All in all, a miserable affair: You’re married to an unappreciative man mired in the glory of his past, supportive of him but lonely, too, until one day, you come home to hear him tell you that he doesn’t love you anymore, that instead he loves Missy, a saleswoman at the Toyota dealership where he works, not as a salesman himself, or even as a mechanic, but as the guy who cheats car buyers into buying extra care insurance packages for things that will never break. Now she’s juggling kids, two part-time jobs, attorney fees to wrest alimony and child support from her ex-husband, inappropriate advances from her much older bosses at both of her jobs, and today. Her day off of all days, the day she has set aside for herself, not even the whole day, but the few measly hours her mother agreed to watch the kids, a couple of hell-raisers made only worse by the divorce, the one day she picked to come to the mall, not even to buy anything, not that she even had the money to buy anything, but just to look around, just to have a few moments to herself, just to revisit the world she thought was going to be her world, today is the day the mall is overrun by the evil undead.
Of course it is.
She is surprised not in the least by this.
And maybe she didn’t trip in the sporting goods store by the exercise equipment. Maybe she didn’t trip at all, but gave herself up, handed herself over, because could it be worse, really, than how she felt now?
All of this, though, all of this speculation I keep to myself. And I’ve decided to speak to Mary as little as possible in case she makes any more stray comments that might unhinge the fragile framework of my coping mechanism, as she’s already done with the security guard.
Roger’s plan might just be the dumbest plan I have ever heard ever, but I go along with it anyway. Why not, right? What have I got to lose, right?
Or, rather, other than my life, what have I got to lose?
I go along with it because I know the others will go along with it, too. They’ve followed Roger’s lead since the moment the screaming began, way on the other side of the mall, somewhere near the food court, the screaming loud enough that we could hear it from so far away. They followed his lead into that fray even when, in the opposite direction and only a hundred yards away, there were doors leading outside, leading to our escape. Even then, they followed him.
By they, of course, I mean, we.
We followed him into the fray.
We watched him save first Tyrone and then his father, and then, at the end, right before we shuffled into this janitor’s closet, Mary in the sporting goods store.
And then into this broom closet: We followed him here, too.
Now he wants us to go up into the ceiling.
“The ceiling,” he tells me, whispering still. “That’s our ticket out of here.”
I look up. He slaps me quickly and lightly on the face. “Don’t look up,” he says. “You’ll give it away.”
I shift my eyes around the room a) to see if anyone just saw Roger slap me and b) to see whom I might give this precious and vital information away to.
“To whom?” I ask.
Roger leans in closer and I wish he wouldn’t. There’s a smell to him that’s ripe and uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the adrenaline in his blood, or maybe he lets off a funky kind of sweat when fighting the evil undead. Whatever it is, I’m doing my best to breathe it in through my mouth.
“Don’t say anything,” he says. “Don’t react to what I’m about to say.”
“Okay.”
“We don’t want to freak anyone out.”
“Sure. No. No problem.”
Now his voice drops to an actual whisper, and I can’t hear him, and for a moment, I wonder if he’s saying something and I just can’t hear him or if he’s decided now is the time to pull that trick where you move your mouth like you’re talking when really you’re not saying anything at all.
“I can’t, I can’t hear you,” I tell him.
He doesn’t like to repeat things, I can tell by the look on his face, but before I can apologize for something that wasn’t my fault, he says, again, “One among us has been infected.”
This news takes me by surprise, but only slightly, and only in that it was Roger who figured this out and not me.
I figured that if anyone were to discover that one of us was infected, it would be me or one of the other unnamed peripheral characters, and only moments too late.
For instance, say one of us would be crying in the corner, hunched over and sobbing and rocking, and another one of us would see this person in pain, and we would sigh in disgust at Roger and Mary and the security guard and Tyrone, all too caught up in their own drama to notice the rest of us, and we would walk over, gently place our hand on his shoulder, sit down softly next to him, and say something like, “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, we’re going to make it out of this, I swear, I promise, we will,” and we would place our other hand on his knee, a sign of friendship, a sign of “You are not alone,” and he would place his own hand over ours, and we would say, “That’s right, it’s going to be just fine, don’t you worry,” but it would come out a little hesitantly, or distractedly, as we would be distracted by the queer texture of the hand on top of our hand, cold and wet and a little sticky, but we wouldn’t look down, not yet. We wouldn’t look down because we would feel guilty for thinking poorly of our comrade in arms, our newfound friend, desperately sad and in need of comfort.
“Do you have a family?” we might ask. “Do you have someone waiting for you?”
And he would nod, a gentle but increasingly vigorous nod.
“Oh yeah?” we might say. “Where? Where are they? Tell me, just tell me about them,” we would say, knowing that sometimes talking about something else, anything else, might distract us, if only temporarily, from the fear and the pain and the sorrow.
Then would come that too-late moment when we look down at the hand covering ours and discover it to be a rotting mass of flesh, at which point we freak out and the creature whips its head around and bites our face off, or when, pivoting off our question about his family, he whips his head quickly around and says something to the effect of “My family? They’re waiting just outside that door” before biting our face off.
Though, truth be told, zombie-like creatures aren’t known for their ability to speak.
Nor for their understanding of ironic timing.
Or even their understanding of delayed gratification.
So, really the surprising thing about Roger coming to me with information about one of us being infected is that there is one of us infected and we are not yet all dead.
Still, it’s a little disappointing to find this out from Roger, who has discovered it all on his own and in enough time to try to think of what to do about it.
“Really?” I say. “Who?”
“Not yet,” he says. “We screw this up, we’re cooked,” he says.
Then he nods seriously and gravely. Then he puts his hand heavily on my shoulder and nods again, and so I smile back at him, which I guess is all he needed from me, because then he moves on to the next person he’s going to tell about his plan.
For my money, I peg Tyrone as the one among us who is infected. Not that I’ve got anything against the kid. He seems like a nice enough kid, or did before he was turned into a mindless and brutal killing machine. He seems nice enough, but he’s also the one we might all least suspect, which is why I suspect him most.
There’s a small, bloody mass on the side of his head, which I originally figured for random brain matter or organ matter splattered there during the run through the maze of maternity clothes after we ducked into the department store. Now I am beginning to wonder if it’s not his actual brain I’m looking at. If that’s maybe where they got him, in his actual brain, not enough to kill him, not enough to really slow him down. But to make him one of their own, how much brain would a zombie need to eat?