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  “Hey, Maurice!”

  “Clarence.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Let me see your dick.”

  “What?”

  “Hey listen I’m not into guys or anything, but I figure since we’re now in this together I might as well see what we’re packing.”

  “There’re zombies around!” he wailed.

  “I didn’t say pull it out and play with it. I just want to see it. I lost mine in an unfortunate hunting accident and it’s kind of nice to know I have one again.”

  “It’s mine!” he said fiercely.

  “We’ll see.”

  His head swiveled down as he first spent some practiced time shifting the enormity of his stomach around and then pulled the elastic of his waistband out.

  “Tightie whities? Really? Nobody wears those things anymore. And from the looks of them, doesn’t look like you’ve cleaned them very often.”

  “I was scared,” he replied.

  “Pull the band further. I can’t see anything down there. What’s it doing, hiding? That’s it?” I told him as he grasped it in his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve seen bigger cocktail weenies.”

  “Who the hell are you!” he screamed indignantly.

  Funny, I thought, guy was a heartbeat away from crapping himself from fear, but question his manhood and he was a half a step away from becoming Rambo.

  “Calm down, Diggler. I’m sure the women folk found you...adequate.”

  He paused. I figured he would retort with ‘Damn straight’ or something equally as inane. Still nothing. “Whoa…wait, the zombie apocalypse comes and you’re STILL a virgin? Why didn’t you screw that little honey you came out here with?”

  “STOP!” he screamed. “SHE’S SPECIAL!”

  “Oh, you have a hard on for her, don’t you? Not that she’d be able to tell, mind you, but you’ve got something for her! We can fix all of this!” I told him with glee.

  “Please don’t hurt her.”

  “We are going to have so much fun together,” I told him.

  ***

  The problem right now was I didn’t know how I was going to accomplish anything. All I knew was that I was just a voice in this guy’s head. I couldn’t make him do anything. I mean, at least in the traditional ‘I control him’ sense. I was pretty sure indirectly I could make him do almost anything, like a puppet. But I don’t want to be a puppet master. I want to run the whole show.

  And then it kind of hit me. Clarisse here wasn’t quite a zombie yet. Yeah, the virus, germ, worm, whatever Hugh is, was in him and even now probably gaining momentum. Building up and overwhelming his immune system. Sure, when he became a zombie, me and Hugh would become a team again! Happy Days!

  “Hey, Clarisse!” I shouted.

  “It’s Clarence!” he shouted out.

  “How you feeling?” I asked him.

  “Why?” he asked cautiously.

  “Hey…listen, man, we’re in this together now. I just want to see how you’re doing.”

  “I feel fine mostly except for this crazy fucking voice in my head, and where that zombie’s tooth snagged me is stinging like a bitch. Can you just tell me who you are?”

  “I’m the zombie that bit you.”

  He cried out. “I wasn’t bitten!”

  “I beg to differ.”

  “Why are you in me?”

  “Well, that part I’m not too sure of. Hugh did something.”

  “Who’s Hugh?”

  “No wonder why you never got laid. You talk too much. You’re giving me a fucking headache and I don’t even have a head. Alright, I’m going to run through this with you. I was a powerful CEO of a Fortune 500 company (what’s he going to do? Fact check me?) My hot-ass wife was having a birthday party for our daughter. She was a protégé, pianist. (I hoped that was the right word). Anyway, one of the little brats at the party was sick and bit me, must have had the zombie virus in him. I don’t know if he was trying to eat me or not, but I threw him across the room to get him away from me. At that point the party was over and the little fuck-faces went home.”

  “I can see you’re a kid person,” Clarence interjected.

  “That’s what my wife says. I love the little pukes. They’re like little sweet meat treats. Ju-veal-niles! Man I crack myself up. Tough to catch, though.”

  I could hear Clarence retching as he thought about me eating children.

  “Hey, I didn’t always eat them!” I shouted indignantly. “The kid turned me into a zombie.”

