CHAPTER TWO
OH, THE HUNGER. So hungry. Waking up, my body was in flames. A human torch. A burning man. The all-consuming fires of hell. As in Dante’s Inferno. As in eternal damnation. You can stop, drop, and roll all you want, there’s no putting out this blaze.
Cognitive function was minimal. At first. Brain turning to mashed potatoes. Body falling to pieces…leprous leprosy. Leper, I was. Leper, I still am.
Upstairs, a noise. Some part of my mind registered: dog. Fluffy. Must go, stumble, waddle, traipse like the Mummy, follow the whimper. I stopped in our conjugal bathroom and stared at my reflection. Jonesing for flesh, manic for meat, I scribbled letters on the mirror with my finger. Inscription, graphomania. The first hint of my sentience.
This is what I wrote: Brains!
Fluffy was Lucy’s dog. A damn toy poodle. I ate her. She was very funny. I mean furry. Why did I write funny? Furry. Or fury. I ate her in a funny furry fury. There was little meat on Fluffy. Tiny brain. The fluffy white fur of Fluffy fell on the bedroom carpet and I learned: In a pinch, any meat will suffice.
When empty, my stomach is a pit of burning coals; every muscle is tearing apart and my tendons are eaten by wolves, my liver chewed up like the liver of Prometheus.
The needle and the damage done.
Dear God, where was my Lucy?
I walked outside and stood at the end of the driveway. Our modest suburban street had been transformed into a Japanese monster movie. Humans ran like B-movie extras, like people running from an alien attack or a blitzkrieg, looking over their shoulders at Armageddon.
Cars screeched out of driveways and smashed into telephone poles and each other, going nowhere. Grandmas and children were left trapped inside SUVs and minivans, staring at the disaster through the windows like they were on a drive-thru safari, looking for the lions.
And chasing them all, the cause of their terror: me.
The old lady from next door ran by in her house slippers. In one hand she wielded a spatula, in the other kitchen shears. “Jack!” she cried when she saw me. “Not you too!”
Lucy and I had hated the biddy. She was the kind of anal-retentive shrew who brought out the leaf blower for one lousy leaf. Once, when Fluffy accidentally crapped in her yard, she picked up his poo and threw it over the fence like a monkey at the zoo.
I grabbed her wrinkly elbow and bit into her arm. She hit me over the head with the spatula as if I were a pancake she wanted to flatten. I didn’t even flinch.
Another zombie moved in and bit the back of her neck, then another and another, until she was surrounded. I stepped away from the group; the old bitch’s arms were over her head like someone bobbing in deep water. Not waving, but drowning. Her utensils fell to the ground.
A young mother ran toward me, clutching her baby to her breast. Every evening as Lucy and I sat on the couch watching Brian Williams, this woman power-walked past our picture window. We didn’t know her name or which house she lived in, but she’d become a fixture in our lives, as reliable as the evening news and David Letterman.
I reached out and snatched the baby from her as she powered by; Mama fell to her knees.
“Please,” she pleaded. “Not the baby.”
Oh, the melodrama. I clutched the baby by its arms, shaking it. I bared my teeth, drooling like Grendel over a virgin sacrifice.
“Mooooaaah!” I roared.
The baby’s face was scrunched up, its eyes squeezed shut. It was utterly helpless. Defenseless. Fay Wray in the arms of King Kong, as tender and juicy as veal.
The need to feed grew within me. It was monumental, rivaling the needs of Michael Jackson, Adolf Hitler, Barbra Streisand, Henry VIII, and King Tut…combined. I was a practical joke played by Mother Nature.
Can a being with infinite desire ever be sated?
I opened my mouth as wide as I could, a circus geek with his chicken, Ozzy Osbourne with his bat.
“No!” Mama sobbed and plunged a knitting needle into my forearm.
The needle stuck out like I was a voodoo doll. I dropped the infant and Mama scooped her child up and cradled it. Baby pulled at Mother’s shirt, exposing a milky expanse of swollen breast. I understood its hunger. Mama turned tail and took off, dodging zombies like a running back, baby tucked under her arm like a football.
