The dim light at the foot of the stairs suddenly disappears with the faint bump of the door closing.
“Are you okay?” I whisper.
“Ssshh.” There’s a silence so stark I can hear my ears ringing like tinnitus. Then I feel her next to me.
“You busted the lock, you fucking faggot,” she hisses. “Come help me barricade the door.”
“Did you see any zombies out there?” I ask.
“No. It’s quiet.”
“What if one got in the house?”
“When?” she asks.
“When you were on top of me?”
“Then it would’ve gotten us already,” she whispers. “And we would’ve heard it. And—” She trails off. “You are such a pussy. How did a guy like you stay alive out there?”
I want to laugh. She’s so much tougher than me. “That’s how,” I say.
“Being a pussy?”
“Pretty much.”
“Oh great. Come help me.” She slides silently away, and I fumble for the railing and try to move like she moved. Except I sound like a colony of swarming bats, squeaking and scuffing my way down the stairs until I get to the bottom step and thump heavily against the floor.
“Shut up,” she says.
“It was an accident,” I whisper.
“It sounds like your whole life is an accident.”
“Stop giving me shit. I’m just a guy trying to stay alive, you fucking bitch.”
“Help me move this dresser.” She grabs my wrist and pulls me across the room, then puts my hand on something wooden. I feel around it.
“This is an armoire and it weighs a ton,” I say.
“That’s why men have muscles.”
We lift, walking the thing a few inches, hearing the cabinet doors clatter lightly against their latch. Then I have to set it down because I feel like I’m going to bump into something. We keep moving like this, a few inches at a time. The wooden lip I’m grasping offers barely any purchase for my fingers. My muscles are truly no match for this, but she seems to have no problem. I wonder if she was a trucker or something.
Surprisingly, my host remains silent through this ordeal, and a few minutes later, we have that thing squarely in front of the door.
“We gotta put the couch against it now,” she says.
I groan inwardly, but I understand that a good shove by a bunch of undead hands will send that top-heavy pile of shit toppling right over.
The couch is a miracle to move, because it has coasters under it to protect the floors.
“I’m glad you had the foresight to put coasters under your couch legs in case of a zombie apocalypse,” I remark.
“Oh I didn’t do that,” she says. “I’m just squatting this house. Found it two weeks ago, raided all the nearby pantries, and haven’t left.”
A sliver of faint light appears in the solid black room, and the silhouette of her head peering out the window where she’d moved aside a curtain. “Nothing out there. It’s totally dead,” she says.
“Totally dead,” I laugh.
She grunts a laugh.
“That’s pretty funny,” I say.
“I’m actually glad you’re here. I can tell you’re a nice guy.”
The curtain falls back into place, and I hear the couch squeak as she falls onto it. I flop down on the opposite end.
I feel so much relief. The couch is as safe and comfortable as a mother’s hug, and it’s great to find another human. Loneliness is its own private hell out here.
“So I guess you don’t have any guns, or I would’ve been shot,” I say.
“Naw, these yuppies don’t carry guns. I’ve searched a few closets and garages, but no luck yet.” She pauses, then, “I guess if you had a gun, I would’ve been shot too, eh?” Another pause. “Actually, if you had a gun, you probably woulda blown your own foot off,” she adds, laughing.
“You’re a lot nicer now than when I got here.”
“There been some men come around here,” she says. “Foragers who got pushy.” She sighs loudly. “I had to kill two.”
I want to ask about it, but I let it go. I know the gist.
“Anyway,” she continues. “I can tell you’re harmless.”
“You can tell all that in the dark, huh?”
“I mean, you won’t try to hurt me.”
“I told you that, right before you kicked me in the jaw,” I say.
She laughs. “Sorry about that.” Her fumbling hand finds my shoulder then touches my chin. “Is it okay? Are you bleeding?”
“Nah, I’m okay. Just a bruise. I’ve taken worse beatings out here.” Her touch feels nice.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“Thirty-seven.”
