CHAPTER TWENTY
DAYS PASSED, WEEKS, a month, who knows? Water is timeless and we were part of it, adrift in the soup of it, barely aware, eating fish only when the hunger became unbearable.
Way above us, there was the shadow of a boat. Ros pulled me to him and pointed to it. The five of us gathered together and kicked upward. We were frogmen, navy SEALs, Ros’s flippers doing most of the hard work. As we neared the surface, sun. Light sparkling on the lake. A sky-blue sky with wisps of high clouds.
I poked my forehead and eyes out of the water. The others did the same, staying mostly submerged, like computer-generated soldiers in a video game. One of Joan’s eyeballs was filmed over with weeds like a grass eye-patch. Ros’s metal head was warped and rusty.
We swam up to the vessel, which was a sailboat, a yacht actually, thirty or forty feet long. I poked my whole head out of the lake. Maria Sangria read the script painted on the side.
It was quiet out of the water, without the pressure of the lake. A breeze whistled in my ear. No sounds came from the boat and I didn’t sense any humans on it either; my shoulder was calm, dead flesh. As tingly as a T-bone. There was no shore that I could see. Water water everywhere; we were right in the middle of the lake.
Ros pulled us around Maria Sangria until we found the anchor. Annie kept slipping underwater; we all did. Zombies aren’t good swimmers. We sink like tombstones.
I pointed at Guts, then at the rope attached to the anchor. Joan and I set Guts free, untying his metaphorical umbilical cord, and the urchin shimmied on up.
“Look at him go,” Ros said, his voice deep and wet as a sea monster’s.
We did our best to keep each other afloat, but Ros kept drifting away. Joan held out her hand and he grabbed it. We pulled him back into our bobbing circle.
Treading water with my friends, I lifted my face up to the heavens, letting the sun dry my skin, which was flapping from being so long submerged. I felt an optimism I’d never experienced as a human. My soul was clear and sweet. We were elemental creatures—water, wind, earth, fire.
Professor Jack would’ve made an Earth, Wind and Fire joke here, inserting a song title or an ironic comment on their costumes or cultural significance. Zombie Jack refrains.
“Mooooooo!” Guts lowed from Maria Sangria, throwing a rope ladder over the side. We made our way over to it and hauled ourselves up, but it was hard going, particularly for Annie. Ros helped her, his hand cupping her half ass, pushing her up while caressing the bite site on her ankle. Those days underwater had diminished her cognition and they certainly hadn’t helped her coordination.
This is your brain, the Reagan-era public service announcement goes. This is your brain as a waterlogged zombie.
Like a pirate, I landed on deck and searched the boat. Avast! And ahoy! Food! Old, desiccated, wrinkly, salty, tough food. Starved to death, perhaps. Or dehydrated. But who cared? One in a deck chair; another facedown on the ground. Two more reclining on cots in the cabin. A male in a yellow slicker, probably the captain, slumped over the wheel.
Human jerky. One for each of us.
“Bon appétit!” said Ros.
I went for the woman in the chair. She was middle-aged and had once been fat, judging from the excess skin. I stood behind her, my legs wobbly and sliding around on the wet deck. I put my hands over her ears, pulled up with all my strength, and screwed off her head.
You’ve seen this scene in a million movies: the unnatural red of the human’s veins and tendons glisten and throb as the head is liberated from the body; the victim screams before, during, and even after the procedure. The proverbial chicken. Quite often the beheading is presented as comeuppance or karma for premarital sex or mistreating women or abusing power. In other words, the victim is a bad, immoral human who deserves death by zombies, death by Leatherface, death by vampires or giant spiders.
There was no narrative significance to this decapitation, however. The lady had been long dead: No blood flowed from her grisly neck; no justice was served. I neither knew nor cared whether she was kind to children and small animals, whether she was faithful to her husband or spent too much money on her clothing. Whether she survived as long as she had at the expense of others or because she saved others.
All I knew was her brains tasted like chocolate cheesecake does to a dieter. A little slice of heaven.
“Better than fish, eh, matey?” Ros asked, munching on pieces of the captain. Ros’s face was Technicolor mold—an autumn of reds, browns, and golds.
“Arrrrr,” I said, tilting my head to the side and squinting one eye closed in the universal pirate face.
