Brains: A Zombie Memoir

by Robin Becker

  Ros pulled us around Maria Sangria until we found the anchor. Annie kept slipping underwater; we all did. Zombies aren’t good swimmers. We sink like tombstones.

  I pointed at Guts, then at the rope attached to the anchor. Joan and I set Guts free, untying his metaphorical umbilical cord, and the urchin shimmied on up.

  “Look at him go,” Ros said, his voice deep and wet as a sea monster’s.

  We did our best to keep each other afloat, but Ros kept drifting away. Joan held out her hand and he grabbed it. We pulled him back into our bobbing circle.

  Treading water with my friends, I lifted my face up to the heavens, letting the sun dry my skin, which was flapping from being so long submerged. I felt an optimism I’d never experienced as a human. My soul was clear and sweet. We were elemental creatures-water, wind, earth, fire.

  Professor Jack would’ve made an Earth, Wind and Fire joke here, inserting a song title or an ironic comment on their costumes or cultural significance. Zombie Jack refrains.

  “Mooooooo!” Guts lowed from Maria Sangria, throwing a rope ladder over the side. We made our way over to it and hauled ourselves up, but it was hard going, particularly for Annie. Ros helped her, his hand cupping her half ass, pushing her up while caressing the bite site on her ankle. Those days underwater had diminished her cognition and they certainly hadn’t helped her coordination.

  This is your brain, the Reagan-era public service announcement goes. This is your brain as a waterlogged zombie.

  Like a pirate, I landed on deck and searched the boat. Avast! And ahoy! Food! Old, desiccated, wrinkly, salty, tough food. Starved to death, perhaps. Or dehydrated. But who cared? One in a deck chair; another facedown on the ground. Two more reclining on cots in the cabin. A male in a yellow slicker, probably the captain, slumped over the wheel.

  Human jerky. One for each of us.

  “Bon appétit!” said Ros.

  I went for the woman in the chair. She was middle-aged and had once been fat, judging from the excess skin. I stood behind her, my legs wobbly and sliding around on the wet deck. I put my hands over her ears, pulled up with all my strength, and screwed off her head.

  You’ve seen this scene in a million movies: the unnatural red of the human’s veins and tendons glisten and throb as the head is liberated from the body; the victim screams before, during, and even after the procedure. The proverbial chicken. Quite often the beheading is presented as comeuppance or karma for premarital sex or mistreating women or abusing power. In other words, the victim is a bad, immoral human who deserves death by zombies, death by Leatherface, death by vampires or giant spiders.

  There was no narrative significance to this decapitation, however. The lady had been long dead: No blood flowed from her grisly neck; no justice was served. I neither knew nor cared whether she was kind to children and small animals, whether she was faithful to her husband or spent too much money on her clothing. Whether she survived as long as she had at the expense of others or because she saved others.

  All I knew was her brains tasted like chocolate cheesecake does to a dieter. A little slice of heaven.

  “Better than fish, eh, matey?” Ros asked, munching on pieces of the captain. Ros’s face was Technicolor mold-an autumn of reds, browns, and golds.

  “Arrrrr,” I said, tilting my head to the side and squinting one eye closed in the universal pirate face.

  “Arrrrr,” Ros replied, baring his teeth.

  Shiver me timbers. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. I was a parrot-on-the-shoulder, peg-leg, skull-and-crossbones badass mother-fucker.

  Shit, pirates ain’t got nothing on us zombies.

  AFTER OUR MEAL, we regrouped on the poop deck. Ros was lying on his side, picking his teeth with a piece of wood. He pulled out a black molar and threw it into the lake. A bird landed on the railing of the boat, some water creature with stilt legs and a long orange beak. She looked at us with eyes blank as a zombie’s; no one moved to eat her, full as we were with dead flesh. She squawked once and flew off.

  Judging from the sun and the mildness of the wind, it was early spring.

  Joan made a noise like a drowning cat and took off her waterproof backpack. The top was ripped open, the zipper broken. She turned it upside down. Water, brine shrimp, and plants tumbled out, but no Isaac. In the passion of our feeding, we’d forgotten him. Where was our red-eyed devil baby? Guts ran to Joan and pounded his fists on her squishy bosom.

