INTRODUCTION:

Scare Quotes and Coffin Rides

So . . . Amy’s friend Jen was flying in from Memphis that day, and she wanted to hit all the Pittsburgh landmarks like the Duquesne Incline (insert picture of the worst ride at any theme park), that crazy church they turned into a bar (insert picture of weeping Jesus and Church Brew Works), the overrated Primanti Brothers (insert picture of inspired truck driver jamming an entire meal into a sandwich so he can deliver that Coors, the site of that motherfucking rapist Roethlisberger’s near decapitation (insert picture of headless stone statue), etc., etc. Also, despite being like two foot two, Jen apparently thinks of herself as some sort of competitive eater because she engulfed an omelet bigger than a hubcap and then wanted to hit up the “Atomic Hot Wings Challenge” at Quaker Steak and Lube (most deceptive restaurant title ever) before I was barely out of bed.

But it was already a big day. That morning, I’d just gotten word that my zombie story, “Zee Bee & Bee,” a tale that had gotten out of hand and expanded way past the point of publishability and had been chopped up into more anthology-friendly pieces, was finally being published in its entirety (as you’ll see it’s even longer now, as well as both more and less fucked up). So to celebrate we decided to check out “Monroeville Zombies” a.k.a. “The Mysterious New Zombie Museum at the Monroeville Mall I Kept Hearing About At Work,” the not-so-hidden shrine for George Romero’s original masterpiece Dawn of the Dead.

“Maybe Jen could add this to her Pac-Man tour?” I begged. “We’ll still eat something weird, I promise! Pleeeeease?”

This was easier said than done. First off, it was getting late in the day, and we were still dealing with Chicken Wing Hiroshima, or The Day We Do Not Speak Of.

See, Jen had signed a waiver before she started eating those nuclear wings, in case of an untimely death, but where was my waiver? Because the boneless wings with the “mild” sauce that I ordered (translation “for pussies”) were barely friggin’ edible at all. Amy was filming Jen’s valiant, red-faced attempt to get down that last wing Cool Hand Luke style (more like Burning Hand Luke style if you made the mistake of touching the suckers, and God help you if you tried to piss afterwards), but I kept trying to point her camera phone at my desperate attempts to penetrate a boneless wing with a plastic fork. “Wing,” my ass. Try “flipper.” It was impossible. This was the true challenge they did not dare advertise. Luckily, there were wrenches and screwdrivers glued to the walls because, hey, it’s a theme joint. But I have to assume those are sneakily stuck up there in case of a rubber-chicken-penetration emergency and not really for the kitsch factor at all.

So, while I was still whining about my meal, Jen ate that last toxic fin, er, wing, grabbed her awesome “trophy” (a.k.a. “crappy bumper sticker”) and we ran out the door to meet my friend Nate at the mall before the exhibit closed. See, Nate’s kind of a zombie connoisseur and the type of guy who takes his apocalyptic scenarios more seriously than most, so I figured he’d dig this “museum” we’d somehow missed.

(By the way, there will be more scare quotes than usual in this adventure. You know, the ones they used in newspaper headlines to be sly and/or indicate insincerity? The ones they put around “doctors” in those books about Nazi medical experiments? Apologies for that. I mean, “sorry.”)

Okay, so there we were. It’s like 5:15, and the internet was telling us the Zombie Museum closed at 6:00. So we come flying in the Barnes & Noble side of the mall at Mach 2, and we (me) immediately get distracted by zombie anthologies and DVDs on an endcap. So by the time we get into the mall itself to claw at the directory, it’s 5:30. And, of course, there’s no listing for anything containing the word “zombie” or “museum.”

Amy tries asking some employees at a jewelry store and gets back an audible scoff in return. Nope, no idea what she’s talking about. So Amy and Jen wander off to get some ice cream, sort of giving up (and Jen needs ice cream to wash the delicious atomic chemicals out of her mouth), but Nate and I are still hopeful. We notice a GameStop out of the corner of our eyes, (“Gotta be movie geeks in there, right, right?!”), and we run inside.

