Cinco De Zombie

by Albert Aykler

  “Not on purpose. But Kevin freaked.”

  “I can see that happening.”

  “He paid me to come out and look for rats with him yesterday. Or the day before. It’s kind of confusing right now.”

  “That’s why you kept those gloves on?”

  “Wish I had a mask.” And then he coughed lightly and passed out.

  “Hey, Ray.” I went over to him. “Ray.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who designed that tattoo?” Now messed up by the swelling on one shoulder, a long thin line ran up one arm, around his neck three times, and down the other. In one hand, a bird pulled the string, and on the other, a cat reached for it.

  “I did. You like it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I have another one on my chest. An x-ray of my skull kind of thing.”

  “Cool.”

  He laughed. “You’re old, kind of, aren’t you?”

  “I guess. Older than I look, anyway.”

  “Don’t let me turn into—” He coughed. “Hey, what’s your name old guy? Who are you?”

  “Singleton.”

  “That’s not your real name.”

  “It is.”

  “Bullshit. But whatever.”

  “You’re right. But whatever. It’s all I know.”

  “Weird. Maybe I’m like you.”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe.”

  “Singleton, dude, don’t let me be like…like that kind of sick.”

  “I won’t.”

  He passed out. And I shook him until he woke up one last time.

  “You have family, Ray?”

  “My mom.”

  “In LA?”

  “No, no. Up north. On the coast. Way north. She’s got a truck. A taco truck. Upscale.”

  “Family business—”

  “Ha. Not exactly. Two degrees in Psychology. She did this truck thing. ‘Easy money,’ she says.”

  He coughed and coughed. The coughing stopped and so did Ray. A waste of a good soul. His fingers twitched.

  I used the Cowboy Cop’s knife to sever his spinal cord and scramble the nervous system. I did my best to avoid the tattoo, but it’s a messy job.

  I left him laid out on the car hood.

  Not one person saved that night. Not yet.

  Before I left him, I told dead Ray something I did not yet believe myself, “Leo. My name is Leo.”

  Who is this guy Leo, anyway?

  Who names their kid Leo?

  Astrologers? A lion loving nature freak? Da Vinci fans?

  Maybe it’s a family name? What family? None came for me at the facility. They told me they could not find any.

  Leo must be short for something, but what?

  Leon or Leonardo? Leonidas? Yet, the name fit like a lost piece of clothing unearthed from behind the dresser, itchy with forgotten familiarity. I could not help wanting to lose it again.

  The curse of anyone knowing that I am Leo, including me, is that then I have to be someone. A person. And then I will have to care what happens here and to who. More than I do now and more than I want to.

  And I have a bad feeling Leo is more involved with how this infection started than I want to know.

  That I am more guilty. I am not just some IT guy. And that is why I forgot everything. To survive the crushing weight of my unavoidable guilt.

  Bury the facts. Bury the past. Bury myself. Bury Leo.

  But I know time is finally running out on that strategy. My subconscious wants more space. The burial ground is full. Leo is crawling out of the grave I put him in, one painful, sick, rotting, and Sid Singleton eating memory at a time.

  I listened to the night. I know I keep mentioning this, but it bears repeating because the sound of that night stands out. The silence. Only a few bugs. No birds. And, certainly, no animals.

  Way off in the distance, I could hear water running. A river or stream across the road from the restaurant though the trees, and the night hid it from view. Nearly every living thing not rooted to the dirt had moved off to another patch of moonlight. If planet earth coming up short on a debt had a sound, this was it.

  I walked out to the road and listened, wanting to feel relieved standing in the moonlight. So much silence. Everywhere and every way silence.

  I looked at the fat coyote in the El Coyote Gordo sign, the light outline on the dark board visible even with the lights off. All I could think was that at any second that happy dog would go zombie, too.

  I could have left then. Driven away. But the job felt incomplete.

  I sat there looking at the empty parking lot. The weight of the work I had yet to do kept me from moving. I had saved the heaviest thing for last. I had to decide whether or not to kill my last friend on earth.