  “In the lake,” Ros said. “But not dead. Never dead.”

  Ros was right. Isaac would wash up on shore one day, ravaged by the lake and its fish, perhaps little more than a skeleton, but ravenous nevertheless.

  Brains, Part II: Isaac’s Revenge.

  We all looked rancid. Annie’s cheek had a gaping hole ringed with brown blood and leeches; Ros was missing a few fetid fingers, probably eaten by fish; we all carried snails, weeds, shells, and clams in our hair and pockets, clinging to our clothes and flesh. Joan stuck a finger in her ear and out popped a minnow. Guts picked the weeds out of her eyeball.

  “What’s the plan, captain?” Ros asked.

  Wavelets slapped against the stern or the bow or the fore or the aft. The clouds looked like ducks or demons or Africa. In between them, a plane flew.

  It had been a cold winter for zombies. If planes were flying.

  I stood up and removed my water gear. Time for a checkup; everyone did the same. We formed a circle and examined each other. Guts’s guts were gray worms; Ros’s ribs poked through his chest and the tip of his penis was gone; moss was growing on Annie’s stomach. What looked like cottage cheese covered Joan’s chest, and all of our hair was falling out.

  I was afraid to look down at my own body, although it had betrayed me long ago. I nodded at Joan and mimed sewing, taping, healing.

  “First aid kit,” Ros said. “Down below.” Joan saluted and turned on her heel.

  It took hours to save us, from flies and their maggots, from fluvial decay and skeletonization. Saint Joan worked on each of us in turn. Guts helped her, scraping rot like barnacles, sewing up holes, and wrapping tape around softening bones. Guts found a paint set somewhere below and with it, Joan became an artist as well as a mortician, coloring our faces with pinks, peaches, and browns, reddening our lips. Preparing our bodies for viewing. Or for war.

  Joan sewed a tarp over my torso; it crinkled when I moved, but it was firmer than my own flesh. I fiddled with the boat’s radio. The battery was dead. I found a few guns under one of the cots. Although Annie was shell-shocked, more Annabel Lee than Annie Oakley, she smiled at me when I pressed one of the guns into her hand, and that old light gleamed in her eye; she wasn’t totally gone, not yet. I set an empty water bottle on the edge of the ship. Annie took aim and nailed it.

  “Atta girl!” Ros said. “Knew you were in there.” Joan was fitting a pair of pantyhose over his ribs; she paused to smile maternally at Annie. “Where to?” Ros asked.

  I gestured at the horizon as if to say, “Wherever the wind takes us, soldier boy, whichever way the wind blows.”

  “Roger that,” Ros said.

  After we were all patched up and dressed-praise Saint Joan, miracle worker-Ros and I hauled anchor and the boat headed west with the wind, chasing the sun and the Joads and the stars in Hollywood. Our own Manifest Destiny.

  Guts hung over the edge of Maria Sangria, scanning the water’s surface for Isaac. The rest of us joined him. The sun was setting, turning the shifting clouds orange. It looked unreal, like an orange juice commercial or a glossy ad for a subdivision built around golf.

  Ros spread his arms apart. “I’m the king of the world!” he yelled.

  We all got the reference. Titanic. Gigantic. The future’s so bright, we gotta eat brains.

  Over half-decayed and Ros was still a clever boy. Iceberg of America, here we come.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE WATER WAS all kinds of blue, the blue of cleaning fluid and electric Kool-Aid, the blue of the American flag and Indian be
lt buckles, the blue of the blood pooled in the bottom of a corpse. It glinted like diamonds as we headed west.

  Go in one direction long enough, and you’re bound to get somewhere. Even if it’s right back where you started.

  Because it’s the journey that counts, isn’t it?

  “Who do you think is left?” Ros asked, rolling on the deck like a rag doll, as if his bones had liquefied. And maybe they had. “Man or zombieman?”

  Annie tossed a frying pan in the air and shot it. “Hey!” Ros yelled. “Bullets don’t grow on trees.” She pulled off her middle finger and gave it to him.

  “I get it,” he said, scratching his cheek with her finger. “Very funny. But just more work for Joan.”

