by Max Brooks
“Moo,” said the cow, with a chorus of “baas” from the two sheep and even a few distant “cluckcluckclucks” from the chickens.
“Yes, grass, ha-ha,” I said, “but underneath that grass, underneath the dirt, stone, sand, and gravel is something that’s going to change everything around here!” I raised the bars like an Olympic medal.
“ ’Cause thanks to my new method, the Way of the Five P’s, I’ve just kicked the Stone Age into the Iron Age!”
“This is gonna be a good night,” I boasted to the watching cow. “Not only do I have iron to work with, but”—I held up a handful of torches—“I’m also gonna prove that fire keeps the bad guys away.”
After setting up twelve torches on the tree closest to the meadow, I waited behind my glass wall for the sun to set, the moon to rise, and for the monsters to make their appearance. And when they did, they walked right through my barrier of torchlight. Anger rising, temples throbbing, I uttered a very loud, very angry, very inappropriate word.
“Guhhh,” gloated the first zombie who slouched up to my window.
“You win this one,” I said, holding up the three iron bars, “but I’m just getting started.”
Now, if you’re already a veteran of this world, then you know what kind of weapon can be made with iron. The same one you can also make with stone or just wood, and the same one I couldn’t imagine making at the time. I wasn’t thinking clearly, okay? There were a lot of reasons for this: frustration, hunger, and one that I’ll go into later because I wasn’t aware of it yet.
For now, just know that I wasn’t using my noggin the way I should have, and therefore all I could conceive of was an iron version of my axe. Which I didn’t craft, by the way, because it would have taken up the only three precious ingots I had.
Conserve your resources, I thought. Figure out what you could make, then only make what you need.
As the night wore on, and one mob after another marched mockingly past my harmless torch tree, I stood at a crafting table in front of my glass wall, watching one ghostly item option after another pass me by.
The only two worth mentioning ended up becoming critical to my survival, even though I didn’t know it at the time. The first one, which would have cost me two ingots, looked kind of like a pair of scissors but with the handles connected instead of crossed. I think the technical term is “shears.” The other one, which would have cost me all three, was nothing more than an iron bucket.
“That’s it?” I growled with exasperation. “A bucket and shears? That’s the best I can do with iron?” The night had been a total washout—first the torches, now my supposed Iron Age. “And I had such high hopes,” I said, sighing in a moment of deep self-pity.
I glanced up from the crafting table and saw a zombie in the meadow burst into flames. The sun’s first rays were just poking over Disappointment Hill on what I now thought of as Disappointment Morning.
“That’s right!” I shouted through the glass. “Burn!” At least my enemies wouldn’t live long enough to celebrate my night of failure. “Burn, burn, burn!” I chanted, and smelled a new, offensive odor: my own breath.
I haven’t said much about bodily functions in this story so far, because, so far, I hadn’t had any. No poo. No pee. None of the gross-but-necessary stuff I used to do back home. I hadn’t even let off that musical gas that’s got so many creative nicknames. Which I did not miss, by the way, given that I lived in a stuffy dugout with no ventilation!
But now, for some reason, I suddenly had the sour stink of morning breath, although I suspected it didn’t have much to do with the morning.
My headache from last night hadn’t gone away, either. If anything it had gotten worse. Chills were also rippling across my back, even though the room temperature hadn’t changed. I realized how weak and listless I felt. Not tired, just lead bones and concrete muscles. At the same time, my heart knocked wildly against my chest.
“Am I starving?” I asked, smelling my own breath blow back at me from the window. “Is this how it feels?”
Of course it was, and I knew it. I’d lived with hunger since I’d gotten to this world, but in my heart of hearts I never really believed it would kill me. Accidents and monsters—immediate, in-your-face hazards—were real, but slowly wasting away?
I don’t think I’d ever been close to that kind of danger in my old life. Lethal hunger was for other people, old people reminiscing about wars and depressions, or far-off, nameless strangers begging for aid on TV.
