Eve (or: 'How to be a Zombie and not Murder Everyone')

by Cesar Vitale

  The man takes a couple of steps towards him. "Who are you?"

  "The zombie… behind… counter," Levon mumbles, on his hands and knees, "not… dangerous… cool… girl."

  He collapses face first on the floor, his hand extended in front of his body like he's waiting for rescue. I peek over the counter as the man turns my way.

  Trying hard as I can to smile, I rise, showcasing the paper in front of me.

  I'm cool =D.

  The man stares at me for what feels like seventeen weeks, gun still pointed straight to my chest. He frowns, then he unfrowns, then he frowns again. His kid takes a step forward.

  "I say shoot her anyways, dad!"

  "Fuck you, fatty," I say, to the boy.

  Gladly, they just hear grunts.

  "We've been on the road for four months, now," Patrick says, sliding his back down the wall to the floor with us. "Got all the way from San Diego to here. Walked most of the way."

  By my side, Levon's sleeping under the window, the moon cutting a piece of his face in bright silver. He looks peaceful.

  I scribble to Patrick:

  Where are you going?

  "New York," Patrick replies, simply. "They have a safe port there, my friend Jeremy told me. He was in the army, before it all –" he pauses, taking a deep breath. "Listen, I gotta ask… are all zombies like you? Can they all think and talk?"

  Yes, I scribble.

  "And they still go around killing people?"

  I shrug.

  "Jesus…"

  We found antibiotics, after everyone had time to calm down and Patrick was finally convinced I would not eat his son. We also found bandages, and, in another amazing act of kindness by the universe, Patrick told us that he was a doctor.

  Well… a veterinarian. A retired veterinarian, actually.

  Levon was reluctant, but Patrick actually managed to get the bar out of his leg and bandage the wound pretty well. We didn't find any anesthetics, though, which I suppose is why Levon is still passed out.

  Is there really a colony… New… ork? I scribble. It's getting hard even to scribble, now.

  By my side, Tommy Gina growls softly in his sleep.

  "So said Jeremy," Patrick answers me. "There better be, because otherwise…"

  Patrick looks from me to his son, asleep with his head leaned on Levon's shoulder.

  "We're taking a plane there," he says, reaching into his backpack and showing me a map. "Palm Springs International airport is only thirty miles away from here. Jeremy told me the army had some twin engines there they left behind, with gas and everything. That's our best hope, at least."

  Can… you… fly?

  "Well, no," Patrick replies, with a sigh. "That's why we haven't gone yet. We need a pilot. And the closest I ever got to flying a plane was that one time I didn't spot a bump and my Fierro went cruising into the air half a block, haha."

  He laughs like he doesn't really mean it. I pick up the pen again, but I can't think of anything to write.

  My mind. It's hard to concentrate.

  Is this what starving feels like? I feel like I'm high all the time.

  (Which is not so bad, actually.)

  "I can fly," Levon mumbles, his eyes still closed under the window.

  "What?"

  Dreaming, I scribble.

  Levon blinks himself awake, looking down at the paper in my hands. "I'm not dreaming. I can fly planes."

  "You can?" Patrick's eyes go wide like a kid who just heard Christmas has been canceled and replaced by Monster Truck and Ice Cream Day.

  "Yes. My father made me take courses… back before… everything. He was a pilot. For AA."

  "Holy shit, Levon," I say, forgetting they can't hear me.

  Levon raises his gaze to me with difficulty. "Told you New York was a good idea."

  He closes his eyes again, and his head falls down over Patrick's kid's. He snores loudly.

  "This is great knews!" Patrick says, with a smile at me. "Did you hear that, crazy zombie girl? We're going to New York!"

  I nod. I can barely put the words he's saying together into coherent meaning in my head, I'm so tired. I manage to grab the pen and scribble, Going… sleep, before sliding myself to the wall by Levon and resting my head back.

  "Yeah, yeah, all right," Patrick says, still smiling. "You kids rest. It's going to be morning soon, and tomorrow we're flying the hell out of Zombiecountry!"

