Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction

by Mariano Villarreal

  “I think there are more zombies on the streets,” I said aloud, leaving the window. I was talking to myself. But Panchito heard me and thought I was talking to him.

  “Don’t even think about talking to the neighbors about zombies again,” he said, from the door to the room. “Remember what happened at the last Committee meeting.”

  “That’s true. Panchito, tell me the truth,” I desperately tried to change the subject to avoid thinking about that unpleasant event, “don’t you miss bathing?”

  “Sometimes in summer, yes, but now that winter is coming... well, I never really liked water. Isn’t that right, hermano?”

  “Yes, it is. I remember you shouting when you were put in the bath. How mad Mama got!”

  “Now at least I do something for the household by not bathing. Before, I had to endure the old lady’s nagging all the time. Why couldn’t I work, look at your brother in the CIDEZ and you here lazing around, they’re going to throw you in jail. And on top of it, I had to bathe. Now at least she’s calm.”

  “The one who’s about to go play dominos on the corner is me. I’m going out of my mind with boredom!”

  “You won’t believe it. Every day there are fewer who go to play on the corner. Most of them seem like zombies but they aren’t. I know because their skin isn’t decaying and their eyes aren’t white, but they have a lost look and they’re clumsy. The other day, I arrived at the corner and there was a pile of people around the table. Timba and Pancha’s son, what’s his name, Omarito, were playing. Everyone was silent, silent as a grave, my brother. When have you ever seen a domino game with everyone silent?”

  “Well... Wasn’t it invented by some monks who were under a vow of silence?”

  “But in Cuba dominos is played with shouts, mi hermano! That’s what happens. Zombies have become fashionable. Even the young guys want to look like the living dead.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “It’s true. It’s not my case, I do it for the extra meat ration, and to get the sector boss off my back.” The sector boss was nothing more than a bad mix of policeman and social worker in charge of making life impossible for those who weren’t “socially integrated,” as was the case with my brother before he “became a zombie.” “But there are chamacos, the ones who sit in the park on G Street...”

  “Where the geeks and freaks used to hang out?”

  “Exactly. They use makeup to look like zombies. The only thing they do is shamble in silence from 23 to the Malecón and from the Malecón back to 23. Then the police show up and yell at them to go back to their homes, and no one complains. They all obediently get on the last bus at two in the morning. That P2 comes here full of emos and freaks. All silent. So silent you can hear your own breathing. Silent as a tomb.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s the truth. I prefer not to go out.”

  In the dining room, abuela continued to watch her new television, recently taken out of the box. Mama was cooking something. I decided to amuse myself reading the paper. The Granma is the only one we get. Those red letters make up, in this strange font, the word for “abuelita” in English. Below, in white letters on a black background, it reads: Official Publication of the Communist Party of Cuba. The Granma is a newspaper that continues the now-extinct tradition of the official publications of the communist parties, like Pravda in its time. Generally, they are daily papers that don’t permit competition and only express one opinion: that of the government.

  I’ve been reading this same newspaper for years and I don’t get tired of checking that motto. As if it were something marvelous and exciting, as if it were going to change overnight, as if one day below those red letters it might read: The Official Publication of the Cuban Republican Party. Or perhaps The Official Publication of the Christian Democratic Party.

  I read the headline: ZOMBIES, A WEAPON OF THE REVOLUTION.

  I don’t even bother to read the article. It’s no doubt some piece of crap, like everything in the Granma. I throw the paper aside. I don’t know what to do, not having anything specific to do.

  There’s a knock at the door and Mama shouts a long “commmmmmming!” Panchito runs into his room to play his role as a zombie. It was one of the mosquito inspectors, the same one as ever. But this time he was odder than usual, too quiet. But his skin was in good condition and though he walked carefully, it wasn’t with the clumsiness of a zombie. He was human, he was alive at any rate. I’ve spent enough time with zombies to be able to tell.

