by Robin Becker
I ached; my soul ached. I was junk-sick and hungry for booze, pills, McDonald’s, sex, cars, chewing gum, crank, crack, Diet Coke, laudanum, Internet porn, video games-all of it. Take every weak human addiction and multiply it by the living, the dead, and the living dead, from George Washington to Saddam Hussein, from Homer to Bono, and that might come close to describing the magnitude of my hunger.
I desired, very much, to eat him.
“You deserved a semester off,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Ernst was flat on his back like an overturned beetle. One of his stubby legs was twisted around the chrome leg of the chair; the desk was poking him in the rib cage. He struggled to free himself, but every time he reached down to pull on his thigh, the desk dug deeper into his side. The man was weak from a lifetime of sitting; his arms were roly-poly, with no visible biceps, triceps, or delts. His suit was wrinkled and stained. He had been a competent administrator, and that’s not saying much.
“Damn it, Jack,” he said, trying to drag both his body and the desk away from me and wincing from the pain. “Have you no humanity left?”
I got down on my hands and knees next to him: my boss, my colleague, my savior, my lamb. Appeaser of the beast in me. I took a bite. The memory is as clear as Wordsworth’s claim for poetry: emotion recollected in tranquility.
I started with his stomach and received a mouthful of poly-cotton blend. I spit it out and with the next bite hit pay dirt. His skin tasted like baby powder and musk. There was a thick layer of fat surrounding the muscle; it was gristly and responded to the teeth with an al dente spring. I heard the pack gathering behind me, moaning for stink. Ernst raised himself on one elbow, screamed, and kicked his leg like a toddler throwing a tantrum.
“You always were an asshole,” he said.
Tell me something I don’t know. Meal ticket.
IN THE MIDDLE of Iowa I was chased by a group of men in orange vests and waders. I was running through the corn, Ernst’s broken femur jammed in the back pocket of my Dockers.
There were zombie hunters everywhere. Shotgun-wielding rednecks who aimed for the head.
“There’s one now!” a man yelled.
“Holy shit,” said another. “That one’s running.”
“Impossible. The shits don’t know how to run.”
“Sure looks like he’s running.”
Someone laughed. “You call that running, Bobby? Now I know why you wasn’t much of a ball player in school. The thing’s legs are barely lifting off the ground. He’s a shuffler, all right. Running. Shit, them things can’t run.”
“I think Bobby’s right, sheriff. Whether or not he’s got the skill, he’s got the will. Looks like he’s trying to get away from us.”
I didn’t stop moving.
“Damnedest thing,” the sheriff said. “He does appear to have a plan.”
The sheriff gave me too much credit; I didn’t have a plan. I had one thought: Survive. And that meant protecting my brain.
Since I was-and am-a corpse, a fleeing, decaying corpse, I leave body parts behind when I run through vegetation. Little chunks of falling-off flesh cling to tall grass, raspberry vines, or brambles, making me easy to track.
I felt a stinging in my back and lurched forward.
“Got ’im!”
“You slowed him down, son, but you don’t have him, not ’til you hit him in the head and he’s flat on the ground.”
“Just take your time and aim, Bobby. He ain’t going nowhere in a hurry.”
I felt another sting at the site of my neighbor’s bite. I fell down and moaned.
“That time I got ’im for sure.”
“Don’t get cocky. It’s best to check your kill, make sure it’s dead. Just like you do with a deer.”
“Did you hear him though?”
“Sounded damn-near human.”
“I don’t like this one. Gives me the creeps.”
“More creeps than the others? You are a piece of work, Bobby. Grow some balls, why dontcha? Now go finish the job. Put that stench down for good.”
I crawled away, elbow over elbow, and hid in a stand of corn. I took out the only weapons I had: my notebook and pen.
Help me, Bobby, I wrote. Spare me.
The letters were shaky and the pen strokes thin; it looked like it was written by a child.
Bobby rustled through the stalks.
“Hurry up,” his comrades yelled. “There’s another group on the horizon.”
With my head down, not daring to look young Bobby in the eye for fear I’d attack, I held up the paper.
