Cinco De Zombie

by Albert Aykler

  I ran Ziggy around the kitchen banging pots and pans and knocking over dishes. I led him to the walk-in fridge. Once past the open door, I turned and put the door between me and Ziggy Zombie. The wall was on my left, a narrow passage between the open door and a stainless-steel shelving unit on my right. Ziggy Zombie would try to come through there.

  I heard him as he came around the door. I made a one-handed swing with the bat across his body, trying to knock him sideways and back into the walk-in. Ribs cracked. I had him angled right. He stumbled back behind the door. I shoved hard and heard him fall into the walk-in. I slammed the door, latched it, and locked it with the padlock hanging conveniently where it was supposed to. I could hear him banging around, but that didn’t worry me. I did not have time to wonder where they kept the key.

  It was Young Chad’s screams that worried me. He must have come through that front door once I got Ziggy Zombie out of there.

  “Dad, come on. Dad. Dad.”

  Clang. Something came into the kitchen from the window into the restaurant. I looked over. The cleaver was on the floor, and Zombie Soccer Dad was not where I had left him. Not even his arm. Nothing but a lot of his gelatinous zombie blood.

  The kid screamed, “Dad, come on. Knock it off. Stop it.”

  I yelled through the window, “Get out of here, kid.”

  Young Chad looked cornered over by the pool table, but he had some room and made it work, cutting around Zombie Dad’s bad arm and straight out the open door, not stopping to close it.

  I watched Zombie Soccer Dad head after him, casting a creepy Mariachi zombie silhouette against the bright SUV lights in the front door before Karen-Mother-of-Two backed out of the lot and headed down the road in the direction of the campground. Zombie Soccer Dad stopped in the doorway.

  And as Green River died out, I heard the dishwasher’s last call to the family that abandoned him in the lot. “Wait. Please. I’m not one of them. Look.”

  Zombie Soccer Dad turned his head toward the voice, pom pom tassels on that grand sombrero shaking as he did.

  “Shit.”

  I heard bike chain rattles and “Ohshitohshitohshit” from the parking lot. I banged on the kitchen window with the bat hoping to distract Zombie Soccer Dad long enough to give the dishwasher a running chance. I could see from the sombrero tilts that he heard me, but my banging got lost in the most recent, all too appropriate, song on the jukebox. “Running with the Devil” blasted as the sombrero silhouette moved out of my view and into the parking lot.

  I fumbled with the back door handle before making it outside where I promptly slipped and fell into a large pool of rancid vegetable oil and pork fat. The bat rattled away across the asphalt into the dark. Once my eyes adjusted, I spotted my aluminum zombie slugger under a nearby dumpster. I slid my way over on greasy hands and knees to retrieve it.

  The dishwasher screamed from the parking lot.

  I thought, Too late, too late, too late…

  Let’s return to an interesting question. How did Soccer Dad get that sombrero, anyway?

  A lot happened in a short space of time that night. Much of which I could not explain. People died. Zombies rose. Mayhem ensued.

  But the sombrero…that bugs me. Something so simple. So unlikely. I gave this a lot of thought before I sat down to document my evening at El Coyote Gordo.

  I came up with three equally implausible explanations and one slightly more plausible explanation for how Soccer Dad came to wear that grand piece of headgear.

  1. El Sombrerón—Back in Guatemala a few years back, one of the guys who guarded the lab told me a story about a local monster or spirit or ghoul or what have you they tell children about to keep them coming home before dark and all that. El Sombrerón, as the name might clue you, wears a sombrero. A sombrero of unusual size given his stature, which is not large. With a hat that obscures his face, his nocturnal habits, and feet that apparently do not always point the direction he moves, often leaving no tracks behind him, El Sombrerón doesn’t need size to be scary. Search for him on the Internet and you will read about his other predilections, particularly the threat of stealing away young women, but my security guard friend, Neto, a big fan of the AK-47 by the way, had some other theories about his most fearsome abilities. According to Neto, El Sombrerón wore that hat to protect his true identity as master of the gateway to the land of the dead. While children and pretty girls often tempt him, they being particularly susceptible to his powers of persuasion, the surest way of calling him was any attempt to raise the dead. Neto said he expected him to show up down in Guatemala since Silvercrest (locally known as Laboratorio Pollo de Plata) had dared raised the dead at that research facility. The thought crossed my mind that maybe the spirit of El Sombrerón wasn’t as much of a literalist as we skeptics and considerably more of an opportunist. Seeing the sombrero and the dead raised up, he only needed a bodily temple to house his familiar, and so, he jumped into Soccer Dad. Not too tall. Agile enough. And the sombrero fit.