  "Grrr," I grunt, feeling the world around me disappear in the mist of sleep.

  "-- is no shelter. There is no food. If you are in a safe house, stay put. Repeating – We have abandoned headquarters. If you are hearing this, do not come to New York. The Temporary Army Shelter has been compromised, and we were forced to leave the building. There is no shelter. There is no food. If you are in a safe house, stay put. Repeating –"

  I open my eyes, still half-asleep.

  In front of me, Patrick is sitting on the floor, legs crossed, looking straight ahead at a small black box. Outside, the blue-black darkness above has started giving way to the first rays of dusk behind the horizon, painting a patch of the sky in faint pink.

  "-- There is no food. If you are in a safe house, stay put. Repeating –"

  I try to blink the scene into focus, but already I feel my thoughts drifting back to sleep mode.

  My eyes start closing again, almost against my will. I think I see Patrick turning around to face his kid before I drift off, but it might have been inside my head.

  "He's dead."

  I open my eyes and immediately close them again, using my hand to block the sun.

  "He's dead, Eve."

  Squinting and struggling, I pull my head up. Sometime during the night I must have slipped down to the floor, because that's where I am now.

  "What?" I ask.

  "Eve, wake up," Levon's voice reaches me again.

  I pull my body up, rubbing my eyes. Levon is standing a couple of feet away from me, right in front of Patrick's kid, who's still lying against the wall same as last night.

  "Eve… he's…"

  I get up.

  Holy shit.

  The kid's face is peaceful, like he might just be asleep. Looking closer, though, I can see he's not breathing, and his skin is a pale shade of blue.

  Patrick is nowhere to be found.

  "What happened, Eve?"

  "He killed his son. Then he killed himself," I whisper to myself.

  "Jesus Christ. It doesn't look like he was bitten. And we would have woken up, right?"

  I look from the body to Levon, trying to focus. He's walking in circles, hands all over his hair and face.

  "We need to get out of here," he says. "Whatever killed him might be back. We need to get to the airport. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, Eve."

  I frown, stopping my eyes on him.

  "The airport!" he yells, impatient. "New York! We need to go to New York!"

  Oh, shit, Levon. Shit, shit, shit a giant shit then eat it and shit it back again.

  I crouch for the paper and pen.

  "Jesus Christ," Levon repeats, throwing another look at the boy's body, then averting his eyes. "This is so fucked up."

  Leaning the paper against the wall, I write:

  There is no colony. The radio…

  From behind me, Levon starts crying. "I can't take this anymore. I can't take it. I can't. I can't. I don't wanna die, Eve."

  I turn around, holding the paper close to my chest as he cries.

  "What?" he asks with a sniff, looking down at the paper. "What is it?"

  I look from the paper to his tear-stained eyes to the body of Patrick's son against the wall.

  Shit, Levon. Shit.

  "What is it, Eve!?"

  I crumple the paper.

  "Nothing," I say. "Come on. Let's go to New York."

  Grabbing his hand, I lead him towards the exit. Outside, on the way to the car, Patrick's body rests just by a FedEx store, half his head blown again, his hands still wrapped around the shotgun
. A small black radio sits on his lap, silent. Levon doesn't see. We get in the car in silence, and Tommy follows us into the backseat.

  Zombie fact number sixteen: Life sucks.

  CHAPTER 9

  "What!?"

  "I can do it, I can do it!"

  "No, no," I say, turning to face Levon's even-more-stupid-with-pilot-headphones-on face. "You said you knew how to fly planes! That's why you're flying a plane!"

  "Look, I know you're angry," Levon says, "but I can't understand what you say unless you write it –"

  I grab my pad and scribble furiously on it:

  You said you took courses!

  "I did take courses!" Levon replies, as the plane bumps up and down with what I hope is turbulence and not engine malfunction. "I just never really learned how to… land."

  "OH, SO WE'LL JUST FLY FOREVER, THEN!" I shout, looking from him to the clouds below us outside. "WE'LL JUST FLY UNTIL THE END OF TIMES! LOVELY!"

  "Stop grunting at me," Levon replies. "I know how to land, I just never… landed solo before."

