“This is going to be the coolest Halloween ever!” Heather could hardly contain her excitement. “These have got to be the best costumes I've ever seen!”

Will looked up at her from the couch, stirred from his nap. “Let's take a look.”

Heather shoved him over and sat down, bouncing in enthusiasm, a big bag on her lap. “Oh yeah, Amrita turned me on to Harold Chin, this guy she knows who makes these incredible, one-of-a-kind costumes.”

Will rolled his eyes a little. “No doubt some faab-ulous design by one of her gay admirers. You're gonna be a sexy fairy princess, I'm gonna be a pirate in assless pants?”

Heather shared his laugh, then swatted him playfully. Will was momentarily disappointed-- not about the assless part, but the anticipation of seeing Heather shaking it at the Paxton's Halloween Blowout in some revealing getup. But, he thought further, Heather was so hot she could be sexy in a potato sack. His reverie was driven out of his mind when she started pulling out the bag's contents.

“No! Amrita's friend works at Exelgene, in bio-engineering. He makes costumes on the side.” She stood up and shook out what looked startlingly like a wolf's hide. “This one is yours.”

Will took the fur-covered costume and checked it out. It was a rubbery-feeling full-body suit, done in startlingly realistic detail. The chest was padded with bulging muscles and the whole suit was covered with long silver-black hair; the hands ended in hard claws. And the head-- The head had a snout, filled with fangs.

“Holy crap! Check out the detail! This must have cost you a ton!”

“They weren't cheap, but totally worth it. We're gonna blow everyone's minds! Here, check out mine.” Heather held up her costume, and Will actually gasped in momentary fright.

It was a zombie costume, a full-body latex-like suit colored in ghastly grays and insanely detailed. Dessicated flesh, prominent ribcage, rictus grimace of teeth, the full living dead Monty.

“Jesus! That's... that's really scary!”

“Sure is, huh?”

“Heather, wouldn't you be more comfortable going as, say, a sexy--”

“--Don't say it, Will! I know you like it when I go out all sexy, but I have to admit I'm getting a little tired of getting ogled, felt up and hit on every damn Halloween. I want to scare people.”

“Starting with me, apparently. Alright, even though it is totally flattering to go to parties with a French maid or a hot Devil on my arm, I see your point. Still, isn't that going to be a little uncomfortable to wear all night?”

Heather smiled as she waved her costume's corpse-like arms around. “That's the best part! These are made out of some special biopolymer. That's what Amrita's friend does: he develops artificial skin for grafts and wound repair. 'Adaptive biopolymer something-something.' It's on the instruction sheet. It's supposed to breathe and be totally comfortable for long wear.”

Will nodded, impressed. “Okay. Sounds good. I'm in.”

Heather draped her zombie suit over the back of the couch, pushed Will down and sat on his stomach. She leaned forward and kissed him, her long blond hair tickling his face. He could feel her erect nipples on his t-shirt.

Will was a little puzzled by Heather's sudden arousal-- pleased, but puzzled-- as she sat up and teasingly started pulling off her top. “We're gonna scare the shit out of everybody!”

* * *

Late afternoon on the day of the Paxton's big Halloween party, Will and Heather started getting ready to go. Heather insisted they put their costumes on in different rooms “for maximum effect.”

Will read the instruction sheet. It was pretty simple: Take off clothes, put on suit, zip up, apply reagent. Will worked the leg of the costume over his as he pondered what the hell “reagent” was. His toes hit something hard inside the foot of the costume. He pulled it off and retrieved a small spray can. It was labeled “REAGENT: Apply evenly to costume when fully donned. For best results, have another person apply it.”

He continued dressing, pulling the costume up his legs and hips, the copious fur making for easy grip. In moments he had the whole costume on except the head, which dangled on his rubbery-padded chest.  It was hard to get a good grip on the across-the-shoulders zip-slide handles with his clawed hands. He pulled the mask over his head, grabbed the reagent, and went over to the bedroom so Heather could zip him up.

As Will walked down the hall, he thought Heather was totally ripped off. His costume was uncomfortable: tight in some places, baggy and chafing in others, and the fur was already making it very hot. He knocked on the door and muffled by the snout, said “A little help?”

