Brains: A Zombie Memoir

by Becker

  Joan ushered us into an REI and Ros, our soldier, helped all of us select waterproof jackets, pants, and caps—anything to slow down the rate of decay. We could be underwater for months.

  Guts took off his jeans and T-shirt. His little body was ravaged. Lesions all over like an AIDS patient. Bruised pieces of flesh like old fruit. The duct tape holding in his guts was coming undone; bullet holes dotted his back like stigmata.

  “Do I look like that?” Ros asked.

  Underneath our clothes, we all looked like that; underneath the patches Joan had sewn over our bullet holes, under my Jason-mask shoulder and Ros’s metal head and Joan’s suede knee and Annie’s patched ass, we were rotting corpses. We could never forget it.

  Joan opened her doctor’s bag. Isaac’s head popped out like a whack-a-mole. Thawed, immaculate, and as complete as the day he was born, he wouldn’t need any repairs.

  “Help us, Joan,” Ros said, holding out his hands in supplication. The Virgin Mary lawn statuary pose. Joan threaded her needle.

  She worked on Annie first and when the teenager was as good as new, I stationed her at the door. The army wasn’t too far behind us and we needed a guard. A few zombies tottered down the sidewalk, bunched together in groups of two or three. I made sure Annie understood she should look out for humans and alert me if any approached. She brought her hand to her forehead in a salute.

  I helped Joan with Guts, holding his intestines in place while she stitched his stomach. I considered removing his innards entirely. We could store them in a canopic jar, mummifying them for future archaeologists.

  Why not remove all of our vital organs, leaving only brains and bones? Intestines, liver, lungs, stomach, we didn’t need them. Isn’t that how King Tut remained so gloriously intact for centuries? Wouldn’t that preserve us?

  I walked like an Egyptian, trying to communicate my idea to Ros and Joan. In the distance, there were gunshots.

  “No time for dancing,” Ros said. “Army’s coming.”

  I looked over to Annie to see if she could give us a status update. She wasn’t there. I shook Ros’s elbow and pointed to where the teenage zombie had been.

  “Annie?” he asked. I shrugged my shoulders and shambled to the door. Outside, there was only the blue of the lake and a smattering of aimless corpses, wandering around like the people you see on television whose homes have been destroyed by tornadoes or hurricanes, standing in what used to be their living rooms, looking for birth certificates or wedding photos, any remains of their past lives.

  Ros was right behind me. “Annie!” he said as loudly as he could. He sounded like a goat.

  “Where is she?” he asked. I shook my head. “We have to look for her.” I nodded my assent.

  Joan and Guts joined us at the door. “Kid,” Ros said to Guts, “you run. Cover ground. Captain, you go north, I’ll go south. Nurse, stay here with the baby. Annie may come back.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a good plan,” Ros gurgled.

  I shook my head again, adding my arm and finger to the gesture. Because splitting up would be a mistake. It happens in every disaster movie or thriller, every horror and slasher flick. The core group members go in separate directions to find the missing person or search for an exit or locate the cell phone or radio or a weapon. The killer takes advantage of their solitude, picking each character off at his leisure, going for the weakest ones first.

  Divide and conquer. I wouldn’t let it happen to us.

  I put my arms around Ros, Joan, and Guts and held them close. Ros tried to squirm away, but I would not let go. We had to stick together.

  “You’re the boss,” Ros said.

  We walked out of the store and headed north. Isaac was in a carrier on Joan’s back. Joan put her arm around my waist and gave me a squeeze; I held Ros firmly by his jacket, afraid he would try to escape from my grasp.

  There were more gunshots, each round louder than the one before.

  “Stupid,” Ros said. “They’ll get all of us this way.”

  We stumbled forward.

  “Kid,” Ros said, shaking Guts’s shoulder. “Run! Find Annie!”

  Before I could stop him, Guts was off, racing down the main street, jogging past the high-end stores like a star athlete, putting distance between us and him.

  “Our only chance,” Ros said. “Sorry.”

  Guts turned a corner and disappeared. I looked behind us. We’d gone a paltry fifty feet.

  “He’ll find her,” Ros said. “She’s slow.”

