“More tah-cos for you.”
“It would be a crime against tacos. Look at these beauties.”
“Your kind of tah-co, eh?”
“Everyone’s kind of taco. If they only knew.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“I really don’t want to puke these up.”
“Don’t be a silly willy. When did you vomit last?”
I shrugged.
“Hours ago. You have had gummy wooms, beef jeh-ky, und-und-und potaytoh chips, und zey are all in your tummy, no?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Now, eat zem up before everyone is infected.”
And I started. Three tacos later. “My God, these are good.”
“I zink you will be owing me ten dollars.”
Z minus eighteen minutes and fifteen seconds.
When Pete The Bartender came over to set us up, his partner, the weekend cowboy looking guy, came over to the bar to hang out with him while he worked on the latest round of drinks. From time to time, I could hear them speaking quietly to themselves and chuckling, mostly in reaction to the crazy attack chipmunk story over at the Soccer Family table. They hung out there until Pete was certain everyone had their drinks and all the excitement had died down.
Ziggy called out to them as Pete stepped from behind the bar on the way back to the poolroom. “Señors! One zing if you have a second. Before you get back to za game.”
“What can we do for you?” Pete came over with his buddy trailing behind.
“You come here all za time, right?” He meant Pete. “Und you look like you come here some of za time, too. Like a reg-you-lah.”
The Weekend Cowboy answered first. “Yeah. More or less.”
“He’s a regular, alright.”
“A quick question. A friend of ours told us about zis place. Long hair. Geeky. Like us.”
“Kevin?” Pete knew him.
“Yes, Kevin. Zat’s him.”
“Yeah, he comes in here a lot.” Weekend Cowboy knew him, too.
“Or did. Haven’t seen him the last few days.”
“But it’s Tuesday, and he’s always here Tuesdays. So, he should be here.” It crossed my mind that maybe Weekend Cowboy was keeping tabs on Kevin.
“Tell me, was Kevin looking well?”
“I dunno…I mean.” Pete didn’t seem to think there was a well look for Kevin.
“He said zat he was staying at a camping ground nearby.”
“El Coyote, just up the road.”
“Weird guy.” Weekend Cowboy wanted some info in return, but he wasn’t going to ask for it directly.
“Weirder zan us?”
“Maybe. He was way into prog rock.” I think Pete might have been trying to save his tip because we would easily take home the award for Oddest Customers of The Week if they gave out such a thing. Me in my day-glo and glitter explosion of discount designer casual. Ziggy with his blond curly explosion of unkempt hair, Beethoven T-shirt, red jeans, bright yellow sneakers, and unavoidable black eye patch.
“Zat’s him! Mein Gott, zis is good.” Ziggy had gulped down about a quarter of the glowing Blue Monsterita by this point, so he was loose. Through this whole exchange, he kept working on it and his chimichanga.
“Yeah, you friends of his?” Weekend Cowboy asked.
“Work friends,” I answered.
“Right. He’s not quite right, is he? In the head, I mean.” And then I noticed a badge on Weekend Cowboy’s belt. I had spotted what looked like a gun on the inside of his left ankle on the way in, but I didn’t know the laws in every state about that stuff. The badge cleared things up. Weekend Cowboy was a cop.
“Well…ze zing is…”
I’m not sure what Ziggy was avoiding saying, so I jumped in. “Yeah, he’s a nut. But basically harmless.”
“That’s what I figured, but my boss was concerned. A logger clearing a firebreak out at the campground called him in for looking like the type to try living out there. I mean, he’s been there off and on since July, but…said he had a lot of vacation time saved up or something.”
“Yah, he likes his vay-cay-shon.”
“But he has a job?” Before we could answer, he went on. “Somewhere other than in his motorhome, I mean?”
Ziggy stepped up for the lie. He was a natural. “Kevin has a job waiting for him. He’s our eccentric genius type. We will be needing him.” He more or less casually pulled out his Silvercrest picture ID, lanyard and all, from his murse to show it off as he said this.
