Joan poked his stomach with her elbow, cutting his cry short. She pointed down the street.
The children were walking toward us, Guts skipping and jumping. They waved, big smiles on their adorable faces, greeting us like dead grandparents welcoming their descendants to heaven. Annie twirled in a circle like a music-box ballerina.
Wherever she’d been, I didn’t care. Even though she disobeyed me, I was elated to see her. She was forgiven.
ROS, JOAN, AND I dragged our raggedy asses across the park. Isaac was encased in the waterproof pack on Joan’s back. So snugly wrapped, he was invisible.
It started raining and it must have been cold. Our feet squeaked on the sand.
“You,” Ros said, shaking his fist at Annie when we met them at the lake.
Annie went through a series of pantomimes describing her adventure. From what I could gather, she’d picked up the scent of a human and took off after him, thinking that a meal was in order before our watery sojourn. She’d found him in the Crate and Barrel, but as she drew near, he crossed the line from human to zombie. She wrinkled her nose to express her distaste.
While she acted out the scene, I tied all of us together with nylon rope. I didn’t want to lose anyone again.
“Scared us half to death,” Ros said. “Bad girl!”
I tried to look severe, but I couldn’t. I felt warm and fuzzy inside and I hugged Annie close, pressing her head against my breast.
We heard a barrage of machine-gun fire. There was no more time for sentiment.
Thin sheets of ice floated on top of the lake and a few chunks washed up on shore. Annie bent down, picked up a handful of sand, and let it sift through her fingers. Guts skipped a rock, but the water was too choppy to count the number of times it skimmed the surface. Joan had her eyes fixed on the horizon.
“Baaaahhhhhee,” she said, pointing. I squinted in the direction of her finger but couldn’t see anything.
“Is that a boat?” Ros asked. “Or ship?”
I could see only gray: gray sky, gray lake, gray clouds like great gray brains.
“Destroyer,” Ros said. “I think.”
Annie brandished one of her guns. She aimed and shot; the bullet fell far short.
“It’s way far away,” Ros said, “but good eye.”
My heart sank like a battleship. Not much had gone right for us. If current trends continued, we’d be shot when we rose from the lake in the spring. Hunted and gunned down like animals.
And I didn’t want to die again. I wanted to emerge from the water a great leader, a visionary capable of bringing my people out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land.
This was my dream, my grand solution: Negotiate with the humans. Find our common ground and reach an uneasy peace, explaining that we, too, are God’s children. And as such, we have a right to exist. Since we need brains, offer to eat their criminals, their invalids, their suicides and car crash victims. Stillborns, abortions, vegetables. Anyone expendable. We’d be performing a valuable service, when you thought about it. And when the zombie population dwindled as a result of decay or insurgent attacks, we’d bite a few humans and allow them to join our ranks. My guess was there would be no dearth of volunteers. In fact, over time, being selected would become an honor or ritual, a part of their culture, like in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
We could live forever that way. Symbiotically. It wasn’t perfect-no compromise is-but it was a start.
Guts began walking into the lake. When the water reached his ankles, he looked over his shoulder and held out his hands. I stepped forward, hoping to walk on water. No such luck. I grabbed one of Guts’s hands; Joan took the other. Annie and Ros joined us and we formed a chain. We could have been a group of actors pretending to be a normal American family on vacation, ready to take a winter swim together at some fabulous lakeside resort. Or we could have actually been that family, no more simulations or acting, no layers of meaning and artifice sprinkled with postmodern allusions. The birth of the real.
A zombie is a zombie is a zombie is a zombie.
Full-immersion baptism. We shambled into the water like characters in a Flannery O’Connor short story. I glanced at Joan. She didn’t look like herself in her forest-green water gear. Without her nurse’s uniform, she could have been any zombie; her noble nose was mostly gone, her skin a crazy quilt of brown blood. But her medical bag was snug in a waterproof backpack, alongside Isaac.
We kept walking. The water reached Guts’s waist, his chest, his brave little chin. I didn’t feel wet, although I was halfway in; I didn’t feel anything.
“Hold your breath, little man,” Ros said as Guts went under.
Soon enough we were all underwater where it was dark and murky. There must have been fish but I didn’t see any. Not at first. Ros said something, and the sound came in waves, washing over me like sonar, like dolphins talking. I wanted to give him the thumbs-up but didn’t dare let go of Annie and Guts. They were my lifeline. My future. My underwater breathing apparatus.
We were in limbo, wandering the bottom of Lake Michigan. A lost tribe of sodden zombies, we were prehistoric. Dinosaurs. I tried to steer us north, but I’ve never had a good sense of direction.
My eyes adjusted to the dark. A school of shiny yellow fish surrounded us. One ventured forward and nibbled on Guts’s neck. Then another. I shooed them away.
Here was a contingency I hadn’t thought of: What if we were eaten by fish?
The belly of the whale, that I could handle. Being devoured by a leviathan is biblical and grand, full of history and tradition. Think Moby Dick, Jonah, Jaws, Orca, Lake Placid and Lake Placid 2. Even Godzilla lived in the sea.
But being nibbled on by a school of small fry was beneath me. As a mythical being, I would not accept a demise less than epic. I jerked us away from the school.
And the lake turned deeper and a shade darker. The current was as strong as the ocean. There was a rip tide or an undertow, and I was lifted up by it. I let go of my comrades’ hands.
We let the water take us. It was effortless, this dance. I wiggled my body like an eel. Annie and Guts were doing the same-Joan and Ros were too far away to see, but I could feel their weight tugging on the rope around my waist. The five of us were one creature, each part of a greater whole, fingers on a hand, tentacles of a giant squid, cogs in a machine.
It was like flying. Jonathon Livingdead Seagull. There was freedom underwater. We went where the lake sent us.
A speckled fish passed between Guts and me; it had a pink stripe down its side like a Nike swoosh. Then a salmon, steel gray and bigger than Isaac, its mouth shaped like a bottle opener. He gave us the fish-eye and moved on.
We could swim forever this way, I thought. To the ends of the earth. To the ocean or the gulf. Until the water gets shallow and the weather turns warm and we crawl onto the shore, a little worse for the wear, but still striving, still bleating our clarion cry for brains and more brains. For life.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE FLOATED AND swam like mermaids. I slipped in and out of consciousness, half-frozen and half-Buddha, one step closer to nirvana and pure being.
I was a butterfly, a jellyfish. My life as a human grew more and more remote. The trappings of culture, all we created, the whole bloated project of humanity, from the pyramids to Frank Gehry, Pindar to Bukowski, suet to sushi, all of it as ephemeral as an Etch-A-Sketch. Like Ros, I remembered random events from my past as if they had happened to someone in a movie.
As children, my sister and I spent a few weeks every summer with Oma and Opa in their cottage in Seattle. It smelled like lavender potpourri and boiled meat. The four of us played Scrabble and Oma always won, clasping her thick fingers together and bringing them to her lips as she studied the board.