Steve Parmacek

"'Oh god, yeah… someone grabbed my arm… his fingertips just rubbed off like… dried apple sauce or something… dug in pretty deep…'""- Steve Parmacek, confirming he was injured by a zombie in Life After: The Arising"Steve Parmacek is a minor character in the Life After novels.

A high school student, Steve participates in the marching band competition at Thomas Massey high school just before the zombie apocalypse begins. He manages to make it inside the school where he finds Jeff Grey and his group of survivors, kicking off the events of Life After: The Arising.

Appearance and Character
Steve is not described by Jeff in any detail, other than the fact that he's wearing a green marching band uniform with a little bit of blood on the sleeve, and that he might have had brown eyes. When they meet, Steve is first running in panic, then relieved to find someone else, then terrified at the possibility of turning into a zombie, and finally furious at the proposition of being tied up as a condition of joining Jeff's group.

Once Steve dies and turns into a zombie, he becomes the group's unofficial study of the undead; though they all saw the corpses risen from the grave, Steve is the first victim they see transition to a zombified state. Thereafter, they occasionally study and remark on his condition, keeping him present and refusing to kill him on the grounds that he might ultimately show them if a zombie can die from natural causes.

History
Nothing is known about Steve's past beyond what is apparent when he meets Jeff.

Life After: The Arising
Steve participates in the marching band festival at TMHS as a member of a visiting school band when a crowd of zombies interrupt the proceedings. In the ensuing panic, Steve was left behind by the bus on which he arrived, and at some point, he was accosted by a zombie whose bony fingers pierced his sleeve and broke skin on his arm. He then ran to the school and managed to find a way inside.

When he encounters Jeff and Julia Marino, Jeff immediately asks about his injury and determines that they can't help him due to the likelihood that he'll turn into a zombie as well. He relents with the condition that Steve allow himself to be tied up until the following day. Melody Landon would seem to have the strongest dissent to this idea, refusing to get near him. As he is being restrained to a garden row in the school's greenhouse, Steve gets progressively angrier to the point that Jeff has to tape his mouth shut. Throughout the rest of the evening, he reacts aggressively toward whomever is around him despite his movements being severely restrained.

By morning, Steve has turned into a zombie, confirming Jeff's suspicions about their predicament. Whenever someone is near him, he begins to struggle against the tape keeping him in place. Later in the day, Jeff drops a bottle of mint he uses to treat his toothpicks and Steve seems drawn to the smell, filling Jeff with the belief that the undead will uniformly be attracted to the scent. As a result, he does an experiment which he finds to be vaguely successful. Immediately thereafter, Jeff decided to secure Steve's head to the garden row and gag him; as Jeff uses a wrench to stuff a sock in his mouth, Steve's jaw snaps shut, cracking his front teeth before Jeff can finish the job and re-tape his mouth.

A few days later, when the group is joined by John Anderson, Jeff considers that Steve's eyes appear to be lighter in color than they were before. Anderson is terrified by Steve. After a few hours go by, John Johnston spots a white crusty material seeping around Steve's gag. Later still, Steve's eyes close and he appears to be sleeping, but only shortly thereafter, his eyes are open again, staring at the ceiling despite the nearby presence of people around him. That night, when the school is sieged by a massive throng of undead, Steve goes back to thrashing wildly. The group abandons him as they flee in a panic.

Days later, Jeff thinks of Steve when he considers that they might have to kill someone in the group if they get bitten, and a short while later, Julia is inflicted with a nasty cut from a scalpel soaked in a zombie's blood. Jeff tries to reason some way they can avoid killing Julia, but remembers that Steve was turned simply by having his skin gouged.

Another day later, the group returns to TMHS, intending to start reinforcing the building for a prolonged stay when they find Steve still fixed to the garden row, his skin described as having turned a whitish-gray. Upon seeing him again, Jeff idly supposes that zombies might have some kind of telepathic link to each other and that Steve basically served as a beacon for the attack that drove them out of the school. Anderson pulls a gun, intending to end him right then and there, but Jeff argues that Steve is the only zombie they know turned the night of the arising, so it might be worth seeing if he can starve or expire from otherwise natural causes. As a result, Jeff, Anderson, and Rich McKnight peel him off the garden row and drop him feet-first over the back of the building. When he lands, the tibia and fibula of his right leg crack and split through his skin, but he continues to kick and struggle, confirming that he survived the fall. Later, when the group is policing up the property, Melody points out that he's still thrashing, so Rich fashions him a blindfold. Later still, Jeff and Anderson pass by him, with Anderson wondering aloud if he'll ever starve.

On the night the group intends to settle in the school, Melody upbraids Jeff for his attitude toward rescuing Helen Cleary, who flees from a house across the street when it is attacked by zombies, and when she storms off, Jeff muses that Melody was the most resistant to the idea of giving Steve a safe place to stay only two weeks prior.

Life After: The Void
Two months after the events of Life After: The Arising, Jeff, Anderson and Rich have settled their band of survivors into a new life at the freshly fortified high school. Steve remains where he was left, broken, bound, gagged, and blindfolded. At some point in the intervening months, Karen DeMarco decided to study Steve, deducing that he hasn't excreted much after death and that his body is not undergoing autolysis. Having been undead for several months and exposed to the elements, Karen suggests that zombies have a distinct smell unlike organisms undergoing decay: Steve smells like the mildew in his hair and clothes and the rust in his veins.

Several days later, on Christmas Eve, a military-backed scientific expedition to the cemetery arrives via helicopter. Anderson recognizes one of the scouts as an acquaintance from the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, ultimately meeting him outside, where the soldier indicates he figured the school was occupied because the only zombie in the region is Steve.

More than a week later, when Jeff has finished convalescing following a grievous injury, TMHS is under attack by the undead; though they continued to sporadically approach the school in the preceding months, there are now hundreds threatening a breach. Anderson supposes the three reasons for this: a fire they started when they were set upon by the undead in the nearby Delaware County Community College, the sound of the helicopters arriving at and departing from TMHS, and Steve. Following up on Jeff's nascent theory that Steve might somehow act as a beacon from the undead, Anderson has moved him from the back of the school into a black truck in front of the school. When Anderson rejoins the fray, he commandeers a black truck, which is presumably the one with Steve inside, driving it down the street with the alarm activated and the horn blaring, perhaps hoping that the combination of elements will draw the dead away from the front of the school.