Now I understood them. My body, like a machine, had run out of fuel, and it was breaking down. How long did I have before the machine broke entirely?
“Moo,” came a distant call from across the meadow, reminding me of what I had to do.
“The garden!” I exclaimed, waving gratefully at the cow. “Today’s the day,” I told myself with each limping step, “the shoots have to be ripe.”
And they were. At least that’s what I hoped. One of the cultivated squares had grown into tall, golden hanging stalks heavy with large, black, mini-cubed kernels of…what? Wheat? Barley? Rye?
Wheat, I thought, and reached out for the beckoning square. I not only came up with a collection of seeds, which I promptly replanted, but also a thick bushel of grain.
Lifting the bushel, my hand froze bare inches from my mouth.
“It’s edible,” I said, refusing to consider that the whole project was a blind alley. “I just need to do something with it.”
Hobbling back to my bunker, I kept uttering, “Don’t give up.” And when the furnace refused to cook the grain, I added, “Panic drowns thought.”
“Just gotta combine it with something,” I muttered, throwing the bushel and anything else I could find onto the crafting table. “That’s it, yeah, combine, that’s what you do here, combine stuff.”
And that’s what I tried to do for half the day. Countless combinations of the egg, sugar, even flowers, wood, and dirt. I must have looked crazy, babbling to myself through one failed experiment after another. By the several-dozenth dud, I looked up and shouted, “More!”
That had to be the answer. One bushel wasn’t enough. Just like multiple woodblocks or cobblestones, I just needed more wheat!
Limping back outside, praying that the morning had given one more square a chance to ripen, I saw that the garden was still green.
I began to swear, then noticed something that’d completely slipped by me before. The square I’d harvested hadn’t been the first one I’d planted, but rather the closest to the ocean.
“Water!” I cried, furious at my own stupidity. “Plants need it to grow!”
And yes, if I’d been in my right mind, I probably would have done what you’re thinking of right now. I would have just dug a trench from the water’s edge to let it run right past the rest of my crops.
But I didn’t. Instead, my scared, starving, screwed-up brain devised the worst of all possible plans.
“The bucket!” I rasped, remembering what I could have crafted the night before. Now, using the beachside table, I whipped the three iron ingots into a metal pail. A second later, I’d scooped up a full, brimming load of water, and the second after that I poured it right onto the row of plants.
“NO!” I screamed as the stationary liquid cube washed not only the seeds, but all my work, energy, and time, out to sea. I dove in after them, snatching the hovering green pebbles from the shallow sand ledge. “Right back where I started,” I whispered at the seeds. Then, in a mounting torrent of rage, erupted, “Right back where I started!”
Blinded by fury, I ran across the beach, punching anything in front of me: sand, dirt, even the solid stone wall of the cliff, all to the roaring chorus of “Right! Back! Where! I! STARTED!” And on that last word I hurled the bucket into the ocean.
The act seemed to suck all the anger right out of me, replacing it with the clarity of consequences. I watched in horror as my brand new, extremely rare, and possibly useful pail sailed up and out into the blue.
“Oh no,” I whispered, plunging back into the cold depths. Unlike the seeds, I’d thrown the bucket much farther out. I tried swimming underwater, looking in its general direction and seeing nothing but inky midnight. I splashed to the surface, inhaled deeply then crash-dived like a submarine.
There it was! In the purple haze of subsurface sunlight, I could just make out a small object hovering on a narrow ledge of gravel. Just one block over, and it would have been lost forever. I spluttered back up to the surface not only with the bucket, but with the knowledge that tantrums never help.
Trying to remain calm and digest this new lesson—the only thing I could digest—I began replanting my seeds. I scooped up the cube of water and was about to pour it back into the sea when I suddenly had the idea of drinking it. True, I’d never been thirsty, and true, water alone wouldn’t stave off malnutrition, but at least a full belly might make me feel a little better.
