Homeless Zombies

I saw Joe Reed in the back of Harvey's Bar and Grill. He was sitting alone in a dark corner booth, sipping a beer, minding his business.

Problem was: Joe Reed was dead, had been for six months. Victim of a heart attack at the tender age of forty-five. My age.

I had attended his funeral.

After staring back there a couple minutes, I shook it off and decided that the guy just couldn't be Joe Reed. Must just be some incredible look-alike.

I shifted around and waved at the bartender. With my glass refilled, I tried watching a ball game on a small TV on a shelf above the bar. But I couldn't resist glancing over my shoulder every now and then at the guy who looked just like Joe Reed.

Finally, I had to take a leak. The men’s room was in the back of the bar off a small hallway just beyond the booth he occupied. As I walked past him, I gave a quick look and decided that the resemblance was so close that it really might be Joe Reed after all back from the dead.

In the john, I nearly pissed my pants laughing, jumping up and down and slapping the wall in front of the urinal. That's Joe Reed, I told myself. Joe Reed! The same guy I had seen just a few months ago reposed in a brass coffin at the Bristol Memorial Funeral Parlor. He'd been a pale cadaver in that box, silent and lifeless as a department store mannequin.

So what was he doing here, alive, drinking a beer in what used to be the favorite corner of his favorite bar? He was dead goddamn-it!

On the return trip from the men’s room, I couldn't help myself. I stopped at the booth and gave him a long look.

"Joe?" I mumbled, my speech slurred from a long night of drinking regret out of my life. "Joe Reed?"

He turned to me with a blank stare, his eyelids heavy, dumb. Seeing him square, I knew it was him: Joe Reed. We had been childhood friends, best friend for a time during our teenage, high school years, and until our early twenties, had been quite close.

But by the time we both got married and settled into family life and careers, our friendship was a cold memory, nothing more than a few yellow pictures of grinning, swaggering teens in my mother’s worn out photo album. We had simply drifted off in different directions like high school friends often do. The day I learned he had died, I hadn't seen Joe Reed in over three years, since our twenty-fifth high school reunion.

Seeing him now, I recalled the same childhood memories that seeing him dead in the coffin at his wake had flashed through my mind. Football games in the park and coming home to our angry mothers covered with mud and muck from head to toe. One-on-one basketball games at the hoop attached to the front of his garage until the sun went down. Come to think of it, I took my first drink of liquor with Joe, sneaking hot mouthfuls of vodka from his father's stash in the basement, and replacing what we had taken with water.

"Joe?" I let out a breathless laugh.

But this Joe - or this guy, this clone, whatever he was - didn't answer. He just blinked.

"Joe Reed?"

No response.

"It's me," I said. "Don. Don Kaminski."

Still nothing.

"Joe," I laughed, pleading. "Say something."

After a time, I backed away and just stood at his booth. I tried to explain to the guy as directly as I could what the problem was - that he looked incredibly like a friend of mine who had died - who had died! - only a few months back.

But he just sat there, staring at me with those blank eyes, offering nothing.

"Can't you talk?"

The silence seemed designed to mock me now, and it was starting to piss me off. Who was this prick? He didn't seem to have the slightest interest in commiserating with me over this odd, troubling situation in which he looked exactly like a friend of mine who had died.

Instead of saying something, anything, he just looked away indifferently. He took a sip of his damned beer, the same dark beer I remembered Joe Reed had come to like shortly after his eighteenth birthday when we started going out to bars, especially this one - Harvey’s.

"Yes," he said, his voice deeper than I had ever remembered. "I can talk."

It was unmistakably the voice of Joe Reed.

I stared at him for a time, wobbling slightly, trying to catch my breath. But you're dead, I wanted to say. Six feet under. I saw your casket at the grave. I even cried and fell into my wife's arms when the priest said those last somber words, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, reminding us all that all we are is dust. I ate bacon and eggs and sipped orange juice and coffee at your funeral breakfast in the back room of DeMarino's Restaurant. Then, I gulped several shots of bourbon with your brothers, Tom and Bill, that afternoon long after most of the guests had already gone home.

"Who the hell are you?" I asked, gasping.

His dull eyes glared. There was not a hint of friendship in them. He refused to say another word.

Finally, I backed off and stumbled back to my barstool. The bartender was waiting for me.

