Breathers

by S.G. Browne

Genres: Black Humor; Horror; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

For fans of Max Brooks's The Zombie Survival Guide and zombie aficionados everywhere, a hilarious debut novel about life (and love) after death.

Meet Andy Warner, a recently deceased everyman and newly minted zombie. Resented by his parents, abandoned by his friends, and reviled by a society that no longer considers him human, Andy is having a bit of trouble adjusting to his new existence. But all that changes when he goes to an Undead Anonymous meeting and finds kindred souls in Rita, an impossibly sexy recent suicide with a taste for the formaldehyde in cosmetic products, and Jerry, a twenty-one-year-old car-crash victim with an exposed brain and a penchant for Renaissance pornography. When the group meets a rogue zombie who teaches them the joys of human flesh, things start to get messy, and Andy embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will take him from his casket to the SPCA to a media-driven class-action lawsuit on behalf of the rights of zombies everywhere.

Darkly funny, surprisingly touching, and gory enough to satisfy even the most discerning reader, Breathers is a romantic zombie comedy (rom-zom-com, for short) that will leave you laughing, squirming, and clamoring for more.

Release date: March 3, 2009

Publisher: Crown

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1

I wake up on the floor in darkness.

Faint artificial light filters in through a window, which doesn't make sense because there aren't any windows in the wine cellar. But I'm not able to deal with that question until I figure out why I'm on my back in a pool of liquid that's seeping into my clothes.

That and I can hear Sammy Davis Jr. singing "Jingle Bells."

When I sit up, something rolls off of my body and onto the floor with a hard, hollow thunk. It's a bottle. In the faint light coming in through the window, I watch the bottle roll away across the floor until it comes to rest against the wall with a clang. It's an empty bottle of wine. And the wall isn't a wall but the base of the Whirlpool oven.

I'm in the kitchen.

On the digital LED display at the top of the range, the clock changes from 12:47 to 12:48.

My head is pounding. I don't know how many bottles of wine I've consumed, but I know I started drinking before lunch. The impetus for my wine binge is as clear to me as the digital numbers of the oven clock, but I have no idea what happened to the last twelve hours.

Or how I ended up in the kitchen.

Or what I'm sitting in.

Part of me doesn't want to know. Part of me just wants to believe that it's nothing more than fermented grapes. That I somehow managed to get out of the wine cellar and into the kitchen and then passed out, dumping the contents of the bottle of wine onto the floor. Except the front of my clothes aren't wet, only the back, and since the bottle was on my chest when I woke up, I couldn't have spilled wine on the floor without soaking my shirt.

I put my hand down into the puddle, which is congealed and sticky, then bring my hand up to my nose. It smells sweet. At first I think it's yogurt or strawberry preserves, until I put my finger in my mouth.

It's Baskin-Robbins strawberries and cream ice cream. My father's favorite. He keeps at least two quarts of it in the freezer at all times. What I don't understand is what it's doing on the kitchen floor. Then I turn around and stagger to my feet and understand why.

Three quarts of Baskin-Robbins are smashed open, their contents melted and spreading out across the floor. Surrounding them are boxes of frozen vegetables, packages of frozen meats, containers of frozen juice concentrate, and half a dozen ice cube trays, their contents melted and mixed in with the ice cream, forming a pool of defrosted frozen items.

Oh shit, I think. What the hell did I do?

Not that it really matters. My parents are going to ship me off to a zoo when they get back from Palm Springs. Unless they wake up in the morning and my father is upset enough about what I've done to cancel their trip and ship me off to a research facility out of spite.

I don't know what I intended to accomplish by dumping the entire contents of the freezer onto the kitchen floor, but I figure it would probably be a good idea to try to put back what I can and clean up the rest of it before my parents wake up. But when I open the freezer, I discover there's not any room.

My parents are in the freezer. I can see hands and legs and feet and my father's face staring out at me from the second shelf. His head is in a large Ziploc freezer bag, as are the rest of my parents' body parts. Or most of them. When I open the refrigerator, my parents are in there, too.

All the wine I've drunk is suddenly trying to find its way back into the bottle and I barely make it to the sink before I throw up. Actually, it's more like reverse drinking. Just wine and a little stomach acid. But no chunks of Mom or Dad.

Our relationship wasn't always like this.