She snorts again with laughter. “Well, I figured you for a kid just outta college. You’re a grown man, eh?”
“Sure. How old are you?”
“Hey,” she says. “I got an idea.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Let’s cut the small talk and have some fun. I ain’t had a man in months, and the world is pretty much over as far as I can see. Since you’re leaving tomorrow, we might as well get laid.”
I recoil. For all my lascivious thoughts, I suddenly don’t want to have sex. It feels awkward and wrong. I can’t see this woman, don’t know her, why the fuck is she asking me for sex? This is like every man’s jack-off fantasy, but in real life, it’s completely unsexy. I have no desire to do it. For all I know, she has AIDS. I can’t wrap my mind around this woman, or how she can be thinking of sex right now. “Um, but I don’t really know you, uh, you can’t just--”
Her hand finds my thigh, near the knee, and begins sliding upward.
Chapter 17: Then
So there I was, sitting in the damn cop car in my tranquil little circle of rotting faces, which looks like some syphilitic James Ensor painting. I was the human sardine, inside my little can, so transfixed by these critters.
They looked so much like normal people. Some of them didn’t even have any visible wounds; there was just a hungry mouth and a disturbing look in their eyes. Zombies don’t look at you like a normal person. Their eyes are already eating you. Sometimes their mouths open and close, too. Like fish mouths, or Pac-Man when he’s running around the board and the dots are all cleared, but he’s still chomping away at nothing.
The spider crack on the windshield made me nervous, but mostly they were just pawing at the car. Once in a while, a fingernail would grate on glass. I wasn’t sure what to do, go forward or go backward. If there were too many and I went forward, I could get stuck and not be able to move; just a sitting duck until one of those enraged spazzy zombies shows up to smash the windshield.
Mouths pressed against the glass, smudging spittle on it. Zombie carwash. I don’t know why I wasn’t scared; it just looked so harmless, as if none of them had any strength. Might as well have been a bunch of hamsters trying to dig their way into the car.
I put the car in reverse, backing slowly. I watched them part like the Red Sea behind me. A couple zombies dropped beneath the trunk, and the car bumped over them.
Then there were no more zombies, just empty boulevard full of neon signs. I could see Sam’s Club again, but no more muzzle flashes from there. Either the survivors had gotten away or been bitten. The fires still burned in the doorway, and I saw shapes walking through the fire.
Sam’s Club was nostalgic to me, because when the store opened a couple decades back, my Dungeons and Dragons buddies started saying I had a store named after my dick and making unclever jokes like, “Hey, I think that hot cashier was checking out Sam’s club!” and “She wants to ride your club, Sam!”
The zombie horde reached my car again, bumping against it as they tried to assimilate me. I decided there was nothing I could do for those people in the parking lot and began accelerating in reverse down Erie. I tried to turn the wheel really fast and pull a Dukes of Hazzard-style donut, but the car just spun out of control then jolted violently to a ha
lt when it slammed into the curb.
The zombie horde headed my way, and it felt like the director would yell ‘cut’ and all of the actors would just break out into conversation.
Nope. They just stumbled toward me, in some zombie deja vu moment. I’d seen it over and over on late night TV. Somehow, zombie movies existed before this shit ever went down. Makes no sense, right? Yet here it was. As if some secret government lab had designed this plague in the 1950s Cold War scheme, and a rogue scientist from the project confided to George Romero that this was gonna happen one day, and voila a genre was born. Do you understand how fucking ridiculous it is to be a sci-fi nerd and see zombies in real life? And how the hell did Romero die right before it happened?
I didn’t let them reach the car this time. They gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I pulled away, sped back down the road, and got on the highway at Thompson. Still headed west, into the city.
One would think the logical idea would be to head away from populated areas into bumfuck rural safety. But when something like this happens, you really feel a need for human connection. It goes way beyond the need for a girlfriend. I just wanted to be around other people, living people…lots and lots of living people. And I knew downtown must have some contingent of police and National Guard repelling the invaders and protecting the Federal Building.