Like with the wheat and so much else before it, my hand and mouth practiced passive resistance. I didn’t get upset, though, and not just because I was hanging on to sanity by my square fingernails. The idea of drinking had set off another thin, wobbly, but possibly lifesaving train of thought.
“Can I drink anything else?” I asked the now empty bucket, and with impeccable timing, I heard a distant “moo.”
Milk!
Shaking my head, I limped back to the observation bubble. “How could I forget this?” I asked the blotchy, grazing mammal on the other side of the glass. “Even if I didn’t drink milk at home, even if I was lactose intolerant, I still should have remembered where milk came from.”
The cow snorted, probably saying, “Took ya long enough.”
I walked outside and circled the animal a few times. “How do you…” I began awkwardly. “I mean, what’s the right way to…”
Clearly I’d neither milked a cow or ever seen it done in my world. However, a quick, terse “moo!” reminded me that the complexity of tasks in that other world didn’t apply here.
“Right,” I said, holding the bucket out to its—her?—pinkish udder. “I’ll be as gentle as I…” I started to explain, but before the thought was finished, the pail filled with creamy, frothy liquid.
“Thank you,” I said, smelling the rich, familiar scent. I drank long and deep, savoring every drop. I waited for my stomach to fill, my wounds to heal, my worries to melt into a river of dairy bliss.
None of that happened. I didn’t even feel the liquid in my belly. “I know,” I said nervously, milking another pail and hobbling back into my observation room. “I just need to keep going!”
Feeling the demons rise, the panic and frustration and explosive, raging hopelessness, I leapt into combining this new ingredient with every other edible mixture I could think of.
Milk and egg, milk and wheat, milk and egg and wheat, milkeggwheatsugar…this and that, back and forth. “My last chance,” I babbled incessantly, “last chance, last chance.”
That chance evaporated as every possible combination failed.
“It doesn’t…” I stammered, staring at what should have been all different kinds of food, “doesn’t make sense.”
Past lessons came flooding back, about things not having to make sense to me to make sense, and how I shouldn’t assume anything that I couldn’t prove. And that’s when I remembered the proof of another kind of food, one I’d already eaten, and which was now standing right in front of me.
My brain switched off. It wasn’t a tantrum, not this time. I wasn’t hot-tempered now, but rather very, very cold.
I looked up from the crafting table into the meadow, out at the cow which had turned its back on me. My mouth filled with spit, my stomach with digestive juices. My body knew what it wanted. Images of steak filled my brain as the axe handle filled my hand.
I slouched slowly across the grass, breathing heavily in a cloud of my own foul breath. The cow didn’t move, munching on its last meal, ignorant of my approach. I shuffled closer. It took no notice.
Just a few more steps, just a few more seconds, and it would all be over. The cow fed peacefully. I raised the axe.
Meat.
Food.
Life.
The cow turned and our eyes met.
“Moo.”
I dropped the axe and staggered back.
“I…I’m sorry, my friend,” I told the gentle beast. “Because you are my friend, even though I don’t deserve you.”
Soft, heaving sobs cut into every word. “You’re—all—I—have.”
And only then did I realize how truly lonely I was. I might not have remembered my life from the other world, and the other people I shared that life with, but I knew they had to exist. Friends, family—why else would my soul feel as empty as my stomach? Why else had I talked to myself, materials, monsters, even the sun up above?
I was trying to fight the isolation that was as deadly to my mind as starvation was to my body. Survival, I now understood, meant taking care of them both. That’s why I’d always felt so comforted talking to the animals. No, they couldn’t talk back, but they could feel, they could hurt, and they wanted to live just as much as I did. And sharing those basic needs meant I would never be alone.
“Friends keep you sane,” I said, picking up the axe at my feet. “And if I’d used this, I’d have ended up just like a zombie.”
“Moo,” said the cow, trying to lighten the mood.
“You’re right,” I chuckled. “I guess I kinda look halfway there already.” With my unhealed bruises, my limping stride, and my breath smelling like a garbage pile, I could see that my four-legged pal had a point. But was she just making a joke, or trying to get me to see something I’d missed?
