by Robin Becker
That’s why my feelings surprised me: I felt a kinship with the creatures as we ambled down the road. I had sympathy for their hunger, compassion for their unquenchable thirst, sorrow when I looked at their maimed corpses. And I was worried about the future. Our collective ontology concerned me.
I practiced speaking as we walked, but I must have coughed up my vocal cords, if that’s possible, and my tongue was a black and useless thing, a limp and charred sausage.
How could I discuss our survival with Stein if I couldn’t even say goo-goo-ga-ga? For all I knew, Stein had become a zombie too. Just a slob like one of us. Crying for brains and covered with wounds that don’t heal or weep.
“Eeeeeee,” I said. Vowel sounds I could handle; consonants made me gnash my teeth.
The ground rumbled and shook. I pulled on the rope and brought Eve to me, inserting the tip of my finger into her wrist, which seemed to calm her. The unmistakable whir of a chopper filled the air.
Behind us, a military convoy crested the horizon. The American flag flew on the first tank, Old Glory waving in the wind.
This was why Eisenhower built these highways in the first place: to mobilize the military and evacuate citizens during an atomic attack. Black asphalt crisscrossing the contiguous forty-eight like bondage gear.
Never mind that most Americans took the highways to visit Disney World or dying grandmothers, not escape giant mushroom clouds and Russians. The roads brought us purple dinosaurs and snake farms. All-night diners and oil refineries. Buicks and monster trucks. The world’s largest ball of twine. Cold War dreams turned millennial nightmare.
Better dead than red.
But better undead than dead.
Over fifty years after its construction, the System of Interstate and Defense Highways had finally fulfilled its original function. Mission accomplished.
Zombie Ike must be proud.
The tanks were accompanied by foot soldiers equipped with hand grenades, rocket launchers, submachine guns, pistols, flamethrowers, MREs, cigarettes, porn. And sharpshooters who went for the head.
Civilization hadn’t completely broken down yet if the military was killing to the tune of “Walk This Way”-the Run-DMC version.
Doesn’t anyone slaughter to “Ride of the Valkyries” anymore?
The soldiers opened fire. They were marching in unison, to the beat. They were, in fact, walking “this way,” if “this way” meant the wholesale and rhythmic massacre of innocent American zombies.
I crooked my finger deeper inside Eve’s wrist, hooked it around a bone, and pulled her closer. The other zombies were walking directly into the bullets. They simply couldn’t comprehend the danger-they looked at the soldiers and saw only breakfast, dinner, a light snack.
My tribe is a stupid tribe, and that’s precisely why I wanted to save them. To teach and lead them. But I couldn’t do it if they wouldn’t let me. It’s like convincing your alcoholic girlfriend not to drink: It ain’t gonna happen. Booze or brains, it’s all the same. The addict has to want to change.
A nearby zombie’s head exploded and a piece of his brains splattered on my glasses. His teeth flew out of his mouth and chattered down the highway. Eve took a hit to her swanlike neck, the chunk of flesh whizzing behind us so fast it whistled. My bride was falling to pieces under my care. I tugged hard on her rope and we took cover behind a Toyota Tercel.
THE CONVOY WAS easily a mile long, the middle guard a ragtag battalion of soldiers and civilians, Hondas and Beetles, motorcycles and skateboards. A young mother carried her baby in one arm and a machine gun in the other; a blond moppet of a boy skipped hand-in-hand with a cornrowed African-American girl, both throwing grenades into the zombie multitude. Humanity was finally united against a common enemy: us. Me.
This was genocide in front of my eyes and I couldn’t stop it; my people were being extinguished like all the powerless masses of the world. Oppressed, dispossessed, hated. History teaches us that humans kill what they fear.
“Immigrant Song” came on at a lower volume than the Run-DMC, and the convoy stopped. In front of us was a giant cage on wheels, like the lion’s cage at the circus, only bigger and pulled by a Hummer. There were zombies trapped inside, dozens of them at least, bumping into each other and clamoring at the bars. A small troop of battle-dressed soldiers walked alongside the corral, two of them on the side facing the Tercel.
