Procedure: Kill Zombies.
It never worked, not in The Einar Arboretum, Kampala, Helsinki, or in that unpronounceable town in Romania, but I could not help myself.
Over in the poolroom, Jason the Cowboy Cop had gone full zombie. He lurched to his feet and threw Zombie Ziggy back down onto the barroom floor, not far from where I had discovered him when I came out of the restroom. Ziggy sat up as I rounded the bar on my way to Screaming Karen-Mother-of-Two and The Kids (nice band name there, free to anyone who wants it) and if you have ever thought a dog or cat might be capable of philosophy, you will understand why I thought Ziggy was looking right me. Recognizing me.
Foolishly, I slowed down and said something like, “What the hell, Ziggy?”
He watched me and halfway straightened up in his awkward sitting position. Convinced he recognized me, too, and ignoring the large Zombie Cowboy Cop now on his feet in the pool room behind him, I said his name again, “Ziggy.”
Zombie Ziggy replied with a voice made of two-parts biological gravel, one-part air, and one-part old Ziggy. “I slowed it down. But it’s going to come fast, Zinger.” He got to his feet.
“What?”
“Silvercrest El Coyote Strain…” and then he said or tried to say some longish number that definitely began with a two. He trailed off, dropping back into Zombie mode, head turning towards the ever more insistent screams of the family in the dining area. Fortunately, in that moment all that racket had Zombie Cowboy Cop’s attention, too.
“Ziggy.” I had more questions for him. What was in his murse, for starters?
He stopped again but didn’t speak.
“Ziggy.”
He turned to me quickly and bared his teeth. “Fast, huh?” Then he stood up and came at me.
I took a swing at him, connecting with his body. I felt ribs pop and crack under the bat. My hit sent him back into the steps to the poolroom, tangling him up with Zombie Cowboy Cop’s legs. They both fell backwards.
I did not stick around to watch that Zombie Laurel and Hardy routine resolve itself. Nothing made sense that night. Rapid infections. Fast zombies. Talking zombies. And now I could not follow my most basic principles for dealing with the infected. I resorted to my ethos.
I looked back over to the dining area. Zombie Biker Nurse had given up on the now spasmodic Biker Gene. On her feet with a long piece of Biker Gene’s lower intestine dangling from her mouth, she moved towards the family.
I remember thinking, Please, not another Helsinki. Did that count as a prayer? A request to whatever might have any supernatural sway here at the El Coyote Gordo. Would God get signal from here? I didn’t think so, but any port in a zombie storm.
And this is the part where I slid through Biker Gene’s enchilada entrails to take out the Biker Nurse and, not incidentally, save the family under the table. Hold your applause until the end of my story. Before I made my dash to climb up the bar, I looked over to Karen-Mother-of-Two, still under the table clutching Ziggy’s murse. I told her, “You know it’s time to run, right?”
I ran. I jumped. I landed on top of the bar. The grunge metal cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” blared from the jukebox. The cook screamed his Mexican battle cries and swung a big kitchen knife in one hand and his phone in the other, trying to capture video. Zombies in every direction but up. I remembered what this place looked like when we arrived and how I got here.
The jukebox screamed.
What remained of my broken amnesiac zombie killing infected-with-something-too-weird-to-identify mind glitched boomerang video style in the infinity of an instant to replay a far more distant memory that I did not know I had lost.
Olympia under the sheet sleeping.
Close the loop and start again.
Olympia under the sheet sleeping.
I say something. I ask something? I suggest something?
She wakes up, turns to me with those green eyes of hers, and answers, “It’s not that easy.”
Close the loop and start again.
Olympia under the sheet sleeping.
I suggest something.
She wakes up. She turns to me with those green eyes of hers. Her face is all pity for this fool. She answers me, “It’s not that easy.”
Close the loop and start again.
Olympia under the sheet sleeping.
I suggest, “Maybe this…”
She wakes up. She turns to me with those green, green eyes of hers. Her face is all pity for this fool. She answers me, “It’s not that easy.”
Close the loop and start again.
Olympia under the sheet sleeping.
I beg her, “Maybe this is our forever?”
She wakes up and turns those green, warm sea green eyes of hers on me. Her face is all pity for this fool of all fools. She answers, “It’s not that easy.”
“Why not?”
“Leo, I don't think you are built for forever.”
Close the loop on Leo. Back to Singleton dancing on the bar for the zombies of El Coyote Gordo.
“Outta the way,” I yelled some sense into the Cook who backed up as I gave the Zombie Bartender one low swing under the base of the skull. He fell forward into the up to now unscathed rack of mezcals and tequilas. The booze started tumbling down on top of him as I brought down two more rapid railroad spike driving swings on top of his skull. He collapsed under that last swing, and half the bottles behind the bar came down on top of him.
Zombie Soccer Dad wiggled, jiggled, and jumped at the sound of the breaking glass. He redoubled his braindead efforts to get free of the cleaver and kitchen counter but remained locked in place.