"You know that guy?" I asked him, gesturing behind me with a thumb as I gulped some beer.

"What guy?"

"The guy in the back booth," I said.

The bartender squinted that way. "What f'n guy?" he asked.

I turned around and saw that the booth where Joe Reed's incredible look-alike had been was now quite empty.

"A ghost!" Betty said. "What you saw was Joe Reed's ghost."

She smiled as she tucked me under the covers, glad that I had come home before midnight and not stayed out to sunrise and spent half my paycheck again. Betty had become a plump and lonesome housebound woman as she approached her forty-sixth birthday. In high school, she had been a beauty. Blond and tart. Once, she had dated Joe Reed, but said he had hands swifter than water and rough as sand, and that she was not that kind of girl. She'd dumped him flat and started dating me not long after. But she had cried real tears at his wake and it made me wonder if she regretted not putting up with his swift hands and that crooked, daring smile all the other girls seemed to blush over.

"No," I insisted. "I saw him."

I must have sounded like a complete drunk.

"Jo' Reed'" I slurred.

Betty patted my head and smiled knowingly.

"Optical illusion," she suggested as she rose up and headed out the room. (We hadn't slept together in years). As she turned out the light, she added: "Hallucination."

I fell into a deep, dark sleep. No dreams. I didn’t wake up until about ten the next morning. Seeing Joe Reed the previous night suddenly came to mind.

The smell of coffee and bacon wafted up from the kitchen. I heard Betty humming to herself, happy to be alive. Still happy, perhaps, that I had come home early for a change that Friday night, if not a little drunk again. Well, you couldn't hope for complete miracles.

I stumbled downstairs, the hangover not all that bad. Betty smiled as I fell into my chair at the kitchen table.

"You okay?" she asked. "Hungry?"

"Starved," I said.

I slurped up the eggs, over easy, with a slice of toast lathered with too much butter, and bacon she placed in front of me and gulped it all down with a strong cup of coffee. Betty joined me as I was soaking up the last of the eggs.

"Still think you saw Joe last night?"

I looked up. Somehow, I had almost forgotten about that, that I had told her.

I tried to explain what I had seen, and why I felt so certain that it had really been him, and not just some stranger who merely resembled him. And certainly not a ghost or hallucination.

"It was him," I repeated. "Joe Reed."

Betty gave me doubtful look as if I had just escaped from a mental ward.

"What the hell where you doing out there, anyway?" she asked. "In the old neighborhood? At Harvey’s of all places?"
"I don’t know," I said with a shrug, and took a sip of coffee. She was right to ask that. I hadn’t been to that bar in maybe ten years, ever since we used to live around the corner from the place before I got the job at Ford and we moved out of the city. Actually, I had been depressed after a couple of drinks at Dixie’s, my usual stop after my 3-11 shift with some of the guys from Ford, and craved some nostalgia, some old faces. Instead all I got was the face of a dead man.

"Missed the place, I guess," I told her.

"But seeing Joe Reed there," she said, "that’s impossible."

With a sigh, I answered: "Don’t you think I know that." I took another sip of coffee and glanced at Betty.

She was staring off toward the window, thinking of something. Joe Reed, perhaps.

The next night, a Saturday, I told Betty I was going to the store for another six pack. I went back to Harvey’s instead. And I saw him again - Joe Reed, sitting in the same corner booth in the back of the place.

After guzzling down two straight beers, I jumped off the barstool and strode directly to him.

"Mind if I sit?"

He regarded me distantly, without a hint of recognition. His eyes had that cold, empty look, same as yesterday. It was as if he was only half-awake, only distantly aware.

I sat down anyway.

"You're Joe Reed, aren't you?" I was sure of myself, persuaded.

But he remained noncommittal. Didn't even shrug. Sat there circling the lip of his glass of beer with his right index finger, around and around. It was something old Joe Reed used to do and I shuddered with the sudden recollection of that.

Finally, our eyes met. That gave me a fright. They were Joe Reed's eyes. Only instead of blue, they seemed gray.

He swallowed the rest of his beer, and abruptly stood. Without a word, he edged past me and started toward the front of the bar.

After a moment, and a deep breath, I followed after him.

He was a shadow walking down Maple Grove when I first caught sight of him after leaving the bar. It had just rained, and the wet pavement and dark puddles glistened in the cold white glare of the street lamps.

