CHAPTER SIX
THE CORPSE CATCHERS came and the corpse catchers caught us. A rose is a rose is a rose.
A team of ten trotted toward us, looking like extreme butterfly catchers, wearing Kevlar, hazmat suits, and helmets, and carrying long poles, nets, and muzzles.
“Watch out for the female,” Guil said to them. “She’s more aggressive.”
“Roger that.”
I didn’t resist or move. There wasn’t much left at the site of my original bite. Strips of muscle clinging to the shoulder bone. I was only weeks away from being a dancing skeleton.
A catcher cut our rope.
“This is new,” he said, looking at the frayed end.
“I’m guessing they did that in life,” Ros said, “after they got bit, so they’d be together when they turned.”
“Maybe, but he’s more decomposed than she is.”
I forced myself to my knees, then stood upright. I felt like Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. I am not an animal. I am a human being. I…am…a…man.
They covered Eve’s head with their net and, using ten-foot poles, secured a muzzle over her. It looked medieval, like a knight’s helmet but without the feathers and flourishes. They screwed the muzzle tightly around her neck with giant clamps. The woman in the iron mask, Eve clenched and unclenched her only hand. Her arms flailed as she groped blindly. I knew she was groping for flesh. Her corduroy maternity jumper—once as yellow as a lemon drop—was polka-dotted with dried blood.
The catchers led her to the cage; I had never loved her more.
“I am a conscious being,” I longed to scream to the corpse catchers, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to the world at large. “I love!”
“Uuhhhhnnnh,” I moaned, and slouched toward them. Their net dropped over my head.
I stink, therefore I am.
CROUCHED IN THE corner of that stench-filled cattle cage, surrounded by rotters and moaners, our ontological state was clear to me: We were not men. Not any longer. But neither were we supernatural. Although we rose from the dead, we were not immortal. My pork shoulder attested to that.
Shortly after my capture, I made an attempt to distinguish myself. I crept up to the bars and held a note out to the guards, shaking the paper when they walked by. They ignored me, treating me like the others. And when I looked at my brethren, I realized why.
I was one of them, a member of the crowd, a zombie, nothing more, nothing less, helpless under the boot of this army.
EVE’S EYES CONTINUED to plague me. Pale blue with a hideous veil over them, they were the eyes of Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan. Open but unseeing.
Why are America’s most famous vegetables women? A year ago, I might have analyzed the female passivity and entrenched paternalism inherent in using women as national symbols for the chronic and persistent vegetative state. The “insertion” of the phallic feeding tube. The sexual connotations of the term “pulling the plug.” The group of male doctors “stimulating” the patient to see if she “responds.” I would have published the article too, maybe turned it into a book.
Now I only wonder: Does a vegetable’s brain taste like broccoli? The soldiers had new lyrics for that old standby:
I don’t know but I been told.
F*ckin’ zombies ain’t got no soul.
CORNFIELD AFTER PASTURE after cornfield after pasture after farm. Whenever a zombie appeared on the horizon, Ros and Guil took shots at him, her. It. If it was just one and they missed, they might let it go. If there were more, foot soldiers were dispatched while Ros and Guil stayed with us.
Illinois was devoid of the living. The convoy stopped often, sometimes remaining immobile for over a day. We heard gunshots, bombs, mortars, tow trucks moving cars off the highway. When we began moving again, fresh zombies were sometimes thrown in with us. Prisoners of war, they arrived frightened, hungry, and beaten by the military.
I overheard the guards say we were headed north to be studied and experimented on. Poked and prodded. We were special zombies, they snorted, a select few saved from extermination. The military deemed us worthy of further investigation.
But I didn’t believe that claptrap any more than they did. My companions were stupid, lumpen zombies, as proletarian as chimney sweeps, some with guts hanging out of their asses and holes blown through their chests, all with that vacant stare. Eve was banging her stump against her head like an autistic brat and my fellow prisoners were reaching their hands through the bars, desperate for brains. The moaning had reached that peculiar pitch: the key of need. If the guards didn’t feed us soon, there would be a riot.
After a few days, they brought us a meal. We all knew the meat was coming. My shoulder felt it first. Zombies began walking in tight anticipatory circles. Everyone was pulsing and electric, our bite sites connected as if by a live wire. Positioning myself near Eve, I fingered her stump and looked into her eyes. I wanted to communicate with her, to exchange a meaningful glance and delight together in what was to come, like newlyweds glancing at each other on their wedding night. But Eve’s eyes were doll’s eyes. Marble and flat.
I detested them. Eyes like stones.
I’m glad I ate Lucy. I’d hate to see her dulled, reduced to an object, a thing. A rabid automaton. Like a Meg Ryan movie, zombiehood would have offended her.
The guards threw the meat in the middle of the pack. It was a mixture of pig and cow, of guts, brains, bones, and hooves, and it was still warm with thick, wet blood. Like a wolf, I pounced on it.
So did everyone else. We fought over those brains Jack London–style: tooth and claw, club and fang. We fought like addicts over the final toot of coke. Piglets for teats. Holiday shoppers clawing each other for that last Tickle-Me Cabbage Patch Elmo Baby.
I had to win the brains to achieve alpha male status. I had to be king of the hill, at the top of the food chain. Because there is a hierarchy in zombiedom, however primitive: At the top is me, of course, standing alone, the smart zombie; next are the intact and the newly turned; slightly below them are those like Eve, older and a bit more decayed, but spunky and mobile still. Then come those with major injuries, gaping holes and broken legs or necks. The ladder continues downward in a predictable fashion until it hits rock bottom: disembodied legs and arms, crawling around like Thing from The Addams Family.
At least they have no eyes to haunt me.
I pushed the weak aside; I pulled hard on Mr. Businesszombie’s arm and it ripped right out of the socket, ruining his pinstripe suit. Score one for Professor Zombie.
Surrounding the prime cut of brains was a football huddle of young strapping zombies. One still had a slight pinkish hue; he couldn’t have been undead for more than a few hours. His hair hung over his eyes in a shaggy surfer wave, blond, silky, and straight. I nicknamed him Brad Pitt Zombie, and although he was muscular and handsome, I had something Brad Pitt Zombie lacked: cognition.
I wrested a leg bone from a feeble feeding group. Mostly children, they were lying down and suckling like grotesque kittens. Candy from babies. I held the bone aloft, arms raised to the roof of the cage, like the ape in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I heard the movie’s theme song swelling in the background as I swung the bone in a circle, sinking it into soft flesh, knocking down rivals. The triumphant drums pounded.
Thus Spake Zarathustra.
I battled my way into the middle of the huddle, gripping the bone like a baseball bat. A few zombies shuffled away; some continued feeding. I jabbed and poked and made caveman noises, scattering them all. Except for pink-cheeked Brad Pitt. He munched on those brains as if they were his due. Finally I took aim and smashed his pretty cheek, which split open, a perfect fissure like a fault line. He retreated.
I grabbed my prize, a brain the size of a basketball, and hobbled to a corner of the cage. Striking a defensive posture with my back to the wall, I sank my face into the spongy gray matter.
Aaaah…sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you.
When I looked up, chunks of brain clinging to my beard like canned ham, Eve stood in front of me. I ripped off a handful and extended it to her.
As she accepted my offering, a faint light flickered in her dead eyes. Call it respect. Call it gratitude. Call it victory. I called it love.