Hernando, struck dumb by how quickly Gabriela acquiesced, refused to leave his father’s house for two weeks after Gabriela went away. He canceled all appointments with his friends and instructed the house staff not to allow anyone, but for the unlikely Gabriela, entrance onto the large estate.
Then, one hot summer afternoon, Hernando, who had that day moved no farther a distance than that between his bed and the chaise lounge set beneath his bedroom window, was surprised to see in that bedroom window the face of a faithful servant and friend. At first startled and then quickly angered (for had he not given specific instructions?), Hernando at once decided to shove the intruder, push him out of the window and off the wall, so that he would fall and perhaps break his legs. As he grabbed the man’s shirt, ready to give him a strong shove, the servant pulled from his person a carefully folded letter and shook it in Hernando’s face, saying, “Please, Don Hernando, please, I have instructions from Gabriela.” Quickly, then, Hernando pulled the young man inside, grabbed the letter, and read it and read it again and read it for a third time before once looking up at the servant who had delivered it, at which point he said, “You may leave.”
As per the letter’s instructions, Hernando approached the innkeeper, Señor Juan Gonzales, hired by Don Rafael to run the inn in order to pay off a debt, and informed him that letters would soon arrive, sometimes many in just one day. Gonzales was to keep these letters, and every Sunday after the eight o’clock Mass, he, Don Hernando, would come to the inn for breakfast and Señor Gonzales would slip the letters to him, hidden wrapped with the tortillas. Señor Gonzales was not, under any circumstances, to hand the letters to anyone else.
For three months, Gabriela mailed all letters for Hernando to the innkeeper. Don Rafael, at first glad to see his son had finally given up his foolishness, quickly grew suspicious of Hernando’s Sunday visits to his innkeeper, Señor Gonzales. When confronted, Señor Gonzales, easily intimidated, told Don Rafael that, yes, Hernando received letters, though Señor Gonzales claimed not to know from whom. Don Rafael instructed Señor Gonzales to set aside one of the letters to be handed over after Hernando had retrieved the others. Unable to disobey Don Rafael, yet unwilling to betray the young Hernando, Señor Gonzales took the first letter to arrive on Monday, hesitated only a moment before opening it, and set himself the task of copying it over and over again, doing so for the full week, meticulously tracing each letter until he had finally mastered Gabriela’s hand. And then, Saturday night, Gonzales forged a letter from Gabriela, claiming that she no longer loved Hernando, that she had met another man, a doctor, and that she wished to never see him again. He sealed this fake letter into an envelope and marked the envelope with a small X in the top right hand corner.
Anxious about the deception, however, Señor Gonzales, by mistake, gave the forged letter to Hernando, and accidentally passed one of the real letters, one that had arrived just the day before, to Don Rafael, only realizing his mistake as Don Rafael, after opening the letter, handed the unmarked envelope back to Señor Gonzales.
“Aha!” exclaimed Don Rafael. “It is just as I suspected. It is a letter from Gabriela. And also as I suspected, she has finally broken his heart, has left him for another man, a doctor.”
Escape from the Mall
I have only known Roger for a couple of hours now, but when he comes over to me, he’s got a look on his face that tells me he’s got something on his mind.
He’s wrapping a strip of tattered cloth around the palm of his hand. It’s a serious venture, this wrapping of the cloth around the palm of his hand. As he walks over to me, he seems to be considering this process more than he’s considering me, more than he’s considering the act of walking, which is why, even though we are all huddled here—the seven of us—here in this janitor’s supply closet, which cannot be much larger than a decently sized public toilet, why it takes a good minute or two for him to reach me. Why it takes him long enough that for a moment I consider meeting him halfway, if only to quickly get over with whatever it is he is going to propose to me.
Instead, I try to think back over the past couple of hours to see if I can remember what he might have done to the palm of his hand, but I can’t remember anything in particular. Granted, there is a lot to remember. Granted, there is a lot I’d rather not remember.
The way Jennifer slipped on the wet tile in the middle of the food court just as the hordes rushed over her, for example. The way she screamed for our help. The way they slurped as they slurped her up. I could stand to forget that.
Not to mention the way that black guy, that black guy with the kid, the kid who’s now sulking, red-eyed and snotty and blotchy-faced in the corner, the way that guy turned around at the last minute, at the very last minute, right before Roger jimmied the closet door open, turned around and charged into the throng of them, wielding Roger’s Louisville Slugger and yelling over his shoulder, “I’ll always love you, Tyrone,” the way they kind of just parted for him, like the Red Sea for Moses, stepped aside and let him charge right into the heart of them before the mass of them swallowed him whole.
That.
I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one who’d rather forget that.
But as for Roger and his palm and what might have happened to his palm that might now require such deliberate attention, I can’t say as I remember.
He hasn’t stopped moving toward me even as he’s come close enough to me that he could probably whisper whatever it is he’s going to say and I’d still be able to hear it, and for a moment I think to myself, Maybe he’s going to kiss me. And then I think, That’d be unexpected.
