He looks up to us all one last time, his left eye now closed completely, the other one dilated 8-ball black, as red fingers of brain and burger spiderweb down the side of his neck. He points up to his beloved European Indian Zombie to quote one final movie before his arms hang limp like balloon strings a week after your birthday.

"It should have been you," he croaks.

His face hits the ground so hard it disappears up to the ears.

"Our hearts have stopped," the news anchor sighs. "But our brains just keep going."

Right before we break through all the half-a.s.s defenses and into the house for good, I hear a strange voice on the television. One I'm not related to. A Camel must have found the real news broadcast and left it on. They would have already known that hearts were stopping everywhere, of course, as most of theirs had, too. But seeing the real news, hearing it out loud, as well as all of us pounding on each other instead of the walls, must have empowered them to accept everything as real enough to finally fight for the house.

But I am still convinced that one of the Camels has a pulse, that one of them came into our game alive as h.e.l.l. I'm sure of this. The towel he dropped when he compulsively avoided the door handle was my first clue. And now, judging by the gasping and bubbling in my ear, this man is probably upstairs with Underwater Zombie's head in the toilet, trying in vain to drown him.

I already miss Sour Towel Zombie. At a moment like this, he would name-drop the n.a.z.i Zombie movie Shock Waves again. Just like I did. We loved that flick to death though, huge fans of the tasteless ending where hapless victims were forced to hide in ovens to escape.

To my right, Bobby Z has broken into the living room, and now he's choking out one of the other Camels who's trying desperately to warn his new bride through coughs and sputters. When his eyes roll back, Bobby Z helpfully moves the Camel's mouth and plays ventriloquist as the bridge gets low and tries to hide.

"Hey, baby!" Bobby Z shouts. "Ain't got no heart, but I love you! You ever hear that song that goes 'Stars are dying in my chest until I see you again?' That's our song! Wait, where are you going?"

Bobby Z gets the Camel down and out for good with a knee in his windpipe, cartilage crackling kinda like bubble wrap, but maybe a little more satisfying, judging by Bobby's smile. And popping bubble wrap was pretty G.o.dd.a.m.n satisfying for our crew, especially when we got big orders of fake teeth and barbecue sauce.

Then Bobby starts turning over furniture to find the bride. When he gives the Camel a heel to the temple as an afterthought, I hear a "Tisk!" from the corner and suddenly remember that newlywed's familiar but annoying habit. Bobby Z seems ready to find her with the next chair he'll flip, but he's having a lot of trouble with one of his hands, now flapping alarmingly at the wrist. If Sour Towel Zombie was here, he'd tell him: "It's just like Dr. Frankenstein said in Day of the Dead, 'We are them, just functioning less perfectly.'"

With some extra effort he upends the couch, and there she is tucked behind it, deep under some red cushions, burrowing like a tick. More like a "tisk." I watch her reach out to her husband on the floor, fingers tickling the knee-shaped crater in his throat, seemingly trying to coax it to inflate. Some air hisses from him as if her fingernail finds a tire valve, and over a gurgle he points a quivering wedding ring toward her.

I suddenly remember that sinking feeling you always get when you find out a girl you're into has a boyfriend, that feeling when you can tell something changed her mind about having the best conversation with you, and they decide to bring up their relationship out of the blue with a sneaky, off-hand comment like, "Yeah, my boyfriend likes cold chicken and barbecue sauce, too." A feeling that spent most of your adolescence hidden in your stomach under your shirt like a dead animal you were trying to sneak into the house.

When I say I "remember" this feeling rather than feeling it, it's because, without a pulse, I'm long past actually feeling anything.

Then a dripping Camel starts stomping down the stairs, rifle slung over his shoulder, dragging another dead bride behind him, her head tracing her path like the train on her wedding dress probably did the night before. I'm not sure what he just did to Underwater Zombie, but it's clear we're losing staff quickly. Right as I begin to suspect I'm being watched, I suddenly notice Davey Jones sitting in the one upright chair, watching us all in amus.e.m.e.nt. He's clapping his hands slow and sarcastic.

"You guys did awesome," he laughs. "By that, I mean you died awesome."

f.u.c.k him, always playing disappointed dad. How many times can you disappoint someone before you begin to look forward to doing it? About nine.

Davey Jones hands me an orange juice to snap me out of it. Always an orange juice with him with alcohol being recently outlawed. For awhile, we had even tried one of those popular Zombie Cliche Drinking Games (was that really Third Stage Zombie's idea?), but we won't be doing that again any time soon. Among the complications of such a game when applied to our production ...

