I was wiping down the counter at the bar when a group of zombies came in. A few of them wrinkled their noses when they got here, which was a little weird.
“Oh man… smells like somebody died in here,” said one of them.
Oh great. Not real zombies. Just what we needed. Still, it’s best to be polite.
“Can I get you fellows anything? The headcheese on rye is the special today.”
“Um… can I just get a coke. With a straw. Don’t want to have to redo my latex.”
I leaned forward and said, fairly quietly, “You boys realize that this is a zombie bar, right?”
“Yeah, we’re just on break. The director said we should check out a real zombie bar before we get back to shooting. He wants it to be a realistic as possible.”
I snorted. I’d heard that the crew of Dead/Alive 3: Back for More was going to be filming a few scenes here in town. I didn’t realize that they were hiring human extras to be zombies. That’s what I get for not paying attention to the news.
I took the rest of their orders. Mostly just drinks. Apparently the lead makeup artist was a bit of a terror, and none of the extras wanted to incur his wrath. I was about to suggest a table on the side of the room closest to the door, but before I could, one of the group wandered into the middle of the room and snagged the table
Every half-rotted eye in the room was on them. And they were oblivious.
Buster, one of the bigger regulars, staggered over to their table. It was hard to tell if he was angry, since most of his facial muscles weren’t connected to anything. “What you think… you… humans… doing?”
I was surprised that he remembered to lift his pitch at the end of the sentence to signify that it was a question. His speech center is decayed enough that tonality usually escapes him. He must have been thinking long and hard about what to ask before he stumbled over there.
“You have… human… face. You wear zombie face. Why?”
The one with the coke swallowed nervously. “Umm… we’re in a movie. We’re extras in the movie.”
“Buster know about movie. Buster went to cas-ting a-gent. Cas-ting a-gent says Buster is too dumb to take direction. Buster think that director is too dumb to direct zombies.”
“They were just looking for people in the background to play zombies.”
I could see Buster stiffen, or at least the parts of him that still worked stiffened. “Hey! That… our word. You say different-ly anim-ated.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know… he said it a minute ago,” the guy said as he pointed at me.
“He works with us. He knows us. He allowed to. You. You wear zombie face. You pretend to be us in film where zombies not allowed. You not allowed to. Is our word.”
“Sorry, man. We just got hired to play parts, that’s all.” The guy looked genuinely nervous. I think it just hit him that he was surrounded by actual zombies. And they didn’t seem to like him much.
Buster leaned down to eye level with him, and I saw the guy trying not to recoil. Also trying not to breathe through his nose. Buster grinned, a horrific sight to see from a distance, let alone up close.
“Look at him. He thinks we going to eat his brains.”
There was a general chorus of ‘brains’ from around the room.
“Buster not want tiny snack,” Buster said as he walked away.
The group of humans filtered out the door. I sent a bowl of chicken ganglia to Buster’s table. On the house.