There are two employees working. One is a very athletic-looking young man who’s not doing much of anything. The other is the expected slovenly, disheveled, basement-dweller type who is furiously helping some screeching family buy games for their Wii. Do they still make a Wii? Or is it now Wii III? Either way, I choose poorly. The sporty kid doesn’t seem to understand anything I’m saying, let alone where this mysterious “museum” is. But then, like a chorus of angels, Mr. Disheveled tips his head towards us, never even looking up from his transaction, to explain within the duration of his weary sigh:

“Take a right out of the store, take a left by the escalators, a left where they used to sell snowmobiles, a right where Old Man Witherspoon’s barn used to be, a right near the creek, a left near the Hurricane Booth, and there you’ll find a toy store. It’s in the back of the toy store.”

Holy shit, we’re back in business. 5:53 and counting. As Nate and I run out and grab Jen and Amy like a couple of footballs, I swear I see Disheveled mutter into his watch just like those creepy skeletal secret alien overlords in They Live:

“I’m sending down four more.”

But there it is! Buried in the back, a converted storeroom entrance in the shadows of this toy store reads, “Zombie Museum.” And it apparently doesn’t close any time soon. None of this “Open till 6:00” bullshit like it warned us on the website. But there’s no one in here at all. Just some punk on his laptop messing with Facebook who doesn’t even stop Jen and Amy from bringing in drippy ice creams.

But for a museum, hell, it’s not bad! Small but heartfelt. Sad but earnest. Among the attractions: full-size replicas of the Nazi Zombie from Shockwave, poor, doomed Flyboy and pint-sized Roger from the original Dawn of the Dead (Flyboy is in his tragic limp-necked final state, of course), the barrel with the Army stamp and emergency phone number from Return of the Living Dead (yeah, don’t “dial down the center,” dude, unless you want a mushroom cloud for breakfast), authentic severed-limb props from the original trilogy with blood bladders and tubes still attached, a TV running the special features off the ‘78 Dawn of the Dead DVD, an actual framed newspaper headline from Day of the Dead screaming, “The Dead Walk!” but, thank Christ, with none of those insincere quotation marks around “dead” to ruin it, and, last but not least . . .

The coffin ride.

Wh-What? Well, there’s this full-size coffin being guarded by a replica of the graveyard zombie from Night of the Living Dead. Unfortunately, he’s holding up a sign that reads:

“Sorry! Coffin Ride Out Of Order.”

But there’s nothing at all to indicate that this is a “ride.” It’s really just a coffin. With a small milk crate step to climb up and flop on into the coffin. No electrical cords, no lights, no controls of any kind. Just the coffin. So we start to suspect that this “coffin ride” might be, uh, death? So if it wasn’t out of order, maybe you would pay your dollar and . . . get shot in the face? It raises all sorts of questions. At first, we think, okay, maybe it sort of vibrates like those lame vehicles outside a K-Mart, but the more we talk about it, the more we’re sure it means that, yes, you will be killed. We don’t dare ask the punk at the counter ’cause I learned my lesson earlier when I foolishly tried to get an extra large T-shirt with the “Monroeville Zombies” hockey logo on it and I only saw small and mediums hanging. But Captain Spacebook mumbled, “No, those are the most popular, so we never have ‘em.” Which was very Yogi Berra. Like saying, “Yeah, no one goes to that restaurant anymore because it’s too crowded.”

So, anyway, that’s about it, I think. What else did we do? What else could we do? We watched the TV cycling the special features off the Day of the Dead so I could point out that all the zombie extras were also munching on hot wings during those movies, just like Jen (apparently because it most resembled delicious human flesh), and we got some cool snapshots of the scale-model dollhouse replica of a Monroeville Mall of the ’70s (ice rink included?!), and I even snuck some bubble-gum machine Homies onto the teeny dollhouse escalators to pose for some pics with all the toys (security was quite lax, remember? “No Shirt, No Shoes, Bad Service”), and then, when other people started to wander on in, we wandered on out.

