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The kitchen at the back of the manor house did not see much haste these days, just like the overgrown inner yard right outside its door that had, at some point in its existence, been a perfectly good herb garden before succumbing to crawler plants, raspberry bushes, and goldenrod. That had, however, been back in the day when the place had been alive with many more inhabitants, and an entire army of employees had been taking care of the buildings and the land surrounding them, the adjacent family cemetery included.
No, right now, the life here was as slow as life could be, and some hopeless romantic fool would have probably described it as peaceful and even tranquil. In the next sentence, they would have probably lamented the fast-paced city life and elevated this humble, quiet property to mythological, almost divine heights, were it not for a peculiar detail:
Guests normally tended to leave much faster than they had arrived.
Provided they did leave.
But, back to the kitchen.
Despite the nighttime having settled upon the land, the kitchen was abuzz with activity. Relatively speaking, anyway, for the ones responsible for said activity were three gentlemen who each looked like they had recently crawled from the aforementioned cemetery, but not before spending prolonged time six feet under, and communicated in a way that one would expect creatures of their kind to communicate. They had nowhere to hurry, and all the time in the world at their disposal as they disposed of a few trayfuls of baked goods and fruit, each and every of which looked like somebody had intentionally rolled them about on the floor. Luckily for everybody involved, the compost box outside the door did not care for trivialities, accepting any and all offerings made to it, before the quaint servants hurried, far as that word could be used about them, back inside and out of the pouring rain.
Victor, one of the rather grey-skinned, not entirely alive in the regular meaning of that word, gentlemen, and the one who sported a magnificent mohawk that would put any self-described punk to shame, huffed and groaned, and dropped the silver tray upon the table with enough force that it dented slightly.
”Careful with that.”
”Go crawl under a tombstone.”
Tommy, the one equally dead-looking man wielding a mighty set of dreadlocks he would have probably been able to use as a melee weapon if he decided that headbanging was an appropriate way to spend his afterlife, and the one who had objected to such treatment of household wares, groaned and slapped the back of Victor’s head. The impact was hard enough that it would have put a living person’s lights out for a couple hours, but, as it was, Victor merely shook his head and growled at his fellow deadman.
”Family heirloom,” Tommy insisted.
Victor groaned a word that, in Zombie, meant something along the lines of “heirloom-schmeirloom”, but proceeded to put the tray away as its maker had intended for it to be put away.
”You do that in front of Doc, and you will really crawl under a tombstone, ” Patient Zero, the third distinctly dead gentleman who sported a beard that peeked out from under his hood and would have made every self-respecting fantasy dwarf go green with envy, noted, as he merely followed the ordeal from the side. ”It will be no fun, to be locked in box forever.”
”The living person did that, and she went away fine!” Victor hissed.
Patient Zero made a sound that in his living days would have been a low whistle but now sounded more like a dry, broken tree creaking in the wind. Both of those sounds served the same purpose, however; that purpose being, acknowledgment.
”She was rude,” he agreed, picking his words as though he expected the aforementioned Doctor to manifest behind his back this very moment.
”Croissants take a long time to make!” Victor shuffled closer to Patient Zero, clearly intent on picking a fight in case his plight was dismissed. ”Even longer if you are a deadman.”
”I am sure the living people would think they are delicious.”
If there was one thing that zombies were good at, it was not giving in to intimidation of any kind. Those worked on the living, but the dead, or the wrong ones, as the living people called them, were just as bothered by somebody threatening them as they would be about a sudden change in the weather. Which was to say, not at all. This, Patient Zero demonstrated right now, even with the other all up in his grey, slightly decayed face, and the fact that Victor, just like the rest of them, was capable of tearing a living person to pieces within minutes had absolutely no effect on him.
”She did not even try one!” Victor went from threatening to complaining within seconds. ”She just threw them at me! Who does that?”
”Living people do. Throw things at us, all the time, when they run. Have you not noticed?”
”Which part of “under Doc’s protection” did she not get?” Tommy decided to join in, for he, too, appeared at least miffed about the events that had taken place in the afternoon. ”Is she stupid?”
”Living people do not understand.”