  2. He put it on after I went to the restroom and before he went zombie. Maybe in his pre-death confusion, he traversed the restaurant, grabbed the sombrero, put it on, and collapsed over by his table for his few minutes of death before coming up Sombrero Soccer Dad Zombie. Maybe I didn’t notice it over there amid all the rest of the action. We can probably rule this one out based on his condition when I went to the restroom. That guy had did not have the strength and dexterity required to slap his own knee much less wander across the bar to put on a large Mexican hat.

  3. A lucky throw from the bartender. People routinely panic and throw things once they realize they are under attack by previously dead people who want to eat them. This could happen. I once saw a fisherman in Helsinki throw a large salmon through a ship porthole from forty feet away in some combination of luck and adrenaline-fueled hyper competency. That said, that Helsinki fisherman a) threw fish for a living, and b) threw a lot of fish that did not go through anything or slow the zombies he was aiming at (except for one zombie that slipped on a small herring). A smarter move might have been to dump everything he had at their feet and make a run for it. Ah, 20/20 hindsight is the curse of every zombie situation I have ever encountered. Given all that, when we consider that nothing else came out from behind the bar into the restaurant—things that would have made a lot more sense (including all those bottles of mezcal, which could have done some serious damage) we have to rule this explanation out, too. No one threw the sombrero in self-defense.

  4. The bartender or maybe the waitress shoved it onto his head in self-defense—it may seem like a weak move when you are sitting safely behind a docked laptop and flat screen disaster window after the fact, but consider the situation. All the time for rational planning has passed. Zombies are upon you. You panic. But your brain tells you all these old signals about the value of the booze behind the bar and how to safely stack barware. You have never stood behind that bar attacking people or defending yourself, much less facing ghouls who only minutes earlier were your customers. You need something to turn them around. Stop the zombie. Maybe it will go away. Something disposable. Why would you waste anything important on something so unsanitary? You go for the sombrero. Admittedly, this explanation feels as anemic as the others, but it remains the most plausible.

  Of course, one more terrible possibility remains which I do not dare enumerate, but will mention for the sake of thoroughness: the big black spangled and glamorous sombrero de Mexico caught Zombie Soccer Dad’s eye. He walked right over, one foot in front of the other. He grabbed that hat and put it on himself before he dove into the bartender’s neck for a mouthful of what makes Zombies groove, gyrate, and do their go-go dance of death. Naturally, if you believe that, you have to wonder if Soccer Dad is not, despite how crazy it sounds, the second (or umpteenth) coming of El Sombrerón (see explanation 1).

  6 Excuse me, is this your arm?

  Why someone chooses one way down a road versus the other way up it in a moment of distress probably
says as much about their notion of security and their deeper personal pyscho-geography as it does about the real direction of safety.

  The dishwasher chose the direction that would take him past the campground. Maybe he thought the people there would help him. Or maybe he lived out that way. Though, from the looks of things, most people in the area lived back in the other direction. Maybe he figured he was outsmarting the flesh-eating ghoul somehow. Or maybe it was something noble within him, a desire to help the Soccer Family who had gone that same direction before him.

  A decision that fast though…I attribute to panic. It was the only way out that he saw at that moment. The way he saw others go. The way he knew he could pedal fastest, downhill, and away from El Coyote Gordo. Away from the Zombie Soccer Dad who must have at least put his one working hand on the dishwasher to make him issue that tortured cat scream that led me to think I had failed him.