“Holy shit,” Bobby said. “What are you?”
Gunshots rang out from another part of the field.
“Bobby!” they called. “What’s going on?”
I cradled my head in my arms, protecting it, supplicating before this farm boy. Bobby shot the ground next to me.
“Got ’im!” he yelled as he ran off.
Thank you, Bobby, child of the corn. I owe you my life.
THE HIGHWAY WAS littered with abandoned vehicles. A traffic jam without road ragers shouting into cell phones. The grass was yellow and brown, scorched by the sun. The crops were dry and neglected.
For breakfast I veered into the trees and found a rabbit’s nest. The mother and her five bunnies screamed as I bit into them. The sound was unexpected, as piercing and angry as the cry of a newborn stuffed in a trash can at prom. The rabbits’ brains were small, their intestines filled with hard pellets like Skittles. I stored a foot in my pocket for luck.
Still hungry, I shuffled back to the highway.
The dead walked with me, wobbling like newly birthed calves, bumper-car zombies going nowhere. The ratio, Blake called it. Hamster wheels within hamster wheels.
The bullet holes in my back, the bite on my shoulder…it occurred to me that if I stopped the decay, I could escape the grave, live forever.
A Hummer drove down the highway, tearing through the zombie throng like Moses parting a Red Sea of bloody corpses.
The driver barely slowed down; he knocked over the walking dead as if they were bowling pins and he was going for a perfect game. I stepped out of the way and called out to the others to do the same.
“Mmoohhhaaa. Oooaaahhh!” I cried. Pathetic. My lips barely parted and my mouth felt like a crawfish castle-dry and full of mud. I was stuck in a body that would not obey me. A stroke victim, I was locked in. A rotting portable prison.
A walking putrefying metaphor.
I, Robot.
I, Zombie.
And, oh, those silly zombies. Letting themselves be run over like skunks and possum. And then worse, picking themselves back up afterward, maimed but mobile. Resurrected roadkill. The tenacity of the undead. Their blind stupidity. A teenage zombette still wearing her soccer uniform, her legs were crushed by the Hummer’s tires. That didn’t stop her, however. She sprang back up like one of the Hydra’s heads and continued forward on those flattened legs, her red braids and braces gleaming. She was damn near perky.
As the vehicle passed me, I peered into the windows. Inside was a nuclear family-mom, dad, two girls, and a boy. Even a dog-some kind of terrier yapping away, its nose and paws pressed against the glass. The mother, a ponytailed blonde in a pink yoga outfit, stared back at me. We made eye contact and I flashed her the peace sign and grinned, dislodging a clump of crust in the corner of my mouth. The woman put her hand to her throat and in that instant, I felt known. Understood. My sentience was acknowledged by another thinking being. And then they were gone, hightailing it down the highway, crashing into parked cars and catatonic zombies.
I was even lonelier after that brief connection. Like Orestes or Princess Di, I was chased by demons both real and imagined. I needed a companion. I’d have taken Lilith if Eve was unavailable, but I preferred Eve. More compliant, made from my rib. Except for that apple thing, Eve would be perfect.
THE DEAD WALK at a snail’s pace, complete with trails of slime. At the rate I was going, I’d deco
mpose before reaching Chicago and finding Stein. A pickup truck cruised down the road, picking off members of the horde at random. When it stopped, the driver bending down to retrieve something from the floor-a plug of chaw, no doubt-and his passenger reloading, I acted.
Climbing in was an effort. My joints were stiff with rigor mortis. I lay down between a spare tire and a tool case. Empty beer cans and shotgun shells rattled around me and a gun rack loomed above. I covered myself with a blue tarp.
In life, I wouldn’t have looked twice at these men. They were large and one wore an oversized T-shirt advertising Pepsi. Both had on NASCAR ball caps.
The only Homer they knew was Simpson; their favorite beer was Bud Light. Their idea of an art film was The Shawshank Redemption and their wives collected Precious Moments figurines. What could I possibly talk about with them? The weather?
It was all I could do not to eat them.
“That one over there is almost pretty,” one said.
