CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE WATER WAS all kinds of blue, the blue of cleaning fluid and electric Kool-Aid, the blue of the American flag and Indian belt buckles, the blue of the blood pooled in the bottom of a corpse. It glinted like diamonds as we headed west.
Go in one direction long enough, and you’re bound to get somewhere. Even if it’s right back where you started.
Because it’s the journey that counts, isn’t it?
“Who do you think is left?” Ros asked, rolling on the deck like a rag doll, as if his bones had liquefied. And maybe they had. “Man or zombieman?”
Annie tossed a frying pan in the air and shot it. “Hey!” Ros yelled. “Bullets don’t grow on trees.” She pulled off her middle finger and gave it to him.
“I get it,” he said, scratching his cheek with her finger. “Very funny. But just more work for Joan.”
Annie grabbed her finger and stomped over to Joan, her bitten ass a gelatinous mass of jiggle. She glared at Ros while Joan sewed the digit back on.
Guts shrieked and scrambled down from the crow’s nest, binoculars hanging from his neck. He pointed west and handed the binoculars to me.
Chicago was in the distant horizon. The skyline looked like a diorama of a skyline; the antennae on top of the Sears Tower looked like cockroach antennae.
Chicago. Where Stein lived and died, and last we checked, where zombies ruled.
“What’s out there?” Ros asked, reaching for the binoculars. I gave them to him. “Holy shit,” he said. “The Windy City. How the f*ck did we end up back here?”
Full circle, I wanted to say.
And wherever you go, there you are.
Ros offered the binoculars to Annie, but she wouldn’t take them. She clutched Joan instead, burying her head in what was left of the matron’s bosom, which was clad once again in the nurse’s uniform. The two of them headed below deck.
We had time before we hit the shore of Lake Michigan, and I had to prepare for what we might encounter. If zombies met us, I would recruit for the revolution, the next step in our evolution, using simple illustrations like a newspaper comic strip.
It was more likely, however, that humans would be waiting with bullets and bombs, Rambos with ammo belts crisscrossing their bare chests, hell-bent on our destruction. For their own preservation, of course, and who could blame them?
We all want to survive.
I shuffled below deck with the women. I was looking for paper and cardboard, markers, paints, and pens. Writing is my superpower and it would save us.
Like the old IBM command goes: Think.
OUR BOAT SAILED toward Navy Pier as if someone were steering. As we drew near, the humans spotted us. Guts was in the crow’s nest—he loved it up there, alone with the wind—when they sent up a flare. Guts fell down the mast and thumped on the deck, a puddle of slime forming immediately under his head.
“Incoming!” Ros cried, and giggled.
So far, so good.
To our right was a vintage lighthouse, to our left an oversized buoy. The sun reflected off the lake, turning everything into cardboard cutouts. Behind the pier were the skyscrapers, as ruined and vacant as Mayan temples.
I looked through the binoculars. The Ferris wheel stood motionless; the funnel cake and postcard stands were empty. At the end of the pier, where once upon a time tourists stood admiring the view, was a human male with his own binoculars, staring back at me.
I waved my arm for everyone to hit the deck. Guts stayed down with his slime and Ros joined him. I gave the human the thumbs-up, praying that my thumb looked like his—normal, pink, alive. The male returned the gesture and smiled. He looked truly happy to see what he thought were survivors. Who knew how many of them were left? Judging from the lack of activity on the pier, not many.
And then Annie emerged from the cabin.
As in: She Came from the Grave. As in: She-Zombie from Below Deck. As in: Yacht of the Living Dead.
She was armed with what we found on board—which wasn’t much, but she still looked ready for battle. The human lowered his binoculars.
“Get down!” Ros said, and I complied. Ros with his metal head might be safe, but the rest of us had left our helmets back in Wisconsin.
We heard shouts from the humans—indistinct and urgent commands planning their attack, plotting our demise.
Guts whimpered and I put my arm around him. He nestled his head in my armpit, his hair one giant knot. I rolled onto my back and Guts curled against me like my wife. My head hit Annie’s foot; her legs were apart like a commando’s and she had the rifle at her shoulder, waiting to get close enough for a shot. I tugged on her pants, trying to stop her.
