It's your lucky day: you get to read about zombies from the safety of your zombie-free home/café/school/world! This humorous short story stars undead characters in the vein of iZombie, meaning they can more or less blend into the human world. Which begs the question: is your zombie-free world REALLY as safe as you think it is?

A Delicate Palate is part of THE DEAD SHOW anthology, put together by the incomparable Red_Harvey. There are more stories from this anthology up on Wattpad for your reading pleasure and the entire anthology is available on Amazon. See Red's page for more details. 

Please enjoy A Delicate Palate... and remember to stay away from high fructose corn syrup and nitrates!

A DELICATE PALATE

I found Camelia's message written on a three-by-five recipe card propped up against a vase of wilting tulips:

Lower intestines are best with a hint of cinnamon. Not too much,
mind you. We aren't eating oatmeal. If you can stomach it (see
what I did there?), add a peach or two to your roasting pan with a
yard of intestine and bake at 375 for an hour. Do NOT use canned
peaches. These are disgusting, and so are you if you use them.
High fructose corn syrup isn't good for anyone, alive or undead.

Remember: one bite of brain and the last coherent thought you'll
have will be regretting that you didn't take my advice.

I flicked the card finger-football style, it spun onto the floor, then breezed under the table.
 Gone... just like Camelia. I'd been abandoned, left with nothing more than a main course
recipe and untested, unwanted advice. The fridge was a gelatinous playground of all things innards. Bowels, kidneys, colons. All the lower parts of humans Camelia insisted
were good for me. I didn't want "good for me" though, I wanted what I
wanted. What I craved.

Slamming the fridge, I sank to my knees, pressing my back against the stainless steel. "Frickin-A, man."

Not a single brain in sight.

~ * ~

I'd been a zombie for five months, one week, and four days, and it was all Camelia's fault.

Okay, ninety percent her fault and ten percent mine for being stupid. My friend Trevor told me it was obvious she was a zombie. I should have realized it from the beginning, but all I saw was a rich girl wearing designer skinny jeans and perfume that made me lose my damn
mind. I thought her blood-shot eyes were from the nips she snuck out of
her engraved flask, and I wasn't about to judge that. We all have our vices.

Trevor informed me later (after it was too late, so thanks for nothing, asshole) that her flask smelled like dead people, not peppermint schnapps. All I could smell was her perfume, and it said, "get over here, Darrin," not "stay away, I'm an undead human flesh-eater."
If a woman like that wanted to slum it with me, I wasn't going to complain about veiny eyes and the surprisingly strong grip on my arm as she led me into my VW Camper.

Living like a nomad on the beaches of California had its perks, but not all women were as big a fan of Buffy's bff, Willow, as I was. In fact, some of them didn't like that I named my ride/home after a TV lesbian witch. Camelia didn't seem to mind. The van must be a cheap thrill for someone used to five-star hotels and mansions with koi ponds and live-in maids.

Everything was going fine until she spotted my kitchen, which consisted of a hotplate and ice-filled cooler. Her warm smile morphed into a grimace.

"What the hell's that?"

She pointed to a shelf featuring a couple bags of chips, an unopened jar of pickles, and a packet of beef jerky.

"Um... food?"

This was the crucial moment in which I should have realized things were not going as well as I'd thought. Camelia scowled, her nose crinkling. She released a long sigh before responding. "I thought for sure I'd found an organic meal. Do you know how many nitrates are in beef jerky? There's no way I can eat you now."

"So...okay, by 'eat,' do you mean you'll go down on me? Because I can go get us some hummus if that's what it takes."

"How can you have that stupid man bun and wear a mala around your neck and own a van like this," she gestured to our luxurious accommodations, "and not be a vegan? You should be firmer about your identity. It's like you can't decide if you're an eighteen-year-old dropout, or a seventy-year-old Woodstock reject."