“Com om im,” she said. He opened the door and saw her, fully zipped up in an ill-fitting rubber zombie costume. Her breasts were squished down, the crotch was six inches too low, and it looked uncomfortably tight. She didn't look scary: she looked ludicrous. The mouth opening was tiny and the tight mask distorted her voice. “I'm finking I ot the 'ong size.”

“I'll say. Here, zip me up. Maybe the reagent will make it fit better or something.” Heather turned him around and ran the two red plastic slides so they clicked together at the back of his neck. They then both brandished their bottles of reagent and started spritzing each other. Aside from getting each other slightly damp, nothing obvious happened at first.

Without warning, Will's nostrils filled with odors. It was like he could smell everything: the deodorant on Heather's discarded shirt, acrid dust on the crown molding, the trash in the waste pail down the hall. He could feel, too: the cool breeze that wafted through the room make his pelt hair stand on end.

His pelt hair?

He looked over to the mirror and saw... a Werewolf. The costume's skin was his own. He watched the muscles ripple under the fur, felt blood rush under the quick of his claws, saw a line of slaver drool down the corner of his open mouth. His eyes were fierce, red irises on black sclera.

“Oh my god!” he said in a growling rumble. “This is incredible! How is yours-” He turned to look at Heather and almost fell backwards in shock.

Heather was a zombie, an animated corpse. It was like half her mass was gone. Her waistline was reduced to a narrow cylinder, and her ribcage was prominent, in some places showing bone through broken, dried skin. Her skull-like head was poised in a neck that was just sinew and bones. No nose, one ear, and a patch of scalp was missing, white skull contrasting with thin blond hair. The change in her eyes was stunning: The left one was sunken and milk-white, and the right one was gone, an empty socket.

Strangely, she could enunciate fairly well, considering her lips were tightly shriveled around her mouth and her tongue was shrunken and black. “What, Will? How does it look?” She moved over to the mirror and her jaw dropped. And in this case, that wasn't an overused expression: her jaw opened impossibly wide, resting on her neck, like the Ghost of Jacob Marley. She ran her hands over her skeletal body, her bony fingers clacking over her ribs. “Holy shit! This is incredible!

“Heather, are you... Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I'm perfectly comfortable. Weird, huh? Whoa-- what happened to my tits?”  She turned to show him: the right one was shriveled and dessicated, and the left one was missing entirely, a mass of ravaged tissue where it was. She laughed, her cadaverous smile making it chilling.

Even though he was marveling at the sensations in his costumed body, her stunning transformation made him put his new senses aside. “Heather, that might be too much. Maybe we should reconsider this.”

“No way,” she said as she picked up and unzipped a cocktail dress that looked like it had been buried for ten years. “You're gonna have to drive, though. One eye, no depth perception.”

* * *

Heather and Will did indeed make a splash at the Paxton's Halloween Blowout. They both scared the crap out of half the people there. It's one thing to go to a costume party and chat up a person wearing a rubber “Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf-Man” mask: It is quite another to try to have a civil conversation with a hulking, slavering, panting werewolf, staring with red eyes while peeling off a beer bottle label with a long black claw, without fearing for one's life.

Heather was thrilled. True, it was hard to hang out with her girlfriends and talk about makeup and such when they couldn't make eye contact with her, but her evening's goal was not yakking with friends.  She had targets in mind: the usual boorish guys who pinched her ass and stared at her chest when she wore her usual sexy Halloween costume (and the rest of the year too). All she needed to do is grab their heads with her cold, skeletal hands and rasp “brains!” They invariable choked on their cocktails. Her high point was the jerk guy she ambushed out in a dark part of the backyard: He actually pissed his pants.

Zombie Heather and Werewolf Will were not the only wearers of Harold Chin's biopolymer disguises.  Amrita herself made quite a impression as the blue-skinned Hindu goddess Kali, bearing fangs and wearing a necklace of tiny skulls. All four of her arms worked perfectly, which she demonstrated by shaking hands while holding a drink, a cigarette, and a snack dish.

