by Dayna Ingram
We reach the nurse’s station at the head of the emergency room waiting area. There actually aren’t too many people waiting around: a forty-ish mother with her two young boys sitting under the television in the corner, flipping through magazines; a be-flannelled mid-thirties lumberjack type holding an oil-stained rag over his hand in one of the center seats; and a sixty-some-odd-year-old couple holding hands in the seats nearest the entrance doors.
An identical nurse behind the station hands Renni a clipboard and a pen. The other nurse lets go of my wheelchair and says, “You’ll have to fill out those forms. It’s procedure.”
“It’s the emergency room.” Renni enunciates like she’s speaking to a child with a head injury. “Some crazed junky bit a hole in her leg; it’s actively inviting infection the longer you refuse to treat it. She needs to be tested for hepatitis, among other things. I’m sure you can get started on her while I take care of these formalities, hm?”
That’s the most amount of words I’ve ever heard Renni Ramirez string together at one time, in real life or on screen. Her characters aren’t exactly known for being verbose. And she’s speechifying on behalf of me. I feel like a proud parent…but in a reverse-Oedipal way.
“Well, but,” the nurse behind the counter starts, “Is she covered under your insurance?”
Renni plunges a hand into the side pocket of her camo pants and pulls out her wallet. She takes out her insurance card and hands it over. “Yeah, she’s my cousin.”
“I thought she was your friend?” The other nurse says.
“We get along,” Renni says.
“This insurance company only gives coverage to immediate family,” the counter nurse says.
“Yeah, she’s my sister.”
“But you just said….”
“Sometimes I don’t like her too much so I pretend she’s my cousin to piss her off.”
“But….”
“Hey look, guys—I’m bleeding!”
While they were occupied in their verbal battle, I surreptitiously drove my fingers into my bandage until I almost blacked out from the pain and felt the bandage grow soggy with my blood. I am the queen of quick distractions. Also, I may need to throw up.
Finally recognizing the urgency of the situation, nurse number one takes the reins of my wheelchair and pushes me through some swinging doors into the halls of the emergency wing. Briefly, I regret not saying goodbye to Renni—or thank you, or please sign my breasts—because I have a feeling she won’t be sticking around, with me or this crazy, zombie-infested town.
The nurse leads me to a single empty room, lays a paper gown out on the roll-away hospital bed and tells me to get changed. “I’ll have a doctor in to examine you in just a minute,” she says, turns on her heel military style, and she’s gone.
Alone, the world becomes as quiet as it was inside Renni’s motorcycle helmet. Slowly I climb out of the wheelchair and lie on top of the paper clothes on the thin, uncomfortable mattress of the bed. This is all the energy I can manage. I lie there on my stomach, fingers clenching, releasing, clenching the pillow that is just centimeters away from my head but I don’t have the energy to slide it beneath me. I’m not Superman. Here without any distractions, in this swollen bubble of illusory safety and false normalcy, I can finally stop listening out for everyone and everything else and just listen to my body. Oh, joy.
My brain has been rightly ignoring the pain in my leg because it’s like information overload; my nerves can only deliver so many messages at once. The whole thing feels like it’s steeped in lava that is at once volcanically hot and iceberg cold. The icy hot stab of pain shoots all the way up from the bite and spider-webs out over my chest, along the back of my throat, and up into my brain, specifically right behind my eyes. The Advil I’d taken earlier soothed my fever some, but it’s gonna take some extra-strength prescription shit to knock this bitch out. Speaking of knocking things out, I’ve noticed my eyelids have become increasingly heavy, and that even though the blackness of closing my eyes brings with it the intense urge to vomit, I keep closing them. Close, open, close, open. Like prolonged blinking.
Suddenly I cease to be aware of anything, not my body or the pain. I pass out.
While my body lies there doing its unconscious healing thing bodies are wont to do, these other things are happening:
…Renni Ramirez sits in the waiting room, ostensibly filling out insurance forms while chewing on the pen cap (later bid over by the nurses and orderlies, finally won by Thomas T. Thomas for $25 and two tickets to the monster truck rally on Thursday), trying to figure out which sounds better: “By the way, there’s a horde of zombies causing some shit at the strip mall down yonder. Might want to check into that.” Or: “A group of smelly men assaulted me in the strip mall down yonder, could you be a dear and go defend my honor? Bring some guns!”
