Zombie Baseball Beatdown

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “Yeah.”

  We watched the bobbing heads of the cleanup squad as they made their way through the corrals. When they got to the zombie cows, they started shouting. And then there was a crackling, zapping sound, followed by squealing.

  The zombie cows started flowing out of their corral. “I think they opened a gate,” Joe whispered.

  “They’re letting them run free?” I asked. “That’s crazy!”

  Throwing away caution, I climbed higher on the fence, trying to get a better view of what was happening across the feedlots.

  A stream of zombie cows were being herded toward…

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What?” Joe popped up, too, followed by Miguel.

  The guys in the gray suits were zapping the zombie cows with cattle prods. The cows moved faster and faster, running like a frothing river, all of them mooing and screaming and biting one another. All of them stampeding toward these huge doors in the side of the Milrow meatpacking plant.

  Over the doors, a faded sign was posted.

  BEEF INTAKE

  CHAPTER 28

  “So they’re really going to make zombie burgers?” Joe asked.

  “They can’t be,” I said. “That would be insane.”

  “Don’t forget who we’re dealing with. These guys don’t care about anything,” Miguel said. “They deal with bad meat all the time. They’ll just spray it with some ammonia and send it out like it’s the freshest stuff in the world.”

  “You still got space on your phone?” I asked Joe.

  “Sure.”

  “Good. We’re going in, then.”

  Miguel shook his head. “The game’s over, Rabi. We should just go back and give this to the police or something.”

  “You think they’ll believe us?” I asked. “All we’ve got are pictures of some crazy cows.”

  “We got the zombie,” Miguel said.

  Joe shook his head. “No, we don’t. You think I could film and dance on a fence at the same time?” He opened his phone and showed us the footage. The cows looked crazy, sure, but it all looked pretty low-res, and even Miguel had to admit it didn’t do the job.

  “We need to see what they’re doing,” I said. “Then we can report it. We need real proof. Something people can’t say we faked for YouTube.”

  “Like what?” Miguel said. “You want to try to bust out a zombie cow and drag it back to town?”

  “I want to go into that meatpacking plant, and I want to see what they’re doing in there.”

  “And you want me to help.”

  Joe said, “It’s a zombie uprising, man. If we don’t work together, we’re all toast. Pretty soon, zombies’ll be like lice. Everywhere. You know you want to see that.”

  Miguel gave him a dirty look.

  “Come on, Miguel,” I said. “Don’t give me that whole Zombies won’t cross the border thing. This is all of us. We’re all in this. Whatever Milrow’s doing is going to affect everyone, sooner or later.”

  “I know I’m going to regret this,” Miguel said, but he went along as we hacked our way back through the corn and over to the Milrow Meat Solutions main entrance. We flopped down in the cornfields a hundred feet from the doors.

  “There it is.”

  “You still got the key?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but there’s a ton of people around right now. As soon as they see a couple of kids, they’ll kick us out.”

  “Should we wait until dark?”

  “You want to be out here in the dark?” Joe asked.

  “I thought you loooved all this zombie cow action.”

  “Not at night! I want to at least be able to see which direction they’re coming from. And that one zombie’s still roaming around.”

  “We need to get in during the right work hours,” Miguel said. “Otherwise my uncle’s key definitely won’t work. These keys are set to only open doors during your shifts.”

  “Can you describe what the place looks like, inside?” I asked. “You think there’s some place we can hide?”

  Miguel shrugged. “Maybe one of the bathrooms. They got these bathrooms and changing rooms for all the workers, for washing off all the blood and everything, and they’re pretty close to the doors. Nobody’s in there when a shift is happening because everyone’s trying to keep up the pace on the lines. Workers can’t slow down or they get fired.”

  We needed to figure out some way to hang out inside and wait until things got quieter. “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got an idea. We need a pen and paper and some tape, though. We need someone to go back to town.”

  “If we keep riding around on our bikes, I’m going to get picked up, for sure,” Miguel said.

