And, in effect, it worked. The evacuation order, a concise and appropriately alarmist message, echoed through the night of the living dead, and all Pringlesians heard it. Not everybody obeyed, which saved many others because it was no longer easy to flee. The streets were infested with thirsty corpses, who fell upon the head of anybody who came out of their house. And the only thing it achieved was to save them the trouble of breaking down doors and tripping over furniture — which they did whenever necessary.
Scenes of horror and trepanation were repeated over and over in a terrifying chaos of simultaneity throughout the downtown area, and they spread further and further into outlying areas by the minute. In the Palacio, deliberations got mired in defeatist anomie. Nobody dared leave, but they also couldn’t find anything practical to do besides worry about their families. Among those gathered was the police medical examiner, a distinguished and highly respected Pringles surgeon, philanthropist, and scholar — he had come when the first alarm was raised. They asked him if there was any explanation for the strange events they were witnessing (and suffering).
No, of course there was no explanation, just like there were no antecedents, as far as he knew. According to what they’d seen till now, the dead had risen from their graves because of a sharp craving for active endorphins; Nature, or a post-Nature of unknown characteristics, had provided them with the motor skills necessary to acquire it themselves, in the quickest and most efficient way possible.
At the request of those in attendance, he briefly described endorphins, the substance produced by the brain for its own use — an optimizer of thought, or the thoughts of an optimist. He employed the hackneyed metaphor of the glass half full or half empty.
Were they necessary for life?
No. Extending the metaphor, one could say that the glass contained liquid to the midpoint, and that was life. The fact that it could be seen as “half full” or “half empty” didn’t change the concrete situation — that is to say, organic life as a real process — it only made this life livable or unlivable. The lack of antecedents for this event could be due to the fact that science had never been curious enough to measure hormonal secretions once organic activity stopped at death. It was possible that a kind of syndrome of abstinence took place, and that this was the equivalent, like a simulacrum, of life, after life. In reality, he said, after thinking about it for a moment, it wasn’t entirely true that there were no antecedents. Perhaps, on the contrary, they abounded. Perhaps that was all there was, and they were suffering the consequences of an overflow of antecedents. Hadn’t they seen the same plot in countless movies, in stories and popular legends that hailed from the oldest antiquity and from all the peoples on Earth? Perhaps ancient and latent wisdom deep in humankind knew what science still did not.
From there, he could only speculate, and respond with hypothetical speculations to the questions they were asking. Above all, to one question, which was of burning importance: Was there any way to stop them? A priori, no, there wasn’t. The final and definitive means for stopping danger that came from another person was death. And in this case, that wasn’t applicable. He didn’t deny that there could be others. If death was the final means, it meant that there existed all the others that came before it, making it “final”; these spanned from verbal interventions (“Please, I’d prefer that you didn’t”) to incineration or exorcism, for example. Any of those might work, but which one? Sooner or later, someone would find one through the method of trial and error. Unfortunately, he didn’t think it would be them; they wouldn’t have time.
At this point he repeated that he was speculating in a vacuum, adding that maybe by now new information would be available. He called the cell phone of a colleague and found out that at the Clinic, where this colleague was, the doctors were meeting to analyze the situation, just as they were doing. The same thing was happening at the Hospital, which was further away, almost on the outskirts of town on the way to the Station. The Clinic, more centrally located, was at the other end of town from the Plaza and the Palacio; the attackers were approaching it, and a brave group of people from the neighborhood had set up warning relays along the adjacent streets, and the doctors were preparing, with the help of some burly male nurses, to capture one of the ambulatory corpses and submit it to a dissection that would, with any luck, reveal the secrets of its functionality in the afterlife. They were already in touch with the Hospital, which had more advanced diagnostic equipment, in order to coordinate the effort.
This was encouraging news for the refugees in the Palacio. They were not alone, and something was being done. There was a certain irony, which nobody noticed, that it would be the members of the medical profession who would be leading the Resistance. Under less dramatic circumstances, someone would have been able to say, “Not satisfied with killing the living, now they want to kill the dead.”
The host from the Beyond had occupied the entire town, as well as outlying areas, small farms, ranches, even the caves along the cliffs where the tramps found shelter. Their tempo had increased, and all precautions had failed. What had happened? When they reached downtown, the living dead had simply changed their strategy: they abandoned the step-by-step approach they’d been following till then, and instead of pursuing a scorched-earth policy, they shot out in every direction to the periphery of the urban sphere, only to return, now exhaustively, from the countryside, into the nucleus of the more densely populated zone. There were so many of them that they were able to do this, and even so, they had spare troops. The maneuver, which the terrorized Pringlesians could not fail to notice, was even more overwhelming in its diabolical cunning for not having been organized by a central command. In this army of corpses, nobody gave or received orders, which seemed to come from a collective mind, an infallible automatism against which no defense was possible. Everywhere, between shouts and cries, people were simply giving up.
Nowhere was safe. Not inside or out, not in front or behind or to the sides, not up or down. There was only night, shadows convulsed by fear and traversed by random rows of streetlights; around the edges of this light, which only made the darkness denser, slipped unshrouded goose-stepping killers, preceded by a sour scent and heralded by the panting of hungry beasts.
Doctors and city officials (those who were left) were not the only ones looking for a solution. There were those who believed that all one had to do was wait for dawn, and then the danger would pass, as do all fantasies and fears engendered by the night. It was difficult to convince oneself that it was not a dream, and only the speed of the action prevented that idea from sinking deeper; if there had been time, every single Pringlesian would have argued in the depths of their hearts in favor of the oneiric, and they would have felt guilty for having involved their relatives and neighbors in their own nightmare. Some gathered in the living rooms of their homes in bathrobes or pajamas, woke the sleeping, turned on all the lights, conferred, talked on the telephone, played loud music: they emphasized the human, the familiar, and waited. For what? For the most part, they didn’t have long to wait. Even contrary to their most reasonable expectations, even shouting to one another: It can’t be! It can’t be! the doors would open and the oozing scarecrows would appear, those beings from the shadows who did not fear the light, equipped with their platinum straws, and then parents had the occasion to watch their children’s skulls being cracked open; husbands, the draining of their wives’ endorphins; all within the super-familiar and reassuring atmosphere of home.