Brenda had tried every trick but the Book. She soon let two schoolfriends take her for Christian Sundays. Elisha and Corntrough were Evangelicals, and there was something haunting about the way they spoke, with everything “special,” and “calling out” and “rising up” for everything else, and so much “really just” whatever it was. Brenda was a vegetarian. And the loveliness and purity of their jumpers, and the way sometimes they gazed contentedly on you because you were hurtling on Hell. Brenda liked that peace. Her parents had hustled sorcery, here was its trajectory.

She stood bent in her shower. She shook hot diamonds from her hair.

Sunday’s come. Brenda sits on the edge of her bed, a woman in a child’s room. “Oh Lord, Heavenly father,” she murmurs, “please suck my wart from off my body. For thine is the power, the Heaven and the glory, forever and ever, amen.” 

Any moment the doorbell. 

Brenda paused to enter her ostentatious sunglasses, so encompassing they included a breathing tube and cup size. These monsters gave her the reassuring sensation of being bent over a well in a glade. 

“Hi Brenda.” They are all white. 

“Hi Brenda.” 

“Hiya guys. My hair’s a little damp.” 

 God’s sun shone. A parade of blinging blacks moved past on bicycles and mobile phones.  

“That’s so not legal,” Brenda commented anxiously. “Or maybe it is. I don’t know. It so shouldn’t be legal.” 

Though neither friend remarked on it, there was something in their free and relaxed manner to suggest that a tiny fellow, about a foot high, completely naked with bright red skin, would spoon lumps of molten brimstone into Brenda’s scorched and overflowing anus often and forever. “It’s so not safe,” said Brenda. 

Nonetheless, how great, to be the springiest things in a muffled lull. Brenda smiled, feeling her face tilted up by the smile as if by ropes. Energised by the thought of God, she lifted clumps of fallen petals and threw them up, and ran past their rain, spinning. 

The mood was all over Cambridge – see short promotional film for mood.

Scene 19

Inside a church. Sunny, spacious, full. An ENGLISH MINISTER, a LAY PRIEST and two ALCOLYTES, all in muftis, FATHER PATRICK, a visiting American, in vestments.

The observant viewer will spot in the pews BRENDA, ELISHA and CORNTROUGH near the exit, TOBY near the front on the left hand side.

LAY PRIEST: It’s the good at are scared, assa fing. It’s them at ave Jesus in they hearts, as are likely a ave pup in they pants. Just a little play on words folks a get the ball rolling. Sermons don’t ave a be all boring you know. I’ll try a keep it short.

Beat.

LAY PRIEST: But it also contains what I believe to be a very important message, which is fear.

Beat.

LAY PRIEST: We all, live with fear. Fear of crime, fear of illness, fear of redundancy, of personal, financial, loss. And I just fink . . . it’s really important that we sometimes take a moment, to step back and say . . . hang on . . . ‘the Lord . . . is my Shepherd. Wiff Im by my side, what can go wrong?’

Beat.

LAY PRIEST: What can go wrong? I’ve already mentioned a few. Illness . . . can go wrong. Monetary investments . . . can go wrong. Faith itself can, sometimes, go wrong. I ave ad the fortune, never to ave to part . . . wiff a thumb. Not so, Mr. Blackwell, who lost is, four years ago, in a lemon cutter, while he was tending the bar, in a night club. Mr. Blackwell . . . is ere today. What I’m tryin a say is . . . you look around you sometimes donchya and you fink . . . fiddle-dee-dee! I’m glad I’m not Jesus! You turn on the telly and you see these pictures of these starving kids and they legs blown off and there’s some bloke telling you the earth is actually warming up and that’s actually going to kill us all. I am in amazement, suffering is totally victorious holdin the floor no effort. And outside for all you know it’s your car at’s getting nicked.

Beat.

LAY PRIEST: Faith and love are the core of the Christian faith. This as a knock-on effect in almost every area of Christian life. Once you ave developed these key skills it will impact charity, it will impact . . . and it will impact hope. Because hope is the only solution to fear. It is only through hope that we can ever hope to combat fear.

The camera drifts across Brenda’s parted lips, and frenum and septum and across the bridge of her nose and her eye and down her cheek and her neck and her top and her lap, and crash zooms through the fibres of her denim and her knickers and focuses on the wart in her pants. A grand, slow, zoom begins. As the lay preacher continues through his next speech, he gradually fades down as choral music fades in. It is an intricate setting of Delerious?’s “Deeper” somewhat in the manners of Orlando Gibbons. Eventually, deep within the florets we see Mary’s beautific face. Cut music.

