I'd never seen the film while I was alive, was never drawn to zombie or slasher fare, but I found the film fascinating. Not from a film-making standpoint-plot, story, direction, acting, all that artsy c.r.a.p. I'm talking about something more spiritual, a moment of clarity, an epiphany about my own existence. And I don't think I was the only one who felt it.

I know we're not supposed to perpetuate the stereotype of the undead, or living dead, whatever you want to call us. UA preaches restraint at all times. And G.o.d knows I'm the last one who thought I'd consider doing this. I was a vegetarian, for Christ's sake. But what else am I supposed to do? When I get lonely I get bored. When I get bored, I get anxious. When I get anxious, I get frustrated. And when I get frustrated, I want to chew on things.

I just hope my parents understand.

12/ Justine Musk Best Served.

Cold.

LOCKING THE GIRL INTHE CLOSET SOUNDED BAD, Thad knew, but it's not like it was a cramped little coffin of a closet, or even what a typical person thought of when a typical person thought "closet:" it was a freaking room, lined with his three thousand dollar suits and five hundred dollar custom shirts, also his more casual wear, his organic cotton and denim and cashmere, also his rows on rows of Ferragamo shoes, his cowboy boots, his sneaks. There was a rack just for all his leather jackets, because a person could never have too many leather jackets, and push them aside and you'd find his built-in safe, where he kept some cash and a few prized video tapes and a stash of cocaine that would make Scarface proud.

He was taking the girl on a tour of the house, separating her from the little herd of friends she'd come with. He wasn't exactly sure when they had arrived. Navaid had sent them, knowing how reluctant Thad was to step out of the house ever since hed walked in on a burglary, been tied up naked and thrown in the back of a car and dumped at the bottom of the hill, where he'd had to hop across the road at 2 a.m. and pound on the door of the Bel Air Security guardhouse. The delivery of attractive females was a service Navaid provided for a few select friends: he owned the club Tasty, and he would round up cute girls and put them on a shuttle bus and send them to a house in the hills for a private party. They weren't prost.i.tutes or anything, just sweet young things from the Valley or the O.C. who wanted the buzz of being around wealth and fame-even if it was B-level fame, or notoriety, as in Thad's case. Thad did remember checking their driver's licenses before allowing them into his private residence, he had to be mindful of such things now, and besides, it was a good excuse to turn away the fat-for-LA one and the one with the sour look on her face. This girl-her name was Andrea-was an actress or model of some kind (big surprise, in this town) but had a cla.s.sy look to her, which he liked, and she was a little bit more archaeological than what he usually went for, she was at least twenty-five, and he liked that too, at least once in a while.

So. Up the curving staircase and through the hall, here's the bathroom with the dark Italian marble, the Jacuzzi nestled against the corner windows overlooking the drop of Bel Air valley below-oh look at the hawk surfing the treetops, nature is so wonderful-and into the bedroom with the big platform bed right in the center heaped with zebra-print pillows-oh look at the African masks on the walls, African art is so wonderful-and then, see this amazing closet, and he guided her inside and went to his safe and chopped up some lines on the back of a framed Pica.s.so drawing that someone, not him, had set on the center island for precisely this purpose, and then they were making out. When he had his tongue in her mouth and his hand on her breast he realized she was yielding and open and he could f.u.c.k her right here right now. Which wasn't exactly what he'd been intending but he'd been chubby and shy as a kid, the son that his father had labeled a loser, and so the fact that he was now that guy who had girls practically throwing b.l.o.w.j.o.bs at him, a.s.suming of course that a b.l.o.w.j.o.b was a thing you could throw, which it wasn't, never ceased to amaze him. Not that he would admit that to anybody. But somehow it made it impossible to ever turn down the opportunity for s.e.x, a.s.suming the girl was even remotely attractive, because saying no to s.e.x was all broken mirrors and black cats and the number 666. It didn't matter if it was good, or if he was good, if he was too c.o.ked up to perform the deed for long or even at all. So long as s.e.x was on offer, all was right with the world, that horrible personal catastrophe he always sensed dangling over his head like the sword of Damocles prevented yet again from plunging down into his skull. All thanks to the magical ritualistic power of f.u.c.king.

So they were getting it on and he had just slipped his fingers inside the white lace of her panties when something tossed itself against the closet door, yipping and scrabbling, and he cursed into the girl's neck.

"What is that?" she said. Andrea, her name was Andrea, he wasn't some sleazebag who couldn't even remember a chick's name. Most of them, anyway. "Is that a dog?"

"No," he said, "it's a ferret."

"It's a ferret?"

