At the bottom was a graphic of a stick-figure human running from a gang of zombies. The caption read: DO NOT APPROACH THE ENEMY. IF YOU CAN AVOID A CONFRONTATION BY RUNNING AWAY, THEN RUN AWAY. IF YOU ARE CORNERED, DESTROY THE ENEMY’S BRAIN BY SHOOTING, STABBING, BLUDGEONING, OR BURNING.
“What’s it say?” Ros asked.
I shook my head. It was too complicated and depressing to explain that we were a virus.
“We’re losing,” Ros said.
I nodded. We shuffled on, but it was becoming harder and harder to move. The wind felt like a wall and there was an inch of snow piled on my shoulder. We caught up to Guts and he handed me Isaac. The baby was frozen solid. An ice puck. I tossed him to Joan, who put him in her doctor’s bag.
“Wait,” Ros said. We stopped. Annie swayed like a pine in the harsh winter wind. If we stayed still much longer, we’d freeze in the middle of the highway, and it was dawning on me that freezing was not our best option. At least not out in the open, where the army would eventually find us and blow our brains out.
The best laid plans of zombies and men…
Ros pointed east. “The lake,” he said. “Jump in the lake.”
It was a good idea. Winter at the bottom of the lake, then walk into the sunshine come spring. Primordial creatures crawling out of the slime.
We turned right and headed for Lake Michigan. We were survivors, refugees, and just desperate enough to take the Polar Bear Plunge.
DOWNTOWN MANITOWOC WAS lovely. It’s on the lake, with a courthouse and a park with swings and a gazebo, plus a museum and marinas. It was white with snow, pure as a sno-globe winter scene. Stores lined the street: Urban Outfitters, Starbucks, the Gap, Williams-Sonoma, all of them with their windows broken and doors wide open. Money strewn on the floors. The credit card machines and cash registers silenced.
Joan ushered us into an REI and Ros, our soldier, helped all of us select waterproof jackets, pants, and caps-anything to slow down the rate of decay. We could be underwater for months.
Guts took off his jeans and T-shirt. His little body was ravaged. Lesions all over like an AIDS patient. Bruised pieces of flesh like old fruit. The duct tape holding in his guts was coming undone; bullet holes dotted his back like stigmata.
“Do I look like that?” Ros asked.
Underneath our clothes, we all looked like that; underneath the patches Joan had sewn over our bullet holes, under my Jason-mask shoulder and Ros’s metal head and Joan’s suede knee and Annie’s patched ass, we were rotting corpses. We could never forget it.
Joan opened her doctor’s bag. Isaac’s head popped out like a whack-a-mole. Thawed, immaculate, and as complete as the day he was born, he wouldn’t need any repairs.
“Help us, Joan,” Ros said, holding out his hands in supplication. The Virgin Mary lawn statuary pose. Joan threaded her needle.
She worked on Annie first and when the teenager was as good as new, I stationed her at the door. The army wasn’t too far behind us and we needed a guard. A few zombies tottered down the sidewalk, bunched together in groups of two or three. I made sure Annie understood she should look out for humans and alert me if any approached. She brought her hand to her forehead in a salute.
I helped Joan with Guts, holding his intestines in place while she stitched his stomach. I considered removing his innards entirely. We could store them in a canopic jar, mummifying them for future archaeologists.
Why not remove all of our vital organs, leaving only brains and bones? Intestines, liver, lungs, stomach, we didn’t need them. Isn’t that how King Tut remained so gloriously intact for centuries? Wouldn’t that preserve us?
I walked like an Egyptian, trying to communicate my idea to Ros and Joan. In the distance, there were gunshots.
“No time for dancing,” Ros said. “Army’s coming.”
I looked over to Annie to see if she could give us a status update. She wasn’t there. I shook Ros’s elbow and pointed to where the teenage zombie had been.
“Annie?” he asked. I shrugged my shoulders and shambled to the door. Outside, there was only the blue of the lake and a smattering of aimless corpses, wandering around like the people you see on television whose homes have been destroyed by tornadoes or hurricanes, standing in what used to be their living rooms, looking for birth certificates or wedding photos, any remains of their past lives.
Ros was right behind me. “Annie!” he said as loudly as he could. He sounded like a goat.
“Where is she?” he asked. I shook my head. “We have to look for her.” I nodded my assent.
Joan and Guts joined us at the door. “Kid,” Ros said to Guts, “you run. Cover ground. Captain, you go north, I’ll go south. Nurse, stay here with the baby. Annie may come back.”
I shook my head.
“It’s a good plan,” Ros gurgled.
I shook my head again, adding my arm and finger to the gesture. Because splitting up would be a mistake. It happens in every disaster movie or thriller, every horror and slasher flick. The core group members go in separate directions to find the missing person or search for an exit or locate the cell phone or radio or a weapon. The killer takes advantage of their solitude, picking each character off at his leisure, going for the weakest ones first.
Divide and conquer. I wouldn’t let it happen to us.
I put my arms around Ros, Joan, and Guts and held them close. Ros tried to squirm away, but I would not let go. We had to stick together.
“You’re the boss,” Ros said.
We walked out of the store and headed north. Isaac was in a carrier on Joan’s back. Joan put her arm around my waist and gave me a squeeze; I held Ros firmly by his jacket, afraid he would try to escape from my grasp.
There were more gunshots, each round louder than the one before.
“Stupid,” Ros said. “They’ll get all of us this way.”
We stumbled forward.
“Kid,” Ros said, shaking Guts’s shoulder. “Run! Find Annie!”
Before I could stop him, Guts was off, racing down the main street, jogging past the high-end stores like a star athlete, putting distance between us and him.
“Our only chance,” Ros said. “Sorry.”
Guts turned a corner and disappeared. I looked behind us. We’d gone a paltry fifty feet.
“He’ll find her,” Ros said. “She’s slow.”
Ros was right. Annie couldn’t have gone far. We crawled back to the REI and waited.
THE AIR BEGAN to hum and buzz, as if someone had flipped a switch and turned on the electricity. Our bite sites tingled. The army couldn’t be too far off. In the street, zombies began walking in the same direction, with determination and purpose, heading straight for the humans. Like rats leaving a sinking ship, they were going to meet their second death halfway.
Not us, though. We stayed hidden in the REI, oozing slime on the trendy camping chairs, trying to ignore the call of the wild.
Ros wandered around the store, adding flippers and a snorkeling mask to his underwater gear.
“Help me breathe,” he joked as he snapped the mask on.
Joan shuffled over to the window and I heaved myself out of my chair. If we waited much longer, we’d either give in and join the herd or be discovered by a reconnaissance unit. Neither option was acceptable. I made a swimming motion with my arms.
“Roger that,” Ros said.
We opened the door. Down the road we could see the zombies of Wisconsin heading south, a giant flock of stinking flightless birds.
“Bye-bye,” Ros said, waving at their backs. “Good luck.”
He pressed on his diaphragm and opened his mouth to give it one last try. “Annie!” he bellowed.