I named them Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Here was the greatest tragedy of the twenty-first century. A viral outbreak and the military’s bumbling response. Something was rotten in the state of Iowa. Or were we already in Illinois?
And was Britney Spears a zombie? Was the Dalai Lama?
The hammer of the gods.
Next to me, Eve thrashed around, foaming with desire. It was all I could do to keep her tethered; it was all I could do to keep from joining her in mad brain-lust.
Because just one bullet to the head and Jack Barnes would be dead.
“Don’t even think about it,” Rosencrantz (hereafter Ros) yelled as he rifle-butted a zombie poking his head through the bars.
“God, it stinks in there,” Guildenstern (hereafter Guil) said.
“Fuckin’ stenches,” Ros said, and stumbled forward, moaning and pretending to bite Guil’s shoulder.
“Cut it out, dude. You could get yourself killed.”
“No one would take me for one of them,” Ros said, and stood at attention, drawing himself up to his full six feet and squaring his shoulders.
“I meant by one of them, not us.”
“Any soldier who can’t successfully combat a zombie is a retard and deserves to be eaten.”
Oh, how I wished I could bound forward like Bruce Willis, utter a snazzy one-liner, and devour the cocky bastard. Clearly that hubristic line signaled his demise. Anyone familiar with the grammar of film-not to mention Greek and Elizabethan tragedies-knows that.
Unfortunately Rosencrantz was right: I couldn’t fight him with my restricted motor skills. And that depressed me. The military ranked lower than absurdists and Everybody Loves Raymond fans in my personal hierarchy of intelligence.
“Maybe,” Guil warned, “but don’t let your guard down. Always be alert and above all else, be prepared.”
“What is this, the Boy Scouts? These corpses are slower than your grandma and mine put together. Bottom line: The war is over and the good guys won. Disaster, world takeover, zombie apocalypse averted.”
Eve leapt, exhibiting a strength and agility far beyond what a pregnant zombie should possess. She dragged me around the Tercel and toward the soldiers. I tried to hold her back, hooking my foot on the bumper of the car, but the rope connecting us began to cut through my khakis and sink into my flesh. It could have slashed me in half-I was that decayed and soft-and then I’d be one of those pathetic crip zombies, dragging my torso around while my detached legs walked in aimless, undead circles.
Guil lifted his gun to his shoulder. “Die, zombie bitch!” he yelled, his finger on the trigger.
Ros hesitated. “Wait!” he said. “Check it out. That zombitch is preggie and she’s dragging another one by a rope. What the fuck!”
“Whoa,” said Guil, lowering his gun.
“We better take these guys prisoner. Call the corpse catchers.”
Guil took a walkie-talkie out and spoke into it. “Two of them,” he said. “Male and female. Not class-five aggressive, but not reduced to parts yet either. Moderate caution.”
I struggled to hold Eve back. Her arms were outstretched, reaching for the soldiers, and she was pulling me with all her slight might. I fell to the ground, her ball and chain, dead weight.
“Uhhnnnnhh,” she said.
Poor Eve, she’d really lost her looks since becoming a zombie. Her once-cute bangs were dirty and mottled with gore, and her eyes were filmed over, as haunting and evil as a vulture’s. At times I wanted to gouge her eyes out; they reminded me of what I must look like.
I look like the rest of them.
>
As we rot, we become more alike. What was distinct and individual in life-a Marilyn Monroe mole, red hair, big breasts, Buddy Holly glasses, a penchant for making puns or wearing yellow suspenders-is erased and replaced with the shuffle, the moan, the torn clothes, the stink, the pallor, the dripping flesh, and the insatiable yearning. As we decay, we become one entity. United we stand. Or sway, rather.
“We have to hold them for a few,” Guil said. “Catch crew is about a quarter-mile up the line.”
“Looks like the male’s doing that for us.”
“You think that’s his wife and baby? And maybe he’s trying to keep the family together?”
I nodded my head at Guil’s partial truth. In life, Eve had been a stranger. I wouldn’t have opened the door for her at the mall. In death, she was mine, and I felt as responsible for the child as if I’d sired it myself.