I assessed the van's interior. The orange shag carpet, salvaged from my cousin's basement, was totally retro. I'd installed it myself, along with the faux wood paneling and the blacklight Jimi Hendrix poster. All of it was meant to set a certain vibe--just not the one I was getting from her.

"I'm twenty-nine."

"Exactly."

"Exactly what?"

She sighed again. I wished her haughtiness wasn't such a turn on because it was obvious by now she wasn't going down on me.

"Look, Derrick."

"Darrin."

"You're just the sort of pathetic clown I might have use for." She scrawled something on a post-it note, stuck it onto my forehead, then turned to leave. "That's my address. Don't share it. Be there tomorrow at 8:00 a.m."

"How do you know I don't have plans tomorrow? Or, you know, a job to go to?"

She paused at the door, a mixture of pity and amusement shining in her eyes. "You do have a job now. Thanks to me. Don't be late."

~ * ~

I consulted with Trevor that night over a couple of beers. We lounged on a picnic table in front of Willow, watching the sun set over the Pacific. Trevor didn't think I should go to Camelia's house, job or no job.

"Dude, she's totally a zombie."

"Don't be that way! I mean, I know she wears a lot of makeup, and she's more high maintenance than the women I usually go for, but she's very smart. You shouldn't judge people just because they're rich."

Trevor still insisted against my gainful employment. "No, Darrin, she's a zombie. As in, a member of the undead."

"What?" Intoxicating perfume... body swaying in those skinny jeans. "Nah, I don't see it."

"She told you she was going to eat you!"

"See? If she was a zombie, she'd have gone and done it. Relax, dude. She's just a hot one percenter with a delicate palate, and good taste in men."

Trevor tipped the beer bottle into his mouth, draining its contents. "You're going to be so screwed if you go there tomorrow. And I refuse to answer your desperate texts about how I was right, and now she's disemboweling you, so 'please, Trevor, come and save me.' You're on your own with that one."

I stood and stretched my arms wide, taking in the last dying rays of the dying day. "On my own with that one is exactly how I want it to be. You'll see. She's going to make me her bodyguard, or her butler or pool boy, so she can enact some rich girl fantasy she's been sitting on her whole life. This is going to work out fine."

~ * ~

Camelia didn't live in a mansion. Instead, she owned a sweet pad in a luxury high-rise overlooking downtown Los Angeles. That was my first shock. My second, was that I made it past the doorman. He gave me the once-over, taking in my basketball shorts and Clash t-shirt with an undisguised sneer.

"Um, I'm here to see Camelia Linden."

The doorman stared at me with bloodshot eyes. His sneer remained, lips melted back like wax from a dripping candle.

"She invited me, I swear."

He sniffed and then nodded over his shoulder, past the lobby towards a row of shiny gold elevators. "Top floor." Then, because it seemed like he couldn't help himself, he added, "Looks like you'removing up in the world."

"Thanks, I guess?" I squinted as I moved passed him, glad when the doors of the elevator cut me off from his view. The elevator rode up, opening briefly at the twenty-seventh floor to reveal a mother and son wearing matching sunglasses.

"Oh, I pushed the wrong button," the mother said. Her child craned his head, inhaling the air around me with loud, piggy snorts. Lips curled, he ran his tongue over his teeth, moaning all the while. His mother pulled him back, hand clenched onto his shoulder. "He's not for you." She turned her attention to me. "We're eating out today."

I nodded and punched the door button, spending the next three seconds with my eyes downcast, ready for the child to spring on me. Small miracle, the door closed without incident, and I continued up to Camelia's penthouse. It took her a few moments to remember I was
supposed to be there.

"Right... Daryl. The man with the van." Clad in a silk bathrobe, she led me into her apartment. There were no koi, but still, it was hard not to be impressed. Marble floors inlaid with gold offset the modern art and posh furniture worthy of a magazine spread. My scuffed flip-flops and I didn't exactly match the décor.

"It's Darren, actually. But you have the van part right."

"Thanks to you, I couldn't eat until late last night. It's thrown me off."

