Sweet Romance13 min read
The Night I Hoarded Perfume and Met a Zombie King
ButterPicks13 views
I never thought I'd be the kind of person to hoard perfume when the world was ending. Everyone else loaded carts with cans of beans and bottled water. I loaded a suitcase with glass bottles instead—sprays and mists, tester vials, fancy flacons. "For smell," I told myself. "For sanity." I was hoarding a memory: the idea that if the city smelled like anything but rot, maybe I could pretend nothing had happened.
"You're not thinking straight, Kaitlyn," my neighbor Juana told me over the phone as sirens cut through the air. "If you want to live, get food."
"I know how to cook leaves," I said. "Besides, perfume helps."
"Okay, then. Don't be stupid." She hung up, a soft click that became the sound of the old neighborhood closing like a drawn curtain.
I was doing what I could to hide the truth. My apartment was on the eighteenth floor in a building of thin walls and older people and children who used to knock to borrow sugar. Now the knocking had stopped. I slept with windows shut and curtains drawn. I sprayed perfume in every corner: citrus, rose, oud, cheap synthetic "C" brand that smelled like chemicals gone wrong. I filled the rooms with competing scents until even I couldn't tell what my real smell was.
Then the man came.
He climbed through my broken window at midnight like sleepwalking royalty. He was not like the shambling things the news showed. His skin was pale and intact. His hair was still perfect. He smelled—not of rot—but of something that made the room feel smaller and my ribs ache.
"You're the one who called me a liar," he said.
He didn't have to say his name. I knew the face from magazine covers and late-night interviews. He'd been the kind of celebrity whose jawline made fan blogs run hot. Branch Abdullah. He'd once stared at my posts in court as I defended a joke I'd made online. He'd sued me for a dollar to teach me a lesson. I paid, mortified, and thought that was the end.
"Branch?" I whispered, too small for my own voice. "You climbed into my apartment."
He looked at me like he was remembering something: a childhood classroom, a shared lunch, a hug that didn't last long enough. Then his eyes—too black now—returned to the hard edges of survival.
"Don't move," he said. "You leave, I bite."
I didn't move. I held my pillow like the only weapon I had.
"You could apologize," I blurted. "I'll even—I'll take it back. I'll post an apology."
"I don't need apologies." He lay down on my bed like he'd been allowed to. He closed his eyes as if the bed were the most ordinary place in the world.
We slept in a kind of uneasy truce. The city below became a low hum of brush and slow movement. People screamed into the group chat and then fell silent. Messages blinked and died. The word "zombie king" floated through the feeds like a bad headline. They said one in a billion mutated into something else; they called him a king because of the way the other things followed him. They said he was unkillable. They said, in the way people always say things they want to be true, that if one king came, the world was already broken.
At dawn the building smelled less like perfume and more like a tide of bodies pressing backward. Branch opened his eyes and turned his head toward the window, hearing something I couldn't hear. He stood, limped a little, and walked to the living room, then outside to the stairwell like he was checking on a child.
"Why did you come to me?" I asked when he returned with a small bag of something green he had pulled from a planter.
"You were loud," he said. "You made noise on the internet. I found you."
"That's a weird way to confess stalking." I tried to be angry, but my hands shook.
He crouched and picked up my palm. It was cold in his hands, and his laugh in the dark had no warmth. "Smell my arm," he said.
I pretended not to notice. "You have leftovers of reputation. You used to be someone different."
He looked at me, and in that look something flickered like a child's light. "I once was small and got hurt. Someone stood up for me. I wanted to be brave for her. I looked for her and couldn't find her until you."
I didn't have the courage to ask who she was. It felt like asking a friend to name a favorite memory after a funeral.
"Spray everything," he said later, when the smell of the city crept back in between the closed curtains. "It stops them for a while."
So I sprayed. Then we drove in the dead city in his borrowed car—sprinting between shadows, Branch holding the wheel with one good arm while the other hung empty at his side like a ghost limb. We emptied shops into suitcases. We filled the trunk with perfume the way other people filled carts with tins of beans.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked once, hands full of red, dusty boxes.
He shrugged. "Because you're here."
For a while, the world shrank to the two of us: his command of the silence, my anxious fingers packing. He was not what he'd been on screen anymore, but sometimes at night, when the city paused and our heartbeat matched, he turned his face to me and the old softness shivered like a curtain. With all his worn edges and his new, uncanny strength, he still had the same whisper and the same impossible distance.