The brightly lit windows of the Brooklyn Pickle glimmered reassuringly down, as if I could just walk in and order a sandwich. I’d eaten there so many times that I realized with solemn finality I would probably never enjoy a turkey club from there ever again.
I turned on the radio, not the scanner, the regular radio, to see if we still had radio stations. A lot of stations were still broadcasting:
Y94 FM: “…the Infinity Mall is not safe…”
95X: “…numerous vehicle accidents clogging Route 81 north and the plague seems to have covered the entire north side of the city…”
96.9: “…stay indoors, lock yourselves in, close your shades…”
I pause at 100.9 K-Rock, where the DJs are yelling and swearing, “…got to do with fuckin zombies, man? I mean, everyone’s been waiting for this and now it’s here.”
“Nobody knows what it even is.”
“Who gives a shit? It’s fucking awesome. And…shit, we can say fuck on the radio. Shit. Piss. Pussy.” The DJ starts laughing like some easily amused college kid. “Tonight’s the night that K-Rock will rape your mom’s pussy!”
“And ass!” some guy’s voice calls out in the background.
“That’s right, her ass too! Suck my cock bitches, I am the God of Hellfire! Fuck you K-Rock and fuck you, Larry. Why don’t you come on down to the station and fire me? You’re already such a fuckin’ zombie that the zombies probably won’t even bother you!” Two guys shrieked with laughter in the background while the DJ continued, “The Zombie Fuckin’ Apocalypse is finally here, man! I repeat, all over upstate New York, flesh-eating zombies are spreading and chaos is ensuing! And to our listeners--go fuck yourselves!”
“Unless you want to bring us beer,” someone shouts from the background.
“Oh yeah,” the DJ says. “We’re definitely running low on beer. Only one case left.”
“There’s no such thing as zombies,” a different guy chimes in. “It’s obviously germ warfare.”
“Oh yeah--how about you go on outside and tell the zombies that.”
This is surreal, speeding down an empty 690 westbound, listening to these guys and dodging the occasional zombie that walks into the road. It sounds like there’s 9 or 10 people in the studio, having a party.
Some K-Rock guy says, “What do zombies, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny have in common? They’re not fuckin’ real!”
“And Jesus,” someone yells. “They’re as fake as Jesus; tell America that.” Then he laughs and walks closer to the microphone, yelling louder as he approaches. “That’s right, America, you fuckin fags--reality check--Jesus isn’t real and he isn’t coming to save you, so you can stop praying for Kirk Cameron’s divine intervention.”
A girl’s voice says, “No, let them keep praying--I think this is natural selection, personally.”
My ex-girlfriend, Veronica--the one who broke my heart and left me after grad school--would’ve referred to these guys as apes. They were just normal, stupid lunkheads who talked about tits all the time, hated gay people, and screamed loudly at the television in the bar whenever Syracuse University scored a touchdown.
Veronica and I were so different and strange, and we didn’t relate to other people. On the Myers-Briggs personality test, we had both scored INFP, which meant we were into introversion, intuition, feeling, and perceiving. We were a really small portion of the population with highly attuned emotions.
We first met at an INFP campus meeting, where only six people showed up. She cornered me afterwards and talked to me because she liked my vibe and how “unassuming” I was.
“I’m just weird,” I’d told her, blushing furiously because she was too pretty and I could barely look in her eyes.
“Weird is good,” she said. “I’m weird too. Do you want to be like all the others?”
“All the other what?”
“The dumb apes. You know, just walking around and crashing through their lives, looking for sparkly lights and bumping bass and chicken wings.”
I totally knew what she meant. That’s basically what all the rest of the people in my city looked like to me--some fraternity of loud, obnoxious assholes which I was definitely not a member of.