First off, "Do A Shot When Arm Reaches Through Window" was problematic because it made lightweights hesitate to push through when needed. Next, "Knock Drink Out Of Nearest Gnarly Hand If Martyrdom Slows Down Flick" caused too many instances of fights, brooding, then more fights, not to mention wasted alcohol. Oh, yeah, "Shotgun Beer If/When Motherf.u.c.ker in Uniform Pulls Double-Cross, Shotgun Two If Motherf.u.c.ker Is Carrying Shotgun." That included Army and Navy T-shirts, so we were faced as soon as the Bobbys punched the time clock. And, of course, "Claim Beer of Closest Corpse if Character Shows Confusion About Living or Dead Status Of Approaching Loved One" just caused severe depression as we pondered our own situation.

Oh, yeah, it was "Drink Ninety Beers If Hero Displays Cowardice Or p.u.s.s.y Saves The Day," but no one ever did, so don't worry. Because crazy s.h.i.t like that only happened in the movies.

And who knew we were asking for trouble with the staple "Drink Nonstop For Duration of Tom Savini Cameos?" Well, try it when the man himself visits one weekend with a cease-and-desist order about copyright infringement.

We were so hammered after chugging until he stumbled off that we almost had to change everyone's name to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Zombie in the morning.

Me and Cigarette Zombie still watch one together every night. In front of our own TVs though, miles apart. Synchronized start times are exactly 9:00. Even though, as of today, it was likely we had finally seen them all, I was hoping we could start at the beginning of the pile all over again. It was the perfect way to watch them, hundreds of videotapes we'd stockpiled from every dusty, out-of-business video store in the state, cover art bleached white by decades of sunlight cooking them through the windows, not a single t.i.tle left to read. We didn't have to talk about the movie before, during, or after either. It was enough just to know she was watching the movie at the same time I was so that I could imagine what parts would make her laugh. I was sure she laughed a lot when there was no one there to verify it.

Still weaving my way through corpses, I see a zombie wearing the brown, crusty football helmet again, stiff-arming everyone in its path. Picking up speed, it lowers a shoulder and puts American Indian Zombie backwards through a boarded-up window before he can react. Then it dips his head, crashes through a door and is gone, leaving a piece of shredded tube sock and skin in the teeth of the door frame left behind.

Suddenly surrounded by unfamiliar faces, pink and blue alike, I recklessly reach to grab someone even though I know this would break the rules and end the game. Mags sits next to Davey Jones, and I notice both her feet are facing the wrong way and think, "Hey, that's my job!" She's singing the Rolling Stones and giggling.

"You make a dead man come ..."

American Indian Zombie is sobbing and climbing outside, then back inside. I turn to offer a sympathetic hand, and he shoves me away. He points to the clutter of the room as if to explain that's why he's crying. "The pollution ..." he mutters like the old commercial before the Camel's next shot brings him down, ragged jawbone and pinwheeling ear riding the bullet and half his dreamcatcher necklace out the door.

Then the Camel squeezes an eye to take aim at me, and I hold up my hands in surrender.

"Whoa, hey, wait a second," I say as he opens his squint. "Uh, so, did you know there are zombies in the Bible?"

I keep trying to distract him as I back up.

"I mean, besides Jesus? No, I'm telling you, it's true. Where's Matt? He'll tell ya. I can't remember the exact pa.s.sage. Let me go find a Bible. Should be easy to locate. This is a hotel, right?"

The Camel lowers the rifle, eager to debate.

"Did you know that the reliability of the Bible rests on 5,300 ma.n.u.scripts, source material, and eye-witness accounts?" he asks me. "Therefore, if discrediting the Good Book is your goal, there are more facts behind it than any other cla.s.sic history or literature, including Homer and Aristotle."

"Dude," I shrug. "Zombies in the Bible though. I'm just saying."

The barrel of the gun taps the floor as he ponders this, and it gives me enough time to get out of the room. Behind me, I hear the rifle shot, and I know without looking back that European Indian Zombie, a.k.a. Second-Year Cultural Studies Drop-Out Zombie, a.k.a. Rachel, has just taken a bullet through the red dot on her forehead. Right where it belongs.

And at this time, I make the mistake of running for the bas.e.m.e.nt door.

The stairs turn left at the bottom. So, in theory, you could stand on the top step and not be seen by anyone hiding in the dark. So that's where I wait, counting to a hundred. I think back to one time I shared an apartment with this girl and how I used to come home late from work and stand outside my own door, key in my hand, waiting forever to go in. I had no logical reason for my actions that I could reasonably explain to anyone if they were to walk up and see me frozen there, especially if she were to open the door before I did. I just couldn't face her sometimes. I think that must be it. I just needed to be alone on the steps for as long as I could. Five hours was the record, and I don't break it tonight.

