Cinco De Zombie

by Albert Aykler

  Come on up, have an iced tea. Sit a spell. Enjoy the smell of the trees. There’s peanuts and chips at the canteen, and we’re having a big campfire out by the pond tonight. No, no, we don’t expect any illness, disease, danger, and especially not zombies.

  The porch was twenty square feet of old-fashioned, head-in-the-sand, what-could-be-wrong-in-the-world-when-we-have-this bliss. The idyllic creepy tranquility of it made the contents of my stomach fizz and my feet itch. Zombies love these places. I exhaled deeply through my nose.

  I looked through the open door before entering the renovated house, where I groped for but did not find a light switch near the door. But I could see well enough that the old-fashioned campground bliss suffered a bad night. Maybe it was gone forever.

  I heard another knock over behind the counter that divided what must have been the living room from the old kitchen area. The long counter served as check-in desk on one end and the canteen counter on the other.

  The cash register in the middle of the counter was an old big brass antique thing that popped up the numbers on cards. Probably couldn’t ring up anything over $999.99. Stuck on no sale, they probably used it as the cash drawer and did the math on a calculator.

  I say probably because someone or something had strewn anything and everything not as heavy as that cash register around the room. I saw parts of a credit card machine over in one corner. Pens and pencils, candy bars, and small wrapped hard candies strewn everywhere. And blood. Lots and lots of blood. Maybe from one or two people, but also from chipmunks. In one corner of the room, I saw the body of one sticking out from under the large coffee presspot that had flattened its head.

  I found a pile of hard candies that looked clean, grabbed a handful and pocketed them. I paused before I unwrapped and put a root beer barrel in my mouth, somewhat worried it might trigger another flashback. Nothing specific, but it tasted familiar. Too sweet. Something I must have loved once back when I was a young version of that Leo guy.

  Yet another dull knock came from behind the counter. I stepped around the check-in end of the counter, careful not to step on the potato chip bags or shattered glass case that still held the remains of homemade cookies and brownies.

  Turning the corner, the light of my headlamp fell on the floor behind the counter. Three more loud bangs startled me so that I scrambled back into the kitchen area behind the counter.

  I looked again. The next couple of knocks didn’t startle me so much this time. I looked down. A small wiry, headless old body. An older lady who had gone zombie. Hands and arms bitten and scratched by chipmunks. Head removed by a close-range shotgun blast or two from the looks of the buckshot and blood. That might explain a couple of the bangs that had drawn Zombie Soccer Dad away from me.

  Her hand clutched a wooden-handled carpenter’s hammer. From the looks of it, she had used it to defend herself against the zombie chipmunks. Fur. Blood. Part of a chipmunk body wrapped over the hammer head.

  They do that sometimes. Hold things after they turn. A security guard, one of the first infected in the Helsinki incident, had hold of a child’s toy (the locals called it a Moomin doll, whatever that is) from the kid who had infected him. When we found him three days later on the other side of the island at the water’s edge, his zombie foot caught and twisted between two rocks on the craggy Baltic shoreline, he seemed unable to let go of that Moomin.

  Anyway, the Zombie Old Lady’s hammer hand twitched when I put the light directly on her wrist. The hammer banged whatever junk was around it. I kicked the hammer out of her hand before searching the rest of the logging home turned reception center turned zombie hellhole.

  A lot of mess and signs of at least one more person here. In a room that had probably originally been a bedroom, and now served as the campground office, I found two empty shotgun shell boxes on the floor of an open wardrobe.

  The room seemed nearly undisturbed otherwise, with comparatively little blood—handprint on the doorjamb and few drops on the floor. The lamp, stapler, and computer all remained on top of the small desk. Everything looked to have shifted around when someone had knocked into the desk, but it remained where it belonged.

  A storeroom that had once probably served as the other bedroom had taken a shotgun blast into one corner. Evidence of dead, infected chipmunks covered the floor. Bones, fur, and chipmunk flesh blasted to pieces too small or twisted to name made an approximate death toll impossible. Bloody sneaker prints lead to the room’s one window. No glass remained in the pane and a last sneaker print on the sill revealed where the person had made their last step in the house.

