“Maybe,” Guil warned, “but don’t let your guard down. Always be alert and above all else, be prepared.”
“What is this, the Boy Scouts? These corpses are slower than your grandma and mine put together. Bottom line: The war is over and the good guys won. Disaster, world takeover, zombie apocalypse averted.”
Eve leapt, exhibiting a strength and agility far beyond what a pregnant zombie should possess. She dragged me around the Tercel and toward the soldiers. I tried to hold her back, hooking my foot on the bumper of the car, but the rope connecting us began to cut through my khakis and sink into my flesh. It could have slashed me in half-I was that decayed and soft-and then I’d be one of those pathetic crip zombies, dragging my torso around while my detached legs walked in aimless, undead circles.
Guil lifted his gun to his shoulder. “Die, zombie bitch!” he yelled, his finger on the trigger.
Ros hesitated. “Wait!” he said. “Check it out. That zombitch is preggie and she’s dragging another one by a rope. What the fuck!”
“Whoa,” said Guil, lowering his gun.
“We better take these guys prisoner. Call the corpse catchers.”
Guil took a walkie-talkie out and spoke into it. “Two of them,” he said. “Male and female. Not class-five aggressive, but not reduced to parts yet either. Moderate caution.”
I struggled to hold Eve back. Her arms were outstretched, reaching for the soldiers, and she was pulling me with all her slight might. I fell to the ground, her ball and chain, dead weight.
“Uhhnnnnhh,” she said.
Poor Eve, she’d really lost her looks since becoming a zombie. Her once-cute bangs were dirty and mottled with gore, and her eyes were filmed over, as haunting and evil as a vulture’s. At times I wanted to gouge her eyes out; they reminded me of what I must look like.
I look like the rest of them.
As we rot, we become more alike. What was distinct and individual in life-a Marilyn Monroe mole, red hair, big breasts, Buddy Holly glasses, a penchant for making puns or wearing yellow suspenders-is erased and replaced with the shuffle, the moan, the torn clothes, the stink, the pallor, the dripping flesh, and the insatiable yearning. As we decay, we become one entity. United we stand. Or sway, rather.
“We have to hold them for a few,” Guil said. “Catch crew is about a quarter-mile up the line.”
“Looks like the male’s doing that for us.”
“You think that’s his wife and baby? And maybe he’s trying to keep the family together?”
I nodded my head at Guil’s partial truth. In life, Eve had been a stranger. I wouldn’t have opened the door for her at the mall. In death, she was mine, and I felt as responsible for the child as if I’d sired it myself.
“Holy shit!” Ros said. “Did that corpse just nod his head? Is he communicating with us?” He walked closer.
“Careful,” Guil said.
“He’s got her on a pretty short leash.”
“It’s not just her you gotta worry about.”
Ros sidestepped the snapping Eve and approached where I lay on the shoulder, mashing my teeth into the white line, fighting for control. Because this was my opportunity to show the real me, the man beneath the animal. I watched Ros’s combat boots approach. He knelt down.
He was young, not more than twenty, and he looked corn-fed, with freckles and a wide, flat face like a cow pie, only ruddy and pink. His hair was the color of dried corn stalks and his eyes were cornflower blue and bright.
Behind them was what I needed.
“What’s up, fella?” he said, talking to me like I was a dog. “Can you hear me? Do you know what I’m saying? What are you doing with this here female and this rope?”
There was compassion in his voice. And the promise of help.
Stein, I tried to say, take me to Stein.
“Sheeeaiii!” is what came out.
“His eyes,” Ros said.
“From here he looks pretty zombified,” Guil said.
I rolled my head from side to side, shaking like an epileptic. I put my hand in my tweed jacket pocket and touched the papers there. My writing. Evidence of my cognition.
Ros was ten feet away. So close I could smell him. Everything in me sang: Brains for dinner. Brains for lunch. Brains for breakfast. Brains for brunch…
“I don’t know,” Ros said. “There might be someone home.”
The zombies in the cage were watching; I could feel them cheering me on like binge-drinking fraternity brothers. We were tingling together, the ant phenomenon. My shoulder felt like a hard-on. A zombie orgy of sucking and smooching and licking and touching and brains and brains and brains and brains…
I withdrew my hand from my pocket, turning my back on salvation, and went for it. I wish I could say I attacked like a cat, even a fat old house cat, but we all know how zombies move. I crawled toward him, hand over hand on the pavement, baring my teeth.
“Looks like he’s going for ya,” Guil said.
Ros stood up. “Roger that. I’d hate to shoot this one, though. They’ll want him for sure. Where are those fuckers?”
“I’m gonna slow him down,” Guil said, “just in case.”
“Roger that.”
Guil tased me down the left side of my body, from shoulder to foot. My limbs twitched like a galvanized frog’s. He turned the Taser on Eve.
“Watch the baby,” Ros said. “They’ll probably wanna check it out. I don’t think we have too many pregnant ones, least not in this sector.”
Guil nodded and zapped Eve’s legs. She fell but continued pulling on the rope connecting us, single-minded in her pursuit.
Original sin. Eve did it again. She just can’t resist temptation.
CHAPTER SIX
THE CORPSE CATCHERS came and the corpse catchers caught us. A rose is a rose is a rose.
A team of ten trotted toward us, looking like extreme butterfly catchers, wearing Kevlar, hazmat suits, and helmets, and carrying long poles, nets, and muzzles.
“Watch out for the female,” Guil said to them. “She’s more aggressive.”
“Roger that.”
I didn’t resist or move. There wasn’t much left at the site of my original bite. Strips of muscle clinging to the shoulder bone. I was only weeks away from being a dancing skeleton.
A catcher cut our rope.
“This is new,” he said, looking at the frayed end.
“I’m guessing they did that in life,” Ros said, “after they got bit, so they’d be together when they turned.”
“Maybe, but he’s more decomposed than she is.”
I forced myself to my knees, then stood upright. I felt like Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. I am not an animal. I am a human being. I…am…a…man.
They covered Eve’s head with their net and, using ten-foot poles, secured a muzzle over her. It looked medieval, like a knight’s helmet but without the feathers and flourishes. They screwed the muzzle tightly around her neck with giant clamps. The woman in the iron mask, Eve clenched and unclenched her only hand. Her arms flailed as she groped blindly. I knew she was groping for flesh. Her corduroy maternity jumper-once as yellow as a lemon drop-was polka-dotted with dried blood.
The catchers led her to the cage; I had never loved her more.
“I am a conscious being,” I longed to scream to the corpse catchers, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to the world at large. “I love!”
“Uuhhhhnnnh,” I moaned, and slouched toward them. Their net dropped over my head.
I stink, therefore I am.
CROUCHED IN THE corner of that stench-filled cattle cage, surrounded by rotters and moaners, our ontological state was clear to me: We were not men. Not any longer. But neither were we supernatural. Although we rose from the dead, we were not immortal. My pork shoulder attested to that.