But he doesn’t kiss me, which is fine, as I think it might hurt Mary’s feelings, Mary who’s been looking at him doe-eyed since he decapitated the one that was about to rip her skull off and eat her brains out.
He doesn’t kiss me, but he leans in close enough that I could bite his nose if I wanted to. I guess he could bite my nose if he wanted to, too.
Neither of us bites the other one’s nose.
“How you holding up?” he says, whispering hoarsely.
“Great,” I say. “What happened to your hand?” I ask.
He lifts it up and points it palm forward at my face and says, “This? Nothing. This ain’t nothing. I’m good, man. I’m good.”
I don’t get much of a look at it before he drops it quickly back down to his side, but the smell of it that lingers in the air where his hand was just a second ago smells rotten and earthy. But before I can force the issue, he tells me he has a plan.
“A plan?” I ask. “A plan to do what?”
“We’ve been sitting here almost an hour now,” he says. “We’re starting to get restless. We’re starting to panic.”
I shift my eyes to get a look around the room, and no one looks restless or panicked. Everyone looks tired and sad and sweaty. No one looks restless or panicked at all, except for Roger, I realize, once I shift my eyes back to him.
“Sure,” I say. “What’s your plan?”
This story has nothing to do with me. I know this, even as I am in the middle of it. This story has everything to do with Roger and Mary and Tyrone and the security guard. I don’t know the security guard’s name, but he’s got a look about him, a look that makes me think that this story is his story, too, more his story, anyway, than my own. He’s got that reformed-addict-turned-security-guard-waiting-to-make-the-ultimate-sacrifice-for-people-he-doesn’t-even-know-in-an-attempt-to-atone-for-the-misery-he-caused-in-his-youth kind of look. That, or maybe it’s just that he looks bigger than the rest of us. Bigger and unhurried, too, as if he has seen all this before, or as if just this sort of situation—a zombie attack, an alien invasion, a giant, ferocious lizard, mutated by the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima, rampaging through Houston—was what he had been planning for, what he had expected when he signed up for the job as a security guard for th
is mall in the suburbs. But when I mention this to Mary, who, every time I speak to her, looks surprised to see me there with the rest of them, she tells me he’s stoned.
I’ve got a story for Mary, too.
Recently divorced, mother of two.
Not the prom queen from high school, maybe a late bloomer, but when she bloomed, pretty enough that she married that prom-king type.
Maybe an actual prom king from the rival high school, or not a prom king at all, but a quarterback, or point guard.
All in all, a miserable affair: You’re married to an unappreciative man mired in the glory of his past, supportive of him but lonely, too, until one day, you come home to hear him tell you that he doesn’t love you anymore, that instead he loves Missy, a saleswoman at the Toyota dealership where he works, not as a salesman himself, or even as a mechanic, but as the guy who cheats car buyers into buying extra care insurance packages for things that will never break. Now she’s juggling kids, two part-time jobs, attorney fees to wrest alimony and child support from her ex-husband, inappropriate advances from her much older bosses at both of her jobs, and today. Her day off of all days, the day she has set aside for herself, not even the whole day, but the few measly hours her mother agreed to watch the kids, a couple of hell-raisers made only worse by the divorce, the one day she picked to come to the mall, not even to buy anything, not that she even had the money to buy anything, but just to look around, just to have a few moments to herself, just to revisit the world she thought was going to be her world, today is the day the mall is overrun by the evil undead.
Of course it is.
She is surprised not in the least by this.
And maybe she didn’t trip in the sporting goods store by the exercise equipment. Maybe she didn’t trip at all, but gave herself up, handed herself over, because could it be worse, really, than how she felt now?
All of this, though, all of this speculation I keep to myself. And I’ve decided to speak to Mary as little as possible in case she makes any more stray comments that might unhinge the fragile framework of my coping mechanism, as she’s already done with the security guard.
Roger’s plan might just be the dumbest plan I have ever heard ever, but I go along with it anyway. Why not, right? What have I got to lose, right?
Or, rather, other than my life, what have I got to lose?
I go along with it because I know the others will go along with it, too. They’ve followed Roger’s lead since the moment the screaming began, way on the other side of the mall, somewhere near the food court, the screaming loud enough that we could hear it from so far away. They followed his lead into that fray even when, in the opposite direction and only a hundred yards away, there were doors leading outside, leading to our escape. Even then, they followed him.
By they, of course, I mean, we.
We followed him into the fray.
We watched him save first Tyrone and then his father, and then, at the end, right before we shuffled into this janitor’s closet, Mary in the sporting goods store.
And then into this broom closet: We followed him here, too.
Now he wants us to go up into the ceiling.
“The ceiling,” he tells me, whispering still. “That’s our ticket out of here.”
I look up. He slaps me quickly and lightly on the face. “Don’t look up,” he says. “You’ll give it away.”
I shift my eyes around the room a) to see if anyone just saw Roger slap me and b) to see whom I might give this precious and vital information away to.
“To whom?” I ask.
Roger leans in closer and I wish he wouldn’t. There’s a smell to him that’s ripe and uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the adrenaline in his blood, or maybe he lets off a funky kind of sweat when fighting the evil undead. Whatever it is, I’m doing my best to breathe it in through my mouth.