…A group of three male doctors huddle behind the swinging doors to the back quarters of the emergency room, spying through the glass at the famous actress in the spotted blue sundress and navy camo pants, alternately convincing themselves it can’t be her and upping each other’s bribes for the chance to set her broken nose.
…Brad and Cherry hold each other in the manager’s office of Ashbee’s, telling themselves their closeness is born only out of their need for warmth, even though the zombie outbreak has had little to no effect on the quality of the air conditioning. He listens out for any strange sounds, prepared to start piling chairs in front of doors, because it’s the only thing he can think of to do; she listens to her heart beating, and to his heart beating, and wonders why it has taken her so long to notice how ripped his pectoral muscles are beneath his unflattering Ashbee’s vest.
…My brain regurgitates previously absorbed facts about zombies—namely, that if you are bitten by a zombie, you become a zombie—into a soup of my deepest seated anxieties—surrounding my body image, my lack of college education, how I killed my gerbil that one time because I left the cage open and it got out and I sat on it , and Carmelle—and feeds it back into my dreamscape, so that while my body repairs itself, I am treated to this fun adventure: I’m having sex with Carmelle, she’s on top, straddling me with her fingers between my legs and my hands on her bouncing breasts, and I’m moaning, but not in a sexy oh-yeah-baby-do-it-just-like-that way, and then I say out loud (or in my brain), “You look delicious. Let me taste you.” And bouncing, straddling Carmelle laughs because she thinks I’m being sexy when really I am just hungry, because next thing either of us knows, I’m clinging to her left breast with my teeth and ripping out her nipple, tying my tongue around the nerve endings as if it were a maraschino cherry. She falls back, clutching her bleeding chest, saying over and over, “I knew it, I knew it.” My gerbil runs across my bed and I step on it. The scene shifts and I’m dragging my rotting feet down the street, arms out in the horror movie classic zombie strut, and some hot punk girls across the street point at me and laugh. One of them says, “She’s fat.”
When I slog out of this fever dream, I lie perfectly still and keep my eyes closed, savoring the blackness, the solitude. Only vaguely do I hear the sound of people’s voices, and only slowly do I recognize the voices are coming from a television or radio program. I can’t make out exact words, but one program employs a laugh track (or a very lubricated live audience) before the channel changes. It occurs to me that someone must be in the room with me in order to change these channels, and that’s when I have to start remembering where I am and why I’m here. I open my eyes.
It’s a slightly different hospital room; this one has a window that looks out onto the parking lot. It’s a single room with its own bathroom off to my right, and a small TV anchored to the wall in the corner. In front of which, Renni Ramirez stands, pointing a black remote at it like a magic wand, shaking it in agitation.
She’s still here.
For a few minutes, I just watch her. I haven’t moved at all yet, except to turn my head slightly, and she’s so intent on flipping the channels of
the television that she hasn’t noticed I’m awake. She’s pulled her hair back into a wavy ponytail tied up in a plain rubber band she probably got off one of the nurses; fine brown wisps tickle the sides of her face, her ears. With her hair up, the bulk of her neck is exposed, and I spend thirty-seven seconds studying the contours of this alone, how neatly it curves into her collarbone, how delicately it moves when she swallows. I admire the vibrancy of her tanned, brown skin—which, this close up, I can see has been slightly freckled by the sun in some places, like along her elbow—and how well it complements her sundress and camo pants. An odd combination that she works with enviable confidence. Somehow, her outfit has suffered not a drop of blood. And there, her sunglasses still dangle comfortably against the bust of the dress. A bandage is now taped across the bridge of her nose, and the blood has been cleaned away. It’s calming, the surreal effect of her presence here in this hospital room in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio, but also panic-inducing; it proves that the laws of probability no longer apply: As long as Renni Ramirez can stand next to your bedside and watch forty seconds of a M*A*S*H rerun, the dead can walk the earth.