Cigarette Zombie is sprawled out on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor, her eyegla.s.ses two jagged rings of blood and shards. Seeing this is worse than if her skull had been shattered, because I'm reminded of a story she told me about her father first realizing she couldn't see clearly. She had been skiing with her dad, and they were standing at the snack counter between slopes. He asked her what she wanted, and she couldn't see any of the choices on the giant menu behind the clerk's head. Cigarette Zombie confessed to me that she had tried to be sly and get her dad to read the menu for her, trying to make a joke out of it. But he saw right through the ruse and took her to the eye doctor soon after. She said she was ashamed of her lie until she wore the c.o.ke bottles to school and the kids started picking on her, just like she knew they would. She said she'd rather lie, or stumble around blind b.u.mping into things any day of the week, than relive that first day of 3rd grade.

And when she saw the call for zombies in the "help wanted" pages decades later, well, that had nothing to do with anything. Except the stumbling part.

"The job just sounded hilarious," she said.

Reaching for her broken gla.s.ses, I see another Camel curled up against the far bas.e.m.e.nt wall, another bride, eyes watching me close. How many f.u.c.king brides were there? I must have looked past her when I first came down, possibly mistaking her for part of the house, something that used to happen to Cigarette Zombie all the time back in school. She said she wouldn't see anybody at all until the second or third day of cla.s.s, even after she got her gla.s.ses.

The Camel in the corner has found the car battery, but I can see that she didn't use it to power the portable radio like she was supposed to. From the looks of things, she seems to have been trying to cook the chicken we stored down there for fake entrails. Either that or bring a chicken back to life. I imagine her down here in the dark before she died, sparking the jumper cables over a pile of barbecue. Sour Towel Zombie would have loved that s.h.i.t. He definitely would have warned her of the dangers of zombie poultry, as detailed in the buddy-cop zombie film Dead Heat. Then he would have warned her to watch her feet because of the horrific consequences of reanimating anything more than once, as demonstrated in the same film. And witnessed here every weekend for about 300 bucks a head.

I creep closer and raise her chin out of the shadows. She allows me to do this, and I see that she is striking. I knew a girl once who defined love at first sight as, simply, "The Whoosh," something about the rush of blood from the brain to places on your body you need it less. She admitted this didn't translate well out loud from the definition in her head. I remember Sour Towel Zombie scoping this girl out on the driveway when she was signing the waiver, but I guess I forgot to really look at her until now. The end of the world will do that to you every time.

"Check her out," he had whispered. "A sable hat? What, is she Russian or something? 'Cause if she is, I'd f.u.c.k her all the way to Gorky Park ..."

"You do that," I'd said.

"... I'd leave a stain on her head like Gorbachev ..."

"Sounds more threatening than romantic."

"... she'd call my c.o.c.k Glasnost ..." and on and on and on until someone finally told him that "Glasnost" wasn't the name of the movie he was thinking of.

"You need more salt," the Camel bride whispers to me, her dead eyes milky and staring right past.

"The chicken needs more salt?" I ask her.

"No, the driveway," she answers softly. "We almost slipped when we ran up to the house. There was nothing about that in the contract. We could sue you, you know."

"You know what you can use instead of salt? Kitty litter."

"Does that mean instead of kitty litter you can use salt?" She smiles, maybe seeing me.

"Yeah, if you want your cat to poof out like a pine cone and run around with a red a.s.s." I smile back.

"More salt." She's looking past me again. "Just tell someone you need more salt. Someone could slip." She punctuates this with one weary "tisk" then slumps. I put my head to her chest. No heartbeat, nothing. But it doesn't mean a thing. I should have checked while she was talking.

As I pull her arm up to my mouth, I fight the urge to tell her that she already slipped, and that we don't need salt. We don't need anything.

She'll taste perfect just the way she is. And blood on her wedding night is expected.

I grab both her feet in one hand and raise them high, crossing her legs at the ankles and holding them above my head. With my other hand, I pull off her jeans. I imagine her lifting up to make it easier. I look around the bas.e.m.e.nt nervously, knowing that, these days, being surrounded by an audience of the dead doesn't necessarily mean you're alone. Greedily burying my nose like a puppy in its first bowl, I root around for any other sign of life. It's all very scientific. And I find it, something I noticed earlier when I tried desperately to convince everyone there was someone alive playing our game tonight instead of just corpses pretending they were married.