“Don’t say anything,” he says. “Don’t react to what I’m about to say.”
“Okay.”
“We don’t want to freak anyone out.”
“Sure. No. No problem.”
Now his voice drops to an actual whisper, and I can’t hear him, and for a moment, I wonder if he’s saying something and I just can’t hear him or if he’s decided now is the time to pull that trick where you move your mouth like you’re talking when really you’re not saying anything at all.
“I can’t, I can’t hear you,” I tell him.
He doesn’t like to repeat things, I can tell by the look on his face, but before I can apologize for something that wasn’t my fault, he says, again, “One among us has been infected.”
This news takes me by surprise, but only slightly, and only in that it was Roger who figured this out and not me.
I figured that if anyone were to discover that one of us was infected, it would be me or one of the other unnamed peripheral characters, and only moments too late.
For instance, say one of us would be crying in the corner, hunched over and sobbing and rocking, and another one of us would see this person in pain, and we would sigh in disgust at Roger and Mary and the security guard and Tyrone, all too caught up in their own drama to notice the rest of us, and we would walk over, gently place our hand on his shoulder, sit down softly next to him, and say something like, “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, we’re going to make it out of this, I swear, I promise, we will,” and we would place our other hand on his knee, a sign of friendship, a sign of “You are not alone,” and he would place his own hand over ours, and we would say, “That’s right, it’s going to be just fine, don’t you worry,” but it would come out a little hesitantly, or distractedly, as we would be distracted by the queer texture of the hand on top of our hand, cold and wet and a little sticky, but we wouldn’t look down, not yet. We wouldn’t look down because we would feel guilty for thinking poorly of our comrade in arms, our newfound friend, desperately sad and in need of comfort.
“Do you have a family?” we might ask. “Do you have someone waiting for you?”
And he would nod, a gentle but increasingly vigorous nod.
“Oh yeah?” we might say. “Where? Where are they? Tell me, just tell me about them,” we would say, knowing that sometimes talking about something else, anything else, might distract us, if only temporarily, from the fear and the pain and the sorrow.
Then would come that too-late moment when we look down at the hand covering ours and discover it to be a rotting mass of flesh, at which point we freak out and the creature whips its head around and bites our face off, or when, pivoting off our question about his family, he whips his head quickly around and says something to the effect of “My family? They’re waiting just outside that door” before biting our face off.
Though, truth be told, zombie-like creatures aren’t known for their ability to speak.
Nor for their understanding of ironic timing.
Or even their understanding of delayed gratification.
So, really the surprising thing about Roger coming to me with information about one of us being infected is that there is one of us infected and we are not yet all dead.
Still, it’s a little disappointing to find this out from Roger, who has discovered it all on his own and in enough time to try to think of what to do about it.
“Really?” I say. “Who?”
“Not yet,” he says. “We screw this up, we’re cooked,” he says.
Then he nods seriously and gravely. Then he puts his hand heavily on my shoulder and nods again, and so I smile back at him, which I guess is all he needed from me, because then he moves on to the next person he’s going to tell about his plan.
For my money, I peg Tyrone as the one among us who is infected. Not that I’ve got anything against the kid. He seems like a nice enough kid, or did before he was turned into a mindless and brutal killing machine. He seems nice enough, but he’s
also the one we might all least suspect, which is why I suspect him most.
There’s a small, bloody mass on the side of his head, which I originally figured for random brain matter or organ matter splattered there during the run through the maze of maternity clothes after we ducked into the department store. Now I am beginning to wonder if it’s not his actual brain I’m looking at. If that’s maybe where they got him, in his actual brain, not enough to kill him, not enough to really slow him down. But to make him one of their own, how much brain would a zombie need to eat?
Not much, by my reckoning.
The longer I stare at that piece of Tyrone’s brain sticking out of his skull, the more I wonder why no one else but Roger has noticed it, and then what I might be able to do to preemptively disable the thing that once was Tyrone. I scan the room for a piece of equipment that might quietly and quickly be transformed into some kind of specialized weapon, but the most threatening thing I see is the mop and mop handle, or the broom, or the disinfectant spray, none of which seem all that promising. As I’m trying to figure out if there’s some way I can take a roll or two of toilet paper, light them on fire, and turn them into some kind of something, though, Mary crosses over to Tyrone and pulls his head to her chest, to comfort him, maybe, or to comfort herself, or maybe both, and he hiccups one time and then sobs heavily into her, and I see the piece of brain matter slip off his head and fall into her lap.
When I first heard the screams, I was walking into the mall, and Roger, who had just passed me going the other way, was walking out of the mall. Then the screams happened and then we both turned around, and maybe he gave me the benefit of the doubt, maybe he saw in me what we all hope to see in ourselves—selflessness, bravery, willingness—because when he saw me turn around so I could walk back out of the mall, having decided that the new pair of shoes I hoped to buy wasn’t worth dealing with the kind of hysterical, pained, violence-ridden screaming coming from the far part of the mall, he grabbed me by the shoulder, a strange glint in his eye, and said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
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