On the way from the Cemetery, the town started at about the halfway point. And that spot was marked by Primary School #7, where the invading army had had its first real banquet of the night, especially because of the number of children whose brains were teeming with happiness matter. From then on, there were almost no empty spots in the urban weave. The compact herd of corpses spread to the right, through the grid of dirt streets and onto the first paved ones. They entered every house, lit up and dark, rich and poor, but the bigger and more agile ones went on to the wealthier houses, knowing that the rich were happier. They ran over the rooftops to get to the adjacent streets, their grotesque shapes, silhouetted against the light of the moon, took inhuman leaps, crashing through a skylight with a burst of broken glass. Competition among them made them faster and more dangerous.
They left “scorched earth” in their wake: the only ones who saw them and managed to escape were a few people in cars who didn’t stop out of curiosity and sped away. There weren’t many (most cars were surrounded, the windows broken, and the people “slurped”), but there were enough of them to carry the news downtown. A white police van didn’t have such luck.
Be that as it may, Pringles had been put on alert. Even though the information was spreading quickly, panic was building up slowly. The movies and, before the movies, the ancestral legends those stories are based on, had produced in the population a basic state of incredulity; at the same time it prepared them for an emergency (they had only to remember what the protagonists of those movies had done); it also prevented them from reacting because everybody knew, or thought they knew, that fiction was not reality. They had to see with their own eyes somebody who had seen them (with their own eyes) to be convinced of the terror of reality, and even then they weren’t convinced. It was one of those cases in which the real is irreplaceable and not representable. Unfortunately for them, the real was also instantaneous and without future.
And while oscillations of belief continued, the hunt didn’t let up for a minute in the neighborhoods behind the Plaza, always gaining ground toward downtown. The metaphor of the hunt didn’t actually fit very well; it was more like a flower tasting, or a tasting of juicy statues immobilized by terror and surprise. The element of surprise began to diminish as events developed. Terror increased in indirect proportion, and spread more quickly than the living dead, who moved slowly because of their appetite for endorphins, which prevented them from leaving a single head unturned. That’s when some escaped. The first was a seven-year-old girl who leapt out of bed screaming and scrambled through the giraffe legs of the corpse that had burst into her bedroom, making his loose tibias knock together like castanets and seriously challenging his balance. Two things saved her: her big family, which kept the other intruders busy, and how small she was; she was the size of a three-year-old, but her real age gave her disproportionate agility and speed. She ran down a glass-enclosed corridor. The reflection of the moon through the green diamond-shaped windows lit up the comings and goings of the ragged ghouls to and from the skulls of her family members. The operation included a bloodcurdling slurp, which she fortunately didn’t hear. She dodged two who tried to stop her and slipped through the hole where the door to the patio had been. One of the corpses was already chasing her, as one chases a sugarplum that has rolled off a cake. Outside another, who was roaming around the property, spotted her and leaped in front of her to cut her off. Without slowing down, the girl veered off toward the chicken coop and jumped inside. She sought the protection of the darkness, under the roosts; her friends the chickens were asleep, brooding; she knew her way to the very back corner, which was her favorite hiding place, and she didn’t wake them. But the two corpses who burst in did. This unleashed a phenomenal uproar of flapping and squawking in the phosphorescent-streaked darkness; the whiteness of their bones was mirrored in the feathers of the Leghorns, making the darkness even more confusing. The corpses, too big for the small chicken coop, got tangled up in the poles, and when they spread out their arms to shoo away the chickens, they got tangled up in each other and fell on their backs, as if they were doing acrobatics with feathered balls, all to the sounds of frantic clucking. Hens are not aggressive animals, on the contrary, but their shyness, as well as their limited intelligence, worked in their favor in this instance; their irrational fear made them unmanageable, and in the midst of the confusion, the little girl escaped again.
She was one of the few that escaped the cerebral kiss. Block after block, the harvest advanced. The dead grew emboldened by their own efficiency. But because nothing is wholly predictable in human material, they came up against a couple of bizarre situations, which clashed with how bizarre they were. One such situation was at the Chalet de la Virgen, which from the outside looked just like any other house, with a little front yard, a car in the garage, laundry hanging serenely on the clothesline out back, and a welcome mat by the front door. The door as well as the windows exploded and half a dozen robbers from beyond the grave burst in snorting and taking huge disjointed strides that soon lost direction: their zeal fizzled out because there was nobody home. Or, better put, the whole family was where it should be: the parents in their double bed, the children in twin beds, the baby in the crib, and even the grandmother in her bedroom covered with a blanket she’d knit with her own hands. But they were all exactly like the statue of Our Lady of Schoenstatt, stiff and with impassive painted faces, all the same shape as if they had been cast in the same mold. The corpses stamped their feet in confusion, and some would have tried to sink their teeth into a plaster head if it hadn’t been such a disproportionately small head, like a button. They left in a rage. But it was their own fault. You had to have been dead and spent a long time in the Cemetery not to know of the existence of the famous Chalet de la Virgen of Pringles.
The ones who paid the price were the neighbors, against whom the attackers unleashed their fury. This didn’t slow their advance, on the contrary: they became more hot-headed. They couldn’t get enough to eat thereby confirming the truth of the expression, “Appetite comes with eating.” Moreover, lest we forget, there were thousands of them, and they’d just barely started; legions and legions of them — horrifying waves of limping, spastic corpses that kept spreading chaotically across the nocturnal checkerboard of the town — had still not tasted any happiness drops, and they were sharpening their straws. Those that had partaken of the strange nectar, wanted more; along with their snorts, they burst out in mechanical fits of laughter, something between barks and growls, and they improvised dances in the middle of the street — sarabandes, naked jotas, perforated rumbas — that dissolved the same way they had formed, with stampedes that carried them onto roofs or into the tops of trees.
The truth is, although they worked quickly (and more and more quickly: it was like a sped-up movie), they had a lot to do, and this gave the living forces in Pringles time to organize their defense. The town had been put on alert. At this point, not even those with the most nay-saying mentality could deny it. But even if they didn’t deny it, they were only accepting it on a guarded level of belief. Nobody likes to be the butt of a joke, that’s how the human soul is; everybody trusts that the mechanism of the joke will have a fallback position in reality, which allows them to switch from being objects to subjects.