The next class period Lucy wore a skirt and blouse, and on our wedding night, she emerged from the bathroom wearing those same Winnie the Pooh bottoms. I pulled them down, turned her over, and gave her a good spanking.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I was an asshole.

It took zombiedom to give me a soul, death to make me “human.”

Scouting ahead of us, Guts found a corpse at a Kum and Go. Male. From the waist down, he was unharmed and clothed in Levi’s and Nikes. He had no torso or head, just a spinal cord sticking straight out of his pelvis, picked clean of every speck of flesh, like a lollipop stick. By his side was a pistol. He must’ve shot himself and then been eaten by vultures or crows, not zombies. Otherwise his legs would be marching in blind circles.

We fell to our knees and gobbled his groin, thighs, ankles, feet, all of it, the meat tough and old but at least not poisoned with the virus.

Eve was stooped over the body. Her hair had grown, as everyone knows it continues to do after death, and it hung in her eyes. She shoved the guy’s bladder in her piehole, rubbing blood over her face like a porn star. She was nothing like my skinny Lucy. Not even close.

AS WE NEARED Chicago, we began to see more zombies. Wandering the shoulder and weaving down the yellow line. Icicles hanging from their noses, their open wounds like Coke slushies, their eyes as filmy as dirty snow. Isaac moaned for fresh meat. My professor pockets were empty.

“Must be cold,” Ros kept repeating. “But can’t feel it. Hungry, hungry, hunger, hunger, hunger. I’m so well hunger. Ha. Brains. Oh. Where’s Sergeant Collins?” He trailed off, mumbling, then began the litany again.

The moon went from full to crescent, slivered like a thumbnail.

We hadn’t seen a rabbit or squirrel in days. All creatures great and small, eaten by or hiding from my kinsmen. Only the birds remained, flying out of reach.

With zombies at the top of the food chain, the ecosystem was out of whack. If current trends continued, we’d eat ourselves into extinction.

By the time we reached Cook County, the road was thick with zombies. Like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, it was hard to shuffle through them all. So many were naked or wearing only soiled boxer briefs or thongs or their clothes were shredded like shipwreck survivors on a deserted island, their bodies gray and covered with cuts and bruises. Breasts sagged to hipbones. Cocks and balls hung limp as if stricken with some incurable venereal disease. Joan’s eyes darted from patient to patient, her doctor’s bag clutched in her hand; with her perky cap, she looked like an alert blue jay.

And our hunger. And our moans. We were deafening. Distracting. It took all of my will to keep our little group focused and together, to fight the urge to join the pack and wander without purpose, lose identity, become just another ant.

I understand why humans join cults. Free will is overrated.

There’s freedom in surrender. Ask any POW. Ask any kidnapped kid with Stockholm syndrome. The questions are over: What do you want to do tonight, dear? What do you want for dinner? Should we have kids? Rural, urban, suburb, or exurb? Paper or plastic? Coke or Pepsi?

There are no more questions because there’s only one answer left:

Brains. Do I repeat myself? Very well then-I repeat myself. Brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains.

Did I mention brains?

Damn, was I hungry.

We had to get off that state highway to hell. Saint Joan was dragging Eve through the snow and Eve was turning into a Popsicle. Eventually the rope tethering them together would cut Joan’s arms off and then who’d sew us back together?

I steered us off the road and toward a strip mall with a Dollar Tree, a Rent-A-Center, a Payless, and an empty parking lot covered with virgin snow.

If only I had some capital and a supplier, I could open a Brains Superstore in that strip mall. Good location, plenty of customers. BrainsMart, I’d call it. Or BrainSmart. How about Old Brainy? Brains R Us. I could go on, but why bother?

Beyond the mall was a scrubby little field, and beyond that a scrubby suburb of cookie-cutter McMansions and McTown Houses. That’s where we headed. From there, we’d continue east, through fields and subdivisions, away from the highway with its teeming masses. Even if we were to encounter an edible human on the main road, the competition would be keen.

“Hunhhhhhm,” Saint Joan gurgled. She was struggling with Eve, trying to lift the insentient Mother Zombie off the snow. There were rust-colored ice crystals hanging off Eve’s stump and her entire back was frozen solid like a side of beef hanging on a meat hook. Joan showed me her shoulders; the rope had burned through her nurse’s uniform and was making headway into her flesh.

“Stupid zombie,” Ros said, pointing at Eve where she lay on the snow. “Stupid zombie,” he repeated, pointing at Kapotas, who was at least standing on his own but leaning forward on his peg leg as if about to fall, his arms hanging at his sides. The blue embroidery thread on his neck was unraveling.

Nothing lasts forever. Not even zombies.

I nodded. If I had any breath, I would’ve exhaled a plume of steam in the cold air.

“Undead weight,” Ros said. “Slowing us down.”

Guts pelted Ros with a snowball, hitting him on his metal head.

“Why you little…,” Ros said, and took off after the rascal.

Poor Ros. Our speedy Gutsy Gonzalez ran circles around him. Because Ros, despite his amazing ability-pull his string and watch him talk!-traveled at zombie speed. Ros stretched his arms out, thumbs together in the classic throttling position-Homer Simpson about to choke Bart-and shuffled a few inches through the snow. Guts hit him with another snowball, square in the face.

Sitting in his red plastic sled, Isaac clapped his devil hands.

Rosebud, I thought. Red wheelbarrow. All of it necessary.

Ros had a point about Kapotas and Eve, but I couldn’t abandon the mother of the child. Not yet.

We heard a caw, and a pair of crows flew overhead, dwarfing the snowbirds and cardinals we had been seeing. Annie drew her pistol, aimed, shot twice, and the crows thumped to the ground. Everyone clapped her on the back. Our sharpshooter. Not consumptive Annabel Lee but Annie Oakley, Queen of the Dead Midwest. I pointed at Guts, then in the direction of the felled birds, and he jogged off to fetch them.

“Love that kid,” Ros said. He looked at Annie. “You too,” he said.

Guts returned with the birds. They were scrawny and underfed, but we ate them, feathers, feet, bones, beaks, eyes-everything. Zombies are like Indians; no part of the animal is wasted.

“Mooooaaaauah,” Kapotas moaned, grabbing for the pebble-sized heart speared on Isaac’s fingernail. Before he could reach it, however, Guts sprang to action and tackled Kapotas, who went down like a meat mannequin. Guts perched on the sculptor’s barrel chest, restraining him while munching on a crow’s foot.

“Needs salt,” Ros said, iridescent black feathers hanging from his mouth. “And brains.”

What a joker he was, a regular Groucho Marx.

After the meal, we headed toward the subdivision. Kapotas remained on the ground and I didn’t coax him up. If he rose on his own, we wouldn’t prevent him from coming with us; we weren’t cruel. But he didn’t. He just lolled right where Guts tackled him, staring up at the sun and moaning. Saint Joan looked back at him, and if she were capable of nuanced expression, I’d say her face was wistful. She was, after all, a healer.

“Good riddance,” Ros said. “Bad rubbish.” He pointed at Eve, who was walking backward, being pulled by me. “Her next.”