  Ros was right. Annie couldn’t have gone far. We crawled back to the REI and waited.

  THE AIR BEGAN to hum and buzz, as if someone had flipped a switch and turned on the electricity. Our bite sites tingled. The army couldn’t be too far off. In the street, zombies began walking in the same direction, with determination and purpose, heading straight for the humans. Like rats leaving a sinking ship, they were going to meet their second death halfway.

  Not us, though. We stayed hidden in the REI, oozing slime on the trendy camping chairs, trying to ignore the call of the wild.

  Ros wandered around the store, adding flippers and a snorkeling mask to his underwater gear.

  “Help me breathe,” he joked as he snapped the mask on.

  Joan shuffled over to the window and I heaved myself out of my chair. If we waited much longer, we’d either give in and join the herd or be discovered by a reconnaissance unit. Neither option was acceptable. I made a swimming motion with my arms.

  “Roger that,” Ros said.

  We opened the door. Down the road we could see the zombies of Wisconsin heading south, a giant flock of stinking flightless birds.

  “Bye-bye,” Ros said, waving at their backs. “Good luck.”

  He pressed on his diaphragm and opened his mouth to give it one last try. “Annie!” he bellowed.

  Joan poked his stomach with her elbow, cutting his cry short. She pointed down the street.

  The children were walking toward us, Guts skipping and jumping. They waved, big smiles on their adorable faces, greeting us like dead grandparents welcoming their descendants to heaven. Annie twirled in a circle like a music-box ballerina.

  Wherever she’d been, I didn’t care. Even though she disobeyed me, I was elated to see her. She was forgiven.

  ROS, JOAN, AND I dragged our raggedy asses across the park. Isaac was encased in the waterproof pack on Joan’s back. So snugly wrapped, he was invisible.

  It started raining and it must have been cold. Our feet squeaked on the sand.

  “You,” Ros said, shaking his fist at Annie when we met them at the lake.

  Annie went through a series of pantomimes describing her adventure. From what I could gather, she’d picked up the scent of a human and took off after him, thinking that a meal was in order before our watery sojourn. She’d found him in the Crate and Barrel, but as she drew near, he crossed the line from human to zombie. She wrinkled her nose to express her distaste.

  While she acted out the scene, I tied all of us together with nylon rope. I didn’t want to lose anyone again.

  “Scared us half to death,” Ros said. “Bad girl!”

  I tried to look severe, but I couldn’t. I felt warm and fuzzy inside and I hugged Annie close, pressing her head against my breast.

  We heard a barrage of machine-gun fire. There was no more time for sentiment.

  Thin sheets of ice floated on top of the lake and a few chunks washed up on shore. Annie bent down, picked up a handful of sand, and let it sift through her fingers. Guts skipped a rock, but the water was too choppy to count the number of times it skimmed the surface. Joan had her eyes fixed on the horizon.

  “Baaaahhhhhee,” she said, pointing. I squinted in the direction of her finger but couldn’t see anything.

  “Is that a boat?” Ros asked. “Or ship?”

  I could see only gray: gray sky, gray lake, gray clouds like great gray brains.

  “Destroyer,” Ros said. “I think.”


  Annie brandished one of her guns. She aimed and shot; the bullet fell far short.

  “It’s way far away,” Ros said, “but good eye.”

  My heart sank like a battleship. Not much had gone right for us. If current trends continued, we’d be shot when we rose from the lake in the spring. Hunted and gunned down like animals.

  And I didn’t want to die again. I wanted to emerge from the water a great leader, a visionary capable of bringing my people out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land.

  This was my dream, my grand solution: Negotiate with the humans. Find our common ground and reach an uneasy peace, explaining that we, too, are God’s children. And as such, we have a right to exist. Since we need brains, offer to eat their criminals, their invalids, their suicides and car crash victims. Stillborns, abortions, vegetables. Anyone expendable. We’d be performing a valuable service, when you thought about it. And when the zombie population dwindled as a result of decay or insurgent attacks, we’d bite a few humans and allow them to join our ranks. My guess was there would be no dearth of volunteers. In fact, over time, being selected would become an honor or ritual, a part of their culture, like in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

  We could live forever that way. Symbiotically. It wasn’t perfect—no compromise is—but it was a start.