  11 Salsa Fresca

  Ice in a plastic cup. Zombie Ziggy in the cooler. Same thing. The only difference a matter of scale and what shakes first. The cup shakes the ice. The zombie shakes the building. Zombie Ziggy rattled and rattled.

  When I first stepped back inside the restaurant, that sticky black silence wrapping the forest had hold of El Coyote Gordo. No more twitching zombie dead. No drips, drops, bangs, or running kitchen equipment. The only sound my gagging and spitting at the wretched stench of infected flesh mixed with cold, partially-digested Mexican dinners.

  Flipping the power main back on ended the creepy quiet. I set the kitchen air handling system fan to high while the ice machines, refrigerators, lights, and appliances came on in a rag tag roll call succession of clicks, blinks, and compression coil shudders. The jukebox answered last, picking up in the middle of a song I did not remember hearing while shutting things down. “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes. Welcome to the 21st Century.

  Zombie Ziggy started knocking around his walk-in refrigerator hideaway almost as soon as the power came back on. I tried yelling through the door, “Ziggy, can you hear me? Ziggy.”

  No stopping. No sign that the sound of my voice did anything but direct his clumsy banging and scratching to the door. I dropped the aluminum bat with a loud clang on the cement kitchen floor and the sounds from the walk-in did not change in any meaningful way.

  I needed chips and salsa.

  The Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment has two possible options and corresponding outcomes: 1) leave the cat in the box, and it dies without food and water, and 2) open the box and, in the process, kill the cat (there is no way to open it without killing the cat).

  A theoretical physicist, Herr Schrödinger invented this puzzling scenario to help illustrate and explore the inherent challenges in understanding quantum mechanics.

  Schrödinger’s Zombie is different but no less a conundrum. It was invented by me, a zombie killer, to illustrate the difficulty in making up my mind about putting an end to the zombified human body that might still be carrying around my one true friend.

  Leave Ziggy Zombie in the walk-in fridge as is. Drive away from El Coyote and don’t look back. He dies or the cleanup crew kills him. Dead Ziggy.

  Let Ziggy Zombie out of the walk-in. He attacks. I kill him. He could kill me, but the outcome is still the same for him, eventually. Dead Ziggy.

  Let Ziggy Zombie out of the walk-in. He talks to me. What do I do? Is he a Dead Ziggy? Zombies are dead, right? What if he tries to eat me? Do I kill him? Is that murder? Do I run away and let someone else kill him? What if he kills someone else? What if the talking is nothing more than a weird trick of his dead brain? Some mis-fire? There may be no Ziggy in there at all? Ziggy’s head is another of Schrödinger’s thought experiments, but whose isn’t? Dead Ziggy.

  Sometimes the free chips and salsa are the best part, even if they are never the reason you went out for Mexican Food in the first place. When the stale taco, over-cheesed enchilada, and dry-rice-and-pasty-refried-bean let down that is your dinner arrives—the thing you hoped against hope would be better this time—you can always fill up on chips and salsa.

  The worst Mexican restaurant on Earth—even the awkwar
dly named Taqueria In Hels in the suburbs of Helsinki that purchased everything they served from a DIY Mexican Restaurant Catalog Company based in Copenhagen—had a hard time screwing up chips and salsa.

  When life dumps a great deal of dark sticky awfulness on me from a great height, this is the food that comforts. Even tortilla chips that bend more than crunch, dipped into soured ketchup masquerading as salsa, can save whatever passes for my soul. But that night at El Coyote Gordo I needed something more than mere soul saving.

  I needed something to remind me that my sorry amnesiac soul could be more than a zombie killing freak of nature in bloody sneakers. Save the soul, but help me remember it came as part of a human being, however permanently broken and beyond saving. Give me salsa fresca.

