Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (28 page)

Like Pavlov’s Dogs

By Steven R. Boyett

[1]

“
Good
morning, happy campers!” blares the loudspeaker on the wal above the head of Marly Tsung’s narrow bed. “It’s another beautiful day in paradise!” A bel rings. “Rise and shine!”

Marly the sleepy camper slides out from her pocket of warmth. “Rise your own fucking shine,”

she mutters as she rises from her pal et and staggers to the computer screen that glows a dul gray above her desk. The word UPDATE pulses in the middle of the monitor; she flicks it with a finger and turns away to find the clothes she shed the night before.

“Today is Wednesday, the twenty-ninth,” says her recorded voice. “Today marks the three hundred seventy-second day of the station’s operation.” Marly sniffs and makes a sour face at how pleasant her earlier self sounds. How
enthused
. “Gung ho,” she says.

“The structural integrity of the Ecosphere is ninety-nine point five percent,” the recording continues brightly, “with indications of water-vapor leakage in panels above the northern quadrant of the Rain Forest environment.”

“Christ,” says Marly, hating the daily cheerfulness of her own voice. She slides into faded, baggy jeans, then scoops on peasant sandals.

“Unseasonal warm weather in this region of Arizona has increased the convection winds from the Desert environment, and as a result the humidity has increased in the Rain Forest environment. Rainfal may be expected in the late afternoon. Soil nitrogenating systems are—”

Marly puts on a T-shirt, sees the neck tag pass in front of her, pul s the shirt partway off, and turns it around.

Leaving, she pauses at the door and looks back. Computer console on oak desk, dirty laundry, precariously stacked pop-music cassettes, rumpled bed. If someone were to come in here, someone who knew Marly but wasn’t on Staff, would they be able to figure out who lived here?

She looks away. The question is moot. The only people in the entire world who know Marly are the Ecostation personnel.

She slides shut the door on her own voice and heads down the narrow hal to one of the station’s two bathrooms.

FLUSH TWICE—IT’S A LONG WAY TO THE KITCHEN is scrawled in black felt-tip on the wal facing her. It’s been there a year now. More recently—say, ten months ago— someone wrote, below that, EAT SHIT. And below that— with a kind of prophetic irony—WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

Marly never did think these were very funny.

She flushes—once—and heads for the rec room and the inevitable. Her waste heads for reclamation and the (nearly) inedible.

Four of the other seven station personnel are in the rec room ahead of her. Bil theasshole stands on the blue wrestling mat. He’s wearing his gray UCLA sweat suit again. If clothes could get leprosy, they’d look like that sweat suit. On a leather thong around his neck is a silver whistle.

Marly thinks her usual idle morning thought about what it would feel like to choke Bil theasshole by that lanyard. She imagines his stern face purpling, his reptilian eyes dimming. Watching his tinfoil-colored eyes staring at the door, Marly invents Tsung’s law: The biggest shithead and the person in command can usual y be shot with the same bul et.

Pale Grace sits glumly at an unplugged gaming table, drumming her nails against the dark glass tabletop. Marly shakes her head. A year now, and Grace stil looks like someone desperate for a cigarette. She catches Marly watching her and ducks her head and twitches a smile.

Marly thinks of just staring at her to drive her even more crazy, but what’s the point?

Slumped against the heavy bag in the corner like a determined marathon dancer is Dieter. He smiles sleepily at her and scratches his ful , brown beard. “Grow me coffee,” he says in his pleasant Rotweiler growl, “and I wil unblock your pipes for the next year.”

She smiles and shakes her head. “No beans,” she replies. This has become their daily morning ritual. Dieter knows what that headshake is real y for: He’s unblocked her pipes enough already, thank you.

Sitting barefoot in lotus on the folding card table is little carrot-topped Bonnie. She smiles warmly at Marly, attempting to get her to acknowledge the spiritual kinship that supposedly exists between them because Bonnie is into metaphysics and Marly is Chinese.

Marly makes herself look inscrutable.

