Cinco De Zombie

by Albert Aykler

  More nothing, and then I heard something rustling over in the bushes that divided this campsite from the next one. It sounded like Jiu Jitsu Zombie Dad and rustled away with some speed, but I waited a long while before speaking in a low, I-gargle-gravel, tough guy voice.

  “How do you know Ziggy?”

  September camping. Mid-September. Labor Day long past. Everyone back in school. Campgrounds in the warmer places down south might fill up with retirees, van-based digital nomads, and the random soul searchers, but up north, things empty out. I could feel the threat of a cold autumn on the wind that night.

  What the hell was going on at the El Coyote Campground and Resort? Why was anyone camping there?

  Some Internet facts I confirmed after this all went down:

  The El Coyote Campground officially closes the day after Labor Day

  Mid-September weather up in those parts is somewhat unpredictable, and people are advised to camp in the El Coyote Forest with winter gear.

  Three weeks before Ziggy and I showed up for dinner at the El Coyote, a Delaware based subsidiary of Silvercrest Research Laboratories, the Long-Boodge Outdoors Corporation, purchased the El Coyote Campground and Resort from a local family for three times its previously assessed value. Long-Boodge Outdoors Corporation, apparently a relatively new entry into the family campground chain business, told the previous owners and local newspaper that according to their assessments the property was severely undervalued. They saw an opportunity for significant growth given their development strategy, most visibly and immediately, this meant providing additional state-of-the-art waste bins, waste removal, and a new fire break perimeter.

  All to say, I think hindsight justifies my thinking this campground seemed a little weird, and maybe makes up for my coming at Karen-Mother-Of-Two as a bit of an asshole in a stressful situation.

  “How do you know Ziggy?”

  “From the restaurant.”

  “Bullshit. Who do you work for?”

  “Do you mind? My family is freaked out.” Tara sobbed and Chad seemed to have developed a nervous tic, blinking repeatedly, and twisting his linked index fingers together over and over.

  “Sorry. Yeah.” We stood there under the moon and stars, not appreciating the forest or its profound silence. The smell of the burning vehicle slowly dissipated with small metal knocks and pings from under the hood as the machinery cooled. We all jumped at the sound of one of the doors creaking as it swung further open.

  “So, what do we do now?” Tara wanted to know.

  “We wait for help.” I doubted any was coming, but they didn’t need to know that.

  “Everyone in the tent. Come on kids.” Karen unzipped the door and herded them inside.

  “What about Dad?” Young Chad would not give up on that guy.

  While Karen made up some story about their unwell father and how they would eventually see him again, I fixed the tent lines I had tripped over earlier. They turned on a light inside. The nylon tent glowed orange.

  When I finished getting the tent upright, I joined them in the glow. Karen sat on a sleeping bag on the floor, legs comfortably crossed (Yoga pays off). Tara rested her head on her mother’s lap and held Young Chad, who laid next to her. Karen stroked her daughter’s hair. “Let’s just take a breath. We’re safe now. In here.”

  “How are we going to get home?” Tara’s body lay still, but her eyes bounced from Mom to brother to me to tent door and back again.

  “I’m going to bring you a car,” I said.

  “You are? From where?”

  “Over at the restaurant.”

  “We can go with you to get it.”

  “No, it’s better if we stay here.” I noticed Karen and the kids had removed their shoes upon entering the tent. I hadn’t. I looked down at my ridiculously over-branded designer sneakers. Black dirt and pine needles stuck on coagulated blood and old Mexican Food. Put them in a glass case in a modern art museum. They would become an artistic comment on the profound curse of unbridled corporate greed.

  “Uh…sorry for my…” My art shoes.

  “No worries. You saved us from the chipmunks.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  The kids both tried putting energy into those Thank Yous, but all they had left keeping their eyes open was a thick residue of panic and fear. In Helsinki, the kids shivered until they passed out. No one came to hold them. They never believed in their safety.

  “I am going to try to speak calmly with you Karen, but I need to know some things and bullshitting me now cannot help your situation.”

  “Who the—?”

  “Karen.”

  I looked at her and down at her kids. She had set Ziggy’s murse on top of what must have been her husband’s sleeping bag. I grabbed it and opened it with my free hand, dumping the contents out on the tent floor. Not much there. A metal box of mints, Ziggy’s wallet, his Silvercrest ID, and ten small hypo pens. Five capped and unused. None of them marked.

  “I figure Ziggy popped himself in the restaurant bathroom. And I saw him do your husband. So, the rest—”

  “They don’t hurt that bad. You should do it. It keeps you safe,” Tara told me.

  “Like a flu shot,” added Chad.

  “Thanks.”

  Karen froze. I don’t know what she thought I might do. Having seen me savagely kill fifty-six chipmunks and take out at least four zombies, she probably figured killing her and her kids was not out of the question. I carefully set the bat down and squatted on my haunches so I could look her in the eyes.

  “I don’t have a lot of time here, Karen, but I do want a couple of answers so I know that I am doing the right thing to keep this all under control. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Short, honest answers for now, please.”