Then the broadcasts said another name. "There are two," the presenter said. "Two zombie kings in the city." And like that a second shadow read my name and laughed.
He came with a bellow that tore the air and a muscle the size of a pillar. He carried another woman—Juliana Meyer—like a rag doll. My stomach did a cold, sick flip.
"Juliana!" I screamed when I saw her face. She looked at me like the world had never been anything but a stage. Her hair was a mess. She blinked like someone waking from a bad dream.
"Are you happy now?" she said, looking at me. "Did you win?"
I had a hundred answers. I had the court and the drama and the message boards and the way she smiled at the cameras and left other people's hearts bent and frayed. But there was a child in the center of me who knew the way people get small and lose everything: I reached for Juliana and she flinched as if I'd hurt her.
Then, the second king stepped into the room. He was savage and exultant. He introduced himself.
"Vernon Burnett," he said, like giving the city's last insult.
He wanted Branch to join him. He wanted the neighborhood and the city and the planet. He laughed and slapped Branch on a bloody shoulder.
Branch did something no one expected: he pushed Vernon away and told him to keep his distance. "Stay away from my people," Branch said.
"You mean your girl?" Vernon sneered.
"Her name is mine now," Branch said.
I felt like someone had dropped my ribs out. "Don't call me anything," I said, too proud to be grateful. "I'm not yours. I'm Kaitlyn."
Vernon laughed and left a thin trail of coercion behind him. He strutted like a bully on a stage of ruin, promising the people at his feet a new world under him. He trained legs of the dead into a compact army. The whole city braced.
At first I thought Branch had a plan. He fought with a focus that turned incompetent into something precise. He saved me more than once. He cradled strangers as if they were kids and put them back inside apartments. He was a strange hero because he was still dangerous in many ways. I sang to him—his old hit, the one he rose to fame with—because the sound of that melody seemed to call back a man inside him.
"Sing it," he said one night, when he woke with eyes that were almost humane. "Sing it badly."
"You said I ruined it the first time."
"You did. Again."
I sang. He laughed like a neighbor again, and for a second, I let myself be ordinary.
Then Vernon returned in force and the whole neighborhood became a battlefield.
"Get down!" I shouted at the windows. The doors shook under the pound of a thousand feet. People threw down keys, knockers, even pots and pans—anything heavy enough to slow them.
"Why are you protecting us?" I asked Branch between blows, my voice raw.
He spat blood on the ground and smiled. "Because you asked me to. Because you sang my song."
The fight was a chaos of teeth and metal. Branch fought Vernon like both a lover and a general. At one point, he lost an arm; then his body did something impossible and regrew a new one like a wrong miracle. The sight was gruesome and beautiful. And when Branch finally cracked Vernon's skull by hitting both his temples at once—the one tip the experts had failed to explain—we watched Vernon slump and go still.
After that, our street smelled like iron and perfume. The neighbors who had hidden from me now cheered from windows. Some applauded. Some cried. In the heat of that victory, cameras and phones recorded what had happened: a pale man with celebrity cheekbones wielding stranger's anger into salvation.
Juliana was taken by the authorities almost immediately. The footage of her being carried in Vernon's hands, limp and indignant, became public. People who once adored her clicked "share" as if the truth about her could be balanced by a headline.
Then the punishment began.
The city set a stage: the old plaza in front of the ruins of city hall. It was daylight and cold, and the sky kept its promise of rain. Everyone with a phone came. The officials called it a tribunal. They called it restorative, but what it really was had the taste of a public unveiling.
Juliana was led in—hands bound but upright, with makeup that hadn't been designed for a trial, only for applause. Her face was the face of someone who had practiced regret like a costume. Cameras focused. Drones made little hums like flies.
"Why did you help him?" a stranger cried from the crowd.
She looked at the sea of faces—hungry, insulted, betrayed. "I didn't know what he'd become," she said. "I was trapped. I was terrified."
"Trapped?" a man in the first row shouted. "You left people who loved you because you wanted spotlight and then you joined the man who destroyed them!"
"It's not so simple," Juliana answered. Her voice trembled a little—not from fear, but from realizing that the spotlight had turned into a searchlight on her mistakes. "I wanted to keep what I had. He promised safety."