Sure, there were the standard growing pains and disagreements most parents and sons encounter.

Hormones.

Independence.

Latent Oedipal desires.

But when your only son reanimates from the dead, it creates an entirely new dynamic that your average parents just aren't prepared to handle.

After all, it's not like there's a handbook for dealing with spontaneous resurrection. That's the technical term for zombies you hear thrown around by experts on talk shows and news programs, as if they know what it's like to be a reanimated corpse. They have no idea of the emotional fallout from a rapidly digesting pancreas. Or how hard it is to keep your tissues from liquefying.

My father was a de facto expert. And by "de facto," I mean he was the only one who considered himself an expert on anything.

Plumbing.

Politics.

Personal hygiene.

"You know, Andrew, you can get rid of those blackheads by using olive oil and vinegar."

He actually believed this. Fortunately, he let Mom do the cooking. Otherwise, I would have been the only kid in my school eating arugula salad with sliced pears, Asiago cheese, and a benzoyl peroxide dressing.

Don't get me wrong. My dad wasn't an idiot. He just always thought he was right, even when he had no idea what he was talking about. He would have made a great politician.

However, I do have to give my father props for his choice in refrigerators. My mom wanted one of those Whirlpool side-by-side models, but my father insisted on an Amana bottom freezer. Said it was more energy efficient, drawing cold air down instead of up. He also claimed it provided better use of shelf space.

While my parents' heads and most of their limbs are tucked away inside the freezer, their bodies from hip to shoulder are stuffed into the refrigerator. Had it been a side-by-side model, I never would have been able to fit their torsos on the shelves. Thanks Dad.

On the CD player in the living room, Dean Martin is singing "Auld Lang Syne."

Staring at my parents stuffed into the Amana bottom freezer, their torsos crammed between the mayonnaise and the leftover Thanksgiving turkey, their heads sealed in Ziploc bags, I'm overcome with a surreal sense of disbelief. From the expression on my father's face, it appears he's just as surprised as me.

Maybe none of this would have come to pass had my father taken the time to understand what I was going through instead of treating me like a pariah.

Or maybe I'm just kidding myself.

Maybe everything that happened between the accident and now was inevitable.

Chapter 2

Two months before I find my parents in the Amana bottom freezer, I'm at the Soquel Community Center, sitting in a semicircle of chairs that's open toward a petite, fifty-two-year-old woman who looks like my third-grade teacher. Except my third-grade teacher never ended up on the wrong end of a twelve-gauge, pump-action Mossberg.

On the freestanding chalkboard behind her, written in block letters, is the proclamation:

YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Upper- and lowercase letters probably would have softened the message, but the petite woman, the group moderator, a gunshot victim named Helen, is just trying to make us feel better.

"Rita, would you like to start tonight?" asks Helen.

Rita's face is a pale moon hovering in the black hood of her sweatshirt. She has on a black turtleneck and black pants. The only color she's wearing is on her lips, which are Eternal Red.

Rita slit her wrists and then her throat on her twenty-third birthday. That was less than a month ago. Most of the time she wears gloves and turtlenecks to hide the stitches. Sometimes she wears hooded sweatshirts. Other times she wears scarves. On bad days, she wears all three. Tonight she left the scarf at home, so at least she's not feeling morose.

Rita licks her lips--sucks on them, actually, removing most of her lipstick. From her pocket she produces a black cylinder and applies another coat, smacking her lips together. It's either an oral fetish or she needs a fix.

"I still feel alone most of the time," says Rita. "Once in a while, I can almost imagine none of this ever happened. Then I look in the mirror and the hopelessness comes flooding back."

Five other heads nod in understanding. Carl is the lone dissenter.

"You don't agree, Carl?" asks Helen.

Carl was stabbed seven times, twice in the face, by two teenagers who stole his wallet and used his credit cards to buy seven hundred dollars' worth of online pornography.

"No," says Carl. "I agree with her completely. She is hopeless."

"That's nice," says Naomi, lighting up a cigarette. Half African American, half Japanese, Naomi could still pass for a model if it weren't for her empty eye socket and the way the right side of her face sags. "Why don't you just rip open her stitches while you're at it?"

"I'll leave that to your husband," says Carl.

Naomi's husband came home after a bad day of golf and took out his frustrations on her with a Titleist four-iron.