  I walked back through the mess to the kitchen, raiding the fridge for sodas along with some cold candy bars. I stepped outside. The back porch had no roof or awning, allowing for a better view out and around the nearby forest and campground.

  The small porch, or stoop, held one stainless steel, vinyl upholstered kitchen table chair, weathered, rusted, but sturdy. With me standing out there, there wasn’t room for much else except the small bucket with sand in it that made the porch into a small smoking area.

  I could imagine the Lindgren’s or their employees coming out here to keep a casual eye on things. Tonight, I tried out the view, looking over their family business. Still and quiet. From the porch, I could see the road through the campground and several of the sites. There were large piles of brush and around the perimeter. Signs of a freshly cleaned, or maybe expanded, fire break.

  In the campground, back the way I had come, I saw part of the orange tent and, further on, between the trees, the beige siding of Kevin’s mobile rodent zombie factory.

  I turned back to go through the house and stopped. On the old wooden porch railing, someone had carefully or carelessly left a human ear.

  Helsinki was full of ears. Little ears.

  How can they even hear? I wondered. They look so small.

  The mercenaries Silvercrest hired to assist in the cleanup—men from places sadly more accustomed to wholesale slaughter than Northern Europe—had arranged the test subjects for final count and scientific review. Lacking adequate tarps or plastic covers, they laid them stomach down to obscure their faces. Their small heads rolled to one side so that all the tiny dead ears opened skyward.

  I saw two hundred test subjects lined up outside the lab. All children. All ears. Waiting patiently for some answer. Why this? Why us? Is this what we were for? Our purpose?

  A woman in a hazardous materials suit tallied the dead. She assured us that this fell well within the margin of acceptable error for tests of such radical and innovative therapeutic treatments. She had accepted the corporate calculations that included legal liability, public relations fallout (should it ever leak), future returns upon success, and subsequent shareholder returns.

  “Well within the acceptable limits. Considering…” She repeated this in her Dutch accent, always ending it the same way, “Considering…” I watched her obsessively tapping her touchpad as she checked the identity and condition of each child.

  “Considering what?”

  “What?”

  “Considering the goal.”

  “What goal?”

  She looked up at me. She recognized me, though I had no memory of seeing her before. She looked terrified. Terrified of me. For a moment, I thought I might have broken her mind.

  “Is this a test?” she asked me.

  “A what? No, it’s an honest question.”

  “That’s not for me to tell you.”

  “But you do know?”

  “I know that you know and that is enough. I am a technician. Only a tech.”

  And she went back to her gruesome data collection task before I could blurt out that I did not, as a matter of fact, know the goal. But I don’t think she would have believed that I didn’t know it, anyway.

  I never found out why I scared her so much. Or why she thought I knew anything. She never spoke to me again, even though I was all ears.

  I tramped around in the dark behind the h
ouse until I nearly stepped on it. Another dead zombie. Shotgun blasts to the left knee, the stomach, and the kill shot over the right shoulder and into the neck. Someone had aimed for the head, missed, and, against all odds, stopped this one with birdshot at close-range.

  Before zombiehood, the body belonged to a thick bodied old man wearing a plaid shirt and heavy canvas work pants. The therapeutic sneakers gave him away as a retiree rather than the active woodsman he must have been in his youth. In his left hand, he held a roll of gauze, now dirty and wet from the ground.

  He didn’t have much hair, so when I pushed his head to one side with my foot, the open wound where he once had an ear became obvious. Blood had dried in a strange pattern down along his chin and the left side of his neck. This must have been Mr. Lindgren.

  My mind rolled together a scenario to make sense of this. It came to me faster than I would have liked, given how sad and pathetic it made me feel.