Staying safely behind him, out of sight, I tried to remember the way Joe Reed had walked. This certainly wasn't it. It was more deliberate, stiffer than I remembered, driven by something outside his control. Programmed.

That thought should have stopped me. Should have put the kibosh on the whole idea of solving the mystery of Joe Reed's apparent and bizarre resurrection.

But it didn't.

I followed him as he meandered down a series of narrow sidestreets, silent and foreboding considering the dreary night and the odd circumstances. Old, grungy clapboard houses hulked so close in the shadows of this old neighborhood you could almost reach between them.

I remained at least fifty yards back, ready to use one of the thick maples lining the street to step behind should he suspect someone lurking after him and suddenly look back. But he seemed so intensely driven to get to wherever he was going, I felt he wouldn’t do this.

At last, he rounded a corner onto Colton Avenue where more old clapboard houses huddled. In fact, it was the street where Betty and I used to live.

Joe Reed abruptly stopped in front of one of the old houses, turned sharply after a moment, and started up a narrow walkway. I hurried to the front yard. Crouching down, I watched as he stepped onto the porch, opened the front door and walked in.

Something told me to follow him. But my instinct for self-preservation warned against it. Leave this hellish place! Go home! This mystery wasn't worth solving. But, of course, I had to go forward, go into that old house. I knew I wouldn't sleep again if I didn't find out how Joe Reed had come back to life. And why.

I started down the dark, narrow walkway. Unsteadily, I walked up the front steps of the porch and stopped for a moment at the front door. Finally, I opened it and entered an old, musty foyer.

The smell of decay nearly drove me back. It was as if I had opened a coffin and was inhaling the dust of a dead man.

I hesitated a long moment, struck with the silence and foreboding of this place. But I fought off the dread, stood my ground.

Instead of running, I heard myself shout out: "Hello!"

The shout echoed and resounded off the high ceilings of the foyer and inner, seemingly long-abandoned rooms. I crouched tensely, waiting, still fearful of the repercussions of this trespass.

After another few moments, I called out again, "Hello!" Straightening, I added, "Is anybody here?"

Nothing. Not a peep.

Frowning, I pressed on deeper into the place. Blindly. Driven onward for no good reason other than my aching curiosity. I had seen a man I thought had died. His body, at least, had risen, whole and fresh, and now walked among the living. Among us. I had to know how such a thing was possible.

I quickly found the living room, a large expanse of darkness furnished with chairs and sofas and tables covered with white tarp. The door was open. Lurking in the shadows, I sensed a presence, palpable though subdued.

I cautiously stepped forward and approached the threshold. Stopping there momentarily, I leaned forward and squinted. And listened.

After a moment, I backed off and suppressed a gasp. I knew at once that there was something in that room. Beings.

After a fretful breathe, and despite my fear, I stepped forward and saw them, a least a dozen, shadows – shapes of men, women. Some were standing, others sat cross-legged on the dank carpet. Doing nothing.

Upon my entrance, there was a general, though disinterested, glance in my direction. My sudden presence was acknowledged briefly, but that was all. Within moments, each of them returned to their silent brooding, as if I didn't matter.

Then a soft voice behind me, at the threshold, said:

"They’re zombies."

I jumped, naturally. Gasped. My heart pounded and for a moment, I felt dizzy. I whirled around and saw a rather unimposing, plump little man.

"Homeless zombies," he added with a smirk.

He quickly introduced himself as Dr. Charles F. Hulbert. He reached out and offered a solid handshake after having so thoroughly startled me.

After letting go of his hand, I asked, "How - how's that?"

"The creatures you see," he said, gesturing with his tiny, plump right arm to the assembly of listless folk milling about in the living room. "They're zombies. Homeless, mindless zombies." He gazed at them with a wan expression. "Resurrected from death."

At last, he turned to me.

"You see," he went on, "I have let them go. Helped them escape. Brought them here."

I thought that he must be mad and cursed myself again for having so easily been lured into this danger. I could be sitting in a warm bar, washing down another shot with another beer, trying to pick up some old hag who might have walked into Harvey’s off the street with some equally old, haggard friends.

I looked at him with half a smile and half a sneer.

"What are you talking about, Mister?" I pointed to the roomful of zombies. "Who are they really?"