"Whose safety?" a neighbor I recognized—Charity Walker—barked. Charity's voice had the sharpness of someone who had seen too much loss. "You took pictures at his doorstep and then left the others bleeding!"
Juliana reached for words and came up with a smile. "I did what I had to do to survive."
A woman near me, Juana Lindstrom, spat. "You call that surviving? You sell us out and call it survival."
The head of the human resistance, Colin Bryant, climbed the low stage and addressed the crowd with the flat voice of a man used to making hard choices. "This will be public," he said. "This is not just about Juliana Meyer. It's about a pattern. It's about those who put themselves above the community. It's about taking responsibility."
People shouted back. Some called for a harsh sentence. Some wanted judicial fairness. But justice in the ruins of the city had the texture of what people could do with their hands. We were all tired of sitting and watching.
Colin read charges. He read how Juliana, before the collapse, had used access to certain locations to hide where groups of people were sleeping. He read how she had—when news crews no longer fed her image—met Vernon Burnett, and how she negotiated. He read how Vernon had promised her protection at the cost of loyalty to those who loved her.
Juliana tried to speak. "They took my choices out of context," she said. "I—"
"Enough," Colin said. He stepped down, and the microphone made a small keening noise as it left his hand. "People here have lost children. People here have been taken. If there is restitution to be done, we will make a record. We will find survivors. We will put what we can afford on the table."
An old woman at the front, whose husband had been bitten in the first week and who could not stop calling his name, started to list the things they had lost. People joined in like a chorus. Phones recorded the names. Names became facts that could no longer be swept aside.
"Apologize," someone demanded. "Tell them to their faces."
Juliana turned on the crowd like a child who'd been forced into school for the first time and then asked to recite her sins. "I am sorry," she said. "I am sorry I took what I shouldn't have. I am sorry I didn't stand up to him. I'm sorry I feared being alone." The apology needed to be more than words. It needed to be work.
Colin nodded and read out the terms. "You will not be locked away for life," he said. "You will be required to do three things: public service in the neighborhoods you harmed; testimony about Vernon Burnett's methods to help track other collaborators; and participation in rebuilding efforts. If you refuse, the legal process will proceed in full."
A section of the crowd hissed like a stadium. Some wanted her punished more. Some wanted to hear more. But the people around me—Charity, Juana, neighbors with faces I knew from the staircase—were not satisfied with mere spectacle. They wanted a change that could be felt.
And so the punishment took shape not only in Colin's list but in what the crowd demanded. She would be made to stand in the square and help load food for the elders. She would scrub blood-stained hallways. She would sit on the stairwells and listen to the families tell their stories. Cameras kept clicking. The watching world would see her hands dirtied with the same sweat of those she had once smiled away.
"Will you do it?" a little boy asked. He had been the same age as the times when Juliana's glossy smile had sold perfume. His question was simple and raw.
Juliana's eyes filled. "Yes," she said. "I'll do it all."
But the punishment had one more part that no official had scripted. The neighbors themselves set the last condition. The boy's mother, Charity, looked Juliana in the eye and said, "You'll do all that. And every month we will decide if you have earned the right to live among us. If you do not, we will show you to the files and the world." There were murmurs; the meaning was clear.
Juliana nodded again. She walked into the line to lift boxes. Her hands trembled. She tried to wipe clean the notions of her old life with work and plain labor. The cameras recorded the stoop and the boxes and the way she flinched at the smell of blood. She had her followers once. Now she had heavy boxes and neighbors who watched her every shoulder move. The humiliation was public, long, and not theatrical: it was domestic and relentless.
Some clapped. Some vomited. Some filmed. Some stood silent and watched the woman who had been a symbol of glamour lift sacks and scrub floors. People argued and cried; the small plaza took on the mood of a communal kitchen in which every hand that cooked had to account for every borrowed coin.
I watched Juliana carry boxes and wipe stains. Inside, a part of me wanted to gloat; another wanted to hold her. She had been cruel in ways that had hurt people, but she'd also been someone who danced under auditorium lights. Her fall became a lesson we could all see. The applause when she finally dropped a box and asked for help felt like complicated mercy.
"Is this enough?" she asked me once, toward the end of the first week, exhausted and covered in grit.
"I don't know," I said. "But it's what we can do right now."
She bowed her head. "I will keep doing it."
The crowd's response was a mix of sighs and a few warm hands—and then they turned their attention back to the rebuilt street, the flowers that had managed to push through cracked concrete, and Branch.