  Annie grabbed her finger and stomped over to Joan, her bitten ass a gelatinous mass of jiggle. She glared at Ros while Joan sewed the digit back on.

  Guts shrieked and scrambled down from the crow’s nest, binoculars hanging from his neck. He pointed west and handed the binoculars to me.

  Chicago was in the distant horizon. The skyline looked like a diorama of a skyline; the antennae on top of the Sears Tower looked like cockroach antennae.

  Chicago. Where Stein lived and died, and last we checked, where zombies ruled.

  “What’s out there?” Ros asked, reaching for the binoculars. I gave them to him. “Holy shit,” he said. “The Windy City. How the fuck did we end up back here?”

  Full circle, I wanted to say.

  And wherever you go, there you are.

  Ros offered the binoculars to Annie, but she wouldn’t take them. She clutched Joan instead, burying her head in what was left of the matron’s bosom, which was clad once again in the nurse’s uniform. The two of them headed below deck.

  We had time before we hit the shore of Lake Michigan, and I had to prepare for what we might encounter. If zombies met us, I would recruit for the revolution, the next step in our evolution, using simple illustrations like a newspaper comic strip.

  It was more likely, however, that humans would be waiting with bullets and bombs, Rambos with ammo belts crisscrossing their bare chests, hell-bent on our destruction. For their own preservation, of course, and who could blame them?

  We all want to survive.

  I shuffled below deck with the women. I was looking for paper and cardboard, markers, paints, and pens. Writing is my superpower and it would save us.

  Like the old IBM command goes: Think.

  OUR BOAT SAILED toward Navy Pier as if someone were steering. As we drew near, the humans spotted us. Guts was in the crow’s nest-he loved it up there, alone with the wind-when they sent up a flare. Guts fell down the mast and thumped on the deck, a puddle of slime forming immediately under his head.

  “Incoming!” Ros cried, and giggled.

  So far, so good.

  To our right was a vintage lighthouse, to our left an oversized buoy. The sun reflected off the lake, turning everything into cardboard cutouts. Behind the pier were the skyscrapers, as ruined and vacant as Mayan temples.

  I looked through the binoculars. The Ferris wheel stood motionless; the funnel cake and postcard stands were empty. At the end of the pier, where once upon a time tourists stood admiring the view, was a human male with his own binoculars, staring back at me.

  I waved my arm for everyone to hit the deck. Guts stayed down with his slime and Ros joined him. I gave the human the thumbs-up, praying that my thumb looked like his-normal, pink, alive. The male returned the gesture and smiled. He looked truly happy to see what he thought were survivors. Who knew how many of them were left? Judging from the lack of activity on the pier, not many.

  And then Annie emerged from the cabin.

  As in: She Came from the Grave. As in: She-Zombie from Below Deck. As in: Yacht of the Living Dead.

  She was armed with what we found on board-which wasn’t much, but she still looked ready for battle. The human lowered his binoculars.

  “Get down!” Ros said, and I complied. Ros with his metal head might be safe, but the rest of us had left our helmets back in Wisconsin.

  We heard shouts from the humans-indistinct and urgent commands planning their attack, plotting our demise.

  Guts whimpered and I put my arm around him. He nestled his head in my armpit, his hair one giant knot. I rolled onto my back and Guts curled against me like my wife. My head hit Annie’s foot; her legs were apart like a commando’s and she had the rifle at her shoulder, waiting to get close enough for a shot. I tugged on her pants, trying to stop her.

  Because this was not how it should end.

  “You go, Annie,” Ros said. “Get ’em!”

  There was the classic sound of a missile whistling overhead like a Wile E. Coyote Acme bomb, and the back of the boat exploded. Annie dropped to her knees; Saint Joan came stumbling out of the cabin, her bun charred and covered in dust.

  I crawled over to the cardboard signs I’d made, gathered them under my arm, and pointed to the crow’s nest-at an angle now as the boat started to sink.

  Those signs would save us. Words and signs and symbols prove our intelligence; they create our consciousness.

  Language isn’t a virus from outer space, as Zombie William Burroughs said. It’s a virus from within.

  Like the zombie virus, it changed us. With language, we evolved.