"How was that because of me?" I inquired, hoping she'd dive into some dirty talk about how thinking about me kept her up all night.

Waving away my question, she motioned to a teal sofa accented with magenta pillows. "Sit down. I'll be right with you."

I thought maybe she was going to get dressed, but she came back a moment later wearing the same next-to-nothing robe. In her hand was a flask of the stuff she'd been nipping at the day before. She poured the contents into a glass.

"A little early for that, isn't it?"

"Not if you want to keep your vital organs on the inside of you."

I shifted, eyes gliding between the v-line of her robe and the LA skyline shimmering against the sun through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind her. "Sometimes I don't know how to connect your words to reality."

She raised an eyebrow.

"Also, I think you should know, for your own safety... there's a creepy little kid living on floor twenty-seven. Pretty sure he's president of the local chapter of Future Serial Killers of America."

"There are creepy kids on every floor of this building. Creepy adults, too."

"Is this, like, a party building? Even the doorman looked hung over."

She placed a manicured hand over her mouth, stifling a laugh. "Those fumes from your van must be depleting your brain cells."

"Hey, that's not cool!"

"You truly don't know, do you? Everyone in the building, including Orion, our doorman, is like me." When she saw that didn't click with me, she went on, carefully enunciating each word: "This. Is. A. Zombian. Building."

"A... zombie... zombian." I wasn't on acid, or any other mind-altering drug, but it sure felt like I was tripping. Maybe I had brain cancer and the tumor was causing hallucinations. "Are you telling me Trevor was right?"

"Who's Trevor?"

Wait a minute... brain cancer. Brains. I glanced at the path to the exit. "Did you bring me up here so that you can eat my brains or something?"

She gave a sneer that could outshine Orion's, or even that weird kid's. "Or something. First, we've already covered the fact that I don't consider you suitable food. Second, brains are completely off limits. It was your intestines I was after. They're my favorite."

I stood and scuttled to the entryway, my eyes fixed on her. "Are you the sauntering kind, or the kind that suddenly moves at superhuman speed and then pierces my neck with your fangs?"

She rolled her eyes. "Those are vampires, which were slayed back into the Hellmouth in 2003, and no, I neither move at superhuman speed nor saunter."

She said that last word like I'd asked her to wear off-brand shoes. I decided to change tactics in the midst of my escape attempt. "So, are you like, into me then? Like in a non-food way? Because you're really hot and all, but eating people's intestines is kind of a deal-breaker for me."

"I'm not into you, Van Man. What I told you yesterday was true. I have a job for you."

"What is it?"

Getting up, she wandered around the couch to a sideboard, where she mixed up a drink. "We all have innate character traits that help us adapt to this life. Mine is the ability to manage those below me. Yours is to present yourself as a bumbling, but kind-hearted fool."

"Hey!"

"A fool people trust easily. People don't trust me. They're suspicious. Except for you, but that's because you're an idiot. I really do wish you'd at least been on a kosher diet. I could have worked with that. But anyways, you eat crap, and now here you are, still alive. And it's going to work to my advantage in the end."

"You know, I'm not so sure I trust you anymore."

She handed me a cocktail glass with an olive bobbing in it. "Drink up, and then we'll discuss the terms of your employment."

I still wasn't sure if I should stay or go. She claimed she didn't want to kill me, and I'll be honest, I needed money and she had plenty of it. If a whole high-rise full of zombies lived in downtown LA and no one seemed to notice, they couldn't be too murderous.

I twirled the glass between my thumb and index finger. Even if they weren't ravaging the whole city, the whole zombie thing was hard to overlook. Maybe I'd indulge in just the one drink, for politeness' sake, then try to get out of there, hopefully taking all of my innards with me.

The first sip went down easy. Rich people drinks do not disappoint.

"This is the best martini I've ever tasted," I managed to say before I slumped over onto the couch.

Parts 2 and 3 coming soon!