I pulled the needle out and walked toward the house. Behind me, I heard screams and moans, teeth crunching bones. The sounds of civilization coming to an end.
ZOMBIES DON’T SLEEP. I wandered the house looking for Lucy, half afraid I would find her and eat her, more afraid I already had. I left messages for her in the furniture’s dust, scrawled a letter on the dry-erase board in the kitchen, stuck Post-it notes on the walls of our bedroom. They all said the same thing: Forgive me, Lucy, for being a monster.
I might have spent hours or days walking from room to room. I couldn’t tell anymore. Time meant nothing. The past and the future no longer existed. The present was the only thing that felt real.
How Buddhist of me…if Buddhists ate babies for brunch.
When I gazed at myself in the antique gilt mirror over the fire-place, “I started back,” as Frankenstein’s monster said, “unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.”
My hair was matted and dreadlocked. In life the look would have been trendy for a certain demographic; even the clots of blood and chunks of meat and bone embedded in the tangle could have passed for over-the-top Goth. I had the pallor of the undead—pale as the kitchen sink. My wrinkles, lines around my eyes and mouth that once connoted a life fully lived, were etched in black and red, a caricature of distinguished age. My once gym-toned and muscled body was wasting and my shoulder, the site of my bite, was falling off like spit-roasted barbecue. Yet I felt no pain.
I pressed my nose against the mirror. No fog. No breath.
On the mantel was a framed photo of Lucy smearing cake on my face. It’s a scene replayed at a million wedding receptions: The bride shoving frosting at the groom, intentionally missing his mouth, her own mouth opened wide with laughter. The ritual is simultaneously playful and sadistic, combining food and sex, dominance and submission, consumption and power. Sugar, spice, and everything nice.
I swept my hand across the mantel, sending the photo, a ceramic vase, and a brass cat flying. I felt dramatic and romantic: a soap opera hero, Hamlet wringing his hands, lonely Adam pining for Eve.
There was no use rambling around in that house of memories. Like Lucy said, I always have a plan. A purpose.
Professor Jack Barnes was taking a trip, a pilgrimage, in search of others like him. I couldn’t be the only corpse with consciousness, the only brain-eater with a brain. I wasn’t entirely alone. Was I?
I REJOINED MY fellow zombies in the street, following the herd, moaning as they did, lifting my arms as I walked, stiff as a board. Admittedly, my gait was a bit more strident, more competent than the others’. I had cognition on my side and I was a relatively young zombie; most of my body parts were intact.
Car alarms blared; sirens wailed; and my shoulder tingled. I sensed humans nearby but saw none. They were hiding in basements, no doubt, cowering in bathtubs or eating canned spinach in bomb shelters. A helicopter flew overhead, spraying us with machine-gun fire, but the attack was short and perfunctory, the equivalent of a drive-by shooting. The chopper was headed south, probably to Saint Louis to save the Arch. No one cared about our tiny town and its corn, cows, and liberal arts college.
I searched the eyes of my companions as we shuffled along, looking for a glimmer of intelligence, recognition, memory. I saw nothing. Their eyes were soulless and flat, devoid of thought, empty of feeling, and hell-bent on finding loved ones and neighbors to eat. Instinct alone propelled them forward, one rank foot in front of the other. Programmed for one thing and one thing only, they wouldn’t stop until they got it.
Marie Delaney from across the street fell in beside me. In life she had been a doctor, and a generous one at that; one evening when Lucy refused to go to the hospital after punching the wall of the sunroom in a fit of jealous rage, we’d knocked on Marie’s door. After a brief examination, the good doctor prepared an ice pack for Lucy’s hand—no questions asked and no payment accepted.
Lucy’s anger had been justified. She’d discovered a transgression of mine, an affair of no consequence with a graduate student, a dim meaty woman with breasts the size of a newborn’s head, both of which, breast and metaphorical infant, I’d gladly eat now. That would be more pleasant than screwing the woman was, come to think of it.
Zombie Marie still had on her scrubs. They were splattered with blood, a Jackson Pollock of red and black and forest green. Her neck was broken; it lolled on her left shoulder, causing her to walk in a lopsided fashion. The classic zombie shuffle.
