Brains: A Zombie Memoir

  Brains: A Zombie Memoir

  Robin Becker

  Becker's slender debut novella is an unusual take on the zombie genre: part Grapes of Wrath, part postmodern memoir. A virus outbreak turns millions of people into mindless zombies, and the remaining humans declare war on the undead. Zombified English professor Jack Barnes discovers that he has retained his memories and his consciousness. Joined by several other sentient zombies, Barnes sets off to find the virus's creator in hopes of presenting a treatise on zombie civil rights. Barnes's dogged entitlement and self-centeredness make him both uninteresting and unbearable, and while Becker's writing is crisp, the plot meanders like its characters, consisting of little more than cannibalistic feasts and tin-eared literary and pop culture references (Hell is other zombies; Perhaps life as a zombie is better than no life at all).

  Robin Becker

  Brains: A Zombie Memoir

  All goes onward and outward…and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

  WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF MYSELF”

  PROLOGUE

  WHAT YOU HOLD in your hands is a zombie memoir, the touching postlife story of a walking corpse and his journey toward self-acceptance and knowledge, told honestly and in the first person, straight from his skeletal hand to your plump one.

  What you hold in your hands I wrote and left on top of the desk in my hideout, a log cabin in the northern wilds of Canada. It is nothing short of revolutionary. Revisionist historians, prepare to revise.

  In life, I was an English professor at a small college in rural Missouri. My mind retained information like a steel trap: No one played six degrees of Bacon better than I. No one knew more about Walt Whitman, the New Testament, or B movies from the 1950s. In conversation, I relentlessly sought the upper hand, whether discussing the best method for making flaky piecrusts (use Crisco, not butter) or the cultural importance of Freud (as massive as his cigar).

  In death, I am a flesh-eating zombie with a messianic complex and these superpowers: I can think and I can write.

  My name is Jack Barnes and I am a survivor. This is my story.

  CHAPTER ONE

  BRAINS. AFTER I was resurrected, my first thought was, Brains. I want brains. Give me brains!

  The imperative seemed to come from outside of my body; it rang in my head like the voice of a god I had no choice but to obey. Brains: I heard it clearly, simply, plainly. Brains! And I immediately set out to procure some.

  Now that I have analyzed this hunger, this twisted form of cannibalism, I realize it does not reside in my stomach, the typical seat of appetite; it stems from a deeper place, my divine core, what some might call the soul.

  It is a small price to pay for immortality.

  Brains. More dear to me than my wife. More precious than my intellect and education, my Volvo and credit rating-all that mattered in “life” now pales in comparison to this infinite urge. Even now, as I write these words, my lips quiver and a drop of saliva-tinged crimson-falls onto the paper, resulting in a brain-shaped stain.

  Stain, brain, rain, brain, pain, brain, sustain, brain, wane, brain, refrain, brain, cocaine, brain, main, brain, brain, brain, brains!

  Oh, how I love them.

  THE VIRUS HIT the world like a terrorist attack.

  Lucy and I-both still warmly human-were holed up in the living room watching news reports of the zombie invasion. It wasn’t confined to the Midwest, as they originally thought, but had spread all over the United States. Indeed, all over the world. And it happened in a matter of hours.

  Brian Williams looked wan, scared, a little boy in a grown-up suit, the endearing humor in the corners of his eyes lost forever. Lucy clicked over to Fox. I always suspected my wife of secret conservatism, but I said nothing. Because there was Geraldo Rivera, out in the street, interviewing a she-zombie. A zombette.

  “Why are you doing this?” Geraldo asked the creature. “Can you even talk? Everyone thinks you’re a monster.”

  The zombie groaned and grabbed the reporter’s cheeks as if to move in for a kiss.

  “That zombie must’ve been an athlete in life,” I said. “She’s quicker than some of the others I’ve seen.”

  “The poor dear,” Lucy said.