“Holy shit!” Ros said. “Did that corpse just nod his head? Is he communicating with us?” He walked closer.
“Careful,” Guil said.
“He’s got her on a pretty short leash.”
“It’s not just her you gotta worry about.”
Ros sidestepped the snapping Eve and approached where I lay on the shoulder, mashing my teeth into the white line, fighting for control. Because this was my opportunity to show the real me, the man beneath the animal. I watched Ros’s combat boots approach. He knelt down.
He was young, not more than twenty, and he looked corn-fed, with freckles and a wide, flat face like a cow pie, only ruddy and pink. His hair was the color of dried corn stalks and his eyes were cornflower blue and bright.
Behind them was what I needed.
“What’s up, fella?” he said, talking to me like I was a dog. “Can you hear me? Do you know what I’m saying? What are you doing with this here female and this rope?”
There was compassion in his voice. And the promise of help.
Stein, I tried to say, take me to Stein.
“Sheeeaiii!” is what came out.
“His eyes,” Ros said.
“From here he looks pretty zombified,” Guil said.
I rolled my head from side to side, shaking like an epileptic. I put my hand in my tweed jacket pocket and touched the papers there. My writing. Evidence of my cognition.
Ros was ten feet away. So close I could smell him. Everything in me sang: Brains for dinner. Brains for lunch. Brains for breakfast. Brains for brunch…
“I don’t know,” Ros said. “There might be someone home.”
The zombies in the cage were watching; I could feel them cheering me on like binge-drinking fraternity brothers. We were tingling together, the ant phenomenon. My shoulder felt like a hard-on. A zombie orgy of sucking and smooching and licking and touching and brains and brains and brains and brains…
I withdrew my hand from my pocket, turning my back on salvation, and went for it. I wish I could say I attacked like a cat, even a fat old house cat, but we all know how zombies move. I crawled toward him, hand over hand on the pavement, baring my teeth.
“Looks like he’s going for ya,” Guil said.
Ros stood up. “Roger that. I’d hate to shoot this one, though. They’ll want him for sure. Where are those fuckers?”
“I’m gonna slow him down,” Guil said, “just in case.”
“Roger that.”
Guil tased me down the left side of my body, from shoulder to foot. My limbs twitched like a galvanized frog’s. He turned the Taser on Eve.
“Watch the baby,” Ros said. “They’ll probably wanna check it out. I don’t think we have too many pregnant ones, least not in this sector.”
Guil nodded and zapped Eve’s legs. She fell but continued pulling on the rope connecting us, single-minded in her pursuit.
Original sin. Eve did it again. She just can’t resist temptation.
CHAPTER SIX
THE CORPSE CATCHERS came and the corpse catchers caught us. A rose is a rose is a rose.
A team of ten trotted toward us, looking like extreme butterfly catchers, wearing Kevlar, hazmat suits, and helmets, and carrying long poles, nets, and muzzles.
“Watch out for the female,” Guil said to them. “She’s more aggressive.”
“Roger that.”
I didn’t resist or move. There wasn’t much left at the site of my original bite. Strips of muscle clinging to the shoulder bone. I was only weeks away from being a dancing skeleton.
A catcher cut our rope.
“This is new,” he said, looking at the frayed end.
“I’m guessing they did that in life,” Ros said, “after they got bit, so they’d be together when they turned.”
“Maybe, but he’s more decomposed than she is.”
I forced myself to my knees, then stood upright. I felt like Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. I am not an animal. I am a human being. I…am…a…man.
They covered Eve’s head with their net and, using ten-foot poles, secured a muzzle over her. It looked medieval, like a knight’s helmet but without the feathers and flourishes. They screwed the muzzle tightly around her neck with giant clamps. The woman in the iron mask, Eve clenched and unclenched her only hand. Her arms flailed as she groped blindly. I knew she was groping for flesh. Her corduroy maternity jumper-once as yellow as a lemon drop-was polka-dotted with dried blood.
The catchers led her to the cage; I had never loved her more.
“I am a conscious being,” I longed to scream to the corpse catchers, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to the world at large. “I love!”
“Uuhhhhnnnh,” I moaned, and slouched toward them. Their net dropped over my head.