  While she and her husband fought off the zombie vermin, Mrs. Lindgren suffered a bite from one or more chipmunks. She died with a carpenter’s hammer in her hand. As Mr. Lundgren wept and worried over her twitching infected corpse, she popped up zombie and bit his ear.

  I think if she had taken it clean off, he would never have retrieved it. Realizing that she had become like the chipmunks—transformed from grandmotherly wife to insatiable monster—he found his shotgun and stopped her. Finished her. In all the hubbub, his ear could not stay on.

  Mr. Lindgren stepped outside, probably feeling feverish, overwhelmed with grief, traumatized, and losing mental faculties. He had found the gauze to help bandage his ear but lost track of things. He set the gun down. And he set the ear on the railing. Then he wandered off.

  Before long, Bloody Sneaker comes along and finds the mess. Maybe more chipmunks. The Lindgren’s shotgun. He grabs ammo without knowing buckshot from birdshot. Something or someone sends him exiting hastily out the back window where he confronts Zombie Old Man Lindgren. He blasts him until the old man ends up here. Like this.

  Maybe Bloody Sneaker was around for more of it, and maybe the chipmunks were worse than I supposed. But the number and pattern of the shots more or less fit.

  While all that happened here, the first blast or two diverted Zombie Soccer Dad from the road towards the campground. I gave chase through the woods. The sounds of the horn honking and the family under attack from the Zombie Chipmunks drew us to the campsite, along with most of the local infected vermin. Three more blasts and Zombie Soccer Dad turned from chasing me and his family to tracking down Bloody Sneaker over at reception.

  I am not enough of a tracker, much less a night tracker, to figure out which direction Bloody Sneaker ran off to, but I needed to find him and Zombie Soccer Dad to finish this thing.

  I have come to the personal, though entirely objective, conclusion that surprise parties universally suck.

  Either they are not a surprise and so, they make everyone a liar, acting out some weird scenario in which our over-planned and engineered lives still have some shred of spontaneity.

  Or they are a surprise. And the surprised person is miserable because all they wanted was to go home and take a quiet dump after a long day of work, but now they have to thank a bunch of people for ruining their place of solitude with their cheery, passive aggressive bullshit (“Aren’t you glad you have such thoughtful friends?”).

  OK, I admit, someone somewhere may love surprises. Not everyone had the thwarted quiet dump scenario. But for me, they can never be any good. I loathe most surprises as they always lead me to situations that are either awkward or awful. Or both.

  And all of this stuff at the El Coyote Gordo and El Coyote Campground felt like someone had thrown me the worst surprise party of all time. And the someone was looking like Ziggy, along with Kevin’s somewhat unsuspecting help.

  I wanted to short circuit the surprise, or what was left of it, because I could feel something else out there. Some other thing or person waiting to pop out of the shadows in a reverie of evil delight at seeing me caught off guard at the reality of my life. Having to rethink everything that happened to me. Having to recalculate what and who to trust about anything. If they can lie about a party, they can lie about your love life, your job, your friends, everything.

  But if I can catch the lie and stop the surprise, then I am OK. The world is as I understand it. Untrustworthy in a way that I can count on.

  I had to move Old Mother Lindgren’s headless zombified body to find it. I did not want to touch her. It might not even be underneath her, but I had to look.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Lindgren. I don’t know if it’s there, but I honestly do not know where else to look.”

  She had nothing to say and no means of saying it. I knelt down and rolled her off the pile of stuff that had once occupied the reception desk and snack bar. In that pile, I found a dry wipe laminated map of the campground.

  Only two sites marked. Soccer Camping Family and Kevin.

  But did anyone else leave in the last couple of weeks? Hopefully, no one bothered to come here this late in the season.

  Digging through the blood and paper, I finally found what looked like Old Mother Lindgren’s registry for the place. It was the same one she had started using years before. Thank you for holding onto your 20th Century record keeping habits. The world may depend on it.

