Brains: A Zombie Memoir Read online

  I chose the thigh for several reasons. First, it was firm yet still jiggly, the kind of thigh that looks good in short shorts. And I’ve always preferred the dark meat.

  Second, a bite on the thigh would be out of sight. Even though my penis is as gangrenous as the rest of my extremities and sexual desire is but a dim memory, I still like to look at an attractive woman.

  My final reason was Darwinian: I wanted to give Eve just a flesh wound, avoiding tendons and bones so she would have an advantage in our struggle for survival. When running from humans with guns or chasing humans with brains, every asset counts.

  After the bite, I dragged Eve by her hair across the parking lot and toward a Mickey D’s. Perfectly Neanderthal, I know, but desperate times…

  We huddled in the restaurant’s kitchen. It smelled greasy, repugnant. I never liked fast food as a human. That was for the obese proletariat. Let them have their Big Macs and heart attacks. I ate endive and goat cheese. All the same, there I was, scrunched under a fryer: hunted, haunted, and hungry.

  And I still hadn’t peed or shat.

  Eve passed out immediately and when she awoke, I was writing. She put her hand over her unborn child and stared at me. She was growing paler. She would be with me soon.

  Cue gothic screams. Cut to a shot of a deserted moor.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  I opened my mouth and out gurgled black blood and a low rumble.

  “Can I see?” She held out her hand.

  I clasped my notes to my chest like a teenage girl hiding her diary from her brother. I shook my head. Eve moved closer.

  How I wanted her! I was a date rapist, Multiple Miggs smelling Clarice’s cunt, Jack the Ripper, Josef Mengele dissecting his twins, the Zodiac Killer. The whole pantheon. I was out of control. Poe’s Imp of the Perverse struck me and I was obsessed with one thought and one thought only:

  Eat her, eat her, EAT HER BRAINS!

  Dear God. Could a monster like me even have a mate?

  Her hand was extended in a gesture of friendship. I noticed, for the first time, that she had a severe overbite, more than an overbite; her teeth were buck and coated with slimy plaque. I wondered what that plaque tasted like. When she opened her mouth, a string of saliva connected her bottom and top teeth. Little gobs of spittle collected in the corners of her lips when she spoke.

  “Can I help you?” she asked. “You look, I don’t know, scared or something.”

  Inarticulate brute that I am, I yowled in response. I sounded like Chewbacca.

  “You can, like, write? Can all of you?”

  She leaned closer to me and her hand, so transparent and thin I could see the blue veins underneath, touched the spiral binding of my notebook.

  I moaned and bit that hand clean off.

  Her bone stared up at me. Yellowish white but pure nonetheless. Blood gushed from her veins. I scuttled over to the cash registers and watched her as I ate her hand, which was ropy and bony. Far too scant for anything more than an appetizer.

  Finger food is the punch line to this joke.

  At least, I reasoned, if reason one can when crouched on the floor munching on a pinky, she would die and be resurrected sooner this way.

  Her wrist was a geyser of blood, Old Faithful spilling onto the oily floor.

  Soon the virus would staunch the blood flow, and by nightfall, the transformation would be complete. My bride and I could get on the road-two homeless zombies on a spiritual quest. Searching for our maker.

  EVE WAS IN her final stages, incoherent, rolling on the floor, vomiting up her soul. The virus had devoured enough healthy cells to render her unfit for consumption. Utterly inedible.

  My question: Why do I write? To be more precise, how am I able to write? I can’t talk, I can hardly walk, and I certainly can’t play the guitar. And yet I can hold a pencil, I can string letters and words and sentences together in a way that makes sense. This must be how the first caveman artist felt when his clan finally understood his hieroglyph meant water or hunter or sex or God. Are those not the basics? Man, woman, water, God.

  And now add brains to the list.

  If the virus melts the brain as they say it does, shutting down the frontal lobe, then part of my cognitive function is unaffected, uninfected. I either possess an innate resistance to some aspects of the virus or I am Zombie Adam, a bona fide mutation, the founding member of a new race.