Because this was not how it should end.
“You go, Annie,” Ros said. “Get ’em!”
There was the classic sound of a missile whistling overhead like a Wile E. Coyote Acme bomb, and the back of the boat exploded. Annie dropped to her knees; Saint Joan came stumbling out of the cabin, her bun charred and covered in dust.
I crawled over to the cardboard signs I’d made, gathered them under my arm, and pointed to the crow’s nest—at an angle now as the boat started to sink.
Those signs would save us. Words and signs and symbols prove our intelligence; they create our consciousness.
Language isn’t a virus from outer space, as Zombie William Burroughs said. It’s a virus from within.
Like the zombie virus, it changed us. With language, we evolved.
Oh, that mad genius Stein; he was Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein all rolled into one big 21st Century Fox.
Quick as a lick, Guts was on his feet. Running was his superpower and he used it for the good of the group. He grabbed the signs out of my hand and headed for the crow’s nest. He climbed up the pole and with his brave little hands held the first sign high over his head.
WE CAN THINK, it read.
A bullet plowed into Guts’s shoulder. He jerked back but continued to hold the sign aloft.
Language, our only savior. My words as revolutionary as the Magna Carta, the Treaty of Versailles, and The Feminine Mystique. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: All zombies are created equal.
Guts moved to the second sign.
“What do they say?” Ros asked.
Guts held the sign up.
FRIEND? it asked.
And with that, they blew his brains out.
GUTS FELL INTO the lake, slow motion, end over end; the two signs followed him, floating down like paper airplanes. They bobbed on top of the water, impotent symbols with no one to read them, alphabet soup. The third sign landed on deck.
Annie gurgled and vocalized—“MROOOHAAA”—and charged the bow, not even bothering to aim, shooting wildly at the shore. They shot her in the center of her forehead, right in her third eye.
Joan cried out, her grief palpable. With the young ones dead and Isaac at the bottom of the lake, our future looked nonexistent.
I crawled over to the only sign left—WE ARE YOU, it read. I clutched it to my breast as if it were the holiest relic, the shroud of Turin, a tortilla imprinted with the Virgin’s face. A lock of Muhammad’s hair.
“Holy shit,” Ros said. “Plan, captain?”
I tossed him the binoculars and motioned for him to use them. Ros poked his metal head over the railing.
“They’re huddled in a group,” he said, “talking and pointing and looking over here. Barking into walkie-talkies. People running around too. With clipboards and shit.” Ros lowered the binoculars and turned to me. “Getting pretty close to shore,” he said. “Be face-to-face soon.”
The boat was sinking, but the tide and the wind kept moving us westward. Flat on my stomach, elbow over elbow at zombie speed, clutching the final sign, I reached the bow and placed it on the railing.
“WE ARE YOU!” I wanted to shout it from the treetops: Just as humans came from apes, we came from humans. We are your descendants; that makes you our ancestors. Our fathers and mothers.
No one is alone. We are all connected.
The wind blew and pushed both the sign and boat forward; I held steady. They had to know.
A loudspeaker crackled.
“Attention,” a voice said. “This is Lieutenant Bill Davis of the provisional United States Army. Surrender your weapons.”
“Not very friendly,” Ros said.
Joan grabbed the rifle out of Annie’s cold dead hands and pulled herself over to me, resting the weapon on the railing next to my sign.
The object and its representation. The thing and its sign. The gun and the word.
Sticks and stones may break my bones…
I put my arm around Joan. Our healer, our saint. The goddess who kept us alive—yes, alive, not undead or living dead or stenches or corpses or rotters, but living beings.
Cogito, ergo sum. That’s Zombie Descartes, of course. I think, therefore I am.
“Stand up,” Lieutenant Davis commanded, the PA distorting his voice. “Stand where we can see you.”
I shook my head at Joan. My eyes were pleading with her because her eyes had light in them, were filled with love. Like the first time I saw her, months ago, when Ros caged her like cattle and I rejoiced to find another like me.
