Dinner Is Served

by Ryan Harron

My heart sped up a little as I realized I was being followed, and my pace soon sped up to match

it. Another glance over my shoulder confirmed my realization - two men were walking behind me, just

as they had been for the past ten minutes. They seemed to walk slowly, as if they were completely

indifferent as to whether or not they caught up to me, but they were definitely following.

In an effort to lose them, or at least to confirm that I wasn't just being paranoid, I turned down

what I thought was a side street to see if they'd follow. Unfortunately, they did, and what I had thought

to be a street turned out to be an alley, with a large brick wall blocking off the back of it.

I took a quick look around my surroundings to see if there was anywhere I could hide, but there

was nothing. A small garden - mostly herbs but dotted with a few vegetables as well - was growing at

the end of it, and the walls on either side were unadorned and featureless. Nowhere for me to hide, and

no convenient service doors to allow me access to the buildings, either.

Matters were made worse as the two men shuffled into the alley, and the overhead lights

provided me with my first opportunity to get a good look at them. Both were zombies. Shit. Their

foul smell and guttural moans became amplified in the enclosed space, making it seem as if the alley

was closing itself around me, and that I would never leave here alive.

With no desire to become yet another victim, I reached into my purse, desperate to pull out the

small gun that I kept there for protection. As much as the government liked to claim they were

successfully dealing with the "zombie issue", and that attacks were on the decline, I knew at least three

people that had been attacked here in Harriston in the past six months. A girl could never be too

careful, so the gun never left my side when I went out.

I took a deep breath and squeezed off two rounds at the first zombie. The first missed, whizzing

past its left ear, but the second one connected with its head, spraying bits of zombie all over the other

one and the alley. I took another breath and fired again; the second one went down after only one shot.

Both of the zombies dispatched, I leaned against the wall in the alley to catch my breath. That's

when I heard the sound again - that horrible, groaning sound that could only mean another zombie had

worked its way into the alley. I was fairly sure this one hadn't been traveling with the others - I

distinctly remembered only the two of them, and I doubted they were smart enough to coordinate pack

hunts anyways. It probably had just heard the gunshots, and was drawn in by the sounds.

I rose and again pulled the trigger of my revolver. Nothing happened. I squeezed the trigger

again; aside from the empty clicking of the revolver's chamber, there was no effect. How could this

be? I distinctly remembered filling all six rounds after the last time that I had used the gun! And then

it hit me - Mark. He had borrowed the gun from me last weekend when he was taking that road trip to

the south side of town, and he had mentioned some zombie trouble on that trip. Had the inconsiderate

bastard really forgotten to reload it after he was done? He was definitely going to get an earful from

me later when I got home.

I dropped my purse down to the ground, putting the gun back inside it as I did. I knew that the

odds of fighting this thing off were against me, and I wanted to make sure to give myself the best

fighting chance possible. "Come on, you undead bastard," I said as I raised my fists in front of me,

more for my own nerve-building than to intimidate him.

The zombie continued to walk towards me, but then, without any explanation, he walked past

me. His dead eyes were mostly glazed over, but I was standing right in front of him when he first

walked into the alley. He must have seen me. Despite that, though, he continued to shuffle forward,

walking to the back of the alley were the small garden lay.

"What the hell is going on here?" I asked myself. It was then that the zombie looked in my

direction, and the most amazing thing happened. It spoke. Like, actual words, and not just the usual

collection of moans and groans that one hears when a zombie attack is imminent.

"Don't worry," the zombie said to me. "You have nothing to fear from me at the moment - I'm

just here for the herbs."

His voice was definitely inhuman - guttural and rough, the way that you would expect a voice to

sound if its owner had been gargling with hot asphalt on a cold afternoon. At the same time, though,

there was a sophistication to it that shocked me.

"What do you mean?" I found myself asking reflexively. "Don't you want to, like, eat my

brains or something like that?"

“Dear heavens, no," the zombie explained. By this point he had stopped even looking in my

direction, and was rummaging through the herbs in the garden. "Have you ever eaten brain? It has

quite the unpleasant aftertaste."

"No, I have never eaten brain!" I answered immediately, before the ludicrousness of the

question began to sink in. "Isn't that what you zombies do, though? Eat brains?"

"Well, that is what a lot of us do, although I can't really understand it. It's too flavourless,

really. And raw, as well? I mean, sushi is one thing, but raw brain? Quite unsanitary."

“Amazing. A vegetarian zombie. And here I am, without a video camera. This would make

one hell of a story for my show.”