  I looked at Joe. “You do it.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you look like an American.”

  “How come you’re always telling me about how you’re an American, too, and now I got to do all the work?” Joe groused.

  “That’s not what it’s about,” I said. “If they see Miguel, they’ll grab him. Especially after that baseball bat stunt with his neighbor. If they see me, I’m connected to him on account of the last time the police hauled me in. But if they see you?

  “Think about it like comic books. You’re the invisible one. You come and go like the wind. No one even notices you. You’re just part of town. Like the signs and the corn and the cows. Nothing to look at; move along, folks.”

  Joe started looking more excited. “I come and go like the wind. Invisible.”

  “You got it. It’s your superpower. Now, you want to use your powers of invisibility for good? Or are you going to work for the bad guys?” I nodded over at the Milrow building.

  “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  And he was off. Just like that. Whoosh. Like the wind. Miguel was looking at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That was creepy,” he said.

  “What was?”

  “The way you got inside Joe’s head. One second he didn’t want to do any work, the next second he thinks he’s one of his comic book heroes, and he’s riding all the way back to town.”

  I thought about it. “We all want to be important. I guess you just have to find some way to help people see why they are.”

  “I would have just yelled at him and told him to stop being a dumbwad.”

  “That wouldn’t work with Joe. That’s what his dad does. It just messes with him more. This way is better. Everyone wants to be a hero, right?”

  “Not me. I just want to get the heck out of this place.”

  “No, you don’t. Not really.”

  Miguel glared at me. “Yeah. I do. So leave me alone, all right?”

  I shut up. We sat in the corn and waited, listening to the mooing of the cows in the feedlots, accompanied by other, stranger sounds that might have been cows screaming as they bit one another.

  Miguel just stared into space, waiting.

  I was getting more worried about him. No family. No future. It would make anyone crazy.

  Miguel was wrong, I decided.

  He might not want to be a hero, but it was starting to look like he needed to be one.

  CHAPTER 29

  “What’s been happening?” Joe asked as he returned and flopped down beside us.

  “Nothing,” Miguel said. “Just them cows doing their zombie screaming thing.”

  “I got the paper and the tape. I got some flashlights, too.”

  “Where’d you get these?”

  “Took ’em from my dad’s toolbox.” He tossed us some bottles of orange and blue rehydrating drink and some candy bars. “I brought provisions, too.”

  “Good thinking!”

  I took the paper and pen from Joe and wrote some block letters on the paper as Miguel stared at the meatpacking plant.

  “What are you doing?” Joe asked.

  “Don’t worry about it.” I got some of the tape out, too. “Ready?”

  Miguel flashed the key card and grabbed his baseball bat. “Bo
rn ready.”

  “Let’s go.”

  We headed through the parking lot toward the workers’ entrance. “You sure about this?” Joe asked, scanning the lot. “Shouldn’t we be sneaky?”

  “If we look sneaky, when they see us, they’ll think we’re sneaky,” I said. “Act like you belong.”

  “We don’t belong in a meatpacking plant!” Joe said.

  “We do now. If someone stops us, we say we were playing ball and I fell down in the muck, and now we’re looking for someplace to clean me up.”

  Joe held his nose. “Well, that’s believable, at least.”

  We reached the door and Miguel swiped the key card through the door’s reader. Nothing happened. My heart stopped.

  Miguel slid the card again, slower. The light glowed green. I almost wanted to laugh. They might have gotten rid of the workers, but they hadn’t gotten rid of the keys yet.

  Miguel pulled the door open. “Gentlemen,” he said, and waved us through. “Milrow Meat Solutions would like to welcome you to its state-of-the-art protein-processing facility.”

  Inside, Miguel walked down the hall like he owned it, and we followed. I wished I had that kind of swagger. A kid with a baseball bat, not afraid of anything. He turned and walked straight into the locker rooms.

  We heard a voice. “What are you doing here, kid?”

  Joe and I froze.

  Busted.