Putting the axe in my belt, my eyes fell to the pouch next to it, the one containing the stacked, stinking piles of collected zombie flesh. “You know something, Moo,” I said, abruptly naming the cow, “there is one potential food source I still haven’t tried.”
“Moo,” agreed the pardoned filet mignon.
Just looking at the chunks of meat made me queasy. “Hopefully,” I said, crafting a table, then a furnace, “I won’t have a repeat of the raw chicken.”
The spoiled flesh wouldn’t cook. The furnace didn’t want it any more than I did.
“Moo,” insisted the cow, as I held the fetid hunk to my nose.
“What if it’s worse than the chicken? Maybe I should wait and—”
“Moo!”
“All right!” I snapped, and popped the vile piece of carrion into my mouth. I chewed and gagged and swallowed and gagged a whole lot more.
I didn’t get sick like with the chicken, but I almost wished I had. What happened to me was something new, something terrible, and something unique to this world.
Call it ravenousness, or hyper-hunger, but I suddenly wanted to eat the entire world. It felt like my stomach was trying to consume itself, as if every cell was a miniature mouth snapping and screaming for food. At the same time my mouth felt like I’d just licked the sludge off the bottom of a summertime Dumpster.
“Ghaaa,” I gasped in what must have been a spot-on zombie impression. I coughed, I wretched, I ran in frantic circles, looking for anything to chase away the taste. I pressed my face to a tree, trying to actually lick the bark. I jumped into the lagoon, trying to force a drop of water between my lips.
“Moo!” Moo was trying to throw my taste buds a lifeline.
Milk!
I still had the second helping from my failed experiments. I grabbed the bucket and chugged like there was no tomorrow. And then suddenly I was fine. Hyper-hunger: gone. “Thanks!” I gasped to Moo, climbing out of the lagoon and noticing that my ankle suddenly felt a little better.
I tried a few more steps and, while not entirely healed, the sharp pain had faded to a dull ache. I took a deep breath and, lo and behold, my bruised ribs felt better.
“This?” I asked Moo, holding up another chunk of gourmet ghoul. “This is the answer?”
Moo ga
ve me an impatient snort, as if to say, “Don’t think about it. Just do it!”
“Right,” I said, milking her again and holding the bucket ready. It was almost worse the second time, because now I knew what was coming.
“Oy.” I winced, and bit into the decaying grossosity.
I chewed, gulped, and chased with the second pail. This time the hyper-hunger barely lasted a second, and when it was done, my wounds were almost healed.
“Oh, that’s better!” I breathed, feeling a little of my strength return.
“This doesn’t make me a cannibal, right?” I asked, imagining the repulsive substance in my stomach. “I mean, if zombies just spawn as-is, then they couldn’t have ever been human, right?”
“Moo,” said my bovine buddy reminding me just to be grateful.
“Yeah, I know,” I admitted. “At least I won’t have to worry about starving. In fact, I think there’s a saying where I come from: Don’t live to eat, just eat to live.”
I looked up at the setting sun, thinking of tonight’s zombies in a whole new way. “Thank you,” I told Moo, milking her for another pail, “not just for this, but for, you know, everything, even after what I almost did to you.”
And then my generous, nurturing, unbelievably awesome pal gave me the third and final gift of friendship that day. “Moo,” she said, which I knew meant, “I forgive you.”
That night my stomach growled along with the undead vermin. Watching them spawn through the safety of my observation bubble, I actually found myself staring hungrily at the roving mobs, impatiently hoping for the dawn to turn them into bits of disgusting mush.
Now I’m a scavenger, I thought, clocking every zombie’s spawn point. Isn’t that what they call something that survives on dead meat? A vulture or a hyena or a maggot, that’s me.
I thought I remembered hearing somewhere that early humans had started out that way, chasing off other scavengers to feed on the picked-over carcasses of animals. Maybe it was true, or maybe I was just trying to make myself feel better.