  “Wait! You’re a zombie? Zombies think?”

  “I’m getting to that if you would just shut up. The zombie is really a virus or something. It has a consciousness, sort of. Pretty rudimentary, really only concerned with eating for the most part. He…it…came after me when it was taking me over. I thought I was going insane.”

  “You sure you weren’t already? You sound plenty insane to me,” Clarence whimpered.

  “Hey, man, you weren’t there. I was huddled in my mind, much like I’m huddled in yours right now, and I could hear him coming for me. I fought with everything that I was to hold onto my...self, I guess. Me and Hugh.”

  “Hugh?”

  “I named him.”

  “You named the zombie?”

  “I named the thing that made the zombie. Anyway, me and Hugh came to an agreement. He would stop trying to kill me and I would help him in his quest.”

  “You mean to eat? You help the zombie to eat?”

  I thought about it. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

  “How could you? You’re killing innocent people.”

  “Listen, Clarinet, this thing took over my body. I couldn’t do shit except watch. I watched as he ate my date.”

  “You said you were married.”

  “I get around. Then I watched as it ate my dad.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Don’t worry, he was an asshole. And after he was finished with him we were stuck in my apartment with nothing to eat. Hugh was screaming bloody murder and we were SO hungry. Stupid shit couldn’t even open a door.”

  “How’d you get out then?”

  “I opened the door for him.”

  “You let that monster loose on the world?” Clarence asked as he looked down on my used up body.

  “What choice did I have? He was locked in the apartment and I was locked in my own damn head. He was driving me insane with his moaning for food. I told him to give me control of my hand back and I opened the door so he could feed.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Hell no. He was still stupider than dirt. He kept finding ways to get himself shot. I promised him food if he let me direct the ship.”

  “You’re sick!” Clarence screamed.

  “DON’T YOU JUDGE ME! He was in MY body. If he got shot…I got shot. And you know what? I didn’t want to get fucking shot, plain and simple.”

  “So you valued your life over all others?”

  “Sure I did. Who’s more important to me, than me? That’s a stupid friggin’ question.”

  There was an uneasy silence between us. I didn’t like having my morals (or lack thereof) challenged, and I would imagine Claude didn’t like being pregnant with me. Another case of unplanned childhood. A little protection goes a long way.

  Chlamydia hadn’t moved in a while. We were still pretty much in the same place we had met. Sometimes he would look at the sky, sometimes in the direction his sweetheart had gone. Every blue moon or so he would glance over at my prone form and shudder. But he didn’t move, not much anyway. Sometimes he would get down on his haunches and that would be about it.

  “What are you doing? Why don’t you go find a nudie magazine that we can look through at least?”

  “I don’t feel so good,” he answered right before he leaned over and puked.

  “What did you eat? Borscht?” I asked him as I looked at the voluminous jets of bile being spewed on the ground.

  I thought I was being witty. He sounded pissed wh
en he told me to fuck off. On second thought, as I gazed upon his pool of mouth refuse, it looked like that shit they eat in New Orleans. What’s that crap? Jambalaya? All that is, is some poor country shit, that some barefoot, toothless hag was ripping through her bare cupboards and put all the crap in a big stew pot that hadn’t been eaten yet, and when her fat beer bellied husband came home from putting his drink on, he asked what that shit was his old lady had put on the table, and she came up with that name on the spot. I mean, pretty fucking industrious of her, but a turd is still a turd even if you call it a ham. So, yeah, that’s what Clambake’s puke looked like.

  “My head is killing me,” Clarence said as he dropped to his knees.

  I started singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic as loud as I could. He didn’t appreciate my humor.

  “Oh, God, please let it stop,” he said as he got into the fetal position.

  I was once again bathed in darkness as he clamped his eyes shut. I’d been to this rodeo before. Me and Hugh went way back, but I wasn’t sure who was in here with us. I started to prepare my zombie fallout shelter.

  “Dipwad! Hey, dipwad!”