The lay priest has tidied his notes. He makes his way into the pews.

The English priest or whatever he is is about to continue when he is stopped by an urgent whisper by the American priest or whatever he is. They bend their heads together, for a frivolous moment Lisa imagines that the ceremony has been delayed so that the American priest or whatever he is could get a light.

ENGLISH: Father Patrick informs me that God has spoken to him. He has warned Father Patrick that there is someone among us today who does not know Jesus. If this is you, step forward.

There is a hush. Lisa notices one or two heads twirling and straining, as if they know she is on her way to the front, and are trying to see what’s keeping her. Elisha and Corntrough both look thoughtful, with downcast eyes and little smiles.

ENGLISH: No? Is there not someone here today, who is without Jesus? Who cannot feel Jesus’ . . . hand . . . on their heart?

Lisa is terrified that if she doesn’t pipe up, Elisha or Corntrough will dob her in. She stares ahead blankly. The hush. Corntrough clears his throat.

ENGLISH: No? We all know Jesus, then!

There is relaxed laughter. The gentle commotion at the front begins to bristle with the next item on the agenda. Lisa feels relief.

Interview With A Zombie

BY FRANCIS CROT

Those murmuring and humorous shufflers at the outer gates, unlike the lurching huntsmen of the lawn, were only recently passed. They were dressed informally, as if unburied. The observant reader will spot Vanessa carrying a femur through them. These “Just Add Maggots” attendants in their muftis, Brenda theorised, though vaster in their number, were of a lesser order than those whose bones had long marinated in the sacred ground. Those who were not already in the church grounds at the instant of the Trump could not cross it now. They desired to enter, but were held, as though by a fierce wind, or invisible shield.

Fear Brenda finally knew united with its proper complement – not guilt, not its crushing delegitimations, the convulsions of a cosmically gauche rationality, but love – fear, and love – love for her Lord – for the line about the church grounds was not arbitrary, but acknowledged by the living dead! Howsoever mutilated, there was structural affinity between the unfathomable atrocity and the religious emancipatory wish which had preceded it various institutional elaborations. “Hallelujah!” she unbidden shouted [lit. “Get me out of here in one piece”].

Even those buried in the cemetary had not entered the chapel earlier. Its sanctity must be of an even higher repulsive order. It would be the ideal sanctuary, were it not full of meat.



This was the meat that Brenda then considered. Infested, overrun by whatever dark principle brooded here, the Deific germ had defended itself the only way it knew how – by secreting a cyst wall of Our Lord’s body, to await, beseiged, angelic reinforcement. Or perhaps the sorcerous airs themselves were the origin of the meat, blotting out this sanctified territory, abhorrent to it, with enveloping spongy tissue from Hell? Then might the holy building yet spit it out? Or perhaps some dark worm in the Divine psyche had agitated it to this abnormal surfeit of flesh, parasites oft are seen thus to disorient their Hosts. The girls were divided and soon Elisha was in trouble again. Its hands cupped her breasts like sinks full of kitchen knives, and came away snagging on the steak within them. Brenda overtook her own hysteric squeal and body-checked the zombie. Brenda and Elisha hated the disorientating zombies.

She had begun to recommend her yet-ramifying hypotheses concerning the meat to Elisha when the second girl darted rapidly off from her side, down the little slope at whose foot stood the clogged chapel.

Folicles, thick as children’s plaits, protruded at random from frank puckers. Elisha seized one of these with both hands and yanked it free. It was crowned with twitching roots of gory flab – plucked like a dodgy upturned rose. Elisha let it fall and clawed sensibly at the exposed pore. Brenda saw at once. They would carve slots in the chapel’s belly and embed themselves, defy the man-eating devil somewhat like snug snow angels.

Snow angels had made an impression on Brenda – ha! ha! – in that without ever really thinking about it, she’d always thought of angels as reptiles. Most people think ‘angel,’ they think, ‘big holy mammal.’ Not Brenda. The cold. This is off-message. Inside the meat, Brenda thought as she ran down the slope, God in His wisdom has given us security.

The zombies poured in a wedge downhill towards them. They would claw basins. They . . . would claw basins! Brenda envisioned herself snug in the meat, blowing a raspberry and having the tip of her tongue snipped, and giggled.