“Shoot her!”
“Now hold on a minute. She looks recently turned-probably still warm inside there. Fresh.”
“You ain’t never tried that, have you?”
“Screwing a zombie? Hell no!”
“But you’ve thought about it?”
“It’s crossed my mind. I suppose you’d have to tie her up first and gag her, or cover her whole head with something to protect yourself. Like a Wal-Mart bag maybe. Or a catcher’s mask. Then I guess you could just do it regular.”
“You are one sick fuck, Earl.”
“On second thought, doggy-style might be the safest bet.”
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”
There was a shotgun blast.
“Got her!” Earl said.
“Good shot. Right in the head.”
“Kind of seems like a waste though.”
“She did look like your wife.” He laughed.
“That ain’t funny. My wife is one of ’em.”
Poor man. The title of his life’s movie? I Married a Zombie Bitch.
The men rolled up their windows and the truck picked up speed. Hidden under my tarp, I exercised self-control. Mindful restraint.
Denying my instincts, displaying the discipline of an ascetic monk, I took out my affirmation journal.
This is what I wrote:
A To-Not-Do List
Do not smash the back window and attack the driver.
Do not climb on top of the cab and slap your bloody hand on the windshield.
Do not press your face against the glass and bare your teeth at Earl.
Do not eat the rednecks.
Oh, but their dull stupid brains. I reckon they’re tasty.
WE DROVE ALL night through the cornfields of the Midwest. Lying on my back, I peeked out of the tarp and up at the stars. Amazingly, they were still there.
I may have prayed. If I believed in God I would have, but I was raised an atheist.
“God was wounded during World War One,” my father taught me, “and died in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Don’t believe any of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo.”
My paternal grandparents were wealthy Jewish doctors who fled the Nazis in 1937. My grandmother was the first woman to graduate from the University of Vienna. When they arrived in America, they had a strongbox full of diamonds and identification papers. They had money tucked away in a Swiss bank account. And they had their lives and their children by the hand.
They left their drapes and Turkish rugs, pots and pans, real estate and religion to the Nazis. For all I know, Hitler himself slept in their oak four-poster bed underneath the feather duvet and on top of the dozens of pillows Oma kept fluffed and spotless. Oma and Opa never went back to Vienna, but Oma often talked about what they left behind.
Her stories ended the same way every time: “And that, kleine Jack, is how the Boorsteins became the Barneses.”
I have Viennese property I could claim. There’s an apartment building and a house. A pea patch and some vacant lots. Lucy begged me to take her to my ancestral home for our honeymoon, but I refused.
“Too painful?” she asked.
“Too boring,” I lied.
We honeymooned in the Caribbean instead, where Lucy wore a bikini and ran into the ocean, her heels almost touching the crescent moons of her bottom. She looked over her shoulder at me and I chased after her, grabbing her by the waist and kissing her; she was meatier then and I adored her.
“Float like you’re dead,” she’d said, treading water.
I rolled face-first into the sea, my arms splayed out, my legs hanging straight down. Lucy jumped on, straddling me piggyback style.
I dove underwater then, sunken with the weight of my wife. I could hear her giggling above me and I swam as hard as I could, breaking the surface like a dolphin, Lucy riding me like a nymph.
If only Lucy were with me as the truck bounced along. She would have made a child’s game out of our concealment. Hide and Seek or Kick the Can.
Lightning flashed and it started to rain. I pulled the tarp over my head, my fingers leaving behind a thick coat of crud, sticky as glue.
Fat raindrops hit the tarp; each one sounded like a nail pounding me deeper into my coffin.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE TRUCK STOPPED at a TA Travel Center in the middle of that godforsaken, corn-infested state. It was morning, the sky was clear, and the area appeared to be free of zombies. Humans milled about, filling up their gas tanks, gathering food and drink, exchanging information and gossip. No money changed hands, indicating a massive breakdown in the economy as well as society as a whole. Nothing is more integral to America than the accumulation of wealth. And if no one paid for anything, no one made a profit.
In the wake of the Zombie Apocalypse, humanity had gone commie. Zombie Joe McCarthy must be scratching at the walls of his crypt.