A white string trails from between her legs, and I think of the tiny strip that pops the batteries out of a remote control. This makes me worry. I sure as h.e.l.l don't want four double-A's flying out and bouncing off my nose. It would completely ruin any chance of her moving for me again.

But I pull the string out with my teeth anyway, looking for the ring on the end with my tongue, hoping it activates her like a doll. But all I hear is a hiss, and I don't know which end it's coming from. The tip of the string is stained red, bright red, the kind of red they warn you about in First Aid cla.s.s, full of oxygen, close to the heart, in need of immediate attention.

Coming right up.

I bury my nose deeper, work the last of my teeth, drink her deep. Alive. Because blood is delicious, that sharp copper and electric charge, like sucking a handful of pennies when you're a child, almost crying because you can't bite down. Except these pennies let you chew, let you split them open like hard candy.

An urge to cough builds in my chest, and I swallow her some more, thick and soothing nectar rolling down my throat, convincing me that I've finally suppressed my nervous hack forever, this barking reflex that once ruined the mood when I tried this in high school, a sneeze even thrown in that night to utterly guarantee disgrace. A reflex actually diagnosed as a reflux, now, of course, worsened by our diet of too much orange juice and barbecue chicken. Yes, always chicken. Yes, it looks like blood, skin, and we gobbled that s.h.i.t for the sake of the game. But don't believe what they say. Only chicken tastes like chicken. Not this.

And, yeah, blood looks like barbecue, too, but it isn't.

I drink deeper. Blood is the G.o.dd.a.m.n cure for anything. I know I will never cough again.

Cough gone, confidence building, I move up to solve a mystery. I don't even glance around this time, as I know this bride is mine. h.e.l.l, technically, in most countries, we'd be married at this point. Blood this bright is legally binding. That's what Leviticus tells us anyway, right?

I push some skin back with my cleanest fingernail and watch it creep out into the light. Not a bean or a grain of rice or a tiny gold BB like they always claimed. No, it's actually a claw. A cat's claw has been hiding under that hood all along.

"Under the hood?" She said that to me once, that one night I tried this. And I made the mistake of saying, "Well, then it needs driven," and she laughed at me for forgetting the "to be" in that sentence, a grammatical mistake common in and around the Pittsburgh area that she would forever christen the "Hamlet" (just one of many crippling conditions afflicting a typical conversation-addled Yinzer Zombie). After that, I could do nothing right.

After that, I could do nothing right.

My bride slides away from my mouth, and I take this as more evidence of life, and, for a crazy second, I consider putting some salt under her a.s.s for traction, maybe more for flavor. Of course, cat litter works just as well.

Tonight reminds me of my most misguided attempt ever to prove I was worried about my girlfriend losing control if she ever got too drunk at a party. She pa.s.sed out on my birthday, and I methodically, robotically f.u.c.ked her while unconscious. The fact that I photographed myself holding a clipboard somehow made it even creepier even though I was sure I could excuse it all in the name of science. Nope.

I'm telling you though, it's a claw I'm chasing. It doesn't just look like a claw, pop out, then retract like a claw. It is a claw. I know s.h.i.t is weird out there in the world lately, but right now I'm sure it's always been a claw under there. Push hard enough on any part of a girl and a claw might just come out.

My sandpaper tongue starts working this shard of rock-hard flint. Do this long enough and it would have to ignite. No need to blow the gas pump for a climax.

I knew someone once who had a cat with thumbs, which wasn't that strange, she told me. But when she took a paw in her hand and pushed in all the secret spots, nine more claws curled out into her palm, making, what, about ninety claws total? I actually screamed. So did the cat. Then we both ran. But no one went after me.

Inspired by these memories, maybe more out of habit, I chase this claw around a tiny circle awhile. It does laps around my tongue, proving to me that even if she isn't alive, this part of her has to be. I chase that claw around, feel the point sharpened to infinity stabbing hard into my tongue, feel my own blood mixing with hers, and I gasp as I swallow to keep up. The claw grows longer, and I flick and grind it harder with a man's only visible, glistening muscle, ripping long lines through any tastebuds that remain, right between sweet and sour like a gardener, gouging out the last one that sensed bitterness for good.

c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s on a corpse? Sure, that sounds nasty out loud. But only if you don't know what a romantic coming-of-age moment this is.

I want to bite. How can anyone not want to bite this? Something this small, the way it slips behind your teeth? It f.u.c.king tries to get bit. Wanna bite. Can't bite. Gotta bite. Don't bite. Impossible. It's like the commercial for that cherry sucker you get down to a tiny nub on the end of the stick. It's way way past licking at that point. It's simply begging to detonate between your teeth.