"It's a platypus, it's an aardvark, it's one of those hairless creepy cats, of course it's a canine, it's the highly annoying little canine that belongs to the female personage who calls herself my girlfriend so would you hunker here for a few minutes between Mr. Gucci and Mr. Paul Smith and save us some drama? It's appreciated," and he shoved her away from him-but it was a gentle shove, more of a push, not really a push so much as a nudge-and opened the door and scooped up the barking creature with one arm and shut and locked the closet door with the other. He didn't have locks on all his doors, he wasn't paranoid, just the places where he tended to keep certain possessions that society in all its underwhelming wisdom liked to label "illegal."

Then Kimmie was in his face, taking the dog from him and nuzzling- h.e.l.l, practically chewing on the creature's neck, "You're so yummy, I could eat you up,"-and telling him that the girl's friends were downstairs and of course they didn't know the gate code that would release them from the property. He said, "You mean they're still here?" and she said, "Where were they supposed to go?" and he had no answer for that.

As he pressed the numbers of the gate code into the device beside his front door-he refused to give his code to anybody, despite the inconvenience it tended to cause him-something struck him as wrong. He couldn't figure out what it was, but it burrowed beneath the skin of his soul-if you believed in souls, which he sort of mostly did-and remained there. "Thaddy?" Kimmie said, and she came up to him, and something she saw in his face or his body language made her wrap her arms around him. She smelled like vanilla. She was a cleancut, fresh-faced nineteen-year-old from some nothing place in one of the flyover states, where he had never been and knew he'd never go. "Thaddy, baby, what's wrong?"

"Nothing," he said. He couldn't possibly explain it. Just this empty feeling that washed over him, triggered by something-something-that he could never quite figure out but knew he would later, probably, at some point, when it would crash him low and blue all over again.

It was almost eleven am. He hadn't really slept since the night before the night before and was giving a dinner party in some number of hours. He asked Kimmie to lie down with him for a while, just to hold him, and she liked that. It made her think he had a sensitive streak somewhere deep inside him. Somewhere really really deep. He lay there on the wide slouchy leather couch in the living room, feeling the warmth of her lanky-limbed nineteen-year-old body, and he waited to feel okay again. His eyes wide, his mind racing.

At one point she said, "Do you want to talk about it?"

She meant the thing that had happened to him. The incident. The burglary. The tied-up naked romp along the bottom of Bel Air Road.

He felt again the cold steel press of the barrel at his temple, the rasp of the rope around his wrists and ankles. "No," he said.

Somehow time pa.s.sed. The drycleaning came-his gray Paul Smith suit-which reminded him that a shower and change of clothes was in order. Why not wear the suit? He kept on his rumpled white t-shirt, his Converse sneakers. For that decadent, cracked-out look. Something was nagging at him. Something he'd forgotten about, but Thad was used to forgetting things, he did it all the time. Kimmie went away and came back again, the little dog dancing at her heels. The chef arrived, the servers, one of them so good-looking he could be a male model in an underwear ad, proving once again that some of the most beautiful people in this town were serving the food and drink. The house filled with the smell of roasting flesh. Something was still nagging at him, but he took some business calls and did more lines and the underwear model put a gla.s.s of Opus One in his hand. Then his guests arrived.

Conversation buzzed. The fresh human presences streaming through the door made him feel better, more relaxed, or at least as relaxed as it was possible for him to be. It was a good mix, he thought. The Hollywood types you would expect-an agent, an independent film producer-but there was also some kind of Internet dude. Rayne Betancourt was there, the socialite who'd gotten famous for being best friends with a socialite famous for being famous. The camera crew from her reality show-When It Raynes It Pours-came up behind her, like faithful Sherpas, and everybody pretended to ignore them while greeting Rayne with extra doses of enthusiasm to get the cameras swinging in their direction. There were a couple of wives or girlfriends, whose names n.o.body would remember (except Thad) and who would spend the evening chatting quietly with each other or listening to the men. And Z was there. His real name was Zachariah Fields, and he'd been composing and producing music for longer than Thad was alive. He was so famous he rarely ventured out of his house. The world came to him, usually in a limousine or town car. He was Thad's neighbor, or, more accurately, several of Thad's neighbors, since he owned three of the five properties on the gated Bel Air cul-de-sac in which Thad had been living for close to six years now. "Baby," Z said, in his booming, throaty voice, "hey baby," and he pulled Thad into his trademark bear hug, both men competing to see who could slap backs the hardest.

Kimmie went in and out of his vision, the little dog at her heels, hard to say which of them was cuter. "The chef," she reported, "is looking kind of greenish. You think he might be sick? Should he be, like, handling our food and stuff?"

"What?"

"The chef."

"Who?"

"The chef."

"Stop talking to me," Thad said, and wandered into the bathroom. He did another b.u.mp off the gla.s.s of a handheld mirror and wandered back out.

