CHAPTER THREE
I HAVEN’T SHAT since my transformation. The phenomenology of feces. How come I haven’t expelled the flesh I’ve eaten? What kind of chemical reaction takes place within me? How is it I extract strength from the meat I eat? I become skinnier, rottener, deader, by the hour.
After eating A. J., I headed to Chicago to look for Howard Stein. Like the Oracle at Delphi, Stein would answer my questions, prophesy my future, provide valuable information. He might even be aware of my condition. Any decent scientist would have planned for the contingency, perhaps even hoped for it. Any decent creator would love and protect his best creation.
In my tweed jacket pocket, I carried the tools necessary to record what I could: my pen and notebook. What more did I need? Posterity would thank me.
As I passed the university, I joined the zombies wandering around the quad, aimless as human students waiting for Intro to World Religions to begin. I stumbled through the fountain and walked over the rosebushes, not even feeling the thorns. I was shuffling, favoring my bitten shoulder, the arm attached to it hanging limp, the stuff-sack tourniquet long gone.
All at once I smelled it, wafting on a warm breeze. My shoulder sang with it. Sweet as summer corn. Sweeter than Lucy’s sweet-scented snatch. The sweet sweet smell of human flesh.
The student zombies smelled it too. Every undead head perked up and we moved as one toward the fragrance.
Oh, he was easy to find. Silly human. He’d barricaded himself in his office; a gray metal filing cabinet containing twenty-five years of teacher evaluations blocked our entrance. A group of us pawed at the door until it opened; the filing cabinet toppled and reams of useless paper covered the floor.
Professor Barnes made me cry, one student had written.
This class was a waste of time, opined another.
I knew the human: Dr. Ernst Welk, chair of the English department, hair white as snow, belly like Santa Claus. He could have easily evaded and outrun us—we move as if through sludge—but he panicked. The scene was a parody of every clichéd horror movie from White Zombie to Friday the 13th Part Million: Geriatric Jason. The slow but relentless killer walks without a care in the world, confident he’ll get his prey if he simply stays the course. And the stupid victim, looking back as she runs, trips over a tree limb or her own high heels.
I felt a line of monsters behind me as I advanced on Dr. Welk. My ancestors: Count Dracula, the Wolfman, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, the Red Death in his mask and vestments. Every party has a pooper; that’s why we invited the Boogeyman.
Ernst ran out of the office and made it halfway down the hall before he tripped and fell over a chair, the kind with the attached desk. He was wearing a suit and tie. He must be crazy, I thought. Why is he here? And in those clothes? Did he return for some document or has he been here from the start? And just how long has that been?
I was the first ghoul to reach him. The others were slower, a good twenty feet behind me.
“Barnes,” he said, “can you hear me? Are you in there?”
“Mmmpph,” I said. “Uuuhhhh!”
Heaven forgive me, but I wanted him. Bad. I was a nymphomaniac for his hot flesh. He was portly and succulent, lying there on the circa-1970s purple carpet with his hands in front of his face like a gay pinup from the golden age of porn.
“Jack,” he began, “about your sabbatical…”
I ached; my soul ached. I was junk-sick and hungry for booze, pills, McDonald’s, sex, cars, chewing gum, crank, crack, Diet Coke, laudanum, Internet porn, video games—all of it. Take every weak human addiction and multiply it by the living, the dead, and the living dead, from George Washington to Saddam Hussein, from Homer to Bono, and that might come close to describing the magnitude of my hunger.
I desired, very much, to eat him.
“You deserved a semester off,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Ernst was flat on his back like an overturned beetle. One of his stubby legs was twisted around the chrome leg of the chair; the desk was poking him in the rib cage. He struggled to free himself, but every time he reached down to pull on his thigh, the desk dug deeper into his side. The man was weak from a lifetime of sitting; his arms were roly-poly, with no visible biceps, triceps, or delts. His suit was wrinkled and stained. He had been a competent administrator, and that’s not saying much.
“Damn it, Jack,” he said, trying to drag both his body and the desk away from me and wincing from the pain. “Have you no humanity left?”
I got down on my hands and knees next to him: my boss, my colleague, my savior, my lamb. Appeaser of the beast in me. I took a bite. The memory is as clear as Wordsworth’s claim for poetry: emotion recollected in tranquility.
I started with his stomach and received a mouthful of poly-cotton blend. I spit it out and with the next bite hit pay dirt. His skin tasted like baby powder and musk. There was a thick layer of fat surrounding the muscle; it was gristly and responded to the teeth with an al dente spring. I heard the pack gathering behind me, moaning for stink. Ernst raised himself on one elbow, screamed, and kicked his leg like a toddler throwing a tantrum.
“You always were an a*shole,” he said.
Tell me something I don’t know. Meal ticket.
IN THE MIDDLE of Iowa I was chased by a group of men in orange vests and waders. I was running through the corn, Ernst’s broken femur jammed in the back pocket of my Dockers.
