The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home

Chapter 5 - Clio

On my way back to the house with my bundle of rhubarb stalks, I made a cursory inspection of the rest of the vegetable patch. Those of us in beleaguered territory – those lucky enough to possess walled gardens – have torn up our herbaceous borders and replaced them with vegetables and the odd fruit ­– raspberries, in my case – as a fallback in case things break down even further and the food supply runs out. Our human food supply, that is.

And, if ours, then eventually that of our predators. Or scavengers, though they do seem to prefer living tissue.

The tomatoes were doing well enough – I grow the Tiny Tims for early ripening, and the beefsteaks for later, though I do have a couple of St. Pierre Heritage for the excellent flavour. The spinach was flourishing, as it usually does. Perhaps Okie would help eat up some of it when she got here, I thought.  But the lettuce was a slug’s banquet. I made a mental note to pick up some Slugs-Be-Gone™ on my way to the bank the next day. Should the garden shop still be running in the traditional way – though with the addition of grillwork and a window through which the purchase is delivered –I would pay for it, but if that were not the case and the clerks were no longer operative, I would literally pick it up. It’s an ill wind that blows no good, as my grandmother used to say. Granted, in this case free Slugs-Be-Gone™ was a miniscule good, balanced against the massive ill that would have produced it. But one must look on the bright side.

I had a pang of nostalgia as I surveyed the herb garden. The herb garden had been my late husband Dexter’s project, and in it he had planted many of the exotic varieties used in his research. He’d had such a sense of humour, my Dexter! At the corporate events to which we were frequently invited – I hesitate to call them “parties,” as they were never very festive – he used to introduce us by saying, “Dexter. And this is my wife, Sinister.” Not everyone got the joke. My dear Okie has inherited her sense of humour from him – well, possibly from both of us – though it skipped a generation with my poor son, Norman.

As I was heading up the steps of the back porch I heard a commotion from next door. This was nothing new: I’d heard many commotions from next door, over the years. That house was inhabited by Frank LeFadu, the well-known film director, who’d had a successful but not in my opinion distinguished career churning out what he termed “bimbo-stompers” and “slut-slashers.” The violation of accepted standards of decorum and good taste had proven very lucrative in his case.  “Just good fun,” he said to me once when I accosted him on the subject of his most recent offense – a truly vulgar effort entitled Cleavage Cleaver – in the household cleanser section of our local supermarket. That was back when you could still use the parking lot without the risk of ending up as an amuse-bouche, and then as a clutch of leftover gobbets strewn all over everyone’s windshields. “It’s in the grand guignol tradition,” he’d added, with a pretentious smirk.

“No need to wave around fancy French names,” I said. “Your films are depraved enough without them.”

“It’s the audience that’s depraved,” Frank said, laughing, as he added two jugs of bleach to his shopping cart. ”My stuff turns them on. C’mon, you’ve watched it too – or how come you know what’s in it?”

Frank has had a succession of wives, or proto-wives – he uses them up like Kleenex™, he tosses them away, I don’t know where they go, post-Frank – and he likes to give pool parties, which mean loud music and giggling and shrieking, and clouds of noxious or aromatic smoke, from the barbecue and other, handheld sources.

But this time the sound quality from the pool party was different. Gurgling screams of horror and disgust, is how these noises would be described in one of Frank’s scripts. I know that because some of these scripts have been delivered to my house by mistake, and in the interests of research I have steamed open the envelopes and read them. Though sometimes I haven’t bothered with the steaming, but have simply ripped and read, then shredded.

I did not think Frank was running a poolside preview of his latest opus. To look, or not to look? I decided to look, not out of prurience, but because whatever was happening next door might ooze or lumber in my direction quite soon.  What was the best vantage point? The second floor window in Dexter’s old study – I’d snooped from there before at Frank’s May-contain-nudity-and-profanity orgies. But, even better: Norman’s childhood tree house, constructed in and around the venerable maple at the north side of the yard.

To claim I scampered up the steps to the tree house would be a slight warping of the truth. Let’s just say I ascended in a dignified manner.

My fears were confirmed. Frank was being savaged by three blondes in bikinis, who had him in the pool and were in the process of turning him into a chew toy. It was not a pretty sight, but it was a riveting one. It would have made a Million-viewers-in-24-hours YouTube not so long ago, but nowadays such items are a dime a dozen. I’m sure I speak for many when I say we’re tired of them, and prefer to read dated escapism such as Anna Karinina and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Or gardening books: those are always soothing. Recalling a helpful hint I’d found in one of them, it occurred to me that even if I could find no Slugs-Be-Gone,™  wet wool would be an alternate remedy for the slugs. Every species has its own notions of what constitutes a desirable meal.

The pool was red with Frank, the water boiling around him like those piranha scenes in old Bruce Lee films. The three blondes assimilating Frank may have forgotten how to read, but they were still agile in the water. And – I admit this made my flesh creep – they were still giggling girlishly, even with their mouths full.

The scene reminded me of a quotation cited in Mulch for the Mind: “The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive tense.” That was written by Dean Inge, a well-known Anglican priest who was said to be gloomy. I murmured a pious and somewhat hypocritical prayer for Frank – May it soon be over – and clambered down from the tree house.

How could this have happened? Frank had prided himself on his electrified perimeter and his newly-installed Z-Spotter facial interpretation install, but this looked like an inside job. How long had those three blondes been on the premises? Were they actresses from one of his films? Those films required multiple and usually flaxen-haired beauties, who got mutilated one after the other with various edged tools. But how could the actresses have been infected? With so much fake blood being flung around on the sets of Frank’s films and so much licking of it going on, it’s more than possible that contamination by the real thing could have occurred.

Either that, or Frank’s software-controlled barrier systems had crashed.

You can’t trust anything digital.

Back in my kitchen, making my rhubarb pies, I listened to the radio: a useful thing to do while cooking, as you can keep your hands and eyes for other purposes. In the Z-news, the Zwat Team had been busy in Niagara Falls, we were told, and tourism could now safely resume; not that it would. An outbreak in Montreal was almost under control – I snorted at that, because what in Montreal was ever under control? As for Toronto, the situation was “still orange,” a code way of saying that they didn’t have a clue. Some people think that the richer areas like Rosedale get all the attention, but one look at the potholes on our streets and you know that isn’t true.

I surfed the radio stations: at least half of them had people indignantly blaming other people for what had occurred. It was everything from a CIA bio-weapon vaccine gone astray, to botched medical research, to spores from outer space, to – of course – God’s anger at us for our immoral and degenerate behavior.

I did wish Dexter were still alive. I’m sure he would have had an answer.

     

Once my three rhubarb pies were cooling on the rack, I took the mini-wieners out of the freezer to defrost in preparation for the next day’s run to the bank. I ate my frugal evening meal of spinach, Tiny Tims, and a few of the new potatoes that were just beginning to manifest. After that I had some warm rhubarb pie, which I have to say was delicious; it exceeded even my own admittedly high standards for this often underestimated dessert.

Then, all tasks completed, I got down to the business of the evening, which was worrying. Why had I not heard from Okie? She was usually a prolific although terse and opaque texter. Had something gone wrong?