Vernon was dead. His end had been ugly and quick; there was no procession. The other kind of punishment—violent, immediate, suffocating—belonged to the battlefield where the two kings had fought until the blood and the noise told us the story. He had been torn by his own ambition, and the ruin of his followers played out in stained cloth and discarded limbs.
But Juliana's punishment was a slow, public unmaking: days of exposure, labor, witness, and a social verdict that changed with every month. People recorded her work; they spoke to her neighbors about the sting she had caused. Her fame became a ledger of errands. Her regret became a schedule.
I forgave her quietly in my head the day she handed me a small packet of leaves and said, "For your soup." She had learned something about the currency of real life: everyday kindness given without cameras sometimes redeemed more than a million followers.
And for Branch, the redemption was different.
"Stay with me," he asked once, that night we had patched his wounds and sat under a balcony of sky that smelled faintly of jasmine and dry stone. "When it's over, will you come?"
"Where?" I asked.
"Anywhere that isn't right now," he said. He smiled, and the smile held the old star and the new war both.
I looked at him, at the missing and regrown arms, at the way his hands smelled like metal and grass.
"I kept perfume," I told him. "Do you want to smell like anything in particular?"
He thought for a moment. "Something that smells like when I was brave," he said.
"I'll find it," I said.
We left when the trucks came. People wanted to talk and thank us and ask more questions about the trophies of war. Colin Bryant thanked us in the open and said the world would try to learn from Branch. Scientists wanted Branch for study, but the story changed. People saw him not only as a monster but as someone who could be studied for possible cures. He let them take his discarded arms into sterile rooms that hummed and glowed, because he believed if they could learn, more people might live.
We came back to the same old neighborhood months later when the air had cleared enough to carry the faint scent of flowers. They called it spring. White magnolias had opened like shy mouths on the boulevard.
"Do you remember what you wanted me to do the night you first came?" I asked Branch as we walked.
He smiled at the memory of a small boy who'd once been held. "To protect the place where you grew up."
"You did," I said.
"It was more than that," he said softly. "You sang my song badly, and that was stubborn kindness. Sometimes the smallest things are the things that come back to save us."
We walked past the little plaza. Juliana stood at a table handing out soup to a long line of neighbors who now recognized the usefulness of a public apology that turned into work. She looked up and saw me and Branch. Her eyes flickered. We nodded. Her hands were steady.
A child tugged on my sleeve and said, "Kaitlyn, were you scared?"
"Terrified," I said, truthfully, and the child laughed.
"Then you were brave," the child said, like something simple and final. "Bravery should be famous."
I laughed. The laughter felt like a bell.
Later we sat on a bench and I opened a small bottle I had been saving—the cheap, chemical "C" brand that had once masked the street. I sprayed it into the air. The scent mixed with blossom and dust and the low breath of people who had not given up.
"Smells like spring," Branch said.
"It smells like the night you chose to stay," I answered.
He closed his eyes and inhaled. The perfume was wrong, but it worked. I thought of a child in a classroom, a bully gone and a friend who stood up. I thought of a song that brought someone back. I thought of how small choices pile into something that can save a town.
"One day I'll be a story," Branch said finally. "One day people will say, 'Remember when the star came down and saved the block?'"
"They'll remember the magnolias too," I said.
He looked at me then, all black eyes and something softer. "Sing that song badly again sometime."
"Only if I can insist you sing a line too," I said.
He rolled his eyes. "Deal."
We sat there until the sun set behind the thin line of buildings. The city had scars. We all did. But the white magnolias smelled like a promise—or a dare. I kept a bottle of perfume in my bag and a song in my mouth. Branch kept a promise he had once made to a small child—and perhaps more to me.
When we rose to go, I tucked the tiny perfume bottle back into its velvet casing. "If you ever need me to cover your smell again," I teased, "I'm your woman."
He took my hand gently. "And if you ever need someone to be a monster to keep your neighbors safe, I'm your man."
I laughed and cried and felt both things at once. The city might never be the same. But in a courtyard where neighbors once kept to themselves, now there was a pot of soup and a line of people who had learned that the world is saved in small, stubborn ways.
"Promise me one thing," Branch said as we walked.
"No," I said, and kissed him on the cheek.
He smiled, and the magnolia scent followed us home.
The End
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