“Silvercrest, huh?” He seemed to know the name. “You guys out here checking on him?”
“You could say zat. But it’s notzing official.”
“I gotcha.”
And we all looked at each other. Weekend Cowboy Cop sizing us up. Us not wanting to say more. Everyone waited. Whoever could wait longer would get more information from the other guys.
Pete jumped back in first. “Well…he’s around here. Likes Mexican food. Comes here almost every night.”
“Right. Sits there scribbling away in his notebook. Can’t seem to stop workin’. Kinda freaked me out at first.”
“But I guess he’s OK. Just weird.”
“Loves those cartoon shows.” They were rolling now.
“American Dad.”
“Yeah, got us watching Rick and Morty, too.”
“Weird. But funny.”
“Yeah, seems like one of those guys who did pretty well in science class in high school.” Weekend Cowboy Cop wrapped it up with a wink of knowing understatement, hoping we had more to offer on the science stuff, I think.
“Pretty well, I zink, yes. Like me, but maybe less partying.” Ziggy raised his Monsterita their way as proof.
“Tuesday night.” Pete checked the time on his cell phone. “He should be here already.”
“Zat would be great.”
“Well, we don’t want to keep you from your game.” I tried for the wrap up.
“No problem. You boys take it easy. Especially you, Sigmund.” Weekend Cowboy Cop smiled at Ziggy. He got a kick out of him.
“It only gets easier mit zis Monster.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.”
“Zank you. We look forward to getting one of zese wiz Kevin.”
As they turned and walked to the pool table, Ziggy’s face twisted into irritated worry. Under his breath, he muttered, “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.”
“Well, at least we know we’re in the right place.”
“Yes, but where’s Kevin?”
“Probably back at his motorhome dissecting that chipmunk.”
“No. Zis is the better place. He knows zat fadder and maybe ze rest of ze family is infected. Zis is where ze science is happening.”
“I don’t know, Zig. I think you may be wrong about this. The dad doesn’t look that sick. Maybe the chipmunk was infected, but it would be a weird jump, right?”
“You don’t get it, Singleton.”
“Get what?”
“It’s mutating faster zan anyone can control. Zer are already two hundred und zirty strains. Most in ze last few years. And Kevin was…he was trying to accelerate ze mutation to—”
“Two hundred and thirty. There were only twenty yesterday.”
“Your yesterday. Zree years ago. He even stole tissue samples from you and was trying to infect zem.”
“What—?”
“You see now.”
I froze. Holding a taco up to my open mouth. Waiting for Ziggy to make sense before biting into it.
“You zink mad scientists only come from Europe or somezing?”
My taco addiction got the better of the Ziggy-making-sense waiting game, and I bit into an amazing chorizo filled tortilla.
The loud sound of dishes clanging together over at the Soccer Family table interrupted a heavenly chorus of flavor-singing taco angels. Ziggy and I looked over.
Soccer dad had dropped the salsa bowl onto his chimichanga platter. His nose was running. The finge
rs of his bandaged hand had turned purple. The rest of him looked paler than before. He and the kids laughed, but Karen-Mother-of-Two did not. She helped him clean things up, looking like she wished her husband had never heard the word Monsterita.
Ziggy whispered at me with the intensity of a newly lit blowtorch, “I wish we brought zat tire iron.”
Ziggy and Kevin would arrange movie nights for me in the lab. I could not leave the Silvercrest facility except to deal with a zombie outbreak and cleanup, so life could get downright boring. Fortunately, my friends were geeks and willing to re-watch movies with me to see how this amnesiac would react. Who knew? Maybe it would bring back some of my memory.
“It’s zerapeutic,” Ziggy told management when he submitted the request for the high-resolution digital projector we hooked up at one end of the lab adjacent to my room.