She tugged up a turf of epidermis an inch thick and shaped like Benelux. Before this rug had even quit pulsating Brenda had punched elbow-deep into the ham gauze. Fraying and scooping until she suspected the skin of her blood-drenched arms, face and chest was seeping empathetic river.

But by was by now absolutely certain that they would run out of time to claw basins (perhaps in a living being / superbeing?) suitable to cower in erectly. Same old same old – would Elisha and Brenda draw the line at also biting away the marshmallow soft fidgety carnage swirls? They would not. Like two Eves they took of it.

In the gelatinous, rich paste of pork tallow, it would be uncomfortable.

As the zombies neared, the girls were able to lead them around the corner of the chapel. Oh the shallow troughs for which they yearned. The flesh snug around their arms. With themselves as bait and liberators, a kind of pattern of movement transpired which seemed to promise triumph to the pair.

Each time the crowd rounded the north-eastern corner of the chapel, mad and leaping, the girls left off their fleshmasonry and begin another brisk clockwise lap. When they were certain they had been followed as far as the south-western corner they sprinted, their gaits by now scarcely less eccentric, the balance of the lap to the gibbous gate and prised more meat. It was then that fatigue took hold. They say sometimes, terrible trauma gives you access to reserves of strength you never knew you had. Perhaps that’s why the zombies endured. No, that’s not right. Brenda felt a funny sort of companionship with the dead. She had to claw thick flesh with her bare hands and so did they. They held this in common. Brenda furnished the meat, to her satisfaction, with the outline of a girl and tried to help Elisha up into it. The wounded girl swatted her and returned heavily to the second outline. Ghosts envy fish, and so on, down to you.

“Go!”

Brenda was off – but this time something was different. Over her shoulder she saw Elisha climbing exhaustedly up – too soon, surely? – into the cavity she had scuffed in the meat. Participants received feedback about their appearance that was either congruent with their self-appraisal, congruent with their reflected appraisal, or more positive than their self-appraisal. Elisha was half-in, half-out when a hand grabbed her thigh. Brenda yelped, so did Elisha and kicked clumsily loose, then she was inside the meat.

‏Inside the meat, for better or worse, to try whether or no the vagrants might force into the seraglio. With relish they consented. Little by little, they pressed the gelatinous fringe of the holy zone, whittling a crater in the face of Elisha, who shrank vainly into the solid unyielding chops. In seconds they had scrabbled off her breasts and nose. You said it not me. One knelt and tore ribbons from her toes with sharp, ostentatious fumbles. The waned moons of her eyes swivelled, directing bloody tears this way and that. A strange, incommunicative groan left Elisha’s lips.

Yet for all that the zombies tore and guzzled, her injuries might be restricted to the peeling of her superficies – depending where the holy line lay.

“Elisha! Elisha!”

She was nowhere near deep enough. The men sanded down the front of her body, to a plane something over an inch behind her face. Brenda tired of screaming. Soon Elisha could not make sounds. When finally all morsels of dead Elisha jutting over the sacred shield were gone, the men moved drunkenly to surround Brenda.

She ran swiftly through their middle and leapt, twirling perfectedly mid-air to face the lawn. Her shoulders hit the meat. He makes me down to lie. As Brenda slotted into her hole, Elisha’s hollowed corpse stepped free. Brenda was pleased she had not followed her first impulse, to clothe herself in her dead friend’s casing. Overzealous solidarity. She saw the sense in leaving that niche unfrequented. The viscera pixie swayed before her now, all trace of their former love gone, and reached both hands towards Brenda’s face.

The others joined her pawing, evil mimes. Was the gutter deep enough? – would the chapel jerk and purge her? – Brenda hypocritically tensed her muscles – prayer must be to speech acts as speech acts are to the words which composit them, only pragmatics cubed can found a proper sense of prayer. Hallelujah, Hallelujah. The moaning men – Elisha, Henry, Corntrough, Mrs. Williamson, the others – reached and reached, and Brenda felt a little nick on her chin. A gallant nail snagged her T-shirt and drew away a thread. She sucked her tummy in. Their fingers tapped on the button of her jeans. Her feet were splayed, forcing her legs bandy. A mushy thumb snapped off near her throat, but tickled. Was it malice or rote, that made them try?

Her body was bent back by the meat, so her chin jutted out farther than her nose. Indeed, her crotch was foremost. And steadily, steadily they were shredding the fabric of her jeans. That they tried to swallow it showed Brenda that she had not exactly been outwitted. Yet perhaps defeated.

