Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

Script Idea #205: A stalker creeps into the room of the woman he obsesses over, only to find her already dead. She filed a restraining order against him and now he is the prime suspect. Will he be able to find the real killer before the police track him down?

He missed Kimmy. She was better than him, far too good for him. To be star-crossed, lovers have to belong to the same grade of human quality. Kimmy could love him only out of pity, and he could never believe she wouldn’t leave him for the Fourth or the Fifth, or some unnumbered Hummer hunk born into the same rarefied category as herself. Kimmy’s grade was honeymoon-in-Tokyo. Joshua’s was somewhere between dandruff survivor and leftover sushi.

It was time to say goodbye, even if stealthily. Feeling weightless, closing his eyes — come what may! — he leaned over her to kiss her fragrant shadow. But instead of her silky, thick hair, his lips touched a bag of lavender she kept on her pillow.

She was gone, gone for good.

Tears fogged up his eyes, but he still stumbled through the fog to rummage around her drawer to seek the cock ring and the handcuffs. The cock ring was nowhere to be found; the handcuffs he pocketed like a seasoned burglar.

* * *

Joshua spent the ride to the Ambassador imagining all the possible consequences of the break-in, the most probable one featuring Kimmy calling the police and having them arrested for aggravated burglary; and if any of her neighbors had seen Stagger prancing along her lawn half-naked, attempted rape might be added to it. But all that was to be dealt with in the future, in the unlikely case it wasn’t already foreclosed. If there is never any reason to believe there will be a future, there is only one way to find out if it’s coming.

Stagger stood impatiently behind Ana, clutching his sword awkwardly in his unbroken left hand, waiting for her to unlock the Ambassador’s door. If ever a man was entitled to a cape and light saber, it was Stagger. Joshua leaned in to read the backlit names next to the buzzers, but they were nothing if not secret words made of consonants. For all he knew, a coded message about the Messiah’s coming was inscribed there: the Bosnian Kabbalah. By the end of time, there will have been no future.

Ana presented no plan of action; she somehow trusted them; she took them as they came. Bosnians, Bega had said, take things as they come, they surf the wave of catastrophe. And here was where Stagger and Joshua’s mission brought them now, before a wall of unpronounceable names. If there’s one thing the Hebrews should be blamed for it is starting all that unpronounceability madness. Hephzibah, for God’s sake, the wife of Hezekiah.

Ana walked up the stairs ahead of them, wearing Joshua’s shirt and tight leggings, her thighs rather admirably shaped. Not so long ago, Joshua had thrust himself forth between those thighs, but it all now seemed like a wet dream, yet another inconclusive one. Stagger ascended before him, grunting with effort, using his sword as a walking stick, his teeth clenched, tendrils of his ponytail lingering around his ears in disarray.

“I’m good,” Stagger said without being asked. How old was he, anyway? If he’d been in his twenties for Desert Storm, he would be in his forties now. It seemed probable, but he was somehow older than that, much older. His body was fit and still young, but the rest of him was, shall we say, excessively mature. Or maybe he was just crashing down from his high. “Proceed,” Stagger said, his face ghostly pale. With all the wrinkles and grimaces and madness now bleached from it, Joshua could suddenly perceive the young man Stagger used to be way back before the big party in the desert, before his landlording career and ensuing madness, before all this. Joshua obediently proceeded, but he needed to pee. The body never quits working. The mind goes out, but the body always hums along, proceeding until it stops. The beauty of life is that eventually everybody turns into a zombie, whereupon they die.

Before Ana’s door, two large thick-soled shoes with dirty tips stood at an angle, as if turning away in disgust. Ana straightened them with a careful toe poke, out of habit, no doubt. It seemed like a meaningless gesture; yet, Joshua understood, she cared about the way things ought to be; she didn’t quite succumb and surf. He, on the other hand, was exhausted as the rococo hopelessness of everything set in. Also, terribly hungry still and in need of urination.

She fumbled for the right key in the batch, and there were a lot of them. What property did she own to have all those keys? The door was unlocked, it turned out, so she walked in. Stagger shuffled sideways in her wake, half squatting like a Jedi, his sword high above his head ready to strike, even if he couldn’t fully grip the handle with his cast. Joshua could see the cicatrice stretching between the ridges of Stagger’s shoulder blades to reach the base of his neck, where Semper Fi was inscribed in blue ink. Joshua had no idea what Semper Fi actually meant. How many marines could read Latin anyway? They could’ve made it more American and vernacular, say: No quittin’ or Thrills and Kills or Appetite for Destruction. Everything should be simpler and more American, particularly at this point in time when we must all stand united because we’re all falling apart.

Ana switched on the light in the hallway, exposing its emptiness. “Esko!” she called, turning on more lights as she moved deeper in. The vacant sadness of the apartment: they had little, Ana and her family. No pictures on the wall; no carpets on the floor; no heirloom furniture; no framed diplomas; no useless VHS players; no books on the coffee table; no coffee table. They were thrown out of their own past, the you people , carrying only their mystical consonants and a weathered catastrophe surfboard. It made Joshua even more queasy, as if he’d just driven over roadkill.

The last light Ana switched on revealed Esko, his left hand under his cheek, lying on the sofa, which was much smaller than him, so his feet hung over its end. One of his tube socks had a huge hole, the ball of his foot bulging out like a peeled potato. He was facing the TV, on which two women, richly oiled and glowing with the soft-core ochre, wrestled in slow motion. Only when Ana moved in front of the TV did his gaze acknowledge her. He glanced over to Stagger in his broken-arm combat posture, and then on to Joshua, who picked that particular moment to gasp for air. Ana said something in Bosnian, something that sounded angry and confrontational, but Esko just shrugged and scratched his nose listlessly. The floor before him was covered with plates and food leftovers and bottles of Corona; it seemed he hadn’t left the sofa for a long time. Ana kept talking, the edge in her voice getting sharper. What was she saying to him? Joshua wished he knew, not only because it pertained to the solution of the missing-girl mystery, but also because he really had to relieve the pressure on his prostate and he couldn’t leave in the middle of a showdown. Ana pressed her hand against her chest and kept shaking her head dramatically as she spoke, making a poignant point, then offered something to Esko in the cupped palms of her hands. Whatever it was, Esko didn’t care much about it. Wincing, as if his nose kept itching, he looked past her at the screen, where one of the women was now arching in what was supposed to be extreme pleasure as the other woman was rimming her navel. Ana stepped forward, excavated the remote from the debris on the floor, and turned off the TV. Her jaw clenched in some form of Balkan fury, as she slapped first her left then her right cheek and then pointed her finger at herself, then at Esko, who finally sat up and nodded resignedly, as if everything had just come together for him, to congeal into an incontestable defeat. Stagger, still as a statue in his samurai pose, stared at Esko with a delirious focus.