Formerly a storeroom or maybe private office space off one of the labs, Silvercrest had originally sealed it off like a bubble in case I carried and could spread the zombie virus. For six months, I did not leave that ten by ten box. When Ziggy first set up the projector, I had to watch the movies through the distortion of multiple layers of plastic shielding. Watching the Matrix that way did not bring any memories back, but did prompt some odd dreams. I woke up after a binge through the trilogy, wondering what Silvercrest had plugged me into and how it was drawing power from my being.
Anyway, after about eight months, I had run out of great must see movies. None of them brought anything back except the urge to eat sour gummy worms. Then one night, Ziggy brought in a beat-up looking external hard drive decorated with a “The Robots Have Already Won” sticker on it. He said, “It’s time to get personal, Singleton.”
“Did you bring gummy worms?”
He threw me an extra-large pack. “Thanks. What are we watching?” By this time, they had taken down the bubble, and I could move freely around the lab. I sat in one of the high lab tech chairs, thinking I would move to the couch once the movie started.
Ziggy plugged in the drive and opened a folder labeled laszlo and started the first movie in the list, file name broken_ocean(1976).mpeg. And we started watching. I did not leave that uncomfortable lab chair for the next ninety-eight minutes, and I barely touched my open bag of gummy worms. We had discovered something important. Something that tied me to my old self. My forgotten self. No memories came back to me, but old me and new me had the same attachment to the films of some forgotten director named Laszlo Murray.
The film we watched that night, The Broken Ocean, was about two kids chasing the tide of an ocean that recedes from them every night. They fall asleep on the beach, concerned that the tide will rise and wash away their campsite, only to wake in a mud-cracked desert, miles from any shore. The two kids walk in search of a tide they can almost hear, an ocean they can almost see. It recedes only slightly slower than they walk. Along the way, they encounter lost technology. Cars. Washers and dryers. Bicycles. Ovens. A printing press. Computers. Hospital beds. A wasteland of something like the late 20th Century modern world.
The ocean has covered everything they come across in mud and gunk, now drying out and rotting in the sun. People appear. Also caked in dry mud. Some hunt them. Some run from them. Finally, they find a canoe and fall asleep on the receding tide. End of movie.
Ziggy and Kevin looked at me. They always expected or wanted some big revelation. Some trigger pulled. Followed by something exploding out of the lost me. This time something happened, but not the way they expected.
“You OK?”
“Let’s watch it again.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Zer are more. Ozers by zis same—”
“This one. Again.” Something in my voice must have freaked them out. I think I issued a real threat out of somewhere or someone deep inside me. I did not remember any single fact about who I was before, but I remembered that sense of deadly intention. I needed to see what I felt deep under all the things we think make us who we are. I needed to see those two kids—those other versions of me—chasing the always and forever receding and eternally broken ocean.
Z minus twelve and counting.
“Christopher Columbus. Hey, Columbus.”
The cook looked at me through the window.
I looked at him. Round headed smile under a bushy mustache. I couldn’t see much of his body except his round shoulders and fat arms propped up on the counter as he leaned out towards me, but I guessed then that he was a heavy guy with a round cook’s gut. I spotted a tattoo on his right forearm. Half of Che Guevara’s face, I think. On the other one, I could make out part of a glorious Virgen de Guadalupe.
“How are those tacos de mercado? Are those your kind of taco?”
I had two left. “Sí, mucho gusto. But I think I need more.” I smiled.
He laughed. “Shit. Good, huh? I learned the ones with the queso fresca from a guy in Guadalajara when I was down there a while back seeing my cousins.”
“So good.” I started on the second to last taco.
“Only guys like you order them, though.”
I looked at him. Guys like what? I think I knew what he meant, and I didn’t think it was an altogether good thing.
“Foodies and taco snobs.”
I swallowed. “Guilty.”
“Not enough cheese or something for people around here. Most people stick with what they know.”
“Crunchy tacos with cheddar.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Can I get three more with nothing but chorizo, cilantro, and onion?”
“Old school. You got it, Cristobal Colon.” And he disappeared back into the kitchen.
