Cinco De Zombie

by Albert Aykler

Nostalgia for food comes down to comforting smells you never want to taste again. Sometimes, I like to think Jaime would be proud of my taco snobbery, but I know he probably wouldn’t give a damn one way or another. He always knew good Mexican food. What took me so long?

  Approaching Kevin’s taco seasoned RV as quietly as possible, I found the remains of more than a few chipmunks. Someone or something had banged the hell out of the things. Nothing approaching my kill numbers, but I saw at least a dozen of the single-serving sized zombie rodents. Heads smashed open. Tails tattered and limp. I remember one set of rear legs twitching furiously as I passed. Based on the particularly messy aftermath of an already messy situation, it looked like Kevin must have had his hands full and used a rock or something to take the things out. And he probably panicked.

  Besides the other side effects this viral infection granting me my zombie immunity may confer on me, it had a psychological benefit. When faced with zombies or zombie rodents, I do not immediately panic. A bite will hurt, but I won’t zombie.

  The chipmunk situation at the Soccer Family site felt more like a mosquito or wasp swarm might feel to someone else. Yes, they could kill me in sufficient numbers, and any bite hurts like hell. But I am free to use the fear these stark, though unlikely, scenarios create as a seed of calmness, because steady conscious attention to the task at hand (killing vermin) guarantees the best chance of survival and least risk of inconvenient nips.

  On the other hand, if a single nip or even half a dozen bites promised death, I would lose my shit in desperate panic. Exactly like Kevin.

  I stepped over the chipmunk corpses and around the two partially collapsed folding hammock chairs on their sides under the battered and bent RV awning to try looking in the window. Dark and one of windows blocked by some box or piece of equipment. From what I could make out, despite the grand width of this classic vacation cruiser, it would be close work inside. I propped the bat up against the side of the RV. Before I dropped the backpack next to it, I took out the tire iron and the Cowboy Cop’s knife.

  Did it make sense to knock on the trailer door? I knocked anyway.

  Did it make sense that something or someone answered? A strange answer. Strangled sounding.

  I knocked again. Not an answer, but movement. Something rattling and plastic on plastic squeaking in the back. The door was locked. Maybe Kevin survived. Maybe he was asleep. More noises from the back, and also some scratching sounds. A weak animal trying to escape from a cage.

  I used the tire iron to pry open the trailer door. It opened out, but Kevin had barricaded the door from the inside. The noise inside and the scratching became more frantic sounding. Not knowing about the infection, I might have guessed the resident had locked themselves in the RV toilet with a half dozen spastic cats. But I knew zombie wiggling and zombie scratching when I heard it. Someone, probably Kevin, had erected this hasty ineffective barricade to keep things inside, not the other way around.

  Honestly, I hate these situations. On the one hand, I could walk away and call this in for the full Silvercrest coverall hazmat suit removal. The Quiet Kevin zombie was probably fine, he hadn’t gotten out yet and probably wouldn’t. He had trapped himself in there. The scratching, while disturbing, probably came from his fingernails on the walls or more chipmunks trapped with him.

  It wasn’t any sense of pride in the thoroughness of my extermination technique that motivated me to keep looking. If I left, I would be safer, and maybe the world too.

  Despite all common sense, I could not help wanting to know. I needed to see. I was victim to the curse of my curious mind. Was it really Kevin in there? What had he been up to? What had he become?

  Eventually, I pushed and pulled my way in. The RV was hooked into campground power, so when I flipped the switch, the interior lights came on. All the noise stopped for a split second. Yep, based on Zombie Soccer Dad and Zombie Kevin, light sensitivity is still a thing for this strain, though the exact reaction probably warrants some study as they seem more drawn to it than stunned as in the earlier strains. I looked around and the scratching resumed.

  I found Kevin’s Silvercrest ID dangling from the rearview mirror, a physical manifestation of the irritating grudge that dangled from his soul. Sector 7G. Senior Researcher. Desperate to save the world. Convinced he had found the good in a pile of waste. Angry Silvercrest had pulled the funding and effectively killed the project. Nothing can stop a true believer, especially one with a wounded ego and a handful of PhDs. Standard recipe for a mad scientist.