Another costumed couple showed up, Hal and Anna. Heather and Will didn't know them well, aside from the fact they were downtown hipster types. Well, not tonight: one was Bo Peep, an adorable girl in a pinafore carrying a Shepard's crook, and the other was a sheep. A real, four-legged, wool-bearing sheep. Nobody was too sure what was actually going on until Bo Peep set a martini on the floor and the sheep lapped it up.

Will figured them for a sort of kinky couple before, but this was some sort of world record. He leaned down to the sheep (his wolf instincts screamed: Plant-eater, herd animal, easy prey filled his mind until he forced it down) and said “Hal? Man, I thought my costume was elaborate. How you doin' in there?”

The sheep looked at him, rolled it's eyes and said “I'm not Hal, I'm Anna. This was Hal's idea. He makes a cute Bo Peep, huh?” Her long tongue snarfed up her olive. “And to answer your question, I'm doing fine, thanks. Just between you and me: I'm not looking forward to what he has planned for me when we get home.”

Will and Heather got home at two in the morning. Heather was still going strong. She grabbed the waistband of his torn sweatpants as soon as the front door closed.

“Oh my God, Will, I gotta see what you have down there.” she pulled his pants down and her jaw dropped down with a clack. There, nestled in a thatch of wiry frosted wolf hair, was a monster penis, huge even flaccid. She grabbed it eagerly.

The sensation of Heather's smooth, hard, cold fingers on his shaft made him jump back three feet and howl so loud it rattled the windows. He looked away, panting hard. “Heather, I think you know I'm pretty open-minded about your kinky tastes, but I think you just found something I am really not into.”

“But it's me, Will. It's still me in here. And I want you to stick that big wolf cock in me and fuck me 'til I'm really dead. Look.” She dropped her cocktail dress to the floor, revealing an unmistakable wet stain of arousal on the string panties that covered her bony pelvis. “That ain't a zombie pussy.”

He glanced over and grimaced. “Uh, yeah. But here's the problem: I am never gonna be able to get hard looking at a dead girl. No way, just not into it. And there's definitely some wolf in me right now, and it ain't the costume. What if I lose control and tear you up with these claws?”

Heather's milky white eye twinkled. “I have an idea...”

Minutes later, Heather the Horny Undead Girl had Will the Werewolf lashed hand and foot to the bed frame with tough, thick cords. She had slipped her sleep blindfold over his red eyes and used a rabbit-fur mitten to tease his wolf-cock to full, enormous hardness.

Will felt her sliding up and down on his shaft. She felt entirely normal down there, except the wolf penis was much more sensitive than “his” and pleasure sparked all over his body.  His heightened  senses confirmed she still smelled like a woman-- like Heather-- but he had to drive the mental image of her cadaverous body out of his head or he'd start going soft. He realized the sensation of her bony pelvis slapping into his fur-padded groin allowed him to mentally cheat on her: All he had to do is imagine he was banging a rail-thin runway model. Surprisingly effective.

* * *

Will stirred from a deep slumber and reached up to rub his eye. He stabbed the bridge of his nose with a sharp claw, which brought him to immediate wakefulness.

He had apparently slipped out of one of his bonds at some time. The brass bed frame was trashed, bent from his exertions. He untied his other hand and his feet and reached over to Heather.

She was still in her corpse costume-- and she wasn't moving. Her white eye stared blankly at the ceiling. He panicked and started shaking her. Her jaw moved and she said “What's up?”

“Your eyes-- your eye was open.”

“I don't think I have eyelids. Slept great, though.” She stroked his snout with her skeletal hand. “Thanks to you, my big ol' Wolfman.”

Will rolled out of bed. “Alright, fun is fun, but Halloween's over. Get me out of this thing.”

Heather grabbed the instruction sheet, got up and walked behind Will. “Looks pretty simple.” She parted his long silver-black mane and exposed the red square zip-slide handle at the back of his neck. She slowly turned it clockwise until it clicked and split in two, them pulled the two pieces away from each other.

As she did, the rush of senses Will's Werewolf body had become used to were replaced by an all-body electric tingle, then the unmistakable feeling of once again being inside a rubber suit. He pulled up on the top flap of the opening and pulled his head out of the costume. He quickly peeled the suit off of his sweat-covered body and donned a robe.