"I told you," he said. "Zombies. Resurrected from death. We stole their bodies from the freshest graves, dozens of them, used the most advanced and controversial bio-nanotechnology to repair dead, damaged tissue, and brought them back to life with a zap of electricity.

"And, presto!" he snapped his fingers and laughed to himself. "To our astonishment, it worked! They woke up. Not one of us had even remotely expected the experiment to become such an utter and complete success.

"But there they were. Dozens of blinking, senseless automatons, oblivious to their condition or previous existence. Mindful only of the instant, the here and now. Without a shred of memory or initiative.

"You see - " and now he laughed sardonically " - each of them has been awakened physically, but without a soul."

His wide eyes gleamed madly in the darkness as he gazed at the zombies.

"Because of this," he went on, almost to himself, "even though we brought them back to life, the Army knew that the experiment had been a disaster. One huge failure. And expensive to boot. What good would it be to recover a soldier and not his soul, his allegiance, his desire to fight again for home and country?

"So the project was canceled, abandoned," Dr. Hulbert went on, and looked at me. "We were sent back to the drawing board. We were asked to find a way not only to resurrect bodies, but souls as well - the essence of what the person was, had been."

Dr. Hulbert sighed as he turned to the dozen-or-so subdued creatures before us in the living room of the old, drafty house.

"As for these poor creatures," he said, "the Army ordered them destroyed. De-animated, was the pleasant word they used."

He looked to me again, his eyes full of distress.

"That," he said, "I simply could not let them do. So I brought them here. To mix and meld into the population of this city. To reassemble and live in this old, forgotten house, the house of my cousin that I rented on the cheap."

I nodded, trying to comprehend his words. Trying to understand, to believe, what he was telling me.

"But," I said, suddenly thinking of Joe Reed, my friend. Now resurrected. Now soul-less. "Couldn't they be retrained? Taught who they had been?"

"We tried that, of course," said the doctor. He leaned against the doorway and slid down it in a sullen lump to the carpet. "We tried everything. The know-how just isn't there yet."

He looked up at me with a shrug.

"Or," he said, "we failed because there simply is no way for man to resurrect a soul."

"So now what?" I asked after a time.

"Back to the drawing board, I guess," Dr. Hurlburt said with a shrug.

"No," I said, and nodded to the cavernous ballroom where the hundred or so homeless zombies dawdled. "What about them?"

His eyes flashed up at me.

"They can live here," he said, with a shrug, then added: "Roam the streets like the thousands of other mindless waifs that populate this city, ignored by the masses, the so-called normal men, like you and me." He sighed. "Ignored and forgotten."

"Until..," but the thought trailed off.

I let him think awhile.

"Until what?" I finally asked.

He looked at me with big, round eyes. There were tears in them.

"Until we find a cure," he said, "for their disease. Until we give them back their souls."

Every night the following week, I snuck out of the house after Linda went to bed and headed for the old house in our old neighborhood where the homeless zombies now lived.

I said nothing to Betty about it. She already thought I was drinking too much and probably couldn't take much more of my nonsense before she left me altogether and went to live with her sister.

Naturally, during these nightly visits, I sought out Joe Reed. Sometimes, he wasn’t there, having himself snuck out to Harvey’s to wet his whistle with his favorite cold brew.

"Doesn't that imply something?" I asked Dr. Hurlburt one evening. "About Joe anyway."

The doctor, or whatever he was, scowled at me.

"That he has a little piece of his soul still in him?" I said. "The little piece that remembers the wonder of a cold draft beer?"

Finally, Dr. Hurlburt laughed.

"Perhaps," he said with a nod, but seemed merely amused by the observation. "Perhaps."

I set about personally trying to help my old friend, Joe Reed, find his soul.

The first thing I did was pay a visit on Joe Reed's older sister, Mary. At first, she didn't recognize me. But after a few minutes she was laughing over the memories of being tormented by Joe and me with toads and earthworms in the old house where they had grown up.

"You two were holy terrors," she remembered. "Little devils!" And laughed some more.

I told her that I had stopped by because the old gang was planning a reunion and we wanted to get some photos of Joe for a scrapbook that could be fondly passed around.