Finally, I make a little waking-up noise—yawning wetly, fidgeting under the thin hospital blanket, crinkling the stupid paper gown someone has changed me into. I blink my eyes as if I’ve just opened them, and Renni is standing right next to my bed. Before I can greet her, she sticks a hand through the metal safety rail and clasps my hand, gently.
“Devin,” she says, and her voice cracks. Her eyes look watery, red lines of exhaustion or stress cloud the milky whites, stabbing the deep brown irises. She swallows hard, creases appear on her forehead like omens, and she tries again, “Devin, it’s bad.”
I think so many things all at once that I think nothing at all. The fear in my eyes must be well communicated because she tightens her grip on my hand and a single tear escapes her eye, lingers on her cheek for support.
“There was nothing they could do, Devin,” she says. “Your leg…they…they had to amputate.”
I bolt upright and lunge for my legs, kicking off the blanket, and grasp my knee about the same time Renni’s evil cackle cannonballs out of her. My face flushes, starting at the neck and steaming to my ears, as I pat both my good legs, one bandaged professionally now, the other perfectly fine all along.
“Good one,” I say dryly, the words scratching my throat.
Renni pushes away from my bedside, still laughing, and wipes away the tear. “I had to do it, man.”
There’s a peach-colored pitcher and two Styrofoam cups on the bedside table near my IV. She pours water from the pitcher into one of the cups and hands it to me. “Thanks,” I say, drinking.
“They don’t just hire me for my stereotype,” she says, and turns back around to try the television again.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to get a local news station,” she says, jamming buttons with her thumb.
“Try four.”
She clicks over to the channel but it’s nothing but the last vestiges of Sunday morning cartoons clinging to their final moments of airtime.
“This town does have one news van, right?” She leaves the channel where it is and throws the remote on the chair against the window, defeated. “I mean, they’d be covering that shit in the strip if there was anything to cover, right?”
“You sound like you think we hallucinated all of it.”
She wipes nonexistent sweat from her neck and looks over at some invisible spot on the wall, as if remembering. “No, man, it happened.”
“Didn’t you tell someone about it, or call the police?”
“Sort of,” she says. She rolls her eyes at my look of concern. “Look, I’m not gonna tell people some zombies just ate a couple of guys, okay. I told them there was a riot and that’s how we both got hurt. They sent a couple of cars.”
My mind flashes on Biff, innocently wandering into his death moments after relieving himself, woefully unprepared for what awaited him. I think of Cherry insisting the cops aren’t equipped to deal with the impossible, and of the hordes that almost got us as we limped our way out of the parking lot. And suddenly I’m crying.
Crying makes me feel like I’m six years old, and I want to be six years old so I can hide my face under the blanket and sleep away the pain, cartoon voices in the background lulling me into a false sense of security that only needs to last until my well runs dry. But I can’t hide under the blanket. I’m an adult. A blubbering, weak, foolish, near-crippled adult, crying in front of Renni Fucking Ramirez.
As if things couldn’t get any more surreal, she swoops away my water cup before I can humiliate myself further by spilling it all over myself, and touches my face to wipe the tears off my cheeks with her thumbs. She crouches down next to me to be eye level, and runs her fingers through the tangles in my hair.
“It’s okay,” is all she says, and it’s all she needs to say. I try hard to pull myself together, for her. I sniff back mucus, blink back eye gunk, lick the salt off my lips. Renni’s hands move from my face to hold my hand, for real this time.
“That guy was your friend, huh?” She asks.
I shake my head. Then I nod. “He was my boss.”
“You called him a bear.”
I smile a little, which turns into a small laugh. “He kind of was.”
“Yeah,” Renni says. “I could see that.”
We sit there in silence for a minute, remembering Biff Tipping, the Bear.
After a time, I ask her, “How’s your nose?”
She crinkles her nose in a Bewitched way, and looks at it cross-eyed. “I can’t really feel it anymore.” With her free hand, the one not holding onto me, heavy and reassuring, she takes an orange bottle of pills out of her pocket. “Endocet. Can’t pony up for the real stuff in Buttfuck, Ohio, I guess.”