  “Do you have water tanks?” he asked in a flat voice, like a telephone operator.

  “Two, one on the roof and the other below.”

  Mama was right in front of him with the visto in her hand. A paper that I’ve never understood its reason for existing, despite my Master’s degree in biochemistry.

  “Do you have spirit glasses?”

  “No.”

  Something strange was happening with this man. Every time he asked a question it seemed he was going to write down the answer, but he never did so. He asked the same questions as ever, the same ones ever since the “war” on mosquitos was first declared instead of recognizing the imminent danger of an epidemic of dengue fever (we’ve always been good at inventing enemies). Nonetheless, something was different in this man. He asked the right questions, in a flat and atonal language. That could be normal; in general, they aren’t the brightest bulbs. When he was answered, he acted as if he were going to note something down but he never did so. He didn’t pretend to write, he just didn’t do it. As if writing was an ancient and abstract memory buried in his subconscious.

  Strange, very strange. Especially because I’d already seen this sort of uncompleted cycle of motor functions. I’d seen it too often at work to ignore it. It’s a typical reaction in our experimentation subjects. But this man didn’t look like one. He could even speak. Of course, I hadn’t heard a single complex sentence.

  “Do you have flowers with water?” he said.

  “That depends on the kind of flowers,” I interrupted the conversation despite Mama’s killer look.

  I knew what I was doing, I was just trying an experiment. If I was right, he couldn’t answer a question of that sort. With all my heart, I hoped I was wrong. Mama didn’t find my interruption funny at all, “Ricardo, what are you saying! Our comrade is in a hurry and...”

  The sentence froze in the air. Our comrade the inspector from the campaign against the mosquito had leaped at me like a predator. His eyes were white and his mouth was open. He made a small whine as he moved toward me with a lost gaze.

  “Panchito, get Mama out of here,” I shouted.

  My brother leapt from his room, grabbed Mama by the shoulders and pulled her away from the zombie. Panchito was always very capable when it was necessary, he wasn’t the layabout everyone always said. Meanwhile, I moved out of the zombie’s path and gave it a kick in the calf. It didn’t even have to be a very strong kick, zombies don’t have good balance. I’d seen the CIDEZ security forces do it. The body fell heavily.

  We didn’t have much time. All our lives were in danger. A single bite, a single brush of its saliva, and there’d be a new zombie in the family. Then it would just be a question of time before there wasn’t any family.

  “Grab him, quick!” I shouted at Panchito, “don’t let him get up!”

  Mama shouted hysterically. Panchito and I each held a shoulder in a useless attempt to immobilize it. The zombie grunted and tried to get up. Its strength was far greater than that of the two of us together. Little by little, it managed to rise despite our efforts. It was winning the battle against gravity. It was just a question of time. Mama didn’t stop shouting.

  But abuela was silent. The television was still on but there was no longer anyone before the Atec-panda. Abuela was always the most practical person in the family. In silence, she got up from her beloved seat and walked, slowly because at her age it didn’t make sense to go anywhere in a hurry, to her roo
m. She appeared again when the zombie was almost standing. We hung from its shoulders in an effort to weigh it down. We barely delayed its slow movements. The music of the Cuban Television National News program could be heard in the dining room. The zombie still hadn’t bit anyone.

  In her hands, abuela carried abuelo’s old, heavy cane. The terrible cane of the Old Man, may he rest in piece. Cedar with a silver tip. The terror of the muggers of the neighborhood when they tried to hold up a poor and defenseless old man. A souvenir of when things came from the United States instead of Russian or China. Mama fell silent.

  The zombie continued to grunt.

  Abuela gave it a blow, a dull thud. Coagulated blood stained the floor and the walls. I felt the crunch of those cranial bones breaking. Abuela remained motionless, holding herself up with the cane. She looked like a samurai in a Akira Kurosawa film. The zombie, on the floor, didn’t groan any more, it didn’t even move.

