The Turk smiled and nodded.
"Oh, wait," I said. "I almost forgot something."
I palmed one of the lithe woman's eyes that I'd been keeping in my pocket as a snack, and then seemed to pluck it from a produce display.
"I hope these grapes are ripe," I said, inspecting the orb. "They do cone all the way from Chile. I'm sure the manager won't mind if I eat just one."
The Turk grew excited, and actually began to applaud.
I popped the eye into my mouth and chewed. After a few bites, I felt it pop. Various humors dripped from my lips like grape juice.
"Oh yes," I said. "I absolutely must have these. They are divine. Now to push my grocery cart to the front and pay for things with money. Then I'll put my fat ass into a minivan and drive back to my house with all my whining kids."
The Turk moaned in approval and laughed. It was not like a human laugh-it was a horrible, undead groaning approximationbut I still appreciated it.
For all the killing and eating, perhaps I'd never felt more fully a zombie than at that moment. By "a zombie," I suppose I have to mean "not human." Yes, then. Perhaps that is what I mean. Humans were the other. The thing to be lampooned and eaten alive whenever possible. I didn't look at them and think: "There is some of me in that." Rather, I thought only: "How do I get some of that in me." My immersion into zombiedom was closest to total when I felt a real contempt for the living. I wasn't just decent, I was better. We were better.
It felt wonderful to embrace this concept: Not just different. Better. Some things are better than other things. And use are better. Zombies are better. It felt so good to say. Yes. We were obviously better. A priori better. All of us. Better than anything else. Superior. Masters of this world. And where, I wondered, were the humans? Where were the people who might have called this position "unfair" or "species-ist" or "undead-ist?" Where were they?
In my stomach. In my fucking stomach.
Objection noted. Now I'm going to eat the brain you used to think of it.
Better than. There could be no question. We were better than humans. That was what we were. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops (and perhaps would've, had my voice been more than a husky growl).
"Fucking humans," I said, tipping over my shopping cart ferociously and making the Turk jump back a little. "We are better than them. We're far, far superior. They are our food. It's obvious to any smart person who takes a look. Zombies aren't just `different,' zombies are better!"
So, anyway, you see some pretty cool things when you travel in a group of four hundred zombies.
Like one morning, right after we moved on from Pipesville, we edged along a barely paved, intensely potholed rural route, and saw an SUV cresting the horizon and heading toward us very fast. It suddenly slammed on the brakes. The tires shrieked. The frame shuddered. Dust kicked up in a fifteen-foot plume. It was like something out of a movie.
I could see the driver's jaw literally drop as he took in all four hundred of us. Then he pulled a U-turn and hauled out of there, kicking up another cloud of dust and frost in the air behind him. It wasn't as dramatic as a battle or anything, but it was sort of cute, I thought.
Another time, I saw our old friends in the military observation helicopter again. Our zombie horde was fording a shallow stream when we heard the helicopter coming. Some part of me hoped it might be the same helicopter from before, and I was delighted when they came into view. The contraption hovered close, but not too close. This time, they were strangely cautious for men safely suspended hundreds of feet in the air. They took notes and photographs as they had before. I let them linger for five full minutes before becoming annoyed enough to take a shot at them. This time, I used the sawed-off shotgun I'd taken from the grocery store. My aim had not improved-and damn if the gun didn't buck like a mule-but I heard the tinny pings of buckshot against the helicopter's metal belly.
It moved off with all speed.
Fucking humans, I thought. We're better than you. How many photographs do you have to take before you figure that out?
Dumbasses.
Other times, traveling in a large group of zombies could be frustrating. Zombies aren't good at communicating generally, and they're really lousy at raising an alarm or telling other zombies when they see something important. (If they do see something good, they just quietly change course and lumber toward it. That's all the notification you can expect.) If you walk in the back of the horde, you can sometimes watch this happening. One zombie in the middle of the pack will see or smell something (like a human) and veer off. Then a few others will follow. Then the horde sort of splits and reconstitutes, the side, say, becomes the front, and suddenly you're all headed in a different direction.