Body parts have a certain paradoxical lightness, wings in particular. The chapel of meat about Brenda's back had some of that.

“Give it up boys!” she muttered “I’m not gonna stage-dive!” But her chin took a deep cut; she shouldn’t move her jaw, unless for a very wise crack. Hallelujah, she cracked wisely in her head. A chaos of flesh, yes, the armless, legless torso of Father Jeremy, twitched and writhed with a horrible rapidity to the fore of her attackers and uncannily bit off her wart. The blemishing scarabæus swallowed, no part of her poked out among their attentions, and so, the little figurehead chewed up, and some further suckling by Father Jeremy at the little spray of blood his bite had brought forth, which soon dwindled, the zombies shuffled off to join their brethren at the outer gates, who had already begun to file off into the day.

Gouge Addiction, or, The True History of Brenda True: Who Was Seduced By A Zombie, To Which Is Appended, A Concise Allegory of the Bird Flu Pandemic

BY FRANCIS CROT

They picked up the M11 for half a day. Only two cars passed in that period, the first going away from Malton and the other towards it. As they were resting in a dip, they didn’t notice the second car in time to get a good look, and be sure if it wasn’t the same again. Lottie thought so. Still-flaming husks, and the welcoming victims of those accidents, shepherded them West across the countryside.

“I saw one where a spaceship explodes in orbit, raining billions of tonnes of toxic sludge onto the planet. Everyone north of the equator becomes one of them.”

“I saw one where the virus only works on adults. So it’s effectively kids and teenagers trying to survive in their world.”

“Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him!”

“I saw one where they rose and layed down again without ever committing a single act of violence.”

It is hardly possible to express the ardour of it. There was plenty of courage, and before long, plenty of certain chums sacrificing their lives to facilitate the continuance of other chums’ lives (in the considered opinions of the survivors). There is a piece of cinema which is important for anyone who burns to know, but know safely, from an armchair, what Lisa looked like in her final moments. It is the bit in the Coen brothers’ Fargo in which the character played by Steve Buschemi is shoved relentlessly into a wood chipper. If you look at the state of Steve Buschemi at the end of Coen brothers’ films, you will see there is a tendency to divide him into increasingly tiny pieces.

Their main themes were God and the infection. A peculiar manners developed within the transmission of practical information. Quite a lot was said very clearly but very indirectly. The pronouns “they” and “them” had unmistakeable reference.

“I saw one where a hot pink meteorite plunges from the sky in the middle of a drive-in movie. Any woman who smells the rock becomes one of them, except sex-crazed.”

“I saw one where the only thing worse than the corny ‘the dead take over’ concept, or the ‘the dead become a metaphor for consumerism’ trope, which would have been poignant, like, forty years ago, was its twee hipster equivalent. You know, the I-know-I’m-writing-a-story-about-the-dead-because-I’m-making-a-comment-about-the-dead-stories. Look, you can make a ‘comment’ about whatever you want, but the ultimate take-away is that in the course of doing so, you just wasted a considerable amount of your creative life for the sake of giving the world another goddamn zombie story. And yes, my qualifications for a zed moratorium include zed love stories, zed noirs, zed mysteries, zombie teen lit, zed westerns, zed dramas, zed comedies-of-error, zed with cance-AAAAAARGH! AAARGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh. Eugh.”

Where they could they followed they waterways. They drank from the streams, and the infected proved a little less swift at crossing than they.

One river, unmarked where they followed it, was their companion for two days. Light grasses wrapped round Joe’s legs. Lazy foam gathered at its quieter edges. “I’d be interested to know,” he once said carefully by its banks, “what you think of the modern church’s dependence on relationship language for our experience of God.”

“I don’t know about dependence,” said Brenda. “You’re so fucking aggressive about God.”

“Preference, whatever. Show me the scripture where it says, ‘A personal relationship with the proprietor – that’s how you get into the Kingdom of Heaven.’”

“Ephesians 5. The church as the bride of Christ.”

Joe grinned, his tongue between his teeth, and waved his head side-to-side. “Yeah, OK, OK! But it seems possible to me that it’s a very cultural, you know, twentieth century thing, helpful for a lot of people, but not necessarily the key to like understanding experience of God for everyone, and possibly even alienating for some?”

“I dunno Joe, God knows you so intimately … all knitted together all Joe-ish … it’d be almost rude of Him not to give you the opportunity to know Him.”

“God as creepy social media stalker.”




“Hmm.”