  “Shut up, just shut up. I need some sleep,” he sniveled.

  “I figure you’ve got another hour or so as a human, then my buddy Hugh is going to come along. At that point he’s pretty much going to destroy you.”

  “W-what?”

  “Not the stuttering shit again. Have you not listened to anything I’ve said?”

  “I don’t want to die!”

  “You can’t stop from becoming a zombie.”

  He started to heave again, maybe from being sick or maybe from the oncoming realization. Who really gives a shit.

  “You can save yourself, though,” I continued. Why did I care? That was the interesting part. I told him about considering himself a person within his own mind and how he needed to build the deepest darkest void within himself. He needed to become his own personal black hole. I could ‘hear’ him rooting around inside his mind; he sounded more like a hippo running around a bubble wrap factory. He was hurting my ears, but even through his loud fumblings I heard something else, something much more insidious. It was the wrigglings of what I considered worms. They were coming…and by the millions.

  “They’re coming,” I said softly. Just as I shut my ‘hatch’ I heard Clementine ask what he should do. I told him ‘survive.’ And then I sat back in utter blackness and solitude. It was as good a time as any to reflect on my life and see how long I was going to have to pay the Piper for my penance. Oh the joys of growing up Catholic; glad I wasn’t saddled with all that guilt they try to push.

  I killed someone when I was seventeen. Did he have it coming? I guess maybe he did, he shouldn’t have intercepted the ball. It was the State Championship game we had gone undefeated the entire season. Then our idiot quarterback gets into a car accident two days before the game, breaks two ribs and his wrist on his non-throwing arm. I told the pussy he should still play.

  The coach didn’t agree. We end up with our greener-than-Ireland freshman quarterback. Idiot could barely hand off without fumbling. We were down 14-12 late in the fourth quarter and we were driving – no thanks to the QB. After I got called for a penalty (tripping) we found ourselves at third down and long. It had to be a pass, we knew it, and they knew it. Our QB hadn’t thrown anything past the line of scrimmage the entire night. We were screwed.

  Fitzgerald, the QB was lined up in the shotgun, Dunnehy, the center, snapped him the ball, and then we did what we’d been doing all season long, we protected the glory boy quarterback. I looked over to make sure the back judge was looking elsewhere and I gave my blocking responsibility a hard nut shot. My fist slammed off his cup and into his – I’m sure – beloved jewels. I laughed as I heard his sideline screaming for a penalty. Fitzie was still dancing around the pocket like he was in a dance marathon.

  “Throw the fucking thing!” I yelled at him.

  The blocking had collapsed on his right-hand side and he was about to be planted into the ground. Well, he let it go; a shot duck would have had a better flight pattern. The ball wobbled like a fat girl’s tits on a treadmill. It was not pretty. The defense was eyeing the prize and it was not difficult to see what was going to happen here. I started to run down to where the ball was eventually going to land. The cornerback for the other team, Lajohn Wilson, made the fateful decision to out jump the competition and pull that ball out of the air.

  His feet hit the turf and he was off to the races. He avoided being tackled by the wide receiver and juked his way out of the path of our running back. That, however, brought him my way. I don’t know if he thought he could get past me or if he was so focused on the end zone he missed me. But I caught the little bastard flush on, my arms hit him in the chest, I grabbed his jersey as I lowered my head, my helmet coming into hard contact with his own. I would later tell people that he must have broken his neck when I drove him into the ground. But no, it happened from that collision. The sound was so loud, so intense, it sounded like I had taken my helmet and dropped it off a ten-story building – that at least covered up the sound of his neck snapping. I watched his eyes, though, mostly because we were face mask to face mask and there wasn’t much else I could look at. But he knew when his neck snapped. I mean, his eyes got this wild glaze of panic. That’s really the best way I could describe it. He knew something terrible had just happened to his body, but his mind had yet to realize the scope and breadth of it.

