Incall Only - Must Have Flesh - Chapter Two

I don’t have a clue as to how all of this started, that is, the sudden rise in the undead population in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The best I can offer you is an account of how it started for us and by us, I mean me and my thirteen year-old son Ian.

Halloween 2007 dawned pretty much like any other day. The only unusual thing afoot was that the kids in the neighborhood had chosen to toilet paper the bushes and trees a night early – presumably to outwit the local police who would most certainly be on the prowl for this evening’s activities. It was cool, but held the promise of warming up nicely in the autumn sunshine. I sent my son off to the bus stop and I said I silent prayer that all would be well, despite the distractions of the upcoming frolicking.

Ian attends an alternative classroom, not because he is intellectually challenged but because of his intelligence he is sometimes impulsive and always skeptical of authority. Not a good mix for a traditional classroom setting. I hoped that the promise of dressing up as a zombie for the sake of free candy would not inhabit so much of the space under his outgrown crew cut that he would have trouble staying on task. Believe me, the irony of that costume as not escaped me.

The first and only appointment I had that day wasn’t until 11’clock , so I used the early morning wisely to tidy up our apartment a bit. A daunting task when you have two nutty professor types living in the same household where empty teacups and half-eaten apples are likely to appear as if by magic and then sit unnoticed for days. Tidying up usually consisted of haphazardly loading the dishwasher, righting the kitchen again after whatever spontaneous experiment had taken place while I was in the shower, and gathering laundry from the bathroom.

On this occasion, I had found a disturbingly goopy looking but oddly mesmerizing mixture mostly on the inside of a coffee mug on the counter. . If the box of hastily and messily opened cornstarch next to the mug was any indication, he had somehow learned about “oobleck”.

Cornstarch and water in the right quantities, becomes an intriguing, plasma-like substance that solidifies under pressure but returns to liquid form once the pressure is released. Reacting like magma when on a flat surface, you can use your finger, a popsicle stick, or some other implement to draw a picture in the amorphous goo, only to watch your lines slowly fill in as if they were never there or you can set up an aqueduct style structure and watch it progress like lava toward a bowl as my son had done with a series of plates, cutting boards, and cooking utensils. Except he had forgotten the bowl part and it was slowly making its way onto the floor after the pseudo-hyperplasic flow had reached the end of the line via the edge of the counter.

It’s fun stuff to play with and I was tempted to set up a lego Pompeii just to see what happened but the responsibilities of adulthood made it easy to resist the siren song of the oobleck. It’s also fairly easy to clean up with a spatula and some water and on this day I thanked my lucky stars that he hadn’t had time to find out what this stuff would do in a blender.

Making my rounds to the bathroom, I hoped against hope that I would find that my son had actually donned the underwear I had provided him that morning as I do every morning but it was not to be.

Not that I minded so much that my son went commando. I was more concerned that one of his classmates who tended to be as impulsive has he was would pants him in the lunch line and get more than he or she bargained for. My son, in addition to being extremely intelligent, is also very thin. Built like a greyhound, he is all lean muscle and we often have a difficult time finding pants that fit him in this Value-Sized retail world. Consequently, his elastic-waisted cargo pants would make him easy pickin’s for someone who wanted to bring that elastic waist down to his mismatched crew socks.

“Dude, you won’t even let me see you naked.” I had told him. “Are you really prepared for every kid in the school seeing your junk?”

He had shrugged and made some response about such a perpetrator losing body parts and I let it go. He had been warned and unfortunately my son is one of those kids who needs to pee on the electric fence for himself.

Yes, folks, this was the excitement of my life. Cleaning house. Massaging clients. Cooking dinner. Turning my son from a lanky, mostly-clean teenager into a walking corpse with a fake bloodstained sweatshirt, some simulated tire tracks, liquid latex, and cleverly applied makeup.

I would show you a picture but I destroyed it a few months ago. The thought of seeing my son as a simulated zombie was a little more than I could take considering that in the blink of an eye any one of us could make a mistake and end up that way. Seeing adults that way is hard, but I’ve grown somewhat jaded in that respect. I will never get used to seeing children with flayed flesh and vacant eyes knowing that I have to destroy them.

My life for what used to be theirs. Hardly seems fair that I have to do the dirty work of whatever scientists, defense agency, or nuclear plant created this mess and I refuse to entertain the notion that I may one day have to do that to my own child or that he’ll have to perform that task should I start to change. The thought would drive me seventeen kinds of insane and I am needed here.