But at the door, there was this one hyperactive brat who seemed to be making fun of the meager attractions, as we’d been tempted to do before our communion, and Nate surprised us all by cornering this snarky little fuck away from his parents and hissing:

“Listen, kid, when I was your age, zombies were real!”

And get this, remember that “Hurricane Booth” that the other clerk mentioned earlier on our adventure? It actually existed, too. But, sadly, it was just as busted as the coffin ride. A sign on it promised “200 mile per hour winds!” so we quickly bullied Amy inside (the only one of us wearing a skirt), and I desperately tried to get it to take my dollar. Nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. The second the glass door closed her inside, a crowd magically appeared, expectant looks on their faces, as if that’s what the dollar paid for, rubberneckers. I’m not kidding. It was like bam! Suddenly, out of the hazy fog of mall odors, there was now a crowd watching me fumble with my soggy dollar and Amy scratch at the glass like she was in a microwave set on “broil.” I swear some of these bystanders must have rappelled out of the ceiling at the prospect of seeing some nudity. But much to their disappointment, we let Amy and her skirt back out of the booth, never knowing what the booth really did at all, if anything (had to be a microwave, seriously). But now that I’m typing this, I wonder if its function all along was to authentically imitate the experience of a hurricane’s devastation by just taking all your money and then spitting out a small piece of paper that states:

“Now you’re homeless.”

Oh, yeah, there really was a “creek,” too. No joke. Sure, it was more like a stagnant little pond, right outside the store with a tiny bridge going across it, but, still, there was a river in this mall. Just like that clerk said. A stern sign nearby warned, “Don’t feed the fish!” and, sure enough, it was packed full of those bloated, sluggish mutant koi (koys?) that you see in septic pools at your local zoo. Remember those squirming abominations and those black, horrific ponds? Talk about an aquarium of the undead.

And this creek was full of money, too. So, apparently, you couldn’t “feed” the beasts because that’s cruel, but you could whip coins (koins?) at their heavy, bulbous heads. One of the big ones even had this big, nasty black hole in its side, right near the gills. Clearly the result of a child’s wish gone wrong. What did the little cherub say before those lethal pennies were launched side-arm into the creek? “I hope these fishies are happy!” Smack. “I wuv you!” Thud.

As we were leaving, we did consider trying to “rescue” the injured one for a good minute or so. Translation: “Grab the struggling, diseased, foot-long monster and bumble out the door, chased by security the whole way, so it can likely die in my car.”

Coffin ride indeed.

Anyway, to make a long story longer, and to celebrate the release of my first collection of zombie fiction that you now hold in your fins, our intrepid crew will be heading back to Pittsburgh tonight to tackle that ride again! I mean, tonight! Or . . . tonight, depending on when exactly you threw dropped your dollar into the hurricane to ride this thing.

And you know what? It’s no accident that coffin rides, hurricane booths, and zombie collections are all a buck in this brave, new, digital world. Is that devaluing “literature”? Maybe. But maybe a buck is all you need for anything. Also, in an attempt to entice readers who may be familiar with these stories’ early incarnations, besides the re-insertion of more disturbing elements and a reckless indulgence of some narrative dead-ends, I’ve attempted to add even more Bang For Your Buck than this endless introduction. So if you flip to the end of this godforsaken thing (you may need to use a button if we’re digital, but, fuck it, it’s still your thumb sorta flipping, right?), you will find, finally compiled in its glorious entirety, Send More Paramedics: The Zombie Movie Drinking Game. I would have put it up here before you started reading the story so you could drink and play along, but we tried that with some volunteers just last night. And, yeah, it was fatal.

Don’t be like them.

Okay, hit the book or the buttons with every thumb you got, even the thumbs you were saving for hitchhiking to the Monroeville Mall, or that special thumb you were saving for lunch. And thank you sincerely for reading my stuff.

David James Keaton

5:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

July 3rd, 2015

Louisville, Kentucky