Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion Read Free Page A

in Mexico.
    I may be biased, but I feel that Liverpool zombies, save for thedreary gray skin tone, have the most interesting collection of powers in the world. Our physical strength rivals that of the undead who inhabit the Earth’s poles, and our collection of psychic skills—hypnosis and telekinesis are my two personal favorites—is unmatched. Like the Australian undead, we Liverpudlians can immediately attach and reattach our extremities, except for the head, of course, which, as we know from John’s very own case, is an issue easily solved via some quick and simple stitching.
    The Liverpool undead are virtually impossible to kill, you know. The only way to end our lives is to shoot the bite scar in our necks with a bullet fashioned from a diamond. It takes an expert zombie hunter to make that happen. Only sixty-one Liverpudlian zombies have been put to eternal death.
    Here’s one of the odder things specific to the Liverpool Process: intense physical trauma caused by a living human or an earthly entity such as a car, a bomb, or a gun can kill us … but we won’t die, per se. What happens is, we become stuck in a state between dead and undead, which, by all indications, is a miserable place to be. Those who suffer this horrible fate are called Midpointers. According to an informal 2009 study, there are just over one thousand Midpointers in the world. They’re easy to spot, because they walk two inches off the ground and always have dark blue tears spurting from their eyes. As I said, a miserable place to be.
    To me, the three best things about having been transformed by the Liverpool Process are that we can eat and digest human food without gaining weight or ever having to void our bowels or bladders—although we have been known to expel gas upon occasion—our physical evolution ceases at around the age of fifty (I’ve looked the way I look now since about 1958), and finally, I most enjoy the fact that despite not having any blood in our bodies, we can still get erections and have orgasms, although our ejaculate consists of apowdery substance that some joker back in the nineteenth century started referring to as dustmen —that, of course, being a combination of the words dust and semen.
    Before you dive into your story, I can’t stress enough that mentally, physically, and artistically, Liverpool zombies are strong. But from the moment he was reanimated, John Lennon was stronger.

CHAPTER ONE
    1940–1961
    J ohn Lennon is an easy man to track down, but he’s a hard man to pin down. He hasn’t released a record of new music since 1980, thus he’s not affiliated with a label, so there isn’t a publicity manager you can call to set up an interview. He doesn’t give a damn what people say about him in the press, so he has no need or desire for a PR person. He’s a hermit who doesn’t answer his phone, return emails, or leave the house. The only difference between him and fellow zombie recluse J. D. Salinger is that everybody knows where Lennon lives: The Dakota on 72nd and Central Park West, Apartment 72, New York City, America.
    But if you make nice with the Dakota’s concierge, and slip him a few sawbucks, he might deliver John a package. If you load the package with several boxes of Corn Flakes and ten pounds of Kopi Luwak—a painfully bitter coffee from Indonesia that costs almost six hundred bucks a pound—John might ring you on your cell. If you can persuade John that you don’t have an agenda other than finding out the story behind the Beatles, and you don’t have an axe to grind, and you’ve never touched a diamond bullet in your life, John might invite you over to share a bit of that Kopi. And then maybe, just maybe, after a while, he’ll talk to you on the record about his life and career.
    It took me two years of rambling cell chats, bottomless bowls of Corn Flakes, and horrible java to get John to submit to a formal taped interview, but once I fired up the recorder, the guy was an open