In walk Deke and Haiffa, a mismatched set: him burly, her slight; him hairy, her smooth; him Texas beefeating good-ole-boy-don’t-shoot-til -you-see-the-black-of-their-skin, her Israeli vegetarian educated at Oxford. Natural y they are in love. Marly pays them little mind beyond a glance as they walk in holding hands like children and sit on the unraveling couch; Deke and Haiffa return the favor. They have become Yin and Yang, a unit unto themselves, outside of which exists the entire rest of the world. Proof again that there is such a thing as circumstantial love, love in a context, love-in-a-box.

Last in is Leonard Wil ard. Marly stil spel s his name LYNYRD WYLLYRD on the duty roster, long after the last drop of humor has been squeezed from the joke, which Leonard never got anyway.

Leonard is the youngest staff member, always compensating for his inexperience with puppyish eagerness to please. But despite the fact that Leonard could have been one of the original Mouseketeers, Marly takes his constant good cheer as an indication of his bottomless wel of self deception. The Ecosphere station is his world; everything outside it is… some movie he saw once. In black and white. Late at night. When he was a kid. He real y doesn’t remember it very wel .

Predictably, Bil theasshole blows his whistle the moment the last person walks in. “Okay, troops,” he says. “Fal in.” He likes to cal the staff members “troops.” He would stil be wearing his mirrored aviator sunglasses if Marly hadn’t thrown them into the Ocean.

She fal s in behind the others as they line up on the wrestling mat to begin their calisthenics. Or, as Bil theasshole cal s them, their “cardiovascular aerobic regimen.”

[2]

Sweetpea spits gum onto low-pile, gray carpet. “Flavor’s gone,” she explains.

Doughboy laughs. Shirtless, his hairy bel y quivers. “Where you gonna get some more, girl?”

(“Sailor?” someone cal s from the stacks upstairs. “Goddamn motherfucker—
Sailor!
”) Sweetpea just shrugs and turns her back on Doughboy. She goes to join a group gathered behind one of the tal bookshelves. 0900: American History. One of the group pul s a book from a shelf and heaves it, then gives the finger to someone Doughboy can’t see. The hand is snatched back as a return salvo is launched from Engineering. The book tumbles across the floor and stops facedown like a tired bat near Doughboy’s left boot.
Al oy Tensile Strength Comparisons
. He doesn’t attempt to interpret the title, but bends down, picks up the book, and pul s Sweetpea’s gum from where it has stuck against a page that shows a graph. He brings fingers to chapped lips and blows. Fingers in mouth, then out, and wiped against blue jeans that have al the beltloops ripped loose. “Dumb bitch,” he says, and chews.

A loud slap from above. Doughboy looks up to see gangly Tex being thrown against a tal shelf.

The shelf tips, but does not fal . Books do.

“What the fuck you
yel ing
for, man?” Sailor stands above Tex, who has set a hand to his reddening cheek. Sailor remains there a moment, looking down at Tex with hands on hips, then bends and pul s Tex to his feet. He dusts him off and pats his shoulder. “Look, I’m sorry I hit you, man,” he says. “Only, don’t run around
yel ing
al the time, okay?”

“Sure,” says Tex. His hand leaves his inflamed cheek, and he glances at his palm (for blood?

wonders Doughboy). “Sure. But, I mean, I was just wonderin’, y’know? I mean—” He looks around the library. “What’re we gonna find here?”

Sailor frowns. He looks around. One hand tugs at the face of Mickey Mouse hanging from his right ear. When he looks back at Tex, he’s smiling wryly.

“Books,” he says.

Doughboy nearly chokes on his gum, he thinks this is so goddamn funny.

“What are
you
laughing at?” from above.

Doughboy only shakes his head.

Sailor shakes his head, too, but for completely different reasons. “Fuck,” he says. “I used to
go
to this school.” He comes down the stairs with two hardcover books tucked under one arm. “Yoo of A.”

Doughboy angles his head to see the titles; Sailor hands him the books. Doughboy holds one in each hand before him. His lips move. Furrows appear in his forehead.

Sailor taps the book in Doughboy’s left hand. “
Principles of Behavior Modification
,” he supplies.

He taps the thicker in Doughboy’s right. “
Radiation and Tissue Damage
.” He clasps his hands behind him and rocks back and forth, beaming.

“You taking a test?”

Sailor shakes his head. “Nope. Deadheads are. I think I can teach them to find food for us.
Real
food.”

