CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CAGE REMAINED motionless for days. I didn’t try to figure out why. I spent the time building alliances within the horde. Guts and I visited zombies with Joan and while she sewed up gashes and pushed eyeballs back in sockets, we fingered bite sites and fluttered our hands, flapping our arms like birds.
“Bird” as a symbol of freedom is a preverbal Jungian archetype; it’s ingrained in human consciousness. Think Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” the American eagle soaring high and “free as a bird” think Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, even Poe’s oppressive raven; think the phoenix rising from the ashes.
Some of the more aware zombies appeared to understand that our gestures meant liberty and escape. A dim light shone in their eyes. Others were so far gone, it was useless. Probably dullards as humans as well, they were now catatonic brain-eating machines with no semblance of their former selves. Even fondling their bite sites produced only a mild reaction.
The guards were getting lazy. One day they simply herded a cow into our cage. A fat, lowing, and confused Bessie. With her long eyelashes, dewy brown eyes, and classic cow hide—white with brown splotches—she looked like an advertisement for milk.
“Don’t have a cow,” Ros said as he locked the gate behind him.
Oh, the way we fell on her. Bite sites on fire in a bovine gang bang. A revelry of blood and all those stomachs and did you know cow brains are very big? Which seems counterintuitive since there’s not much thinking going on in there. The hide was tough and the skull was strong, but Joan whipped out her trusty scissors and plunged them into the heifer’s head. All of us, fifty or sixty zombies, swarmed Bessie like ants on a corn dog, flies on shit, bears on honey, like any cliché you can think of.
“Look at ’em,” Ros said. “It’s hard to believe they were once human.”
“There but for the grace of God…,” said Guil.
“Not to mention this assault rifle.”
“God does help those who help themselves.”
“Roger that.”
Those fools. That aphorism’s not in the Bible: God helps those who help themselves. Ben Franklin said it and it has since become the American creed, justification for American greed and unchecked capitalism. The Bible, on the contrary, the New Testament, more specifically, tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves and to feed the sick, the poor, and the hungry.
I stuck my hands into the hole Joan’s scissors made, ripped open that cow’s hide, and sank my face in. Like the frat boy I never was, I braced my hands on her horns and lifted my legs up over my head in a cowstand. My face was deep in her cranium, my forehead touching bone. I stuck my tongue out as far as it could go and licked.
It was bestial brainilingus and it tasted good.
When I put my feet on the ground, my tribe was watching—either in awe or stupefaction, it’s hard to tell with the zombietariat. Eve walked over and licked the blood off my face. She and Brad were holding hands.
“Moohaaah,” she said. I understood her to be expressing delight at my joie de mort and I tickled her wrist in return.
Turning my attention back to the cow, I motioned for Brad to grab hold of one side of the skull. I took the other and together we pulled at the bones. Others joined in—those who had been bandaged by Joan: a man in overalls, a woman in a summer dress, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker—and soon we were pulling as a team, a machine, a giant zombie nutcracker.
The skull came apart with a snap, revealing the jewel inside. A pearl, shining red, thick, and viscous. I grabbed the still-pulsing organ and held it over my head as if I’d just won an Olympic gold medal.
Brains, brains for all my friends!
AFTER EATING THE cow, we were one, and as one, we would escape.
The main obstacle was preventing my people from attacking the guards. If we advanced in our slow-moving way, arms outstretched for cerebrum, we would be shot handily. Our only hope was to surprise the guards, overpower them with our sheer numbers, and shamble away as fast as possible.
Zombies would die in the process. That’s collateral damage. Ask any president or general. Study any war or revolution. Soldiers die. Innocents die. Winner takes all.
Operation Zombie Shield. I mapped it out, and like the best of plans, it was simple: The next time a newbie entered the cage, we would storm, en bloc, and shuffle out the door. Less-developed zombies concentrated in the front, in the back, and on the periphery; those with some cognition clumped in the middle, with the core group—Eve, Joan, Brad, Guts, and myself—snug in the center, protected, hopefully, by the mindless multitude surrounding us.