  I made it out to the parking lot in time to see the dishwasher pedaling away on his bike followed by a gruesome sombrero’d silhouette. Against the parking lot light, the tassels of that big sombrero dangled in time with the left forearm hanging by only a few stretched tendons from the place where the cook’s cleaver had chopped it. In his soccer dad sneakers, I could barely make out the sound of his steps over the receding squeak of the dishwasher’s bicycle chain.

  I wondered for a moment if I could have seen any sign of that cool soccer camping Dad demeanor if I looked into his eyes. Ziggy had hit him with something, but I saw no difference in his behavior. He was all zombie, no dad.

  What if I didn’t go after him?

  What if I got in Ziggy’s car and drove away? Let Silvercrest sort this out. The end of the world was inevitable, anyway. This was their problem, not mine. Sooner or later, immune or not, my zombie luck would to run out.

  Screw it.

  I turned and went back into the Christmas light strewn, Mexican paper cutout banner adorned, dated jukebox, no cell signal, lite beer, zombie gore atrocity that was El Coyote Gordo.

  Is a memory of a memory a real memory? Or is it the only kind of memory we have?

  Stepping back into El Coyote Gordo that night, I re-remembered something I had taken with me through that first incident. Or maybe I picked it up there. Something else besides my love of tacos and my friendship with Ziggy.

  Guilt.

  I felt guilty about something.

  Something I needed to do something about so badly it made my hands itch and crumbled any attempt to focus on rebuilding my life into a pile of fine powdered anxiety that I inhaled like some highly addictive poison in self-punishment.

  And that feeling. That guilt-ridden anxiety. That made my mission clear.

  Eliminate zombies. Eliminate the virus. Every strain. Eliminate any and every chance that this might survive.

  No one should ever get infected again. Wipe it out and the world could go back to destroying itself in all the traditional ways Silvercrest had arrogantly intended to control and eliminate.

  I pulled the front door shut behind me and flipped the various open signs to closed and used the bat to permanently unplug (read: smash) the red and blue ‘Open’ light.

  I wasted no time and stepped directly over to Zombie Cowboy Cop and removed the knife from between his ribs where I had shoved it earlier. Then over to Zombie Biker Gene who had gotten no further in her quest to achieve verticality.

  There, I made my most mercifully polite kill of the night so far, grabbing her ear since she had so little hair on her head, twisting her face to chomp at the air on her right. Knife into the base of the skull, severed the spinal cord and disconnected brain from body in a few moves. I wiped the knife on the surprisingly clean T-shirt sleeve.

  Over at the bar, I dug around for spare keys to lock the front door. Tried the register. Didn’t find anything. Dead Zombie Bartender Pete probably had a set in his pocket. Or the cook. Or maybe the waitress. I made excuses to stop looking. I found the power box near the back door and threw the poorly labeled switches until the place went dark. No lights. No music.

  Exiting out the back, I avoided the waste oil mess entirely, but stopped to add my rancid oil and zombie gore ruined over-branded hoodie to the dumpster, enjoying the cool night air on my arms.

  Out at Ziggy’s car, I grabbed two bottles of water from the ice chest, some gummy worms, the tire iron, and put them all in the backpack. I dropped it in the passenger’s seat along with the bat. Then I sat in the driver’s seat and did the dangerous thing of trying to think like Ziggy. If I were him, where would I keep a spare car key?

  Zis car is bullshit. Let zem steal it. Poor ahh-ssholes.

  Somewhere obvious. The visor over the driver’s seat? No. Under the driver’s seat? Nothing.

  Don’t be such an ahh-sshole, Singleton. Do you zink I care, zat much?

  Ha. There it is. Cellophane taped to the top of the steering wheel. Ziggy had taken the hidden out of hidden in plain sight.

  Und you have taken ze ahh-ss out of dumbahh-ss.

  I shook Ziggy out of my brain, started the car, and headed out to the road looking for the sombrero wearing flesh eating fiend that had started his day as a pretty cool dad.