  In life, I wrote daily. I made my living writing articles, editorials, and books. I composed e-mails and PowerPoint presentations for my classes and colleagues. I occasionally blogged. Perhaps it’s muscle memory. Is Stephen King still writing? Is Joyce Carol Oates? And the poets who squeeze out three lines a day-where is our Rimbaud?

  History needed a zombie to record his experience. Call it creative nonliving fiction. We needed Ovid, Shakespeare, Herodotus. A poet to tell our side of the story. And since Johnny Cash wasn’t coming back from the dead, it was up to me. Luckily, I was made for the job.

  I felt expansive that night, filled with purpose. I forgave the humans for hunting me, as I forgave myself for eating them. Like Anne Frank, in spite of everything, I still believed we are all really good at heart.

  AS I WATCHED Eve turn, I thought of Lucy. My human wife. The dam burst, and I remembered what happened to her. What I’d done. No wonder I repressed the memory; it was as painful to relive as an alien abduction.

  Wretch that I am, I’d eaten her. All of her too. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing. Every single morsel. She was good to the last drop.

  Pass me a Tums, please; I’ve got indigestion.

  We were sitting with the boxes of Christmas decorations-no Hanukkah junk, mind you, no menorah, nothing Hebrew in sight-next to the never-used tent and Lucy’s treadmill, also never used. We were in the basement with our life’s detritus around us and my cheek was on the concrete and Lucy’s hand was in my hair and I closed my eyes and I died.

  Let that sink in: I died.

  There was a moment of suspension when I was no longer human and not yet zombie. My body was nothing, was as good as a couch cushion or a blow-up doll or the giant plastic Santa mocking us in the corner. Walt Disney cryogenically frozen. Pinocchio before the breath of life, hanging limp from his strings.

  It’s true what they say about viewing your corpse from above. I floated near the ceiling, gazing at Lucy and what used to be me, and in that moment, I was as content as one of the Lord’s sheep, a member of His flock. The zombie horde seemed far away; I could barely hear them pounding at the cellar door. My ears were flooded with celestial music, the singing of the spheres. It sounded like twee Britpop. Was it angels with harps? Maybe. Belle & Sebastian? Perhaps. Was it Jesus strumming an acoustic guitar like some traveling barefoot hippie? In my dreams.

  Because let’s rationalize: The whole “near-death experience,” the whole light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel trip, is a trick of the brain, a hallucination. It is not a supernatural event but one last fantasy brought to you by your endorphins to mitigate the absolute terror of death. To inspire hope against the nothingness we all fear. The whole cessation-of-ego-and-selfhood business. The loss of the world. Because everyone wants to exist, right? And we all die in the end.

  Unless we’re undead.

  But then there are the suicides. Hanging themselves on reinforced beams in their empty Seattle apartments; overdosing on pills in their mothers’ bedrooms; blowing their brains out with rifles or shotguns or pistols; starting cars in garages and reading Dostoyevsky until they fall asleep; driving minivans off cliffs with their children strapped in the backseat. They screw existence. In the ass.

  Bear in mind, this is a zombie talking-a supernatural being. What do I know? I might not even be real.

  Oh, ontology.

  Regardless of religion or science, there I was, floating near the ceiling and at peace, when the heavenly music turned into Norwegian death metal and I was ripped away from the fuzzy blankets of cloudland and confronted with demons and devils
and a descent into hell. I was whisked into some sort of meat tube, like a large intestine, where trapped souls screamed at me from polyp walls and everything was flaming orange and too hot. The guy from Munch’s The Scream was there with his hands on the sides of his face. A child tattooed with the mark of the beast morphed into a stampede of wild horses running away from a gothic mansion that morphed into a laughing fat lady in pearls. The typical horror-movie shtick. Cliché, but true.

  And then I was reborn.

  Chew on that for a while.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. For I am evil. And I am the shadow. And I am death.

  Not just zombie but archetype. Not just villain but hero. Jungian shadow, id and ego. Man is woman. Ovaries are testes. Cats are dogs.

  Mr. Hyde was inside me clawing his way out. Dr. Jekyll was nowhere in sight.

  I opened my eyes. And Lucy screamed. The zombie horde broke through the door and I lunged at my wife and my wife was lunch.

