How fucking genius is that?
Throw in some wild futuristic technology, a bit of Carlton’s trademark social commentary (this time focusing on our society’s reality television addiction and Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame), and a plot that literally leaves you guessing until the end, and you’ve got a hit. You’ve got a classic. You’ve got an addition to the zombie canon that, twenty years from now, will be just as influential on the next generation as Romero’s original trilogy and Skipp & Spector’s
If you love zombies, you’ll love this book. But more importantly, if you’re sick of zombies—if you want them to go the fuck away now—then you will love this book. Why? Because it will remind you of what you loved about them in the first place, before they became overdone cliches that saturated the marketplace.
And in either case, you can blame Carlton Mellick.
Empathize
Brian Keene
Somewhere in rural Pennsylvania
June 2011
Charlie rolls over in his sleep and spoons his wife lying next to him. He burrows his face into the back of her neck and inhales the scent of cinnamon and motorcycle grease. His eyes still closed, he takes a deeper smell of her hair and recognizes the odor of cloves mixed with river clay. Her hair is soft against his nose. He wonders why she has such soft hair. Rainbow Cat, his wife, normally has very crusty dreadlocks that are itchy against his nose. With his lips pressed against her bare neck, it feels as if she doesn’t have dreadlocks at all. It feels more like she has a short pixie haircut.
As he rubs his arm against the front of her body, he wonders if this is actually his wife at all. His hand is cupped around a large plump breast, yet his wife is nearly flat-chested. Her waist and hips are soft and curvy, yet his wife’s body is knotty with muscle from working in the fields. When the woman moans, it is deep and smooth, not high and coarse. This is definitely not his wife.
Charlie opens his eyes. He feels groggy, drugged. His muscles are so relaxed that he only just realizes that he’s been fully clothed this whole time, lying on a hard concrete floor. He pushes himself up and looks at the woman next to him. She’s an Asian woman with short dyed-blonde hair, someone he’s never seen before in his life. She’s wearing jeans and a white tank top. Her mouth is open against the pavement, a puddle of drool below the corner of her lip. In her
sleep, she grabs his arm and pulls it back against her chest, hugging it like a teddy bear.
Leaning awkwardly against the sleeping woman with his arm in her grasp, he takes a look around the dimly lit room. It seems to be the lobby of an old abandoned hotel or office building. Dust-coated couches and chairs can be seen through the stripes of light coming from the boarded up windows. Debris from the partially-collapsed ceiling litters the reception area.
There are other people sleeping on the floor all around him, almost two dozen of them. Most of them look to be real scumbags: vagrants, gutter punks, junkies, whores. Charlie wonders how the hell he got there. The last thing he remembers is having drinks with his wife. It was their five year anniversary, the first day in months they were able to afford to go for a night on the town. He remembers having some drinks and then waiting to be served. He remembers the owner of the establishment giving them each a couple of free drinks.
The only thing that makes sense to him would be if he’d gotten too drunk to walk home and passed out in a nearby abandoned building. It isn’t rare for abandoned buildings to be filled with lowlifes these days. It also isn’t uncommon for him to pass out in public places after a night of heavy drinking. But what is strange is the drugged feeling in his brain, his numb mouth and tongue. If he did some kind of drug while he was drunk, Rainbow is probably pissed off at him right now. He promised her he would never do any kind of drug ever again. She might have even kicked him out of their apartment. Perhaps that’s why he’s sleeping in a place like this.
He looks down at the Asian woman snuggling his arm. She’s probably a prostitute. Charlie might have even slept with her last night for all he knows. Rainbow isn’t with him, thankfully. He hopes she arrived safely to their apartment last night and has no recollection of what happened to them the night before. Otherwise, he might have just fucked up their marriage for good.
For a hippy, Rainbow Cat is a very angry and unforgiving human being. She’s also materialistic, snobbish, and high maintenance. He told her he was done with pills and hookers. If this is what happened that would be the end of it. She wouldn’t take him back this time.
Charlie tries to slip his arm away from the sleeping woman, but she only hugs it tighter. He tries to rip it away and she digs her fingernails into his arm. When the fingernails draw blood, he cries out, waking her. Her black eyes pop open and point up at him. As he hovers a foot above her, he sees the shocked look on her face. She is just as surprised and confused to be there as he is. He can tell that she too has no idea where she is or why she is there.
Still holding his arm, she glares at Charlie. Then she grinds her teeth and digs her nails deeper into his arm, as if she thinks he is the person responsible for bringing her there.
The woman is about to go for his eyes when they hear somebody yell, “What the fuck!”
They turn their heads to see a young punk with a tall yellow mohawk standing on the other side of the room.
“Where the hell are we?” he says. “What the fuck is going on and shit?”
A punk girl, one with pink spiky hair, gasps and looks around frantically. More people begin to wake up, all of them just as surprised to be there as Charlie.
“Why am I on the floor?” cries a shivering prostitute, no older than sixteen.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” says a large black homeless man with a beard and mud-coated hoody.
Charlie looks down at the Asian woman and their eyes meet. The white tank top she’s wearing is moist with sweat. Because she’s not wearing a bra, Charlie can clearly see her dark nipples
“Get the fuck off me,” she yells, then kicks him to the floor.
When Charlie gets up, he watches the angry woman storm away from him, covering her breasts with folded arms. She pushes through the shoulder of a muscle-bound punk with a white flat top and a hot pink half-shirt.
“I’ve been drugged,” says a voluptuous punk girl with green hair. “I can taste it.”
“Yeah, me too, and shit,” says the yellow mohawk punk. “What the fuck!” He kicks a piece of rubble across the concrete floor.
Everyone in the room has now woken, pulling themselves slowly to their feet, rubbing their groggy eyes. All of them except for one: a girl in the corner. A tall, bony girl with blonde dreadlocks.
“Rainbow?” Charlie says.
He goes to her and turns her over. It is his wife. She rubs her eyes open and smiles at Charlie.
“There you are,” she says, touching her index finger sloppily to his lower lip.
The Asian woman looks over at Charlie with a sneer, feeling dirty for snuggling with a married man while his wife was in the same room, even if it was an accident. She shakes her head and stares out of a crack in the boarded up window.
When Rainbow Cat looks around and notices the unfamiliar surroundings, she leaps to her feet, and yells, “Oh god.”
The hippy girl looks around the room in a panic. When Charlie tries to hug her to him, she pushes him away.
“This has got to be some kind of mistake,” she says. “This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen.”
The Asian girl looks over at Charlie and says in a calm, serious tone, “You better shut her mouth right now.”
“I can’t be here,” Rainbow cries. “I can’t be here!”
“Shut her up or I’ll snap her neck,” says the Asian woman, without raising her voice.
Charlie can tell by the look in her eyes that she’s serious, so he calms down his wife. The Asian woman’s eyes return to the window, peering at something in the distance.