  Geraldo bludgeoned the zombette with his microphone, but to no effect. The mic merely sank into the undead’s head, disappearing like a baby thrown into quicksand. Geraldo wrestled it out and the camera zoomed in; the mic was covered with tufts of hair and bits of gore. Geraldo shook it like a rattle and the zombie struck, biting his hand. Geraldo shrieked-high-pitched, girlish-and Fox cut back to the newsroom, where a generic blonde warned viewers of the dangers of conversing with corpses.

  “Now that’s the kind of reporting I expect from Fox,” I said. “Stating the obvious with bimbotic style.”

  “Do you think they could be here?” Lucy asked, her eyes darting around the room. “In our town?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “We’re in the middle of the middle of nowhere. The flyover zone. No one comes here if they don’t have to, not even dead people.”

  I heard a noise, as if Hook Man were scratching at our roof. I turned off the idiot box and threw open the drapes.

  Lucy and I were surrounded; there were zombies at the windows, zombies at the doors, zombies coming down the chimney like Santa Claus. It was just like the movies.

  That’s the genius of George Romero. His initial trilogy-Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead-was prescient in the grand tradition of science fiction becoming fact. First you have to imagine a man on the moon, then you can put one there. Imagine an atom-splitting bomb, and then build one. Imagine a virus that turns corpses into the walking dead, and someone, somewhere, will develop that virus.

  And now let us bow our heads in honor of Dr. Howard Stein, my creator. Our father. Mad Scientist Extraordinaire. God in the Garden of Evil. Daddy of the Undead. Cue maniacal laughter.

  There was a crashing sound as zombies broke the living room picture window and stumbled in. I threw the remote at them. Nothing. Then the TV Guide. Nothing. A vintage 1950s kidney-shaped ashtray bounced off of one like a rubber ball. Finally, my copy of the The Da Vinci Code, never read. The ghouls kept coming.

  “Their heads,” Lucy yelled. “The news said you have to injure their heads!”

  “You think I don’t know that? It’s a trope of the genre.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your students, Jack. It’s demeaning.”

  As I bickered with my wife, my neighbor reached me. He was in his bathrobe and boxers and his feet were bare, the veins and bones bulging. The whites of his eyes were yellow and watery, and his arms were open wide for a hug. He leaned forward as if to tell me a secret.

  And bit me. Just like that. Right on top of my shoulder, deep in the muscle.

  It felt like a hot poker on my flesh, a rabid squirrel attack, the blinding light of a comet. It felt, in short, like sharp human teeth ripping me apart. How’s that for metaphor? Nothing like the real thing.

  He chewed on my shoulder, working through the muscle like a dog chewing gristle. I kneed him in the groin and shoved him off me; a chunk of my shoulder remained in his mouth like a meatball.

  More zombies streamed in. Lucy fought them off with our Peruvian rain stick, the annoying rain sound harmonizing with the living dead’s moans until the stick broke and dried beans spilled onto the hardwood floor. Lucy grabbed my elbow and pulled me down to the basement, where we were safe, at least temporarily. There was only one entrance, through the kitchen. We locked the deadbolt behind us, dragged flattened cardboard boxes up the stairs, and duct-taped them over the doorway.

  It was classic victim behavior, actu
ally, seen in dozens of horror movies: Grab whatever you can, stupid humans, and throw it at the door. Hell, use a solid granite tombstone if you’ve got it. Doesn’t matter. If you lock yourself in a room, eventually the monsters will get in.

  Lucy and I huddled between a giant plastic Santa and the LL Bean tent we used just once-and then in the backyard. Now we’d never go to Yosemite.

  “What should I do?” I asked her, gripping my shoulder.

  “What are your options?”

  “As I see it, suicide or zombification.”

  “Don’t focus on the negative, Jack. Think! How can we fix this?”

  I made my jaw go slack and drooled. “Brains. I could eat your brains!” I held out my arms like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, a film that disgraces monsters everywhere.

  In Mary Shelley’s original novel, the creature is sympathetic, a victim of human hatred and intolerance; he speaks French, reads Milton, and loves flowers. He is not a natural-born killer; society turns him into one.

  Karloff’s mute brute, on the other hand, yearns for flesh and blood from the get-go. He turns crowds into mobs and creates fear and loathing, yet his version is the one that lives in our imagination, not Shelley’s.

