The first bite yielded a mouthful of scales. The second bite was all bone, but I ripped through it anyway. Because the third bite hit braindirt: minuscule, grainy, and cold. Entirely unsatisfying. Like jerking off instead of screwing; playing checkers instead of chess; watching Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake of Psycho. Looking at a photograph of Guernica.

Still, I ate the fish. You take what you can get. The water turned pink with its blood and the gang gathered round, hungry for stink.

We chewed on its stomach, intestines, tail, fins, spine, the solid meat of its sides. What I wouldn’t have given for hot brains. Ros popped a fish eye in his mouth and said something that sounded like, “Needs wasabi.”

That’s why I loved Ros. Like his namesake, he was comic relief.

A FLASHBACK, PRE-ZOMBIE. As vivid as reality. Lucid dreaming. Lucy dreaming.

“Jack?” Lucy asked, her voice lilting up at the end of my name. “Why did you marry me?”

I closed the book I’d been reading, marking my place with my thumb: Rene Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy.

“Can someone say high-maintenance?” I said, laughing. “You know why.”

We were in my study with its book-lined walls, big oak desk, Persian rug, Macintosh laptop, and antique china hutch loaded with pop culture ephemera-my Pez collection, a Sigmund Freud action figure, a can of Billy Beer, a Magic 8 Ball. Lucy was dusting, although she didn’t have to. Someone came in once a week.

“We can’t reproduce,” she said. “Isn’t that what marriage is for? To start a family?”

“Tell that to our gay friends.”

“Touché.”

Lucy had just suffered her third miscarriage, and the doctors warned it would likely happen again.

“I married you,” I said, “so no one else could have you. It was a selfish endeavor.”

Lucy wiped my vintage Archies lunch box with an old sock. “Have you thought more about adopting?” she asked.

I put the book on my desk and gave her my full attention. Her dark hair stuck up in the back like Alfalfa’s. She was trying not to cry.

“C’mere,” I said, and held out my arms. She snuggled onto my lap and buried her face in my neck. Her bony ass jutted into my thigh. She was all bones and heart, that girl. Bones and heart.

“I don’t want some stranger’s baby,” she whispered. “I want my own.”

I rubbed her back and petted her short hair. It had been a tough week, a tough year. For Lucy especially.

“Do you want to keep trying?” I asked. “I’m game if you are.”

“I’ll probably fail again.”

“Don’t say that. You didn’t fail,” I said. “How about concentrating on your writing? You could finish your novel.”

“My novel is nothing but self-involved drivel. It’s not gonna change the world.”

“In all honesty, neither is a child.”

“But ours would be special. It would grow up to cure cancer. Or AIDS.”

“Or start a major war.”

“We could raise a Hitler!”

“Or a radio talk show host,” I said.

“Maybe I’m not meant to be a mom.”

“Nobody’s meant to be anything. And even if we had a kid, what then? He would be born, grow up, be happy sometimes, sad mostly, become bitter as he aged and didn’t realize his dreams, and then die old and alone. That’s it. End of story.”

“Don’t forget take up space and use valuable resources.”

“You’re absolutely right. Every human being is a drain on the ecosystem. We’re overrunning the planet as it is. Perhaps it’s for the best.”

Lucy refused to give up, however. We tried for the next several months, but I ate her before she could get pregnant again. For that I’m glad: Her barren womb nurtured me when I needed it most.

CHAPTER TWENTY

DAYS PASSED, WEEKS, a month, who knows? Water is timeless and we were part of it, adrift in the soup of it, barely aware, eating fish only when the hunger became unbearable.

Way above us, there was the shadow of a boat. Ros pulled me to him and pointed to it. The five of us gathered together and kicked upward. We were frogmen, navy SEALs, Ros’s flippers doing most of the hard work. As we neared the surface, sun. Light sparkling on the lake. A sky-blue sky with wisps of high clouds.

I poked my forehead and eyes out of the water. The others did the same, staying mostly submerged, like computer-generated soldiers in a video game. One of Joan’s eyeballs was filmed over with weeds like a grass eye-patch. Ros’s metal head was warped and rusty.

We swam up to the vessel, which was a sailboat, a yacht actually, thirty or forty feet long. I poked my whole head out of the lake. Maria Sangria read the script painted on the side.

It was quiet out of the water, without the pressure of the lake. A breeze whistled in my ear. No sounds came from the boat and I didn’t sense any humans on it either; my shoulder was calm, dead flesh. As tingly as a T-bone. There was no shore that I could see. Water water everywhere; we were right in the middle of the lake.

Ros pulled us around Maria Sangria until we found the anchor. Annie kept slipping underwater; we all did. Zombies aren’t good swimmers. We sink like tombstones.

I pointed at Guts, then at the rope attached to the anchor. Joan and I set Guts free, untying his metaphorical umbilical cord, and the urchin shimmied on up.

“Look at him go,” Ros said, his voice deep and wet as a sea monster’s.

We did our best to keep each other afloat, but Ros kept drifting away. Joan held out her hand and he grabbed it. We pulled him back into our bobbing circle.

Treading water with my friends, I lifted my face up to the heavens, letting the sun dry my skin, which was flapping from being so long submerged. I felt an optimism I’d never experienced as a human. My soul was clear and sweet. We were elemental creatures-water, wind, earth, fire.

Professor Jack would’ve made an Earth, Wind and Fire joke here, inserting a song title or an ironic comment on their costumes or cultural significance. Zombie Jack refrains.

“Mooooooo!” Guts lowed from Maria Sangria, throwing a rope ladder over the side. We made our way over to it and hauled ourselves up, but it was hard going, particularly for Annie. Ros helped her, his hand cupping her half ass, pushing her up while caressing the bite site on her ankle. Those days underwater had diminished her cognition and they certainly hadn’t helped her coordination.

This is your brain, the Reagan-era public service announcement goes. This is your brain as a waterlogged zombie.

Like a pirate, I landed on deck and searched the boat. Avast! And ahoy! Food! Old, desiccated, wrinkly, salty, tough food. Starved to death, perhaps. Or dehydrated. But who cared? One in a deck chair; another facedown on the ground. Two more reclining on cots in the cabin. A male in a yellow slicker, probably the captain, slumped over the wheel.

Human jerky. One for each of us.

“Bon appétit!” said Ros.

I went for the woman in the chair. She was middle-aged and had once been fat, judging from the excess skin. I stood behind her, my legs wobbly and sliding around on the wet deck. I put my hands over her ears, pulled up with all my strength, and screwed off her head.

You’ve seen this scene in a million movies: the unnatural red of the human’s veins and tendons glisten and throb as the head is liberated from the body; the victim screams before, during, and even after the procedure. The proverbial chicken. Quite often the beheading is presented as comeuppance or karma for premarital sex or mistreating women or abusing power. In other words, the victim is a bad, immoral human who deserves death by zombies, death by Leatherface, death by vampires or giant spiders.

There was no narrative significance to this decapitation, however. The lady had been long dead: No blood flowed from her grisly neck; no justice was served. I neither knew nor cared whether she was kind to children and small animals, whether she was faithful to her husband or spent too much money on her clothing. Whether she survived as long as she had at the expense of others or because she saved others.