I can remember-back when I was alive-reading about dinosaurs that used to be a hundred feet from tip to tail. These dinosaurs were so big and so dumb that if you stepped on the tips of their tails, it would take a full minute for them to register it. It took that long for the signal to travel from their tail tips to their brains. Anyway, that's kind of what it feels like, leading a zombie horde.
I'd be walking with the Turk, near the front of the pack, and the zombies in the back might get shot at, or smell some food and go off after it in another direction. You'd be climbing a hill and stop to take a look at the group marching behind you-and there at the back would be four or five dead zombies, and off to the side you'd see a guy scampering down from a deer stand and running off into the forest. And there was nothing you could do. It was one of the hazards of being the brain of an enormous thing, lumbering across the plains like the dinosaurs had. Sometimes people stepped on your tail, and were gone before you knew what had happened.
Other times, the wind might change direction, and the back of the group would get a whiff of some humans in a hidden cabin or forest hideout. When that happened, I'd look back and see our horde separating like an amoeba. It was all I could do to turn my half around and follow after the ones who'd caught the scent. It was like herding cats. Undead, rotting cats.
One day (in what must have been late March), we were walking through a lonely forest stretch by the side of a giant quarry and this amoeba-separation happened. As was usually the case, the Turk and I were two hundred feet in front of the split before we realized what had occurred. I looked back and saw the rear guard of our battalion veering away from the blasted-out quarry and heading into the forest. I sighed and carefully turned the rest of the horde back around to join them. It took a while. I sometimes had to spread my arms and "shoo" the zombies, like a man trying to urge chickens into a coop.
I'd glanced into the forest as we'd passed it and hadn't seen or heard a thing. My first impulse was to bet it was a false-positive. Usually, when the zombies smelled something like this-and there were no other signs, like noises or movement-it would turn out to be a freshly dead human, or a cabin where humans had been the night before.
As if reading my skeptical thoughts, the forest resounded with the echo of a gunshot. It caught me quite by surprise. Then there were more gunshots. Then gunshots and screaming-seemingly from just inside the canopy of barren trees. I quickened my pace, cursing myself. They had been there-hiding from us-and I had missed them. Walked right past and missed them.
I lumbered toward the trees, seeing nothing but other members of the walking dead. The zombies around me steadily became more and more excited. The gunshots continued, intermittent but steady. Then, as I closed in on the trees at the edge of the forest, a resounding shotgun blast exploded, and a zombie's head-cleanly severed by buckshot-rolled out of the forest, coming right at me. I stopped it with my foot like a soccer ball.
"Fucking zombie assholes!" I heard someone scream.
I readied my semiautomatic M16 and crept inside the trees. I didn't have to creep far. The situation was right in front of me, crystal-clear. The zombies had surrounded a tiny hunting cabin on the edge of the woods. It looked very rustic; likely no water or electric. Two men were standing on the roof of the hunting cab
in-one was balding and pudgy, one rough-looking and bearded. The pudgy one was nervously reloading a shotgun. The other was taking careful aim with a composite hunting bow, and shooting zombies through the head. Several dead zombies already lay scattered at the door to the cabin. Many others (who were still "living") had arrows sticking out of their chests and arms.
These men were lost-floating on a little raft in a sea of four hundred zombies. (Or, by the look of it, maybe more like three hundred and ninety now.) Zombies are not natural climbers, so the pair was safe up on the little roof, but there was also next to no way for them to escape.
The pudgy one finished reloading and fired the shotgun wildly into the circle of zombies six deep around him. One zombie's rib cage opened up as he was torn in half. Another's head exploded. Three eighty-eight.