  To pervert Rodney Dangerfield: Monsters can’t get no respect.

  Lucy slapped my forearm. “That’s not funny,” she said, and started to cry.

  “You cry because there’s truth in my jest,” I said. “Which is the goal of all effective humor, exposing the hidden pain in pleasure. The sorrow underneath all we do. The tragedy of our lives. I will be one of them soon, my dear, and I may indeed want to eat your brains. I have a decision to make. To be dead or undead. That is the question.”

  “Let me look at your shoulder.”

  The area surrounding the bite was plum purple and gashed open, the blood already coagulated. I felt beatific, angelic, but my failure to bleed was no miracle; it was the virus congealing my blood, freezing it, stopping it in its tracks and turning me into something both sub- and über-human. If the news reports and movies were true, I would have flulike symptoms-a fever, vomiting, chills, joint pain-then a numbing sensation, followed by a brief death culminating in my reanimation as one of the living dead. The whole process could take anywhere from six to thirty-six hours-the length of the average birth.

  Lucy glanced at the wound and moved several inches away from me. “You could try electrocuting yourself with the Christmas tree lights,” she suggested.

  “Why don’t we have any tools?” I asked, getting up to poke around the basement. “I can’t even find a hammer. Didn’t we ever have occasion to hammer something? A nail perhaps?”

  I was already speaking in the past tense.

  “A hammer would come in handy now,” Lucy said. “We could fortify the door.”

  “Or rope,” I said. “Why don’t we have any rope? We don’t even have a rope to hang yourself with.”

  “Or a pot to piss in.”

  “Rope wouldn’t do anything anyway. I have to destroy my brain. With hanging I’d just be a zombie with a broken neck. That could prove to be a disadvantage in my search for food, I suppose.”

  “But does natural selection, survival of the fittest, apply to the living dead?” Lucy asked. “I mean, does it matter at that point? Will you need to compete with other zombies for food? Or will you live, or unlive, regardless?”

  My bite site stank like rotten pork shoulder. My flesh was putrefying and I felt feverish. Or maybe it was psychosomatic. I sat down on the concrete floor and looked at my wife.

  “It’s a valid question,” she said, “if you decide to, you know, go the zombie route.”

  Lucy wore her hair in a short, mannish cut, which I wished she would grow out into a softer style. But I never asked her to. God forbid I should appear controlling or, even worse, a card-carrying member of the patriarchy who dared suggest she assume a more traditionally feminine appearance.

  She was a big-boned woman, but thin, so that her knees, elbows, and feet stuck out like knobs, almost bursting through her pale, blue-veined skin. She could have gained fifteen pounds. I could see her skeleton, the thinnest veneer of flesh covering it, with no body fat to speak of. Although I loved her dearly, sometimes, in bed, her bones ground into me and hurt.

  But yum. If I could gnaw on one of those bones now as I write this. Just a strip of flesh hanging down would do. The smallest sinew is all I need.

  MUFFLED BY THE cellar door, the moans of the undead sounded like an avant-garde chorus, a John Cage composition. The United States of the Undead: A Sonata in the Key of Reanimation. At the end of the cacophonous piece, the orchestra, consisting of infected musicians in tattered tuxedos, eats the audience.

  It was hot; my shoulder was disintegrating. Lucy held my forehead and stroked my back while I vomited everything I’d ever ingested: Hershey’s Kisses, funnel cakes, peach pits, mother’s milk.

  “You’re a regular Florence Nightingale,” I told her, wiping my lips with the back of my hand. There was a metallic taste in my mouth, like I was sucking on rusty nails or had eaten liver at a roadside diner in the rural South.

  “I’d rather be Hot Lips Houlihan,” she said.

  “Walt Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War.”

  “I wonder what Walt would’ve thought of the living dead,” Lucy said.

  “He’d drink the tasteless water of their souls.”

  Lucy felt my forehead. She fought back tears, my little trouper.

  “You’re burning up,” she said.

  “I’m on fire for you, baby. You make me hot.”