  Heavens, she was tasty. We ate her communally: the fresh-faced blond zombette from next door; the nuclear family from across the street, which, as a result of decay, truly did have 2.5 kids; the haggard waitress zombie from Denny’s, varicose veins now black and inky; the suspicious loner zombie who never gave out Halloween candy; the teenage geek zombie with his pimples and Lord of the Rings T-shirt; and me, the professor zombie, with my tortoiseshell glasses and robin’s-egg-blue shirt.

  This was no symbolic eating, no representational wafer. We didn’t just break bread-we broke flesh; we drank blood. It was a living Eucharist.

  Lucy’s still in me now. Transubstantiation. Her remains remain. Forever and ever. Amen.

  EVE AND ME, underneath the fryer. She was hot and feverish, barely breathing. Her skin was pale green, an anemic summer shoot. A fading spear of summer grass. That’s Zombie Walt Whitman by the way. He never died either; look for him under your boot soles.

  Soon the senseless masses would raid the rest stop. Whitman’s catalogue of Americans: the farmer and the cobbler; the carpenter and the lunatic. The poet and the priest. Zombies, every single one.

  I locked and barricaded the doors. Eve’s moment of transformation was private; it belonged to us alone.

  I FELT THEM before I heard them, before the humans even smelled their rot, their arrival heralded by a tingle in my shoulder, like when your foot falls asleep and you stamp it, waiting for the blood to return, the pinpricks to subside.

  I welcomed the coming of the flock this time. I am more alive when I’m with them. We zombies are nothing more than a flesh-eating ant colony, but without a queen.

  Because was anyone in charge? Could we even have a leader?

  Death rattled like a snake in Eve’s throat, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, I had my bride.

  She was even whiter than before with a hint of sea-foam green. Her wrist had stopped bleeding; it was a scabbed and black stump, the bones poking through. They were thin and fragile looking, more balsa wood than dinosaur fossil. Girl could have used some calcium supplements. Of course, she didn’t have to worry about osteoporosis anymore.

  All she had to worry about was brains.

  If my dick worked, we might have made love.

  Urge and urge and urge-

  Always the procreant urge of the world.

  I fashioned a leash of sorts for Eve. In the frenzy of a feeding or while running from a lynch mob, I didn’t want to lose her. The rope was tied securely around her chest, underneath her breasts and above the rise of her belly, and attached to my belt. I would’ve preferred to hold the rope in my hand, but I didn’t trust my flesh. One good yank and my arm could fall off.

  First things first: the wedding feast.

  We left the McDonald’s and headed for the Travel Center. Where chaos was king. Zombies were advancing toward the building in an unrelenting march; humans took potshots at their heads from the safety of the diner and gift shop.

  Shambling, that’s what the deplorable Max Brooks calls our gait. His book The Zombie Survival Guide was once shelved in the humor section of your local bookstore. Now every redneck and zombie hunter from here to California has a copy in his glove compartment and uses it as an actual survival guide. Every word turned out to be true. How’s that for postmodern irony.

  We exist in a season born of pulp fiction and video games, B movies and comic books. The word made flesh wound.

  Any minute I expected to see Peter Cottontail hopping down the bunny trail with a basket of brightly colored eggs.

  I led Eve back to the El Dorado-that mythic city of gold cum luxury Cadillac-and pacing around the vehicle was a man I took to be her husband. Or at least the father of the child.

  Or, as I thought of him, wedding cake.

  I pushed her out a few feet in front of me and hid as best I could behind her. Eve took a few steps forward, moaning.

  “Susan!” Eve’s lover cried when he saw her.

  His eyes followed the rope connecting her to me. They took in her pallor, her shamble, her vacant eyes and inarticulate groans. He raised his rifle and aimed for her head. He grimaced and lowered the rifle.

  I was betting baby would save us.

  Lover was wearing a Night of the Living Dead T-shirt, which I took in the spirit it was no doubt intended-satirical, cynical, detached. Youthful, knowing, and hip, like being a 9/11 victim for Halloween 2001. Which I was. “Too soon,” everyone at the party said, booing and hissing, when I showed up wearing a business suit and covered in dust. “Too soon.”

  “Oh, Susan,” Lover cried again, his shoulders drooping.