  “Close the door!” Mama once again took control of the situation. Panchito ran to obey. “Ricardo Miguel, you work with zombies. How is it that a living dead can speak?”

  Not only could it speak, it could also look you in the eye and didn’t have rotting skin. Even if its blood had coagulated. I hate when everyone looks at me waiting for a convincing explanation. I carefully studied the body on the floor with its smashed head. I looked over its skin, saw the reflexes of its limbs that still moved automatically, the way the tail of a lizard will still thrash after it’s dead. This couldn’t be possible. It violated the principle of the increase of entropy and I don’t know how many other laws of physics. This smooth skin, not decayed, didn’t fit with how the Z virus behaved. Nor that focused gaze, almost like that of a human. It could even speak simple sentences.

  “It’s evolution,” I said aloud, but the truth was, I was speaking to release all the horror that was in my brain. “They’re adapting to us. They’ve begun to mimic us.”

  “What’s this adapting?” Panchito was almost hysterical. “What do you mean ‘it’s evolution’? They can’t evolve because they’re nothing. They’re zombies, the living dead. That’s all.”

  “It’s not the zombies, it’s the virus.”

  It didn’t make much sense to explain this to my family, they wouldn’t understand anything. The zombies are something more than the living dead, they’re biotic systems. The reservoir for the only life form we haven’t been able to eradicate: the virus. No scientist knows for certain if they’re living beings or organic automata. We can exterminate faster and stronger predators, but we haven’t been able to destroy a minor adversary like the influenza. Or VIH. Now the Z virus is a step ahead of the others. It takes control of our bodies, kills them, reorders our DNA and converts us into biting machines. In order to thereby further disseminate the Z virus among humankind.

  “It’s our fault,” I said. And suddenly there was that horrible silence that meant that everyone was paying attention to me. “It was our serum that helped it adapt to us. We were wrong. We wanted to use them as slaves and we gave the Z virus the tool it needed to adapt itself to us.”

  “But why? Why does it want to adapt to us?”

  “It’s a common trait among animals to fight against its predators. That’s how they survive.”

  “We are the predators of the zombie? Now you’ve lost it, hermano mío! Did you miss the news? In other countries, people flee from zombies because they eat them alive. They are predators on us!”

  “We shoot them with bullets, we use gas against them and we burn them with flamethrowers. We even lock them up in places like the CIDEZ to use them as guinea pigs. We’re their greatest threat, although it might seem impossible. And the serum let them seem like us. I must go back to the CIDEZ. I need to inform them... these samples must be analyzed.”

  “No one is going anywhere!” Mama said, firmly.

  Her face was serious. Her voice had stopped everyone in their tracks, like when we were little kids and she yelled at us. She wasn’t joking, asking, nor begging. And this was Mama. There was no way of crossing her. Abuela, for her part, sat down again on her seat and watched us in silence.

  “Much less you, Ricardo Miguel. We don’t know what happened at the CIDEZ. We don’t even know anything about that mysterious ‘biological leak.’“

  “But, Mama,” Pancho said, “we must do something, warn someone.”

  “Who are you going to warn? The president of the CDR? He’s no longer even seen any more because a zombie bit his wife in Venezuela and he didn’t declare it at customs. By now, he must also be one of them. With or without serum. Are you going to warn the police? They’ve never done anything for us. They spend all day on the road asking for identifications to then give them back without saying anything? Maybe inform on your friends from the neighborhood who no longer make a racket like they used to? Not even the old gossips come to tell me their tidbits about everyone. Kids no longer throw stones, no one complains any more. This cuadra is a grave. A grave where the cadavers still don’t know they’re dead. Now anyone could be a zombie.”

  There was nothing more to say. She was completely correct. That guy from the FAR was also correct. They are a Hive Mind that was much more intelligent than we are. And now they’re adapting.

