CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THEY BOMBED ALL night: firebombs, cluster bombs, smart bombs, cherry bombs, bang and boom, shock and awe. We loafed in the parking lot at our ease, observing the display. It was the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve rolled into one. It was a song of destruction. The heat from the blasts kept us from turning into slushies.
“Any undead in there are toast,” Ros said.
It was just as well. What would they have done? Build cities? Design furniture? Form governments? Make pottery?
Zombies are not creators. Zombies don’t manipulate and control the environment. We don’t organize day laborers or deplete the ozone layer. We don’t build dams or run for city council. We don’t play softball or pinball. We are Zen masters. Like a Venus flytrap, just give us meat and more meat.
Feed me, Seymour!
“Barely remember being human anymore,” Ros said. “I remember stuff that happened, but like in a movie.”
Joan patted his shoulder. Her face was melted wax, her breasts pale shadows of their former stand-at-attention glory. She had fed three children with those dugs and they were rotting now, the worst kind of cancer.
“I was in Baghdad,” Ros continued, “and one day, they were like, you’re going home, soldier. Bigger fish to fry in the States. I was glad to get out of the desert. Felt lucky to be alive and going home to Becky.”
Annie rolled onto her stomach. Her pigtails were stained red and stiff with blood and guts. She looked like a girl the Ramones might have sung about.
“But home was way worse than al-Qaeda,” Ros said. “Everyone dead or undead.”
Used to be you were either alive or dead. Pregnant or not pregnant. Not anymore. Now everybody’s liminal. Everyone’s a transsexual.
Annie made an hourglass figure with her hands and pointed to Ros. “Burrawwheee?” she asked.
“Never found her,” he said.
The bombing stopped, the ground rumbled. In the distance, an engine roared.
“Tank,” Ros said.
“Come and get us, scum suckers!” a voice yelled.
My bite site tingled. The army was advancing, clanging a bell, making a racket. Their plan was obvious: Flush us out and shoot us.
I pantomimed a vague plan of escape, anchored around this basic premise: Must Get Away Now! Guts gathered up Isaac and zoomed ahead. The rest of us picked our sorry selves off the ground and followed.
Joan, Ros, Annie, and I plodded along, bringing pestilence, war, famine, and death—but at a glacial pace, the velocity of slugs. Call us the Four Retarded Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It might take us a while, but eventually we’ll kill and eat you. Relax while you wait—have a cannoli.
Zombies emerged from houses and basements, from underneath piles of wood and rubble. Lured by the promise of human flesh, they headed straight into the military’s trap. We passed them on the street and I tried to look as many as possible in the eye, searching for a glimmer of light, anything brighter than the dirty yellow film that blinded them.
There was nothing. No one home. They were deader than dead. At least they would keep the army occupied while we escaped. To where or what was another question.
WE CONTINUED NORTH, away from the tanks. It was still snowing. Annie slipped and fell on the ice and it took all of us to get her up. Guts stayed a few blocks ahead, scouting locations, searching for humans, military or civilian, to either chomp on or avoid.
We were in a state of nature now: kill or be killed.
We passed a frozen zombie on the side of the road. Joan paused to examine it—the gender was indeterminate, the creature decayed to not much more than patches of skin and tendons clinging to a skeleton.
More planes flew overhead. Leaflets dropped from one of them. ATTENTION, it read. THE OUTBREAK IS UNDER CONTROL. THE VIRUS IS CONTAINED. THE ENEMY IS BEING ISOLATED AND ELIMINATED. FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION, STAY AWAY FROM URBAN AREAS. THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAS SET UP BASES IN MOST STATES. TURN ON YOUR RADIO TO FIND THE ONE NEAREST YOU AND MAKE YOUR WAY THERE IMMEDIATELY. STAY IN OPEN AREAS AND BE ALERT AT ALL TIMES!
At the bottom was a graphic of a stick-figure human running from a gang of zombies. The caption read: DO NOT APPROACH THE ENEMY. IF YOU CAN AVOID A CONFRONTATION BY RUNNING AWAY, THEN RUN AWAY. IF YOU ARE CORNERED, DESTROY THE ENEMY’S BRAIN BY SHOOTING, STABBING, BLUDGEONING, OR BURNING.
“What’s it say?” Ros asked.
I shook my head. It was too complicated and depressing to explain that we were a virus.
“We’re losing,” Ros said.
I nodded. We shuffled on, but it was becoming harder and harder to move. The wind felt like a wall and there was an inch of snow piled on my shoulder. We caught up to Guts and he handed me Isaac. The baby was frozen solid. An ice puck. I tossed him to Joan, who put him in her doctor’s bag.
“Wait,” Ros said. We stopped. Annie swayed like a pine in the harsh winter wind. If we stayed still much longer, we’d freeze in the middle of the highway, and it was dawning on me that freezing was not our best option. At least not out in the open, where the army would eventually find us and blow our brains out.
The best laid plans of zombies and men…
Ros pointed east. “The lake,” he said. “Jump in the lake.”
It was a good idea. Winter at the bottom of the lake, then walk into the sunshine come spring. Primordial creatures crawling out of the slime.
We turned right and headed for Lake Michigan. We were survivors, refugees, and just desperate enough to take the Polar Bear Plunge.
DOWNTOWN MANITOWOC WAS lovely. It’s on the lake, with a courthouse and a park with swings and a gazebo, plus a museum and marinas. It was white with snow, pure as a sno-globe winter scene. Stores lined the street: Urban Outfitters, Starbucks, the Gap, Williams-Sonoma, all of them with their windows broken and doors wide open. Money strewn on the floors. The credit card machines and cash registers silenced.
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.