  “Ok.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “A company called Long-Boodge Outdoors, LBO, but they’re owned by Silvercrest. So, we’re on the same side here—”

  “Save it. So, you did know Ziggy?”

  “I knew you both. But only from pictures and what they told me.”

  “All wonderful lies of my brilliance and good graces, I bet.”

  Karen answered with a crooked ironic smirk that said, You know better. She stroked her daughter’s long dark hair, gently pulling out the tangles without looking down at her hands. Chad’s eyes were almost closed. He knew he was almost safe in the arms of his older sister.

  “How long ago did you administer this stuff?” As we spoke, I restored the contents of Ziggy’s murse.

  “Twenty, thirty minutes ago. I’ve lost track of time. Whenever we first got here.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “They told me he had a vaccine.”

  “Big news.”

  “If you don’t want people getting a virus…but you know—”

  “Don’t assume I know much of anything.” I returned Ziggy’s murse back to the sleeping bag where I found it. She never asked if I wanted any of the vaccine, so I guessed she knew that for me it would be redundant at best.

  “Right. I heard you lost your memor—”

  “Where are they?” I did not need Karen’s pity that night.

  “Where’s who?

  “Silvercrest. I saw you on your phone in the restaurant.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. They’re otherwise occupied. I lost connection.”

  “Otherwise occupied?”

  “Not their exact words.”

  “What did they say, exactly?”

  “They said they were triaging the incident.” Her low voice dripped shame with every word.

  “Triaging?” Some old volume fell open in the deep labyrinthine archive of my brain. I knew that phrase. Or an old me knew it.

  “Something worse is going on somewhere.” Her hands left her daughter’s hair. Her thumbs and forefingers tried to pinch something out of her forehead.

  I could not help adding
, “Or something they think is worse, anyway—”

  Tara’s sobbing shifted into something between the sound of a balloon losing air and a puppy caught under a heavy boot. Karen-Mother-of-Two tried to calm her, stroking her daughter’s head more quickly to wake but not worry her. Young Chad didn’t budge. I grabbed the bat, stood up, and looked around outside the tent. Listening and hoping nothing out there heard Tara. I turned back and dropped to my haunches again.

  “We need to keep quiet.”

  “I know.” I hadn’t noticed Karen’s tears before. Eyes red and face deeply gripping some despairing sorrowful fear.

  I looked away. Down at her hands running through the stream of her daughter’s hair. “Listen,” I told her, “you’re okay now. It’s quiet.”

  “This is not okay. No forest is supposed to be this quiet.”

  Her hands became paler, the light grew brighter, and the world thinner. I was no longer in a tent in the tainted El Coyote forest. In that thinner world, another pair of hands moved idly in my own. I completely disappeared into some old self of mine again.

  “What about your family?” Olympia’s hands.

  “My family?”

  “You do have one, right?”

  “Yes, but— “

  “They’re not the family you thought you signed up for.”

  “There was a sign up?”

  “Yeah, you didn't get the memo?”

  “And memos?”

  “And a manual.”

  “It figures.”

  “Does it?”

  “No, none of it does.” It sounded like me, but felt like a more complicated version.

  “Why won't you look at me?”

  “I am.”

  “Not my hands. At me. Up here.”

  “Your hands are you. Maybe more you than your nose. Or lips. Or ears. Or hair. Or—”

  “Or my eyes?”

  “Nice try.”

  “What do you think the issue is then?” A change in tone. Less tender. More business. She needed something from me.

  “The motive. The root. What’s that about the fish stinking from the head? This fish stinks because it came out of a fetid sea. It stinks tail to head and back again.”

  “But we're all fish in that sea, and it's our job to clean it.”

  “Ha. An inside mixed metaphor job of the worst and most unlikely kind.”

  “We have to do it.”

  “We do?”

  “We can't let them go on like this.” She lifted her hands and pulled away. Thin, strong, pale hands. Such hands convinced me of something about the world surrounding around us. I would do anything for those hands.

  Such hands turn the world. Such hands turned my world.

  “Does it work?” I think Karen-Mother-of-Two had asked me this a few times, but I only processed the last one as I drifted back from my thin world of memory.

  “The vaccine?” My honest answer: a resounding no, but I did not have the guts to tell her that with her kids sleeping on her lap.

  “I mean, is it working now?” she asked.

  “As long as you’re this sad, I see nothing to worry about,” referring to the weird giddiness that had erupted at the restaurant about an hour earlier.

  She understood and gave me a weak chuckle in reply. Then she began crying again.

  “See, no problem.”

  She smiled, wiping tears on one sleeve of her sweatshirt, as the other hand almost compulsively maintained its slow rhythmic flow through her daughter’s hair. They calmed each other in a gesture as old as primates.

  “Where’s Kevin’s camp site?”

  “Right behind ours.”

  “That close?”

  “Why do you think we were here in September? I mean…”

  “Your husband works at Longbody, too?”

  “Long-Boodge. No.”

  “Didn’t he wonder what was up?”