The original K-Rock DJ comes back on and says, “Folks, just so you know, our station is completely surrounded by zombies, and they tore apart Scotty the sound tech when he tried to go out there and investigate. It’s too bad we’re not a TV station or I could show you Scotty now. He’s in our window with his face eaten away. He was a good man. Sucks they got him.”
“Scotty’s not there anymore; he seems to have wandered off,” someone reports. “I got some pictures of him which will be live on the website in two minutes.”
“Is the internet still working? This whole thing fuckin’ sucks.”
“It sucks and it doesn’t suck, know why? Because fuck this society, man. I’d rather live in a zombie apocalypse.”
“Braaaaiiiins,” some guy rasps, and then a movie soundbyte plays-- some old ragtime music where a guy sings, “I could wile away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers, consulting with the rain. And my head I’d be a scratchin’, while my thoughts were busy hatchin’, if I only had a brain!”
Laughter followed and one guy said, “Oh man, I can’t believe you played that.” More snickering.
I recognize the song from the Wizard of Oz, and I realize they must be really stoned. And I feel a pang of jealousy, because it would be so much more fun to be locked in the K-Rock building with them and getting drunk than alone in this cop car. Those guys are idiots, but they’re enjoying themselves a lot more than everyone else. Their calmness makes me feel a deep sense that it will be alright, that the Army will come soon and fix everything. K-Rock will be rescued, I’ll be rescued, and somehow we will all just pick up where we left off, with fewer students for me, and fewer listeners for them.
Judy Garland chimes in, “With the thoughts you’d be thinking, you could be another Lincoln, if you only had a brain.”
“Dude, let’s do lines from Night of the Living Dead on air.”
“No, dude, let’s just do coke lines instead!”
This is followed by tons of laughter. “No--Dawn of the Dead!” someone else shouts. Then he says in a stiff voice, “They return to the places they knew in life!”
Another soundbyte of an old-fashioned newscaster starts playing, “Eyewitness accounts described the assassins as ordinary-looking people, misshapen monsters, people who look like they’re in a trance, and creatures that look like people but behave like animals. Some tell of seeing victims that looked as if they had been torn apart.”
“Oh, man, that guy totally calle
d it.”
“He’s Nostradamus.”
“Are there any pizza shops that are still delivering? We will fucking pay you a hundred-dollar tip if you deliver a pizza to the K-Rock station right now.”
“And two hundred dollars to deliver some coke!”
The DJs erupt into laughter and I turn the radio off.
Chapter 18: Now
This trashy nympho lady is trying to have sex with me.
The touch of a woman’s hand on my thigh has me instantly aroused. I feel like a teenage boy sitting in my parent’s car in Katie Conway’s driveway trying to get up the nerve to kiss her when she reached over and put her hand on my thigh. I jumped both times, and then, like now, I’m three seconds away from spooging my pants. Actually, Katie did make me jizz, but somehow I squirm away from this woman’s hand just in time, scuttling backwards across the couch like a crab.
She squawks out a laugh that’s way too loud for the post-apocalypse world, and I whisper, “Sssshhhh! I don’t even know you.”
“Yeah, well, who really knows anybody?” she says. “Tomorrow we could be dead, what the fuck else is there to do? I just thought you seemed…nice.” She lights up a cigarette, filling the air with the most noxious smell.
“I don’t have sex with people I don’t know,” I say, and my own dick rolls its eyes and laments that it’s attached to the biggest pussy on earth.
In the pitch black, for all I know, I’m rejecting Natalie Portman. “I don’t even have a condom, and I don’t know your name. And I’m in love with someone else, besides.”
She laughs too loudly. “Alright, kid, calm down,” she says, puffing away on her cigarette but speaking at normal volume. “I’m Marsha. Do you want my social security number and date of birth, too? Maybe we can get an AIDS test done at the Civic Center?” She laughs again.
“Quiet down.”
“There’s nothing out there,” she says. “I already checked. I’m sick of the silence, and no one to talk to.”
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