  X

  I’m stopped in front of the door to Maria’s house and I feel like I did back when I had my first girlfriend. Nervous and insecure. I hear her footsteps from within. I’m worried because she drags her feet to open the door.

  It’s the same Maria as ever. Only quieter. And without the shine of intelligence in her eyes that made her so sensual. Now she’s just a common person who drags her feet when she walks. Just like the mosquito inspector, if one can call that puppet a person.

  I’ve come to check out a theory that occurred to me between the horror and the stress. A scientist’s mind sometimes generates incredible things under pressure. Where a normal human would crumble under a nervous breakdown, the trained and organized mind of a scientist might begin to work with extraordinary results. And thereby stay sane, like what happened to me.

  “I know everything,” I say bluntly, and the scene seems to me like something from a Japanese B movie. We two, there on the threshold, standing in front of one another. Looking at one another without touching and speaking in monosyllables.

  “Define everything.”

  “The hive mind. What you are doing?”

  “We?”

  “I think it would be more appropriate to use the singular. Because all of you are part of the same mind, no?”

  “Something more or less like that. It’s much more complex than you can imagine. How did you realize?”

  “Simple analysis. Putting together one piece of data here and another there. The serum, it was always the serum. We can’t create a vaccine. The Z virus has five times more antigenic variables than the common cold. We decided to change the ecosystem of the virus, the zombie itself. It was better for us to make a less voracious zombie, more manageable. Like in the Haitian legend of the Bokor. Friendly zombies, easy to control. Revolutionary zombies. We changed the chemistry of their brains to let them develop vital functions such as smell, vision or touch. The serum manages to mitigate the uncontrollable hunger present in all the zombies from North America, Europe and Japan. We think to convert them into manageable beings.”

  “As usual, you’re one step away from the truth but you can’t see the forest for the trees. What you say about the Z virus is true, everything, but you make one mistake. You’re looking at it as an antigen or a sickness. And the Z virus is a thinking being. Not like us, of course, it’s a virus. But it has all the qualities that define intelligence. In fact, it’s a higher intelligence that propagates itself through the virus. Before, you’d have called them organic automata. It’s a good concept. Until now, you think that it’s a case of a controlling mind when in truth it’s a common mind. A hive mind. First it was a parasite of the minds of the bodies. There’s a very practical reason for that: they’re complete
minds, human, but with little complexity. Empty. Good soldiers to parasitize more complex organisms: the living. Did you perhaps think that the serum was our invention? Doctor Álvarez was looking for a vaccine when he was bitten. But the virus didn’t zombify him. He wasn’t necessary as a soldier. His biochemical knowledge, as well as his reputation in the scientific complex, were necessary to develop a new phase of the initial plan. To achieve a slow and subtle zombification.”

  “When did they zombify you?”

  “In the director’s office. I suppose that I began to be a problem for them and they decided to silence me. They used the new aerosol version of the virus-serum in the same gas. But their plan backfired. The hive mind allowed me to retain my individuality in exchange for being able to use my trained brain.”

  “You planned the biological leak didn’t you?”

  “We should have called it a mass breakout. There were hundreds of zombies prisoner there. I could communicate with all of them, feel their pain, their frustration. Did you know that they feel everything just as we do? Only they don’t communicate like humans do. They speak directly with the Mind, but they’re as human as we are.”

  “As human as an ant performing its job.”

  “As human as any anonymous worker in any part of the world. As human as any Cuban who looks to the newspaper to know what he should think today. The Hive Mind is not the end, it’s only a more efficient form of civilization. Look at it like a highly evolved form of communism. A world without war, without crime, without property. Those who strived for communism placed their trust in the altruism of its leaders. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Fidel Castro... all of them became dictators, all of them were blinded by power. Because they were human. But the Hive Mind is more than human. It’s alien. It travels through the cosmos in strains of the Z virus and when it falls, on meteorites, onto a planet with intelligent life, it brings peace to its inhabitants.”