  “He’s cute, but he’s no genius. And he’s good with the kids. Convinced them they wanted to miss the start of the school year and soccer practice.” More crying. “He’s…was game for anything.”

  Not this, I thought. Not if he knew the whole truth of things. “Hope you get a good bonus.”

  “It won’t be good enough.”

  “There’s more I need to know, but you can tell me later. On the drive out of here.” I grabbed the bat and stood up. “Now, I need to check on Kevin.”

  “What do I do if I—If we—If Ziggy didn’t fix it?”

  As far as I was concerned, Karen and her corporate ilk made me what I am, took my life from me, and opened the door to an actual zombie apocalypse. They said yes and yes and yes to ridiculously unethical experiments to further a monumentally unethical means of making the world a better place that I have yet to understand.

  Each day she sat at her desk or joined her colleagues in a conference room or dialed-in for meetings, she shut down some part of her humanity and blindly ignored the humanity of a great many others who Silvercrest would never grant a voice in their rarified corporate environment.

  Corporate-Cutthroat-Karen was a monster made of two-parts arrogance, one-part hubris, and three-parts ignorant disregard for humanity. Over-educated, insanely over-compensated, and deftly self-insulated from the practical realities of the lives of those people bagging her groceries, mowing her lawn, cooking her food, and buying her company’s products.

  Even now, in my mind’s eye I can see all the unsympathetic ugliness of her snappy-casual, all options luxury crossover, gluten-free, gourmet-vitamin-marshmallow monstrosity of a life. And I wish good riddance to that bad member of our human community.

  But, there in that tent, I saw Karen-Mother-Of-Two and her small, frail, shocked, sleeping Two on her lap. I could tell her she would either eat her children alive or have to kill one or both of them before they ate her. Or I could make up some shit to help her feel better.

  I made up some shit.

  “OK, listen carefully.”

  “OK.”

  “If it’s one of them. Lock them in the car. With Ziggy’s vaccine, there is a way to fix it, regardless of how bad it looks. But it’s not a one-person job. As soon as they appear to die, lock them up.”

  “What about me?”

  “Three things will tell you that it’s going to be you. If it is going to be you, and if you love your children, lock yourself in the car.”

  “What three things?”

  “First, your ears will start ringing like you lived inside Motorhead. Second—”

  “Inside their what?”

  “Inside Motorhead. The band.”

  “How is that possible? I don’t know what that means.”

  “It’s a metaphor. Inside a jet engine. OK? Ears ringing like you stuck your head into the middle of a jet engine.”

  “OK.”

  “Second, your stomach.”

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I’ve never been infected, but people clutch or complain about their stomachs.”

  “Severe stomach pain. Check.”

  “Third, your vision gets weird.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You know how your eye actually takes in images upside down and your mind turns them around?”

  “I think so.”

  “That stops working.”

  “So, everything looks upside down?”

  “That’s how a guy in Helsinki described it to me as the infection took him.” That part was only half of a lie. “Anyway, if you feel like you’re inside a jet engine, lock your ass in the car.”

  “Got it. Thanks.”

  “But you don’t need any of that. I’m counting on Ziggy.”

  And I zipped them into the tent, confident I had earned at least a nomination for Best Bullshittery Not in a Musical or Comedy.

  I thought maybe I should make a booby trap or an alarm in case things went wrong while I checked out Kevin’s campsite. Cans on a string or something. But I had wasted enough time. I sipped at my
water, flipped on my headlamp, and headed out.

  About twenty paces from the tent, something occurred to me. I stopped and looked back at the glowing orange fabric bubble that was their family tent.

  What occurred to me had to do with a story someone told me once. A story about the Spanish Inquisition and one of the many ways of killing a heretic. It involved sewing the bound sacrilegious infidel into a sack with one or more feral animals and then dropping the whole thing into a deep body of water. I had always thought the frantic behavior of a zombie near food resembled movie depictions of drowning victims. What occurred to me at that moment was the ways a nylon waterproof camping tent was a lot like a large sack sewn shut with zippers.

  8 Taco Flavored RV

  Every used motor home or trailer has its own special smell, usually attributable to some past mishap that occurred in transit, in the dark, or because the kitchen lacked the right tool for a given job.

  Many will forever smell of bacon, stewed tomatoes, or the caramelized coffee on the burner of the drip coffee maker. Spatter guards do not seem to help. Smells dissipate at home, but in an RV, they soak in and stick around for the everlasting duration.

  In his mobile zombie incubation unit, Kevin or some previous owner must have had a serious mishap trying to open a bag of taco seasoning, forever marking this trailer with that tortilla chip flavoring Mexican-American food smell. I smelled it from five feet away in a pine forest.

  Pausing for a moment, I reveled in the nostalgia of this aroma before confronting the interior of Quiet Kevin’s aluminum and pressboard fortress of ineptitude. The smell reminded me of the tacos my mom made every Tuesday. Of walking down the aisle in the supermarket with my friend Jamie from Junior High and him looking at the package and saying, “That’s not Mexican.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. But it sure as shit isn’t Mexican. My grandmother would never use that. Or my mother. Or even my sister.”