I showed the plans to the zombies who could focus on paper. They were crude drawings, stick-figure pictures even a child could understand. We also pantomimed the scene, with Guts playing the newbie and Joan a guard.
That Guts was a ham, a natural actor. His layers of reality were believable and complex—he “acted” more zombielike than he actually was: The light went out of his eyes, replaced by an exquisite expression of blankness. After the performance, his sparkle returned, just like that. The kid deserved an Oscar—or at least a Golden Globe.
Brad and I played peripheral zombies and I made sure to grab the walkie-talkie, represented by a cow bone, out of Joan’s hand and throw it across the cage. It was essential to sever the military’s line of communication, if only briefly. Every second would count.
I didn’t know if the plan was communicated. The zombies were at least entertained by our performance, watching us like it was the Fourth of July and we were a fireworks display.
Oh! The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men (an’ zombies).
Gang aft agley.
That’s Zombie Robert Burns, by the way. His poetic apology to a field mouse he accidentally ran over with a plow. The poor rodent was chewed up and spit out. I hoped things would fare better for us.
JOAN, MY FIRST mate, Zombie Army’s five-star general, our own personal Florence Night-in-hell, Joan had a bone to pick with Operation Zombie Shield. Joan had developed her own ideas.
As a matter of fact, Joan had a valid point.
Give these stench-wenches an inch…and they’ll bite off your festering prick.
This was how we communicated: Joan pointed to my drawing of Ros bringing in a new prisoner and shook her head no. I shrugged my shoulders and raised my hands, palms up in the classic “Wha’?” gesture. Joan tapped her head with her finger, setting loose a large scabby piece of her temple, which she kicked aside with her nurse’s shoe—no longer white, now rusted with blood.
With Guts playing Ros, Joan got down on all fours and lumbered around. She winced as her knee touched the cold steel floor of our moving cage and I felt a sympathetic twinge in my shoulder.
“Moooaaah,” she moaned.
She was imitating a cow. Lord, she looked ugly doing it. Her conical breasts pointed straight down like stalactites. What had she been like in life? Was she married? With children? I imagined her as a brusque woman, bustling, efficient, and single. Suitors found her torpedo boobs intimidating. If not the breasts themselves then most certainly the bra, with its reinforcements, dominatrix straps and hooks, and impossibly large, pointy cups. Think Madonna circa 1992 but without the irony. You could poke an eye out with those things.
I made up a life for Joan: She was a woman whose career consumed her, filling the void of her loneliness. She lived near the hospital in an undecorated but immaculate one-room walk-up. She looked down on doctors, seeing them as bland faces with stethoscopes wielded like whips, and anyway, her diagnoses came quicker and more accurately than theirs, because she listened to patients. She expressed her disdain by dropping the definite article when referring to doctors, as in “Doctor will examine you shortly.”
As in, zombie will eat your brains shortly. Would you like a magazine while you wait?
It was obvious Saint Joan wanted us to attack and make our escape when the guards ushered in our next meal, not the next prisoner of war.
I shook my head no.
She tapped her wristwatch and spread her arms wide like she was telling a fish tale. And I’ll say it again: She had a point.
The cage was full—at overcapacity, federal-prison levels of occupancy—and the guards hadn’t brought in a newbie for days. In fact, we’d been moving for a solid day, which was unusual. I nodded at her and tapped my head, indicating I’d think about it. She wagged her finger at me, then pointed to Eve’s belly—which was ready to pop. Eve was looking corpsier than ever and her stomach was moving, the zombino within writhing like an alien about to explode.
Eve could not have the baby in captivity. No child of mine would be born a slave.
Saint Joan was right. We had to escape immediately. Whichever came first: cow or zombie. I had to set us free.
Move over, Moses. Step aside, Joseph Smith. There was a new prophet in town.
Pharaoh, let my people go!