  Guts began walking into the lake. When the water reached his ankles, he looked over his shoulder and held out his hands. I stepped forward, hoping to walk on water. No such luck. I grabbed one of Guts’s hands; Joan took the other. Annie and Ros joined us and we formed a chain. We could have been a group of actors pretending to be a normal American family on vacation, ready to take a winter swim together at some fabulous lakeside resort. Or we could have actually been that family, no more simulations or acting, no layers of meaning and artifice sprinkled with postmodern allusions. The birth of the real.

  A zombie is a zombie is a zombie is a zombie.

  Full-immersion baptism. We shambled into the water like characters in a Flannery O’Connor short story. I glanced at Joan. She didn’t look like herself in her forest-green water gear. Without her nurse’s uniform, she could have been any zombie; her noble nose was mostly gone, her skin a crazy quilt of brown blood. But her medical bag was snug in a waterproof backpack, alongside Isaac.

  We kept walking. The water reached Guts’s waist, his chest, his brave little chin. I didn’t feel wet, although I was halfway in; I didn’t feel anything.

  “Hold your breath, little man,” Ros said as Guts went under.

  Soon enough we were all underwater where it was dark and murky. There must have been fish but I didn’t see any. Not at first. Ros said something, and the sound came in waves, washing over me like sonar, like dolphins talking. I wanted to give him the thumbs-up but didn’t dare let go of Annie and Guts. They were my lifeline. My future. My underwater breathing apparatus.

  We were in limbo, wandering the bottom of Lake Michigan. A lost tribe of sodden zombies, we were prehistoric. Dinosaurs. I tried to steer us north, but I’ve never had a good sense of direction.

  My eyes adjusted to the dark. A school of shiny yellow fish surrounded us. One ventured forward and nibbled on Guts’s neck. Then another. I shooed them away.

  Here was a contingency I hadn’t thought of: What if we were eaten by fish?

  The belly of the whale, that I could handle. Being devoured by a leviathan is biblical and grand, full of history and tradition. Think Moby Dick, Jonah, Jaws, Orca, Lake Placid and Lake Placid 2. Even Godzilla lived in the sea.

  But being nibbled on by a school of small fry was beneath me. As a mythical being, I would not accept a demise less than epic. I jerked us away from the school.

  And the lake turned deeper and a shade darker. The current was as strong as the ocean. There was a rip tide or an undertow, and I was lifted up by it. I let go of my comrades’ hands.

  We let the water take us. It was effortless, this dance. I wiggled my body like an eel. Annie and Guts were doing the same—Joan and Ros were too far away to see, but I could feel their weight tugging on the rope around my waist. The five of us were one creature, each part of a greater whole, fingers on a hand, tentacles of a giant squid, cogs in a machine.

  It was like flying. Jonathon Livingdead Seagull. There was freedom underwater. We went where the lake sent us.

  A speckled fish passed between Guts and me; it had a pink stripe down its side like a Nike swoosh. Then a salmon, steel gray and bigger than Isaac, its mouth shaped like a bottle opener. He gave us the fish-eye and moved on.

  We could swim forever this way, I thought. To the ends of the earth. To the ocean or the gulf. Until the water gets shallow and the weather turns warm and we crawl onto the shore, a little worse for the wear, but still striving, still bleating our clarion cry for brains and more brains. For life.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WE FLOATED AND swam like mermaids. I slipped in and out of consciousness, half-frozen and half-Buddha, one step closer to nirvana and pure being.

  I was a butterfly, a jellyfish. My life as a human grew more and more remote. The trappings of culture, all we created, the whole bloated project of humanity, from the pyramids to Frank Gehry, Pindar to Bukowski, suet to sushi, all of it as ephemeral as an Etch-A-Sketch. Like Ros, I remembered random events from my past as if they had happened to someone in a movie.

  As children, my sister and I spent a few weeks every summer with Oma and Opa in their cottage in Seattle. It smelled like lavender potpourri and boiled meat. The four of us played Scrabble and Oma always won, clasping her thick fingers together and bringing them to her lips as she studied the board.

