He was stepping on his intestines.

Guts went straight to Eve’s thigh and touched it. She leaned into his caress, closing her eyes. If she’d had breath, she would have sighed. But it was Guts’s face that convinced me: This kid’s a prodigy. He stays in the picture.

Cherubic doesn’t go far enough to describe him. Neither does cute. He was every black street urchin in every TV show, from Buckwheat to Arnold. A child of the projects, wise beyond his years, spewing honest precocious wisdom to the foolish adults.

Of course, for all I knew he was more middle-class Cosby than ghetto Good Times in “real” life, but he can’t contradict me. And I’m the one writing history.

Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Jack?

I’m talkin’ superheroes, Arnold. This was my Team America, my own Justice League: me with my amazing ability to read, write, and plan; Saint Joan with her healing bag of magic; Guts with his empathic touch and alive eyes; Eve the maternal, the one who brings forth new life; and Brad, well, he was the expendable one. He would be the first to die again. He had only his life to offer the group and he’d make that sacrifice, if I’d read the script correctly. And I had.

Things were finally looking up.

Guts touched Eve’s stomach and made a cradle out of his arms.

“Baaaay,” he said. I nodded and tousled his braids, which were crusted with dried blood, leaves, twigs, and tiny lengths of veins.

I pinched Joan’s elbow and pointed to Guts’s guts. She rummaged in her bag, whipped out a roll of duct tape, pushed the guts back in, and motioned for me to hold them in place. They were dry and powdery, more like an old man’s half-hard chalky dick than the wet, gooey, squishy, and delicious intestines of the living. Joan taped up his stomach, reinforcing the edges with her needle and thread. Good as new. No, better than new. Joan used embroidery thread, goldenrod, and it shone against his dark skin.

I spent the night touching Eve’s thigh while she lay languorous and gloriously pregnant. Her stomach had grown and I planted my metaphorical flag on it, claiming it as England claimed India, as France claimed Africa. As America claimed the moon. I planned to teach all I knew to what was inside-not about linguistics or Walt Whitman or anything else academic, but about zombie slayers and triage healing. About surviving and leading. Issues of real importance, not hi-lo pomo masturbatory bullshit.

“Expecting” is an apt word for the state we were in. There was anticipation in the air. The baby filled me with a sense of potential and promise, a new beginning. I planned our future: Escape from this prison and find Stein. Under his protection, secure our right to exist. “Live” happily ever after. Roll credits.

Guts was curled next to Eve and me. Our hearts were stopped; we didn’t breathe, bleed, sleep, or shit. We ate brains for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but we were a family. Where there is love, there is hope.

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.