  No one was supposed to be in the changing rooms. I half expected Miguel to just whack the guy with his bat, given the weird mood he was in.

  Instead, we heard him say, “Janitor, sí?” and then a whole stream of Spanish that I didn’t catch.

  “You speak English?” the grown-up voice asked.

  Miguel said, “Mop, sí? Mop, mop, sí?”

  “Oh,” the man’s voice said, sounding uncertain as Miguel unleashed another stream of Spanish. “Uh. All that stuff is over here.”

  Their voices headed away from us. I motioned to Joe, and the two of us ducked into the changing rooms. At the far end, there was a row of toilet stalls, and on the last door, I taped the sign I’d made earlier.

  OUT OF ORDER

  “Get in there,” I said.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Joe said.

  “We’ll see. Climb up on the toilet. Don’t let your feet show underneath.”

  We ducked inside and balanced inside the stall. I wondered what was happening with Miguel. I hoped he was okay.

  “Dude, you smell,” Joe said.

  “Shut up!” I whispered.

  Footsteps were echoing in the changing rooms. We both hunkered down. Someone rapped on the door.

  “Open up,” Miguel said. “I got a better plan.”

  When we opened the door, Miguel was standing there in a janitor’s jumpsuit and holding a mop.

  “Where’d you get all that?”

  Miguel smirked. “Talk Spanish and these jerks all think you’re supposed to have a mop in your hand.” He waved us out. “Come on. I got a real place to hide.” He wrinkled his nose at me. “And, dude, you got to get out of those clothes. Hurry, before some other manager comes down here. Shift change shouldn’t happen for a little while, still.”

  It turned out there was a whole room with mops and brooms and tons of cleaning supplies. Miguel dumped Joe in the closet and me in the shower, while he stood outside in his janitor uniform with a yellow bucket full of mop water. When I was clean, he tossed me another uniform that he’d found and crammed me into the closet with Joe.

  “Stay put,” he said.

  “Wait! Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I’m going to use my superpower of invisibility,” Miguel smirked. “I’m going to come and go like the wind.”

  CHAPTER 30

  By the time Miguel came back, Joe and I were dead bored. It felt like it had been hours.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “All over,” Miguel said. “They’re just letting out the shift. We’re going to have to get out of here fast, as soon they let out. After that, they got a bunch of janitors who all come in.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The guy told me I was early.”

  “Should we all be janitors?” Joe asked.

  “None of us can be, when the real janitors get here.”

  “They’re going to want our suits back,” Miguel agreed.

  “So, what are we trying to find?” Joe asked.

  “Something that the cops will actually care about,” I said. “Something Milrow’s cleanup squad can’t just scoop up and hide. And something that can’t be denied by anyone.”

  We slipped out. The halls were dim with all the lights out, but we had flashlights. We tiptoed through the building.

  “It’s here,” Miguel said, standing in front of some steel doors.

  “What is?”

  He didn’t answer, just swung the doors open. We stood in a cavernous factory room tangled with conveyors and equipment: Meat hooks dangled from chains overhead, conveyor belts went every which way, and massive boxy machines that might have been grinders or other things—but I couldn’t tell—were everywhere. The place was so big you couldn’t even see the far side of it.

  We eased into the space. It was scary, with all the chains and hooks hanging down from their conveyors.

  “What are we looking for?” Joe asked.

  “Something that looks zombie,” I said. “Anything.”

  The concrete floors all glistened with water and blood, and everything gleamed. It was chilly, and it had the scent of a meat locker. It was like smelling life gone cold. Our breath steamed in front of us.

  “What about the cows?” Joe asked. “Where did they go?”

  Miguel waved toward the far side of the huge factory floor. “A bunch of them are in the next room over, in a huge pen. The cows get herded one by one up a ramp that leads into here—”

  Suddenly there was a rattling sound. “Hide!”

  We ducked behind the conveyor lines. Footsteps echoed, along with voices calling out to one another.

  “I thought they were all supposed to be gone!” I whispered.

  “Another shift?” Joe asked.