Despite labeling me as a cultural appropriator with a name plenty of folks in Latin America see near the top of the list of the major European colonial genocidiarres of the past five hundred or so years, I liked the guy.
He had a friendly smile and good humor about it. He liked that I liked his food. He liked that I liked real Mexican food. I think he especially liked that I didn’t get offended when he called me out for calling them “my kind of taco.” And more importantly, I went right on eating and even ordered more. You can mend (or possibly avoid) a lot of the broken fences between people if you can learn to like, or at least appreciate, the food they call home. And having a sense of humor about yourself doesn’t hurt either.
Of course, no amount of dinner table diplomacy will ever reconcile me with corporate virus spawned flesh-eating zombies. Humans are not food. All zombies must die.
The Tacos
Two plates of five tacos served open, each built on two number ten-sized corn tortillas (the small ones). I did not specify filling for that first round, you may remember. So, they came out dealer’s choice. And wow, did he choose well. Though you might think he included some duplicates, each iteration manifested its contents in a unique and wonderful way.
While the fillings were excellent on their own, the salsas and garnish combined with them to lift the flavors from simply lovely to that of sublime culinary artistry. Beyond the accompaniments mentioned below, both plates arrived with extra lime slices. Here are the tacos like clockwork.
First Plate
2 o’clock—Pollo de Tinga, a sprinkle of cilantro and radish over a splash of dark salsa rojo
5 o’clock—Chili colorado, meat that fell apart from a long slow stewing over low heat, cilantro and radish, but with pickled jalapeño carrot salsa
7 o’clock—Chorizo with a slice of avocado and a sprinkle of cilantro
10 o’clock—Garlic zuchini with beans and salsa roja
Center—Ranchero. His masterpiece. Thinly sliced flank steak, a chunk of queso fresca, slices of fresh cabbage and radish, and salsa fresca
Second Plate
2 o’clock—Pollo de Tinga, a sprinkle of cilantro and radish over guacamole
5 o’clock—Chili colorado with cilantro, and radish, but drizzled with avocado salsa
7 o’clock—Chorizo
and salsa fresca made with what must have been mangos and pineapple
10 o’clock—Garlic zuchini with beans and salsa fresca
Center—Ranchero Part II. How do you improve a masterpiece? Pickled jalapeño carrot salsa and salsa fresca. Again, the thinly sliced flank steak, a chunk of queso fresca, fresh cabbage, and radish.
Z minus ten minutes and ten seconds.
“Ze truth has come upon me. I will not finish zis chimichanga.” Ziggy had already finished his Monsterita, and it had conferred on him a kind of tipsy profundity that someone who had never met him might not notice. He stood up to get away from the last third of his chimichanga. He paused, and then, “I must do zree zings. But ze most important is number two.” And he giggled.
“That’s all I need to know, thanks.”
He walked towards the restroom, but then turned and walked backwards a few steps, saying, “Four things,” before turning back around and disappearing down the hall with his murse and mischief-maker’s bounce in his step.
That left me alone with my empty taco plates, half my iced tea, and a restaurant full of strangers. The waitress hustled by with a tray of sodas for the Soccer Family and a couple more beers for the bikers. Karen-Mother-of-Two hoped that by adding some cola to Soccer Dad’s system he might become marginally more coherent. She thought she had a long ride to the hospital ahead of her that night.
“How you doin’?”
“I’m okay. Is that other chimichanga on the way?” Soccer Dad had completely cleaned his plate.
“Sure is. I wanted to be sure you were really up for it.”
“Oh, I am. I’m crazy hungry for some reason.” He sounded better than the sweat dripping off his forehead and pale complexion would lead you to believe. Sick and famished and looking like he might pass out. Maybe drunker than he expected. He was working on the cola and had left his second Monsterita half full.
“It’ll be up in a jiffy.”
“Thank you so much.” Corporate-Career-Karen wanted this dinner to end and to get on the road. She probably hoped they had run out of chimichangas or something.
Cinco De Zombie Page 6