  Before I crammed them into the backpack, I glanced at his lab notes. Especially the last week or two. End of human misery. Saving the planet and all of humanity at the same time.

  Here is the fundamental fix. The brilliant evolutionary tweak. Evolution is too clumsy to arrive at it in time. Or evolution is arriving at it through me. My work is the next leap in the process.

  Naturally, he figured he needed to test this leap on a few rodents first.

  Like most of the guys in the lab, he never spent more than a few days in the woods, and that was a long time ago at Science Camp. So, maybe we can forgive him for not understanding how this whole outdoors thing works. Animals own the forest. Even in a typical, overused roadside campground. We stay there as their guests. They scavenge, invade, pick over, disrupt, and take over anything we bring there. Eventually.

  Kevin did not count on the less-than-lab-safe seals and joints of the typical recreational motor home. The local rodents merely claimed their natural rights when they sniffed and fraternized with his lab rats and their food.

  In came the Ed Sheerans and Taylor Swifts of the rodent world. Not even rats can resist the cute good looks and effortless charm of their chipmunks relatives.

  In they came and out went the infection.

  Oh, right, did I neglect to mention that his hypothesis was shit and his experiments failed nearly as badly as every other the Silvercrest teams have run the past five years? Kevin did succeed in making the cross species jump, but that is its own kind of failure. The rats went crazy and ate one another. The disease took over their brains and bodies, and the surviving rodents were still twitching when I arrived weeks later. Kevin rationalized all of it.

  Blah. Blah. Blah. From the notes:

  Rodent experimentation provides a clear path to virus refinement heretofore thought impossible. Blah blah blah.

  Truth is, beyond the cross species jump, I don’t think he got far with this strain. Maybe the fact that Cool Soccer Dad appeared to be a mere carrier at first means something, but he still went full blown zombie, eventually. Loyal friend that I am, I remember thinking Ziggy’s research was significantly more interesting. He may have done something to slow down the infection and maybe, just maybe, keep it from totally destroying the frontal lobe. I hoped to find something useful left of him in that walk-in fridge later.

  Meanwhile, I went to the source of the loudest noises in the RV. The small bathroom in the back. I could hear Zombie Quiet Kevin thrashing around inside. Taped on the bathroom door; a page torn from a magazine. A photo of the planet Mars with the word ‘Home’ in white text on the blackness of space under it.

  Looking at it, I became dislodged from this dense world of zombie gore again and heard words from some lighter world. The world at the lab not so long ago. A movie night.

  “What is this shit?”

  “It’s fucking Stanislaw Lem.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  Kevin only looked at me in reply. I smiled at him. He knew I knew Lem. He had made me read plenty. And I knew he knew that saying something was Lem didn’t explain anything. That’s kind of the point of Lem.

  “Lem was more interesting zan zis.”

  “It’s beyond boring Kevin.”

  “Boring? It’s meditative. Transcendent.”

  “Synonyms for dull.”

  “Come on. You have to admit, Kevin, it’s not what zey call fast-paced ah-ction.” Ziggy had a habit of playing middle man between Kevi
n and me. Despite his mischievous nature, I think his Austrian way of seeing the world prevented him from appreciating our American style of enjoying a meaningless conflict.

  “Space is vast. It warps time.”

  “Singleton is a committed earzlink.”

  “A what?”

  “Shhh. You’re an earring.” We knew what Ziggy meant, but his constant impishness invited mockery of his accent.

  “Earz-link. Or earz-ling.”

  “Shhh, already.”

  “We’re not going to miss anyzing, Kevin. Earzzzling, Singleton. You are a committed earzzzling.”

  “Oh. Funny.”

  “You are.”

  “If this is space travel, then I am a committed earthling. I am not ready for anything like this.”

  “I am.”

  “I bet zat you are, Kevin.”