There were zombie hunters everywhere. Shotgun-wielding rednecks who aimed for the head.
“There’s one now!” a man yelled.
“Holy shit,” said another. “That one’s running.”
“Impossible. The shits don’t know how to run.”
“Sure looks like he’s running.”
Someone laughed. “You call that running, Bobby? Now I know why you wasn’t much of a ball player in school. The thing’s legs are barely lifting off the ground. He’s a shuffler, all right. Running. Shit, them things can’t run.”
“I think Bobby’s right, sheriff. Whether or not he’s got the skill, he’s got the will. Looks like he’s trying to get away from us.”
I didn’t stop moving.
“Damnedest thing,” the sheriff said. “He does appear to have a plan.”
The sheriff gave me too much credit; I didn’t have a plan. I had one thought: Survive. And that meant protecting my brain.
Since I was—and am—a corpse, a fleeing, decaying corpse, I leave body parts behind when I run through vegetation. Little chunks of falling-off flesh cling to tall grass, raspberry vines, or brambles, making me easy to track.
I felt a stinging in my back and lurched forward.
“Got ’im!”
“You slowed him down, son, but you don’t have him, not ’til you hit him in the head and he’s flat on the ground.”
“Just take your time and aim, Bobby. He ain’t going nowhere in a hurry.”
I felt another sting at the site of my neighbor’s bite. I fell down and moaned.
“That time I got ’im for sure.”
“Don’t get cocky. It’s best to check your kill, make sure it’s dead. Just like you do with a deer.”
“Did you hear him though?”
“Sounded damn-near human.”
“I don’t like this one. Gives me the creeps.”
“More creeps than the others? You are a piece of work, Bobby. Grow some balls, why dontcha? Now go finish the job. Put that stench down for good.”
I crawled away, elbow over elbow, and hid in a stand of corn. I took out the only weapons I had: my notebook and pen.
Help me, Bobby, I wrote. Spare me.
The letters were shaky and the pen strokes thin; it looked like it was written by a child.
Bobby rustled through the stalks.
“Hurry up,” his comrades yelled. “There’s another group on the horizon.”
With my head down, not daring to look young Bobby in the eye for fear I’d attack, I held up the paper.
“Holy shit,” Bobby said. “What are you?”
Gunshots rang out from another part of the field.
“Bobby!” they called. “What’s going on?”
I cradled my head in my arms, protecting it, supplicating before this farm boy. Bobby shot the ground next to me.
“Got ’im!” he yelled as he ran off.
Thank you, Bobby, child of the corn. I owe you my life.
THE HIGHWAY WAS littered with abandoned vehicles. A traffic jam without road ragers shouting into cell phones. The grass was yellow and brown, scorched by the sun. The crops were dry and neglected.
For breakfast I veered into the trees and found a rabbit’s nest. The mother and her five bunnies screamed as I bit into them. The sound was unexpected, as piercing and angry as the cry of a newborn stuffed in a trash can at prom. The rabbits’ brains were small, their intestines filled with hard pellets like Skittles. I stored a foot in my pocket for luck.
Still hungry, I shuffled back to the highway.
The dead walked with me, wobbling like newly birthed calves, bumper-car zombies going nowhere. The ratio, Blake called it. Hamster wheels within hamster wheels.
The bullet holes in my back, the bite on my shoulder…it occurred to me that if I stopped the decay, I could escape the grave, live forever.
A Hummer drove down the highway, tearing through the zombie throng like Moses parting a Red Sea of bloody corpses.
The driver barely slowed down; he knocked over the walking dead as if they were bowling pins and he was going for a perfect game. I stepped out of the way and called out to the others to do the same.
“Mmoohhhaaa. Oooaaahhh!” I cried. Pathetic. My lips barely parted and my mouth felt like a crawfish castle—dry and full of mud. I was stuck in a body that would not obey me. A stroke victim, I was locked in. A rotting portable prison.
A walking putrefying metaphor.
I, Robot.
I, Zombie.
And, oh, those silly zombies. Letting themselves be run over like skunks and possum. And then worse, picking themselves back up afterward, maimed but mobile. Resurrected roadkill. The tenacity of the undead. Their blind stupidity. A teenage zombette still wearing her soccer uniform, her legs were crushed by the Hummer’s tires. That didn’t stop her, however. She sprang back up like one of the Hydra’s heads and continued forward on those flattened legs, her red braids and braces gleaming. She was damn near perky.
As the vehicle passed me, I peered into the windows. Inside was a nuclear family—mom, dad, two girls, and a boy. Even a dog—some kind of terrier yapping away, its nose and paws pressed against the glass. The mother, a ponytailed blonde in a pink yoga outfit, stared back at me. We made eye contact and I flashed her the peace sign and grinned, dislodging a clump of crust in the corner of my mouth. The woman put her hand to her throat and in that instant, I felt known. Understood. My sentience was acknowledged by another thinking being. And then they were gone, hightailing it down the highway, crashing into parked cars and catatonic zombies.
