“Destroyer,” Ros said. “I think.”

Annie brandished one of her guns. She aimed and shot; the bullet fell far short.

“It’s way far away,” Ros said, “but good eye.”

My heart sank like a battleship. Not much had gone right for us. If current trends continued, we’d be shot when we rose from the lake in the spring. Hunted and gunned down like animals.

And I didn’t want to die again. I wanted to emerge from the water a great leader, a visionary capable of bringing my people out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land.

This was my dream, my grand solution: Negotiate with the humans. Find our common ground and reach an uneasy peace, explaining that we, too, are God’s children. And as such, we have a right to exist. Since we need brains, offer to eat their criminals, their invalids, their suicides and car crash victims. Stillborns, abortions, vegetables. Anyone expendable. We’d be performing a valuable service, when you thought about it. And when the zombie population dwindled as a result of decay or insurgent attacks, we’d bite a few humans and allow them to join our ranks. My guess was there would be no dearth of volunteers. In fact, over time, being selected would become an honor or ritual, a part of their culture, like in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

We could live forever that way. Symbiotically. It wasn’t perfect-no compromise is-but it was a start.

Guts began walking into the lake. When the water reached his ankles, he looked over his shoulder and held out his hands. I stepped forward, hoping to walk on water. No such luck. I grabbed one of Guts’s hands; Joan took the other. Annie and Ros joined us and we formed a chain. We could have been a group of actors pretending to be a normal American family on vacation, ready to take a winter swim together at some fabulous lakeside resort. Or we could have actually been that family, no more simulations or acting, no layers of meaning and artifice sprinkled with postmodern allusions. The birth of the real.

A zombie is a zombie is a zombie is a zombie.

Full-immersion baptism. We shambled into the water like characters in a Flannery O’Connor short story. I glanced at Joan. She didn’t look like herself in her forest-green water gear. Without her nurse’s uniform, she could have been any zombie; her noble nose was mostly gone, her skin a crazy quilt of brown blood. But her medical bag was snug in a waterproof backpack, alongside Isaac.

We kept walking. The water reached Guts’s waist, his chest, his brave little chin. I didn’t feel wet, although I was halfway in; I didn’t feel anything.

“Hold your breath, little man,” Ros said as Guts went under.

Soon enough we were all underwater where it was dark and murky. There must have been fish but I didn’t see any. Not at first. Ros said something, and the sound came in waves, washing over me like sonar, like dolphins talking. I wanted to give him the thumbs-up but didn’t dare let go of Annie and Guts. They were my lifeline. My future. My underwater breathing apparatus.

We were in limbo, wandering the bottom of Lake Michigan. A lost tribe of sodden zombies, we were prehistoric. Dinosaurs. I tried to steer us north, but I’ve never had a good sense of direction.

My eyes adjusted to the dark. A school of shiny yellow fish surrounded us. One ventured forward and nibbled on Guts’s neck. Then another. I shooed them away.

Here was a contingency I hadn’t thought of: What if we were eaten by fish?

The belly of the whale, that I could handle. Being devoured by a leviathan is biblical and grand, full of history and tradition. Think Moby Dick, Jonah, Jaws, Orca, Lake Placid and Lake Placid 2. Even Godzilla lived in the sea.

But being nibbled on by a school of small fry was beneath me. As a mythical being, I would not accept a demise less than epic. I jerked us away from the school.

And the lake turned deeper and a shade darker. The current was as strong as the ocean. There was a rip tide or an undertow, and I was lifted up by it. I let go of my comrades’ hands.

We let the water take us. It was effortless, this dance. I wiggled my body like an eel. Annie and Guts were doing the same-Joan and Ros were too far away to see, but I could feel their weight tugging on the rope around my waist. The five of us were one creature, each part of a greater whole, fingers on a hand, tentacles of a giant squid, cogs in a machine.

It was like flying. Jonathon Livingdead Seagull. There was freedom underwater. We went where the lake sent us.

A speckled fish passed between Guts and me; it had a pink stripe down its side like a Nike swoosh. Then a salmon, steel gray and bigger than Isaac, its mouth shaped like a bottle opener. He gave us the fish-eye and moved on.

We could swim forever this way, I thought. To the ends of the earth. To the ocean or the gulf. Until the water gets shallow and the weather turns warm and we crawl onto the shore, a little worse for the wear, but still striving, still bleating our clarion cry for brains and more brains. For life.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

WE FLOATED AND swam like mermaids. I slipped in and out of consciousness, half-frozen and half-Buddha, one step closer to nirvana and pure being.

I was a butterfly, a jellyfish. My life as a human grew more and more remote. The trappings of culture, all we created, the whole bloated project of humanity, from the pyramids to Frank Gehry, Pindar to Bukowski, suet to sushi, all of it as ephemeral as an Etch-A-Sketch. Like Ros, I remembered random events from my past as if they had happened to someone in a movie.

As children, my sister and I spent a few weeks every summer with Oma and Opa in their cottage in Seattle. It smelled like lavender potpourri and boiled meat. The four of us played Scrabble and Oma always won, clasping her thick fingers together and bringing them to her lips as she studied the board.

“We escaped the camps,” she said, “so you could be here, kleine Jack. Safe and happy with us.”

When Oma and Opa died, they left my father a sizable legacy of property, stocks and bonds, old money from Austria, plus new money they’d earned in America. When my father and mother died, that legacy was passed down to my sister and me. Although I’d produced no heirs of my own, my sister had two sons set to inherit our world.

Or did she? And whose world was it? My nephews and my sister, were they alive, dead, or living dead? Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

We passed over a wondrous fish feeding on the bottom. It must have been seven feet long, coral pink, with spikes on its back like a dragon. It didn’t look up at us, just continued to suck on the sand like an aquatic vacuum cleaner. No doubt that species of fish has lived unchanged for millennia, eating whatever settles on lake bottoms, and growing and maturing as a result. Releasing eggs in the spring, reproducing, then getting old and dying. Perfect in its design, no need to evolve. Like a cockroach or an alligator.

I rolled my torso, undulating. I could feel Ros pulling on us, his flippers an advantage in this environment. I pulled on the rope, bringing Guts closer to me. A snail was on his cheek and I ripped it off.

Zombies are the next step in human evolution. The virus, our birth, the apocalyptic mad scientist shtick-no Frankenstein’s creature or end of the world, but a giant leap forward. Progress. Like Vonnegut’s Galápagos, back to the sea.

We eat but don’t grow. We reproduce but don’t need eggs or mitosis, ejaculation or even love. We are as simple as fish. Simpler than fish.

And as Henry Zombie Thoreau said: simplify, simplify, simplify.

We swam past another fish, this one about half the size of Guts. It was the color of a tin can with a splash of orange on its fins. I reached out and grabbed it under the gills. The fish thrashed; its tail was strong and slapped my shoulder, but I brought it to me.