  I looked over the entries. Things had slowed down following Labor Day weekend. Other than Kevin and the Soccer Camping family, I found only one other guest. Someone in a camper van. They needed sewer and electrical hookups, but the column designating trailer length was blank. Make and Model: Mercedes Sprinter. Year: 2015. Name: Laszlo Murray. Should that name sound vaguely familiar? It did. I wrote the license plate on a piece of paper and jammed that in my pocket. Someone needed to chase this guy down…one rat or chipmunk hitchhiker and the world would get a whole lot messier.

  I rolled Old Mother Lindgren over on to her back again. It seemed right.

  I flipped the bat up on my shoulder as I passed the “Carry In Carry Out” sign at the entrance. Yep. Carried out the bat and all my limbs. Hell, I even took some of Kevin’s stuff.

  I flipped the sign on the reception house door to “Closed” before I pulled it shut.

  I walked around the old logging house, stepping into the road in front and, there in the distance, I saw someone that I thought was a sure sign that my luck had finally turned. Zombie Soccer Dad.

  10 The Ballad of El Sombreron

  Off in the distance. A dark figure on the deep blue night between two ridges where the road turned up towards the highway. Silhouette profile of a man, a zombie, in a large sombrero. Looked to me a lot like the stories of old El Sombrerón come to life out there. Face lost under the hat. A slender body with big feet. But in Soccer Dad shoes.

  El Sombrerón de Futbol. Translating that slice of cultural appropriation: Big Hat Soccer Ghoul.

  Whatever the hell you call him, the time had come to end to this zombie once and for all.

  I took a moment to plan out my attack.

  First, knock off the hat. A good whack from behind. Then a hit to the knees. That stops him there. And then finish his head. Afterwards, I would pull him back to the campground reception, to keep him out of view in case the cleanup crew didn’t get here early.

  It did not go as planned. No surprise. My luck continued to suck that night.

  In the time it took me to trot down the road to where the campground entrance met the road, the whole situation changed.

  Zombie Soccer Dad starting running. Not as steady as he might have in life, but damned steady and damned fast for a zombie. He did not know I had seen him or he might have turned and come at me. I chased him.

  I ran past Ziggy’s car thinking I almost had him. He ran faster. This asshole zombie consistently outpaced me. His hunger drove him hard after something or someone. He wanted food more than I wanted yet another zombie kill.

  Existential dread makes any run an uphill slog.

  �
��El Coyote Gordo - It's always Cinco de Mayo somewhere. Celebrate here. Today,” Ziggy read the front of the menu as we sat down in the restaurant, before we started watching the family and eavesdropping on their chipmunk attack story. “What bullshit.”

  “What?”

  “What ‘what’? It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

  “It’s marketing.”

  “What is zis Cincoh duh Mahyo, anyway?”

  Funny thing is, I knew the answer. Could not remember my own mother’s face, but I knew the answer to that one. “It commemorates the Mexican victory of the Battle of Puebla. A big victory no one cares all that much about because it was followed by a pretty serious loss. Not quite Mexican Independence Day, but without it, there probably wouldn’t have been one when there was.”

  Ziggy shrugged.

  “So, drink up and celebrate.”

  He grinned and the power light that was his one good eye popped on and glowed. And we left it at that.

  But I knew and cherished knowing that Cinco de Mayo mattered. More than a little. And to a lot of people. Not just in Mexico.

  In Mexico, it mattered because it showed that the country would not roll over to European rule and would defend its independence. Fun fact: since the Mexican victory in Puebla, no European army has invaded the Americas.

  And that mattered directly north of Mexico. Some people say the French would have come to the aid of the Confederacy in the Civil War if they had beaten the Mexican Army that fifth of May. So, you could say Mexico kept France out of the Civil War and helped the Union win.

  I like Cinco de Mayo. I like celebrating it with tacos and Mexican beer. And I like it, and maybe remember it at all, because it shows how even the most apparently insignificant victory in the world can matter in ways that are impossible to predict.

  Kill a zombie chipmunk and save humanity.

  Kill a Zombie Soccer Dad and save the world.