  “We escaped the camps,” she said, “so you could be here, kleine Jack. Safe and happy with us.”

  When Oma and Opa died, they left my father a sizable legacy of property, stocks and bonds, old money from Austria, plus new money they’d earned in America. When my father and mother died, that legacy was passed down to my sister and me. Although I’d produced no heirs of my own, my sister had two sons set to inherit our world.

  Or did she? And whose world was it? My nephews and my sister, were they alive, dead, or living dead? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

  We passed over a wondrous fish feeding on the bottom. It must have been seven feet long, coral pink, with spikes on its back like a dragon. It didn’t look up at us, just continued to suck on the sand like an aquatic vacuum cleaner. No doubt that species of fish has lived unchanged for millennia, eating whatever settles on lake bottoms, and growing and maturing as a result. Releasing eggs in the spring, reproducing, then getting old and dying. Perfect in its design, no need to evolve. Like a cockroach or an alligator.

  I rolled my torso, undulating. I could feel Ros pulling on us, his flippers an advantage in this environment. I pulled on the rope, bringing Guts closer to me. A snail was on his cheek and I ripped it off.

  Zombies are the next step in human evolution. The virus, our birth, the apocalyptic mad scientist shtick—no Frankenstein’s creature or end of the world, but a giant leap forward. Progress. Like Vonnegut’s Galápagos, back to the sea.

  We eat but don’t grow. We reproduce but don’t need eggs or mitosis, ejaculation or even love. We are as simple as fish. Simpler than fish.

  And as Henry Zombie Thoreau said: simplify, simplify, simplify.

  We swam past another fish, this one about half the size of Guts. It was the color of a tin can with a splash of orange on its fins. I reached out and grabbed it under the gills. The fish thrashed; its tail was strong and slapped my shoulder, but I brought it to me.

  The first bite yielded a mouthful of scales. The second bite was all bone, but I ripped through it anyway. Because the third bite hit braindirt: minuscule, grainy, and cold. Entirely unsatisfying. Like jerking off instead of screwing; playing checkers instead of chess; watching Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake of Psycho. Looking at a photograph of Guernica.

  Still, I ate the fish. You take what you can get. The water turned pink wi
th its blood and the gang gathered round, hungry for stink.

  We chewed on its stomach, intestines, tail, fins, spine, the solid meat of its sides. What I wouldn’t have given for hot brains. Ros popped a fish eye in his mouth and said something that sounded like, “Needs wasabi.”

  That’s why I loved Ros. Like his namesake, he was comic relief.

  A FLASHBACK, PRE-ZOMBIE. As vivid as reality. Lucid dreaming. Lucy dreaming.

  “Jack?” Lucy asked, her voice lilting up at the end of my name. “Why did you marry me?”

  I closed the book I’d been reading, marking my place with my thumb: Rene Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy.

  “Can someone say high-maintenance?” I said, laughing. “You know why.”

  We were in my study with its book-lined walls, big oak desk, Persian rug, Macintosh laptop, and antique china hutch loaded with pop culture ephemera—my Pez collection, a Sigmund Freud action figure, a can of Billy Beer, a Magic 8 Ball. Lucy was dusting, although she didn’t have to. Someone came in once a week.

  “We can’t reproduce,” she said. “Isn’t that what marriage is for? To start a family?”

  “Tell that to our gay friends.”

  “Touché.”

  Lucy had just suffered her third miscarriage, and the doctors warned it would likely happen again.

  “I married you,” I said, “so no one else could have you. It was a selfish endeavor.”

  Lucy wiped my vintage Archies lunch box with an old sock. “Have you thought more about adopting?” she asked.

  I put the book on my desk and gave her my full attention. Her dark hair stuck up in the back like Alfalfa’s. She was trying not to cry.

  “C’mere,” I said, and held out my arms. She snuggled onto my lap and buried her face in my neck. Her bony ass jutted into my thigh. She was all bones and heart, that girl. Bones and heart.

  “I don’t want some stranger’s baby,” she whispered. “I want my own.”

  I rubbed her back and petted her short hair. It had been a tough week, a tough year. For Lucy especially.