"Fuck this," I said to myself, and began to draw a bead on this larger of the two targets with my M16. As I did, he dropped the shotgun and produced a walkie-talkie from his back pocket. He flicked it on and called into it: "Hello? Hello? This is Terry! Is anyone coming?! We're on the roof of Derrick's cabin now. Jesus, there are hundreds of them!!"
Who was he calling, I wondered? I did not wait to find out.
I pulled the trigger three times, hitting him in the chest at least twice. His body blasted backward and he fell off the roof and into the mob of zombies below. He dropped the shotgun and radio. They clattered against the logs of the roof.
When he saw what had happened to his friend, the bearded man dropped his bow and fell flat against the roof of the cabin. I took aim at him and fired, but a prone man proved much harder to hit. I decided to move closer, assuming I could do so safely now that he was pinned. While I strode nearer, the bearded man crawled to the radio and called into it.
"Hello?" he shouted wildly. "This is Derrick! Do you come in? Look, there's a man with them who can shoot. He shot Terry. Do you copy me? A man with the zombies. He shot Terry!"
A voice talked back at him through the static. A familiar voice. (Where had I heard it before?) I sauntered closer through the writhing ocean of zombies, trying to find an angle that would get me a clean shot at beardo.
"No," Derrick continued. "No, I can't. Look, can you try the Guard-see if they can send a helicopter? Tell them we're right by the Lockport Quarry. They can't miss it."
I raised my gun and took three more shots at him. Nothing. Wood danced and splintered around him, but the angle was still all wrong.
"Jesus, they're going to fucking kill me," Derrick shouted. "They're fucking shooting at me. I don't know how, but one of them has a fucking gun! Can you send somebody, please?"
I crept closer and found an old stump, covered by moss and with snow still decorating one side. It was thick enough for me to stand on, and when I did so, it gave me a clean line of sight on the bearded man talking into the radio.
I lifted the M16 carefully and drew my bead. My undead finger tickled the trigger.
Then, disaster.
Have you ever locked your keys in your car? (Sure you have.)
You know that moment where you watch yourself doing it, but you still can't stop? Where you're looking at your keys, still in the ignition, as you shut the door? And then afterward you think, "Why the fuck did I just do that?!"
You know that moment?
Well, this was a little like that-only much, much worse. As I began to squeeze the trigger, I heard the familiar voice coming back again on the bearded man's radio, and realized it was Vanessa's. Then I shot the man-six times through the chest. Another bullet hit his forehead, killing him instantly. And then another bullet hit the radio.
Hit the fucking radio that had just had Vanessa's voice on it.
In horror, I dropped the M16 and put my palms against my forehead. The gun hit the ground and went off, shooting the zombie nearest me in the foot.
I had just heard my girlfriend's voice again. What had she said? It had sounded like: "The other group." Something about "others" or "other group." But ... Vanessa. There was no question. It had been her voice. She was still alive. She had not been killed by bikers (or eaten by zombies). And I had just severed any means of conmiuni- cating with her in the foreseeable future.
I stepped off the stump and fell to my knees, crushed.
I had lost my appetite. (Temporarily.)
While the other zombies happily feasted on the bearded bow hunter, I meditated over the wreckage of the destroyed walkietalkie. It was square and heavy, like a cell phone from the 1980s. My bullet had passed through the earpiece, leaving an opening through which I could see red wires and part of a battery. When I depressed the largest button on the side, it made a hissing noise, but nothing else.
"Hello!" I tried calling into it. "Hello? Vanessa?"
No one came back. After a few minutes, the battery seemed to drain and the small red light on the side of the walkie-talkie faded to the color of dull plastic.
To distract myself, I turned my attention to the inside of the small cabin. It provided little in the way of clues about Vanessa, but there were points of interest. One wall of the cabin had been covered in maps-maps of Knox County, and also maps of the entire state of Ohio. Color-coded pushpins had been placed strategically around the maps. Green pushpins seemed to be concentrated around Columbus and Cleveland, with a few also spaced along Highway 71 between the two cities. Other green pins dotted Highway 70 east toward Wheeling, and west in the direction of Indianapolis. Blue and red pins appeared less frequently, and seemed to dot the countryside more than the population centers. Then there were the yellow pins. These appeared in only three places, and-as I consulted one of the maps closely-appeared to include the cabin I now occupied. There was something to conclude from all of this. These were important clues, and I knew it. I took my time and tried to puzzle them out.