“Alright, zombie-girl. Your turn.” She tried to pout (an impossible gesture with no lips), then turned around. Will parted her sparse hair and found-- nothing.

“Hey, where's the red thing?”

“It's supposed to be right there on the back of my neck.”

“It ain't there.”

“What do you mean--”

“It's not there. There's nothing back there but gray skin!”

Heather frantically felt around the back of her neck, panic rising. “Holy shit! Maybe it broke off last night.” She got on her knobby knees and started searching he floor. “Help me look for it!”

Will searched the bed sheets, hearing Heather's fingers scrape-scrape-scrape on the hardwood floor. At the foot of the bed, under the sheets, he found the red zip-slide handle.

They could not reattach it.

Heather was overcome with fear. A tear, thick and yellow, emerged from the socket of her shrunken white eye and ran down her exposed cheekbone.  She started shaking, and Will held her. He tried not to think about the hard skeletal body and decayed-looking flesh: he tried to think of Heather, his beautiful, curvy, sexy, warm girlfriend, trapped inside a corpse body.

Will called Amrita, who contacted Harold Chin, the creator of Heather's costume. Both rushed over to the house and he examined Heather's predicament. His assessment was, to pardon the expression, grave.

“The biopolymer was designed as a permanent grafting material. The zip handle releases an ionizing detachment pulse under the suit, and that was the only part that penetrated. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid this is on for good.”

Heather, wearing nothing but her new, horrific-looking-- and permanent-- Undead body, raised her thin hands to her ghastly face and began to cry.

As Amrita consoled her, Will turned to Harold with pleading eyes. The creator of Heather's new body was lost in thought. He picked up a portrait of Heather, smiling on a beach somewhere, her bikini showing off her ample charms. Will saw the picture and felt a keen sense of loss.

Harold quietly spoke.“I may have a solution.”

Harold Chin left the house with a box full of pictures and videos of Heather. He took an emergency leave from Exelgene and worked full-time on his solution.

Meanwhile, Heather waited, trapped in her home. The cover Halloween offered her was long over: If she ventured out in public as an animated corpse in mid-November she would probably cause heart attacks.

Will did his utmost to keep her spirits up, but he could never get used her awful, deathly features. He missed Heather's body, her smooth, soft skin, inviting breasts and especially her clear, sparking hazel eyes. He couldn't look into her milky orb and see anything he recognized. He kept imaging the body he loved impossibly compressed, hidden inside the skeletal remains that answered to her name, an animated cadaver that walked and talked and occasionally cried. And, worse of all, he could not even think of making love to her.

In early December Harold Chin came to their house with his solution: a new costume, a rubbery doll-suit of a woman. Heather carefully donned it, being careful her sharp fingers didn't rip the fabric, and Harold zipped her in.  He sprayed the reagent on her, and the zombie wearing the baggy girl-suit turned into an attractive young woman. Heather was back.

She looked at her soft hands, felt her full breasts and she smiled, tears of joy coming from her hazel eyes. She wiped the tears from her eyes and looked puzzled.

“I still can't see out of my right eye!”

“This new skin has bonded to the one beneath it,” Harold said.  “You're still wearing the zombie suit. And you always will.”

* * *

Over the next few months Heather came to consider the loss of her right-eye vision as a sort of badge of wisdom, like Odin's lost orb. Will found some subtle differences with Heather's new new body from her original one: the shape of her breasts, the curve of her lips, minor stuff. But it was just as sexy and inviting as her old one. He wickedly thought it was like dating Heather's sister.

On occasion, Will would wake up late at night and find Heather out of their bed. She would be in another room, in front of a mirror, her outer suit on the floor, staring at her cadaverous body. He left her alone when she did this. I can't imagine what that's like, he thought, being able to stare at your own demise, to look the form of your own death in the eye. She's become a stronger person than I could ever be.

The biggest change in Heather came a year later: She decided to skip Halloween in all it's forms. For Heather, every day was Halloween. Worse, it was like double Halloween. Every day was a costume party: She had to wear a disguise to cover her other disguise, and she could never reveal to the world her real face, her real body, ever again.

She decided she hated Halloween. But the next day was Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. That holiday she kind of liked now.

The End