  Sid Singleton’s Soul Saving Salsa Fresca

  4 - 6 plum tomatoes diced into 1/4-inch pieces

  1 white onion roughly chopped

  1 tsp salt (or to taste)

  1/2 cup cilantro roughly chopped (I like to see some whole leaves and stems survive in there)

  A pinch of ground cinnamon

  Chopped Jalapeño or Serrano peppers (again, this is to taste, but I go for one or two depending on the heat of the peppers on hand and will almost always opt for Serrano if I can)

  Juice from 2 small limes (more if you like limes or the heat from the peppers is too much)

  Instructions: Add the chopped tomatoes to a bowl. Rinse the chopped onion in a strainer or using a thin dishtowel. Pat the onions dry or let them drain so they don’t add too much water when you combine them with the tomatoes. Add the rinsed not-so-wet onions to the tomatoes. Add salt, cilantro, cinnamon, and peppers. Give it all a stir so things evenly distribute and start sharing their flavors with one another. Have a taste. What do you think? Needs some lime, right? Add some lime juice. If you are a lime fan, you can dice a wedge into 1/4 inch pieces, skin and all, and add that to the bowl. Give it another stir. Serve immediately or wait a while for things to marinate. It is good either way. I can eat this for dinner with plain tortilla chips or add it over a taco or almost anything.

  During my Silvercrest confinement, I devoted most of my daytime hours to reading about and testing various salsa recipes in the lab. Books, blogs, social media posts, discussion boards, TV shows, YouTube videos, newspapers, anything was fair game as far as I was concerned. It became an obsession. A bag of chips and bowl of salsa made even the most sterile corner of that clinical environment into my personal safe place.

  I learned something important as I continued trying to get it right. Relax. Salsa is about what you like to eat on tacos and/or tortilla chips. There are right and wrong ways and ingredients, but also nothing you do is wrong. It is the most important thing in the world and it is only salsa.

  Be aware that you may come up with something that defies all tradition and may not even follow most of the old ways great Mexican salsa is made. That’s OK. Someone deserving of sainthood in Mexico invented every kind of salsa a long time ago, either from necessity or boredom, and it was so good that it became a thing worth repeating, sharing, and naming. Maybe you want to rename your version of it out of respect, though.

  So, go out and run this Salsa Fresca recipe against the Internet or whatever, and you will get as many people telling you it is stolen as those who will say it is simply not Salsa Fresca. Not really.

  I go with the broadest translation of the words salsa and fresca. Fresh sauce. This is fresh. It follows many of the most common recipes to make a sauce. The twist in this one is the dash of cinnamon, which is not fresh, and some people find it disgusting. Whatever. I like it.

  Every time I eat it, I thank Mexico for generously sharing their food with the Europeans who overran the continent. The world is a better place with salsa.

  I thanked Mexico from the kitchen of the El Coyote Gordo where I stood in a corner looking at the beat-up metal door to the walk-in fridge, eating my latest batch of salsa with a big stainless-steel kitchen bowl of chips.

  Ray’s uncle, the cook, had all the ingredients at hand. He made beautiful salsa but, as you may remember, the stuff in the salsa bar had those zombie finger additions. Besides, I needed that wonderful strange therapy that making a thing you know and love provides. I imagine people who know some carpentry, painting, sewing, or music have this same kind of therapeutic thing.

  Rough day? No friends in your corner? Everything coming up zombie?

  Do a thing you know. A simple thing. A good thing.

  Sing that song. Mow that lawn. Walk the dog. Grill a burger. Make salsa fresca.

  I skipped something. Something not entirely relevant until this point.

  After I puked up my convenience store burrito, Ziggy and I talked about something other than coffee on the drive. Something important.

  More accurately, I asked him about something. Not just some thing. About every thing. About me. About Silvercrest.

  “Why do it, Ziggy?”

  “Do what?”

  “Come on, Ziggy, the whole thing. The whole fucking thing. Silvercrest. The virus. Why isn’t it gone after everything they—we—know? And why did it start in the first place?”

  He looked at me. I don’t think he knew if my question was sincere or not. It was a look I associated with people who cannot believe I don’t remember something basic about myself. He said, “To make the world a better place.”

  “Sure…”

  “To make people better people.”

  “Come on.”

  “What? Isn’t it obvious by now zat we need to fix things? Look at ze world. Pollution. Wars. Refugees. Poverty. Rich people doing rich zings. Dictators. Mass extinction. All zat shit. We need to fix people.”