She brought out a shoe box of old pictures and leafed through them while we sat at her kitchen table. It didn’t take her long to pull out a dozen or so pictures of Joe in various phases of his life. In one, he was a silly, grinning nine year old. There were a couple poses in his serious teenage years (one of which had me in my serious teenage years with our arms around each other's shoulders in a defiant stance). Another was from his wedding day (I was one of the ushers at that event); and, later, after I had lost touch with him, with his two daughters, Sandra and Kim, and wife, Judy. There was, finally, the one from the last week of his life, in which, I had to agree with Mary, that he did look tired and forlorn.

"Too much work," Mary said as she gazed at this picture. "Too much worry."

One of the last photographs she pulled from the box, almost as an afterthought, surprised me: It was of Joe and a slim, blonde girl, standing in front of his father’s car just before their first and only date. She was staring at him with unmistakable adoration.

"Isn’t that your wife?" Mary asked. "What’s her name?"

"Betty," I told her. "Elizabeth."

Joe Reed didn't even give any the photographs a second look as I shoved them under his heavy gaze one by one in the back booth of Harvey’s a couple nights later.

"Hey, Joe," I said, showing him the one from our teenage years. "Look at these dudes. Two worthless punks." I shook my head, marveling at our arrogance, our youth, our evident disdain for the world.

But Joe Reed didn't flinch. I saw nothing in his eyes but flat dullness.

"You're wasting your time," Dr. Hurlburt said. I had invited him to the bar, to see for himself what effect the photographs might have. "You don't think we tried this in our therapies?"

I shrugged as I pulled the photograph from under Joe Reed's eyes.

On the way back to the zombies’ house with Joe Reed in tow, Dr.Hurlburt seemed to soften a little and thanked me for my efforts to revive his soul.

In front of the place, he turned and looked up into the dark windows.

"Maybe the Army is right," he said. "In wanting to destroy them."

I shuddered. In that moment, with Joe Reed standing dumbly next to us, I almost agreed.

But in the next instant, Joe Reed turned to me.

"Don Kaminski," he said, squinting at me. "Right?"

I looked at Dr.Hurlburt. His eyes were as wide as mine.

I worked 3-11 the next day and rather than going out with my crew for a round of drinks at Dixie’s afterwards, I headed straight for the zombies house.

But the place was on fire. There were firetrucks and ambulances and police cars blocking Colton Avenue. Firemen and cops were rushing around and everyone in the neighborhood was out gawking at the tragedy. I heard somebody tell a neighbor that it must have been a crack house. Weird strangers coming and going. And the place always dark, sinister.

I ran up to the place and one of the cops stopped me.

"Hey, buddy?" He was a tall, burly guy with arms wide as branches. "Where you going?"

"I knew a guy in there," I said.

"There’s no one in there," he said with a cold scowl. "Place was abandoned."

I backed off and gave what used to be the zombies’ house a last glance. It smoldered and stank of old burnt wood. Tomorrow, the city would come and tear it down.

Now, the zombies, if any of them had escaped, were truly homeless.

I turned around and strode the four blocks to Harvey’s. And there he was – Joe Reed, sitting in his favorite booth in the back of the place, sipping a beer.

I hurried back there and slid in across from him.

"Hey, Joe," I said. "You there for the fire? What happened to that doctor guy? Hurlburt?"

He frowned and took a sip of beer.

"Hey, Joe," I said. "Remember me? Its Don. Don Kaminski."

A hint of recognition filled his eyes, then a frown.

"Yeah," he said. "Don."

"Yeah. Don." I gushed. "So what happened. How’d the house burn down."

"Bad men came," he said. "Men from the camp. I was coming here. Didn’t see me."

I guessed that a platoon from the Army had tracked the zombies down to Hurlburt’s cousin house and took the zombies back to some secret base, another Area 51 or something, for "de-animation." Poor things. Then, they lit a match and burned the place down to cover their tracks. Joe Reed must have been on his way to Harvey’s when they raided the place.

"Bastards," I mumbled.

Joe Reed expressed no opinion on that. He just took another sip of beer and waited. For what, I don’t think he even knew.

"You’ll gonna have to come with me," I told him.

He looked across at me, but didn’t seem to care. He was content, didn’t have a worry in the world, and in that moment, I envied him.

I let him finish his beer, then stood and said, "C’mon." I reached under his arm and he let me lift me out of the booth.