  I made sure that my forearm crushed down on his throat as I landed on him. The fucker should have just swatted the ball down, not try to make himself the hero in MY championship game. I felt something move to the side as I brought my entire 250-plus pounds down on his windpipe. He started gagging for air, and he couldn’t even signal anyone to come over and help him. He had completely forgotten about the pigskin at some point when his neck became disconnected from his spine. I’m not initially sure whose hands got on it, but it was our running back that finally picked it up and ran the subsequent winning points into the end zone.

  “Please,” the cornerback said to me as I took my time getting up off of him. But hey, I’m a good sport if nothing else. I grabbed his hand in mine to pull him up. His head flopped back like a broken bobble head doll. Both sets of fans gasped. I thought to drop him back down quickly, but since all eyes were now on me, I put him down gently and waved over to the sidelines. That was pretty much a wasted gesture as the trainers from both sidelines were already rushing in. I walked away and congratulated our running back, while both teams were taking a knee as the injured player was being cared for.

  “Dude, get down, man,” Henderson the running back was saying to me. “That guy’s hurt.”

  “I just wanted to say great touchdown, man!” I was all smiles as I came over.

  “What happened to him?” Henderson asked as I got down on a knee next to him.

  “He ran into the Tim Train. It didn’t work out so well for him.”

  “Is he going to be alright?”

  “Do I look like I give a shit? We’re winning.”

  “There’s more to football than winning,” he told me in all seriousness.

  “You’re full of shit, right?”

  He got up to get a better view. The ambulance came onto the field and finally, after a half an hour, they got his broken ass off the field so we could finish the game. The coaches wanted to suspend the game indefinitely but decided they would honor the cornerback by playing. Basically their rationale for continuing when common courtesy says they probably shouldn’t, thereby disproving my stupid running back’s earlier remarks. It IS all about winning.

  We ended up winning the game; the other team had just completely lost the will to play. That didn’t stop me from hurting another kid. He should have been paying more attention, not my fault his brother was in the hospital. Oh shit…yeah it was! I was smiling. Well now they can be roomies. Broken collarbone was infinitely better than snapped neck though.
/>   A week later I was forced by my coach into visiting the vegetable, good PR or some bullshit. The newspaper was going to be there and it would look good for my college career. I went. The kid had one of those huge contraptions attached to his head, the kind with the screws drilled into his skull, it looked painful. His eyes shifted as I came in. A dawn of recognition twisted his features into a mask of hatred.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Came to see how you were doing. Although I don’t really give two shits. I’m waiting for the newspaper to show up, they take a picture and then I’m going to do something you can’t.” He didn’t bite. “Walk out,” I told him.

  “Docs said if you hadn’t moved me, I might have been able to walk.”

  “Sucks for you.”

  “I’m going to sue.”

  “Over an injury on a football field? Good luck. Even if you won, what do you think I have? My mom and I live in a shitty little apartment, my car is older than I am, and my bank account is in the single digits.”

  He was crying.

  The reporter took that awkward time to walk in. He thought the tears were something akin to joy at my heartfelt apology. He took our picture. I was smiling as I grasped the limp and lifeless hand of whatever his name was. He died while I was in college of some sort of complications arising from his injury. Nothing ever happened about the lawsuit – not that I was overly concerned to begin with. So that was technically my first murder, and really my only one. I couldn’t be held accountable for all the ones that I had done as a zombie, right? I can’t imagine I’d spend all that much time in Hell for one indirect murder. I was feeling pretty good about it when I once again felt the familiar unease as Hugh began to pry around the edges of my internal fortress. He knew something was there, he just didn’t know what or how to get around it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Then the screaming began, stupid Clambake was shrieking off into the far reaches of his brain with Hugh in close pursuit. Did I care? Not really, had never been much of a people person. More of a people parts person, I enjoyed the hands of anybody that was handing me something I needed or wanted…and pussies. The rest of it was wasted matter as far as I was concerned. With that being said, I wasn’t quite done with Clandestine just yet.