I smile at the wink in her voice, and tap my IV. “Must be pumping something pretty good into me. I can barely feel my leg anymore.”
Unfortunately, I ruin the relative lightness of our moment by calling attention to my possible Infection. Honestly I’ve been trying not to think about it, but it’s all I think about. And now that I’ve had that damn dream, all I think about is the leg, my poor underfoot gerbil, and those girls calling me fat (Who calls a zombie fat? Honestly!). There’s an awkward moment where we both try not to look at my leg, and end up meeting each other’s eyes, which is somehow even more awkward.
Luckily, Renni is adept at conversation starters. “I’m double jointed. Want to see?”
She shows me how she can pop her elbow out the wrong way, which enables her to twist her arm around at an ungodly angle. She can pop some bone in her wrist out too, to shift it while she spins her arm almost full circle on the hospital mattress. “Put your fingers there,” she instructs, and I touch the bone as she twists her hand around. I can feel it pop, and then the sinews of tendons pushing it around. Her skin is hot, or my skin is, and I have to break contact before I start blushing again.
“That’s just for you,” she says, crossing her arms over the safety rail, no longer holding my hand, but it’s okay. “No blogging.”
“What makes you think I even have a blog?”
“Everyone has a blog,” she says offhandedly.
“Well, no offense or anything, but I’ll probably write about getting bit by a zombie before I mention your name.” Dammit, Devin, back to the conversation-killer leg.
“All right, you need to take the zombie quiz,” Renni says.
I just kind of look at her like she’s lost it.
“First question: are you hungry?”
“What?” She raises her eyebrows at me. “I guess I could eat.”
“Second question: are you hungry for brains?”
“I…don’t think so.” My mouth is kind of salivating, but it’s more for the taste of cheese than anything else right now.
“Third question: Are you hungry for human flesh?”
“No,” I say.
“Final
test.” She picks up my arm by the wrist and touches two fingers to the pulsing vein. “Oh look you’re alive. Not a zombie.” She drops my wrist back onto the bed dramatically. “Good enough for you?”
I just start laughing, I can’t help it. We laugh together for a minute, and then I say, stupidly, “I’m glad you’re here.”
Her laugh kind of morphs into a snort and she looks down at her arms, once again crossed over the bedrail, and doesn’t say anything.
In an effort to make things even more awkward, I continue to say more stupid things. “Why are you here, anyway? In Ohio?”
She snort-laughs again, and wipes at some phantom stray hairs on her forehead. “I was riding with someone. Supposed to do the coast-to-coast thing. He bailed in Virginia. I kept riding.”
“At the store, you said you were waiting for someone.”
“Yeah,” she says, starting to trail off. “Think I waited long enough.”
“Then why stay?”
She looks at me then, in a way that makes me want to avert my eyes; I have to pinch my thigh under the blanket to stay focused. Her mouth kind of crooks into a half-smile, her eyes narrow invitingly, she licks her lips and says, “Do you want me to go?”
You know, zombies didn’t start out as the brain-eating cannibals we all know and love (in movies, anyway). They didn’t even use to be free agents. They were like slaves of the mystic world, summoned by a witch or whatever the male version of witch is and given instructions on who to maim or kill or frighten into an early grave. According to some fanzine I read in high school, George Romero changed all that with his zombies in the now classic Night of the Living Dead movie. His zombies rose up from the grave of their own mysterious volition, and they were spurred on not by evil conjurors but by a deep, unending need to feed. I’m not sure when the once-bitten lore became a zombie standard (following down the well-trodden path of vampires and werewolves), if it was Romero too, or something older. I don’t even know for sure if the dude who bit me today was a zombie or just some skeezed-out old homeless guy gone psychotic due to lack of meds (but how to explain the small horde waiting for us in the parking lot?), but I am sure that he did bite me. Hard and hungry enough to tear out a mouth-sized chunk of flesh. And if he was a zombie, soon I will be too. So, there’s no real reason to lie to Renni Ramirez now, right?