”I put so much work into them!” Victor did not bother keeping up with the conversation, for he had more important things to be upset about. ”And she throws them at me! Terrible guest!”
”We know,” with that, Patient Zero patted Victor on the shoulder; a gesture that did end up making the latter more cheerful.
”And at the end,” Victor then proceeded to complain, however on an entirely different matter, ”we didn’t even get to bite.”
”It was a failure of a meeting on every side,” Tommy agreed, voicing the thoughts all three of them had about the event.
Patient Zero groaned, the zombie equivalent of a living person pinching the bridge of their nose.
“You know Doc is particular about his rules. No biting guests in his domain without their consent. Rules of hospitality.”
”She would have deserved,” Tommy stated, bluntly. ”And it has nothing to do with wanting to bite!”
This was met with grunts and growls of approval, before they disbanded and returned to their previous tasks. For a while, the only sounds in this part of the manor were the rain outside in the garden and on the windowsills, and those of the zombies milling about, trying to stay out of each other’s way, as they dealt with the slew of chores that had been left unattended due to the guest’s arrival.
Now, of course it was unlikely that Dr. Dead (who in the past had bothered little about actual dead rats adorning tables in his lab with their majestic, if a bit dry, corpses) would ever be bothered about something as trivial as a dusty table in a room that was never being used anyway, but. It was a thing that grounded the three undead into their reality, as horrible as that reality might be at times. Once there were no tasks to tend to, it was easy to get lost in the void that lay beyond the life itself, and that, to the trio, would have been more horrifying than just about anything else. The void was a dark, cold place; a record stuck on repeat. A being stuck in the void was a being lost in time. Suspended in one terrible moment of their eternal existence. A being stuck in the void was a being slowly losing the remains of their mind and becoming aimless, directionless and uncontrollable, like the groups of zombies milling about in the world of the living people. Having a daily schedule kept the trio grounded, and more or less sane in an existence that really had nothing sane about it, and they would be sticking to it while their puppet master saw it useful for his own goals.
”You know, he will bring more of them in the future,” Patient Zero finally interrupted the silence once they all happened to be in the same room again.
This statement caused a bit more of a drama than he had intended, with the other two turning in perfect unison to look at him, before they shuffled closer.
”I refuse to cook for them!” Victor declared right there and then. ”If Doc insists on bringing rude living people here, he can do it himself!”
”We could… just ask him not to.”
There was a moment of very tense silence, before the other two began complaining and objecting to this idea at the same time. Patient Zero made a general gesture at them, which in Zombie meant they were to silence, preferably before the noise broke containment and reached the ears of their lord and master. After all, any and all sounds travelled fast in the dead silence that normally ruled the manor house.
”We are already dead,” he continued. ”What is he going to do? Kill us again?”
”Bury us forever. He can do that.”
”Not for a request. A polite one.”
***
The sound of Tommy knocking on the door echoed ominously in the silence of the manor.
No answer followed.
Tommy knocked again.
Inside, somebody sighed and shuffled papers about, and there was the almost inaudible swish of an oil lamp being extinguished. At least to regular human ears, for to the zombies it might as well have happened right next to them.
Tommy knocked a third time.
“In!” a voice ordered.
The door opened, and the trio spent a moment milling about in the corridor before they poured into the room and approached their master.
Dr. Dead’s study, as it was colloquially known among the three, was a large room with dark oak panelling and a considerable number of items sitting on the shelves lining the walls, or being directly mounted onto the panels, with a few rather ugly wooden figures in-between. The most prominent features in the study were a massive antique oaken desk with just as massive chair, and a large bookshelf with glass doors that revealed behind them books and heaps of paper as well as countless weird little knick-knacks the purpose of which would have escaped the zombies in the best of times, not just right now. The desk sat in the middle of the room, halfway between the door and the fireplace, leaving the person sitting in the chair in a shadow. The large windows were hidden behind thick wine-red curtains that had not been moved for at least a couple years, and this only made the room appear more tomb-like rather than a space which people inhabited.
“What is this?!” Dead demanded. “I do not recall having summoned you!”