  “I practiced.”

  “Practiced what?”

  “When I was a kid, I practiced space travel.”

  “In your spaceship?”

  “How ze hell do you practice zat?”

  “I locked myself in the bathroom—”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “This small bathroom in our basement. For hours.” He laughed.

  “Geez. Get a tree house, Kevin.”

  “I would sit there and do math with this pen light and listen on headphones to this recording of NASA space sounds.”

  “Did you even have parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell, Kevin?”

  “Hours?”

  “Yeah, hours. I would time myself.”

  “Of course, you did.” Sarcastic disbelief.

  “Of course, he timed it. He’s a scientist.” Ziggy’s untrustworthy encouragement egged him on.

  Something or things finally happened in the movie, and we watched, quietly reading the subtitles until it moved to another sequence of meditative visual transcendence, during which Ziggy went to get us all another beer from the lab refrigerator. When he returned, he asked, “What was your longest time?”

  “Forty-seven hours seventeen minutes and fifteen seconds.”

  “What?” I spit beer across the lab. “How old were you?”

  “My parents went away for the weekend. I was fourteen. I could have done more but the next-door neighbor went kind of nuts and ruined it.”

  “What?”

  “She was supposed to check on me.”

  “Right.”

  “Your parents’ concern ruined space travel practice for you.”

  “The neighbor. Mrs. Cosner.”

  “Your parents’ proxy.”

  “Fourteen…Und how many times did you masturbate during that forty-seven hours?

  “Oh, come on, Ziggy.”

  “None.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I was preparing for space travel.”

  “Geezus. Do you guys really have PhDs in things?”

  “Several.” Kevin enjoyed being asked about his PhDs because he loved answering. “Conservation of energy is part of the test, Singleton.”

  “You see zat, conservation of energy.”

  “It is the major challenge for human survival on long space voyages.”

  “Und ze whole reason we know one anozer.”

  I looked at the bathroom door and listened to the strange movements on the other side of it. Conservation of energy. “How many hours this time, Kevin?” I did not expect a coherent answer. I did not get one.

  I assumed he would have locked the door but tried the door handle first, anyway. As I twisted the small, almost flat doorknob, I noticed that the door did not look even with the jamb. It pressed outwards. I could not turn the handle, but not because of a door lock. The latch stuck because of outward pressure against it. Zombie Kevin must be leaning on it. He had no concept of a doorknob. Or a door. He leaned against it because he probably smelled or heard me on the other side. And now, I made a dumb mistake.

  One quick pull with the tire iron and the door will pop right open. Then get out of the way, I thought.

  I stood to one side of the door. The jamb side. I wanted to avoid reaching across and having the door slam open into my face. I shoved the flat end of the tire iron into the gap between the door and the frame, there above the doorknob, and pried.

  Pop. Slam. Zombie. I stood in the immediate path of Zombie Kevin in the Box.

  I landed on my ass in the narrow RV hallway with Zombie Kevin on top of me thrashing, grunting, and snapping his teeth. I had kept hold of the tire iron and pushed it crosswise once, twice, three times into his mouth with everything I had. On the last push, he met it with all of his uncontrolled zombie craving coming down at me. Not many teeth survived the first two shoves. With the third, I lost hold of the tire iron in the back of his jaw somewhere.

  I might get crushed or scratched to death, but Zombie Kevin couldn’t take a piece out of me now. I tried pushing him off me or sliding out sideways or head first, but his thrashing kept me pinned down.

  It came down to that Cowboy Cop’s big ass knife, though not with the clinical precision I would have preferred.

  This was a clumsy, bloody stabfest. I had to go up through is body and reach back around to the back of his neck. His long hair and spastic attacks complicated my every move.

  For any biologists reading this, you might find it noteworthy that I could not feel his heart beating, but I felt his lungs move. I have no medical understanding of these things, but apparently, at certain stages, the virus requires more oxygen, or maybe it needs to vent CO2. Anyway, there is gas involved.

