Towards the end, his suspicion of the family grew. They seemed too nice to him. People who would not ordinarily give him the time of day. Jocks. Not geeks. Between this and his flub with Bartender and the Cowboy Cop, he began wondering if maybe his trivia bar charm was not the great social equalizer he thought.
Kevin’s Emotional State
I flipped through the last few pages of the journal. Infected or not, Kevin had some genuine mad scientist stuff going on. He had decided only he knew the right path forward, not only for the infection, but for humanity.
I could be wrong, but the split from whatever grounded Kevin in something of a normal nerdy world seems to have occurred around the time of the great rat die off, his run in with the Cop and the Bartender, and the subsequent rat escape. He notes something about getting Ray to help him clean things up. How the kid seemed to get his vision of a better world.
Finally, there was his all too accurate note to me. “…you don’t know anything, Singleton. Not a single thing. Nothing.”
Kevin had lost it and knew it would end badly but did nothing meaningful to stop the impending outbreak.
Ziggy
Regular contact with Ziggy. Besides the printed emails, I found a lot of notes regarding conversations with Ziggy and a note saying he would need Ziggy to clarify something mentioned in a text message.
Ziggy worked for Silvercrest the entire time. Based on Corporate Karen’s appearance at the campground, I think Ziggy was feeding Silvercrest information about Kevin’s progress.
After the two scientists argued via email, Kevin’s notes say ‘Screw Ziggy.’ In my quick read, I found no mentions of Ziggy in the last two weeks leading up to the incident at the El Coyote.
Ziggy must have had info back from Corporate Karen. Enough to know he had to take me out of cold storage to address the mess Kevin would inevitably create.
It occurred to me that Ziggy was too smart to have antagonized Kevin the way he did from afar without expecting him to do exactly what he did. So, he may have manipulated Kevin into pressing on with his research.
I looked at that walk-in refrigerator door and knew that inside there was a zombie who may have engineered this whole thing. Kevin. Me. Silvercrest. My paranoid mind started to think that it made sense that Ziggy wanted Kevin to push it so far, because then he had a reason to take me off ice, and a reason to try his cure or vaccination or whatever it was in those hypos.
Mad Scientist versus Mad Scientist.
Asshole versus Asshole.
Zombie Asshole Scientists versus Singleton.
I dug around until I found some twine. Looping it around the pull handle of the walk-in, I ran it all the way through the kitchen pass-through window. Once I had closed the kitchen door into the restaurant and put a few chairs in front of it, I came around to the bar and grabbed hold of the string. I gave it a good pull and unlatched the door.
Zombie Ziggy nearly fell pushing his way through. He ran clumsily at me, arms raised, face caked with the cook’s blood, teeth looking longer, his one eye more desperately dead.
I wanted to hear him speak. Or hear him grunt while failing to speak.
He groped and grunted.
I said, “Ziggy. Ziggy, are you there?”
And he replied as he had hours earlier, “Fast, huh.” And half-jumped at me through the window.
I had the bat in my hand and watched him like I watch them all. Looking for my moment.
I could imagine doing it. I knew how it would go down.
Get into the kitchen fast. One golf swing to the jaw. One over the top to the raised forehead. And a third as he stumbled. Heavy and hard on the back of the skull. Almost gone. Another. And another. I would think that must be it, but his insistent neck would raise his battered head. He would turn his one eye on me. A hungry growl would follow.
“Die already. Just die.”
It would not die at my word.
It would take two, three, maybe a half-dozen more blows. He was my friend once, so I would stop counting. When I finished, I would see only pulp where there had once been a fine Austrian scientific mind with a knack for making those around him love life more than they did without him.
I would sit on the counter and look down at my dead friend. My dead fiend. And I would know I had murdered myself into being utterly alone in this world.
So, I knew that Singleton would not kill to Ziggy.
On the other hand, what would Leo do?
So, answer time.
“What about Ziggy?” you ask.
You didn’t ask, “How many dead?”
Eight at the restaurant. Five more over at the campground. Two of them children. None of them died peacefully. How many innocent? How many guilty? Guilty of what? Guilty of trusting that those with the power to dose them with a deadly virus would have the common decency to keep it responsibly away from them and those they care about.
I suppose all of them were guilty of some imperfection. If you think heading for the remotest of hills for peace and safety is some human imperfection, then I suggest you revise your notion of perfection. Or human.
But no, you did not ask about them. They amount to a rounding error in the cost benefit analysis.
Instead you asked, “What about Ziggy?”
Ziggy is humanity’s only hope against this infection. Somewhere in that alive-dead mess of him are some answers about what is going on and maybe how to fix it. I think. And if you can tip him back into the living, maybe he will pay up on his bet.