  I turn to face him, without a word.

  "Look, they make you do fifty hours of supervised flight before you can fly solo, and I never… well, I've managed to get the plane off the ground and keep it in the air without the instructor's help, but I never quite mastered the landing."

  Meaning what?

  He clears his throat, uncomfortable. "That the instructor always had to take the controls from me so we wouldn't… huh… crash."

  My God, this is a nightmare.

  The twin engines were at the airport, all right, like Patrick said they would be. We managed to get inside one and beautiful Levon over here took off, no problem, all smiles.

  He just forgot to mention he can't land the freaking thing now.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid Levon. My God, if he wasn't flying this thing I swear to God I might eat him, not even out of hunger -- just so he'd stop doing stupid shit.

  And this damn haze inside my head, like I smoked bad pot. It's getting harder and harder to ignore it.

  "It's going to be fine. I can do it," Levon says, watching me from the corner of his eyes. "I've landed safely a lot of times…in Flight Simulator," he completes, in a low tone.

  I roll my eyes.

  Maybe it's better if we crash this thing and die fast, anyway. Maybe Patrick got it right. What are we going to do in New York, anyway?

  And it's not like I can go back to LA. To do what? Wait around to starve to death? Start eating babies?

  Maybe a crash could solve all this. Fast and painless.

  Well… painful. But at least fast.

  "I think we're getting close," Levon says, checking the GPS. "Yeah, we're – uh-oh."

  "What?" I ask.

  "Huh… Eve, I… how do I put this?"

  "What!?"

  "Stop grunting! It's no big deal, I just… I kind of forgot, before we left… to check the… huh..." Levon covers the rest of his sentence with a cough. "… gas."

  "Oh, you fucking idiot! You fucking king of all the idiots in idiotland! You lord of all that's dumb and stupid in the world, how did you manage to survive to this day!?"

  Levon blinks at me. "You're yelling, right? I can tell when you're yelling at me."

  I grab the pad and scribble so furiously the paper almost tears:

  What. Now?

  "Relax… we'll just… I'll land in the nearest airport. If there is one."

  If not?

  Levon scratches his head. "Then in the nearest open field. Or highway – it's not like there's any traffic at this time, haha." He turns to face the sky in front of us. "Really, it'll be fine."

  I shake my head, grabbing the pen again:

  How much gas left?

  "Probably enough to find an airport," Levon says, checking the dashboard. "I think it should be fin –"

  BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

  Levon's eyes freeze on the dashboard, where a little red light just started blinking like crazy by the GPS.

  "Maybe not," he says, biting his lips.

  Through the haze of my clusterfuck of a starving zombie mind, I manage to throw Levon one last 'you're an idiot' look.

  Then the skies rush upwards out the window and we sink through the clouds, and I feel the floor giving away under my feet.

  CHAPTER 10

  "Damian, what is going on?" Eve asked, her eyes so close to the monitor screen her nose was almost touching the Skype logo.

  "I need to tell you something," Damian's pixelated image replied, in a serious tone muffled by static.

  Eve was handling her locket nervously across her chest. She frowned. "What's happening? I'm in LA, I'm watching the news – a hundred thousand people –"

  "Eve, my father's dead," Damian said, a blank expression taking over his face.

  "What!?"

  "He was attacked by one of his patients, last night. They found him in –" Damian paused. "My mom's freaking out. I don't know what to do, Eve. "

  "Damian, you have to come to LA," Eve pleaded. "You can't stay there."

  Even in California, things were already getting out of hands. Shops were closing their doors. People were looting and stocking food. There was no water in most of Westwood and Santa Monica, and some people were even talking about separating from the Union.

  "Mom's looking into that right now," Damian replied. "Eve, listen… I think this… I think this is more serious than people thought. I heard a doctor –"

  "Damian," Eve interrupted, letting go of the locket and grabbing the screen between her hands like it was his face. "Come to LA. Get out of there, now! You can stay with us. It's safe here."

  From outside, she heard hurried footsteps. The door opened without a knock, and her mother stepped in, eyes flooded in red and tears.