I was even lonelier after that brief connection. Like Orestes or Princess Di, I was chased by demons both real and imagined. I needed a companion. I’d have taken Lilith if Eve was unavailable, but I preferred Eve. More compliant, made from my rib. Except for that apple thing, Eve would be perfect.
THE DEAD WALK at a snail’s pace, complete with trails of slime. At the rate I was going, I’d decompose before reaching Chicago and finding Stein. A pickup truck cruised down the road, picking off members of the horde at random. When it stopped, the driver bending down to retrieve something from the floor—a plug of chaw, no doubt—and his passenger reloading, I acted.
Climbing in was an effort. My joints were stiff with rigor mortis. I lay down between a spare tire and a tool case. Empty beer cans and shotgun shells rattled around me and a gun rack loomed above. I covered myself with a blue tarp.
In life, I wouldn’t have looked twice at these men. They were large and one wore an oversized T-shirt advertising Pepsi. Both had on NASCAR ball caps.
The only Homer they knew was Simpson; their favorite beer was Bud Light. Their idea of an art film was The Shawshank Redemption and their wives collected Precious Moments figurines. What could I possibly talk about with them? The weather?
It was all I could do not to eat them.
“That one over there is almost pretty,” one said.
“Shoot her!”
“Now hold on a minute. She looks recently turned—probably still warm inside there. Fresh.”
“You ain’t never tried that, have you?”
“Screwing a zombie? Hell no!”
“But you’ve thought about it?”
“It’s crossed my mind. I suppose you’d have to tie her up first and gag her, or cover her whole head with something to protect yourself. Like a Wal-Mart bag maybe. Or a catcher’s mask. Then I guess you could just do it regular.”
“You are one sick f*ck, Earl.”
“On second thought, doggy-style might be the safest bet.”
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”
There was a shotgun blast.
“Got her!” Earl said.
“Good shot. Right in the head.”
“Kind of seems like a waste though.”
“She did look like your wife.” He laughed.
“That ain’t funny. My wife is one of ’em.”
Poor man. The title of his life’s movie? I Married a Zombie Bitch.
The men rolled up their windows and the truck picked up speed. Hidden under my tarp, I exercised self-control. Mindful restraint.
Denying my instincts, displaying the discipline of an ascetic monk, I took out my affirmation journal.
This is what I wrote:
A To-Not-Do List
Do not smash the back window and attack the driver.
Do not climb on top of the cab and slap your bloody hand on the windshield.
Do not press your face against the glass and bare your teeth at Earl.
Do not eat the rednecks.
Oh, but their dull stupid brains. I reckon they’re tasty.
WE DROVE ALL night through the cornfields of the Midwest. Lying on my back, I peeked out of the tarp and up at the stars. Amazingly, they were still there.
I may have prayed. If I believed in God I would have, but I was raised an atheist.
“God was wounded during World War One,” my father taught me, “and died in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Don’t believe any of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo.”
My paternal grandparents were wealthy Jewish doctors who fled the Nazis in 1937. My grandmother was the first woman to graduate from the University of Vienna. When they arrived in America, they had a strongbox full of diamonds and identification papers. They had money tucked away in a Swiss bank account. And they had their lives and their children by the hand.
They left their drapes and Turkish rugs, pots and pans, real estate and religion to the Nazis. For all I know, Hitler himself slept in their oak four-poster bed underneath the feather duvet and on top of the dozens of pillows Oma kept fluffed and spotless. Oma and Opa never went back to Vienna, but Oma often talked about what they left behind.
Her stories ended the same way every time: “And that, kleine Jack, is how the Boorsteins became the Barneses.”
I have Viennese property I could claim. There’s an apartment building and a house. A pea patch and some vacant lots. Lucy begged me to take her to my ancestral home for our honeymoon, but I refused.
“Too painful?” she asked.
“Too boring,” I lied.
We honeymooned in the Caribbean instead, where Lucy wore a bikini and ran into the ocean, her heels almost touching the crescent moons of her bottom. She looked over her shoulder at me and I chased after her, grabbing her by the waist and kissing her; she was meatier then and I adored her.
“Float like you’re dead,” she’d said, treading water.
I rolled face-first into the sea, my arms splayed out, my legs hanging straight down. Lucy jumped on, straddling me piggyback style.
I dove underwater then, sunken with the weight of my wife. I could hear her giggling above me and I swam as hard as I could, breaking the surface like a dolphin, Lucy riding me like a nymph.
If only Lucy were with me as the truck bounced along. She would have made a child’s game out of our concealment. Hide and Seek or Kick the Can.
Lightning flashed and it started to rain. I pulled the tarp over my head, my fingers leaving behind a thick coat of crud, sticky as glue.
Fat raindrops hit the tarp; each one sounded like a nail pounding me deeper into my coffin.