“I didn't say I was vegetarian,” the zombie explained, sounding somewhat offended, “just that

Robert Hargreaves has the decorum and taste to not attack people out in the middle of the street, even if

he does find himself to be a zombie.”

With that, the zombie plucked a few leaves from one of the plants from the garden in the back

of the alley and started to walk away. My feeling of dumbstruck shock had started to abate, and was

being replaced with ire. Unsanitary? Here he was, a zombie of all things, and he was calling my brain

unsanitary? Just who did he think he was? "Hey, wait a second!" I called out, having finally realized

the full scope of what had just happened to me. I started to follow him out onto the street.

"You can talk," I said to him as I caught up with him.

"Yes, I can talk,” he replied sarcastically, “it's just like I'm human or something."

"You're not really human, though - you're a zombie. I've never heard of a zombie that could

talk before."

“Well, yes, I'll admit that in that regard I'm a little unusual," the zombie explained. "I used to be

just like the rest of them, though. Just another corpse, shambling through my unlife, willing to eat just

about anything that I came across."

"So what happened?" I asked scornfully, "did you have some sort of 'moment of clarity' or

something like that?"

"Not exactly," the zombie said, trying to achieve as close to a chuckle as he could but failing

horribly. "No, my story is a little more mundane than that. I was, as I said, a regular zombie - but then

I fell onto the third rail of a subway line, and the next thing I knew all of my human faculties had

returned to me. I still had all of the physical qualities of a zombie, but all the mental ones of my

previous life. So, I decided to do what anyone would in that situation, and began to apply the skills of

my previous life to my current situation."

"What skills were those?" I asked. I had to admit that at this point I was genuinely curious - I

couldn't imagine what kind of job he had had as a human that would be well-suited to a zombie's life.

"I was a chef," he explained, "specializing in French cuisine, but willing to experiment with

other styles. I knew that I still had a craving for human flesh, but that was no reason to have to eat like

a dog. We must still keep our culture, because without that we are nothing!"

I knew it was a bad idea to follow him into the house, but my curiosity had gotten the best of

me, and the next thing I knew we were walking into his kitchen. A pot sat on the stove, wisps of steam

rising out of it. I had to admit that, despite the circumstances, the dinner did at least smell good. To

the side of the kitchen a small dining-room table was set up, with a dirty old tablecloth on top of it. It

was encrusted with dirt and old splotches of food, with several flies circling around the latter in search

of a meal of their own.

I watched with interest as the zombie - I had still not worked up a willingness to call him by

name - gently placed the herbs he had picked on a cutting board, He gingerly picked up the chef's knife

that lay on the board, and began to chop up the herbs finely. It took him a while to get through the

whole thing - on several occasions he dropped the knife to the ground, and once it even impaled itself

into his thigh. He picked it up each time without a pause, and continued to chop.

"That's the first thing to go, you know," he explained once he was finished, "fine motor control.

Makes it harder and harder to get anything done, because you have to spend half of your time redoing

something that you did wrong the first time." With a sigh he swept the herbs into the large pot, stirring

it with a nearby spoon as he did. After a few moments of this, he lifted a broth-filled spoon to his

mouth. “Sadly,” he said after a second sip, “your sense of taste goes quickly as well. Either that, or

this is just bland. Could you taste it for me?”

“Uh, no thanks,” I said, my eyes focused on the spoon. The broth was thin enough that I could

see through it, right to the dirt that had accumulated on the underside of it. “I'm not really in the mood

for eating right now.”

“It's funny you should say that,” the zombie said, laughing again with that thin wheeze of his,

“because you're going to be part of it.” Having said that, his hand darted out quicker than I would have

thought it able to , and it latched on to my arm tightly.

“What?” I said, shocked. “What are you talking about? You said you didn't want to eat my

brain!”

"That's not quite what I said," he said, correcting me. "I said that eating any old raw brain that

you find on the street disgusted me. It's quite a different thing to taste my brain a la king. And it's so

helpful when dinner volunteers to follow you home. You said you were a reporter, didn't you?"

"Yes," I stammered out. "A television reporter. Political commentator, to be fully honest with

you."

"Ah, good then," he said, brushing the hair out of my face. I wanted to back away from him,

keeping his dirty, maggoty hands away, but by now I was frozen with fear, and felt completely

helpless.

"You've tasted veal, I take it?" he asked, a smile growing across what remained of his thin lips.

He seemed oblivious to the fact that I couldn't answer him. "Meat is so much fresher when it hasn't

been forced to work hard; I'm sure the meal I make of your brain will be no exception."

The last thing I felt, before the world went dark, was his hands running through my hair, and the

chill of his knife across my skin.