  I kept the headlights off to avoid startling him. Thanks to the light of the half-moon and bright wash of the Milky Way, I spotted his shambling figure after about half a mile. Without someone or something to chase, Zombie Soccer Dad made slow progress along the double yellow lines dividing the road. No big deal. Just another zombie out for a quiet moonlit stroll on a federal highway through the woods. Good for me. I needed something slow after everything happened so quickly back at El Coyote.

  Six people dead. My best friend zombified. So, maybe seven dead, depending on how that serum of his does. Common sense would tell me to despair of that way of thinking, but I didn’t have good sense for my friends. Who does?

  I followed Zombie Soccer Dad at a distance, drinking some water, watching his arm dangle lower as the tendons continued to stretch. I needed to figure out what to do here. We would arrive at the campground entrance in less than a quarter mile.

  My Ziggy brain fired up again. Hit him ahh-sshole. Drive ze car into him. It’s junk. He’s a zombie. Over run him. Hit him.

  Off in the distance, someone yelled. Or maybe screamed. A man maybe. Maybe the dishwasher. Zombie Soccer Dad paused at the sound and then picked up the pace.

  I sped up after him and didn’t wonder too long why my face was dripping wet on this blurry night. Tears. Tears hidden on this mountain road between the pines. No one around to ask me about them. And too much to do to try stopping them.

  Maybe there was another sound in the woods. Or maybe that distant yelling attracted him. Whatever the reason, before Ziggy’s jalopy could get up the speed to nail him, I made out the dark arc of Zombie Dad’s sombrero merging into the dark curtain of the nighttime forest.

  A jolt that sent the sombrero tassels swinging as he stepped off the pavement told me that his balance had begun to degrade, but at this rate, based on my previous interactions with these more balanced sorts (someday I will tell the full terrible story about a ballerina on that small island outside of Helsinki), hours would pass before he became a stumbler.

  The popular conception around the conference rooms and shared workspaces at Silvercrest is that infected victims (zombies) are noisy and clumsy. There is some truth to that. If they have some live flesh in their view, they often make a noise not so dissimilar from a high school football team hitting an all-you-can-eat rib roast buffet, something between a growl, a groan, and long belch. But that sound is by no means universal.

  10% may never vocalize in any way.

  Another 20-25% may not vocalize until they have tasted live flesh.

  With 60-65% vocalizing on site of a live meal, the generalization that all of them always groan or will groan when you see them or they see you is entirely understandable. But this generalization can have dire consequences.

  Now, I hear you asking, what about the clumsines
s and staggering?

  Again, this is a reasonable generalization from the safe distance of a conference room or executive lounge armchair. Most, especially those infected for anything longer than a few hours, move from point Z (for zombie) to point Y (for yummy human flesh) in an exaggerated version of the unbalanced way people walk prior to becoming zombies. They move forward in an endless series of controlled falls.

  Have a look around. You will notice that most people fall into their steps. Some with a small bounce, others a tired stagger, many pushing themselves on or leading their way into the world with the parts of their body they have the least or most confidence in—belly, head, shoulders, hips—people throw their favored body part forward or lean into it, and then take a step to catch themselves in time to do it again and so forth.

  Cats do the opposite. They take each step in balance. The foot goes forward before the body every time. A cat can pull back its foot and change directions or avoid putting weight on something unstable. Each step forward falls empty, and the body rolls forward to fill it.

  Accomplishing catlike balance does not come easily to us bipeds since we have only the two feet. But keep your eyes open and you will spot it. Dancers, martial artists of a certain caliber and training, great athletes, and those construction workers high above the street on slender I-beams. All of these people step carefully, quietly, surely. And when one of these folks gets infected, the first few hours can be a nightmare if you are trying to catch or avoid being caught by them. Especially if they are also in that 30-35% of non-vocalizers.

  A loud, uncoordinated zombie is the best kind of zombie.

  You may remember that the Zombie Soccer Dad studied Jiu Jitsu for fifteen years prior to this, his final, camping trip.

  I do not believe in luck. I believe in tacos, cheddar cheese burgers, thin crust pizza, fresh brewed coffee, women who can knock me down in a fair fight, etc. However, I had such awful luck that night in El Coyote that I nearly became a believer.