In the meantime, the hunt continued through the streets, in the houses, on rooftops, and in basements, out in the open and hidden away in the most secret of lairs. Night continued. The moon followed its path across the sky, not rushing anywhere. One of the last reservoirs of blessed living and throbbing material persisted, miraculously, right downtown. It could be found on the top floor of the Teatro Español on Stegmann Street, in a large hall that the Sociedad Española rented for special events. On this occasion, it was for a wedding reception, less elegant than the French one, but just as well attended. The bride was the daughter of a farmer, the sort who breaks the bank in order to impress his new in-laws. They had eaten vast amounts of lamb and suckling pig, and drunk wine like there was no tomorrow. The alarm reached them in good time, and since nobody had yet left, they were all privileged witnesses to the invasion, thanks to their elevated location, and the room’s many balconies. The fact that they hadn’t been attacked could have been due to many reasons, or none, or perhaps they were being saved for dessert. One of the many possible reasons was that they’d fallen between two crowds that had received, early on, a visit from the slurpers of the hereafter: behind them and down below, the moviegoers at the Teatro Español, who were taken by surprise as they left, crowded in the entryway and along the sidewalk; to the side, the hotel guests and the diners at its restaurant. They’d witnessed all of it from the balconies, and they’d had time to prepare themselves. The hall, whose safety arrangements for evacuation would not have passed any kind of inspection, had only one access, a narrow and steep staircase, which would have caused a holocaust in case of fire but was easy to defend. The attempts at invasion by the living dead were repelled by a barrage of bottles thrown from the top of the stairs; they had drunk enough to have an unlimited supply of these projectiles. The attackers had dispersed, and there ensued a long period of tense calm.
Now they were returning, and this time it would be impossible to keep them out. Clearly there was a reflux back toward downtown — they were swarming like storm clouds down Stegmann Street. Even with the bottle pelting and the somersaults and the resulting avalanches created when the bravest attempted hand-to-hand combat, the stairs were soon left unobstructed. The first walking corpses that entered the hall provoked a tumult of shouting and mad dashes that, due to the lack of space, could only result in the tracing of a circle, the classic figure of terror. And even if some might have preferred to leap into the void, they would have been preemptively dissuaded by the doors onto the balconies filling with those inconceivable beings, which they now saw close up and under bright lights. And they kept entering; their sheer numbers rendered defensive attacks futile, for anybody who attacked one was in turn attacked by others. They always won. The worst part was not only that they could see them close up, but since there was no place to escape, they had to watch from close up as they performed their dreadful brain surgery; many people had never thought about having a brain, and now they were seeing them from a few feet away, stripped naked, gouged out and sucked up by a strange tongue, and they even heard the liquid sound of the slurp. Even though they were terrified, they didn’t stop twisting and kicking and ducking. It looked like a dance, with one partner dead and the other alive.
The shouts quieted down little by little. What had begun as a bedlam of shrieks and roars, warnings and pleas for help, slowly drained out into isolated death throes punctuated by silences. And, out of one of the last screams there emerged, unexpectedly, the cure.
An older woman, cowering in a corner at the back of the hall, watched as a slurping corpse — drooling and majestic in its own way — lifted its head up from a child’s open skull and set itself upright on green-splotched tibias with ornate bunches of dried innards hanging down and shaking like the tails of a frock coat, with disconnected remnants of face stuck to its skull, and she saw it look at her, choose her, and take a step toward her.
Then… she recognized it. It came to her from the depth of her being, independent of any mental process; it came to her from the substrata of life in Pringles, from the erudition of many years and a lifelong passionate interest in the lives of others, which in small towns is equivalent to life itself. What came to her was his name.
“Schneider, the Russian!”
It rang out in an interval of silence, then echoed throughout the hall. Some turned to look. The corpse (which was indeed that of the German immigrant Kurt Alfred Schneider, dead for fifteen years), stopped moving, spurned — in an unprecedented gesture — a defenseless prey, turned, and began to walk calmly toward the exit. Next, everything went very fast, as is always fast or even instantaneous the “realization” of something obvious that everybody has thus far ignored.
It had taken all night, or the entire terrible fragment since midnight, as well as the almost entire collective drainage of endorphins, to realize that the dead who were returning were the town’s dead, its parents and grandparents, friends and relatives. Happen what may to the deceased after their final moments, they still continued to be themselves, since otherwise their demise wouldn’t have been theirs. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this sooner? Probably because they hadn’t had time to think of it, or they hadn’t thought it would be of any use. They also had the excuse that those thirsty monsters, who seemed to be guided by diabolically powered remote control, had violently expunged any familiar idea of neighbor, of fellow Pringlesian. They seemed to come from too far away. They came, however, from the Cemetery, where the living went every Sunday to bring them flowers, and, while there, to take a stroll that reignited their will to live. And, there in the Cemetery, the gravestones guaranteed that the horrendous metamorphosis of death did not alter identity, and identity was a name. If not, what good were the gravestones? Things began to fall into place, began to “coincide.” The fact that the dead coincided with their names, as did the living, was mere logic, but suddenly it seemed like a revelation. Which is why the witnesses were surprised when the name put a stop to the killer impulse and made them return to the Cemetery where they belonged. If it was true, if it worked with all of them the way it had worked with Schneider, the Russian, the cure was easy, because everybody (except me), as I already said, knew all of them. Of course they had to recognize them, which a priori did not appear to be that easy.
But it was easy. Until that moment they had seen them only as the post-human monsters that they were, but now, remembering that they were also their fellow Pringlesians and that they had been given Christian burials, the optics had changed. In minutes they would be able to find out just how much. Because they recognized them at first sight. They were surprised to recognize them, and that very surprise made the names pop out. The older women, who had initiated this method, were the ones who could say the most names, pointing to this or that skeletal ghoul, who, upon hearing its name, became obedient, and left. The men didn’t lag too far behind; some more some less, but everybody had done business with everybody else. Age helped. The young people, whose strength and agility gave them an advantage in war, had to defer to the knowledge and memories of the older people during this phase of the war.