As soon as Earl and the driver went inside the truck stop, I peered over the top of the bed. Seeing no one in the immediate vicinity, I climbed out.
My stomach was a vast and empty black hole.
I lumbered from car to car, hiding behind wheels and trunks, pretending to be an injured soldier in a Vietnam War movie. Charlie got my shoulder, I radioed in. Turned it into pork for his stir-fry.
I watched the humans through the windows of the truck stop. Clustered in groups, dispensing soda from the fountain, unwrapping Snickers bars, leafing through Field and Stream. The women fondled molded plastic angels, slipping them into their purses. More for protection than decoration, I imagined. Oh, Archangel Michael, made in China, save me from the vampiric undead; end this eternal waking nightmare.
Inside the curly heads of those ladies were their brains: beautiful, bountiful, bubbly, bewitching, bedazzling brains.
I was thirteen years old again, beholding my first pair of boobs, only this longing was beyond sexual. Swelling to godlike proportions, my desire eclipsed the sun.
I shuffled past a white El Dorado tucked in the far side of the lot and my shoulder tingled. There was movement in the front seat. I looked in and there she sat, a young woman no more than twenty-five, staring back at me with eyes so large and full of fright the irises had disappeared.
What she was doing in the parking lot alone, I’ll never know. Nor do I care.
I tried the handle. Locked. She scrunched down in her seat and put her hands over her head. Not a fighter, this one. More like an ostrich. I wondered where her protector was. Undoubtedly she had one, a pretty woman like her.
I used to look at women and see hips and ass, hair and snatch. How pedestrian that seems now. Leave procreation to the living. I’ll take gray matter.
Then I thought: Don’t eat the whole thing, Jack. Bite her, just enough for a snack. Quell the riotous beast within, infect her with the virus, and take her for your mate. Your Eve.
She was pale, alabaster even, with short dark hair cut into Louise Brooks bangs. I pointed at her and she put her hand over her mouth. With her wide, terrified eyes and the French t
ips on her nails, she looked like a 1950s scream queen.
I scanned the area for a weapon and located a tire iron. What else? So far, my postlife had been cinematic, a travesty of a zombie movie, with the literary addition of a tragic and self-conscious hero, a misunderstood creature with which to sympathize. Of course there’d be a handy weapon to help him!
And don’t feel guilty for your empathy. You’re supposed to identify with me, causing you to question what it means to be human and moral-and to be grateful for your own miserable lot in life. So go ahead and sympathize. Construct me as the “other.”
Let me be your monster.
I grabbed the tire iron with both hands, climbed onto the hood of the car, and raised the tool over my head. At the pinnacle of the arc, the muscles in my rotten shoulder shifted, a chunk of meat detached, and my grip slipped. I tottered. Human voices drifted from around the corner. Eve stared at me, her expression a mixture of terror and fascination, attraction and repulsion. She looked, above all else, curious. As for me, I felt sublime.
I brought the tire iron down and the windshield buckled and cracked in such a way that I was able to rip it out in one piece. I had no idea that was how windshields were constructed. I expected something much more theatrical, the sound of glass shattering into a million pieces, not a muted thunk of splintered plastic.
But no matter. Either way I would have my woman.
Eve screamed as she scrambled for the door. I wish I could say I was too fast for her, but I wasn’t. We both played our parts well. She was the petrified and bumbling victim; I was the ruthless pursuer. Yawn.
“Don’t,” she said when I grabbed her by the arm. “I’m pregnant.”
I looked closely at Eve’s stomach. She was five or six months along. Showing, but not huge.
Jackpot! And baby makes three. I’d have a brand-new family and a shot at happiness.
Then Eve said she was starving and hadn’t had a bite in a while. So I bit her.
Just kidding. At least I have my sense of humor.
OH, BUT I did bite her. On the thigh. And her thigh was the fartiest of French cheeses, the briniest of anchovies. There was the thinnest layer of fat surrounding her muscle-clearly she had been a runner or tennis player-and it was enough to satisfy me. For the time being.