I tried to speak with her, to ask if she had a destination, a plan, a leader, but to my dismay, instead of a well-formed sentence loaded with the requisite layers of meaning—Do you like me? Remember that night we went skinny-dipping in the Smiths’ pool? Thank you for examining Lucy—inarticulate moans came from my gash of a mouth.
A caveman, I was preverbal. A boy raised by wolves. Helen Keller before her education. Nothing more than an animal.
Marie looked at me and her eyes flickered in recognition. For a microflash, a nanosecond, she grasped our predicament. Her eyes cleared to chestnut brown and I saw understanding in their depths. Grief beyond repair. Then the milky-white film, thick as cataracts, returned to her irises, and the pathos was gone.
If eyes are windows to the soul, then Marie’s soul had left the building.
We wandered en masse. There were no sidewalks in our town. Before zombification, cars ruled the streets. Now, we creatures commanded them. We passed a brick home guarded by a concrete goose lawn ornament wearing an Uncle Sam suit for the Fourth of July, then another brick home with concrete deer grazing on the lawn, and a third brick home flying the American flag. We hit the highway and passed the Wal-Mart. The parking lot was almost empty.
Zombies communicate as insects do, through pheromones or memes or telepathy. We moved as one past the store; no one broke off from the group to search the supercenter. The building was deserted, although I now know that Wal-Mart can be an excellent place to hunt. Humans raid the store for food and supplies; we raid the store for humans. Big fish follows small fish follows zooplankton follows phytoplankton. Your basic food chain. Ninth-grade biology.
Wal-Mart—their people make the difference…and the evening meal.
At the edge of town we turned onto a gravel road as if guided by an unseen hand. Cows munching on grass watched us as we filed by, a writhing stinking mass of the undead. They were undisturbed by our moaning. A few even lowed back.
The road ended and we stumbled up against a barbed-wire fence fortified with an eight-foot wall made of car tires and hubcaps, car doors and grilles. To the right was the Chariton River, to the left a field of soy; behind the fortress was A. J. Riley’s junkyard and within, the siren call that lured us: the unmistakable scent of human flesh.
Hyenas let loose on gazelles. Termites on wood. Maggots on meat. Fleas on rats. Amoebas on fleas on rats. We swarmed the wall.
It was a slo-mo frenzy. Rubber and steel fell as we climbed the structure in our shambling way, taking our time, like slippered old men shuffling down hospital hallways. A few zombies fell off the wall and onto the fence, speared like martini olives.
I was the first to reach the top. I hoisted myself over and tumbled down the other side, landing on my feet. A Rottweiler ran at me, a one-headed Cerberus guarding the gates of hell, and sank his teeth into my ankle. I shook him off as if he were a kitten, slamming his body into the wall just as Marie hit the ground. She jumped him. I heard his high-pitched whimper as she tore into his muscular neck.
There was a building in front of me and a Honda Civic to my right, its hood missing and its engine covered with rust. Behind the building were the junked cars, each one as decrepit and dead as we were, each roof a tombstone.
Inside the office, there was a gunshot. Blood splattered on the window in a Rorschach pattern of a dove in flight. I headed for it, a phalanx of zombies trailing behind me, clustered together like a zygote. By the time I made it through the door, most of A. J. Riley’s brains had seeped out of the hole he’d blasted through his head. I got down on my hands and knees and sucked them up like an aardvark sucking ants.
Brian Williams was on the television mounted near the ceiling, his voice calm and professional. “We are coming to you live from our studios in Chicago,” he said, “Ground Zero of this horrific outbreak, where Dr. Howard Stein, the scientist responsible for the virus, lives and works. Sources reveal Stein is working with government officials on a cure or a mutation, pursuing any avenue that might slow the spreading, control the infected, and spare precious lives. In the meantime, you are advised to stay indoors and avoid contact with anyone who has been bitten…”
I was listening to Brian’s report and stuffing my maw when the zombie cluster caught up with me a few minutes later. I stood up and waved my arms, yelling, “Moaaaggh!”
The masses stopped; they bumped into each other like kindergarteners forming a line for candy. “Moaaaggh!” I repeated, and stepped aside to let the mindless demons feed.