”Doctor,” Patient Zero spoke up, in the same manner the zombies talked among themselves, for they were no longer capable of speaking languages of the living people, fully aware that Doctor knew their speech as well as he did his own, despite being prone to bouts of forgetfulness when it suited him.
“Yes?”
There was a moment of much shoving about, before Patient Zero was shoved forwards, as the group’s elected spokeszombie, while still remaining at a respectful (or, rather, safe) distance from the desk.
”Doctor, we have a request.”
“A request?” Dead’s brow furrowed.
“Yes.”
For a moment, there was silence in the room, except for fire cracking in the fireplace, and the man’s fingers tapping against the surface of the table. His dead eye had yet to twitch, so they reckoned that was a good sign.
“Alright. Fine!” Doctor finally announced, amused. “Let’s hear this… request… of yours!”
”Doctor, we would like if you did not invite such living people to our house in the future.”
“Such… people?” Dead arched an eyebrow.
”That woman. Respectfully, stop inviting living people like her.”
The silence that followed was nothing if not stupefied.
”She was rude,” Patient Zero finally elaborated, but only when the silence had been long enough for the deadmen to begin feeling awkward as well.
“She was a guest,” Doctor snarled and began tapping his fingers against the table surface again.
”A bad guest. Good guests do not throw things at their host’s staff.”
“Normally, staff don’t scare the bejeebus out of their master’s guests.”
”That is your fault as much as ours, Doctor.”
That had maybe come out a little more brazen than Patient Zero had intended, but he figured, as the one who had been around the longest in this existence and consequently had had to endure dealing with Dr. Dead for the longest, he had earned the right to be a little more insolent than a zombie addressing Dead should normally be.
Doctor’s eye finally twitched.
“I should bury you forever, for this!” he rose from the chair, his shadow looming over the trio.
”It is the truth!” Patient Zero decided, if he was to go down, he would go down like a zombie, not a cowardly living person. ”You bring the rude, coward woman here, and you tell us we are fault she runs off. You are fault, too.”
”You tell her, she is under your protection, but then she acts stupid!” Tommy saw a chance to contribute and seized it. ”Does she not understand living people’s speech?”
”At least next time find somebody who matches your freak!”
There was once again a very stupefied silence as everybody, Dead included, stared at Victor.
Victor shrunk away behind Patient Zero, just in case.
Stunned, Dead fell back into his chair and remained sitting for a moment that felt way longer than a moment should, to the zombies. After that, when the trio had already resigned themselves to spending the rest of their eternity in a closed box six feet under, Doctor’s shoulders shook, and he began laughing.
“Astounding!” Dead finally declared when he had more or less regained his composure. “You raise the dead, and no one bats an eye. But botch one date, and suddenly everybody has an opinion. Even your own zombies, apparently. What am I supposed to do with you three, hm?”
The trio kept silent, unsure whether or not the next thing they heard would be an order to go get shovels and start digging.
“Fine. That’s what you want, then? That’s your… request? Yes?”
The zombies groaned in unison.
Doctor leant back in the chair and rested his elbows on the armrests, bringing his fingers together in front of him, and sat in contemplating silence for a while. The fire in the fireplace cracked and creaked, and hissed as it found a spot in the wood that had not quite dried out before it had been sent into the inferno.
“I suppose it’s a reasonable request,” the man finally hummed under his nose, before he spoke. “It would save a lot of trouble. And if it doesn’t work the way you have imagined? If the next one, provided there will be one, also runs? What do you propose? Should I have them do a quiz? Question number five: How do you feel about three zombies wandering around on your potential spouse’s property? Or something?”
”We—“ Patient Zero began, but was shoved aside by Victor who had finally regained the brazen side of his.
”We propose you let us bite then!” Victor declared.
”We have to work on the proposal itself,” Tommy, on his turn, shoved Victor back where he belonged right now. ”Not bite. Goes against the rules. We will inform later.”
”We do not know yet. We honestly did not think we would get this far,” Patient Zero finished his own thought that had been so rudely interrupted by his fellow deadman.
“Hell’s sake…” Dr. Dead facepalmed and slouched in his chair.