And then suddenly they were at the table, a grand oak affair that had been especially designed for Thad's dining room. A raised planter ran down the center and sprouted gra.s.s. It was the one act by his interior designer that Thad tended to seriously question. The guests peered at each other over the little green stalks. Thad heard himself talking and his guests laughing appreciatively and then suddenly they were halfway through the fish dish. The fish was dry, which struck Thad as pretty d.a.m.n careless for a chef this expensive, this new chef he was trying out for the first time because someone had recommended the chef to someone who had recommended the chef to Thad, but no one seemed to really mind about the fish and Thad didn't have much appet.i.te anyway.

He realized that Rayne was talking to him. Apparently she had asked him a question because she seemed to be expecting an answer. Then a crew member stepped up to Rayne and whispered in her ear. Rayne stood, and there was some happy male ogling as she and the crewperson fiddled with the mike pack taped above the low rise of her jeans. Then Rayne sat down and said, as if she was saying it for the first time, which Thad suspected she was not, "You and Sabine are friends now, right?"

"You know Sabine?" someone said.

Sabine was one of his ex-girlfriends.

"Not really." Rayne waved a hand. "But we move in some of the same circles."

"The beautiful people circles," someone said.

"Those are small circles."

"Unfortunately so."

Sabine. with the flowing red hair that had first caught Thad's eye, because he hadn't done a redhead in a long time, and the sharp green eyes that had become maybe a little too sharp for his liking. Sabine, with her cultivated air of mystery and all those charms and amulets and s.h.i.t. There was this thing that had happened, this incident concerning a certain video that had somehow found its way onto the web, a video featuring Sabine in rather a range of compromising positions, and she appeared to be less than happy about this. She also appeared to blame Thad.

Thad said, "Friend? How would you define 'friend'? If you define 'friend' as somebody with whom you generate consistent mutual positive regard then I would say 'no.'" This sounded somewhat more polite than: I hate that b.i.t.c.h. "I would definitely say no. No. So in other words-no."

"She said she sent you something. Special delivery."

Which is when he remembered the girl in his closet.

"s.h.i.t," he half-hollered, and pushed back his chair.

"Thaddy?"

"Right back!" he yelled over his shoulder. "Don't go anywhere!"

He took the stairs two at a time. What had he been thinking? No, what had that girl been thinking, and why the h.e.l.l hadn't she done anything-screamed, pounded, thrown shoes at the door-to attract his attention to the fact that she had been locked in the f.u.c.king closet for hours and hours? What kind of idiot was she, and more importantly, was she going to sue him? Did she have legitimate cause? He made a mental note to ask his lawyer.

But as he wound through his darkened bedroom to the closet these initial questions subsided as another rose up to replace them: Was she okay? Could she have O.D.'d-not on anything he'd given her, of course not-but something she maybe took before she got to his house, maybe Navaid had given her? He cursed Navaid. He would have to speak to Navaid.

Because how would that look, if there was a dead girl in his- He yanked open the door.

Silence.

Shadows.

His shirts and pants, his jackets, his shoes, formed vague jumbled shapes in the near-darkness.

He heard, then, a soft sc.r.a.pe, a rustle from the far corner.

Heard an intake of breath, then a low grunting exhale.

She was alive. Thank Christ.

"You're alive!" he yelped. "Thank Christ!"

He actually felt weak in the knees.

Except wait.

Should her breathing sound quite so... quite so... bubbly? Like she was dragging air through her own... through... was "blood" the word he wanted? No. Not. Surely not. And why, exactly, was he continuing to stand in the G.o.dd.a.m.n dark? What was wrong with him-besides that he hadn't slept in days, was sort of afraid to leave his own house since the whole burglary incident less than a month ago, and the drugs?

He reached for the wall switch.

She was on the floor by his wool-and-cashmere overcoat-a shame he could rarely wear that in LA, such a gorgeous coat-her miniskirt hiked up her thighs, her legs splayed across the carpet in a way that seemed... uncomfortable. Her head was hanging down, long blonde hair falling over her face.

And again, that breathing: the long, bubbling inhale, the thick grunting exhale.

He said, "Uh, sweetie? Sweetheart? You okay there?"

He noticed her hands clawing at the carpet: the fingers rigid, the skin an odd, marbled white.

"I'm..."Thad said.

She lifted her head.

"... sorry about this," Thad muttered.

Through the lanks of tangled hair, he could see her eyes. The gaping whites of her eyes. Her face was contorted, her lipstick-smeared lips pulled in a weird rictus grin.

She was whispering something, as she began to drag herself toward him.

"Nice... nice girl," Thad said. "Good little girl."