“Don’t stand,” Ros said. “They’ll shoot you.”
Joan stroked my hair, a chunk of which came out in her hand. She tried to smile, I could tell, but her face remained immobile, a death mask.
I heard violins swelling as Joan rose to her knees; we all winced when her suede-covered bite site hit the deck. She put her hands on the rail and hoisted herself up to stand on the bow—a matron, a caretaker, everyone’s mother. And without a doubt, a zombie.
She flashed the humans the peace sign.
“Identify yourself,” Davis said.
She pointed to my sign. WE ARE YOU.
Somewhere on shore, a bazooka discharged, followed by a smattering of bullets. The boat rocked and Joan almost lost her footing.
“Hold your fire!” Davis yelled.
What a coward I was, hiding from the humans, cowering behind the wooden planks of the boat like a child under the covers, afraid of the dark. Joan looked down at me and this time she did crack a smile. The clouds shifted or the sun moved or the earth tilted and a halo formed behind her head.
From her nurse’s pocket she removed a handgun, stuck it in her mouth, and blew her brains out. Her eyes never left mine.
Saint Joan, sacrificial lamb, she was stronger than we were. She refused to be captured by the enemy; she remained the mistress of her own fate.
Ros and I wailed; we ululated like Middle Eastern women whose children have been killed by taxis. Joan and the handgun and my sign fell to the deck.
“Get Stein,” I heard Davis bark. “Now!”
My stomach jumped at the mention of our creator. I felt Lucy’s sweet meat moving inside me. And Pete’s brain in my bowels and my boss’s pudgy flesh and A. J. Riley’s bullet-ridden cerebellum. Every human I’d munched on, all the entrails I’d savored, they were a part of me now, as integral as my own intellect.
Ros clutched my sleeve. “Stein?” he said. “Pete said he was dead.”
The stern hit the bottom of the harbor. The boat stopped sinking and settled. There wasn’t much separating us physically from the humans now: the bow, twenty feet of water, and the pier. Ontologically, there was a chasm: beating hearts, digestive tracts, and sexual reproduction; architecture, Hello Kitty, and barbecue pork rinds.
But under the right conditions, zombies have something humans will never have: eternity. And at that moment, we had hope.
Howard Stein was coming in our greatest hour of need. He was a man of reason. A scientist. Surely he believed in Enlightenment ideals. Surely he’d help his creation.
“What should we do?” Ros asked.
I held my hand up, palm facing Ros, the traffic cop’s signal to wait.
“I should try to talk to them,” he said.
I shook my head no.
“But once they know I can speak, they can’t kill us.”
I didn’t trust the military. I remembered Hurricane Katrina. Those Americans could speak. In fact, those Americans held up signs just as I had. Stranded on rooftops, the floodwater rising. Help us, the signs said. Save us.
“Can they?” Ros asked, rubbing his hands together, worrying them. “Would they?”
I put my hand on Ros’s shoulder and nodded.
Tuskegee, Guantánamo, the crucifixion.
Ros stood up and saluted. “Private Drake, reporting for duty, sir!” he shouted, his voice deep and wavering, an underwater tuba.
Drake? To me, he’ll always be Rosencrantz.
“Stand down, private,” Davis said into the bullhorn. “Get back on deck.”
Ros slumped next to me. “They don’t care,” he said.
A helicopter circled us. I looked through my binoculars at it and saw someone looking back. The hunter and the hunted; the gaze and its object; exhibitionist and voyeur—I didn’t know which one I was anymore.
“Wish I still had on my uniform,” Ros said. “That would show them.”
I grabbed my sign; it was wet and limp, the letters blurry but still legible. I held it up for the men in the helicopter.
WE ARE YOU. That statement should end all wars: Christian vs. Muslim; White vs. Black; North vs. South; Bear vs. Shark. Us vs. Them.
Zombie vs. Man.
The helicopter hovered for a moment, then angled left and flew away. The first streaks of red appeared in the clouds, bathing Joan’s splattered brains in crimson. Behind the skyscrapers, the sun was setting.
I took out paper and a pen. It was time to finish my masterpiece.