My tongue licked and leaped like fire. Yes, this is how they invented fire. I'm sure of it. Whoosh.

But you know how I know she is alive? Because just like the other girl I tried this on, I know I will never get her off. Which is fine with me because it means I'll never have to stop.

Maybe we were always supposed to bite.

I'm moving up, my tongue tracing a line of sweat and salt down her wrist when three m.u.f.fled gunshots upstairs stop me cold.

There aren't enough of us left, I realize. Or enough time.

Then the Camel bursts in with the rifle and bounds down the stairs, taking them two at a time. When I see what he's wearing, I suddenly understand that he's been outside the whole time, even stumbling in circles with us sometimes without anyone noticing. Once pulling a fishhook from his lip and being all wise. He's been coming and going at will, which is the most disrespect for this movie genre than I've ever seen. But it's okay. I'm still smiling because the Pittsburgh Steelers football helmet finally fits someone perfect.

When he reaches the bottom, the Camel targets me again. The firing pin clicks. And clicks. Empty. Clicks again. Still empty. He drops the rifle and scrubs his palms against his pants.

I drop the bride's ankles and stand. Then I walk towards him and gently put my hand on his back. He's cold, colder than us. And not because he's dead. He's cold because he's been sneaking outside all night, listening to our conversations, discovering our weaknesses, or, at least, our s.h.i.tty taste in movies. He's been cheating, is my point.

And that's when he turns my arm around at least three times and starts to pull it free from my shoulder.

But Bobby B is crashing down the stairs now, too, with Bobby Z stomping close behind. The Camel quickly and correctly recognizes two a.s.sholes united as a more significant threat and releases me. Bobby B leaps quite unzombie-like, and the Camel catches him in mid-flight off the second-to-last step and takes him down hard to the concrete floor, ribs popping in both of them like knuckles under a desk. The Camel begins to punch Bobby B like a jackhammer, just like Dirty Harry did to that motorcycle cop in Magnum Force, something that usually happened to Cop Zombie at some point during the game. "The only way to punch someone," according to Davey Jones' dad, Barney, a.k.a. "Barnaby," a.k.a. "Basketball" Jones, or so we were told. It's looking bad for Bobby B, at least until Bobby Z catches the Camel's fist between punches in a very cinematic pose and then wrestles him onto his back instead. I step closer to the dogpile. I don't know how I ever thought the Camel was cold. I can now feel the heat coming off him in waves as he struggles for his life. I decide Bobby B must feel this, too, as I watch him crawl towards the pile of flailing fists, elbows, and "motherf.u.c.kers!" as if it's a bonfire, his palms out to soak up the warmth.

Bobby B actually looks up at Bobby Z in grat.i.tude, and I'm glad I'm there to see it. Looking from one dirty mug to the other, I can no longer tell them apart, and it's not just the decay or the blue paint smeared on their faces. The Bobbys used to alternate painting their faces black as a shout-out to the racial overtones of the original trilogy and a misguided guarantee of survival.

Clearly, they didn't remember the first movie very well.

"Bobby ... Bobby," I say, and I have the attention of both of them for the first time in our short lives. I try not to waste it. "Like she said outside, you two are brothers, you know?"

Everyone stops the killing for now, so I keep trying to make this count.

"Okay, you know how doctors ask everyone, the very first thing when you get to your appointment, if there's a history of cancer in the family? There's a good reason. It's not just because bad s.h.i.t and diseases are more likely for you if your uncle had one. It is because you are actually the same creature. Your mother? Your father? Everything you are came from them. You are not just a relative. You are another one. That's what you are. Everyone knows this but you. And you."

They both look at each other, then down to where the Camel's shirt has been yanked up.

Sometimes in the film circle, there will be a few grumblings about zombie movies and how easily they always seem to tear apart a human body, how hard that would really be and how zombies should never have some kind of super strength. Not just because they're dead, either. Now, I would agree with this. Up to a point. Because what zombie scholars have never understood until recently is that it is relatively easy to reach into a man's stomach and turn him inside out, even easier when a group of us are pulling in all directions, but easiest of all when there's simply one more pair of hands to help push in the place you are.

Bobby B punches deep into the Camel's gut, and Bobby Z's fist follows right behind. They both open their hands to point their fingers at the same time, and of course the skin splits and stretches like taffy and they tumble forward and they're suddenly swimming in that s.h.i.t like ducks in a pond, heads darting under, blowing bubbles more like two brother in a tub.

I rub my eyes, watching them splash around, looking for blood that never comes.