“Arrrrr,” Ros replied, baring his teeth.
Shiver me timbers. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. I was a parrot-on-the-shoulder, peg-leg, skull-and-crossbones badass mother-f*cker.
Shit, pirates ain’t got nothing on us zombies.
AFTER OUR MEAL, we regrouped on the poop deck. Ros was lying on his side, picking his teeth with a piece of wood. He pulled out a black molar and threw it into the lake. A bird landed on the railing of the boat, some water creature with stilt legs and a long orange beak. She looked at us with eyes blank as a zombie’s; no one moved to eat her, full as we were with dead flesh. She squawked once and flew off.
Judging from the sun and the mildness of the wind, it was early spring.
Joan made a noise like a drowning cat and took off her waterproof backpack. The top was ripped open, the zipper broken. She turned it upside down. Water, brine shrimp, and plants tumbled out, but no Isaac. In the passion of our feeding, we’d forgotten him. Where was our red-eyed devil baby? Guts ran to Joan and pounded his fists on her squishy bosom.
“In the lake,” Ros said. “But not dead. Never dead.”
Ros was right. Isaac would wash up on shore one day, ravaged by the lake and its fish, perhaps little more than a skeleton, but ravenous nevertheless.
Brains, Part II: Isaac’s Revenge.
We all looked rancid. Annie’s cheek had a gaping hole ringed with brown blood and leeches; Ros was missing a few fetid fingers, probably eaten by fish; we all carried snails, weeds, shells, and clams in our hair and pockets, clinging to our clothes and flesh. Joan stuck a finger in her ear and out popped a minnow. Guts picked the weeds out of her eyeball.
“What’s the plan, captain?” Ros asked.
Wavelets slapped against the stern or the bow or the fore or the aft. The clouds looked like ducks or demons or Africa. In between them, a plane flew.
It had been a cold winter for zombies. If planes were flying.
I stood up and removed my water gear. Time for a checkup; everyone did the same. We formed a circle and examined each other. Guts’s guts were gray worms; Ros’s ribs poked through his chest and the tip of his penis was gone; moss was growing on Annie’s stomach. What looked like cottage cheese covered Joan’s chest, and all of our hair was falling out.
I was afraid to look down at my own body, although it had betrayed me long ago. I nodded at Joan and mimed sewing, taping, healing.
“First aid kit,” Ros said. “Down below.” Joan saluted and turned on her heel.
It took hours to save us, from flies and their maggots, from fluvial decay and skeletonization. Saint Joan worked on each of us in turn. Guts helped her, scraping rot like barnacles, sewing up holes, and wrapping tape around softening bones. Guts found a paint set somewhere below and with it, Joan became an artist as well as a mortician, coloring our faces with pinks, peaches, and browns, reddening our lips. Preparing our bodies for viewing. Or for war.
Joan sewed a tarp over my torso; it crinkled when I moved, but it was firmer than my own flesh. I fiddled with the boat’s radio. The battery was dead. I found a few guns under one of the cots. Although Annie was shell-shocked, more Annabel Lee than Annie Oakley, she smiled at me when I pressed one of the guns into her hand, and that old light gleamed in her eye; she wasn’t totally gone, not yet. I set an empty water bottle on the edge of the ship. Annie took aim and nailed it.
“Atta girl!” Ros said. “Knew you were in there.” Joan was fitting a pair of pantyhose over his ribs; she paused to smile maternally at Annie. “Where to?” Ros asked.
I gestured at the horizon as if to say, “Wherever the wind takes us, soldier boy, whichever way the wind blows.”
“Roger that,” Ros said.
After we were all patched up and dressed—praise Saint Joan, miracle worker—Ros and I hauled anchor and the boat headed west with the wind, chasing the sun and the Joads and the stars in Hollywood. Our own Manifest Destiny.
Guts hung over the edge of Maria Sangria, scanning the water’s surface for Isaac. The rest of us joined him. The sun was setting, turning the shifting clouds orange. It looked unreal, like an orange juice commercial or a glossy ad for a subdivision built around golf.
Ros spread his arms apart. “I’m the king of the world!” he yelled.
We all got the reference. Titanic. Gigantic. The future’s so bright, we gotta eat brains.
Over half-decayed and Ros was still a clever boy. Iceberg of America, here we come.