  She kissed my cheek. “Let’s make love,” she whispered. “One last time.”

  Her voice was atonal and shrill, a screech owl in my ear, Yoko Ono singing. I knew it was just my senses, heightened by the fever, as well as the virus coursing through my veins, but I needed her to be quiet.

  So I kissed her. She sucked in her breath and turned her head, wrinkling her nose and gagging. I must have tasted like death, but still she bent forward for another kiss.

  “You need an Altoid,” she said.

  “They’re curiously strong,” I said, “and I’m decaying.”

  I took her in my arms and we kissed again. A violent chill overtook me and I turned my head to the side, coughing up what looked like a piece of lung.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette,” I said.

  “This would be an excellent time for you to start smoking. I mean, why not? At this point, you’ve got nothing to lose.”

  She put her head on my shoulder, then started back in horror when she felt its wetness. A few pieces of my meat stuck to her hair. They were the size and color of bacon bits and although they were pulsating, throbbing, beating with my heart, I couldn’t feel a thing.

  Lucy stood up, located the stuff sack for our tent, and tied it around my wound in a sloppy tourniquet.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked.

  “Plan?”

  “Come on, Jack. You always have a plan. And I always think it won’t work and doubt you and beg you not to do it. You ignore me and do it anyway and it does work, wonderfully, in fact, and everything’s okay and I’m proved wrong again.”

  “Like the time I successfully lobbied to deny Dobson tenure?”

  “I was thinking of that ugly-ass cat-scratching post you constructed out of old carpet and clothes. But yeah, poor Dobson. I felt sorrier for his wife, actually.”

  “He’s an idiot”-I coughed up a speck of blood-“and she’s a bitch.”

  “They’re probably zombies by now.”

  “And the cats loved that post. They used it all the time, sparing the ridiculously expensive couch you made us buy.”

  “My point precisely. You were absolutely right. You always are.”

  The undead rattled the door. They wouldn’t leave until they broke it down; they had nothing better to do.

  “I don’t have a plan, Lucy-kins,” I said. “Unfortunately, there is no master plan. No meta-narrativ
e.”

  “No clockmaker?”

  “No exit.”

  “Hell is other zombies,” she said.

  “Hell is for children.”

  “Love is a battlefield.”

  “A ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’” I said. “Cowritten by Plato and Jesse Jackson. Break beats provided by Chuck D.”

  Lucy put her chin on her knees and wrapped her arms around her shins. “I can’t do this,” she said to the floor.

  “Can’t do what?”

  “We’ve got a real problem here, Jack,” she whispered. Her eyes had a surprised look about them, round and alert, the eyebrows high on her forehead and plucked to a thin arch. “In a few hours, you’re going to be a zombie. And I’m either going to be devoured by you or else bitten and turned into a zombie myself. At the very least I’ll be a widow.” She paused and cocked her head to one side. “But if you join the ranks of the undead,” she continued, placing a finger on her lips, “and I manage to escape unharmed and survive as a human, would I be a widow then? Technically speaking, I mean. Is there a word yet for that relationship?”

  “Hmmm, it’s thorny. I couldn’t say. Language doesn’t evolve that quickly. Or does it? These are the most extenuating of circumstances and I’m sure future cunning linguists will have a field day with the zombie-related lexicon, orthography, neologisms, what have you.”

  A rat scurried in the corner. Death kept knocking on the door.

  Every child’s fear of the dark is justified. There is a monster hiding under your bed.

  In our collective imagination, the babysitter’s phone rings: “Get out!” we yell at her. “He’s in the house!”

  “The best option,” I continued, “is to kill myself before I die, or you could kill me, whichever, so you could escape.”

  “How?”

  “Slit my wrists, maybe. There’s got to be a sharp implement around here somewhere. Or you could run the rake over my face. Then use me as a shield. Hold me in front of you, if I’m not too heavy. Conjure your superhuman strength. Pretend you’re a mother lifting a Volkswagen off her kids. The zombies will fall upon me in an eating frenzy and you run, Lucy, you run to the hills. Run for your life.”