  “No,” Miguel said. “It’s only supposed to be cleaning crews. The guy I talked to said they were going to be cleaning the whole plant, so the night shift wasn’t going to run. Just cleaning.”

  Lights buzzed and flickered on. Workers in white full-body jumpsuits streamed in. Joe found a spot under some of the machinery. “Hide here!”

  We just barely squeezed under.

  “Don’t let your feet stick out!” Miguel whispered. “They’ll see us for sure.”

  It was tight, but we all fit. From our hiding place, we watched as more and more workers came in.

  “Who do those guys remind you of?” I asked.

  “Cleanup squad,” Joe said grimly.

  “Yeah. None of these are regular workers,” Miguel said. “Not with those clothes covering their whole bodies like that. And they don’t have aprons like my uncle and aunt used. These have got to be some other kind of Milrow people.”

  The conveyor lines started up. A door rattled and suddenly we could hear cows, screaming. More workers came in with huge knives and chain saw–like machines. They fired them up as the line started moving.

  The first cow appeared. It had a huge hole in its head, but that didn’t seem to bother the cow at all. A bunch of hooks snagged it and swept it off the ground as it struggled.

  “MOOOOooooooo!”

  The workers went after it with knives and saws. The cow tried to bite them, but they were fast. Cutting and chopping, peeling away the skin. The head came off, the belly opened up, the guts went down a drain. The cow’s head fell to the floor.

  “MOOOOOOoooooooo,” it said. Its hooked body was still jerking around even without its head.

  “Zombie cow for sure,” Joe said, as if we needed him to tell us. The cow was still alive, even though it was completely dead.

  One of the
workers got kicked by the dead cow, but he got right up and chopped the carcass in half. Then water sprayed it and the next worker whacked off the legs. The carcass whizzed along, carried by the hooks, with more workers slicing cuts of meat from the body, even as it kept wriggling.

  The zombie cow became smaller and smaller, and less and less like a cow, as each worker took a whack at it. Pieces and parts were slashed and sliced away, and dropped onto conveyor belts that whisked the meat this way and that through the processing plant, heading for who knew where.

  Another cow entered the production line, and the cleanup squad went after that one, too.

  “MOOoooooooo!”

  Slice! Hack! Chop!

  ZZzZzz-ZZZZzzzzz-ZZZZZZ went the chain saws.

  Another cow whacked into little red pieces.

  More of the line was gearing up. It was crazy loud in the factory now, like we were in the belly of a clanging monster. Ground-up meat oozed out of delivery tubes, and newly cut steaks whipped down conveyor lines, shrink-wrapped in plastic.

  More and more cows were being herded in through the doors, and every single one of them was mooing, even after it was chopped up and dead. The cow heads that had been discarded lay in a huge pile, snapping at one another and at any workers who walked past them.

  Pound after pound of red hamburger poured out of the machines around us, blobs of beef that dropped onto Styrofoam plates and then went through shrink-wrapping machines so that they came out on the other side looking shiny and fresh, with Milrow stickers on the plastic.

  Labels sped past us:

  FARMERS FEAST 100% ALL-NATURAL GROUND BEEF.

  FOREST GLEN ACRES, PURE GROUND BEEF.

  HIGH PLAINS RANCHES, USDA NATURAL GROUND BEEF.

  MILROW MEATS. TOP-QUALITY BEEF FROM OUR FAMILY RANCHES TO YOUR FAMILY TABLE.

  Joe had his cell phone out and he was snapping pictures, looking sick. “I think I’m a vegetarian.”

  Miguel gave him an annoyed glance. “Where did you think all your meat came from? You think it just bamfed into the supermarket like Nightcrawler?”

  I had to agree with Joe, though. It was brutal and nasty. None of the workers seemed to be worried about what they were doing at all. They were just being superefficient. Even if there hadn’t been zombie cow heads lying on the ground, mooing and rolling their eyes and snapping their teeth, the whole setup didn’t feel good to watch.