He locked the door and called the police. He shouted hysterically into the telephone. With an astuteness that was not wholly his own but rather dictated by urgency and instinct, he realized that it would be imprudent to go into too much detail, which would only lead to an interpretation based on his hard-earned fame as a drunk. It was enough to report the bare minimum and let his shouts and desperation speak for themselves. Moreover, a minimum of information — as minimum as possible — would instill more curiosity and help would arrive sooner. Still holding the phone, he began to hear the banging on the door. The bulk of the dead hoard kept going straight ahead — he heard the large iron gates swing open and crash to the ground. Apparently, no door could stop them. The one protecting him bulged and cracked; it wasn’t mere physical strength they used to force it open, but rather a kind of destructive will. The dead bolt flew off and in they came: tall, resolute, looking at him, and groaning. There were several of them; they seemed to be racing to reach him — his terrified and infinite paralysis. They moved like insects or ostriches. More than groans, the sounds they emitted were like the snorting of a dog sniffing his prey. One of them, the winner, fell on him with an expression on its face that suddenly (his last “suddenly”) looked like a smile of triumph. It took his head in both hands — bones poorly gloved with strips of purple flesh — and brought its horrendous mug up to his right temple. It handled him with ease; either terror had paralyzed the victim or the attacker emanated some magnetic substance of fatalism and surrender; in either case resistance was futile. In one mouthful it removed a chunk of the man’s skull — which broke off with an ominous “clack” and was left to hang off his right shoulder — then sunk its teeth into his brain. But it didn’t eat the brain, though it could have, and it seemed like it was going to. With one slurping action both delicate and very strong, it consumed the endorphins in the cortex and the brain stem to the very last drop. After which, it pulled away its face — if you could call that a face — and raised it toward the ceiling, letting out a super-shrill snort as it released the guard’s body, which fell lifeless to the ground. The others had already left: they must have known that this thirsty beast would not leave them even one endorphin. Once it had had its fill, it followed the others out.
The living dead continued to pour through the iron gate, spilling out onto the road leading toward town. Always pressing forward, their goose steps modified by a thousand limps, they were drawn in a tremendous hurry to the yellowish light in the sky above Pringles. The column remained compact during the first stretch, with some platoon leaders out in front and others fanning out in the rear; it looked more like a column than a triangle, the point of the arrow aimed at a Pringles oblivious to the danger, celebrating its Saturday night.
But the formation did not hold beyond the immediate access road to the Cemetery, where there was open country on either side. As soon as they reached the first houses, eager platoons turned off to one side or the other. The inhabitants of these modest houses were sleeping, many of whom didn’t even wake up when their doors and windows came crashing down, and those who did only had time to see, or to guess at through the darkness, the nightmarish bogeymen who leaned over their beds and opened their skulls with one bite. No house was spared, nor a single occupant therein, not even the babies in their cribs. Immediately after completing the cerebral suction, the corpses left and rejoined the cadaverous march, always in the direction of town.
As they advanced, the terrain became more densely populated. Neighborhoods alternated with clusters of ranches and solitary houses, which the detachments swept through exhaustively. Although the populated areas also stretched out laterally, the dead were satisfied with what they found right next to the road, to which they returned once their attacks were accomplished. They didn’t spend too much time on what they must have considered mere distractions. The important objective was the town, where the density of human material promised a much easier and readier harvest.
Not everyone was sleeping in all the houses they attacked. In some, they were still sitting around the dinner table when they were paid the unexpected “visit.” In those cases, screams and horrified expressions were plentiful, as were escape attempts that were never successful because the intruders came in through all the doors and windows at the same time. Nor did it do them any good to lock themselves in a room, but at least it gave some of them time to make an interrupted call to the police, calls that grew more and more frequent as the minutes passed and that finally convinced the forces of law and order that ”something” was happening.
But before the police decided to dispatch a patrol car, the lethal march had covered about half the distance, and there they really scored. It was at the local school, Primary School #7, where that night the School Association was holding a dance, which they did every month to raise funds for building repairs and school supplies. These dances were well-attended, and included a buffet dinner and a disc jockey. At that hour, just past midnight, things were winding down, but nobody had left yet. It was curtains for everybody, and first of all the children.
In the buffet room next to the auditorium where the dance was being held, two ladies were sitting alone at a table, chatting away. When the screams started, neither paid much attention, thinking that the piñata had been broken, or something like that. Each woman was criticizing her respective husband, benevolently, for their opposite approaches to one of the most popular local pastimes: going for a drive. The tradition started in the days when automobiles were a novelty and gasoline was cheap, and had continued. Families or couples would get in the car on Sunday afternoons or any day after dinner and cruise around the streets in all directions. This was called “taking a spin.”
“When we take a spin,” one of the ladies started, then continued, referring to her husband, “José drives so fast! As if he were in a hurry to get somewhere. I tell him: ‘We’re just driving around,’ but he doesn’t listen.”
“Juan, on the other hand,” the other said, “drives so slowly when we go for a spin, that he makes me nervous. I tell him: ‘Speed up a little, you’re going to put me to sleep.’ But he just keeps driving like a snail.”
“I wish José would go a little slower. He drives so fast I can’t see anything. If we drive past somebody we know, I can’t even say hi before we’re already shooting past them.”
“I’d rather go a little faster. It’s unbearable to go so slowly, the car seems to be standing still, and it takes forever just to get to the corner…”
They were both exaggerating (and it was their last exaggerations), but the “meaning” of their complaints, and the satisfying symmetry they created, must have been the reason their conversation so fully absorbed their attention, expressing their personalities and demonstrating the quality of the endorphins they were producing. These passed, after the brutal opening of their skulls, into the systems of the two corpses who attacked them from behind and emptied their brains. They were the last candies in the great sweetshop the school had become, and once the invaders had gorged themselves, they departed the way they had come, leaving behind some three hundred lifeless bodies where only minutes before merriment had prevailed.
There was something diabolically efficient in their timing. If what they wanted were endorphins, the little drops of happiness and hope secreted by the brains of the living, there was no more propitious time than Saturday night, when the worries of life are set aside and people temporarily indulge in gratifying their need for socializing, sex, food, and drink, which they abstain from during the rest of the week. In their depressing existence in the afterlife, the dead had developed a true addiction to endorphins. What a glaring paradox that Cemetery Road had become Endorphin Road.