"He's no longer my husband," says Naomi.

"Technically, no," says Carl. "But then technically, none of us should be here."

"And yet we are here," says Helen. "So why don't we focus on that."

In addition to Helen, Rita, Naomi, and Carl, the other members of the group include Tom, a thirty-eight-year-old dog trainer who nearly lost his right arm along with the left half of his face to a pair of Presa Canarios, and Jerry, a twenty-one-year-old car crash victim. Like me.

Because of our similar experiences, Jerry feels a connection with me, so he sits next to me at every meeting. I don't feel anything but lost, and Jerry, who listens to rap music and still wears his pants halfway down his ass, annoys me, so tonight I made sure to sit at the end of the semicircle next to Naomi.

"We're all survivors," says Helen, who then stands up and walks over to the chalkboard. "I want you all to remember that. I know it's hard dealing with the threats and the name-calling and the expired food products thrown at you, but you survived for a reason."

At times Helen reminds me of Mary Poppins--always cheerful and full of advice that works for characters who live in movies, fairy tales, or the Playboy Mansion. But I have to admit, without the support group I'd probably never leave my parents' wine cellar. Still, I think we need to come up with a name other than Undead Anonymous. After all, when you're undead, you're about as anonymous as a transvestite with a five o'clock shadow.

At least we don't get any support group imposters crashing our meetings, trying to pick up vulnerable women. That would be sick. Interesting, but sick.

Helen finishes writing another of her messages on the chalkboard and turns to face us. Beneath YOU ARE NOT ALONE, she's written the words:

I AM A SURVIVOR.

"Whenever you're feeling lost or hopeless, I want you all to say this out loud. 'I am a survivor.' Say it with me now."

By the time the meeting breaks up, it's dark outside. The end of October is more than two weeks away, but less than a month into autumn and it's already pitch black before Jeopardy.

I never liked autumn. Even before the accident I hated the weather growing cold and the changing of the leaves. Now it's a visual reminder of how my own life has grown cold. Lately I'm beginning to think there's just an endless autumn threatening an eternal winter.

I'm getting melancholy again.

Helen advocates the buddy system when we leave our meetings, though Carl says he doesn't need anyone to hold his hand and heads for home on his own. Jerry, Helen, Rita, and I all live in the same direction, so we head off one way while Naomi and Tom head the other. Most nights, Jerry buddies up with me and talks incessantly about his accident and how he needs to get laid and how he wonders what it would be like to be dead. I wonder about that, too. More so when I have to pair up with Jerry.

"Dude, that car was awesome," says Jerry. "Cherry red with a beast for an engine and a killer sound system. You should have seen it."

I know the story by heart. A fifth of Jack Daniel's, half a dozen bong hits, no seat belt, a utility pole, and bad judgment on a right-hand turn sent Jerry through the windshield of his cherry red 1974 Charger and skidding along River Street head first, scraping away a chunk of his scalp. I've heard the story so many times that I can almost believe it happened to me. Except my accident was worse. Jerry was alone in his car.

My wife was asleep in the passenger seat and, unlike me, she never woke up.

For the first two months after the accident, all I could think about was Rachel--the smell of her hair, the taste of her lips, the warmth of her body next to me at night. I wallowed in my suffering, consumed with anguish and self-pity. That and I had to deal with the smell of my decomposing scalp, the taste of formaldehyde in the back of my throat, and my own cold, decaying body. It was enough to make me want to take a gasoline shower and set myself on fire.

If you've never woken up from a car accident to discover that your wife is dead and you're an animated, rotting corpse, then you probably wouldn't understand.

Helen says that even though we've all lost more than our share, we need to keep our faith in the path that lies ahead of us. She says we need to let go of the past before we can embrace our future. I'm still working on that. Right now, the past is all I have and the future looks about as promising as the new fall lineup on CBS.

I used to wish Rachel would have reanimated with me so I wouldn't have to go through this alone, but eventually I realized she was better off dead. I'd thank God for small favors, but I doubted his existence before this happened and I haven't exactly changed my mind. Losing your wife in a car accident is enough to challenge the faith of even the most devout believer. But when you're a skeptic to begin with, being able to smell your own rotting flesh tends to put the kibosh on your belief in a divine power.

That's one of the biggest problems about coming back from the dead. The smell never quite goes away.