  "They've quarantined Pennsylvania," she said, in a mournful tone. "The airports are all shut down. The army's patrolling the borders."

  In slow motion, Eve looked from her mother to her boyfriend's face onscreen, lost for words.

  "What's going on?" Damian asked, in a hiss of bad internet.

  "Eve? Eve?"

  The voice reaches me echoed and from a distance, like a long lost dork calling me back to life.

  "Eve? Wake up."

  I open my eyes. Levon's big, round face is watching me with worried looks.

  "Are you ok, Eve?"

  "No. My back hurts. My neck hurts. My legs feel like they've been out all night with a Molly dealer."

  "You're grunting, Eve."

  I blink myself awake, pulling Levon aside as I try to sit up.

  "Where are we?"

  Around us, the sun is setting behind a large field of different shades of green. The landscape is a lot different than roadside in Coachello – there are bushes here, and large patches covered in trees all along the field extend until the horizon. In front of us, an abandoned highway presents a collection of overturned cars, trucks and motorbikes. It's cold and windy and quiet.

  To my left, Tommy Gina plays with a very human-looking bone.

  Also, there is a crashed plane with no fuselage on the right side a few feet away from where I'm sitting.

  "Where's my pad?" I ask. Levon frowns.

  Looking up at him, I mimic pen and paper.

  Levon pulls the notepad from his pocket, smiling. "I saved it from the wreckage for you."

  He says this, but it takes me something like ten seconds to figure out what it means.

  Where…we? I scribble, forcing my mind to think straight.

  "I'm not sure," Levon says. "We lost altitude too fast, back there. You passed out. I almost did too – good thing I kept awake." He smiles. "I tried to land us on the highway, like I said I would, but there were too many cars. In the end I had to go for this field. It wasn't smooth at all, but at least we're – what?"

  I get up, drumming the pen under the words.

  Where's…locket?

  "What are you talking – oh, your locket," Levon says, looking from my eyes to my chest
. "I -- I don't know."

  I look around, stuffing my hand under my shirt collar and fumbling for it.

  Nothing.

  On the grass around us – nothing.

  My pockets -- nothing.

  Feeling my heart rate go up (haha, very funny), I head for the plane, penguining fast as I can.

  "Eve, wait!"

  Pulling wires and mechanical gear aside, I browse frantically through what's left of the aircraft. There's blood on my seat, and on Levon's too.

  "Eve, it was a pretty rough landing," Levon says, approaching me from behind. "Maybe the chain snapped. And… and your side of the plane fuselage sort of broke off and flew away back there, so it could be any –"

  "FUCK!" I yell, turning back to face him. "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK, LEVON!"

  Levon's startled look in front of me is only half-real. I have a vague notion of what I'm doing – trying to find Damian's locket – but the best part of my brain is more and more getting lost in the haze. My stomach feels like it's been beaten to death then reanimated five times, then denied food for ten days, then beaten to death again and spat on. My eyes feel heavy.

  "Eve, we gotta keep moving," Levon says, careful. "We gotta find out where we are."

  I hide my face between my hands, throwing my back against the plane wreckage.

  "There's a bunch of cars on the highway," Levon continues, his voice trailing away more and more inside my head. "We should go through them, check out –"

  Levon, stop talking. Please stop talking.

  "-- one of them is bound to have gas. Or we can find a gas station, too, I'm sure there's one --"

  Shut up. Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

  "-- we can drive the rest of the way to New Yo –"

  "THERE IS NO NEW YORK, YOU STUPID NERD!" I yell, barely aware of what's going on, anymore. "THERE IS NO COLONY, THERE IS NO SAFE HAVEN! THERE IS NO NOTHING!"

  Levon recoils, taken aback. "What? Eve, I can't –"

  I push him aside, heading back to the spot on the grass where I left the pad and pen. Picking them up, I try to scribble but…

  I can't get a good grip on the pen. It keeps sliding from my hand.

  "Eve, we gotta keep moving," Levon tries, his voice low as he approaches me. "We can't look for lockets, we're in the open. Can we just –"