She wasn't whispering actual words. It was gibberish, like she was speaking in tongues or something. He wished at the very least that she would shut up. This wasn't really happening to him. He'd had much the same feeling when he'd walked in on the burglary. There'd been a moment when he could have bolted back out through the front door, except everything had gone flat and surreal, like he'd been dropped into a television show. Except it hadn't been a show, any more than this was, and the knowledge busted through him just as the girl got on her hands and knees and seemed to be gathering herself, pulling in that ragged, bubbling breath, and he saw the discoloration in her cheeks and throat and cleavage and realized she was rotting, that the smell in the closet was the smell of rotting flesh.

She launched herself at him, head down, blonde hair flying.

Thad stepped back. He shut the door just as her face came so close he could see the pupils roiling in the great dead white of her eyes.

There was a heavy thumping sound as she slammed against the door and again as she dropped to the ground.

Thad stood there.

He listened.

Nothing. No sound.

He opened the door just a crack and peered inside. Saw the girl's limp form on the floor. She wasn't whispering anything anymore. He might have thought she was dead, except for the wretched thing that was her breathing. Before he could think about what he was doing, he leaped over her. Two strides and he was at his safe, hands shaking as he worked out the combination, then he was grabbing the vials, the bag of cocaine, shoving them in the pockets of his jacket. Then he was vaulting over the girl, and did he maybe feel her fingers brush his pant leg, hear again that hoa.r.s.e senseless whisper or was it his imagination, as if it even mattered, just shut the door and backpedal, stumbling, watching the door, as if she was about to tear through it like the Terminator or something.

Thad sat down on the bed. He did some thinking. He did more c.o.ke. He did more thinking. Then he went back downstairs.

It seemed best to give it to them straight.

"There's a zombie in my closet," Thad said.

He picked up the linen napkin and unfolded it across his lap.

His guests were looking at him. The gra.s.s was sticking up along the center length of the dining room table. He really needed to talk to his interior designer about that. f.u.c.king gra.s.s. His guests were still looking at him. He felt the need to keep on talking. "This girl, she's been in my closet for many hours," he babbled, "and I just went upstairs to let her out, right, except she was on the floor in this really weird position and she looked up at me like this-" He contorted his own face to demonstrate."-and then she came at me like this-" He got out of his chair to show them, then sat down again and picked up his napkin from where it had fallen on the floor. "-and I realized that somehow between the time she got locked in there and now, she turned into this really annoying zombie. Anybody have any thoughts on this?"

He looked around the table.

Eyes met his for the briefest moments before sliding away. There was a silence, interrupted only by the shuffling of one of the servers and the sliding of ice in the pitcher as he went around refilling water gla.s.ses. He missed his aim with one, water splashing and dripping off the edge of the table, but no one except Thad seemed to notice. There was a loud thunk as a camera man dropped his camera. He picked it up with a sheepish grin on his face. It was a strange kind of grin, Thad thought. Kind of frozen.

"Baby," said Z, his voice booming the length of the room. He slapped his hands together. "A zombie! That's wonderful!"

"It isn't," Thad said. "It really isn't."

"You always surprise me, Thad," Z went on. "I said to myself-didn't I, honey-" turning to the raven-haired woman next to him"-I said to myself, 'What surprises will Thad have in store for us tonight?' There's always something! Usually it's some little honey slashing your tires or throwing wine in your face, but this-this is priceless."

"I'm not joking," Thad said. "There is a zombie in my closet."

Another silence.

His guests looked at him, looked at each other, looked at him again.

"Thad," Kimmie said tentatively, "are you okay? You've been under so much stress and-you're still recovering from the, from the, you know, the incident-and you've been partying kind of hard, and-"

"Zombie!"Thad said, and slammed his fist on the table. Silverware jumped and clattered.

He became aware of the server maneuvering behind him. It was the underwear model. One long thin arm extended with the water pitcher, and Thad noticed the red paper wristband. It had Tasty printed all over it. It was one of those VIP things that Navaid gave out at his club. Thad also noticed the bluish-white tinge to the skin, and the way it seemed to just drape off the bone. He rocked back in his chair and glanced up at the man. The server's eyes seemed dull, but that could be from the ba.n.a.lity of the task at hand, or maybe his customary expression. Still, Thad could feel his mind struggling to make a connection, one he felt he should probably share with his guests.

But voices were floating around the table, distracting him."... if there really is a girl, and she's sick or something, maybe we should get her to a doctor."

"She doesn't need a doctor," Thad said. "She would eat the doctor."

"Thaddy, why is there a girl in your closet?"

"Zombies aren't s.e.xy like vampires. Would you ever want to f.u.c.k a zombie?"

"Of course not. Zombies are the walking undead."

"But so are vampires."