  Eve and I moved toward our first meal together. The eating of her former partner would sanctify our relationship, like the lighting of the unity candle. Nothing is taboo once you’ve scarfed down your lover.

  He raised his rifle again and cocked it. He fired and hit Eve in the shoulder. She flinched but kept walking.

  “Forgive me,” he said as he recocked his weapon. “Lord forgive me.”

  I held my hands out in front of me like a statue of Jesus standing on top of the highest hill in some third-world village, His hands blessing the people below, protecting all. I opened my mouth to say, “Believe in me, my son, and you shall be forgiven.”

  “Mooooooorah,” I said instead. Which was perhaps my most articulate moan yet.

  He fired again and blew off Eve’s ear. It flew past me, wavy and surreal, like van Gogh’s ear. We’re not zombies, I thought, we’re artists. We’re not artists, we’re paintings. Cannibalistic Sunflowers. Whistler’s Zombie. Zombie Descending Stairs. Moaning Lisa.

  Eve and I fell on him. I wish I could say we were graceful as ballerinas, but ours is a clumsy, awkward race. Lover dropped his rifle. Eve bared her teeth in his face and he retched at her breath. It’s a scene familiar to us all: Lovers in the morning turn to each other in bed, and both open their mouths to say, “Did you have any dreams, sweetheart?” And both pull back from the vestiges of last night’s beer or cheesecake, the buildup of plaque, decay, and death in the other’s mouth. A reminder that our bodies are science experiments, laboratories of bacteria. Ever-changing and evolving.

  I let Eve take the first bite; she was, after all, eating for two.

  Like a good little zompire, she went for the neck and hit the jugular. Blood spurted up, the money shot. She slurped the veins like lo mein, sitting back on her heels, her chin and mouth covered in blood, ropy sinews hanging out of her delicate overbite like this was the spaghetti-eating scene in Lady and the Tramp. A third of Lover’s neck was gone. I grabbed his head and gave it a good turn and off it came. Lover’s eyes blinked once, then his soul left the building.

  I presented the head to Eve. She clutched its shaggy hair with her remaining hand and buried her face in the open end, bobbing for brains. I plunged my hands into Lover’s stomach, ripped out the intestines, and shoved them in my mouth. They tasted like sour milk and I liked it.

  I looked at Eve and she
appeared to be smiling, but I couldn’t be sure. Do dolphins actually smile? Dogs?

  Fig leaf, I thought as I gazed at my bride. Serpent.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WE REDUCED LOVER to his essence, a pile of bones and puddles of blood, then I struggled into the El Dorado. In spite of all I knew about zombies-the myths and realities, our limitations-it struck me that I might be able to drive to Chicago. If any cadaver could do it, I could.

  The keys were lying on top of the dashboard, the gas tank was full, but I just sat there staring at the speedometer like a crash-test dummy. Behind the wheel, I was incompetent, as confused as an Alzheimer’s patient puzzling over how to make a ham sandwich.

  Disappointed, I got out of the car, and Eve and I shuffled to I-80 on foot. Soon enough we found ourselves in the middle of a herd of five hundred moaning, groaning corpses. A band of zombies is louder than you think. We gurgle, like giant rotting babies. An occasional limb hit the ground with a dull thud but everyone just shambled right over it. Zombies with broken backs dragged themselves across the blacktop, leaving trails of spinal fluid. The runts of the litter, those crips are lucky if they get to suck the bones of a kill.

  I-80 was a junkyard. Vehicles with open doors and steaming engines. Bloody piles of clothes. The odd washing machine or Big Wheel. A stuffed Pink Panther. A desktop. A coffeepot. A dirty diaper. An algebra textbook and a Game Boy. The remains of Western civilization. No cars passed us for an eternity. Eve walked in circles, bumping into other zombies. No one said excuse me.

  As a human, I hadn’t cultivated any sort of group affiliation or identification. In fact, I’d carefully avoided it. Being a lone wolf and an observer, an outsider with a melancholic disposition, suited my ideology and career. As an academic and cultural critic, I interpreted popular phenomena like NASCAR or reality television, but I certainly didn’t consider myself a fan.