CHAPTER ELEVEN

MY FATHER NEVER took me hunting. Dad and I read and discussed books together. We visited museums and cafés. He taught me how to swirl brandy and smoke a pipe. All the splendors of old Europe.

“The forest is a primeval place,” he said, “where ticks suck your blood, brambles scratch your legs, and rednecks lie in wait for people like you and me.”

“Like you and me?” I asked.

“Jews,” he said. “Intellectuals. And the blacks too. The rednecks are not fond of them either.”

As a child, I thought rednecks were creatures with bright red necks, like the tropical birds I saw at the Central Park Zoo. It was years before I realized they were just people, not monsters with bulbous necks hiding behind trees in woods.

Now I’m the monster, lying in wait for a fat red neck. Tables turned.

Guts and I trudged along the highway on our hunt. I put my hand on his helmet. He looked up at me and when I gazed at his undead visage, a surge of emotion swelled in my chest: his sunken and watery eyes, the blackened strip of his tongue, the chicken pox scabs pulsing greenly. I felt paternal and tender toward the tyke, maudlin even, and I understood the love my father held for me: unconditional and pure, selfless, and without a trace of irony.

It made me wish Lucy and I had created a child.

There was a rustling in the overgrown wildflowers in the median. We heard moans and chattering, giggles and nonsense. Two heads emerged from the tall grass.

Zombies Ros and Guil.

“Brains,” Ros said.

That voice! Musical, yes, and a miracle too, for it was a zombie talking. Talking! It was deep and guttural, Barry White singing in a tar pit, the devil speaking through Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

“Br…buh, buh, bray. Mmmmmm,” said Guil, and he sounded as primal as the rest of us.

The soldiers looked worse for the wear, but whose looks improve after death? Ros’s cranium was exposed, but besides that he was in one piece. Guil was in much worse shape; his head fell to the right, resting on his shoulder like a broken jack-in-the-box. The neck veins and muscles hung out like stuffing.

Clearly, they needed Joan-and Zombie Army needed them.

Ros pointed at me.

“You!” he wheezed.

Gadzooks! Not only did he talk but he had a memory to boot. Triple hallelujah!

“Bwaaaaahmmmnoh!” I shouted, and rushed to Ros. Arm extended, I stuck my finger in the top of his head, tickling the edges of the bite.

His eyes rolled back. He looked like Ray Liotta in Hannibal, the scene where Anthony Hopkins eats Liotta’s brains while Liotta is still alive. It’s both a lobotomy and a feast.

“Gooood,” Ros said. “Hmmmmm.”

With my other hand I touched Guil’s neck, where he’d been bit less than a month ago. The three of us stood there for a few minutes, locked in the zombie embrace, a mangled ménage a trois. Guts skipped around our legs like an oversized puppy.

A crow cawed high above us. Ros put his hand on my shoulder.

I pulled away and pointed at Ros and Guil, then at myself and Guts. I scissored my fingers, the sign for walking.

“Yaaa,” said Ros, nodding his head.

Martin Luther King he wasn’t. But at least he could articulate actual words. Coached by me, Cyrano de Bergerac-style, that might be enough. With practice, he’d improve.

I had a dream…or I would if zombies slept.

WITH THE ADDITION of Ros and Guil, we became a true hunting party-three men and a boy. And there was no better place to stalk humans than in their natural habitat.

The question was: Wal-Mart or the mall?

That’s the brilliance of Dawn of the Dead, the second movie in Romero’s trilogy. Set in a shopping center, the film exposes the rib cage of capitalism. Humans are safe within the confines of their shiny prison. They try on furs and fine jewels; they run through the stores, “shopping” with abandon. But it only lasts so long. Because the accumulation of material goods is a panacea, a substitute-it can never fill the void at our spiritual center. It can never acquire the depth of real meaning. It keeps us tethered to the material world, with zombies clawing at the double doors, greedy for more.

And zombies are never satisfied.

Neither are Winona Ryder, Donald Trump, or Jane Doe with her credit card debt of fifteen thousand bucks spent on manicures and pedicures and shoes she’ll never wear to glamorous parties she’ll only read about in Glamour magazine.

I’d rather crave brains than Gucci, Pucci, or Coach. There’s an innocence to brains; the desire is instinctual and primitive. Brains are necessary; we need them like sharks need surfers, like babies need mother’s milk. And like with babies, our wants are our needs.

Brains are truth. Truth brains. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

That’s Zombie John Keats, by the way. A pale flower, Keats died at twenty-six after a year of coughing up blood. The way I feel right now, I’d suck on his tubercular handkerchief. The blood of genius.

WE FOUND A Wal-Mart first. Of course. Discount scourge of the nation. It was off I-39 on a commercial strip with Mickey D’s, Subway, BK, DQ, KFC, all the acronyms. But there was no grease smell hanging thick in the air; there were no cars snaking through the drive-thrus. The sky was cloudless and Windex blue and it seemed like a late-summer’s day, although I can no longer gauge temperature accurately. In fact, I barely feel temperature. I exist; I am that I am. But for the warm tingle at my bite site and my hunger, I’d be as indifferent as a daisy.

A legless zombie was dragging herself down the yellow line in the middle of the road, her torso torn up like ground beef. Other zombies slipped in the trail she left behind.

Members of my tribe surrounded the Wal-Mart, pressing their foreheads against the barricaded automatic doors, leaving streaks of blood on the panes, trying to get to the humans inside. We could feel them in there, going about their business: eating kettle corn and tuna fish, riding bikes, trying on cheap lingerie, making desperate love in the dressing room, shooting guns at targets. And filling the toilets with their waste.

I’m glad zombies don’t shit. It gives us a superior moral edge. We don’t need Charmin or enemas. We’re beyond the body. Beyond good and evil, we use all that we consume; perfectly efficient machines, we absorb nourishment like tapeworms.

With the weight of all those ghouls, eventually the glass Wal-Mart doors would break and zombies would rush in.

I didn’t have that long, however; I had to get back to Eve.

The four of us skirted the perimeter of the parking lot and found the back entrance where the oil and lube center was located. There were no zombies back there-just Dumpsters, trucks, wooden pallets, and shopping carts. We waited for humans to come. And come they would, seeking refuge, adult diapers, and Cheez Doodles. Seeking community, lawn chairs, and Milky Way bars. Comfort, trash bags, and Goldfish crackers.

We hid behind a clump of decorative bushes at the edge of the lot. Guts was tending to Guil’s neck, wrapping it with what looked like poison ivy. I pointed at the two soldiers and made an inclusive circle with my arms, asking them to join Zombie Army.

“Ahhh,” said Ros. “You can…count…on me.”

I threw my fist in the air-power to the undead!-and heard a human squeal. A girl’s peal of laughter. My shoulder tingled. I put my finger to my lips and motioned for everyone to crouch down.

“Annabelle,” a man said, “be quiet.”

“And don’t run ahead,” a woman said.

“It’s okay, Grams. I can shoot a zombie a mile away.”

They were less than fifty yards from us, emerging from some trees to cross the parking lot. The girl-a teenager-sported long blond pigtails, a crossbow draped over her Strawberry Shortcake baby tee, and guns stuck in the waist of her low-rise jeans. The old couple clutched each other, their heads whipping from side to side. They appeared to be unarmed.