I might have another friend, but I don’t remember who it is and every time I start remembering people, they turn out to be dead or complicit in this zombie nightmare that is my life.
I did not want Ziggy to die, but my conscience cannot afford to believe his serum worked on everyone. If it did work, then I murdered the whole Soccer family and Ray the Artist that night. If, by some miracle, Ziggy recovers, I will have to deal with the guilt of my merciful murders. And that means something worse than an amnesiac break this time.
Zombie Ziggy definitely spoke to me in the midst of the mess, but by the time I left the El Coyote, he had me believing that, at best, all he had done was slow this thing down. More likely, I had caught some random words from his failing mind and turned them into something that meant something to me.
The thing is, zombies are dead people. Or that was the thing. Until Ziggy spoke to me in the restaurant. And Karen looked at me with the charm bracelet. Now I don’t know even that one thing.
But the virus always wins. Ziggy groping at me from the El Coyote kitchen was a zombie. I kill zombies.
But Ziggy spoke to me. And zombies do not speak. Ziggy is a person. I don’t murder people.
And if you think those are nothing more than a confusion of lame excuses (they might be), then I guess the answer is that Ziggy was, and is, my friend.
An alive-dead friend is better than a dead-dead one. I have no remorse about killing zombies or wanting to rid the world of this virus and the whole line of stupid research, but I have this one friend I cannot rid the world of.
If it comes to killing him, I am counting on someone else to do it. I cannot balance this cockeyed scale of undead justice on my own.
Besides, Ziggy owes me ten bucks.
Thonk.
What the…? Something rolled across the hood of the car. Probably the thonk maker.
I opened my eyes and lifted my head. Through the gap in the steering wheel, I had a view of the Subaru’s hood. A huge pinecone rolled to a stop against the windshield. It had to be sixteen inches long. Biggest I could remember seeing in person. I think I had seen pictures, or maybe the Leo version of me had seen them. It was not a totally new thing, but it surprised me.
I flopped back in the driver’s seat. I had laid it as close to flat as possible the night before to sleep in a convenience store parking lot on the edge of town. It was closed. Not a very convenient convenience store. Leaving me to inconveniently piss against the back wall of the store, near the dump
ster.
Seat down. Singleton asleep. Oblivious to the hours passing to day light. And, despite the wonder of giant pinecones raining down on the car, I wanted more oblivion. I planned to get coffee at that convenience store later. I would enjoy every burnt bitter oily sip. I smiled at the big pinecone and closed my eyes.
Did I sleep some more? Probably.
The sun felt warmer. The world had become a lot noisier. Not obnoxiously noisy. More of a steady hum that had recently started gaining intensity. In my half-sleep, I identified the sounds as papers flapping in the wind, then cardboard sliding along asphalt, a dust mop working over a rough patch of sand, and finally a box of shoes tipped out and emptying onto a welcome mat. As the volume rose, my dream images had become more and more specific until all I thought of now was shoes, shoes, shoes.
Thunk.
Thunkthunk.
Thuthunk.
None of those thunks hit as sharply as the pinecone. I squinted my eyes open and peeked out. One pinecone out there. Exactly where I had last seen it. Now, it vibrated. And so did I. The whole car shook. And I could not count all the soft thunks.
I sat up and looked around.
Zombies. Zombies. Zombies.
A bright yellow-vested zombie shuffled and bumped his knees against the passenger door. On the driver’s side, a guy still wearing his dark green golf shirt, despite having lost the better part of the left side of his chest, looked in at me. He had my scent. Two or three more thunked into the back. And in the rearview mirror, several more shuffled and shambled across the convenience store parking lot with great intent towards all this thunking.
It was a Subaru thunk party. Every zombie was invited. Human buffet provided.
My normal zombie infested life had beaten me to the mill town.
I gave my new thunker friends a groggy, “Hello, everybody.”
And I could swear I heard the dark green golf shirt zombie at the driver’s side window respond, “Welcome to the Zombie Mill.”
Learn more about
Singleton, Silvercrest, tacos, and the fate of humanity
in the next book in the Silvercrest Experiment series.
Salsa de Zombie
Coming in 2020
About the Author
Albert Aykler lives and writes as a nomad whose remaining connections with the country of his birth are largely digital in nature. Many of his works began as he dwelt in obscure seclusion in the American Northwest while recovering from a period of corporate servitude not unlike that of the characters attempting to survive the horrors and indignities of the world of the Silvercrest Experiment series.
If you like this book, a review would come as a big encouragement for him to write more and faster.
To learn more, visit AlbertAykler.com where you can sign up for The Aykler Report (his almost monthly newsletter).
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