“Think I could meet her?”
“Are you crazy? She kills Drifters. What’s she going to make of you?”
“I’m not a zombie.”
“You’re undead. She’ll think you’re a new model Lucifer just invented.”
“Do you know anything about zombies at all?”
“Yeah. They smell like an abandoned slaughterhouse when you pull their spines out.”
“You know about spines. That’s a start. What else do you want to know?”
“Everything. But I don’t need a Ph.D. Just give me the Trivial Pursuit version.”
“Okay.”
He looks at me.
“You’re really going to get me her autograph?”
“Christ.”
“Forget it. Tell me about the zombies last night.”
“They stank. They were stupid. They drooled and grunted and tried to bite us.”
He nods.
“Zeds and zots.”
“What?”
“Zombie shoptalk. They’re zeros. Dumbest of the dumb. Nothing more than a mouth with legs. What most people call golems.”
“It sounds like there’s something besides golems.”
“See? Who says you have a learning disability?”
“Yeah, who says that?”
“There’s another kind of zombie. Lacunas. You don’t want to meet them.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Lacunas have some brain function left. They can talk, walk, and dress themselves. You might not even notice one in a crowd. But don’t get close enough to smell their breath. They can’t really think for themselves, but they can take orders. The other thing is they’re mean. Old-timers called them St. George’s Pet, like all that’s working upstairs is their speech centers and their lizard brains. Because they’re such little shits, they mostly get used for muscle work.”
“Like Mason with Parker.”
“Exactly. You don’t usually see them unless there’s Deadheads having a turf war, but sometimes they make money renting them out or selling them to street gangs. Lacunas are pretty much the perfect thug.”
“How do you kill them?”
“Like the others. The spine.”
“That’s it? Nothing else?”
“Whatever fucks up the nervous system. Run them through a wood chipper. Nuke them. Chase them down the street like an angry mob in Frankenstein and burn them.”