Read Online Satan Burger by Iii Carlton Mellick - Free Book Online Page B

body.
    "Stag’s dead," Lenny says.
    Stag is not dead, as I told you before.  He is unconscious without a heartbeat.
    But we can’t blame Lenny for thinking this, because it is a very common misunderstanding to take a sleeping someone who has no heartbeat for a dead someone.  Doctors, coroners, morticians, even grave-diggers all make the same mistake on a daily basis.  If you haven’t got a heartbeat, I suggest that you don’t sleep so much because eventually someone will think you are dead and either cremate you or bury you.  And I assure you, waking up to find out that you’ve been cremated or buried is no way to start your day.  I especially stress that you don’t sleep in the middle of the street, floating in the swimming pool, hanging from a noose, curled up in a bathtub with a toaster, holding an empty cup of liquid plumber, or lying on the kitchen floor with a knife stuck in your back.
    In addition to the missing heartbeat, Stag doesn’t breathe, feel (other than his left eye), or need to eat.  He’s a zombie.
    Richard Stein said that a zombie is the star of a very low budget horror movie that can’t be killed and hates to come out during the day. Its favorite pastimes include the mindlessly gnawing of human brains with a group of companion zombies, moaning really loud, and taking very-very slow nature walks by the graveyard.  But Stag is not the same as Richard Stein’s zombie.  He’s just a dead person that is still alive.  He’s not mindless and doesn’t care much for eating human brain.
    Nan finds Gin rickety-smoking a cigarette on a nearby pile of granite, trying to straighten out his broken neck.  She hears his neck snip-crack a bit, getting a better position; he sighs with relief.  The sigh was queer to him, not a normal sigh of relief that comes naturally after fixing a problem.  It was a forced sigh.  This is because he doesn’t breathe anymore.  He can force himself to breathe if he wants to, but he doesn’t need to in order to survive.  For Gin, breathing is completely voluntary now. He can go weeks without taking a breath and without even realizing that he hasn’t taken a breath.
    Nan squats next to him on a cardboard log and asks, "What happened?"
    "I was killed," he answers.
    "What - how could you be killed?"
    "Stag and I got in a car accident and died."
    She laughs.  "What are you?  A zombie?"
    "Yes."  He puts her hand on his heart.  "No heartbeat," he says.
    Ripping her hand back, she shivers a laugh.  It is funny to her.
    "You’re cold," her voice giggling-drunk.
    "Not completely," he says, serious.
    "Does that make me a necrophiliac?"
    "Stop."
    His hippie-sorrow eyes drool into her, and she feels his hurting.  Please-please , she senses him say.  Nan holds him.  All he can hear is her awkwardness.

    Lenny arrives to repeat, "Stag’s dead," purple-wide face, stutters.
    Gin answers, "Yeah, so am I."
    "How can you be dead if you’re walking around?" Lenny asks.
    "I don’t know.  I’ve never been dead before."
    "Stag isn’t walking around," Lenny says.
    Gin says, "Maybe he is asleep."
    "No, he’s dead.  His skull is broken."

    They go back to the autocar to find Stag.
    "I’ll show you," Zombie Gin says . . . But Stag isn’t there once they arrive.
    "He was here," Lenny says, adjusting his nerdy-wear glasses.
    "Are you sure he was, Lenny?" Nan asks, holding onto Gin to warm his blood.
    "Of course I am," answers Lenny.  "What did he do?  Just get up and walk away with a collapsed skull?"
    "Yes," Gin says coldly, scratching his left eye.

    I go to my body. 
    A handwritten sign says, "Satan Burger, 2 miles."
    "It’s a pretty long drive for food," Mort comments.
    I look through the windows at the moon.  It isn’t our original moon.  We lost the original moon in ’72.  Well, we didn’t lose it.  The moon lost itself.  It forgot its way around the Earth, probably because of its Alzheimer’s or maybe it was committing suicide to save itself from the