Doughboy makes a farting noise. “Shit.
We
can’t find real food; how you expect them to?”

“The name ‘Pavlov’ ring a bel ?”

“No.”

Sailor sighs. “Why I stay with you limpdicks I wil never know,” he says.

Doughboy stacks the books. “But how you gonna get—”

“
God damn you, nigger!
”

They turn at the shout from Engineering.

“That
hurt
, motherfucker!”

“Why you didn’t move, then, home?” replies American History. “What you been throwing at
me
the last—”

Shouts, something heavy thrown against a wal , a bookshelf fal ing against a bookshelf, scuffling, and cheers as American History and Engineering begin beating the living shit out of each other.

Sailor walks over to break it up. He takes his time, wondering why the hel he’s bothering in the first place. He oughta just let evolution sort ’em out. Wel , he’s there now; he might as wel do something to split ’em up.

It’s Cheesecake and Jimmy. Figures. Cheesecake’s got the upper hand, which is no surprise, and with no more than two or three blows he’s already made a mess of Jimmy’s face. White boys never could fight.

He leans forward to grab Cheesecake’s teak arm as the knotted fist at the end of it rises, but something stops him. Around them

(“
You gonna let that nigger put a hurt on you, boy?
”) are scattered newspapers. One lies spil ed like a dropped deck of cards

(“
Fuck ’im up! Yeah! Yeah!
”),

fanned out to expose the Local section.

Dul slap of bone-backed meat on softer meat.

Sailor bends to pick up the paper.

(“
Cheese, man, ease up. C’mon, man
.”)

‘Space

Breaks

(“
Motherfucker hit me on my head with a book. A big book, motherfucker!
”) Sailor turns the paper over.

Station’

New Ground

He unfolds the paper.

(“
Ah! Fucking nigger! I’l kil you, fuckin
—”)

‘Space Station’

Breaks New Ground

Sailor frowns. An artist’s conception accompanies the article.

“Let him up,” Sailor says mildly, and they stop.

(Tucson)—Official groundbreaking ceremonies were held Monday morning in a tent 60 miles
northwest of Tucson, to mark the beginning of construction on Ecosphere—a self-contained

“mini-Earth” environment that may prove a vital step in mankind’s eventual colonization of
other planets.

Budgeted at a “modest” $30 mil ion, according to project director Dr. Wil iam Newhal of the
University of Arizona Ecological Sciences division, Ecosphere wil be a completely self-sufficient, 5-mil ion-cubic-feet ecological station. The station wil contain five separate
environments, including a tropical rain forest, a savanna, a marshland, a desert, and a 50,000-gal on salt-water “ocean,” complete with fish. There wil also be living quarters for the
Ecosphere staff, scientific laboratories, livestock, and an agriculture wing—al on two acres
covered by computer-control ed “windowpanes” that regulate the amount of sunlight
received. Even Ecosphere’s electrical energy wil come from the sun, in the form of arrays of
solar-power cel s.

“Ecosphere wil be a sort of model of our planet,” says chief botanist Marly Tsung. “We’l have
a little of everything”—including several thousand types of trees, plants, animals, fish, birds,
insects, and even different kinds of soil.

If al goes wel after Ecosphere is constructed and stocked, eight “Ecosphereans” wil bid
goodbye to the outside world and enter the station’s airlock, and they wil remain as working
residents of this model Earth for two years.

Designed to reproduce and maintain the delicate balance of the Earth’s ecosystem in the midst
of a hostile environment—presently the Arizona desert, but conceivably Mars by the end of
the century— Ecosphere wil also serve as an experiment in how future interplanetary
colonists might get along working in close quarters for long periods. However, Grace Havland,
team psychologist, does not foresee any problems. “We’re al self-motivated, resourceful,
problem-solving people,” she says. “But we’re also very different from one another, with
widely varied interests. I think that wil help. That, and the fact that the station itself provides
a lot of stimuli.” What could go wrong? In the first place, Eco-sphere’s delicate environment
could suffer a

(turn to page 16D)

“I remember this,” says Sailor as the others gather around to see what’s got him so interested.

Jimmy mops his face with his torn, white T-shirt. “They started building it when I was in school.”