  I couldn’t tell if it was inhaling or exhaling. Difficult to know in the circumstances and my elbow could have been lying. Maybe it was a reflex action having to do with the heaving of his torso and violent movements of my arm. It certainly felt like gas moving through those bags at the time.

  Ten or twelve stabs after cutting a hole through his torso and reaching through his back, I severed the spinal cord from the brain. Once I did, I only had to contend with 220 pounds of uncoordinated twitching zombie meat.

  I pulled, lifted, and pushed until finally I got the skin-bound sack of zombie that used to be Kevin off of me. I had a lot of Zombie Kevin all over me. In hindsight, I ought to have listened for Zombie Soccer Dad or Karen-Mother-Of-Two as this zombie had not gone quietly into this weird night. But despite the noise, the family and the zombie left me alone with Kevin and his work.

  I searched through the gore for my headlamp. Zombie Kevin had knocked it off my head when the door sprang open. I found it and put it on. I looked at him more carefully. He had not been zombie for long. Probably turned around the same time as Soccer Dad and Ziggy. I extracted the tire iron from his jaw. I kept thinking about how I felt as though I barely knew this guy even though I had once counted him as a friend. A good friend.

  And the insane quiet of this forest surrounding the small persistent scratching noise in the RV pressed down on the last tattered scraps of my identity. I wanted to weep like Karen-Mother-of-Two. Sob like Tara. Sleep like Chad.

  On the bathroom floor beside the toilet, somewhat worse for wear, I found Kevin’s phone, ear buds, a pen, and a small Moleskin notebook. Filled mostly with tiny scribbled notes he would use to inform his more formal research write-ups. On the last couple of pages, the writing looked larger. I turned to the pages where the larger writing began.

  Kevin addressed his last words to me, Sid Singleton.

  Singleton,

  I hope it is you. Who else?

  Anyone else will only find ashes here. The ones without immunity take no risks, but retrieve no evidence.

  We are on our way now. I thought so before, but now I know it. It’s not perfect, but it will be.

  Did you ever see the first cell phone? Or car phone? Huge cancer-causing disaster of a thing. Now, mine is my pen light and my stereo and would be everything else if I didn’t have some addiction to pen and ink. The next me, w
hoever that is, won’t leave notes this way.

  We are on our way. We are on our way.

  Dozing off. [The writing became larger and less steady here. No longer keeping thoughts on one page, but running across the binding sometimes. Flipping one or more pages ahead to write only a few words.]

  Observations:

  Hunger. So much hunger.

  The areas around bites itch and ache at the same time. No pus as with an infection, but swelling.

  Swelling…

  Thirsty.

  Hungry.

  [He moved to a new page with renewed effort at a steadied hand. After the first line, the writing falls, then rises to the corner of the opposite page]

  Feeling better. More focused. It’s all kinda funny when you think about it. The way everyone freaks out about this. Consider how many people it took to build the pyramids or get us to the moon—I mean, the real body count, including all those impacted by the V2 rockets and materials sciences and human experimentation during WWII. Not to mention Hiroshima. This is hilariously insignificant. Nothing. Allergens have done more…

  [And now the two last pages. The writing became madman scrawls]

  They think I don’t know. I know. I know. I know.

  But we are on our way.

  They pay. I think. They pay. They pretend. They pretend to camp. They pretend to know.

  I know. Ziggy knows.

  But you don’t know anything, Singleton. Not a single thing. Nothing.

  Know this…

  We.

  Are.

  On Our.

  WAY!!!!!

  [When I first looked at the last page, I thought maybe he tried to draw a knife or a banana floating in the clouds in the middle. I looked again, turning the journal this way and that. A rocket blasting off. He even tried to write a name for it on the side. The USS Boondoggle.]

  One lab rat. All that unnerving scratching I heard came from one white lab rat.

  It looked in bad shape in its sealed aquarium. I don’t even know if Kevin had left an air hole for the thing. I don’t think so. I think this may have had something to do with all the we are on our way stuff.