  Oh, that mad genius Stein; he was Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein all rolled into one big 21st Century Fox.

  Quick as a lick, Guts was on his feet. Running was his superpower and he used it for the good of the group. He grabbed the signs out of my hand and headed for the crow’s nest. He climbed up the pole and with his brave little hands held the first sign high over his head.

  WE CAN THINK, it read.

  A bullet plowed into Guts’s shoulder. He jerked back but continued to hold the sign aloft.

  Language, our only savior. My words as revolutionary as the Magna Carta, the Treaty of Versailles, and The Feminine Mystique. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

  We hold these truths to be self-evident: All zombies are created equal.

  Guts moved to the second sign.

  “What do they say?” Ros asked.

  Guts held the sign up.

  FRIEND? it asked.

  And with that, they blew his brains out.

  GUTS FELL INTO the lake, slow motion, end over end; the two signs followed him, floating down like paper airplanes. They bobbed on top of the water, impotent symbols with no one to read them, alphabet soup. The third sign landed on deck.

  Annie gurgled and vocalized-“MROOOHAAA”-and charged the bow, not even bothering to aim, shooting wildly at the shore. They shot her in the center of her forehead, right in her third eye.

  Joan cried out, her grief palpable. With the young ones dead and Isaac at the bottom of the lake, our future looked nonexistent.

  I crawled over to the only sign left-WE ARE YOU, it read. I clutched it to my breast as if it were the holiest relic, the shroud of Turin, a tortilla imprinted with the Virgin’s face. A lock of Muhammad’s hair.

  “Holy shit,” Ros said. “Plan, captain?”

  I tossed him the binoculars and motioned for him to use them. Ros poked his metal head over the railing.

  “They’re huddled in a group,” he said, “talking and pointing and looking over here. Barking into walkie-talkies. People running around too. With clipboards and shit.” Ros lowered the binoculars and turned to me. “Getting pretty close to shore,” he said. “Be face-to-face soon.”

  The boat was sinking, but the tide and the wind kept moving us westward. Flat on my stomach, elbow over elbow at zombie speed, clutching the final sign, I reached the bow and placed it on the railing.

  “WE ARE YOU!” I wanted to shout it from the treetops: Just as humans came from apes, we came from humans. We are your descendants; that makes you our ancestors. Our fathers and mothers.

  No one is alone. We are all connected.

  The wind blew and pushed both the sign and boat forward; I
held steady. They had to know.

  A loudspeaker crackled.

  “Attention,” a voice said. “This is Lieutenant Bill Davis of the provisional United States Army. Surrender your weapons.”

  “Not very friendly,” Ros said.

  Joan grabbed the rifle out of Annie’s cold dead hands and pulled herself over to me, resting the weapon on the railing next to my sign.

  The object and its representation. The thing and its sign. The gun and the word.

  Sticks and stones may break my bones…

  I put my arm around Joan. Our healer, our saint. The goddess who kept us alive-yes, alive, not undead or living dead or stenches or corpses or rotters, but living beings.

  Cogito, ergo sum. That’s Zombie Descartes, of course. I think, therefore I am.

  “Stand up,” Lieutenant Davis commanded, the PA distorting his voice. “Stand where we can see you.”

  I shook my head at Joan. My eyes were pleading with her because her eyes had light in them, were filled with love. Like the first time I saw her, months ago, when Ros caged her like cattle and I rejoiced to find another like me.

  “Don’t stand,” Ros said. “They’ll shoot you.”

  Joan stroked my hair, a chunk of which came out in her hand. She tried to smile, I could tell, but her face remained immobile, a death mask.

  I heard violins swelling as Joan rose to her knees; we all winced when her suede-covered bite site hit the deck. She put her hands on the rail and hoisted herself up to stand on the bow-a matron, a caretaker, everyone’s mother. And without a doubt, a zombie.

  She flashed the humans the peace sign.

  “Identify yourself,” Davis said.

  She pointed to my sign. WE ARE YOU.

  Somewhere on shore, a bazooka discharged, followed by a smattering of bullets. The boat rocked and Joan almost lost her footing.

  “Hold your fire!” Davis yelled.