Betty’s eyes boggled when I walked into the kitchen with Joe Reed in tow. She wobbled for a moment away from the sink, let the dish she had been drying fall with a clink, and plopped heavily onto a chair at the kitchen table.

It took her some time to get over the shock of seeing a dead man.

I explained everything to her, why I had been gone every night the last two weeks. And, finally, what had just happened to the zombies and Joe Reed’s good fortune at having been walking to Harvey’s, his old haunt, to use a bad pun, when the Army troops came.

"And here I thought you had a girlfriend," Betty said with a laugh.

"Joe needs a place to stay for a while," I told her.

Betty looked at him. For a moment, I thought I saw something of the old desire in her eyes. I thought it looked something like the way she was looking at him in that old photograph Joe Reed’s sister, Mary, had given me of their first and only date. But a moment later, I shook my head and thought I must be going crazy. I wondered if Betty even had any more desire for anything left in her.

"Sure," she said, and looked back at me. "For a little while. We got the room."

We put Joe Reed up in one of bedrooms that was for the kid we never had when we bought the house twenty-five years ago. Somehow, after a couple of days, we got used to having him around the house. I went back to work at the Ford plant, and Betty went back to being house-bound. Still, it bothered me that the two of them, even a zombie like Joe Reed, were home alone all day together. During my shift, I started imagining them doing things back home, having wild sex in his bedroom. All over the house for that matter. That would certainly go a long way to wake up his soul.

Three or four days after Joe Reed had moved in with us, I confessed my concerns to Betty. She blushed momentarily, and waved a hand at me.

"Don’t be a fool," she said. "All he does all day is sit in the living room, drinking beer and watching television." She laughed. "Just like you when you come home."

But I didn’t buy it. There seemed something different about Joe Reed after only three days. He seemed more alert, playing at being dumb instead of being dumb.

My fears were confirmed the next day. When I came straight home from work (I wasn’t even stopping at Dixie’s after my shift anymore), the house was empty. Betty and Joe Reed were gone. And all Betty’s clothes and toiletries and romance novels were gone, too.

After rushing around the house like a frantic madman, I found a note pinned to the pillow on my side of the bed, in Betty’s neat handwriting.

Dear Mike,

I read the note a couple more times and let it drop to the bed. What a weird way life has in getting us what we really always wanted. I knew now that Betty had always wanted Joe Reed and I had been the consolation prize.

I suddenly realized that someone was banging at my front door. A moment later, they had crashed through. When I ran out to the living room, I was tackled by a couple skinny Army privates.

"Hold him down!" urged a red-faced, granite-headed sergeant.

Within a few moments, a few other privates were reporting that the rest of the house was clear. The sergeant scowled and gestured to the sofa.

"Sit him there!" he barked.

The privates dragged me over to the sofa and sat at my sides.

The sergeant leaned his granite face into mine.

"Where is he?"

"Who?"

"The fucking zombie!"

I shrugged and almost laughed. It was funny to have to tell him that the fucking zombie had run off with my wife.

Dr. Hurlburt came to see me after a few days. I had been whisked off to that secret Army base and questioned for hours at a time by mean-spirited agents who seemed to doubt every essence of my being. Some of them got impatient and shouted that I was a traitor. Others used the kind approach, trying to be my buddy. Others used threats of severe physical or legal consequences.

I told them all the same thing – the truth. I didn’t know where that zombie, Joe Reed, was. He had run off with my wife.

"They are never gonna believe that story," said Dr. Hurlburt. He was beaming with a kind smile, as if he were innocent in all of this.

"Its true," I told him.

"They can’t believe that a zombie could ever fall in love," he said.

That hurt. Joe Reed, and Betty, in love.

"But, its true, I tell you," I said. "It’s goddamned true."

Dr. Hurlburt sighed.

"So," he said, "they do have souls."

I nodded. I had found out the hard way.

"But they’re still homeless," I told him. "I guess."

Dr. Hurlburt looked at me and smiled.

"Aren’t we all," he told me with a wink.

Vincent Scarsella has been an attorney for 22 years and for the past 12 has been in charge of the office in Buffalo, New York which investigates professional misconduct by lawyers. He is married and has three children. Vincent is the author of Resurrecting Jack which appeared in the April issue of Aphelion.

E-mail: vscarsella@adelphia.net

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