Green pins were the army. Had to be. They were in all the major cites, and they also had presences at the rest stops along the major highways. (Plus, they were green. I think, when you have a bunch of pushpins and one has to represent the army, you go with green.) The cities made sense-they were the Green Zones-but the highways?
And then I recalled what Sam had said about the government trying to keep the economy going and encouraging people to keep going to work. It also made sense, then, that the government would want to focus on keeping the main arteries flowing.
For not the first time, I began to consider how little I knew of the world outside of Knox County. I'd seen the images from across the country on my television-chaotic and militant and things overrun by zombies generally. The government hadn't been saying much, hadn't wanted people to know how they could kill zombies, and certainly hadn't seemed like it had a plan. And that had been months ago.
I'd imagined that in the subsequent weeks the cities had "gotten worse" (for the humans, that is). I'd pictured mobs of newly homeless humans fighting against mobs of zombies (or fighting one another for food). But now, for the first time, I wondered if my estimation might be wrong. Overly cynical.
These green pushpins, if they did in fact indicate the presence of the army-I had no proof that they did-showed that the humans had succeeded in creating militarized Green Zones where perhaps soldiers kept order, and maintained commerce between major cities. This made me curious. I had the sudden urge to move my band west until we hit Interstate 71, just to see what we'd find there.
There were still so many unknowns. Was this a recent map? Did the pushpins reflect verified locations of military personnel, or was it only an idealized rendering of how people on the radio had said it was supposed to be?
Perhaps the highways and cities were safe, and people were punching in and punching out every day despite the threat of zombies. Though my days were now spent cultivating murderous chaos, I wondered: Could humans be comporting themselves with relative civility and discretion just a few miles away?
Knox County-this land where I was free to conduct my zombie battalion from one encampment to another, razing and killing at will-was all that I k
new. For an unsettling moment, I considered that it might be the exception and not the rule.
Then I thought of the humans that were being devoured just outside the cabin where I stood, and instantly felt better about things. Even if there were military presences in the cities, so what? We were still the dominant animals. We'd be like the Chinese communists-conquer the countryside first, then the cities! (I remember Chinese communists! Ha! Perhaps some remnant of a serious book on the subject remains ... but honestly, it feels more like something left over from watching the History Channel.)
I took a step back from the map. I thought: Contemptible thing! I should not allow it to unnerve me so, or to tempt me toward these dubious considerations. I should certainly not allow it to convince me that I was anything other than a dominant life form, playing on the winning team. It was just a map of Ohio with some pushpins in it. Nothing more. Some ink on paper and some painted metal pins. Was I going to let a little paper and ink and metal change my whole view of the world?
I decided-for better or worse-that no, I wasn't.
But even so ... it was interesting.
In addition to a few camping supplies and some food, I found a stack of legal pads and a box of pens in the drawer of a little wooden desk. I drew myself a quick-and-dirty version of the pushpin map and put it in my pocket, before continuing on.
We headed west, more or less, along Highway 229 toward Interstate 71. Just to see, I told myself. Just to take a peek at it and maybe get a general idea of what the humans were up to. It would take a few days of walking, but hey, I was a zombie. I had all the time in the world.
We kept well south of Mount Vernon as we made our trek westward. I had a feeling that that place hadn't changed, and I saw no advantage to leading my parade of three hundred and eightysome zombies past their rifle scopes and Bibles. Mostly, we picked our way through farms. The map I'd scrawled let me know where we were in relation to towns and highways. The hills and fields around us stayed quiet, and the weather turned cold again.
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