Did I give the impression that the cook fought the zombies swarming his restaurant or behaved at all sensibly? He did neither. Instead, he waved his smartphone around the bar and bartender to get closeups of the baseball bat and zombie carnage, including the still wiggling corpse. Zombie Pete the Bartender had become a sightless, brainless, mass of nerves, jerking gradually to a stop under the rattle, clang, crack, and crash of the pile of liquor bottles. Nice shot, I guess.
“What are you doing?”
“I need this for insurance, man.”
Before I could tell him dead people don’t collect insurance, the sound of stomping cowboy boots and Ziggy Zombie grunts spun me back around. Here they came. Disentangled and united in their desire for the nearest eye-level human flesh.
Time to get dirty. I jumped down to the barroom floor to get between the zombies and Francis Ford Dumbass.
And I felt, for that split second, somewhat proud of myself. A blunt instrument, a new fast-moving strain, a chaotic public situation, and me, all on my own, with no guns. And yet, I could see a decent chance that the family, the cook, and the dishwasher would all make it out of there alive.
I mean, I had already knocked out the Zombie Bartender and the Zombie Biker Nurse. That left only three and a half to go (counting the mobility-impaired Biker Gene Zombie).
Wait. I was missing someone. And as it occurred to me, Maybe she’s hiding…
The Zombie Waitress exploded from a tangle of barstools, covered in blood and regurgitated Mexican food. The stools did not slow her Zombie fury. She gave me no chance to catch my breath much less take a swing at her. Small, fast, and running without a care for a bone in her compact zombie body.
Game piece removed from the board. Lights out. Sudden concussive unconsciousness cliché account spent.
I woke up a few minutes later under the virtual weight of the cook’s screaming. Weight because I thought I would save him. Because I had bonded with him over the tacos. Because we both loved tacos and because I loved his tacos, it isn’t too far to reach out and say I loved him. In a way. Didn’t know his name, but I would rather a world with him in it than one lacking his abrupt charm and sincere commitment to excellent food, regardless of the deficiencies of his own printed menu.
I opened my eyes but did not dare look in the direction of his breaking tired voice and the disgusting sou
nds of the zombies ripping him apart faster than you could say muerte a Cristóbal Colón.
When we crashed into the high-top tables and barstools across from the bar, Zombie Waitress slid past me and got immediately tangled up in the legs and rails of the chairs. One of my arms ended up under her, but she could not get a good bite into the bones or I might have lost a few fingers. Never having lost a limb in these situations, expert opinions split fifty-fifty as to whether or not I could regenerate a finger as easily as repair flesh and skin. I am not eager to find out.
Between rescuing my arm, disentangling myself, and resetting my understanding of up from down, I lost track of Ziggy Zombie and Cowboy Cop Zombie. But I had a much-too-close lock on the Waitress Zombie.
Let me be clear. Waitress Zombie had no real chance in this situation. She had become hopelessly tangled up in the bar stool chairs of the high-top tables opposite the bar.
Zombies panic and thrash in these situations until the food is removed. Then they gradually slow to something that I think of as a dormant phase. Guatemala involved walking into a number of homes and outbuildings where staff members, a few unlucky locals and, of course, the group of volunteer test subjects, had reached this degree of dormancy. Sometimes they stood in a corner or got caught between two pieces of furniture or in a closet. They shuffled foot-to-foot, but no longer attempted to get anywhere.
A loud bang or several loud bangs would start them stirring again. Noise or something that triggered their olfactory senses awakened that frantic appetite for fresh meat. In Guatemala, I baited a group of zombies in one large building using a road chicken I found.
No one had clipped the chicken’s wings, so it flapped up to the rafters away from any immediate threat. Those zombies still running free, gathered under it, arms reaching to the rafters in some rapturous grunted liturgy of poultry adoration and desire. Nearby zombies stuck behind various pieces of furniture and doors, banged, pushed, and grunted, making finding them easy.
Waitress Zombie did not have the luxury of time and so would never know that dormant immortality that may have been what the virus designers intended to unleash on humanity. Instead, I gingerly pulled my arm and bat out from under her, stood up, and then stepped around her groping arms to get as clear a swing at her head as possible.
I wished I had that knife I lost in Zombie Cop’s back, or the one the Cook had only a few minutes ago been waving ineptly around as he captured video of his devastated family business. But no such luck.
That left me to do what we came to call the modified bottle opener during the Einar Arboretum clean up. Forceful direct hit through the mouth to the back of the neck and then twist like hell until the spinal cord snaps. In older, more decomposed zombies, the skull, minus the lower jaw, can pop free of the body. Thus, the name.
She bit at me, and her eyes had nothing of that gracious personality who had so deftly helped us and the other customers navigate the menu and overcome our dining misgivings earlier that evening. She had mastered hospitality, the heart of her underappreciated, underpaid, and essential trade. I knew that waitress had died several minutes ago, but this had been her body.
The pathetic spirit of the 80s jukebox offered only Toto’s “Rosanna” to accompany this dirty work.
I sighed and said, “If you are in there, I want you to know that I think your hourly wage is a crime. Also, tipping is not optional. Hey—”
Her zombie death grip had hooked my right ankle.