I stink, therefore I am.
CROUCHED IN THE corner of that stench-filled cattle cage, surrounded by rotters and moaners, our ontological state was clear to me: We were not men. Not any longer. But neither were we supernatural. Although we rose from the dead, we were not immortal. My pork shoulder attested to that.
Shortly after my capture, I made an attempt to distinguish myself. I crept up to the bars and held a note out to the guards, shaking the paper when they walked by. They ignored me, treating me like the others. And when I looked at my brethren, I realized why.
I was one of them, a member of the crowd, a zombie, nothing more, nothing less, helpless under the boot of this army.
EVE’S EYES CONTINUED to plague me. Pale blue with a hideous veil over them, they were the eyes of Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan. Open but unseeing.
Why are America ’s most famous vegetables women? A year ago, I might have analyzed the female passivity and entrenched paternalism inherent in using women as national symbols for the chronic and persistent vegetative state. The “insertion” of the phallic feeding tube. The sexual connotations of the term “pulling the plug.” The group of male doctors “stimulating” the patient to see if she “responds.” I would have published the article too, maybe turned it into a book.
Now I only wonder: Does a vegetable’s brain taste like broccoli? The soldiers had new lyrics for that old standby:
I don’t know but I been told.
Fuckin’ zombies ain’t got no soul.
CORNFIELD AFTER PASTURE after cornfield after pasture after farm. Whenever a zombie appeared on the horizon, Ros and Guil took shots at him, her. It. If it was just one and they missed, they might let it go. If there were more, foot soldiers were dispatched while Ros and Guil stayed with us.
Illinois was devoid of the living. The convoy stopped often, sometimes remaining immobile for over a day. We heard gunshots, bombs, mortars, tow trucks moving cars off the highway. When we began moving again, fresh zombies were sometimes thrown in with us. Prisoners of war, they arrived frightened, hungry, and beaten by the military.
I overheard the guards say we were headed north to be studied and experimented on. Poked and prodded. We were special zombies, they snorted, a select few saved from extermination. The military deemed us worthy of further investigation.
But I didn’t believe that c
laptrap any more than they did. My companions were stupid, lumpen zombies, as proletarian as chimney sweeps, some with guts hanging out of their asses and holes blown through their chests, all with that vacant stare. Eve was banging her stump against her head like an autistic brat and my fellow prisoners were reaching their hands through the bars, desperate for brains. The moaning had reached that peculiar pitch: the key of need. If the guards didn’t feed us soon, there would be a riot.
After a few days, they brought us a meal. We all knew the meat was coming. My shoulder felt it first. Zombies began walking in tight anticipatory circles. Everyone was pulsing and electric, our bite sites connected as if by a live wire. Positioning myself near Eve, I fingered her stump and looked into her eyes. I wanted to communicate with her, to exchange a meaningful glance and delight together in what was to come, like newlyweds glancing at each other on their wedding night. But Eve’s eyes were doll’s eyes. Marble and flat.
I detested them. Eyes like stones.
I’m glad I ate Lucy. I’d hate to see her dulled, reduced to an object, a thing. A rabid automaton. Like a Meg Ryan movie, zombiehood would have offended her.
The guards threw the meat in the middle of the pack. It was a mixture of pig and cow, of guts, brains, bones, and hooves, and it was still warm with thick, wet blood. Like a wolf, I pounced on it.
So did everyone else. We fought over those brains Jack London-style: tooth and claw, club and fang. We fought like addicts over the final toot of coke. Piglets for teats. Holiday shoppers clawing each other for that last Tickle-Me Cabbage Patch Elmo Baby.
I had to win the brains to achieve alpha male status. I had to be king of the hill, at the top of the food chain. Because there is a hierarchy in zombiedom, however primitive: At the top is me, of course, standing alone, the smart zombie; next are the intact and the newly turned; slightly below them are those like Eve, older and a bit more decayed, but spunky and mobile still. Then come those with major injuries, gaping holes and broken legs or necks. The ladder continues downward in a predictable fashion until it hits rock bottom: disembodied legs and arms, crawling around like Thing from The Addams Family.