Zordello

By S. F. Kyd

When young entrepreneur Charlie Park recruits his friend Danny Esposito to help him open a “Zombie Whorehouse and Suicide Parlor,” farce mixes it up with horror, and deadly serious questions arise: If there can be no love or meaning in a world overrun by zombies, what’s the point in staying alive? And if you decide to end it all, why not treat yourself to a cheap thrill on the way out?

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. F. Kyd
• Release date: Mar 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370296941

S. F. Kyd

S. F. Kyd has for many years lived south of the Mason-Dixon line (Maryland, Georgia, Virginia) and has spent all of those years writing in a variety of genres. As a fiction writer, Kyd explores the many ways people struggle to love in a world scarred by prejudice and wanton cruelty. Proceed at your own risk.

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Zordello

A Novella

by S. F. Kyd

Copyright © 2017 by S. F. Kyd

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

1. Charlie

2. Tonisha

3. The Doc

4. Natalia

1. Charlie

So I’m on my way back from scrounging, said Charlie, scored some canned corn and a couple of brews—and I’m rounding the corner at First and Sixty-seventh, by the park, you know? And right in front of me’s this she-walker dining on some hapless breather, poor bastard’s still twitching. She looks no more than a month gone, not three feet away, so close I can smell the rot pouring off her.

Charlie Park looked like a North Korean dictator only with a better haircut, and he was a bullshit artist. I hadn’t decided yet whether to believe him. I swallowed a mouthful of scotch and said, How’d you get away, dude?

"I didn’t, man. She jumped me, lickin’ her chops, and I was sure I was a goner. She throws me down like I’m dessert, but instead of tearing my throat out she tears down my pants, and before I know it she’s riding me like I’ve never been ridden in my life—"

"Have you ever been ridden?" Charlie was notorious, in the time before, for whining about not getting any. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this zombie took his cherry.

Don’t be an asshole, Danny, I get my share. Anyway, I guess ’cause she’d just ate she wasn’t thinking about food no more, but just about sex.

I snorted. Zombies don’t think about sex.

"I didn’t think so either—but this happened, man."

How’d you get it up? I don’t guess she was much of a looker.

"I don’t even know, dude. She had on this pink dress, all dirty and ragged, and her face was zombie gray, one cheek torn open so I could see her teeth, but she could have been worse, you know. No more than a month, like I said. And then it was like I couldn’t see any of that shit, and all the world disappeared except the most incredible sensations, like sex times a thousand."

I decided he was serious, though maybe hallucinating—Charlie would take any drug he could get his hands on. How did you survive it? I mean, she must have been working up an appetite all the time you were dorking her. Didn’t she try to eat you?

No, man. I just got away is all.

Bullshit.

No, man. Here’s the thing: I’m talking to Marvin just this morning, right? You know the guy lives by himself in a brownstone on Sixty-first, full of antiques and shit, likes to pretend he’s a billionaire?

Everybody knows Marvin.

"Well, I’m helping him break into the basement of Antonio’s Pizza, right? looking for canned tomatoes? and we’re talking, and he knows this guy that had almost the exact same thing happen to him—he was there, he saw it. And Marvin’s like someday I’m gonna get me a piece of that zombie pussy. So I get this idea—"

I interrupted him, because the thing I most did not want to do at that moment was listen to one of Charlie’s ideas, which were pure horseshit, every fucking time. Like when there was no more meat in the city, even the canned crap was gone, and he went on for days about going into business selling pigeonburgers, or when he wanted to sling suspension bridges between skyscrapers for safer travel and charge toll—this at a time when there was no elevators to get up there, and anyway nobody was organized enough to set up a lemonade stand.

Seriously, bro, I said. How did you get away?

He mumbled something that sounded a little like Came first.

"Say again? Wait! You came first?"

Yeah. It can happen, right?

This explains why you’ve always been a failure with chicks, Charlie—you’re a one-minute wonder.

"Fuck you, man. So I was back in the world, and she was still going strong, and I was like I can’t believe I’m doing this, and then it occurred to me what she was going to do