two things a real zombie would probably be doing with his Sat.u.r.day night anyway.

"Why the need to give everyone advice all the time? You get that from your uncle."

"Just trying to help you make the most of that wood. And why bring my uncle into ..."

"Tell everyone the advice he gave you the first time you got on the bus to Kindergarten."

"He said, 'Be careful.'"

"Uh, no. What else did he say?"

"Yeah, tell us."

"He said, 'If you stick your hand down a girl's pants and it feels like you're feeding a horse, you're in trouble.'"