  “But is that why YOU do it? Why YOU, Ziggy Ratseneager, keep doing it. Why you keep working for Silvercrest. Is this what and how you wanted it to go? Your life, I mean. Trying to make people better.”

  He sighed. “First, zer is no not working for Silvercrest. Not now.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Zey would sooner destroy me zan let me work anywhere else. No one will hire me, anyway.”

  “Go into a different field.”

  “I don’t zink zat even zen zey would let me be. Besides, now…after zat first incident…”

  “What?”

  “Zer’s you.”

  “Me?”

  “You want me to say it? Yah. You. I stay to take care of you.”

  I did not want to believe it. So much guilt. I had no answer for a few miles of ridiculously beautiful vistas. Pine forests, mountains, and streams rolling down to us from rocky jagged mountains. A snaggle-toothed range in the distance looked like a long strip torn off the bottom of the sky, its snowy peaks revealing the interior of a made-up creator’s white watercolor paper. As though that creator had tried using a lighter version of the world to cover a darker, less perfect, sharper pen-and-ink work of violently beautiful mountains. Peaks made of stone struggling against stone. Together, light over the dark, they made a world worth saving from the only species that had ever grunted and scratched together words like mountain, sky, and creator to name and describe it.

  Finally, I answered him quietly, “Bullshit. Why risk putting me in stasis if I am worth so much?”

  “Ach. You are such an asshole, you know?” And he looked out the driver’s side window, and then wangled his bony index finger at the stereo and his ancient iPod, “Listen, asshole. Listen.”

  It was classical piano. Played fast. And though I know virtually nothing about how to judge it, and would never choose it, it sounded perfect. Perfect for what it was.

  “Fast, huh?”

  “Impossible.”

  Ziggy spoke again at a break in the music, “Do you know how long a concert pianist is in zeir prime? Zeir absolute prime? When zey can win ze awards and make a career zat will keep people buying tickets und records for the rest of zer lives? Or maybe past zat even, if you are Gould or Horowitz or Argerich?”

  “No, how long?”

 
; “Zree years. Zen kaput. You are famous, part of an orchestra, or a guy on ze cruise boats on ze Rhine.”

  “Honestly, third place doesn’t sound that bad,” I mumbled back at him.

  “Same for you, Singleton.”

  “What do you mean?

  “Whatever or whoever made you…once ze virus went active or whatevah…you were exposed, and you started to fall apart…you got only maybe zree years before your nervous system is limp spätzle and your brain is yogurt parfait.”

  “What’s shpettsel?”

  “Pasta, asshole.”

  I finished up some slow math. “Do you mean I can only do this for eighteen more months?”

  “Ze shake in your hand when you woke up earlier? It wasn’t ze first, or ze last, you’ll get more of zose. Your nervous system is running too hot…or too cold maybe…too somezing.” Ziggy seemed genuinely sad. But I couldn’t tell if he was sad for me, for science, or himself. “We needed to slow you down. To maybe figure you out. To maybe get you right. Or at least keep you until zer was somezing we knew only you could do.”

  “It’s that bad.”

  “Maybe. I bet zat it is. Silvercrest, zough…”

  “They don’t agree.”

  “Zey don’t know, do zey? Zey can’t. Only zose who have seen zese infected firsthand know it is no joke and it does not pay to waste zings you don’t understand.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “What?”

  “So, you stayed at Silvercrest because of me, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you, and I guess whoever I was, started at Silvercrest to research something to make the world a better place. Then there was this accident that we survived and my survival, in particular, tells you something about the research. Plus, I am some kind of protection in case of other outbreaks, or was until Silvercrest figured out how to deal with outbreaks using well-armed tactical strike teams in Hazmat suits. Then you figured out I was going to die.

  “But you didn’t tell me. No. Instead, you put me in stasis so you could do more research on whatever it is that keeps me from getting infected. And Silvercrest didn’t want to un-stasis me. I don’t think you did either. But now there’s an outbreak they can’t control because Kevin did it off the clock or something?”