“OK.”
I flipped the bat around. When using a baseball bat, the bottle opener technique works better handle first. I shoved it into that chomping grimacing mouth quickly, and then moved in with an awkward stooping lean to set it back on the top of the spine. Pop. Twist. The whole barstool she had become tangled in flipped over. Then a snap. Only small twitches remained and not many of those.
I removed the bat handle and wiped it clean on one of the less messy parts of her apron, obscuring the chili pepper pattern with the dark infected blood of her neck. The aluminum cleaned easily. The foam grip would always have some of her in it. I noticed a small pale stain from the last of her pink lip gloss.
The cook stopped screaming. Zombie Ziggy and Cowboy Zombie Cop kept feeding. Over the music, I could hear Soccer Dad Zombie still struggling and groaning against that cleaver, twitches from Biker Gene, and an argument out in the parking lot. Young Chad refused to get in the SUV without dad. Poor kid.
Some things I cannot clean. Some parts of the world will never improve. Some infections never heal. Some people will never tip.
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And as the last reverb of the grunge metal cover of “The Chain” fades, we return to the scene that began this story.
Zombie Cowboy Cop not much more than a flopping, twitching zombie torso and Zombie Ziggy chowing down on the cook. I failed to follow basic procedure, mine, Silvercrest’s, anyone’s. And I ditched the most basic principle of zombies: They are already dead. Bat in hand, covered in blood, surrounded by ghouls and gore, I declined to finish off Zombie Ziggy. All because of something I saw in his one good eye.
Out in the parking lot, the family argument became heated and noisy. Ziggy Zombie heard only his own chewing and tearing, but Soccer Zombie Dad noticed something going on out there. Maybe some latent neurons recognized his child’s cries of annoyance and distress.
“Mom, we can’t leave Dad.”
“For the last time, get in the car, Chad.”
“No.”
“Come back here.”
As the song ended, Chad hit the glass front door with a running thud. Ziggy Zombie raised his head at the sound. Soccer Zombie Dad pulled on his cleavered arm, reaching for the door with his free arm.
I pointed the bat at the kid. He looked at me. Seeing me covered in blood, gore, and half-digested Mexican food, he knew I meant Stay even though I did not dare speak.
“What’s goin’ on out there, man?” The dishwasher yelled at me through the kitchen window.
I did not answer. I kept the bat on Chad. I watched the zombies. I was waiting for another song to start in hopes it would cover the sound of my next move. Ziggy Zombie bent over to continue eating the now twitching cook.
Over in the dining area, I could hear Zombie Biker Gene thrashing around. I looked over. It could not get up off the floor. Zombie Biker Nurse had done a number on her partner’s whole mid-section so that only the spine connected the upper and lower halves of her body. In Helsinki, I saw one of these mid-sectionless zombies teeter slowly to its feet only to fold in two after stumbling into its first step forward. Our bodies rely on a lot of meat and muscle to stand and move.
Still no song. Or wait. Something starting low. Here it is. “Green River?” Creedence. They have got to update this jukebox. But it worked. I scrambled back up on top of the bar without drawing Ziggy Zombie’s attention.
“Hey, back there.” No answer from the kitchen. “Hey, dishwasher dude.”
&nbs
p; “Yeah.” I saw a smartphone where I expected to see the dishwasher’s head through the kitchen window.
“Is there a walk-in fridge back there?”
“Yeah.”
“Open it up for me.”
“But—”
“Now.”
Ziggy Zombie turned to me. With the cook in full shakey-shakey and probably starting to taste more like zombie and less like person, I had his interest. I rapped the bat on the bar a few times.
“Is it open?”
“Yeah.”
“Get out and get the kid. Catch a ride with that family in the SUV.”
I heard the back door slam shut. It was just me and the zombies now.
I crouched down on the bar to look out front and saw Chad’s banged up and mosquito-bitten shins above his hiking shoes. He must of have frozen at the site of his thrashing, grunting, sombrero’d father. Not to mention the bloody reality of what Ziggy Zombie was doing to that cook.
Speaking of which, Ziggy Zombie was up and frantically trying to catch hold of my legs at the bar. I side stepped him down to other end. For my next trick, I needed some running room. As I got him down to one end, I felt something against the back of my pant legs. Zombie Soccer Dad had stretched and pulled his arm against the cleaver so that he added another four or five inches to his reach and could almost grab me on the bar. I looked back. The cleaver shook against his pull. Not much longer and he would work himself free.
Time to move.
I ran along the top of the bar to the other end, jumped down on to the zombifying cook’s head and neck, nearly tumbling back into his open midsection. The force and weight of my body on his neck ended him. The knees and leg gave a last kick or two, but otherwise, I had stomped all the zombie out of his carcass.
Ziggy Zombie moved quickly toward me, and I headed down the short hallway that led on one side to the bathrooms and on the other to the kitchen door, tapping and banging the bat along the walls as I moved. He followed.
Cinco De Zombie Page 9